Was Bernie Wrightson Nearly the Artist on Marvel's Conan the Barbarian?

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, see how close Bernie Wrightson came to becoming the original artist on Conan the Barbarian

Welcome to the 910th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, in our second legend, we look into whether Bernie Wrightson had a real chance to become the original artist on Marvel's Conan the Barbarian series.

The late, great Bernie Wrightson (number #33 in our recent fan voting of the greatest comic book artists of all-time) grew up as a fan of EC Comics' horror comics, as reprinted in the early 1960s, but one of the greatest earliest influences that Wrightson had was artist Frank Frazetta. In a 1982 interview in the Comics Journal with Gary Groth, Wrightson explained:

GROTH: Did you study certain other artists, or was it just practice, practice, practice?

WRIGHTSON: Oh, yeah, I think any other artist I ever looked at I studied to one extent or another, and learned something from them. I guess some small part of it was natural aptitude. But I can’t really say how much because I’ve been influenced by so many people, living and dead, that it’s hard to say where anything comes from. It’s all this big hodgepodge. And it’s hopefully something original by the time I’m done with it. But you can kind of narrow it down to a handful of people like most of the EC guys, and Frazetta the paperback cover artist as opposed to Frazetta the comic-book artist, because I never really saw much of his comic book work.

In the 1960s, Frazetta famously did covers for trade paperback collections of Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, and Wrightson was a huge fan of those books. In fact, his fandom of Frazetta indirectly is what got him into drawing comic books professionally, as when he was 17/18 (so we're talking 1965 or so), he heard about a convention where Frazetta was going to appear from another comic book fan. He explained to Jon B. Cooke in TwoMorrows' Comic Book Artist #5:

[H]e told me about this convention in New York where Frazetta was going to be guest of honor and I scraped together train fare. That's were I met Kaluta, Jeff, and a whole bunch of people. I had a big envelope full of drawings. No comic book stuff but little single pictures. Some were very oddly shaped because I would cut the best part of the picture out. It was werewolves, monsters, barbarians, wizards-Universal meets Frank Frazetta. I started showing this stuff and meeting other artists. I had seen Jeff Jones' work in Creepy so I was a fan of his. People are starting to crowd around and they're starting to buy this stuff! I'm there selling drawings for $2, $3, and $5! I didn't have a table-I'm just sitting in the middle of the convention floor and there's money flying at me! I made something like $70 and this was incredible to me! There I was with an empty envelope and people were just fawning all over me, saying, "This is great stuff! Why aren't you working professionally?" I'm just an 18-year-old kid, thinking, "Jesus, what is this?"

With that in mind, Wrightson started doing some Conan pieces around 1965/1966, like this one (this is very early for Wrightson in coloring his work)...

Interestingly enough, Wrightson had a real chance at actually then becoming the first artist on Conan the Barbarian when it made its comic book debut!

How did Bernie Wrightson get a chance to draw Conan the Barbarian?

As I wrote when I did a piece about Conan the Barbarian's 50th Anniversary a while back, Roy Thomas worked out a deal with the Conan licensors to get the comic book license to do Conan comic books, with Thomas noting that he originally tried for a less famous character, assuming Conan would be too expensive for Marvel to license, "Although the original deal didn’t quite work out I ended up contacting Glenn Lord as the literary agent for the Robert E. Howard estate. His name was mentioned in the introduction to one of the Conan volumes that came out, about the time I was getting frustrated by the other deal. So I contacted him and said, ‘We don’t have much money to offer but this might increase Conan’s market a little bit by introducing him to a lot of readers who wouldn’t ordinarily read the paperbacks and that made sense to Glenn so we began a partnership of sorts that was good for Conan, good for me, and good for Marvel."

The issue, as I pointed out then, is that Marvel Publisher Martin Goodman would only agree to spend X amount of dollars on this new title (Goodman decided to take the licensing fee out of the production costs of the issue) and that meant that Thomas could not afford to get John Buscema to draw the series, as Buscema was Marvel's highest-paid artist at the time. Gil Kane was ruled out, as well, as his rates were nearly as high as Buscema's.

So that meant that a new (cheaper) artist would get the title. Barry Windsor-Smith was the early leader, as Thomas was very familiar with his work. Here's an early Smith Conan piece, perhaps a try-out piece?

How close did Wrightson really get?

Bernie Wrightson, by this point, had become a popular young artist at DC, and in the 1969 Nightmaster feature in Showcase #82-84, he drew a character right in line with Conan...

Wrightson was then given a tryout by Marvel for the new Conan series. Here's one of his tryout pieces...

Now, as to whether Wrightson ever really had a shot, Roy Thomas noted to Jon B. Cooke in TwoMorrows' Comic Book Artist #2, "Some people were pushing Bernie Wrightson at us, but that wasn't going to work out - I might have been more iffy, but Stan was right; Bernie wasn't quite ready yet. So we gave it to that kid in England, Barry."

So it sounds like Wrightson really DID have a shot, but he just never had great odds, exactly.

Wrightson then did a similar character, King Kull, for Marvel and, well, that went poorly, as I wrote about in a recent Comic Book Legends Revealed.