In Conan: Battle for the Serpent Crown #1, the savage swordsman from Cimmeria stalks the sordid streets of the City of Sin in a new five-issue Marvel Comics series from Eisner award-winner, Saladin Ahmed, and Luke Ross. Hurtled out of the Hyborian past and onto the Las Vegas Strip of modern-day America, the hungry and coinless Conan sets his sights on a shimmering city in the sands. Conan was somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the plot began to take hold.
Conan: Battle for the Serpent Crown is the latest in an array of Marvel Comics titles set in the weird and perilous world of Robert E. Howard’s most popular literary creation, Conan the Barbarian. Drawing inspiration from events in Savage Avengers, by writer Gerry Duggan and series artists Mike Deodato, Kim Jacinto, and Patch Zircher, and the Jim Zub/Ig Guara mini-series Serpent War, Battle for the Serpent Crown continues the story of a cursed relic and the evil done in its name. Serpent cults from across time have venerated the sinuous artifact and fiendish wizards from the Age of Conan, desirous of its dreadful power, have spilled the blood of countless victims to feed their terrible designs. A cabal of evil wizards from the Hyborian age, led by Kulan Gath, conspires with the shadowy crime syndicate, The Hand, to bring the blight of the Serpent Crown to modern times. The events of Savage Avengers see Conan thrown forward in time from Kulan Gath’s era into the Savage Land of the present day, while Serpent War demonstrates the sinister power of the Serpent Crown in the hands of villains and its enduring nature and influence across time and otherworldly dimensions.
The circumstances of Conan: Battle for the Serpent Crown take place before Ghost Rider (2019) #1, in a time when Doctor Strange has evoked chaotic magic to restore the ruin of Las Vegas after a devastating attack by HYDRA. In doing so, the Sorcerer Supreme unwittingly summoned “a little piece of Hell in the form of the Hotel Inferno,” and its proprietor, Mephisto, to mingle with the spectacles of the City of Sin. Pursuing the cursed wizard Kulan Gath across the strange and hostile realm, Conan wanders the wastes, out of time and out of coin, into a city of ostentatious wealth and unsavory glamour. Relying on predatory and stealthy instincts honed over years of thieving and savagery, Conan sets out to loot the city of its own ill-gotten-gains.
Writer Saladin Ahmed highlights the canny barbarian’s skill in unscrupulous methods and his menacing brutality, refined by his many years spent as both brigand and bandit. But in a time and world not his own, how will the modest skulduggery of the Hyborian Age play against the high stakes depravity of Las Vegas? In a city where vice is the custom and deception, the currency, Conan wagers it all in a plot to plunder the damnable Hotel Inferno in the very Entertainment Capital of the World. Are you not entertained?
Conan: Battle for the Serpent Crown is in stores now!
More: Conan the Barbarian Concludes Epic Year-long Story Arc
Source: Marvel
