The Tower of the Elephant by Robert E. Howard (Valentin Sécher, illustrator)

Conan: The Tower of the Elephant

By Robert E. Howard and Valentin Sécher

Titan Comics 2025

Titan Comics is on a roll. Since partnering with Heroic Signatures to take over the Robert E. Howard franchise, they've released a slew of Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan issues that are, with a few exceptions, the best we've seen in years. Along with these new adventures, Titan turned collectors giddy by reprinting Marvel's catalog of Conan-related omnibus volumes, pumping out over fifteen of these three-pounders so far. And now they've offered up Conan: The Tower of the Elephant, an illustrated Howard classic originally published in French by Bragelonne, a subsidiary of Hachette Livre, in 2022.

“The Tower of the Elephant” first saw print in Weird Tales magazine in March, 1933. The short story has been adapted in comic form several times, including twice in the 1970s by Roy Thomas and once in the mid-2000s by Kurk Busiek. Those issues had to cut and squeeze Howard’s story into panels, bubbles, and boxes. With this incarnation we get the entire text along with a set of original oil paintings by Elric artist Valentin Sécher. The book is a thin 56-page hardcover sized at a somewhat awkward 9.6 by 12.7 inches. It features a beautiful montage cover, twenty-six two-page spreads (one painting each), and four bonus pages that show off Sécher's preliminary sketches and storyboards.

The story opens with a young Conan tarrying in a tavern in thief-riddled Zamora. There he overhears a Kothian slaver mention the secret of the Elephant Tower, where “any fool knows that Yara the priest dwells ... with the great jewel men call the Elephant's Heart.” Conan's larcenous interest is piqued, and he questions the slaver, whose ego takes offense at the probing.

Sécher renders this perfectly with a two-page stand-off, Conan on the left, slaver on the right, each scowling at each other over the gutter. Conan has just enough time to reflect that the slaver and others of his ilk (i.e. men from cities) “are more discourteous than savages (i.e. barbarians like himself) because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split.”

Then all hell breaks loose. The tavern's lone candle is snuffed. Steel is drawn. Shouts and cries break out before “a single strident yell of agony [cuts] the din like a knife.” When light returns the slaver is dead, and Conan is well on his way to the tower, spurred on by the lustful lure of riches.

The story moves quickly to its crashing conclusion. Conan clambers over obstacles, teams up with an unexpected ally, slays beasts, scales the unscalable, avoids venomous death, and faces aliens and evil sorcery while wielding pity in one hand and a sword in the other. And Sécher masterfully captures the critical moments.

Sécher employs a limited palette of ultramarine, burnt sienna, ochre, and a few earthy accent colors that conjure an antiquated mood as one might get from early 19th-century American landscape paintings. It gives Howard's tale a classic visual feel and works to tie each painting to the next. Though his work is detailed, Sécher uses a slightly impressionistic approach where individual stones and muscles and flaps of armor have varying tonal values but not fine texture. His anatomical and architectural proportions are spot-on, and his use of single-point perspective and dramatic viewpoints create powerful compositions, even in the few paintings that are somewhat static in nature. The only smudges in Sécher's effort are that in one or two places the story description and the paintings differ, which is quite noticeable.

This newest release from Titan Comics could be another big win for the publisher, but it does have a few production issues. Though many coffee table art books are printed with matte paper, its use in this reprint seems to diminish its quality as a hardcover graphic novel. The matte paper makes the product feel more like an illustrated children's book. And as to the text on the page, it's quite small and often lacks sharp contrast with the image behind it, making it difficult to read. This could be due its diminished size; the Bragelonne original was nearly 11-by-15 inches. This reduced scale, along with the choice of paper, provide the reader with a kind of miniature reading experience one might expect from a DC Compact. Did Titan shrink the size so the product would fit better on a bookshelf? Maybe. Did it work? Not really. The book feels a little out of place, like it's not quite a graphic novel and not quite an art book. Oh: and an introduction would have been nice.

Still, for English-speaking fans who can’t read French, Titan's Conan: The Tower of the Elephant reprint is well worth shelling out some gold for, even if it's likely to end up sideways on the shelf.

Jim Abbiati is a writer and IT professional living in Mystic, Connecticut. He's the author of Fell's Hollow, The NORTAV Method for Writers, and has an MFA in Creative Writing from National University