We've now had two days of lessons in which students are reading their choice short story for literature circles, in which a couple of kids are reading "The Tower of the Elephant."

I don't have a ton to report, unfortunately, since a lot of our day was eaten up by a district-mandated progress-monitoring exam that used about half of our class. Students were able to get pretty deep into the story (most groups are at least to Conan fighting the giant spider), but they have a little bit of homework since they need to be done with the narrative by the time they see me next.

​I cannot tell you how awesome audiobooks have been for these students. There are a great many REH audiobooks available for free on YouTube for most Conan stories, and there's probably more for this one than any other. It's helped students approach the vocabulary more easily since they're getting words pronounced for them (usually they'd get that from me if I'm reading aloud).

One students- we'll call him Peter- has had a really tough year. He wants nothing to do with school, he despises most of his teachers, and he tells others that he likes me even though he has a pretty funny way of showing it! He was gone the day we started this unit, so I asked him if he wanted to read a story in which there are fights in a bar, with a lion, with a giant spider, and then against a wizard. He was pretty stoked! Thanks, Bob Howard!

I've had some good conversations with students about the conflicts in the story. Many of them laughed or were confused when Conan sheds his tunic after the tavern:

They were like, "Uhhhhh, he's naked?" Seventh graders find everything not immediately familiar to them to be horrifying or hilarious. But this led us to good conversations! After some leading questions about if they noticed anything different about Conan compared to the other tavern patrons, they were able to notice that he's different, an outlander, a barbarian. We made note of how he doesn't seem to understand what's happening in the tavern, and when he sheds his tunic, he is shedding the trappings of civilization. He's a piece of nature, elemental.

A lot of students got tuned into the class Howard civilization vs. barbarism (or for our terms in this unit, character vs. society!) conflicts. I have a few kids in each class who have already started their body biography projects, but I don't think it's any of my "Tower of the Elephant" students. I can't wait to see what sorts of body biographies they put together!

Sometimes when I cover comics on here, I get a negative comment that I pretty much agree with. It's that I usually focus a little bit too much on authors: Roy Thomas, Michael Fleisher, Chuck Dixon, Christopher Priest, Jim Zub... and too little on the great illustrators of those comics. I'll try to take a step in the right direction with that here today, because the Marvel Graphic Novel Conan the Rogue is The John Buscema Show.

Buscema is an interesting character in the Marvel chapter of Conan the Barbarian. To hear him tell it, he doesn't even really like comics very much, especially not superhero comics. I watched an interview where he said he was assigned to draw Amazing Spider-Man for seven issues and despised it. Hated Spider-Man, hated all the supporting characters. Who doesn't like Spider-Man? Big John B, I guess.

The one thing that John liked to draw at Marvel was Conan, and it shows in his body of work. He drew nearly 150 issues of Conan the Barbarian. He drew dozens upon dozens of issues of Savage Sword of Conan, King Conan, and did the daily strip for a while. He preferred the more naturalistic style of the Hyborian Age than drawing rocket ships.

Even when Buscema was doing Conan, he wasn't always satisfied with the results. He was picky about who inked his work and the resulting pages. 

Within the comic book creation process, Buscema would sometimes do pencils, which in comic terms meant producing fully-completed pencil sketches with line work and shadows, and could do about three or three and a half pages a day. 

Other times, he would do just the layouts or "breakdowns," which were only incomplete pencil sketches without blacks or shadows, leaving the rest to his inker. Buscema was adamant that he really only did this out of necessity to keep up with the pace that the books came out. He would've liked to ink his own drawings. Whoever was inking his work- for good or ill- always left their own mark on the image, and I'm sure you can see why John wasn't always a fan. I'm completely ripping this comparison idea off from the book Big John Buscema: Comics & Drawings, where they zeroed-in on several different inks over specifically Conan's eyes. All of the following are penciled by John Buscema.

