Dec 07
Click for full imageNo man – be him a humble farmer from the old country or a tight muscled, loincloth wearing, sword wielding elite barbarian – can resist tackling his snake. So let’s have the loinclothed one waving his swords, standing triumphantly on a snake. Make the colours bright and the expressions memorable.
(Average: 8.51 out of 10)
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December 7th, 2009 at 6:30 am
This would be more impressive if the snake didn’t look quite so much like a paper lion from a Chinese New Year street parade. You can almost see the string that makes his eyes ‘blink’.
The skulls in the background are a nice touch: ‘just in case you were in any doubt this is a DANGEROUS paper lion puppet’.
The single worst thing about this cover though is the absence of the words ‘Robert E. Howard’.
Still, Conan; Raaaargh!
December 7th, 2009 at 8:57 am
Conan smash!!!
I do love this cover. Actually I really wish I had bought this. There was an entire set all with similar pictures but in the end I probably wouldn’t have actually read them so best leave it to someone who might actually appreciate it for the right reasons.
‘Conan of the Isles’ Doesn’t quite strike the image of the Conan I remember. Sounds more like an irish dancing group.
December 7th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Ouch, that snakes greatest weapon is the ability to make its enemies fall over with laughter.
Is it just me that think Conan here looks like an extremely buff (and older) Jack Black? Not sure why this occurs to me
For once i actually LIKE the the font and general layout, pity about the picture.
Is it an actual conan book?
I always associated Conan with the Broadsword or Longsword (although ive only read the R.Jordan ones). those are more like daggers.
December 7th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Broadsword, longsword, dagger, dirk. It’s not how big it is it’s what you do with it etc etc snurk fnarr
December 7th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
And for the record (and much more appropriately) I think Conan looks much more like renowned Italian defender and slayer of men Gattuso than he does like Jack Black.
This cover’s getting better and better the more we talk about it . . .
December 7th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
I don’t want to tell you what happened when I googled images for Gattuso… Lets just say men were never meant to have communal showers.
If this Conan put his hair into some sort of pony-tail he might be… do I dare say, Zardoz. Google image that one if you dare. 😛
My mind will never be the same. I can’t unthink it! gahhhhh!
December 9th, 2009 at 4:55 am
Campest. Monster-Giant-Death-Snake. Ever.
April 29th, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Re: CSA’s post…
Yes, it is, though many Conan purists, on realising who the authors are, promptly scream that it is not canon..
Basically, a bored, 50 year old, King Conan decides to abdicate the throne of Aquilonia, in favour of his son, to find out who is behind the release of a vicious plague…
Calling in a couple of favours, he equips a ship & sets sail, only to be attacked by a galley with a Kraken insiginia, who Conan recognises, from his long hours studying the Aquailonian Royal Archives, to be from the believed mythical state of Atlantis, (which is a thinly disguised Aztec Empire, located in Central America…).
Conan captures the galley after a battle involving him versus the single magic using priest, (who summons a snake like creature, i.e a magic anaconda, which Conan has to fight, hence the cover), while the priest is trying to destroy the contents of a silver box…
After killing the “snake” & priest, Conan manages to retrieve a chart & a compass analogue from the box, before scuttling the galley…
However, when approaching the East Coast of Atlantis, the ship is attacked by a second galley, who use the fantasy equivalent of “stun grenades” on the ship’s crew…
As a result, the entire crew is captured with the exception of Conan, who is knocked overboard, during the first minute of the attack…
Conan however, manages to swim ashore, where he meets a woman who over the period of a couple of days, while he recovers, manages to tell him about the situation concerning the plague (basically, it’s a magical plague, designed by the “corrupt, power hungry priests” ™ to soften up the “eastern barbarians” in preparation for a war of conquest, intended to supply a steady supply of foreign sacrifices to their gods…).
Realising that his crew is going to be the first of these sacrifices, he goes to the nearest “city”, finds & kills a priest in the dead of night, takes his robes, disrupts the ceremonial sacrifice, by killing the high priest in hand to hand combat on top of a pyramid, releases the rest of his crew, & essentially overthrows the city-state in question…
At the end of the book, Conan muses that he’s “going to like it here…”.
November 10th, 2010 at 9:56 am
Can someone find me a blue-eyed (or is it purple-eyed) snake with human-type eyes? I’d be rich showing it at DBacks shows here…
January 23rd, 2012 at 2:42 pm
“Yes, it is, though many Conan purists, on realising who the authors are, promptly scream that it is not canon..”
If it wasn’t written by Robert E. Howard, it is not canon. This is the official stance of CPI, it is the stance as put forward by Rusty Burke’s Purist Manifesto, and considering how often the books by succeeding authors contradict each other, it’s the only stance that makes sense.
However, one shouldn’t mistake the purist position as being anti-pastiche, simply that anything not written by the original author should not be considered on equal footing with the original stories. Conan stories by other authors are fine so long as they are treated and marketed separately from Howard.
January 25th, 2012 at 1:08 pm
That’s no snake — that’s what Michael Jackson looks like without makeup.
November 20th, 2013 at 9:53 pm
Just what is the most significant snake, I would like to be aware of for homework?
November 21st, 2013 at 11:14 am
@Kate. I don’t think snakes get more significant than this.
January 6th, 2014 at 4:56 am
From the Evil overlord list
34: I will not turn into a snake. It never helps.
You could expand that to add “I will never summon a snake – it doesn’t help either.”
January 7th, 2014 at 9:03 am
Jim Henson’s early design for Miss Piggy was quickly rejected by the workshop.
August 12th, 2015 at 5:21 pm
One feels for some reason that this is an extremely awkward snake. Probably doesn’t get invited to a lot of snake parties. Mostly stays at home and indulges its hobby of collecting Snakemon cards. Then one day a smell man in a loin cloth busts into his lair and stabs it. As it lays on the ground bleeding awkwardly the snake thinks to itself, thank god it put all its cards in protective sleeves.
August 27th, 2015 at 3:10 am
To add to the litany of bad snake jokes:
Why does it look like it’s going to pass a hairball any second now?
September 28th, 2015 at 10:31 pm
This is very similar to another book where Conan, down on his luck, takes a job handling a mop at the local grocer’s. It was called “Conan of the Aisles.”
September 28th, 2015 at 11:08 pm
When he received a promotion to Records, he became Conan of the Files.
September 29th, 2015 at 11:49 am
“I have had it with these motherfucking snakes in this motherfucking cave!”
..or could this be a plain? I can’t tell.
July 22nd, 2018 at 7:35 pm
Hm.
A bored 50-year-old Conan, you say? That means he’s been King of Aquilonia for a couple of decades or more, right?
That’s a lot of time on the throne, if you get my drift. Wink wink, nudge nudge….
That would make him Conan of the Piles, wouldn’t it?
July 23rd, 2018 at 2:39 am
@Hammy – After too many years at his paper-pushing day job he ended up: Conan of the Files
July 23rd, 2018 at 9:09 pm
The cover art jogged a memory. Looking up the plot summary on Wikipedia, I realized that I had owned and read this book, even did some fan art for it … and then forgot it absolutely.
I’m with Al Harron: If it wasn’t written by Robert E. Howard, it is not canon.
It’s like the work of another Conan — Arthur Conan Doyle. If a Sherlock Holmes story wasn’t written by Doyle, it’s not canon.
July 23rd, 2018 at 9:19 pm
Oh, and I just want to add …
The Conan That Came to Sarnath!
… wait …