Comic review: Weirdworld #1- A Flabby Voice of Surrender.

Artist: Mike Del Mundo
Writer: Jason Aaron
Colours: Mike Del Mundo & Marco D’Alfonso
Publisher: Marvel (Disney)
Released: 10th June 2015


I didn’t find this ‘WeirdWorld’ to be particularly weird. The art portrayed weird, if weird is psychedelic trippy hippie 1960’s weird, but the narrative itself was just another mainstream comic book story of a lost Conan clone trying to get home, and fighting monsters.

I don’t think that it’s unfair to call Arkon (the protagonist in this book) a ‘Conan clone’ because, well, just look at him. He’s Conan, and it would be daft to pretend that he’s not. I read a lot of Conan books, and there’s no mistaking it. This guy is as close to being Conan as you can possibly get, at least visually speaking anyway.

Jason Aaron writes Arkon as a generic, indistinguishable 2015 era comic book protagonist. The narrative unfolds with Arkon as narrator, telling his own story as he waves his chopper at sharks and jumps off waterfalls. The actions are blood and guts toughness, but the voice of Arkon, unfortunately, is not in the least bit Conan. In place of the iron willed barbarian voice of defiance, courage and brutal integrity we get wet, limp and border line comedic.

‘How does one eviscerate despair? How do you strangle hopelessness?’

What a wuss. Is this Conan the Emo? I don’t think that it’s supposed to be. No, it’s just another limp comic book character written during very dire times for western masculinity. As I read this comic book, enjoying the beautifully painted artwork and lovingly crafted panels, I’m becoming painfully aware that this barbarian, this man of muscles and swords, isn’t really any different to any other whining ‘hero’ that I would read in a mainstream comic book of today.

Five pages in and he’s crying like a child lost in a supermarket. On page seven he is already done. A victim of despair, he’s ready to kill himself, not because of any great problem, not because he’s injured and about to be torn apart by a pack of dogs and unable to defend himself, but because he’s lost, and can’t be bothered to keep on trying to fight. I’m not joking. Seven pages in and this child-man is looking to jump off the nearest cliff. Now that’s a modern emo barbarian hero for you. Why continue to fight to the end when you can moan like a little girl and then do yourself in?

Before our hero takes the final leap into self indulgence, he’s forced into another fight, and the narrative goes into the usual ‘cool’ mode of story-telling that is so common in books (and movies) of today. You know how it goes, right?

Do you have nothing to say? Do you spend your entire life in a fantasy world where reality never peeks, thus making you incapable of saying anything about the world or what it means to have real human experiences? No problem, do something ‘cool’ instead. ‘Cool’ is God now, the comic book geeks live for ‘cool,’ so give it to them until they drown in the stuff.

The cool continues in Weirdworld #1 until the end of the book where the narrative POV switches to a sexy villainous, a girl for Conan the Emo Barbarian to have adventures with. Who knows? If he’s lucky he might even get a small peck on the cheek from her? No girl with anything at all going for her would want to give this drip a proper kiss, so friend-zone is the best that somebody like Arkon the weak could ever hope for.

Poor old Jason Aaron. He’s trying to write tough, and all he’s doing is writing another limp-wristed death of masculinity contemporary ‘hero.’

The artwork by Mike Del Mundo is great. I loved his swirls, his colours, and his artistic theme of harsh bloody, dirty reality mixing with the golden shine of magical fantasy. Mike Del Mundo is a new name to me, and I’ll be keeping an eye on him, but the writing, Aaron’s version of masculinity in particular, is embarrassing. There’s a sense of passive aggressive wetness about it all, and the supposition heavy, narrative voice of the protagonist reads about as well as the awfully stilted dialogue in a Stephen King novel.

It’s a shame. I loved the art, but the voice of the hero, the voice of everybody in the book actually, was just too much wet for me to take.

I really tried to like the book. It’s swords and sorcery, and I love swords and sorcery. It’s Conan (it is) and I love Conan, but it’s an old genre with a modern voice.

That modern voice is completely unbearable. It feels soft, bloated, unused to difficulty and unwilling or unable to endure empty days of useless toil for zero award. There was a feeling of entitlement to it, of expecting that life will be easy, that it will have meaning, that there will be rewards, when anybody who has actually lived a life knows that existence is usually just routine, pain, indifference, frustration, nothingness and toil, toil, toil.

I couldn’t help but take a dislike to the flabby tone of the book, and as much as I loved the artwork, that narrative voice of surrender ultimately stopped me from having the fun that I was desperately trying to have.


Rating: 5/10 (For the art alone)

Comic Review: Fight Club 2 #1- It’s a New Tyler World Order

Script: Chuck Palahniuk
Art: Cameron Stewart
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Released: 27th May 2015


I often say this, but my experience of comic book fans is that they are the most asleep to reality people that I have ever met.

It’s a generalisation, but the comic book fans that I have interacted with are not exactly big fans of reality and truth. “Comics are supposed to be fun man, stop being so serious man, nobody wants to hear about all of that boring ‘conspiracy’ stuff.”

I can see the comic book crowd reading Fight Club 2 #1 as something that is ‘cool.’ Cool because men are in a secret fighting club, and the art has flower petals and pills that hides some of the dialogue. Cool because it has nostalgia value, and cool because it has a girl inappropriately talking about sex with a group of old looking (Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome) kids in it.

Edgy man, sick man, so cool man, yeah man, really cool, just like the movie. The problem is that the people saying ‘cool’ are probably the least cool people in the world today. Sorry, but that’s the truth. Comic book fans are not cool. I’m not cool. Cool is for the young, and comic book readers are far from being young. If you are young and reading comics, sorry, I have bad news for you. You aren’t cool, and you’re reading stuff that is designed for old blokes like me.

People prefer to spend their lives trying to find something that is cool, rather than searching for the truth. Writers know that, so they try to give their readers what they are so desperate for, but can never actually attain. They can try and be clever and give readers some truth within that all-elusive cool, but what can they do when people are completely indifferent to truth?

The original Fight Club movie was about male emasculation caused by corporate, capitalistic compromise, and how men are unsatisfied because of the unnatural ways they are forced to live their lives. It was about the corporatisation of humanity, how everything has become monetised, but nothing has any real spiritual value. It was about the search for meaning, in a world that offers spectacle over truth.

A lot of people missed that of course. What they will remember is soap, Brad Pitt shirtless and sweaty, cool dialogue and a twist at the end with cool explosives. Message lost, and the world continues much the same way as before.

Which brings me nicely to that new Avengers movie? It was bloody terrible, wasn’t it? And do you know why it was terrible, why it left you with a feeling of emptiness in your soul? It was because it was all spectacle and attempts at being cool, with no heart, with no reality and zero truth.

I should be fair to the people of today, because it’s always been this way. The world changes, ‘cool’ changes, but humanity is still stuck in the same old rut of the past 2000+ years. I want to mention the Bible for a minute. Don’t worry, this won’t take long, and I really need to make this point clear.

Jesus said that he was the truth, the only way (John 4:16- Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”) And what do people do? They set up a divide and conquer religion and completely miss his message. His message was that you have to fall in love with truth. He sacrificed his life as an example to us all, his life being about the adoration of the father, the father being moral truth.

What is moral truth? How do I get it? How do I fall in love with it?

Remember all of that stuff about not murdering and lying and stealing and being horrible to people? Remember, do unto others as you would have done unto yourself? That’s moral truth. That’s the goal, that’s what Christianity should be about, that’s what life itself should be about, but isn’t.

Jesus wanted people to love truth more than anything else, but the message was lost, and thus Christianity, a moral philosophy that is supposed to be based on an adoration of truth became just another government sponsored control system.

How bloody sad is that? It’s an indictment of how determined we all are to ignore truth.

