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8 reviews for:
The Savage Sword of Conan, Volume 1
Tim Conrad, Barry Windsor-Smith, Gil Kane, Alex Niño, Joss Jodloman, Pablo Marcos, John Buscema, Jim Starlin, Roy Thomas, Tony DeZúñiga
3.95 AVERAGE
8 reviews for:
The Savage Sword of Conan, Volume 1
Tim Conrad, Barry Windsor-Smith, Gil Kane, Alex Niño, Joss Jodloman, Pablo Marcos, John Buscema, Jim Starlin, Roy Thomas, Tony DeZúñiga
3.95 AVERAGE
Finally, they're reprinting these old Savage Swords! I learned to read on these bad boys and they still serve as the cornerstone of my comic collection. Now I can round out the run. Nothing is lost in the reprint but the cover as the pages were originally done in black&white. It's amazing to think that John Buscema (my favorite artist) or Barry Windsor-Smith turned out so many pages of detailed pen&ink every two months. And Roy Thomas translates Howard very well. If you think you should read them, then you should waste no time in reading them.
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
great stuff. contains a Witch Shall be born and Conan the Conquerer
Well, this took longer than I anticipated, but I should’ve known better. Comics today are notorious for being decompressed. Meaning the plot is spread out and carried mostly by the art and some dialogue. This collection of Savage Sword is from peak 70’s Marvel, which means page after page of captions, which makes for longer reading. This is compounded by Roy Thomas (whom I love as a comic writer) never meeting a trivial detail or description go to waste.
The art in this volume is nothing short of spectacular, with the best Marvel artists of the time doing amazing black and white work. It is worth reading for the art alone.
Another reason this took a while was because the stories are very similar. Conan gets caught up in an adventure, has to escape, fights a terrible battle at the end, and rides off into the sunset. Being the beginning of the run, you get the sense that the creative teams are still working out what they want to do.
All in all, this is a piece of comics history and worth reading. Just go into it knowing that it is much denser than modern comics.
The art in this volume is nothing short of spectacular, with the best Marvel artists of the time doing amazing black and white work. It is worth reading for the art alone.
Another reason this took a while was because the stories are very similar. Conan gets caught up in an adventure, has to escape, fights a terrible battle at the end, and rides off into the sunset. Being the beginning of the run, you get the sense that the creative teams are still working out what they want to do.
All in all, this is a piece of comics history and worth reading. Just go into it knowing that it is much denser than modern comics.
adventurous
dark
informative
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This s a very strong collection, but there were two or three stories that I thought were unreadable due to art design and page layout. Lots of dinosaurs, though.
TL;DR : Even as a male power fantasy this is a bit sh*t.
Between the times when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the Sons of Arius, there was an age of poorly written, overly stylized (read: wordy for no good reason), and formulaic stories reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft's worst acid trip fiction. And unto this Conan, destined to be poorly drawn, wore the crown of Aquilonia on his troubled brown and looked exactly like every other generic well-muscled background character. It is I, his critiquer, who wonders what the knock-on effect of such toxic masculinity and the treatment of women as objects to be passed around like drinking cups will have for decades past and decades to come. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure, when women existed only in the simplex (read: in the singular), never to interact with one another or to have their own thoughts, feelings, or opinions.
Dun dun dun DUN dun dun....
Between the times when the oceans drank Atlantis and the rise of the Sons of Arius, there was an age of poorly written, overly stylized (read: wordy for no good reason), and formulaic stories reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft's worst acid trip fiction. And unto this Conan, destined to be poorly drawn, wore the crown of Aquilonia on his troubled brown and looked exactly like every other generic well-muscled background character. It is I, his critiquer, who wonders what the knock-on effect of such toxic masculinity and the treatment of women as objects to be passed around like drinking cups will have for decades past and decades to come. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure, when women existed only in the simplex (read: in the singular), never to interact with one another or to have their own thoughts, feelings, or opinions.
Dun dun dun DUN dun dun....