Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth, and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.

[00:24] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, David. With me as always, even into the new year of 2026, is the one, the only, the amazing, the magnificent, John Barber.

[00:37] John Barber: Hi. I got excited. I was like, “oh, we must have a really good co-host I didn't know about.”

[00:42] David: Well, John, as it turns out, we do have a really good co-host with us today. Chris Butera. Chris Butera, welcome to the show.

[00:49] Chris Butera: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:50] David: Chris, for those of you who don't know, is the editor-in-chief of the entire Heroic Signatures line of comic books, and for those who don't know, that is, and includes, Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan. Now, those books are published through Titan, but Chris and the people he works for at Heroic Signatures are the people who create these fantastic comics, John.

[01:14] John: Well, I’ve got to admit, some of my questions are going to not really fit in here. […], were you there when Jay Leno came back to the Tonight Show, and what was it like? It turns out, this is a different Conan than I thought.

[01:28] David: That's correct, John. This is the Barbarian, Conan the Barbarian.

[01:32] John: I had 13 days off to think about that one and come up with that one.

[01:36] David: Yeah, you'd think. We took last week off, because of holidays. So, we're recording this in the new year, John, and this will actually come out in the new year, and you have not come up with any new jokes in those first two days of the new year.

[01:48] John: No. Anyway. Very excited to have you here, Chris, for real.

[01:51] David: Yeah, welcome to the show, Chris. Yay.

[01:53] Chris: Thank you very much. I'm waiting for the Conan O'Brien/Conan the Barbarian crossover. It'll happen one day.

[01:58] John: You’d think it would, right?

[02:00] Chris: You'd think so.

[02:01] John: He seems like a fun guy.

[02:03] Chris: I hope that one day, we'll have a movie to promote, in the near future, and we'll be able to put Conan O'Brien in the fur diaper, give him a helmet, give him a sword, and call it a day.

[02:14] John: That'd be awesome.

[02:15] Chris: That's all we would need.

[02:16] David: I think you might be right. Chris, we're excited to have you on this show, because I've told our audience that Chase and I have been responsible for handling a lot of the archive material over at Heroic Signatures, archiving Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan for a while now, and how much we love the job, but I'm jealous, because you get to make all the new stuff. So, I thought it'd be fun for us to do a year-in-review of where you guys have been in the last year, and talk about your highs and lows, and talk a little bit about what's coming next for Conan, and all things Heroic Signatures. Let's get a little bit of your background first. How did you fall into working on comic books?

[02:57] Chris: I fell in backwards, really. So, I started at Heroic. I was brought on as their prose editor, because my background is mostly--I was first a screenwriter, novelist. So, they brought me on--

[03:09] David: Sorry to interrupt, Chris. Prose, John, is comic books without any pictures. I only recently learned this. So, that's why I'm letting people know.

[03:19] Chris: I was brought on to assist in the--Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian, was a prose writer. Roy Thomas brought Conan over to Marvel, into the comics, but Conan started as Sword and Sorcery Pulp Fiction, and I was brought on, because along with doing the comics with Titan, we're doing the prose with Titan as well, but Titan actually has a license for the prose. So, we have less of a firm creative hand in that, but I was brought on to make sure that everything is correct, that we're staying true to the world, and then our comic editor left, and they were like, “hey, Chris, can you be the comics editor?” I'm going to need a lot of handholding, because this is the first time I'm doing anything like that, and talk about being thrown right into the lion's den, handling Conan and Savage Sword. That was three years ago now.

[04:10] David: Has it been that long?

[04:11] Chris: It's been that long. It's been a blur ever since, and it's been really excellent. I mean, what really helps is, we have just an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the talent. Jim Zub alone is worth his weight in not gold, but platinum. That man is just a genius. He's fantastic. He just knows how to channel that Howardian language so well. He knows the character, the world, everything so well. So, when I was first getting my feet wet with the comics, he was really helping me behind the scenes, and just helping bring things along, and it really helps, as well, that he just is an incredible writer, and the artists that we have, the talent who back him up, are just top-tier. So, it's been a real pleasure to really get into the industry.

[05:01] John: I can see you being diplomatic, but Jim personally is just one of the worst, most loathsome human beings you'll find. No, I'm just kidding. Jim's been on the show. I've known Jim for--he's one of my oldest friends in comics. I've known him for 26 years, maybe now 27. I had a similar experience with him on editing Dungeons & Dragons comics. I had a lot of problems with that, and then he comes on and knows the stuff inside and out, but can also tell a good story. He was sending corrections to Watsi on some of the stuff when he figured out, he'd used magic missiles wrong, or whatever. After the book had been published, nobody cared, but he's like, “we’ve got to fix that for the trade, because I forgot, and we have to explain how that happened,” but he knows this stuff so well.

[05:45] Chris: Writers submit things for Savage Sword. I'm like, “this script isn't perfect. They're supposed to be perfect. What are you doing? This is wrong, this is wrong, there’s the typo here. Stop it.” People are like Jim Zub.