And so back to this book, a comic book sequel to a sixteen-year old movie about empty consumerism and living the hollow western capitalistic half-life. A movie that had a strong moral truth at it’s core, a truth that people completely ignored and carried on living their lives exactly as they had done before seeing the movie.

Do you see what I mean? Offer truth, and it gets ignored, every single time. People take the surface glitter, ignore the core, and the world continues to spin, exactly as before.

Do you remember that movie? Do you remember the main guy, the boring bloke? Fight Club 2 #1 opens with him. His name is Sebastian, he’s married, and the cool Brad Pitt character has disappeared. This Sebastian guy’s life has turned into nothing. Married, with a young child and drugged by big pharma, his wife misses the good old days with Tyler, and I don’t blame her. Most people compromise, and at least this book is realistic in that it shows this shallow, hollow, empty compromise suburban nothing life played out into boring middle age.

Unfortunately that makes most of this first issue a bit dull, you get the cool jokes of an adult nature, but they seem blunt now in these days of full frontal graphic horribleness on our Game of Thrones idiot boxes. The book started to bore me, the cool wasn’t enough, it was old cool, Dad cool, not the cool that it used to be, but the cool that it still wants to be, but can never reclaim. The book isn’t quite embarrassing Dad dancing bad, but it’s not the cool that it once was. The panels feel like old re-treads (therapy group jokes, bruised waiters waving the bill) and it needs to do something new to be relevant to the world as it is today.

I was about to give up on it, but then as it concludes, something happens. The Dad dancing stops, Tyler Durden returns, and he’s seems….different.

I didn’t quite get what he was from the main book. I knew he was supposed to be different, he looks different, but I didn’t get it. On a first read he just appeared to be a wild and crazy old (imaginary) friend, perhaps involved in international arms trading, who was going to make the boring protagonist live a bit. But there’s an added section to the book titled, ‘Chaos Report,’ and it does a fantastic job of explaining who this new Tyler is.

Okay then, here is the bit that most people will miss. Tyler Durden now represents a Non Governmental Organisation (NGO) that is sent into foreign countries by the new world order to start revolutions, cause chaos and make sure that foreign governments do what they are told by the western banking elites. Vladimir Putin announced new laws a couple of days ago that are designed to stop these NGO groups from messing around in Russia, and the west isn’t very pleased about it, for obvious reasons.

‘Putin has frequently named NGOs as a threat to national security. “Western special services continue their attempts at using public, non-governmental and politicised organisations to pursue their own objectives, primarily to discredit the authorities and destabilise the internal situation in Russia,” Putin told senior officials of the federal security service in March. “They are already planning their actions for the upcoming election campaigns of 2016-18.”’ 
(Guardian newspaper article 19th May 2015)


These NGO’s often hide their true purposes under the umbrella of being ‘charitable organisations’ (like ‘Human Rights Watch’ and ‘Amnesty International’). The vast number of their members think they are doing good things, helping out the homeless etc, but in reality they are controlled by western intelligence agencies, and exist only to maintain corporate western hegemony. If you want an assassination done, a bomb planted or a revolution started (see the Ukraine right now) then the NGO’s act as an entry point to help you get the job done. Putin understands that, as does the writer of this book, Mr. Chuck Palahniuk.

Tyler Durden, the Brad Pitt character, is now the head of a NGO called Project Mayhem, but what is his long-term goal? Is he an independent operator looking to create his own New World Disorder, or is he helping to bring in the long planned (and real-world) New World Order?

Is Tyler a dusty old totalitarian communist type, or a freedom hungry (from governmental slave masters) anarchist?

Are any real world truths going to be revealed to the comic book reading audience, or is this just a middle life crisis book about one bored bloke and his chaos loving alter ego?

Is it going to tackle the real world issues of 2015, or simply ignore them like so many other contemporary comic books? We’ll see. So far they mentioned Spain, and the collapse of the Euro, so it’s a decent start, but we’ll have to wait and see how far it dares to go. No ‘conspiracy’ theories are necessary, the facts alone will do.

