Jim Zub

Thrice Marked for Death continues the Heroic Signatures/Titan Comics run of Conan the Barbarian, collecting issues 5 through 8. It resumes the story told in the prior volume Bound in Black Stone, albeit after a significant narrative gap of several years. This lacuna is addressed by Conan's reminiscences at the beginning of each issue, trained especially on his time spent as a pirate captain in the company of his love Bêlit. The more immediate matter of the tale takes place in Shadizar, where a depressed Conan has fallen in with a small thieves' brotherhood called the "Gloryhounds."

As in the earlier issues, writer Jim Zub does decent work at structuring the narrative and working up an original story while remaining faithful to the original continuity defined by the pulp-era tales of Robert E. Howard. He gets a little over his skis lexically on occasion, such as when he uses the word "moratorium" for mortuary. This set of four issues does not have a conclusion that will allow for another break in the story. It has instead a cliff-hanger ending where Conan appears to have died--but nearly all readers will have faith in his plot armor.

The art by Doug Braithwaite is serviceable; I liked it significantly less than Roberto De La Torre's run in the previous book. More than once, he represented Conan's lethal violence by having combatants' heads explode with the force of the Cimmerian's blows. Colorist Diego Rodriguez avoids the occasional muddiness from the earlier issues and provides subtle cues in his shift of palette for the reader to transition between the recollected Bêlit sequences and the more immediate Shadizar tale.

The Jeffrey Shanks essays on the REH background material continue in this collection, and Shanks has now discovered Arthur Machen. As before, there is a gallery of alternate covers. There are fewer of them this time, and they are happily larger. Each is given nearly a quarter of a page.… (mais)

Det finns tydligen någon sorts parallellvärld i Marvels univserum som väsentligen är en generisk fantasihistoria: onda skurkar, diverse olika slags intelligenta varelser, magi och så vidare (största skillnaden är väl egentligen att de där varelserna inte är utomjordingar). Efter lite bråk med ett träskmonster hamnar Champions där i Weird War One, liksom The master of the world (fortfarande ett jäkligt fånigt namn).

Den enda som riktigt verkar inse att de inte är på hemmaplan är Riri, övriga tror sig höra hemma där, med anpassningar (Riri är riddare, Miles någon slags tjuvarketyp, Ms Marvel magiker, Wasp någon slags älva och så vidare). Eftersom de inte minns vem de egentligen är hamnar de också på olika sidor i konflikten, tills det hela löses ut och alla kan åka hem till en verkligare(?) värld.

Insprängt här finns även en kort historia om skolskjutningar, vilken mest verkar vilja säga att man inte skall ge upp hoppet om att saker kan bli bättre (men är tämligen läskig innan dess), samt en solohistoria för Snowguard, som mest verkar skriven för att via upp inuitkultur och deras folktro: det är inte dåligt eller tråkigt, men det känns tämligen uppenbart att syftet främst är att läsaren skall lära sig mer om inuiter samt om Amka, som är rolig och bra men knappast kommer få en egen tidning.… (mais)

Bound in Black Stone collects the initial four-issue run from 2023 of the new Conan the Barbarian comic book from Titan Comics, along with a Free Comic Book Day prequel. The prequel "Looking for Lands Beyond" is an account of the sack of Venarium, and the main story is set not too many years later after Conan's first wanderings beyond Cimmeria. He is in the wilderness of northern Aquilonia--not far south of his homeland--when he encounters a menace that motivates him to return and defend his countrymen.

The plot has much to do with Conan-creator Robert E. Howard's notions of the Pictish people. It introduces a Gurian Pictish warrior woman Brissa, with whom Conan becomes intimate. (The Gurian Picts are represented as preservers of the noble Pictish type, as opposed to the degenerate tribes common to the Hyborian Age.) It also offers the visionary involvement of the shade of Brule--the Pictish companion of King Kull of Atlantis from the Thurian Age of Howard's fantasized pre-antiquity.

In both visual and verbal style, these comics largely reflect a return to the 1970s Marvel era. The illustration work by Roberto De La Torre is very much evocative of the John Buscema Conan, both in composition and rendering. Taking advantage of advances in production technology, the colorists have adopted the more shaded palette of the later Dark Horse comics--sometimes to the point of muddiness, I fear. Writer Jim Zub is a bit gabby, on the lines of Roy Thomas. He indulges in the sort of forsoothly archaicisms that Howard's prose spurned. He also lacks the patience that Tim Truman showed in letting the pictures tell the story. One way in which these comics are not a throwback to the offerings on the supermarket carousel racks of my childhood is the heightened saliency of sex and violence, which is certainly a match for anything that later comics and cinema adaptations have led readers to expect.

An appendix offers collected editorial sidebars from Jeffrey Shanks, who does a passable job of summarizing the history of the Conan character and the literary legacies involved in the present comic. He does make a misstep in comparing Howard's "little people" to Tolkien's hobbits, when Howard's model was clearly in the earlier tales from Arthur Machen, which are not so relevant to Tolkien, whose inspirations were folklore, fairy tale, and Dunsany. Machen did access that folklore, but he is responsible for the transformation that Shanks attributes to Howard.

There is a complete covers gallery reproducing the 54 covers under which the five individual floppies had been issued. I'm glad for this feature, as long as publishers insist on the bloated alternate cover practice, but the postage-stamp size of the gallery images leave quite a bit to be desired. A few bonus character sketches of Brissa are nice enough.

On the whole, I enjoyed this book, and I'll be likely to read its sequels.… (mais)