Buscema's Conan is strong, balanced, and muscular. He draws him with more dynamism than Gil Kane did, though they both draw Conan more like an action figure than the pantherish youth that Barry Windsor-Smith drew. He doesn't really go in for the "square-cut" black mane. While I know it's not the most faithful representation of Howard's Conan, he's kind of become the platonic ideal for the modern Cimmerian.

During Roy Thomas's second run on Savage Sword, he crafted, from what I can tell, is the only story credit he ever got on a Conan book. Seeing Buscema's name listed before Roy's feels a little bit like reading "Garfunkel & Simon," "Tails & Sonic," or "Jelly & Peanut Butter." Unfortunately, Marvel didn't seem inclined to push the book. It had a small print run, low sales, and is pretty hard to come by today. I had to buy mine for $115, and even then it's in pretty rough shape. But it was worth it! Conan the Rogue may be Buscema's very best work on the character he's most associated with!

Conan the Rogue, which is plotted, drawn, colored, and inked by John Buscema (it's very rare you see the artist credited for "Art & Color by..." in a comic) and then scripted by his longtime collaborator Roy Thomas, is set almost entirely at Fort Ghori south of the Vilayet Sea. Conan gets thrown out of a tavern and somewhat accidentally ends up in the employ of a local governor named Tarsu Khan. Khan's life has been threatened by his brother and a scheming vizier hoping to foment a war between city-states that will ultimately allow them both to move up the chain of command. Too bad the big guy gets in the way.

Unlike a lot of political intrigue in comics where you see the twists coming from a mile off, it's densely-plotted and well-scripted enough to obfuscate exactly whose plans will come to fruition while Conan's around. The politicking doesn't become the main focus of the book though, and the ending shifts drastically toward a more traditional Conan adventure.

Take a look at the page below. I think the worst thing you could say about Buscema's art- usually- is that his panel layouts are a little less than elegantly-thought-out and he compensates by adding arrows to let you know which panel should come next. That happens pretty frequently in Conan the Barbarian and it always seems like a cop-out to me, poor panel design if we're being honest, but here, he's doing the same thing, this time to his advantage.

Our suspense is held as the door slowly opens to reveal the giant Romm, who we see essentially from his victim's perspective as he ducks his head to slink into the coliseum. Our flow then snakes left on the page to his defiant last words and the reader's eye ends on Romm, towering over him. The long shot from a side perspective makes the size comparison easy. The next thing we get is the weapon snapping our eye back to the right as he cleaves the skull in half, and we get to see all the carnage of it. It's like your eye floats back and forth down the page, like a swinging mace.

In fact, most of Big John's work here is no-holds-barred. Even Savage Sword, despite its freedom from the Comics Code, didn't usually delight in gore and bloodshed. However, check out Lord Nassidren's head here, impaled and caved-in.

Buscema considered Conan the Rogue to be some of his best work, if not the best of his career, and I'm inclined to agree. His poses are perfect and his character designs are immediately striking. As the book moves out of the Fort Ghori outpost's relatively civilized setting into the "Nightmare Swamp" (fuck yeah), we get some disgusting moss zombie creatures and the book finishes really strong.

Throughout the title, his line work is rough in a way that makes the book feel ragged at the edges and lived-in, while his colors (watercolors? I'm not exactly an art expert) look much better than the traditionally-colored Conan the Barbarian title. They're more natural and muted than the gaudy pinks and yellows of the monthly book.

I think my favorite panel is Conan diving across a parade, pulling Tarsu Khan out of the way of oncoming arrows. The motion feels so fluid that it momentarily feels like it transcends static images. I could stare at the muted teals, browns, and tans all day.

If you approach Conan the Rogue wanting the best, most unique plot of all Conan stories, I don't think you'll find it here. But if you approach the graphic novel with an appreciation for John Buscema and you want to see what he can do outside of the confines of the usual system, this is a book you need to read. He had a few issues of Savage Sword left to do, but I'd say it's fair to consider the Rogue John's Conan swan song. An aging master who hasn't lost a step, finally being given a chance to really throw his weight around? This is a wonderful example of what comic art can be.

