Issue: Conan: Island of No Return #2
Release Date: July 20, 2011
Writer: Ron Marz
Penciler: Bart Sears
Inker: Randy Elliott
Colorist: Mark Roberts
Cover: Stjepan Sejic
Letterer: Troy Peteri
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
In the shortest miniseries I’ve ever read, the conclusion of Conan’s adventure to the Island of No Return comes swiftly and abruptly to a fairly obvious end.
Can you call a two-issue story a “miniseries”? I guess you can since you can’t call it a one-shot, but this was a strange format with a story that abruptly ended. I’ll be honest, I can’t remember how the first issue ended so the beginning of this issue felt weird and like I was missing a decent-sized sequence of events that would have led up to it. So, in the middle of Conan and the sisters searching the island for the missing treasure, they run into this group of other guys searching the island for the missing treasure. Conan, being smarter than the average barbarian, comes up with a clever plan to get them off the island without killing them so that he and the girls can find the treasure for themselves. It seems to work, and then it’s business as usual with the searching of treasure and the attempting to seduce Conan by each sister.
Obviously, they find the treasure. Of course they do. And, of course, the sisters turn on Conan and make off with some of the treasure. And, of course, he gets out of a slimy situation and makes it out alive. Just because this little tangent from the usual Conan story/title (that’s the feeling I got, I don’t know if it’s fact) was pretty straightforward in the story it told doesn’t mean that this wasn’t an entertaining two issues of comics. You really can’t go wrong with a barbarian story when you stick to the basics. It was fun, Conan got to kill a bunch of people, and it ended with him sailing away laughing. What more could you want from a side quest story?
Rating: 3 / 5 Stars
