Product Description: This latest collection in Dark Horse's smart, innovative Conan series finds the cunning Cimmerian chased by both unfinished business from his past and a strange novice magician who seeks to deliver a dire warning to the wandering barbarian. Fleshing out Robert E. Howard's unfinished "Hand of Nergal" tale, Timothy Truman weaves several plot threads together in an ambitious culmination of ideas, and his skill at characterization is apparent in both his handling of Howard's beloved, iconic hero and a colorful supporting cast of thieves, royalty, seasoned soldiers, and magicians both good and evil. A great evil from Conan's past moves ever closer while unfathomable terrors awaken and come into view. Conan is, of course, eager to meet both head on!
A very decent drawer, but a poor story, and bad inkings and colours. I tried to sum up my impressions in the title.
The first thing to say is that, according to me, volume 5 was the last good volume of the series. This volume, indeed, brings few pleasure. At first, I thought it was mainly because of Giorello's drawings. But I changed my mind with time. The guy is less good than Nord, of course, that's obvious. But not many could be compared to him. But Giorello is not a bad drawer at all. When one looks at the black & white sketches and illustrations at the end of the book, they're actually very good. So why is the final result graphically so poor?
First answer, which has already been said in another review : the inking is definitely too thick. Maybe keeping the same artistical choice than Nord would be good : putting colors without inking. I wish Giorello would think about it.
Second answer, the colours. I hate to criticize the work of someone because it means time and passion, but the fact is that here, they are most of the time ugly. Without any volumes. It's interesting to see that in some cases, we can imagine what the volume could have been. Take a look at the page where Conan meets again Eyeless Jerim. Cases 2, 3 and 4 are actually very well coloured (it's faces). If all textures, clothes, and people were coloured all the time with the same attention that these 3 faces, the volume would have been so different, and so nice...
About the story, it's true I felt more in a bad Lovecraft story than anything. But knowing the passion of Howard for Lovecraft, it's actually quite faithful, I guess. I quite like Truman's work, but I didn't have the impression of seeing the work of an experienced author here. We hear several time the motives of each character. Once is enough. And we have completely lost this observation of the world by Conan we had in previous volumes, which was interesting (the critics about the 'civilized' world).
Is it caused by the story or by the graphic mistakes (inking and colours), I don't know, but the fact is that I didn't have the impression of seeing a Conan universe, but more a quite bad generic horror-heroic fantasy one.
To sum up, yes, I was very disappointed by this volume, but I'll still take a look at the next volume. If the artists make changes in their artistic choices, we can see here that they have the potential of doing something nice. They just didn't use this potential here...
A little improved at 2 and 1/2 stars I'd like to go on record as saying this is not the end of Dark Horse Conan line. This new book is an improvement over the last but it is a mixed blessing. The story is decent enough when it's not rambling. Once again the series suffers from being too long. This provides too many opportunities to get into needless characterization. The problem is that the characters are not very complex and their dialogue doesn't move the story along. The hope is that eventually Timothy Truman will start doing what Howard did and that is to give a lot of character to his players by making them just revealing enough to be interesting while managing to avoid lengthy conversations. Right now there's a repetitive nature to these folks that skirts the risk of becoming cliche'. For all this effort to establish these people in the life of Conan one wonders if they're going to be around for a while? The reader will learn this is probably not the case. If they return after the current (loooong running) arc, will we care? This entire series has been plagued by the writers' desire to put their spin on Conan. Perhaps they feel that Robert E. Howard needed this effort? At first it was easy to let these attempts at expanding on Conan's life slide but the more I read Robert Howard and reread his Conan stories in particular the more it's apparent that most characterization was left to the imagination of the readers. So, why do we need to know, and repeatedly, the motives of Lord Than, Iniri, her old blind companion, the sorcerer Atalis, etc? While we're asking those questions, why are the women all drawn to look vivacious and dress like dancers at "gentelmen's clubs"? Why did Than and Conan look so much alike? It was also disappointing to see the monster in the tale so early in the story. That made it seem inconsequential. I'm also not sure what the point of the reanimated Nestor sub plot was all about. Frankly, the walking and fighting undead (?) is already old hat. Conan could have fought regular flesh and blood soldiers and not the undead, reanimated corpses. It was overkill. Then there's Conan's first intentions when he sees the princess. I won't ruin it by revealing anything, but again, it was inappropriate. Tomas Giorello's art is good but not very distinctive. His drawings look bound to John Buscema's stylings if he was influenced by Simon Bisley. (Why does Conan seem to be stuck in Frazetta's idea of how he should look? I love Frazetta's work but other artists have made distinctive efforts that are just as viable. So, rather than the Buscema/Frazetta model could we see a Conan the way Mike Kaluta, Gil Kane, Barry Windsor-Smith or the recent trio of illustrators designed him? If not, why?) The colorist on this series is a vast improvement over the previous "Rogues in the House" story arc. In the end this book is better but it still cursed by poor choices. At best I have to say it's a mixed bag; not terrible, not commendable.
