One of the greatest nights of my life happened in the mid 1980s while attending the San Diego Comic Con. My comic book buddy Scott Williams and I had been collecting original art since 1981. The small group of fellow art collectors at SDC all knew each other. Scott, myself, and the Czarneki brothers were invited to a suite at the Grant Hotel for beers and to look at original art this new-to-us collector was carrying around the Con in his two portfolios. That night at the Grant Hotel I pulled from the portfolios Red Nails, Conan 24, and Frazetta's Squeeze Play. Red Nails and Conan 24 had recently been purchased directly from BWS. As best as I can remember either one or two pages were missing because BWS had previously given them away to a friend. Going through Red Nails one page at a time was a once in a lifetime memory treasure. Since then the book has remained complete and has transferred ownership only two other times. I spoke with the people at Genesis West who produced this gorgeous Archive and they said they considered countless choices of printing and paper and finishes before deciding on the final format. While the glossy format certainly is susceptible to smudging, the beauty in the resolution is impeccable. In the decision to print one page per page instead of a page on the front and the back because they wanted to replicate the experience of looking through a stack of at original art one page at a time. Having gone through the stack of Red Nails originals one page at a time I can attest to the fact that this Archive is as close as that experience can be. Picking out the facing "blow-up" panel was something that they thought would give the reader another focus to go into the page. Kind of like the back and forth the Kayfabe Crew often did on the video. In my dreams we will someday see volume 2.
To address some of your questions, this all first appeared in Marvel's black-and-white Savage Tales issues 2 and 3 (1973, 1974), so, yes, this art was absolutely done with consideration of the monochrome medium. I was nine years old when my older cousin handed them to me, and needless to say my mind was utterly blown. And maybe a year later all of it was reprinted at large scale, in color, in the first Conan Marvel Treasury Edition. As a lifelong fan of this piece, it breaks my heart that I was unaware of this slipcover edition until well after it came out, so for now it remains out of my grasp at an exorbitant collector's asking price. Live and learn.
Did you know someone actually suggested releasing Savage Sword in color? They wanted to add color to all the beautiful black and white artwork. I believe it was someone at Marvel, but I can't remember their name. I may be alone in this, but I felt it was so blasphemous.
I had the honor and pleasure of chatting with Mr. Windsor Smith at length in NY just as Conan #5 had dropped. What a charming, humble guy. Just beginning to stretch his artistic muscles away from the Jack Kirby influence. I mentioned I thought issue #4 was a great leap in detail and drawing confidence. He agreed he was finding his groove as to the kind of artistic approach he wanted. I'll say! I couldn't believe what he did in the issues to follow, especially issue 24 and the B&W stories.
Saw the giant size. Colour version of this Tale. Ffffng amazing. The inside of the City with luminous greens reads the carpet’s tapestry’s etc. and the big pics. Like the throne rooms. Etc. stunning
The first installment in Savage Tales, Barry missed the deadline and had to turn it in with the last page or 2 partially inked (right after Valeria kills that guy wearing the skull and skeleton costume) ... and Roy Thomas had Pablo Marcos finish those pages... Barry didn't miss the deadline on any of the rest of the story. He didn't use any assistants, himself. This was also still a couple of years before The Studio was formed, so, no - - Wrightson and Kaluta weren't hanging around when he drew these pages, though he'd met them at conventions. At the time, Barry was sharing studio space with commercial artist Charles White III (who was mostly an airbrush illustrator) - Barry talks about this time period in his 2 volume art and bio book OPUS, from Fantagraphics.
Do you have any idea of whaterver happened to Volume 3? It never saw the light of day. And it´s too bad because those volumes are a fascinanting reading. I was expecting just an art book and didn´t expect at all to read about all those out of the body experiences that BWS was experiencing during those years, I found it very brave of him to bare himself like this tellling all this to us.
Cost me a fortune but its one of the best purchases I ever made! A real insight into BWS working method - you can even see where he switches from standard nibs to fountain pen nibs! I'm leaving this one to my sons with strict instructions to never sell it (unless the price is silly money lol)
There's some controversy about this in the Artist Edition Discussion thread (great place for advance info, by the way). Some feel that the book was padded out by only printing on the recto and putting in all of the text pages (notice that BWS himself did not participate) to justify the high price. The publisher also had access to the art from the Frost Giant's Daughter and Song of Red Sonja, but held it back to use in a second volume, but the Red Nails book didn't sell enough to do that. There's been some complaints that there could've been a book similar in format and page count to the IDW books using all the material and it would've been more of a sales success at virtually any price. I don't necessarily feel like greed was a major motivation for the decisions that were made (and not made), but Genesis West was considerably less active in promoting and marketing than IDW and there didn't seem to be much of an infrastructure to deal with just getting the thing in front of eyeballs. I still bought it, figuring it would just disappear and maybe never be reprinted. It's still incredible.
I first saw this story in Savage Sword of Conan b&w magazine. Savage Tales had already been canceled so any work for that magazine got published in Savage Sword.
Thanks for featuring this fellas! Classy production. Just wish the art was full bleed with the IDW Artist Edition paper stock, but I'll take what I can get. And I've gotten everything. I've hunted this down every time it's been reprinted/re-colored/re-formatted. Barry Smith's CONAN, & especially RED NAILS (in Savage Tales) is what ultimately inspired me to make my first "real" effort to make comics - buying over-sized bristol board, and seeking out proper pen/ink/brush tools (I share my BWS obsession in the Afterword for The Marvel ART of CONAN the BARBARIAN HC).
Exactly...after being used to the IDW excellent paper stock, the shiny paper really put me off....I love the artwork, but hate the paper. That's why IDW is the best.
Since the chances of me finding this anywhere much less at an affordable price are slim, even more so in light of the Kayfabe effect, I took the poor man's route and did a custom bind of the Barry Windsor-Smith issues of Conan Saga, the black and white magazine size comic similar to the Savage Sword of Conan that came out in the late 80's which reprinted the classic Conan issues from the beginning. I hope Marvel considers producing something similar to this or better yet a Gallery Edition and bringing Windsor-Smith to redo the colors for deluxe paper.
What I would really like to see is a hardcover reprint of the Conan Marvel Treasury Edition as long as the printing preserves BWS's lovely coloring. Maybe the only way to replicate this would be to print on crappy paper, which would be fine with me, or hire someone to ensure that the colors print just like they did in the Treasury Edition. That was one of the finest Old School coloring jobs ever.
Marvel master remasterer is Michael Kelleher. His work is precision perfection. But marvel uses such a crappy see thru paper stock for their overpriced collections. All his hard work is barely noticeable. The 4 Conan treasuries definitely deserved to be collected in a full color gallery edition. With someone taking great care to make sure the paper quality and printing process is of the highest quality. They did a nice job recently with the jim starlin worlock gallery edition paper was decently thick and opaque. But within a few months they did the BWS wolverine run and already had gone to a thinner flimsier paper stock. Atleast they did have Michael Kelleher as the remasterer. His work does ancient comic work proud and seemingly with great reverence for the source material. It all depends on the paperstock quality and attention to printing quality. Nuff Said!
You nailed the different line quality on the last page of chapter one, but it wasn't Kaluta. That's Filipino artist Pablo Marcos inking the last two pages (21 & 22) due to the deadline crunch.
An excellent review (Enjoyed your comments, guys!) of BWS's Red Nails Artist's Edition. I had this masterpiece of a book some years back as I have enjoyed - as many comics fans have - Barry Smith's artwork for decades and to me, this illustrated story from Robert E. Howard's 1930s, has been one of my favorite comic magazines ever illustrated (in par with John Byrne and Terry Austin's Star-Lord story in Marvel Preview #11) Haha! You guys questioned, at the end, something to the effect of What was Barry Smith thinking at the time when he was creating these beautiful pages (each panel is just at another level for that period, and in my opinion, even for today's standards)...BWS writes about these years while creating Red Nails in his OPUS #1 book. What an amazing era it must've been to be a young adult in those years of the 70s - I wasn't too far behind...AGL (residing overseas, is a little difficult to get much of anything shipped but I will find a way soon to buy this masterpiece of a book and get to my location...)