I've been an English teacher for more than 12 years. Taught everything from sixth grade to seniors in high school. It's always a nice bonus when you get to teach something that you're personally passionate about, so I'm pretty excited about right now.  

I have about two weeks that I can play with in my 7th grade classrooms (if you're out of the US, these kids are between 12 and 13 years old) before the end of my quarter, so based on student needs, I decided to try to reinforce some of our literature standards from earlier in the year. They read The Outsiders back in September, but we haven't gotten to read any literature since. And because many middle schoolers in America never want to move past reading Dogman or Captain Underpants or Diary of a Wimpy Kid (or worse, never read anything at all), I want to use this opportunity to introduce them to some great literature, including a Robert E. Howard story.

My students are therefore starting literature circles where they pick the short story they'll get to read. I've given them the options of:

• "Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket" by Jack Finney
• "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes
• "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
• "Weight" by Dhonielle Clayton
• and the reason why I'm blogging about this, "The Tower of the Elephant" by Robert E. Howard.

I teach at a PBL (Project-Based Learning) school, so most units are based around a "driving question" that the kids answer over the course of the unit. I'm calling this one "Conflicted" and our DQ is: "Is conflict more likely to make our lives better or worse?" I think "Tower of the Elephant" is fun for this because the conflict in the narrative has almost no effect on Conan at all- he doesn't get what he wants, but he's also not drastically changed by the events. Unlike many of the other stories where the protagonist has a large personal change, it's a little unique.

"Tower of the Elephant" is pretty layered in terms of conflict. It's got the character vs. character conflicts (Conan's confrontation with the tavern keeper, the spider, Yara), character vs. society (Conan's outlander nature that keeps him from understanding certain social intricacies, and him against the corrupt city of Zamora, with Yara as its representative), and character vs. environment (the lions, the spider's lair).

"Tower" is also a pretty good choice from the Conan canon because it's not as bloody as others. It's a raucous adventure story, but Conan's first kill is just implied, then he fights lions, a spider, Yara, but his final confrontation is entirely bloodless. I'd get complaints from parents if he was hacking and slashing like he is sometimes. Also, I cut just a few lines about drunkenness from the descriptions of The Maul. They wouldn't be worth the parent emails.

The project students will create here is a "Body Biography," which is a graphically-represented way to engage with character and conflict. I'm hoping to post some student examples when they're done! They'll ideally be putting Conan in the center, with several narrative aspects around him (which will correspond with body parts) answering the driving question, examining the conflict, and more.

We started our unit on Tuesday by discussing story structure, conflict types (character vs. character, vs. self, vs. environment [nature], vs. society, and vs. technology), internal vs. external conflict, and we practiced looking for these in Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day." The kids did great!

Today, Thursday (I see 7th graders two days a week and teach 8th grader the other two days a week), the kids chose their stories, got into their literature circle groups, and started reading. I'm pretty happy that I have at least one small group in each class reading "Tower of the Elephant!" Some of them were very intrigued by the little premise or teaser that I wrote for each one, some liked the picture I included. Giving choice and using high-interest texts like the ones I've selected are always pretty good ideas, and students are very engaged right now.

Thus far, our biggest hurdle is that students have struggled with some of the vocabulary. Regardless of if you want to derisively call it purple prose, REH's writing style is in sharp contrast to Flannery O'Connor's folksiness or "Flowers for Algernon's" purposefully-misspelled epistles or or Poe's unreliable narrators. My current balancing act is trying to get the kids to not stress too much about the surrounding world (it doesn't matter if you really know what a Brythunian is, kids!) while also not dissuading them from hopefully recognizing Conan as an outsider who's different from the "civilized" people in the city of Zamora.

We have longer class periods, so students got about halfway through their narratives today. I plan on updating you as the unit goes on!

If there are any other teachers reading this, here are some of the standards we're covering in this unit:

• Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text
• Determine a theme or central idea of the text and how it is convened through particular details
• Describe how a particular story's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution
• Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text including figurative and connotative meanings
• Analyze how a particular sentence, chapter, or scene fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of theme, setting, or plot

I like Roy Thomas and his Conan work. I would bet that you like Roy Thomas and his Conan work. 

