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| The Savage Sword of Conan, Vol. 1 | 
| Author: Roy Thomas
Creators: Barry Windsor-smith, John Buscema
Publisher: Dark Horse
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $10.24
You Save: $7.71 (43%)
New (8) from $10.24
Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 14506
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 542
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 6.6 x 1.1
ISBN: 1593078382
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN: 9781593078386
ASIN: 1593078382
Publication Date: January 16, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20080906212818T
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Product Description
In the mid 1970s following the colossal success of Conan the Barbarian, Roy Thomas helped expand the universe of Conan to showcase further stories and the talents of some of the comics industry's best with the equally popular Savage Sword of Conan magazine. Now, for the first time in over thirty years, these primal tales, featuring Robert E. Howard's most popular character, are available in this, the first in a series of massive trade paperbacks, collecting all Savage Sword Conan stories beginning with issue one. Included in this volume are tales by Roy Thomas, featuring the breathtaking art of such legends as Barry Windsor-Smith, John Buscema, Alfredo Alcala, Jim Starlin, Al Milgrom, Pablo Marcos, Walter Simonson and more. But that's not all. Also included in this tome are Conan's few appearances in the title Savage Tales - for the complete Conan collection!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 ...Before the Oceans Drank Atlantis July 22, 2008
I have wanted, wished and waited for something like this to come along! I grew up in the 80's collecting 'Savage Sword'. To a mid-teen boy it was the best stuff ever!
This collection gives fans an opportunity to collect and read all of Conan's SS adventures from the beginning. The two downsides are:
1) The reduced picture size. (SSOC was larger as a magazine)
2) None of the "extras" were included. (Often there were Red Sonja, Kull or Solomon Kane stories at the end of each SS. It would have been great to keep those attached.
Overall though, I love this series and intend to buy all of them that they make!
THE BEST CONAN STORIES IN COMICS June 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Dark Horse has been reprinting Marvel Comics' color Conan comics for a few years but now they are adding the Conan stories from the black & white Savage Sword of Conan Magazine. This volume one Omnibus edition features 544 pages and includes the Conan stories from Savage Tales # 1 - 5, and Savage Sword of Conan # 1 - 10. Back in the day as a young Conan fan, Savage Tales was like the Holy Grail. These first five issues pre-dated Savage Sword and within a few years had already escalated in price beyond my pocket change. With this volume we are seeing theses stories again for the first time in over 30 years. What immediately strikes you about the book is the incredible roster of artists. These are truly legendary names: Barry Windsor Smith, Neal Adams, Jim Starlin, Mike Kaluta, Frank Brunner, John Buscema, Boris Vallejo, Esteban Maroto, Alex Nino, and Tim Conrad. From a purely artistic standpoint, Savage Sword and Savage Tales were dwarfing just about anything else going on in comics at that time.
The volume leads off with one of Robert E. Howard's shortest, but most well known Conan tales, The Frost Giant's Daughter. This is one of Conan's earliest tales chronologically. Still a teenager, he encounters a beautiful woman in the frozen north who leads him into an ambush by her giant brothers. The story features some of the best art to grace the magazine by Barry Smith. I have a theory about present day comic book art... Comic art APPEARS to be much better than it was say 20 or 30 years ago but this is due to advances in technology as far as printing, colorization, and digital enhancing. Today we see so many artists working in a minimalist, cartoony style because it can be digitally produced much quicker than hand drawn artwork. But you can't really hide behind technology when working in strict black and white.
Jump ahead to the second story, and adaptation of Howard;s Red Nails and just marvel at Smith's detailed line work. Look at Conan in the wilderness as Smith painstakingly draws seemingly every blade of grass and every leaf on the trees and bushes. Look at the close-ups of Conan with so many individual follicles of hair illustrated and then compare it to a lot of art today where you might get a curl or two drawn in. Smith puts most modern day artists to shame with his unique, renaissance influenced style.
The second issue of Savage Sword presents another Howard Adpatation, Black Colossus in which Conan faces off against a three thousand year old sorcerer. This story teams long time Conan penciller John Buscema with his frequent partner Alfredo Alcala. Buscema always drew a great Conan but Alcala pushed his work a notch higher with a gritty detail that would only work in a black and white format.
Issue #5 of Savage Swords sports one of Boris' best covers depicting Conan being crucified, from the tale, A Witch Shall Be Born. This story features Conan at his most resilient, surviving his crucifixion in the desert to get revenge on the man who put him there.
The final story from Savage Sword #10 concludes the adaptation of Howard's only full-length Conan Novel, The Hour of the Dragon. In a way it's a strange inclusion because you only get the last third of the story or so. The first parts were printed in Giant-Size Conan the Barbarian and while this is a great Story it might have been best just to skip it rather than having it pickup in the middle.
The art does lose some of it's potency since it is reduced down to regular comic size from it's original format but that's about the only negative I can come up with from this superb book. This was one of the best comics that Marvel ever produced and a we have to thank Dark Horse for making these stories available again to Conan fans.