The original Fight Club movie felt real, it felt like it was saying something, but it was set in a time before 9/11, before the war on terror, before the modern age of mass government surveilance and endless wars based on lies. This sequel is set in a very different time. How far will it dare to go? Will it seek truth, or middle aged nostalgia cool? Will it point a spotlight on what is happening in the world today? Will it tell the truth, or will it compromise and just try to tell a funny, cool and entertaining story?

Time will tell, and would anybody notice the truth when they see it anyway? History teaches us that truth will stare us in the face, and shout until it makes our ears bleed, but still, the sleeping face of humanity will fail to see what is directly in front of it. The sad fact of the matter is that people don’t see, not because they are stupid, but because they don’t want to see. Life is easier that way, and the search for cool always wins out over the search for truth, especially when it comes to the world of comic books.

So, bearing this in mind, I hope that Chuck goes for it. Dump reality over our head Chuck. Engulf us in a tidal wave of truth. Most people won’t even notice. Give the comic book fans their ‘cool’ bits, tell us that the suburbs are a bit boring, treat us to a punch up and explosion every now and then, and I think you’ll just about get away with it.


Rating: 7/10 (Not that exciting so far, but it has promise)



Link to article quoted in this review:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/19/russia-bans-undesirable-international-organisations-2016-elections

Comic book review: Green Lantern #38- Emasculated chump hangs out in friendship zone

Writer: Robert Venditti
Artist: Admira Wijaya
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 7th January 2015

What’s going on in my mainstream superhero comic books this week? Why are the so-called ‘heroes’ being portrayed as emasculated losers who have no lives, no friends and no girlfriends?

Who wants to read this depressing crap about loser superheroes? Oh yeah, comic book fans.

Drink up losers

After reading about the suicide inducing no-life of Ant Man the next book I picked up this week was about the equally depressing loser life of Green Lantern.

Unlike poor old Ant Man at least Hal Jordan has a job, but at the beginning of this book he’s told to sod off, so he does, straight to a bar.

He spends the rest of issue #38 drinking, hanging out with his childish loser mates, and concluding his non-adventures with a humiliating conversation with an ex-girlfriend who rejects him, gives him a pity kiss peck on the cheek, then buggers off to have fun with her new boyfriend.

What the hell was that supposed to be?

Am I supposed to identify with this loser because I am a comic book fan and therefore a loser myself? That’s the conclusion I took from Ant Man #1, and I’m getting exactly the same vibe with this one.

Guess what? I don’t relate to put upon, unemployed single fathers and dumped boyfriends drinking dejectedly in a bar. Perhaps I’m weird? Perhaps I’m not a big enough loser to read comic books these days? Perhaps I need to go back out into the world and experience more humiliation and rejection before I can relate to these books? I better buy myself some new sensible clubbing shoes, because at the moment I feel like I don't belong in this depressing club for rejected, lonely, pathetic, emasculated, humiliated men.

Goddamn it, what’s up with my comic books this week? I don’t want to read about losers. I just don’t, and so another book gets a much deserved low rating from this thoroughly pissed off reviewer. Perhaps I'm wrong? Perhaps I need to change my ways? I'll finish this review here as I need to go the shops. I have some sensible shoes that I need to buy.

Rating: 2/10 (for that ridiculous alternative front cover)

Comic book review: King Conan Conqueror #6- A Kingdom of Dust

Writer: Timothy Truman
Artist: Tomas Giorello
Colours: Jose Villarrubia
Publisher: Dark Horse Comic
Released: 30th July 2014


‘But of what worth are power and the treasures it brings…if there’s no one to give them to?’

So says an elderly King Conan as he concludes his tale of the glory days of battle and how he re-gained his kingdom, and his Queen.

After the glorious battle, after the mighty sweep of his sword and vengeance gained, the defeat of his enemies and the destruction of the wizard Xaltotun, the book ends not with a celebration, but with a melancholy lamentation.

It’s that feeling of melancholy that I will remember the most from this latest take on Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon story. This final edition celebrates Conan’s victory with gloriously illustrated panels that depict the key moments of battle.

The standout panels are the destruction of the wizard himself, in a swash of blood and furious, aggressive muscular vengeance. It’s the colouring that does it here, but in the quieter panels there is a look in the eye of the elderly King Conan. Still mighty, still a towering colossus of coiled muscularity, but the eye, surrounded by scars, it is sad, very sad.

The good news is that this creative team is going to return. There are no details as of yet, but as soon as I hear about them I’ll put it up on my blog. I don’t usually announce comic book news here, but with this creative team working again on Conan; I’ll make a happy exception.

King Conan The Conqueror Part 6 of 6 is a book of blood, battle and glorious vengeance for our eponymous hero. It was a great victory, but now as an elderly King Conan re-tells the tale of his most glorious hour, there is no joy there, no celebration, no boastful elevation of his own legend. No, there is only sadness as he surveys the life he is now living, and how everybody he knew, admired, loved or hated are no longer of the world.

All that remains is a melancholy old King with a kingdom of material riches but with nobody to share them with. Worse still, he has no heir apparent to the Kingdom he spent his life’s energies and passions to secure, and as he looks over the body of his dead wife the past is all he has. The present is numb, and the future offers nothing but dust.


Rating: 10/10

Comic book review: The Squidder #1- Hell yeah, I’m reading a decent comic book at last

Writer: Ben Templesmith
Artist: Ben Templesmith
Publisher: IDW
Released: 16th July 2014

I’ve been reading a right load of crap this week, and it’s been getting on my nerves a bit really. I mean, there’s so much junk coming out of corporate whores Marvel and DC. So much statist team worshipping nonsense, and ‘politically correct’ stories with women acting like men whilst men act like cowering wimps, but I avoid most of that now.

These days I'm starting to concentrate my time and money on ‘independent’ comic books, but all I’ve been reading so far this week is limp offerings from writers who are being as bland and politically correct as possible, presumably so they can weasel a precious career for themselves working as a house slave for the big two dusty dinosaur behemoths.

Where’s the sense of rebellion, the strong human urge to tell is as it is no matter what the consequences? Bloody comic book writers, sometimes I think they’re more entrenched within the new world order matrix than the soft feminist liberal readers themselves.

All I want is a book with balls, a book with aggression, a book with a strong individual fighting against something, not another soft bloody team-member of team UN or team Nato or whatever Police state synonym a writer is worshipping this particular week. That’s why I’m so relieved to be writing this review, on a Friday morning, when I’ve finally read a comic book that has a heart beat and a bit of life about it. Check out my previous reviews from this week. What a sorry pile of old tosh it’s been so far. This book is heads and shoulders the best thing I’ve read all week.

It’s not even that complicated, or original, but you don’t have to be clever just for the sake of being clever to write a good comic book. Keep it easy to read, stick some hair on it’s chest and tell the damn story, that’s all I want.

The Squidder is about a bloke living in an apocalyptic wasteland where the masters have full control over their slave population. That slave population fight amongst themselves for scraps at the foot of the masters table, some collaborate and worship the masters, and our hero despises the whole lot of them and fights against it as a man, as somebody with moral integrity, aggression, strength, individuality, courage and the spirit of humanity that spits in the eye of anything that wants to call itself ‘master.’

Love it, love it, love it. The comparisons between this book, the times in which we are living today, and what the elite’s have in store for our collective future if we don’t start doing something about it are obvious for anybody paying attention. The art is Ben Templesmith at his best, oh how to describe it? Nicotine stained, fractured, wounded, but defiant. I love it, love it, love it.

