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With The Unsung Sword of Conan, I'm trying to highlight under-appreciated works in the Conan canon.  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.  In the de Camp / Carter original, Conan is fleeing from Hyberborean slavers (and wolves, to boot) and ducks into a crevice in a wall to escape. What he finds is an ancient crypt and a mummified warrior who comes to life when a magical sword is removed from his lap. He ends up burning the decayed thing to dust. Roy added a frame narrative to keep his story in continuity- while fighting alongside the Turanians, Conan and several other soldiers are trapped in a cave, which causes him to think back to his younger days. In the past, still in the frozen north, Conan fights a bear and ends up tumbling into a hole, which kills the bear and breaks his sword. Another sword reveals itself to him, this one complete with a skull-adorned hilt and a strange inscription that Conan admits probably says not to disturb it. Ignoring the potential warning, he removes the blade, which causes his shadow to spring to life and fight against him. He's able to dispatch his shadow after just two pages of combat, using fire to dispel any shadows, much the same as the original story, and then it's back to his Turanian days. Conan wonders if the blade had been enchanted or cursed and what would've happened if he'd ended up keeping it. At the end of the issue, we see that very same sword tumble out of the hand of one of Conan's victims. I guess he made the smart choice after all. And did I mention that gorgeous Gil Kane cover, inked by John Romita?  Sal Buscema "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.  Conan gropes around in the dark for a bit before making a fire. When he does, the yellows, reds, and browns of his skin, his helmet, and the campfire seem so beautifully vivid after two pages of knockout blue. We're then hit with the splash page revealing the crypt's Thing, wearing a helmet not unlike our hero's. Conan recoils and lets out a "Crom's devils!" The "sunken sockets" of the skeletal figures eyes "burn" against Conan. This shit fucking rules, dude. When the Thing comes alive and attacks Conan, we keep our focus on its eyeless gaze as Conan hacks at its arms, legs, temples, etc. The narration asks my favorite question from the original: "How do you kill a thing that is already dead?"  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. 
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 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 as you've always imagined he would look if he was in a Whitesnake video. 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. With The Unsung Sword of Conan, I'm trying to highlight under-appreciated works in the Conan canon.  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: I'm appalled. I'm truly appalled... The story. Michael Fleisher. His only real achievement so far has been DC's Jonah Hex, but I read SSOC #61 with an open mind. And in my opinion - I'd like to say it's trash, I'd like to say it's garbage, but I have to be honest. It's S - - - ! I'm sorry if the word offends anyone, and it will probably preclude any possible publication of this letter, but it's the word to best describe this misogynistic, sadistic, simple-minded piece of work.  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!
 1970's Conan the Barbarian title starts out a little weird. As young Conan putzes around just outside of Cimmeria in the first three issues, it's near-universally considered to be a slow start to one of the (eventual) best comics of the 70s. There are flashes of what is to come in #3, "The Twilight of the Grim Grey God," but most of it is rather tonally inconsistent, like author Roy Thomas isn't exactly sure what he wants to do on the book. Even as the thief stories start with issue #4's adaptation of "The Tower of the Elephant," it doesn't automatically get that much better even though we're entering one of Conan's most fun life periods. Conan certainly improves quite a bit from issue #7-on, which would see free adaptation of "The God in the Bowl," "Rogues in the House," "The Garden of Fear" and a psychedelic crossover with Elric of Melnibone. Like its title barbarian, the book tends to wander for a while, and even though there are some great issues, it doesn't really have a clear narrative thrust. Where it all really comes together about a dozen and a half issues in when Roy Thomas begins his "War of the Tarim" storyline.  The whole War of the Tarim is a Roy Thomas original... in a way. It's set in Conan's first mercenary period, which in the generally-accepted timeline comes in his early-to-mid twenties, right after his thieving. He goes east for the first time an enlists in the army of Turan, learning how to ride a horse, use a bow and arrow, and strategize militarily. As far as the Robert E. Howard original canon goes, there's not much there. The unfinished fragment "The Hand of Nergal" is all REH really included, though the period is fleshed out some more if you consider the L. Sprague de Camp stuff from the 60s. Roy says that from the start he was looking for a way to reenact the Trojan War in CtB, and this is where he finally got his chance. Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith were planning an epic. The War of the Tarim story arc, which more or less spans issues #19 to #26, is soft-launched by the creative team in issues #17 and 18 as they adapt Howard's "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth." These issues are a lot of fun and I honestly liked them better than the prose original (I found having Conan and Fafnir as the main characters a little more engaging) though Gil Kane's art can be hit-or-miss and sometimes his faces look oddly off-model. These two issues dumped Conan into the waters of the Vilayet Sea as he wanders substantially east for the first time. He crosses paths with an old bit-part character named Fafnir who appeared briefly in Conan #6. He begins as a rival, and eventually becomes a friend. Conan and Fafnir (who call each other "Redbeard" and "Little Man," respectively) are perfect analogues to that shot from Predator where Arnie and Carl are locking hands and flexing their biceps like oversized baseballs, only this time it's one dude with black hair and one dude with red. Conan and Fafnir become part of a military coup before plunging back into the inland sea to escape.  The end of issue #18 lands the Cimmerian on the ship of Prince Yezdigerd, a royal up until then had never really been in the spotlight of stories. Rather, he had always been a more unseen force that worked behind the scenes to periodically throw a wrench into Conan's plans. As it's better than being thrown overboard, Conan takes up with the Turanian army. Conan #19 kicks off the Tarim War for real. It's explained to our young northerner that spies from the city of Makkalet a few short weeks ago stole into the city of Aghrapur and kidnapped the "living Tarim," the current incarnation of an ancient god who freed the Hyrkanian people long ago and has been worshipped ever since in whatever form into which he is reborn. Conan just scowls and scoffs at the wooden carving of the Tarim lashed to the boat, and this is where the real dramatic rub comes in for the story. Not only is Conan not a true believer in either side of this holy war, but he feels bald contempt for both sides. He will fight, but his first question is what it pays. They land in Makkalet and Conan does what he does best. Barry Windsor-Smith's art in this issue, "Hawks from the Sea," is a serious trade-up from the two previous Gil Kane-penciled books. His beautifully-hatched, rococo style works so much better for the Hyborian Age than Kane's action figure poses. He does great covers, but I always felt his interiors looked better for superhero titles. Because of comic creation's breakneck schedule, the team didn't even have time to ink the second half of the book and it leaves it with an interesting Prince Valiant feel. It certainly looks different than the inked work, lacking the strong outlines and deep blacks comics usually have, but it doesn't look worse.  Perhaps it's because Conan is not fighting for gods or glory, but the story is surprisingly not enamored with this war. We're never led to believe that this is a worthwhile cause or anything other than a petty fight between despots. It takes the time to show us the meaninglessness of the violence as Conan looks down into a skirmish from atop a wall, aiding an injured Fafnir. It's a short moment of genuine human connection between equals before Conan is forced to leave Fafnir and we see him tumble off the wall. Even with a reader sobered by that scene, the skeletal soldiers summoned by the mysterious wizard, Kharam-Akkad, are sick as fuck.  The war continues in issue #20, "The Black Hound of Vengeance," in which Conan comes closer to Kharam-Akkad. Fafnir loses an arm, which Roy refers to as one of the "dark undersides of the glories of the Trojan War." They wanted to humanize our Cimmerian hero a bit. The real achievement worth talking about in this issue actually comes when the story of the book is almost entirely over: for a two-page epilogue, Barry chose to simply draw about a dozen illustrations and Roy wrote in prose, placing the text in and around the drawings as needed. The resulting vibe is like reading the bloodiest picture book you can imagine, while Conan puts a permanent scar on Yezdigerd's cheek before diving off the edge of the ship. The epilogue paces the end of the book well and calls back to the pulp era that works so well for Conan. "The Monster of the Monoliths," which follows in issue #21, features an all-time great Barry Windsor-Smith cover to go along with a story that Roy Thomas feels only treads water. It says it's based on REH's "The Black Stone," but I don't feel like the issue evokes "The Black Stone" much- It feels far more like the L. Sprague de Camp pastiche "The Curse of the Monolith." Conan swaps sides in the war, but the city of Makkalet is not without its own problems. We see a betrayal and, as Conan is strapped to a monolith with an eldritch frog, he barely escapes with his life. Though he wants to ride west and away from the war, he keeps a vow he has made and returns to Makkalet to enlist friends for the conflict. Fans in the 1970s had to wait a bit to see the story continue, as that aforementioned comic crunch claimed issue #22 in its churn. Without a story finished, but with a stellar Barry Windsor-Smith cover already sent to the printer, Roy sheepishly reprinted Conan #1, with the promise that the saga would be back in the following issue. It was, but with a noticeably less impressive Gil Kane cover. Though both issues #22 and 23 were intended to introduce Red Sonja to the Conan mythos, neither cover actually depicts her in the cover illustration, which seems odd today considering that she's clearly the breakout character of 70s Conan.  Roy says that it was nice to have Conan's life all mapped out before he even began writing. He knew that he would eventually introduce Conan's raven-haired Shemite love, Bêlit, in "Queen of the Black Coast" and his blond companion, Valeria in "Red Nails." So he decided to introduce a red-haired character as an occasional ally and occasional adversary to the big guy. In order to do this, he looked to the REH story "The Shadow of the Vulture" to adapt the WWI character Red Sonya of Rogatino into Red Sonja of Hyrkania. Much has been written about this already; you likely already know this bit. Sonja's debut issue is actually probably one of least-exciting of the War of the Tarim, at least until Sonja and Conan exact some espionage-style revenge at the end of the book. The story just seems to go by a little too quickly: it introduces the character Mikhal Oglu, "the Vulture," and establishes him as a terrifying, shadowy menace for a few panels, but doesn't really do a whole lot with him. Roy wishes he'd stretched the story out to become a two-parter, and I think he's right. It would've hit a little harder. Sonja feels a little off in this story. Not only is this prior to her acquiring her signature chainmail bikini, but she's also got more realistic orangeish-red hair rather than literal crimson, and she looks slightly older than she usually does today.  Issue #24, "The Song of Red Sonja," fares a lot better than #23. It's just a more fun time than its predecessor as Conan and Sonja sneak into a palace tower of Makkalet under the pretense that they're simply thieving. But Sonja has a hidden mission there as well. She introduces Conan to the magical phrase "Ka Nama Kaa Lajerama" which Conan will use periodically to ward off evil serpent-people of the god Set (he's even using it today in 2025 comics). I am left wondering if the secret to why this issue is so good lies with Barry Windsor-Smith. He had decided to leave the Conan the Barbarian title and wanted this issue to be his ultimate statement. Roy gave Barry the green light to play around a bit. That full-page dance at the beginning? All Barry. The tower and treasure and snake monsters? Barry again. Roy and Barry seem to have liked what they did for the epilogue of issue #20, because the combination of unbordered illustrations and straight prose returns twice in this issue for brief asides. They kind of tie the War of the Tarim era together under one style, so it's cool to see it return. I wish more comics would break up their formula in ways like this more often. Sonja gets the best of Conan (this time, anyway!) and disappears. The intricate piles of treasure in the tower and the bejeweled snakeskins were among the final Conan the Barbarian images Barry Windsor-Smith would ever draw. Barry did a few Savage Sword books, some Conan Saga covers, and a Conan Vs. Rune one-shot decades later, but "The Song of Red Sonja" would be his last time penciling the regular Conan title. Comparing his work in the first few issues to what he was doing just three years later is astounding. He'd grown from the friendly, square-jawed Jack Kirby figures to an unmistakably unique skillset in just a few years. I would mourn his exit from Conan, but finally made room on the roster for John Buscema to finally step in as the regular Conan penciller. Buscema draws Conan the way John Romita drew Spider-Man: crystallized and perfectly. Not only was Buscema destined to be Conan's long-term artist, but his interiors and covers took a title that was already climbing in sales and then kicked it into high gear, eventually becoming one of Marvel's bestselling series.  Big John's first issue as artist sends the War of the Tarim careening toward its conclusion. Issue #25 finally allows the sorcerer Kharam-Akkad and the Cimmerian barbarian to face off in a riff on the Howard classic, "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune." As Conan does battle with the wizard, the crazed faces of the Turanians march on Makkalet yelling, "For the Tarim!" With Kharam-Akkad dispatched in spectacular, prophesized fashion (foreshadowing Conan's future tenure as Amra the Lion), all that is left is to see who will claim the living Tarim once and for all. "The Hour of the Griffin" in issue #26 serves as the war's epic conclusion. Issue #25 had brought the Roy Thomas / John Buscema team together, but issue #26 would bring about the final piece of the puzzle: longtime Buscema inker Ernie Chan would inks Big John's pencils for the first time. Finally bringing that whole Trojan War thing back around, the Turanians invade Makkalet by sneaking through tunnels into a horse statue in the city. With the gates open, pandemonium fills the streets. Conan reluctantly rescues some royals before retreating to the chamber which happens to house the Tarim himself.  Conan scoffs at the robed figure and commands that he reveal himself to an unbeliever. He knocks over a brazier which fills the room with light and throws the Tarim's image on countless mirrors, which was apparently Kharam-Akkad's preferred home décor choice. What Conan sees is not a god, but a drooling, inbred old man. Once he processes what he sees, Conan involuntarily throws his head back and laughs. He is vindicated as men fight and die in a holy war which he's seen right through from the start. The Tarim is struck by a stray arrow from the invading forces, causing him to fall into the uncovered brazier and burn to death. Prince Yezdigerd and the Turanians find the body, re-cloak him, and prop him up for the coming procession. "The city that houses the living Tarim lays claim to homage from all Hyrkanian peoples. My faithful troops expect a procession, come the dawn... and by dark Erlik, they shall have it!" spake Yezdigerd, revealing that this was a political power grab, never a sincere attempt at a rescue. Roy intended to use Conan #26 to set the Cimmerian on a new path, which he does, sending our hero riding out of Makkalet, westbound and away from all this holy war bullshit. His time in Turan was not over, but Conan the Barbarian the character, and Conan the Barbarian the comic book series would go back to wandering. However, the next 91 issues would be an adventure worth reading. And eventually, Roy would find a special spark again, greatly expanding on REH's stories to once again put his own stamp on things, this time by pairing Conan with his greatest love for an astounding 40+ issues of pirate marauding.  I used to do YouTube video essays with my brother back when I was bored during the pandemic. I feel like there are people who might not be super keen to read a long essay, but they might listen to a video while they cook or mow the lawn or something, so I adapted one of my blog posts into a video here.
I might do this from time to time, who knows. Video editing sure takes a lot longer than writing, though! Anyway, give it a look-see if you like. I hope you enjoy!  Don Kraar is something of a mystery when it comes to the history of Conan comics. He's not a well-loved mover-shaker type like Roy Thomas or Kurt Busiek. He's not exactly one of the architects of Savage Sword's flop era like the Saturday morning cartoon weirdness of Michael Fleisher or the paint-by-numbers adventures by Chuck Dixon. In total, he wrote 21 stories for Savage Sword, which is actually quite a few compared to how many issues of Savage Sword you and I have written. But none of them are remembered particularly well, though he had some good installments in there (SSOC #112 "The Blossoms of the Black Lotus," anyone else...?). He contributed some issues to Conan the King and a few DC titles. There seems to be one picture of Don that exists in total on the entire internet. I couldn't find any interviews. So I wasn't exactly sure what I'd get when the Marvel Graphic Novel Conan the Reaver arrived at my door, complete with a noticeable coffee stain on the back cover. The previous two that I read- The Horn of Azoth and The Witch Queen of Acheron- weren't great. And Don write the latter.  Like today's author, Mr. Don Kraar, these Marvel Graphic Novel releases are sort of oddballs in the Conan canon. They're longer than a regular comic book release, a little oversized, and sometimes draw big talent. But in 1987 when Conan the Reaver was released, Savage Sword of Conan was already putting out extra-long, oversized stories driven by some big names, so what's the point when it comes to Conan? Color panels? I was starting to think they were kind of a waste of time. I'm happy to report that Conan the Reaver is not only the best of the three so far, but that it's pretty fantastic. It has, at least for the time, renewed my interest in them. Released two years after The Witch Queen of Acheron as the second MGN featuring Conan and the 28th MGN overall, Reaver is a young Conan story which puts the Cimmerian in the underbelly of Aghrapur on the trail of a great treasure.  What a great Conan reaction shot. Conan has enmeshed himself with the thieves guild in the Turanian capital and is helping them get information out of the city guards in a spectacular fashion. Forcing the captain of the guard to walk a tightrope above a pit of flames, Conan strikes up a deal to get the keys to the great treasure room under King Yildiz's castle. Posing as a new member of the castle guard, he quickly proves his sword to be a valuable addition to Turan's militias and is shown the treasure room. His general decency, in fact, pretty quickly endears Conan to everyone as he gets to know Aghrapur, but the secret assassins of the Red Mist are threatening not only the king's plans, but his as well. Everyone in the civilized city has their own machinations, but our barbarian hero just wants some loot, and he's okay with killing a few corrupt guards or nobles to get there. Kraar does an excellent job of weaving together solid suspense into a thieving sword and sorcery story. Though you might not be completely surprised at a twist or two, the plotting is really fun.  Seemingly the only picture of Don Kraar that exists. I've read descriptions of John Severin's art describe him with phrases like "a master at work," and I don't know if I agree entirely at this juncture. He has very serviceable panel layouts and paces the action well (something that those other two MGNs completely failed at) but his art, especially his character designs, strike me much more as Prince Valiant than they do as gritty Conan the Barbarian. He renders faces strongly and his close-ups are excellently detailed. However, a lot of his backgrounds are empty, solid colors, and he clothes everyone to look like an ancient Roman. Chronologically, this graphic novel seems to fall after the rest of Conan's thieving stories and before his service to the Turanian army that pretty much begins with "The Hand of Nergal." I suppose this implies that Conan goes way further south and east from Shadizar than many of us originally pictured, seeing as Aghrapur sits on the coast of the Vilayet Sea, nearly to Hyrkania. But this story also works as a bridge between the thief stories and the first set of mercenary stories. If you read my other posts about these MGNs, I did some complaining about the cash I had to drop to get them. Conan the Reaver was the cheapest of all three so far, so I'm finally getting my money's worth! I really wish I had a half-star icon to rate it a three-and-a-half out of five. Now, if only I could find anything else out about Don Kraar... ★★★☆☆   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.  X Für U in Freiburg im Breisgau 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.  Apparently, the publisher Condor Verlag held the rights to publishing Marvel properties in Germany from the mid-1980s through the mid-90s. Honestly, the best source I could find on them is this Transformers fan wiki that lays out quite a bit. According to them, Condor was infamous for publishing stories weirdly out of order or in issues that made them hard to follow, made ugly changes to art and text, and made their own covers in weirdly amateurish ways. None of that was super surprising to learn after flipping through these guys. Volume #8 is a reprinting of Conan the Barbarian #45, 57 - 63, and 65 and uses the cover for Conan #57 as the paperback's cover. The cover art has been resized and shaped and features a box that says "First German publication!" The issue order is a little weird, but it at least makes sense that the paperback's cover is from one of the issues included inside (this will not always be the case). On the front inside cover is an ad for their Spider-Man reprints, known as Die Spinne in German, which is funny. The odd thing is that in skipping from issue #45 to #57, Conan is travelling with Tara and Yusef at the start of the second issue, and who those characters are or why Conan's with them will be completely lost on the reader. I get why they included #57: it's the prelude to "Queen of the Black Coast," which issue #58 really kicks off, but the lack of continuity is jarring.  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.
