If you ask people about the comic book history of Conan the Cimmerian, it seems like there are three major eras folks think of. There's the original 70s glory days, with the first volumes of Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan ending in 1993 and 1995, respectively (and to a slightly lesser extent, Conan the King). There's the second peak with Dark Horse's mid-2000s Conan series led by Kurt Busiek, Cary Nord, and Tim Truman. Then there's the current Titan line which shares the same titles as the original Marvel series.

That means that there are two somewhat neglected little periods in there that don't get much attention. One of them is Marvel's second volume of Conan the Barbarian in the 90s, which Tennessee Fats recently did a good video on. The other is this little three-year stint right before Titan picked up the license where Conan was back at Marvel. For how much talent was in the creative pool, it almost makes it weird that this tenure isn't talked about more.

From 2019 to 2021, Marvel gave the reigns to Jason Aaron who took over the eponymous title for a dozen issues before handing it to future barbarian stalwart Jim Zub, where it ended on legacy issue #300. Ron Garney, Patch Zircher, Mike Deodato Jr., Esad Ribic, and Greg Smallwood were all handling art at some point, so it's not exactly a slouchy team!

The curiosity for me is the Savage Sword title itself. Conan the Barbarian by Jason Aaron makes sense to me. Savage Avengers is new, and extremely cool. But Savage Sword is kind of the odd duck. The original Savage Sword was born out of necessity- skirting the Comics Code Authority to tell more brutal, bloody stories than a monthly comic book could. It was instantly, obviously different: oversized magazine format, double or triple the length of a monthly issue, painted covers, black and white newsprint pages, backup stories or essays or prose. 2019's Savage Sword of Conan by Gerry Duggan is (almost) none of those things, which just makes it odd they gave it that title. It's a standard comic format and it's not any bloodier than the Jason Aaron title, seeing as the Comics Code is long-dead. The most obvious thing it does have in common with the original is painted covers, this time done by GOAT Alex Ross. Marvel did apparently issue a black-and-white version of the story in trade paperback, but I've only ever come across the color version. Additionally, they print part of Scott Oden's story "The Shadow of Vengeance" in the back of the issues, which is cool.

Luckily enough for us, all of the hand-wringing I'm doing about inconsistencies above is extremely secondary. Duggan and artist Ron Garney do a great job with a fun, Stygia-set adventure.

Conan has been captured at sea by a pirate crew and is gradually nursed back to health by a fellow prisoner named Suty, who he doesn't realize has asked for his freedom in exchange for keeping Conan alive. Conan, of course, needs no help escaping, but because Suty is shackled to him, Suty ends up going with him. The Cimmerian accidentally catches a magical glance of a map belonging to Koga Thun, Stygian sorcerer of some ill repute. Conan and Suty also cross paths with a librarian who teams up with them and they venture into a labyrinth beneath the city for more hijinks to ensure.

Duggan nods to REH's serpent men for some pleasant surprises that help you feel like he's done his homework on the history of Conan, and there are some really good lines sprinkled throughout.

The thing that feels most notable about their five-issue arc is that it is a perfect case study for how comic book storytelling has changed from Conan's comic heyday in the 70s. The scope of this story isn't too expansive; I can't help but feel that this five-issue story would've occupied a single issue of the original Savage Sword of Conan. A sixty-page adventure broken into a prologue and three or four parts doesn't seem out of place, rather than a 100-plus page treatment it got. I don't necessarily think that would've yielded a better or worse result, but it serves to show how much comic book storytelling has changed in the last fifty years.

A bloody story with hand impalements, head lopping, and lots of venom stings doesn't feel as visceral as it might have when that sort of thing was now. If slotted into Marvel's original SSOC volume, it would be somewhere in the middle of the pack.

The incredible Alex Ross covers seem to heighten this comparison. Explicit send-ups to the classic Marvel era abound in Ross's gorgeous photorealistic paintings. In one, Conan fights alongside the Black Corsairs and clearly the Marvel Comics version of Bêlit (the furry britches give it away). In another, Ross riffs on Barry Windsor-Smith's iconic cover for Marvel Treasure Edition #4. In another, he literally has Conan stand in front of a slew of old SSOC covers.

It's very much different from the thing it's throwing back to. It's a little odd having this low-level pulse when it doesn't really evoke what it's gesturing at. But Duggan and Garney's Savage Sword of Conan is still worth your time.

I don't know anyone who's read Conan the Barbarian #250, from November 1991. Everyone rightfully loves Roy Thomas's first 115 issues on the title, but most bounce off by the end of that run, and some stick it through to Christopher Priest's excellent tenure. Even though Roy returns to the book with issue #241 (actually it's issue #240, just written under a pseudonym), there's not a lot of chatter about his final 35 issues before Conan was cancelled for the first time.

Roy's goal was to right the ship and return the title to its Bronze Age glory. He quickly wrapped up the previous writer's altogether-pretty-garbage teenage Conan storyline and zipped us right to where he left off at issue #115 in 1980. Seriously, Roy puts us in the same physical place with the same supporting cast, 10 years later.

More than that, he even decides to imply that the previous 125 issues were actually all probably just a dream.

Robert E. Howard was born just slightly closer to tomorrow, America's semiquincentennial, than its founding (ten years exactly), and "Gates of Empire" is a more unique story in his oeuvre. It's a comedy-adventure story set in 1167 during the Crusades, starring a decidedly un-Howardian lead named Giles Hobson. Instead of the do-it-yourself, hard-as-nails adventurers that populate so many Howard tales, Giles is a fat, selfish, chronic liar who bumbles his way through his narrative, always looking to claim as much credit for his wins and distance himself from his failures as he can. The backdrop of the story revolves around Giles's adventures in Cairo during a conflict between the Muslim Egyptians and the Christian Norman Franks. As the two empires war, Giles plays a double agent, mostly accidentally.

REH readers will recognize a lot of names in this one. We have an Amalric (perhaps Howard's favorite name to re-use other than Steve Costigan) and a de Chastillon household with a character named Agnes (but her last name isn't de Chastillon).

It is far from the best Howard story that I've read, but it's serviceable, and it's fun to get a story full of sight gags from an author not known for them. Originally to be published in a 1934 issue of Magic Carpet, the magazine folded before publication and the story was originally published in Golden Fleece in 1939, three years after Howard died.

Roy takes Giles and re-christens him "Hobb" for the Hyborian Age, still a drunk, manipulative loser who once tricked Conan into fighting his allies in the middle of the night. Only one other element of "Gates of Empire" really makes it into Conan #250, and that's the visual of being pulled up by a rope through a giant hole in the floor. We'll get there.

Hobb is kidnapped and taken to the ruins of Kuthchemes, famous residence of Thugra Khotan from "Black Colossus," where he's intercepted by Conan, Sonja, and Zula. Within Kuthchemes, there's a poisonous underground river called the River of Darkness (essentially the River Styx in our mythology, but that name's taken by Howard's Nile analogue in the Hyborian Age). While sailing on that river, Zula and the Cimmerian see visions of dead friends and family, as well as both a young and elderly Conan figure to fight. It's the kind of thing you expect in a "landmark" anniversary issue.

As our intrepid adventurers (plus Hobb) finally leave the river's cave, they're pulled up through a pit opening in the floor as it's revealed that the cave is actually the flesh of a many-eyed eldritch beast. This echoes one scene toward the end of "Gates of Empire" in which Hobb has been lowered into a trap-door pit and must climb his way out. Right as his fingers and hands are about to give way, he's pulled up over the lip. In this version, Conan dives back into the pit to save Hobb from the monster, himself rescued when the rest of the crew dumps all the heavy treasure of gold coins and chests onto the tentacled thing, causing it to release its grip on the Cimmerian.

The issue ends with Red Sonja and Zula deciding to go their separate ways from Conan after nearly ten issues together again, but Conan is stuck with Hobb by his side for quite a few more.

This is one of Roy Thomas's Howard adaptions that feels like it should have scare quotes around the word "adaptation," plucking just a few identifiable markers from the original and otherwise writing his own story around them. As a big anniversary issue, it's certainly smaller scale than the other big climax books on the title like Conan the Barbarian #100, #115, or #200, written by Thomas, Thomas, and Priest, respectively. But Mike Docherty's art is vastly improved-upon by Ernie Chan's inks and the various colorists on the book give the title some spark, especially the sickly green hues in the River of Darkness.

Roy had only 25 more issues left before the stories of the bronzed barbarian were cancelled, destined to have no more big anniversary issues (unless you count the 50th anniversary retrospective King-Size Conan in 2020 which Roy contributed to).

Pax vobiscum, fellow Americans. Happy 4th.

I think of Robert E. Howard’s King Kull stories the same way I think about the band The Velvet Underground. While they might not have been quote-unquote successes, and they’re not household names (unless you live in a cool household), they are massively influential. The Velvet Underground basically invented alternative rock and art rock, and the Kull story “The Shadow Kingdom” basically invented the sword-and-sorcery genre. The band and the story just slap their respective new genres on the table and there they are, fully formed.

Unfortunately for Howard, only three of his King Kull stories sold, all to Weird Tales between 1926 and 1930. Those three were “The Shadow Kingdom,” “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” and “Kings of the Night.” But Howard wrote far more than just three tales of his exile from Atlantis. There are fifteen known Kull works in some form or another, be they finished or unfinished, most just went unpublished during his lifetime.

Howard thought really highly of his Kull stories: he had a great time writing them, saying in a 1927 letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, “I enjoyed writing ["The Shadow Kingdom"] more than any piece of prose I ever wrote." He thought he executed his ideas well, and as scholar Patrice Louinet puts it, “The Shadow Kingdom occupies a special place in Howard’s fiction in particular and weird fiction in general, as well as in the author’s heart.” I’m sure it also helped that when “The Shadow Kingdom” sold to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales for $100, it was more money than anyone had ever paid in one go to Howard in his entire lifetime. 

It seems like it was a real blow to Howard when Wright rejected a new Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!” He also sent it to Argosy and Adventure, but they rejected it, too. Maybe it wasn’t ready yet. He put the rest of his Kull material back in his trunk, with the idea to perhaps return to it later.

One of those stories that Howard stuffed in his trunk was called “The Curse of the Golden Skull,” and it wouldn’t see publication until 1967 when Howard’s literary agent packaged it into the ninth issue of his fanzine The Howard Collector.

We don’t exactly know when “The Curse of the Golden Skull” was written, but it was likely in late 1928 or early 1929, as Howard had returned to writing Kull after making a digression for his novel Skull-Face in 1928. It appears that three stories of Kull were rejected around this time, either from Weird Tales or Argosy, and then Howard left Kull behind entirely by the beginning of 1931.

“The Curse of the Golden Skull” is very short, just a couple of pages, really. It also didn’t actually feature Kull—though he’s implied to be not far away, just offstage. It’s an interestingly-structured story. Essentially two vignettes taking place thousands of years apart, connected by one paragraph in between them. In the first vignette, Rotath of Lemuria, a great sorcerer of the Thurian Age, is dying in a shrine on Lemuria’s highest peak after having recently been stabbed. It’s interesting how much happens just out of view of the story in this short narrative—we see Rotath dying, but we don’t see the killing blow. Rotath thinks to himself about how his own mistakes brought him to this end and how he shouldn’t have revealed his powers to the king of Lemuria because it freaked him out enough to seek help to kill Rotath.

Anticipating the themes of his Conan stories, Rotath, despite all his magnificent magical power, is brought to his end by nothing more than the sharp point of sword wielded by a barbarian chief. With his final breaths, Rotath curses those who might disturb his golden bones.

My favorite part of this story is the one-paragraph interlude which compresses millennia into just a moment, in which “the green oceans rose and wrote an epic poem in emerald and the rhythm thereof was terrible.” This, too, connects to many of the motifs you see played out through Howard stories over the years. Cataclysms vastly reshape the earth and her denizens rapidly evolve and devolve. The changing of epochs is the only constant.

​In the modern day, a scientist stumbles across Rotath’s shrine and his bones. Howard was always so good with personification (cities unfurl across the land, towers reach to the sky) as a beard masks this scientist’s face and mire slimes his boots. He’s made less sympathetic by his reaction to the shrine, desiring acclaim of universities and powerful societies, so we don’t feel as bad when he gets bitten by a snake and presumably dies. Like Rotath’s lethal sword wound, the adder bite is just implied by a shriek and a stagger.

The two men are connected across eons, united only by ambition, and a one-sided rage. This story does a lot while so much of the action is in absentia. I can see why it didn’t sell and at the same time, I find it pretty compelling, two men, two deaths, with centuries in between.

And then, across another ocean of time… 

By 1970, “The Curse of the Golden Skull” had finally left the trunk via The Howard Collector. Marvel was licensing Conan the Barbarian from Glenn Lord to launch their comic of the same name. Roy Thomas was hard at work throughout the early 70s to make Conan a success for the House of Ideas, very frequently adapting Conan stories or other Howard works, fitting them neatly into his comic timeline.

In 1974, Roy enlisted the help of comics legend Neal Adams to draw an issue of Savage Tales, the black and white magazine they had launched alongside Conan the Barbarian that could do longer, more mature stories, but without the constraints of the Comics Code Authority. Roy and Neal had worked together on X-Men and The Avengers, but Neal had never done pencils on a Conan story before.

Since there were a bunch of creatives on the Savage Tales team and the mag’s stories didn’t appear in any specific order, Roy figured that he could assign Neal a 30-page story, and when it was done, they would print it. 

Marvel was currently in talks with science fiction writers and controversial Conan banner-carriers L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter for the adaptation rights to their additional Conan stories which had been appearing in paperbacks since the 60s. In specific, Roy had his eye on the story “The City of Skulls,” which had appeared in the generically-titled Conan from Lancer Books and for my money is certainly one of their lesser collaborations. 

As Conan got spun off into his own magazine, from Savage Tales to The Savage Sword of Conan, the plan for Roy and Neal’s “City of Skulls” adaptation moved there. And then for other reasons unknown to us, and maybe even unknown to Roy Thomas, the adaptation was moved from Savage Sword to the monthly, comic-sized, color title, Conan the Barbarian. It was to become issue #37, with a cover date of April 1974. This meant that the planned 30 pages could suddenly run absolutely no longer than 19.

And if that wasn’t enough, about the time Neal Adams was finishing penciling page six, where Conan and Juma nearly get run through by a rhinoceros, L. Sprague de Camp decided that he actually did not give his permission for Marvel to use his story, and the whole issue began to collapse. 

Roy was not about to let Neal’s art go to waste, so they decided to pivot. Roy figured if they were technically adapting a different story, they would be able to use the pages Neal had already drawn as set-up, and then de Camp wouldn’t be able to say “boo” to a goose. Glenn Lord suggested a little-known, only-recently published King Kull story titled “The Curse of the Golden Skull.” If I had to guess, I’d assume that Roy liked how little action was actually depicted in the story, giving him lots of space to fill in the gaps. Roy had Neal draw three new pages, which would be the new start to the story, adapting the scene in which Rotath dies in his shrine. After that, it would cut to Conan and Juma.

They worked out a deal with de Camp to continue using Juma, so the credits page now lists Roy as our writer, Neal as our artist doing both the pencils and the inks, the original is credited to Howard, and de Camp and Carter get a special shoutout for letting Marvel use Juma.

I have to imagine that L. Sprague de Camp never ended up reading the issue, because it is wildly similar to “The City of Skulls” in most ways other than its prologue. In both Conan #37 and “City of Skulls,” Conan and Juma are escorting a Turanian princess when they’re attacked. They’re knocked out and chained while they are taken to a tropical depression deep within a mountain range. In that tropical depression is a hidden city where an evil ruler makes them work in a mine. They attempt a daring escape and ultimately use a giant monster to kill the ruler of the city. In “City of Skulls” it’s a god statue that steps on Jalung Thongpa, in issue #37 it’s a slug that eats Rotath’s golden bones and then spits out his skin. Roy is eager to point out minor differences, like Conan being more disinterested in the Turanian princess in their version, but they follow the story pretty faithfully. Roy says it turned out more like de Camp’s story than he would’ve wanted, but that he likes their version better. I’m inclined to agree.

