Conan (The Barbarian)

On Saturday I was forced to sit still all day, which is always dangerous. I find that time goes at about half the normal speed when I don't feel well, which is obviously bad because it prolongs the misery, but as one turns the corner toward recovery it can open up the door in my head to the feeling of days sick off school when one could mainline strangely adult Australian soap operas like The Sullivans or Sons And Daughters, tapping a primal creativity. Into this rich, primordial soup was poured the new knowledge that Conan The Barbarian is out of copyright in Europe. 

Now I don't know how my Conan crossover comic would work. The simple answer, perhaps, is that it wouldn't work. Mostly because my knowledge of the "Cimmerian" is limited to watching the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger film version fairly recently, a film that I enjoyed a great deal. 

Now, I'm no lover of research, but you can really tell when I've done some, so I reckon if I read one of these barbarous novels, I could deliver on every level. It probably wouldn't be satisfying to anyone who likes Conan, or indeed my comics, with each part of the crossover cancelling the strengths of the other. But the landscapes of the Hyborian age are a lot easier to draw than the infernal metropolitan locales of my recent works. You can't imagine the artist's paradise of a background of "just some rocks and some sky" or "just a cave" or "just a bit of scrubland and some bones".  That makes me think that I could be tempted.

No no, I won't be tempted. I'm not that foolish. Or am I? I shouldn't be allowed to make decisions with a headache. I might have accidentally reverse engineered Groo The Wanderer.

NOTE: The final picture of the five at the top is Conan vs Chloe Noonan, as I told Marc Ellerby that he needs to get on this too. Such is my professionalism that I even coloured that one in.