OK, I've read "Savage Sword of Conan 1-6" (I believe more volumes are due out) and I was happy with all of them, more or less. You can sense Conan being cleaned up a bit when they went from Howard's source material to deCamp's, but they are still pretty good stories for the most part, filled with treachery, adventure and action. However, long about volumes 5 and 6 some real comic book writers produced their own stories, and god, they were bad. The sort of brain-damaged rot that gives the whole field a bad name. I remember one story with Conan going through an interstellar portal where flying people enslaved others and made them turn a mill wheel. It was badly drawn, badly done, and an embarrassment to all and sundry, or should have been at any rate. I hate to think what was left out if that and similar pieces of crap were included.
Still, these stories have SO FAR been relatively few and far between. I remain encouraged enough to buy Volume 7 if and when it appears (I have no idea how long the series will be). I guess I like Savage Sword of Conan because it answers the question: "What if John Norman had been a really good writer who didn't focus on the sexual bondage so much but portrayed a society where manly men enjoyed the favors of slavegirls without question?"
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