The temporal relationship between "The Phoenix on the Sword" and "The Scarlet Citadel" is not as clear as some would like you to think it is.

Appearing in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales, "The Phoenix on the Sword" was the first Conan story published. It's well-documented that this story didn't spring to Howard in fully original form, but that he had a few warm-ups to creating Conan. His "Cimmeria" poem written earlier that year (though not published until 1956) introduced Conan's homeland.  "People of the Dark," published in June 1932 in Strange Tales had introduced a barbarian character named Conan (the Reaver, not the Cimmerian). And "Phoenix on the Sword was cribbed from the unsold King Kull story "By This Axe I Rule!"

Though it's dead simple to know where this story takes place in Conan's life, the narrative gives us tons of interesting chronological notes. Conan is obviously older, having lived his barbarian life and is now king of Aquilonia.

• Conan seized the crown of Aquilonia: "Yes. The fat fool claims it by reason of a trace of royal blood. Conan makes a bad mistake in letting men live who still boast descent from the old dynasty, from which he tore the crown of Aquilonia."
• The previous king was named Numedides: "I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams."
• Conan is established as having come from the barbarian north: "Alone of us all, Rinaldo has no personal ambition. He sees in Conan a red- handed, rough-footed barbarian who came out of the north to plunder a civilized land. He idealizes the king whom Conan killed to get the crown, remembering only that he occasionally patronized the arts, and forgetting the evils of his reign, and he is making the people forget. Already they openly sing The Lament for the King in which Rinaldo lauds the sainted villain and denounces Conan as 'that black-hearted savage from the abyss'. Conan laughs, but the people snarl."
• Enough time has passed between Conan overthrowing Numedides and the opening of the narrative for people to have erected a statue to the former king in the Temple of Mitra: "When I overthrew Numedides, then I was the Liberator—now they spit at my shadow. They have put a statue of that swine in the temple of Mitra, and people go and wail before it, hailing it as the holy effigy of a saintly monarch who was done to death by a red-handed barbarian." The conventional wisdom that you may hear on the internet is that "Phoenix" takes place during the first year of his kingship, but there's nothing in the text to get that exact. It has been a minimum of a few months, but could be a year, or even several.
• Conan notes to his advisor Prospero that he has been to Asgard and Vanaheim, which Prospero believes may have been myths. It becomes well-established in the Hyborian Age that faraway countries are usually believed to be legend by those sufficiently distant: "The maps of the court show well the countries of south, east and west, but in the north they are vague and faulty. I am adding the northern lands myself. Here is Cimmeria, where I was born. And—" "Asgard and Vanaheim," Prospero scanned the map. "By Mitra, I had almost believed those countries to have been fabulous."

Clearly, obviously, this story is easy to place. I'm bored just sitting here writing it. So let's compare it to "The Scarlet Citadel." Despite being the second Conan story published, "The Scarlet Citadel" was not the second written, but probably the fourth.

In Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author, Willard Oliver postulates that "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" and "The God in the Bowl" were written between the two King Conan stories, but neither of those tales would be published until much later. "The Scarlet Citadel," though, would be published in the January 1933 issue of Weird Tales, just a month behind its predecessor.

I was surprised in my revisiting of these two texts that their temporal placement was not as strong as I remembered. The commonly-accepted chronology is that "Citadel" takes place about a year after "Phoenix," but there's nothing quite so clear in the narratives. I find that it's most likely that "Phoenix" takes place first because there has to have been time for a "whole cycle of hero-tales" to have been written and to become famous, but the one-year difference is not really there. Gary Romeo examines a Conan chronology by P. Schuyler Miller which postulates that "Citadel" takes place right after "Phoenix," perhaps within the same year. "An Informal Biography of Conan the Cimmerian" (found in The Blade of Conan these days) also thinks "Citadel" takes place right afterword. 

If you're only looking at the texts, I don't think it's that clear.

Our final chronology for this post is as follows.

Crossing into Texas feels like you've entered a different realm, irrespective of the introduction of "Don't mess with Texas" signs.

