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With The Unsung Sword of Conan, I'm trying to highlight under-appreciated works in the Conan canon.  In May of 1975, the double-length comic book Giant-Size X-Men #1 landed with a clang on newsstands. True to its title, Giant-Size was thicker than your average comic, but it was also trying to sell something big: a new era of the X-Men, a team nobody cared about at the time. The X-Men title had been a shambling corpse for years, simply publishing reprints of old stories for 28 issues in a row. Giant-Size was meant to revive the mutants. Truth be told, a lot of it had to do with diversifying the cast to sell more comics to different markets. Members of this new "Second Genesis" X-Men team would be from all over the world: Canada, Russia, Germany, Kenya, Ireland, and Japan. It was a lot different than the five upper-crusty, blond, white kids from New York that comprised the old team. Among the creative team was Len Wein, who got the writing credit on the issue, as well as twenty-four year-old newcomer from Long Island Chris Claremont, who had contributed a couple of ideas to the plotting. Pulling the X-Men out of reprints was part of Giant-Size's goal, so it would need a writer on the regular Uncanny X-Men book. Len Wein realized as soon as Giant-Size was done that he was too busy to take on that responsibility as well.  Chris Claremont and editor Louise Simonson Len decided to offer the gig to Chris. Claremont had done well in his limited time at Marvel, but was untested, and Len Wein figured that none of the more experienced writers at Marvel would have their feathers ruffled by the offer since X-Men was a low-tier title. Len didn't feel like he was missing out by dropping it, but Chris was excited. He remembers accepting Len's offer by proclaiming, "Shit-yes!" Chris and Len worked out that Chris would write the new X-Men book for six issues. He figured that would be all. In fact, Chris was happy to have that. The comics industry was dying, he thought. "Nobody bought comics. It was a dying industry, and we knew it. Nobody cared. We were just there to have fun. We all figured by 1980 we'd all be out looking for a real job," he said. What Chris couldn't have known was that he was about to revitalize not only Marvel Comics, but the comics industry as a whole, and become one of its all-time greatest creators. For the next several years, Chris entered what pop music critics call an "imperial period." Everything he did was insanely well-reviewed and sold insanely well. It would be an understatement to say that he revolutionized what people thought of when they thought of the X-Men. He fucking obliterated what had come before. He turned the X-Men's 1960s into a footnote so much so that it acquired a new epithet: "Classic X-Men," to differentiate it from the real, modern "X-Men." When you think of the X-Men, if you're not thinking of Cyclops, Jean Gray, Beast, or the word "mutant," you're probably thinking of one of Claremont's creations. He invented the heroes Shadowcat, the Phoenix, Gambit, Rogue, Emma Frost, Jubilee, Psylocke, Cable, Northstar, Captain Britain, Sunspot, Warpath, Cannonball, and Moira MacTaggart as well as the villains Sabretooth, Pyro, Mr. Sinister, Mystique, Madelyne Pryor, Lady Deathstrike, and the Hellfire Club. Being responsible for just one or two of those would be enough to enshrine you in X-Men history. The X-Men films, which themselves helped transform the film industry in regards to comic book movies, are almost all based on his works in some way. In just a few short years, Chris, along with artist John Byrne, had produced many of what are still some of the most iconic storylines in not only X-Men history, but Marvel history in general. They produced "The Dark Phoenix Saga," "Days of Future Past," and "God Loves, Man Kills," not to mention developing Wolverine into the single most popular mutant of all time and probably the second-most famous Marvel character of all, right behind Spider-Man.   And somewhere in the middle of all this, Chris Claremont found the time to write one, single issue of The Savage Sword of Conan. Issue #74, with its A-story feature written by Claremont and a backup by Roy Thomas, was published in January of 1982, about a year and a half after Roy Thomas had quit Marvel and Savage Sword had entered a tumultuous period (which I have written extensively about). Savage Sword #74 came right at the end of that tumult, when the Michael Fleisher era was dawning on the title. But out of the blue, here comes Chris Claremont, who, as far as I can tell, had never touched Conan with a ten-foot pole before. I wonder if it was Louise Simonson, editor on both the Conan titles and the X-books, who brought Claremont over to Savage Sword. There's a quote that made its way around social media last year that is attributed to Claremont. It says, “In terms of characterization, [Wolverine]'s a lineal descendant of Conan... Wolverine is a Cimmerian. Lock, stock, and barrel. If Conan and Wolverine met on the street they would be relating to each other like looking into a funhouse mirror at distorted images of themselves Wolverine is out of place and out of time. He's a classic Howard character.” Now, I can't find any verifiable source that Claremont said that, so it's probably fake. But it's right. Perhaps that's why this issue is so excellent- Claremont already had experience turning the savage Wolverine into a beloved character, so he knew what he was doing. The two would have an incredible meeting in Gerry Duggan's Savage Avengers 40 years later.  As Savage Sword #74 opens, Conan is on his way through the northern reaches of a mountain range: perhaps Brythunia, Nemedia, or the Border Kingdom that lay close to Cimmeria. He checks in at a remote inn and pays for his stay in fine furs he's hunted. He is struck during his revels by unhappy memories of childhood. A former friend named Shard who betrayed him and made off with his loot. You can pinpoint the exact time frame in which this issue was published because Shard is a 1:1 mirror image of guitarist John Oates. That night, Conan is torn from his bed by a one-handed man named Kendrick, an evidently clairvoyant character who has foreseen Conan's coming through a crystal ball. Conan is rough and violent, but without the taint of evil, Kendrick notes. Kendrick asks, in exchange for a king's ransom in gold, to ferry a passenger away from the inn. That passenger is a woman named Astriel whose hair apparently matches her ice-blue eyes. Even in black and white, Val Mayerik's art shimmers like dawn running on the snows. His Astriel is icy and beautiful, while Conan is hot-blooded and carved out of rock. He occasionally surrounds Astriel with a sort of aura that makes her feel reflective like ice.  As it turns out, Astriel is being pursued by Conan's old friend Shard, along with two Stygian sorcerers, twin brothers in the employ of Thoth-Amon. They give chase to Conan and Astriel, who flee through the snows. Their horses are vaporized, a horde of devil-bats attacks them, and the pair ultimately do battle with Shard and his twin wizards. Astriel ultimately saves herself by having come close enough to use the magic of her homeland. She reveals herself as the "Snow Queen, Lady of the Silver Silence" promised in the title, and expels those who wish her harm with the help of some wildlife loyal to her. The story ends with Conan convalescing in her lair, laid up until the snows thaw in the spring. It's a lot of time to spend together, and they'll make the best of it.  Parts of this story are so unmistakably Claremont. A term often trotted out to describe Claremont's work is "soap opera." John Byrne once joked that Chris Claremont's ideal issue of X-Men would've been just 22 pages of his characters walking around and talking about their problems. To quote Chris himself, "To me, the fights are bullshit." His focus on relationships that made Uncanny X-Men an indelible teen drama is here in spades; a few short character moments really pack punch. Conan's betrayal at the hands of Shard in his younger days which fades back to Conan's lonely eyes. The fear that a sex worker will give up Conan and Astriel's position either willingly or through coercion gives weight to what otherwise might be a forgettable brothel character, inserted just for some T 'n' A. It's particularly melancholy that Kendrick, now appearing decades older than Astriel, is actually her longtime lover, cursed to watch her beauty perpetuate while he ages at a normal human rate, and he ultimately gives everything for her. Even the moment when Astriel impales one of the twin sorcerers is more emotional than you would think it would be. He utters, "Brother..." as he crumples next to his twin, a look of utter helplessness on his face. Claremont entwines the paths of Conan and Astriel, two people not easily disposed to opening up, and crafts a powerful tale about trust and about those who you let get close. Val Mayerik's low winter suns and heavy shadows over the white wastes of the north all feel appropriately mythic, ornate, and totally in service of this chiastic fantasy story. As Astriel and Conan grow closer, Astriel literally lets her hair down. It begins in a tight braid like Princess Leia's on Hoth before gradually loosening as she opens up to her companion. Mayerik's Conan, on the other hand, is not the action figure superhero of John Buscema's or Gil Kane's versions of the character, but a ferocious, and at-times frightening, slab of meat.  I have a hypothesis about this story, and I'm not sure if I'm right about it, but I think I can make a good argument. Chris Claremont's duties at Marvel in the late 70s and early 80s hadn't only been with X-Men. One of his pet projects had been developing the character of Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers's offshoot of the Captain Marvel hero. Like the diversification of the X-Men team, part of Ms. Marvel had been about appealing to women to sell more comics, but Chris had poured a lot of himself into the character. He'd worked to try to keep Carol from being just an object of sex appeal on the page, trying to very finely sketch who she was as a person. Though Claremont didn't create Ms. Marvel, Marvel historian Sean Howe argues that nobody had ever invested as much in a female superhero as Chris did with her. For twenty issues he tried his best to create a living, modern character, but the title was cancelled and he had to move on. He'd sometimes put Carol as a guest character in his X-Men stories. But just a year later in 1980, he saw Ms. Marvel forcibly impregnated in Avengers #200, an event that everyone involved seems ashamed of now. It's gone down in comic history as "The Rape of Ms. Marvel." Claremont, apparently, was aghast.  It makes a lot of sense to me, then, to see him create a woman character of unspeakable power in the pages of Savage Sword of Conan. Astriel had previously been taken from her home and underestimated by the evil Thoth-Amon. Should Conan and Astriel be overtaken, Astriel asks Conan that he kill her. "I have been dishonored. I prefer death," she tells the Cimmerian. Later in the story, Shard's band of brigands bears down on Conan and Astriel, vastly outnumbering our heroes. It is Astriel's power, not Conan's, that protects them. She is fully in control of her domain and drives out the trespassers. No one can touch her unless she chooses. It's easy to draw a through-line from Ms. Marvel to Astriel, with Claremont finally able to give a more fitting coda to his woman hero.  Chris Claremont and his X-Men titles changed the comic landscape drastically. Through the 80s and into 90s, Claremont and his mutant teams dominating, changing the face of who and what comics could tell stories about. In some ways, they may have caused the downturn of Conan books as readers wanted more personal stories and fewer tales of steel-clanging adventure. Claremont returned to Conan just one more time, with King-Size Conan #1, which is pretty fucking awesome itself. I may have to dedicate a future Unsung Sword column to that issue alone. In this 2020 one-shot, billed as a celebration of 50 years of Conan comics, a half-dozen stories are told by some of the best writers in modern comics, along with ol' Roy Thomas returning to his very first Conan the Barbarian issue. Unsurprisingly, in Claremont's story, he mostly forgoes the battles. He opens on the end of a conflict, but spends the rest of his pages dedicated to a conversation between Conan and a dying girl. It's really moving, and feels like something no other Conan writer would do. Two years later, Marvel would lose the rights to Conan and that era would be over. Titan would take over, bringing us into the modern day.  Savage Sword of Conan #74 may be the last time the book was truly great. I'm sad we only ever got two stories from Chris Claremont, but they're some of the best Conan stories of their respective decades.
