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Roy Thomas

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Chronicles of Conan Volume 1: Tower of the Elephant and Other Stories Kindle & comiXology

by Roy Thomas (Author), Barry Windsor-Smith (Illustrator) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 74 ratings

Part of: Chronicles of Conan

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In the early 1970s, Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian exploded on to the comics scene. Writer Roy Thomas teamed with a young artist named Barry Smith, and together the two mapped out some of the most stirring and memorable Conan adventures to come along since those written by Howard himself. Over the course of their 24 issue run together, Thomas and Smith defined Conan for a generation of comics readers, and now those stories are collected in this series. Featuring completely remastered color and text corrections, and containing material not available for nearly thirty years.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These reprints from Marvel's Conan the Barbarian (originally published in the early 1970s) shows the best and worst of sword and sorcery adventure. At its best, S&S fiction enables readers to identify with heroes who fight against vast, cosmic forces. At its worst, it features muscle-bound louts in fur skivvies who bellow insults at each other while waving enormous, phallic weapons. Robert E. Howard, who created Conan in a series of pulp magazine tales, achieved the former level more often than he sank to the latter. Eventually, Thomas and Windsor-Smith did, too. Thomas's informative closing notes explain how, under Stan Lee's editorship, he got permission to write a Conan comic in collaboration with young artist Windsor-Smith. He admits to glitches in the writing and blemishes in the art, but correctly states that the comic hit its stride by issue #4, an adaptation of Howard's "Tower of the Elephant." This archetypal Conan story sets the quick-thinking, tough outsider against a corrupt, over-sophisticated society. The young barbarian is exasperated by the superior attitudes of the experienced rogues in the slums of a decadent metropolis, so he decides to test himself by robbing a powerful, evil sorcerer. This comics adaptation isn't without flaws, but Thomas does preserve Howard's escalating sense of menace and strangeness. Windsor-Smith's pencils do justice to the mood too, making Conan believably muscular enough to prevail against human or superhuman foes. The stories in this deluxe collection are much more spirited and solid than those featured in the original printing.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Roy Thomas is a comic book writer and editor. He is a former editor in chief of Marvel Comics. He is known for his work on Conan the Barbarian, The Avengers, X-Men, and a number of other beloved titles.

Barry Windsor-Smith is a comic book writer, illustrator, and painter. He was educated at East Ham Technical College and later went on to write for Marvel, DC, Valiant, Dark Horse, and other comic book imprints. Windsor-Smith is best known for his work on Avengers, Iron Man, Conan the Barbarian, and Red Sonja. He is a member of the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00BNM0J8C
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dark Horse Books (October 7, 2003)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 7, 2003
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 582578 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 160 pages

Customer Reviews:
4.2 74 ratings

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Roy Thomas

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Roy William Thomas, Jr. (born November 22, 1940) is an American comic book writer and editor, who was Stan Lee's first successor as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. He is possibly best known for introducing the pulp magazine hero Conan the Barbarian to American comics, with a series that added to the storyline of Robert E. Howard's character and helped launch a sword and sorcery trend in comics. Thomas is also known for his championing of Golden Age comic-book heroes – particularly the 1940s superhero team the Justice Society of America – and for lengthy writing stints on Marvel's X-Men and Avengers, and DC Comics' All-Star Squadron, among other titles.

Thomas was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2011.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Photo by Nightscream (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Hal Jordan

Fun Bronze Age Marvel Comics

Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2014

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These stories are by no means the best that Marvel produced during its heyday from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, but they are fun. Read straight through, you notice that Conan isn't given much of a back story and the names of the countries in the mythical age these stories are set in are rather confusing -- as are the relationships among the countries. It's also puzzling that whatever the weather, Conan marches around mostly wearing trunks. In addition, what his goal in life is seems obscure. Still, Roy Thomas does a good job of coming up with interesting stories -- only some of which are based on Robert Howard's original tales. Barry Smith's art is decent, and is in some ways more closely related to comic book art of more recent days than to the Silver Age art of, say, Jack Kirby.

Thomas also contributes an interesting afterword in which he describes how Marvel came to acquire the rights to the Howard stories (the Howard estate was willing to sell the rights cheaply!). He also gives a candid take on the strengths and weaknesses of this writing and Smith's art.

The failure to reprint the covers is disappointing, but not a deal breaker for me.

All told, I think most comic fans will enjoy these decently reproduced and inexpensive reprints.

One person found this helpful

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poetwriter

Classic Conan from the early 1970s

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2023

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This book is good for anyone who wanted to read about Conan. The artwork is super great its good to share with young readers in mind.

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Mel Odom

Beginning of a great series

Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2014

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Roy Thomas was the second major writer at Marvel Comics, groomed by Stan Lee himself. But Thomas was also the first guy to bring Conan the Barbarian to comics. In fact, he was the one who named Conan “the Barbarian” instead of the Cimmerian as Robert E. Howard usually referred to his larger-than-life hero.

I remember reading the first Conan comic book, borrowed from a friend of mine named Ricky who was enthusiastic about it. I can’t remember if he’d read Conan’s newest paperback releases from Lancer or not before the comic came out. I knew I hadn’t.

Frankly, I was less than impressed with the story, and not happy at all with the astronaut floating in space in one of the panels. That took the story right out of the fantasy realm for me. I had recently read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Those books were fantasy to me.