The book ends with our hero taking an assignment, he has a death wish, but you get a sense that it’s this death wish that is driving him on, giving him the courage to change things, shake things up a bit. After all, when you no longer fear death you really are a man to be reckoned with. Enough waffling from me. Get this book, get this book now.
Rating: 9/10

Review: Spawn #245- 90's adolescent

Writer: Todd McFarlane
Artist: Todd McFarlane and Szymon Kudranski
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 9th July 2014


It might seem a bit strange for me to say this, especially if you think that I am some sort of far too knowledgeable comic book geek (which I’m not), but I didn’t know much about the Spawn character before picking up this book. I knew it had something to do with Spiderman, and that’s probably why I hadn’t bothered with it before. You see Spiderman is for children, and I haven’t been a child for a very long time, so I pay no heed to Spiderman. That makes sense, right?

I picked up Spawn #245 because I liked the creepy front cover of the fat evil clown, and yes I know the image is a very worn out cliché, but it’s still a good image and also because I didn’t have that many comic books to read this week.

I was initially a bit confused with the book as I saw it was an Image comic, and even I know that Spiderman is Marvel, so what was going on here? A quick Start Page search later (I don’t use the NSA search engine of choice Google) and I was up to date with the situation between Todd McFarlane and Marvel. It's not that complicated.

McFarlane created Spawn in the early 1990’s (not that bloody time period again. Comics have been stuck there for far too long now) whilst working for Marvel, and he had a bit of success with it and decided to bring the character out of Marvel and into Image comics, which he helped to set up. A good idea, and I’m sure he has a healthy bank account now because of it. But is the book any good in 2014?

First off, this is not really a comic book for grown-ups. It’s still very much a comic, with themes and characters designed for the perpetually adolescent mind-set. An audience that might be physically in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s or 50’s, but it’s an audience still stuck in the dating and getting to find their way in the world stage of their developments. It’s a Spiderman book basically, for people who haven’t grown up, and perhaps never will. Why do I say this? Because issue #245 has all of those teenage, adolescent concerns that you will find in a television show about twenty-something’s, before children and commitments come along to make things complicated, and stick you on the boring treadmill of routine that so many adults waste their lives upon.

The main protagonist is a handsome, well built superstar celebrity with a gorgeous girl desperately in love with him, a great career and strangers obsessing over how intriguing he is as he nonchalantly passes them by in the street, all cool and mysterious and handsome. This is a wish fulfilment character for teenage boys. The story is all about him, his exciting past and how people just want to understand what makes him so fascinating, so dangerous, so sexy, and so handsome. The book ends with a common fear of the teenage boy, a crazy girl with a knife who will emasculate you (choppy) and take away all of your cool independence and boyhood testosterone driven power.

The art has a darkness to it that gives the impression that this is more ‘adult’ and serious than it actually is, but some of the facials look a bit expressionless and two dimensional. Overall, I’ve seen a lot worse and it does create an atmosphere that just about carries the narrative. There’s no Clown in the book by the way, but that’s okay. If you trust covers you don’t know comics.

It sounds like I hated the book, but I didn’t hate it at all. Comic books by their very nature are adolescent, and this is a half-decent adolescent comic book. There are no New World order issues explored in the book, so it could have been set in any time period, and is most redolent to myself of the early 1990’s time period in which the writer first created the character.

There are mentions of blogs and celebrity television, but there’s more to these times than just throwing in references to new technologies every now and then. Just ask Edward Snowden about it. A guy who told the truth, and is now hiding out in Russia because the criminal US government wants to put him in jail for doing so. We live in very strange and dangerous times. Times where the lies of the western governments that are owned and controlled by undemocratic banking families and corporate interests are being increasingly exposed. The best comic books will reflect the times in which they are written. This book doesn’t do that.