But you know who really likes Roy Thomas's Conan work? 

Roy Thomas.

Actually, that sounds mean. Let me rephrase it. There is a Roy Thomas version of the life of Conan of Cimmeria built through issues of Conan the Barbarian, Savage Sword, and King Conan. As far as I can tell, this timeline consists of the original Robert E. Howard stories, the L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter pastiches (he adapted most of the REH and de Camp stories anyway), as well as the original issues that Roy wrote throughout the 70s. And this timeline is the only one Roy uses. Not only that, but he usually goes out of his way to signal to you that a story is set in the Roy Thomas / Marvel Comics / whatever you want to call it timeline.

This timeline largely follows the one de Camp laid out with the Lancer and Ace novels, but features some notable additions that Roy usually mentions. His version frequently makes use of the original characters Red Sonja, Zula, Turgohl, and Fafnir. It expands the role of Juma and Gonar from other stories. He always makes note of his War of the Tarim era and he expanded the "Queen of the Black Coast" era to a years-old epic that included Bêlit regaining the throne of Asgalun.

He'll signal that he's using this timeline in a few ways. When he returned to Savage Sword of Conan after ten years away, his whole first issue is essentially a recap of the Roy Thomas version of Conan's life up to that point. It leaves out anything not covered in his original tenure, and Roy claims a profound disinterest in other peoples' versions of Conan, meaning he claims to have never read the other stuff anyway. Check out the panel below that artist John Buscema drew from Savage Sword #190 as a nod to Conan #93. 

In that same issue, there's a bit of continuity between when he left the book and when he returned. The last adaptation of a de Camp story he did (in issue #60) was "The Ivory Goddess," and SSOC picks up at #190 soon after, with the Barachan pirate era. 

Roy did the same thing other times when he returned to the title, like when he wrote a prequel to Conan the Barbarian #1 in King Size Conan #1, fifty years after the original. In 2024, for Titan's Savage Sword #7 (it's not even a Marvel book anymore and he's still referencing his own Marvel timeline) the opening line of his issue lets you know that it takes place shortly after Conan #28, featuring Helgi and the War of the Tarim.

I could go on and on. 

I tell you all this to set up Roy's Marvel Graphic Novel output from 1992: The Ravagers Out of Time. The final Marvel Graphic Novel that Roy collaborated on, and actually the final MGN featuring Conan, Roy lets you know pretty quickly that we're playing in his sandbox here. Most of the MGN Conan stories aren't tied too directly to any existing Cimmerian stuff. You can assume they take place in the same universe as all the other late-20th-century Marvel comics, but they're largely their own stories. Not The Ravagers Out of Time.

Ravagers is a sequel to Conan the Barbarian #37, drawn by Neal Adams for an April 1974 release. In the issue, Conan and Juma are captured by Rotath of Lemuria, a King Kull villain revived in the Hyborian Age. Enslaved, the two heroes are put to work in a mine. This is the reason why the issue is notable: Neal Adams drew a giant, man-eating slug that looked like a vulva (many people say on purpose) and Roy was seriously apprehensive that it would get censored by the Comics Code Authority. It didn't, apparently. Evil Rotath gets absorbed by the slug.

This is where Ravagers Out of Time picks up. Chronolgically speaking, this comic takes place during Conan's kozak / Free Companion days some time around "The Devil in Iron" or "Iron Shadows in the Moon." He's clearly pretty eastward, harrying the outskirts of the empire of Turan. Looking for treasure, Conan and co. come across that giant slug again, but it's evident that Rotath's mind has taken over the giant slug. Oh yeah, and it's gold now because of Rotath's golden bones. It flings them back into the Thurian Age to attack King Kull so that Rotath can take Kull's body as his own instead of being stuck in the slug.