I woke up at five in the morning because I had a long drive ahead of me. The arid front range of Colorado gave way to the smooth, volcanic hills of New Mexico as I descended out of Raton Pass. There, in mid-June, was not a tree to be seen, but there are gentle slopes up isolated mountains covered in surprisingly green grass. I was listening to the second John Carter novel, The Gods of Mars, as I reached Texline, Texas.

Texline is aptly named, nestled just inside the Texas side of the north-south border of New Mexico and the panhandle. As soon as you pass it, the landscape changes. The empty plains are taken over by farmed fields and pasture and silos you can see through haze. From my Coloradan perspective, the elevation is pretty low, but you find yourself on long, high stretches of road which allow you to see for dozens of miles in every direction.

Even though I grew up in La Junta, CO, a southeastern Colorado town that's only about two hours from Texas, the Lone Star State has always felt like it was its own world away.

I started this blog almost exactly a year ago, and somewhere along the way, I decided that I wanted to make the trip down to Cross Plains, Texas for the annual Howard Days. It's a long drive- about 11 and a half hours from Denver, and with stopping for gas and such, it's more like 13 hours. But I've so wanted to see where the boss man lived and worked, so it would be worth it.

A few months prior to Howard Days, Howard historian Jeff Shanks offered me the opportunity to speak at the Glenn Lord Symposium, one of the sessions at the festival, and my brain just about exploded. That sounded like just about the coolest thing I could conceive of, but there was a problem. One of my cousins was getting married the exact same weekend as Howard Days. I hemmed and hawed for a while, but I came to the conclusion that if I skipped the wedding for the festival, my family would probably hate me forever. So I went to the wedding instead (it was lovely).

Since I was on summer break from the school where I teach, I figured I might make the trip down to Texas anyway. I do this thing sometimes when I can swing it: go on Google Maps and search "comic shops" in a city I haven't been to, and start seeing what the options are. Dallas-Fort Worth, the biggest metro area near to Cross Plains (I mean, it's still like two and a half hours away, but the state is fucking gigantic, so in Texas terms it's practically in the same zip code) has dozens. I would not make another person suffer through me just bouncing around in comic shops and bookstores, so I set off to crate dig for comics, Conan goodies, and visit some historic sites, alone.

A few hours after I passed through Texline, I entered Amarillo, which feels like an island in the middle of a corn-field-and-dirt sea. Charley Crockett's version of "Amarillo By Morning" played softly on my car speakers as I rolled into the west side of town and stopped at the Cadillac Ranch. I visited the first comic shop of the trip, Whataburger was had, and it was disappointing. Put the gun down, Texans. 

The landscape changes in that part of Texas very gradually. Your altitude is descending the entire time, so it gets more verdant and fecund by inches. It becomes clear how lonely Texas is while you're making this drive. It's not only because I was doing it solo, but because each town I passed was no more than a few thousand people with one little main street, maybe a coffee shop, and a few church steeples recessed from the interstate. It was about the time I was due north of Cross Plains when an accident on the highway ahead of me left shards of glass on the road, putting a puncture in my tire. I scrambled to find a mechanic just about the point when I realized this was too long of a drive for one person to do. A single tire shop was still open in town that was able to fix me up, and I was on my way.

By the time I pulled into Dallas, I had been on the road for about 15 hours. I had finished The Gods of Mars and got a good ways into Conan the Unconquered because it was the only Conan audiobook I could find on YouTube I hadn't read before. It was still hot as hell, and way stickier than I'm used to. There were also far more donut shops than I've see anywhere else. I guess that's just a Texas thing.

One of my nights there, I found a micro brewery and sat on the patio drinking a beer. I actually brought my Dark Horse Savage Sword of Conan Vol. 2 for this purpose: I wanted to re-read Savage Sword #16 - 19's "People of the Black Circle" adaption while sitting in the heat. Trying to actually enjoy the heat and knowing I would miss it dearly when I was scraping snow off my car at six in the morning a few months from now, I went to the Hyborian Age analogue for India. It's a very different kind of place than the patio of a Dallas brewery, but it funnily enough didn't feel jarringly different.

​We're all born in a strange land. And Texas is a strange land. It's belonged to six different nations. It's extremely diverse in people and environment. Every road and plaza is named for a famous person or president who was born or killed here. I tried to picture Howard, hammering away on his typewriter late into the night with the windows open for airflow as I tried to ignore beads of sweat on me while reading the comic.

