Review by Frank Plowright

Starting with a prologue establishing how the young Conan was among the united Cimmerian tribes who repelled the Aquilonian invaders, Jim Zub jumps forward a few years to Conan now a battle-hardened warrior at 24 resigning from a band of plunderers.

It’s a scene-setting sequence, displaying Conan’s raw power and his ethical lines in the sand before the true threat manifests. It’s a form of zombie Pict, cold-eyed and remorselessly savage, yet only interested in dragging corpses from the villages they destroy. Conan finds himself allied with Brissa, a very capable Pictish woman who’s not yet succumbed to the plague afflicting her fellows. She tells Conan the creatures are already loose in his homeland, so little of his past can survive.

For older Conan fans there’s no mistaking artist Roberto De La Torre’s primary influence. This is John Busema’s Conan, small steely eyes surrounded by shaggy black hair atop an impossibly muscled frame battering his way through life. De La Torre presents a variety of landscapes, and has an advantage over Buscema by virtue of how far comics colouring has progressed. Dean White and José Villarrubia add visual tone elevating the art.

There are clichés associated with Conan stemming from the wish-fulfilment fantasies of his creator Robert E. Howard, not least women forever swooning into his heavily sinewed arms. However, in these days of increasing incel resentment does the formula of might and muscles equalling sex with an attractive woman not perhaps need some tweaking? It’s admittedly a fine line as it begins to tamper with everything that defines Conan. Perhaps a start, though, would be Conan referring to people by name rather than “woman”.

However, writing Conan is really about giving readers what they want, and Zub supplies the full ticklist from an overwhelming supernatural threat to the utterly confident and indomitable personality. An information dump toward the end seems an unnecessary diversion, and there’s a lot of dialogue at times, but that’s quibbling about a crowd-pleaser. Zub continues with Thrice Marked For Death.