Conan: Isle of No Return 1

You know where you are with a Conan comic:

Ridiculously muscled  bodies?

Tick.

A chase scene in which Conan is pursued by guards?

Tick.

Impractically attired women wearing dominatrix clothing?

Tick.

A deserted city containing fabled treasures?

Tick .

A fearsome creature guarding said fabled treasures?

Tick

Yes, they’re all here.  Reading this brought on a not always pleasurable sense of déjà vu.

Writer Ron Marz populates this template with some cheesy and innuendo-laden dialogue, much of it jarringly anachronistic: “Losing your head seems a fair price for a chance at THAT fine ass.” His Conan is oversexed, irresistibly attractive to women and easily led by the prospect of wealth. For someone who supposedly earns his living as a wily thief, he’s really not the brightest star in the firmament.

For all that it’s cheesy and unoriginal it’s also quite readable. Marz keeps the storyline moving along at a fair clip, and jettisons the pretentions that have come to belabour other, modern-day comics. You’ll find no pseudo soul-searching here, no mock poetic captions, no elaborately contrived cross-continuity.  Yes, it’s pretty mindless stuff, but it does have a sense of energy and direction.

Bart Sear’s art provides a visual equivalent to the scripting.  It has a powerful sense of propulsion, which is aided by strong, uncluttered page design.  In this respect it’s admirable: he clearly understands the dynamics of traditional comics narrative. The issue opens with a rooftop chase that could almost be used as a textbook example of how to compose a page effectively. Against this though, he draws deeply unattractive characters. His Conan, who wears a horned helmet, gives a nod to Barry Windsor-Smith’s iconic visualisation, but lacks any sense of that artist’s finesse. His Conan resembles a body builder who has overdosed on steroids and there’s a lumpen, over-defined quality to the musculature. The faces are squashed or identikit: there are two women thieves that accompany Conan in this story, and I defy anyone to tell the difference between the two, beyond the fact that one is blonde, the other dark haired.  Add in some fairly obvious photoshopped panels, and the overall impression is of someone who has raw talent, but who has no real sense of how to refine that skill.

It’s probably damning with faint praise to say that this comic’s execution matches its brutish, power-laden fantasies well, but that’s the overall impression gained. It has fairly obvious deficiencies, and the tone of the whole affair is crushingly unoriginal. As such, it’s unlikely to remain in your mind any longer than it takes to read the issue, but overall, this was better than my (admittedly low) initial expectations allowed.