Zamora, with its epithet-laden cities Zamora the Accursed and Shadizar the Wicked, has always been one of my favorite Hyborian Age nations. It's not a large country, but it's always seemed to be filled to the border with scoundrels and treasure and danger. But I've always had one issue: Robert E. Howard uses the term "Zamorian," while many other authors have used the term "Zamoran." Which is more proper?

In terms of stories either written or outlined by creator Robert E. Howard, Zamora appears in "The Tower of the Elephant," "The Hall of the Dead," and "The Blood-Stained God," the last two of which were posthumous collaborations by L. Sprague de Camp. Howard uses the term "Zamorian" to describe the denizens of Zamora in both "Tower of the Elephant" and the two-page synopsis that would become "Hall of the Dead." In turning a Kirby O'Donnell story "The Curse of the Crimson God" into a Conan story set in the Hyborian Age, de Camp followed suit by using the term "Zamorian." But to be honest, it always felt a little more natural to me without the "i." It's not Zamoria.

To make matters even slightly worse, there seems to be much confusion about Zamora. L. Sprague de Camp (mistakenly) re-named the City of Thieves to Arenjun rather than Zamora, a revision that has persevered throughout loads of Conan media despite most people with an opinion on the subject saying that it's wrong.

You may be the type to say, "Howard used 'Zamorian,' therefore it's 'Zamorian,' next question, please," and that's valid. But so many other authors playing in Howard's sandbox have used the term "Zamoran," so I wanted to delve a little deeper and see if there's a form that it should take.

When we say "Zamorian" or "Zamoran" to describe a ficitonal person from the fictional land of Zamora, what we're doing is employing those terms as demonyms. A demonym (or a "gentilic") is a word that identifies a group of people in relation to a place. Essentially, it's the adjective form of a place's name. They're frequently created simply by adding an -n on the end of the name of the place, but not always.

But even more than that, "Zamorian" and "Zamoran" can also function as ethnonyms. Much like demonyms, these terms denote a group of people in relation to an ethnicity. So you could scurry your way up Yara's tower and steal heaps of Zamorian jewels, but you could also get into a tavern brawl with some Zamorian bruisers. Each nation in the Hyborian Age has an ethnonym attached to it, but I can't find any that waffle back and forth between two options like those from Zamora do.

I thought that the answer to my question might be as simple as looking online into the real-life region of Zamora, Spain. Like the Hyborian Age region of the same name, the capital of Spain's Zamora is also named Zamora. Unfortunately, the demonym for these particular Spaniards is "Zamorano" and "Zamorana," so it's not an exact match.

Even a cursory look into demonyms and ethnonyms reveals that they aren't always as simple as merely adding an -n to the end of the name of a place. In fact, it's very often irregular. Adding -ian, -er, -ish, and many other suffixes, while also changing or dropping the end of words are ridiculously common.

Howard even did this with other ethnicities and demographics within the Hyborian Age, but as far as I've ever read, nobody has ever offered alternative demonyms for them.

Sometimes demonyms and ethnonyms even get extremely irregular. They may change the spelling of the place or be completely unrelated to the root word. This might be based on all kinds of things like phonemes in a word, a historical circumstance, or a sports mascot.

Seriously, you could go on and on about non-standard demonyms for hours. I bet you know a few that are a little strange near where you live. 

If we stick with cultures from the Hyborian Age, most stick with the standard demonym form, but there are quite a few that are irregular!

There are even several cultures that I don't think we have a demonym for. What do we call people from the Border Kingdoms? How about residents of Punt? Are the citizens of Ophir Ophirians (or Ophireans)? If you're from the lost city of Kuthchemes, are you a Kuthchemer?

I've always found the "word of God" answer of "Howard used 'Zamorian,' so that settles it," to be rather boring, but after looking into how many irregular demonyms and ethnonyms there are, there really isn't any reason for the correct term to not be "Zamorian." The Hyborian Age has always had contradictions of which even Robert E. Howard is guilty. Hey Bob, is the capital of Aquilonia Tarantia or Tamar? Because it varies by story. 

From now on, I'll more confidently use the term "Zamorian" to refer to that ancient race of people who swear by Bel slink through the Maul at night, and I wish future authors would be consistent in using just one of them.

