Review: Conan – Road of Kings #10 by Dark Horse
Conan The Barbarian holds a special place in my heart. Like the Incredible Hulk, I have relied on Conan over the years to be the wantonly destructive, unimaginably strong, cold-hearted, selfish bringer of all things BAD @$$ that I have always wished I could be. Unfortunately, Conan: Road of Kings #10 goes against a good number of the things I love about this legendary warrior.
Conan: RoK #10 picks up where the last two issues have left off. Through some shadowy webs of underhandedness and intrigue, Aquilonia’s government is in a state of upheaval. A king outside the royal bloodline, Deucalion, rises to power and it causes the capital city, Tarantia, to be under siege by dissidents. We pick up with Conan talking to a team of conspirators who want to kill Deucalion to restore the royal lineage of Aquilionian kings. Regrettably, the team informs Conan, the next heir to the throne turns out to be a cowardly and pretentious jack-donkey named Prince Arpelo. And so, Conan is forced to make a choice to make this happen or take a different route. Conan appears to agree to help the team but not for the good of Aquilonia or even just to slash and thrash a couple of goons. No, Conan decides to put his life on the line for…..a little girl and her mother. WHAT?!??!?!?!
Say what you want about the lead up to this comic but come on, unless this little girl is somehow Conan’s long lost daughter of a long lost beloved courtship, which she’s not, why the EFF would he ever care about protecting this kid? Please, that’s not the Conan I know and love. Conan is not supposed to get all mushy and soft cause some little girl with curls lost her daddy and her mom is likely to get wiped out as well. The Conan I know is supposed to snarl and cause that little girl to drop lumps into her frumpy dress. But alas, throughout the entire comic, Conan just keeps kowtowing to this kid as if she held the keys to his Lamborghini (yeah, that was an anachronism). I really just couldn’t stand it.
To top it off, Conan didn’t really get into too many battles. The biggest one was with this Dragon, but it really just looked like a giant lizard, and even then, it wasn’t a very exciting showdown. At the very least, he puts it down in a messy but the reader doesn’t really get to relish it all that much. And that leads me to the artwork and diction of the comic. I gotta say that I wasn’t very impressed. Many of the panels were dominated by back and forth discussions which always seemed to feel like the characters, themselves, were trying too hard to talk in the colloquial medieval, swashbuckling tongue. It was boring. I was really not pulled in or enthralled by what was being said or how the characters were physically interacting with each other.
And, this is where I just get picky, the cover of the comic appears to have little to do with the contents itself, unless I’m missing something. But even if I am, I still feel that is a failure as its the job of the comic creators to make linkages between the two relevant. Or, at least, if you’re gonna break that rule, make the cover super, duper awesome. This cover was just foolishness on paper. It may have some tinges of realism to it but listen, I’m not picking up Conan for its portraitures of realism. I want to seem to raging, dust-in-the-air action!!!
As much as I love Conan, this particular comic seems to have fallen a bit short. At best, I give it Two Crown Points of Crom out of Five, and that’s being generous. Let’s hope the succeeding issues will bring back a little more of what we love about Conan!!!!
