THE SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN #16 REVIEW – BLACK-AND-WHITE BARBARIC FURY STILL HITS LIKE A BROADSWORD!

The Savage Sword of Conan #16 walks in carrying sixty-plus black-and-white pages, three Jim Zub stories, enough steel to open a hardware store, and the kind of Robert E. Howard energy where civilization always seems one bad afternoon away from getting eaten by something ancient. This issue also pushes deeper into the larger Howard-verse material Zub has been building, so the magazine is doing two jobs at once: delivering standalone savage tales while letting the shadow of Thulsa Doom stretch across different eras and characters.

The lead Conan story, “Massacred Memories,” is the heavyweight of the package. Zub uses corrupted memory and supernatural manipulation to put Conan in a situation where hitting the nearest problem with a sword is not automatically the solution, although, come on, the sword still gets plenty of employment. Nicola Scott’s artwork is gorgeous in black and white. Her anatomy has power without turning Conan into a refrigerator with hair, and the expressions carry real emotional information between the bursts of violence. The environments feel tactile, the monsters feel physical, and the rendering has enough detail to reward slowing down without choking the page.

That story also shows why the magazine format still works. Scott gets room. Big compositions can breathe, landscapes can establish scale, and Zub can let a grim image sit without needing to race toward the next page turn. There is old-school pulp flavor here, but the storytelling does not feel like somebody photocopied 1976 and prayed nostalgia would do the rest.

“The Ghosts of Wahpeton” shifts the entire texture by returning to Steve Corcoran and Howard’s weird-western territory. Chris Campana’s pages have more grit and snap, with gunfire, shadows, weathered faces, and supernatural intrusion sitting comfortably beside the Western imagery. Zub connects Corcoran’s moral damage to the larger threat without making the story feel like Conan wandered into the wrong magazine. That tonal flexibility is one of the issue’s biggest strengths. The Howard-verse idea works because the connective tissue is cosmic and thematic rather than everybody needing to stand in the same room for a crossover selfie.

Then “Zuleika: The Warrior Within” brings Sean Izaakse into the mix, and his cleaner, more graphic storytelling gives the final feature another distinct identity. Zuleika’s story carries a different emotional center than Conan or Corcoran, and Zub gives her enough agency that she does not feel like another supporting piece placed on the board for the event. Izaakse balances character acting with sudden brutality, and the story’s generational and spiritual imagery pushes the larger Thulsa Doom threat into territory that feels personal rather than merely cosmic.

Across all three stories, the black-and-white presentation is a feature, not a missing component. Scott, Campana, and Izaakse approach value, texture, silhouette, and detail differently, so flipping from one story to the next actually feels like entering a new pulp magazine while the shared threat keeps the issue coherent. The pin-up material and editorial framing add to that old-school anthology experience without making the book feel padded.

If there is a downside, it is that readers who have not been following Zub’s wider Howard-verse work may feel some mythology passing over their heads. Thulsa Doom’s influence, the Black Stone material, and the broader timeline carry more weight if you have been reading the previous connected stories. Zub provides enough context to keep the issue functional, but you can feel the machinery of a bigger saga underneath the individual tales.

For me, that does not hurt the package much because every feature still has its own reason to exist. Savage Sword should feel like opening a forbidden drawer full of maps, monsters, doomed men, dangerous women, and stories somebody definitely told you not to read before bed. Issue #16 gets that vibe. It is muscular without becoming brainless, reverent toward Howard without becoming trapped by him, and visually varied without losing the magazine’s identity.

If Titan and Heroic Signatures keep letting strong artists attack this world in big black-and-white pages, keep printing the damn thing. Sometimes you want decompressed superhero conversation. Sometimes you want Conan looking at an eldritch nightmare like it just volunteered to become a problem. There is room for both.

CRUSADERS SCORE:
4.5/5

Writer: Jim Zub. “Massacred Memories”
Artist: Nicola Scott. “The Ghosts of Wahpeton”
Artist: Chris Campana. “Zuleika: The Warrior Within”
Artist: Sean Izaakse
Savage Sword of Conan Editor: Chris Butera
Group Editor: Jake Devine
Senior Creative Editor: David Leach.
Lead Creative Editor: Phoebe Hedges
Publisher: Titan Comics