Dark Horse Comics brings the legend of Conan to vivid life with this fantastic series. If you have always thought of Conan as a brute, think again. As well as great strength and martial skills, he is also a superb tactician. Expertly written by Kurt Busiek and featuring outstanding artwork, this 50 issues series is a must-read for everyone, especially fantasy lovers. If you are a stranger to comic books, this is an excellent place to start.

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Excerpt of the review from SF Site:

Contrary to popular misinterpretation (thanks primarily to the Marvel comic books and two feature films), Conan, as presented by Howard, is much more than a fighter. He is a thinker, a tactician, a lover, and a loyal friend. Conan is a barbarian, a thief, a mercenary, and ultimately, a king. The tales are full of political intrigue, romance, swordplay, magic, mythology, and more. Like all of Howard's work, Conan was a vividly imaginative interpretation of a young man's West Texas world.

In the graphic novel, a young Conan has journeyed north in search of the legendary kingdom of Hyborea with its riches and immortals. While saving a young woman's life, he gets embroiled in a confrontation between the warring peoples Aesir and Vanir. Through a series of fights and political machinations, events eventually lead to the frost giant's daughter and eventually Hyborea.

Busiek's masterful manipulation of Howard's playground is supported and supplemented by the artistic talents of Gary Nord, Thomas Yeates, and Dave Stewart. Robert E. Howard was a master of action, who wrote some of the finest and most influential fight scenes ever produced. Reminiscent of Frank Frazetta, the art manages to translate the intensity and flow of the source material. Nord's interpretation of the frost giants is original and inspired.

Excerpt of the review from Graphic Novel Review:

Overall, the point to be made about the writing is that Busiek easily handles the difficult task of blending his own stories, and his own interpretation of the character, with Howard’s: the man is a pro. Yes, the prose is purple, the plots are melodramatic, the characters are thin. But, come on, this is Conan the Barbarian.

What really sets this version of Conan apart from the rest, though — and apart from almost any other action/adventure comic book being published today — is the mind-eatingly splendid artwork. That sort of thing gets said a lot, by graphic novel reviewers, when they’re talking about fantasy books. Usually, it means that the artwork is the kind of overly-rendered, photorealistic, pose-centric crap that you see on the covers of heavy metal albums and in posters for big budget fantasy movies. That’s not what this artwork is like at all. It’s something I’ve never seen before: scribbly, deliberately unfinished-looking, on the lowest level (the figure and the line), and yet gussied up at the highest level with the latest mainstream comics coloring techniques and painterly washes. It’s a strange, tense marriage of styles that works very well. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a bit of Kubert’s Tarzan to Nord’s Conan, but where Kubert puts his ink line in the forefront, making everything all about the line, Nord allows his line to fall to the back, in favor of pure shape and action, when necessary. In some places, the coloring by Dave Stewart swallows the line entirely, giving the characters and the settings a carved-in-soap kind of look. In other places, you get the sense that there was a tightly-pencilled line, which has been covered over by the coloring, and then one or both of the artists came back in with a Sharpie to just touch up a couple of key details with a thin black squiggle. I’m not sure if that was the technique or not, and I’m sure I’m not describing it well enough — suffice it to say that the style is distinctive and well-done. Together, Nord and Stewart have managed to breathe visual life into a character and an idiom that had become tired and old under the influence of geeky fan-favorites like Frank Frazetta, Barry Windsor-Smith, and John Buscema. I’m not saying that these artists weren’t masters — they were great, each in his own way — but that’s precisely the problem: they were masters. Their vision of the character and the world, bastardized by imitators and by imitators of imitators, like fifth and sixth generation mimeographs, had to be blasted out of our brains before we could actually “see” Conan again, with fresh eyes. Nord and Stewart have done that. This Conan is alive: he’s funny (his body language, I should say, is witty), he’s vicious, and he’s something else entirely. The fact that, toward the end of the book, another great fan-favorite, Michael Wm. Kaluta, actually draws a longish sequence in the middle of a story, in a completely different style, without putting the younger and less-well-known artists of the rest of the story to shame, or jarring us in any way, is another testament to their accomplishment.

Usually, the highest compliment I can pay to a series of graphic novels (and so many of them are series, rather than standalone works, that the series structure is probably the norm, rather than the exception — grumble, grumble) is to recommend that you not only buy the current volume, but that you follow the series into the future, and purchase subsequent volumes as well. Not only will I personally be doing that (at least, as long as the current creative team stays on board, I will be doing that), I’m also planning, myself, to purchase the previous two volumes, even though this isn’t my favorite kind of story, or my favorite kind of character, by a long shot.

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