Titan Comics has released the official trailer for Conan: Tides of the Tyrant-King, and the villain at its center is one that even casual Conan fans will recognize on sight: Thulsa Doom, the Atlantean necromancer, is back.
The four-issue event comes from writer Jim Zub and artist Jésus Merino, with issue #1 hitting shops on September 23rd for $4.99.
Here's the official solicitation: "CONAN OF CIMMERIA believed that THULSA DOOM's evil had been banished forever, but the Atlantean necromancer's dark power stirs once more and, if it cannot be stopped, the dead shall overtake the living! The Tyrant-King of Atlantis returns and all shall suffer, unless Conan and his brave allies can turn back the tide!"
Robert E. Howard put Doom on the page in 1928, in a Kull manuscript called "Delcardes' Cat" that he later revised and retitled "The Cat and the Skull," casting him as a skull-faced sorcerer against Kull of Atlantis. Weird Tales passed on it. The story stayed in a drawer until 1967, more than thirty years after Howard's death, so the character sat unread while Conan became a phenomenon.
The "Atlantean necromancer" billing needs an asterisk, too. In Howard's prose, Doom never fought Conan. Not once. He was Kull's enemy, in an age Howard placed thousands of years BEFORE the Hyborian era, and it was Kull who came from Atlantis. Pairing the two started with the Milius film, and Titan's current run has been stitching Doom into Conan's continuity from the beginning.
So how do you build an event around a villain who was never Conan's to begin with? Zub's answer is to split the book. Conan holds one half, and a second Howard protagonist named Stephen Costigan holds the other, fighting his own version of this war centuries later while the same evil works both ends!
Howard fans are sure to recognize that surname. He wrote a Sailor Steve Costigan, a merchant seaman and ship's champion boxer who debuted in the pulp magazine Fight Stories in July 1929 and went on to headline nearly forty tales. More completed stories than any Howard hero except Conan. Zub wrote that character last year in Savage Sword of Conan #10, and he planted the seed for this one on the way through!
"Last year when I wrote Sailor Steve Costigan in Savage Sword of Conan #10 I dropped a key bit about a similarily-named Stephen Costigan, who now appears in the Tides of the Tyrant-King event mini-series," Zub wrote in his newsletter, captioning a piece of art "Steve and Stephen, the Costigan Cousins."
He also explained the thinking behind mining Howard's back catalog this way: "Robert E. Howard re-used names he liked in different stories, sometimes different genres entirely. I'm using as many cool pieces as possible in our Howardverse events, but it can require some extra problem solving."
He signed off with, "I keep telling you guys, it's all planned out!"
The event opens a week early with The Savage Sword of Conan #16 on September 16th, a $6.99 black-and-white anthology carrying three Zub stories with art by Nicola Scott, Chris Campana, and Sean Izaakse. One of them picks up the weird-western gunslinger Steve Corcoran, another Howard creation, and corrupted memory runs through the issue as a theme.
Issue #1 arrives with a deep bench of alternate covers: Roberto De La Torre, Utsab Chatterjee, Gerardo Zaffino, Merino himself, and Stuart Sayger, plus a glow-in-the-dark De La Torre variant. Retailers have until Monday, August 31st, to lock in orders, so anyone who wants a specific cover should talk to their shop this week.
If you'd rather wait for the whole story in one volume, the collected edition is already up for pre-order. Conan The Barbarian: Tides of the Tyrant-King gathers all four issues in a 112-page paperback for $17.99, and single issues are available digitally through Kindle and Comixology as they release. Titan also keeps the full series page and release calendar on its official site.
Titan and Heroic Signatures have been assembling this shared Howardverse since taking the license. Zub's Conan the Barbarian run has been one of the more consistently praised licensed books on the stands, and a Tides of the Tyrant-King #0 preview went out on Free Comic Book Day this year to set the table.
The screen side is busy too, with Genndy Tartakovsky's animated take revealed earlier this summer and Arnold Schwarzenegger still talking up King Conan. But Doom has spent the decades between movies on the page.
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