Vancouver Fan Expo was a lot of fun and, as I type this, I’m just outside Calgary staying with friends and getting some writing work done before I ricochet back to the west coast for Emerald City Comicon in Seattle next week. On to more important news-
The sword & sorcery action-comedy series that kicked off my writing career is back in a wonderful new compact-manga-sized format, perfect for reading, sharing, or giving as a gift to the fantasy fan in your life.
As some of the middle volumes of the original trade paperbacks went out of print at Image, the numbers didn’t quite make sense to reprint them on their own, but that also meant retailers and readers couldn’t easily get the whole series. We talked about possibly doing an all-in-one omnibus but the reality is that although those big tomes look awesome on a bookshelf, they’re a pain to actually hold and read. I wanted to make sure new readers could easily discover the series and longtime fans could snag a copy for themselves in a format and price point that would work for everyone.
This 3-volume complete edition is perfect for retail and ideal for readers, with eye-catching new cover artwork by Edwin Huang and Misty Coats.
Lion at the Sword & Sorcery Book Club has been a steady supporter of my work in the Hyborian Age. We met in person last year at Robert E. Howard Days in Texas and since then we’ve been talking about getting together for an interview. Finally, almost 8 months later, we made it happen and it was a really nice chat:
That’s a full-size Atlantean Sword sent to me by Heroic Signatures, the rights holders of Conan the Barbarian…It was in my new contract.
When we started negotiating for my long term writing deal on Conan, we bounced terms back and forth – how much work, schedule, pay rate, and all the other mission critical business stuff you’d expect – And, as we were getting close to the finish line, there was a catch-all “Anything else?” and I brought up a joke from last year when I said if things went really well I should get a sword.
The response back was an amused “Are you serious?”
And I realized, oddly, that I was.
Sure, I could just buy a licensed movie replica and be done with it, a gift to myself, but it wouldn’t have the same meaning as the Conan crew sending me one as a “signing bonus” – Bequeathing a blade to me for a job well done.
Many fans assume that since I write lots of sword & sorcery I must have a bunch of swords because it’s something that usually comes along with being a bone deep fan of the genre, but I actually don’t. I have a lot of books and original art in my personal collection, but not many statues or toys, and I don’t have any weapons…well, until now.
This one’s special. A kind gesture by my creative partners and a milestone on a wonderful journey.
Speaking of journeys, I had a great time at Fan Expo Chicago over the weekend. The show had a solid comic crowd at its core, with a lot more comic retailers and readers on site than many of the other pop culture shows I’m at. Hearing that Conan is doing so well and that it’s top of the pile for so many readers is humbling.
A few shop owners let me know that Hyborian excitement has extended to back issue bins as well, with old school fans snapping up old Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan issues to get more material to tide them over between our new releases.
I spoke to Derek McCaw at Fanboy Planet all about working on an iconic character like Conan, second chances, long term plans, and a lot more. I think we cover some really good ground here, so check it out!
I mentioned in my previous newsletter that I’ll be Dungeon Mastering a wild adventure on November 4th-8th in northern England as part of D&D In a Castle and seats are extremely limited.
Normally only D&D In a Castle members get first crack at tickets with a special registration password, but the Castle crew has kindly allowed me to extend that same password to my newsletter here, so if you’re looking for a special gaming experience on D&D’s 50th anniversary year, click on through HERE to the registration page and use the Secret Password:
Fan Expo Canada, the country’s biggest pop culture convention, is just a few days away. I’m a feature guest at the show this year and will be set up with the Comic Sketch Art crew in Artist Alley in the South Hall. More details on my website once the location and panel schedule is finalized.
I’m in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin for Founders & Legends and Gary Con, celebrating 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop roleplaying games alongside a slew of writers and artists who helped build a hobby from the ground up. Two days in and it’s already been a pretty amazing and surreal experience.
Last night someone asked me if getting to write Dungeons & Dragons and Conan the Barbarian and be a guest at events like this were on my “Bucket List” – life goals/dreams someone hopes to achieve.
And, I had to be honest, the answer was a resounding “No”.
These kinds of things weren’t on my bucket list when I was younger because I couldn’t even see the bucket.
I would read comic books, absorb the names of those artists and writers, and wonder if it might be possible to meet those amazing people some day. My brother and I would pore over RPG books, see that an adventure was originally run as a tournament at a convention and dream about maybe someday going to that convention and playing in one of those tournaments. Just getting a bit closer to the people who made the stuff we enjoyed. That was the extent of my nerdy dreams.
The idea that I would ever get to create that stuff, have my name on the cover of a book, be well regarded in that field or be friends and peers with any of those creators would have seemed ridiculously impossible to me as a kid.
