Giving Conan a job, good idea. Trying to fire him later...bad idea.

I haven't had a lot of time lately, but I did manage to flip through another book in my unread pile: The Chronicles of Conan: Blood Dawn and Other Stories, written by James (Priest) Owsley and Don Kraar, with art by Ernie Chan, John Buscema, Mike Docherty, and others. This is volume 24 in Dark Horse's reprints of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian series, which ran for 275 issues: today we're up to 1986 and #182-189, along with an issue we've checked out before, Conan Annual #11, "Bride of the Oculist."

The Annual and a single fill-in issue aside, the rest of this trade continues storylines that began around #172, some of which would continue past #200. The King Maddoc and Tetra the time-travelling witch plots are wrapped up, the Devourer of Souls stories begin, and some supporting characters stick around for both. Conan had risen to the rank of Warlord, serving the insane Maddoc the Second, who believes Conan could be a threat to him and plots to have him eliminated. Thus making a threat of Conan...not a great idea.

Dark Horse is up to volume 29 of their Chronicles, so they're getting up to Marvel's retelling of of Conan's youth, which I don't remember being great, but maybe they read better collected. These issues read pretty well at once, so there's that.