Posted in: Comics, Comics Publishers, Conventions, Current News, Events, Pop Culture, san diego comic con, Titan | Tagged: conan, roy thomas, sdcc

Roy Thomas Returns To Write Conan, Announced At San Diego Comic-Con

Roy Thomas returns to write Conan comic books, drawn by Robert De LA Torre and announced at San Diego Comic-Con

At the Conan panel held by Heroic Signatures and Titan Comics at San Diego Comic-Con, the publisher and creators talked about how the Savage Sword of Conan magazine series would be continuing for another year, but also Conan writer for Marvel and Titan, Jim Zub, stated that one of the creative teams on the issue would be Roy Thomas and Rob de la Torre. Jim Zub credited Roy Thomas with the very fact that Conan comic books existed in the first place. And he does have a point,

Roy Thomas, Marvel's associate editor in the early seventies, obtained the licensed property from the estate of its creator, Robert E. Howard, after finding Conan chief among readers' requests for literary properties to be adapted to comics. In 2010, he said "I put together a memo for publisher Martin Goodman saying why we should… I hadn't read a lot of Howard, I bought a couple of the books for the Frazetta covers but I'd never really read them. When Goodman gave us permission to license a character, we figured we couldn't afford Conan….. By that time, there'd been about half-a-decade of Conan coming out in Lancer paperbacks, so we figured no sense going after that, there was no way we were going to get it. I knew Lin Carter slightly, who had authored a character called Thongor, who was half Conan and half John Carter of Mars…. Lin was great, but his agent kept wanting us to offer more money than the $150 per issue that Martin Goodman had magnanimously said we could pay for rights." But after reading and enjoying the Conan of Cimmeria novel, Thomas contacted Glen Lord, literary agent for the Howard estate, and said "we can't offer much money but it might increase Conan's audience and so forth, what do you think? I didn't have much elasticity, but I was so embarrassed by the $150 that I upped it to $200 without thinking. So that when Glen agreed … I decided I'd have to write the first issue or so, so that if Goodman objected I could knock a couple pages off my rate to even things out." It also meant they couldn't afford Sal Buscema for the comic as planned, so instead hired newcomer British artist Barry Windsor-Smith. With a few ups and downs, and Bisceme later joining the title, the Conan comic books ended up becoming one of Marvel's more popular titles in the seventies, lifting the prominence of the character in pop culture, enabling films to be made and for the character to become synonymous with swords and sorcery storytelling, as well as the very word "barbarian"

And now Roy Thomas is returning to write the character from Titan Comics and Heroic Signatures next year. Anyway, I thought it would be opportune, at this point, to recognise Roy Thomas for something he most definitely does deserve credit for.

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