Bang for your buck June 13, 2008
I had only read one Savage Sword comic, back in 1987, but I remembered how much I liked it. I've been collecting the new Dark Horse Conan series, and I've always been a big fan of the original Robert E. Howard stories, so I was excited when I learned they were re-releasing the Savage Sword comics.
The print is smaller here, which other reviewers have complained about, and in a few stories you lose some of the details. It depends on the artist, really. I haven't found it to be a major problem on any of them, but it can make certain frames hard to see on occasion. The newsprint-quality pages is something else you might hear complaints about, but for me it added to the spirit of the work. The black and white art also, it's a style I don't see often anymore, and I love it.
The main positive is that there is just so much in a volume. For the price you get a lot of Conan, more than your money's worth for sure. It's the same price as is a single volume in the old Marvel series reprints, but you get three-to-four times as much content for that price.
Overall I think it was well worth the money I paid, and I'm definitely looking forward to future volumes in the series.
Conan's PG-Rated Adventures Begin May 27, 2008
Created in 1932 as a pulp-fiction fantasy hero by Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian found new life 38 years later when Marvel Comics launched its successful Conan comic. But something of Howard's Conan was lost in the kid-friendly Marvel monthly, so a magazine, "Savage Sword Of Conan", was created.
A collection of Conan stories from the first ten issues of "SSC", as well as five issues of predecessor mag "Savage Tales", "Savage Sword Of Conan Volume 1" offers a generous helping of Cimmerian savagery as published from 1973 to 1976. Unencumbered by the Comics Code, Conan fights rotting corpses, crushes skulls, and makes his moves on assorted cat-eyed brunettes and pouty blondes whose near-nakedness is played up on every page. It's Conan as Howard intended.
Now published again as a Dark Horse compilation, it's easy to see what "Savage Sword" really had going for it: Incredible artwork and a steady scripter in Roy Thomas, the primary person behind both "Savage Sword" and the original Marvel Conan. Here, with "Savage Sword", Thomas uses the room to take Conan through novel-length adventures rather than the more episodic treatments of the Marvel comic. He has help from some singular artists, none better than John Buscema, who gave panels a depth of detail that makes them singularly re-readable.
Picking a favorite Conan adventure from this pile is hard. Thomas makes striking use of several original Howard stories, including Howard's only full-length Conan novel, "The Hour Of The Dragon" (here confusingly chopped up into non-consecutive chapters as "Corsairs Against Stygia" and "Conan The Conqueror"), and the classic novella "Red Nails". Other great Howard adventures repurposed here include "A Witch Shall Be Born" (where Conan is crucified on a giant X and chomps a vulture by its neck for nourishment) and the splendidly atmospheric "Iron Shadows Of The Moon."
While a couple of the Howard adaptations are notably sketchier, and the non-Howard-based stories often wilt in comparison to the group mentioned above, there is a remarkable consistency in the stories. Formulaic, yes, with Conan often interchangeably doing battle with a wizard, slaying a monster, and saving a maiden, yet the action is never less than gripping and there's enough variety of incident to keep one entertained. In one story, the monster gets the woman (of her own free will); in another, Conan feeds the woman to the monster himself. He even ditches one hottie for a horse.
Often captured, never defeated, Conan has a routine, almost casual response for his would-be tormentors: "Loose my bonds and hand me a sword, and I'll not walk the road to Hell alone." Whatever his enemies plot usually turns out a bad idea.
In a world of shifting values, it's nice to have Conan around again. Dark Horse would have done better to offer some introductory information, perhaps an intro from Thomas like he did with Dark Horse's reprints of the Marvel comic books. There's a strong need for a map of Howard's Hyboria for those of us who don't know our Asgard from our Kush - the magazines follow a non-chronological path and Conan bound around the known world a few times during his singular career.
But quibbles aside, what you get here is a remarkably generous portion of Conan's finest moments. Even Conan would be pleased about that.
excellent content, poor presentation May 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For a fan of Conan in particular or graphic storytelling in general, the content of this volume is excellent. There are, after, all, reasons that The Savage Sword of Conan mag has been so fondly remembered for the past thirty years: the stories are exciting and frequently thoughtful, and the artwork is beautiful.
Ironically, though, for a fan of Conan in particular or graphic storytelling in general, the presentation of that content is disappointing. Contrary to what at least one other reviewer has asserted, this book is not like a Marvel Essential or DC Showcase volume, because 1) the original Savage Sword of Conan magazine was in a significantly larger format than this book, and 2) the reproduction of the artwork in this book is quite--surprisingly--poor. Given that the original stories were in black & white, one would expect (I certainly did) that they would reproduce very well, but such is not the case. The book's printing (at least in the copy I have) is so dim on many pages that much detail is lost (a problem exacerbated by the smaller-than-original size), making the reading of the book often akin to looking at a poor photocopy.
Is this book better than nothing? Sure. But would it have been so difficult to print the thing well enough to do justice to the original stories?
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