Review by Frank Plowright

A Nest of Serpents begins with Conan rescuing a scantily clad young woman from a bizarre beast, which is pretty well the day job. How she happened to be threatened by the beast on a rocky outcrop and why she has no clothes are topics not addressed, but she soon becomes irrelevant as they arrive at a town of unnaturally pleasant people. The adage has it that something seeming too good to be true almost certainly means it’s not true, and despite his best efforts Conan finds himself the captive of a malicious sorceress.

There seems no connection to the previous Twisting Loyalties beyond Jim Zub as writer, yet one manifests midway through, while Fernando Dagnino is new to the series as artist. Like Roberto De La Torre before him, he very much takes John Buscema as his artistic template, with layouts and expressions very similar, but a recognisable style very much fits what for a long while is Conan going through scenarios regular readers will have seen many times before. It’s almost a tick box of familiar scenes, while anyone new to Conan may have heightened levels of excitement.

It’s only at the midway point that Zub departs from a template to introduce a complication, and from then on this is a far more interesting outing, not least for the first meeting in this iteration of Conan and the sorcerer who’ll become his greatest enemy, Thoth-Amon. It builds convincingly on what had seemed passing events from before, while Dagnino creates some stomach-turning threats.

By the end A Nest of Serpents seems to be Zub setting up matters for the future. It works best if you’re relatively new to Conan.