An Interesting Fact About Conan The Barbarian

Just another Saturday night in Newport by the look of it.

Show this cover to a comic nerd and they will get very excited, for two main reasons.

Firstly because the story within forms the second half of The Song Of Red Sonja, the first story to involve everybody’s favourite henna-haired harridan.¹

Note Sonja’s attire which actually looks like a woman could fight properly in it, unlike later chain-mail bikini costumes (see footnote below)²

It was years before Return Of The Jedi so I guess the metal swimming cossie look was ground-breaking in some way.

Secondly, it marks the final regular issue drawn by the well-regarded artist Barry Windsor-Smith, who hailed from London. He also did the cover. Loverly, innit?

There is a third reason why some of the odder of we older comic book guys love this issue though…

The book was written by Roy Thomas, one of the major shapers of the Marvel world we know and love today.

While many folks are familiar with the names of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but Roy and others built on Stan and Jack’s work, introducing more variety and more innovations, such as adapting Robert E. Howard’s excellent short stories about sword and sorcery antihero Conan.

Barry Smith’s assignment to the book was written in the stars. The company was not too sure there was a market for Conan, Smith was new to the company and eager to work, so he was given the job.

He was a huge success and after a few “bumps in the road”³ the book quickly became one of Marvel’s top sellers.

However, his three year tenure on the comic was punctuated by dissatisfaction with the direction the stories were taking and the attitude of the Marvel management of the day to its employees.

He was also being paid considerably less than more established artists despite all the awards and kudos coming Marvel’s way for the innovative work he was doing.

So one assumes that what follows was a parting shot, a little gift for his soon-to-be-former employers in the last comic he wrote for them.

Roy Thomas takes up the story.⁴

I’m amazed that I fell for a little “joke” of Barry’s on Page 3.

He asked me to have one character in panel 4 call another a “wank”.

At that time, that British slang word for masturbation (or one who masturbates) was hardly common knowledge in the USA, and I certainly didn’t know it.

Still, I was suspicious enough to ask Barry to assure me that there wouldn’t be a problem because it was a dirty word in England.

He insisted it wasn’t.

I went along with him and soon (from a letter postmarked “UK” learned that I had been had.

I was annoyed with Barry for lying to me, of course, and after that day, if he had told me the sky was blue, I’d have opened the window and looked outside

Psst - Wanna see the offending panel? Course you do.

Conan The Barbarian? Onan The Barbarian, more like!

1. Thank you to the late, great Pterry Pratchett for that description from The Light Fantastic of his own Sonja parody character, Hennara.

The book also features an ageing rogue called Cohen The Barbarian. If you’re here for the Conan content, check it out. You’ll love it.

Thanks also to Pterry for showing us all the possibilities of multiple footnotes, which I’m afraid to say are rather over-used these days by lesser mortals,

2. Nope. I’m not putting That Sort Of Illustration here. Go find it on the internet yourself if you must.

3. Word is that Smith resigned from the book two or three times before finally calling it a day.

4. From the afterword to The Chronicles Of Conan, Volume 4, published by Dark Horse, 2004. The first four volumes are a beautiful collection of Thomas / Smith’s Conan run.