If you’re reading the story with the issue’s history in mind, certain points start to emerge where you can see them squeezing most of the story into the ten pages they had left, like when Conan and Juma are working in the mine and the narration tells us that we’ll skip mercifully forward past their enslavement. Sure, Roy, you’re definitely doing it for our sake.

Issue #37 would end up being one of only two issues Neal Adams did pencils for. He did a few covers and he helped out with inking for an issue or two later on, but his time in the Conan orbit was small. It sucks for us, because his work is incredibly good. His figures are all unique, and his sense for action and storytelling are as solid as it gets.

Due to a paper shortage caused by a labor strike, there were some hiccups in the Marvel release schedule about the time Conan #37 hit the stands. Instead of potentially getting pulled off the shelf a week or two later to make room for new comics, #37 actually stayed on the newsstand for a full month, causing it to become the bestselling Conan comic for quite a few years. It’s a fun issue, so I’m not mad about that.

Rotath was dead, Neal was gone, and Roy kept plugging away.

And then, across another, much smaller ocean of time… maybe a lake of time or a large pond of time…

In 1992, Roy Thomas was returning to Conan after over a decade away. He was on his second tenure writing both Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword, titles he would close out with a run on each between 1993 and 1995.

As part of the Marvel Graphic Novel line, Roy was periodically a part of the creative team bringing feature-length, color stories printed on big, high-quality paper. For his final MGN, Roy returned to “The Curse of the Golden Skull” in Conan: The Ravagers Out of Time to write a sequel. Unlike the two stories it builds off of, there doesn’t seem to be any high drama in this comic’s path to the page. Despite taking place many years after Conan #37, this graphic novel has a pretty similar setup to his story nearly twenty years prior. There’s an ambush in the Turanian mountains, a trek to the hidden city, which is now a ruin, and then delving into the mines underneath.

To Conan and Red Sonja’s surprise, Rotath is still down there, having taken over the mind of that giant slug that ate him all those years ago. This time, Rotath uses magic to send them all back to the Thurian Age, giving Conan and Sonja the chance to team up with the barbarian king of Valusia. Roy leans more into some of the throwaway lines like including the Ape Lords from Howard’s vignette as a major force in the story, allied against Conan and Kull. 

In addition to acting as a sequel to issue 37, the graphic novel also references “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” “Kings of the Night,” as well as one oblique reference to Conan #68 from August 1976, when Conan, Red Sonja, and Belit meet Kull, Brule, and Gonar. As the medium of comics so often does, the original story has been adapted and built upon until now it’s a jumble of threads of continuity. Despite its tangled timeline threads, the book does a good-enough job of saying something about people uniting, even with those not of their own time, to cooperate against evil, in some ways anticipating what they’re doing over at Titan Comics today, emphasizing the Howardverse through crossover events. 

Mike Docherty is not my favorite artist, but he does a solid job here and seems to have improved from his work on Conan the Barbarian: The Horn of Azoth. It’s a fun story, but won’t be anyone’s favorite.

More than 60 years on from Howard’s original, unpublished vignette, there were those who still cared enough to return to his ideas. Instead of two men connected by a curse across time, we have several stories, connected only by a love of Robert E. Howard’s original ideas. And the desire to sell comic books.

[Note: This blog post was originally written as the script for a YouTube video, found below.]

Robert E. Howard exists in a kind of unique space when it comes to adaptation. His works and his universe are sort of "up for grabs" in a way that other literary works aren't. Like, can you imagine if JK Rowling died tomorrow and then the publishing house which had been putting out her work suddenly went all-in on rewriting all her Robert Galbraith stories as Harry Potter books? Re-setting them at Hogwarts and adding magic? That would be phenomenally weird.

But that's what's been happening to Robert E. Howard since the 50s.

It goes the other way, too. In 1976, Lin Carter published a Thongor the Barbarian story called "Black Moonlight." And then two years later, re-wrote it to be a Conan story entitled "The Gem in the Tower," and added it to his and L. Sprague de Camp's expanded Conan mythos. Wouldn't that be wild if an author published a science fiction novel, and then two years later reused the exact same story for a Star Wars story set on Tatooine?

For most of his literary life, which extends much past his 30 brief years on Earth, Robert E. Howard's works have experienced these weird periods of half-adaptation and revision in a way that many other writers have never had. 

Following Howard's death in 1936, his trunk full of unpublished and unfinished works passed into the care of his literary estate executors, and it was picked through by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. Posthumous material would roll out gradually for the next two decades.

This was where we saw what we might call the first batch of questionable adaptations. Publisher Martin Greenberg suggested to the sci-fi writers that they turn some of Howard's unpublished stuff into Conan stories. In 1955, Howard's El Borak story "Three-Bladed Doom" was turned into the Conan story The Flame Knife, his Kirby O'Donnell adventure "The Trail of the Blood-Stained God" dropped "The Trail of" and Conan was added, his desert-set "Hawks Over Egypt" moved to Shem, and his 16th-century Türkiye romp became "The Road of the Eagles." I think I'm solidly in the minority when I say that these stories are actually pretty enjoyable, with the weakest one being "Hawks Over Shem." "The Road of the Eagles," in particular, is a really fun, memorable tale.

But like I said, this is just the first wave of weird adaptation. These stories set a precedent. Where Conan would be kinda-sorta adapted the most, though, is in comic books.

I'm mostly talking about the color Conan the Barbarian title here - Savage Sword adapted stories more cleanly (but not always!) - but Conan the Barbarian was a lot more checkered. And Roy Thomas and the rest of the Conan creative team continued in the tradition of adapting Conanless Howard stories into Conan comics for a long time, like issue #38's "The Were-Woman" coming from Howard's "The House of Arabu," but I'm not going to talk about those ones since there are far too many for a blog post. Sometimes Conan the Barbarian would half-adapt a story. Sometimes it would seemingly adapt two stories at the same time by throwing them into a blender. Sometimes it would adapt a story a second time, sort of re-writing the original adaptation!

The first of these happens in Conan #21, during the War of the Tarim arc. The credits page claims that it is "Inspired in Part" by Robert E. Howard's "The Black Stone" story. But that "in part" phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because this story feels much more like an adaptation of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's story "The Curse of the Monolith." Like "Curse of the Monolith," it's set in Conan's Turanian mercenary period. He's lured to a large, stone monolith under false pretenses, strapped to the monolith, and then an eldritch beast descends slowly down toward him from the top of the monolith. In both stories, metal bands are a secret to the whole ruse. But it's far from a straight adaptation, so it seems to kind of split the middle without making any mention of de Camp or Carter.

Issue #31 quasi-adapts "The Thing in the Crypt." Roy had been trying to get the rights to the original story, but while Lin Carter was game, Sprague was not, so he decided to write his own young Conan crypt story, replacing "Thing in the Crypt" in the timeline. What we got was "The Shadow on the Tomb," which works far better than it should have. Funnily enough, they later did get the rights to the original story and used it as the basis for issue #92.

While the supernatural element is different in both: a sentient, corporeal shadow in one and a living-dead sentry in the other, the issues are basically the same. Conan is chased into a cave by an animal, discovers a cursed sword which he disturbs, fights its protector, and then uses fire to kill the sentry. Conan #31 adds a really fun wraparound narrative that helps attach the book to the comic continuity, but otherwise are remarkably similar. We either have to accept that Conan had two remarkably similar adventures very close to one another in time and made the same mistakes in both, learning nothing from the first, or that one of these stories overwrites the other. If I remember right, Roy Thomas considers the "Shadow on the Tomb" version the more canon of the two.

Issue #37 from 1974 tries once again to adapt two stories at the same time, honestly to the betterment of both of them. It was written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Neal Adams, making me wish we got a hundred more Neal Adams-penciled Conan comics. This issue, "The Curse of the Golden Skull," simultaneously adapts Howard's unpublished short (short) story of the same name alongside de Camp and Carter's Conan yarn, "The City of Skulls." Really though, what it does is graft "Curse of the Golden Skull" onto "City of Skulls'" golden bones. It follows all the story beats of "City of Skulls:" Conan and Juma get captured and taken to a tropical bowl in the middle of a mountain range, they're enslaved for a time, the risk a daring escape, and they fight a giant monster that they end up using to kill their enslaver. The comic really just takes the villain and turns it into Rotath of Lemuria, a Thurian Age-villain transplanted to the Hyborian Age. It could be the pacing, it could be Rotath, it could be Neal Adams's incredible art, but it works a whole lot better than the prose piece it cribs mostly from. 

