The Official Robert E. Howard Website

Kurt Busiek Interviewed

Though Kurt Busiek began writing comics in 1982, it was his work on Marvels in 1994 alongside artist Alex Ross that catapulted him into the elites of comic book writers. The following year, Busiek began collaborating with Brent Anderson on the award-winning Astro City series. He has continued to write high-profile series (recently a Marvel/DC crossover, JLA/Avengers, with George Perez), generally featuring some of the industry's most prominent heroes.

Because Busiek was well-known for scripting superhero comics, his choice as writer for the new Dark Horse comic book series Conan may have surprised some fans. Fortunately, he turns out to have just as good of a flair for barbarian tales as he does for superpowered costumed characters. His understanding of what makes Conan such an interesting character--and what makes Robert E. Howard such an exceptional and popular writer--suggests that this new series will be one of the highlights in the history of the Cimmerian adventurer.

The interview below is an excerpt from the Spectrum Magazine Conan Super Special (coming in June from Win-Mill Productions). Editor Craig Miller spoke with Kurt Busiek by phone on February 4, 2004.

CM: As you were working on the superhero comics, had you been interested in the Conan material all along, or did that develop later?

KB: It came along later. It's sort of an amusing story. I read all the Marvel comics that were superhero comics. There was some resistance to things like Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf By Night, but ultimately I ended up buying Tomb of Dracula because it was really good but never warmed to Werewolf By Night. And Conan was just one of those big, dumb, half-naked barbarians with a sword. Who cares about those guys? [Laughter] However, even at a time when I was refusing to buy the Conan comics, I’d buy an issue if Neal Adams drew it--there was like one issue of Savage Sword, one issue of Conan the Barbarian--or when Barry Smith did "Worms of the Earth." But even when I was refusing to buy them because they were these dumb barbarians and clearly beneath a sophisticated guy like me, the Conan movie came out, and I went and saw it on the first day because it was a Marvel comic, and I was loyal to Marvel. Which is largely why I went and saw Star Wars on the first day, too. So those producers owe Marvel some money, maybe!

But I had a few Conan comics sitting around the house, and my sister read them and liked them and asked for more. I didn't really want to get any more Conan comics, but I did pick up some of the Conan paperbacks. I read some of those, too, but I discovered years later that what I was reading was the Lin Carter stuff, and that didn't hook me either. I didn’t really get interested until I was ill, and I needed something to read, and I borrowed Conan 1-100 from a friend. I just wanted a long run of something that had some continuity, where I could read something I hadn't read before. And man, they were dynamite! Shortly thereafter I had amassed a collection of all the Conan stuff that Roy Thomas had written: His two runs on Conan, Savage Sword, all the other stuff--Red Sonja, Kull, whatever--that he’d been involved in. I tracked down the British trade paperbacks that collect the original Robert E. Howard Conan material without any contributions or editing by any other writers. And those are even more dynamite! So the comics led me to the real Howard stuff, and the real Howard stuff made me a Conan fan. I liked Conan after reading the first hundred issues; I liked Roy's Conan. I didn't have a whole lot of interest in reading any other comic book writer's Conan, and when I've read the stuff that Roy didn't write, it still makes me go, "This isn't the stuff." When it comes to comics, Roy's Conan is the stuff. And Howard's Conan is the real stuff. So that's what it took to make me a fan.

CM: Roy Thomas's comics followed Conan's life chronologically. Are you going to follow that pattern for the Dark Horse series?

KB: We're going to follow that basic idea. We're starting completely over. While I have a great deal of respect for what Roy did, a lot of what he and Barry and John Buscema and Gil Kane did was constrained by the Comics Code or by the demands of the times--shorter story arcs, milder action and on and on and on. And I'm glad Dark Horse is reprinting that stuff, and I hope they reprint all of what Roy did, because it's well worth reading. But if we were going to take that as our continuity, we would not only be taking the stuff that Roy had to do along with the stuff that he wanted to do, we'd also be taking the stuff that all the other comics writers did, much of which was lousy. And Roy incorporated a great deal of what [L. Sprague] de Camp and Carter did. Do we include that? Do we include what Robert Jordan did? Do we include the recent Harry Turtledove Conan of Venarium? Let's just start over. Let’s go back to the foundation. Roy’s stuff is great and can stand on its own, and we’ll start our own version, and hopefully it’ll be able to stand alongside it.

CM: In fact, it gets even more complicated, because at the beginning of the Marvel run, Roy could use the Carter stuff, but not the de Camp stuff. And then later he was allowed to use de Camp, so he had to try to retro-fit it, because originally, when he couldn't use it, he worked around it.

