There’s a brand new publishing entity in town, and it comes with quite a pedigree. Pan-Universal Galactic Worldwide, or PUG Worldwide, is a new publisher formed by John Nee (fomer Marvel Comics publisher), John Barber (former editor-in-chief at IDW), and Nate Murry (co-founder, Clover Press).

For the launch of PUG Worldwide’s first project, Conan the Barbarian: Colossal Edition, the publisher is partnering with Zoop. But as exciting as this “amazing assemblage of Cimmerian steel” may be, that’s just the beginning of the plans PUG Worldwide has in store.

Here at Popverse, we know an exciting venture when we see one, and we certainly couldn’t resist the opportunity to speak with Barber, PUG Worldwide’s editor-in-chief. Read on to learn all about the origins of PUG Worldwide, to find out more about Conan the Barbarian: Colossal Edition, and to get a hint of what’s in store for the new publisher in the not-too-distant future.

Popverse: John, Your resume includes webcomics, Marvel and IDW. Can you tell us a little bit about the road that led to PUG Worldwide?

John Barber: I always loved comics. I grew up loving comics. When I was in high school, one of the things that really appealed to me was that idea of being able to go out and tell your own stories in comics. Which you couldn’t really do in that many mediums, then… You could write novels, but it’s not like you could make a movie at home, the way you can now.

I was into a wide range of comics. Then when webcomics started becoming a viable thing, I read Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form. I love Scott. That’s not widely regarded as one of the best of his books, but that was definitely the one that changed my life. He was talking about how you could use the internet to tell comics stories, and different ways of formatting comics. So I got really into that and spent a couple of years doing experimental webcomics.

My background is mostly in art and graphic design, with a little bit of English as my minor in college. After I finished grad school and graphic design, I said, 'I want to work in comics, so I’m either going to find a job in comics or find a bag of money under a tree.' I’m still looking for that bag of money.

But my now-wife and I moved to New York, and I applied for random jobs, and one of them was a job at Marvel, which I literally forgot about. And then Bill Jemas called me and I thought it was my friends messing with me. I actually had to go home to my computer and find the cover letter, and I realized, 'I did apply to a job at Marvel. This might be real!'

It was right at the end of the Jemas era of Marvel. He was on his way out, but he was still working there, and Dan Buckley was coming in at that point. And I got hired there. I was as an assistant editor, and then worked my way up to editor over a few years. I left to pursue writing.

I wound up getting some work writing some Transformers stuff, and that started growing. My editor, who I knew from Marvel, Andy Schmidt, he left IDW. The Transformers stuff was mostly at IDW, I had a few short stories at Marvel. Schmidt left, and I said, 'I just got my first ongoing series, but then my editor quit.' But Schmidt said, 'It’s not like Marvel, you can write here and edit at the same time.' And I said, 'Oh, that’s interesting.'

I ended up talking to everybody at IDW and moving out to San Diego. Which is where I went to school; I lived in San Diego for a really long time, I went to college in San Diego. My wife and I met at college there. We’d just had a kid, so we moved back to San Diego. Worked at IDW, wrote a ton of Transformers stuff at the same time I was a senior editor there. And eventually, I left again to full-time write. I was doing a bunch of writing on Transformers, Back to the Future, some Spider-Man, a little bit of Doctor Strange, a little bit of Star Wars.

And then I was offered the chance to come back to IDW as editor-in-chief, or it came up that I could do that. I hadn’t really thought about it, but the idea of editor-in-chief sounded interesting. I’ve never been into job titles, but that was one that always had meaning to me. I think of Archie Goodwin, and Joe Quesada, and all the people that I grew up with. Jim Shooter. It was sort of this legendary title.

So I went back to IDW. Things went a little weird at IDW for a couple years, the pandemic being one of them, and a lot of shifts in management and the infrastructure of IDW. At the end of 2021, I was no longer at IDW, and started talking to John Nee.

