Conan-Red Sonja #1 - Full Script (co-written with Gail Simone) (Patreon)

Back in 2015, Gail Simone reached out to offer me an incredible opportunity. Did I like Conan and would I be interested in writing the first team-up between Conan and Red Sonja in over 15 years? Easy answer: Yes and Yes!

I grew up reading the Conan novels and comics, and watching the movies. Conan-esque pulp fantasy permeated my expectations of sword & sorcery when I played Dungeons & Dragons. On top of all that, in a weird twist of fate, my first "professional" comic gig was recoloring old Barry Windsor-Smith pages for the Dark Horse Chronicles Of Conan reprints. Co-writing these two legendary characters with Gail as she kicked ass on the solo Red Sonja series was a dream come true.

I reached out to Gail to get permission to post the scripts and story outline here on my Patreon, so you'll get the benefit of seeing how Gail writes and compare it to my own approach.

Gail definitely set the pace on this mini-series, providing the main story beats, while I paced it all out and added bridging elements in to make it fit inside 4 jam-packed issues. Gail also wrote the first scene and I matched her script format for this project so it wouldn't be too obvious who wrote which sections (which was different from Avengers: No Surrender, where each writer on the project followed their own formatting). Even though I did my best to emulate her approach, I can still tell who wrote which parts of this first issue (thought we did tinker with dialogue on each other's pages in spots):

PAGES 1-6: Gail

PAGES 7-12: Zub

PAGES 13-18: Gail

PAGES 19-21: Zub

PAGE 22: Gail

The pacing sheet I put together was quite rough. We followed it in spots and deviated in others. I had actually forgotten how much things shifted from that until I reopened the document to this post together.

Unfortunately, with the rights for Conan returned to Marvel, this series is no longer available on comiXology. Hopefully they'll reprint it at some point, because it was an absolute thrill to work on and Dan Panosian and Dave Stewart illustrated the hell out of it.

Anyway, a project from the archives I'm really proud of. I wrote Conan again in the upcoming Avengers: No Road Home story starting in February so this is a nice way to bring it all full circle.

Enjoy!