“The Coming Of Conan!”
March 8, 2011
Conan The Barbarian (the title alone sounded so…powerful) #1 was cover-dated October, 1970, just after my 15th birthday in July. I was a freshman in high school and we had just moved from Hialeah, where I had lived most of my life at that point, to south Miami. For years I had looked forward to attending Hialeah High School and being a “Thoroughbred” (as they were and still are known) with most of my friends from junior high, but instead I was attending Coral Park High School and I honestly don’t remember what they called themselves. Being there was not appealing to me at all and looking back I don’t recall much of my 2 years there (I finished my senior year of high school at night at another school) except that the school had a halfway decent art instructor, a journalism teacher who couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag, two English teachers who, while being as different as night and day, were two of the best teachers I ever sat under, that I participated in intra-mural gymnastics, wrestling, track and football and I took driver’s education through the school. And, because I had been handling Audio/Visual hardware since elementary school, that I got to be in the A/V class/club, which served a dual purpose of giving me a free period every day and sometimes got me out of classes to run equipment in other classes. The only other high point of Coral Park was that it was there I discovered J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy when I bought the paperback set from Jeff Miller for $5.00. It’s funny, I never cared for Coral Park much, but the more I sit here and think about it, the more things I recall. (Fodder for later blog entries)
In the 10th grade I rode the bus to school and the building was over-crowded so the student body was split into shifts. The early shift ran from 7am until 1pm and the late shift ran from 11am until 5pm, with the cafeteria absorbing the 2 hour spill-over for lunches. I was on the early shift and our bus usually arrived around 6:35 or so. and most days I would walk down to the boy’s locker room and get a carton of lemonade and an Almond Joy candy bar for breakfast, because I tried to sleep in until the last possible minute and run out the door just in time to catch the bus. That was when I was on the early shift. When I got moved to the late shift I would, on many occasions, miss the bus to school completely. What a slacker!
On the early shift I was supposed to go to lunch for 45 minutes before my last class of the day. Since the cafeteria was crowded, the school administration did not force us to stay on campus for lunch, freeing students to walk to a nearby shopping center or, for those who had cars, to drive somewhere else for lunch. I, of course, was walking, but I could usually make it there in 7 or 8 minutes and back in the same time…on those days when I actually returned in time to attend that last class. Sometimes I wouldn’t get back until time to get on the bus to return home.
The usual reason for my delay in returning was that there was a combination magazine/newsstand/bookstore in the shopping center and, being the voracious reader that I was, it was sometimes too tempting to read a new book, comic or magazine rather than go back and sit in class. This little slice of heaven had just about anything that was legal to read (and maybe a few things that weren’t) and best of all, they were one of the first places to begin putting their comic books on the wooden magazine racks rather than in the old metal “spinner racks” so that instead of being mashed, wrinkled, bent and dog-eared, the comics were nice and flat and in fairly decent shape. It was in this shop that I first discovered the next evolutionary step up from Mad Magazine (no, not Cracked, that was a step down), National Lampoon.
It was also in this shop that I picked up the very first issue of Conan The Barbarian #1. I had been seeing the promotions for it in various Marvel Comics that I read for the previous six months or so and knew it was supposed to be in the shop that day. I remember walking through the racks and shelves to the back of the store where the magazines and comic books were and seeing the top half of the cover peeking over the edge of the rack below it, Conan’s angry face beckoning to me.
Conan was a character in the “sword and sorcery” genre of writing that was created by the late R. E. Howard in 1932 for pulp-fiction magazines. A resurgence of the character’s popularity in paperback novels in the late 1960′s convinced Marvel Comics Editor/Writer Roy Thomas to license the character for comic book adaptations. History says Thomas himself had to agree to write the adaptations as part of the contact agreement with Howard’s heirs, a stipulation he probably had no difficulty agreeing to since he had publicly admired the character and storylines and felt he had a rich vein of material to work with.
Rather than select a veteran artist to illustrate the stories, up and coming British penciller Barry Smith (now Barry Windsor-Smith) was chosen by Thomas to bring Conan and his world to life with his drawings. I remember the first time I saw a book that Smith had drawn was also his very first work for Marvel; X-Men #53 published in February of 1969. While it was plain to see that Smith was doing his best to emulate the style of Marvel Artist Emeritus Jack “King” Kirby”, I (and most of fandom at the time) thought it was some of the worst comic book art I had seen. To see the improvements in his style, storytelling and illustrative skills advance so much in 20 short months was astounding. (Comics legend has it that, newly arrived from Britain to work for Marvel in New York City, Smith had no studio or even full-sized drawing board to work on so he sat on park benches in the city drawing his first few books.) But Thomas made the absolutely right choice in making Smith the artist on the book as he captured the intensity of Conan and the “magical” essence of the world he lived in. Later, veteran artists such as both the late John Buscema and Gil Kane would have long runs on the book in its 25 year history, but it was Smith who set the tone artistically.
This book proved that comic books did not belong exclusively to the superhero genre; that a comic could be popular without involving capes and masks, and that an older audience would welcome more literary content in a comic book story. It sparked a surge in sword and sorcery titles and stories and made comic book companies realize the untapped potential for material that licensing provided.
But most of all, it was just fun.
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