Kull the Conqueror: A King Comes Riding

[@crawdad19141]

The Severin's defined the look of Kull for me. What an amazing long and prolific career they had! I think you could do an entire video just on Johns work alone, across so many titles and genres. Horror, humor, war, westerns superhero fantasy, he literally did it all and even as he aged his work never diminished in quality. I especially liked his work on Cracked and Mad, doing parodies of movies and tv shows.

[@glockensig]

Michael .... descendant of an exiled Atlantean?? Maybe that's why Roger is attracted to you!😂

[@IsmaelSaeed-ox9ls]

Hello Michael Hello. I have every Kull Omnibus at home, as well as the Solomon Kane Omnibus. Roy Thomas is a true genius . Thanks Michael and Roger for this cool video.

[@jasonsantos3037]

I hope Kull gets his own Comic book series again.

[@michaelk.vaughan8617]

@@jasonsantos3037 me too.

[@GrammaticusBooks]

Great stuff Michael! I have the first couple issues of Kull the Conqueror but that Omnibus looks like a must have! You keep costing me money sir! (in a good way of course 😄)

[@waltera13]

Imma Kull Booster! SEVERINS!!!!

[@RichardFay]

I first encountered Kull in a paperback (I think by Lancer), which had a great cover by Roy G. Krenkel. I completely agree about "The Shadow Kingdom". You probably already know this, but for anyone who doesn't - Howard wrote a Kull story "By This Axe I Rule"; it didn't sell, so he rewrote it as "The Phoenix on the Sword", which was the very first Conan story. Without Kull,, we never would have had Conan.

[@patricktilton5377]

The first appearance of Red Sonja in Marvel's CONAN comic -- drawn by Barry Smith -- involved a shape-shifting diadem that turned into a serpent, and the trick to getting it to turn back was to say the magic phrase "Ka Nama Kaa Lajerama!" -- which Roy Thomas got from "The Shadow Kingdom" story involving King Kull. Gotta hand it to Roy, he knew what he was doing when he wrote Marvel's adaptations of REH, tying it all together as he helped to fill in the blanks between Conan's adventures. Wouldn't it be great if someone could address the United Nations general assembly (or some similar such gathering of VIPs) and shout out "KA NAMA KAA LAJERAMA!!!" . . . and for the utterance of that magic phrase to expose a bunch of 'em -- maybe even all of 'em -- as a bunch of secret Lizard People, in some kind of David Icke conspiracy-bonkers wet-dream? 🤪

[@MysteryandMayhem-gr7nn]

I have a lot of those original Kull comics and the Dark Horse reprints of the Marvel stories. I was a fan of the work of John Severin in those early issues. Great stuff!

[@andrewmacdonald3667]

Steve will be disappointed that you didn’t cover the Ploog issues.

[@robpetersen87]

Pulp readers were so strange and fickle as far as which characters they connected with. It seems obvious that Kull was less loved that Conan because, as you said, he was more brooding and less worldly than the very fun Conan, yet Khlit the Cossack was (in his time) more popular than either of them, and he's an even stranger and less typical hero than Kull! Regardless, I think the Kull stories were among Howard's very best.

[@AndrewBuckleBookReviews]

Love those books, got the two Kull omnis as well as a mix of B&W and Kull comics and also Creatures On The Loose. Great video as ever

[@chrismarcks5571]

Excellent review! As an early fan of Conan and Kull in my youth, I own the original Kull comics along with this Omnibus.

[@ellesse3862]

Read only a handful of issues as they were scarce, was lucky to get the Dark Horse reprint collections, five volumes of the Chronicles of Kull and two chunky black & white volumes of Savage Sword of Kull. Great comics for fans of that genre and Robert E Howard fans. Those omnibus covers are beautiful, my favourite is the one with Kull and the tiger.

[@Guerreroazteca63]

Really love the way and form of your reviews. Your videos became my weekly 'literature news channel'. Greetings from Germany!

[@RobynHoodeofSherwood]

The art work is beautiful!

[@russworks2882]

Like many artists of their generation, both John Severin and Wally Wood were big admirers of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant. If you look at the early years of Prince Valiant you can really see it. Kull's world was so much more beautifully realized than Conan's in the comics, and I think Foster has a lot to do with that. Wood also did a nice series of sword and sorcery stories in the early issues of Marvel's Tower of Shadows.