 In 1975, comic artist Barry Windsor-Smith was coming off a run of 22 issues of Conan the Barbarian and several of the all-time best issues of Savage Sword of Conan. Both titles would become widely acknowledged as some of the greatest Marvel comics of the 1970s. And then he quit comics. For a while, at least. Barry was disillusioned with the business side of comics in which editors and corporations made demands of artists and seemed to hate having to draw hordes of superhero characters for which he cared little. Barry left the commercial comic game for a few years. He founded The Studio, where he and other artists worked in New York City outside of the rat race of comics designed to sell floppies off the spinner rack. For a time, Barry tried to elevate the comics medium, working on adult-oriented fantasy stories. Barry's style had evolved over the years from a simple Jack Kirby clone to an intricate, unmistakable personal brand. You can literally watch Barry develop his own touch in the pages of just a handful of Ka-Zar stories, allowing himself to make extensive use of shadows and elaborate hatching. He begins to draw characters with less friendly boxy features than artists like Kirby or Romita, and frequently gives faces small features with high cheekbones and deep contouring. As the 70s progressed and he worked away from comics aimed at kids, that style continued to evolve until it evoked an otherworldly and fable-like quality. After drawing the comics for an in-universe comic artist in the Oliver Stone movie The Hand in 1981, Barry headed back to comics full-time.  Barry returned to Marvel in 1983, after nearly 8 years away, working on a Marvel Fanfare title featuring The Thing and with Herb Trimpe on the title Machine Man. He picked the workflow back up quickly and was soon writing, penciling, and inking entire books by himself. His output at Marvel was well-received, but limited. He only contributed to a few books a year, doing just a handful of superhero books for the rest of the 80s: a few X-Men here, some Fantastic Four there. Perhaps he knew he would get burned out again if he fully committed to the grind of daily comics work. His long-awaited quasi-return to Conan happened in 1987, when he painted nine gorgeous covers for the Conan reprint mag Conan Saga. Each cover is staggering, but Barry didn't always feel that way. His first few were genuine artistic efforts, reflecting what he felt was his best-ever work on the character. By his sixth of nine covers, he was feeling less invested in the project. He openly says that it was his last cover that he felt like he was actually trying to create a "real picture" of Conan. For his final set, he doesn't disparage his own artwork, but considers them little more than elaborate pinups. Over the course of the 9 covers, he depicts action scenes, calm moments, and direct references to Robert E. Howard stories. Even Barry's phoned-in work is as good as most people's best.  Barry's work at Marvel continued for a time. He created the modern origin story for Wolverine in Weapon X, experimenting with bold color and grotesque modifications to the character. During the comics boom of the early 90s, he bounced from Marvel to Valiant Comics to Malibu Comics, each trying to court him as a unique artistic voice to add to their bullpen. At Malibu, he created the character Rune, a disgusting vampire being with a skullet haircut and double-hinged jaw, giant bat wings, and mystical powers. Rune was both terrifying and pathetic; he was frequently down on his luck (forcing down the blood of alcoholics in alleyways) in addition to being a genuine super-powered threat. His self-titled book ran for a little less than 20 issues, at which point Malibu was bought by Marvel Comics, specifically to get ahold of their digital coloring techniques. Marvel cancelled all of Malibu's "Ultraverse" titles in 1994, including Rune.  Rune was now owned by the same publishing house that still had the rights to Conan, so Barry pitted the two titans against one another in 1995's Conan vs. Rune #1, whose issue number deceptively promises us more than one issue, though the story would technically be continued in Conan #4 and Conan the Savage #4 (neither of which would be written or drawn by Barry). It was the first time since his 1973 adaption of "Red Nails" that Barry had worked on an actual Conan story. I can't find online whether it was pitched by the company hoping to cross-pollinate its fanbases or by Barry himself, pairing some of his oldest work with his newest. In Conan vs. Rune, the Cimmerian wanders the wastes of Turan in a state of desperation when he happens to cross a seemingly dead city. The city is not entirely unoccupied, Conan soon realizes, when he becomes trapped inside and hears something horrific outside eating his horse. Most of the city's inhabitants have been completely eviscerated, though, with piles of human flesh and sinew strewn throughout the darkened ruins. Hey, this was a 90s comic after all. Conan meets a lone survivor who tells him of their clan finding a dark, god-like creature in the desert, who they nursed back to health. Once healthy, this god being turned on them (Surprise! It's Rune.) and sucked the life out of most of the city. Conan challenges the evil being and the two do battle.  The story is gloriously violent and gory, making full use of Conan's power and Rune's malevolence. The artwork is stellar too: Barry renders Conan a little beefier here than he had when penciling his Conan the Barbarian issues back in the early 70s. Design-wise, he's drawn a little closer to the Platonic ideal of Conan that John Buscema created. Rune has ditched the skullet for a samurai top-bun and a set of black armor, making him more imposing than ever. Barry Windsor-Smith's official site details a spat that Barry had with the colorists before the book was published. As noted before, Malibu was one of the first comic companies using digital coloring, which was mostly done for Barry's art by Albert Calleros. But Albert had left Malibu before Conan vs. Rune, leaving other, more amateurish colorists to fill in. The result was disastrous and removed the fantastical quality from Barry's art. I remember thinking this style of digital coloring looked kind of cool when I stared at the comics on the magazine rack at Safeway when I was 10 years old in 2001, but by 2008 when I was checking out trade paperbacks of Ultimate X-Men from my high school library, it looked painfully dated.  Barry's hand-painted color guide versions on the left. The digital coloring version on the right. Barry threatened to sue Marvel if they went forward with publishing the digitally-colored version. He quickly touched-up some of his painted color guides and those were the ones used in the final print, still not up to Barry's standards since he claims they were scanned in poorly. While I'm usually pretty averse to crossover comics and stuff that reeks of marketing, Conan vs. Rune is a really cool one-shot. The story won't change anyone's life, but the artwork is beautiful through and through. While Marvel's marketing states that Conan #4 would continue the story begun here, Rune's presence amounts to little more than a teaser at the end of that book. Conan the Savage #4, the ostensible conclusion, is more of a real story, but doesn't make a ton of sense. That issue written by Chuck Dixon is a King Conan story, implying that Rune has apparently been hanging out in the Hyborian age for at least a few decades without doing much of note. Additionally, he's drawn without the knobby knees or grotesque features that Barry gave him, making him a far more one-dimensional gargoyle supervillain. It makes him less interesting. After reading more of Barry's 90s work, I've wanted to check out some of his other creations like Archer & Armstrong, but much of it has not been collected into accessible paperbacks. The way Barry tells it, he's routinely reached out to Marvel to discuss reprinting old material or even augmenting titles like Weapon X with bonus artwork and story pages, but they seem uninterested or they outright ghost him. If you haven't read Barry's Monsters, published in 2021, it's incredible. Certainly in my list of top 3 comics published this decade so far. Barry is an artist in not just literally, but in the most philosophical sense of the word. He can elevate even a gory, 90s fight one-off into something better, and I hope that we see more of his work hitting the printer again soon.   The current Conan the Barbarian title from Titan Comics did something recently that really surprised me. Jim Zub, its author, has frequently set stories in the periphery of canonical Howard classics: we see the aftermath of "Queen of the Black Coast," we see an interpretation of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter." But issue 21 goes somewhere I didn't think they would go: one of Robert E. Howard's worst, most vitriolically racist stories, "The Vale of Lost Women." When I did my first read-through of all the stories in my Conan timeline, "The Vale of Lost Women" was the first one-star review I gave, and the first real stinker. In case you're unfamiliar, here's the most basic rundown of the plot: a girl named Livia has been captured by the Bakalah tribe in the Black Kingdoms. She pleads to Conan, who is currently acting as one of their chiefs, to rescue her. The two strike a up a deal for Conan to rescue her in return for sexual favors. Livia then gets away from the tribe after Conan beheads their leader, is attacked by a demon bat before Conan saves her. Conan ultimately refuses to collect his reward and promises to take Livia to the Stygian border so that she can return to her home country of Ophir.  This story is rough for a few reasons. The last third in which Livia gets away and is attacked by the devil bat from Outer Dark doesn't really have much to do with the first two-thirds, so the plot is kind of loosely connected at best. The story is dark and violent, not a fun way, but in a gratuitous way that Howard scholar Bob Byrne describes as being "heavily charged with the imagery of rape." Most of it, though, is that the crux of the plot is extremely racist. Black characters are described throughout as disgusting, evil, violent, subhuman creatures- particularly their chief, who the prose likens to a frog. Livia is livid that Conan, a white man, would let a white woman be touched by "black dogs." "She made no effort to classify [Conan's] position among the races of mankind. It was enough that his skin was white." And, "You are a barbarian like the others—only your skin is white; your soul is black as theirs. You care naught that a man of your own color has been foully done to death by these black dogs—that a white woman is their slave!"  I could go on with myriad examples, but that feels gross. There's no evidence that Howard ever submitted "The Vale of Lost Women" for publication, so perhaps even he knew it wasn't his best work. Usually, when I have brought up Howard's racism, a few things happen. Some commenters call me a name and leave. But most fans hand-wave it and say, "He was a Texan a hundred years ago, what do you expect?" I always get the sense that when people bring up that he was a southerner decades ago, it comes with a shrug of the shoulders and the suggestion that we just never need to speak of it again. I've even seen people propose that he might have actually been progressive on race compared to other central Texans of the Depression era. L. Sprague de Camp says in his essay "Howard and the Races" in the collection The Blade of Conan, "Howard was, if a racist, a comparatively mild one" and then goes on to describe the unpublished Howard story "The Last White Man," which is almost comical in how racist it is considering de Camp's "mild" racism line. But every time someone says that Howard was no more racist than anyone else of his day, I'm reminded of one of my favorite professors from undergrad, and a phrase he used to say often: "Just because we historicize, doesn't mean we excuse." Though we understand why Robert E. Howard would be racially intolerant in a southern US state in the 1930s, doesn't make it suddenly okay. I'm not sitting here trying to advocate that we apply postcolonial theory and modern-day standards of "positive representation" or anything like that, I am merely proposing that we acknowledge that Howard was, by basically any measure, a racist. And I love most of the writings of Robert E. Howard, but I think we should talk about it. I'm not here to shame anyone or try to take a Conan story you love from you or anything, but I would like to engage honestly about what we do with pretty racist stories in today's world. It makes for an interesting problem to be solved if you're going to try to adapt one of them. Jim Zub and "The Vale of Lost Women" Here's where we get to Jim Zub's Conan #21 "Slaves of the Magi," which picks up toward the end of "Vale of Lost Women" right as Conan slays the devil bat, with a first page that mirrors the cover of Marvel's Conan #104 from 1979. Conan takes Livia north to Stygia, where they encounter a strange village that is a little too welcoming for comfort. Zub smartly reframes key aspects of this story, leaving behind the undesirable racist elements. He begins in medias res, therefore jettisoning the lackluster plot construction of the original. Instead of Conan saving Livia "simply because of the color of [her] hide" in "Vale," this is part of a calculated infiltration plan he's had with the Bamula tribe. Zub fills in some of the backstory between the Bamulas and the Bakalahs, making them long-time enemies. Now, it's a political conflict rather than a racial one. He also spends a few panels at the beginning of the issue getting readers up to speed on where Conan's been recently. The narration makes clear that Conan has befriended the Bamulas- like him, they're strong and smart, and he feels a sense of "kinship and camaraderie" with them that he's been missing recently. While the setting is the same, Conan is now a friend and equal to these characters because of who they are, not an outsider because of the color of his skin. As Conan and Livia ride north, they are accompanied by some Bamula tribesmen, of whom Livia is not afraid or intolerant. I was pretty floored. Jim was able to salvage a story I had written off entirely as an irredeemable piece of garbage and reframe key aspects that remove it from its racist context entirely. It's already been made clear that Jim Zub's an excellent writer, but that takes a very deft pen to do! Oddly enough, he's not actually the only Conan writer to have accomplished this same feat. Roy Thomas and "Black Canaan" "Black Canaan" is one of Robert E. Howard's most infamous weird tales. It carries with it a reputation of being impressively racist. This one involves an American southerner named Kirby Buckner rushing home to the land of his youth, a backwoods swampland called Canaan. The descendants of enslaved Black Americans are seemingly about to stage an uprising, banding together against the White citizens of the area to claim Canaan as a Black-only swath of land. Led by a voodoo priest named Saul Stark, the Black Canaanites use ancient tribal magic and trying to fight against the White Canaanites. The narrative is an all-around horrifying read today. I've decided to show you just one passage from "Black Canaan" to illustrate its intolerance. "What makes you think it might be an uprising?" I asked. It's always important when you come across a narrative with racist characters to interrogate whether that story is depicting racism or if it's endorsing racism. With "Black Canaan," it's obviously endorsing the racism of the main characters. The quote above is never dealt with, nobody learns a positive lesson, the Black characters are the villains not only because of the spooky voodoo of Saul Stark, but because they're the enemies of the Whites, who we're obviously supposed to side with. "Black Canaan" has only one good scene, in which Kirby Buckner comes across Saul Stark's abandoned cabin. There's some solid suspense to be had as he approaches the door, sweating about what might be contained within. The rest feels like Klan propaganda. And honestly, that kind of makes sense from a Texan. The Texas Rangers were known as "Los Diablos Tejanos" (The Texas Devils) at the time and were essentially a racial death squad that acted with impunity.  Now imagine my surprise when I open Conan the Barbarian #82 to see that it is adapting "Black Canaan" as a Conan story in the Marvel continuity. Like Jim Zub did this year with "Vale," Roy Thomas played with a few small aspects to distance the story from its racist origins. In moving the story to the Hyborian Age, Roy has already done something kind of interesting. He sets his version, "The Sorceress of the Swamp" and "The Dance of the Skull" in southern Stygia, on the border of the Black Kingdoms. By doing this, Roy has already shaved off some of the racial conflicts. Instead of White vs. Black, this is a story of Stygians vs. Kushites, both of whom are people of color. Conan has frequent conflicts with Stygians (I'd argue wizards from that country give him more trouble than anyone from just about anywhere else), so he doesn't join them based on skin color.  The Stygians try to enlist Conan on their side because he's clearly not Black, but is very tan and therefore kind of similarly pigmented to the Stygians. He, noting his closeness with the Black Corsairs, denies their offer based on race and says that he chooses his comrades based on things other than skin color. Instead, Conan fights against the sorcerer Toroa (this version's Saul Stark), who is clearly a malevolent psycho. Not because of his skin color, but because he's turning people into crocodile monsters in the bog. We all know how Conan feels about wizards. Elsewhere, Roy drops some of the more outdated characteristics. One character with an extremely stereotypical, uneducated, southern Black accent in "Black Canaan" speaks normally in the Conan version. I'd argue that some of Roy's touches went a long way in the 70s. When adapting "Queen of the Black Coast," Roy expands the character of the pirate N'Yaga, mentioned only twice by name in Howard's story, into a full-fledged character who acts as a loving mentor and father figure to the Shemite Belit, who is White.  What should we do about Howard's racism in 2025?So what's the proper course of action when dealing with some of Robert E. Howard's racist source material? SF and fantasy author Jason Sanford, as a father to mixed-race kids, makes a compelling argument that we just shouldn't read him anymore. Like Jason says, I struggle to imagine myself recommending a story like "Shadows in Zamboula" to one of my friends who isn't White. Scottish blogger Al Harron has a very different take in response to Jason. Part of me wonders how much experience Al has with southern, American racism since he's from the UK and if that influences his opinions. Gary Romeo, who writes the Sprague De Camp Fan blog and is someone I respect a lot, penned a very good (now-deleted) article on Howard's racism back in the day. I do appreciate that everyone I've listed above seems to come at this argument in good faith. I'd really like to hear what some Black writers, or at least some non-White authors would have to say on the subject. As far as I'm aware, there aren't too many creators of color who've worked on Conan. Christopher Priest and Larry Yakata wrote some of Savage Sword in the 80s. Stephen Graham Jones published a short story a few years ago. There were always a few Filipino artists and colorists working for Marvel in the 70s. But I'd be really interested in seeing a story by someone like comic writer and race scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates work on Conan.  I'm just a white guy from Colorado, so I'm not the expert here. I absolutely don't think we need to throw out Howard entirely. I also don't think we should just claim that he wasn't a racist and move on. I keep thinking about Disney's 1946 film Song of the South. This very poorly-aged film is not available to watch anywhere and Disney is content to let nobody know that it exists. The film hasn't been shown since a 1986 theater re-release. However, its characters in the Splash Mountain ride at Disneyland and Disney's unofficial theme song "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" live on, without many people knowing where they came from at all. I was in my 20s before I'd ever even heard of Song of the South. I don't think hiding away the darker aspects of the past are the way to do it (though I understand why Disney, as a corporation, would want to do that), but I think there are lessons to be learned here. "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" is a fun little iconic song that pretty much everyone knows. We don't need to trash it for its association with Song of the South, but I wish the film was available if only for educational purposes. That would allow people to engage with the prejudices of the past, see how things have changed, and hopefully not repeat those mistakes.  Likewise, I think we should keep Robert E. Howard's more racist tales available to read and speak openly about the outdated stereotypes, racist characterization, and time periods that allowed them to be so. Conan's a great character. I mean, I've spent a solid year reading and blogging about hundreds of stories starring him. I love spending time in the Hyborian Age. So I don't think we need to dispose of him and his world because Robert E. Howard was a racist. We should acknowledge what is racist about "Black Canaan," "The Last White Man," "The Vale of Lost Women," and others and place them in historical context. But like Jim Zub and Roy Thomas have done, I think we should work to move any of the racist elements out of newer adaptions. When writers do this, I think it's artistically interesting: what a challenge to take a story like "The Vale of Lost Women" and turn it into something new today. But it's also historically intriguing: we can see how far we've come from the 1930s and give a raggedy old yarn new life. The original "Vale" is still there and available to read, but Jim Zub's crafted a new take on it that's a more enjoyable read, goes somewhere new, and isn't poisoned by personal prejudices. Conan does have a periodically sordid past, but that doesn't have to be his future.   In December of 2024, I published a project I had been working on for quite some time: putting the first 100 issues of The Savage Sword of Conan into chronological order. I have since then continued to read as much Savage Sword as I can, continuing to place the stories in an attempt at chronological order. While a lot of people have tried to collapse all the Marvel Comics Conan stories into one chronology, I won't be doing that. Once or twice, the comics cross over (like when SSOC #1 continues a story from CTB #42, which had come out just a bit earlier) and sometimes they reference each other (like when SSOC #204 involves characters introduced years prior in CTB #84-94). But the two often offer conflicting accounts several times: for example, they each have different stories about how Conan gained the name Amra. Additionally, Conan the Barbarian frequently teams Conan up with original companions for a length of a few issues who, if these stories were happening concurrently, would have those characters be weirdly and intermittently absent. And finally, the two just feel like very different beasts. Even though the two technically take place in the same timeline, I'll mostly leave Conan the Barbarian out. Like in my previous post, there are a few factors that I used to place these stories:
Below is my updated attempt to put all these stories into an order. I'd say "a coherent order" but one character having this many adventures in one lifetime truly doesn't make any sense at all. Stories added into the chronology by Savage Sword are marked in red. If a story was not adapted into a story in Savage Sword, but there is a comic adaption from one of the other Bronze Age anthology Conan books like Conan the Barbarian, King Conan, or Savage Tales, I've marked those as well. Notes are marked in blue. I hope this thing isn't so long that it takes forever to load. The earliest stories in Savage Sword's chronology pick up in Conan's early youth, before he leaves Cimmeria for the first time.  "Rite of Blood" - Savage Sword 89
"Hunters and Hunted!" - Savage Sword 83
"Old Garrad's Heart" - Savage Sword 203
"Day of Manhood" - Savage Sword 227
"The Black Hound of Death" - Savage Sword 219
Here, we see a time jump of a few years. We skip over Conan leaving Cimmeria for the first time. If you want to see a version of that, the first Conan the Barbarian Free Comic Book Day Issue from Titan covers it. We pick up with Conan up north, and one of the first Robert E. Howard stories. "The Coming of Conan" - Savage Sword 222
 "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" - Savage Tales of Conan 1 "The Mill" - Savage Sword 105
"Legions of the Dead" - Savage Sword 39 "The Thing in the Crypt" - Conan the Barbarian 92 "The Mercenary" - Savage Sword 126
Here is the start of the thief stories. Several of them were not adapted in Savage Sword, but only in Conan the Barbarian. That's always puzzled me- "Rogues in the House" is so good ("The God in the Bowl" is good too, just not quite as good), I'm not sure why it never made it to SSOC. Maybe Roy felt he'd done it well enough in CtB. "The God in the Bowl" - Conan the Barbarian 7 "Rogues in the House" - Conan the Barbarian 10 - 11 "The Tower of the Elephant" - Savage Sword 24 (also adapted in Conan the Barbarian #4) "The Darksome Demon of Raba-Than" - Savage Sword 84
 "The World Beyond the Mists" - Savage Sword 93
Conan and the Sorcerer - Savage Sword 53 - 55
Conan the Mercenary - Savage Sword 217 - 218 The Sword of Skelos - Savage Sword 57 - 58 "Alchemy" - Savage Sword 118
"The Treachery of the Gray Wolf!" - Savage Sword 104
"Thief in the Night" - Savage Sword 213
"The Cave Dwellers" - Savage Sword 77
"The Palace of Pleasure" - Savage Sword 81
"The Blood Ruby of Death" - Savage Sword 98
"The Hall of the Dead" / the Nestor synopsis - Conan the Barbarian 8 The Nestor synopsis, known more commonly by the name of the title L. Sprague de Camp gave it: "The Hall of the Dead," is usually considered the end of the thief stories. Other than one small digression in SSOC 91's B story, the Turanian mercenary stories begin immediately. In Roy Thomas's Conan the Barbarian series, the Turanian mercenary period is greatly expanded with the "War of the Tarim," frequently referenced in stories penned by Thomas.  "The Vezek Inn" - Savage Sword 109
"The Beast" - Savage Sword 91
"The Valley of Howling Shadows" - Savage Sword 118
"The Chain" - Savage Sword 91
"The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" - Savage Sword 13
"The Hand of Nergal" / the Yaralet fragment - Conan the Barbarian 30 "The City of Skulls" - Savage Sword 59 "The People of the Summit" "The Curse of the Monolith" - Savage Sword 33 "Night of the Rat!" - Savage Sword 95
"A Dream of an Empire" - Savage Sword 112
"The Secret of Skull River" - Savage Sword 5
 "The Colossus of Shem" - Savage Sword 72
"The Colossus of Shem" in SSOC 72 is functionally the end of the Turanian mercenary stories. In several original stories along with a few adaptions, Conan wanders west afterword. In some chronologies, Conan follows the Road of Kings west from Turan. In others, he wanders a bit more. Conan and the Spider God - Savage Sword 207 - 210
"The Blood-Stained God" - Marvel Super Special 9 (and reprinted in Conan Saga 80) "Curse of the Ageless Ones" - Savage Sword 128
"The Curse of the Undead Man" - Savage Sword 1
 "Autumn of the Witch" - Savage Sword 130
"The Forever Phial" - Savage Sword 8
"A Horror of a Different Color" - Savage Sword 227
"The Lair of the Ice Worm" - Savage Sword 34 "Winter of the Wolf" - Savage Sword 132
"Cursers of the Light" - Savage Sword 133
"The Quest for the Shrine of Luma" - Savage Sword 113
"Child of Sorcery" - Savage Sword 29
"The Sea of No Return" - Savage Sword 66
"The Debt of the Warrior" - Savage Sword 123
"Queen of the Black Coast" marks the beginning of Conan's first pirate period. His first pirate crew is aboard the Tigress with Belit. Many authors have told extended adventures of Conan and Belit together, which usually happen between the first and second chapters of "Queen of the Black Coast." "Queen of the Black Coast," Chapter I - Conan the Barbarian 58  "The Leopard Men of Darfar" - Savage Sword 97
"Lion of the Waves" - Savage Sword 86
"Deepest Devotion" - Savage Sword 107
"Queen of the Black Coast," Chapters II - V - Conan the Barbarian 59
Conan comes ashore ending his first pirate period and here begins to wander north from the Black Kingdoms in his next experiences as a mercenary. "The Vale of Lost Women" - Conan the Barbarian 104 "The Castle of Terror" "The Snout in the Dark" - Conan the Barbarian 106 - 107 "The Fountain of Umir" - Savage Sword 121
After Conan returns to the Hyborian kingdoms from the south, we move into a period of Conan's life mostly unseen in the original REH canon where he acts as a mercenary for various city-states in Corinthia.  "Werewoman" - Savage Sword 221
"The Lurker in the Labyrinth" - Savage Sword 71
"Demons in the Firelight" - Savage Sword 78 - 79
"Devourer of Souls" - Savage Sword 90
"The Ape-Bat of Marmet Tarn" - Savage Sword 96
 "Forest of Fiends" - Savage Sword 91
"Claws of the Osprey" - Savage Sword 108
"The Shatterer of Worlds" - Savage Sword 109
"Lions of Corinthia" - Savage Sword 228
"The God of Thieves" - Savage Sword 211
"The Blood of Bel" - Savage Sword 212
Here we leave Corinthia and enter Conan's more commonly-accepted first mercenary period. "The Dweller in the Depths" - Savage Sword 70
 "The Gamesmen of Asgalun" - Savage Sword 89
"Eye of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 69
"The Vengeance of Nitocris" - Savage Sword 216
"Hawks Over Shem" - Savage Sword 36 "Black Colossus" - Savage Sword 2 "At the Mountain of the Moon God" - Savage Sword 3
"Shadows in the Dark"  "Colossus of Argos" - Savage Sword 80
"Isle of the Faceless Ones" - Savage Sword 115
"The Wizard-Fiend of Zingara" - Savage Sword 61
"The Mud Men of Keshan" - Savage Sword 111
"Death Dwarves Stygia" - Savage Sword 94
"Children of Rhan" - Savage Sword 64
"The Temple of the Tiger" - Savage Sword 62
Conan here heads east to the Vilayet Sea and begins his second pirate period, this time with the crew known as the Red Brotherhood. "Iron Shadows in the Moon" - Savage Sword 4 "Sons of the White Wolf" - Savage Sword 37
"The Road of the Eagles" - Savage Sword 38 Here is the beginning of Conan's period as a Zuagir raider. This period is often visited in SSOC. "A Witch Shall Be Born" - Savage Sword 5 "Mirror of the Manticore" - Savage Sword 58
"Sleeper Beneath the Sands" - Savage Sword 6
"Citadel at the Center of Time" - Savage Sword 7
"Black Tears" - Savage Sword 35  "The Curse of the Cat Goddess" - Savage Sword 9
"Moat of Blood" - Savage Sword 63
"Reavers of the Steppes" - Savage Sword 131
Savage Sword 218 - 221, 223 - 226, 229 - 235
"Isle of the Hunter" - Savage Sword 88
"Shadows in Zamboula" - Savage Sword 14 "The Star of Khorala" - Savage Sword 44 "The Hill of Horror" - Savage Sword 95
"The Country of the Knife" - Savage Sword 11
"One Night in the Maul" - Savage Sword 99
"When a God Lives" - Savage Sword 100
"At the Altar of the Goat God" - Savage Sword 125
"Lords of the Falcon" - Savage Sword 116
"The Winds of Aka-Gaar" - Savage Sword 117
 "The Haunters of Castle Crimson" - Savage Sword 12
"The Fangs of the Serpent" - Savage Sword 65
"Dominion of the Bat" - Savage Sword 76
"The Iron Lions of the Kharamun" - Savage Sword 102
"The Blood of the Gods" - Savage Sword 28
This is the end of Conan's Zuagir period. Conan usually returns to acting as a mercenary once he leaves the desert. "The Slithering Shadow" - Savage Sword 20 "Drums of Tombalku" - Savage Sword 21 "Nekht Semerkeht" - Savage Sword 223
 "Escape from the Temple" - Savage Sword 87
"The Devil in Iron" - Savage Sword 15 "The Crypt!" - Savage Sword 105
The Flame Knife - Savage Sword 31 - 32 "The Toll" - Savage Sword 114
"The White Tiger of Vendhya!" - Savage Sword 103
"There Will Come a Dark Stranger" - Savage Sword 124
"The Daughter of the God King" - Savage Sword 85
"Revenge of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 86
"The Daughter of Raktavashi" - Savage Sword 234
"A Rage of Goblins" - Savage Sword 235
"The People of the Black Circle" - Savage Sword 16 - 19 "The Road to Shondakar" - Savage Sword 228
"...In the Eye of the Beholder" - Savage Sword 111
"Star of Thamazhu" - Savage Sword 120
 "Master of the Broadsword" - Savage Sword 132
"The Siren" - Savage Sword 101
"The Blossoms of the Black Lotus" - Savage Sword 122
Here is the beginning of Conan's third pirate period, this time with the Barachans. "The Sea Mage's Daughter" - Savage Sword 129
"Seventh Isle of Doom" - Savage Sword 136
"Daughter of the Western Sea" - Savage Sword 213
"The Gem in the Tower" - Savage Sword 45 "Treasure" - Savage Sword 227
"The Pool of the Black One" - Savage Sword 22 - 23 "Plunder of Death Island" - Savage Sword 67
"The Changeling Quest" - Savage Sword 73
"The Temple of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" - Savage Sword 75
"The Demon in the Dark" - Savage Sword 82 - 83
"The Jeweled Bird" - Savage Sword 92
Conan the Buccaneer - Savage Sword 40 - 43
"The Informer" - Savage Sword 99
"Fued of Blood" - Savage Sword 106
"The Eyes of G'Bharr Rjinn!" - Savage Sword 107
 Savage Sword 189 - 206
"Swords of Sukhmet" - Savage Sword 225
"Red Nails" - Savage Tales of Conan 2 - 3 Conan and the Gods of the Mountain - Savage Sword 211 - 213, 215, 217
"Black Cloaks of Ophir" - Savage Sword 68
"Reunion in Scarlet" - Savage Sword 127
"Jewels of Gwahlur" - Savage Sword 25 "The Ivory Goddess" - Savage Sword 60 Here is the end of Conan's Barachan pirate episodes. Next, we see a few wandering stories before his time as an Aquilonian scout.  "The Armor of Zuulda Thaal" - Savage Sword 87
"The Fear of Crom" - Savage Sword 108
"The Opponents" - Savage Sword 116
"Homecoming" - Savage Sword 119
"The Crimson Citadel" - Savage Sword 141
"Secret of the Great Stone" - Savage Sword 123
"Lady of the Silver Snows" - Savage Sword 74
"The Army of the Dead" - Savage Sword 110
"Blind Vengeance" - Savage Sword 142
 "The Night of the Dark God" - Savage Tales of Conan 4
Savage Sword 144 - 150
"The Dwellers Under the Tombs" - Savage Sword 224
"The Boon" - Savage Sword 116
Here is the beginning of Conan's time in Aquilonia. First as a scout, then as king. "Three Lives for N'Garthl" - Savage Sword 135
"The Lost Legion" - Savage Sword 137
"Riddle of the Demuzaar" - Savage Sword 114
"Blood and Honor" - Savage Sword 143
"Lair of the Lizard God" - Savage Sword 138
"Garden of Blood" - Savage Sword 139
"The Girl of the Haunted Wood" - Savage Sword 140
"Beyond the Black River" - Savage Sword 26 - 27  "The Dark Stranger" - Savage Sword 88
"Mitra Defend Us" - Savage Sword 112
"Moon of Blood" - Savage Sword 46 "The Treasure of Tranicos" - Savage Sword 47 - 48  Conan the Liberator - Savage Sword 49 - 52
"Wolves Beyond the Border" - Savage Sword 59
"The Reign of Thulandra Thuu" - Savage Sword 214
"The Phoenix on the Sword" "The Phoenix in the Shadow" - Savage Sword 227
"The Scarlet Citadel" - Savage Sword 30 The Hour of the Dragon - Savage Sword 8 - 10 The Return of Conan - King Conan 5 - 8 Here is the end of Conan's young kingship and we see a time jump of around 10 years past the birth of his children. "The Witch of the Mists" - King Conan 1 "Challenge" - Savage Sword 93
 "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" - King Conan 2 "Red Moon of Zembabwei" - King Conan 3 "Shadows in the Skull" - King Conan 4 Conan of the Isles "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian" - Savage Sword 8 "Death-Song" implies Conan's death, some time in his 60s or 70s. After that, there are obviously no more Conan stories to tell. Or are there? There are a few that jump ahead even into the modern day. "Death's Dark Riders" - Savage Sword 219
"Death's Dark Tower" - Savage Sword 220
"Barbarians of the Border" - Savage Sword 200
"People of the Dark" - Savage Sword 6
Stories that were impossible to place There were a few stories told in Savage Sword that were just completely impossible to place. Unless I'm really missing something, they don't contain any contextual clues: Conan doesn't seem specifically young or old, there are no lines that indicate where the story takes place geographically, and there are no characters, items, or skills that give away a general time in Conan's life. Those are as follows: "The Lady of the Tower" - Savage Sword 98
"The Gift" - Savage Sword 100
"The Dinner Guest" - Savage Sword 110
"A Quiet Place" - Savage Sword 113
"The Warlord of the Castle" - Savage Sword 115
"The Haunters of Terror Tower" - Savage Sword 222
ConclusionWell, that's my best attempt. You may noticed that there are still about 30 issues missing, which I don't currently own. I'll continue to update this page. As I said last time, this was more of a nerdy chronology exercise than any kind of suggestion to read in this order. I've never been a fan of complicated comic book reading orders; they're unnecessary and add very little, like this one would. Are there any clues that I missed in these stories? I'd love to refine this if there's something that I haven't taken into account. Let me know in the comments, if so.   In 1982, the same year Conan the Barbarian hit theaters, Edward R. Pressman, a producer for the movie, approached comic writers Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway that same year to begin working on a script for the sequel. Roy had quit writing the Marvel Conan comics two years prior, and was currently working at DC, reviving Golden Age heroes like the Justice Society and All-Star Squadron. Roy had been a consultant on the first movie, and was probably the only living person to have written more Conan material than Robert E. Howard himself, so who on Earth could have been a better pick? Gerry Conway, an accomplished and celebrated comic writer in his own right, had joined Roy to write the upcoming 1983 Ralph Bakshi-directed, rotoscoped sword-and-sorcery movie Fire & Ice, which everyone compares to Conan with its dark fantasy and Frank Frazetta posters. The talent behind this thing was solid.  Dino De Laurentiis John Milius (who directed the first film and is so, so good at what he does) was out, so Kiwi director Roger Donaldson was picked to direct the as-of-yet-untitled Conan sequel and with his playwright partner Ian Mune, came to Hollywood and started working on a script. They even brought in fan-favorite Barry Windsor-Smith to do some concept art. What the created was title Conan, King of Thieves, and it sounds like Roy and Gerry were pretty proud of it. It was then that Edward R. Pressman sold his interest in the Conan property to Dino De Laurentiis, an Italian producer. Even if you don't know that name, I bet you've seen a Dino De Laurentiis movie; about half of the 70s and 80s movies I watch begin with me thinking, "Oh shit, Dino De Laurentiis produced this too?" That's not to say he was great, he was just everywhere. He produced Barbarella, Danger: Diabolik, Serpico, Death Wish, Three Days of the Condor, Blue Velvet, the King Kong remake, Flash Gordon, Dune, The Dead Zone, Maximum Overdrive, Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness, Manhunter, and obviously, the Conan and Red Sonja movies. If it was a genre picture and it was kind of stupid (complimentary), it was probably produced by Dino.  Concept art for "Conan II" from William Stout De Laurentiis wanted them to tone down the violence of the first movie- it did numbers, but he thought it could have made more money as a PG film. They reworked scenes and cut things like Conan climbing through a temple using holes in the wall which are occupied by gross, giant leeches. "No bloodsuckers!" is what Roy remembers De Laurentiis shouting through a translator between soccer games on TV. Eventually, Richard Fleisher replaced Roger Donaldson as director and they hired another screenwriter to do another pass on the script. Roy and Gerry were gone, Barry's concept art wasn't used. While the major story beats are pretty similar to Conan, King of Thieves, the dialogue for the now-titled Conan the Destroyer was totally rewritten. Roy and Gerry got a "story" credit while Stanley Mann, acclaimed writer of- uh, Damien - Omen II, got the "screenplay" credit. Cool. Roy said that they originally left his and Gerry's names off the opening credits, telling them that the credit sequence was done and it would have cost them a bunch to go back and re-edit it. They offered the pair a bunch of money to let them leave their names out of the credits, but Roy and Gerry said no, they wanted their names up there. That pretty much made them persona non grata in the Conan movie biz from there on out.  On the opening page of Conan the Barbarian: The Horn of Azoth, Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway claim that everybody they showed their Conan script to thought it was better than the finished movie, a claim which, sure, I guess we'll have to take their word on. When an editor at Marvel got ahold of it, he apparently suggested they turn it into a graphic novel, so here we are: the script for Conan, King of Thieves became Conan the Barbarian: The Horn of Azoth. This comic seems to have taken on almost legendary status among Conan fans, partially due to the "what-might-have-been" nature of the movie and the fact that it's kind of rare. I paid $40 to get my hands on it, and it's just barely longer than your average issue of Savage Sword. We get a bit of a prologue set long before the age of humans in a war between gods, resulting in the evil god Azoth getting his horn ripped off. Then, back in the Hyborian Age, Conan is painting Shadizar red while brawling in a pit for cash when he's identified for a dangerous mission by a magical father/daughter pair: followers of the "dreaming god." They break him out of prison in exchange for helping him, so the whole setup is a little "Rogues in the House." Because Conan is in Shadizar, seemingly young and penniless, the story seems to be set firmly in his thief period, probably between "The Tower of the Elephant" and the Nestor synopsis, but since Roy usually considers the L. Sprague de Camp stories canon, we can assume it's the full "The Hall of the Dead" version.  Conan then travels with Azoth cultists to retrieve a gem, with the gem they can then acquire Azoth's horn as an artifact, and they get trailed by some enemies who soon become tenuous allies. He's in the dark the whole time about the true motivations of the followers of the "dreaming god," and of course they betray him soon enough. Like the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, they pass through a few "trials" to prove their worthiness. There are some fights, some deaths, and Conan ends up riding out of Shadizar without a dollar in his pocket. If you've seen Conan the Destroyer, it is pretty much the same sequence of events with different names. I prefer the baddies of the comic to the Dollar General Thoth-Amon of the movie, but Grace Jones added a lot of gravitas to a character (Zula in the movie, Shumballa in the comic) who's kind of a nothingburger on the page. Am I regretting that I paid $40 for this? Well, I'm not thrilled about it. Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway have remarked that when adapting a 130-page screenplay into a 62-page comic, some material had to be cut, and I think that's The Horn of Azoth's biggest problem. We're introduced to cool locations which the story seems eager to rush right out of. I want to see Conan explore the mysterious Crypt of Shadows, guarded by tribesmen in the Kezankian Mountains... but 11 panels after the crypt is introduced, we're done with what the story needs to do there and we rush along.  I think some of the pacing issues might be illustrator Mike Docherty's issue rather than the writers. His drawings can be kind of stilted, quiet, and disjointed. One scene in which this little dude "Rammon, son of Rammon" throws a knife features an oddly-assembled throwing motion, followed by a couple of remarkably empty panels as we watch the knife fly (magically?). The last two pages of the story could have been cut entirely as they feature no dialogue, no narration, no new revelations, and kind of just watch Conan as he goes back to Shadizar. If they were short on pages, they don't seem to have allocated them very well. The Horn of Azoth is alright, but it probably doesn't deserve the hype as this lost Conan story that finally made it to the page and is now a collector's item. There are some bright spots like the prologue war between gods, the frozen stone Azoth lurching out the side of a mountain, some of the supporting characters. But it oddly feels stretched between two worlds. The visual design of many of the locations and costumes feels more like the first film than any other Conan media, which leaves it feeling a little empty a less lived-in. The art is lackluster and and the pacing is off.  This is the type of comic book that I think you might find at an estate sale or in a used bookstore for cheap, and if you do, you should pick it up if you get a good deal. However, I wouldn't suggest picking one up from online (stop saying I'm bitter about how much I paid for it) for its full price. If you can't find one, just watch Destroyer again and pretend the names are different. There are cooler Conan rarities out there.
