Opening panels of Cuentos de Abuelito #8 adapted form the orginal story.
thology series called Cuentos de Abuelito
(Grandpa’s Stories). This was first pointed out by
Paul Herman in The Neverending Hunt in 2006, but
his information was incomplete. He noted that a series called Cuentos de Abuelito presents La Reina
de la Costa Negra, published by Corporacion Editorial Mexicana S.A. (C.E.M.S.A.), had run for 18 issues in 1952 in a small-size format (4x5½") and that
he owned a copy of #17.
In 2008, Paul Wells, added a more information
(and more questions) when he discussed "La Reina
de la Costa Negra" in an article on sword and sorcery comics in Alter Ego #80. Using information provided by Ulises Mavrides, a researcher and collector
from Mexico, Wells first notes that La Reina appeared in two issues of Cuentos de Abuelito, then
later contradicts himself saying that it appeared in
issues 8-12. He credits the writers of that story arc
as Loa and Victor Rodriguez and the artist as Salvador Lavalle with covers done by Hector "Hecky"
Gutierrez. Excerpts from these issues also indicate
La Reina was much more violent than US comics in the 60s
that they adapt the
Howard story, though
with Bêlit surviving at the
end. The opening panels
from #8 show Conan riding down to a port as in
the beginning of the
La Reina de la Costa Negra #47
original Howard story.
(Joma 1966)
While Wells does not
explicitly say it, this suggests that #8 may have been
the first appearance of La Reina and thus the first
comic appearance of Conan. That said, he clearly
was not aware of the 18 issues that Paul Herman
referenced so the question of exactly how many
issue of Cuentos there were and how many contained Conan stories was still unclear.
Wells did have more information on the two later
standalone La Reina de la Costa Negra series. According to his source, Mavrides, the digest-sized
(5x7") E.M.A. series ran for 11 weekly issues from
1958-59. Written by Riol de Man, it retooled some of
the stories from the earlier Cuentos series with new
artwork by Lavalle and Gutierrez (including no small
amount of swipes from Joe Kubert’s "Viking Prince"
that was running in The Brave and the Bold at the
time).
The later Joma series (standard comic book size),
according to Wells ran for at least 47 issues in 1965
to 1966. The early issues of the Joma series were
re-prints of the 1958 E.M.A. series, but new stories
by J. Kstro and art by Lavalle were added for the
later issues. One of the interesting charac- Page
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