Great episodes! BWS is one of my favorite artist. I would like to pint out that the first art on page four was extensively reproduced on Marvel ads in Brazil during the 80’s . When I was a child I was fascinated by this art because the Conan art that was published at the time was John Buscema’s. I’m so glad to finally see this on a page
Conan was one of the first comics that I ever remember having as a child, that and Hulk #272 with Sasquatch and Wendigo. Read those jams until the covers came off.
Love Windsor-Smith's conan. I got this a month or so ago. I have his red nails in savage tales, treasury, the "graphic novel" and now the art archives.
Ablaze have been publishing "The Cimmerian" and they made Red Nails with artist Olivier Vatine. He just had a collaboration with Mike Mignola - Hellboy and The B.P.R.D.: Night of the Cyclops. It would be awesome to watch you guys make a comparison like you did once ago. Modern vs Old school. Cheers
The major artist on the ablaze red nails is actually last named cassegrain. Vatine may have done some covers or helped with layout but if I'm getting my facts straight i think its Didier Cassegrain or some similar sounding name. Look him up i think he used to work in animation. Also the unfortunate thing about the ablaze conan is that those are American reduced size reprints of very nice oversized European large size graphic novels that allow the reader to really indulge in the fantastic artwork. The American editions seem to only care whether or not a book fits neatly on a book shelf. No regards for the creators original vision/ version. U'll notice in the ablaze editions that the larger size art reduces in really haphazard ways on the smaller paper dimension. The European audiences really benefit from the quality care and appreciation that European publishers seem to have by comparison. Nuff Said
Hmmm...I wondered what source the the artist's edition drew from and looks like it's the Savage Tales version. The treasury edition reprint had a few things redrawn such as more detail to the city on the opening splash, and the re-inking of the final page of the first chapter, which, for deadline reasons that no doubt fueled Barry's departure from Marvel after this story, was noticeably inked by Pablo Marcos.
Barry redrew a little of the pages that Marcos inked and then reinked it himself... and even on pages he had entirely done, himself, he added a shadow here and there... I assume aside from redoing the Marcos inked pages, the rest of the touch-ups was done on stats or photocopies... which is why the changes don't appear on the original art.
Yeah I definitely agree with the size ratio questionability even some of the border notes look written slightly smaller than you would think, though it is hard to tell on the screen, otherwise he must be working with a microscope!
This is a great book. Those blue dots in the margins are next to editorial comments, so I assume they are there so that the person to whom they are directed will see them and make the requested changes or otherwise address them.
You mentioned the title page lettering... a normal letterer (I forget who) did the normal dialog and caption lettering, but the title pages... If I'm not mistaken, Barry did that himself, seeing it as part of the art.
Much like GUTS, CONAN is a true legend. Quiet, wandering protagonist, that can be placed in a Samurai, Spaghetti Western, or Fantasy setting & become a King 🤴
The shiny paper is awful. I have this, and treasure it...but it's a love/hate purchase. IDW knows how to do Art Reprints, to give the feel of actual artwork. This feels like a shiny book.
One of the greatest nights of my life happened in the mid 1980s while attending the San Diego Comic Con. My comic book buddy Scott Williams and I had been collecting original art since 1981. The small group of fellow art collectors at SDC all knew each other. Scott, myself, and the Czarneki brothers were invited to a suite at the Grant Hotel for beers and to look at original art this new-to-us collector was carrying around the Con in his two portfolios. That night at the Grant Hotel I pulled from the portfolios Red Nails, Conan 24, and Frazetta's Squeeze Play. Red Nails and Conan 24 had recently been purchased directly from BWS. As best as I can remember either one or two pages were missing because BWS had previously given them away to a friend. Going through Red Nails one page at a time was a once in a lifetime memory treasure. Since then the book has remained complete and has transferred ownership only two other times. I spoke with the people at Genesis West who produced this gorgeous Archive and they said they considered countless choices of printing and paper and finishes before deciding on the final format. While the glossy format certainly is susceptible to smudging, the beauty in the resolution is impeccable. In the decision to print one page per page instead of a page on the front and the back because they wanted to replicate the experience of looking through a stack of at original art one page at a time. Having gone through the stack of Red Nails originals one page at a time I can attest to the fact that this Archive is as close as that experience can be. Picking out the facing "blow-up" panel was something that they thought would give the reader another focus to go into the page. Kind of like the back and forth the Kayfabe Crew often did on the video. In my dreams we will someday see volume 2.
