Conan the Barbarian #2

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

What value really is there in being avenged when all are dead?  The narrative of conquest and battle supremacy could easily choke out Conan's undercurrents of futility, but Wood doesn't allow them.  To engage a fierce and savage pirate with a ship of traders is wildly irresponsible.  Conan's responsibility to them, in so far as he feels any, comes only with their deaths, not for their lives.  Dying nobly in battle is the only language Conan speaks, and he recognizes their valor even as he ignores the absence of battle-proficiency before their attack.  The narrator, more sensitive to this moral ambiguity, illuminates Conan's callousness in the delicate elegy he gives them. 

"And much like the timber...  ...the crew of the Argus was lost.  With strong backs and stout hearts, they'd pulled the ship through the worst storms the sea god Lir saw fit to hurl their way.  But oars are not the same as spears and swords" (Conan the Barbarian #2: 10).

They were exceptional at what they did, but they were not fighters.  And their deaths, though we (like Conan) knew them little, register more strongly with us than they do for the warrior, who underappreciates their value.

His arrogance, however, and his blindness to others' mastery at other crafts do not diminish his own skill or accomplishment in eradicating Bêlit's black and painted crew of pirates.  "This battle was one deserving of immortality in song--such was the Cimmerian's prowess that morning" (17).  It is a song that Wood gives him, staggered along a slashed and bloody page, severed in Cloonan's layout like so many sword wounds.  He emerges alone and triumphant to face Bêlit only to find himself the subject of her own imagination of wild barbarian wolves descended from icy moors with axes and swords.  It's an end that could easily devolve into nothing but feral and bloody lust, the pairing of the Cimmerian and the pirate queen, and it's conceivable that it may still be.  But it's also dense with possibility.  Should her seductive offer be sincere, Bêlit is hardly the unconquerable siren in Conan's fantasy, the blood-soaked and untamed warrior stepping through the battle gore.  He imagines her an equal—one (in mirroring panels) whose fiery eyes and sharp teeth match his own—but he finds her soft-lipped and dark-eyed and even, perhaps, a little disappointing.