 Savage Sword #232. Cover by Doug Beekman It's a small miracle that any comic is good for long. The need to continually be creative within the same sandbox, the demands of editors, the churn of collaborators, the tastes of comic fans completely at the mercy of hype, the challenges of just, you know, life makes any long-running comic a Sisyphean task to complete. I'm not here to sling mud at anyone's creative efforts. I want to examine one of the most interesting periods of one of my favorite comics. I detailed in "How Conan Conquered the Comics Code" how The Savage Sword of Conan came to life in the space left open by a revised Comics Code Authority to become an unlikely Bronze Age hit. Savage Sword would go on to become one of the greatest 1970s creations for Marvel and one of my favorite comic books of all time. And to be honest, there's a ton that's been written about Savage Sword's early issues. Jeffrey Talanian penned a good retrospective on Roy Thomas's Conan comics work for Blackgate just this January. Savage Sword's beginning has been thoroughly celebrated. But Savage Sword of Conan was not always one hit after the last. It went through a few distinct eras that made its publication into an interesting tapestry of good, bad, mediocre, and weird storytelling. After its initial run of greatness, it slumped into a strange period where it felt adrift on the Vilayet Sea: seldom truly terrible, but there were pieces missing from its enchanting first five-dozen issues. While much has been written about Roy Thomas's glorious first run on Savage Sword, less has been said about the rest. If you read the title's Wikipedia page, the "Publication History" section stops at the end of Roy's tenure and you might think that was the end of the story. There's a lot more to explore! From the Letters Page"I still enjoyed scripting Conan the Barbarian and companion mag Savage Sword of Conan enormously... but enthusiasms, like romances, wax and wane... and then wax and wane again." - Roy Thomas  Roy Thomas at home circa 1979 In spring 1980, Roy Thomas sat in his home in Los Angeles, California, where he had moved from New York with his wife a few years prior. For the last ten years, Roy had been employed by Marvel Comics as the writer and editor on the four-color Conan the Barbarian title, written more than sixty issues of the black-and-white companion mag Savage Sword of Conan, and had even penned years of dailies for the Conan newspaper strip. Always looking to avoid having to fill his schedule with any of Marvel's superhero fare, he had even recently launched a fourth Hyborian Age title, King Conan, which would soon be rebranded as Conan the King. This was all likely about to be behind him as he and Marvel had been unable to agree on a new writer/editor contract. His phone rang. It was a secretary from Marvel's offices in New York, and they had a message for him. He already knew he would be leaving the creative team for those Conan books, and while he hadn't announced his departure ahead of time, he had penned a short, one-paragraph farewell to the readers for the letters page at the back of his final issue, Conan the Barbarian #115. According to Roy, he wanted to go out with class: it was all warm fuzzies and didn't even hint that there might be bad blood between him and Marvel's management. "These fifteen years have been a ball," Roy had written. But the secretary at Marvel had bad news.  Conan the Barbarian #115. Cover art by John Buscema, Ernie Chan, and Irv Watanabe They wouldn't be printing the farewell note in his final issue. Roy clearly had a lot of animosity toward Marvel's editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, but figured that Shooter would at least be professional enough to tell him of a decision like that himself. Roy told the secretary something to the effect that Shooter was a real asshole and hung up the phone. As the connection between the New York office and his LA home severed, Roy had a feeling that his time with Conan was done. He'd spent ten years of his life chronicling the adventures of the bronzed barbarian, but that was over now. He assumed he'd never write Conan again. He was wrong. All-New Sword & Sorcery Thrillers Savage Sword #39. Cover by Earl Norem The first sixty issues of Savage Sword of Conan, which comprise Roy Thomas's first run on the title and were mostly drawn by John Buscema, are a certified tour de force of comic creators at the top of their game- not to mention the concurrent 115 in Conan the Barbarian and other Conan titles. Their run on Savage Sword bounced all over the timeline of Conan's life, adapting classic Robert E. Howard yarns, retrofitting Howard stories to feature Conan, and sneaking in few originals. They also took advantage of the literary boom of Conan pastiches from that period, treating new works like "Legions of the Dead" by L. Sprague de Camp and "Conan and the Sorcerer" by Andrew J. Offutt with the same care as they did undisputed Howard classics like "The Scarlet Citadel." This was always a testament to Thomas and Buscema's work together: they could elevate just about any story they got their hands on by emphasizing the right elements, and downplaying any that drag.  Savage Sword #21. Cover by Earl Norem Roy treated all Conan work as equals: he didn't only choose to adapt the major works like "Black Colossus" and "Red Nails," though those were certainly present, but he tackled less-celebrated works like "Drums of Tombalku" and "The Servants of Bit-Yakin" within the first 25 books. The really easy thing for him was that, as editor and writer of the book, he could make all the editorial decisions, assign himself whatever he felt best to write, then turn it over to John Buscema to pencil (as was the Marvel method) before he would complete scripting the book. Since Savage Sword was free of the constraints of the Comics Code Authority, it could tell full-length stories with all the impalements in battle, the horrifying god-creatures, and nubile Nemedians in-tact. That fact is important when translating Robert E. Howard's work, which was frequently dark and salacious. While I try to never make the mistake of thinking that creators aren't thinking about money and are purely in it for the storytelling, those sixty issues come pretty close. They're just about the only thing that, in my adulthood, has brought me back to the same feelings I had when I was ten years old, reading black-and-white Amazing Spider-Man reprints from the sixties. Roy and John had a remarkable way of capturing pure adventure. It was not to last. The well was poisoned by at least October 1979 when Roy Thomas said to the New York Times, "There is a feeling among most of the people I know that Marvel has become more callous and inhuman."  Jim Shooter When Roy's contract as a writer/editor came up for renewal in 1980, he was pretty sure he wasn't going to be extending his employment at the House of Ideas. He had seen that his friend and fellow Marvel legend Marv Wolfman had been told they would only renew his contract as a writer, not a writer/editor, and anticipated that the same thing was about to happen to him. Roy figured he could skip the whole charade and just quit if he was going to be offered the same deal; he had zero interest in writing books he wasn't also the editor on. Cryptically, someone representing Marvel told him, "The way we treated Marv is not necessarily the way we'd treat you." Roy didn't really know what that meant. In a letter from editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, he was told, "I can't and won't" guarantee a writer-editor position, and though Roy would probably be allowed to be the editor on his own books, Shooter wanted it to go through the Marvel office at all stages of production. He was told to have his own lawyer draw up a new contract. When Roy tells it, he usually leaves the exact conditions of his exit from Marvel vague; he will mostly leave out details about their contract dispute and just say that he was lied to, without ever really specifying what he was lied to about, other than maybe saying that there would, in fact, be an editor over him. He's often said that his contract at Marvel was just allowed to "run out." By the end of 1980, that's exactly what happened. "I would hardly deny that I bore considerable ill will toward editor-in-chief Jim Shooter for the way he had negotiated with me in recent months over a revised contract. I won’t go into details, because Jim has his own side of the story and I’m not interested in trying to convert anybody to “my side” in this particular setting. I decided that I’d simply go quietly into that good night, still writing Savage Sword stories to fill out my contract until it ran out, a very few months away.”  Roy Thomas A word about Roy Thomas: he was probably a good fit to write Conan not only for his narration skills and vivid imagination, but because he's like the Cimmerian in one important way. He does not like to give second chances. Barry Windsor-Smith once lied to him about what the word "wanker" meant when he used it in an early Conan story and Roy says he never trusted Barry again. Jack Kirby changed his mind about something he told Roy he would do on a Fantastic Four story, and, Roy said he'd never trust Kirby either. Writing even years after his exit from Marvel, Roy's distaste for editor-in-chief Jim Shooter is still palpable. Roy paints Shooter as conniving and manipulative, but to his credit, Shooter had whipped Marvel into shape in Roy's last years there and was extending very good page rates and rights (relative to the rest of the industry) to its creators. Shooter had been the stabilizing factor in a revolving door of 5 editors-in-chief at Marvel which included Archie Goodwin, Marv Wolfman, and, yes, Roy Thomas. Whereas Roy had been a very hands-off editor-in-chief, allowing his writers and artists to do almost anything they desired, Shooter was very much in people's business and frequently re-wrote dialogue and directed stories. Yes, Shooter killed Gwen Stacy, but he also helped mastermind Giant-Size X-Men #1. He oversaw the ill-advised and much-maligned Avengers #200, but also helped turn Daredevil into a superstar as opposed to "weak-tea Spider-Man" as Marvel historian Sean Howe put it. I mean, the month Shooter took over Marvel, they published 45 comic books, only 26 of which shipped on time. They even received a phone call from the printer asking, "Are you guys still in business?" That situation didn't last long under Jim "Trouble" Shooter. While Shooter was very controversial, it would be really hard to argue that he was not also vital to Marvel's success for much of his tenure. Both Thomas and Shooter probably deserve some slack. According to Len Wein, "It was an impossible job. And as long as we kept doing that impossible job, they wouldn't believe it was impossible."  Stan Lee and Jim Shooter Roy noticed that in his final King Conan issues at Marvel, there were a few details he perceived as slights directed at him. Instead of the letters pages reading "Dear Roy" as they had for a decade, they more generically opened, "Dear Editor." In King Conan, he was being listed only as the writer, despite having done most of the editorial as well. It's clear that nobody on the outside anticipated his departure. In the letters page for Conan #115, also the book's 10th anniversary issue, one letter says, "Here's hoping for ten more years, and ten beyond that!" I wonder how disappointed that reader was to pick up issue 116. By the time Roy received that phone call from the assistant at Marvel HQ, he was content to let Marvel, and Conan the Barbarian take a long ride down the River Styx into Stygia. He flew to New York as a personal favor to Marvel president Jim Galton and held a meeting with Galton, Stan Lee, and Jim Shooter. Roy was told he could sign the contract or not, to which he responded, "It's been a nice 15 years," and walked out of the office. He went downstairs to meet his girlfriend and said, "I feel very dirty. Let's get the fuck out of here." Roy's time with Savage Sword of Conan was not done forever, though, and strangely enough, it wasn't even done in the short term. Seas of No Return Cover art for Savage Sword #64 by Joe Jusko With its chief creative officer having left Savage Sword of Conan, not to mention how people talk about the next hundred-some-odd issues today, one might expect it to become an immediate dumpster fire. But strangely enough, Savage Sword was about to enter one of its most interesting periods. After Roy left Marvel about the time issue 60 came out, there were still about a half-dozen issues of Savage Sword that he had ready to go. That would keep the title chugging for a while seeing as it was only published semi-monthly except for the high summer season. But Roy's final issues didn't get published immediately- instead, new writer Michael Fleisher's first few issues made the page, followed by one by Bruce Jones, before Roy's name was listed as the author again. This confused some loyal readers when Roy's last few stories came out. Was he back? Unfortunately no, he told fans at conventions and through the mail.  The children of Rhan. Art by John Buscema The Fleisher-scripted issues 61-63 are pretty good, jumping around some of Conan's middle life. Issue 61, "The Wizard-Fiend of Zingara," features some scheming royals, some magical trickery, and some dungeon crawling for an issue that picks up nicely where Roy left off. #62's "The Temple of the Tiger" is a Red Brotherhood pirate story with an island of Amazons. "Moat of Blood" in issue 63 is a little dorkier, featuring a sentient kelp monster thing in an evil king's moat. Weirdly enough, Conan fights some kind of sea monster in all three of Fleisher's first issues. The real surprise is issue 64, penned by Bruce Jones. "Children of Rhan," featuring Conan helping a young girl (who, as you could probably guess, is not just a regular young girl) return to her people, stacks up favorably against almost anything Roy Thomas ever wrote. Jones would plot and script 10 issues altogether, mostly up to #82 (he also wrote issue 8, way back in 1975), but his issue #64 is his finest. In fact, issue 64 is probably better than some of the Roy Thomas issues that follow it, as though Roy is writing on autopilot for a few, knowing his tenure is coming to an end. Roy does choose to go out with a bang, though. Issue 68, "Black Cloaks of Ophir," is a fun politically-intriguing tale which shows off some of Roy's best abilities to write engaging prose and showcases Conan as more than just a beefcake who can swing a sword. Issue 69, "Eye of the Sorcerer," his truly final issue on Savage Sword for over a decade, is a ridiculously epic, beautifully-drawn adventure story that could be adapted into a D&D campaign that would make Matthew Mercer blush. It's quite the feat that he was able to squeeze the whole thing into only one issue. And with that, Roy was gone.  A page from Savage Sword #69. Art by Ernie Chan Michael Fleisher picks up for real in issue 70 with some serviceable body horror and monster masses in his first few issues as Savage Sword's permanent chronicler. Fleisher's a noticeably different writer than Roy: he has a different feel for things and favors other aspects of Conan's mythology. Roy has a deft hand for mirroring Howard's florid prose in a way that feels serious and he always adds weight though his narration in fight scenes that otherwise might just be filled with sound effects of clanging steel and bellows of pain. Fleisher's writing is a little more tropey and lighter, a touch more Saturday-morning-cartoon than 1930s pulp. Both authors make frequent use of the word "selfsame," so there's that. While Roy preferred Conan's piratical periods and his kozaki raider stint, Fleisher sets many of his stories in the period of Conan's life when he is acting as a mercenary for city-states in Corinthia, a time only alluded to before him. He makes use of original, recurring villains far more than Roy does and explores fewer lost cities with magic MacGuffins. And while Roy adapted many pastiche writers, both decades-old and contemporary, Fleisher stuck to originals.  A page from Savage Sword #74. Art by Val Mayerik I would be remiss to not mention one single issue during this period written by X-Men revelator Chris Claremont, who I would bet sits on most readers' Mount Rushmores of Bronze Age creators. Issue 74, "Lady of the Silver Snows" is a dramatic, rich, romantic one-off story drawn by Val Mayerik that surpasses almost anything else on the title. I've never really seen anyone mention this story, but it's a hidden gem that deserves to be in the conversation of greatest Savage Sword stories of all time. And with this last, glorious high of adventure storytelling, Savage Sword of Conan's peak was over. "Confounding all belief, HE LIVES!" Writer Harlan Ellison Late in the evening some time in 1979, The Comics Journal writer Gary Groth strode into the Manhattan apartment of Harlan Ellison for an interview that would last until 3 in the morning. Groth was looking for Ellison to sling some shit- he admits it was his M.O. at the time. He wanted a polemic. Ellison was all too happy to oblige and opened fire on people who are now considered the stuff of legend: Don Heck ("Five thousand Don Hecks are not worth one Neal Adams."), H.R. Giger ("Giger's clearly deranged. Show [his work] to any psychiatrist."), and H.P. Lovecraft ("[Other writers] have not got the lunatic mentality of Lovecraft."). Oddly enough, Ellison doesn't mean it all exactly negatively. In a perverse way, I think he thought he was sort of giving a compliment as he goes on a tangent about Conan creator Robert E. Howard. "Howard was crazy as a bed bug. He was insane. This was a man who was a huge bear of a man, who had these great dream fantasies of barbarians and mightily thewed warriors and Celts and Vikings and riding in the Arabian desert and Almuric, Conan, Kull, and all these weird ooky-booky words. He lived in Cross Plains, Texas in the middle of the Depression, and he never went more than 20 or 30 miles from his home. He lived with his mother until his mother died and then he went down and sat in the car and blew his brains out. Now, that's a sick person. This is not a happy, adjusted person. That shows up in Howard's work. You can read a Conan story as opposed to... take all the lesser writers, all the guys who do the Conan rip-offs and imitations, which are such garbage, because they are all manqué. They can't imitate Howard because they're not crazy. They're just writers writing stories because they admired Howard, but they don't understand you have to be bugfuck to write that way."  Michael Fleisher Ellison also takes on young comic writer Michael Fleisher for his work on an apparently pretty fucked up novel and the titles The Spectre and Jonah Hex. He calls Fleisher "certifiable" and "so fuckin' twisted," so Fleisher tried to sue the pants off of him and lost, years later. The interview devastated Fleisher's career, who honestly seems like a good guy that didn't deserve it. He eventually packed up his comics work and essentially changed careers entirely, travelling, getting his PhD and becoming an academic. It wouldn't be the first time Fleisher left behind comics- he once said he sold his collection of over 2000 comic books for a penny each to a "junk lady" on NYC's Third Avenue and didn't pick up another for almost fifteen years. Compared to his work on other comics, Michael Fleisher's time chronicling Conan the Cimmerian is almost no more than a footnote. While I really disagree with the broad strokes (in 2025, I think we're really over the "You gotta, like, suffer to make good art, man" attitude) but I kind of wish Harlan Ellison had been more right about the connection between Howard and Fleisher. Being of the same mindset as Robert E. Howard might have yielded some comics that hewed closer to Howard's original. The World Beyond the Mists Savage Sword #75. Cover by Earl Norem It's not great after issue #74. Unfortunately, Michael Fleisher's tenure on Savage Sword really sags, both in terms of ideas and storytelling. It starts almost right away, from his first story as the series' permanent lead writer. Issue 75, "The Temple of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" is, for most of its aspects, a fine issue of Savage Sword. It might be a little boilerplate, but this thing ran for 235 issues; it would be a little unrealistic for me to demand that they all knock my socks off. However, issue 75 has one thing working against it: it introduces the villain Bor'aqh Sharaq, who kind of sets the tone for what's to come. Challenging Captain Bor'aqh Sharaq for command of a pirate ship, Conan cuts of Sharaq's hand and sends him tumbling overboard. The character Nahrela looks at Conan and remarks, "Mark my words, Cimmerian! Captain Sharaq is out there somewhere-- and alive! And someday he'll come back to split your black-maned head in twain. And when he does, twil be something of a pity, really--." I couldn't agree with Nahrela more.  Sharaq begins working his way back toward Conan, gradually losing body parts and then eventually acquiring a spiked helmet and some sci-fi weapons like a spring-loaded knife launcher where his hand used to be. Bor'aqh Sharaq feels like he's intended to be the Prometheus to Conan's Batman: an anachronistically teched-up villain with a pointy helmet, mechanical augmentations, and eventually a laser gun (*sigh*). But whereas Prometheus is an exciting villain that makes you wonder how Batman will defeat his mirror-image villain without becoming as bad as him, Bor'aqh Sharaq just makes you wonder what Robert E. Howard would have thought of the whole situation. The helmet doesn't look menacing, it just looks dumb. The weapons feel like accessories for an action figure. And all that would be somewhat forgiven if Sharaq's characterization was cool, but he's not even a particularly formidable foe- he's just an asshole that's more tenacious than the usual Hyborian bad guy. Sharaq would become a recurring adversary. The issues following "The Temple of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" fare a little better: "Dominion of the Bat" and "The Cave Dwellers" are more classic Conan adventures. Still, I started to find myself pleasantly surprised when I would close an issue and think, "Hey, that was actually pretty decent." For most of his run, Fleisher introduces his readers to a lot of original villains, most of which have a pretty silly, superhero quality to them like Sharaq. Wrarrl the Soul Eater commands an army of hideous clay people to do his bidding and oscillates between being a pretty cool threat and a pretty dweeby General Grievous type. He feels like much more of a worthy opponent, and certainly doesn't wear out his welcome like Sharaq (even though, if I'm being honest, his costume is probably even more ridiculous).  