Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and ninety-fifth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.
As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first legend in this installment. Click here for the second legend in this installment.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
Stan Lee insisted on Conan the Barbarian having no more animals on the covers if he was going to not cancel the book.
STATUS:
Basically True
IN HONOR OF CONAN THE BARBARIAN'S 50TH ANNIVERSARY IN COMICS, THIS INSTALLMENT WILL BE ALL CONAN LEGENDS! Maybe even the next installment.
Six and a half years ago, I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed about how Conan was actually CANCELED after just seven issues of his series came out!
After a big start, the book ran into trouble. Quoting from that piece:
[T]he sales dropped steadily for each of the next SIX issues!
The book was quickly turned into a monthly book soon after it debuted (as it debuted so strong) but after the sales reports came in for Conan #7 (which would be about the time that issue #13 was being produced), Stan Lee (who was then still "just" the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel. Martin Goodman was still around as the Publisher) had made a decision. It was not just that Conan had poor sales, but it was also that Lee saw that Smith was clearly a major star, so Lee wanted to get Smith on to superhero titles. So Lee canceled Conan.
Roy Thomas, of course, was not in the office when this happened. He was at home doing some writing (Thomas would split his weeks between his home and the Marvel office). When Thomas showed up the next day, he naturally hit the roof. He argued vociferously for the book. If Lee wanted to pull Smith from the book, then fine, do that, but then just give the book another artist, don't cancel it!
Eventually, Thomas won Lee over and Conan was un-canceled, although it was sent back to bi-monthly status with Conan #14.
However, what is interesting is to learn exactly WHAT Roy Thomas had to agree with to keep the book going!
Roy explained it to ICv2:
We were trying to figure out what to do about things and then Stan decided to take a look at the covers. “You’ve got too many animals on the covers,” he said. I liked these covers. There was a giant bat, a giant spider from “Tower of the Elephant,” the man-headed serpent and things of this sort, a woman changing into a tiger. So Stan said, “Get some more humanoid menacing-looking villains instead of these animals.”
Thomas continued:
As it happened the story we were doing had two different menaces in it. One was a giant gila monster based on a synopsis by Robert E. Howard and the other was a number of giant, seven or eight foot, skeletal warriors in armor. We had the skeletal warriors on the cover and that issue, #8, picked up in sales and the next issue, which had a kind of menacing winged man on it fighting Conan, that picked up a little more from there and after that it was never in any kind of danger of being cancelled for the next fifteen, twenty years.
The lesson, of course, is to just listen to what Stan Lee wants! The funny thing, though, is that later Marvel editors would listen to Lee a bit TOO much, which led to stuff like Iron Man having a nose on his mask and Marvel actually effectively banning the color green on their covers for years. You see, Stan would say something like, "Green is bad" on a cover and that would be translated as green should be banned PERIOD on ALL covers. Jim Shooter would talk about how he would then discuss this with Lee and he had no idea that he had made so many seemingly companywide decisions vis a vis covers, as he obviously forgot about the discussions as soon as they were finished.
Thanks to Roy Thomas for the awesome information! That guy is SO informative!
CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest TV Legends Revealed - Find out whether a title caption for the animated TV series, Futurama, actually warned time travels from traveling to the year 2020.
MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that's it for this installment!
Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!
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