Conan vol. 17: Shadows Over Kush

Fred Van Lente makes his debut as the new writer for this series and almost immediately has Conan getting into trouble in the land of Kush.  The barbarian, still feeling the loss of his love Belit, gets drunk enough to have his gear stolen by a fence and then thrown into a junk pile teeming with giant carnivorous worms.  Naturally, this just makes him mad and is only the beginning of the story.  By the end of his adventures in this land Conan will have teamed up with an aged wizard named Agara, taken down a zombie attack, gone to work for the corrupt rulers of Kush, and gone toe-to-toe with a summoned boar-creature.  Business as usual for the barbarian as you can see.  Van Lente goes through all this rather efficiently and with a few self-aware bits — the best of which is when Kush’s queen lectures Conan on the finer points of witch hunting — for levity.

Still, this is all pretty standard issue as far as these stories go, and the writer even makes the questionable story decision to have Conan fight off an uprising led by the oppressed dark-skinned lower class of this society.  Thankfully this phase of his career doesn’t last long, but it’s still uncomfortable to read.  The most interesting part of the story is how Belit is treated as a literal ghost that is haunting the title character.  I like that Van Lente is picking up on the romance that defined Brian Wood’s run, as it makes sense that the character wouldn’t be over it so soon.  Van Lente also manages to write her out at the end in a fairly elegant fashion as Conan and his new crew head off to Stygia in search of a treasure horde.  That sounds like a recipe for disaster in regards to the characters, as well as the makings of a story worth reading.  I wasn’t completely won over by the new writer’s work here — though artists Brian Ching and Eduardo Francisco turn in gritty work worthy of the title — yet nothing about it gave me any real reason to stop reading this series.  It’s middle-of-the-road “Conan,” but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad read.