I met John when IDW was doing the Marvel kids comics. I’d never actually known him before; a lot of people at IDW knew him really well. He’s obviously a huge industry figure; I’d seen him but I didn’t really know him. We hit it off, more or less. And after I left IDW, he emailed me and we started talking about working on stuff. And then I got a call to see if I’d be interested in working at what eventually became PUG Worldwide. I was, and I took the job, and that’s been what I’ve been doing ever since.

What is the origin story for PUG Worldwide?

When John left Marvel during the pandemic, he started doing some consulting. And that started growing in a more elaborate company. We still do some consulting, but we also do prose books, games, art books, comics, RPG development for ourselves at others. All that stuff started to grow up.

We had a bunch of different facets of the industry that we had people coming in from, with expertise in that or that worked in those areas that John and everyone else knew. It wound up being several ex-IDW people and a few other people, so it’s been exciting. That’s sort of the origin for it. It sort of grew up from that.

What can you tell us about Conan the Barbarian: Colossal Edition?

Obviously, coming from IDW, we love the artist’s editions, and we all love being able to see that original art at the full size. I’ve always been a huge Conan fan. Conan’s an interesting character that has existed for a really long time, and still has a level of popularity that you don’t see from a lot of stuff from that era.

It’s a little extemporaneous; it’s got a little bit of that quality, like Batman. When you think of a Batman story, you don’t think of a retro 1930s story. A lot of stuff is locked in the era that it came from. Conan was always cool with that.

One of the amazing things with Conan is that Conan has such a huge legacy in comics. Even though Conan didn’t start as a comics property, it’s almost as close to that as you can get, with how much the comics have influenced the character; the way we think of the character visually.

The amazing art, with Barry Windsor-Smith on the original run, and John Buscema spent so much of his career drawing Conan... There’s so many great Buscema pages and collaborations with other artists, inking him or finishing him. Gil Kane.

And one of the things that was exciting as we dug through the stuff for the Colossal Edition was seeing all these other artists who you don’t think of as Conan artists, but who did some Conan. Neil Adams, Bill Sienkiewicz, Jim Lee, Art Adams. Some of the artists from that time. It’s kind of amazing to see everybody drawing that character in that world.

So we wanted to put together a book that really celebrated the first part of the history of Conan. Not that we don’t want to celebrate the later parts, when you had greats like Cary Nord… The current run of Conan, I think is fantastic. A lot of good artists throughout the whole run. Hopefully we’ll get to some of that later on, maybe in a future edition. But for right now we’re really concentrating on the original years of the series, the Marvel years of Conan. Not that there isn’t a lot more to mine from that.

And I believe the introduction is by Roy Thomas?

Yes. You don’t have Conan comics without Roy Thomas. He was such an instrumental part in getting that at Marvel. But also, he wrote so many of those and so many stories; he did amazing adaptations and amazing original stories.

It was an honor to talk to Roy, and to have Roy come in a do the introduction. We’d vaguely crossed paths a couple times in the past. There was an adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans years and years ago at Marvel that Roy wrote that I was a little bit involved in. It was super exciting to have him writing an intro to a Conan book.

What made you decide to partner with Zoop on this project?

Zoop had worked with Scott Dunbier. We all know Scott, and anything we do in this arena is with the utmost respect to Scott. They’d done The Winter Men Artist’s Edition via Zoop, and that seemed to go really well.

Zoop itself, one of the founders of Zoop, Eric Moss, is an ex-IDW guy, so a lot of us have known him for a long time as well. They’d been talking to me personally about doing a thing at Zoop, even before I was at PUG W. So it was exciting to actually get to do something.

Nate Murray, our publisher, worked with them really closely to set up the deal. Zoop handles a lot of the pieces of crowdfunding in a way that other crowdfunding sites don’t, which is nice.

I’m sure we could have worked around it if this wasn’t the way they worked, but they frequently worked with the same printer that we were printing our Colossal Edition with, which is the same printer that IDW uses, and we use it on a lot of our other printed stuff. So, there have been some books that have been like Artist’s Editions in the past that maybe haven’t been up to the level of quality that the best of these things look… But we’re pretty confident that this one will be. Not to take anything away from Scott, that was always Scott’s baby, but we all touched it in some way, we all saw how that worked, and we all worked with the printer really closely. The pages aren’t going to be glossy, they aren’t going to be thin. This will be nice.

