In the fall of 2003, Dark Horse Comics brought writer Robert E. Howard’s
best known creation, Conan the Barbarian, back to comic books with a special
25¢ issue. Conan #0 was not only a major hit, it set up the entire series
to follow. By the time the first monthly issue of the series arrived in February
2004, it was already a hit. The creative team of writer Kurt Busiek (Astro
City, Marvels), artist Cary Nord (Bruce Wayne, Agent of
S.H.I.E.L.D.), colorist Dave Stewart, letterer Richard Starkings, and editor
Scott Allie began carving out a distinct niche in modern
comics.

Conan as a series has left few bystanders. Most fans have
held polar opinions about it, with only a few professing no real opinion. It’s
also been a big hit for Dark Horse, going through three printings of
Conan #1, as well as both hardcover and trade paperback collections of
the first story arc.

What made it somewhat controversial is that it
basically has started from the ground up. While the company has been reprinting
the original Marvel Comics version of the character in trade paperback format,
they’ve gone their own direction with the content and style of the new
title.

Busiek’s scripts feature a narrative voice that could be that of
Howard himself. Nord’s art is done in pencil form only. Stewart’s colors make
the book look painted. Some longtime Conan fans have been put off by it, but
many more have eagerly embraced the new series. More importantly, Conan has
attracted new fans to the character, not just recaptured Marvel-era enthusiasts.

Scoop talked with Scott Allie about the series.

Scoop:
What did you do before editing for Dark Horse?
I did some fishing and
clamming. That was sort of all there was for work in my hometown. After that, I
was a stage manager at a theatre, where my best moment was adjusting a
microphone stand for Odetta. Tears were streaming down her face as she was
singing, and she said, Baby, could you come here and point this thing at me? She
made the audience applaud for me when I got it right.

Scoop: What are
some of the other projects you edit?
My big claim to fame is
Hellboy. I’ve edited that since almost the beginning, and it provided a
lot of the inroads along the way for me. Pretty much every artist is willing to
talk to the guy who edits Mike Mignola-glory by association. I also had a run on
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I’ve done a few hundred other books. I’ve
edited a lot of P. Craig Russell’s best work, as well as Kelley Jones and Sergio
Aragones. Those are my historical highlights.

Scoop: What’s a typical
day — if there is one — like for you?
I play with my kid for a few
hours before coming to work, then I listen to a lot of country music while
reading scripts and trying to decipher layouts and cover sketches. I talk on the
phone to Mignola pretty much every day, talk to half a dozen other creators on
any given day, wonder where the hell Cary is with the next batch of Conan pages,

Scoop: Were you a Conan fan before getting the assignment to edit the
new series?
Not all that much. I liked him a lot, but since I’ve been
editing the book, I’ve learned how devout a real Conan fan can be. Meaning that
I’ve detected a superhuman level of … interest from certain people in what
we’re doing. Some of the mail I get, man, I never could have written a
fan letter with such conviction.

Scoop: What did you think when
you first found out you were going to edit it?
Well, your question
should be what did I do to make sure no one else edit this book but me. When I
heard we were probably going to publish Conan comics, I went in to my boss’s
office and did chimpanzee jumps on his desk until he agreed to let me edit it. I
made crazy promises, egotistical claims about my unique ability to do the job.

Scoop: The popular wisdom was that Conan, after a long run at Marvel,
was pretty much finished in comics, at least in the short term. What made you
and the people at Dark Horse think otherwise?
People remember a great
title longer than they remember a terrible title. Conan had been a great title
for a long time at Marvel; that memory outlasted the memory of the terrible
title it became. This is a character so compelling, so dynamic, so perfectly
suited to this medium, that we knew that if we did it right it could be our
biggest book in a long time.

Scoop: Was Kurt Busiek locked in as the
writer for the main series right from the start or did you look at other
proposals, too?
We considered a couple people, but we never got so far
as approaching them. Kurt wrote us a three or five page letter that summed up
his ideas on the book, and it was just what we wanted. He put in better words
than we could have everything we hoped for from the title. He clearly had a take
on it, just from that letter, that was needed to elevate the title to the
stature it deserved.

Scoop: Despite the presence of seriously strong
scripts from Busiek, in terms of talent the monthly Conan series seems
like it’s one of the best examples of a creative ensemble in business, with
writer, artist, colorist and letterer all adding important components to the
finished product. Was this the direction you planned on going or did it just
happen?
Well, it’s always what you hope for with a book. That you’ll get
the best team possible. Sometimes it comes together, sometimes it doesn’t. Cary
was the wild card. He didn’t have a consistent enough track record for us to
really know what we were gonna get from him, and even the way I first came to
approach him was more accident than planning. But once we talked, it was clear
to me that his desire and understanding of the character was strong enough to
bring to life the potential I saw in his samples.

Scoop: How many
artists did you look at before going with Cary Nord? What made you settle on
him?
Cary was the first guy I really looked at, then I looked at 20
other terrific artists. We went with Cary because just as Kurt’s letter
perfectly realized what we wanted for the title, Cary’s samples gave us a
picture we never wanted to stop looking at. Dave did a sample paint job over it,
so we could see what the un-inked art would look like, and after that, every
sample we got from another artist-from very good artists-just paled by
comparison. I’d had a picture in my head that I was looking for, and Cary drew
exactly that picture, exactly that vision.