Read my other posts about Conan comics here.
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With The Unsung Sword of Conan, I'm trying to highlight under-appreciated works in the Conan canon.  It starts with a bit of a Roshomon: after rescuing a woman from a gang of would-be killers, their target Shahela spins a yarn about the recent history of her nation Ophir. Conan listens intently to Shahela as she paints herself and her all-female guard squad, the Iron Maidens, as the underdogs in a war against tyranny. The Black Cloaks, a veritable death squad that operated with impunity, cast a shadow over Ophir. They imprisoned the country's rightful leader, Queen Varia, and Shahela seeks to free the besieged queen. But just a few pages later, Conan is told the same story with slightly different embellishments by another character, the administrator named Balthis. To hear Balthis tell it, the Black Cloaks were actually serving at the pleasure of Varia, and it was Shahela poisoned the throne against the Cloaks. It was the Iron Maidens, he says, who helped Shahela imprison the queen. We're left wondering who- if anyone- we are to believe.  It probably doesn't come as a surprise to the engaged reader that both Shahela and Balthis are vying for power and hoping that a certain steely-thewed Cimmerian joins their cause. Conan is a newcomer in Ophir and hears these two tales fairly soon after arriving in the country, apparently fresh from his Barachan pirate days, and probably a little prior to "Red Nails." This Conan is one of my favorite incarnations of the character: he is now not only worldly but very strategically smart. He knows the ways of civilization and war so that he's not just a physical force to be reckoned with, but a cunning adversary with his sword sheathed, too. It turns out that a little bit of what Balthus and Shehela both said was true. Varia was a good queen and did try to disband the Black Cloaks, but not through the influence of Shahela. Both the Cloaks' and the Maidens' leaders are vying for power in their own ways- Shahela needs to kill Varia and Balthis needs to marry her. Sure, Conan has never really cared for politics, but he does have a streak of caring about justice and standing up to tyrants, so he enmeshes himself in the power struggle. Seeing the scheming, Conan chooses Door #3 and decides to play them against each other and act as a spy. He soon learns that there's another party here, Toiro, Varia's cousin with an equal claim to the throne as Shahela if Varia were to die. "Wheels within wheels," Conan thinks to himself.  When Toiro eventually gets captured, Conan gets into the castle to free both him and Varia, but is interrupted by Balthis and the Cloaks, and is ultimately dropped into a skeleton-laden dungeon with a twelve-foot-tall, man-eating ghoul inside. Conan manages to stun it long enough to get away, but doesn't kill it. When we next see the Cimmerian, he's donned the armor of the nigh-mythical founder of the nation, King Thanus, and stirs up the people of Ophir against both Shahela and Balthis. There are some fun, though vague, "power to the people" themes here. Freeing Toiro and then setting his sights of Varia, Conan crosses paths with Shahela one last time. He has repeatedly said throughout the issue that he doesn't care to do combat with women when avoidable (thinking fondly of Bêlit and Red Sonja each time). He is spared that decision in the final moments by the return of the twelve-foot zombie creature. There's a surprising amount of pathos in Shahela's cries for Conan to help her, to not be devoured by this thing, and as Conan slays it, Shahela drops dead too. The panels don't make it clear whether he snapped her spine or broke her neck or if Conan's sword went just a little too far through the monster's gut. Either way, Ophir is saved.  This was to be Roy Thomas's second-to-last issue on Savage Sword for over a decade, and word was out that there would be someone new in the driver's seat. Issue #60, Roy's last continuous issue of his all-time 60-issue run on the title, didn't betray anything about his departure, but #61 sure did. In the letters section "Swords and Scrolls," new writer Michael Fleisher writes "A Special Note of Appreciation" to Roy's contributions on Conan through the years. It's probably the best send-off any writer could hope for. Fan reaction was mixed- one letter published in issue #62 bemoaned that he felt Roy had been stuck in a rut for a few years. Fleisher and the editorial team took the classy route and said they disagreed- that all Roy's work had been excellent. In the back of #63, a letter-writer really tore into Fleisher: I'm appalled. I'm truly appalled... The story. Michael Fleisher. His only real achievement so far has been DC's Jonah Hex, but I read SSOC #61 with an open mind. And in my opinion - I'd like to say it's trash, I'd like to say it's garbage, but I have to be honest. It's S - - - ! I'm sorry if the word offends anyone, and it will probably preclude any possible publication of this letter, but it's the word to best describe this misogynistic, sadistic, simple-minded piece of work.  Dave Clark of Haddon Heights, NJ goes on for like six more paragraphs, ending with "Thank you for listening." Marvel just responded, "You're welcome." One more steamed letter-writer wrote in, "Can't you guys think up anything original?" Readers of any of my writing about Savage Sword will know that I'm inclined to agree with these writers-in. Marvel didn't print any reactions to "Black Cloaks of Ophir" until issue #71, which were universally positive. Readers praised the suspense in the plot and Ernie Chan's art. Some proposed that Ernie take over John Buscema's mantle as the regular SSOC artist, which I wouldn't have minded, but only because Ernie is entirely a Buscema clone (I'm not joking, I got halfway through reading the issue before I realized they weren't Big John's pencils). The title page of the issue says that "Black Cloaks of Ophir" was adapted from a plot by Andrew J. Offutt, whose work on Conan and the Sorcerer Roy had recently adapted in the mag, so I'd be interested in knowing how much interplay there was between the two of them. Roy had one more story ready to go, but had long-since moved on to DC Comics. It would be one of his best originals. I've never seen anyone talk about "Black Cloaks of Ophir." It seems to be one of the issues that hasn't risen to the same level as most of the REH adaptations, and since it exists outside the first 60 issues of the title, I bet most readers haven't given it a go. They should!
 In December of 2024, I published a project I had been working on for quite some time: putting the first 100 issues of The Savage Sword of Conan into chronological order. I have since then continued to read as much Savage Sword as I can, continuing to place the stories in an attempt at chronological order. While a lot of people have tried to collapse all the Marvel Comics Conan stories into one chronology, I won't be doing that. Once or twice, the comics cross over (like when SSOC #1 continues a story from CTB #42, which had come out just a bit earlier) and sometimes they reference each other (like when SSOC #204 involves characters introduced years prior in CTB #84-94). But the two often offer conflicting accounts several times: for example, they each have different stories about how Conan gained the name Amra. Additionally, Conan the Barbarian frequently teams Conan up with original companions for a length of a few issues who, if these stories were happening concurrently, would have those characters be weirdly and intermittently absent. And finally, the two just feel like very different beasts. Even though the two technically take place in the same timeline, I'll mostly leave Conan the Barbarian out. Like in my previous post, there are a few factors that I used to place these stories:
Below is my updated attempt to put all these stories into an order. I'd say "a coherent order" but one character having this many adventures in one lifetime truly doesn't make any sense at all. Stories added into the chronology by Savage Sword are marked in red. If a story was not adapted into a story in Savage Sword, but there is a comic adaption from one of the other Bronze Age anthology Conan books like Conan the Barbarian, King Conan, or Savage Tales, I've marked those as well. Notes are marked in blue. I hope this thing isn't so long that it takes forever to load. The earliest stories in Savage Sword's chronology pick up in Conan's early youth, before he leaves Cimmeria for the first time.  "Rite of Blood" - Savage Sword 89
"Hunters and Hunted!" - Savage Sword 83
"Old Garrad's Heart" - Savage Sword 203
"Day of Manhood" - Savage Sword 227
"The Black Hound of Death" - Savage Sword 219
Here, we see a time jump of a few years. We skip over Conan leaving Cimmeria for the first time. If you want to see a version of that, the first Conan the Barbarian Free Comic Book Day Issue from Titan covers it. We pick up with Conan up north, and one of the first Robert E. Howard stories. "The Coming of Conan" - Savage Sword 222
 "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" - Savage Tales of Conan 1 "The Mill" - Savage Sword 105
"Legions of the Dead" - Savage Sword 39 "The Thing in the Crypt" - Conan the Barbarian 92 "The Mercenary" - Savage Sword 126
Here is the start of the thief stories. Several of them were not adapted in Savage Sword, but only in Conan the Barbarian. That's always puzzled me- "Rogues in the House" is so good ("The God in the Bowl" is good too, just not quite as good), I'm not sure why it never made it to SSOC. Maybe Roy felt he'd done it well enough in CtB. "The God in the Bowl" - Conan the Barbarian 7 "Rogues in the House" - Conan the Barbarian 10 - 11 "The Tower of the Elephant" - Savage Sword 24 (also adapted in Conan the Barbarian #4) "The Darksome Demon of Raba-Than" - Savage Sword 84
 "The World Beyond the Mists" - Savage Sword 93
Conan and the Sorcerer - Savage Sword 53 - 55
Conan the Mercenary - Savage Sword 217 - 218 The Sword of Skelos - Savage Sword 57 - 58 "Alchemy" - Savage Sword 118
"The Treachery of the Gray Wolf!" - Savage Sword 104
"Thief in the Night" - Savage Sword 213
"The Cave Dwellers" - Savage Sword 77
"The Palace of Pleasure" - Savage Sword 81
"The Blood Ruby of Death" - Savage Sword 98
"The Hall of the Dead" / the Nestor synopsis - Conan the Barbarian 8 The Nestor synopsis, known more commonly by the name of the title L. Sprague de Camp gave it: "The Hall of the Dead," is usually considered the end of the thief stories. Other than one small digression in SSOC 91's B story, the Turanian mercenary stories begin immediately. In Roy Thomas's Conan the Barbarian series, the Turanian mercenary period is greatly expanded with the "War of the Tarim," frequently referenced in stories penned by Thomas.  "The Vezek Inn" - Savage Sword 109
"The Beast" - Savage Sword 91
"The Valley of Howling Shadows" - Savage Sword 118
"The Chain" - Savage Sword 91
"The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" - Savage Sword 13
"The Hand of Nergal" / the Yaralet fragment - Conan the Barbarian 30 "The City of Skulls" - Savage Sword 59 "The People of the Summit" "The Curse of the Monolith" - Savage Sword 33 "Night of the Rat!" - Savage Sword 95
"A Dream of an Empire" - Savage Sword 112