Eventually, though, Conan became – and still is – a mainstay of my reading. I do remember Barry Windsor-Smith’s art, though. No one did stuff like Barry Windsor-Smith. That second page of the comic book that has the panel of Conan running with his horned helmet is one of those iconic images that will never leave me, and never fail to reduce me to a 12 year old boy again.

Windsor-Smith’s use of small panels and Thomas’s tendency toward verbosity (often explaining in narrative what a reader can SEE in the panels) makes those issues often read like an illustrated manuscript rather than a comic book. I don’t know how Windsor-Smith did it, and I know there are artists who would run for the hills if this kind of work load was shoved at them.

The stories kind of limp along in this collection because Thomas was still finding his feet as a storyteller in general, and hadn’t (by his own admission in the afterward) really known what he was doing with Conan. Or where he wanted to go.

The adaptation of Howard’s “Tower of the Elephant” is a story I always think of when I think of Conan. The story is just so heartfelt, and it’s weird to think of just how young both Howard and Thomas were when the first wrote the story and the second adapted it to comics.

Windsor-Smith (according to Thomas) was incredibly excited about the story. He did his best on the pages, and even got Thomas to stay off of some of them to let the story be told visually.

Sitting and reading these first stories one after another does tend to show how repetitive the adventures are. At one point, Conan got canceled (for a day) because of low sales, but thankfully the series picked back up and allowed Thomas to continue writing literally hundreds of Conan tales for years.

Barry Windsor-Smith was lost along the way, but John Buscema stepped in as the regular artist for years and gave Conan that iconic look so many comic book fans around the world know and love.

I’m looking forward to reading other volumes of the Conan the Barbarian series, called the Chronicles of Conan in these collections. I spent a lot of my formative youth reading the adventures of the barbarian hero, so I look forward to adventuring with him again.

7 people found this helpful

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Steven

Conan rules. Crom! Count the dead!

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2016

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Robert E is arguably my favorite author, and I've loved these stories for 40+ years. Unfortunately, I already have them, and was actually looking for graphic novels. This was a book. Still....if you don't have...you must get. It saddens me to think that since Arnold when people think of Conan they think of Schwarzenegger. Didn't really hate the movies,but didn't particularly like 'em either. I used to get Savage Sword and was always the high point of my month. Sigh. Sucks to get old. Ha. Harry Potter...pfffft. I do like R.A. Salvatore quite a bit as far as modern fantasy, and a few others. Oh well....back to the hunt.

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I. R. Kerr

Conan the Barbarian issues 1-8

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 21, 2008

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In Roy Thomas' afterword at the back he tells how it was only by good fortune and a little subterfuge that Marvel got permission to bring Conan to life.
Thankfully for those of us who were buying comics in the early 1970's the task was handed to Roy Thomas himself, a task he stayed with for 115 issues. The artwork for the first few years was handed to Barry Smith and it is plain in these first 8 issues that he was still developing his style, they may not be to everyone's taste but they look far better in the enhanced colours that are used here.
There is a decent mixture of new tales along with others based on Howard's original stories. Roy Thomas' first issue scene setter is an original tale introducing Conan as a young Cimmerian sword for hire who soon finds himself fighting against wizards, demons and beast-men and rescuing maidens in peril along the way. The covers of the comics, also by Barry Smith and sadly not re-printed here, promised so much, and by and large they delivered. It is thanks to the comic genius of Stan Lee that he spotted a worrying trend on the covers and his advice to Roy Thomas helped steer the title from declining sales to become one of Marvel's flagship titles.
A few of Robert E. Howard's tales are used here, "Twilight of the Grim Grey God", the brilliant "Tower of The Elephant" with its moving ending and "The God in The Bowl" re-named as "The Lurker Within", "Zukala's Daughter" is based on one of Howard's poems.
Of Thomas' own tales the first two introductory issues were great but "Devil Wings over Shadizar" stood out for me. He skilfully kept the stories flowing between issues, linking some of Howard's best loved tales together with some of his own best writing. Conan The Barbarian was one of my must-have's in my early comic collecting days and thanks to these reprints I am catching up on half remembered tales, as well as working my way through Howard's original stories.
I just wish the original covers could have been reprinted here but I guess there are copyright issues involved that unfortunately not even a sword wielding, demon-slaying, wild-eyed Cimmerian could help solve.

10 people found this helpful

Dean Kutryk

First impression

Reviewed in Canada on April 30, 2009

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The book contains a series of comics. The color is bright, the pages are thick, and the artwork is professional. I would read it over again.

In this series, I found "Lair of the Beast-Men" and "Zukala's Daughter" fun to read, but I can't complain about any of them, this was a good set. In a subsequent comic, Zukala returns (in chronicles 3). I like that about these books, and there is coordination for the series, making it better to read them in sequence than randomly and I also noticed that there are additional supplementary books.

Conan battles against beast, and he battles with a decietful women that he had rescued. He does not find his kingdom in this set. With all of this trouble in the Hyborian age, it almost equals what we face, but Conan is not detered. I enjoy finding out what is going to jump out and challenge him. We discover some characteristics of Conan over time such as his distrust of magic or his sense of loyalty and pride, but I don't know how close of an approximation he is to the barbarian king in history. I am a novice yet as far as it goes. I heard that the original story teller used history as a background for his fantasy world.