Kull the Conqueror #3
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeKull the Conqueror Vol. 3 #3 is a notable chapter in Marvel's final Bronze Age run with Robert E. Howard's pre-Conan barbarian king, representing one of the last sustained attempts by a major publisher to give Kull a regular monthly showcase before the character largely retreated to graphic novel format. The story introduces several new creatures and antagonists native to Howard's Pre-Cataclysmic Age — including Gorn, the Roc of Lemuria, the Demon Bull, Xanthes, and the undead Dead Men of the Deep — expanding the mythology of Valusia beyond the source prose. It also deepens Kull's characterization by anchoring his present-day kingship in his traumatic past as a slave, a thematic move that sets this volume apart from earlier, more action-driven Kull adaptations. The issue exists within the broader context of Marvel's 1971–1985 trilogy of Kull series, the third and final color-comics run before the property moved to Dark Horse Comics decades later.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The third Kull the Conqueror ongoing series launched in May 1983 under editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, with Alan Zelenetz — who had also served as the principal author of Marvel's Official Handbook of the Conan Universe — as the series' primary writer from issue #2 onward, paired almost exclusively with veteran penciler John Buscema. Issue #3 brought inker Klaus Janson into the collaboration, a pairing that readers and later collected-edition reviewers have singled out as among the strongest artistic configurations of the run. The series existed as a direct outgrowth of the short-lived 1982 prestige-format Kull series (which lasted only two issues), reformatted into a standard ongoing comic after that experiment concluded.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Title of the story: 'Dead Men of the Deep'; cover date December 1983, on-sale date August 23, 1983.
- Written by Alan Zelenetz; penciled by John Buscema; inked by Klaus Janson; lettered by John Morelli; edited by Ralph Macchio and Bob Harras under editor-in-chief Jim Shooter.
- First appearances in this issue: Gorn (Kull's old partner in slavery), the Roc of Lemuria, Count Dal Sendor, the Demon Bull, Xanthes, and the supernatural Dead Men of the Deep.
- Brule the Spear-Slayer appears as a supporting character; his comic-book first appearance was in Kull the Conqueror Vol. 1 #1 (June 1971), scripted by Roy Thomas and penciled by Ross Andru — not this issue.
- The plot centers on Kull discovering a former fellow slave named Gorn, freeing him, and pursuing the pirate who once sold both men into bondage, all while political tensions threatening war simmer in the background.
- The Dead Men of the Deep — an undead crew dispatched by the sorcerer Xanthes — are ultimately destroyed when Kull and his men abandon their galley and set it ablaze, fire being the creatures' established weakness.
- The issue was published in both a Direct Edition and a Newsstand Edition, as well as a Canadian edition with a different cover price.
- The story was later reprinted in The Chronicles of Kull Volume 5: Dead Men of the Deep and Other Stories (Dark Horse Comics) and in Kull the Conqueror: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus (Marvel, 2021), which collects the full 1982–1985 era of Marvel's Kull comics.
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Reprinted in Superaventuras Marvel #25 (1984), The Chronicles of Kull #5 (2012), Kull the Conqueror: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus #[nn] (2021)
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