Conan the Barbarian #10

When we were kids my cousin and I both had big stacks of comics. We used to trade some of them back and forth.

I remember borrowing Conan the Barbarian #10 from him, but having to return it because the pictures in the book terrified me. I was afraid to keep the book in my room at night. It was way too much for a four year old to process.

In retrospect, it's a great story. It contains all sorts of memorable images: there's a giant, anthropomorphic bull-god that somehow manifests out of a pillar of naked human bodies, a public hanging of one of the story's heroes, a shot of a sweaty fat man being squashed to death by the bull-god's red thumb, and a kind of lovely and surreal sequence in which the bull-god's naked (human) torso breaks through a domed roof and stretches his arms to the stars.

The whole thing is brilliantly done, and today it's one of my favorite memories of the comics of my youth. This was part of a great run by the creative team of Roy Thomas and Barry Smith. It's one of the high-points of the Conan comic series for me.

Smith's work at this time was not quite fully formed, but it contained the energetic enthusiasms of a young artist on a path of genuine exploration and growth. In a year or so his work would be amazingly lush and gorgeous, but at this point he was just coming into his own as a graphic storyteller.

(The hanging sequence is particulary memorable: it is presented as a series of wordless panels tracking Conan's reactions as his friend's legs kick and dangle from the scaffold above him. It's a pretty powerful sequence, for a sword and sorcery comic.)

A few years later I came across this story again, in a mass market collection of Conan stories. By then I was no longer frightented by the stories macabre or violent elements--indeed, I was entering that phase of male adolescence that finds romance in the violent and macabre.

Today I just admire the vividness of Smith's images, and the flair of his visual storytelling.