Conan the Cimmerian

Haven't read the one-shot, but I'm finding "Cimmerian" to be pretty bleah. I like Giorello on art, but the spark that animated the first 15 issues or so under Busiek seems to be gone. What I loved about the book when it first launched was that Busiek was weaving a grand tapestry in the background while still keeping the episodic nature of Conan's life intact. Without him, that seems to have been lost--it's just a series of "OK, now we do "The Hand of Nergal"...OK, now it's "Black Colossus"..." and so on. Well-executed and all, but when this series started it was something truly special.

I'm still praying Busiek comes back at some point.

That's a good point. The difficulty with the chronological approach is that the book has necessarily been mired in a period of itinerant soldiering. I'm interested to see how the title handles the period of "Queen of the Black Coast"; a reasonably faithful adaptation has the potential of offering a lot of growth for Conan, but at the same time-depending on how a writer interprets the lacunae of the story-the book could also sink into years worth of pirating stories, much as the Marvel series did.

The premise seems to be to build every 6-7 issue storyline around one of the original Howard stories, arrayed in chronological order, thereby fitting each one into the larger continuity. So I don't think they'll have years of pirate stories, just a 6-issue run build around "Queen of the Black Coast". Although admittedly that particular story does lend itself to being chopped up and spread out a little (you could do the first half of the story as the beginning of the pirate era, then cram in a storyline or two before doing the second half, with the lost city).

But yeah, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about: most Conan stories are so standalone that without Busiek's overarcing storyline it comes off as way too repetitive and episodic. I was sort of disparaging the storylines post-"The God in the Bowl", but even past "Tower of the Elephant", when Busiek apparently had some health problems that led to some fill-in issues, you can see a pretty well-crafted storyline, with that Gunderman Conan befriends who's working under a curse, linking all the issues together. Truman so far hasn't bothered with anything like that, unless you count boring stories of Conan's grandfather (it's cool that they're drawn by Richard Corben, but they're still pretty boring).