BWS also took over more of the writing, still largely uncredited, as his grasp of the craft of graphic storytelling progressed. His work on Conan made Windsor-Smith a star in the comics field. He won the Academy of Comic Book Arts award for Outstanding New Talent in 1970, and for Best Continuing Feature for Conan in both 1971 and 1972.

His run on Conan the Barbarian culminated in the classic stories “The Song of Red Sonja” in issue # 24, with the story by BWS, and the adaptation, with scripter Roy Thomas, of Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails,” which appeared in the second and third issues of Marvel’s black and white comics magazine Savage Tales in late 1973.