Conan Road of Kings #11
Script by Roy Thomas
Pencils by Mike Hawthorne
Inks by John Lucas
Colors by Dan Jackson
Letters by Richard Starkings & Comicraft
Cover by Alexsi Briclot
Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: December 21st, 2011
Cover Price: $3.50

Conan Road of Kings #11 is a “breather” issue. It’s the issue in between grand adventures that slows down the pace for a minute and let’s you explore some of Conan’s character traits and lets his personality do most of the heavy lifting, story-wise. Hey, it’s Roy Thomas writing Conan. Thank you again, Dark Horse!

As I said before, this issue does have some action in it, but it’s mostly a nice tale of what Conan does after leaving the kingdom of Aquilonia and before his next full-fledged adventure. We get a nice look at how Conan interacts with people in a new town and how they view him as an outsider. But, of course, we do get some action thrown in. It wouldn’t be Conan if he didn’t get into a bar fight and into trouble with the local authorities. A very nice change of pace issue from the past few. This one takes it’s time delivers a nice, fun read.

Look kids! Mike Hawthorne is back!! Awesome!!! Hawthorne is quickly turning out to be not only one of my favorite Conan artists, but one of my favorite artists in general. A truly hidden talent who’s just waiting for the right book to sky rocket him to the big time. Hopefully there’s some editors out there paying attention to his work on this book. And SPEAKING of this book, it’s another home run for Hawthorne. His people look great, women especially, his scenery and backgrounds are superb and, something that I hadn’t noticed before, he brings a very nice sense of uniqueness to each different city or kingdom in the Conan universe. All the cities have a life of their own and don’t just look like they could all interconnect. Just like in real life, you can tell that these are different places in the same world. Well played, Mr. Hawthorne.

This is one of the few times where I can say this about a Conan The Barbarian issue, but this is a GREAT starting point for people looking to jump on the title. This book is a fun, light Conan adventure that doesn’t give you the feeling that you’ve had to read the past years worth of stories to know what’s going on. Highly recommended.