It's the season of giving... perhaps you'll consider donating?

The Robert E. Howard House in Cross Plains, Texas requires major repairs to remain standing. Due to its listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the preservation costs increase. I just donated $50; perhaps you could too.

I'm very much looking forward to visiting the museum this June for Howard Days, and maybe I'll see you there!

Here's a link to the donation page.

Okay, I'm kind of cheating a little bit with this one. This issue isn't some diamond in the rough that nobody's read or discussed, but it's got a great story (behind it as well as between the pages).

L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter published "The Thing in the Crypt" in the paperback collection Conan in 1967. Outside of the speculation that it probably originated as a draft of a future Thongor story, it was a wholly original little jaunt published alongside some other excellent early-life Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, and a few acceptable de Camp / Carter pastiches.

"The Thing in the Crypt," is, for my money at least, a seriously top-of-the-pile Conan pastiche. It's brisk, creepy, thematically consistent with Howard, and a whole lot of fun to read.

Six years after it came out, Roy Thomas was writing Conan the Barbarian for Marvel Comics and had convinced Glenn Lord of the Howard estate to let him adapt a couple of REH tales into the comic series. He was working on obtaining the rights of some others- Lin Carter had allowed it for "The Hand of Nergal" a few issues prior, but de Camp wasn't so sure. Thomas wanted to depict "Thing in the Crypt" as a flashback episode to take place between Conan #2 and #3, which is a little odd seeing as he considered the story to be a "lesser" de Camp story. When writing about the story, he didn't even seem that interested in it. As de Camp dragged his feet, Roy said, "Fuck it."

He decided to create his own crypt story that would replace "The Thing in the Crypt" for the Marvel continuity. When wondering what he should have Conan fight in the ancient tomb to differentiate his new version from the de Camp story, his wife Jean suggested, "Why don't you have him fight his own shadow?" Roy ran with that idea and ended up creating "The Shadow on the Tomb!" for Conan the Barbarian #31.

"The Shadow on the Tomb!" is fun, but a little sillier than the original. I think Roy's choice to connect the story to his current continuity via the frame narrative was a great choice- it feels less random and it's more unique than just having Conan fuck up by activating a curse and then run his ass out of there. It helps make it less of an adaptation and more of an original yarn.

And then just five years later, Marvel Comics had a new contract with L. Sprague de Camp that allowed them to adapt any of the Conan pastiches they wanted. For some reason, Roy decided to revisit "The Thing in the Crypt" instead of any of the other pastiches in the library. It worked out from the perspective of the Marvel office- John Buscema was out on vacation, so they needed a "filler" episode as they did from time to time. But instead of reprinting an old story, Roy enlisted Big John's little brother, Sal Buscema, to go back to the crypt. Sal is, at times, indistinguishable from his his brother anyway.

​Within the continuity of the book, it made no sense for them to adapt this story here- the end of Conan and Bêlit's adventures were heating up and they were about to attempt a coup in the city of Asgalun, but instead, we looked backward 7 years and returned to some of Conan's earliest adventures.

Roy and Sal had an entirely self-inflicted problem on their hands now: what to do with the fact that they now had two nearly identical stories in which a young Conan, fleeing enemies in the frozen north, disturbs a cursed tomb by moving a magical sword and then has to do battle with a sentry? They decided to go with the simplest, and probably least-elegant solution. Both stories would be canonical to the Marvel continuity. They added some caption boxes at the beginning noting that issue #92 would take place between Conan #2 and #3, and then added a caption at the end saying that Conan probably lost this magical sword, leaving him open to needing another just a few days later.

​Whatever, man.

Like the prose story it's based on, Conan the Barbarian #92 opens with the young Cimmerian running at full speed from a pack of ravenous wolves. While it's a great opening, I think the most interesting thing about page one is that the credits read that the issue is by "Roy Thomas & Ernie Chan," with a special guest penciller, Sal Buscema. I don't think I've ever seen the inker elevated to the spot next to the writer where the penciller usually is.

Conan quickly dives into the titular crypt where the wolves apparently dare not to tread... instead, they just whimper outside of it. And here's the moment that originally made me think, "Maybe I need to blog about this issue:" the following pages are completely monochrome, with only black outlines and blue coloring, to simulate darkness. Roy, and perhaps the Marvel staff in general, called these "knockout panels." When I first read that, I thought it meant that they were meant to knock the socks off the reader since they're such a departure from usual coloring. But I think it's far more likely that they got that name because they're so quick and easy for the colorist to "knock out." Anyway, colorist George Roussos deserves his flowers.

As Conan's campfire rages, the backgrounds have shifted from blue to magenta, and as Conan flips the sentry into the fire, the panels are filled with a red-orange glow that engulfs the page and I'm hoping that George Roussos got a raise or something. He worked as an inker in addition to a colorist and worked with all the greats like Jack Kirby, so I'm sure he wouldn't even remember this issue if I could ask him about it today (he died in 2000).

In the final panels, Conan is bathed in a red and yellow that looks incredible, like a sunset, as he steps away from the crypt. It's a gorgeous ending to a gorgeous comic.

​Clumsily, Roy's final caption box stutters out, "Yeah, um, I know it's weird, but Conan was soon captured by a second group of Hyperborean slavers and had a very similar experience, but this time with a shadow! Please do not invent trade paperbacks so that these stories are never republished and easily compared." At least, that's how I think it went. I didn't go back and check.

Roy Thomas didn't love "The Thing in the Crypt," but ended up adapting it twice. In terms of pop culture representation, it may be the most-often depicted non-REH Conan story. It also inspired a scene in the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger film. It appeared again in the live action Conan the Adventurer TV show. And just about every sword and sorcery fan noticed the parallels between this and the "mound dweller" scene in Robert Eggers's The Northman.

Because of all of those, I think it's fair to say that there's something about the story that really resonates with readers.

When Conan the Barbarian returned to its regularly-scheduled programming in issue #93, it would be careening toward the end of the Conan & Bêlit saga that he had been writing for 40 issues. It was its last grasp at greatness before Roy left.

There's this remarkable cold open in episode three of animator Genndy Tartakovsky's adult animation show, Primal. A pack of wooly mammoths trudges through a blizzard in a storming tundra; unbeknownst to them, an older mammoth lags behind. The elder is missing a tusk, his fur is raggedy to the point of being threadbare, and his eyes betray an exhaustion not present in the others. He becomes separated from his pack without them noticing.

The mammoth lets out a bellow, but it goes unanswered.

After the blizzard breaks, the mammoth is attacked by the show's wordless odd-couple protagonists: the caveman Spear who wields his namesake, and the T-Rex known as Fang. Robert E. Howard fans will catch the references.

The mammoth fights back, but is overpowered by the two hunters. As his trunk lets out gasps of air, Spear raises a rock above his head. He looks into the mammoth's yellow eye and delivers the killing blow. But after the mammoth goes limp, Spear does something surprising. He places his hand gently on the mammoth's side and sees himself reflected in the eye as it closes. He stands there pensively for a moment before making himself a cloak out of the fur.

I tell you with no shame, I cried. And it was like seven minutes into the episode.

"A Cold Death," the title of this episode, is a very good episode of Primal, but it's not an unusual episode of Primal. This is a fantastic TV show that feels like the antithesis to the current media landscape. It's the kind of show we need right now.

People not so long ago used to use the phrase "the attention economy." Everyone wants your attention: your phone, your television, your radio, your game consoles, and they're all fighting for it. Just ten or so years later, that term feels painfully outdated. These days, it feels like nobody really wants your attention.

Netflix makes "second-screen content" to play idly in the background while you scroll Facebook for the hundredth time today. People are generating AI content that kind of looks like a real thing if you don't glance at it too hard, but the longer you look, the more horrifying it becomes. And the movie theater feels like it is in its final hours as nobody seems to want to give themselves over to the theater experience anymore.

I'm as guilty of this as anybody. My wife will give me a hard time as she sees that even though I'm playing a PS5 game, my laptop is also set up so that I can watch a movie, but my phone magically teleports itself to my hand during loading screens. I'm paying attention to everything, but in actuality, nothing.

Primal is currently part of my cure for what ails. The show is silent, meaning it has a "storyboarder" rather than a writer. Spear and Fang, unlikely partners, traverse a fantastic anachronistic landscape together, with each episode largely being its own story disconnected to other installments.

The fact that it's silent- I mean, it's very loud at times, but has almost no spoken dialogue- is one of its secret weapons. It demands your attention. If you try to watch Instagram reels while it plays in the background, you will miss the entire thing. Once the show has your attention, I promise you that it will hold it. The animation is a gorgeous hand-drawn affair with classic painted backgrounds and thick, sometimes ragged outlines on characters. Those characters, whether they be dinosaurs, monsters, or humans, are all incredibly expressive. I suppose you would have to be if it's the only tool you have to convey emotion. Spear is blocky and bottom-heavy with nothing but screams and his face to express himself. Fang uses her whole, long body and keen nose to interact with the world, creating an entirely different mode from Spear.

Primal is a profoundly human show despite very few of its characters being actual humans. It is very violent, yes, with its crimson blood-splatters and brutal fight scenes, but it is also frequently sweet, sad, funny, and contemplative. You very quickly see the humanity in both Spear's human family and Fang's dinosaur kids as each episode invites you to sit silently and really go somewhere with it.

Later on in that episode, the mammoth kill scene plays back again almost exactly, except this time, it's Spear and his son hunting a primordial deer. Spear's son looks into the deer's eye as it dies, the same way Spear did with the mammoth. Both of them take a moment to feel what they're doing for a second and we see that this event is a common event for the cavemen. It's the way of their world, but that doesn't render it devoid of meaning. It's a lot more than you might expect from a cartoon.

The third season begins premiering in about a month, and I can't wait to watch it. 

When Robert E. Howard sat down to write "The Devil in Iron," the tenth Conan story to reach publication, it was after a period of nine months during which he didn't write anything for his sword-and-sorcery series character. He had been experiencing bouts of burnout, taking a few months between Conan stories and trying out different genres. He did the same thing right before "Queen of the Black Coast." Perhaps this long gap is why this story is so devoid of other connections to the Hyborian world.

"The Devil in Iron" was published in the August 1934 issue of Weird Tales and followed a very similar plot to the previous story Howard had written, "Iron Shadows in the Moon." Both feature islands in the Vilayet Sea, pirates, iron golem enemies, and fairly forgettable one-off companions. "Devil in Iron" was voted the best story of the issue despite how it re-tread earlier subjects and earned Howard $115.

There is very little mooring this to one single place in Conan's life.

• Conan is a new chief to the kozaks: "'That is because of the new chief who has risen among them,' answered Ghaznavi. 'You know whom I mean.' 'Aye!' replied Jehungir feelingly. 'It is that devil Conan; he is even wilder than the kozaks, yet he is crafty as a mountain lion.'
  • As a side note, I wondered in my Chronologically Speaking entry about "Iron Shadows in the Moon," why Conan bristles at the term "kozak." Seeing as this story tells us it means "wastrel," I get the sense that it's sort of a slur.
  • Conan evidently met the kozaks with nothing but the clothes on his back and quickly rose through the ranks: "This was Conan, who had wandered into the armed camps of the kozaks with no other possession than his wits and his sword, and who had carved his way to leadership among them."
• Conan refers to the black lotus of Xuthal, which places this story after "Xuthal of the Dusk:" "Her sleep was too deep to be natural. He decided that she must be an addict of some drug, perhaps like the black lotus of Xuthal." This line has vexed many previous chronologizers, because the general consensus seems to be that Conan should be a little older in "Xuthal," but since I've placed it early, this isn't a problem for me right now.
• Has Conan seen a copy of the Book of Skelos? This story seems to imply that he has: "Conan had seen rude images of them, in miniature, among the idol huts of the Yuetshi, and there was a description of them in the Book of Skelos, which drew on prehistoric sources." But where would he have seen a Book of Skelos? The copies seem to be exclusively in the hands of powerful wizards, who Conan is famously not a fan of. Or is this a strangely-worded sentence that just means that there are pictures in the Book of Skelos of the snake creatures he's looking at?
• Conan evidently understands Nemedian: "There was no door in that wall, but he leaned close and heard distinctly. And an icy chill crawled slowly along his spine. The tongue was Nemedian, but the voice was not human." This makes sense based on the placement of "Rogues in the House" well before this.

Here's the really tricky question about placing this story: Are the Free Companions / kozaks essentially the same group as the pirates of the Red Brotherhood? Consider this line about the kozaks.

If the barriers between the kozaks and the pirates are permeable, which this line seems to imply they are, then when we see Conan "carving" out leadership in the group, perhaps this is the same event we see at the end of "Iron Shadows in the Moon," when Conan meets the Red Brotherhood and immediately starts rising in the ranks. In the previous stories in which Conan is a mercenary, he's apparently just of the rank-and-file members, not in leadership, so those stories would go before this.

Some fellow Conan chronology nerds like Dale Rippke have hypothesized that Conan is younger in "Iron Shadows" because of how he approaches the Red Brotherhood (they would argue he does so naively), but that's not an impression I agree with.

Other timelines place this story chronologically right before "The People of the Black Circle," in which Conan is the hetman of the Afghuli hillpeople. That's possible, but I'm inclined right now to place it right after "Iron Shadows in the Moon." That way, he isn't traipsing back all over the world and spends some time on the Vilayet before going anywhere else. I'm not opposed to changing its placement if that makes more sense in the future, but right now, I think it works best immediately after its twin "iron" story.

Appearing in Weird Tales in May 1934, "Queen of the Black Coast" is the ninth Conan of Cimmeria story published and appeared just one month after "Iron Shadows in the Moon." In the last four stories published, three of them are pirate stories, and this is the third time in nine that Howard's made use of the black lotus powder as a plot device. However, these are more quirks of publishing rather than a throughline in Howard's writing. "Queen of the Black Coast" had been written and set to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales by August 1932, but wouldn't be published for almost another two years. Howard was paid $115 for it.

There are lots of interesting chronological markers in this story!

So what do we know for sure?

• This story must take place after his thieving days. The places it firmly after "Rogues" and "Tower."
• This story takes place after he is a mercenary for Turan, where he learned archery.

What events are probable, but not 100% clear?

• Conan has been to Nordheim and Nemedia.
• Conan doesn't seem to have ever been a pirate before.
• Conan probably hasn't come across the "Xuthal" version of the black lotus.

What is possible?

• Conan has been to Aquilonia, to get his sword.
• Conan has been to Koth, to get his armor.
• Conan has been to Ophir, to get his cloak.

Here's the thing: I don't think we should give that much weight to his clothing. Argos is a city that is usually portrayed as a hub of commerce. The mercenary bands which Conan has been with are universally described as extremely diverse, motley crews. I find it far more likely that he's simply bought these clothes or picked items off dead bodies on the battlefield. In later stories, he's frequently clad in just a loincloth, which means that he's probably rapidly gaining and losing articles of clothing anyway. 

Therefore, we should focus on Conan's characterization and other clues. He's after his thieving days, during his mercenary days, but probably before "Xuthal of the Dusk." Additionally, if we look back to "Iron Shadows in the Moon," Conan smiles enigmatically about pirates and makes a crack at the end by calling Olivia "the Queen of the Blue Sea," which might be a reference to his time with Bêlit. So this story is probably set before "Iron Shadows" as well.

In May of 1975, the double-length comic book Giant-Size X-Men #1 landed with a clang on newsstands. True to its title, Giant-Size was thicker than your average comic, but it was also trying to sell something big: a new era of the X-Men, a team nobody cared about at the time. The X-Men title had been a shambling corpse for years, simply publishing reprints of old stories for 28 issues in a row. Giant-Size was meant to revive the mutants.

Truth be told, a lot of it had to do with diversifying the cast to sell more comics to different markets. Members of this new "Second Genesis" X-Men team would be from all over the world: Canada, Russia, Germany, Kenya, Ireland, and Japan. It was a lot different than the five upper-crusty, blond, white kids from New York that comprised the old team.

Among the creative team was Len Wein, who got the writing credit on the issue, as well as twenty-four year-old newcomer from Long Island Chris Claremont, who had contributed a couple of ideas to the plotting. Pulling the X-Men out of reprints was part of Giant-Size's goal, so it would need a writer on the regular Uncanny X-Men book. Len Wein realized as soon as Giant-Size was done that he was too busy to take on that responsibility as well.

Len decided to offer the gig to Chris. Claremont had done well in his limited time at Marvel, but was untested, and Len Wein figured that none of the more experienced writers at Marvel would have their feathers ruffled by the offer since X-Men was a low-tier title. Len didn't feel like he was missing out by dropping it, but Chris was excited. He remembers accepting Len's offer by proclaiming, "Shit-yes!"

Chris and Len worked out that Chris would write the new X-Men book for six issues. He figured that would be all. 

In fact, Chris was happy to have that. The comics industry was dying, he thought. "Nobody bought comics. It was a dying industry, and we knew it. Nobody cared. We were just there to have fun. We all figured by 1980 we'd all be out looking for a real job," he said. What Chris couldn't have known was that he was about to revitalize not only Marvel Comics, but the comics industry as a whole, and become one of its all-time greatest creators.

