SDCC 2024 Interview: “Conan the Barbarian”

Titan Comics continues its arc of long-running character Conan the Barbarian with writer Jim Zub at the helm.

The character of Conan the Barbarian has lasted in pop culture for decades through various mediums. The current run of comics, published by Titan Comics, continues the tradition of impactful stories based on well-established lore. The Geekiary sat down with writer Jim Zub at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con to discuss his current run on the Conan the Barbarian comics, as well as the storied history of the character and lore.

The Geekiary: What can you tell us about the upcoming arc of the comic?

Jim Zub: The Conan series – the first year we just did was a big, kind of epic tale themed around this mystical material called black stone. And it was the biggest, wildest kind of story we could tell. You can’t endlessly go up, so we kind of needed a breather.

The next story is called “Frozen Faith.” We go back to a younger Conan, we’re jumping around the timeline, and now we’re getting a sense of the wanderlust, his doubts, his faith and his doubts about his future. It’s a nice way to kind of get to real survival story kind of roots that is intrinsic to the pulp genre, but still have some cool stakes.

TG: What appeals most to you most about the character and the world?

Zub: Conan, he’s an icon; he’s arguably the world’s most famous fantasy character, the most recognizable. Getting to play with an icon is a wonderful thing. It’s a joy and it’s intimidating, and it puts a good kind of pressure on you because you need to explore, like, “What do you think you’ve got to say about something that has been continuously published for ninety years.”

There’s a reason why the character sticks around – because it speaks to something in us about survival and about the power for an individual to make a change and to grab hold of our own destiny even if it’s going to destroy us. That’s what I think is really cool about the character, it seems to speak to a lot of the fanbase.

TG: What are the challenges of writing for that character compared to other characters you’ve written before?

Zub: I’ve written iconic characters, like at Marvel, worked on franchises that have had longevity, but this is the oldest and probably the most singular as a concept. That forces me to not want to compromise in terms of my research for getting the voice down. Robert E. Howard’s original stories have a real lyricism to them, there’s a very particular glossary of language that is not the norm in modern writing. I didn’t just want to write it with a modern flair, so kind of marinating in that language has been one of the hardest but also really satisfying. Because when you get it, it feels different from regular sentence structure or the kind of vocabulary. When I finish a section of writing for the lettering script, I’ll usually come down for dinner and my wife’s looking at me, and I’m like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got electricity crackling from across the keyboard.” Something feels right, and that’s a very cool feeling.

TG: There have been many different iterations of the character. How much inspiration did you draw from the other versions?

Zub: The Howard stories, depending on how you measure it – twenty-two or twenty-six fragments, the original short stories – those are the absolute canon. I always default back to those, but I grew up on the comics. Roy Thomas, obviously a huge influence. Kurt Busiek’s run at Dark Horse was really influential, too. Tim Truman did some wonderful work. I read them with an eye for commonalities like we all see what is similar in the character, the throughlines that I feel we can draw upon.

But Howard’s got to come first, that’s the fountain spring. Visually of course, we’ve got this real bronze age feel to the book. It’s supposed to look like big John Buscema by way of Frank Frazetta, with a bit of Hal Foster thrown in for good measure. That’s the stuff that I wanted it to feel like the book you read as a kid or the book that you never read but wished that you did.

TG: Are there any characters or plots that you’ve wanted to incorporate that you haven’t had the chance to yet?

Zub: I mean, big time, without being pretty spoilery of the material. Almost every Howard story of Conan is a pillar of time in the character’s overall timeline, and we’re going to reflect them all in some way, shape, or form, but not just do straight adaptation. Any story that I haven’t touched upon yet, “The God in the Bowl” or “Beyond the Black River” or “Red Nails.” Those are wonderful prose stories, and I want to throw you a curveball, so you don’t know what going to come next, but not just straight adapt them.

TG: What do you want fans to take away most from your version of Conan?

Zub: That sword and sorcery is such a vibrant, incredible genre, and it’s not stuck in the ’70s, it’s not stuck in the ’30s, it’s not stuck in the ’50s. That it can be relevant and powerful and speak to things in the here and now. Because they are universal ideas of adventure and excitement in humanity.

TG: If you had the opportunity to have Conan crossover with any other comic book character, who would it be and why?

Zub: It’s hard to say. It’s funny, I was talking to someone earlier – in the original Conan comic run, he crosses over with Michael Moorcock’s Elric. And that character’s got a really cool kind of mystical flair; it’s a different kind of dark, almost fable, sort of fantasy, like a fairytale, a dark fairytale. I think there’s something neat there, that you can do it again and explore. I don’t know about comic characters, but there’s Lovecraftian themes woven through a lot of the original pulp stories because Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard were pen pals. They were riffing on each other in the original “Weird Tales,” so I’d definitely try to channel a little bit more Cthulhuian darkness into the storytelling. That’s not comics, but it’s more intrinsic to what I’m trying to do.

The most recent issue, Conan the Barbarian #13 is available now.

Author: Jessica Wolff

Jessica Wolff is a graduate of Drexel University with a BS in Film/Video. She has a passion for entertainment and representation in entertainment. She currently resides outside of Washington, DC.

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