KB: Right. So he winds up altering the other stuff to match what was established back when he couldn’t use it. So much stuff had been piled up in the Conan continuity, it just seemed the best idea was to go back to what everybody else was building on, which was Robert E. Howard--those short stories, those fragments, those outlines, nothing else. That enabled us to take the Conan chronology and make a little more sense out of it. For instance, everybody pretty much put "The Frost Giant's Daughter" into Conan's life at a later point than what would have made the most sense largely because by the time the story was published, enough other stuff had been written about Conan that it no longer seemed to fit in the natural place. So de Camp stuck it in a later place where, yeah, okay, it could fit there--it’s not perfect, but it’ll work. Everybody else built on that. But once you take away all of that other stuff, and you're left with the pure Howard--well of course "Frost Giant's Daughter" is the first story! Going back to the “Probable Outline of Conan’s Career” that P. Schuyler Miller and [John D.] Clark wrote--there are places that maybe that isn't perfect either, but it's the one chronology that Howard said, "Yeah, you got it pretty much right," and that makes it worth sticking to whenever possible. With the stories that aren't in that outline, that hadn’t been published when it was written, you need to go back and place them where they make sense. And that’s not necessarily where they got placed based on the editorial needs of the multi-writer Conan later on. So I've been corresponding with Conan fans and scholars about some stories, and it just seemed obvious that "The Frost Giant's Daughter" is chronologically, in terms of Conan's life, the earliest of them.

We were kind of surprised to discover that "The God in the Bowl" is the second. People have been thinking for years that "The Tower of the Elephant" was the first story of Conan in civilization, and it bugged me that at the end of "The God in the Bowl," he kills the snake-creature, and then he practically does this Warner Bros. cartoon thing--he goes running over the horizon. He didn't stop running until morning, it said. He ran out of the city scared of a dead god. When he sees a god in "The Tower of the Elephant," he's startled. He freezes. He isn't sure what to do. But he doesn't go running off over the horizon, does he? And this one's alive! So when you look at the internal clues in the stories, not to mention that Howard wrote "The God in the Bowl" before he wrote "The Tower of the Elephant" (although it remained unpublished), it’s clear this is a younger Conan. This is a Conan who understands civilization less, and this is a Conan who really hasn't come in contact with one of these things before. That's why he has a more extreme reaction in the story.

It's fun to be able to pull apart the chronology and say, "Okay, let's justify it. Let's reorganize it." In "The Devil in Iron," Conan makes a reference to the lotus-eaters in the city of Xuthal. But according to the officially-accepted chronology, it's set years before he actually goes to the city of Xuthal! And it's not like anybody knows about Xuthal--it's a lost city, so he wasn't hearing any stories about it! [Laughter] So these stories are just clearly out of order.

This is all Conan-fan geekery, and I love it. But to go back to the original question, yeah, we're picking up Conan right after he leaves Cimmeria for the first time. He makes contact with a tribe of the Aesir, who are fighting Vanir warriors, and then he gets captured by the Hyperboreans, and after he's free of the Hyperboreans, he makes his way down to the civilized lands, and so on. We're following the whole outline of Conan's life as it's generally understood--telling new stories that flesh out the outline, and adapting the Howard stories as we run into them. "The Frost Giant's Daughter" is our issue 2. Howard never actually wrote the Hyperborea story, so we segue into our version of it next, making up a new tale that I hope serves well enough. When we're done with that, Conan heads down into civilization, and we'll seque him into "The God in the Bowl," which kind of brings Thoth-Amon on stage, and Kalanthes, priest of Ibis, and the rivalry between the two of them is something that we can build other stories on. And then it's off to Zamora and "The Tower of the Elephant," and we just move on through Conan's life that way.

CM: That sounds great. The script in Conan 0 is quite clever, creating a framing device of sorts that leads into the regular series, and using the Nemedian Chronicles paragraph ("Know, O Prince...") to set everything up. You even have the prince as part of the story! Was this your idea, or did Dark Horse want an issue 0 to get the ball rolling?

KB: I can brag about that. Yeah, it was my idea. I suggested doing a low-priced preview issue. I was concerned because Dark Horse does not have the market penetration Marvel or DC has. They do well; they're not a small company. But they're not at the top, either. So how can we get the most people to sample this series? The reason we made it a quarter was, a quarter was the cover price of Weird Tales when Conan first appeared there.

And yeah, I suggested we build on the idea that the Nemedian Chronicles are a story being told to a prince. Who is this prince? Why is he being told this story? What can we get out of that?

