Conan the Barbarian #1

History

Roy Thomas, then Marvel's associate editor and a devoted reader of Howard's Lancer paperback reprints, championed the idea of licensing Conan after reader letters repeatedly requested sword-and-sorcery material; he negotiated the rights directly with Glenn Lord, literary agent for the Howard estate, on a modest per-issue fee that publisher Martin Goodman had grudgingly authorized. Goodman's insistence on keeping production costs low meant Thomas's first-choice penciller, John Buscema, priced himself out of consideration — inadvertently opening the assignment to the younger, British-born Barry Windsor-Smith, who was already collaborating with Thomas on anthology horror work. Windsor-Smith's debut pages showed clear Jack Kirby influence, but the Conan run became the crucible in which he evolved a distinctive Romantic illustration style drawing on Pre-Raphaelite painters — a stylistic transformation that unfolded issue by issue across the early run. Stan Lee edited the book and nearly cancelled it with issue #7 due to softening sales before Thomas successfully argued for its continuation.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First comic-book appearance and origin of Conan the Barbarian (Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age hero), in the story titled 'The Coming of Conan!'
• First comic-book appearance of King Kull — a cameo in a single-panel flashback vision projected by the mystical Star-Stone device inside Sharkosh's cavern temple
• First officially licensed English-language comic adaptation of Howard's Conan character; prior unlicensed Conan comics had been published in Mexico beginning in 1952
• Creative team: writer Roy Thomas, penciller Barry Windsor-Smith (credited as Barry Smith), inker Dan Adkins (interior) / John Verpoorten (cover), letterer Sam Rosen, editor Stan Lee; cover date October 1970, on-sale July 1970
• Windsor-Smith was a budget-driven substitute for Thomas's first choice, John Buscema, whose page rate publisher Martin Goodman deemed too high for an untested non-superhero genre title
• The series launched by this issue ran 275 issues (October 1970 – December 1993) and sparked a broad sword-and-sorcery wave in 1970s American comics
• The story from this issue was reprinted in Conan the Barbarian #22 (January 1973) and later retold with new art by Thomas and John Buscema in Savage Sword of Conan #222
• The issue has been collected in Dark Horse's Chronicles of Conan Vol. 1 (2003), Marvel's Original Marvel Years Omnibus Vol. 1 (2018), a True Believers reprint (March 2019), the Original Marvel Years Epic Collection Vol. 1 (2020), a Facsimile Edition (February 2022), and Titan's Original Comics Omnibus Vol. 1 (2024)

Cast · 2 characters

Full credits

Key issues in Conan the Barbarian

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#23 1st appearance — Red Sonja

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#14 1st appearance — Kulan Gath

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#270 1st appearance — Milo

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#6 1st appearance — Jenna

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#7 1st appearance — Thoth-Amon