[05:58] David: So, I inherited Dungeons & Dragons and Jim Zub from John, and the first thing that I realized was, the last thing I would do as an editor is let Jim Zub stop writing that series, because Dungeons & Dragons was a very difficult license, because they're very specific, and very particular. They have the ability to generate a lot of notes, which if you're trying to produce a new comic book every four weeks, that can get problematic real fast, but Jim literally, as John said, just eliminated all of that. They were so comfortable with him, and he was so buttoned-up with his knowledge of the material, everything flew through really quickly and easily, but then on top of that, Jim is also an artist. So, he thinks like an artist, oftentimes. So, when he's writing his descriptions of panels, he's writing it, thinking like an artist, which is also, I think, a little unusual. You don't have a ton of writers who were artists first, like Jim was, or is. So, you get the benefit of, that level of his storytelling is there. On top of all of that, Jim is this incredibly detail-oriented, buttoned-up writer who knows to give you solicitation copy for the next issue. Before you even know you need it, it's in your inbox. So, man, for you, Chris, and for me too, jumping onto a new series, having Jim there already, there's not a better way to have things set up for you for success, as an editor, because he really does do a lot of heavy-lifting for you, and I really do appreciate him greatly for that.

[07:28] Chris: On top of all of that, as well, he's also an incredible colorist, as well. So, […] the aspect, he can give very detailed and very smart notes.

[07:38] David: Yeah. I mean, he literally taught this stuff at a college for years. I don't think he's teaching now, though.

[07:44] Chris: It's been at least six months since he's just been wholly in the Hyborian Age.

[07:50] David: Does that mean that his output for you has increased, or is it just that he's more narrowly focused on the things that he's already doing?

[07:58] Chris: It's a bit of both. His output has increased, but he also travels quite a bit. He's in demand. People love to talk about him and talk to him as much as we are right now. So, he's always going to this convention. I think he just did D&D in a Castle. I think that's what it's officially called. D&D in a Castle in Scotland or in England. He did that last month. So, he'll be gone for a couple weeks. I'm like, “okay, I need three scripts in two weeks. Let's go,” and he'll deliver. With his scripts, I think maybe, I'll have one note like, “you used the apostrophe in the wrong spot here.”

[08:37] John: When you came on to the comics, that was maybe a year--was it a year into that run, or a few months into that run?

[08:44] Chris: It was quite close. I was officially sole editor as of Arc 4.

[08:51] John: Oh, okay.

[08:52] Chris: But I was assistant editor midway through Arc 2.

[08:55] John: Okay. One of those things that makes sense, because the comics are really good, but you still don't always see it. When Heroic took over doing the Conan books again after Marvel, there was a shot upwards, in terms of sales. I actually remember Jim telling me, I think it was at the Eisners, what the sales figures of the first issue were, and I don't think that was the end of it. I think it went up from Issue #1. I don't think that was the highest point. Were you around for that? Did you attribute that to anything? I mean, it looks like, when Marvel got the Conan license--I mean, I love Jason Aaron--They put Jason Aaron on there. He's one of their top writers, and they were pretty successful with it too, but it seems like Jim wasn't necessarily the--I mean, he'd already been writing this stuff at Marvel, but he wasn't necessarily the marquee name, as recognized by the Big 2, at that point. It wasn't like Scott Snyder, or something like that. It felt like Moneyball with the art. Who was the first artist on that? He was so good.

[09:47] Chris: Rob de La Torre.

[09:48] John: Yes, Rob de La Torre. He's always been fantastic, but he's never been Conan fantastic. I don't think he's ever been that good.

[09:56] Chris: I mean, there was some special alchemy that happened. I came on in June of ‘23. I came on right before San Diego, when we were really pushing the first issue. So, I was there when it was first released, and I don't know what it was. Maybe it was because Titan put a huge push behind it. Maybe it's because we had something like 50 covers. Maybe it’s because--I mean, Jim was just so respectful of--Jim and Heroic, as a whole, we were like, “we’re getting back to Howard. We’re getting back to the original DNA of what Conan's supposed to be.” Rob came in just slinging the best ink. Somehow, it was just like lightning in a bottle, and we've just been riding that lightning wave, if you will, all the way through. I mean, it hit so well, and I would actually even argue that maybe that first arc, they're still finding the footing. Also, it did help too that the Free Comic Book Day issue that came out that preceding May was excellent as well, and it was just a little taste of “we're going back to the roots, and I think the old-school fans just saw that, and loved it, and being able to bring in new fans, as well. I couldn't put my finger on why it was as successful as it was. It just worked.

[11:11] John: Yeah, it seemed like one of the early parts of the same wave that you've seen going on with Transformers at Skybound, or Scott Snyder […] the Absolute Line at DC, where they were the right people for the job, not the biggest marquee names you were going to get for it. Sometimes, they were the big marquee names. I'm not trying to diminish anybody, but it seems like something that has been hitting those--a few other places too--but those 3 especially. I felt like Conan was the first out of the gate on that. You can be crazy successful on something that way, and being true to the source material as well.

[11:47] David: It seems like, in 2025, you've leaned into a little more of the longer-form stories a little bit, where you've got something set up in Savage Sword or in Conan, and then those two will cross, not thematically, not necessarily story cross--Part 1 here, Part 2 there--but thematically, and then you're spinning off these fun little mini-series from that. It'll start in Conan, and then spin off into its own little mini-series. I'm sure that was intentional. Is that going to continue, and what was like that for you, basically doubling your workload, at times, throughout the year? Because you also added Savage Sword of Conan in the last 12 months too. Something close to that.

