Titan Comics released The Savage Sword of Conan #15 this month, and the lead story stitches together a serviceable Conan tale that struggles with pacing but lands its pulpiest beats.
Writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner script “Conan: The Exchange” with art from Andy Belanger. Conan opens the issue as a prisoner aboard Captain Brock’s ship alongside Tadia Brazoria and a handful of other captives. He breaks free, kills his guards, and takes the vessel with the other prisoners’ help.
Tadia’s backstory carries the weight of the issue. A former cookery maid forced into a scheme by King Cyrus of the Isle of Maldyra, she lost her child fleeing the king’s demented son Edgart and rebuilt her life as a blacksmith’s apprentice before Brock hunted her down again. Conan and Tadia jump ship together, and the Cimmerian spends the rest of the story helping her settle the score: killing Edgart’s guards, freeing two more captives, and facing down a giant blind serpent in King Cyrus’s dungeon before the throne changes hands again.
The pulp elements here work. A dungeon serpent and a usurped crown are the kind of material Conan comics were built on, and Palmiotti and Conner know how to hit those beats. The pacing between them is where the story stumbles, with the plot’s political machinations slowing down what should be a straight line from captivity to vengeance.
The art carries a similar problem. Belanger’s figure work holds up, but several backgrounds read like the characters were dropped onto stock imagery rather than drawn into the same scene. It pulls the reader out of the action at exactly the moments the story needs to hold together, and it falls short of the standard set by other Savage Sword shorts in this Titan revival.
Sandwiched between the lead story and the backup is “The Ghost Kings,” a Robert E. Howard poem illustrated by Juan Alberto Hernández as an homage to H. Rider Haggard. It’s brief, and it’s the best few pages in the book.
The real standout of the issue is the backup, “Breckinridge Elkins: The Two-Ton Terror!,” written by Tom DeFalco with art by Ron Frenz and inks from Pat Olliffe. Elkins gets sent to Misery Swamp to catch snapping turtles for his father’s soup, runs into the legendary Two-Ton Turtle, and the resulting tall tale moves fast and lands its jokes.
DeFalco, Frenz, and Olliffe spent years together on Spider-Girl, and that chemistry shows on every page of this backup. It is the kind of character-driven adventure comic this creative team built a reputation on, and the issue leaves you wanting a full monthly series with all three of them back at it. A handful of pages is not enough.
The Savage Sword of Conan #15 earns a 7.5 out of 10. The lead story’s art and pacing hold back the bulk of the book, but the Elkins backup alone makes the issue worth the cover price.
Would a full ongoing series from DeFalco, Frenz, and Olliffe find an audience in today’s direct market, or has the appetite for that style of team-driven adventure comic faded along with the artists who made it?