"The Secret of Skull River" - Savage Sword 5
 "The Colossus of Shem" - Savage Sword 72
"The Colossus of Shem" in SSOC 72 is functionally the end of the Turanian mercenary stories. In several original stories along with a few adaptions, Conan wanders west afterword. In some chronologies, Conan follows the Road of Kings west from Turan. In others, he wanders a bit more. Conan and the Spider God - Savage Sword 207 - 210
"The Blood-Stained God" - Marvel Super Special 9 (and reprinted in Conan Saga 80) "Curse of the Ageless Ones" - Savage Sword 128
"The Curse of the Undead Man" - Savage Sword 1
 "Autumn of the Witch" - Savage Sword 130
"The Forever Phial" - Savage Sword 8
"A Horror of a Different Color" - Savage Sword 227
"The Lair of the Ice Worm" - Savage Sword 34 "Winter of the Wolf" - Savage Sword 132
"Cursers of the Light" - Savage Sword 133
"The Quest for the Shrine of Luma" - Savage Sword 113
"Child of Sorcery" - Savage Sword 29
"The Sea of No Return" - Savage Sword 66
"The Debt of the Warrior" - Savage Sword 123
"Queen of the Black Coast" marks the beginning of Conan's first pirate period. His first pirate crew is aboard the Tigress with Belit. Many authors have told extended adventures of Conan and Belit together, which usually happen between the first and second chapters of "Queen of the Black Coast." "Queen of the Black Coast," Chapter I - Conan the Barbarian 58  "The Leopard Men of Darfar" - Savage Sword 97
"Lion of the Waves" - Savage Sword 86
"Deepest Devotion" - Savage Sword 107
"Queen of the Black Coast," Chapters II - V - Conan the Barbarian 59
Conan comes ashore ending his first pirate period and here begins to wander north from the Black Kingdoms in his next experiences as a mercenary. "The Vale of Lost Women" - Conan the Barbarian 104 "The Castle of Terror" "The Snout in the Dark" - Conan the Barbarian 106 - 107 "The Fountain of Umir" - Savage Sword 121
After Conan returns to the Hyborian kingdoms from the south, we move into a period of Conan's life mostly unseen in the original REH canon where he acts as a mercenary for various city-states in Corinthia.  "Werewoman" - Savage Sword 221
"The Lurker in the Labyrinth" - Savage Sword 71
"Demons in the Firelight" - Savage Sword 78 - 79
"Devourer of Souls" - Savage Sword 90
"The Ape-Bat of Marmet Tarn" - Savage Sword 96
 "Forest of Fiends" - Savage Sword 91
"Claws of the Osprey" - Savage Sword 108
"The Shatterer of Worlds" - Savage Sword 109
"Lions of Corinthia" - Savage Sword 228
"The God of Thieves" - Savage Sword 211
"The Blood of Bel" - Savage Sword 212
Here we leave Corinthia and enter Conan's more commonly-accepted first mercenary period. "The Dweller in the Depths" - Savage Sword 70
 "The Gamesmen of Asgalun" - Savage Sword 89
"Eye of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 69
"The Vengeance of Nitocris" - Savage Sword 216
"Hawks Over Shem" - Savage Sword 36 "Black Colossus" - Savage Sword 2 "At the Mountain of the Moon God" - Savage Sword 3
"Shadows in the Dark"  "Colossus of Argos" - Savage Sword 80
"Isle of the Faceless Ones" - Savage Sword 115
"The Wizard-Fiend of Zingara" - Savage Sword 61
"The Mud Men of Keshan" - Savage Sword 111
"Death Dwarves Stygia" - Savage Sword 94
"Children of Rhan" - Savage Sword 64
"The Temple of the Tiger" - Savage Sword 62
Conan here heads east to the Vilayet Sea and begins his second pirate period, this time with the crew known as the Red Brotherhood. "Iron Shadows in the Moon" - Savage Sword 4 "Sons of the White Wolf" - Savage Sword 37
"The Road of the Eagles" - Savage Sword 38 Here is the beginning of Conan's period as a Zuagir raider. This period is often visited in SSOC. "A Witch Shall Be Born" - Savage Sword 5 "Mirror of the Manticore" - Savage Sword 58
"Sleeper Beneath the Sands" - Savage Sword 6
"Citadel at the Center of Time" - Savage Sword 7
"Black Tears" - Savage Sword 35  "The Curse of the Cat Goddess" - Savage Sword 9
"Moat of Blood" - Savage Sword 63
"Reavers of the Steppes" - Savage Sword 131
Savage Sword 218 - 221, 223 - 226, 229 - 235
"Isle of the Hunter" - Savage Sword 88
"Shadows in Zamboula" - Savage Sword 14 "The Star of Khorala" - Savage Sword 44 "The Hill of Horror" - Savage Sword 95
"The Country of the Knife" - Savage Sword 11
"One Night in the Maul" - Savage Sword 99
"When a God Lives" - Savage Sword 100
"At the Altar of the Goat God" - Savage Sword 125
"Lords of the Falcon" - Savage Sword 116
"The Winds of Aka-Gaar" - Savage Sword 117
 "The Haunters of Castle Crimson" - Savage Sword 12
"The Fangs of the Serpent" - Savage Sword 65
"Dominion of the Bat" - Savage Sword 76
"The Iron Lions of the Kharamun" - Savage Sword 102
"The Blood of the Gods" - Savage Sword 28
This is the end of Conan's Zuagir period. Conan usually returns to acting as a mercenary once he leaves the desert. "The Slithering Shadow" - Savage Sword 20 "Drums of Tombalku" - Savage Sword 21 "Nekht Semerkeht" - Savage Sword 223
 "Escape from the Temple" - Savage Sword 87
"The Devil in Iron" - Savage Sword 15 "The Crypt!" - Savage Sword 105
The Flame Knife - Savage Sword 31 - 32 "The Toll" - Savage Sword 114
"The White Tiger of Vendhya!" - Savage Sword 103
"There Will Come a Dark Stranger" - Savage Sword 124
"The Daughter of the God King" - Savage Sword 85
"Revenge of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 86
"The Daughter of Raktavashi" - Savage Sword 234
"A Rage of Goblins" - Savage Sword 235
"The People of the Black Circle" - Savage Sword 16 - 19 "The Road to Shondakar" - Savage Sword 228
"...In the Eye of the Beholder" - Savage Sword 111
"Star of Thamazhu" - Savage Sword 120
 "Master of the Broadsword" - Savage Sword 132
"The Siren" - Savage Sword 101
"The Blossoms of the Black Lotus" - Savage Sword 122
Here is the beginning of Conan's third pirate period, this time with the Barachans. "The Sea Mage's Daughter" - Savage Sword 129
"Seventh Isle of Doom" - Savage Sword 136
"Daughter of the Western Sea" - Savage Sword 213
"The Gem in the Tower" - Savage Sword 45 "Treasure" - Savage Sword 227
"The Pool of the Black One" - Savage Sword 22 - 23 "Plunder of Death Island" - Savage Sword 67
"The Changeling Quest" - Savage Sword 73
"The Temple of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" - Savage Sword 75
"The Demon in the Dark" - Savage Sword 82 - 83
"The Jeweled Bird" - Savage Sword 92
Conan the Buccaneer - Savage Sword 40 - 43
"The Informer" - Savage Sword 99
"Fued of Blood" - Savage Sword 106
"The Eyes of G'Bharr Rjinn!" - Savage Sword 107
 Savage Sword 189 - 206
"Swords of Sukhmet" - Savage Sword 225
"Red Nails" - Savage Tales of Conan 2 - 3 Conan and the Gods of the Mountain - Savage Sword 211 - 213, 215, 217
"Black Cloaks of Ophir" - Savage Sword 68
"Reunion in Scarlet" - Savage Sword 127
"Jewels of Gwahlur" - Savage Sword 25 "The Ivory Goddess" - Savage Sword 60 Here is the end of Conan's Barachan pirate episodes. Next, we see a few wandering stories before his time as an Aquilonian scout.  "The Armor of Zuulda Thaal" - Savage Sword 87
"The Fear of Crom" - Savage Sword 108
"The Opponents" - Savage Sword 116
"Homecoming" - Savage Sword 119
"The Crimson Citadel" - Savage Sword 141
"Secret of the Great Stone" - Savage Sword 123
"Lady of the Silver Snows" - Savage Sword 74
"The Army of the Dead" - Savage Sword 110
"Blind Vengeance" - Savage Sword 142
 "The Night of the Dark God" - Savage Tales of Conan 4
Savage Sword 144 - 150
"The Dwellers Under the Tombs" - Savage Sword 224
"The Boon" - Savage Sword 116
Here is the beginning of Conan's time in Aquilonia. First as a scout, then as king. "Three Lives for N'Garthl" - Savage Sword 135
"The Lost Legion" - Savage Sword 137
"Riddle of the Demuzaar" - Savage Sword 114
"Blood and Honor" - Savage Sword 143
"Lair of the Lizard God" - Savage Sword 138
"Garden of Blood" - Savage Sword 139
"The Girl of the Haunted Wood" - Savage Sword 140
"Beyond the Black River" - Savage Sword 26 - 27  "The Dark Stranger" - Savage Sword 88
"Mitra Defend Us" - Savage Sword 112
"Moon of Blood" - Savage Sword 46 "The Treasure of Tranicos" - Savage Sword 47 - 48  Conan the Liberator - Savage Sword 49 - 52
"Wolves Beyond the Border" - Savage Sword 59
"The Reign of Thulandra Thuu" - Savage Sword 214
"The Phoenix on the Sword" "The Phoenix in the Shadow" - Savage Sword 227
"The Scarlet Citadel" - Savage Sword 30 The Hour of the Dragon - Savage Sword 8 - 10 The Return of Conan - King Conan 5 - 8 Here is the end of Conan's young kingship and we see a time jump of around 10 years past the birth of his children. "The Witch of the Mists" - King Conan 1 "Challenge" - Savage Sword 93
 "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" - King Conan 2 "Red Moon of Zembabwei" - King Conan 3 "Shadows in the Skull" - King Conan 4 Conan of the Isles "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian" - Savage Sword 8 "Death-Song" implies Conan's death, some time in his 60s or 70s. After that, there are obviously no more Conan stories to tell. Or are there? There are a few that jump ahead even into the modern day. "Death's Dark Riders" - Savage Sword 219
"Death's Dark Tower" - Savage Sword 220
"Barbarians of the Border" - Savage Sword 200
"People of the Dark" - Savage Sword 6
Stories that were impossible to place There were a few stories told in Savage Sword that were just completely impossible to place. Unless I'm really missing something, they don't contain any contextual clues: Conan doesn't seem specifically young or old, there are no lines that indicate where the story takes place geographically, and there are no characters, items, or skills that give away a general time in Conan's life. Those are as follows: "The Lady of the Tower" - Savage Sword 98
"The Gift" - Savage Sword 100
"The Dinner Guest" - Savage Sword 110
"A Quiet Place" - Savage Sword 113
"The Warlord of the Castle" - Savage Sword 115
"The Haunters of Terror Tower" - Savage Sword 222
