Kuunari

I picked up Conan the Barbarian #1 by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan.  I will admit, the only reason I was at all interested in it is that I’m a huge Brian Wood fan, and both of his other big monthlies, DMZ and Northlanders, were ending and I didn’t want to stop reading his work.  I had never read any stories about Conan and the only experience with the character was the movies with Arnold.  In some ways, I’m glad I got to wait for this treatment of the Conan story.

This comic tells the beginning to the story of “The Queen of the Black Coast“, a rather notorious Conan story that concerns Conan’s exploits as a pirate with a woman named Belit.  It’s one of the few that deal with lust rather than greed.  I hadn’t heard of the story before this, but am very interested to see what Brian Wood does with it.  Already there

Becky Cloonan’s art has been a revelation.  I tend to enjoy in my comics a bit more gritty style than her style appears to be on the surface.  It reminds me a lot of Saturday morning cartoons with bold lines and dark lines around most characters.  However, on closer inspection you see the detail she puts into each frame.  There are some closeups of Conan in which we see the stubble of hard days on the road and sweat of the hot desert city he is in.  The art style ultimately proves effective because it is a story of young Conan, before he has seen all that he has seen.  In fact, this story tells of one of the moments that turn him into the hardened adventurer to come.

I’ll give it 4 1/2 stars out of 5, mostly because this comic was stage setting. I imagine when I look back on this comic after the 25 comic book run of this story, I’ll be giving it 5 stars.

Interested? Previews available at Comic Book Resources, as well as a “commentary track” with Brian Wood.