Great story and artwork, don't listen to these haters I admit that the artwork and story in this book aren't as good as the previous ones, but it is still very good and these 1-star reviews are way too harsh. The story and dialogue are solid and honestly the drawing is great, it is just that the inking and coloring are a little too dark compared to Nord's colorful work. But the book is still great to look at. I have seen plenty of 1-star artwork, and this is certainly not 1-star work.
I look forward to volume 7.
Time to give up hope- Conan has hit his stride I was apprehensive about buying this volume... after the fiasco of Rogues in the House, which I gave a 1-star review along with several others, I was loathe to go into the comic shop to pick up the copy of volume 6 I had pre-ordered. At first, looking at it, I was encouraged that the Art had improved greatly. The story, however, fared nowhere near as well.
Perhaps Tim Truman just doesn't have the magic touch that Kurt Busiek does. One must admit, Busiek can write, and he'd certainly be a hard act to follow. Truman doesn't even seem to try, though. The writing, while better than Rogues in the House, is standard fare. There is little or no distinction between the villain Nergal, supposedly the Mesopotamian god of pestilence and death, and any nameless tentacled blob. Nary a line of dialogue is spoken by Conan, and though much is made of his friend Nestor being cursed, it only manifests in a half-hearted back-from-the-dead-to-kill-you scenario. Lots of potential for intrigue, character development, or at least adventure, but really what we get is just a standard hack & slash followed by a battle royale reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
To put it in a nutshell, there's no way I would have bought this if I hadn't made the mistake of pre-ordering it before reading it or the preceding volume, and I presume no other self-respecting Conan fan would either.
Dark Horse's Conan Hits Rock Bottom The biggest question a reader will have after reading this latest story arc from Dark Horse may be "How did this series get so bad?". After four outstanding story arcs from Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord, Conan hit a major bump in the road with Volume five; "Rogues in the House", which was obviously rushed to meet impending deadlines and plagued by creative team strife. The outcome of that volume was some bad fill-in art by Thomas Giorello and a botched coloring job half way through the book by Richard Isanov. In The Hand of Nergal, Dark Horse promotes Tomas Giorello to regular artist and straddles him with another round of poor coloring. Giorello, who is obviously not ready for such a prestigeous assignment, also ruins his own pencil work with some heavy handed inking. Judging by the sketches in the back pages of the book, Tomas can do much better than what we see throughout the story, but he has yet to fully master perspective and some of his figures are very blocky and rigid. His creatures also look quite clumsy in places. With all the artists who have contributed to the Conan relaunch, he is by far the poorest. Tim Truman, who I think is very talented as both a writer and artist, has yet to impress with either of his two adaptations so far. Former writer Kurt Busiek was much better at adapting Robert E. Howard's work to the comic book medium seamlessly, as well as building a framework of original stories around each adaptation. I feel Tim's approach is not quite as reverent or in keeping with the tone of the original work. Some of his added dialogue sticks out from the rest of the work, and while Busiek took minor stories from the Conan canon and built an epic around them, such as with "Frost Giant's Daughter" and "Bowl", Truman appears to go the opposite direction, diminishing the impact of Howard's fragment. His conclusion of the "Nestor saga", building since the Hall of the Dead storyline, is very anticlimatic, and his conclusion of that subplot is handled as an afterthought. This is the last collection of work from the current Dark Horse comic book series, ending the stories of Conan's career as a thief. Dark Horse recently relaunched the book as Conan of Cimmeria with the same creative team, but with the awful results of this volume, I doubt I will be back for more. Tragic.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