For the next several years, Chris entered what pop music critics call an "imperial period." Everything he did was insanely well-reviewed and sold insanely well. It would be an understatement to say that he revolutionized what people thought of when they thought of the X-Men. He fucking obliterated what had come before. He turned the X-Men's 1960s into a footnote so much so that it acquired a new epithet: "Classic X-Men," to differentiate it from the real, modern "X-Men." When you think of the X-Men, if you're not thinking of Cyclops, Jean Gray, Beast, or the word "mutant," you're probably thinking of one of Claremont's creations. He invented the heroes Shadowcat, the Phoenix, Gambit, Rogue, Emma Frost, Jubilee, Psylocke, Cable, Northstar, Captain Britain, Sunspot, Warpath, Cannonball, and Moira MacTaggart as well as the villains Sabretooth, Pyro, Mr. Sinister, Mystique, Madelyne Pryor, Lady Deathstrike, and the Hellfire Club. Being responsible for just one or two of those would be enough to enshrine you in X-Men history.

​The X-Men films, which themselves helped transform the film industry in regards to comic book movies, are almost all based on his works in some way.

In just a few short years, Chris, along with artist John Byrne, had produced many of what are still some of the most iconic storylines in not only X-Men history, but Marvel history in general. They produced "The Dark Phoenix Saga," "Days of Future Past," and "God Loves, Man Kills," not to mention developing Wolverine into the single most popular mutant of all time and probably the second-most famous Marvel character of all, right behind Spider-Man.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, Chris Claremont found the time to write one, single issue of The Savage Sword of Conan.

Issue #74, with its A-story feature written by Claremont and a backup by Roy Thomas, was published in January of 1982, about a year and a half after Roy Thomas had quit Marvel and Savage Sword had entered a tumultuous period (which I have written extensively about). 

Savage Sword #74 came right at the end of that tumult, when the Michael Fleisher era was dawning on the title. But out of the blue, here comes Chris Claremont, who, as far as I can tell, had never touched Conan with a ten-foot pole before. I wonder if it was Louise Simonson, editor on both the Conan titles and the X-books, who brought Claremont over to Savage Sword. There's a quote that made its way around social media last year that is attributed to Claremont. It says, “In terms of characterization, [Wolverine]'s a lineal descendant of Conan... Wolverine is a Cimmerian. Lock, stock, and barrel. If Conan and Wolverine met on the street they would be relating to each other like looking into a funhouse mirror at distorted images of themselves Wolverine is out of place and out of time. He's a classic Howard character.” Now, I can't find any verifiable source that Claremont said that, so it's probably fake. But it's right.

Perhaps that's why this issue is so excellent- Claremont already had experience turning the savage Wolverine into a beloved character, so he knew what he was doing. The two would have an incredible meeting in Gerry Duggan's Savage Avengers 40 years later.

As Savage Sword #74 opens, Conan is on his way through the northern reaches of a mountain range: perhaps Brythunia, Nemedia, or the Border Kingdom that lay close to Cimmeria. He checks in at a remote inn and pays for his stay in fine furs he's hunted. 

He is struck during his revels by unhappy memories of childhood. A former friend named Shard who betrayed him and made off with his loot. You can pinpoint the exact time frame in which this issue was published because Shard is a 1:1 mirror image of guitarist John Oates.

That night, Conan is torn from his bed by a one-handed man named Kendrick, an evidently clairvoyant character who has foreseen Conan's coming through a crystal ball. Conan is rough and violent, but without the taint of evil, Kendrick notes.

Kendrick asks, in exchange for a king's ransom in gold, to ferry a passenger away from the inn. That passenger is a woman named Astriel whose hair apparently matches her ice-blue eyes. Even in black and white, Val Mayerik's art shimmers like dawn running on the snows. His Astriel is icy and beautiful, while Conan is hot-blooded and carved out of rock. He occasionally surrounds Astriel with a sort of aura that makes her feel reflective like ice.

As it turns out, Astriel is being pursued by Conan's old friend Shard, along with two Stygian sorcerers, twin brothers in the employ of Thoth-Amon. They give chase to Conan and Astriel, who flee through the snows. Their horses are vaporized, a horde of devil-bats attacks them, and the pair ultimately do battle with Shard and his twin wizards. Astriel ultimately saves herself by having come close enough to use the magic of her homeland. She reveals herself as the "Snow Queen, Lady of the Silver Silence" promised in the title, and expels those who wish her harm with the help of some wildlife loyal to her. 

The story ends with Conan convalescing in her lair, laid up until the snows thaw in the spring. It's a lot of time to spend together, and they'll make the best of it.

Parts of this story are so unmistakably Claremont. A term often trotted out to describe Claremont's work is "soap opera." John Byrne once joked that Chris Claremont's ideal issue of X-Men would've been just 22 pages of his characters walking around and talking about their problems. To quote Chris himself, "To me, the fights are bullshit." His focus on relationships that made Uncanny X-Men an indelible teen drama is here in spades; a few short character moments really pack punch. Conan's betrayal at the hands of Shard in his younger days which fades back to Conan's lonely eyes. The fear that a sex worker will give up Conan and Astriel's position either willingly or through coercion gives weight to what otherwise might be a forgettable brothel character, inserted just for some T 'n' A. It's particularly melancholy that Kendrick, now appearing decades older than Astriel, is actually her longtime lover, cursed to watch her beauty perpetuate while he ages at a normal human rate, and he ultimately gives everything for her. Even the moment when Astriel impales one of the twin sorcerers is more emotional than you would think it would be. He utters, "Brother..." as he crumples next to his twin, a look of utter helplessness on his face.

Claremont entwines the paths of Conan and Astriel, two people not easily disposed to opening up, and crafts a powerful tale about trust and about those who you let get close.

Val Mayerik's low winter suns and heavy shadows over the white wastes of the north all feel appropriately mythic, ornate, and totally in service of this chiastic fantasy story. As Astriel and Conan grow closer, Astriel literally lets her hair down. It begins in a tight braid like Princess Leia's on Hoth before gradually loosening as she opens up to her companion. Mayerik's Conan, on the other hand, is not the action figure superhero of John Buscema's or Gil Kane's versions of the character, but a ferocious, and at-times frightening, slab of meat.

I have a hypothesis about this story, and I'm not sure if I'm right about it, but I think I can make a good argument. 

Chris Claremont's duties at Marvel in the late 70s and early 80s hadn't only been with X-Men. One of his pet projects had been developing the character of Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers's offshoot of the Captain Marvel hero. Like the diversification of the X-Men team, part of Ms. Marvel had been about appealing to women to sell more comics, but Chris had poured a lot of himself into the character.

He'd worked to try to keep Carol from being just an object of sex appeal on the page, trying to very finely sketch who she was as a person. Though Claremont didn't create Ms. Marvel, Marvel historian Sean Howe argues that nobody had ever invested as much in a female superhero as Chris did with her. For twenty issues he tried his best to create a living, modern character, but the title was cancelled and he had to move on. He'd sometimes put Carol as a guest character in his X-Men stories. 

But just a year later in 1980, he saw Ms. Marvel forcibly impregnated in Avengers #200, an event that everyone involved seems ashamed of now. It's gone down in comic history as "The Rape of Ms. Marvel." Claremont, apparently, was aghast.

It makes a lot of sense to me, then, to see him create a woman character of unspeakable power in the pages of Savage Sword of Conan. Astriel had previously been taken from her home and underestimated by the evil Thoth-Amon. Should Conan and Astriel be overtaken, Astriel asks Conan that he kill her. 

"I have been dishonored. I prefer death," she tells the Cimmerian.

Later in the story, Shard's band of brigands bears down on Conan and Astriel, vastly outnumbering our heroes. It is Astriel's power, not Conan's, that protects them. She is fully in control of her domain and drives out the trespassers. No one can touch her unless she chooses. It's easy to draw a through-line from Ms. Marvel to Astriel, with Claremont finally able to give a more fitting coda to his woman hero.

Chris Claremont and his X-Men titles changed the comic landscape drastically. Through the 80s and into 90s, Claremont and his mutant teams dominating, changing the face of who and what comics could tell stories about. In some ways, they may have caused the downturn of Conan books as readers wanted more personal stories and fewer tales of steel-clanging adventure.

Claremont returned to Conan just one more time, with King-Size Conan #1, which is pretty fucking awesome itself. I may have to dedicate a future Unsung Sword column to that issue alone. In this 2020 one-shot, billed as a celebration of 50 years of Conan comics, a half-dozen stories are told by some of the best writers in modern comics, along with ol' Roy Thomas returning to his very first Conan the Barbarian issue. Unsurprisingly, in Claremont's story, he mostly forgoes the battles. He opens on the end of a conflict, but spends the rest of his pages dedicated to a conversation between Conan and a dying girl. It's really moving, and feels like something no other Conan writer would do.

