Conan has a daunting history: love for Conan's creator, Robert E. Howard, remains strong, and messing about in Howard's sandbox can be risky business if care is not taken to respect what Howard established. On the other hand, straight-ahead homage or pastiche is unlikely to sit right with a modern readership, either. Conan writer Kurt Busiek manages to strike just the right balance between old and new, adapting Howard's prose stories to comic form while extrapolating all-new adventures -- very much in the original spirit -- to entertain us with. (Howard himself comes to life in a series of back-up features by Jim and Ruth Keegan, "The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob: True Stories from the Life of Robert E. Howard").

Tackling Conan is equally daunting art-wise, the Marvel series having been handled by legends like Barry Windsor-Smith and John Buscema, among others. Series artist Cary Nord strikes a similar balance to Busiek, balancing respect for the artistic tradition he has inherited while simultaneously tacking out into uncharted artistic territory (Conan is colored directly from Nord's pencils by the uber-talented Dave Stewart, giving the book a painted feel, and an upcoming issue will see Nord experimenting with charcoal illustration, something rarely seen in mainstream comics).

The perfect representative images of what the series accomplishes are the striking scenes of decapitation rendered with such obvious joy by Cary Nord. This at once signifies a break with the past -- a literal severing of ties -- while remaining firmly in the savage tradition of Conan.

Much is often made of the similarity of comics to both prose fiction and film, since comics uses both printed words and sequential images. Comics is its own animal, of course, using words and pictures differently than any other medium, and employing a whole bag of tricks -- like captions and thought balloons -- indigenous only to comics.

Merging as it does a hero of both prose and cinema into comic form, Conan is an example of how comics can act like both of these mediums at the same time, while still remaining unique. Conan sees a return to narrative captions in the third person (something modern comics have tended to avoid), and the font choice and lower-case lettering (comics tend to favor all-caps) give the effect that the captions have been ripped from a work of prose. Conan uses lots of wide-screen panels (shaped more-or-less like a movie screen), and the action plays out over several pages, making for a very cinematic effect.

All of which is to say that this one fires on all cylinders -- check it out!