I hope you got a kick out of the John Buscema Conan newspaper strips I’ve been running along the top of the site for the past few weeks. I wanted to emulate the feel of a newspaper page, where if you miss a day it’s gone for good. Sunday pages can be found here.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with the artist as conducted by J. David Spurlock and found in the John Buscema Sketchbook, where it seems that Buscema faced the same problems with the limitation of the strip format that Eisner ran into.

David: You also did the newspaper strip and movie adaptations.

John: I only did seven weeks of the newspaper strip, and then I dropped it because I didn’t want to do it. I penciled and inked seven weeks, and I wasn’t too happy with the format, because the panels were half the size of the panels I was normally used to working on. After I dropped it they gave it to somebody else, and I don’t know what happened to it.

David: Ernie Chan who had been inking a lot of your Conan work took it over. You did some Sunday strips. too.

John: I did a couple. Initially I was excited about the newspaper strip but I wasn’t too happy about the fact that they were paying me my comic book rate. It’s assumed that strips pay more money than comic books. But I figured, “Well, if it clicks, who knows what will happen?” So I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.” They wanted seven weeks in advance, and I started working on it. When I found out the size of the panels, I knew I wasn’t going to continue it, because I couldn’t do anything creative. It was so damn small!

David: I know Al Williamson had the same problem when he was doing Star Wars. He kept complaining to the syndicate about loss of detail, the reproduction was lousy, and their answer was, “Simplify the art!” And he said, “You hired me because you wanted realism, and now you’re telling me to turn it into a cartoon!”

John: The problem in the art world is, the guys who are buying the artwork are not artists, they’re editors, and they often don’t know art from a hole in the ground.

Sketch by Buscema from the back of one of his pages.

In a year of great comics, and even greater comic reprint projects, I’m surprised to find myself leaning toward Dark Horse’s Savage Sword of Conan as my favourite publication of the year, so far.

I’m especially drawn to the depictions of the environment. It’s taking me twice as long as it normally would to get through each book. I find myself stopping at random panels and just drinking in Buscema’s compositions and Alcala’s brushwork. This is as close to the adventure strips of Raymond and Foster as Marvel or DC ever got.

In every interview with the artist that I’ve ever read, Buscema has stated his preference for working on Conan, and it shows. There’s a lot of love put on display here.

All images from the first volume of the collected Savage Sword of Conan. The three volumes released so far this year add up to over 1600 pages of comics, the majority of them by Buscema.