​Two years later, Marvel would lose the rights to Conan and that era would be over. Titan would take over, bringing us into the modern day.

Savage Sword of Conan #74 may be the last time the book was truly great. I'm sad we only ever got two stories from Chris Claremont, but they're some of the best Conan stories of their respective decades. 

Read my other posts about Conan comics here.

"Iron Shadows in the Moon" was published as "Shadows in the Moonlight" in Weird Tales' April 1934 issue. Published three months after "Rogues in the House" and just one month prior to "Queen of the Black Coast," I'm realizing the Robert E. Howard was in a bit of a pirate phase. "Pool of the Black One," "Iron Shadows," and "Black Coast" are all samplings of Conan's different pirate periods (Barachan, Red Brotherhood, and Black Coast, presented ironically in reverse-chronological order), and I've never realized they were all published pretty close to one another.

This is far from my favorite Conan story, but it's pretty brief and has some interesting chronological clues in it which are more fun to deal with than the times he straight-up says he's been somewhere or done something.

​It's actually really fun to try to place!

Revisiting this story has helped me appreciate it a little more in terms of how it calls forward (though, chronologically, back) to "Queen of the Black Coast" in a few interesting ways. 

Since he starts the story as the seeming last surviving Free Companion and ends the story with the pirates, this is functionally a bridge between his kozaki period and his Red Brotherhood pirate period.

Here's one thing that I think is key to this story's chronological placement: Conan seems to be describing similar events in both a passage from "Xuthal of the Dusk" and "Iron Shadows:"

If Conan is describing the same rebel prince of Koth and same mercenary bands, which I think he probably is, the Free Companions went south through Shem to outlands of Stygia, then through Kush. From there, they became independent of Almuric's command and apparently went back up through Koth, Zamora, and then to Turan where "Iron Shadows in the Moon" picks up. You'll have to tell me in the comments if you think this makes sense. The thing is, if I do actually look at other chronologies, pretty much everyone else has "Iron Shadows" come before "Xuthal," sometimes waaay before it, so I feel like I may be missing something.

I'm kind of starting to doubt myself with this story... did I miss any other connections?

​Without this connection to "Xuthal of the Dusk," "Iron Shadows" could land pretty much anywhere between "Rogues in the House" and "The Pool of the Black One."

I kind of bristle at the use of the word "graphic novel" these days, through no fault of graphic novels themselves. I work in education, and there's a huge number of teachers who seem to use the term because they're embarrassed about the label "comic book." Everything with pictures becomes a "graphic novel" to these people. The emphasis on graphic novels as a gateway to more literacy has become kind of iffy anyway- I've started to notice students who never want to move on from Dogman and Captain Underpants and Amulet. I've got some 7th graders who still use the phrase "chapter books." That makes me chafe far more than a weird use of "graphic novel."

The term itself doesn't really have anything wrong with it, though it does carry with it a bit of a promise. Something billing itself as a graphic novel brings some associations along with it- that it will likely be larger in scope than this month's issue of Uncanny X-Men, or that it will maybe be slightly more challenging or literary than a random issue of Detective Comics.

The "Marvel Graphic Novel" line especially seems to be making these promises.

Jim Shooter pitched Marvel Graphic Novels in 1979 as physically and narratively different than your average Marvel comic. They would be in a larger format with a few dozen more pages, a cardboard cover and slick paper printing with some big story consequences. They started with a bang with The Death of Captain Marvel, which is still the definitive original Captain Marvel story, and have included undisputed classics like X-Men's God Loves, Man Kills. They had an insane bullpen of talent on these: Chris Claremot, John Byrne, Geof Isherwood, David Michelinie, Frank Miller, Dennis O'Neil. But some of this shit is still just... not good.

The three previous MGNs I've written about this blog have been a mixed bag at best. Horn of Azoth was disappointing and hampered by bad art, The Witch Queen of Acheron had a few moments but was hampered by bad art, and Conan the Reaver was decent: definitely the best of the three, no complaints about the art. Conan the Barbarian: The Skull of Set, the fifty-third graphic novel in the line, written by Doug Moench and drawn by Paul Gulacy, is definitely my favorite of these four so far.

Conan is captured in Messantia and made to buy his freedom by escorting a wagon full of weapons to a little Argossean port city which is at serious risk of invasion. The Cimmerian realizes quickly that the wagon is not exactly what he was told it was and is soon after saddled with the care of four people fleeing Argos: a wealthy merchant, his wife, a foppish aristocrat, and a priestess of Mitra. Word from Messantia is that one of them is a spy, selling out Argos to Stygia and Koth... but which one?

Chased by a bandit gang into a mountain range, Conan tries to buy the group some time by stranding their wagon on a plateau that seems out of reach for the pursuing hillmen. They're ultimately trapped: Argossean soldiers on one side, bandits on the other, a spy in their midst, and the group of five is holed up in the mystical Ruins of Eidoran. Before long it turns out that more than one of the wagon's occupants is not who they seem.

I love Conan stories with setups like this. A mysterious place, people you can't trust, and a coin-flip of which hostile force will arrive first.

I'd argue that The Skull of Set is a pretty darn good Conan graphic novel and its plot would fit right in with the upper-middle tier of Savage Sword issues. Its art by Paul Gulacy is very good but also sets it apart slightly from Marvel's 70s Conan heyday- it certainly looks more modern. Conan's sporting more of a mullet than a "square-cut" black mane, and one or two characters look like they were ripped from Motley Crue videos, but that's not a slight.

In action scenes, Gulacy sometimes unmoors his panels from the grid and places them in order or on top of one another, adding to the cacophony of battle. I read one review in which the author thought Doug Moench got too wordy with the exposition, and he certainly isn't light with his pen, but he's not edging out Roy Thomas for verbosity or anything. Honestly, I think this thing's a pretty excellent pick-up.

In terms of its chronology, I would put The Skull of Set right after the Karl Edward Wagner novel The Road of Kings, which is also set on the western coast of the world. In both of these narratives, Conan still seems young, but is very shrewd and it ultimately saves his life.

Of course, the only real difference between these MGNs and an issue of Savage Sword of Conan is color, so they probably aren't the most essential adds to a Conan collection.

While I have no burning desire to pick up the Conan of the Isles graphic novel, I'm definitely trying to get my hands on Conan the Rogue, which is the only Conan story John Buscema ever got a story credit on, so I'm really curious. Unfortunately, they're all going for $100-500 on the net, so we'll see.

To find my other posts about the Marvel Graphic Novels, go here.

I get to the local barcade, The 1-Up, about 6:15, a little early. There are a few of these around, but the ones in downtown Denver and Boulder are infested with hip college kids in jaunty hats so it's impossible to get a drink, and the one on Colfax is always crawling with creeps and cops.

​I feed fifty dollars into the change machine and fill up a plastic cup with tokens. I'm meeting some of my oldest friends, Adam and Mio, here to beat the 1987 hack-and-slash arcade game Rastan Saga, known here in America as just Rastan. I figure if we can't beat it with fifty bucks worth of tokens, we'll never beat it at all.

Rastan Saga is no Donkey Kong or Paperboy. Hell, it's not even a Bubble Bobble or a Tapper in terms of name recognition, but the game has a bit of a reputation as being really, really good and also insanely difficult.

From the moment I lay eyes on it, I know Rastan Saga wants to be a Conan game. In 1987, Yoshinori Kobayashi of the game developer Taito was reportedly a big fan of the Conan the Barbarian movie and wanted to release a Conan game for arcades, but they didn't have the rights. What they put out is clearly the Cimmerian with the serial numbers filed off.

Rastan is a loincloth-wearing, sword-wielding, sword-and-sorcery barbarian. Mirroring Conan's fictional life almost exactly, Rastan is now a king who sits on a golden throne a la the epilogue shot of Arnie as King Conan from the 1982 movie, but was in his youth both a thief and a murderer. Unlike Conan, the game tells you that this will be a chronological retelling of his path. In the Japanese version, there is a prologue that tells us Rastan is on a quest for a dragon's head, but those have been removed from the American edition. Most of the artwork on the cabinet itself makes Rastan look like a sandy brunette, if not a blonde, but some of the artwork is just Conan. The Commodore 64 cover of the game features a straight-up rip of Earl Norem's cover for Savage Sword #24.

