The Four Color Media Monitor

Freak Sugar interviewed Zub about his assignments for writing modern Conan tales, and he also told about some of the most infamous liberals he worked with over the years:

Believe it or not, my first professional gig in comics was Conan-related. When I started working at the UDON studio in the spring of 2003 I recolored some old Conan the Barbarian stories in a reprint series Dark Horse put out called The Chronicles of Conan.

12 years later in 2015, I was an established comic writer building my career when Gail Simone asked if I wanted to co-write with her on a Conan-Red Sonja mini-series co-produced by Dark Horse and Dynamite Comics, the first time the two characters had teamed up in over 15 years. We worked with artists Dan Panosian and Randy Green to deliver a sword & sorcery epic that spanned across the lives of both characters. I thought it would be my only chance to ever write Conan and it was a blast.

In 2019 I worked with Mark Waid and Al Ewing on a second Avengers weekly storyline called Avengers: No Road Home. Conan the Barbarian was returning to Marvel and we were asked by editorial to bring him into the mix for this Avengers story. I did my damnedest to weave classic sword & sorcery elements into this superheroic tale and, once again, it was a ton of fun and I thought this would be my last chance to write Conan.

I pitched a Conan solo story to editor Mark Basso at Marvel and that led to a 3-part story in the new Savage Sword of Conan anthology series, a story I called Conan the Gambler.

The Conan rights holders liked the Gambler story so much that they asked if I could team-up Conan with other Robert E. Howard characters, which became the Conan: Serpent War mini-series that brought together Conan, Solomon Kane, Dark Agnes, James Allison (and Moon Knight) into a wild time-spanning tale.

I didn’t realize Jason Aaron was wrapping up his run on Conan the Barbarian and so, once again, what I thought would be my last chance to ever write Conan turned into yet another opportunity. In late 2019 I was offered the chance to write Conan the Barbarian, the flagship title. It was an absolute bucket list project for me, something I never thought I’d get the chance to do.

And those folks sure turned out to be pretty awful, based on their leftist ideological standings, and Zub's a leftist too, unfortunately. Not mentioned is how Aaron capitulated to the woke mob over a skimpy outfit the artist drew for a girl Conan was helping out, and this, for all we know, might've led to the company holding the copyrights on Conan and Red Sonja revoking them altogether. It was, after all, a case of allowing outside sources interfere with the creative direction of the tale at hand. How can anybody expect to tell a good story if so-called oundits are going to come out of nowhere and "wag the dog" as the saying goes?

Contrary to the clichés that have sometimes overshadowed the character over the years, Conan is incredibly smart. He could not survive all this time and conquer all these challenges if he wasn’t. He’s far more than a brute and his most memorable adventures speak to larger concepts around ‘civilization VS savagery’, a theme that still resonates to this day.

That's certainly saying much more than can be said about some of the people Zub's worked with, who don't seem particularly interested in making the for combating modern savagery in the form of Islamic terrorism. So, what's the point then? Many publishers and writers in the USA these days won't address the issue of Islamofascism, if at all, and it's undermined the battle of Civilization vs. Savagery very badly.

FS: If you had one final pitch for your new Conan the Barbarian series, what would it be?

JZ: There will be blood. Blood and steel and seductive stories in an age undreamed of.

Depending how one views this, bloodshed does not a good focus make in an era where there's too much emphasis on violence and too little on romance and/or sex.

Newsarama also interviewed Zub, and tells more of the direction they're taking at a different publishing arm:

Were you able to salvage any of your plans for the Marvel run?

If readers want to get a hint of the kinds of things that we were thinking about for the future of the Marvel run, I did a miniseries called Serpent War, which took vestiges of other Robert E. Howard stories and started to weave them together. It was just scratching the surface of the possibilities. Now we're going to be able to do this on a much bigger stage.

That being said, I'm not trying to recreate what was there. I feel like we've got an even better opportunity now. Everyone on the Marvel book was great, but we're in a different space now. We're not limited in terms of rating on the new book, we're definitely channelling that kind of classic Savage Sword violence.

Again, if this is their foremost emphasis, it's hardly an angle to celebrate. If he wouldn't emphasize a story centered around sex the same way he does bloody mayhem here, that sums up in a nutshell why this doesn't please me.

What are your long term hopes for the book?

I'm in it for the long haul! I know what I'm doing for the first two years and beyond. We're already starting to sort of poke at the edges of it before the book has even launched.

All I want to do is make as much cool stuff as humanly possible. Let's show people why this character endures and why these stories still matter. And not just because of the old stuff, but because we can still play these tunes and surprise you.

You know, any iconic character is difficult to write because it can feel like everything's been played out, but if you do it well, you can still take those ingredients and make something unexpected and cool. I feel very honored to be at the front of this charge and I'm doing everything I can to make it as exciting as possible.

Now that's rich in an era where many iconic creations are hijacked for one-sidedly leftist political agendas. Certainly those owned by conglomerates. I don't ask for "originality", but I certainly do expect entertainment merit, and that's not something Aaron's provided when he goes out of his way to deliver woke lectures. If Zub can prove capable of avoiding the same errors Aaron and Ewing have made, that's fine. But if he's willing to associate with the kind of ideologues who've failed to follow his advice, then his arguments don't have much impact. And even an independent publisher can prove vulnerable to wokeness.

Labels: history, indie publishers, licensed products, marvel comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda