This is "Look Back," a feature that I plan to do for at least all of 2019 and possibly beyond that (and possibly forget about in a week, who knows?). The concept is that every week (I'll probably be skipping the four fifth weeks in the year, but maybe not) of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each week will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first week of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second week looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third week looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth week looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.

This is a bit late, but today, we go back to July 1970 for the comic book debut of Conan the Barbarian by Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor Smith and Dan Adkins!

Roy Thomas explained to ICV2 how the Conan license came about for Marvel in 1970:

I wasn’t a reader of that type of fiction particularly. I had read Edgar Rice Burroughs, his Martian novels, as a kid. And I started collecting the Lancer Conan paperbacks when they started coming out about 1966 or so, mostly because I liked the Frank Frazetta covers. He’d been doing a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs and related fantasy covers and I liked the Conan covers but I didn’t get into the one story I tried to read, Conan the Adventurer, so I never really tried again for a couple of years.

Marvel’s readers kept writing us letters saying we should pick up the rights to a few of these things that were coming out in the bookstores as well as doing superheroes. One thing they suggested a lot was a sword and sorcery title, and especially Robert E. Howard and Conan were being mentioned. I was somewhat familiar with them and Stan really wasn’t. He asked me if it was a good idea and we discussed the general concept of what sword and sorcery was. Stan didn’t really have any idea. He asked me to write the publisher Martin Goodman a memo, a couple of pages or so, saying why we should license the rights to a sword and sorcery character. So I did.

I must have been fairly convincing because Martin Goodman said it sounded like a good idea to him. I know I told him in the memo that after all we have a brawny powerful hero, we have a lot of beautiful women, perhaps clothed for a warm climate, we have a lot of sorcerers who were almost like super villains, plus a lot of monsters. That sounded pretty good. I didn’t stress the fact that it would also look like it was in an ancient or medieval world, so he OKed me to go after the rights to a sword and sorcery character, although Conan was not the one I actually went after. I didn’t think it would be within our little price range, the little amount of money that I was authorized to offer.

Although the original deal didn’t quite work out I ended up contacting Glenn Lord as the literary agent for the Robert E. Howard estate. His name was mentioned in the introduction to one of the Conan volumes that came out, about the time I was getting frustrated by the other deal. So I contacted him and said, ‘We don’t have much money to offer but this might increase Conan’s market a little bit by introducing him to a lot of readers who wouldn’t ordinarily read the paperbacks and that made sense to Glenn so we began a partnership of sorts that was good for Conan, good for me, and good for Marvel.

The funny thing about this arrangement, though, is that Goodman would only agree to spend X amount of dollars on this new title (Goodman decided to take the licensing fee out of the production costs of the issue) and that meant that Thomas could not afford to get John Buscema to draw the series. If you know anything about John Buscema, it should be that he preferred to draw pretty much anything BUT superhero comics, so he was really itching at the chance to drawn Conan, especially once Thomas got the license and said, "Hey, would you be interested in drawing Conan?". But because of the restrictions, Buscema, being one of Marvel's there biggest artists at the time (with Gil Kane and John Romita being the other two biggest artists) was off limits.

In stepped a young man named Barry Smith.

Barry Smith had come to America from England with his friend, Steve Parkhouse, to break into American comic books. Smith was heavily influenced by Jack Kirby at this time and he did great work, but then lost his work visa and had to return to England. Thomas enjoyed his work and found assignments for Smith in Marvel's various anthologies until the launch of Conan. With Buscema off limits, Thomas turned to the cheaper Smith, inked by Dan Adkins, and the results were outstanding.

Smith had evolved from his heavy Kirby influence (although it was still there a bit), but goodness, look at how dynamic Smith was, as we see young Conan leap into battle....

Conan is drawn into a quest where he rescues a young woman from some sort of demon-like creatures. In the process, Thomas cleverly sets up a bit where we see the past of the Hyborian Age (which included another Robert E. Howard character, King Kull) and the future, in which we see that Conan is destined to one day become a king. It's a wonderful approach for the first issue, giving off the hints of all of the amazing adventures that await this Cimmerian hero.

Of course, the twist is that the young woman that Conan saved is one of the demon-like creatures herself...

One of the most impressive things about Smith (who wouldn't adapt his mother's maiden name, Windsor, until after he took a break from comic books after his Conan run finished) is the way that he did these bold page approaches. He did this during his early work at Marvel, where he was still heavily Jack Kirby influenced, but he adapted that same concept into his Conan work while losing some of the more obvious Kirby elements, giving it a really distinctive look.

We're basically seeing the birth of a comic book superstar in these pages, while Thomas did his standard excellent writing. And Conan has been a fixture in comics ever since.

If you folks have any suggestions for August (or any other later months) 2010, 1995, 1970 and 1945 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we're discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.