[@gavinmcintosh5716]

Kull and the Barbarians was a great ,if short lived, mag. Hmm, I see a pattern here. Great to see him show up in the current Conan comics from Titan. 😊

[@HectorPlasmic]

“Slay, Kull, slay!”

[@DanielsBibliophagy]

I hope this reprints. This looks fun.

[@PhillipBurger-x4g]

Creatures on the Loose? Why, they did an excellent adaptation of Thongor of Lemuria. Roy Thomas really Lin Cartered up the place with that one!

[@nooctip]

Dust Jacket? Fool! No dust jacket can contain KULL!

[@carstenmaat4653]

They included the killing of the king of Valusia in the Kull movie with Kevin Sorbo. Which was an okay movie with a great score by Joel Goldsmith.

[@charliedogg7683]

Kull is definitely more of a brooding philosopher than Conan and Howard used the character to delve into the very nature of human existence in such stories as "The Mirrors Of Tuzun Thune". The Severins are, individually, wonderful artists and together they made a phenomenal team. They should certainly be much better appreciated today. I've always enjoyed the way Marvel in the Bronze Age wove tales of the Serpent Crown and the Serpent Men into their superhero comics, quietly bringing their versions of Kull, Conan, Red Sonja and Solomon Kane into the Marvel Universe without detracting from what Howard wrote.

[@MagusMarquillin]

I was just looking at some Bernie Wrightson illustraions as I read the Stand, eerie stuff. It's interesting history - not sure if it's worth the shelf space for me, the art is cool but I'd rather just reread the story as prose that evokes better images, the snake men are more then snake heads on men bodies, and the Picts are a bit too white and don't seem to stand out much from the Atlantians or Valusians - like the early Conan, there too much white guys in loin cloths. Never the less, I'm interesting about what else is in there, and how much the Kull comics went beyond what Howard wrote, and how well that went. I saw a little bit of that in an issue of Savage Sword of Conan, and seems there was a SS of Kull too.

[@unstopitable]

Wasn't Wally Wood the guy who bought a gigantic photocopying/mimeograph machine, put it in his home, and then, whenever he could, copy his own work so that he could repurpose it to meet his superhuman workload? (This is was waaaay before home computers.) Seems like I remember someone else mentioning this. Anyway, cheers!

[@russworks2882]

He actually built a massive tracing machine that artists used back then called an Art-o-graph and had an encyclopedic swipe file. He did tend to swipe his own stuff as well as others', but he mostly used assistants, from what I've read, to get the images in pencil down on the page, utilizing the Art-o-graph. This freed him up to concentrate on the inking and, no matter the source, once he inked it. it looked like Wood art. As you say, it was the way to accelerate the production speed back when comics pay was so lousy. I think there's evidence of photocopy technology being used on his later strips like Cannon and Sally Forth, but once it became easy to have access to copy or stat machines that was one of the tools many artists used on daily strips. You just photocopy (or simply cut out) a car from a newspaper ad and paste it down on your art and that saves you a panel's worth of labor.

[@unstopitable]

@@russworks2882 Yeah, I seemed to remember something like that. I ine could it all photocopying machine/mimeograph b/c I didn't know what else to call it. Pretty insane to do that back in the day. But I bet it helped. Cheers.

[@samael2112]

Wonder if Gene Wolfe borrowed from Kull... In Shadow of the Torturer, Severian gets exiled after he helps a woman to commit suicide so she doesn't have to be tortured.

[@thekeywitness]

Cool, REH is the man. I just wish they’d made Kull look different from Conan. Like, a beard would have helped.

[@luciferfernandez7094]

I might be wrong but I think Thomas originally pitched Kull as a comic before Conan - BWS drew some pages of that and for whatever reason ditched it and made Conan instead

[@redwawst3258]

😊

[@taotzu1339]

I never got into Kull as he and Brule reminded me too much of The Lone Ranger and Tonto. I never much cared for the whole Old West cowboys and Indians struggles. I am now reading some Kull, but still avoiding westerns altogether.