Publisher: Titan Comics
Writer: Jim Zub
Artist: Rob de la Torre
Colours: Dean White
Letterer: Richard Starkings
Release Date: 27th March 2024

Casting the titular character back in time some eighty thousand years, Jim Zub’s penmanship for issue nine of Conan The Barbarian walks a terrifyingly taut tightrope between fan fiction and something seen in Marvel’s ’70s comic book anthology series “What If..?” True, the surprising plot twist undoubtedly provides the Canadian author with an opportunity to involve the Cimmerian in a truly savage, sense-shattering sword-fight against the legendary King of Valusia – something which would excite many a devotee of Robert E. Howard’s writing. But this confrontation is manufactured in such a bemusing, irrational manner, that many fans of both sword and sorcery heroes will surely be wondering just what exactly is going on..?

Foremost of these disappointing doubts is surely the logic behind just how the adventurer has time-travelled to Kull the Conqueror’s era in the first place, having previously been depicted killing himself with a sword rather than continue on as a blood-soaked zombie. The fact the heavily-muscled thief simply steps out of a destroyed black stone statue set upon a hilltop with all his physical faculties intact, at least once he’s slept, is as mysterious as it is arguably absurd. Whilst Brule of the Borni Tribe’s willingness to accept the stranger as a fellow comrade-in-arms, and subsequently take him straight to the very heart of his civilisation’s power unrestrained, appears to have been manufactured purely to quickly place Conan in the presence of the “Exile of Atlantis”.

Disconcertingly however, Zub also appears unable to resist the chance to have the barbarian encounter a younger incarnation of Yag-kosha. Such a meeting is debatably dubious at best, due to the elephant-headed creature now presumably knowing that a horrible, lingering fate (and eventual death) awaits him in Yara’s evil tower in the Zamorian city of Arenjun. Indeed, so abrupt is this reunion’s end, that many a bibliophile will probably feel even Zub himself suddenly thought better of exploring such “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff” too much.

What does undeniably work throughout this publication though, is “ravaging” Rob De La Torre’s artwork, which genuinely whisks the reader away to pre-cataclysmic Atlantis with just a few strokes of his pencil. Of particular note has to be the aforementioned battle between Conan and Kull, as its intensity quite literally leaps off the printed page, and is most certainly worth the cover price of this comic alone.

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