It's a real Roy Thomas Special! It's got Red Sonja! It's got Gonar! It adapts a Kull story into a Conan story! It's explicitly tied to an original Conan the Barbarian issue! The only way it could get any more Roy'd-up (Roy'ded? I feel like there's a good pun in there somewhere) is if it used the word "selfsame."

Look, I'm afraid I'm being too mean again. The Ravagers Out of Time is good! And it's certainly much better than some of the other Marvel Graphic Novels. Mike Docherty's art never had a chance against the great Neal Adams, but the art in this book is also noticeably better than some of its peers.

In a sense, while this story is as Roy Thomas as they come, it also feels a bit like it's doing the same thing that Jim Zub does from time to time on Conan today. It weaves together Howard characters from both Conan's epoch and Kull's, and it gives each of them a Gonar the Pict who act as mysterious forces uniting different periods in time. Truth be told, it's a pretty similar idea to what Jim is doing with the Scourge of the Serpent mini-series right now (which will release its final issue literally today, 7 January 2026).

Do you like Jim Zub's Conan work? Do you like Roy Thomas's Conan work? Then you'll probably like The Ravagers Out of Time. Certainly not a showstopper, but a fun adventure that deepens a little bit when you try to trace all of its roots. It's become almost a running joke when I talk about the MGNs for me to complain that I didn't get my money's worth. Well, of course it happens that one of the good ones was one I didn't buy for myself, but my wife got it for me for Christmas. Gonar the Pict knows how cruel the fates can be.
​
★★★☆☆

Last year, I published a piece called "The Fall and Rise (and Fall and Rise) of The Savage Sword of Conan." I was pretty happy with the results and got quite a few comments on it, which I don't get very often, so that was cool.

If you're not already aware, I have a YouTube channel now that I keep as a bit of an offshoot of this blog. Most of the stuff I upload are companion pieces to things written here, but this is a full video adaptation of that aforementioned Savage Sword retrospective.

I started this in early November and spent about an hour or two a day on it (not including any of the writing, which had already been done for about a year), so I probably spent between 75 and 100 hours editing here. It takes a lot longer when you don't have a talking head video and you have to have something on the screen at pretty much all times. You have no idea how many SSOC covers I have saved as PNGs on my computer right now.

I hope you enjoy it!

The table was probably set by Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" comics in 1971. The New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People established that DC was ready to do comics outside of the superhero genre. Marvel had recently had success with Conan the Barbarian, The Savage Sword of Conan, and the other characters in Savage Tales like Man-Thing and Ka-Zar the Savage through a loosening of the Comics Code Authority. DC was about to play catch-up.

The 1970s, making up the first two-thirds of the Bronze Age of Comics, was a time of great change for the entire comic book industry, but in retrospect, Marvel Comics certainly was weathering those changes better than DC. In fact, Marvel was surging while DC laggged.

Key talent moved between companies in unexpected ways like Kirby jumping ship from Marvel to DC. Marvel's higher page rates were enticing writers and artists to try their hand there even with Jim Shooter's management style that some staffers considered suffocating.

Royalties agreements and labor disputes changed the entirety of how the backstage world of comic creation worked.

The "DC Explosion" was the name given to the publishing initiative that arrived in the mid-1970s (some people say it really began as early as 1975, but the more agreed-upon date is in 1978). DC began publishing way, way more comics. Between '75 and '78, a whopping thirty new titles would hit shelves, many of which would be published after just a handful of issues, some of which would be cancelled after just a single issue, and even more would be cancelled before they ever even went to print. Many of those were printed in DC's two-issue ashcan book, Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, to maintain the rights. Quickly, as most titles were cancelled (even fucking Detective Comics of all books was on the chopping block), DC laid off almost half of its staff. It went down in history as the "DC Implosion." They kind of walked into that one.

And out of this time, we got a couple of pretty-good sword & sorcery comics that always seemed to be a step or five behind Marvel's.