It's 97 degrees out, so I've driven five minutes to the nearest Barnes & Noble and I've already started sweating in the sun. Slipping into an air-conditioned book store and sitting around for an hour or two sampling books isn't a bad way to beat the heat, though. Nothing in this B&N seems to have been updated since 2002 except for the seating options, which are less comfortable than they used to be. So I sit in a wooden chair with the intention of reading the first few chapters of Conan: Songs of the Slain by Tim Lebbon, which came out about two weeks ago.

Across from my chair in this aisle is a shelf of Star Wars books, one of the many Star Wars shelves they have. And I see Tim Lebbon's name on the spine of one of the novels. 

Star Wars books get churned out like cans of Coors Light at a baseball game, always have. The first one even hit shelves a few months before the original film even came out, and it's been a steady pace ever since. They've released ten of them in 2025, and we've still got four months to go in the year. Whenever I see a fiction factory like that, I can't help but feel any kind of interest completely dry up. 

When that many books are coming out, they cease to register to me as any kind of lit or art or anything, and just feel to me like product. Books pitched by a boardroom, to fill a quota, to get something else on the shelf, written by hired guns. I've had students who devour Star Wars novels, and I'm always happy if something gets kids to read, but they're just not for me.

When you look at the authors' names on the spines, you notice a lot of repeats. There is a certain brand of author who seems to only write Star Wars books, which feels similar to the brand of author who only writes movie novelizations. I'm sure that's its own set of skills, like ghostwriting a book for a celebrity, but it's just not one I'm interested in. And to be clear, this is a company problem, not an author problem. I don't blame the writers.

Tim Lebbon, author of Conan: Songs of the Slain and a seeming nice dude, bills himself on his Twitter account as a "Horror author," but it seems to most people that he's "A guy who wrote a Star Wars novel" (the colon-abusing Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void in 2013). He's got original books as well, but quite a few tie-ins to existing franchises. I bring this up because I guess I'm always just a little less excited to read something when it feels like it came off a shrink-wrapped palette at the Novel Factory.

Conan novels have suffered from that vibe before (the Tor Books, sometimes the Dark Horse comics), and seem to be just barely avoiding it in the current Titan era. We're moving at about the pace of two novels a year. Is that sustainable for quality? I don't know. My real conclusion about this current novel is that I think your mileage will vary, but it didn't really work for me.

Songs of the Slain is a very middle-of-the-road Conan novel featuring King Conan dusting off his sword to go fulfill a promise to someone he made forty years ago (based on a true story told to Lebbon by his grandfather!). King Conan stories are kind of interesting in one way: you always have to get Conan off the throne. He has to be at least a decently good king or the whole thing looks silly- you don't want Conan to be incompetent or vindictive in ruling Aquilonia. But by making him necessarily a good king, you've usually got to keep him out of his own castle to have a good adventure (except in "The Phoenix on the Sword"). 

At times, Songs of the Slain feels like a legacy sequel to "The Scarlet Citadel" and at other times feels like a riff on Unforgiven. But as other bloggers and reviewers have noted, it's perhaps time to leave the term "pastiche" behind, because most of these authors, especially Lebbon, aren't really trying to ape Howard's style anymore. I re-read "The Scarlet Citadel" to refresh myself on it, and it reads entirely differently. Lebbon's got a workmanlike prose that doesn't have much flash; entirely different than the unseen, but felt, shadows that creep at the edge of Howard's dungeon crawl. As other bloggers and reviewers have noted, sometimes the writing style here feels off. Characters swear in modern ways ("I don't give two shits") and there is indeed the very strange inclusion of "plastic tubes" at one point, after which Conan pulls up Google Maps on his iPhone to see the quickest way to Koth (kidding).

This novel starts a little stronger than it ends, with a flashback to young Conan in Shadizar before moving forty years in the future. An exciting scene involving gem-hunters rappelling off a cliff introduces the villain of the piece, Grake (rhymes with "Jake"), who is essentially who Conan would be if he was more of a playground bully. This novel made me realize that one likeable thing about Conan is that he never really brags or displays explicit ambition- he doesn't say, "One day, everyone will know the name of Conan, who will be the greatest king in the world!" Instead, we get lines like this from "Red Nails:"

But Grake leans into being an ambitious, mean, more brutish version of Conan. He's not a bad villain, but Conan calling him "Grake the fake" at the end felt embarrassing. There's at least one really funny scene where Grake is dreaming of defeating Conan: Conan crumples before him, begs for mercy, and shits his pants. It's so ridiculous that I had to laugh. 

