Collecting Conan (Early Access for Crushing Comics Club members)

Here's the surprise guide I've hinted at a few times this week: Collecting Conan!

Log in to CK to access this guide. You received a CK login via email; leave a comment if you have not seen it. Note that this guide isn't linked from anywhere else right now - I'm still figuring out where it fits into my page hierarchy.

This guide is tentatively scheduled for general public release on March 13, coinciding with the release of the final edition of the Chronicles of Conan paperback series, covering the entire run of Marvel's Conan The Barbarian!

It's definitely a bit rough-around-the-edges at the moment (edit: I've already fixed the not-totally-functioning TOC and not many images), but that's what I get for messing with a character who is in neither Marvel nor DC's continuity, despite Marvel publishing him for 30 years.

I've always been fascinated with Conan, starting from catching scenes from Arnold's 1982 film on my parent's TV as a kid and a tattered old copy of Conan The Barbarian #62 I somehow inherted straight through my first attempt at penning new releases posts in 2015. 

It was in researching that post that I became fascinated with how deep Conan's reprinted archives were - Dark Horse had issued dozens of paperbacks covering his entire primary run at Marvel as well collections covering over 100 issues in the new Dark Horse continuity.

As I said then, "[N]ow I kind of want to read Conan. This is how it happens." I'm a sucker for long runs, and an even bigger sucker for coherent collected shelves.

While I've managed to avoid the siren call of collecting these dozens of books, I couldn't resist trying to untangle the various releases. Chronicles reprinted Barbarian but Chronicles of King Conan were reprints of another series and Marvel rebooted Conan in 1994 before Dark Horse did in 2003 with plain old Conan, followed by Conan The Cimmerian even though that's actually a befitting title for an initial volume considering it's how Robert E. Howard originally described him:

Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."

And thus, after a year-and-a-half of on-and-off tinkering that was nudged to completion by my not having a guide to link to for Conan's appearance on this year's Marvel Omnibus Survey, we have my first and only (but not for long!) guide to a licensed character!

I'll have a post up in the next few days detailing the next few pages up for completion.

Questions or comments? Let me know below!