Now one thing I didn't get to mention in that post was that Conan has always been very popular in Germany. And we have to thank the Condor Verlag for making a lot of his material from Marvel Comics available to german readers even if it was through the awful Condor pocket books.
I have already mentioned this before but to re - iterate for the newer readers or anybody else who missed it a big downside to the pocket books was that they were not glued very good so that after a dozen times of reading it you had a collection of loose pages on your hands.
Later on the binding got better but you still had the other negative sides of a pocket book to contend with. Which was that thanks to the reduced size the artwork didn't shine as much as in the original format and they had to shorten the text. While in the original Conan might have said something like : " Take that you Stygian dog, son of a drunk hyena, for murdering a comely wench I hardly knew but spent the night with. " which in the german pocket book got reduced to : " Hah ! There ! Ow ! Die ! " or something similar. But you still have to give Condor credit for bringing less known material to german comicbook fans because they put just everything they could get their hands on into those pocket books.
On the other side that material was often spread out over various pocket books with huge gaps sometimes and other times they left the readers hanging with an open ending. As for Conan he was so popular in Germany that the pocket books got up to number 49 and there were magazine size Conan comics which went up to number 10 as they mostly included the KING CONAN issues ( with some TALES OF ASGARD thrown into the mix ).
One last thing about the pocket books regular readers may remember it from my previous posts on Condor Verlag but they took some liberties with the covers. In some cases they used original covers for the books.
In other cases they recut covers and took off or added some stuff to it.
In some cases they had them redrawn by artists with horrible results.
But anyway, my late brother was very big into Conan ( well, we both were since an uncle who was a G I brought us a huge stack of US comics - mostly CONAN THE BARBARIAN by John Buscema and Ernie Chan - thus effectively ruining us for life but in a good way ) and he read it through the pocket books. That's enough of an intro so let's get to the good stuff.
and I just can't wait to be king
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