Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Tag: Thulsa Doom

Aaron Lopresti — Lost Beauty

Original Art and The Artists

Unused Cover, Sword of Red Sonja: Doom of the Gods #1, October 2007

In an age of variant covers, exclusive covers, incentive covers, et al, sometimes a cover simply gets lost in shuffle.

It happens. (Take it from a former publisher. It definitely happens.)

Case in point: This stunning Red Sonja cover art was scheduled for Sword of Red Sonja: Doom of the Gods #1, got shuffled around and by the time the mini-series was complete, had not been published. I’m sure it didn’t help that another artist turned in a similar composition for a later issue.

I had a chance to catch up with Aaron last month and he thinks it may have appeared in a later trade collection or elsewhere at some point, but he couldn’t swear to it. And neither one of us could find it.

So, unpublished until we hear further. (Bonus points for the Marvel cover paper — all covers look better on that board, even if they weren’t actually produced by Marvel.)

All four published Lopresti covers from the original mini-series.

John Buscema & Tony DeZuniga — Skull On The Seas

Original Art and The Artists

Savage Sword of Conan #191, October 1991

Roy Thomas returns to Conan for the first time in 10 years, and partners with superstar artist John Buscema, pretty much picking up where the pair left off in terms of innovative and exciting Conan stories.

In addition to astonishing talent, Buscema could be very productive in terms of his total output — in this stretch of Conan he is providing layouts and rough pencils only, freeing him up for other projects. Here Tony DeZuniga provides some nice finishing touches for John. (I think here you can see John’s obvious handiwork, which was not always the case with DeZuniga inks.)

Lots of ink — as it were — has been spilled on who was Buscema’s best embellisher on Conan.  See here, here, and here for illustrative discussions.

My opinions have varied over time, and sometimes from issue to issue. The debate itself is fun.

And the talking skull? Spoiler alert: It belongs to King Kull’s arch nemesis Thulsa Doom. (In fairness, Thulsa eventually gives Conan much grief as well.)