Stories like these occupy a somewhat odd place in the literary world. I don't want to make it sound like this has only ever happened to Howard. For example, you may know that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie stemmed from an unrelated Tim Powers pirate novel titled On Stranger Tides, which they threw Jack Sparrow into and used as the basis for that film.

​And I didn't even touch on another whole tangle of related ideas with the debate over editing and revision to Howard stories. Since his death, writers have not just been adapting his stories very freely, but also making edits that range from a few words to entire revisions to the very structure of the text. This wasn't meant to be exhaustive, because there are dozens if not hundreds of examples of this. Which ones did I miss?

Is there a Conan story that Robert E. Howard wrote with more possible sequels than his 1934 yarn "A Witch Shall Be Born?" I've gone on record several times to note that the story is far from my favorite: its momentum halts a little too hard when the epistolary section from Astreas the Nemedian kicks in. But there's something that's very compelling about the story. Conan is at his most un-killable. The supporting cast of Salome, Taramis, and Olgerd Vladislav are some of the best in the canon. And, notably, its vengeful ending is one for the ages.

​But the story ends with Conan simply riding away.

Where does he go? I've argued that he spends time as chief of the Zuagirs before ending his desert raider tenure in "Shadows in Zamboula." But I'm far from the only person who's tried to explore what happens next. The space left open by the narrative's ending has been compelling for a great number of Conan pastiche writers, from 1955 until today. With a brand-new possible sequel to the story, I thought it was time to examine the many possible sequels.

The earliest sequel to "A Witch Shall Be Born" did not begin its life that way. The Flame Knife is one of the four Howard stories that de Camp edited to insert Conan, and all of those are pretty good, probably because there's still so much Howard in them. De Camp makes the wise choice of bringing back "A Witch Shall Be Born's" Olgerd Vladislav as the enemy for this, even though it's otherwise unconnected to "Witch." Apparently, Olgerd is still pretty bitter about getting deposed in his original story.

There are some good fantasy elements and there's a very tense standoff in a lost mountain city (great setting!), so I actually really like this one even though I know de Camp's work isn't everyone's cup of tea.

The Flame Knife was then adapted into Savage Sword #31 in 1978.

The next sequel came from the earliest Conan pastiche writers: the duo of L. Sprague de Camp yet again, along with Lin Carter. "Black Tears" first appeared in Conan the Wanderer in 1968 and is set about a year after its predacessor. Gary Romeo over at his blog brings up that this one might be better served to have its byline listed with Carter's name first rather than the traditional de Camp / Carter; it looks like this was primarily a Carter yarn with just a few edits and suggestions provided by Sprague.

"Black Tears" is a breezy, if rather forgettable sequel to "Witch" that has some solid prose in it but ultimately is ripped off from a Thongor story a little too hard, and sees Conan dispatch his final enemy a little bit too easily. It almost reminds me of a version of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," but set in the desert rather than the snows. 

"Black Tears" was adapted into comic form in Savage Sword #35.

After "A Witch Shall Be Born" was adapted by Roy Thomas and John Buscema in Savage Sword #5, the next two issues would each feature possible sequels to it. The first is "The Sleeper Beneath the Sands," written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Sonny Trinidad, who isn't a big name in the Conan world but did contribute to a few issues here and there.

"Sleeper" tends to repeat some of the ideas from its predecessor, with Conan getting strung up out in the desert once again, and it brings back Olgerd Vladislav who Conan doesn't kill, but decides not to save. I feel like this one would've done a little bit better if it was the backup story behind a more complete feature, but it never really develops its own identity.

We have arrived. This story, which is actually the earliest issue of Savage Sword I own, absolutely fucking rules. Conan has moved the Zuagirs west toward Akbitana following "Witch." Pulling on some of Robert E. Howard's common themes of rapid human evolution and devolution, Conan gets a tour through time in the basement of the Citadel at the Center of Time. He sees dinosaurs, cultures from his future (our past), and Buscema's pencils embellished by Alcala's inks do the whole thing beautifully.

​This is one of my favorite Zuagir raider-set Savage Sword stories.

This short backup story which appeared after the end of Roy Thomas's three-issue adaptation of Conan and the Sorcerer is 100% focused on Olgerd Vladislav and how he might have survived the events of "The Sleeper Beneath the Sands." It's short and simple, but I'll never say no to more of ol' Olgerd.

​Through some magic trickery, he's able to heal his deathly wounds sustained in Savage Sword #6 and regain power with the Zuagirs. I do think it's a little odd to present a short epilogue to a story... fifty-two issues after that first story appeared.

While Jim Zub is the lead writer of the current Conan the Barbarian title from Titan, he's done only a few pieces for Savage Sword, though he's done a variety of things from full features to prose to wordless backup stories. Issue #14 featured maybe my favorite of his SSOC projects so far: "Dwellers of the Oasis." With Conan still reeling from his crucifixion, he's in the desert with his hands wrapped tight. After falling into a lost underground (undersand?) city, he encounters some very nice people with no ulterior motives whatsover.

The splash page that artist Ivan Gil does to introduce both Conan and us to this underground civilization is fantastic and the environment is sufficiently creepy thanks to the work of both Jim and Ivan. One of Jim's writing hallmarks is his embedding of subtle themes into his raucous adventures, and this one seems to be dealing with the concept of moving forward and healing in spite of intense pain, adding some layers to an already-fantastic comic book. I hope we see more from the team-up of Jim Zub and Ivan Gil soon.

Do me a favor: take a look at the two comic pages down below. Compare them for a second. How do they feel to you? Which one do you like better?

The left page is taken from Conan the Barbarian #172. It was written by Christopher Priest, penciled by John Buscema, inked by Bob Camp, and colored by George Roussos. The page on the right is from Conan the Barbarian #175. It was once again crafted by Priest, Buscema, and Roussos, but with Ernie Chan doing the inks.

If you're like me, you probably think the page from issue #175 is a better final product. It might even be hard to nail down why it's better, but I'll propose a few ideas. The content isn't too dissimilar: there are some action packed panels at the top (and both have an open panel in the upper-right), as well as a few dialogue-focused panels, with a mix of close-up and wide shots. They have the same number of panels and even a similar flow. But there's something about the one on the right that is leagues better than the one on the left. While I like that the panel in #172's upper-right is an open panel, helping it feel less moored to time, it seems to come out of nowhere. It's not exactly clear what happens next. Do the two Picts get hit by the flying axe? How? They don't look like they're standing close enough together. They drop their weapons, and then there's a beat, and then they fall over dead? The action is just not clear, making it hard to follow. Plus, the backgrounds are extremely basic. some green grass, some blue sky. It looks generic and boring. Even Conan's face looks empty and generic, with pupils that seem to be crying out to be filled in black. 

The page on the right does so much better at all these things. The action takes place between different skirmishes on a battlefield, but the unified backgrounds and poses helps them feel tied together. The faces are more detailed and unique. Even though the red-headed Delmurio is a rugged rapscallion like Conan, they both have totally different vibes and face shapes. The inking feels darker in the shadows and more complete. Everything is more competently done here.

I chose these panels to illustrate the difference between the first few issues of Christopher Priest's run on Conan the Barbarian and how it eventually comes together. Priest, writing then under the name Jim Owsley, has a rough couple of first issues, and it's really not his fault. He picks up from the previous writer at #172, and the first three books he writes just feel terrible. Instead, I feel the need to lay the blame at comic legend John Buscema.

Perhaps the crew was still figuring out how to work together. Priest has said that he didn't really like Conan all that much. Buscema very famously didn't even like comic books that much... maybe they needed some time to gel.