ConclusionWell, that's my best attempt. You may noticed that there are still about 30 issues missing, which I don't currently own. I'll continue to update this page. As I said last time, this was more of a nerdy chronology exercise than any kind of suggestion to read in this order. I've never been a fan of complicated comic book reading orders; they're unnecessary and add very little, like this one would. Are there any clues that I missed in these stories? I'd love to refine this if there's something that I haven't taken into account. Let me know in the comments, if so.   Savage Sword #232. Cover by Doug Beekman It's a small miracle that any comic is good for long. The need to continually be creative within the same sandbox, the demands of editors, the churn of collaborators, the tastes of comic fans completely at the mercy of hype, the challenges of just, you know, life makes any long-running comic a Sisyphean task to complete. I'm not here to sling mud at anyone's creative efforts. I want to examine one of the most interesting periods of one of my favorite comics. I detailed in "How Conan Conquered the Comics Code" how The Savage Sword of Conan came to life in the space left open by a revised Comics Code Authority to become an unlikely Bronze Age hit. Savage Sword would go on to become one of the greatest 1970s creations for Marvel and one of my favorite comic books of all time. And to be honest, there's a ton that's been written about Savage Sword's early issues. Jeffrey Talanian penned a good retrospective on Roy Thomas's Conan comics work for Blackgate just this January. Savage Sword's beginning has been thoroughly celebrated. But Savage Sword of Conan was not always one hit after the last. It went through a few distinct eras that made its publication into an interesting tapestry of good, bad, mediocre, and weird storytelling. After its initial run of greatness, it slumped into a strange period where it felt adrift on the Vilayet Sea: seldom truly terrible, but there were pieces missing from its enchanting first five-dozen issues. While much has been written about Roy Thomas's glorious first run on Savage Sword, less has been said about the rest. If you read the title's Wikipedia page, the "Publication History" section stops at the end of Roy's tenure and you might think that was the end of the story. There's a lot more to explore! From the Letters Page"I still enjoyed scripting Conan the Barbarian and companion mag Savage Sword of Conan enormously... but enthusiasms, like romances, wax and wane... and then wax and wane again." - Roy Thomas  Roy Thomas at home circa 1979 In spring 1980, Roy Thomas sat in his home in Los Angeles, California, where he had moved from New York with his wife a few years prior. For the last ten years, Roy had been employed by Marvel Comics as the writer and editor on the four-color Conan the Barbarian title, written more than sixty issues of the black-and-white companion mag Savage Sword of Conan, and had even penned years of dailies for the Conan newspaper strip. Always looking to avoid having to fill his schedule with any of Marvel's superhero fare, he had even recently launched a fourth Hyborian Age title, King Conan, which would soon be rebranded as Conan the King. This was all likely about to be behind him as he and Marvel had been unable to agree on a new writer/editor contract. His phone rang. It was a secretary from Marvel's offices in New York, and they had a message for him. He already knew he would be leaving the creative team for those Conan books, and while he hadn't announced his departure ahead of time, he had penned a short, one-paragraph farewell to the readers for the letters page at the back of his final issue, Conan the Barbarian #115. According to Roy, he wanted to go out with class: it was all warm fuzzies and didn't even hint that there might be bad blood between him and Marvel's management. "These fifteen years have been a ball," Roy had written. But the secretary at Marvel had bad news.  Conan the Barbarian #115. Cover art by John Buscema, Ernie Chan, and Irv Watanabe They wouldn't be printing the farewell note in his final issue. Roy clearly had a lot of animosity toward Marvel's editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, but figured that Shooter would at least be professional enough to tell him of a decision like that himself. Roy told the secretary something to the effect that Shooter was a real asshole and hung up the phone. As the connection between the New York office and his LA home severed, Roy had a feeling that his time with Conan was done. He'd spent ten years of his life chronicling the adventures of the bronzed barbarian, but that was over now. He assumed he'd never write Conan again. He was wrong. All-New Sword & Sorcery Thrillers Savage Sword #39. Cover by Earl Norem The first sixty issues of Savage Sword of Conan, which comprise Roy Thomas's first run on the title and were mostly drawn by John Buscema, are a certified tour de force of comic creators at the top of their game- not to mention the concurrent 115 in Conan the Barbarian and other Conan titles. Their run on Savage Sword bounced all over the timeline of Conan's life, adapting classic Robert E. Howard yarns, retrofitting Howard stories to feature Conan, and sneaking in few originals. They also took advantage of the literary boom of Conan pastiches from that period, treating new works like "Legions of the Dead" by L. Sprague de Camp and "Conan and the Sorcerer" by Andrew J. Offutt with the same care as they did undisputed Howard classics like "The Scarlet Citadel." This was always a testament to Thomas and Buscema's work together: they could elevate just about any story they got their hands on by emphasizing the right elements, and downplaying any that drag.  Savage Sword #21. Cover by Earl Norem Roy treated all Conan work as equals: he didn't only choose to adapt the major works like "Black Colossus" and "Red Nails," though those were certainly present, but he tackled less-celebrated works like "Drums of Tombalku" and "The Servants of Bit-Yakin" within the first 25 books. The really easy thing for him was that, as editor and writer of the book, he could make all the editorial decisions, assign himself whatever he felt best to write, then turn it over to John Buscema to pencil (as was the Marvel method) before he would complete scripting the book. Since Savage Sword was free of the constraints of the Comics Code Authority, it could tell full-length stories with all the impalements in battle, the horrifying god-creatures, and nubile Nemedians in-tact. That fact is important when translating Robert E. Howard's work, which was frequently dark and salacious. While I try to never make the mistake of thinking that creators aren't thinking about money and are purely in it for the storytelling, those sixty issues come pretty close. They're just about the only thing that, in my adulthood, has brought me back to the same feelings I had when I was ten years old, reading black-and-white Amazing Spider-Man reprints from the sixties. Roy and John had a remarkable way of capturing pure adventure. It was not to last. The well was poisoned by at least October 1979 when Roy Thomas said to the New York Times, "There is a feeling among most of the people I know that Marvel has become more callous and inhuman."  Jim Shooter When Roy's contract as a writer/editor came up for renewal in 1980, he was pretty sure he wasn't going to be extending his employment at the House of Ideas. He had seen that his friend and fellow Marvel legend Marv Wolfman had been told they would only renew his contract as a writer, not a writer/editor, and anticipated that the same thing was about to happen to him. Roy figured he could skip the whole charade and just quit if he was going to be offered the same deal; he had zero interest in writing books he wasn't also the editor on. Cryptically, someone representing Marvel told him, "The way we treated Marv is not necessarily the way we'd treat you." Roy didn't really know what that meant. In a letter from editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, he was told, "I can't and won't" guarantee a writer-editor position, and though Roy would probably be allowed to be the editor on his own books, Shooter wanted it to go through the Marvel office at all stages of production. He was told to have his own lawyer draw up a new contract. When Roy tells it, he usually leaves the exact conditions of his exit from Marvel vague; he will mostly leave out details about their contract dispute and just say that he was lied to, without ever really specifying what he was lied to about, other than maybe saying that there would, in fact, be an editor over him. He's often said that his contract at Marvel was just allowed to "run out." By the end of 1980, that's exactly what happened. "I would hardly deny that I bore considerable ill will toward editor-in-chief Jim Shooter for the way he had negotiated with me in recent months over a revised contract. I won’t go into details, because Jim has his own side of the story and I’m not interested in trying to convert anybody to “my side” in this particular setting. I decided that I’d simply go quietly into that good night, still writing Savage Sword stories to fill out my contract until it ran out, a very few months away.”  Roy Thomas A word about Roy Thomas: he was probably a good fit to write Conan not only for his narration skills and vivid imagination, but because he's like the Cimmerian in one important way. He does not like to give second chances. Barry Windsor-Smith once lied to him about what the word "wanker" meant when he used it in an early Conan story and Roy says he never trusted Barry again. Jack Kirby changed his mind about something he told Roy he would do on a Fantastic Four story, and, Roy said he'd never trust Kirby either. Writing even years after his exit from Marvel, Roy's distaste for editor-in-chief Jim Shooter is still palpable. Roy paints Shooter as conniving and manipulative, but to his credit, Shooter had whipped Marvel into shape in Roy's last years there and was extending very good page rates and rights (relative to the rest of the industry) to its creators. Shooter had been the stabilizing factor in a revolving door of 5 editors-in-chief at Marvel which included Archie Goodwin, Marv Wolfman, and, yes, Roy Thomas. Whereas Roy had been a very hands-off editor-in-chief, allowing his writers and artists to do almost anything they desired, Shooter was very much in people's business and frequently re-wrote dialogue and directed stories. Yes, Shooter killed Gwen Stacy, but he also helped mastermind Giant-Size X-Men #1. He oversaw the ill-advised and much-maligned Avengers #200, but also helped turn Daredevil into a superstar as opposed to "weak-tea Spider-Man" as Marvel historian Sean Howe put it. I mean, the month Shooter took over Marvel, they published 45 comic books, only 26 of which shipped on time. They even received a phone call from the printer asking, "Are you guys still in business?" That situation didn't last long under Jim "Trouble" Shooter. While Shooter was very controversial, it would be really hard to argue that he was not also vital to Marvel's success for much of his tenure. Both Thomas and Shooter probably deserve some slack. According to Len Wein, "It was an impossible job. And as long as we kept doing that impossible job, they wouldn't believe it was impossible."  Stan Lee and Jim Shooter Roy noticed that in his final King Conan issues at Marvel, there were a few details he perceived as slights directed at him. Instead of the letters pages reading "Dear Roy" as they had for a decade, they more generically opened, "Dear Editor." In King Conan, he was being listed only as the writer, despite having done most of the editorial as well. It's clear that nobody on the outside anticipated his departure. In the letters page for Conan #115, also the book's 10th anniversary issue, one letter says, "Here's hoping for ten more years, and ten beyond that!" I wonder how disappointed that reader was to pick up issue 116. By the time Roy received that phone call from the assistant at Marvel HQ, he was content to let Marvel, and Conan the Barbarian take a long ride down the River Styx into Stygia. He flew to New York as a personal favor to Marvel president Jim Galton and held a meeting with Galton, Stan Lee, and Jim Shooter. Roy was told he could sign the contract or not, to which he responded, "It's been a nice 15 years," and walked out of the office. He went downstairs to meet his girlfriend and said, "I feel very dirty. Let's get the fuck out of here." Roy's time with Savage Sword of Conan was not done forever, though, and strangely enough, it wasn't even done in the short term. Seas of No Return Cover art for Savage Sword #64 by Joe Jusko With its chief creative officer having left Savage Sword of Conan, not to mention how people talk about the next hundred-some-odd issues today, one might expect it to become an immediate dumpster fire. But strangely enough, Savage Sword was about to enter one of its most interesting periods. After Roy left Marvel about the time issue 60 came out, there were still about a half-dozen issues of Savage Sword that he had ready to go. That would keep the title chugging for a while seeing as it was only published semi-monthly except for the high summer season. But Roy's final issues didn't get published immediately- instead, new writer Michael Fleisher's first few issues made the page, followed by one by Bruce Jones, before Roy's name was listed as the author again. This confused some loyal readers when Roy's last few stories came out. Was he back? Unfortunately no, he told fans at conventions and through the mail.  