King Conan

Following on from the post a couple of days ago, here is my collection of King Conan comics related stuff. Again, like with the Conan, Kull and Solomon Kane collections, these are the items released by Dark Horse when they held the franchise for Robert E Howard's stable of comic characters.

Dark Horse were nothing if not thorough with their release schedules for the characters they held the rights for over the last ten years or so. King Conan was well represented and had more released for him, even though the tales were spin-offs from the main Conan storylines etc., than either Solomon or Kull.

As per the Conan blog entry, first up are the Marvel reprints...

The Chronicles of King Conan : 11 volumes

Unusually for King Conan, as a character, there were no Savage Sword of or Saga of series that I am aware of, so I can only report on the Chronicles of King Conan reprints that were collected into the colour trades. There were eleven volumes (which surprised me a bit as I didn't think there were that many) of King Conan's story that were treated to Dark Horse's release schedule.

I am sure that Dark Horse missed many of Marvel's Conan and King Conan stories as there was such a huge amount released over the last four or five decades. Although I am a great fan of Conan in comic form (but the printed words of Robert E Howard is where he is truly represented), I am not that interested in spending too long hunting down every single story he ever appeared in. If they are collected into an easy to access format then I will pick it up, but I will not purchase a whole book of oft-repeated stuff just for that one tale.

Dark Horse Mini-series : 5 volumes & 1 omnibus edition

Moving onto what Dark Horse released for King Conan is relatively easy as there were just five mini-series that were subsequently released as collected trades and a huge omnibus edition with all those trades contained within.

And the Colossal King Conan edition that collects them all...

 
Again, I have all of these stories to look forward to reading and mining for adventure and scenario ideas. The next couple of years will see me reading a heck of a lot of comics and trades (mustn't forget I have 2015 (the year, not prog number) onwards of 2000AD and Judge Dredd Megazine still to go too) as well as listing anything I took away from those collections. Added to the prepping and painting of my gaming miniatures, I have several years' worth of hobby related stuff to get through.

To paraphrase the old saying: Gamers only die when they have finished painting the last miniature in their collection. This probably holds true for comic collectors too, as they always have some unread comics lying around. Hence, why so many of us hobbyists never complete everything in our collections - there will always be one small set of minatures for a particular game we had set our minds on recreating that will be in some box somewhere at the back of some cupboard that will never be painted, just in case the saying is true.