Conan The Barbarian #24 - Titan Comics

CONAN THE BARBARIAN No. 24, October 2025

Containing a genuinely skin-crawling confrontation between the titular character and a disconcertingly dark cavern filled full of Medusa-headed serpents, there probably isn’t any doubt that Jim Zub’s script for Issue Twenty-Four of “Conan The Barbarian” strongly taps into a rich vein of Robert E. Howard’s lore and legacy. But whilst this somewhat contrived situation is both thoroughly entertaining and action-packed, a number of other elements to this comic’s twenty-two page plot might not sit as well with those bibliophiles familiar with the Hyborian Age-based works of the “father of the sword and sorcery subgenre.”

Foremost of these concerns is surely the Canadian writer’s depiction of Zula as a somewhat untrustworthy, shadowy rogue, who cowardly deserts his comrade-in-arms towards the end of this comic just when the Cimmerian has need of his help to rescue poor doomed Livia from Athyr-Bast’s Tower. Indeed, the author quite overtly portrays the shapeshifting magic user as a devious deceiver of men, who even goes so far as to openly admit to the Barbarian that he actually saved the muscular warrior from a snake-borne spirit so he could harness its incredible power in an amulet, rather than simply do the adventurer a morally decent deed; “So your offer to free me from that evil was just a selfish stratagem?”

To make matters worse though, the utterly depressing ending to this book debatably raises the question as to what the actual point of Zub’s multi-part narrative even was – apart from him mercilessly killing off all of the cast members he took from Howard’s 1967 short story "The Vale of Lost Women”. So demoralising a conclusion simply leaves an aggrieved Conan determined not to enter Stygia again, and arguably also puts a significant dampener on the war chief of the Bamulas’ previous 'promise in prose' to innocent Livia that he would safely send her home to Ophir after she was almost sacrificed to the “devil from the Outer Dark.”  

Much more uplifting than this publication’s penmanship is Fernando Dagnino’s artwork. The Madrid-born illustrator does a first-rate job in imbuing the Cimmerian with all the ferocity any perusing bibliophile might expect from the agitated interloper, and impressively captures much of the look of director Ridley Scott’s haunting “Alien” egg chamber when he pencils the birthing lair of Thoth-Amon’s slithering man-serpents beneath the heavily-populated streets of Kheshatta.

The regular cover art of "CONAN THE BARBARIAN" #24 by Dan Panosian