Genuinely, I don't want to be too negative here. There's a lot that works! A good cold open. Conan's old acquaintance Baht Taan is likeable. Lebbon includes quite a few women characters and writes them better than many other Conan authors. There's a fight scene with a zombie horde. Conan's old age has left him a little pudgy and he believably struggles. But most of the book fell flat for me. I just don't think the singing troupe The Last Song is a very strong central conceit, and Conan never really goes anywhere very interesting.

Chronologically speaking, this story goes well after the end of The Hour of the Dragon and The Return of Conan, but before the four "old man Conan" stories in L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's Conan of Aquilonia collection. You can mostly tell this because of his son Conn- Conn has been born but (and is a completely unseen character) but is talked about like he's just a child.

Let me know if aspects of this novel worked more for you than they did for me- I wanted to like this one more than I did.

Welcome back to another episode of "John C. Hocking Kicks Ass." I just finished Conan and the Living Plague, and I know I'm late to the party since it came out around this time last year, but I don't feel that bad about it since Living Plague just won Mr. Hocking the Costigan Award for creative writing at this summer's Howard Days festival. He and his work deserve it- we've got another excellent Conan novel from him here.

Following Conan and the Emerald Lotus and "Black Starlight," Conan is still in Shem, selling his sword to make some coin. Due to his obvious skill, he's roped into being a part of a unit that is tasked with breaking into the plague-ridden city of Dulcine to steal its treasure which is, presumably, just sitting there for the taking since everyone's too afraid to approach the deadly walls. In an interview over on BlackGate, they describe it as feeling like a heist novel, which is an apt description. How do you get past an enemy army and into the walls of a city ravaged by a deadly virus? Well, creatively. I don't need to spoil it for you.

Eventually, we do get into the city, there's some eldritch-flavored magic, and basically the zombies from 28 Days Later, but they've got swords. While I wouldn't call them horror stories, Hocking's Conan work always leans toward the horrific.

Like Emerald Lotus and de Camp & Carter's "Shadows in the Dark" before it, Living Plague makes great use of a supporting cast with which to surround Conan. There's the friendly and unshakable soldier, Shamtare. The extremely likeable young buck of an archer, Pezur. The up-to-something sorcerer Adrastus. The quiet and deadly Balthano. And prince Eoreck, who is a total fucking prick and so much fun to see contrasted with the rest of the cast, who are actual men of action. Giving Conan a compelling supporting cast has always made the stakes of the story more personal and interesting.

Not only is his characterization stellar, but Hocking is gifted in directing action sequences that pace his work effectively. In the beginning, I found myself comparing it to Conan the Magnificent, a Robert Jordan novel I read a few months back (and haven't blogged about because I could think of nothing interesting to say about it). In the first third of Magnificent, there's this overlong scene of Conan in a mercenary camp one-upping the other soldiers. The scene isn't that interesting to begin with, but it drags and drags, leaving me thinking, "Robert E. Howard would never stay in one place for this long, let alone this locale. Let's get a move on!" Living Plague starts somewhat similarly- Prince Eoreck is looking for a few men to demonstrate their strength, including Conan. But whereas Jordan had Conan predictably splitting his own arrows for an interminable length of pages, Hocking presents a more unique test of skill that's a blast to read and then moves on quickly to the adventure.

Let me give you one more example of some propulsive action that makes the book well-worth a read. I make notes in a Google Doc while I read stories for this blog, and at the halfway point in the book, I wrote down a scene I wanted to remember to talk about, and found myself describing it like this: Conan and crew get cornered by the plague zombies in an alleyway, they climb some crates into a window, they jump out onto another roof, and Conan lights an inferno to keep the zombies at bay. I looked at this sequence of events and was astounded with the fact that I had described pretty much exactly what happened, but in the novel, it's a thrilling survival scene that was nipping at my heels the whole time. It was my favorite scene in the book and literally a heart-pounder. Hocking does so much with a very simple setup.