When Buscema pencils a page that doesn't turn out ideal, most people lay the blame at the foot of the inker, including Buscema himself. While there were some sub-par inkers that really change John's work for the worse, and this was even a time in which he did more "breakdowns" while an inker provided the "finishes," he's got to bare some of the blame here. The breakdowns in these first few books just suck. They have unclear action and a lack of backgrounds, rendering the action inert and the stories somewhat lifeless. The covers (mostly also by Buscema) seem phoned-in as well. Conan's fighting someone in an empty space. Ish #174 is a small step up from the first two, with an improvement to the story but still sub-par art. When the team gets to issue #175, suddenly things just lock into place. Buscema bounces back and Priest's writing takes a huge step forward.

Conan's been on the western side of the continent for a couple of issues, fighting some Picts, occasionally aiding some Zingaran armed forces, gathering companions. One of Christopher Priest's foremost goals was to "Marvelize" Conan by giving him a supporting cast and maybe even some Clint Eastwood-style line reads. Issue #175 represents the first time that would really work out.

From the first page of the issue, things feel different. Our splash page is more lush and detailed than anything the past several issues. By this point, Conan is with his longer-term travel buddies, Tetra and Delmurio. Not only is there brief exposition, but we get to see some comedy and fun character bits. Giving Conan a regular cast allowed Priest the chance to do more character work than other Conan writers.

​Our three protagonists are looking to charter a ship from the Zingaran coast; they end up aboard a dinky little vessel headed by a cloaked captain with a creepy aura about him. If you've already guessed that he's secretly the villain, congratulations, you win nothing since everyone else saw it coming too. 

But that's not the fun part!

Conan and co. are sail into a creepy rock face inlaid with a human maw at which point Conan is apparently back home in Cimmeria. Howard purists might bristle at this depiction of Cimmeria, which seems more akin to the snowy wastes of Vanaheim than the leaden clouds and rolling hills of Conan's youth, it's not exactly paramount to the story. Conan gets "the Line" in a way that really works for the first time: "I am a son of Cimmeria. For me, there is no other way."

Warned of "the Scarlet Personage" by other trapped Cimmerians, Conan fights a ninja-like dude with a great design. He rips off his mask, revealing the Scarlet Personage underneath. Conan takes his enemy down, of course. Priest saw Conan as not quite a hero, but more of a problem-solver, and Conan's no-nonsense, let's-get-this-shit-over-with attitude here represents Priest's version of the character perfectly. 

Eventually, Priest's track record on Conan would even out a little bit. He actually figures himself out even faster than Roy Thomas had in 1970 and 1971. As Conan fights Imhotep the Ravager of Worlds, Wrarrl the Devourer of Souls, and even his companion Tetra, fun times were to be had by all. By the time Conan arrives in the Shemetish city of El Shah Maddoc in issue #179, Conan the Barbarian was on a serious upswing.

From issue #84 through #100, Roy Thomas and John Buscema told the final stretch of their Conan & Bêlit saga. In some ways, it was the best run of those 43 issues of Conan the Barbarian, and in others, it was the worst.

It was a revelation when Roy began adapting "Queen of the Black Coast" because he could unlock another side of Conan. The Cimmerian now had someone more consistent to talk to, to save, to be saved by, to fall in love with, and just generally interact with. In the final third of his Conan & Bêlit saga, he would do it again by introducing Zula, the last of the Zamballahs. 

Zula, the last of his tribe, is a lot like Conan in a few ways. He's strong, shrewd, and, when the story calls for it, heroic. He's a little more suspicious and untrusting than the Cimmerian, but he's a match for the big guy in all the right ways. Interestingly, Zula's coloring in the book goes through one wild transition. In his first appearance in issue #84, Zula has extremely dark skin, as in it's pure black ink highlighted in blue, the exact same way Conan and Bêlit's hair is. They wanted to distinguish him from other Black characters in the book, who usually appeared with their skin colored brown. Apparently, there's an old, racist phrase I'd never heard before levied against Black men about being so dark-skinned they're "almost purple." Like a lot of phrases employed by dumbass racists, that doesn't even really make sense. But Roy wanted to turn that phrase on its head, I guess, by making the capable, likable Zula almost purple, which is not a decision I support. Outside of the ill-advised reasons, Zula just looks a little strange in that first issue, and kind of sinks into the page with the rest of the inking.

It's fixed in his following appearance, and Zula would appear dark-skinned (colored gray, essentially) but not literally black after that. It looks much better. Of course, this is mostly bunk since to the vast majority of people, Zula looks like Grace Jones.

For how many of the next several issues are told in flashback, with characters catching one another up on their recent whereabouts, you might think these issues would suck, but they surprisingly don't.

Issues #84 - 86 would be a great time to jump on the title, had you dropped it somewhere prior, as Conan and Zula relate their general histories to one another and it's clear that they have unique, but compatible backgrounds. They later meet up with Bêlit, who recalls her own recent happenings and everyone's up to speed for the final race to #100.

The unfortunate thing is that this stretch of comics begins to get bogged down by reprints and diversions, and it's generally writer Roy Thomas's fault. He says that when he moved to LA in 1976, Marvel Comics felt really far away and he began to see it as just a job rather than his passion. He was lured by the glitz of TV and movies and it became a little harder to pick up his comic book pen. You probably wouldn't notice unless you were paying close attention, but there was a reprint in issue #87 (the second time in less than a year, this time reprinting Savage Sword #3) and several flashback or adaptation issues that slow the roll of the title. When the book is focused on Bêlit's return to Asgalun's throne or putting Conan, Zula, and the Black Corsairs up against a Stygian threat, it's generally phenomenal. But it wasn't that every month. Like, I really like issue #92. It's a fun adaptation of "The Thing in the Crypt" that I dug so much I wrote an Unsung Sword of Conan column about it. But it appears in the issue immediately preceding Bêlit's taking of the throne of Asgalun, which feels so whack. In the moment where we should be winding up to a triumph, we're looking back to a completely unrelated story.

In the moment we'd all been waiting for, Bêlit claims the throne of Asgalun, finally avenging her deposed father. But in a twist you probably saw coming, she would never be happy leaving the pirate life behind, so she abdicates the throne a third of a second after receiving it. It makes sense; Roy says he based this on his own experiences. He was offered the Editor-In-Chief role at Marvel a second time and turned it down. He didn't actually want the job, he just wanted to be a offered it, he says.

Thoth-Amon continues to meddle in Conan's affairs from afar (with Roy being very careful that the two don't actually meet yet so as to not step on Robert E. Howard's toes). 

Zula parts ways with the rest of the cast in issue #93 before Roy begins his "Sack of Abombi" storyline, based on a throwaway line from "The Scarlet Citadel." It's fun to see the homages contained in here, like the cover of issue #97 reflecting Frank Frazetta's "Sacrifice (Conan the Avenger)" painting. The issues between #93 and #100 are all good times, but you get the point. Let's waste no more ink.​

Conan the Barbarian #100 is probably the last time the title was great under Roy's stewardship. Nearly fifty issues had been building up to the death of Bêlit on the River Zarkheba, and he handles it with aplomb. We finally see Conan and Bêlit's "I would not tread on their shadow" conversation from "Queen of the Black Coast," which hits much harder this time as we've seen the two grow together for the last three years in real-time. One of the most interesting and debatable things about "Queen of the Black Coast" is how long-term Conan and Bêlit would have been. How long do they travel together? To me, it doesn't seem like long. How long would they have traveled together for? Well, I think they were always doomed to tragedy by one method or another. Roy, who always saw his role as an "embellisher" for Howard, has embellished one of REH's best stories in the best way.

​For all my complaints about the general pacing of the title at this time, they dry up in this issue.

Roy Thomas and John Buscema unlock their best work here. From Bêlit's mournful hanging on the ship to the methodical killing spree Conan goes on in the immediate aftermath, to the final battle with the bat creature who "slew his mate," the king-sized issue is one of the best issues of Conan ever. Buscema goes hard in the final panels, particularly the splash page filled with Conan's stoic figure and George Roussos's blues, magentas, and greens.

The true Bronze Age greatness of Conan the Barbarian was pretty much over after that. Roy was here for another 15 issues, but none of them are really essential. Conan the Barbarian Annual #5 and 6 are both fantastic, retelling The Hour of the Dragon, but the regular title under Roy's stewardship went gently into that good night, where it was handed off to J.M. DeMatteis, and, unfortunately, a slightly less-promising future.

