Thulsa Doom is coming back, and Titan Comics has the trailer to prove it! Conan: Tides of the Tyrant-King lands September 23rd, a four-issue run that puts the Cimmerian back in front of the villain most moviegoers know him for. Jim Zub writes, with Jésus Merino on art.
The official synopsis: "CONAN OF CIMMERIA believed that THULSA DOOM's evil had been banished forever, but the Atlantean necromancer's dark power stirs once more and, if it cannot be stopped, the dead shall overtake the living! The Tyrant-King of Atlantis returns and all shall suffer, unless Conan and his brave allies can turn back the tide!"
You can sample it before committing a dime. Titan put out a Tides of the Tyrant-King #0 issue on Free Comic Book Day back in May, and it's still up free on the publisher's site.
For a lot of readers, Thulsa Doom means James Earl Jones in the 1982 Conan the Barbarian, the snake cult, the hypnotic voice, and one of the great villain performances in fantasy cinema. Robert E. Howard never actually wrote him as a Conan villain!
So who was he? He belonged to King Kull, the Atlantean warrior-king Howard created before Conan existed, and Kull's age sat thousands of years earlier in the author's own timeline. The two heroes were never supposed to cross paths. John Milius handed Doom to Conan for the 1982 film, the version everyone remembers, and comics have been working to justify that pairing ever since.
There's a second hero in this thing too. Stephen Costigan, another Howard creation, fights the same enemy from an entirely different age. Zub says he's kin to Sailor Steve Costigan, the two-fisted pulp boxer Howard wrote nearly forty stories about, and that he planted him back in Savage Sword of Conan #10 last year before anyone knew why.
He captioned the art reveal in his newsletter simply: "Steve and Stephen, the Costigan Cousins."
Conan is being rebuilt on several fronts at once. Genndy Tartakovsky's animated series got its first look in June, bringing the Primal creator's brutal, near-wordless style to the Cimmerian. That one is set up at Prime Video with Cartoon Network Studios producing, built on Howard's Queen of the Black Coast. Tartakovsky has been open that it only just entered development, almost twenty years after he first pitched the idea in 2008. On the live-action side, Arnold Schwarzenegger has kept talking up King Conan, pitching it as an older, wearier take in the vein of Unforgiven.
Neither of those has a release date yet. Titan's books ship every month regardless!
Merino draws the main series, and he arrives with serious credentials: the Spanish artist broke in at Marvel on Avengers Forever and spent years at DC on Superman, Justice Society of America, and Action Comics. The Savage Sword prelude pulls in Nicola Scott, Chris Campana, and Sean Izaakse. Its three stories range far enough to take in one of Howard's weird-western gunslingers, so this event clearly has no intention of staying inside Hyboria.
Zub has been the main architect of that, running Conan the Barbarian for Titan and Heroic Signatures alongside the Savage Sword anthology, and building a connected Howardverse that pulls in characters well beyond Conan. Thulsa Doom and the Costigans are both part of that project.
Readers who want the full run-up should start a week earlier, on September 16th, when The Savage Sword of Conan #16 opens the event with a trio of Zub stories in black and white. The main series then begins on the 23rd and runs four issues at $4.99 apiece.
Waiting for the complete story is an option as well. The collected paperback runs 112 pages for $17.99 and is open for pre-order now, while digital single issues go up alongside the print run. Issue #2 follows on October 21st, per Titan's release calendar.
So where does James Earl Jones' Thulsa Doom rank for you among fantasy movie villains?
Let us know in the comments below!
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