A king who knows when to walk away from the throne is rarer than dragon gold.
April delivers a monument to Conan’s imperial era, brings fifty-year-old sword-and-sorcery back to life in full color, and hands the stage to a younger barbarian-king with something to prove before he ever wore a crown.
Lay your gold on the counter.
Pulp, Restored, in Full Color, with Savage Sword Reforged #4 on April 22
The original Savage Sword of Conan magazine ran in black and white because that’s what let it go places the color comics couldn’t. The art was visceral, the stories were brutal, and the era produced some of the most ferocious Conan imagery in the character’s history.
Savage Sword Reforged is the answer to a question longtime fans have been asking for years: what do those stories look like with modern color technique applied to them? Not sanitized. Not softened. Just the brutal 70s and 80s originals, finally given the color palette they never got.
Issue #4 continues that project. If you haven’t picked up the Reforged line yet, this is as good an entry point as any, as each issue is self-contained, and the craft on display is the kind that makes you want to go hunt down the black-and-white originals and read them back-to-back.
See Kull of Atlantis Before the Crown in KULL – The Undoomed Man on April 28
Robert E. Howard created Kull years before Conan, and the two characters share a bone-deep restlessness, a contempt for comfortable slavery, and a talent for surviving things that should have killed them.
Adam Rose’s The Undoomed Man, part of the new Heroic Legends Series, puts you in the company of a Kull who hasn’t yet become king, who doesn’t know he’s going to become king, and who right now is just a hardened, survival-sharpened barbarian with cruel omens pressing in from every direction and no backup.
Kull is in chains. Someone offers him his freedom on one condition. He has to climb Skull Mountain, find the beast that’s been slaughtering livestock, and come back with its head.
Simple enough.
See Kull at his most elemental when this ships April 28th.
Conan’s 2026 Free Comic Book Day Release is The Tides of the Tyrant King on May 5
Conan thought Thulsa Doom was finished. He was wrong.
The Atlantean necromancer’s power is stirring again, and if the Tyrant-King of Atlantis isn’t stopped, the dead will overtake the living.
Tides of the Tyrant King is a massive jumping-on point for new and returning readers, offered for free and available exclusively on Free Comic Book Day, and engineered to pull anyone who’s been on the fence straight into the current continuity.
Find your nearest participating retailer and mark the date.
The Next Three Tales told in Savage Sword of Conan #14 – Delayed to May 6th
Titan’s black-and-white magazine revival continues to be one of the best things happening in Conan publishing right now: uncensored, anthology-format, and operating completely outside the main color continuity, which means zero homework required to pick it up cold.
Issue #14 runs three stories.
Jim Zub and Ivan Gil deliver a blood-and-sand Conan piece in the brutalist tradition the format was built for.
Joe Pruett and Goran Sudžuka turn the lens on Bêlit, the Queen of the Black Coast, in what’s shaping up to be one of the more intriguing character spotlights the series has run.
And Matthew John closes things out with a prose piece built around the theme of cruel luck which is, when you think about it, the foundational theme of every Conan story ever written. May 6th.
Conan Serves up Carnage in Conan the Barbarian #31 – Delayed to May 27
Issue #30 spent its runtime following Conan’s hunter, the Son of the Tooth: a killer who wears a necklace strung with the teeth of his past victims and tracks his targets by spirit rather than by trail.
In issue #31, the cat-and-mouse ends and the violence begins, and the man delivering that violence on the page is none other than Doug Braithwaite. The delay to May 27th exists because this showdown deserves to look exactly as good as it should. Braithwaite getting the time he needs to execute a confrontation of this weight is simply the right call.
A king who walked away on his own terms, a legend restored in color, and a man who’d be king fighting for his freedom on a haunted mountain.
April is the month this franchise reminds you why it’s been running for fifty years.
Lo Terry
In his effort to help Heroic Signatures tell legendary stories, Lo Terry does a lot. Sometimes, that means spearheading an innovative, AI-driven tavern adventure. In others it means writing words in the voice of a mischievous merchant for people to chuckle at. It's a fun time.
