Comics I Bought This Week: July 14, 2012

Jul14
on July 14, 2012 at 6:00 am
Posted In: Comics I Bought This Week

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics plus a hard cover collection:

  • Bloodshot −1

  • Revival – 1

  • Planetoid – 2

  • The Massive – 2

  • Hoax Hunters −1

  • Grifter – 11

  • Dancer – 3

  • The Waking Dead – 100

  • ”Creepy Presents: Richard Corben”

    • And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

    ”Conan Volume 11: Road of Kings” by Roy Thomas and Mike Hawthorne

    This eleventh volume of Conan is the first of the Dark Horse volumes to be written by Roy Thomas the writer of Marvel Comics’ Conan comic all through the 1970s and a good chunk of the 1980s and 1990s too. I used to read Conan way back then but it got stale for me some time in the 1980s. I was interested to see how this volume would compare to the Kurt Busiek and Tim Truman written volumes that I had read so far.

    The main difference I see with this volume is that Conan is less internal. Volumes one through ten got into Conan’s head and dealt with his emotions more than in this one. In this story Conan is the star but it’s not necessarily about him. It’s more about the plot. It’s not about what’s going on in Conan’s mind. It’s about what he’s doing. And what he’s doing is having a Conan adventure. He starts out as the captain of a pirate ship but then ends up traveling on the Road of Kings to deliver a princess home to her father. Monsters, sorcerers, soldiers, assassins, and all sorts of others stand in his way.

    The other difference from volumes one through ten is the art. Here we get more traditional inked and colored comic book art as compared to the digitally painted pencil art of earlier volumes. It’s pretty good art. Less subtle than the painterly stuff from earlier volumes but it suits the plot driven story. I also notice that we get a Conan who smiles more than he did before. He’s a bit more confident and devil-may-care than in previous stories. Since Dark Horse is doing these stories in chronological order it makes sense that Conan has gained in confidence but it probably has to do with the creative team as well.

    Overall I’d have to say that this wasn’t my favorite Conan volume but I liked it. The plot twists kept on coming and kept me interested in things. I was actually a little apprehensive that I wouldn’t like this volume since my last memory of reading Thomas written Conan was that it wasn’t interesting but that’s not the case here. It was even a nice change of pace to read such a plot driven Conan story.