Cool ! – more ramblings on the genre are always welcome – will follow with interest – oh, and couldn’t agree more about ‘Comedy sidekicks’ – they are a plague and a blight on so many productions – I was very disappointed with the sequel to the original Conan TB, namely 1984’s Conan the Destroyer – particularly as the script was Roy Thomas based, and given his work on the comics, thought it could have been so much better…….
Michael Basset’s Solomon Kane in 2009 had a lot of problems that might have shocked the purists, but as you point out thankfully was a mature enough narrative to avoid a cretinous companion, and all the better for it……
hope to see more from you soon 