Bor'aqh Sharaq, Wraarl the Soul Eater, and the Brotherhood of the Falcon The Brotherhood of the Falcon are another set of baddies that Conan would fight a total of seven times. Each one nameless, faceless, and mostly brainless, these ninja-like hordes wouldn't feel out of place in an issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or an episode of Power Rangers, always dead-set on getting revenge on their nemesis Conan while never seeming to get anywhere close to winning. It wouldn't have surprised me if Conan ever looked over to them and asked, "Sorry, who are you again?" These guys kept popping up, usually at the periphery of stories during Fleisher's run that ended up nearly as long as Roy's.  A page from Savage Sword #94. Art by Val Mayerik These issues played more with science fiction and less with the Weird Tales element of off-putting sorcery and forbidden magic. Like a James Bond film, many of the one-off villains are denoted as the bad guy because they're ugly or have an obvious deformity. Countless piggish kings get the wool pulled over their eyes by a devious sorcerer with a deformity or scar. It's rarely truly terrible (issue 89's "Gamesmen of Asgalun" or issue 94's "Death Dwarves Stygia" which is seemingly missing an apostrophe or the word "of" in its title) but at that selfsame moment, something just feels different about the title under Fleisher's stewardship. Some of the magic of the original is gone. Savage Sword has less of an identity. "Death Dwarves Stygia" is probably my vote for the worst issue of the entire series. Its plot is dumb and meanspirited, the characters are uninspired, and even Val Mayerik's usually-beautiful art is brought back down to Earth by notorious corner-cutter Vince Colletta. There are still a few excellent stories here and there, many of which are backup stories penned by Marvel all-star Christopher Priest, then still writing under the name Jim Owsley. Issues 92 through 109 mostly feature B stories from him, and they frequently outshine the A story. Priest manages to be clever, exciting, and surprising in very few pages. Like Roy Thomas was prone to, he sometimes fills in areas of Conan's backstory that had never been explored, like showing us exactly how Conan ends up in King Yildiz's service for Turan. One of the best backups is titled simply "The Crypt," by Jim Neal, William Johnson, and Geof Isherwood (who has actually commented on this blog before). It's an illustrated verse of Conan marching into a haunted castle to rescue Octavia from "The Devil in Iron." Simple, short, and effective.  Chuck Dixon After issue 112, the final continuous Fleisher-written story, Larry Yakata, Gary Kwapisz, and Don Kraar step in to contribute a few issues each before a third full-time Savage Sword writer would be picked. This time it was Charles Dixon, better known to comic readers as Chuck. During my first read of Savage Sword, I was very excited to reach this point: Chuck Dixon's one of my favorite writers of the late 80s and early 90s! His Robin and Nightwing material is fantastic and helped establish the Boy Wonder as his own hero outside of Batman's shadow. I was a little disappointed. Dixon's Savage Sword continues many of the trends from Fleisher's run: rarely falling to the level of an outright stinker but also very seldom reaching any sort of adventurous heights. His first issue puts Conan up north, which is always a bit of a plus for me. We have so many legions of stories that take place in tropical or desert environs that it's always a nice change of pace to get Conan up in the snows. He defends a village from a werewolf horde, and it's... fine. His second issue is pretty darn weird and features a subterranean race of monkey-like beings becoming friends with a long-lost father, who's back from the grave (but not really). It kind of beggars description. It's not the last time that one of Dixon's stories would leave me a little baffled. Issue 140's "The Girl of the Haunted Wood" is memorable in that its warpy dream sequences are pretty different from the usual monster-and-magic fare. Chuck does have some highlights, especially with issue 144: "The Waiting Doom." Pairing Conan up with Red Sonja, the two race against a company of men who wish Conan dead, featuring an iron-masked giant named Rhuk and some eldritch god fun.  A page from Savage Sword #145. Art by Gary Kwapisz Unfortunately, the highlights are outweighed by some paint-by-numbers Conan stories. It's kind of hard to actually identify why it gets worse, because Conan is still, in the strictest sense, doing what he's always done. But most issues don't feel tied to any specific time in Conan's life, which causes them to feel less sweeping, less epic, and maybe lacking in imagination. The villains all feel one-note and pretty much none of them are memorable. Very few of the locales have interesting stories that make you want to plunge deeper into tombs of spider-haunted mystery. The title stretches on, feeling a little less tied to the original adventuresome spirit of Robert E. Howard's character, and more like its own, generic thing. Every now and then, you'll get a story set adjacent to "Beyond the Black River," or featuring a Howard character, but most often, you could swap Conan out for a more generic fantasy hero and not much would change. As I worked my way through the mid-100s for the first time, I found myself less invested in the title and less engaged by the stories.  A panel from Savage Sword #189. Art by Mike Docherty As happened when Roy Thomas and Michael Fleisher had concluded their runs on Savage Sword, Chuck Dixon's wound down and there was another smattering of authors who would pen an issue or two at a time between clear lead writers. Issue 189 by Michael Higgins feels like a microcosm of the title as a whole at that point. Conan acts out of character (laughing at enslaved people for sale on the auction block, killing a man just to take his hooded robe) and the plot feels random. It calls all the way back to the "Zukala's Daughter" story from Conan the Barbarian issues 5, 14, and 15, which were twenty year-old issues by that point, but it doesn't really do so in any interesting way. It doesn't exactly feel like time wasted to read it, but there's a stack of unread, compelling comics on my coffee table calling my name, and Savage Sword of Conan just feels like it's going through the motions as it eases into the 90s. Let Bygones be Bygones"Working for DC is a little bit like quitting comics." - Roy Thomas  All-Star Squadron #1. Cover by Rich Buckler In 1986, Roy Thomas had been working at Marvel's rival, DC Comics, for about six years. He had actually been doing work for DC much longer than that- scripting episodes of the Plastic Man TV show before he quit Marvel in 1980 (their refusal to allow space for him to do DC work was one of the many things that drove him to quit). In those years, Roy had some success reviving some Golden Age heroes, looking backward in books like Justice Society of America and All-Star Squadron. I actually reached out to 84 year-old Roy Thomas about this time in his life and he said that writing All-Star Squadron during the 80s was the only book he enjoyed writing more than Conan, but DC's method of publishing was mostly not to his liking. He also had the chance to write the story for the movie Conan the Destroyer, but the final film was very unlike what he and Gerry Conway had put together. Despite the vitriol he felt when he'd left Marvel, the feelings had subsided. He wrote a letter to Jim Shooter: "Dear Jim, I don't know if I agree with Roy here: he certainly was a grudge-carrier. He took things very personally. Shooter opined in a now-deleted 2011 blog post: "I have no doubt that Roy and I will always have a number of points of disagreement, but I agree with his sentiment that we’re really not all that far apart. I think we are both men of good will who wanted the same thing, the best for the task at hand—making comics... With the personal conflicts between them mostly taken care of, Roy returned to Marvel in 1986 to work on some of their "New Universe" line, just barely catching the last bit of Jim Shooter's tenure as editor-in-chief. Shooter was fired on April 15th, 1987. Roy had written him a letter just a month prior. "I’ve long regretted that our different (and both quite reasonable in their varying ways) objectives in 1980 led-- perhaps inevitably-- to a break ‘twixt Marvel and myself, and I regret some of my own more extreme actions at the time. I’ve been impressed by your professional ability to let bygones be bygones, including letting Stan’s Soapbox “plugging” me to be printed, and I’d like to think I’d have done the same, were our positions reversed."  Conan the Adventurer #1. Cover by Rafael Kayanan It's not clear whether the two have ever spoken since. [Update: Jim Shooter passed away in June 2025. Roy Thomas has said that the two ran into one another a few times in his last years and ended on good terms.] Roy told me another thing when I emailed him. He said since he was back at Marvel, it was no longer as an editor: he was a writer solely. That meant that he was always looking for more books to fill up his schedule. A "young Conan" series called Conan the Adventurer had just been canned- Roy wrote the final issue of it under a pen name. He never really thought that book measured up to the 70s stuff, and the editors at Marvel agreed, so they cancelled it. The sales for Conan the Barbarian had been dropping, especially since Conan the Destroyer had been kind of a flop, so Roy was offered the chance to return to Conan the Barbarian in hopes that his return would help the sales rebound. Shortly after that, he was asked to return to writing Savage Sword. After over a decade away, the middling black-and-white mag was about to experience an unlikely resurgence. It Seems Hard to Believe Savage Sword #190. Cover by Earl Norem In October of 1991, Roy Thomas's name graced the byline for Savage Sword of Conan for the first time in over a decade, for issue #190. There had been 120 Savage Sword issues published since he'd left the book, about double the number that he'd written during his first tenure. As if to say, "I know I've been away a while, maybe you have too," issue 190 features a recap of sorts. On a long sea voyage from the Barachan Isles to Khitai, Conan recounts much of his history to his Khitan employer and the skull of Thulsa Doom, hitting many of the major beats of his life: the siege of Venarium, his thievery in Zamora, Belit's whirlwind love for him, time served in various militaries, time spent fighting several gods, time fondly remembered with friends. Thulsa Doom asks, "Is it really more than ten years since Belit died?" Conan replies: "It seems hard to believe." It feels to me like Roy reminding us what's so great about this fictional world, and reminding himself what he loved about it. Is it really more than ten years since he last wrote one of these adventures? It seems hard to believe.  A page from Savage Sword #194. Art by John Buscema It is almost comical at how much better Savage Sword gets the very second Roy returns. The narration improves, the stories are more inspired, the action is more exciting, and Conan feels more like who you want him to be. But the guy writing the book was not the only change that was being made here. Savage Sword of Conan was about to do something it hadn't really done before: be told in chronological order, like the Conan the Barbarian title. Yes, it begins with a four-issue arc entitled "The Skull on the Seas," but issue 194, "The Witch-Queen of Yamatai!" would pick up right where 193 left off. Chuck Dixon had a few stories continue on from one another but only for a handful of issues, but from here on out, the meat of Savage Sword would be a continuous narrative. I've made this comparison before, but many Savage Sword stories treat continuity like Star Wars does these days. It's sort of empty. Sure, Solo: A Star Wars Story tells the story of how Han Solo got the Millennium Falcon and expands on what the Kessel Run actually is, but did it do it in some kind of satisfying way that made you feel it was a story that had to be told? I sure as hell didn't think so. Roy Thomas is the Andor in this Star Wars metaphor, though. The same way Andor takes a one-off character that was fine in his first appearance and makes you root for him, exploring his history and the world around him in interesting ways that feel vital and full of life, Roy Thomas breathes fun into every aspect of his second run on Savage Sword, bringing together disparate aspects of Conan's life in ways that feel fresh. He rolls together some of the best personalities of Conan's late career: we meet Valeria prior to her adventure with Conan in "Red Nails." He expands the adventures and personalities of the pirates Strombanni and Black Zorano from "The Treasure of Tranicos." He takes second-rate Conan stories like "Drums of Tombalku" and returns to their environs in a more fleshed out and satisfying way that makes even the original feel better. Issues 202 through 206 tell a four-issue arc titled "The City of Magicians," and it's a testament to Roy's writing that I don't give a shit that we don't even get to the titular city of magicians until the last issue. That conclusion is a spectacular 50-some-odd page action epic that ends in an incredible impalement and an alley-oop style cleave. After "The City of Magicians," Roy begins to lean more heavily on adaptions. Much of the rest of Savage Sword is adaptions of Conan novels, adding Conan to existing fantasy stories, or writing sequels and prequels to other adventures.  Savage Sword #211. Cover by George Pratt Even though I've been singing pretty high praises, I don't want to mislead you. Not every single issue of Roy's second run is solid Zamorian gold. After "The City of Magicians," Roy adapts the pretty-good novel Conan and the Spider God into a four-issue set, which feels like a little bit of a disappointment, but mostly only because what immediately preceded it was so excellent. The pacing's just not quite as tight and the story's not quite as adventurous as previous issues seeing as Conan spends most of it blacksmithing, drinking, and doing recon on a spider-worshipping cult. While John Buscema, the most prolific Conan artist, still did the pencils for this arc, the inking fell to ER Cruz, whose inks change Buscema's work quite a bit. He renders Conan a little sharper, like a Lee Van Cleef lookalike, and uses lots of hatching. Issue #211 kicks off an adaption of Conan and the Gods of the Mountain, which is Roy's first real misstep back on the book. It's a direct sequel to the all-timer "Red Nails," and the art feels like it's aping Barry Windsor-Smith, which isn't a bad combination. It's just that the pacing is so incredibly slow. Gods of the Mountain is serialized in issues 211, 212, 213, 215, and 217 but not 214 or 216 for some reason. The adaption already feels overlong (I bet Roy could've done it justice in two or three issues instead of five), but it has several stories sandwiched between as if to lengthen it even more, mocking us. All the other stuff is great: #213 has some really fun backup stories, #214's "The Reign of Thulandra Thuu" is cool, and issue #216 is an adaption of- get this- a Tennessee Williams story, and it's excellent. Andrew J. Offutt's novel Conan the Mercenary is adapted in just two issues from 217 to 218 and it's much leaner and meaner than Gods of the Mountain, so it comes across as a real blast. The story quality wasn't the only thing that started to get a little more inconsistent after the 200-mark. Since Roy was now just the writer on Savage Sword, he didn't have control over things like what the covers looked like or which artists he worked with. Fine artists all, he says today, but it's pretty clear that few of the late Savage Sword artists quite measure up to Buscema, Windsor-Smith, Kane, Mayerik, and other heavy hitters of the early issues. Fin Savage Sword #235. Cover by Rudy Nebres Savage Sword goes out with two concurrently-running storylines. Set in different parts of Conan's life, they bring together a bunch of different characters from his adventures. In one, he and Red Sonja join forces with old friends Turgohl, Zula, and Fafnir. In the other, Roy is penciled one last time by "Big" John Buscema as Conan reunites with Nafertari from "Shadows in Zamboula." Both of them are appropriately epic, fun adventure stories. Commander Grimm of Cimmeria, bad guy for the former story, is an original antagonist that is much cooler and more threatening than any of the original Michael Fleisher villains with his ruthless ways and razor teeth. And though he's a good villain, he's certainly no Thoth-Amon to go out with. While both final storylines are a lot of fun, they certainly feel like just another day at the office for the big guy. One of the stories ends with Conan yawning, saying that he'd like to sleep until the rains wear down Crom's mountain into a molehill. It's not a bad ending, but you would never think you were reading the conclusion to 20 years of sword-and-sorcery action. The other is a little more thematically appropriate: it has Conan walk off into the sunset, promising, "There will be many more foes for him to face, before he lays down his sword one last time." Sure, just not in the pages of Savage Sword of Conan.  Roy Thomas circa 1995 By 1995, the year of its cancellation, Savage Sword of Conan was only selling about 4,700 copies per month. From 1990 through 1992, both Conan and Savage Sword had sat somewhere in the 60th-80th best-selling book each month, but numbers gradually slipped. By '93, both titles fell out of the top 100 for the first time. In January '95, it was the 274th-best-selling comic that month, and even the poorly-reviewed Conan the Adventurer was selling about twice as many issues. The Copper Age of Comics was in full swing, with 9 of the top 10 best-selling comics that month being X-Men titles, and the X-books were easily clearing more than a million collective floppies. Roy has opined that maybe times were just different now, and perhaps Conan's heyday had passed. He admits that they were never able to get Marvel's Conan titles back to the heights of the 1970s. Neither Conan the Barbarian or Savage Sword had even been relaunched or re-numbered, which was increasingly impressive in the days when everyone was getting new number ones. Even Superman, which had been running continually since 1939, had been renumbered a few years prior. Conan didn't escape the renumbering / relaunching trend entirely. Right after Savage Sword wrapped up, Conan the Savage hit shelves with the cover promising the "beginning a new era of barbarian action!" The first issue has two stories, both by former Savage Sword writers Chuck Dixon and Roy Thomas. They're both fine. It certainly feels like they were trying to do "Conan, but more 90s" and Conan feels much meaner in the first few issues than usual. Unfortunately, "This ain't your granddaddy's Conan" doesn't land quite as well when it's the 60 year-old stories that everyone loves the most. This new era of barbarian action lasted just ten issues and Marvel sold the rights to publish Conan books in 1998.  Conan the Savage #1. Cover by Simon Bisley Dark Horse had the rights for a while, and how good those books are depends on who you ask. They sure did a lot of them. In 2019, Marvel relaunched Savage Sword as a 12-issue series, spearheaded by writer Gerry Duggan and featuring gorgeous Alex Ross paintings for covers. While I've heard decent things about this series, I haven't picked it up yet, though I'm sure I will eventually. Conan would also show up in the main 616 Marvel universe in places like Savage Avengers, which is a truly excellent and bloody time. Wolverine and Conan interacting is everything that you hoped it would be. After just a few years, Marvel would lose the license to print Conan stories, transferring it over to Titan Comics, who I had never heard of prior to their Conan licensing. I was goofing around in Colorado Springs one day in 2023, in a godawfully messy comic shop. They had piles of books from the floor to the height of my shoulder with no apparent organizational system, and I was struggling to find what I was looking for. I decided to just ask the clerk if they had any old Savage Swords. He said they didn't have much in the way of back issues, but they were going to get the new one. "New one?" I asked. He told me that Titan was about to launch Savage Sword once again, just like the old days: it would have at least an A story and a B story, celebrate several different Howard characters, and- perhaps most importantly- be printed on oversized black-and-white newsprint. I added it to my pull list as soon as I could.  Savage Sword #5 (2024). Cover by Alex Horley The new Savage Sword, now into its second year at the time of writing, has been continually excellent. It's brought together modern champions for Conan like Jim Zub and Jason Aaron, while bringing back some of the throwback staff like Joe Jusko and my man Roy Thomas. The spirit of those Bronze Age Conan stories are completely in tact, feeling like both a retro celebration of one of our favorite old books while also feeling refreshingly pure in the modern comic landscape. The other titles I'm reading might get interrupted for months at a time by event crossovers I don't really care about or might shoehorn in garbage for big movie synergy, but not Conan. A nerd for the continuity like me has had a lot of fun picking through the new book. There are references to the 70s Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword, to Dark Horse's and Marvel's 2000s books, to pastiche novels, the movies... it may not all be canon, but it's all Conan, and it's all fair game. A lot of people are waking up to how interesting Savage Sword was throughout its life. You can find the Dark Horse reprints of it with increasing scarcity: I bought Volume 1 for twenty bucks back in 2015, but spent about $100 on Volume 22 this year. I once saw Volume 11 in a glass case at the Bizarre Bazaar in Fort Collins, CO with a sign that said "Very rare! Do not touch!" I'm not so sure about that. For those not looking to hunt down out-of-print TPBs, Titan Comics is reprinting all of Savage Sword as a part of their "Original Marvel Years" series of omnis, which are beautifully-packaged and full of extras, but they'll set you back about $125 brand new. Or maybe you should go to your local comic shop where you can find loads of Savage Sword back issues for just a few bucks. Weirdly enough, most of them don't have enough demand to command more than a $5 or $10 pricetag each. For 50 years, Savage Sword has never really gone away, though the spirit of the original has been elusive. Roy and the other writers and artists have popped up from time to time to delve back into the Hyborian Age, seeming to be as reluctant to let it go as many of us readers. I know that, for the time being, it's great to have it back where it's a brand new adventure every month. Enjoy it while it lasts!  Art by Geof Isherwood If you've read this far, thanks for playing ball with me. I really enjoy writing these more longform pieces, but they take a hell of a long time to put together (I think I've been writing this since just after Christmas). I appreciate you reading!
