Conan The Barbarian: Battle of the Black Stone is one of the biggest surprises of the year. A bloody, thrilling pulp epic, with a razor-sharp sense of atmosphere and dread, the book has gotten a lot of attention as an explosive example of what Conan stories can do at their best. With the entire series out, and the collected edition coming out in April 2025 from Heroic Signatures and Titan Comics, there’s no better time to check out an epic fantasy story that will excite and thrill you. The Beat reached out to Conan The Barbarian writer Jim Zub on his approach to the fantasy epic and how it felt to launch such a massive event.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. It also contains spoilers for the first three issues of Battle of the Black Stone.
JARED BIRD: Welcome and thank you so much for your time. The final issue of Conan the Barbarian: Battle of the Black Stone came out on December 4th, 2024. Could you give a brief elevator pitch of the series for those who have yet to check it out?
JIM ZUB: Battle of the Black Stone is basically a pulp epic. We’re taking characters from different genres and stories, all created by Robert E Howard, the father of sword and sorcery and best known for Conan the Barbarian. He actually wrote a lot of different pulp short stories, wrote for various magazines and created other characters who I think deserve to be better known. As part of my overarching pitch for relaunching Conan at Titan Comics, I talked about bigger and broader mythic storytelling. One of the things I covered was the interconnected nature of these stories, taking what was already there in the original pulp stories and expanding on them to make them feel even bigger and more meaningful across all these different characters and time periods. A lot of them exist in this dark space of cosmic horror and mystery, as well as, of course, sword and sorcery or historical fantasy.
The character cast of Battle of the Black Stone includes Conan the Barbarian of the Hyborian Age, who most readers will know, but there are a lot of other characters as well. Probably most famous after Conan is Solomon Kane, a puritan monster hunter. You’ve also got Dark Agnes, who is a swordswoman and adventurer moving through France; Conrad and Kirowan, probably the least known characters in the story, a pair of occult investigators from the 1930s, with a Lovecraftian air to them, and El Borak, a Texan gunfighter traveling through the Middle East. Bringing them all together under one umbrella in this epic story crossing time and testing them all in different ways, raising the stakes and expanding the pulp milieu. Our team wanted to make it feel bombastic and intense, keeping readers guessing at every turn, and the big final reveal at the end of the story sets up even more exciting adventures to come.
BIRD: I find it interesting how many people don’t realize how prolific Howard was with his writing.
ZUB: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. He was a whirlwind.
BIRD: He passed away when he was 30 years old.
ZUB: It’s wild to think of the amount of material he generated. Whether it’s his stories or hundreds of poems he wrote that were never published, as well as hundreds of letters to other authors who he was pen pals with. He talked about history and storytelling and writing with them, and the changing face of America. He was prolific, not just in terms of pure fiction writing, but in so many other ways, and it staggers people when they learn how much he accomplished in such a short span of time.
BIRD: What’s it been like working with Titan Comics and Heroic Signatures?
ZUB: I mainly work directly with Heroic Signatures, who are the rights holders to The Robert E Howard Character Library. A big thing they wanted to do when teaming up with Titan Comics was to make it a real partnership, to have more say in the creative process. Titan is obviously involved in a larger publishing sense, but my editor is in the Heroic Signatures office, next door to the people who own and control the rights to all those characters. Two people decide the fate of any of the story stuff we’re doing, which makes it easy to do story brainstorming sessions, and easier to decide things because we’re all pushing in the same direction. I feel so fortunate to be at the sharp tip of the spear of this publishing initiative, working with so many amazing people at both Heroic Signatures and at Titan.
I’ve said it many times but it’s true, Conan is the Superman of sword and sorcery. He’s the template that so many stories come from, and he’s possibly the most famous fantasy character in the world. Getting the chance to steer that ship is unbelievable in the coolest way possible, and to know that we have this long term plan that’s going to stretch over the next few years, with Black Stone as the first pillar of that. It’s been a proving ground to show people we can make this thing work and not just tell a good story over a few issues but over the course of years. To make each issue exciting and satisfying, and also keep readers looking forward to what’s next.
Art by Jonas Scharf
BIRD: You’ve worked with a number of exceptional artists including Doug Braithwaite and Jonas Scharf. How did your approach as a writer change depending on the artist?
