Reviews for Conan: The Newspaper Strips, Volume 1

The average rating for Conan: The Newspaper Strips, Volume 1 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-20 00:00:00 Nate Devries Let's establish upfront that the production on this book is really poor. It appears that the art was scanned in directly from newspaper clippings, and then cleaned up as much as possible. The black and white panels suffer from a combination of enlarging and high contrast, wrecking what must have originally been very good artwork, and the Sunday color panels -- which aren't bad at first -- get rendered way too small as the book wears on, probably because the source didn't have the upper right panel (and there's a fascinating page layout explanation that probably only a page layout nerd like me finds fascinating). Surely the originals must exist in a better, cleaner form, right? Was there some reason they couldn't be obtained? But putting aside the production problems, it's fun revisiting a newspaper comic I used to read as a kid. Some long-dormant synapses fired up, as I found myself recalling storylines from 35 years ago. It was my introduction to the Conan mythos, and remains the only Conan-related material I've ever bothered to read. Though at times the dialogue borders on the ridiculous (and there are also the pacing issues of a daily strip to contend with) this is great, high-adventure stuff.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-03 00:00:00 Sherri Lafrance Interesting reading. I feel like I learned quite a bit about what is involved in writing something like this, telling little bits and pieces of stories in very short format. The constraints of such work means that the stories weren't subtle but generally very broad. Monster of the day or sorcerer of the day. I could see the character of the comic book Conan developing here, although the character seemed a pretty far cry from what you read about in REH's original work.