​Every time I read or watch a story with zombies in it, one of my favorite pastimes is figuring what the zombies mean to the writer at that point in time, because zombies always mean something. In Night of the Living Dead is was those standing in the way of the racial progress of the 60s. In Dawn of the Dead, they were the consumer of the 70s. In 28 Days Later, they were the threat of terrorism. In The Last of Us, they reek of climate catastrophe. I don't care to share my ideas here, since I was so far off interpreting aspects of Emerald Lotus the first time. I know he has no interest in writing a politically relevant story, but I feel like they come from somewhere. Maybe I'd bring it up if I got to talk to Mr. Hocking about it. 

I did get some Covid flashbacks when the central cast was donning masks to protect themselves from plague and the wizard was covering himself in oil that wards off the plague... I couldn't help but think about my parents wiping down their groceries with Clorox wipes. Then I found out that Hocking wrote this in 1996 and just felt like he got things depressingly right. 

Hocking tells excellent Conan stories in a way that feels like they have all the right Weird Tales elements but aren't slavishly recreating REH's style or anything. Notably, his villains and sorcerers are usually pretty likeable; they're certainly more human than Thoth-Amon or the Black Seers of Yimsha. Hocking is particular in how he depicts the desire for power as a devastating plague or a consuming addiction.

Hocking has said once or twice that he's outlined some more Conan stuff: something up in Asgard and Vanaheim, something titled "Conan in the City of Pain." I really, really hope we don't have to wait 20 years to see his next batch. And if he puts out something that's not Conan-related, I'll be first in line at the book store!

★★★★☆

That man's name?... Voltar!

I cannot tell you how pleased I've been to recently discover Voltar, a comic book sword-and-sorcery hero created by frequent Savage Sword of Conan artist and inker Alfredo Alcala. I'd never even heard of the character until Reddit user and frequent r/ConantheBarbarian poster u/Man_Out_Of_Time_2 purchased some Voltar art. Voltar's pretty fantastic.

If you picture John Buscema's Conan and then slap a winged Thor helmet on him, you've got Voltar. That description might lead you to believe that Voltar's just a ripoff of those two characters, but Voltar debuted in 1963, a full seven years before Conan would make his comic book debut by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith and only one year after Thor first appeared in Journey into Mystery. Clearly inspired by Robert E. Howard's Conan and a couple of other evident sources (Lord of the Rings, Norse mythology, Bible stories), Voltar is not so much a barbarian but rather a military officer in the army of the fictional kingdom of Elysium. ​

Alfredo Alcala was one of the most prominent Filipino artists in the 60s and 70s who eventually made his way over to the States. In search of cheap creative labor, Marvel did a lot of hiring artists, writers, and inkers from the Philippines in those years, many of whom went on to produce classic work, including Alcala, who'd been a fan of American comics for decades. When the Philippines was invaded by Japan in 1941, Alcala was a teenager. He buried his collection of American comics under the floorboards of his house to protect them and he went to work using his art skills against the Axis powers. He'd ride his bike by military encampments and Japanese gun positions and then draw them from memory, handing the artwork off to the American forces in the area.

Those first Voltar comics in the early 1960s are damn hard to track down, though. You can see a few images online, but I'm not able to find any complete stories or even anything for purchase- not that I'm confident I'd be able to read them even if I could get my hands on them- are they written in Filipino or English (or even Tagalog)? In fact, I'm not even sure whether they're in comic strip or comic book form. Perhaps my research skills fail me (There's an omnibus of some of his work, but that one's in Portuguese!). If you know any you want to share... comments are down below!

I was, however, able to read what seem to be the only two Voltar stories to be published in America. The first is a copy of Magic Carpet #1 from 1977. This issue doesn't seem to be anywhere online, so I sprang for a copy of it on Ebay. There doesn't seem to be too much demand out there, so prices are reasonable. It also features a backup story titled "Buccaneers on the Skull Planet," which may be the coolest title in the history of fiction. The other Voltar story is a seven-issue serialized story for the Warren Publishing magazine The Rook, issues #2 through 9 published in 1979 through 1981. Both of these stories are simply titled "Voltar" within, but they're very different stories. Because so little about these stories is out there, I thought I might recap them a little more than I normally would.

