Conan: The Frost-Giant's Daughter and Other Stories

Conan has been adapted into comic form a lot, okay, a whole lot, and probably every single Conan story ever put down has been done in the comics at some point. Comics, after all, are produced on a relentless schedule, and that can make them voracious devourers of content. For many, many years the license belonged to Marvel, and they produced both the cleaned-up Conan comic and the much more artful Savage Sword of Conan series. Their license expired in the mid-90s, and the property was fallow for a while.

In 2004 Dark Horse started a whole new Conan series, unconnected from the old Marvel continuity. Like all the comics, it mixed straight adaptations of Howard stories with interpolated bits meant to fill in the blank spots in Conan’s biography. This first collection gathers issues #0 to #7 in this new run, and showcases the work of new writer Kurt Busiek and new artist Cary Nord.

Busiek is an Eisner-Award-winning comics writer who has worked extensively on well-known characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, Aquaman, and a four-year run on Avengers. Even before he was a pro, he is credited with the idea that the Phoenix was not really Jean Grey, and so is at least partly responsible for the character’s resurrection.

Handed the keys to Conan, Busiek does a creditable job. He fits “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” into a larger story arc about Conan traveling through the northlands, teaming up with and fighting the Aesir and Vanir, all the while looking for Hyperborea – the mysterious land of sorcerers behind the north wind. The plot has some nice twists and turns, and does some good characterization of the hero without weakening him. Busiek’s character is aggressive, surly, and prone to violence at the drop of a coin – the way he should be. In fact the only problem with the arc is that Conan visiting Hyperborea seems like something he would remember and mention later on, and as such it doesn’t match up with the original stories.

The real star of the show, however, is artist Cary Nord. A comics professional who has drawn almost any character you can think of, most notable for his run on Daredevil, Nord won an Eisner Award for his work on this very series right here, and it’s easy to see why. A lot of Conan artists have walked in Frazetta’s shadow, and Nord is not really any different, but he seems less influenced by Frank and more by the built-up visual vocabulary that decades of artists have created, making the Hyborian Age as familiar as the Shire.

What Nord really does best is atmosphere and evocation. His faces and action shots are excellent, but it is really when he breaks out into a wide vista of the imaginary world that he takes your breath away. He has a touch with misty distances and suggested details with simple color washes or broad sweeps of the brush. Under his eye, the age of Conan seems to live and breathe in a way it rarely does in art. Too many artists focus on blood and gore and monsters, and Nord does not lack for those, but it’s the way that he pictures the world that really catches the eye – the way he paints the age undreamed of as a place both absolutely real and yet brimming over with mystery and magic.

In later stories, Nord seemed to lose his touch a bit, and turned in work that seemed rushed and not as clean as this, but here he is clearly fired up and excited about what he is doing, and the result is one of the finest visual renderings of the world Bob Howard created so many years ago. The best art, for me, is like a window you want to step through, and Nord succeeds in that beyond almost anyone.