ZUB: The art teams we’ve had for the relaunch have been staggering, honestly. I’m honored to be teamed up with so many incredible people. Roberto De La Torre, of course, came out the gate explosive. I’ve been a fan of Doug Braithwaite’s work for many years and Jonas Scharf, who is new for most people, has been making a big impression on readers because of his quality. We sought him out for Black Stone specifically. I saw pages he had done for a Witcher graphic novel, which were very textured and his understanding of light and shadow was a perfect fit for the story I had in mind. We kind of circled the wagons around him early on. I got to meet him at New York Comic Con last year, and we had dinner where I verbally laid out the whole story of Black Stone to him. His eyes got wider and wider with each part, and it was great to get that instant excited feedback.
I write quite differently depending on the artist – with Roberto, we went as old school as possible and did the ‘Marvel Method’, like Roy Thomas would have done back in the day. I wrote an outline of the pages, he drew the line art, and I’d go back in to do the lettering script. Sometimes I’d give bits of dialogue I knew would be important, but usually the text was done once the art was already complete. It’s unusual for modern comics but I found it invigorating. It flexes different creative muscles for me.
Doug wanted me to do full script, so I went back to writing in full script which is the way I’ve been writing for more than ten years now. I put in a lot of descriptive sections on the Hyborian Age in there because Doug was less familiar with the source material, so I tended to ramble a lot more in the script.
Every script is a letter to the artist and editor. It’s a story document, a cheerleading memo, a way to try to get people hyped up and have them envision the story how you see it.
I asked Jonas what he wanted to do, because I could go either way, and he had never done the Marvel Method so he asked if we could try that out. We did it for Free Comic Book Day, and it worked out really well and he found it really exciting to be able to set the pacing of the story that way, so we did Battle of the Black Stone using that plot-first approach, which has been really cool. It’s fun to team up with an artist and say ‘I’m a Swiss Army Knife – What do you need?’, focusing on what makes the best final product and gets them excited about putting stuff down on the page. It’s also interesting to fit the dialogue around art instead of the other way around.
BIRD: The flexibility of that must be something special to have in a writer / artist relationship. It’s really interesting, I haven’t really heard many people do that.
ZUB: No, it’s not something I’ve seen a lot of people do. I know some writers who have done it, and they’ve expressed to me that they don’t enjoy it much. A lot of artists find it quite overwhelming as well. Training myself up on that was an interesting challenge in the best way possible.
Conan has always been a visually bombastic series in the best way possible. A lot of artists have brought their very best to it. When people work on characters that are considered legendary, they really want to do their best. Being able to say to artists ‘what do you want? How can we put your art up front in the best way that works for you?’ is exciting.
Very few artists are on every issue of a monthly series, and even now there’s a sentiment that it’s my Conan series. That’s flattering, but just not true. Without De La Torre, Scharf, Braithwaite and others, this series would be nothing. If I can set the table for artists in a way where we elevate them to deliver their best, I hope we can really show how the book exists because of their efforts.
BIRD: Classical Conan stories have this unique narrative voice because of Howard’s prose. How did you emulate the voice of Howard and make it your own?
ZUB: That’s a good question. I read an interview with Roy Thomas where he said that he fell into the narrative approach for Conan. He realized quite early on that there would be pages of people clashing with weapons. If you used traditional sound effects it would just be ‘slash, slash, ugh!’ over and over again, and would become really boring. He chose a poetic lyricism, clearly inspired by the original Robert E. Howard stories. It branded the book as something different, and made the action feel elevated, bringing more gravitas to the page. You’re reading atmospheric information, descriptions of sounds or the smell of coppery blood in the air, and it makes you slow down and pay more attention to the page and how it exemplifies or juxtaposes with the artwork. He’d also do this wonderful thing where the text discussed inner thoughts while the artwork presented harsh violence. I thought that was really beautiful and unique to Conan.
The issues that used that narrative approach felt like Conan, for me. When I wrote Conan originally at Marvel Comics I did that, but was more timid about it because I worried it would feel dated or hokey. The more I did it, the more I realized how much I liked it. It doesn’t feel old, it’s timeless. I don’t think that every comic should do it, as a lot of titles thrive off of a more contemporary quality, but Conan is in the Hyborian Age. He doesn’t need to be contemporary, it’s fantasy. When I read that story, I want to be in that time. Getting this impossible second chance to relaunch the book at Titan allowed me to carefully plan – How do we present this material, and what should it feel like?