[12:29] Chris: Savage Sword actually was coming out just a little ways after—actually, it may have been a year after the monthly kicked off, but the mini-series, those have always been in play. If you look at Arcs 1 through 3, those lead up into the Battle of the Black Stone mini-series, and then this past year, we just finished Scourge of the Serpent. So, everything that's going on with the monthly is also tying in there, and then to make sure we have cross-pollination across each title, we also have one Savage Sword issue per year that will tie in to the mini-series coming out, but it will precede it by about a month. If anybody asks, we definitely plan to have Scourge of the Serpent be in Year of the Snake in Chinese mythology. That was absolutely something that we did, if anybody asks. So, we're trying to do that once a year. So, the next one's going to be called Tides of the Tyrant King. We'll have a Free Comic Book Day issue. Though, it's not called Free Comic Book Day now. We're doing it through Lunar. So, The First Saturday in May, I think, is their super catchy title that they came up with.

[13:30] David: Is that really what they're calling it?

[13:31] Chris: I'm almost positive.

[13:33] David: Oh, my gosh.

[13:34] Chris: Yeah. Jesús Merino's doing the art for that.

[13:37] David: That's cool.

[13:38] Chris: Quick side note, that man is a machine. Whenever he turns in his roughs, that's better art than most artists are sending over as finished products. He's like, “here's some sketches I did.” “These are sketches. Are you kidding me?”

[13:52] David: I feel like Jesús Merino was the inker for Carlos Pacheco, in the moment where Carlos Pacheco was really exploding, and Carlos was doing these insane angles. He'd do a worm's-eye shot, looking up the leg of the superhero who's got arms and legs spread akimbo, doing some weird, crazy action, and I think Jesús Merino was the guy that was inking all that, and then I think Jesús Merino left Carlos, because he wanted to do his own thing, and I vaguely recall him getting on a book or issue, or something, and thinking, “man, I wish he'd ink Carlos Pacheco again,” but he was still way better than most guys. I loved the pairing of those two, and I was just sad that it was clear that Jesús Merino was going to be good enough to not be inking other people, but do his own thing. So, I was a little bummed, but yeah, he's very good. I haven't seen his stuff in a while, though. I'm anxious to see what he's doing these days.

[14:50] Chris: I should have some inks for “First Saturday in May” next week. So, once I get those, I'll […].

[14:57] David: Oh, yeah. The benefits of working for the publisher.

[15:03] Chris: So, he's doing the next mini-series, and it's called Tides of the Tyrant King, and that'll lead to the mini-series, which will come out in September. It'll have a preceding Savage Sword issue as well, like last time, and there's always a novel that ties in as well, but it's a very loose tie to the novels. There's just some slight dovetailing that happens.

[15:24] David: Are the novels full-length novels?

[15:26] Chris: Oh, they're full-length, yeah.

[15:27] David: And do you have the same writer on those, or is it different for those?

[15:31] Chris: Different every time.

[15:32] David: Are you handling those as well, Chris?

[15:34] Chris: A guy named Daquan Cadogan over at Titan Books, he sources the writer. Since it's licensed, most of what it comes down to, for us, is making sure that it just makes sense in the world, that we approve the overall outline, how it goes, and then just digging into the manuscript when they first send it over, to make sure there's nothing incorrect in there, and we are also doing e-book short stories, which are more like short stories and little novellas that come out once a month, and those are based on all the characters in the Robert E. Howard universe, if you will. So, there's some Kull, there's some Conan, there's some Dark Agnes, there's El Borak. I think we just hired someone to do a Cormac Mac Art story. It's all in the place. There's a lot of Robert E. Howard in the universe going on right now.

[16:18] John: When you say they're licensed, do you mean someone else has the novel rights to them, and they're licensing them to you, or you're licensing them to Titan?

[16:25] Chris: We’re licensing that to Titan.

[16:28] John: I'm just curious, there's some crazy rights issues.

[16:38] David: So, let's see, this issue, you brought in a new artist for the Conan the Barbarian series, I believe.

[16:43] Chris: Yes, Fernando Dagnino.

[16:45] David: How did you find this guy?

[16:46] Chris: Another great part about working with Jim Zub is that he'll be like, “I really want to work with this artist.” I'm like, “great. Let me reach out, and see if he's available,” because Rob worked on the monthly comic for a while. Everyone loves Rob. We all love Rob, but it is really draining on him. His last one that he did was, he did Arc 3, and that was our big Thulsa Doom Arc, which if you haven't had a chance to look at it, is gorgeous. Every page in Issue #12, which is the final issue of that arc, you could take that page, and you can blow it up, and put it on your wall, and it'd be something you'd stare at every day. He was just so excellent, but it was just so draining on him, and he didn't want to work on the monthly anymore. So, he does work in Savage Sword. He did an issue with Roy Thomas back in Savage #7. He's doing one for Issue #13, but he wants to stay away from the monthly for a little while. We're hoping to get him back soon.

[17:37] David: Let's talk about that Savage Sword Issue #7 for a minute, with Roy Thomas and Rob de La Torre, because I think that might be one of my favorite pieces of comic book story and art.

[17:47] John: If you were to […] a single issue of last year, I think that's my favorite. The Liam Sharp issue is #2. Those two. I was literally reading that with my jaw open, and some of the storytelling stuff that Rob was doing in that was spectacular.