The children of Rhan. Art by John Buscema The Fleisher-scripted issues 61-63 are pretty good, jumping around some of Conan's middle life. Issue 61, "The Wizard-Fiend of Zingara," features some scheming royals, some magical trickery, and some dungeon crawling for an issue that picks up nicely where Roy left off. #62's "The Temple of the Tiger" is a Red Brotherhood pirate story with an island of Amazons. "Moat of Blood" in issue 63 is a little dorkier, featuring a sentient kelp monster thing in an evil king's moat. Weirdly enough, Conan fights some kind of sea monster in all three of Fleisher's first issues. The real surprise is issue 64, penned by Bruce Jones. "Children of Rhan," featuring Conan helping a young girl (who, as you could probably guess, is not just a regular young girl) return to her people, stacks up favorably against almost anything Roy Thomas ever wrote. Jones would plot and script 10 issues altogether, mostly up to #82 (he also wrote issue 8, way back in 1975), but his issue #64 is his finest. In fact, issue 64 is probably better than some of the Roy Thomas issues that follow it, as though Roy is writing on autopilot for a few, knowing his tenure is coming to an end. Roy does choose to go out with a bang, though. Issue 68, "Black Cloaks of Ophir," is a fun politically-intriguing tale which shows off some of Roy's best abilities to write engaging prose and showcases Conan as more than just a beefcake who can swing a sword. Issue 69, "Eye of the Sorcerer," his truly final issue on Savage Sword for over a decade, is a ridiculously epic, beautifully-drawn adventure story that could be adapted into a D&D campaign that would make Matthew Mercer blush. It's quite the feat that he was able to squeeze the whole thing into only one issue. And with that, Roy was gone.  A page from Savage Sword #69. Art by Ernie Chan Michael Fleisher picks up for real in issue 70 with some serviceable body horror and monster masses in his first few issues as Savage Sword's permanent chronicler. Fleisher's a noticeably different writer than Roy: he has a different feel for things and favors other aspects of Conan's mythology. Roy has a deft hand for mirroring Howard's florid prose in a way that feels serious and he always adds weight though his narration in fight scenes that otherwise might just be filled with sound effects of clanging steel and bellows of pain. Fleisher's writing is a little more tropey and lighter, a touch more Saturday-morning-cartoon than 1930s pulp. Both authors make frequent use of the word "selfsame," so there's that. While Roy preferred Conan's piratical periods and his kozaki raider stint, Fleisher sets many of his stories in the period of Conan's life when he is acting as a mercenary for city-states in Corinthia, a time only alluded to before him. He makes use of original, recurring villains far more than Roy does and explores fewer lost cities with magic MacGuffins. And while Roy adapted many pastiche writers, both decades-old and contemporary, Fleisher stuck to originals.  A page from Savage Sword #74. Art by Val Mayerik I would be remiss to not mention one single issue during this period written by X-Men revelator Chris Claremont, who I would bet sits on most readers' Mount Rushmores of Bronze Age creators. Issue 74, "Lady of the Silver Snows" is a dramatic, rich, romantic one-off story drawn by Val Mayerik that surpasses almost anything else on the title. I've never really seen anyone mention this story, but it's a hidden gem that deserves to be in the conversation of greatest Savage Sword stories of all time. And with this last, glorious high of adventure storytelling, Savage Sword of Conan's peak was over. "Confounding all belief, HE LIVES!" Writer Harlan Ellison Late in the evening some time in 1979, The Comics Journal writer Gary Groth strode into the Manhattan apartment of Harlan Ellison for an interview that would last until 3 in the morning. Groth was looking for Ellison to sling some shit- he admits it was his M.O. at the time. He wanted a polemic. Ellison was all too happy to oblige and opened fire on people who are now considered the stuff of legend: Don Heck ("Five thousand Don Hecks are not worth one Neal Adams."), H.R. Giger ("Giger's clearly deranged. Show [his work] to any psychiatrist."), and H.P. Lovecraft ("[Other writers] have not got the lunatic mentality of Lovecraft."). Oddly enough, Ellison doesn't mean it all exactly negatively. In a perverse way, I think he thought he was sort of giving a compliment as he goes on a tangent about Conan creator Robert E. Howard. "Howard was crazy as a bed bug. He was insane. This was a man who was a huge bear of a man, who had these great dream fantasies of barbarians and mightily thewed warriors and Celts and Vikings and riding in the Arabian desert and Almuric, Conan, Kull, and all these weird ooky-booky words. He lived in Cross Plains, Texas in the middle of the Depression, and he never went more than 20 or 30 miles from his home. He lived with his mother until his mother died and then he went down and sat in the car and blew his brains out. Now, that's a sick person. This is not a happy, adjusted person. That shows up in Howard's work. You can read a Conan story as opposed to... take all the lesser writers, all the guys who do the Conan rip-offs and imitations, which are such garbage, because they are all manqué. They can't imitate Howard because they're not crazy. They're just writers writing stories because they admired Howard, but they don't understand you have to be bugfuck to write that way."  Michael Fleisher Ellison also takes on young comic writer Michael Fleisher for his work on an apparently pretty fucked up novel and the titles The Spectre and Jonah Hex. He calls Fleisher "certifiable" and "so fuckin' twisted," so Fleisher tried to sue the pants off of him and lost, years later. The interview devastated Fleisher's career, who honestly seems like a good guy that didn't deserve it. He eventually packed up his comics work and essentially changed careers entirely, travelling, getting his PhD and becoming an academic. It wouldn't be the first time Fleisher left behind comics- he once said he sold his collection of over 2000 comic books for a penny each to a "junk lady" on NYC's Third Avenue and didn't pick up another for almost fifteen years. Compared to his work on other comics, Michael Fleisher's time chronicling Conan the Cimmerian is almost no more than a footnote. While I really disagree with the broad strokes (in 2025, I think we're really over the "You gotta, like, suffer to make good art, man" attitude) but I kind of wish Harlan Ellison had been more right about the connection between Howard and Fleisher. Being of the same mindset as Robert E. Howard might have yielded some comics that hewed closer to Howard's original. The World Beyond the Mists Savage Sword #75. Cover by Earl Norem It's not great after issue #74. Unfortunately, Michael Fleisher's tenure on Savage Sword really sags, both in terms of ideas and storytelling. It starts almost right away, from his first story as the series' permanent lead writer. Issue 75, "The Temple of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" is, for most of its aspects, a fine issue of Savage Sword. It might be a little boilerplate, but this thing ran for 235 issues; it would be a little unrealistic for me to demand that they all knock my socks off. However, issue 75 has one thing working against it: it introduces the villain Bor'aqh Sharaq, who kind of sets the tone for what's to come. Challenging Captain Bor'aqh Sharaq for command of a pirate ship, Conan cuts of Sharaq's hand and sends him tumbling overboard. The character Nahrela looks at Conan and remarks, "Mark my words, Cimmerian! Captain Sharaq is out there somewhere-- and alive! And someday he'll come back to split your black-maned head in twain. And when he does, twil be something of a pity, really--." I couldn't agree with Nahrela more.  Sharaq begins working his way back toward Conan, gradually losing body parts and then eventually acquiring a spiked helmet and some sci-fi weapons like a spring-loaded knife launcher where his hand used to be. Bor'aqh Sharaq feels like he's intended to be the Prometheus to Conan's Batman: an anachronistically teched-up villain with a pointy helmet, mechanical augmentations, and eventually a laser gun (*sigh*). But whereas Prometheus is an exciting villain that makes you wonder how Batman will defeat his mirror-image villain without becoming as bad as him, Bor'aqh Sharaq just makes you wonder what Robert E. Howard would have thought of the whole situation. The helmet doesn't look menacing, it just looks dumb. The weapons feel like accessories for an action figure. And all that would be somewhat forgiven if Sharaq's characterization was cool, but he's not even a particularly formidable foe- he's just an asshole that's more tenacious than the usual Hyborian bad guy. Sharaq would become a recurring adversary. The issues following "The Temple of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" fare a little better: "Dominion of the Bat" and "The Cave Dwellers" are more classic Conan adventures. Still, I started to find myself pleasantly surprised when I would close an issue and think, "Hey, that was actually pretty decent." For most of his run, Fleisher introduces his readers to a lot of original villains, most of which have a pretty silly, superhero quality to them like Sharaq. Wrarrl the Soul Eater commands an army of hideous clay people to do his bidding and oscillates between being a pretty cool threat and a pretty dweeby General Grievous type. He feels like much more of a worthy opponent, and certainly doesn't wear out his welcome like Sharaq (even though, if I'm being honest, his costume is probably even more ridiculous).  Bor'aqh Sharaq, Wraarl the Soul Eater, and the Brotherhood of the Falcon The Brotherhood of the Falcon are another set of baddies that Conan would fight a total of seven times. Each one nameless, faceless, and mostly brainless, these ninja-like hordes wouldn't feel out of place in an issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or an episode of Power Rangers, always dead-set on getting revenge on their nemesis Conan while never seeming to get anywhere close to winning. It wouldn't have surprised me if Conan ever looked over to them and asked, "Sorry, who are you again?" These guys kept popping up, usually at the periphery of stories during Fleisher's run that ended up nearly as long as Roy's.  