This is usually a blog about trying to put every Conan story into a coherent chronological order. Meet me over at the "Chronology" page if you're interested in that. -Dan  In 1954, social psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth. It was a flashpoint for the comic book industry. Wertham had actually been speaking out for years on what he perceived to be the dangers of comics, rather unsuccessfully. He was far from the only opponent of comics in the early 50s, but his book allowed him to become the poster boy for the supposed illicit influence on kids. Comic books, he argued, would turn your kids into dope-smoking, Satan-worshipping, crime-committing homosexuals. Now, comic books are cool, but they're unfortunately not that cool. Dr. Wertham's claims are seen by most these days as greatly exaggerated, if not outright quackery, but his voice was a part of a chorus that led the Comics Magazine Association of America adopting the Comics Code Authority in 1954. The Comics Code was a draconian list of rules that severely limited what kinds of content could appear in comics in the name of protecting the most impressionable readers from "injuring" their sensibilities and producing "wholesome" entertainment. Only comic books approved by the code would bear the seal "Approved by the Comics Code Authority" in the corner, and wholesale distributors would not carry comic books without the seal. So while submitting your comics for Code approval was technically voluntary, it was functionally mandatory if you wanted them to sell. The seal was powerful, and as Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund puts it, "Nothing inherent in the form of comics prevents comic books from telling stories for different audiences, but the perception of comic books as juvenile literature was reinforced by the Comics Code."  The Comics Code was in place for decades; I even remember seeing it on some of the books available when I started reading comics in 2001. Looking back 70 years later, the Code is a great example of how censorship, even if it can be well-meaning, is not only restrictive, but actually anti-art. The 1954 Code was extremely confining, prohibiting lurid illustrations, scenes of violence and gore, and most depictions of sexuality. There are a few standards that I'm not necessarily against; for example, it didn't allow comics to ridicule or attack racial groups. But most of the Code was backward and puritanical. It banned using the words "horror" or "terror" in titles, stated that "respected institutions" and parents should never be questioned, and it criminalized slang and poor grammar. It famously barred comics writer Marv Wolfman from being credited, seeing as his name looked too similar to "wolf-man."  The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has compiled quite a few examples of the Code modifying art which frequently changed the flow of the comic and kneecapped its impact. I love to use these as examples of the dangers of censorship when I celebrated Banned Books Week annually with my students. In this first example, you can see that the Code objected to this female lounge singer character's neckline, and the Code-approved re-draw brought her dress up several inches. The Code sometimes demanded art like this be redone, but sometimes also just did slipshod jobs like erasing a line denoting a woman's cleavage, leaving a somewhat awkward space in a panel.  Here, you can see that quite a bit of the violence was taken out of this alien invasion story as part of the exclusion of scenes depicting "excessive" violence (I wonder if "excessive" violence would be identified by you the same way it would by me...). I think it's worth pointing out that not only does the word balloon at the top not really make sense with the re-drawn art---are the twelve-foot-tall aliens firing on the crowd?---but the flow of the panel is entirely changed. Instead of your eye naturally finding the word balloon, then moving to the alien and flowing downward with the ray gun blast, ultimately landing on the crowd that's running away, there's just this big emptiness where there's no movement or used space at all. Instead, there's lots of ground shown between this alien and some now-awkwardly-placed characters in the foreground. The fluid movement from the top of the panel to the bottom is eliminated entirely. And, at least for me, the re-drawn panel feels much more still and lifeless than the original. This next one might be my favorite because the resulting re-draw is so phenomenally awkward. I suppose that doctors would count as respected institutions, which means they can't be disrespected by choking them out. It's permissible, however, to show someone stealing from them, apparently. The thing that really puts it over the top is the edits to the middle panels. Instead of seeing your first-person hands on the optometrist's neck, you get these impossibly-placed hands with the optometrist somehow stroking his chin as he thinks. However, his elbows look like they must be about four feet away from him as his right hand touches his chin and his left hand floats strangely high. Then in the next panel, the shot is awkwardly framed down to his chin, and he's noticeably still blue despite his airway being Code-approved unimpeded. The text of the story is now fundamentally different from the one the writer and artist submitted.  The final example I'd like to share is baffling. When I'm talking the Comics Code with my high school students, I like to show my students the pre-Code Nick Fury submission on the left and have them guess what was too salacious for the Code to allow. They usually zero in on the smoke, the disembodied lips, or the proximity of the characters when they're shown together. But, believe it or not, it's the phone being off the hook that the Comics Code would not allow. A sensual embrace is okay, as are guns, lit cigarettes in ashtrays, and swinging 60s clothing, but a phone off its hook was far too sexy for them. Your guess why is as good as mine.  When Conan the Barbarian burst onto the comic scene at the end of 1970, the Code was still in strong effect. It was revised and slightly loosened the next year, allowing for some horror, magic, and sword-and-sorcery elements to re-enter the comic landscape. Conan historian Jeffrey Shanks opines that Code administrators seeing Conan comics might have signaled to them that the comic landscape was changing, and may have helped hasten the loosening of the Code. Without those changes, it's tough to imagine that a Conan comic could really be possible.  Whereas the 1954 Code banned most of the darker aspects of fantasy stories: the walking dead, vampires, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism, the 1971 revision of the Code allowed them when "in the classic tradition" of works like Dracula and Frankenstein. This opened the door for common Conan tropes like undead sentries protecting a treasure. Those classic Conan the Barbarian comics by Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor-Smith, and John Buscema are excellent, but they're definitely more buttoned-up than their source material. I wouldn't hesitate to hand one of those Conan the Barbarian issues to a 9 or 10 year-old since their fantasy violence isn't overly intense, at least not any more than a He-Man or Thundercats cartoon. They're largely bloodless. But Robert E. Howard's original, literary barbarian didn't shy away from intense depictions of violence, lurid descriptions of magic and the occult, and gratuitous sex appeal (no actual sex scenes, though). So unless you had only known Conan through the 1970s comics, something felt like it was missing. Roy Thomas has spoken openly in recent decades about how much of a pain to deal with the Comics Code was as a writer, and how he and his artists sometimes pressed their luck in getting Code approval. He recalls how Code approval sometimes vexed him: "Actually, the thing that gave me the most pause was the way John [Buscema] garbed Helgi, the damsel-in-distress-of-the-month: in a short vest, open between her ample breasts. I had visions of the Comics Code insisting, after the story was all ready to go, that she be redrawn in a cardigan sweater. Fortunately, that didn't happen. Not only were comics loosening up a bit by the early '70s, but Code head Leonard Darvin once told me he allowed things to slip by in Conan that he wouldn't have in the super hero mags, because he suspected the former had a somewhat older average audience." When putting on his writer's cap, Roy certainly wanted the freedom to tell stories in ways he thought were best. But Roy was also the editor of the book, so he knew he had to play things carefully when working around or outright pushing against the Comics Code. They sometimes acquiesced in ways that didn't make them completely happy: Roy notes how it's a little awkward that Conan's sword seems to explode off of enemies rather than cut them like on the second page of issue #1. They leave some things implied, like the character Jenna's status as a sex worker. And sometimes, they would even outright note to one another in the margins, "Hope the Comics Code doesn't cut this!"  In Conan #9, when a character is dropped into a patch of man-eating flowers, they devour the guy without any of the violence technically being shown. As the flowers eat him, their color changes from white and pink to blood red. The Code normally would have objected to violence like this seeing as they had access to the color notes on the pages: had Roy written "As the flowers eat him, they turn red with his blood," it wouldn't have flown. Lucky for the creative team, the colorist on the book was Maddy Cohen, who happened to be dating the artist, Barry Windsor-Smith. Instead of writing directions for her on the page, he was able to give her color notes verbally and the Code censors were left in the dark as to their true intentions.  Conan #10 features a kill scene which the Robert E. Howard original specifically says involves Conan decapitating his enemies, but Roy knew that would never fly under the Code. Instead, Barry decided to have the Cimmerian deliver the killing blow out of frame and then show the evil priest of Anu's head in profile, and his obese body is conveniently not where it would be in the frame if his head were still attached to his body. An inclusion by omission, which Roy Thomas says allowed readers to draw their own conclusions. The Code didn't seem to notice. The Code did notice that Conan wasn't punished for killing a priest of all people, though. Roy countered with the fact that he would be in a dungeon at the start of the next issue (with the real start to "Rogues in the House"), but that wasn't good enough for Code administrators. Three caption boxes that previewed Conan's upcoming incarceration were added to the last few panels at the Code's behest. An intimate moment with Red Sonja was made to be re-drawn in Conan #24, as Conan's wandering hands brought up above the waterline to merely be cupping her waist, rather than clearly getting a handful.  "Moon of Zembabwei," the story in Conan #28, had the Cimmerian fighting an ape beast that Conan ultimately killed by stabbing it in the neck. For some odd reason, the Code cared less about blood of other colors than red, so they made the creature bleed black. The scene is pretty violent, but the Code didn't seem to mind, and it was printed as John Buscema originally drew it.  In Conan #37, Roy remembers wringing his hands as he wondered if the Code would object to one of Neal Adams' drawings of a gigantic slug monster looking a little bit like a vulva. The Code apparently didn't think it was objectionable enough to ask for changes, and I'm glad they didn't. When I read that issue, it didn't even cross my mind that someone might object to it, but I've talked to other readers who noticed it immediately. Sometimes, Roy was worried about not only offending the Code censors, but also the general reading public as well. He knew that as he approached the "Queen of the Black Coast" storyline, he was going to have Conan split a judge's head in two, which sends Conan running from the law and onto the nearest ship, kicking off the story. But Roy was concerned that Conan would look too much like a "wanton murderer" and it would turn off readers. He decided to hide a few clues in the story (some ostentatious rings) tying the judge to a slaver seen earlier in the story, therefore making the judge also a criminal. However, Roy admits that within the story, Conan never sees the rings or connects the dots of the two men's criminal enterprise (a caption box literally says "Conan never notices a certain ring he would doubtless recognize"). He only kills the judge because he's about to be sent to prison. So Conan was still essentially wantonly murdering, but Roy wanted something in the story to point to if the Code raised any eyebrows.  The Conan creative team wasn't always successful at working around Code censors. Included below is a panel from Conan #58 which the Code rejected, and it's approved re-drawn beneath. They didn't take issue with the scantily-clad Belit's furry britches or with a "blind flood of desire," but instead found Conan's open legs objectionable. In the final drawing, Conan's legs are to one side and he looks like he's about to fall over. Elsewhere in that issue, Code censors had Roy Thomas change the "mating dance of Belit" into the "love dance of Belit." Roy pushed back a bit: aren't those the same thing? Well, "love dance," is general, they said. "Mating dance" is specific. Roy acquiesced.  It's sad to me that the Marvel staff had to either strategize around the Code, work actively to hide their true intentions, or censor their great work. Roy did occasionally censor his own stuff- he says he wasn't really out to ruffle feathers- he did so reluctantly, and got away with what he could. Conan the Barbarian wasn't an instant success. The premiere sold pretty well, but then the next six issues lagged behind more popular books, and trended downward. It was even cancelled for about a day before the Marvel editors reversed their decision. But starting with issue 8, the series began a steady sales increase that meant it was safe from cancellation for a very long time.  Around the time that Conan the Barbarian #1 was premiering in 1970, Roy Thomas got a phone call from Stan Lee with an idea for a new book. It was a for a series he wanted to call Savage Tales, and Stan outlined to Roy an idea that he had for a new character called Man-Thing, an intensely tragic character turned into a swamp monster. While fleshing out the story idea from Stan and sending it to writer Gerry Conway to script, Roy wasn't immediately sold on it. He felt that Man-Thing seemed too similar to the existing character The Heap and that Marvel already had a popular hero named The Thing, not to mention the eventual title Giant-Size Man-Thing is hilarious in a way that would probably chafe against the Code. The aspect that was unique about the book, though, is that it would be a black-and-white magazine-sized comic, which was something Marvel didn't have at the time. It wasn't a completely original idea: Warren Publishing had been putting out Creepy and Eerie comic magazines since the mid-1960s. The paper size was a little bit larger, they cost more than a regular comic, and, importantly, as a magazine they were completely independent of the Comics Code Authority. Looking at early 70s comics side-by-side today, it's a little wild to think how restricted one was while the other couldn't be touched by the Code. The magazine dimensions are only about three-quarters of an inch larger than the height and width of a regular comic book. Brian Cronin at Comic Book Resources helps explain that it was essentially a stocking trick: since magazines and comic books were racked in different places at the newsstand, a non-Code magazine like Savage Tales wouldn't be sitting right next to a Code-approved Batman comic.  A visit to the comic section at the newsstand probably in early 1972. You can see Conan #12 "The Dweller in the Dark" in the upper-left. It makes sense that Man-Thing's origin story would need to appear in a comic outside of Comics Code approval. It's terribly sad, features less-than-glorious depictions of the government, and deals with drugs, corruption, and artist Gray Morrow draws a woman in basically transparent clothes. Essentially, it's everything the Code wasn't keen on. It's also dynamite! Those early Savage Tales stories featuring Man-Thing, Ka-Zar of the jungle, and Conan the Barbarian are all wonderful Bronze-Age nuggets of weird storytelling. And in case the decapitated head on the cover wasn't a big enough clue, it was printed with a notice saying that "This publication is rated 'M' for the mature reader!" It's a sort of anti-Comics Code Seal. Stan originally wanted a King Kull story instead of Conan- Stan liked how names that started with K looked on a cover better than names that started with a C, plus, they already had one Conan comic. Did they need two? For reasons unknown, Stan changed his mind and went with Conan; he and Kull are cut from the same cloth anyway.  The first chronological Conan story "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is a good fit for the first issue. It's a simple and effective episode (surprisingly brief at only 11 pages). Brevity was always a skill both Robert E. Howard and Roy Thomas possessed, and it's one I decidedly don't have (If you think this article's long, you should see how much my next one about comic history spiraled out). Roy's dialogue and Barry Windsor-Smith's art in those 11 pages absolutely kick ass. When the adaptation was reprinted later in Conan the Barbarian #16, basically every panel had to be edited on some level due to Atali's diaphanous clothes. The letter they received from the CCA said that the story needed heavy re-draws to be deemed acceptable, and "the lightest goassamer draping of the female figure, wherever it is used on the female's breasts, pubic areas or buttocks must be made opaque and to cover these areas thoroughly." Just about every panel has some note from the Code administrator, and they use the word "buttock" about two-dozen times.  Unfortunately, not everyone was as much of a fan of those early Savage Tales stories as I am. Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, who had been working in comics since 1929 and had been with Marvel since the very beginning, cancelled the book after only one issue. Roy Thomas recalled the cancelling in 2008 like this: "I never got all the inside story, but there were several things that led to Savage Tales being cancelled after that first issue. Martin Goodman had never really wanted to do a non-Code comic, probably because he didn't want any trouble with the CMAA over it. Nor did he really want to get into magazine-format comics; and Stan really did. So Goodman looked for an excuse to cancel it. I also heard we weren't able to sell the mag in Canada, which ordinarily would probably have taken maybe 10% of the print run- that somebody at the competition, DC or Warren or wherever, told the Canadians it was salacious material. But I never got any confirmation of that, and it may be an urban legend.  Roy had a second Conan story for the next Savage Tales issue already in the works, but since the book was canned, he moved it over to Conan the Barbarian. As you may have expected, the Comics Code censors made them rework a considerable amount of art drawn of female characters which Roy notes would have been "no problem" in the black-and-white pages. For a few years, Savage Tales lay dormant while Roy, Barry, John, and others chugged away at making the Comics Code-bound Conan the Barbarian a success. Goodman eventually backed Stan Lee when Stan wanted to publish an anti-drug Spider-Man comic which the Code denied. Marvel published the book anyway. Many people have noted that Stan may have gotten a little too much credit for his work in the 60s, frequently overshadowing collaborators who deserved more recognition, but Stan definitely took some principled, measured stands against the Comics Code for which he should be lauded.  