Picture Conan the Barbarian: a man who has spent ninety years of publication history carving his way through serpent cults, decadent sorcerers, and one very memorable resurrected lizard in a lost jungle city, squaring off against a dragon.

A real one. Wings. Fire. Ancient, sentient, and very much on purpose. It’s never happened. Not really. Not in the way you’re imagining it.

That changes on May 13, when Titan Comics launches Conan and Dragonero #1, the first issue of a seven-part English-language adaptation of a crossover that originally premiered at Italy’s Lucca Comics & Games in 2022 and ran as a three-issue series in 2023.

On paper, it’s a team-up but, in practice, it’s something stranger: two fundamentally different traditions of fiction – the pulp, cosmic-horror sword-and-sorcery Robert E. Howard built in the 1930s, and the post-Tolkien, institutional high fantasy that’s dominated European comics for decades – sharing a panel and working out their differences in steel.

If the name Dragonero means nothing to you, you’re exactly who this piece is for.

Who Is Dragonero? Meet Ian Aranill and the World of Erondár

Dragonero debuted in 2007 as a standalone graphic novel from Sergio Bonelli Editore, the same Italian publishing house behind Tex and Dylan Dog, institutions that have shaped European comics for over half a century. The response was strong enough that Bonelli expanded it into an ongoing monthly in 2013. Nearly a decade and a half in, it’s one of the biggest fantasy franchises in Italian comics.

Its setting is a continent called Erondár. There’s an Empire holding the center, elves and orcs moving through its politics, and a guild of engineers called the Technocrats building balloon-airplanes and automatic ballistas alongside the magic. It’s clock-punk stitched into high fantasy, like Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbook running parallel to the spellbook.

Its protagonist is Ian Aranill, an Imperial Scout sent to the Empire’s worst corners to handle the things nobody else can. He doesn’t work alone. Ian’s core crew includes Gmor, a fiercely loyal orc; Sera, an elf with deep ties to the natural world; and his sister Myrva, a Technocrat who fights with firearms and specialty ammunition instead of a sword. He’s also the last of the Varliedarto, an old bloodline of specialized dragon hunters. Think of it less as a hobby and more as a job description with a high mortality rate.

What earned him the name Dragonero was a single fight where he killed a black dragon (hence the name of the series being Dragonero: Italian for black dragon). During the kill, he accidentally swallowed its blood. For most people in Erondár, drinking dragon blood, which is magically live, would be fatal. In Ian’s case, his sword, bathed in the same blood, turned permanently black. And somewhere in his physiology, a switch got installed.

Which is to say: everything that makes him formidable is downstream of the dragon he killed.

What Are Dragons in Dragonero’s World?

The dragons of Erondár are the archetype you grew up with. Wings. Fire. Ancient intelligence behind the eyes. They are saturated with magic down to the marrow, which makes them apex predators of both the food chain and the arcane one.

Because of this, killing one is less of a combat problem and more of a cosmological event. A dragon’s blood is live enough to kill the drinker or remake him. Its bone is dense enough to take color and property from the magic inside it. Its death warps whatever it touches on the way out, from steel, to stone, to the man standing over the body.

This is why the Varliedarto exist as a distinct lineage in the first place. You don’t send a regular soldier after a dragon, because a regular soldier can’t survive the kill even when the kill goes right. Ian’s bloodline exists because dragons are a problem that rewrites the people who solve them.

That’s the framework he carries into every fight. It’s also the framework he’s about to carry somewhere it doesn’t apply.

Are There Dragons in Conan the Barbarian?

Kind of. 

Howard built the Hyborian Age against the grain of mythic fantasy. There are no elven kingdoms, no dwarven halls under the mountains, no wyrms circling the spires at dusk. Magic exists, but it’s rare, decadent, and almost always in the hands of something you’d rather not meet. The world is pseudo-historical, morally filthy, and closer to Lovecraft than to Tolkien.

In the Hyborian Age, a dragon is a prehistoric horror pulled out of the ground by dark magic, or it’s stitched onto an enemy flag. Nothing more. Nothing with wings. Nothing Ian Aranill would recognize as the thing he’s spent his life hunting.

The closest thing to a dragon in the entire Conan canon shows up in Red Nails, Howard’s final Conan story, serialized in Weird Tales in 1936. Conan and the pirate Valeria are pushing through the jungle toward the lost city of Xuchotl when they run into the thing the text explicitly calls a “Hyborian Dragon.”

It is not a dragon. Not the one you’re thinking of.

It’s a prehistoric saurian – something closer to a dinosaur than anything with wings – that Xuchotl’s ancient inhabitants reanimated through necromancy and set loose in the jungle as a kind of forgotten security system. Conan calls it a dragon because he has no other word for it. He’s never seen a dinosaur. Nobody in the Hyborian Age has. The term ‘dragon’ is just the closest thing his world’s mythology gives him to describe a thing that shouldn’t exist.

It has an impervious hide, it moves with incredible speed, and it possesses the primordial wrongness of a thing that should have stayed buried. Conan, for all his strength, can’t cut through it. He has to outthink it. Which is, in about one page, the entire Cimmerian thesis: raw power is never enough, wits finish the fight.

Then there’s The Hour of the Dragon, Howard’s only full-length Conan novel. Despite the title, there isn’t a single dragon in it. The “dragon” is the banner of Nemedia, the rival kingdom marching on Conan’s Aquilonia. The “hour” is the moment that banner flies over conquered territory. Howard reached for the most evocative word in fantasy – dragon – and used it to mean empire, armies, and political annihilation rather than point to a creature.

Which means, in the context of this crossover, something extraordinary is about to happen. In Conan’s world, dragons are myths in the same way they’re myths in ours. They’re the stuff of campfire stories, they’re shapes on old flags. They’re just words that are used to scare children and name empires. Conan has never seen one. He has no reason to believe they’re real. And he’s about to walk into a world where they are.

What Is the Conan the Barbarian x Dragonero Crossover?

The plot of this story is clean, old-school sword-and-sorcery: a dragon, a theft of mystic gems, a primordial demon waiting to be woken, and Tarantia – the jewel of Aquilonia – sitting directly in the blast radius. This is high-fantasy machinery powering pulp stakes.

The big question being asked in this crossover is whether or not both characters survive contact with the biggest threats of each other’s genre.

Conan lands in Erondár and faces the mythic dragon he was, by design, never supposed to meet. One has to wonder if the Cimmerian still works when you drop him into the exact high-fantasy furniture Howard spent his career refusing.

Ian crosses the other way and finds himself in a world without his Empire, his Technocrats, or the institutional scaffolding that gives Erondár its shape. Similarly, one has to wonder if Ian Aranill still works when you strip out the whole institutional lattice that has helped him survive dragons this long.

Regardless of the answer, throughout the story all that they can both rely on is simple steel, superstition, and sorcery that was old when history started.

The main cover comes from Roberto De La Torre: a name any current Conan reader will already know. The script is co-written by Stefano Vietti and Luca Enoch, the two creators who launched Dragonero back in 2007, with Lorenzo Nuti handling interior art and color.

Together, this creative powerhouse delivers on a nearly century-long fantasy of all sword-and-sorcery enthusiasts to see the legendary barbarian tackle a titan that’s even bigger than he is.

We sat down with the creators to talk about how they built this collision, covering topics spanning from how you write Conan’s first reaction to a real dragon, to what happens when you strip Ian of every advantage Erondár gives him, to why this crossover took nearly two decades of Dragonero history to earn. 

Conan and Dragonero #1 arrives May 13 from Titan Comics.