I have to ask a question of myself. Do I really need another 1990’s comic book in my collection? This book is okay, but it’s not exactly cutting edge, and I’m looking for cutting edge these days. I want to read something that screams 2014, not 1992. I’ll be fair to it though, because it does intrigue me, a little. I’ll give it two more months, and if I see any 2014 concerns explored in the book then I’ll keep reading. If I don’t, then at least I know what Spawn is about. It’s not bad. It’s a good comic for teenage boys, but for somebody of my advanced years I need just a little more than it’s giving at the moment. But hey, two months. We’ll see.
Rating: 7/10

Review: King Conan The Conqueror Part 5 of 6: Masculinity fight-back

Artist: Tomas Giorello
Writer: Timothy Truman
Colourist: Jose Villarrubia
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Released: 25th June 2014

The work produced by the creative team of Truman, Giorello and Villarrubia on this latest re-telling of Robert E. Howard’s Hour of the Dragon has been amazing, there’s no other word for it. This story has been told over and over again, and I have read it many, many times. Yet when the latest issue comes out, as it did this week, it’s still the one comic book that I’m most looking forward to reading, even though I know the story inside out by now. That’s the biggest compliment that I can pay to it, that something so familiar is not in the least bit worn out, and is still as fresh as anything released today.

This issue is nearing the end of Howard’s tale now, and it follows on from the previous issue's cliff-hanger, with a Hammer Horror style Mummy walking menacingly towards our eponymous hero. You have to love the dialogue here, with the testosterone and masculine strength that pulsates through the artwork being perfectly realised in the actual words coming from Conan’s mouth. Without spoilers, (for those lucky few not yet familiar with the tale) the Mummy gives Conan a gift. Here’s how the subsequent conversation between Conan and said Mummy goes-

Conan- “Who are you?”
Mummy- “ I was Thoth-Mekhi. I am dead.”
Conan- “ Well, since you’re feeling so damned helpful, show me out of this cursed temple will you?”

Is that not beautiful? How Conan, completely unintimidated by any man, living or dead talks to the Mummy like it’s some kind of random bloke in the street who’s giving him directions. Conan really is a man from a lost past. A past where men acted like men, and politically correctness and the curse that is liberal feminism had yet to blight the body politic.

This is further confirmed in the next few pages where scantily clad temple prostitutes get drunk with a corrupt and decedent king. This is not portrayed as a good thing by the way. It’s portrayed as a bad thing, as something that weak cowardly men do rather than engage with life and taking charge of their own destinies. This is no dedication to licentiousness, drunkenness and abusing your ill-deserved social status (for all of you celebrity worshippers out there), no this is a warning about what happens when you act like a fool and not like a man.

The artwork throughout this book is of the highest possible calibre, and together with the colouring it creates an impression that you simply will not see in your average Wolverine or Batman book. Just look at the panels I’ve included alongside this review, and get the bloody book immediately. If you like good art then you’ll want to get this book. Put the feminist liberal guilt trip nonsense aside for a second and be a real bloody man, or a real bloody woman, and just buy the bloody book.

This series ends next month, but if you haven’t been following it don’t worry. There will be two trade paperbacks coming out very soon that collect all twelve issues of the run. If you haven’t been following this run you need to get those two books as soon as they are released, and if you have been following this run, you need to pick them up as well, but you already know that.

This has been good. No, it’s been more than good. This is Conan being told as Conan should be told, and in this cultural wasteland of 2014 we should be immensely grateful that Darkhorse comics is still putting out books that don’t pander to the bullshit feminist liberal agenda that is poisoning all of the younger generations of comic book fans, heads full as they are with Rockefeller nonsense from their years of incarceration, mind-control indoctrination at school, college and university.

This is a book with red blood and a strong anti-authoritarian, masculine heartbeat. Do you realise how rare that is today? There are hints that the creative team will continue to work on more Conan stories past this run, and we’ll get more news on that next month. I’m sure they’ll continue. They have to continue. I can hear Conan himself roaring his demand through this generation of defeated male comic-com attending, emasculated guilt-tripping, soft dullards. ‘Oh you shall continue. By Crom I demand that you do.’ Do not ignore Conan, it would be unwise to do so.
Rating: 10/10