[18:01] David: I feel like Rob, when he came on to Conan, it was like, “whoa, John Buscema's reincarnated somehow,” and in that Savage Sword issue, clearly, he had some more time to think through what he wanted to do, and I feel like somehow, he's surpassed Buscema, in some ways, but the best of Buscema--when Alfredo Alcala is inking Buscema. That's some of my favorite stuff. Just incredible piece, and Roy Thomas, man, didn't seem like he missed a step. It was right there, right on point.

[18:38] Chris: That's just a groove that he just put his wheel back in, and was just going. I mean, just reading his outline, there's just--whenever you read a script or an outline from someone who's writing Conan, you can tell pretty much right away if they get it, if they get the character, if they get the world, and just reading Roy's outline, it was just, he hadn't missed a beat. He was just right in it. He knew exactly what he was talking about. He knew the character down pat. I remember having a big, stupid grin on my face as I was reading the whole outline through, and then sending it over to Rob, and Rob immediately returning back with an email, saying, “oh, my God. This is everything I wanted it to be, and more,” and then you can see that with Rob's inking. You can see just how much fun he's having. He talked about it once, how he feels like he's honoring the past in what he's doing there, and I also think that Rob, as good as he is in the monthly--he's incredible in the monthly--there's something about him in Savage Sword that is just right.

[19:37] John: Paper quality, everything, the ink.

[19:40] Chris: It's just so nice, and I really can't wait for the next one, Issue #13. So, Issue #13, we want to bring Rob back. We want to bring Roy back. We want to bring the two of them back, obviously, but Roy is incredibly busy right now. He's working on Alter Ego. He is working on his two-part autobiography that he's doing right now, that he's just spending all of his time on. So, he didn't have time to write a story, and Rob has wanted, forever, to write his own story. So, Rob actually wrote the plot for this with help from Roy, and he just went off, and he did all the art. He'd made the story. So, Roy's coming on, and he's just doing the dialogue, which is something that Buscema and Roy had done before.

[20:27] David: Marvel-style.

[20:28] Chris: Yeah, and Roy was like, “this sounds great. This is exactly what I want to do. This is perfect. Excellent.” So, Rob's been turning in these pages that, if you saw Savage #7, you're like, “this is incredible,” but #13, he's leveled up again. I don't know how he did it. It's just even better. I can't wait for people to see it, just because some of my favorite pages were the first thing he turned in. This is mesmerizing.

[20:52] John: Did Roy write it plot-first?

[20:53] Chris: He wrote a very detailed outline.

[20:56] John: Knowing Roy Thomas, I assumed he wrote it plot-first, but also the way de La Torre approached some of the scenes in there, it was different than the way Jim would approach the scenes, and this is a thing I've been thinking about a lot lately, and I'm not going to derail for long—so, sorry, but the idea that when you're reading a comic, there's stuff that is sometimes fighting what the comic is trying to be, and you can see it on the page, and it might be as simple as a balloon in the wrong place, or it might be as difficult as relying on emotions of the characters, and then an artist that just is not drawing faces, that draws faces in the shadows, or something, or taking these shortcuts. These things are fighting what the comic is trying to do, and that comic had none of that. Here, you're going over a cliff. Well, it's on the edge of a page, and it's falling down, and it's falling down into the next tier of panels, and your eye just follows that exactly. Can't wait to see what Rob does, coming up with more of the plot himself, or you're coming up with the whole structure himself.

[21:51] David: It's funny you mention that, not to derail this further, but I've been thinking a lot about that too lately, in the writer-as-artist, or the artist-as-writer. I think some of what we may have lost in translation over the last several years now--there's something about modern comics--it's lacking energy, and I wonder if part of it is because we're not working Marvel-style, basically. We're working with these rigid, fully-built-out scripts, and the people that are giving direction are not artists. So, the artists are being constrained by what the writers are doing, and I'm wondering if we've gone too far, and given the writer too much control. I'd really like to explore that, and experiment with that a little bit more in my own writing.

You hire these incredibly talented people to put marks on the page, and then you handcuff them, in some ways. I'm just wondering if that's something that we should get away from, as editors and as creative. Let the artist cook, basically, because the stuff that you do see the real energy in, like Daniel Warren Johnson, he's doing the whole thing. As the writer, he's the artist. He's making all the decisions visually, and no one's more interesting or exciting, or dynamic than that guy right now. Well, very few. I've just been thinking about that a little bit lately.

[23:12] Chris: I think that it really comes down to the pairing, more than anything. I think it's really case-by-case, because I think you're going to get some writers that really needle down on the page, and probably takes the energy out of what the artist is trying to do.

[23:24] John: There are some artists that absolutely don't want stuff like that, that do want that structure. Howard Chaykin is one of our favorites here. You give Howard Chaykin a plot, he'd get on the phone and be yelling at you within 15 minutes.

[23:37] David: Right.

[23:38] John: He needs some of the writer's paycheck, because he's doing the writer's work, but he's also not somebody that's working with writer Schlub A. He's also writing and drawing his own stuff 100% of the time now, and the last time he wasn't was Matt Fraction. So, I think you're right, Chris, that it's how you're going to work together, and that's one of the things that's been nice about it, is that it felt like Jim and Rob were a team on the book, and when a guest artist came in, it felt like a guest artist, not a sloppy “we need somebody right now” thing. Somebody else was very good, and it had a little bit of a different feel to it, but enough similar feel that it worked. It didn't feel plug-and-play. You didn't get the most Robert de La Torre-drawing guy that wasn't as good as him to draw that stuff. You got somebody else. That's all worked the whole way, and then when you go into Savage Sword, you get these little--I don't know--pop singles, or whatever--one-off stories by really interesting creators working together. Very good stuff.