Scoop: How did the
decision to color his pencils rather than go with a traditional pencil-ink-color
combination come about?
Cary had never been happy with how he was inked.
I looked at some of his inked work, and couldn’t see what was wrong-until I saw
his pencils. I’d been down this road before. Certain guys can’t be inked. They
do something so subtle in the grey of their pencils that something will always
be lost when you turn it into hard, solid black and white. But the solution,
once again, came about almost by accident. Cary had done a sample that I loved,
Kurt loved, but not all the mysterious and shadowed decision makers were sold on
it. I thought that if Dave-who’s always my go-to colorist-threw a little color
on it, it would convince everyone. Basically, if believed that if we showed them
nineteen black and white samples and one colored one, they’d go for the colored
one. Dave said he’d do it for free, because he agreed with Kurt and I that we
had to get Cary approved-but I didn’t have an inker so invested in it, so I
asked Dave to just do it over the pencils, just roughly. He did just that, then
he called me and said this was how to do the book. Kurt agreed. I was reluctant,
because my one reservation on Cary was his speed. I felt that an inker would
possibly be able to help him time wise-hire an inker that can draw, and maybe he
can do backgrounds, do finishes, save the penciler time in that way. Lose the
inker, and it really becomes all about the penciler’s ability to hit deadlines.
But the work Dave did over him was so good that I gave in-and everyone else gave
in too, and we had our team.

Scoop: Richard Starkings’ use of
typewriter type style in the narration is one of the amazing facets of the book
since it basically represents not only a traditional omniscient (or
semi-omniscient) narrative voice, but also Conan creator Robert E. Howard
writing the stories back in the his own day. Whose idea was this, and how
integral to the execution of Busiek’s scripts is the lettering now?
I
think this was Kurt’s idea, and it’s one of the things about the book that has
been hotly contested. Kurt suggested it over dinner one night, and I thought,
What the hell, I haven’t seen that before. Okay. By then I knew that we had an
incredibly unique book on our hands. Very distinctive. Why not take some more
chances, do some unexpected things. It felt right. There were a dozen reasons
not to do it-reasons which have been explained to me repeatedly in the last two
years-but I like it. The typewriter style is only one of the unique lettering
tricks in the book-Kurt brought Richard along for the ride because they have a
history and a shorthand for communicating about this stuff, and Kurt really
writes around the varied lettering approaches, he uses them as a storytelling
element. The over all effect of the book is reinforced greatly by what Richard
does. And I believe he is the best at this kind, if not all kinds, of lettering.
You mentioned a minute ago something about everyone on the team bringing
something distinctive to the table. None of these guys are replaceable. Only me.
Anyone could edit this thing, but we lose the damn letterer, and the whole thing
is down like a house of cards.

Scoop: You’ve been very creative with
the scheduled fill-in issues, generally making them serve a purpose. Could you
explain what you’re doing?
Sure. Basically we’re frantically trying to
deal with Cary’s speed without undermining the integrity of the book. We’re not
just gonna have some knucklehead who sort of looks like Cary come in to draw an
issue of a story Cary started. Kurt proposed the idea of “Born on the
Battlefield” as a series of fill-ins spread out to save Cary time. We talked
over the story. I said I had the perfect guy to convey young Conan in a
terrible, terrible land. We work out stories that aren’t a part of the story
Cary is telling, so they don’t belong side by side with his stories, but we try
to drop them in at a time when they won’t interrupt Cary’s stories. Then we try
to find the perfect artist for the story-or sometimes we find the artist, then
we try to come up with the perfect story for them. We’re trying to maintain the
integrity of the monthly by not shoehorning unrelated stories in out of nowhere,
and maintain the integrity of the collections of Cary’s work by separating the
fill-ins from the main story, so the fill-ins won’t be collected in Cary’s
collections.

Scoop: Thus far you’ve had a one-shot and a three-issue
mini-series separate from by associated with the regular series. What more can
we expect along those lines?
Lots. Staring in October we’re gonna have a
side project coming out every month. Not launching every month-but in October we
have a King Conan story set in the Far East, and then in February we have the
history of Thoth-amon, set far in the past, drawn by Kelley Jones, and written
by Kurt and Len Wein. After that, we have things in the works with some
surprising established teams, some of whom were born to do Conan, some of whom
you might never have thought for this.

Scoop: Dark Horse has also
proven there’s definitely a market for the older Marvel series, or at least some
of it. How surprised have you been at the success of your trade paperback line?
Will it be continuing?
It will continue, but it will evolve. There’s
other material, other ways of presenting it, so we’re gonna shake it up a bit.
We’re gonna get to the Savage Sword stuff, the King Conan stuff, and
present it differently from the Chronicles of Conan books. We’ll probably
keep doing some Chronicles, but we want to offer other material too. We knew
those books would do well, but frankly I don’t think any of us expected them to
do this well.

Scoop: Unlike a lot of modern comics, Conan has a
letters page. What makes a letters page important to you?
It shows the
readers there’s a community around the book, and it gives them a forum to share
their thoughts or knowledge. With Conan, you have people who’ve read everything
Howard ever wrote, and people too young to have even seen the John Milius movie.
It fills some people in on things they aren’t already aware of. And because of
the way I run the letters page, it shows the diverse reactions people can have
to the work. Someone might hate the typewriter font, someone else loves it.
Someone things the art is too sloppy, someone thinks it’s energetic and
explosive. I find that interesting. I love how strongly people react to what
we’re doing. We don’t have a bunch of uninterested, slackjawed readers. I’d
rather have them pissed than bored.