Titan Comics and Heroic Signatures have announced Conan the Barbarian: Battle of the Black Stone, a four-part event series that will see Conan of Cimmeria cross paths with other Robert E. Howard creations Solomon Kane and Dark Agnes. Conan the Barbarian ongoing series writer Jim Zub will be joined by Jonas Scharf for this crossover of epic proportions, kicking off September 4.
The first issue will have variant covers by Samwise Didier, Tony Fleecs, Sedat Oezgen, Stuart Sayger, and Gerado Zaffino. It will retail for $3.99
The story synopsis:
“Conan of Cimmeria is haunted by shadows, living nightmares connected to a mysterious eye symbol etched in Black Stone. An unspeakable evil looms over the Hyborian Age and every age connected to it… And it will take more than a lone barbarian to stop its relentless march upon time, space, and sanity.”
According to Jim Zub, Conan the Barbarian: Battle of the Black Stone will touch on story elements seeded across the ongoing series and the Free Comic Book Day special issue.
“Battle of the Black Stone uses story threads we’ve been weaving in right from the start, from last year’s Conan the Barbarian #0 Free Comic Day issue and our entire first year.”
“The mysteries and powers of the Black Stone are one of the pillars I put into my original proposal for the series and, now that we have momentum, we can really go all out in telling this epic tale of pulp-inspired adventure across the ages. Black Stone is a mysterious material that showed up in multiple Robert E. Howard prose stories and we’re using it to link not just Conan’s Hyborian age to Kull’s Thurian age, but other points in time and characters from those eras as well.”
While best known for the creation of Conan the Barbarian, author Robert E. Howard had a prolific career writing stories and poems across multiple genres – including fantasy, horror, westerns, boxing, historical and weird fiction. Some of his other creations include Kull the Conqueror, an Atlantean from an era predating Conan’s Hyperborean Age; and Solomon Kane, a 17th century Puritan adventurer. Dark Agnes (also called Agnes de Chastillon) is a 16th century French swords-woman and is one of Howard’s more obscure characters – only appearing in three stories published decades after the author’s death.