[24:31] Chris: Fernando, him and Jim, […]. So, Fernando has a little bit more leeway, and Jim trusts him. He does great work, and then Doug, Doug is full script every time, and Doug, he brings his own certain energy. Doug is incredible. He's incredible to work with, but then you have someone like Ivan Gil, who just did the Scourge of the Serpent for us. He was--oh God, was he a plot? Oh, God--No, he was full script as well, and he brought this European energy to it. Jonas Scharf before that. I mean, it's been really nice to see the different ways that Jim interacts with these different artists, and how he pulls out what he needs to pull out from them, and they always bring their A-game, and then you switch from that over to Savage Sword, and seeing these different artist and writer pairings, how they work, how closely they work, it's been really interesting--with me coming to comics so late, it's been really interesting watching just how different creative pairs tackle a story. The Conan stories, they all have the same magic that runs through them, but how everyone takes that magic, and morphs it into their own narrative, to a way, it's really just fascinating.

[25:46] David: To your credit, though, there's been very few stories in the last two years of Conan that I've been reading, where I'm like, “that one fell a little flat.” It has happened a couple times. I would say, the first--we've been blowing lots of smoke. So, I’ll say this, be a little harsh--a little critique in all the fun. I think the first couple issues of Savage Sword of Conan, maybe the first two or three issues, it felt like you were finding your footing a little bit. It felt like there were bigger plans, and they just didn't come all the way through with those first couple of issues. They're still good quality, but when you compare those first couple of issues to where Savage Sword is now, it's almost not the same magazine. It really has the essence of the Howard-verse baked into it now, and everybody is rowing in the same direction, and everybody's giving 100% effort in that direction. I like to think that artists and writers are always trying to give 100%, but sometimes their 100% is misplaced, but this feels like everybody's headed towards the same goal, which I think speaks largely, probably, to your skills as an editor, Chris, and your growing skills, as an editor. So, hats off, once again, to a job well done.

[27:02] Chris: Appreciate that. I think there was finding our feet in the beginning, even all the way down to just how we work with the newspaper again. I think when you look at the first three issues, there's a lot of problems on the page, when it comes to how the ink looks, and some of it was looking really washed out. We didn't know the right style to make sure that we got the best looking magazine that we could have, and I think there was finding that new identity as well, and now it really does feel like we're in a groove again, which feels really good, and again, it does help that everyone wants to bring their A-game. Ivan Gil, he did Scourge the Serpent, he is now doing a story with Jim that will probably be Savage #14, probably, depending when it finishes, and he loved doing Scourge the Serpent. He's touching three different Howard stories in there. He's doing the Kull story. He's doing the Conrad & Kirowan story. He's doing a Conan story. That was a lot of fun for him, but Savage Sword is what he grew up with. This is his lifeblood. So, he is sending over his roughs. It's like, “are these okay? Are these all fine?” “Yeah, these are beautiful. These are fantastic. You don't need to worry about it,” but it just means so much to him that he wants to get it exactly perfect, which is great.

[28:12] John: One of the other things that came out of Savage Sword, though, was I spent Thanksgiving with my favorite Thanksgiving-themed hero, Solomon Kane, reading the Pat Zircher story, but that started off in there. That one went really well, but I know I've worked with Patrick Zircher on a few things, and I don't think any of it was as good as the Solomon Kane thing. I somehow missed the limited series, and I saw the paperback of it, and I picked it up, and I’m like, “It's in color. It was so beautiful in black and white. I wonder who they got to color it.” I'm like, “they got Patrick Zircher to color it. This is probably okay,” and it was. It was just spectacular. I don't know. I feel like that's another case of somebody who, if I recall correctly, preceded Rob de La Torre on Iron Man, after the Adi Granov/Warren Ellis’ 6 issues. I believe it was the two of them in sequence.

[29:03] David: Really?

[29:04] John: Yeah. Both of them, tremendously much better artists now than they were then, and I don't mean that as an insult then. I just mean those are solid. Now they're just doing this world-class work. Were you putting Savage Sword together when that started, and was that a case of him wanting to do Solomon Kane, or you wanting to find somebody to do Solomon Kane and spread out from Conan?

[29:23] Chris: That was underway when I started. He had done his Kane story for Savage Sword. I think my bosses knew him, because he did Savage Avengers, and he wanted to do Solomon Kane. He killed it on his Solomon Kane story that he did, that was spread across the first three issues of Savage. It was already happening when I was brought on, but he did the first mini-series, and now he's doing a second one. He's doing a second one right now, and we've been talking about how excellent Jim is for the majority of this podcast, but Pat is just a delight. That man, he's very much a writer after my own heart, because I've always grown up not just with sword and sorcery, but with a lot of swashbuckling adventures, and historical fiction, and that is his bread and butter. So, anytime he's digging into something, he goes deep into the research. So, he knows exactly what he's talking about. There's so much verisimilitude with the world he's building out. So, in this past Kane mini-series, they were in Renaissance Venice, they went to Africa, and now in the next series that's coming out this summer, they're going to India. Solomon Kane has never gone to India. It's going to be this beautiful, big, bright color palette, but it's also very dark, and very mythological.

