‘Conan the Barbarian: Frozen Faith’ – Zub, Braithwaite, Rodriguez (Heroic Signatures/Titan Comics)

After leaving Cimmeria filled with wanderlust, a young Conan heads north in search of glory. What he finds in that cold climate will change his outlook forever, setting him on the path that will make him a legend.

It’s taken me a little longer than planned to pick this book up (blame ‘Into the Narrowdark’ but in a good way, that book absolutely grabbed my attention) but I’m thoroughly enjoying Zub’s ‘Conan’ so reading ‘Frozen Faith’ was always going to be a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. And at the risk of repeating myself. It was well worth the read. I’m definitely repeating myself but at this point, I don’t care :o) ‘Conan’ really is in the best of hands with Jim Zub who instinctively gets the character, both in terms of adapting Howard’s stories and in letting Conan search out further new adventures. And Doug Braithwaite’s artwork continues to be just superb, really capturing the essence of Conan himself as well as the wider world that he strides through.

I’ll be honest… I’ve got an ‘interesting’ day brewing at work so when I realized that I’d already covered half of ‘Frozen Faith’ discussing a couple of the individual issues (‘Conan the Barbarian’ #14 & #15), I breathed a little sigh of relief.
You can click Here and have a little bit extra, some quick thoughts on #1 of ‘Battle of the Black Stone’, but all the bits relevant to ‘Frozen Faith’ have been lifted and can be found below…

'The Frost Giant's Daughter' has become one of my favourite 'Conan' stories and as far as the plot goes in this adaptation, I don't have an awful lot more to add to my original thoughts on the story itself. On the whole, Zub stays very faithful to the main thrust of the plot and given that it's Howard, you can't argue with that. We do get a couple of extras though that I think enhance this tale. Now I love Howard's opening, for 'The Frost Giant's Daughter', but I've also got a lot of time for the way that Zub wraps a little background around this. I like background, especially when it's done as well as this. I also appreciated the way that Zub takes a little bit of the edge off Conan coming across like a predator with Atali. Don't get me wrong, Conan is still being led by his, ahem… man parts (look, my eldest daughter has started occasionally visiting the blog) but this time, I got the impression that two games were being played here and that a clash was more or less inevitable.

I will quite happily read comic adaptations of 'The Frost Giant's Daughter' all day, Zub's is definitely one of the better ones.

Reading the whole book though… What I really found interesting to get into was how Zub uses the encounter with Atali to answer the questions that Conan has about faith and where his own god sits in the world. It’s a fair question for Conan to ask; Crom is a ‘hands off’ kind of god, to the extent where it’s reasonable for a Cimmerian child to wonder if he is there at all. Zub introduces the young Conan to the concept of faith and both Zub and Conan come to the swift conclusion that more proof is required. Enter Atali and her father… Conan’s reactions to the supernatural are always worth spending time with and we get a lot more here as Zub uses it to flesh out Conan’s character and give him a little closure on a question that bugged him since he was a child.

Conan is relentless in a lot of ways but I personally have never seen him treat an existential question in the same way that he would grind down an opponent. That’s what we see him do here though and it’s a refreshing approach, but also one that reinforces what Conan has always been. I like that kind of characterization, hopefully there will be more to come in the future.

I shouldn’t have left this book on the shelf as long as I did… I won’t make that mistake when the next volume comes out :o)