A page from Savage Sword #94. Art by Val Mayerik These issues played more with science fiction and less with the Weird Tales element of off-putting sorcery and forbidden magic. Like a James Bond film, many of the one-off villains are denoted as the bad guy because they're ugly or have an obvious deformity. Countless piggish kings get the wool pulled over their eyes by a devious sorcerer with a deformity or scar. It's rarely truly terrible (issue 89's "Gamesmen of Asgalun" or issue 94's "Death Dwarves Stygia" which is seemingly missing an apostrophe or the word "of" in its title) but at that selfsame moment, something just feels different about the title under Fleisher's stewardship. Some of the magic of the original is gone. Savage Sword has less of an identity. "Death Dwarves Stygia" is probably my vote for the worst issue of the entire series. Its plot is dumb and meanspirited, the characters are uninspired, and even Val Mayerik's usually-beautiful art is brought back down to Earth by notorious corner-cutter Vince Colletta. There are still a few excellent stories here and there, many of which are backup stories penned by Marvel all-star Christopher Priest, then still writing under the name Jim Owsley. Issues 92 through 109 mostly feature B stories from him, and they frequently outshine the A story. Priest manages to be clever, exciting, and surprising in very few pages. Like Roy Thomas was prone to, he sometimes fills in areas of Conan's backstory that had never been explored, like showing us exactly how Conan ends up in King Yildiz's service for Turan. One of the best backups is titled simply "The Crypt," by Jim Neal, William Johnson, and Geof Isherwood (who has actually commented on this blog before). It's an illustrated verse of Conan marching into a haunted castle to rescue Octavia from "The Devil in Iron." Simple, short, and effective.  Chuck Dixon After issue 112, the final continuous Fleisher-written story, Larry Yakata, Gary Kwapisz, and Don Kraar step in to contribute a few issues each before a third full-time Savage Sword writer would be picked. This time it was Charles Dixon, better known to comic readers as Chuck. During my first read of Savage Sword, I was very excited to reach this point: Chuck Dixon's one of my favorite writers of the late 80s and early 90s! His Robin and Nightwing material is fantastic and helped establish the Boy Wonder as his own hero outside of Batman's shadow. I was a little disappointed. Dixon's Savage Sword continues many of the trends from Fleisher's run: rarely falling to the level of an outright stinker but also very seldom reaching any sort of adventurous heights. His first issue puts Conan up north, which is always a bit of a plus for me. We have so many legions of stories that take place in tropical or desert environs that it's always a nice change of pace to get Conan up in the snows. He defends a village from a werewolf horde, and it's... fine. His second issue is pretty darn weird and features a subterranean race of monkey-like beings becoming friends with a long-lost father, who's back from the grave (but not really). It kind of beggars description. It's not the last time that one of Dixon's stories would leave me a little baffled. Issue 140's "The Girl of the Haunted Wood" is memorable in that its warpy dream sequences are pretty different from the usual monster-and-magic fare. Chuck does have some highlights, especially with issue 144: "The Waiting Doom." Pairing Conan up with Red Sonja, the two race against a company of men who wish Conan dead, featuring an iron-masked giant named Rhuk and some eldritch god fun.  A page from Savage Sword #145. Art by Gary Kwapisz Unfortunately, the highlights are outweighed by some paint-by-numbers Conan stories. It's kind of hard to actually identify why it gets worse, because Conan is still, in the strictest sense, doing what he's always done. But most issues don't feel tied to any specific time in Conan's life, which causes them to feel less sweeping, less epic, and maybe lacking in imagination. The villains all feel one-note and pretty much none of them are memorable. Very few of the locales have interesting stories that make you want to plunge deeper into tombs of spider-haunted mystery. The title stretches on, feeling a little less tied to the original adventuresome spirit of Robert E. Howard's character, and more like its own, generic thing. Every now and then, you'll get a story set adjacent to "Beyond the Black River," or featuring a Howard character, but most often, you could swap Conan out for a more generic fantasy hero and not much would change. As I worked my way through the mid-100s for the first time, I found myself less invested in the title and less engaged by the stories.  A panel from Savage Sword #189. Art by Mike Docherty As happened when Roy Thomas and Michael Fleisher had concluded their runs on Savage Sword, Chuck Dixon's wound down and there was another smattering of authors who would pen an issue or two at a time between clear lead writers. Issue 189 by Michael Higgins feels like a microcosm of the title as a whole at that point. Conan acts out of character (laughing at enslaved people for sale on the auction block, killing a man just to take his hooded robe) and the plot feels random. It calls all the way back to the "Zukala's Daughter" story from Conan the Barbarian issues 5, 14, and 15, which were twenty year-old issues by that point, but it doesn't really do so in any interesting way. It doesn't exactly feel like time wasted to read it, but there's a stack of unread, compelling comics on my coffee table calling my name, and Savage Sword of Conan just feels like it's going through the motions as it eases into the 90s. Let Bygones be Bygones"Working for DC is a little bit like quitting comics." - Roy Thomas  All-Star Squadron #1. Cover by Rich Buckler In 1986, Roy Thomas had been working at Marvel's rival, DC Comics, for about six years. He had actually been doing work for DC much longer than that- scripting episodes of the Plastic Man TV show before he quit Marvel in 1980 (their refusal to allow space for him to do DC work was one of the many things that drove him to quit). In those years, Roy had some success reviving some Golden Age heroes, looking backward in books like Justice Society of America and All-Star Squadron. I actually reached out to 84 year-old Roy Thomas about this time in his life and he said that writing All-Star Squadron during the 80s was the only book he enjoyed writing more than Conan, but DC's method of publishing was mostly not to his liking. He also had the chance to write the story for the movie Conan the Destroyer, but the final film was very unlike what he and Gerry Conway had put together. Despite the vitriol he felt when he'd left Marvel, the feelings had subsided. He wrote a letter to Jim Shooter: "Dear Jim, I don't know if I agree with Roy here: he certainly was a grudge-carrier. He took things very personally. Shooter opined in a now-deleted 2011 blog post: "I have no doubt that Roy and I will always have a number of points of disagreement, but I agree with his sentiment that we’re really not all that far apart. I think we are both men of good will who wanted the same thing, the best for the task at hand—making comics... With the personal conflicts between them mostly taken care of, Roy returned to Marvel in 1986 to work on some of their "New Universe" line, just barely catching the last bit of Jim Shooter's tenure as editor-in-chief. Shooter was fired on April 15th, 1987. Roy had written him a letter just a month prior. "I’ve long regretted that our different (and both quite reasonable in their varying ways) objectives in 1980 led-- perhaps inevitably-- to a break ‘twixt Marvel and myself, and I regret some of my own more extreme actions at the time. I’ve been impressed by your professional ability to let bygones be bygones, including letting Stan’s Soapbox “plugging” me to be printed, and I’d like to think I’d have done the same, were our positions reversed."  Conan the Adventurer #1. Cover by Rafael Kayanan It's not clear whether the two have ever spoken since. [Update: Jim Shooter passed away in June 2025. Roy Thomas has said that the two ran into one another a few times in his last years and ended on good terms.] Roy told me another thing when I emailed him. He said since he was back at Marvel, it was no longer as an editor: he was a writer solely. That meant that he was always looking for more books to fill up his schedule. A "young Conan" series called Conan the Adventurer had just been canned- Roy wrote the final issue of it under a pen name. He never really thought that book measured up to the 70s stuff, and the editors at Marvel agreed, so they cancelled it. The sales for Conan the Barbarian had been dropping, especially since Conan the Destroyer had been kind of a flop, so Roy was offered the chance to return to Conan the Barbarian in hopes that his return would help the sales rebound. Shortly after that, he was asked to return to writing Savage Sword. After over a decade away, the middling black-and-white mag was about to experience an unlikely resurgence. It Seems Hard to Believe Savage Sword #190. Cover by Earl Norem In October of 1991, Roy Thomas's name graced the byline for Savage Sword of Conan for the first time in over a decade, for issue #190. There had been 120 Savage Sword issues published since he'd left the book, about double the number that he'd written during his first tenure. As if to say, "I know I've been away a while, maybe you have too," issue 190 features a recap of sorts. On a long sea voyage from the Barachan Isles to Khitai, Conan recounts much of his history to his Khitan employer and the skull of Thulsa Doom, hitting many of the major beats of his life: the siege of Venarium, his thievery in Zamora, Belit's whirlwind love for him, time served in various militaries, time spent fighting several gods, time fondly remembered with friends. Thulsa Doom asks, "Is it really more than ten years since Belit died?" Conan replies: "It seems hard to believe." It feels to me like Roy reminding us what's so great about this fictional world, and reminding himself what he loved about it. Is it really more than ten years since he last wrote one of these adventures? It seems hard to believe.  