There are six levels, each ending with a different boss. The barbarian starts out with a regular sword but a few power-ups along the way give you some extra oomph, like a flail with increased range, an axe with increased power, or flaming sword that shoots fireballs. While it plays really well, the eight-way joystick is a little annoying in tense moments as you can sometimes jump straight up when you mean to jump up and to the right, but that's just the sort of thing you have to deal with in 40 year-old arcade games.

The token machine spits out my fifty dollars worth of tokens and I palm them into a cheap plastic cup before I walk over to the bar.

"What's the cheapest beer you guys have tonight?" I ask the bartender. "It's Saturday night, so there's no happy hour... I guess it's a PBR can," she replies. That's fine with me, so I lay down $5 for my first tall boy.

It's a short walk to Rastan, where I see that it says "Kid Niki" on the side, which means this cabinet was probably converted to Rastan Saga from the Dragonball ripoff Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. Taito only issued Rastan as a conversion kit, so there are no dedicated Rastan machines at all. All the cabinets here at the 1-Up have shelves retrofitted to the side, so I plop my beer and coin cup on my left and play a warm-up round. As you put a token in, the machine plays this deep chooom sound that really tickles your vintage arcade fancy.

Just to my right, the Broomfield High School class of 1986 is supposed to be having a class reunion, judging by the paper sign on the reserved tables. So far, it's just one stony-faced looking guy in a Colorado Avalanche t-shirt and a bomber jacket with his arms crossed, waiting for the rest of his graduating class. To my left is a machine I've never heard of called Jungle King. Nobody touches it all night.

I play my first run at Rastan as a warm-up and am immediately reminded of what I learned last time I played this game. Don't even go for the power-ups on the first level; it's easy enough that they're not worth the time. I do okay for having prepared as well as a ninth-grader before a geography exam, which is to say I haven't touched this game in two months. I figure this practice run is a good sign- I've never truly tried to beat an arcade game in one go. At a Dave & Busters when I was 14, we played Time Crisis 2 for half of our year-end field trip there, but that's it.

The Broomfield High reunion guy steps over and introduces himself as Tom. He tells me that he used to play this game at a local arcade in 1987 and I fight the urge to tell him that I wasn't even born in 1987 and instead ask him if he has any tips. He says no because the arcade wasn't there for long. Drat. Oh well. He sits back down.

Adam and Mio arrive right on time. Adam orders a Coors Light and Mio gets a Dr. Pepper. They haven't been to this particular 1-Up before, so we do a lap of the arcade before we settle into Rastan. The whole place is decorated like you're inside a maze of warp pipes from Super Mario, with amateur murals of video game characters above the machines, the kind my mom paints for play scenes at Vacation Bible School.

The first level of Rastan Saga (or "Round," as the game terms them) is a desolate mountain range with craggy rocks in the background. Rastan the barbarian drops down from the sky and we start slashing, jumping, ducking past waves of bad guys. While the game doesn't have a timer on any of the levels, the sun will gradually go down, causing a really pretty palette change in the parallax-shifting background. The light becomes a reddish dusk and the game gradually throws more enemies at you to encourage speed.

Every round has two sections: an outdoor portion and then an indoor castle / dungeon setting which is evidently the abode of the eventual boss. We manage to get through the outdoor portion of round one pretty quickly. I'm surprised, but pleased.

I head over to the bathroom and a guy is walking out when I'm walking in. He has on a black t-shirt that says in lowercase Times New Roman letters, "not eric." I ask him if his name is Eric and he tells me to fuck off.

​I hit the bar on the way back to the game.

There is apparently a Rastan Saga II (known almost backwards outside of Japan as "Nastar") and Rastan Saga III. Apparently, the second installment is boiled ass and the third is perhaps the best in the series, though the title seems to change by the minute. I've seen it referred to as Warrior Blade, Warrior Blade: Rastan Saga III, Warrior Blade: Rastan Saga Episode III and Rastan Saga III: Warrior Blade. The Conan homages (ripoffs?) continue with III, featuring a paint-over of Arnold's Conan the Destroyer pose on the promo materials.

It's becoming clear that Rastan costing only a quarter a play is a mercy, especially when most of the pinball games, even the old ones I love like Monster Bash and Twilight Zone, are a whole dollar. It's going to help us get much further.

We get to the boss, who's a long-armed axe-wielding skeleton with a horned helmet. After a few fruitless attempts, I tag Adam in. He's always been better at video games than me. We realize pretty quickly that he should focus on defense: dodge the swords thrown at you or the boss's axe swings and then sneak in hits whenever you feel safe to. He defeats the boss and we are told, "YOU ARE A BRAVE FIGHTER TO HAVE CLEARED SUCH A DIFFICULT STAGE." Apparently, this too was changed for the American edition of the game like the prologue. Other versions say, "MY JOURNEY HAS JUST BEGUN. THERE IS NOT A MOMENT TO LOSE. I MUST HURRY," which is, frankly, way better. As Adam kills the boss, I realize I've already killed my second beer.

The second round is a dark swamp and it introduces a new enemy type: snakes. The only way to hit snakes is to crouch before you swing your sword, but that's all fine and dandy since that's what we've been doing half the time anyway to avoid enemy strikes. Thankfully, the difficultly of this new level is down a little bit from the second half of round one, so we're really cooking for a moment.

The Broomfield High class reunion has not materialized and I'm starting to feel bad for Tom. If I were him, I would've tried to distract myself by playing some games, but he's barely moved since he talked to me as I first stepped up to Rastan Saga. He's sitting with palms in his pits, legs spread like he could need to stand up at any moment, and I wonder if his turnout will be better next year for their fortieth. His small eyes are scanning the room as though there's a chance the reunion has gotten in past the ID check and managed to make it all the way to arcade machines and perhaps he has just heretofore missed them.

As we play round two and cross a river in the swamp on slow-moving log flumes, Adam jokes that his favorite part of the Conan the Barbarian movie was when Conan had to carefully jump across slow-moving logs, a classic fantasy trope. We cross acid pits that look more like bubbling root beer than anything else. This environment certainly isn't as aesthetically pleasing as the first, though we're kind of finding our groove and are able to do better at re-tracing our steps every time we die without taking damage.

In the interior half of round two, I notice that we actually might be starting to get kind of good at this. There's a part where you're inundated with enemies from all sides, but to move on, you need to strike downward at a breakable tile to fall into a basement. We die a bunch of times, but eventually start making this buttery-smooth jump off a ledge right through the floor, and since all the enemies de-spawn when they leave the screen, we don't even have to fight them. I've drunk two more beers.

I know that arcades are, at their core, kind of a scam. Suckers like me pump quarters into a game designed to eat them efficiently. I try to convince myself that as long as I know that, it's better somehow. It mostly works, and we're definitely having fun.

​But we hit a snag. We get seriously stuck here for about a half hour: from the checkpoint, we climb a chain to an upper floor. At the top, there's a fire pit  spewing fireballs for us to dodge. I try to memorize the pattern, but each fireball has a different number of small and big bounces and I've had four beers at this point, so it's pretty fruitless. To make matters worse, on a platform halfway across the bridge, two enemies come at you from each aside and are all too happy to knock you back into the fireballs or into the pit entirely, so we die again and again.

It's 8pm now, so the bar staff comes over the loudspeaker to kick out anyone under 21. The music switches to mid-2000s club bangers and it's at that point that I realize the music for Rastan Saga is really, really good. There are only three songs in the game: one for the outdoor levels, one for the indoor levels, and one for boss fights. The outside tune is a propulsive little beat whereas the inside music's a lot more spooky and fantastical. They don't get old.

Adam opts for an Old Fashioned as his second drink, which here at The 1-Up is named after a video game character, but I can't remember which one (Max Payne? Solid Snake?) because I'm now four beers deep. I stick with PBR, which you know is good because it won a blue ribbon at some point.

I figured that the alcohol would be the greatest physical factor working against me tonight but I'm finding that my left wrist is developing a bit of a cramp. I guess craning one hand above a jump button and an attack button for two and a half hours continually doesn't make it feel so hot. Adam is feeling the strain too, so we start to switch off a little more often in order to give our poor, delicate hands a break.

I even convince Mio to give it a go and she passes the game back to me pretty quickly. She's never really gone in for the dumb shit that I plan (like blowing fifty bucks on a video game at the arcade just to see if we can do it) and I don't blame her. 

We do eventually get to the boss of round two and as we drop into a room (Rastan always starts things by falling from the sky) with curled snake pillars, I hope to myself that it's some kind of Thoth-Amon-style snake god or wizard thing. To my chagrin, Rastan decides to do that thing that 80s pop culture loves to do where every character has a personality except one: there's the wolfish, dangerous guy and the big, dopey guy and the little, nerdy guy... and then there's the girl. Her differentiating factor is that she's the girl. That's this boss, who is just Woman. She's an unremarkable lady in blue armor. If you look at the game manual it even gives her the boring name "Slayer," when the rest of the bosses are named cool shit like "Kentorous" and "Shukumas." Adam hits her around a dozen times and the game tells us again that we are brave fighters to have cleared such a difficult stage and we're on to round three.