Partially as a result of Stan's efforts, the Code began to loosen ever so slightly. Goodman retired from Marvel in 1972 and Stan assumed the role of publisher, which meant that he didn't need Goodman's approval for a certain black-and-white, magazine-sized book. Still, Stan had lots of new responsibilities as publisher and president of Marvel, so he handed the reins of Savage Tales, and the editor-in-chief role, to Roy. Most of the stories they had originally planned for the second issue had already been printed, so Roy asked if he could make Savage Tales a more Robert E. Howard-focused mag. Stan said yes. Proudly declaring that it was "Back by popular demand," Savage Tales #2 hit stands in October of 1973, only 30 months after the first issue. This time, Conan was featured on the cover and the interior had an adaption of a top-tier Robert E. Howard story: "Red Nails." While the first issue had featured a "Conan the Barbarian starring in..." tag above the title, issue 2 now read "Savage Tales featuring Conan the Barbarian" with our Cimmerian hero's name as large as the title itself. John Buscema's painted cover already hints that this is not a Code-approved book as it has a nude woman threatened by an executioner and some conveniently-placed smoke obscuring her form. Any comic version of "Red Nails" would have had to look very different under the Code. Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's adaption of it is extremely bloody and almost immediately features horrifying undead creatures. It's suggestively sexual: the words "throbs and pulses" appear together, in that order, and the story is very critical of power structures. The climax of the narrative has one fairly steamy lesbionic scene as well, all wrapped around an attempt at human sacrifice. "Red Nails" was already one of Robert E. Howard's best Conan stories, but Roy's dialogue and Barry's intricate art really do live up to their charming claim on the title page that they adapted it "with aplomb." Instead of the short 11 pages allotted for "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" in the first issue, "Red Nails" was a two-parter, spanning 21 pages for just its first installment. In addition to "Red Nails," Barry Windsor-Smith also locked in to draw an illustrated version of Howard's poem "Cimmeria" and a full-page, in-house ad. Roy convinced Robert E. Howard's agent, Glenn Lord, to write a biography of Howard for issue 2 as well. Savage Tales continued with Conan as the headline character for a few more issues, with the Cimmerian eventually sharing cover space with Ka-Zar, Lord of the Hidden Jungle. Those first five issues feature painted covers by some of the best artists working in comics at the time, covers whose intensity really lived up to the title of the book. The mag was hugely successful.  After issue 5, Conan was spun off into his own book which would bear his name permanently in the title: The Savage Sword of Conan. Savage Sword was also unconstrained by the Comics Code, meaning that it could live up to all the bloody promise of Robert E. Howard's original character. Whereas other Marvel characters played in the backup stories of Savage Tales, Roy Thomas saw Savage Sword as a Howard showcase and wanted to use characters like King Kull and Solomon Kane for the backups. According to Roy Thomas, when you were assigned to write a Marvel comic in the 70s, as soon as it was given to you, it was "due yesterday, if not the day before." As such, getting assigned the first issue of Savage Sword meant a tight deadline, so he reluctantly re-purposed the next few plots he had figured out for Conan and slotted them into the new title. It's a little awkward as a first issue: Conan meets up with Red Sonja, who he clearly has a history with, but what that history is will be mostly lost on the reader if they haven't read Conan #23. I certainly hadn't when I first stumbled across Savage Sword, so I figured it was all to be left to my imagination. It is in this issue that Red Sonja acquires her signature chain-mail bikini, which was far too revealing for a Code-bound book like Conan the Barbarian, in which she wore a full-coverage, long-sleeve chainmail shirt.  Savage Sword's first story, "The Curse of the Undead Man," would continue in Conan #43, which came out soon afterword. Roy lamented that since the black-and-white mag had a smaller readership than the color comic, some of its readers would miss the first half of the narrative, but people seem to have done okay. I think this kind of cross-pollination between books is much more acceptable in today's industry. The book was a success, Comics Code be damned, and Savage Sword would go on to run for more than 200 issues into the mid-90s. For many of the first 60 issues of Savage Sword of Conan, Roy adapted Howard's prose stories, but mixed in original yarns as well, jumping all over Conan's life. In addition to Roy Thomas and John Buscema, its place as uncensored playground of storytelling attracted some of the greatest talent in comics, including fantasy artist Boris Vallejo, X-Men mastermind Chris Claremont and my personal favorite Robin writer, Chuck Dixon, but Roy Thomas has always remained its greatest creator. He returned to the book in its later years after what most readers agree was a sag in quality, bringing the stories back up to their former glory for the final stretch of issues. Savage Sword is remembered as one of the peaks of the Bronze Age. While it was out of print for much of the 90s and 2000s, it's now been collected in omnibuses by Dark Horse, Marvel, and Titan Comics. The Comics Code was again revised in 1989, this time featuring much more sweeping changes. It was now presented within the text of the Code as a sort of optional seal of approval for comics which you could feel confident giving to young kids, rather than the arbiter between wholesome quality and evil smut.  A size comparison between my own copies of Conan the Barbarian #19 and Savage Sword of Conan #7 The submission procedure was changed to allow more conversation between comic editors and Code administrators. This time, editors could "discuss with the administrator the concerns raised with him and reach agreement on how the comic can properly bear the Code Seal either without being revised or within a mutually-agreeable set of alternate revisions." The standards were much more broad in the 1989 revision. They allowed for more nuance and reflected that times may change, making space for things like "contemporary styles and fashions" for character costumes. They still wanted to encourage "wholesome lifestyles" to be portrayed as desirable and for characters to be role models, but also actually acknowledged that there were comic books for adult readers. "The members of the Comics Magazine Association of America include publishers who elect to publish comics that are not intended to bear the Code Seal, and that therefore need not go through the approval process described above. Among the comics in this category may be titles intended for adult readers. Member publishers hereby affirm that we will distribute these publications only through distribution channels in which it is possible to notify retailers and distributors of their content, and thus help the publications reach their intended audiences. The member publishers agree to refrain from distributing these publications through those distribution channels that, like the traditional newsstand, are serviced by individuals who are unaware of the content of specific publications before placing them on display."  By this time, comic books had reached a new level of maturity. Many of the tropes that are recognizable to modern readers had their progenitors around this time: the modern "event" book like Secret Wars, the convoluting and then exploding of decades worth of continuity in Crisis on Infinite Earths, the long-form graphic novel and meta deconstruction of the superhero genre in Watchmen. It would be difficult for anyone to argue at that time that comics were only for kids, and Conan helped solidify that. Conan had reached new heights too with two major motion pictures and a Red Sonja movie which it seems like we all agree to be the unofficial third in the trilogy. By Mitra, I don't know a single Conan fan who considers "Kalidor" to actually be a separate character from Schwarzenegger's Conan. The Comics Code was still in effect until 2011 but with gradually diminishing influence. Marvel pulled their books from approval in 2001 in favor of giving their titles a rating in-house. Ten years later, DC pulled theirs as well, and Archie was the final publisher to withdraw later that year. It quietly disappeared, and NPR's obituary for the Code begins with the line, "I come to bury the Comics Magazine Association of America, not to praise it." The Comics Code isn't forgotten, but it's usually the butt of the jokes these days. Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo recently had me laughing out loud by using a Comics Code Seal of Approval lookalike as the censor bars when the villain Blockbuster gets cussed out at the end of Nightwing #96.  Every year, Banned Books Week falls somewhere in late September or early October. It's a celebration of our First Amendment right to read and an outward expression of resistance to censorship. It's celebrated by the American Library Association, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the National Council of Teachers of English (of which I am a card-carrying member), and more.
That means that every year, I teach about the Comics Code to my students. We'll dissect book bans spearheaded by anti-free speech groups like Moms for Liberty. We'll evaluate the PMRC's censorship of music and the "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" label on music. We'll make the case for kids' rights to have access to books. And if I have time, I get to bring up some great comic book creators and how they fought censorship with everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character. Titan Comics recently revived the Savage Sword mag for a new print run which features some of the coolest writers and artists in comics today. It even throws back to classic Savage Sword artists like Joe Jusko doing painted covers again. Everyone loves it and you should check it out. Or, find the original run here.  In an alternate universe, Roy Thomas and Marvel Comics acquired the rights to Lin Carter's hero Thongor, leading to the long-running comic Thongor the Barbarian, The Savage Sword of Thongor, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's star turn was as the big-screen Thongor. Maybe you're even tuning into Late Night with Thongor O'Brien. Or perhaps not (especially not that last one), since Thongor's not near as cool as Conan. But that was the goal at one point. In 1970, Stan Lee was looking for a sword-and-sorcery characters to acquire the rights to for Marvel Comics, and he called Roy Thomas into his office. Thomas listed off the pulp heroes he was aware of: Thongor, Kull, Conan, John Carter. Roy was passingly familiar with Conan, having bought a copy of Conan the Adventurer for the Frank Frazetta cover and was sort of nonplussed by "The People of the Black Circle." He'd eventually picked up a few more of the Lancer / Ace series for the Frazetta covers and liked a few of the stories within. Stan Lee was hoping to get the rights to Thongor. Stan, ever the salesman, thought the name looked better on a cover than a name like "Conan" that started with a C. I don't get why, but it led to Roy Thomas making an offer to adapt Thongor stories into Marvel books. Ultimately, the Lin Carter camp wanted too much for the rights and Marvel wasn't willing to pony up, so Thomas looked elsewhere. He ultimately wrote to Glenn Lord: Howard's estate executor and one of Conan's champions, offering $200 per issue ($50 more than Stan had allowed him to offer). Thankfully, Lord accepted and Thomas teamed with rookie artist Barry Windsor-Smith (at that point lacking the "Windsor") to adapt Conan. Side bar: if you've never read Barry Windsor-Smith's Monsters, get a copy now. It's a rejected Hulk story from the 80s, and one of the most deeply affecting comics I've ever read.  Roy Thomas circa 1970 To kind of approximate a costume like superhero comic readers probably would have been expecting, they gave young Conan a helmet with horns adorning the front and a necklace of three red pendants around his neck. Other than that, it was just a loincloth. Now, Roy and Barry didn't actually have the rights to any original Robert E. Howard material at first, and though that would soon change, it meant that the Conan the Barbarian comic for Marvel wouldn't be anything like straight adaptions of the character's stories. Unlike the original Howard stories, the Lancer books, or the eventual Savage Sword of Conan, this comic would be linear in narrative. With so much Conan stuff inherently appearing out of order, this feels like a deliberate choice now, but looking back, it was probably just the obvious move. Comic readers were used to Amazing Spider-Man #35 carrying on the story from Amazing Spider-Man #34, after all. This leads me to the chronology of Roy and Barry's Conan. I picked up the Titan Comics omnibus of the first 26 issues and was very interested in how it both mirrors and diverges from the usually-accepted chronology of Conan's life. In some places, it is remarkably similar, or even expands beautifully on throwaway lines from Howard's original stories. In other parts, it changes large aspects of Conan's history, while still sort of rhyming with the prose work, some parts of which hadn't even been written yet. I think this was on purpose. Roy Thomas is very well-versed in Conan chronologies and has said in his essays looking back on Conan the Barbarian that while he couldn't just adapt existing Conan stories, he wanted to generally follow and honor the timeline organized by past chronologizers like P. Schuyler Miller and L. Sprague de Camp. Below, I compare many of the story beats we see in those first 26 issues. Arrows between issues that are red represent direct adaptions, while arrows that are in blue represent stories that rhyme with, seem to be inspired by, or in other ways mirror Conan's prose short stories. From the north came Conan Conan's life begins in Cimmeria, being born on a battlefield. This is one of the indisputable aspects of Conan's life, though it's not shown in the Conan the Barbarian comic (which I'm going to abbreviate as "CtB" from here on). Whereas the prose stories frequently mention the Cimmerian raid on Aquilonia's Venarium fort, we don't see this is CtB. Instead, we skip to Vanaheim, where Conan is already raiding with those mentioned in "The Frost-Giant's Daughter." Conan is 17, but of course, already a great fighter. In Conan's prose adventures, he raids with the Aesir, which takes him to the castle of Haloga in Hyperborea. He's enslaved by the Hyperboreans, eventually escaping and fleeing south into the Brythunian mountains. His inquisitor is the witch queen Vammatar, who controls undead hordes. In the CtB comic, we get a progression where the details are entirely different but the broad strokes are ultimately the same. Roy Thomas wanted to waste little time getting Conan down into the "gleaming cities" of the Hyborian kingdoms, while also starting in the north like "Frost-Giant." Conan still gets enslaved in Hyperborea, but with some futuristic societies, under very different circumstances. Conan's inquisitor this time is a leader of subhuman "Beast Men" named Moira.  As Conan flees south from Hyperborea, in the third issue we get a digression from the prose stories entirely in the form of "The Twilight of the Grim Grey God," which is a really stellar issue. It has no prose equivalent in Conan's journey. There's a novel by Sean A. Moore with a similar title: Conan and the Grim Grey God, but the two seem to have entirely different plots. What Thomas was doing here was pulling a play from L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's playbook: those two authors had been adapting non-Conan REH material into Conan stories since the mid-50s, so Thomas looked to the Conanless Howard historical tale "The Grey God Passes," AKA "The Twilight of the Grey Gods," AKA "Spears of Clontarf." Honestly, the first two issues of CtB aren't that great; I think Roy was finding his footing. Roy has said he agrees. While reading those first two stories, I was a little worried I had made a mistake ponying up the whopping $125 pricetag for the omnibus, but my fears were soon assuaged. The third rebounds hard and it's a compelling, original story. "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," while not adapted yet, will appear later on.  A thief in the night As I noted above, Marvel Comics didn't have the rights to adapt any actual Robert E. Howard Conan stories when they acquired the rights to the Cimmerian initially, but after Roy Thomas was able to convince both Glenn Lord and the Marvel execs to pony up for the rights to other REH work, it wouldn't take long for Roy to seek out the rights to his favorite Conan story, "The Tower of the Elephant." It's the only Conan story that Thomas adapted three different times: once in Conan the Barbarian in 1971, again in Savage Sword of Conan in 1977, and also in the Conan the Barbarian newspaper strip that ran from 1978 to 81. In the traditionally-accepted prose progression, Conan comes down from the north into the thief city of Zamora, where his first adventure is chronicled in "The Tower of the Elephant." It makes me happy to know that Roy Thomas agrees that the thief city is unnamed and is not Arenjun, as so many authors have conflated. Conan's first thief story being "Tower" contradicts the chronology I settled on, but I don't want to complicate things too much here, so ignore me for a bit. In the Howard stories, Conan follows "Tower" with thieving in Shadizar the Wicked in "The Hall of the Dead," then going over to Nemedia in "The God in the Bowl," and finally to an unnamed city-state in Corinthia for "Rogues in the House."  In the CtB comic, Conan begins his thieving journey in Zamora just like he does in Howard's stories. Thomas's adaption of "Tower" is very faithful. Where he goes from there is more interesting, though. Conan leaves Zamora's Thief-City pretty quickly (at least compared to how much time he seems to have spent there in Savage Sword) and we see him next in a remote Zamorian village for issue 5, "Zukala's Daughter." Issue 5 was actually planned by Thomas and Smith prior to nabbing "The Tower of the Elephant," so it was the original issue 3 for the book. I don't think it's a great issue, unfortunately. Inspired by the REH poem "Zukala's Daughter" and pulling from other inspirational sources Roy Thomas can't quite remember, it's a one-and-done story that doesn't have any kind of equivalent in short story form. Conan then goes to Shadizar, which Roy Thomas was very excited about when writing. While Zamora is pretty well-defined in "Tower of the Elephant," Thomas was able to mold Shadizar much more to how he saw it seeing as its only appearance was in "The Hall of the Dead." We get a few issues there: the mediocre issue 6 in "Devil-Wings Over Shadizar" and then "The Lurker Within" for issue 7, which is their adaption of "The God in the Bowl." Roy made a few changes to "The Lurker Within" like changing a few names around and adding one female character that isn't in the original story, but even kept some of de Camp's lines he didn't love just so that he wouldn't deviate too much from the original. Issue 7 is a huge step up over the previous issues and, by my estimation, where the comic really finds its footing. Roy felt the same in hindsight and expressed a lot of pride in this issue. There are very few duds for the next twenty issues!  