To address some of your questions, this all first appeared in Marvel's black-and-white Savage Tales issues 2 and 3 (1973, 1974), so, yes, this art was absolutely done with consideration of the monochrome medium. I was nine years old when my older cousin handed them to me, and needless to say my mind was utterly blown. And maybe a year later all of it was reprinted at large scale, in color, in the first Conan Marvel Treasury Edition. As a lifelong fan of this piece, it breaks my heart that I was unaware of this slipcover edition until well after it came out, so for now it remains out of my grasp at an exorbitant collector's asking price. Live and learn.
I feel your pain. It kill’s me that I missed it too. 😑
Did you know someone actually suggested releasing Savage Sword in color? They wanted to add color to all the beautiful black and white artwork. I believe it was someone at Marvel, but I can't remember their name. I may be alone in this, but I felt it was so blasphemous.
"The Whole Wide World" (1996), the film in which actor Vincent D'Onofrio plays the role of Robert E Howard.
I had the honor and pleasure of chatting with Mr. Windsor Smith at length in NY just as Conan #5 had dropped. What a charming, humble guy. Just beginning to stretch his artistic muscles away from the Jack Kirby influence. I mentioned I thought issue #4 was a great leap in detail and drawing confidence. He agreed he was finding his groove as to the kind of artistic approach he wanted. I'll say! I couldn't believe what he did in the issues to follow, especially issue 24 and the B&W stories.
Saw the giant size. Colour version of this Tale. Ffffng amazing. The inside of the City with luminous greens reads the carpet’s tapestry’s etc. and the big pics. Like the throne rooms. Etc. stunning
The first installment in Savage Tales, Barry missed the deadline and had to turn it in with the last page or 2 partially inked (right after Valeria kills that guy wearing the skull and skeleton costume) ... and Roy Thomas had Pablo Marcos finish those pages... Barry didn't miss the deadline on any of the rest of the story. He didn't use any assistants, himself. This was also still a couple of years before The Studio was formed, so, no - - Wrightson and Kaluta weren't hanging around when he drew these pages, though he'd met them at conventions. At the time, Barry was sharing studio space with commercial artist Charles White III (who was mostly an airbrush illustrator) - Barry talks about this time period in his 2 volume art and bio book OPUS, from Fantagraphics.
Do you have any idea of whaterver happened to Volume 3? It never saw the light of day. And it´s too bad because those volumes are a fascinanting reading. I was expecting just an art book and didn´t expect at all to read about all those out of the body experiences that BWS was experiencing during those years, I found it very brave of him to bare himself like this tellling all this to us.
I can't believe this was put out by Marvel. Amazing work, it truly is astonishing.
You guys know yr stuff. I'm sold. Love seeing an old fave & hearing yr commentary.
Cost me a fortune but its one of the best purchases I ever made! A real insight into BWS working method - you can even see where he switches from standard nibs to fountain pen nibs! I'm leaving this one to my sons with strict instructions to never sell it (unless the price is silly money lol)
There's some controversy about this in the Artist Edition Discussion thread (great place for advance info, by the way). Some feel that the book was padded out by only printing on the recto and putting in all of the text pages (notice that BWS himself did not participate) to justify the high price. The publisher also had access to the art from the Frost Giant's Daughter and Song of Red Sonja, but held it back to use in a second volume, but the Red Nails book didn't sell enough to do that. There's been some complaints that there could've been a book similar in format and page count to the IDW books using all the material and it would've been more of a sales success at virtually any price. I don't necessarily feel like greed was a major motivation for the decisions that were made (and not made), but Genesis West was considerably less active in promoting and marketing than IDW and there didn't seem to be much of an infrastructure to deal with just getting the thing in front of eyeballs.
