The Legacy Of Conan The Barbarian

Conan's first appearance in print wasn't even supposed to star him - Robert E. Howard took an unpublished story starring his other fantasy hero, Kull the Conqueror, and rewote it to feature Conan for the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales. It opens with Conan in middle-age, having seized the throne of Aquilonia and growing restless. A group of conspirators wish to kill him and retake the throne, but the machinations of the dark wizard Thoth-Amon might have something to say about that. This story established Conan as world-weary, amoral, and a total badass with a long history, and fans were hooked right away.

One of the things that makes the world of Conan so awesome is its richly-developed setting. The "Hyborian Age" was a lost period in recorded history, after the destruction of Atlantis but before any civilization we now know rose. When Howard sold the first Conan story, he sat down and wrote an eight thousand word manuscript detailing the culture and history of this time, giving his heroes and villains an incredibly well-rendered playground to hack and slash through.

Robert E. Howard only wrote a little over two dozen Conan stories, many of which weren't even published in his lifetime. The character passed through many hands in the world of fiction, including Robert Jordan, Poul Anderson and L. Sprague de Camp. But if we were going to pick one creator who is most linked to the Cimmerian, it's illustrator Frank Frazetta. Frazetta developed the iconic visual look for the character across dozens of book cover paintings, almost single-handedly developing the genre known as barbarian art.

It's fair to say that non-superhero comics from Marvel and DC typically don't do very well. The one notable exception was Conan The Barbarian, which ran uninterrupted from 1970 to 1993 - that's almost a quarter of a century of barbarian action. Primarily written by Roy Thomas, the series spotlighted the awesome art of John Buscema, who gave the barbarian a muscular, hard-edged look that has carried forward to this day. The series both adapted classic Howard stories as well as added new tales to the lore, and because it took place in the Marvel universe, Conan met such luminaries as Dr. Strange and Spider-Man every once in a while.