One of the key things about Conan and the whole epic sweep of the stories is that we know from the very first story, or would if we were reading Conan back in the thirties, that Conan becomes king of Aquilonia. Because the first story is "The Phoenix on the Sword," and he is king of Aquilonia. So we know he's got this destiny. It's not some mystic or cosmic destiny, but it's where the story’s going to end up, and knowing that colors our reaction to all the others. So it was established from the start in the pulps. And Roy established it in the first issue of Conan the Barbarian by having that ancient witch creature give Conan visions of the future--including the Apollo moon landing. And so we were told again, "Conan's going to be a king." I wanted to do the same thing in a different way. We're starting at the beginning, but we want people to know that this isn't just a wandering barbarian who you can expect to be just hacking the heads off of monsters. This is a life. This is a biography that's got a shape to it. This is a legend, and legends have destinations. So by framing it all as somebody recounting the legend of Conan, and not only that but saying, "Half of this stuff probably isn't true," it makes it feel more like a legend than, say, a history class, or an open-ended, never-ending series. And that whole Nemedian Chronicles fragment is so cool, how could we not use it?

CM: You'd mentioned earlier that the de Camp and Carter stories had hit you differently from the stories by Howard himself. What distinguishes the REH stories from those of other writers? Why are they more vibrant?

KB: Part of it is, I think, Howard wrote from the gut. Anybody who has come along afterward--sadly, including me--is trying to write somebody else's vision. It was Howard's idea, and he saw it strongest. I also think a lot of later writers lost sight of what Conan is really about. Howard thought civilization was in a terrible state, that it was declining, that a strong and principled man could be ground up by the corrupt machineries of civilization. Conan is his strong, principled, pure, uncivilized man who goes up against the machineries of decaying civilizations and wins. Conan stories are almost never about Conan beating a monster. If there's a monster in them, the monster is working for somebody who is doing something nasty politically, treating people unfairly, duping the natives into thinking he's a god. It's about men having power over men, and abusing that power. And Conan is the guy who takes whatever you throw at him, and still comes at you and chops your head off because you're a prick. So Conan was in some ways an expression of Howard's frustration at what he saw as the failures of modern civilization, and because he was a pulp writer, and because he was Robert E. Howard, he framed these stories not as some Upton Sinclair exposé, but as a rip-snorting adventure.

CM: How would you describe Conan as portrayed by Howard? Some interpretations--such as the movies--seem to have dumbed him down some, as if he's nothing more than an excellent, though slightly dimwitted, fighter.

KB: I think some of that may have been because Schwarzenegger was not really capable of delivering dialogue. They took virtually all of his lines and rewrote them to give somebody else the exposition. Conan is anything but dimwitted. He is in fact extremely quick-witted. Conan is, at the beginning, ill-educated. He doesn't know how things work, but he picks it up pretty fast. By the end of it, he knows a lot about how things work, and he's sick of how things work, and he'd just as soon break them. Much of Conan's life is spent traveling around and discovering things that he hasn't seen before. He's not actually seeking out an education, but he's getting one. He's very good at reading people. He's staunchly loyal to friends and pretty brutal to betrayers. He's not just a greedy thief who's out for himself, although he certainly is greedy, and a thief, and out for himself!

CM: Will that be part of the characterization of the comic, or will he be cleaned up to be more of a hero?

KB: I don't want to clean him up a bit!

CM: I believe that was a concern of Marvel's when they started to publish him. They had Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four and the Avengers. Would it work having a self-centered barbarian as the star of a comic book, or would he need to be molded into more of a superhero type? If someone's being mugged, Spider-Man automatically jumps over to help him, whereas Conan might consider for a moment what's in it for himself.

KB: Right. Yeah. If you want Conan to save somebody in a mugging, you have the guy being mugged, and you have Conan watching, and he's sort of amused, and you have one of the muggers look at him and say, "Be off with you, you Cimmerian dog, or you'll be next!" And Conan says, "Oh yeah?" [Laughter] Then he starts breaking heads. Conan doesn't need much of a reason, but he does need a reason.