Now that ​Bêlit was established in her own right and her relationship with Conan had begun to develop as their love had the power to even destroy a magician's illusion in Conan the Barbarian #68, we could really get this sea-bourne road trip moving. The next fourteen issues, from #70 to #83, would send the crew of the Tigress behind enemy lines for a chance to get to know Stygia, complete with its snake worshippers and Black Ring wizards. What may look like fairly standard fantasy adventure fare from the outside actually offers some of the best of what the Bronze Age of Comics had. The comic thunders with life.

It's instantly apparent from the beginning that there's a stark uptick in art quality right at issue #70. "The City in the Storm!" which the first in a two-part free adaptation of Robert E. Howard's "Marchers of Valhalla," sees inker Ernie Chan return to the title to embellish penciller John Buscema's work. Ernie's inks synthesize perfectly with Buscema's art to really earn the title "Embellisher." The full-page illustration at the start of issue #71 as an example, their Conan is powerfully posed and always looks great in motion. This is undeniably the A-Team at play: a Gil Kane cover, Big John B and Ernie Chan on the art, with Roy Thomas scripting an adaptation of a Howard story... 70s comics don't get better than that. 

These issues play a lot with Conan and Bêlit that further endear the pair to us, and each other. A brief moment between them in #71 starts as a power struggle and ends with a moment of quiet reflection. In the medium of comics, where space equals time, it's incredibly brief, especially that slim last panel where Bêlit is framed alone against the night sky, caught off-guard in a long shot as Conan has disarmed her. 

​Looking back, Roy says that all of this storytelling looks effortless, and you can absolutely tell the team's having fun.

For most of the rest of this period, Bêlit and the Black Corsairs head into Stygia, where Roy Thomas became the first person to really flesh the country out. In REH's original canon, it's seen in Hour of the Dragon, and we see lots of Stygians like Thoth-Amon in "Red Nails," "Xuthal of the Dusk," and "The Phoenix on the Sword." But surprisingly, most of the cities of Stygia are named but unseen. The black walls of Khemi, the capital Luxur, and the magician city Keshatta are mostly out-of-frame. But first, they would return to Shem.

Issue #72's "Vengeance in Asgalun" includes one of Gil Kane's "Conan is mad at you, specifically" covers from this period (they're all fun) and pits our pair against Stygians in Bêlit's home city of Asgalun. Disguised as a humble blacksmith his wife, Conan and Bêlit get to trade comical blows while in character. For this brief episode, Conan the Barbarian becomes part sitcom. Though the reveal is cut short by Stygian sorcerer Ptor-Nubis (tied to Thoth-Amon through the Black Ring), Bêlit learns that her father may still be alive before she escapes with her "husband."

Storytelling surprises abound in issue #74, which feels incredibly modern compared to the rest of the series. Conan is asleep aboard the Tigress when an extended dream sequence begins in which Thoth-Amon reaches out to and threatens the Cimmerian, who remembers him from issue #7's adaptation of "The God in the Bowl." It makes some sense for Roy to remind us of who will eventually become Conan's big bad and it adds to the Stygian menace if you keep in mind that, up until and including this point, Conan and Thoth haven't actually met each other in person. Since they don't seem to really have a personal history in REH stories like "The Phoenix on the Sword" and Roy didn't want to upset the original canon, he came up with the excuse that maybe Thoth-Amon didn't realize he was reaching out to Conan in his dreams either. Eh, I guess I'll take it.

The rest of the issue feels paced like a Modern Age book, complete with thoughtful character moments and a quick battle at the end on the black walls of Khemi. The Black Corsairs also pick up the recurring character Neftha here. She and Bêlit will in the coming issues do... well, I guess you would call it "grayface," considering how the Stygians are colored in this book. You can't see it right now, but I'm shrugging my shoulders pretty hard and grimacing more out of confusion than distaste.

Issues #75 through 77 take us to the city of Harakht with its hawk riding sentries for a fun three-part adventure that separates Conan from the crew for a time and leaves him "Swordless in Stygia." Ultimately, our heroes end up being part of a crew that helps depose the evil twin ruler Hor-Neb, leaving his more benevolent brother Mer-Ath the sole ruler of the Hawk-City of Harakht. It's nice to see that not all Stygians are snake-worshippers and wizards!

As the creative team did from time to time, issue #78 reprints Savage Sword #1. Roy freely admits they were forced to print a rerun because he was being lax with his deadlines. This time, it wasn't just a ploy to catch up with the monthly comic schedule, though, but to print a story that had been used elsewhere out of necessity. SSOC #1 was originally intended to be Conan #43, but had been moved over to Savage Sword since the planned adaptation of "Black Colossus" was taking too long and would be pushed back to issue #2. Roy wasn't too broken up about it; he figured that readers eager to continue the story from issue #42 would hop on over to Savage Sword and maybe get hooked there, cross-pollinating the readership to the new book. But he'd still wanted to see the issue in color, so he finally brought it over about 35 issues later.

With Buscema busy on Savage Sword and a few other books, the regular Conan title was going to see an art switch-up for the foreseeable future. Howard Chaykin, who had worked with Roy on his Star Wars comic adaptation in 1977, was brought in to pencil the book. According to Roy, he really only did the layouts, with Ernie's pens finishing the artwork so that it didn't look too different from Buscema's stuff. And Roy's right- they look about 80% the same.

This set of issues, from #79 to 81, adapt one of Robert E. Howard's El Borak stories, "The Lost Valley of Iskander." The original story features only Francis Xavier Gordon, who Roy could reskin to Conan fairly easily, but a tougher issue to deal with was what Conan's companions should be up to during this adventure. Roy employed those very-cool hawk riders from Harakht and simply had Conan help them with a mission that would take them away from the city. That would get him away from the crew of the Tigress for a while and he could get lost, solo, in the Valley of Iskander. This enchanted valley is somehow out of time (and enchanted? Conan can't seem to remember Bêlit...), with Roy explaining in captions that this "Iskander" fellow for whom the valley takes its name is actually our Alexander the Great, who has somehow already been here long ago, despite not yet being born for thousands of years. I'm reminded of an interview of Jason Alexander pushing back against an inconsistent character moment for George Costanza on Seinfeld. Larry David told Jason, "Who cares, as long as it's funny?" Roy seems to be saying to readers, "Who gives a shit, as long as it's adventurous?" I'm with him. 

​Conan becomes embroiled in the power struggles of the city of Attalan in the Valley of Iskander and though he clashes with the gigantic Ptolemy, he chooses to defend the city from invading Stygians and he becomes a hero for it. He marches out of the city at the end, somehow back into the regularly-temporal Hyborian Age where he remembers Bêlit just fine.

While Roy admits that Marvel editorial wasn't super happy with him (since "The Valley of Iskander" wasn't a Conan story, they had to pay extra for the rights to adapt it), Roy makes special note of the fact that this issue had the first advertisement for Marvel toys- in this case, dolls- featuring Conan alongside other heroes like Spider-Man, Hulk, and Captain America. He took this as a sign that Conan was not only a sales juggernaut, but a comic cultural one, too. He figured he could get away with the adaptation: 

From here, Conan trudges into the swamps of Stygia.

With a two-parter in issues #82 and 83, Roy dares the extremely tricky task of adapting one of Robert E. Howard's most racist stories: "Black Canaan." Roy usually tiptoed around Howard's racism and qualified it by saying things like only "overly-sensitive" readers found it racist, but we can have intelligent, honest discussions about what we like in 2026; it's horrifically racist. I suspect that Roy somewhat agreed, because he does quite a bit of work to eliminate the racist elements and re-cast them in a less-outmoded way.

He gives Conan a line about choosing his friends by something other than skin color, and Conan actively dismisses some robbers' skin colors to the reader. He removes the conflict from the Black Canaanites vs. White Canaanites conflict of the original story and sets Stygians (themselves people of color) and the Black residents of a village called Viper's Head. In Roy's hands, the story still thumps with tension, fear, and sexuality, but in a way that lets you focus on the black magic and sexy siren lady who you know is bad news. Issues #82 and 83 end up being a very cool exercise in what Roy Thomas means when he splashes the banner "Freely adapted from..." across his title page.

