Kurt Busiek on Conan

-At the time of this interview, Conan has been coming out for about eighteen months. How do you remain passionate about the material and do you still feel excitement for what lies ahead? 

It would be hard NOT to be passionate about this material -- not only is Conan a terrific, passionate, visceral character who's fun to write, but I get to work with Cary Nord, Dave Stewart, Greg Ruth and Rich Starkings, who do such a beautiful job that it'd be great working with them even if we were doing Jell-O Man or Tales of Chartered Accountancy. Getting to work with a crew like this AND doing it on a book like this -- that's just the best.

And one of the things I like most about Conan is the grand sweep of his life -- the way he changes and grows and does different things over time. He's got no Batcave to return to, no coffeehouse to hang out in -- he just keeps moving, encountering new things. Right now, we're playing with Conan's life as a thief, but we won't have time to get into a rut with it before he's off to the next thing, as a mercenary soldier, and then as a pirate. With those kinds of changes to look forward to, it's easy to stay jazzed about it.
 
-We're coming up on your adaptation of one of Howard's most popular Conan stories,
The Tower of the Elephant. Can you tell us a bit about your approach to adapting this classic bit of the Conan mythos? Is it at all daunting presenting this in comic form? 

It's a bit daunting, yeah -- not only because it's such a strong story, but because it's been adapted by Roy Thomas twice, once with Barry Smith, once with John Buscema, so there's a pretty high bar set on this one.

But it's also a powerful, visual story with a lot of drive and momentum, so at least half the job's done for me, and I just need to hang on and not screw it up while translating it from prose to comics. I have the advantage of a larger canvas than Roy and company -- I get to take three issues to fit it all in, which gives us room for the action to be big and bold, and the nuance and texture of it to come through.

The first thing I did was outline the whole thing, breaking the story down into pages and panels, looking for the places we needed a big visual, or where I needed to take some of Howard's narration and expand it, dramatizing it on the page with dialogue and action. Once I had all three issues broken down, I was confident that it'd all pace out well, and from there it was just a matter of doing it, of adapting what can be adapted, expanding what needs to be expanded, making the scene transitions visual, choosing where to stick with REH's narrative and where to back off and let the art carry it ... it can be a juggling act, but it's a lot of fun.
 
-An upcoming story adaptation (Hall of the Dead) is based on notes from an unpublished Howard story. Can you tell us a bit about the story and how you approached piecing it together to create a cohesive narrative? 

Well, I'm still finishing TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT, at this point, so I haven't actually adapted HALL OF THE DEAD yet. But I got together with Scott Allie recently, and we hashed out the beginnings of the adaptation -- how many issues it'll take (two) and what else needs to be done around it, to set it up and then to roll out of the end of it into new stuff that all works together as a coherent arc.

As it turns out, there's good stuff to set up -- it starts with Conan being chased by the Zamorian army because he's been so much trouble as a thief, so we get to show how that comes about -- and good stuff to build on, as well. By the time of the next adaptation, ROGUES IN THE HOUSE, some major changes have happened -- Conan's teamed up with a character from HALL, and they've had a successful run as thieves together ... or at least, successful for a while. So we get to build stories on that, bringing the two characters together, forging a partnership, and getting them into big trouble. Lots to work with.
 
-Tell us a bit about how you structure your Conan fill-in issues? Do you plan ahead for the stories they contain and how they might tie in to the bigger story structure? Do they allow you to explore areas the main arc does not? 

We do different kinds of fill-in issues. The "Born On the Battlefield" ones, which Greg Ruth does the art for, are a separate story arc unto themselves, one that plays out as single-issue stories but will come together, when they're all done, as chapters in a unified story, showing how Conan grew up, how he came to be what he is and why he set out on his journeys. So those all add up to a kind of sprawling origin story, and the audience seems to welcome that.

But we need other fill-ins as well, to give Cary and Dave time to do what they do as well as they do it. And there, we want to do stories that matter, stories that the audience will never think of as filler, as just something cobbled together to fill space. So in some, we get to play to an artist's strengths and see a story you wouldn't get without them, as with Bruce Timm's short piece in #18 or the all-combat story Rafael Kayanan is working on for us for a future issue. For some, we tie in to the main story in different ways -- as with #18 again, and John Severin's beautiful story that, while it doesn't focus on Conan, picks up a thread from an earlier story and sets things up that'll affect the main story again, when Conan gets out to Turan. And Tim Truman will be working on a two-parter that does more with the Prince and the Wazir, characters who we have big plans for, but who haven't been explored much yet -- that's something we can do that'll build off something the readers are interested in, in a way that can step back from the main storyline and give us another look at Conan, and start to answer some questions that have been simmering since #0.

And we've even got a special one-issue story planned for Robert E. Howard's centennial next June, which seems like the ideal occasion to try something special and different to mark the occasion. Scott's looking for the perfect artist for that one at the moment.

So we take a number of different approaches, but common to them all is that we want to make even the fill-in issues something special, something that tells a story the audience wants to see but wouldn't fit into the main storyline yet, or that stands apart as a unique and striking work. Something that makes waiting another month for the main story worth it, as opposed to something that just has to be endured.