I recently acquired a copy of Dark Horse’s reprints of the newspaper strips from the 70s. This book got a bit of hate because of supposedly poor reproduction value but I didn’t have too much of a problem with it. Could it have been better? Definitely. The color strips were a little small while the black and white strips were blown up a little too big. The biggest issue is one strip is missing with a repeat of an earlier strip in its place. You can easily find the missing strip online, so I printed it out and stuck it in the book. A bit unnecessary that I had to do that but I’m not going to let one thing ruin the entire book for me. The pacing is a little awkward with a lot of repeated information and dialogue because 6 days a week the strips were usually only 3-4 panels at most, so each new strip would quickly recap the previous strip in case somebody may have missed it. Then you’re left with only 2-3 panels of new content. The Sunday color strips were twice as long and covered more ground. Toward the end of the book they started using a scroll in the first panel with text to recap rather than blowing an entire panel on it and that helped speed things up.

I really enjoyed these stories and wish there were more but, unfortunately, we’ve only ever been given the first of a proposed two volumes. I hope Marvel will print the second volume or do one volume with everything in it.

Keeping with the reason I made this site, I decided to track all of Conan’s travels, kills, and women throughout his daily newspaper adventures. As one might expect, the tone of the stories is quite a bit different from regular comics so he didn’t kill nearly as many people and never actually got laid on panel. Here are the stats for Conan: The Newspaper Strips Volume 1:

Travels

Cimmeria (birth story), Zamora (the first place we actually see Conan), Wizard Sutra’s castle outside of Zamora, Shadizar the Wicked, an unnamed desert village southeast of Shadizar, Jillium, ruins outside Jillium, Khushalkan near Zamboula, unnamed Shadizar desert village, Kush, jungles, Kordurra, Khorshemish in Koth, Zamora

Kills

The Coming of Conan intro story – 3+ men, giant spider

First full story – 2 winged creatures, sentient plants, giant lizard creature, Sutra in ape form

Red Sonja story – 3 Zamoran robbers

Slavers story – at least 1 mercenary in a flashback, giant striped slug

Sorceror’s story – 3 guards

People of the Cataclysm story – 2 slavers, Gorat

Castle of the Cruel One – 1 savage, Montaro as a werewolf

Kordurra story – 5 Ophireans

Bride of the Black Book – 1 rider of Polonar, 1 Shadow Man, 1 man shown during the Crom story at the end

Total – 23+ men (counting Sutra as an Ape and Montaro as a werewolf), 1 giant spider, 2 winged creatures, sentient plants, giant lizard, giant slug, 1 Shadow Man.

Women

Belit is mentioned in past tense but that’s it.

Total – 1.