Issue 8 takes Conan to a moonlight city named Lanjau (rather than Larsha in the REH/dC version). The plot beats are quite similar, but the monsters are frankly cooler in Thomas's version, and it includes an Gunderman named Burgun who mirrors the Gunderman Nestor of the prose version, but only slightly. Roy didn't want to simply adapt de Camp's version of "The Hall of the Dead," so he took some liberties with his storytelling. For example, he adds some very cool armor to the undead sentries in the titular hall since he didn't feel like they were described in much detail and decides to reuse Burgun later on. Roy Thomas notes that issues 2-7 each saw declines in sales from the previous issue, leading to Stan Lee preparing to cancel the book. But 8 was where things started to change. It was the first book to sell better than the previous issue, and the title began an upward climb from there. For the next twenty years, he says, CtB was never on the chopping block again. Issue 9, "The Garden of Fear," is an original creation for which there's no prose equivalent.  Rogues in the temple, and then in the house CtB issues 10 and 11 are something really special. Marvel was implementing a change in which they would expand their output from 15-cent, 32-page books to 25-cent, 48-page books, which was something DC was doing at the time, too. As such, Thomas and Smith suddenly had a few more pages to play with in issues 10 and 11. Issue 10, "Beware the Wrath of Anu," seems wholly original for a while (the cover even promises "ALL NEW STORIES" somewhat deceptively). Conan is in an unnamed Corinthian city-state and happens to meet back up with the unnamed Gunderman from issue 7, named Burgun instead of Nestor. As Conan, Burgun, and an original character named Jenna burgle at temple to a bull god, all kinds of strange, cosmic shit happens. But the end of the issue reveals something: this is all lead-in to "Rogues in the House," which the comic adapts in issue 11. Roy Thomas masterfully expands on all kinds of throw-away lines and setup from the prose story to create an excellent prelude that is both wickedly entertaining and fills in all kinds of gaps. You know how they wrote that whole Solo movie around the throwaway line about how the Millennium Falcon could do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs? This is what they wish they were doing over at LucasFilm.  Conan gets thrown in jail (as he appears at the beginning of "Rogues") due to their thieving activities in issue 10. It's revealed that the woman he seeks revenge on is actually Jenna, whose role is massively expanded form the short story. It's at this point where the CtB "Rogues" meets up with the prose version and follows REH's pretty closely, albeit with a much more purely simian Thak that I originally ever pictured.  From the letters pages Now that CtB's thief stories were completed with "Rogues in the House," which Roy Thomas rightly deemed to be a high point of comics in the 1970s, the REH canon joins Conan up with the Turanians, but we don't get that yet in CtB. Instead, there's a wholly original digression for a few issues, followed by an old stand-by re-ordered in the chronology. Remember how Marvel had inflated the page count of their books for CtB 10 and 11? It was almost immediately rescinded, bringing Roy and Barry's page requirements back down into the twenties. Pushed by a close deadline, the decided to use a story they had written for Savage Tales #2 which had been cancelled, leaving the story unpublished. This became CtB's 12th issue, "The Dweller in the Dark," for which there's no analogue in prose. Even more out of the box, though, is what they did next. Roy Thomas notes in an essay that when he was writing CtB, the sum total of authors who had published anything Conan-based was limited to himself, Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg. He thought he might give someone else a shot. Opening up their bullpen to Conan pitches, issue 13 came from sword & sorcery writer John Jakes and resulted in "The Web of the Spider-God." Like the whole Grim Grey God situation detailed above, there's a Conan and the Spider God novel by de Camp that is entirely unrelated. Their next pitch came from British author Michael Moorcock, incorporating his character Elric of Melniboné, who is not nearly as dorky as he first seems. Issues 13 and 14 are a cosmic-as-fuck two-parter featuring Elric, and I enjoyed them way more than the covers made me think I would. Especially their last pages, for which the art is a serious show-stopper. These stories, with no traditional prose companions, take Conan south to the land of Koth much sooner than the short stories do. They've also caused me to look into Elric stories, which seem to be pretty awesome so far. After that, once again likely spurred on by tight deadlines, Roy and Barry reprinted their adaption of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" from Savage Tales as issue 15. This doesn't line up with where I put "Frost-Giant" in my chronology, or in the other popular placement after Conan's Turanian mercenary days, but it certainly seems like it landed here in CtB out of necessity, rather than as part of a grand plan. Additionally, the torch was passed by this point to Gil Kane as the lead illustrator, who I noted in my post about the first 100 issues of Savage Sword just... doesn't draw Conan to my liking. Barry will be back before too long. Go east, young man If one is following the original REH canon, Howard sends Conan east after his thieving days so that he can join the army of Turan as a mercenary in the service of King Yildiz. I noted when reading through my chronology that this was one of the least-inspiring episodes of Conan's long career, and I've seen others chime in to that effect as well. However, it's kind of an important one: it's where Conan evidently learns to use a bow, to refine his horseman skills, and gains travel experience. Many note that Conan's physical description in his thief days keep him in sandals and a loin cloth, but Conan dons armors, helmets, and notably a scarlet cloak at the end of "The Hand of Nergal" that we'll see again in "Queen of the Black Coast," linking those two stories chronologically. If we're talking minutia, there's also the fact that "Nergal" mentions that Conan's horse was given to him by Murilo in "Rogues in the House," which implies that "Rogues" was shortly before "Nergal," it it's clear CtB isn't playing that same game. In Howard' chronology, Conan's Turanian days are limited to the single unfinished story "The Hand of Nergal." de Camp and Carter expanded that to six stories, though really only two of them have Conan completing a military mission given to him by King Yildiz. This is the biggest change for CtB so far, I'd say. For the next long stretch of issues, Conan is sent east, joining the Turanians, and having adventures with light connections to the Howard / de Camp / Carter stories.  Issues 17 and 18 adapt the Conanless Howard story "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth," incorporating Conan into the narrative and introducing a character named Fafnir, who becomes a bit of a partner for Conan for several issues. Roy Thomas didn't even expect for Fafnir to appear after that two-part story, but Fafnir grows into an excellent character over the course of several issues together with Conan. The end of issue 18 explicitly shows Conan and Fafnir ending up on a Turanian war galley the Vilayet Sea being hired into the service of Prince Yezdigerd of Turan, therefore exploring part of his Turanian days unseen in Howard's work. Though I'm not the biggest fan of Conan's Turanian days in short story form, many of the issues from 17 to 26 are excellent comics. While issue 19 mostly confines the action to one Turanian ship, it's a great adventure. It feels a little similar to "The Hand of Nergal" to me, but CtB will eventually adapt "Nergal" itself. Issue 20 puts Conan at odds with the Turanian government and (sort of) has him resigning his commission from the country, dramatically leaping off the ship. Issue 21 puts Conan far to the east, and while it isn't a direct adaption of "The Curse of the Monolith," it rhymes with many elements of that story. Conan is tricked into going to the monolith by a priest, he's strapped to it, and there's a creature who wants to consume him that descends from the top of the monolith. The next few issues, up to the end of the first volume of The Original Marvel Years' first omnibus, have Conan floating around Hyrkania, Turan, and Khitai. Surprisingly, it has Conan spend what I felt was a huge stretch of time in the Turanian city of Makkalet, meeting Red Sonja and folding other non-Conan stories into the mix. Issue 22 is a reprint and therefore I won't include it here. Issue 23 is freely adapted from "The Shadow of the Vulture," and 25 is "inspired in part" by "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune," both originally lacking Conan (but the second is a Kull story, so that's close!).  Freely adaptedAfter issue 24, Barry Windsor-Smith left the book for good. When Stan Lee asked Roy Thomas what he thought would happen to the book, he said that they would sell more comic books, but win fewer awards. At the end of issue 26, it seems like Conan is going to drift back west.
I can't wait to pick up the next volume of this series, which should hit shelves in just a few weeks. It's so interesting to me how Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Gil Kane were able to weave elements into their Conan canon in a way that freely adapted and rhymed with other parts of the Conan universe, while also feeling adventurously original.  About halfway through reading through every Conan story, I had the idea of trying to place every original Savage Sword of Conan story into the chronology to see where they fit. Savage Sword is my first love of Conan: it's where I was introduced to him and it's probably my favorite format to read his adventures. Published by Marvel Comics from 1974 to 1995, Savage Sword was a black-and-white bronze age comic series. It was magazine-sized to skirt the restrictive Comics Code Authority's regulations on violence and adult content, and it's so good. I love this comic. It has some of the best creators of the 70s and 80s working on it: shepherded by Roy Thomas for the first 60 or so issues and then mainly by Michael Fleisher for the years after that, Savage Sword mostly adapted stories of an older Conan. While there are several early stories that made it to the mag, almost everything after "Hawks Over Shem" was adapted. Many of the stories were originals, and those are the ones I'm going to try to fit into our chronology here. Some of them were adapted from Robert E. Howard's historical short stories and poems. Some adapted Conan pastiches. Some were truly original Conan stories from the likes of Barry Windsor-Smith, Roy Thomas, Chuck Dixon, Chris Claremont, and Michael Fleisher. I don't own every issue of the comic- far from it. But I own the first 11 omnibuses published by Dark Horse, so I have a little more than the first 100 issues. They include a few other titles in them occasionally like Savage Tales of Conan the Barbarian. I could be way off on some of these, and others I'm pretty confident of my placement. I looked at a number of factors to try to place stories:
It seems like Conan's Zuagir raider period and his time as a Barachan pirate are particular favorites among Savage Sword writers seeing as a disproportionate amount of stories refer to Conan as a Zuagir chief or a Barachan buccaneer. I'm assuming that's because they're kind of flexible roles that could happen over a large swath of the map. I sort of thought that there would be more stories in these issues about his time with Aquilonia (either as a scout or as a king) or over in Vendhya around "The People of the Black Circle," but I was wrong on both accounts. There are very few original King Conan stories in these first 100 issues. Below is my best attempt at fitting them into Conan's career. Stories added into the chronology by Savage Sword are marked in red. If a story was not adapted into a story in Savage Sword, but there is a comic adaption from one of the other Bronze Age anthology Conan books like Conan the Barbarian, King Conan, or Savage Tales, I've marked those as well, but I'm certainly not trying to collapse all Conan comic material into one timeline or anything like that. Let me know what you think! The Conan Chronology + Savage Sword of Conan's first 100 issuesSSOC adds two stories of Conan's early life before leaving Cimmeria before adapting several of the L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter stories that detail Conan's earliest career events. "Rite of Blood" - Savage Sword 89
"Hunters and Hunted!" - Savage Sword 83
 "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" - Savage Tales of Conan 1 "Legions of the Dead" - Savage Sword 39 "The Thing in the Crypt" - Conan the Barbarian 92 The thief stories begin with "The God in the Bowl." "The God in the Bowl" - Conan the Barbarian 7 "Rogues in the House" - Conan the Barbarian 10 - 11 "The Tower of the Elephant" - Savage Sword 24 "The Darksome Demon of Raba-Than" - Savage Sword 84
"The World Beyond the Mists" - Savage Sword 93
"The Sorcerer and the Soul" - Savage Sword 53
"The Stalker Amid the Sands" - Savage Sword 54
"Black Lotus and Yellow Death" - Savage Sword 55
"The Sword of Skelos" - Savage Sword 56
"The Eye of Erlik" - Savage Sword 57
"For the Throne of Zamboula" - Savage Sword 58
"The Cave Dwellers" - Savage Sword 77
"The Palace of Pleasure" - Savage Sword 81
"The Blood Ruby of Death" - Savage Sword 98
"The Hall of the Dead" - Conan the Barbarian 8 "The Hall of the Dead" is the end of the thief stories. Other than one small digression in SSOC 91's B story, the Turanian mercenary stories begin immediately. "The Beast" - Savage Sword 91
 "The Chain" - Savage Sword 91
"The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" - Savage Sword 13
"The Hand of Nergal" - Conan the Barbarian 30 "The City of Skulls" - Savage Sword 59 "The People of the Summit" "The Curse of the Monolith" - Savage Sword 33 "Night of the Rat!" - Savage Sword 95
"The Secret of Skull River" - Savage Sword 5
"The Colossus of Shem" - Savage Sword 72
"The Colossus of Shem" in SSOC 72 is functionally the end of the Turanian mercenary stories. In several original stories along with a few adaptions, Conan wanders west afterword. "The Blood-Stained God" - Marvel Super Special 9 (and reprinted in Conan Saga 80) "The Curse of the Undead Man" - Savage Sword 1
"The Forever Phial" - Savage Sword 8
"The Lair of the Ice Worm" - Savage Sword 34 "Child of Sorcery" - Savage Sword 29
"The Sea of No Return" - Savage Sword 66
"Queen of the Black Coast" marks the beginning of Conan's first pirate period. His first pirate crew is aboard the Tigress with Belit. "Queen of the Black Coast" - Conan the Barbarian 58 - 59 "The Leopard Men of Darfar" - Savage Sword 97
"Lion of the Waves" - Savage Sword 86
Conan comes ashore ending his first pirate period and here begins to wander north from the Black Kingdoms in his next experiences as a mercenary. "The Vale of Lost Women" - Conan the Barbarian 104 "The Castle of Terror" "The Snout in the Dark" - Conan the Barbarian 106 - 107 After "The Snout in the Dark," we move into a period of Conan's life unseen in the original REH canon where he acts as a mercenary for various city-states in Corinthia. "The Lurker in the Labyrinth" - Savage Sword 71
"Demons in the Firelight" - Savage Sword 78 - 79
"Devourer of Souls" - Savage Sword 90
 "The Ape-Bat of Marmet Tarn" - Savage Sword 96
"Forest of Fiends" - Savage Sword 91
"The Dweller in the Depths" - Savage Sword 70
"The Gamesmen of Asgalun" - Savage Sword 89
"Eye of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 69
"Hawks Over Shem" - Savage Sword 36 "Black Colossus" - Savage Sword 2 "At the Mountain of the Moon God" - Savage Sword 3
"Shadows in the Dark" "Colossus of Argos" - Savage Sword 80
"The Wizard-Fiend of Zingara" - Savage Sword 61
 "Death Dwarves of Stygia" - Savage Sword 94
"Children of Rhan" - Savage Sword 64
"The Temple of the Tiger" - Savage Sword 62
Conan here heads east to the Vilayet Sea and begins his second pirate period, this time with the crew known as the Red Brotherhood. "Iron Shadows in the Moon" - Savage Sword 4 "Sons of the White Wolf" - Savage Sword 37
"The Road of the Eagles" - Savage Sword 38 Here is the beginning of Conan's period as a Zuagir raider. This period is often visited in SSOC. "A Witch Shall Be Born" - Savage Sword 5 "Mirror of the Manticore" - Savage Sword 58
"Sleeper Beneath the Sands" - Savage Sword 6
"Citadel at the Center of Time" - Savage Sword 7
"Black Tears" - Savage Sword 35 "The Curse of the Cat Goddess" - Savage Sword 9
"Moat of Blood" - Savage Sword 63
"Isle of the Hunter" - Savage Sword 88
"Shadows in Zamboula" - Savage Sword 14 "The Star of Khorala" - Savage Sword 44  "The Hill of Horror" - Savage Sword 95
"The Country of the Knife" - Savage Sword 11
"One Night in the Maul" - Savage Sword 99
"When a God Lives" - Savage Sword 100 (!)
"The Haunters of Castle Crimson" - Savage Sword 12
"The Fangs of the Serpent" - Savage Sword 65
"Dominion of the Bat" - Savage Sword 76
"The Blood of the Gods" - Savage Sword 28
This is the end of Conan's Zuagir period. "The Slithering Shadow" - Savage Sword 20 "Drums of Tombalku" - Savage Sword 21  "Escape from the Temple" - Savage Sword 87
"The Devil in Iron" - Savage Sword 15 The Flame Knife - Savage Sword 31 - 32 "The Daughter of the God King" - Savage Sword 85
"Revenge of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 86
"The People of the Black Circle" - Savage Sword 16 - 19 "Black Cloaks of Ophir" - Savage Sword 68
Here is the beginning of Conan's third pirate period, this time with the Barachans. "The Gem in the Tower" - Savage Sword 45 "The Pool of the Black One" - Savage Sword 22 - 23 "Plunder of Death Island" - Savage Sword 67
"The Changeling Quest" - Savage Sword 73
 Bor'aqh motherfucking Sharaq "The Temple of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" - Savage Sword 75
"The Demon in the Dark" - Savage Sword 82 - 83
"The Jeweled Bird" - Savage Sword 92
"A Dream of Blood" - Savage Sword 40
"The Quest for the Cobra Crown" - Savage Sword 41
"The Devil-Tree of Gamburu" - Savage Sword 42
"King Thoth-Amon" - Savage Sword 43
"The Informer" - Savage Sword 99
"Red Nails" - Savage Tales of Conan 2 - 3 "Jewels of Gwahlur" - Savage Sword 25 "The Ivory Goddess" - Savage Sword 60 Here is the end of Conan's Barachan pirate episodes. Next, we see a few wandering stories before his time as an Aquilonian scout.  "The Armor of Zuulda Thaal" - Savage Sword 87
"Lady of the Silver Snows" - Savage Sword 74
"The Night of the Dark God" - Savage Tales of Conan 4
Here is the beginning of Conan's time in Aquilonia. First as a scout, then as king. "Beyond the Black River" - Savage Sword 26 - 27 "The Dark Stranger" - Savage Sword 88
"Moon of Blood" - Savage Sword 46 "The Treasure of Tranicos" - Savage Sword 47 - 48 "When Madness Wears the Crown" - Savage Sword 49
"When Madness Wears the Crown" - Savage Sword 50
"Satyrs' Blood" - Savage Sword 51
"The Crown and the Carnage" - Savage Sword 52
"Wolves Beyond the Border" - Savage Sword 59 "The Phoenix on the Sword" "The Scarlet Citadel" - Savage Sword 30 The Hour of the Dragon - Savage Sword 8 - 10 The Return of Conan - King Conan 5 - 8 Here is the end of Conan's young kingship and we see a time jump of around 10 years past the birth of his children. "The Witch of the Mists" - King Conan 1 "Challenge" - Savage Sword 93
 "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" - King Conan 2 "Red Moon of Zembabwei" - King Conan 3 "Shadows in the Skull" - King Conan 4 Conan of the Isles "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian" - Savage Sword 8 "People of the Dark" - Savage Sword 6
Stories that were impossible to placeThere were a few stories told in Savage Sword that were just completely impossible to place. Unless I'm really missing something, they don't contain any contextual clues: Conan doesn't seem specifically young or old, there are no lines that indicate where the story takes place geographically, and there are no characters, items, or skills that give away a general time in Conan's life. Those are as follows: "The Lady of the Tower" - Savage Sword 98
"The Gift" - Savage Sword 100
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AuthorHey, I'm Dan. This is my project reading through the career of everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, in chronological order. 
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