Conan the Barbarian comic book order??!
Question: i want to start reading the Conan the Barbarian comic books but don't know what order are they on. i have the dark horse which start from 00-44, but i see that theres other stories what is the order of this?
Answers: i want to start reading the Conan the Barbarian comic books but don't know what order are they on. i have the dark horse which start from 00-44, but i see that theres other stories what is the order of this?
Any order. I was about eighteen when Barry Smith's Marvels came out so I was familiar with the original pulp stories before I was with the comics (which did blow me away). I'm not equally impressed with all the comics I've seen, but I have to admit the team on Dark Horse's version is VERY impressive.
Howard was a gloriously messy writer. Most of us encountered Conan through the prism of L. Sprague de Camp's fastidious attempts to clean him up, which Roy Thomas used in his original comic book because he needed continuity. The stories were not written in chronological order (the stories Howard wrote) and continuity was very much secondary to action. The older I get the less I appreciate the continuity. While Thomas handled it very well, he and his artists generally handled their adaptations well enough so it wasn't necessary. And Busiek et all are that good.
All you really need to know is he's born into a small tribe in the north, after some experience fighting, he's captured and briefly enslaved by the Hyborians, he escapes, heading southward where he first makes his living as a thief then as a pirate and mercenary before becoming first a general then the King of the Aquilonians.
If you need more continuity than that then may I suggest de Camp's Viagens Interplaneterias novels. The Conan stories are all about the action. Dive in, and if you don't like where you are, dive in somewhere else. You'll pick up what you need for each story in each story, and you'll pick up everything eventually.
Unfortunately, I'm no expert on Conan. I have the Dark Horse series and some older Marvel issues, though. My advice is to just start from Issue #0 of the Dark Horse run.
I'm not positive if it follows the Robert E. Howard storyline correctly, but I do recall the writer of the comic saying he was trying to be faithful to the original stories, so I would assume so.