One of DC's first attempts at an answer to Conan was a series entitled Sword of Sorcery, adapting Fritz Leiber heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. It had an absolute murderer's row of talent behind it: Denny O'Neil, Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, and Jim Starlin, but only lasted for five issues before it was canned. Around that time, editor Carmine Infantino demanded, "I need two more sword & sorcery books. One's coming out in Jauary, you're two months late on it and one's out in February. You're only one month late on it." Paul Levitz and Spidey co-creator Steve Ditko ended up with the assignment, turning it into Stalker, a Michael Moorcock pastiche which lasted only four issues.

DC's first moderate success came in 1973 when Mike Grell marched into DC's office with the plan to pitch a sword & sorcery adventure strip called Savage Empire. He'd been working on it for years, and he envisioned it as his answer to Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. DC editorial told him he was about 15 years too late, but had him pitch it to Carmine Infantino anyway. As he was about to open his mouth to make his presentation, he couldn't help but think that DC would own every aspect of Savage Empire if they decided to buy it, so he pivoted.

He, on the spot, completely made up a new series. It had echoes of Savage Empire in it, along with Burroughs's Pellucidar series and even M*A*S*H, and importantly, wasn't signing his long-gestating Savage Empire away. He called it The Warlord.

In The Warlord, Air Force pilot Travis Morgan accidentally discovers the Hollow Earth when returning home from a spying mission, dropping him in Skartaris: the land of eternal sunlight. It distinguishes itself from other sword & sorcery by making heavy use of science fiction themes as wells as S&S; there are ancient Atlantean computers and Morgan wields not only a sword but a pistol usually as well. The Warlord is pretty fucking awesome, and does quite a bit to make sure that it's not mistaken for a Conan clone. DC could now directly compete with Marvel's fantasy books.

Two issues in, Warlord was cancelled and Mike Grell was pissed. "[Infantino] can't do that!" he protested, "He promised me a one-year run!" But shortly thereafter, Jenette Kahn took the role of publisher and asked where Warlord was, for it was one of the books she had liked. When she was told Infantino had cancelled it, she said, "Well, Carmine's not here anymore. Put it back," and The Warlord returned to publication with an eight-month gap between issues #2 and #3. Warlord is mostly fantastic, and it's unique in the world of American comics as being largely a product of just one author and artist, more along the lines of how mangaka draw in Japan.

As an insert in Warlord #48, DC tried their hand at another new sword & sorcery character, this time using Mr. Conan the Barbarian himself, Roy Thomas. Roy had left Marvel in 1980 and now in 1981 was working for DC, so they set him to work trying to recreate some of the magic he made for the competition. The creation was Arak, Son of Thunder, featuring a Native American hero who ends up discovering Europe before European colonists arrive in the Americas.

Arak starts out as painfully similar to Conan, but distinguished himself over time. Roy Thomas claims today that it was hard not to base the adventures in the framework created by Robert E. Howard since he was the godfather of the genre. But ultimately Arak started to sport a mohawk rather than long hair and became less of a rip. It's fun to see Arak meet historical figures like Charlemagne, and people often bring up that he was noticeably well-depicted, at least in comparison to other Native American heroes of his day. His self-titled book ran for fifty issues before getting the axe.

In the same Warlord issue insert that spawned Arak, DC tried their hand at another sword & sorcery hero, this time in a self-titled book called Claw the Unconquered. Claw can be fun, but was certainly less successful than Arak.

Created by eventual Marvel great David Michelinie (have you read his whole Amazing Spider-Man run, not just the Venom stuff? It's fantastic!) and frequent Conan artist/inker Ernie Chan, Claw is almost indistinguishable from the Cimmerian. Yes, he has a demon hand ("The Hand of Nergal," anyone?) that's covered up by a metal gauntlet, but that's about it. Clad in a white loincloth instead of a brown one, Claw spends a few issues wondering about his true origins while having some barbarian adventures in a land nearly identical to the Hyborian Age. Had someone recolored his loincloth and changed a few proper nouns, you wouldn't realize you weren't reading a Marvel book. That's not to say it's a terrible time, on the contrary, it's halfway-decent, but it does almost nothing to allow Claw to make a distinct impression.