A page from Savage Sword #194. Art by John Buscema It is almost comical at how much better Savage Sword gets the very second Roy returns. The narration improves, the stories are more inspired, the action is more exciting, and Conan feels more like who you want him to be. But the guy writing the book was not the only change that was being made here. Savage Sword of Conan was about to do something it hadn't really done before: be told in chronological order, like the Conan the Barbarian title. Yes, it begins with a four-issue arc entitled "The Skull on the Seas," but issue 194, "The Witch-Queen of Yamatai!" would pick up right where 193 left off. Chuck Dixon had a few stories continue on from one another but only for a handful of issues, but from here on out, the meat of Savage Sword would be a continuous narrative. I've made this comparison before, but many Savage Sword stories treat continuity like Star Wars does these days. It's sort of empty. Sure, Solo: A Star Wars Story tells the story of how Han Solo got the Millennium Falcon and expands on what the Kessel Run actually is, but did it do it in some kind of satisfying way that made you feel it was a story that had to be told? I sure as hell didn't think so. Roy Thomas is the Andor in this Star Wars metaphor, though. The same way Andor takes a one-off character that was fine in his first appearance and makes you root for him, exploring his history and the world around him in interesting ways that feel vital and full of life, Roy Thomas breathes fun into every aspect of his second run on Savage Sword, bringing together disparate aspects of Conan's life in ways that feel fresh. He rolls together some of the best personalities of Conan's late career: we meet Valeria prior to her adventure with Conan in "Red Nails." He expands the adventures and personalities of the pirates Strombanni and Black Zorano from "The Treasure of Tranicos." He takes second-rate Conan stories like "Drums of Tombalku" and returns to their environs in a more fleshed out and satisfying way that makes even the original feel better. Issues 202 through 206 tell a four-issue arc titled "The City of Magicians," and it's a testament to Roy's writing that I don't give a shit that we don't even get to the titular city of magicians until the last issue. That conclusion is a spectacular 50-some-odd page action epic that ends in an incredible impalement and an alley-oop style cleave. After "The City of Magicians," Roy begins to lean more heavily on adaptions. Much of the rest of Savage Sword is adaptions of Conan novels, adding Conan to existing fantasy stories, or writing sequels and prequels to other adventures.  Savage Sword #211. Cover by George Pratt Even though I've been singing pretty high praises, I don't want to mislead you. Not every single issue of Roy's second run is solid Zamorian gold. After "The City of Magicians," Roy adapts the pretty-good novel Conan and the Spider God into a four-issue set, which feels like a little bit of a disappointment, but mostly only because what immediately preceded it was so excellent. The pacing's just not quite as tight and the story's not quite as adventurous as previous issues seeing as Conan spends most of it blacksmithing, drinking, and doing recon on a spider-worshipping cult. While John Buscema, the most prolific Conan artist, still did the pencils for this arc, the inking fell to ER Cruz, whose inks change Buscema's work quite a bit. He renders Conan a little sharper, like a Lee Van Cleef lookalike, and uses lots of hatching. Issue #211 kicks off an adaption of Conan and the Gods of the Mountain, which is Roy's first real misstep back on the book. It's a direct sequel to the all-timer "Red Nails," and the art feels like it's aping Barry Windsor-Smith, which isn't a bad combination. It's just that the pacing is so incredibly slow. Gods of the Mountain is serialized in issues 211, 212, 213, 215, and 217 but not 214 or 216 for some reason. The adaption already feels overlong (I bet Roy could've done it justice in two or three issues instead of five), but it has several stories sandwiched between as if to lengthen it even more, mocking us. All the other stuff is great: #213 has some really fun backup stories, #214's "The Reign of Thulandra Thuu" is cool, and issue #216 is an adaption of- get this- a Tennessee Williams story, and it's excellent. Andrew J. Offutt's novel Conan the Mercenary is adapted in just two issues from 217 to 218 and it's much leaner and meaner than Gods of the Mountain, so it comes across as a real blast. The story quality wasn't the only thing that started to get a little more inconsistent after the 200-mark. Since Roy was now just the writer on Savage Sword, he didn't have control over things like what the covers looked like or which artists he worked with. Fine artists all, he says today, but it's pretty clear that few of the late Savage Sword artists quite measure up to Buscema, Windsor-Smith, Kane, Mayerik, and other heavy hitters of the early issues. Fin Savage Sword #235. Cover by Rudy Nebres Savage Sword goes out with two concurrently-running storylines. Set in different parts of Conan's life, they bring together a bunch of different characters from his adventures. In one, he and Red Sonja join forces with old friends Turgohl, Zula, and Fafnir. In the other, Roy is penciled one last time by "Big" John Buscema as Conan reunites with Nafertari from "Shadows in Zamboula." Both of them are appropriately epic, fun adventure stories. Commander Grimm of Cimmeria, bad guy for the former story, is an original antagonist that is much cooler and more threatening than any of the original Michael Fleisher villains with his ruthless ways and razor teeth. And though he's a good villain, he's certainly no Thoth-Amon to go out with. While both final storylines are a lot of fun, they certainly feel like just another day at the office for the big guy. One of the stories ends with Conan yawning, saying that he'd like to sleep until the rains wear down Crom's mountain into a molehill. It's not a bad ending, but you would never think you were reading the conclusion to 20 years of sword-and-sorcery action. The other is a little more thematically appropriate: it has Conan walk off into the sunset, promising, "There will be many more foes for him to face, before he lays down his sword one last time." Sure, just not in the pages of Savage Sword of Conan.  Roy Thomas circa 1995 By 1995, the year of its cancellation, Savage Sword of Conan was only selling about 4,700 copies per month. From 1990 through 1992, both Conan and Savage Sword had sat somewhere in the 60th-80th best-selling book each month, but numbers gradually slipped. By '93, both titles fell out of the top 100 for the first time. In January '95, it was the 274th-best-selling comic that month, and even the poorly-reviewed Conan the Adventurer was selling about twice as many issues. The Copper Age of Comics was in full swing, with 9 of the top 10 best-selling comics that month being X-Men titles, and the X-books were easily clearing more than a million collective floppies. Roy has opined that maybe times were just different now, and perhaps Conan's heyday had passed. He admits that they were never able to get Marvel's Conan titles back to the heights of the 1970s. Neither Conan the Barbarian or Savage Sword had even been relaunched or re-numbered, which was increasingly impressive in the days when everyone was getting new number ones. Even Superman, which had been running continually since 1939, had been renumbered a few years prior. Conan didn't escape the renumbering / relaunching trend entirely. Right after Savage Sword wrapped up, Conan the Savage hit shelves with the cover promising the "beginning a new era of barbarian action!" The first issue has two stories, both by former Savage Sword writers Chuck Dixon and Roy Thomas. They're both fine. It certainly feels like they were trying to do "Conan, but more 90s" and Conan feels much meaner in the first few issues than usual. Unfortunately, "This ain't your granddaddy's Conan" doesn't land quite as well when it's the 60 year-old stories that everyone loves the most. This new era of barbarian action lasted just ten issues and Marvel sold the rights to publish Conan books in 1998.  Conan the Savage #1. Cover by Simon Bisley Dark Horse had the rights for a while, and how good those books are depends on who you ask. They sure did a lot of them. In 2019, Marvel relaunched Savage Sword as a 12-issue series, spearheaded by writer Gerry Duggan and featuring gorgeous Alex Ross paintings for covers. While I've heard decent things about this series, I haven't picked it up yet, though I'm sure I will eventually. Conan would also show up in the main 616 Marvel universe in places like Savage Avengers, which is a truly excellent and bloody time. Wolverine and Conan interacting is everything that you hoped it would be. After just a few years, Marvel would lose the license to print Conan stories, transferring it over to Titan Comics, who I had never heard of prior to their Conan licensing. I was goofing around in Colorado Springs one day in 2023, in a godawfully messy comic shop. They had piles of books from the floor to the height of my shoulder with no apparent organizational system, and I was struggling to find what I was looking for. I decided to just ask the clerk if they had any old Savage Swords. He said they didn't have much in the way of back issues, but they were going to get the new one. "New one?" I asked. He told me that Titan was about to launch Savage Sword once again, just like the old days: it would have at least an A story and a B story, celebrate several different Howard characters, and- perhaps most importantly- be printed on oversized black-and-white newsprint. I added it to my pull list as soon as I could.  Savage Sword #5 (2024). Cover by Alex Horley The new Savage Sword, now into its second year at the time of writing, has been continually excellent. It's brought together modern champions for Conan like Jim Zub and Jason Aaron, while bringing back some of the throwback staff like Joe Jusko and my man Roy Thomas. The spirit of those Bronze Age Conan stories are completely in tact, feeling like both a retro celebration of one of our favorite old books while also feeling refreshingly pure in the modern comic landscape. The other titles I'm reading might get interrupted for months at a time by event crossovers I don't really care about or might shoehorn in garbage for big movie synergy, but not Conan. A nerd for the continuity like me has had a lot of fun picking through the new book. There are references to the 70s Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword, to Dark Horse's and Marvel's 2000s books, to pastiche novels, the movies... it may not all be canon, but it's all Conan, and it's all fair game. A lot of people are waking up to how interesting Savage Sword was throughout its life. You can find the Dark Horse reprints of it with increasing scarcity: I bought Volume 1 for twenty bucks back in 2015, but spent about $100 on Volume 22 this year. I once saw Volume 11 in a glass case at the Bizarre Bazaar in Fort Collins, CO with a sign that said "Very rare! Do not touch!" I'm not so sure about that. For those not looking to hunt down out-of-print TPBs, Titan Comics is reprinting all of Savage Sword as a part of their "Original Marvel Years" series of omnis, which are beautifully-packaged and full of extras, but they'll set you back about $125 brand new. Or maybe you should go to your local comic shop where you can find loads of Savage Sword back issues for just a few bucks. Weirdly enough, most of them don't have enough demand to command more than a $5 or $10 pricetag each. For 50 years, Savage Sword has never really gone away, though the spirit of the original has been elusive. Roy and the other writers and artists have popped up from time to time to delve back into the Hyborian Age, seeming to be as reluctant to let it go as many of us readers. I know that, for the time being, it's great to have it back where it's a brand new adventure every month. Enjoy it while it lasts!  Art by Geof Isherwood If you've read this far, thanks for playing ball with me. I really enjoy writing these more longform pieces, but they take a hell of a long time to put together (I think I've been writing this since just after Christmas). I appreciate you reading!
