I have spent the last couple of hours making phone calls and combing over a recording of an interview like Jim Garrison with the audio evidence from Dealey Plaza, and I’m no closer to an answer then I was when I started all this: is Djimon Hounsou’s comic book trilogy really Conan?

You’ll recall that the actor told IESB that he was going to be in a comic book trilogy which he described as his dream project. On the day that the story broke, cub CHUD reporter Phil Owen was doing a phoner with Djimon for another publication. He tried to get further details and this is what Hounsou told him:

I kind of wanted to be quiet about it until I completely finished the project. It’s obviously a comic book that used to be part of the Conan comic book…

The last part is hard to make out for certain, but it sounds like he’s saying ‘and we’re developing that.’

Okay, so maybe Djimon isn’t familiar with Conan as a pulp fiction character and only knows him from the Marvel comics. I called Nu Image, the folks putting the new Conan movie together and I was told that not only are they not talking to Djimon Hounsou for the film, they don’t have a director and they’re probably two months from even having a finished script.

So that’s not helpful. The next thing I did was go through other Robert E Howard properties that are in development; Solomon Kane actually has a character that would be stereotypically perfect: N’Longa, an African witch doctor and Kane’s blood brother. But that movie – while envisioned as the start of a trilogy – has been filming since January. If Hounsou is going to play N’Longa, it’s just a cameo setting him up for sequels.

Then there’s Bran Mak Morn, to which Peter Berg is attached, but that’s about Celts. Not seeing that work. There is Red Sonja, which was a Conan spin-off, but… well, you see why that isn’t really making sense. And there’s Kull, which has ties to the Conanverse, but which was a dud in film form just ten years ago.

All of this has left me scratching my head. I’ve attached the sound file of the answer so you can listen; I had originally thought that perhaps Hounsou was saying Tintin with a French accent, which could – in a stretch – be misheard as Conan. Listening to the audio a couple of times leaves me certain he’s saying Conan.

The only other guess I have is that there’s a basic confusion in general, and that Hounsou isn’t making a Conan movie but writing a Conan comic. Dark Horse is aggressively publishing new Conan stories right now in both a regular series and occasional spin-offs and one shots. It’s not unusual for comic book types to get crazy for Hollywood types who want to write some comics as a lark. During the interview Phil came to understand that Hounsou likes to write – is it possible he’s doing a comic book story that he’d like to develop into a movie?

This whole thing is so murky. We’ll continue probing so we can figure out just what the fuck is happening here.