At this point, it's about 9:30 and we've been playing Rastan Saga for three solid hours. Tom's high school reunion crew still hasn't shown up yet, and I think he's started calling people to see if they're coming. I feel pretty bad for him, especially because I start thinking that you couldn't even pay me to go to one of my high school reunions, and I ask Tom if he wants to help us along in the game. "Maybe you can work out some of those 1987 skills!" I tell him.

"No, I'm good," he says flatly. Hey, I tried, I guess.

We're now out of the swamp and into a deep cave full of purple stalactites and my notes about the experience that I'm taking in my phone are starting to get a little harder to understand after the fact.

We are now fully in sync with Rastan. The game presses in on you from all sides and forces you to react. If the game thinks you're stalling, enemies pour in from the sides to turn up the temperature on you. The music pulses you forward as the game pounds you into submission. Every time you die, you feel like you know exactly how to conquer the thing that killed you; you're not left wondering how to beat it, there's just the question of if you can pull it off. My heart thumps like a clothes dryer with shoes in it. The term "beating" the game has never felt more immediate to me than right now. I try to pound it into submission.

Even so, when we're not that far into the next level, we once again get completely stuck for what seems like forever. Rastan slides down a pretty long slope toward a pit, chased by a boulder. The boulder gains on you, so you have to dodge it before you can get to the bottom of the slope by jumping up and sort of back to the left, but timing it is proving to be really hard, especially when you're also trying to avoid a bat and the dinosaur man and manticore on the platform you're supposed to eventually jump to.

Soon after, you're sliding down another hill which is punctuated by instant-death fireballs instead of rocks and we get stuck here interminably.

It takes everything Adam and I have to get through this section. The first time we actually make it past, we pray that we've crossed the checkpoint and won't have to do it again. Our prayers are rewarded.

But our luck doesn't hold out for long. 

The next test is harder than it should be: kill a bad guy, jump over the spikes, kill another bad guy, jump over even higher spikes, kill more enemies. But that 8-way joystick is now our enemy as we can never seem to jump that second set of spikes without getting run through a few times. To top it off, the enemies on the top row keep coming down to hurt us while we're trying to do the high jump, and more shit is spawning behind us.

We are running low on quarters. It's 10:30 at this point. My hand is cramping, the edges of my vision are starting to blur. To make matters worse, I've read that the final round (which is still two rounds away) doesn't have any checkpoints, so you have to beat it in a single go. The despair is palpable, and far more powerful than the PBR.

I die one last time. "Fuck this game," I tell Adam, "I never want to look at it again." I watch the whole countdown to "GAME OVER" and have a few second thoughts about letting it tick all the way down. My right hand kind of twitches when it hits three. But that's all. It reaches zero and I pick up my coin cup and my empties.

Rastan is the natural state of life. My attempt to beat the game is unnatural, a whim of circumstance. And Rastan must always ultimately triumph.

It's not all bad. When we walked in earlier that night, the all-time high score on this Rastan Saga cabinet was owned by "???" and was about 230,000. Adam and I have destroyed ???'s legacy. We own something like the top thirty-nine high scores now, with our names switching back and forth- ADM, ADM, ADM, and the DAN, DAN, DAN every few scores. I enter my name one last time into the three letters allotted to claim your high score. It's about 960,000.

As I close out my bar tab, I notice that Tom has moved. They already took the signs away designating his booth as reserved for Broomfield High, so he's up on his feet and playing games. From what I can tell, he's killing it at Galaga, kind of moving his whole body with the joystick. He looks like he's having fun.

I've got just a few tokens left, so we play Mario Kart Arcade GP, which is technically drunk driving for me.

When I get home, I do the sensible thing. I drink some water. But also, I realize that Rastan Saga is available as a download on the Switch 2, so I buy it there for $6, which, if you're keeping track, is less than we spent at the arcade.

​I still haven't beaten it.

Photos in the above post were taken by Adam Moore.
Graphics were provided by Jake at Yergs Brand.

Critic Chuck Klosterman has this great bit in an exhaustive piece about KISS where he reviews every single album they ever put out, in a paragraph or so each. When he gets to their solo albums after Double Platinum and before Dynasty, he gives each one a lukewarmly-positive review.

Ace's is "about as vintage as any of these jokers are gonna get from here on out." Gene's has a lot of guest stars on it. Paul's probably should've charted better if not for weird, off-putting song titles. And then there's Peter's album. All Klosterman says is, "This record was released by Peter Criss in 1978."

That's kind of how it felt to find something to say about the new Conan novel, Spawn of the Serpent God.

I don't want to be too much of a dick about it. The book is not bad by any means. It just kind of ran through me. I read it over the course of three nights, and to its credit, it is certainly a breezy, quick read. But it just didn't really sick to me at all.

​Spawn of the Serpent God is ostensibly a light sequel to "The Tower of the Elephant" and sort-of prequel to Conan and the Spider God, referencing events and characters from both, but not in a slavish way where you'll be lost if you haven't read one of them (but let's be real- you've read "Tower of the Elephant" a bunch of times, haven't you?). It also bills itself as a tie-in to the "Scourge of the Serpent" comic series coming out right now, but doesn't really do that in a meaningful way. Tim Waggoner said in a blog post that all Titan asked of him was to include Set and ancient serpent men in the story.

Conan, just shy of 19 and thieving in Zamora, is currently partnered with the Zamorian thief Valja, and they're painting the town red. The whiz-bang opening in which they try to steal an idol from a temple of Ishtar is a pretty great start to things! Eventually, the two of them team up with a pair of mystics to try to take down a Stygian sorcerer who's set up shop in the ruins of Yara's tower.

There's eventually a time skip of about 15 years, moving ahead to Conan's 33rd year and reuniting of most of the principle characters. Valja and the villain Shengis are fun. I would certainly hope they would be, since Conan disappears from the narrative entirely for nearly sixty pages right in the middle of the book. The magical mountain fortress Ravenhold is pretty cool, but certainly doesn't feel very "Conan-y" to me. Oh well, it's fun.

There are a couple of light themes through the book about gender, sexuality, and the duality of good vs. evil. Tim Waggoner's characters all feel very flawed and very human, which is welcomed.

​I really try not to review anything on this blog unless I feel like have something new to say about it, and for this novel, I just never really found the angle. I'm inclined to agree with Gary Romeo's review over at SpraguedeCampFan. He said, "Someone, someday, might recapture the original magic. But for now, I’m mostly entertained. A night reading instead of watching Netflix." Entertaining enough, and yeah, better than doomscrolling for a night.

Those Titan books sure do all look good together, though.

I haven't picked up the other Titan release, Blood of the Serpent yet, but for the four with the silhouette covers that I do own, here's my ranking. Far and away the best of them is City of the Dead, followed by Cult of the Obsidian Moon, Spawn of the Serpent God, and then in a distant fourth place is Songs of the Slain.

It starts with a bit of a Roshomon: after rescuing a woman from a gang of would-be killers, their target Shahela spins a yarn about the recent history of her nation Ophir. Conan listens intently to Shahela as she paints herself and her all-female guard squad, the Iron Maidens, as the underdogs in a war against tyranny. The Black Cloaks, a veritable death squad that operated with impunity, cast a shadow over Ophir. They imprisoned the country's rightful leader, Queen Varia, and Shahela seeks to free the besieged queen.

But just a few pages later, Conan is told the same story with slightly different embellishments by another character, the administrator named Balthis. To hear Balthis tell it, the Black Cloaks were actually serving at the pleasure of Varia, and it was Shahela poisoned the throne against the Cloaks. It was the Iron Maidens, he says, who helped Shahela imprison the queen.

We're left wondering who- if anyone- we are to believe. 

It probably doesn't come as a surprise to the engaged reader that both Shahela and Balthis are vying for power and hoping that a certain steely-thewed Cimmerian joins their cause. Conan is a newcomer in Ophir and hears these two tales fairly soon after arriving in the country, apparently fresh from his Barachan pirate days, and probably a little prior to "Red Nails."

This Conan is one of my favorite incarnations of the character: he is now not only worldly but very strategically smart. He knows the ways of civilization and war so that he's not just a physical force to be reckoned with, but a cunning adversary with his sword sheathed, too.

It turns out that a little bit of what Balthus and Shehela both said was true. Varia was a good queen and did try to disband the Black Cloaks, but not through the influence of Shahela. Both the Cloaks' and the Maidens' leaders are vying for power in their own ways- Shahela needs to kill Varia and Balthis needs to marry her.