My own personal history with India, I was hired to write a script about a guy named Jim Corbett, who was around during the Raj, and he hunted man-eating tigers. I was flown out to India, and I traipsed in tiger-infested jungles. So, he's like, “I want to send Kane to India.” I'm like, “yes, let's go. Let's do this.” So, that is looking beautiful, and he wrote, he drew it, he's doing all the color himself, and that man is a machine. I'm almost positive, when I get back to my office on Monday, I'm going to have an e-mail from him with just a completed issue, just because he never stops.

[31:11] John: Yeah. Look, Solomon Kane's probably my favorite of the Howard stuff, too. I absolutely love that. There's a lot of disturbing stuff, reading that character, where you'll have--I mean, on the one hand, he is one of the only characters of that era where I would say a key part about him is, he hates slavery, and he will kill any slaver, or be talking about why he is frustrated at being unable to kill slavers, but on the other hand, he'll also stand up on a mountain, and be like, “I'm the king of the Aryan people, and I'm bringing civilization to Africa,” or whatever. Knowing that came from a very different era, and that this wasn't far off from the end of the Civil War, if I remember right, Howard's family cook, or something--They had somebody who was working at their house that was an ex-slave--it was that close to it. Is that something that you or Patrick adjust for, or try to reframe? Because he seems to be working very much within the realm of taking the stories as canon, and telling stories around that canon, where the first story, he's going to Africa, but he hasn't got the staff that he gets later on, yet. Is that a concern that you guys go with, or is it just natural filling-in there, the same way you don't have Superman talking about Japanese people like he did during World War II, or something, or that's not even an issue, you wouldn't go there?

[32:27] Chris: I mean, for us, the Howard stories are canon. Everything else is just tales told around the campfire. So, things change and shift, and there are certainly problematic stories that Robert E. Howard wrote. Famously, some of the Conan stories--I mean, Shadows in Zamboula, which is one of our next Savage Sword Reforge, that story, the prose version, the fiction version is a bit rough, and Solomon Kane is also--there's some, it really does feel like there's only a handful of Solomon Kane stories that, if you gave to a kid today, that they'd be like, “this is fine.” Everything else has some language problems. I think when it comes to writing the new stuff, I think--I mean, Pat is a modern writer, writing from a modern mindset. I think a lot of what wouldn't really pass these days isn't passing his mind when he's writing something new, but he's always--I mean, in the new miniseries coming up, he does have a flashback where he retells, I believe it's part of the Red Brotherhood, and he's not shying away from things, but he's also not digging into anything that we would feel uncomfortable putting out.

Our fourth arc for Conan the Barbarian was an arc called Frozen Faith, which is basically a retelling of The Frost-Giant's Daughter, and one of the main moments in The Frost-Giant's Daughter is, Conan catches up with Atali, and in the original text, it reads very much like he's about to assault this woman, and that was the point that we were like, “okay, how do we handle this? How do we keep this true to the story, while also getting it from both their perspectives about being problematic? How does this work in this modern retelling?” And a lot of what we did was, left it to Doug Braithwaite, trusting him to do the right thing on the page, and I think he handled it really well, and you can see, Conan's lustful, yes, but then Atali's over here--it's hard to explain without showing you the page itself, but it's handled with such nuance, without shying away from what could be construed as something that's problematic, and it makes for a very rich storytelling experience, I think.

[34:37] John: Yeah, I feel like Conan never got his--I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong--never gets as problematic as James Bond, or something, if you want to start digging into that stuff.

[34:44] Chris: A couple stories, that you go, “oh, God.”

[34:47] John: Well, yeah, it's also tough, because we have this goldfish memory, culturally, sometimes, where we forget how acceptable certain things were, how recently, and then cast back 100 years from that, and expect those values to have been in place 100 years earlier, or something, but I also feel, with Solomon Kane especially, I was never sure if Howard was on Solomon Kane's side. He keeps talking about him as being a fanatic, and things. So, there's a certain amount, where I feel like he gets leeway of “yeah, he's doing something bad, because he's just into this one thing, which is, go around and stop evil.”

[35:22] Chris: Yeah, his language around him does--when you say something fanatic, that automatically comes with a negative connotation that comes with it. I think that also helps when he's writing about this character. Kane himself is very conflicted, and he's just purely about his faith, and how that clashes with morality and the world around him. It's very interesting. I always joked, when it comes to a lot of the Howard characters, is that, most of them, when I first started reading them, these all just feel like Conan in a different font, but if you look a little deeper, you could see that there's a lot of different nuances with each character, and how they get to be who they are, and how that comes out in the narrative.

[36:06] John: I feel like that's something you guys have been approaching, in a way that--I didn't know as much about Howard's stuff when I was reading some of the Dark Horse, when they did those Robert E. Howard's Savage Tales, where it was different. Some of those are, “I can't believe they got this creator to do a story. That's awesome.” Some of it was, “this is a perfectly acceptable story. That's fine,” but there's a lot of no context in there, of characters just coming off very same-y, if you don't know that going into it, and I remember Jim saying something to me years ago about it being more of a Kull thing than a Conan thing, and I'm like, “I thought they were the same guy, just in different times,” and now I know better, but that was my first introduction to that idea.