Conan will steal food. Conan will steal liquor. Conan will steal money. Conan will steal jewelry. Conan won't commit rape. Conan wouldn't betray somebody for money. But let himself live a little better or have some fun for a few nights? Sure, he sees no problem with that. I doubt he would take money from a beggar. He'll go rob somebody rich; they’ve got more of it. So is he a saint? No. But the Red Priest is worse. The Hyperboreans are worse. When it's Conan versus the Frost Giant's daughter, she's luring men to their death. That's not nice. Conan wouldn't do that. So the fact that he's self-interested, that's not a moral failing. The fact that he's a thief or a mercenary or whatever, he's just getting by in a rough world. Those are the rules. That's who the character is. You wouldn't do a story that's all about, "Here's how Conan conspired to steal something from a fairly nice person and wrecked their life." But Conan could be hired to steal something from a greedy merchant, no problem. If that merchant has never particularly harmed Conan, it doesn’t much matter, because usually the theft will wind up causing something bigger, more dangerous. And in the end, it's Conan versus some sort of evil unleashed--the evil of power unchecked, or the evil of a plan gone awry. Conan is the force for good by the end of the story. He's just never intending to be, but his own need to survive, or his sense of pride, or something like that winds up spurring him to do what needs to be done.

CM: Did you have any significant say in who would be drawing the comic?

KB: Cary [Nord] was Dark Horse's idea, but I saw his samples, and they were fantastic, so I was all for it. At that point any time anybody else's samples came in, they got compared to Cary's. So he wasn't my suggestion, but I'm very, very enthusiastic about what he has done. [Dark Horse publisher] Mike Richardson had told me that if there was an artist that Dark Horse wanted, and I was really, really opposed to him, well, they wanted me on the book. So it would have to be a hell of an artist before they'd say, "No, Kurt, you don't like him, but you're working with him." So apparently I had some say, but I didn't have to use it.

CM: Barry Windsor-Smith was well-known for adding things to Roy Thomas's scripts. How much leeway does Cary have with your scripts? Do you give him full scripts, or are these done "Marvel style"?

KB: They're full scripts. I expect that Cary has less leeway than Barry, but on the other hand, Cary's not as fast as Barry was. Cary can certainly embellish anything he wants, and if he wants to make a change in the story, or approach things differently, then all he's got to do is call and say, “How about this instead?" But so far he hasn't really been doing that. What I'm mainly trying to do is make sure to keep the pages open enough so that he can exercise his terrific illustrative ability.

CM: Was there anything else you wanted to mention? It sounds like you're in this for the long haul.

KB: It would be nice to do the whole damn saga! There are all kinds of things that could alter that, but it would be nice. The other thing I'd like to mention would be that the artwork in the zero issue that you liked isn't just Cary; it's Cary and Dave Stewart.

CM: Right, right.

KB: Dave is doing such a gorgeous job, and issue one is better on Cary's part and on Dave's part than zero was, and two is better still. Wait till you see Atali's brothers! Early on, Dark Horse was talking about bringing in an inker for Cary, and they sent one page of Cary's pencil samples to Dave Stewart to see what he could do with it color-wise, just as a sample. He didn't just color in the linework; he took the pencils and worked with the pencil textures and put in all that digital watercolor that we've been seeing. It was such a beautiful job that both Dave and I were going, "No inkers! No inkers! Let’s do this!" It was Dave's coloring that was so strong that made [Conan editor] Scott [Allie] and the other guys go "Okay, no inker."

I think the reason some people underestimated Conan is, when there were Conan comics coming out last, as we've discussed, they weren't very good. The reason they weren't very good is that Marvel was trying to figure out how to sell Conan to superhero comics fans, and basically thinking, "How can we make Conan look like an Image book?" And when I say "toward the end," I don't mean the very last gasp in 1990 when Roy Thomas and John Buscema came back. When you've got a three-issue mini-series written by Roy Thomas with pencils and inks by John Buscema, that one's not wrong. The only thing wrong with that was that it was drawn for a black-and-white magazine and printed in a regular comic, so the page dimensions didn't fit. But the artwork was lovely. The story worked fine, the characters were on, and all. It's the thing where they're putting straps and buckles all over Conan, and his thighs are bigger than his head, and they're doing their best to say, "Hey, you people who are buying Youngblood, and whatever all else, here's something else." But those guys weren't Conan fans, so this wasn't really going to attract them, but it really was going to turn off the Conan fans, who were going to say, "That's not what Conan is supposed to be."

Our big stroke of brilliance was to say, it’s Conan—it should be Conan. Instead of trying to make this book look like whatever's popular at the moment, let it look like a really good Conan. Conan is an internationally-famous character. Conan is hugely popular. There are Conan books, movies, games, Conan this, Conan that. Conan is more popular today than when Conan the Barbarian was launched by Marvel in 1970, so what we want to do is reach out and connect to those guys instead of trying to say, "Hey, people who buy Wolverine, how can we make you buy Conan too?" You know, you people who buy Wolverine, enjoy Wolverine. Have fun with Wolverine. God bless. Anybody who likes Conan, come over here. This is what it's supposed to be like.