Conan Newspaper Strips

[Jeff of Earth-J]

As I mentioned elsewhere, I don’t remember reading this strip when I was a kid although I do remember seeing it. I bought the recent collection of the entire run (don’t be fooled by “volume one” on the cover) to see how well Roy Thomas and John Buscema transferred their respective arts from the medium of comic books to that of comic strips. The answer is quite well, but the collection itself has problems. First of all I should mention that the daily strips are HUGE… two per page, and the Sundays start by filling an entire page each.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, twelve weeks in to the run, the 1/3 page Sundays drop to 1/4 page size… just about the same size as one of the dailies. Also, although the line work on the Sunday strips is crisp and clear, the line work on the dailies is murky and indistinct. At the size they’re reprinted, I really expect to be able to “get between the lines,” but as it is, the size just exacerbates the problem. Furthermore, given Roy Thomas’ highly detailed introductions to the collections of his Conan comic book stories, this collection has no supplementary text material at all.

The stories are typical of what one would expect (including an origin story and a lengthy Red Sonja continuity), but given the shoddy reproduction of this volume, I can’t even recommend it to hardcore fans. This is a true disappointment given the usual high quality of Dark Horse reprint collections.

[Mr. Satanism]

My hometown paper never carried any of the cool strips when I was a kid. I remember being shocked whenever I visited my aunt & uncle, who moved around the country quite a bit back then. Their locals had Conan, Star Wars, even, IIRC a Justice League strip of some sort (can anyone confirm this?). Back home, I was stuck with Mary Worth.

[Luke Blanchard]

The JLA strip was World's Greatest Superheroes. I've read or listened to an interview with Martin Pasko in which he described it as really a revival of the Superman strip stemming from the Superman movie, but other DC heroes also appeared.

[Luke Blanchard]

I've always loved the Mary Worth sequence where Mary in her Apple Mary guise fought the Halloween Pumpkin King.

[ClarkKent_DC]

Luke Blanchard said:

The JLA strip was World's Greatest Superheroes. I've read or listened to an interview with Martin Pasko in which he described it as really a revival of the Superman strip stemming from the Superman movie, but other DC heroes also appeared.

World's Greatest Superheroes began as a Justice League strip and featured the full team at the start; it gradually shifted focus to telling stories about Superman only. There are some samples of it here at The Speeding Bullet.