[36:49] Chris: I love Kull, personally. In our offices, we have giant paint swipes that are on our office walls, and everyone gets a specific character that's on the glass, and I fought for Kull, because I love Kull so much, because he's the thinking man barbarian. He's a philosopher king, but also if you read the Howard stories, because Kull came before Conan, and you can tell it's a young man writing, but the writing is very sparse. A lot of the stories just fizzle out. He had a big idea that he didn't know how to quite execute on. It's really fascinating to read his growth, as a writer, and how Kull becomes Conan, and how Conan's the refinement of that, in one way, but also more coarse, in another way.

[37:35] John: Howard's life wasn't very long, and he packed so much writing into that time. It's one of those things, like the Beatles. I've been working on a comic tied in with a pop band for long enough that we have zero approved pages, and we've been working on it for half of the length of time the Beatles were around, and knowing that Howard had that growth in a tragically short amount of time, you're right, it's absolutely fascinating, and the number of characters that came out of that that are distinct, when you look at them, and that maybe represent different epochs in his life, but also just different takes on some of the same materials, or some of the same approaches. I mean, his boxing stories are fantastic, and you guys dug into that a lot. Not the boxing, necessarily, but the whole Black Stone, that was a Robert E. Howard story, but that's an object that has appeared throughout multiple stories of his, that weren't Conan-related.

[38:25] Chris: We didn't even touch my favorite Black Stone story, which is The Dark Man, which is great. I forget if it's either Breckenridge Elkins, or if it's Steve Costigan--I think it's Steve Costigan, where he wrote way more Steve Costigan stories than he ever wrote of Conan, if I remember correctly, which is insane.

[38:44] John: Yeah, that's fascinating and interesting. […] out there is, this is Robert E. Howard's version of Corto Maltese, before there was Corto Maltese. Wild. That's neat.

[38:55] Chris: When I first started, I was familiar with Conan and Robert E. Howard, and I had read a lot over the years, but then when I started, they were like, “okay, you need to do another crash course. Just read everything again.” So, now it's all blurred together. I think one of my goals for this year is to go back, and reread, just so I can pull more lore to put into my brain, so that when Jim's like, “yeah, but what about this character?” I'm like, “oh, you mean this character? I know exactly who you’re talking about.”

[39:25] David: The thing I failed at the most was trying to stay one step ahead of Jim. I have a question for you. It might be a little nebulous, but let's see where it goes. I know that the Conan brand has a lot of hardcore followers. I mean, there's been a monthly Conan comic book published, I think without fail, for 50 years. So, there's a lot of people that have been around it a long time, and have certain expectations about what Conan is, and what Conan comic books are, but at the same time, you have to bring in new readers. We have to continue to grow the audience, or keep the audience fresh, because some people drop off, for one thing or another. What does that struggle look like for you with these books, and how do you reconcile that in your own mind, as the editor, in terms of serving two masters, in a way, or is it serving two masters? How do you hold that in your head, I guess?

[40:23] Chris: That's a very good question. Beyond me, in the office, I think there have been a lot of big strides to make sure we're maintaining our core audience, while also reaching out and getting those new eyeballs, and one of the big initiatives that have happened this past year, a guy named Sean Curley, who's our YouTube director, he's been doing a lot of great work on our YouTube channel, doing huge lore videos, talking about everything from how Robert E. Howard might have been, somehow, the originator of the Snake Men myth that permeates throughout culture, all the way over to He-Man action figures, how they tie into Conan, and I think there's a big audience nowadays for people who are interested in videos like that, just lore videos, lore of the Hyborian Age. So, on one hand, that's great. For me, when it comes to my work, my job as the editor, I think it's always just finding new voices to bring in, to bring new perspective to it, and I think that makes a great--I think Savage Sword is a really fertile ground to try out new, exciting voices, and seeing what works, and seeing what doesn't, but always trying something new, so you don't stagnate, and you're just keeping it fresh, as much as possible. I mean, you always want to bring your Roy Thomases in, you want to bring your Robs in, but also Andrew MacLean, who did Head Lopper, we're trying to get him. I think he's going to be on an issue, when he has time.

[41:49] David: That'd be a good one. His style has changed recently. I don't love it as much as I loved his Head Lopper style, or his Volume 1 Head Lopper style, but I still really like his stuff. I think he's really good.

[42:02] Chris: I'm really interested to see how he takes on Conan, to differentiate and give it its own style within his style. I think if you look at the monthly, the monthly really caters, in a lot of ways, to the hardcore fans, while also appealing as well--now we've been doing these big Howard-verse things--appealing to people who are really fans of the Marvel universe, where it's these big expanding stories that have little stories in them, and bringing it back, whereas Savage Sword, while we're still catering to those loyal fans, also, again, just trying new things, so that it's not just the same old all over again. Savage Sword is a perfect playground for it, because it's an anthology series. There's room to experiment and have fun.

I think this past year, I think it was Savage #8, where we did just a bunch of B-stories, and those B-stories had all different types of writers and artists. So, that was the first time Liam Sharp was in Savage for us. That was very classic, very beautiful. It was almost like Doré and Alcala, smashed together, but then we also had Marco Rudy, who'd had this just big, sweeping, very mesmerizing, almost dream-like style. We had a guy who was a little bit more of a manga-esque style. Just trying new things, and seeing what the fans are responding to. If they don't like this, we're like, “okay. We won’t do that again. At least we tried.” I'll work on Conan as long as I can, but there will be someone who comes after me. There'll be someone that comes after them, and Conan is such an iconic figure, and he just resonates. He's resonated with fans for 100 years. My job is to just tell the stories that are as true to the character as possible, and hope that it'll find an audience, and people will enjoy it, and if not, I'll be run out of the Hyborian Age with pitchforks. That's fine.

