Barry Windsor-Smith / Kull of Atlantis p10

With this early outing (month before Conan) Barry Smith saw a chance to do something dynamic. In the setup for this scene Kull in the travels of his youth comes upon the desperate scene in a fishing village. A girl is being prepared to be burned at the stake, accused of cavorting with pirates. Each panel here exudes desperation and bold emotion, what would the barbarian Kull do?

From "Kull of Atlantis" (from the following ComicLink https://www.comiclink.com/auctions/item.asp?id=1210108)

Created in the months before he drew Conan the Barbarian #1 in 1970. This is pure Smith art, both pencils and inks. Because it was developed with a paperback format in mind, the art features only large, powerful panels of exceptional quality. Smith adapted the look he developed for Kull here into his now legendary design for Conan.

In the late 1960s the popularity of the Frazetta-covered paperback editions of reprints of Robert E. Howard's Conan pulp stories from the 1930s generated a lot of renewed interest in the character and Marvel's Roy Thomas proposed licensing the Conan character for a comic book adaptation.

The first Marvel title, Conan the Barbarian began in 1970 and is well-known comic book history. In order to keep the comic book profitable despite the licensing fee, Marvel assigned its newest, and lowest paid artist, a young Barry Smith, who previously had been working as a fill-in artist for the publisher.

While the licensing deal with the Howard estate was in the works, Thomas and Smith also came up with the idea of taking on a different Howard character, Kull, and reaching out to a paperback publisher with a different format that combined Smith's illustrations and Howard's original text. Since paperback pages were smaller than comic book pages, Smith created 13 two-panel pages, 5 three-panel pages, and a splash page for the initial story, entitled "Kull of Atlantis." A second splash was later created, likely intended as a cover image. Marvel reached an agreement on Conan and Smith ended up using his Kull design for Conan instead. The technique used as a shading method for pages within this story is called screentone (brand name, Zip-A-Tone).

An abbreviated version of "Kull of Atlantis" finally saw print in 1974 in Savage Sword of Conan #3. It was also reprinted in Conan Saga #51 (1991).