I still bought it, figuring it would just disappear and maybe never be reprinted. It's still incredible.
I first saw this story in Savage Sword of Conan b&w magazine. Savage Tales had already been canceled so any work for that magazine got published in Savage Sword.
Thanks for featuring this fellas! Classy production. Just wish the art was full bleed with the IDW Artist Edition paper stock, but I'll take what I can get. And I've gotten everything. I've hunted this down every time it's been reprinted/re-colored/re-formatted.
Barry Smith's CONAN, & especially RED NAILS (in Savage Tales) is what ultimately inspired me to make my first "real" effort to make comics - buying over-sized bristol board, and seeking out proper pen/ink/brush tools (I share my BWS obsession in the Afterword for The Marvel ART of CONAN the BARBARIAN HC).
Exactly...after being used to the IDW excellent paper stock, the shiny paper really put me off....I love the artwork, but hate the paper. That's why IDW is the best.
Since the chances of me finding this anywhere much less at an affordable price are slim, even more so in light of the Kayfabe effect, I took the poor man's route and did a custom bind of the Barry Windsor-Smith issues of Conan Saga, the black and white magazine size comic similar to the Savage Sword of Conan that came out in the late 80's which reprinted the classic Conan issues from the beginning. I hope Marvel considers producing something similar to this or better yet a Gallery Edition and bringing Windsor-Smith to redo the colors for deluxe paper.
A Gallery Edition is a fantastic idea. The Weapon X Gallery Edition came out last week; they seem to have finally figured out the color.
So odd that Marvel has not given this a hardcover/treasury edition reprint, despite all the Conan material they’ve cranked out.
What I would really like to see is a hardcover reprint of the Conan Marvel Treasury Edition as long as the printing preserves BWS's lovely coloring. Maybe the only way to replicate this would be to print on crappy paper, which would be fine with me, or hire someone to ensure that the colors print just like they did in the Treasury Edition. That was one of the finest Old School coloring jobs ever.
Marvel master remasterer is Michael Kelleher. His work is precision perfection. But marvel uses such a crappy see thru paper stock for their overpriced collections. All his hard work is barely noticeable. The 4 Conan treasuries definitely deserved to be collected in a full color gallery edition. With someone taking great care to make sure the paper quality and printing process is of the highest quality. They did a nice job recently with the jim starlin worlock gallery edition paper was decently thick and opaque. But within a few months they did the BWS wolverine run and already had gone to a thinner flimsier paper stock. Atleast they did have Michael Kelleher as the remasterer. His work does ancient comic work proud and seemingly with great reverence for the source material. It all depends on the paperstock quality and attention to printing quality. Nuff Said!
You nailed the different line quality on the last page of chapter one, but it wasn't Kaluta. That's Filipino artist Pablo Marcos inking the last two pages (21 & 22) due to the deadline crunch.
An excellent review (Enjoyed your comments, guys!) of BWS's Red Nails Artist's Edition. I had this masterpiece of a book some years back as I have enjoyed - as many comics fans have - Barry Smith's artwork for decades and to me, this illustrated story from Robert E. Howard's 1930s, has been one of my favorite comic magazines ever illustrated (in par with John Byrne and Terry Austin's Star-Lord story in Marvel Preview #11) Haha! You guys questioned, at the end, something to the effect of What was Barry Smith thinking at the time when he was creating these beautiful pages (each panel is just at another level for that period, and in my opinion, even for today's standards)...BWS writes about these years while creating Red Nails in his OPUS #1 book. What an amazing era it must've been to be a young adult in those years of the 70s - I wasn't too far behind...AGL (residing overseas, is a little difficult to get much of anything shipped but I will find a way soon to buy this masterpiece of a book and get to my location...)
