Tower of the Elephant & Other Stories (Chronicles of Conan, Volume 1)

Rating:
Summary: Barry Smith is a genius! Fantastic!
Review: This book covers the first 8 stories by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith. There's a total of three books with all the "Conan - The Barbarian" 24 issues. The three volumes cover all the Barry Smith era with an EXCELLENT artwork. This book is a must have for every Conan fan.

Rating:
Summary: The adventures of young Conan
Review: This first volume in the Chronicles of Conan reprint series, "Tower of the Elephant & Other Stories" is in all honesty the worst of the lot. Roy Thomas had not yet found the right voice for Conan, and Barry Smith was still a hack artist imitating everyone and coming off bland. To top it all off, for the first several issues Conan wears a silly horned helmet. BUT!

It gets better. With each issue, Thomas and Smith begin to gel, begin to flex their creative muscles, and begin to define a Conan that is different from Howard's, but no less true. Conan loses the silly helmet. And then there series gets amazing.

Here we have the seeds of greatness, along with some really excellent stories. "The Tower of the Elephant," including even the prose of the original Howard story, is a great Conan adventure. "Twilight of the Grim Grey God," although not originally a Conan story, is well-adapted to the Northern Barbarian. "Zuakal's Daughter" is a fine story, although the villain looks a bit too much like Dr. Doom.

It is a shame that the original covers where not included. Otherwise, this is a excellent collection of Conan stories. Roy Thomas's musings on the series are very cool, like having a director's commentary track on a DVD.

Rating:
Summary: Another missed opportunity
Review: This was a decent effort but that's all it was. These classic stories of a cult comic could have been collected in a format that was larger to show off Barry Windsor Smith's struggling but dynamic art. Instead, we get the standard format comic collection. The publisher could have had extra material covering the whole creative tone of this offbeat success from writer to artist and inker (even the original colorist keys would have been nice). Instead the only extra material we get is the self-serving writer reflecting on his contribution. While he covers the creative process pretty well and gives credit where credit is due the text is still only one perspective and that's it. This volume could also have been collected in an economical hardcover edition. Maybe that'll happen one day but not any time soon.
Last of all are the great liberties taken by today's colorists who use their high tech coloring toys to sculpt and tone their myriad color schemes over the original line drawings. I know I'm in the minority when I criticize this but I know more than a few artists in the comic industry who are tired of these painter want-to-bes who have so little respect for the lines on the paper. They use those lines the way kids use the lines in coloring books. They add whatever they want with little, and often no consideration to what the artist is trying to accomplish with the drawn art. Ironically this is one of the better volumes in this series. I've studied art and color as an illustrator and I don't get the concept that all caucasian flesh tones intensify into dark brown hues as they head into the shadowed areas of that form. In the original versions of the comics the colorist did something very bold for that time period. That person colored flesh in shadow with a blue ink tint over the flesh tone. It was absolutely innovative and effective. This was a formal flesh color method being used in a comic book! Too bad the new folks are still in the coloring book mindset.

Rating:
Summary: CROM! What a wonderful book!
Review: When I was young I had read all of Howard's Conan stories and the DeCamp and Carter pastiches, so I was incredibly excited when Marvel brought out the Conan the Barbarian comic books. This volume is a compilation of the first eight issues (sans the covers, unfortunately - a big minus!).

In Mark Schultz's foreward to "The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian," which compiles all of Howard's Conan stories in the order in which he wrote them, he observes that there is no mistaking a Howard story. Reading through that book I was shocked at how elegant and cleanly and clearly written were the Howard stories compared to later pastiches and original stories by other writers. Conan was Howard's and Howard's alone to write, it seems. That holds true in this volume, too. Although all of the stories are written by Roy Thomas, the absolute best (and memory tells me that they were the best when these were still new comics) are those originally written by Howard himself or derived from his material: "Twilight of the Grim Grey God," "Tower of the Elephant" (a very, very memorable piece, even thirty+ years later), "The Lurker Within" (from Howard's story, "The God in the Bowl," it is strong in the parts where it follows Howard's story, weak in the new additions), and one of the most memorable Conan comics of all, "Keepers of the Crypt," based on an original Howard synopsis. The latter especially suffers from the lack of its magnificent cover.

Fortunately, the Afterward by Thomas helps to explain the history of the Marvel comic and the hows and whys of the ups and downs of the comic's popularity, and how it was tied to the (not published here!) covers.

Even without the covers (how we must hammer on that in the hope that future editions will have them) this is an excellent book and a worthy addition to the library of any comic collector or fan of Conan.

I give this 4 stars, the fifth missing because of the absence of ... you know what.