Conan The Barbarian #3 - Marvel Comics

CONAN THE BARBARIAN No. 3, April 2019

Whilst happy happenstance has undeniably played an important part in ensuring the survival of Conan the Cimmerian during so many of Robert E. Howard’s Sword and Sorcery novellas, it is difficult to believe that the majority of this particular adventure’s audience were entirely sold upon Jason Aaron’s premise that the barbarian would have died at the age of seventeen years if not for an incredible run of good fortune. Indeed, starting with the well-muscled thief’s miraculous escape from a mountainous landslide which required his captors to spend three days digging their captive “out from under the rubble”, the Alabama-born author’s script for Issue Three of “Conan The Barbarian” seemingly contains little else than a catalogue of auspicious escapes, ranging from an ancient tree's blessed branch breaking just as the savage youth is being hung for robbing the Nemedian’s Royal Gold Store, through to a lucky lightning bolt striking down the Red Tree Hill Inquisitor moments before the lawman was about to hew his haplessly-bound prisoner in half with a powerful axe blow.

Of course, that isn’t to say that the titular character doesn’t then try to make the very best of his providential predicaments by scattering the settlement’s well-armed soldiers with a bone-breaking bough or threatening to cold-bloodedly crack the scrawny neck of a well-meaning disciple of Mitra if he isn’t released from his lowly jail cell. But none of these exciting escapades ultimately conclude well for Conan, and despite the brutish adventurer’s best efforts he is consistently recaptured either by the mining town’s impoverished people or by an uncaring ‘sheriff’ who prefers to callously kill his own cleric with a crossbow through the throat than allow the Cimmerian to get out of his chamber and flee certain death; “Conan killed the priest. We all saw it… Move the body up the mountain before the dogs get wind of it. I want them good and starving when the time comes. Which won’t be long.”

Mercifully however, what entertainment might debatably be lost through Aaron’s penmanship is easily recollected by Mahmud Asrar’s excellent pencilling, especially whenever the “Pakistani-Austrian comic book artist” chooses to draw Robert E. Howard’s creation straining against his shackles or utilising his near super-human strength so as to momentarily overcome his captors by charging his full bulk into a long-standing tree and bringing it down upon their unbelieving heads. In fact, for those readers who like to imagine the fate Conan is so desperately fighting against, the illustrator’s opening page depicting an unnamed semi-conscious Hyrkanian falling to his death amidst a pack of blood-frenzied wild dogs easily lasts in the mind’s eye well after this twenty-page periodical is finished.

The regular cover art of "CONAN THE BARBARIAN" No. 3 by Esad Ribic