The Conan comics by Ablaze are a fascinating alternative to the fully licensed titles featuring Robert E. Howard’s iconic barbarian. You see, Howard’s stories are now public domain, but the rights to Conan the Barbarian are not.

To get around this, Ablaze call the character ‘The Cimmerian’ in their comic titles, referencing Conan’s homeland. As you can see from my Superman-homaging cover of The Cimmerian: Red Nails #1, even that part of the title has been removed!

Red Nails is a classic Conan story, and Ablaze present the first chapter here in comic book form, followed by the same part of the story in its original text format, by Robert E. Howard.

The story itself sees Conan accompanied by female warrior Valeria, making their way through a huge forest, encountering a dragon and then a stone city which initially seems deserted…

The painted artwork, by Olivier Vatine and Didier Cassegrain, is gorgeous, and the action scenes look fantastic. Particularly the more bloody panels, which are very effectively rendered (and the creature design is phenomenal too).

The comic was initially published in French, written by Régis Hautiére, and it’s a fantastic adaptation of the original story.

Speaking of which, though it’s a clever touch to have the original story serialised alongside the graphic adaptation, the text is so ridiculously small that it’s borderline unreadable for me. It’s definitely nice to have, and I understand the need to try and squeeze it into the page count of the comic without adding undue cost to the production, but it’s a shame that it had to be so restricted in size!

Still, this 2020 adaptation is a good read overall, and as I’ve been reading lots of Conan stuff recently (Titan Comics have an extensive range of current Conan titles I’ve been digging into quite heavily), this was a good find in the £1 box at Southampton Comics!

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