Two glimpses into “Conan’s” future…
What does the future hold for everyone’s favorite barbarian? Brian Wood takes a literal approach to that question in the latest volume of his run on the character’s ongoing series “Nightmare of the Shallows.” The results are good enough to make up for the half of the volume that doesn’t involve Conan tripping balls with his girlfriend. However, as Wood has wrapped up his serialized run, Fred Van Lente will be taking over for him on the new ongoing title “Conan the Avenger.” It’ll be a while before I find out how he fares there, but I figure that the miniseries he did with artist Ariel Olivetti “Conan and the People of the Black Circle” would offer a pretty good impression. In the end, it just made my waiting for the first volume of that series a lot easier to take.
Getting back to Wood’s “Conan,” the first half of this new volume is easily the weaker one. After Belit takes off into the deserts of Shem for reasons she chooses not to disclose to her lover, Conan heads after her and winds up press-ganged into an army that plans to lay siege to a desert fortress. In a twist that should surprise no one, this turns out to be the place where Belit headed off to in order to sort out some old family business. All of this involves lots of scenes that involve Conan looking and acting very mopey as he tries to figure out how to get his girl back. “Mopey” is an adjective that I never wanted to use to describe the title character. Even though this arc provides some welcome insight into Belit’s character and history, it’s mainly a wash because it shows us a Conan I’m really not interested in reading about. For what it’s worth, artist Mirko Colak (with Andrea Muti and Pierluigi Baldassini pitching in for the final third) delivers some solid art, even if a lot of it involves “Mopey Conan.”
Davide Gianfelice, one of Wood’s collaborators from “Northlanders,” illustrates the second arc, and he displays some impressive versatility in all of the scenes he’s called upon to draw. That’s due to the fact that this arc involves Conan and Belit hallucinating on a drug called Yellow Lotus that promises to show them the true pleasures of the mind. In their case, the drug initially leads the two lovers into a virtual horrorshow of their past exploits as they wind up relying on each other — or their shades — to make it through the various trials intact. The first two thirds make for a twisty, but interesting read as Conan and Belit jump from scenes of vengeful zombies in the forest, to a dive for sunken treasure, to a coupled jump off of a cliff to prove their love. Wood doesn’t telegraph these scene changes, so while their abruptness may make things a bit difficult to follow they amplify the hallucinatory mood.
Then things solidify for the last issue as Conan receives a vision of life with Belit on a desert island… along with their two children. Seeing the barbarian as a devoted husband and father figure is something completely new to this series, but the knowledge that this is a dream makes it easier to accept and get lost in as well. Wood also does a good job of selling the Cimmerian in these roles, showing how his time with his offspring as children is filled with happiness and wonder, only to give way to terror as he realizes that his son — born of two warrior bloodlines — will eventually leave him someday. It’s a fear that turns out to be even more vivid than the people who come to raid the island and one that transforms into regret as we see Conan live out his final days peacefully with his wife and daughter.
“Peaceful Conan” isn’t something I read these comics to see either, but the scenes here are more skillfully put together than the slog of “Mopey Conan’s” adventures. Wood knows he has a limited amount of time to sell us on this idea, so he doesn’t waste any time in doing so. The result is probably the best single issue I’ve read of his run and one that elevates the volume as a whole. Having something that good be the last thing I read has that effect on me.
Unfortunately there’s no such elevation to be found in Van Lente and Olivetti’s “People of the Black Circle.” The back of the volume tells us that it was adapted from one of Robert E. Howard’s novellas and based on this, it’s clearly one of his lesser ones. This is a bog-standard swords and sorcery tale that has Conan, when he eventually shows up, getting involved in a revenge plot where the sister of the King of Vendhya tries to avenge the death of her brother at the hands of the title characters.
The story gets bogged down in too much exposition at the start and never quite recovers after that. Even when Conan finds his way into the narrative, we don’t get to see him do a whole lot of stuff he’s already done plenty of times over in the course of the main series and the miniseries that preceded this one. Lots of bad guys die, wizards conjure up deadly spells, and everything leads to a final showdown in a hard-to-reach stronghold. The previous titles I’ve read from Van Lente have been marked by fun and irreverence, and these two things are nowhere to be found here. Olivetti’s CG-styled art is nice to look at on occasion as his characters are impressively detailed, but don’t suggest motion very well. Then there are the times when it looks like he forgot to draw a background…
Given that this is Van Lente’s first time at bat with the character, the results are less than encouraging in regards to what I should be expecting from him on the ongoing series. As he was adapting a specific Howard story, maybe he just felt reined in by the task or a reverence to the source material. Either way, I’ll still be buying the first volume of his run on the ongoing series just to see if he gets better. Dark Horse has shown some pretty good judgment in the writers they’ve found to chronicle Conan’s adventures so far, so I’m willing to trust in their judgment here after this less-than-auspicious start. Even though Wood’s run hasn’t been the clear-cut home run that I was hoping for, it has still been worthy of the standard established by the writers that preceded him. Now the burden is on Van Lente to do the same.