Right now, my creative career is so cosmically beyond any bucket I could have perceived that I can’t fully wrap my head around it. It’s special and wonderful even when it can be stressful and difficult and a bit exhausting.
I said something to that effect to the person who asked me and he said “Well, I’m kind of having that experience right now getting to chat with you.”
So yeah, it’s all a bit mind blowing…
The Crucible Welcomes Its First Victims
Speaking of gaming tournaments, this week at the shows I’m playtesting an original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition adventure I put together for fun.
The Crucible is a dungeon crawl tournament-style AD&D adventure for six 3rd level characters. It’s filled with dangerous traps, puzzles, and unusual combat encounters in the tradition of the Tomb of Horrors and Deathtrap Dungeon.
I built the riddles and puzzles so a group can “brute force” their way through if needed, but solving them either nullifies or severely weakens an encounter, giving the party a much better chance of surviving the whole adventure.
The adventure is named after an arc of Conan I wrote at Marvel, a story where our Cimmerian is tricked into competing in a similar deathtrap-laden tournament.
I ran the adventure for the first time yesterday and the playtest crew did really well. Over the course of 3 hours these six strangers came together to overcome five major encounter areas and reach the last puzzle, while roleplaying and laughing all the way. The team made some smart strategic decisions in combat and exhausted all their healing magic to bring two characters back from the brink of death. I’m curious how the other groups fare later this week.
A few people here and online have already asked if I’m going to publish the adventure. Right now it’s a pet project I put together so I’d have something original to run at TTRPG shows and in its current state it’s a series of scrappy notes, handouts and other pieces, not a properly written and edited manuscript. That said, it would be fun to formalize it up at some point and bring things full circle by having an adventure playtested at a game event become “real”.
Coffee & Heroes – Part 3
A few weeks ago I had a wonderful time talking with the owners of Coffee & Heroes in Ireland all about my career in comics. It was a great chat and covered so much ground that they’ve split it into 3 parts.
Here’s part 3, where we dive deep on CONAN THE BARBARIAN, including writing an icon, working on Conan at Marvel during the pandemic, pitching the relaunch to Heroic Signatures, working on the new monthly series, the new Savage Sword of Conan magazine, and more!
(And here’s Part 1 and Part 2, if you missed them.)
• Kyodokan‘s technique for cooking Teriyaki Chicken is simple and effective. I made it last week following their technique and it turned out wonderfully.
Late last week I walked away from an unannounced and unfinished project. I’m pretty sure that’s a first for me.
(No, I won’t publicly say what it was and probably never will. I’m not here to sling mud. There are a lot of wonderful people involved who did great work and they don’t deserve any more stress than they’ve already got.)
In some ways, it’s a good thing – a signal to myself that there is actually a limit in terms of how much I’m willing to be yanked around before the time-money-hassle equation no longer adds up.
Of course, my pragmatic freelancer-fueled brain tried to fight me every step of the way. I had a hard enough time convincing it that I could turn down work from time to time even if a project wasn’t a good fit, the schedule was too tight, or the pay involved was insultingly low, but this…this was different – it was a great fit, the original schedule worked fine, and the pay was in my range…but then the whole thing slid into chaos.
When you contribute to licensed properties, obviously, the licensor gets approval. I know the drill and I work damn hard doing the research and bringing the things I do well into the mix while fitting within the confines of an existing IP. I’ve done it dozens of times on plenty of well known properties.
I’ve also done my fair share of revisions and rewrites. I don’t think my words are sacrosanct or unchangeable, by any means. I deeply appreciate editorial and licensor feedback to make sure we all have something we’re proud of when the finished project is out there in the world.
But, in this case – I was almost done writing, multiple scripts were approved, and there was finished art well underway when we were suddenly told that everything our team had done was now “unapproved” and we needed to start from scratch – That’s just unnecessary, unprofessional, and I can’t trust anything you tell me going forward.
Why even have ‘approvals’ if they don’t mean anything?
It became pretty clear that the people reviewing the work had changed and the licensor no longer wanted this project to exist at all. It was a vestigial limb hopelessly dragging behind a previously agreed upon deal. I had to decide if I was going to pull it all back to the starting blocks and bitterly try to figure out the moving target of their expectations or step away and use my time and effort more productively. I chose the latter and, despite some twinges of freelancer guilt, I’m glad I did. The Zub of 5 or 6 years ago might have made a different decision and it would have been ulcer-inducing.
I don’t know if this is a sign of success, but it’s certainly a sign that I know what I bring to a project and that I’m willing to communicate that more clearly, in any case. Every creative career has highs and lows (and lows, and lows…), and I’m thankful that, at this moment, I have the freedom to make this choice and lean into other projects that engage and challenge me without breaking my brain.