So all that just kind of dovetailed together really well, and we were excited to try something new out. We’d done some Kickstarters with games before, under some of our other imprints, and that all works great too – it just depends on the project. But Zoop seemed like the right one for this.

What can you tell us (or tease) about other upcoming projects and/or talent from PUG Worldwide?

We’ve been working behind the scenes for a couple of years, since the end of ’21. We’re going to be doing some more stuff that’s actually going to be public facing, that people will see our name on. We have some other stuff with Conan, we have some other licenses that we’ll be announcing soon, that are pretty big and pretty cool, in the art book range of things.

We’re going to be doing a line of 3D comics. We’re working with a couple of different partners on that. Representing classic comics in 3D, with 3D glasses – we’re pretty excited about that, and pretty exciting about making that announcement, hopefully soon.

And we’ve got some original stuff coming out. The first one of those is going to be a comic I’m writing called Signa, with my partner in crime, Andrew Griffith. We used to do Transformers together, we’ve worked together for more than a decade. But this will be our first creator owned comic, so we’re super excited about that. We’re looking to launch that early next year.

We’ve been helping develop the Adventure Time role playing game for Cryptozoic, doing some RPG development for ourselves and our partners. We’ve got a game called “Everyone Else Thinks This Game is Awesome” that shipping right now which is coming out right now through Erasmus Fox, which is an imprint.

And John Nee has a book he and SJ Rozan wrote called The Murder of Mr. Ma. That’ll be coming out in April of next year. That’s one that’s going out through SoHo Press, but we’re packaging that book the way Byron Preiss used to do that kind of thing of putting that stuff together, but finding the right home to distribute it and get it out there.

A lot of stuff like that, thinking of different ways of distributing things and getting the right items to the right places for the people to see them. The comic market is a lot more fragmented than it used to be, just like everything else is, in terms of entertainment.

So over the decades, that’s become the trick. There’s more people who are open to reading comics now, but that means the only fans of comics aren’t the ones who are coming in on Wednesday afternoon to pick up their comics, the way it was twenty or thirty years ago. You can get comics so many other ways now; same thing with games, same things with any of that stuff that’s become more mainstream as it has gone on. Conan art books, any of that sort of stuff. So we’re trying to find where to go to get it to the right people, and make cool items for the greatest fans.

What is something everyone should know about PUG Worldwide?

One of the things that I really enjoy about it is, we’re small and scrappy. There aren’t that many of us, we all wear a few different hats and kind of work on a bunch of different things.

To me, that’s always exciting, and it’s where exciting things tend to come from, is that sense of, “Well, let’s try it. Maybe this is the way to go and maybe it isn’t, but let’s give it a shot and see what happens.

Is there anything else that you’d like me to include?

It’s been great to work with Heroic Signatures, who are the rights holders of Conan. They’ve been terrific. I get the impression that they’re very excited about Conan and about getting that stuff out there, and getting interesting takes, new books, new ways of looking at the character out there. Zoop’s been terrific. Roy Thomas.

I do want to say, Ian Chalgren is designing the Colossal Edition. He’s fantastic. He’s built up his own artist edition style books in the past, on his own, showing how he’d do it and what he’d do with them. He’s been on Cartoon Kayfabe talking about it. So it was really exciting to get to work with him.

And then we’ve got Chris Ryall writing some text pieces to set the scene for some of the art, especially with this one, because we’re covering so many different artists. The vast majority of the book is divided up between Barry Windsor Smith, Gil Kane, and John Buscema. But there’s an extensive section in the back that has a lot of those different artists that I talked about. Alex Toth, Howard Chaykin, a lot of people that you’d expect if you’re a Conan fan, and then some that might take you by surprise if you don’t remember that one Conan cover that somebody did at some point or another.

So it’s been terrific working with them, and Ian’s just knocked it out of the park with the design, and the sort of level of detail that he’s getting into. So I’m very excited to see how this all comes together at the end, and being able to hold the book in my and, instead of just looking at PDFs.