Writers Kurt Busiek and Len Wein (along with artist Kelley Jones) work hard to keep Conan: Book of Thoth out of the Boring Zone, but I'm afraid it's a losing battle.
A) this is an origin story, and (even worse) one of a villain, so it's all cackling laughter and evil triumphing.
Two) this is a Conan story in which Conan can't appear at all, so we just get a couple hundred pages of neo-Howardian pre-historical squalor and woe.
Thoth-Amon is a major Conan villain -- one of the few who doesn't show up and get his head chopped off in the space of a short story, I mean, which is what "major Conan villain" means. And so, round about 2005, he got a comic-book series to explain Who He Is and How He Got That Way. And, well, it turns out he was a nasty street kid -- battered by his father, to make it even more tedious and psychological -- in some random Hyperborian Age city, who did various nasty things for four long issues to end up as High Priest of Set and secret ruler of an entire nation.
MUA-HA-HA-HA!!!!!
Book of Thoth is pretty much all one tone -- slightly detached tsk-tsking at how horrible this guy named variously Thoth, Amon, and Thoth-Amon is, while still being excited at each new bit of nastiness. It's really only for huge Conan fans, and I have no clear idea why it was on my shelf. (My best theory is that it came in one of the care packages of comics I got after my flood in 2011.) And it is one more signpost to show that we really don't need more origin stories.
(By the way, I don't know if Mssrs. Busiek, Wein and Jones knew this at the time, but if you google "Book of Thoth," you get a whole lot of what are technically called "woo-woo" books about Atlanteans and energy beings and a tiny little bit of Egyptiana. Sometimes the obvious title makes your project hard to find.)
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