Sure, Conan has never really cared for politics, but he does have a streak of caring about justice and standing up to tyrants, so he enmeshes himself in the power struggle. Seeing the scheming, Conan chooses Door #3 and decides to play them against each other and act as a spy. He soon learns that there's another party here, Toiro, Varia's cousin with an equal claim to the throne as Shahela if Varia were to die.

​"Wheels within wheels," Conan thinks to himself.

When Toiro eventually gets captured, Conan gets into the castle to free both him and Varia, but is interrupted by Balthis and the Cloaks, and is ultimately dropped into a skeleton-laden dungeon with a twelve-foot-tall, man-eating ghoul inside. Conan manages to stun it long enough to get away, but doesn't kill it.

When we next see the Cimmerian, he's donned the armor of the nigh-mythical founder of the nation, King Thanus, and stirs up the people of Ophir against both Shahela and Balthis. There are some fun, though vague, "power to the people" themes here. 

Freeing Toiro and then setting his sights of Varia, Conan crosses paths with Shahela one last time. He has repeatedly said throughout the issue that he doesn't care to do combat with women when avoidable (thinking fondly of Bêlit and Red Sonja each time). He is spared that decision in the final moments by the return of the twelve-foot zombie creature. There's a surprising amount of pathos in Shahela's cries for Conan to help her, to not be devoured by this thing, and as Conan slays it, Shahela drops dead too. The panels don't make it clear whether he snapped her spine or broke her neck or if Conan's sword went just a little too far through the monster's gut. Either way, Ophir is saved.

This was to be Roy Thomas's second-to-last issue on Savage Sword for over a decade, and word was out that there would be someone new in the driver's seat. Issue #60, Roy's last continuous issue of his all-time 60-issue run on the title, didn't betray anything about his departure, but #61 sure did. In the letters section "Swords and Scrolls," new writer Michael Fleisher writes "A Special Note of Appreciation" to Roy's contributions on Conan through the years. It's probably the best send-off any writer could hope for.

Fan reaction was mixed- one letter published in issue #62 bemoaned that he felt Roy had been stuck in a rut for a few years. Fleisher and the editorial team took the classy route and said they disagreed- that all Roy's work had been excellent.

In the back of #63, a letter-writer really tore into Fleisher:

Dave Clark of Haddon Heights, NJ goes on for like six more paragraphs, ending with "Thank you for listening." Marvel just responded, "You're welcome."

​One more steamed letter-writer wrote in, "Can't you guys think up anything original?" Readers of any of my writing about Savage Sword will know that I'm inclined to agree with these writers-in.

Marvel didn't print any reactions to "Black Cloaks of Ophir" until issue #71, which were universally positive. Readers praised the suspense in the plot and Ernie Chan's art. Some proposed that Ernie take over John Buscema's mantle as the regular SSOC artist, which I wouldn't have minded, but only because Ernie is entirely a Buscema clone (I'm not joking, I got halfway through reading the issue before I realized they weren't Big John's pencils).

The title page of the issue says that "Black Cloaks of Ophir" was adapted from a plot by Andrew J. Offutt, whose work on Conan and the Sorcerer Roy had recently adapted in the mag, so I'd be interested in knowing how much interplay there was between the two of them. Roy had one more story ready to go, but had long-since moved on to DC Comics.

​It would be one of his best originals.

I've never seen anyone talk about "Black Cloaks of Ophir." It seems to be one of the issues that hasn't risen to the same level as most of the REH adaptations, and since it exists outside the first 60 issues of the title, I bet most readers haven't given it a go. They should!

"Rogues in the House" was first published in the January 1934 issue of Weird Tales, about three months after readers had been treated to their previous Conan story, "The Pool of the Black One." The story appeared seventh in the mag and didn't make the cover, suggesting perhaps a lack of confidence in this entry in the Conan saga. If that's what they felt, it was certainly misguided, as "Rogues" is a through-and-through banger.

All of the above leads me to conclude that within our chronology so far, "Rogues" should be only the second in the timeline. I think the elements that put it after "The Tower of the Elephant" are a little weak, though. It's mostly my interpretation of how Conan's thieving and combat skills are described. There's nothing that's a smoking gun, so it could go first.

1970's Conan the Barbarian title starts out a little weird. As young Conan putzes around just outside of Cimmeria in the first three issues, it's near-universally considered to be a slow start to one of the (eventual) best comics of the 70s. There are flashes of what is to come in #3, "The Twilight of the Grim Grey God," but most of it is rather tonally inconsistent, like author Roy Thomas isn't exactly sure what he wants to do on the book.

Even as the thief stories start with issue #4's adaptation of "The Tower of the Elephant," it doesn't automatically get that much better even though we're entering one of Conan's most fun life periods. Conan certainly improves quite a bit from issue #7-on, which would see free adaptation of "The God in the Bowl," "Rogues in the House," "The Garden of Fear" and a psychedelic crossover with Elric of Melnibone. Like its title barbarian, the book tends to wander for a while, and even though there are some great issues, it doesn't really have a clear narrative thrust.

Where it all really comes together about a dozen and a half issues in when Roy Thomas begins his "War of the Tarim" storyline.

The whole War of the Tarim is a Roy Thomas original... in a way. It's set in Conan's first mercenary period, which in the generally-accepted timeline comes in his early-to-mid twenties, right after his thieving. He goes east for the first time an enlists in the army of Turan, learning how to ride a horse, use a bow and arrow, and strategize militarily. As far as the Robert E. Howard original canon goes, there's not much there. The unfinished fragment "The Hand of Nergal" is all REH really included, though the period is fleshed out some more if you consider the L. Sprague de Camp stuff from the 60s. Roy says that from the start he was looking for a way to reenact the Trojan War in CtB, and this is where he finally got his chance.

Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith were planning an epic.

The War of the Tarim story arc, which more or less spans issues #19 to #26, is soft-launched by the creative team in issues #17 and 18 as they adapt Howard's "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth." These issues are a lot of fun and I honestly liked them better than the prose original (I found having Conan and Fafnir as the main characters a little more engaging) though Gil Kane's art can be hit-or-miss and sometimes his faces look oddly off-model. These two issues dumped Conan into the waters of the Vilayet Sea as he wanders substantially east for the first time. He crosses paths with an old bit-part character named Fafnir who appeared briefly in Conan #6. He begins as a rival, and eventually becomes a friend. Conan and Fafnir (who call each other "Redbeard" and "Little Man," respectively) are perfect analogues to that shot from Predator where Arnie and Carl are locking hands and flexing their biceps like oversized baseballs, only this time it's one dude with black hair and one dude with red.

Conan and Fafnir become part of a military coup before plunging back into the inland sea to escape.

The end of issue #18 lands the Cimmerian on the ship of Prince Yezdigerd, a royal up until then had never really been in the spotlight of stories. Rather, he had always been a more unseen force that worked behind the scenes to periodically throw a wrench into Conan's plans. As it's better than being thrown overboard, Conan takes up with the Turanian army.

Conan #19 kicks off the Tarim War for real. It's explained to our young northerner that spies from the city of Makkalet a few short weeks ago stole into the city of Aghrapur and kidnapped the "living Tarim," the current incarnation of an ancient god who freed the Hyrkanian people long ago and has been worshipped ever since in whatever form into which he is reborn. 

Conan just scowls and scoffs at the wooden carving of the Tarim lashed to the boat, and this is where the real dramatic rub comes in for the story. Not only is Conan not a true believer in either side of this holy war, but he feels bald contempt for both sides. He will fight, but his first question is what it pays. They land in Makkalet and Conan does what he does best.

Barry Windsor-Smith's art in this issue, "Hawks from the Sea," is a serious trade-up from the two previous Gil Kane-penciled books. His beautifully-hatched, rococo style works so much better for the Hyborian Age than Kane's action figure poses. He does great covers, but I always felt his interiors looked better for superhero titles. Because of comic creation's breakneck schedule, the team didn't even have time to ink the second half of the book and it leaves it with an interesting Prince Valiant feel. It certainly looks different than the inked work, lacking the strong outlines and deep blacks comics usually have, but it doesn't look worse.

Perhaps it's because Conan is not fighting for gods or glory, but the story is surprisingly not enamored with this war. We're never led to believe that this is a worthwhile cause or anything other than a petty fight between despots. It takes the time to show us the meaninglessness of the violence as Conan looks down into a skirmish from atop a wall, aiding an injured Fafnir. It's a short moment of genuine human connection between equals before Conan is forced to leave Fafnir and we see him tumble off the wall. Even with a reader sobered by that scene, the skeletal soldiers summoned by the mysterious wizard, Kharam-Akkad, are sick as fuck.