That meant rereading the Howard stories. I’d read them, of course, but never gone marrow deep into analyzing why he made certain choices. It was such a unique opportunity, and the Heroic Signatures crew put their chips on me and believed in me, which gave me that good kind of pressure. I marinated in the source material with a notepad beside me as I reread the stories. I wrote down lines that Howard had written so I could analyze the beat structure, the vocabulary, the lyricism and the gravitas. This is the source, this is how Conan speaks and is described and how he moves. Using that and my favorite comic stories, I built an internal lexicon for myself, so that when I sat down at the keyboard I could have that bombast running through my mind. The first time I got artwork from Roberto, and I had to do the lettering script, it was trumpets going off. This is the level we can hit. No one will think this is purple prose when you’re juxtaposing it with that unbelievable artwork. When we got the first lettered proof back, it was like ‘Holy shit.’ It felt so primordial, a time capsule but my name was on it. We hit something very fundamental about those stories, and all I wanted to do was keep that momentum.
Sometimes it’s difficult. I’ll finish scripting a page and I’ll know it doesn’t sound right and I need to come back to it a couple times until it works. Other times I’ll send the lettering script to my editor and he’ll bounce them back and I’ll tackle it until we get it right. But there are other times where I come down for dinner, my wife will look at me and ask ‘Do you need to get back upstairs?’ and I’ll say ‘As soon as I finish eating, I have to head right back, because there’s lightning crackling across the keyboard and I don’t want to miss it.’
It’s an adrenaline rush of words and pictures coming together – it’s exactly what you hope for. Not every page is like that, but it seems to be happening more often than on any other series I’ve worked on, and readers seem to like it. I’ve gotten over my nerves about it, and freed from the constraints of having to make characters talk like they’re in 2024. Conan sounds like Conan and if we do it right, that will make it timeless.
Art by Doug Braithwraite
BIRD: How did you approach making Battle of the Black Stone feel important without disrupting the main title’s ongoing storyline?
ZUB: It was easy to put into a pitch and really hard to actually pull off. I said specifically to Titan and Heroic that the monthly book had to be self contained. If you read issue #1 to issue #12 back to back, you should have a satisfying experience. Black Stone had to be icing on the cake – it works with the material from the monthly book but what if we took it even further? That’s the challenge I gave myself. I hate it when a monthly book drives you and tells the reader ‘there’s nothing important happening here, go check out the event book!’. The main book has to stand on its own and be satisfying. I don’t want to read the monthly title, and then we cut away and something plot-critical happened in the pages of another book. I want issue 11, 12, 13 to be a continuous adventure. The monthly Conan book will always be focused on the Hyborian Age, but Black Stone allowed us to explore other ages and characters as well. If we follow my overarching plan, we’ll never have Solomon Kane show up in the monthly book. If that happens, we’ve gotten away from the purity of the monthly title. With a mini-series like Battle of the Black Stone, all bets are off. We can go other places with it, do different things, showcase other genres and other spaces in cool ways. There’s a hint of those spaces in the monthly book if you look closely, but it’s not crossover material. The monthly title is Conan’s book, and he is the absolute focus.
BIRD: You got to explore the perspectives of multiple other Robert Howard characters in Battle of the Black Stone. Are there any, apart from Conan, that you found particularly enjoyable to write?
ZUB: I think Solomon Kane is wicked because of his purity of purpose. I wrote him in Conan: Serpent War back at Marvel and it was a lot of fun juxtaposing him with Moon Knight. Moon Knight is the avatar of a god he doesn’t even like, and doesn’t know if the mission he’s on is a just one. Solomon Kane believes utterly in his god and the purity of his cause, but he’s never met or interacted with his god.
Kane drives the narrative so easily; ‘Oh, there’s devil spawn over there? Let’s go. If it kills me, I’m doing it in the name of god.’ I find that refreshing. Characters with feet of clay are wonderful, full of nuance and emotion. Pulp characters have a simplicity where you can just drive them into an adventure. I don’t need to have these characters question why they do what they do, I need to put them in the coolest situation possible where you genuinely feel like they won’t overcome the odds. That’s the purity of pulp.
A friend of mine called them “procedural characters”. Sherlock Holmes is Sherlock Holmes, and Conan, while he’s different at key points in his life, is still Conan. In each of those eras, he is himself. It’s procedural in a sense, like when we watch CSI or similar shows, those characters are just themselves. We don’t want to see Columbo change, we want to see people interacting with the Columbo we know and love. All the characters in Black Stone are built like that. They aren’t going through a classic character arc, but they’re super satisfying as the characters that they are. If I do my job, hopefully you can see the entertainment value in a character with purity of purpose like Solomon Kane, Dark Agnes, Kirowan and Conrad, or El Borak, just like you do with Conan.
