Paneling: What If? Vol 1 #43

I posted this panel on Bluesky the other day, then realized I should have made a Paneling post about it instead, then went back and forth about whether I should just do one anyway, decided I shouldn’t because the last post I did also featured Conan.

Then I decided that I made the rules, so here we are.

I’ve been making my way through the various volumes of the Conan the Barbarian Omnibus that collect the original Marvel run. I just recently finished the sixth volume.

In addition to collecting the issues of the main series and its annuals, this volume reprints a story that, as the title of this post tells you, comes from the series What If?

If you’re not familiar, the premise of the comic was to look at different events – both cosmic and mundane – and speculate about how things might have gone differently. Generally, it’s a single moment that changes everything. The spider biting someone other than Peter Parker. Wolverine killing the Hulk in their first encounter.

Most of the time, the change is to a canon event, something that happened in the main Marvel Universe, but the question of “What If Conan the Barbarian Were Stranded in the 20th Century?” proceeds from the previous question of “What If Conan the Barbarian Walked the Earth Today?” which was asked thirty issues earlier in What If? #13.

That story flowed from a story told in the pages of Savage Sword of Conan #7. In the original story, Conan might have – but didn’t – fall into a transtemporal vortex. That issue of What If? followed a divergent path in which he did and wound up in the 20th Century.

In that story, Conan banged Roy Thomas’s girlfriend – on more than one occasion, Thomas created characters based on and named for his now-wife Dann (formerly Danette) – had all sorts of misadventures in New York City and ultimately returned to his own time.

But what if we expand on that what if and ask what if he hadn’t gone back to the Hyborian Age?

Well, for one thing, we’d get this killer Bill Sienkiewicz cover.

And for another, we got the memorable first panel on page twelve of the story, which we’ll get to in a second.

The story, scripted by Peter B. Gillis and illustrated by Bob Hall – whose work was just featured in an Unbagging – finds Conan missing his window of opportunity to return to his own time and winding up, not for the first time in his eventful life, in jail.

Of course, being Conan, he eventually escapes and finds himself alone on the mean streets of New York City, but NYC has nothing on places like Shadizar the Wicked, and being a cunning and canny survivor, Conan manages to get by, living off of muggings and petty theft, and quickly picking up the language and getting the lay of the land.

In time, he starts moving up the ranks of organized crime, and eventually, after having fully acclimated to his new environment, he decides to look up an old friend.

Of course, before doing so, he gets some rather dodgy sartorial advice from one of his associates, and thus we are presented with Conan the Pimp.

Things don’t work out, as Danette preferred the loincloth to the white suit, and Conan decides to move on, eventually forming his own gang and having a run-in with Captain America that leads him to question his place in this strange new world.

There are plenty of other memorable panels in the story, such as Conan attempting to mimic the words of a panhandler who successfully earned a quarter from a passerby…

…and some great bits in his battle with Captain America, but the pimp outfit is the one that’s really stuck with me.

I should note that at this point in my omnibus reading I’m past the point to which I’d read the Marvel series and am in uncharted territory.

I’m not sure if one of the later volumes in the omnibus collects the Conan story that appeared in the second volume of What If?, which featured a time-tossed Wolverine facing off against the sullen-eyed Cimmerian, which I did pick up back then, but until I get there and find out, it was fun to finally get to this memorable moment.

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