Great episodes! BWS is one of my favorite artist. I would like to pint out that the first art on page four was extensively reproduced on Marvel ads in Brazil during the 80’s . When I was a child I was fascinated by this art because the Conan art that was published at the time was John Buscema’s. I’m so glad to finally see this on a page
Yeah! Probably the best Conan story!
BWS is awesome
Conan was one of the first comics that I ever remember having as a child, that and Hulk #272 with Sasquatch and Wendigo. Read those jams until the covers came off.
Love Windsor-Smith's conan. I got this a month or so ago. I have his red nails in savage tales, treasury, the "graphic novel" and now the art archives.
Stoked for this episode! This is as close as I'll probably come to seeing this book.
Thanks for this one lads the mrs has band me from from buying artist editions so I’d never had a chance to check this one out
My friend introduced me to red nails about 5 years ago, BWS is the a fucking badass...
Ablaze have been publishing "The Cimmerian" and they made Red Nails with artist Olivier Vatine.
He just had a collaboration with Mike Mignola - Hellboy and The B.P.R.D.: Night of the Cyclops.
It would be awesome to watch you guys make a comparison like you did once ago. Modern vs Old school. Cheers
The major artist on the ablaze red nails is actually last named cassegrain. Vatine may have done some covers or helped with layout but if I'm getting my facts straight i think its Didier Cassegrain or some similar sounding name. Look him up i think he used to work in animation. Also the unfortunate thing about the ablaze conan is that those are American reduced size reprints of very nice oversized European large size graphic novels that allow the reader to really indulge in the fantastic artwork. The American editions seem to only care whether or not a book fits neatly on a book shelf. No regards for the creators original vision/ version. U'll notice in the ablaze editions that the larger size art reduces in really haphazard ways on the smaller paper dimension. The European audiences really benefit from the quality care and appreciation that European publishers seem to have by comparison. Nuff Said
Hmmm...I wondered what source the the artist's edition drew from and looks like it's the Savage Tales version. The treasury edition reprint had a few things redrawn such as more detail to the city on the opening splash, and the re-inking of the final page of the first chapter, which, for deadline reasons that no doubt fueled Barry's departure from Marvel after this story, was noticeably inked by Pablo Marcos.
Barry redrew a little of the pages that Marcos inked and then reinked it himself... and even on pages he had entirely done, himself, he added a shadow here and there... I assume aside from redoing the Marcos inked pages, the rest of the touch-ups was done on stats or photocopies... which is why the changes don't appear on the original art.
Yeah I definitely agree with the size ratio questionability even some of the border notes look written slightly smaller than you would think, though it is hard to tell on the screen, otherwise he must be working with a microscope!
It was very coo tht CONAN wielded a Klyntar Symbiote Sword in a recent "Savage Avengers" series
This is a great book. Those blue dots in the margins are next to editorial comments, so I assume they are there so that the person to whom they are directed will see them and make the requested changes or otherwise address them.
The framed blow-ups on the left seem to be consistent with the width of the plaque rather than any consistent scaling.
The endpapers could have had some pieces from his Conan portfolios. He did some fantastic work on those.
You mentioned the title page lettering... a normal letterer (I forget who) did the normal dialog and caption lettering, but the title pages... If I'm not mistaken, Barry did that himself, seeing it as part of the art.
Much like GUTS, CONAN is a true legend. Quiet, wandering protagonist, that can be placed in a Samurai, Spaghetti Western, or Fantasy setting & become a King 🤴
Awesome
first time seeing these by BWS. Back in the 80's there was a TSR artist, Jeff Dee, that I liked. I can see the BWS influence on his style for sure.
I have no idea what they are talking about, but I want to hear more
The movie you're thinking of is The Whole Wide World.
The shiny paper is awful. I have this, and treasure it...but it's a love/hate purchase. IDW knows how to do Art Reprints, to give the feel of actual artwork. This feels like a shiny book.
350 to 400 for this thing.
Why do they pronounce 'Conan,' as 'Conyan?' Is that a Philly accent?
che brutta rilegatura e che brutta carta! peccato