Cover art by Joe Jusko. Logo by Dan Panosian. Pre-order now!
A Savage Story
Speaking of challenges, this week I finalized my prose piece for Savage Sword of Conan #1. Marinating in Robert E. Howard’s famous fiction before I tried to rock out a short story of my own for the Cimmerian was suitably humbling, in all kinds of good ways. Summoning a scene without an artist to make me look good is a much different prospect and flexes a whole different set of creative muscles.
I have never taken any formal writing classes. I did a swack of Creative Writing in high school and learned some script writing when I took a year of Film & Multimedia before I started Classical Animation, but the rest of my ‘training’ has been reading about the craft and putting my own work out into the world; improving story by story and project by project. With my art background, the visual rhythm of animation and comics make the most sense to me. They’re where I feel most comfortable. I love the visual medium and love collaborating with artists.
Stripping everything back to the primacy of prose exposes a lot more of my imposter syndrome. I struggle to quiet that inner critic because I can’t point at the great art and tell it to shut up. It’s just my words sitting out there exposed on the page and either it grabs the reader’s imagination or it doesn’t.
I can write emails, blogposts, tutorials, curriculum, critique, pitches, ad copy, art notes, informal descriptions, and dialogue aplenty but, you know, that’s not ‘real’ writing. That’s not the power of the written word to weave worlds of wonder.
I wrote a Conan short story and, this time, it’s just me.
It’s very pulpy and punchy and I like it, even though it felt strange as a process. (Not bad, mind you, just strange.) People who edit this stuff for a living have read it and liked it and I’m being paid for it, so either they’re all lying because they don’t want to hurt my feelings, or I did okay.
It’s called “Sacrifice in the Sand”, it’s based on Joe Jusko’s gorgeous cover art and, when the big first issue of our mighty magazine hits stores in late February, readers get to decide if it hit the mark or not.
Either way, let me know.
And Yet, More Advice
Despite me exposing my fiction fears, I’m still out here writing advice to people who want to pursue a comic writing career. Ridiculous!
Give it a read and, if you find it helpful, feel free to share it around.
We Sold Out – Again!
Conan the Barbarian #6 arrived in stores last week. Readers seemed to really like it and the pent up demand (it had been delayed two weeks after shipping problems) blew reorders past the overprint, which means there’s a 2nd print coming at the end of the month, with a line art version of the stunning cover art by Jae Lee.
We’re now in the rare position of having sales rise as the series continues, which is an incredible vote of confidence for our team’s hard work. Thank you once again and please keep reading!
More Shenanigans
Despite the fact that I’m a quitter, a sham, quite ridiculous, and a sellout, I also can’t shut up when it comes to talking about my work and the craft.
For Conan fans, the Hyborian chatter starts at around the 22 minute mark. At the 37 minute mark I talk about my Marvel run of Conan issues and reflect on what I did well, things I still needed to learn, and things that were out of our control.
It’s always a pleasure talking with Adam. He’s enthusiastic, well researched, and subtly moves the conversation into some great places. Give it a listen and feel free to check out past interview episodes I link to below-
In late May I spoke to Tim Cundle at Mass Movement all about Dungeons & Dragons, Disney Kingdoms and Figment, and the dream project that was and still is Conan the Barbarian.
It’s a really fun interview and we cover a lot of ground. Check it out!
Here’s an interview with the Conan the Barbarian Forum, a vibrant Portuguese language Conan community. Host Marco Collares and translator Duda Ferreira chat with me about the upcoming relaunch, working with the incredible Rob De La Torre, editor Matt Murray and more.
If you don’t speak Portuguese, here are time-stamped links to my answers in English to their key questions:
Over on the Graymalkin Lane podcast, we talk about the strange history of Sapphire Styx and how she became a pivotal player in my plans for Betsy Braddock back in the MYSTERY IN MADRIPOOR mini-series from 2018.
I’m a guest on the latest episode of the CROMCAST, chatting up a storm about the Conan comic relaunch, the Hyborian Age, my love of sword & sorcery, TTRPGs, and more!
• What are the three things you value most in life?
• Tell me a memory that shaped you.
• Tell me in as much detail as you can about something that once existed, but now does not.
• What, if anything, is perfect?
• What do you suck at?
• What are you great at?
• Do you say “I love you” too much or too little?
• If you could name a hot sauce, what would you call it and why?
• What are you most proud of?
• How do you deal with failure?
• If you were on a starship, what position would you hold?
• If you could give just one piece of advice, what would that be?
Rub a dub dub, it’s time for Jim Zub! Reilly and George welcome the prolific writer to the Hypothetic Isle for a wide-ranging talk on all things Conan, good dental care, inhabitants of the forest moon of Endor and the correct way to pronounce “Cimmerian”.
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