This 25ish-page story was written by Manuel Auad, obviously with pencils and inks by Alcala. As Alcala is listed as the sole creator of Voltar but doesn't have a story credit or anything like that, it's hard to tell if he did any direction of the writing.

An evil wizard named Kan is attacking the Tower of Zimar, the denizens of which send a desperate plea to Voltar via carrier falcon. Being a good guy, Voltar springs into action. He is warned by a blind, old man that what is sees is not always the truth, which Voltar more or less ignores at first blush. On his way to the tower, Voltar comes across several trials that are more or less previewed on the cover of the issue- he meets a tricky satyr, an aggressive centaur, an illusion-casting sorceress, and a dragon monster. When he arrives at Zimar, he's actually able to dispatch Kan pretty easily since Kan's magic is almost too powerful and seems to have deluded him, but Voltar, remembering the words of the old man, is able to just kind of stand there and then deliver one killing blow. Like early Conan the Barbarian comics, Voltar's sword more explodes off his enemies than cuts them.

Most of these encounters with fantastical enemies are told pretty episodically- Voltar meets a character, they fight for a few panels, and by the time you turn the page, he's victorious and moving onto the next one. I'm not against a picaresque.

The character and creature designs are a lot of fun here, with creepy monsters and imaginative illusions that are cast before Voltar during his journey. None of the prose storytelling is outright incredible, but we're all here for the art, not necessarily the words on the page.

While the title pages only bill this story as Voltar once again, I've seen some sources call this one Voltar: Comes the Endtime or simply Voltar: Endtime, so that's how I've been thinking of this arc to differentiate it from Magic Carpet. This is easily the better of the two stories, this time written by Bill DuBay under the pen name "Will Richardson" as the backup stories in seven issues of the time-traveling Rook's magazine. It helps that having seven issues of storytelling gives the story a lot more space to breathe, but the central conceit of the story is a lot stronger, too. 

Chronologically, Endtime takes place much later than Magic Carpet's tale, with Voltar being an older warrior on the edge of retirement (though you'd never know it based on how Alcala draws him- he still looks like the world's most jacked 25 year-old). The goblin armies of Gog and Magog are marching on Elysium, and the country is looking for a messiah. Is Voltar that messiah, or will they only tease us with that idea before making a last-minute switch? I'll never tell.

​Voltar once again goes on a journey here to save his people, with most issues including a one-off villain for Voltar to defeat with either his brains or his brawn before moving closer to Gog and Magog. This story ratchets up the continuity and worldbuilding. Voltar has evidently been away from Elysium for a long time, which allowed the goblin armies to invade. We meet Antiochus, king of Elysium and Voltar's father, who also tells us of Voltar's sister and mother. Voltar implies that he might actually be immortal, despite the story telling us he's getting old. What I didn't tell you earlier is that Magic Carpet #1 didn't even make any mention of Elysium, leaving the story in an unnamed setting.

These seven issues are so much fun.

There's also a constant drumbeat through Comes the Endtime where characters or the narration bemoan the stench of war, violence, and destruction. It's always presented as a plague or a rot that disgustingly invades your nose, and I'm left wondering how much input Alcala had on this story. It would make sense for a Filipino who saw his land invaded by the Japanese during WWII to see the effects of war as a plague. Or maybe it was the California kid who wasn't even born until after the war... I don't know! 

If you like sword and sorcery, or 70s comics, or just classic adventure stories, Voltar is a total blast. He feels very much like a cousin of Conan while maintaining some of his own unique traits story beats, like his obnoxious winged helmet and referring to himself in the third person.

But let's talk the art. We're all here for the art. It's incredible.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the scant few pages of Voltar that exist are some of the most beautiful Bronze Age comic art in existence. Alcala's ornately-designed pages are completely lush with detail, giving life to every inch of the page. In Endtime, every few pages is a bold double-barreled splash page. It helps the stories feel like more than the straightforward adventure tales that they are, giving them a mythical quality. I could gush about Alcala's work all day. His character designs are excellent, and it's interesting to see that Voltar looks (without his helmet, at least) exactly how Conan will be drawn by legions of artists in the coming decades, but this Voltar design got there first.

