Conan Saga #34

This January 1990 Marvel magazine-format issue sets a brooding, atmospheric tone with Jim Starlin's painted-style cover: a muscular, bound Conan faces down an enormous serpent rearing up before him across a skull-littered landscape, the creature's glowing eye fixed on the Cimmerian with unmistakable menace. The scene captures everything that makes Conan enduring — raw physicality against overwhelming supernatural odds, rendered in deep, murky greens that feel genuinely unsettling. Inside, Roy Thomas scripts "The Flame Knife" with John Buscema's art inked by Tony DeZuniga, a creative pairing that reliably delivers Hyborian adventure at its most compelling.