And….. we’re finished. What a trip that was. I managed to read every single original Conan story from Dark Horse in less than 2 months. I read everything via trade paperback when they originally came out and I did it the same way for this read through. Having individual issues would help with organization since some of the stories in the miscellaneous collections (Blood-Stained Crown, The Spear, Daughters of Midora, etc) need to be placed at various points throughout.

I adjusted my reading order numerous times throughout this run. I thought I had a pretty good order to start out but would encounter details and discrepancies that I had forgotten about over the years and had to reorganize things several times. Not everything fits perfectly, but I wanted to include every single story published and I think my reading order is pretty solid. Mostly I went by what Dark Horse gave us in order and the Dale Rippke chronology it’s loosely based on but I had to make a lot of judgment calls when placing the random one off stories and mini series. My method was to take what we knew for sure and where Conan would be located at those times, then fill in the blanks with what was leftover. Some stories had obvious places they had to occur due to events that had taken place prior to them, others I just used the location on the map and tried to come up with a logical travel pattern. Conan wouldn’t just randomly appear on the other side of the map with nothing suggesting how he got there. During the King Conan stories, some of the mini-series don’t have to occur in the specific times I placed them, I just put them where they made the most sense to me and felt natural. You may find a different order to some of these that makes better sense and I’d love to know about it and make adjustments.

I think the biggest thing that surprised me throughout this run is how different the stories felt when read all together. During the 15 years of reading them every 6 months or so when a new collection would come out, sometimes I felt like I was reading the same story over and over again. Conan kills a wizard and bangs some random girl. Rinse and repeat. That’s actually not the case at all. Over 40+ TPBs, Conan actually only killed 13 wizards and had sex with 38 women. Much, much lower numbers than anticipated. Hell, I have several friends that have had more sexual partners than that.

Speaking of Conan’s sex life, I tried not to make too many assumptions. If he was merely seen hanging around a woman in a camp or a tavern I didn’t just immediately think he had fucked her at some point. I needed evidence of some kind, either being shown, told, or heavily implied. So you can probably say Conan had a lot more than 38 women but I would say you can only confirm with certainty that he had those 38. When I started this run I wanted Conan to cross 100 but he came up far short of that goal. Had Dark Horse been able to publish all of the REH stories plus the necessary filler stories to bridge the gaps, he still probably wouldn’t have crossed 100.

In terms of kills, I wanted to see Conan kill at least 1,000 people but he didn’t get anywhere near that. Still, almost 550 confirmed human kills is astronomical. Think about all of the battle scenes that we didn’t get to fully see–it’s possible he did kill 1,000 or more, we just can’t know for sure. Factoring in all of the other undead, creatures, and whatnot, he still didn’t reach that 1,000 but by Crom he did a lot of killing. Then once again consider the stories Dark Horse didn’t get the chance to publish, who knows how many more kills we could’ve seen.

When initially following these adventures as they were coming out, you got left with a bad case of blue balls after The Slayer volume 2. It’s the last thing Dark Horse published and it’s a huge cliffhanger. I was extremely disappointed for my 15 years of reading to go out like that. However, reading through Conan’s entire life in chronological order is very satisfying. The ending of Slayer vol 2 takes place maybe 2/3 of the way through everything and there’s much more to come afterward. You have to take a leap with me to put any particular story after that but I feel like I came up with a good, logical next step afterward that bandages the wound of being left out to dry in the publishing order. The chronological reading finished with Wolves Beyond the Border and it’s a very nice conclusion for our time in Hyboria in the age of Conan. He’s old, he’s worn out, he’s lost loves, he’s lost purpose, he seeks new adventures and we don’t know where he goes from there. It’s the only way to end something like this.

I can’t say for sure what my favorite book or story arc was, probably something from the early thieving days or the later days as king, but I can without doubt say my least favorite book is The Nightmare of the Shallows. I understand what they were going for by bridging the gap between Belit losing their baby and then sailing down the River Zarkheba to her ultimate doom, but the entire book felt extremely pointless. When Brian Wood’s Queen of the Black Coast was originally coming out, it was referred to a lot as “emo Conan” and I completely agree with that assessment. I liked the change of art, I’m a big fan of more cartoonish comic art like Becky Cloonan, Mike Allred, etc. That’s not what bothered me. Conan just behaved very out of character during some of those stories, particularly the ones in the middle. I chalk some of that up to young love and his first experience with it. His lost confidence, hesitation, being unsure of things. I understand all of that because we’ve all been there. I thought it just went a little too far for the person we’d seen before and would see again after. The Nightmare of the Shallows was the rock bottom of emo Conan and I could’ve really done without it. It didn’t really even make much sense. Regardless, it’s part of the Dark Horse Conan mythos and I treated it with the same respect and scrutiny as everything else.

There were other books that I remembered not caring much for at the time but I found myself enjoying them this time around. The ones that come to mind in particular are the two Road of Kings books. They still feel a little more old school and I’m not crazy about the art, but they read just fine when included with everything else.

The funny thing about all of this is that my initial reasoning for it was to refresh myself for the upcoming Marvel Conan stories and now I’m not even sure I want to read them. I typically like to re-read a comic or tpb before the next one comes up, just to refamiliarize myself with where everything is. I also feel like I got my money’s worth by giving it another look. Some of these Conan stories I hadn’t read in over a decade and I really loved the idea of living them again and preparing for new adventures. I figured it would build up excitement for the new stuff, despite being irritated that Dark Horse didn’t get to finish their run. The only problem is now that I’ve read through Conan’s entire life and gotten a satisfying ending by finishing with Wolves Beyond the Border rather than The Devil in Iron, I don’t know that I really want to disrupt this nice closed up world and life-cycle by adding new stories to it. This massive Dark Horse run and the reading order I came up with has a full circle to it and feels like it’s over. I’d have to view the Marvel stuff as sort of like Ultimate Spider-man to the regular Spider-man. I don’t know. I have a few more months to dwell on it.

I hope this undertaking inspires others to pick back up Conan’s Dark Horse stories and maybe it will help you put everything in a good order that feels satisfying and conclusive. When I finished reading Bone for the first time I genuinely missed the characters and felt a little lonely knowing my time with them was over. I’m feeling something of the same about Conan right now. I watched his mother birth him on the battlefield, I saw his first kill, his first love, his first loss, his journeys across the world, his reign as king, and finally was left with the intentional vagueness of his last days to ponder how such an extraordinary life could’ve ended. There were a lot of philosophical points about civilization, overcoming struggle, finding your own path in the world, and taking what you want in life because nobody will give it to you. The average person would never expect to find such life lessons in a comic book, much less a Conan comic.

By Crom, what a journey it was.