At least he doesn't overstay his welcome; DC axed Claw the Unconquered after issue #12.

DC had a few other S&S randos over the years: Starfire (no, not that Starfire) spun off of Claw for eight issues. The adapted the English myth Beowulf for six issues.

Some of these characters have popped up here and there in other versions over the years, but most of them have remained as forgotten as they were short. DC ended up weathering the bronze age and then ushering in the Copper Age of Comics in 1986 where they dominated. Their fantasy characters today don't really have any sword & sorcery traces in them, but they're no longer trying to compete with Conan.

Robert E. Howard had his eyes set on the novel form when he published "The People of the Black Circle." Around the time he began working on an attempt at Almuric and The Hour of the Dragon, he wrote what would become the longest Conan story to date, at about 31,000 words which earned him $250 (about six grand in today's dollars). "The People of the Black Circle" was written in January and February 1934 and since Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright liked it so much, it was published quickly, appearing in the serial in the September, October, and November '34 issues of WT.

"Black Circle" is one of Howard's absolute best, and is rather unique in how it places itself in chronology. There are few references to other stories outside of when Conan literally tells other characters about his life.

Toward the end of the story, the real chronological markers begin to show up as Conan begins mentioning previous life periods.

• "Black Circle" must come after his days with the Free Companions shown or referenced in "Iron Shadows in the Moon" and "The Devil in Iron:" "There is a chief of the Khurakzai who will keep you safely while I bicker with the Afghulis. If they will have none of me, by Crom! I will ride northward with you to the steppes of the kozaki. I was a hetman among the Free Companions before I rode southward. I'll make you a queen on the Zaporoska River!"
  • That line about being a hetman among the Free Companions before he rode southward is the most telling aspect of this speech. This seems to place the three most eastern stories together in the timeline. Conan likely heads east to the Vilayet Sea where he experiences the events of "Iron Shadows in the Moon," then "The Devil in Iron," and afterward rides south to Vendhya where he ingratiates himself to the Afghulis in this story.
• At the very end of the story, Conan lists to Yasmina Devi many of the things he has done in his life: "Listen: I was born in the Cimmerian hills where the people are all barbarians. I have been a mercenary soldier, a corsair, a kozak, and a hundred other things. What king has roamed the countries, fought the battles, loved the women, and won the plunder that I have?" There's a lot going on in this paragraph!
  • We've seen Conan be a mercenary soldier in "Xuthal of the Dusk" and "Black Colossus."
  • We've seen him be a corsair in "Queen of the Black Coast" and we'll see him be one again in "The Pool of the Black One."
  • We've seen his kozak days in "The Devil in Iron" and "Iron Shadows in the Moon," likely immediately preceding this narrative.
  • Conan's "hundred other things" is fun to speculate about. I suppose it would need to encompass his thief days and his early wanderings with the Aesir too. But we haven't actually gotten to that story yet. It leaves the door open for a lot of options.
  • Conan has "roamed the countries" of at least Cimmeria, Zamora, Nemedia, Argos, Kush, Stygia, Turan, Hyrkania, Shem, Afghulistan, and Vendhya.
  • He's "fought the battles" which are too numerous to count.
  • He's "loved the women:" Bêlit, for sure. Is he including Natala? Thalis? Probably Olivia.
  • Funnily enough, most of the plunder Conan wins must be off the page. Most of the time, the treasure he's jonesing for in each story either ends up out of reach. He very frequently ends stories empty-handed, fleeing with just his life.
  • Conan makes an off-hand comment about how kings haven't lived the life he has, so it must be prior to his kingship.

Based on the other aspects of this chronology, grouping the eastern stories together, I think it makes the most sense to place "The People of the Black Circle" before Conan journeys back westward to become a captain of spearmen in "Black Colossus." This solves the "mad dash" issue and is internally consistent with Conan's "riding southward" line.

I find it interesting that "Black Colossus" is so much further back now than many other chronologies place it. I'm not against it, I just didn't really expect it.

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.