Taranaich

Midnight God takes place 5 years after Conan married Zenobia, and their first child was murdered by Ra-Sidh, so I'm guessing that at this stage of the game Conan's late 60s. Conan would have been an old man when he sired children with Zenobia.

 

Though I'm wondering what his "final adventure" will be.

 

He's faced the first evil god ever (triumphing only because the wounds the god had, a convienent flashback of dear old granpapa and the giant kings of acheron giving him advice on where to attack), the most evil acheronian sorceror ever (and he still needed Hadrathus's help to triumph), numerous evil sorcerors (thugra khotan, the master of yimsha, and if we're going by dark horse continuity that avatar that thoth summoned)

Well technically speaking it's the other way round: Hadrathus defeated Xaltotun with the help of Conan, Zelata and her wolf. Conan's fight was with Tarascus, and we know how that turned out.

Taranaich: you are assuming that Wood either knows or cares about any of those things. It's very clear that he does not.

Heh, I stopped assuming I had any idea what Wood was planning a long time ago.
 

Well, most of these plot elements you mention could have occurred later in Conan's career. We do not even know when he got the name Amra. It could have been years after Queen of the Black Coast.

If you go with the "two Corsair periods" theory (which I am a proponent of myself), yes - but even accounting for that, there's still all this to include:

TheTigress ranged the sea, and the black villages shuddered. Tom-toms beat in the night, with a tale that the she-devil of the sea had found a mate, an iron man whose wrath was as that of a wounded lion. And survivors of butchered Stygian ships named Bêlit with curse, and a white warrior with fierce blue eyes; so the Stygian princes remembered this man long and long, and their memory was a bitter tree which bore crimson fruit in the years to come.
 

... Battle and raid had thinned their crew; only some eighty spearmen remained, scarcely enough to work the long galley. But Bêlit would not take the time to make the long cruise southward to the island kingdoms where she recruited her buccaneers.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen a lot of raiding, pirating, butchered Stygian ships, encounters with Stygian princes, black villages shuddering, or replenishing their crew from the island kingdoms. Unless Wood's going to do what REH did and just refer to those events in the last arc, which I would've thought would be completely missing the point of expanding QotBC in the first place. Then again...

But I agree, Wood has missed a great opportunity to tie in some of those plot elements into Queen of the Black Coast. But in order to do this, he should have read some of the Conan stories (or at least the excellent article in your blog about this period).

 

At least we have a nearly perfect adaptation of Queen of the Black Coast, with most of these elements worked in, by Roy Thomas. When I want to read the story in comics, that will be the one I turn to, and will try to forget Wood's experiment.

Ah well.

That thought had occurred to me as well. Why kill their golden goose? If he's willing to stick around they might as well keep milking it as long as they can. They've got a winning formula with the romance angle.  If I were DH, I'm not sure sure I'd want to kill off Belit and then jump into Snout in the Dark with just Conan.If this keeps Wood doing pastiche and the REH adaptions will be done by others as standalone minis, it might not be a bad thing.

I'm half wondering Wood might have Belit come back from the dead and stay, to continue her and Conan's adventures. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me at this point.

That said, I don't mind doing REH adaptations as standalone minies.  Unlike others I'm not as big a fan of DH's current saga, so I don't mind if I never see the Vizier, Prince, or Janissa again.  It could be a pretty good model to follow.

Awesome news! Thanks for sharing, Zak!

 

Found a preview of the cover for "The People of the Black Circle"

 

Everyone's already mentioned Conan's musculature and the weird knife-headed humanoids, and I agree, but I have to ask: who's the woman?  She doesn't look remotely Vendhyan, and has auburn hair, so she can't be Yasmina.  Can't be Gitara either, and she isn't brown enough to be an Afghuli girl.

Or is this like those covers for "The Phoenix on the Sword," where they have little to nothing in common with the actual stories?  I hope so.

(I'd kvetch with Yasmina being *the* most interesting female lead, since there are half a dozen contenders, though I'll happily consider her among the most interesting.)

So after Conan & Belit Go To Ianthe, we'll have one story arc left before the second part of "Queen of the Black Coast."

That means Wood has to cram in:

 - The Sack of Abombi

 - Burning the Stygian Fleet

 - Conan wrestling a Python

 - the Island Kingdoms

 - Amra

 - Ajonga, Yasunga and Laranga

 - Publio

 - The House of Servio

 - at least one example of the Tigress actually engaging in something resembling piracy along the Black Coast, butchering at least one Stygian ship, or anything that would cause the black villages to shudder at the name of Belit

into a single arc. We've already lost opportunities like South of Khitai/North of Hyrkania, the Nameless Continent, South of the Black Kingdoms, the Treasure of Tranicos, Thutmekri, Sakumbe, and more, and now we have to fit in the essentials directedly references in the story into only one arc? Any one of those elements could have made for story arcs in and of themselves.

There's this other book [Robert E. Howard story] called Sword Woman, it's pretty
obscure, but it's a real novel. It's a story about a 16th century French girl
who defies her arranged marriage and kills everybody with a sword. For that
writer it's pretty feminist and progressive.

Oh for Christ's sake...

That's it, I'm done. I can't be bothered giving Wood the benefit of the doubt when he's saying blatantly stupid, self-contradictory nonsense like that (has he forgotten Belit - you know, the main character in the series he's writing RIGHT NOW?) I know I should've given up ages ago, but really, I came out all guns blazing wanting to cut him a bit of slack, and now he's coming out with this.

Compare to Gail Simone, who isn't even writing about an actual Howard character, yet recognizes Howard was "pretty feminist and progressive" for the standards of the time, not that one of his characters was "pretty feminist and progressive" for the standards of the author.

It's hardly ever spoken about, and
I saw it and thought "I could write that." It instantly had massive appeal to me
and felt right up my alley in a couple different ways. So I got provisional
approval from Dark Horse to do it at some point. I'm really busy so I don't know
when, but at some point I want to write that.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if Dark Horse is going to do Sword Woman, you already have Paul Tobin doing a great job.  I don't want Wood to bollocks up Dark Agnes to "save" Conan, because Conan still has Truman and now Van Lente doing series. There's a choice. I seriously doubt there'll be multiple Dark Agnes series by different authors going around, so if DH go with an author, they stick with them.

But if not Tobin, why not seek out a female author? Again, look at the buzz Simone's getting for Red Sonja.