Publisher: Titan Comics
Writer: Jim Zub
Artist: Doug Braithwaite
Colours: Diego Rodriguez
Letterer: Richard Starkings
Release Date: 28th February 2024

There can surely be little doubt that Jim Zub’s narrative for issue eight of Conan The Barbarian depicts the titular character at his most merciless, brutally hacking to death any hapless wannabe hero who foolishly stands between the possessed Cimmerian and his quest to recover an ancient sword. But for those followers of Crom who were expecting this sword and sorcery adventure to resemble something penned by Robert E. Howard himself, “Sacrifice” may well have fallen significantly short of the mark.

To begin with, Zub pens Belit as a disconcertingly resentful captain of the Tigress, who actually attempts to throw her beloved’s blade into the ocean for fear that it continues to remind him of “a lost lover”. Such aggressive mistrust on behalf of the Queen of the Black Coast genuinely seems to jar with the Hyborian Age pirate’s personality as portrayed way back within the pages of “Weird Tales” in 1934, and even causes the future King of Aquilonia to angrily comment that “petty jealously is beneath you.”

Making the twenty-two-page plot even more unconvincing though is the author’s attempt to assure his audience that Conan has carried the exact same hand-weapon for years, during many of his earliest exploits. This notion simply doesn’t ring true, and debatably takes something away from Howard’s subsequent short stories, such as (the unfinished) “The Snout in the Dark” and “The Slithering Shadow” – Neither of which make mention of the black-haired barbarian continuously wielding a supernatural sword capable of killing a Dark God; “After Belit’s death, the Cimmerian carried the ancient Pict blade as he trekked through the Jungles of Kush.”

Lastly, for those fans of Zub who are familiar with his writing, the notion of the warrior once again becoming possessed by a demonic spirit and carrying a mythical hand-weapon is very similar to Jim’s multi-part storyline concerning the Tooth of the Nightstar, which he produced for Marvel Comics just three short years ago. Indeed, the similarities between the two tales are irritatingly quite striking, with the supposedly strong-willed thief simply being turned into a one-man killing machine who savagely slaughters all before him in a gory bloodlust due to the evil powers controlling his mind.

The writer of this piece was: Simon Moore
Simon Tweets from @Blaxkleric ‏
You can read more of his reviews at The Brown Bag