There's a very clear delineating point between here and the rest of the Conan and Bêlit saga, which had 17 more issues to go. Roy and his team were about to introduce one of the coolest characters of the whole saga. The death of the Queen of the Black Coast draws near!

Read Part Three of this series here!

For how large Bêlit looms in the Conan canon, it's always been something of an oddity that she and Conan were together for such a short time. 

If you read Robert E. Howard's "Queen of the Black Coast," there's a gap between Chapters I and II that seems, to me at least, to last a few weeks or a few months while they really fall for one another before Bêlit is killed by the end of the story (spoilers for a story that's approaching 100 years old). I suppose it's appropriate that their romance would be quick: both Conan and Bêlit are strong, fiery people and their relationship probably wouldn't have lasted. I have a hard time picturing them running to Walgreens together because they ran out of milk, or whatever the Hyborian Age equivalent of that would be.

Writing comics for Marvel in the 70s, Roy Thomas and co. were using the L. Sprague de Camp timeline, which Roy agreed set Conan and Bêlit's time together aboard the Tigress at about three years, so Roy was gearing up for a serious saga, one that he called the "saga of Conan and Bêlit." The Conan the Barbarian title was more or less passing in real time, so Roy was planning a a corresponding three real years of stories with the the pirates together. His plan was to take that ripe time between Chapters I and II and to expand it into an epic that went from the coast to the jungles, and, eventually, to a throne.

From issue #58 to issue #100, Roy Thomas's Conan and Bêlit saga would become one of the definitive peaks of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian.

As he did during his "War of the Tarim" saga, Roy soft-launched the era an issue ahead of time. It helped having "Queen of the Black Coast" to use as a basis for everything moving forward. In the issues prior to #58, Roy had Conan acquire the items he's wearing at the start of the Howard story- a red cloak, a horned helmet, a mail hauberk.

There was ripe ground for connecting his comic narrative threads to REH's pirate story in two paragraphs at the beginning in which Conan relates to his captain, Tito, about getting into some legal trouble because of killing a guard over the "sweetheart of a young soldier," who Roy made into Yusef and Tara, two really likable characters that had been travelling with Conan in the comic book for a few issues. Issue #57 shows this incident that separates Conan from the young pair, as he cleaves a magistrate's skull in two with some not-very-Code-approved violence. This issue features a hella Gil Kane cover, but its sub-par pencils by Mike Ploog (what is with the way this dude draws faces?) make me really glad that John Buscema would be back the following issue.

Issue #58 begins on horseback as Conan careens toward the Argossean harbor. He leaps aboard a ship and demands that it take him away with it, officially beginning his adaptation of "Queen of the Black Coast" in the same place Howard did. Weirdly enough, two pages are eaten up by almost entirely recapping the previous issue's story as though Buscema was eager to put his stamp on the story. Conan sails south, past Shem, Stygia, and some classic sea sirens. You know what happens next as the Argus is boarded by Bêlit and her Black Corsairs, who are impressed by Conan's ability with a sword, causing him to be folded into the crew.

Roy sparred a little with the Comics Code Authority administrators here as the subtext of the story gets a little steamy. In fact, while much of the dialogue remains in tact from the exact words Howard wrote, many of the changes are simply to appease the Comics Code. At one point, Bêlit's "supple thigh" brushes against Conan's sword (hubba hubba), which Roy didn't even bother including since he knew the Code would throw it out. Bêlit's "mating dance" was changed to her "love dance" at Code request and a panel of Conan and Bêlit kissing was re-drawn because Code administrator Len Darvin thought it looked too much like Bêlit was about to go down on the Cimmerian. 

The next two issues, #59 and #60, establish a backstory for Bêlit which was noticeably absent in the original story. Roy figured with three years of stories to tell ahead of him, and since the Marvel readership liked origins, he probably needed to provide one, though he thought it was intentional that Howard had never given her one. He decided to base it on a line from Howard in which she says, "Wolves of the blue sea, behold ye now the dance — the mating-dance of Bêlit, whose fathers were kings of Askalon!" As with all things REH, made-up proper nouns changed names every now and then (like Tamar and Tarantia), but "Askalon" is probably Asgalun, Shem.

The Conan team titled their origin story "The Ballad of Bêlit" to mirror the earlier issue "The Song of Red Sonja." In Roy's continuity, Bêlit is the daughter of Shemite royalty who is forced to flee as a little girl when a Stygian plot to kill her dad is successful. Roy expands the role of the extremely minor Black Corsair N'Yaga (mentioned just twice in "Queen of the Black Coast") into a trusted advisor of her dad's, and a surrogate father figure for her once they'd been deposed. This also helps explain how she came to command her pirate crew, as N'Yaga spun a tale that she is the daughter of the death goddess Derketa. As such, the Black Corsairs all address her as "Goddess."

Writing in ​Bêlit's backstory as the wandering daughter of a deposed king ended up being essentially Roy's secret weapon. Whereas he would keep the fire and the bravado of Howard's original character, his Bêlit would have the additional righteous indignation of reclaiming her lost throne. It gives the saga a clear, ultimate end-point and ups the stakes considerably. The relationship between Conan and ​Bêlit helped the book find a new verve as well: Conan now had a much deeper personal buy-in to the stories. Adding ​Bêlit to the book feels like finally adding Robin to Batman in that there was now a relationship at the core of the book that could run much deeper than the team-ups Conan usually had. It is made all the sweeter that we knew that partnership has its days numbered.

Roy had one other blank to fill in as well. While both "The Scarlet Citadel" and "The Hour of the Dragon" refer to Conan as "Amra" of the Black Corsairs, the name actually isn't used even once in his Black Coast adventure, which meant Roy was pretty free to give him the name however he wanted. He chose to have Conan earn it. Roy essentially turned "Amra" into a transferable title In issues #61-63, Conan goes up against the original Amra, lord of the lions, who is blatantly a Tarzan ripoff that Roy doesn't even deny. He had bad blood with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate from working with them on Tarzan comics, and took out his revenge in the pages of Conan the Barbarian.

The original Amra is a red-haired, loincloth-wearing jungle man with a jet-black lion as his companion. While the first issue of the Amra storyline didn't grab me, its ending more than makes up for it. Issue #63 has a few pages showing off what Roy Thomas and John Buscema do best: Roy narrating an intense fight with Buscema's pencils showing the action. It's an incredible close-quarters knife fight that uses perspective tricks to create a cinematic, breathtaking comic book experience.

Issue #64 reprints the Savage Sword story "The Secret of the Skull River." Boo. Roy tells a bizarre story about this one: inker Steve Gan "fell in love" so hard with the Buscema pencils he was sent to ink that he refused to return them. Apparently they didn't get the pages back from the Phillipines in time and just had to reprint an old story.

The next set of issues pitted the crew of the Tigress against a slew of fantastic Bronze-Age baddies Ahmaan the Merciless (#65), Dagon the Death God (#66), and an enchanted man-tiger (#67). This type of comic book storytelling doesn't really exist anymore: classic one-and-dones that feature a complete story are all the more charming for it. That last story has the best villain with its anthropomorphic cat villain, but also brings Tara, Yusef, and even Red Sonja back after a 30-issue absence and we get to see ​Bêlit betray some jealousy for the first time. It's endearing to see the brutal Queen of the Black Coast get cautious about the She-Devil with a Sword, especially since longtime readers know that Sonja isn't about to give it up for Conan. But Bêlit doesn't know that, so it's actually kind of cute.

Sonja sticks around for a few issues and we get an adventure with Kull, Gonar the Pict, and Brule the Spear-Slayer through issue #68, "Of Once and Future Kings!" 

After nonstop seafaring adventure for ten issues aboard the pirate ship, it was time for a break. Issue #69 adapts the Robert E. Howard story "Out of the Deep" which makes for one of Roy's best issues ever. Roy says in his Barbarian Life book that this kind of story would usually be saved for Savage Sword, but it was likely used here for scheduling reasons. Though it's unclear why Buscema was unable to pencil the story, it became one of Val Mayerik's first Conan credits. The beauty of Mayerik's art, which is like a halfway point between Windsor-Smith and Buscema, is perfect for the issue.

