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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read my other posts about Conan comics here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But our luck doesn't hold out for long. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​I still haven't beaten it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​It would be one of his best originals.

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