Conan the Barbarian #1

"Queen of the Black Coast," Part 1
written by Brian Wood
art by Becky Cloonan
colors by Dave Stewart

It's a world—admittedly one I come to with minimal experience in it—that echoes a familiar history and geography, and yet ultimately is nothing like it.  Ostensibly paleolithic, but scattered with cities, criss-crossed by professional traders, and, if only by Conan's own weapon of choice, proficient in metal-working.  It is the world as though it were lived mythology.  Wood, having already demonstrated his mastery in historical accuracy with Northlanders, discloses his ease with sword-and-sorcery fantasy as well.  He takes his cue from Robert E. Howard, whom he quotes on the title page splash—the opening chapter of Howard's first Conan short story, "The Phoenix on the Sword," from Weird Tales, December 1932—but the notes are all his own.

Handsome, roguish and so thoroughly defined by his warrior ethos, Conan the Cimmerian is equal parts charisma and hubris, each reinforcing the other.  He's got the swagger of a braggadocio along with the certainty and self-satisfaction of an egotistical ass.  It's because he's both of those things that Wood's Conan is so compelling.  He is just as likely to defend to the death a ship of merchants as he is to endanger them by coercing their compliance in his escape from a favored trading port.  He takes because he can; he protects, too, because he can.

It's little wonder then that the seams between the world Conan inhabits and his imagining of that world are difficult to differentiate, if not in reality porous.  In his wild, barbarian imagination, Tito's tale of Bêlit, captain of the Tigress and pirate queen of the Black Coast, becomes a fiery and bloody reverie of pain and pleasure.  By the time Bêlit's black ship appears, Conan's fantasy—always a little richer and saturated—is all but indistinguishable from his action.  It's a strategy that casts some doubt on Conan's own retelling of his arrest and escape:  the brutish violation of the young woman by the king's guard, his cool refusal to leave his drink, and his defiant court appearance.  This is, nearly by the force of his desire and appetite, in both name and story Conan's world.