Tales from the Green Scrapbook #4: Conan the Barbarian Newspaper Strip

Being another in our ridiculously occasional series of scans of items I taped into a green notebook when I was a child...

I was never the world's biggest fan of Conan, either the comics or the original novels. But in September of 1978, when the Conan the Barbarian newspaper comic strip debuted in the Milwaukee Journal (and many other newspapers across the land), I dutifully fulfilled my comic-book-nerd duty and saved the article announcing the strip for posterity.

Not being a huge fan, I consequently don't have too much to say about the article now. It reads mostly well to me today, a switch from some of the previous entries I've posted here under the "Tales from the Green Scrapbook" rubric. It hits the high points I knew about, and it hypes Roy Thomas' writing and, to a lesser extent, Jon Buscema's artwork, to the proper degrees.

So all that's left for me to do is to apologize for (1) not noting the actual publication date when the article was published, and (2) cramming things together and making it all so hard to read. Still, I hope you enjoy it for what it is, a time capsule into a bygone era when an adventure comic strip could be launched in the newspapers and have the faintest hope of being popular. (Not that Conan particularly was all that popular as a strip; I'm not sure how long it lasted, but it couldn't have been for too long.)