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| Jim Zub (left) answering questions for an on-camera interviewer (not me). |
While I've sporadically covered Titan Comics' new Conan The Barbarian series, I've reviewed all three issues of Savage Sword. So I thought I'd kick off my interview with author Jim Zub by asking him about his contribution to this year's The Savage Sword of Conan #1.
David: I enjoyed your first prose story in Savage Sword #1. The whole notion of the woman’s sense of responsibility to her family, her community, and her religion. Was that originally a comic script?
Jim: No, that's an original short story. What happened was this. In the ‘70s Savage Sword magazine they would have a whole mixture. They would have essays. They would have poems. They would have short stories and then they would have comic stories. So we wanted the new Savage Sword to have that same kind of variety to it.
Marvel Comics' Savage Sword #1 (August 1974)
As we were putting together the issues the editor Chris Butera [at Heroic Signatures] and I were talking and they said, “You know, Joe Jusko is doing his first Conan cover in over 20 years. It would be cool to do these too. Every so often they'd have a short story based on the cover image. You're our flagship Conan writer. Do you want to take this on?
And of course you say yes and then you're terrified because you've taken on this. The original Conan stories from the 1930s are short prose stories and I'm being assigned a short prose story. So you’re not just adapting the character, you're adapting the format from weird tales, which is seminal literature in genre fiction. Do you really think you got one of those in you?
Jim Zub & renowned Savage Sword artist Joe Jusko
You know that's a pretty…that’s kind of a little bit of ego I guess. I sweated over those 3000 words more than almost any other project I've ever done. I really felt the weight of that prose. That's [Robert E] Howard’s sandbox and I'm no longer just making sandcastles over to one side. I'm playing in that the same way he would, using the kind of verbiage he would use. I really wanted to do a potent kind of atmospheric punchy story the way he would, so I reread all the original Conan and a bunch of his other short stories.
I've only got this limited window of words. How can I make it as visceral as possible and leave you with a feeling about that character, that she had made a sacrifice, and that Conan had sacrificed those lives to get her back. And that little twist at the end that she doesn't need to die because her family's already been saved. That stuff happened before that, so the story feels bigger than the container of those words: that the things that happened before will happen after.
We don't know if they make it out of the desert but we can assume they do because it's Conan and he's going to do it and so we don't even need to show that part. We just show the end of the conflict and then he's going to carry her on. It was a fun challenge honestly.
Joe Jusko's cover for Titan Comics' Savage Sword #1 (February 2024)
David: It was a nice rescue plot.
Jim: Thanks. Yeah, simple and direct but also in the writing of the action scene and trying to sum it up. You know, when you're writing comics, you're relying so much on the artist to convey the violence, the excitement, the dynamicism. Now I’ve got to paint it in your mind with the words, and you're like, well, I can't rest on my laurels and hope the artist does it. I’ve got to do it all. So, it was cool.
David: Yeah, I could tell. What with the tonality of the flow of the words, it was much more in the older pulp style.
Jim: Absolutely! By design, for sure. It was a cool challenge for me, and I was really happy on the other side of that. I was really sweating it--you know, doing it--but when it was all done you're like, "Yeah!" It was cool to kind of summon up that kind of energy and put it on the page.
For more on Titan's debut issue, see my review of The Savage Sword Of Conan #1.
Thanks again to Titan Comics for arranging my interview with Jim Zub, and the press office at Comic-Con International for granting me the opportunity to speak with the author bringing Conan back to comic readers! I'll share more of this interview soon!
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