Conan The Avenger #3 - A Review

Conan The Avenger #3 finds our hero in a conflicted state of mind.  His father taught him to never trust a wizard, yet Conan now finds himself in the employ of one - a so-called witchunter who uses his powers against evil sorcerors.  The witchhunter has promised to rid Conan of the ghost that haunts him in exchange for his help but Conan is uncertain whether he wants to be free of it, since the ghost in question is his beloved Belit and she seems to be protecting him from harm.  These thoughts and an empty purse weigh more heavily on Conan's troubled spirit than current events in the city of Punt, where a panicked populace blames the king's sister for the witchcraft that deforms their children and curses their lands...

This book has many problems but the greatest of these is a severe lack of Conan.  Our favorite barbarian doesn't show up until well past the halfway point of this issue.  Even then his story seems to be an afterthought compared to the politics of Punt and the growing civil unrest.  This presents another problem - why should the reader care about the political struggle when Conan can't be bothered to give a damn?

Fred Van Lente's fails to capture the spirit of the Conan mythos.  I've written before of how Van Lente's scripts thus far have lacked the sense of weird mystery that is a large part of the Howard oeuvre.  That problem is also present here.  For all of Conan's waffling regarding whether or not he can work for a wizard, he seems remarkably at-ease with the idea that the love of his life is haunting him or is unable to rest because of his own conflicted heart.  This seems terribly out of character for Conan, who is far more passionate about those he cares for and is usually depicted as being ill at ease with anything that smacks of the unnatural.

I've also written about their being certain logic problems with the scripts in this series so far.  Previous issues brought us slavers who seemed more interested in stealing from passed-out drunks than selling them for a profit.  As one would expect from a slaver!  This issue sees Conan having the good fortune to find the only two prostitutes in Punt who are willing to indulge in a threesome and let him crash at their place without requiring any payment in advance.

The good news is this is artist Brian Ching's last issue.  The bad news is that he delivers his worst job yet in this issue.  This does not look like professional quality artwork.  This looks like a poor first attempt at a quick-sketch for a storyboard.  Ching has somehow managed the trick of delivering artwork that is indistinct yet still cluttered with line-work!

Only the most devout of Conan fans need bother with this issue.  The rest of you would do better to wait until next month.  I don't hold out much hope that the story will improve, but at least the artwork should be better.

Conan The Avenger #2 - A Review

I savaged the first issue of Conan The Avenger in a review for Kabooooom.com and was honestly ready to call it quits on this book for a time.  The artwork was terrible in several respects.  The dialogue was decent, though the actual story of the book was rife with plot holes.  About the only thing the book had going for it was that writer Fred Van Lente had clearly done his homework researching Robert E. Howard's Hyboria and had chosen a solid foundation on which to build a unique story.


Sadly, this second issue has done little to justify what little hope I had that things might improve.  If anything, the artwork has become even worse.  Brian Ching manages the impossible, creating figures that are vaguely defined yet somehow rendered with overly complex line-work.  You can see some attempt at detailing but you can't see any of the details!  Colorist Michael Atiyeh also does this book a disservice by painting everything with a washed-out palette that holds little aesthetic appeal.


Astonishingly, it was the story that vexed me most this time around - specifically the revelation that the ghost of Belit is now haunting Conan and frequently jumping in to aid him in battle.  While this is somewhat more welcome than Brian Wood's treatment of Belit in his adaptation of Queen of The Black Coast, it almost seems that Van Lente is over-correcting in trying to right Wood's mistake.

Wood depicted Belit's famous manifestation as a protective spirit as a hallucination on Conan's part.  By contrast, Van Lente eliminates all mystery regarding Belit's appearance, depicting her as a ghost who cannot rest until Conan finds peace with her death.  Neither of these ideas seem true to the Howard cannon, which deliberately kept the details of any sort of life after death vague excepting those forms of undeath that resulted in monsters being created, such as the Lost Women or the victims of The Pool Of The Black One.

Regardless, this is the worst Conan story since his return to comics under Dark Horse's aegis.  I'll likely keep reading this book for the sake of keeping my collection complete and warning you good people away.  But there's no reason for casual Conan fans to waste their time on this book.