I first encountered John Buscema and Conan the Barbarian at the exact same time. At Christmas in 1973 a favorite aunt gave me a stack of comic books and among them was Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian issue #36, written by Roy Thomas and drawn by ‘Big’ John Buscema, as Stan Lee nicknamed him. I have never been the same.

I was eleven, and up until that point I’d been reading mostly DC Comics with solid art by guys like Curt Swan and Irv Novick. Buscema was about to take me to school. His Conan was a massive powerful brute who stalked through the pages looking like he’d be glad to rip your head off. Buscema’s figures had so much weight and mass they looked almost solid.

I was so taken with Buscema’s rendition of the character that when I actually started reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories a couple of years later, it was Big John’s version I saw in my mind’s eye. That is still true to this day. Buscema’s Conan is the yardstick by which I measure all other artists’ work on the character. No one has replaced him in all these years.

Of course when I first discovered Buscema’s art, I didn’t know he was already a legend in comics for his work on The Avengers, Sub-Mariner, The Silver Surfer, and others. All that would come later for me.

According to Big John (born December 11, 1927), his interest in drawing began when he saw the popular newspaper comic strips of the day and tried to draw Popeye. He copied the strips over and over. This led to an interest in adventure strips like Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and most important, Prince Valiant. Valiant’s creator Hal Foster would be a major influence on Buscema throughout his career, and on one issue of Conan the Barbarian in particular, but we’ll get to that.

Buscema’s original plan was to become a commercial artist, but the first work he was offered was at Timely Comics in 1948 by editor Stan Lee. Buscema worked on titles like True Adventures and Man Comics. Unfortunately, he had started in the comics field just as it was entering a post-war slump and the Timely Bullpen was disbanded less than two years later.

Buscema continued to do some freelance work for Timely and for other publishers like Ziff-Davis, Hillman and Quality, but comics work was still drying up and in the late 1950s, he left comics to freelance in the commercial art field. Over the next eight years he would do advertising art, storyboards, and all types of illustration work. You’ve seen Mad Men? Like that.

Buscema brought all that training and experience with him when he returned to Timely, now rechristened as Marvel Comics, in 1966. His first assignment was drawing Nick Fury, and he was supposed to be working over Jack Kirby’s layouts, but Buscema says, “I erased every panel and redrew it, because I couldn’t draw like Kirby.”

Still over time, as Buscema moved to drawing the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, he studied Kirby’s compositions and dynamic figure work and absorbed it into his own approach, basically creating the Marvel house style for the next couple of decades. The power and foreshortening of Jack Kirby, with more realistic human anatomy and “prettier’ people.

The only problem was, Buscema absolutely hated drawing superheroes. In a 1978 interview he said, “I hate it with a passion. I hated doing the Avengers, and I hate doing any superhero.”

Not one to mince words, our John. So what did he like? From the same interview, “Conan is my favorite character. In fact I recently asked Roy Thomas, or rather I told Marvel and Roy, I’d like to do Conan exclusively. It’s the only project in comics that I’ve ever done that I really enjoy.”

And it shows. Buscema’s first published issue of CtB was #25. In his first few issues, the lessons Big John had learned from Kirby were still evident. Though not quite as bombastic, the art still has a certain superhero feel to it, not dissimilar to his work on Thor. It didn’t take long though before John’s earlier, more naturalistic approach began to take over. The figures became more classically realistic, though still bigger than life.

The first artist on CtB, Barry Windsor Smith, was popular with many fans, but Buscema’a art proved more popular with readers in general and sales of Conan the Barbarian improved dramatically. For a time, the color Conan comic would become one of Marvel’s Top sellers.

Marvel gave the Cimmerian his own black and white magazine, The Savage Sword of Conan, and there, with more pages to spread out and no restrictions from the Comics Code of America, Big John could really cut loose. Working with Roy Thomas, Buscema drew a series of adaptations of REH’s original stories that still stand as the finest visual representations of Conan’s adventures.

They began with a 35 page adaptation of REH’s “Black Colossus,” with sumptuous inks by Alfredo Alcala. The opening page is an amazing piece of detailed inkwork on top of Buscema’s solid pencils. To my mind though, they really hit their stride with SSoC issue #4’s adaptation of “Iron Shadows in the Moon”. The third page is a full-page illustration showing a wild-eyed Conan about to wreak vengeance on a hated enemy. And over the next two pages he does just that.

Which brings me to another aspect of John Buscema’s Conan that I don’t think has ever been equaled, and that was Big John’s ability to show the sheer savagery of the Cimmerian. A big, burly man himself, and a lifelong fan of boxing, Buscema seemed to have an innate feel for hand to hand combat and rage fueled battle.

I mentioned earlier that one particular issue of Conan the Barbarian allowed Buscema to pay homage to his idol, Hal Foster. Roy Thomas orchestrated this. In an essay in the book Barbarian Life: Volume One, Roy talks about his and Buscema’s shared love of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant strip, and how in one sequence from June 1937, Valiant fought what Foster called ‘a giant sea-crocodile’.

Roy says, “Ever since I first saw this strip reprinted in the mid-1960s, I had felt I’d like to see Conan face such a dragon/crocodile.”

Roy wrote a story to set this up and sent Buscema some xeroxed reference from the original strip. Buscema obliged with gorgeous artwork that he both penciled and inked. The ‘dragon’ looked exactly like Foster’s and Big John expertly choreographed a seven-page running battle with the monster. For speed’s sake, comic publishers often had one artist draw the story in pencil and another apply ink with pen and brush. John had some good inkers and bad over the years, but nobody even came close to when he inked his own work. Issue #39’s The Dragon From the Inland Sea is a high point in the color Conan comic.

I could go on about Buscema’s art in general and Conan in specific forever, but I’m running out of word space, so just let me reiterate, Big John Buscema was born to draw Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian. And he did it so well even Crom would approve.

Charles R. Rutledge is the author of Dracula’s Revenge and Dracula’s Ghost, and the co-author of three books in the Griffin and Price series, written with James A. Moore. His short stories have appeared in over 30 anthologies including Fright Train and The Drive-In: Multiplex. Charles occasionally writes the sword and sorcery adventures of his own barbarian warrior, Kharrn.