Voltar and the other fighting characters ripple with muscle that is always posed with dynamic, interesting movement. The bad guys have angular, pointy helmets or jutting goblin jaws that betray their allegiances. The landscapes are fantastical: high castles jut out of severe rock faces, beams of light shoot through impenetrable cloud masses. It makes me wish that Alcala had more chances to do the pencils and the inks on Savage Sword, because he's a master of his craft.

Now, Voltar's not really much of a barbarian; he doesn't seem to be from outside civilization, he's not a berzerking rage monster. Calling him "Voltar the Barbarian" feels like a bit of a misnomer, but it's an epithet that people seem to attach to him frequently, so here we are. Like Thongor of Lemuria, he's one of Conan's descendants. They've all got two-syllable names and a country or "the Barbarian" on the end.

If you want to check out Voltar for yourself, you can pick up a copy of Magic Carpet #1 on Ebay for a fairly reasonable price, but I'd suggest googling the Rook issues, because they're all online for free if you know which sites to go to, if you know what I mean. They're worth the risk.

I just spent two weeks in Germany- my first time really out of the US. Whenever I visit anywhere new, I always search for a couple of things on Google Maps: cool punk bars or venues, used book and record stores, and most importantly, comic shops. We went to Berlin, Freiburg im Breisgau near the French border, and Munich, and I got to hit up comic shops in both Berlin and Freiburg.

Comics are published a little differently in Europe than they are here in the States; today, Panini Comics reprints a lot of Marvel and DC stuff (my brother once visited Paris and brought back a Panini book that had a sampler of comics in it, much like old Shonen Jump magazines that had one issue from five or six series at a time). Sometimes the formats and titles are a changed a bit, and I imagine some titles don't make it from the States to Europe at all. That made it a little hard for me to navigate Modern Graphics, the comic shop in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin. Side note: Kreuzberg fucking rules and I would go back any time. They did have a room of English titles there, but nothing too exciting, mostly 2010s-era Marvel Conan stuff.

Freiburg's shop was much cooler as far as I'm concerned. Freiburg's a cute city right next to the Black Forest and made me realize that every mountain town here in Colorado like Vail and Aspen are all trying to be Freiburg and the like. It has a university there, and right next to the school is a comic shop called X Für U. They had some really cool English and German comics, with a great selection of Conan stuff toward the back of the shop. My eye was immediately caught by how many of these 1980s Conan reprints they had called Conan Der Barbar, which you can probably already tell is "Conan the Barbarian" in German. They had a whole slew of them and I wish I wasn't travelling at the time with limited backpack space. They all have six to nine issues of Conan reprinted in their pages.

I bought three of the titles, #8, 15, and 16 for 2 Euros apiece since those were all the lowest numbers they had and my only other thought was to just pick by cover art since I had a train to catch and didn't have time to flip through all of them.

Volume #15 features a list of issues that makes a lot more sense in that it's just issues 131 - 137 straight through and in order. The thing that doesn't make sense, though, is that the cover used for the paperback is Earl Norem's painted cover for Savage Sword #107! Not only is that not representative of the issues found within, it's an entirely different comic series! I'm left wondering if they were chosen by someone not that familiar with Conan. While much of the story arc contained here is "Queen of the Black Coast" and this cover features Conan on a pirate ship and there's a woman pirate there, it's clearly not Belit.

The same thing happens for Volume #16, which prints Conan #138 - 144, following chronologically from the previous volume, but uses Joe Jusko's cover for Savage Sword #65. These make no sense and seem to have been chosen for no reason other than the fact that they're cool covers. Once again, the art's been cropped, and you may notice that some aspect of each piece of art breaks the frame on all the covers.

If we actually move past the covers for a second, that Transformers wiki was right about some of the ugly choices. The text in word balloons and caption boxes is uglier, blockier text than American comics and sometimes leaves weird spaces due to text length differences.

I speak a little German, but not enough to really read a comic all the way through, so these are mostly just fun curiosities for me. I wasn't able to find a ton about Condor's Conan Der Barbar online, so if you know of any databases that say which volumes reprinted which issues or anything like that, I'd love to see it.