The war continues in issue #20, "The Black Hound of Vengeance," in which Conan comes closer to Kharam-Akkad. Fafnir loses an arm, which Roy refers to as one of the "dark undersides of the glories of the Trojan War." They wanted to humanize our Cimmerian hero a bit.

​The real achievement worth talking about in this issue actually comes when the story of the book is almost entirely over: for a two-page epilogue, Barry chose to simply draw about a dozen illustrations and Roy wrote in prose, placing the text in and around the drawings as needed. The resulting vibe is like reading the bloodiest picture book you can imagine, while Conan puts a permanent scar on Yezdigerd's cheek before diving off the edge of the ship. The epilogue paces the end of the book well and calls back to the pulp era that works so well for Conan.

"The Monster of the Monoliths," which follows in issue #21, features an all-time great Barry Windsor-Smith cover to go along with a story that Roy Thomas feels only treads water. It says it's based on REH's "The Black Stone," but I don't feel like the issue evokes "The Black Stone" much- It feels far more like the L. Sprague de Camp pastiche "The Curse of the Monolith." Conan swaps sides in the war, but the city of Makkalet is not without its own problems. We see a betrayal and, as Conan is strapped to a monolith with an eldritch frog, he barely escapes with his life. Though he wants to ride west and away from the war, he keeps a vow he has made and returns to Makkalet to enlist friends for the conflict.

Fans in the 1970s had to wait a bit to see the story continue, as that aforementioned comic crunch claimed issue #22 in its churn. Without a story finished, but with a stellar Barry Windsor-Smith cover already sent to the printer, Roy sheepishly reprinted Conan #1, with the promise that the saga would be back in the following issue. It was, but with a noticeably less impressive Gil Kane cover. Though both issues #22 and 23 were intended to introduce Red Sonja to the Conan mythos, neither cover actually depicts her in the cover illustration, which seems odd today considering that she's clearly the breakout character of 70s Conan.

Roy says that it was nice to have Conan's life all mapped out before he even began writing. He knew that he would eventually introduce Conan's raven-haired Shemite love, Bêlit, in "Queen of the Black Coast" and his blond companion, Valeria in "Red Nails." So he decided to introduce a red-haired character as an occasional ally and occasional adversary to the big guy. In order to do this, he looked to the REH story "The Shadow of the Vulture" to adapt the WWI character Red Sonya of Rogatino into Red Sonja of Hyrkania. Much has been written about this already; you likely already know this bit.

Sonja's debut issue is actually probably one of least-exciting of the War of the Tarim, at least until Sonja and Conan exact some espionage-style revenge at the end of the book. The story just seems to go by a little too quickly: it introduces the character Mikhal Oglu, "the Vulture," and establishes him as a terrifying, shadowy menace for a few panels, but doesn't really do a whole lot with him. Roy wishes he'd stretched the story out to become a two-parter, and I think he's right. It would've hit a little harder.

Sonja feels a little off in this story. Not only is this prior to her acquiring her signature chainmail bikini, but she's also got more realistic orangeish-red hair rather than literal crimson, and she looks slightly older than she usually does today.

Issue #24, "The Song of Red Sonja," fares a lot better than #23. It's just a more fun time than its predecessor as Conan and Sonja sneak into a palace tower of Makkalet under the pretense that they're simply thieving. But Sonja has a hidden mission there as well. She introduces Conan to the magical phrase "Ka Nama Kaa Lajerama" which Conan will use periodically to ward off evil serpent-people of the god Set (he's even using it today in 2025 comics).

I am left wondering if the secret to why this issue is so good lies with Barry Windsor-Smith. He had decided to leave the Conan the Barbarian title and wanted this issue to be his ultimate statement. Roy gave Barry the green light to play around a bit. That full-page dance at the beginning? All Barry. The tower and treasure and snake monsters? Barry again.

Roy and Barry seem to have liked what they did for the epilogue of issue #20, because the combination of unbordered illustrations and straight prose returns twice in this issue for brief asides. They kind of tie the War of the Tarim era together under one style, so it's cool to see it return. I wish more comics would break up their formula in ways like this more often.

Sonja gets the best of Conan (this time, anyway!) and disappears. 

The intricate piles of treasure in the tower and the bejeweled snakeskins were among the final Conan the Barbarian images Barry Windsor-Smith would ever draw. Barry did a few Savage Sword books, some Conan Saga covers, and a Conan Vs. Rune one-shot decades later, but "The Song of Red Sonja" would be his last time penciling the regular Conan title. Comparing his work in the first few issues to what he was doing just three years later is astounding. He'd grown from the friendly, square-jawed Jack Kirby figures to an unmistakably unique skillset in just a few years.

I would mourn his exit from Conan, but finally made room on the roster for John Buscema to finally step in as the regular Conan penciller. Buscema draws Conan the way John Romita drew Spider-Man: crystallized and perfectly. Not only was Buscema destined to be Conan's long-term artist, but his interiors and covers took a title that was already climbing in sales and then kicked it into high gear, eventually becoming one of Marvel's bestselling series.

Big John's first issue as artist sends the War of the Tarim careening toward its conclusion. Issue #25 finally allows the sorcerer Kharam-Akkad and the Cimmerian barbarian to face off in a riff on the Howard classic, "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune." As Conan does battle with the wizard, the crazed faces of the Turanians march on Makkalet yelling, "For the Tarim!" 

With Kharam-Akkad dispatched in spectacular, prophesized fashion (foreshadowing Conan's future tenure as Amra the Lion), all that is left is to see who will claim the living Tarim once and for all.

"The Hour of the Griffin" in issue #26 serves as the war's epic conclusion. Issue #25 had brought the Roy Thomas / John Buscema team together, but issue #26 would bring about the final piece of the puzzle: longtime Buscema inker Ernie Chan would inks Big John's pencils for the first time.

​Finally bringing that whole Trojan War thing back around, the Turanians invade Makkalet by sneaking through tunnels into a horse statue in the city. With the gates open, pandemonium fills the streets. Conan reluctantly rescues some royals before retreating to the chamber which happens to house the Tarim himself.

Conan scoffs at the robed figure and commands that he reveal himself to an unbeliever. He knocks over a brazier which fills the room with light and throws the Tarim's image on countless mirrors, which was apparently Kharam-Akkad's preferred home décor choice. What Conan sees is not a god, but a drooling, inbred old man.

Once he processes what he sees, Conan involuntarily throws his head back and laughs. He is vindicated as men fight and die in a holy war which he's seen right through from the start. The Tarim is struck by a stray arrow from the invading forces, causing him to fall into the uncovered brazier and burn to death. Prince Yezdigerd and the Turanians find the body, re-cloak him, and prop him up for the coming procession. "The city that houses the living Tarim lays claim to homage from all Hyrkanian peoples. My faithful troops expect a procession, come the dawn... and by dark Erlik, they shall have it!" spake Yezdigerd, revealing that this was a political power grab, never a sincere attempt at a rescue.

Roy intended to use Conan #26 to set the Cimmerian on a new path, which he does, sending our hero riding out of Makkalet, westbound and away from all this holy war bullshit.

His time in Turan was not over, but Conan the Barbarian the character, and Conan the Barbarian the comic book series would go back to wandering. However, the next 91 issues would be an adventure worth reading. And eventually, Roy would find a special spark again, greatly expanding on REH's stories to once again put his own stamp on things, this time by pairing Conan with his greatest love for an astounding 40+ issues of pirate marauding.

Ever been to NYC or San Diego Comic Con? I certainly haven't. Those two cons are holy grail conventions for me- something that I think I'd have to plan over a year in advance to get to, but have never had the pleasure of attending yet.

My friend Angel was at NYCC this past weekend with the Colorado Ghostbusters, though, and while she was there, she was able to visit Jim Zub to pick up a signed NYCC-exclusive variant of Conan the Barbarian #25. Jim Zub was even nice enough to pose with a picture for it! What a mensch!

This brings me up to a ridiculous four different covers of Conan #25, so I'm realizing I have a problem. The New York convention variant is by artist Alfredo Cardona and depicts Conan with Belit and what are presumably the bat-like creatures that eventually kill her at the end of "Queen of the Black Coast."

Thanks, Jim!

I used to do YouTube video essays with my brother back when I was bored during the pandemic. I feel like there are people who might not be super keen to read a long essay, but they might listen to a video while they cook or mow the lawn or something, so I adapted one of my blog posts into a video here. 

I might do this from time to time, who knows. Video editing sure takes a lot longer than writing, though!

​Anyway, give it a look-see if you like. I hope you enjoy!