Saturday, February 18, 2017

Four one-shot Conan digests


Apart from the numbered digest-sized issues in the regular run of the Conan the Barbarian series, to the best of my knowledge, there were only four other digest-sized one-shot editions of Conan comics published by Yaffa/Page Publications:

King Conan #1 (cover price $0.70);


King Conan NN (cover price $0.75) - a reprint of King Conan #1;


Untamed World of Conan (cover price $0.75) - a retitled reprint of Conan the Barbarian #2;


The Legend of Conan NN (cover price $0.75) - a retitled reprint of Conan the Barbarian #3;


I confess I haven't physically crosschecked the contents of the last two digests with their respective parent issues, but given the covers and the track record of  Yaffa/Page inhouse reprints it's a safe assumption that the digests are direct reprints of the larger format issues of the original series.

Given that #2 and #3 of Conan the Barbarian earned retitled unnumbered digest editions one might assume that a similar reprint Conan the Barbarian #1 exists. However, Conan the Barbarian #1 was reprinted as Conan the Barbarian #11 of that series. In fact, the publication of Conan the Barbarian #11 as a regular-sized issue ended the run of digest-sized instalments of the Conan the Barbarian series. This is a pattern I've noticed in quite a few other Yaffa/Page series. There are exceptions, but it is nevertheless a quite well-established pattern, which I intend to return to in future blog posts.

The King Conan #1 issue listed above may be numbered but I don't believe there was a second issue, even thought it appears it was projected as a series.

Having said all that, there may indeed be more Conan digests, but I haven't come across any others to date.

2 comments:

James said...

I'm not aware of anything else, but I don't collect these and don't have much knowledge. One thing I'm not clear about from you post is exactly which of these issues are pocket size and which are full size. It is almost impossible to tell from a scan alone. Could you be specific and I'll make sure AusReprints is accurate.

spiros xenos said...

James, all four of these issues are digest editions.