Conan The Barbarian: Free Comic Book Day 2024 - Titan Comics

CONAN THE BARBARIAN: FREE COMIC BOOK DAY 2024, May 2024

Evidently launching an event “which will roll out through late Summer and into the Fall”, this “all-new” Free Comic Book Day one-shot certainly seems to contain all the elements needed to prove a successful draw for devotees of Robert E. Howard’s creations. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of another twelve-page periodical which contains quite so many personalities previously penned by “the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre.”

Perhaps understandably leading this formidable roster is the late great novelist’s Conan the Barbarian, who is portrayed as valiantly fighting off a senseless suicidal Pict assault upon the freshly-established Aquilonian province of Conajohara. This ferocious skirmish, proficiently pencilled by “Jaunty Jonas Scharf”, is as blood-soaked as it well-written, and enjoyably depicts one of those rare moments where the black-haired Cimmerian actually faces a human opponent whose sheer physicality actually gets him to momentarily pause in his death-dealing; “Trees can be cut -- and my axe stands ready.”

Regrettably though, this gratuitous confrontation all-too suddenly concludes with the victorious titular character involuntarily recollecting his devilishly-tainted tales as witnessed in “Titan Comics” current ongoing series. Admittedly, in many ways this publication is just a blatant advertisement “to reach thousands of new and lapsed readers” anyway, so a summary of what an ill-informed bibliophile might have missed when Howard’s heavily-muscled mercenary first glimpsed the multi-tentacled ‘unspeakable evil beneath the dark waters of the past’ should perhaps be expected.

What comes next however is a total surprise, as Jim Zub’s narrative shows that the evil sigil seen by Conan hanging around his dead foe’s neck also haunts the likes of Solomon Kane, Dark Agnes De Chastillon, El Borak, Professor John Kirowan, and even disabled Twentieth-Century author James Allison – whose mysterious disappearance at the hands of some unseen monster conjured up by his imagination neatly bookends the comic. This notion of a single “Howardverse” won't be anything new to those familiar with the “Weird Tales” contributor's tales, as all of the stories concerning Allison are based upon the man recollecting his ancestor’s past experiences during the end of the Hyborian Age. Yet somewhat worryingly, such a potential mass-merging of so many genres into a single, over-arching plot debatably somewhat smacks of being ‘fan fiction’ as opposed to a serious continuation of the pulp fictionist’s numerous notable works.

Writer: Jim Zub, Artist: Jonas Scharf, and Color Artist: Jao Canola