Conan is so easy to explain; he’s the original wandering warrior, adventuring through unfamiliar places. Things change around Conan. When he shows up, whatever was happening there is going to change — Military, religion, government, dark magic or creature. Conan the Cimmerian arrives, and he’s going to change it or break it. Something badass and amazing will happen because Conan is Conan. He’s the Barbarian amongst normal civilisation, the warrior amongst men, the leader amongst those who would normally surrender. If I can find those same types of sharp points for a character like Solomon Kane, hopefully the readers will say ‘Yeah, I like that guy too.’
BIRD: From the perspective of a reader, I went into Battle of the Black Stone without any familiarity with Conan. I knew about Conrad and Kirowan.
ZUB: Oh, interesting!
BIRD: I’m a big fan of the Cthulhu mythos, but didn’t know these characters were created by Robert E Howard. Something I loved about the series was falling in love with a character like Conan, but especially Solomon Kane. He’s a force of nature. He goes, plot follows, because of his sheer force of will. I’m excited to see what Patch Zircher does with the character in his miniseries next year.
ZUB: Me too. I think Patch Zircher understands the character, and his love for Kane is irresistible. This is the most excited I’ve ever seen him. We have a shared DNA now because he drew ‘The Gambler’, a Conan story I did, which is what got me on the radar for Heroic Signatures. By the time the monthly Conan series launched at Marvel, they were already looking for who would write Conan next, and they dug ‘The Gambler’. Without the right artist, it wouldn’t have had the same effect, so I owe Patch quite a bit. The Gambler made Heroic believe I had the voice and wouldn’t water it down. Now at Titan Conan is a mature readers book now, so we don’t have to hold back on anything. It goes where it needs to go, not in an exploitative way but in a way that fits for the character and source material.
BIRD: How did it feel to kill off some of Howard’s characters in Black Stone?
ZUB: That came about in a really weird way, with two things happening at once. When I was structuring out the story, I knew I’d have all these characters fighting against the Black Stone Beast summoned from the Obelisk. They’re on the run, and things are nasty, and we have to prove that the stakes are dire. At the same time, I was also dealing with a cast of seven characters, because there was also Brissa and the ghost of James Allison running around. We have to make sure every issue had interesting things happening to seven characters, and I have to prove the stakes were high. The solution was surprisingly straightforward – I had to thin out the cast. I went back and forth, considering whose death would have the most impact. I figured it would be nasty to kill El Borak, because he’s the crux at the start of the story, and then it cascaded from there. It gave it a pulp feeling, because anyone can die, and no one is safe. I could thin the cast and focus on the remaining characters, and it helped make the whole mini-series into a pressure cooker.
Issue #3 is a ‘Grand Guignol’, and we’re just knocking characters down like chess pieces. I wrote the outline wondering if Heroic would even let me do this, and I sent in the plan and our editor was like ‘This is awesome!’. It’s funny because in Issue #1, people were wondering when things would pick up speed and and by Issue #2 people were like ‘Slow down, what are you doing?! Everyone’s going in a blender!’ and we’re like ‘Yeah! This is happening!’.
Issue #4 has an impossibly fun thing where we need to make it feel like the impact is real but also set the table for the wilder things to come. The final page has a big reveal, and either people will lock in and stay with us, or they’ll be sad it’s not what they wanted. Hopefully we’ve built enough trust so readers stick around, because there’s even more to come later on. You can’t say that people can’t come back from the dead, because that’s always possible in fiction, but I never want it to feel like it doesn’t matter. There’s bad things going on, and not everyone is going to come out of this without scars and other damage. Can I make readers feel the depth of that emotion and make them care about what’s next?
BIRD: What other books of yours would you recommend to people who enjoy your work on Conan the Barbarian?
ZUB: None of this would’ve happened without the spell that Skullkickers cast for me. It’s tongue firmly in cheek, a ridiculous action adventure. Wayward put me on the map for a lot of readers, sort of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Japan, with teenagers fighting mythological monsters. I didn’t have to take myself seriously on Skullkickers, so I could blunt some of the emotional bits and didn’t have to worry about the pathos. I didn’t want to leave myself exposed with something genuinely emotional in case people didn’t like it. With Wayward, I wanted to dig in and do dramatic storytelling and make readers care. I made myself more vulnerable and played with a larger cast of characters. Wayward is obviously very different from Conan, but there’s violence and emotion and the darkness in a way that does kind oddly work with Conan in a way readers might enjoy.
BIRD: Thank you so much for your time.
Art by Steven Cummings and Ross A. Campbell
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