This collection of Conan stories was a bit of a mixed bag. By far the weakest story for me was the title story, 'The Curse of the Golden Skull'. This was partially adapted from an L. Sprague De Camp Conan tale -- before he pulled out and it became a bit of a mishmash of a tale full of inconsistencies. Not only that, but I wasn't greatly impressed with Neal Adam's rendering of Conan. And his evil golden wizard wore a leotard. There was also a side character, Juma (an allowed creation of DeCamp's) , who was OK but who tended to steal Conan's thunder. Unlike Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Conan works best alone, or at least in charge. I noticed the same thing (but better written) with the Michael Moorcock Conan story in volume 3, where Elric was basically calling the shots.

Apart from that tale, the quality was pretty good. I particularly liked the penultimate tale 'The Garden of Death and Life' adapted from C.L. Moore's 'Shambleau'. As usual, I also appreciated Roy Thomas' retrospective commentary. It seems the Conan comics were doing very well at that time. Perhaps that led to a little bit of complacency in this volume. ( )