Sending us back in time to an episode taking place before Conan #2, the Cimmerian is captured and taken to a seaside village where fuckery is afoot. There appears to be an entity from the ocean that has taken members of the village and either created copies of their bodies or sucked their souls right out. The village isn't sure who to trust, but Conan's natural distrust for magic puts him on edge enough to not rule out sorcery. As he helps defend the village, he demonstrates some of the decency that makes him such a likable character.

After this interlude, it was back to the Black Coast and particularly to Stygia, where we would spend a handful of fantastic issues. Perhaps Roy's greatest skill in comics was to adapt, embellish, and flesh out. His "Queen of the Black Coast" saga is my vote for the best example of that.

The last time I covered a saga like this, it was a mere seven issues before it was all wrapped up, and even then it felt like an incredible epic. At the end of the first year of the "Queen of the Black Coast" saga, a dozen issues in, Conan's time with Bêlit was just beginning. Read Part Two of this series here!

Los Angeles, California. Circa 1977.

Christy Marx is in her mid-20s. She's in L.A. trying to make it in comics. Originally thinking she'd have to draw comics to be a success, she's finally settled on the idea that she can just write, which is where her passion lies anyway.

​At a fan meetup, she attends a panel with Roy Thomas, who is the current writer of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan. Christy's an avid fantasy fan herself.

As the questions are lobbed at Roy one by one, Christy gets the sense that Roy's a little bit bored with this interaction. "Typical fan questions" is how she describes it. As the last question of the panel, she asks him what his future goals and plans are with his comics. He's delighted to be asked something out of the ordinary.

A bit later, Christy gets a chance to talk to Roy and he says that it would be interesting to get a Conan story told from the point of view of one of the women that encounters Conan; there are, after all, many such characters to come across him for a short time and maybe even have a whirlwind fling.

Fast-forward four years. Christy's focus has changed from comic books to animation. She hasn't left the comic game entirely, but she's had quite a bit of success writing scripts for the TV shows Spider-Man and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. She'll very soon write some Red Sonja stories and her own series called Sisterhood of Steel. She will ultimately become a core architect of my childhood media consumption, writing for X-Men: Evolution, ReBoot, Beast Wars, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

In early 1981, Roy buys another story from her, this time called "Eye of the Sorcerer." Funnily enough, Christy doesn't remember a single thing about it. She knows in 2026 that she has the issue somewhere, but it's buried in a closet or storage room or something.

It ends up being an incredible send-off for Roy.

SSOC #69 hit the newsrack in October of 1981, which means that Roy had fully quit Marvel at least eleven months prior. It's kind of strange to see the little signs that the book was cobbled together with the ghost of Roy Thomas at the center of it. The letters in the "Swords & Scrolls" page were being answered by editor Louise "Weezie" Simonson rather than Roy. The book had introduced Michael Fleisher as the new writer for issues #61-63, but then published four of Roy's remaining stories while Bruce Jones and Fleisher kind of flip-flopped writing for about five issues. The title was clearly in flux, and honestly, I love it.

Issue #69 was at the center of all this change, and it's a damn good issue.

I noticed a while back that Roy's last several issues on Savage Sword were not entirely original compositions. Issue #67 was based on a Fred Blosser plot. Issue #68 came from an Andrew J. Offutt story. And then #69 is Christy's "Eye of the Sorcerer."

I conducted a brief interview with Christy Marx over email while writing this retrospective. I got the sense the Roy knew his time was up and was buying plots from people to make his job a little easier- he seemed to kind of have one foot out the door. When I asked if Christy got the same sense about Roy, while she didn't say she agreed with me, she said she felt it was a reasonable assumption.

Since Christy says she doesn't really recall the issue, I'll have to help us all remember.

The full-page opening pits Conan in an arm-wrestling match in a tavern called the Inn of the Black Dragon. Down at the bottom of the page, it credits Ernie Chan and Alfredo Alcala for the "Art" (I'm assuming that means that Ernie penciled and Alcala inked, but I'm not sure. And weirdly enough, it just says "Story: ROY THOMAS;" no mention of Christy anywhere. It wouldn't be until issue #74 when the "Swords and Scrolls" letters page would open with a bold-faced apology reading: "DEPARTMENT OF RED-FACED HYBORIAN APOLOGIES: Well, we goofed again! Remember SSOC #69's titanic tale, "Eye of the Sorcerer?" Well, it was plotted by Christy Marx, whose credit was inadvertently left off both the story and the lettercol on the story. So, herewith, our apologies to Ms. Marx, and a promise never to do it again." Late is better than never, but seeing your name in the back pages of a comic book you didn't write is much less cool than seeing it in the credits on the first page of one you did.

The book immediately sets up an adversarial relationship between Conan and an older man named Udelas. Competing for who will captain a traveling caravan's guard, Udelas is chosen as the leader in a way that makes Conan chafe. They're not outright enemies, but it's clear the two don't like one another very much. 

Much to Udelas's chagrin, his son takes to Conan and we get a little easter egg around a campfire as Conan seems to be finishing telling Udelas's son Dern the story of "The Tower of the Elephant."

In the first of three big setpieces in this story, Conan and Udelas rescue Dern from an underground city populated by bat-winged cave-dwellers. The boy apparently wandered through a portal in a cave while the caravan was stopped and our heroes are temporarily enslaved before escaping. If it sounds like I'm glossing over a lot here, I promise it's not my fault: my only complaint about this story is that it would've been a badass three-parter since it shoves so much into a single issue.

In one of the quieter moments that follows their subterranean escape, Conan shares some time with his employer, the beautiful Valiana, in one of the most beautiful full-page illustrations I've seen in Savage Sword. I don't know why this issue is inked so differently than others, but Alcala's shading renders a gorgeous page.

Our second big story beat sends the caravan passing through a wood occupied by a bear god. When Conan attempts to make a small sacrifice to allow safe passage, he buts heads with Udelas again when the old man forbids such heathenistic acts. And wouldn't you know it, a single page later and we get beset by a bear that's apparently sponsored by Target. Though Udelas had initially spurned Conan at the entrance to the wood, he saves him from the bear. Seeing as Conan helped save Dern from the bat-people, the two men are now even, and coming to a bit more of an understanding.

In the final stretch of the issue, the caravan passes by the same mountain continually and the peak seems to move by itself each day. Eventually, they arrive. The creative team really ratchet up the sword and sorcery vibes here as the mystery and magic get more and more off-putting by the panel. I don't want to spoil anything for you since I'd love for you to check out the issue for yourself, but it gets weird (complimentary).

The whole thing sticks the landing well. This imaginative adventure makes for a really fun read. Unfortunately, Christy didn't contribute any more stories to Savage Sword after issue #69, but she did continue to add to the mythos. She worked with Roy Thomas again in the pages of Red Sonja, scripted a later issue of Conan the Barbarian, and ultimately was the head writer on the Conan the Adventurer cartoon in the 90s.

The term "strong female character" comes up a lot when people talk about Christy's work, and I asked her if that was intentional. She told me "Hell yeah." Christy's had a long and very successful career in comics, sword and sorcery media, and Conan specifically. She deserves her place in Conan history!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1983, Buscema apparently pushed to get to plot some Conan comics for the first time. From issues 155 to 159, he got story credit alongside writer Christopher Priest. Apparently it wasn't as easy as he thought it would be, and he walked away from the situation with a little more respect for the writers.

Half a decade later, during Roy Thomas's second run on Savage Sword, he did the story for one more Conan comic, this time scripted by Roy Thomas, and it was the first time Buscema's plotting really paid off. Seeing Buscema's name listed before Roy's feels a little bit like reading "Garfunkel & Simon," "Tails & Sonic," or "Jelly & Peanut Butter."

​Unfortunately, Marvel didn't seem inclined to push the book. It had a small print run, low sales, and is pretty hard to come by today. I had to buy mine for $115, and even then it's in pretty rough shape. But it was worth it! Conan the Rogue may be Buscema's very best work on the character he's most associated with!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roy Thomas.

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

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

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

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

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

I could go on and on. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​Whatever, man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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