[43:46] David: There is something interesting about Conan, because it is a property that's long in the tooth, but it doesn't feel that way. Even with everything that's been done with it, in comic books and other media, over the course of just the last 50 years, in particular, it doesn't feel like it's dated. It doesn't feel like it's of another time. I've been looking at Popeye a lot lately, and Popeye, up through the 70s and into the 80s, was a pretty viable property. Tons of material was being created, and then for some reason, it just fell off. It just fell out of favor, fell out of the zeitgeist. It had run its course, in a way. That archetype was not something that resonated with them anymore, in our society, as it is today. I think that's what was happening, but Conan hasn't had that. People still want macho, muscly dudes beating the crap out of monsters. That's a thing that people still want in 2026.

[44:40] Chris: There's more to it, as well. It is just a dude with a fur diaper and a sword, but he's talking also about barbarism versus civilization, and I feel like that's a theme that people are always wrestling with, in […]. I've always joked and said, “yeah, he's James Bond in a fur diaper,” and in a lot of ways, like James Bond, he's also been reinvented, over the years, but also still maintained that core of who he is. So, he still appeals to people. They want to know who the next James Bond is, and they want to know how it's going to shift and change. Now that Amazon has it, probably going to kill it, but I think they're of a similar token, and as a fan, I'm really interested and excited to see where it goes. I mean, Jim is currently contracted to Issue #50. He's pretty publicly said that, and we would love to keep him on. He has become the Conan guy, but there will come a day when Jim no longer wants to do Conan, and who will take up the torch after him, and if they'll still be able to have that same resonance that Zub does. Scary. It's exciting, though.

[45:51] John: One of the things I think Conan does have going for him is that you can be interested in different parts of what constituted him. The same thing with James Bond, where there are people that talk about “he's a male fantasy. You get the fashion and the food. With Conan, the power and the strength.” I feel like that's not what I enjoy about Conan, at all. That's a thing that's there, but the thing I enjoy about it is the world that it exists in, and like you said, those questions of barbarism versus society, and stuff. There's stuff that somebody like Michael Moorcock later on would foreground in writing similar stuff, but that still means I enjoy the hell out of the Conan stories. I also think there's a certain fearlessness, in the way you guys have approached that book. There are more captions in Conan than are allowed in comics now, and it's awesome to do that. There isn't somebody being like, “no, you can't do that.” That's a tool in the toolbox, and that's one that fits really well with the way Jim is telling stories about Conan, and it works so well. I imagine this is the sort of thing that the editors and publishers react out of fear about, of “it's going to look like we don't know what we're doing. It's going to look like we don't know that most comics don't have this many captions. So, we shouldn't have this many captions.” I don't know. It creates a really unique reading experience in the middle of a pile of comics, for me.

[47:13] David: Well, Chris, I think we should wrap it up. Thank you so much for chatting with us. Is there anything you want to let us know about, what you’ve got coming up in 2026, with Conan, Savage Sword, anything you can talk about, tease the fans with before we sign off here today?

[47:26] Chris: We’ve got Rob/Roy again in Savage #13. We have Gabriel Rodriguez in Savage #12, which we're really excited about.

[47:33] John: I heard, unfortunately, you got saddled with a terrible writer on that one, though.

[47:36] David: Oh, yeah. I heard that, too.

[47:37] Chris: Chris Ryall is fantastic. I love working with him. We’ve got Solomon Kane coming this summer. We announced it last year. We have Kull. It's going to be coming very beginning of 2027, which we're very excited about. Savage Sword. All good stuff. We're all having a good time.

[47:53] David: It looks like it. I think the books are as good, if not better, than they've ever been. Really enjoying everything. Savage Sword of Conan, like I said, is just firing on all cylinders, for me. Anything else, John?

[48:04] John: No, I'm good. I'm looking forward to all that stuff.

[48:06] David: Thanks, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for spending some time with us. If our listeners haven't checked out an issue of Conan or Savage Sword, any issue seems to be a pretty good one to jump on. Jim Zub's writing on Conan the Barbarian is great, and the art and various writers you've got on Savage Sword are all top-notch. Thanks for joining us today, everybody, and we'll see you next week. We didn't take any time off, John. Whole holiday season, we nailed it. We were there the whole holiday season.

[48:34] John: Okay.

[48:35] David: I don't think our fans appreciate that enough, John. We have 5 people that we are beholden to, and we take that responsibility very seriously. Our 5 listeners are very important, and we did not take any time off for them. They had all the Corner Box podcasts that they could possibly want. Well, maybe not all they want, but they got as much as they expected the entire time. Every other podcast on the planet was taking time off during the holidays, and we did not, John.

[48:59] John: Yeah. Not like DC not shipping anything New Year's Eve, despite my efforts that I made to go to the comic bookstore. Thanks, guys.

[49:07] David: Yeah, see? Disappointment. We didn't--

[49:09] John: Yeah, we didn't do that. I don't know if we came out that day, but we would have.

[49:12] David: We would have. I'll tell you what, we came out on that Tuesday, like clockwork. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time on the Corner Box. Bye.

This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.