King Conan #5 - Marvel Comics

KING CONAN No. 5, July 2022

Providing its audience with an excellent “glimpse into the never-before-revealed past of the Stygian Wizard” Thoth-Amon, Jason Aaron’s narrative for Issue Five of “King Conan” probably captured the attention of many Robert E. Howard fans by predominantly pitching itself shortly after the events depicted in the December 1932 original yarn "The Phoenix on the Sword". Indeed, as an attempt to fill in some of the background gaps concerning “the sorcerer who will strike fear into the Hyborian Age” goes, this twenty-page periodical’s plot does a more than satisfactory job envisaging the rise of the initially unpromising snake worshipping boy; “Whilst everyone was gathered inside the temple, Thoth-Amon bound the doors, doused the stones with the tar and presented his offering to Set.”

In addition, the Alabama-born author also makes a semi-successful attempt to finally explain just how the emaciated-looking magic user came to be shipwrecked upon the same pitifully small “cursed isle” as Aquilonia’s former king. True, this explanation is arguably far less credible than the writer’s flashback “deep within the marshes of the River Styx”, considering that it is seemingly based upon the notion that the great snake deity had decided to sacrifice his prominent priest to a pack of marauding sharks just prior to Ascalante’s one-time slave hearing the Cimmerian’s voice bellowing about rum. But at least the sheer coincidence of the two living legends unlikely meeting in the middle of nowhere was not simply a matter of unconvincing chance and instead as a result of events being manipulated by at least one so-called divinity.

Far less persuasive is Aaron’s penmanship concerning Conan’s heavy-handed bullying of his arch-nemesis following their implausible pact to aid one another until free of the zombie-infested island. The barbarian has always been penned as being highly wary (and even intimidated) by those able to master the arcane dark arts, so the fact he’s seen picking up perhaps his era’s greatest sorcerer by the scruff of his neck at one point in a gesture of disrespectful dominance, smacks of uncharacteristic arrogant contempt, even if the Stygian’s powers are supposedly at something of a low ebb during this story.

Such inconsistency also appears to affect the artwork of Mahmud Asrar, whose opening splash showing a shaven-headed Thoth-Amon being whipped by his fellow acolytes with hooded cobras is one of the comic’s most memorable moments. However, by the time the spotlight returns to Princess Prima’s desolate abode, the Turkish illustrator’s pencilling appears a little tired and is slightly inconsistent when it comes to the skeletal form of the Black Ring’s Master Mage.

The regular cover art of "KING CONAN" #5 by Mahmud Asrar & Matthew Wilson