This is usually a blog about trying to put every Conan story into a coherent chronological order. Meet me over at the "Chronology" page if you're interested in that. -Dan  In 1954, social psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth. It was a flashpoint for the comic book industry. Wertham had actually been speaking out for years on what he perceived to be the dangers of comics, rather unsuccessfully. He was far from the only opponent of comics in the early 50s, but his book allowed him to become the poster boy for the supposed illicit influence on kids. Comic books, he argued, would turn your kids into dope-smoking, Satan-worshipping, crime-committing homosexuals. Now, comic books are cool, but they're unfortunately not that cool. Dr. Wertham's claims are seen by most these days as greatly exaggerated, if not outright quackery, but his voice was a part of a chorus that led the Comics Magazine Association of America adopting the Comics Code Authority in 1954. The Comics Code was a draconian list of rules that severely limited what kinds of content could appear in comics in the name of protecting the most impressionable readers from "injuring" their sensibilities and producing "wholesome" entertainment. Only comic books approved by the code would bear the seal "Approved by the Comics Code Authority" in the corner, and wholesale distributors would not carry comic books without the seal. So while submitting your comics for Code approval was technically voluntary, it was functionally mandatory if you wanted them to sell. The seal was powerful, and as Dr. Amy Kiste Nyberg at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund puts it, "Nothing inherent in the form of comics prevents comic books from telling stories for different audiences, but the perception of comic books as juvenile literature was reinforced by the Comics Code."  The Comics Code was in place for decades; I even remember seeing it on some of the books available when I started reading comics in 2001. Looking back 70 years later, the Code is a great example of how censorship, even if it can be well-meaning, is not only restrictive, but actually anti-art. The 1954 Code was extremely confining, prohibiting lurid illustrations, scenes of violence and gore, and most depictions of sexuality. There are a few standards that I'm not necessarily against; for example, it didn't allow comics to ridicule or attack racial groups. But most of the Code was backward and puritanical. It banned using the words "horror" or "terror" in titles, stated that "respected institutions" and parents should never be questioned, and it criminalized slang and poor grammar. It famously barred comics writer Marv Wolfman from being credited, seeing as his name looked too similar to "wolf-man."  The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has compiled quite a few examples of the Code modifying art which frequently changed the flow of the comic and kneecapped its impact. I love to use these as examples of the dangers of censorship when I celebrated Banned Books Week annually with my students. In this first example, you can see that the Code objected to this female lounge singer character's neckline, and the Code-approved re-draw brought her dress up several inches. The Code sometimes demanded art like this be redone, but sometimes also just did slipshod jobs like erasing a line denoting a woman's cleavage, leaving a somewhat awkward space in a panel.  Here, you can see that quite a bit of the violence was taken out of this alien invasion story as part of the exclusion of scenes depicting "excessive" violence (I wonder if "excessive" violence would be identified by you the same way it would by me...). I think it's worth pointing out that not only does the word balloon at the top not really make sense with the re-drawn art---are the twelve-foot-tall aliens firing on the crowd?---but the flow of the panel is entirely changed. Instead of your eye naturally finding the word balloon, then moving to the alien and flowing downward with the ray gun blast, ultimately landing on the crowd that's running away, there's just this big emptiness where there's no movement or used space at all. Instead, there's lots of ground shown between this alien and some now-awkwardly-placed characters in the foreground. The fluid movement from the top of the panel to the bottom is eliminated entirely. And, at least for me, the re-drawn panel feels much more still and lifeless than the original. This next one might be my favorite because the resulting re-draw is so phenomenally awkward. I suppose that doctors would count as respected institutions, which means they can't be disrespected by choking them out. It's permissible, however, to show someone stealing from them, apparently. The thing that really puts it over the top is the edits to the middle panels. Instead of seeing your first-person hands on the optometrist's neck, you get these impossibly-placed hands with the optometrist somehow stroking his chin as he thinks. However, his elbows look like they must be about four feet away from him as his right hand touches his chin and his left hand floats strangely high. Then in the next panel, the shot is awkwardly framed down to his chin, and he's noticeably still blue despite his airway being Code-approved unimpeded. The text of the story is now fundamentally different from the one the writer and artist submitted.  The final example I'd like to share is baffling. When I'm talking the Comics Code with my high school students, I like to show my students the pre-Code Nick Fury submission on the left and have them guess what was too salacious for the Code to allow. They usually zero in on the smoke, the disembodied lips, or the proximity of the characters when they're shown together. But, believe it or not, it's the phone being off the hook that the Comics Code would not allow. A sensual embrace is okay, as are guns, lit cigarettes in ashtrays, and swinging 60s clothing, but a phone off its hook was far too sexy for them. Your guess why is as good as mine.  When Conan the Barbarian burst onto the comic scene at the end of 1970, the Code was still in strong effect. It was revised and slightly loosened the next year, allowing for some horror, magic, and sword-and-sorcery elements to re-enter the comic landscape. Conan historian Jeffrey Shanks opines that Code administrators seeing Conan comics might have signaled to them that the comic landscape was changing, and may have helped hasten the loosening of the Code. Without those changes, it's tough to imagine that a Conan comic could really be possible.  Whereas the 1954 Code banned most of the darker aspects of fantasy stories: the walking dead, vampires, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism, the 1971 revision of the Code allowed them when "in the classic tradition" of works like Dracula and Frankenstein. This opened the door for common Conan tropes like undead sentries protecting a treasure. Those classic Conan the Barbarian comics by Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor-Smith, and John Buscema are excellent, but they're definitely more buttoned-up than their source material. I wouldn't hesitate to hand one of those Conan the Barbarian issues to a 9 or 10 year-old since their fantasy violence isn't overly intense, at least not any more than a He-Man or Thundercats cartoon. They're largely bloodless. But Robert E. Howard's original, literary barbarian didn't shy away from intense depictions of violence, lurid descriptions of magic and the occult, and gratuitous sex appeal (no actual sex scenes, though). So unless you had only known Conan through the 1970s comics, something felt like it was missing. Roy Thomas has spoken openly in recent decades about how much of a pain to deal with the Comics Code was as a writer, and how he and his artists sometimes pressed their luck in getting Code approval. He recalls how Code approval sometimes vexed him: "Actually, the thing that gave me the most pause was the way John [Buscema] garbed Helgi, the damsel-in-distress-of-the-month: in a short vest, open between her ample breasts. I had visions of the Comics Code insisting, after the story was all ready to go, that she be redrawn in a cardigan sweater. Fortunately, that didn't happen. Not only were comics loosening up a bit by the early '70s, but Code head Leonard Darvin once told me he allowed things to slip by in Conan that he wouldn't have in the super hero mags, because he suspected the former had a somewhat older average audience." When putting on his writer's cap, Roy certainly wanted the freedom to tell stories in ways he thought were best. But Roy was also the editor of the book, so he knew he had to play things carefully when working around or outright pushing against the Comics Code. They sometimes acquiesced in ways that didn't make them completely happy: Roy notes how it's a little awkward that Conan's sword seems to explode off of enemies rather than cut them like on the second page of issue #1. They leave some things implied, like the character Jenna's status as a sex worker. And sometimes, they would even outright note to one another in the margins, "Hope the Comics Code doesn't cut this!"  In Conan #9, when a character is dropped into a patch of man-eating flowers, they devour the guy without any of the violence technically being shown. As the flowers eat him, their color changes from white and pink to blood red. The Code normally would have objected to violence like this seeing as they had access to the color notes on the pages: had Roy written "As the flowers eat him, they turn red with his blood," it wouldn't have flown. Lucky for the creative team, the colorist on the book was Maddy Cohen, who happened to be dating the artist, Barry Windsor-Smith. Instead of writing directions for her on the page, he was able to give her color notes verbally and the Code censors were left in the dark as to their true intentions.  Conan #10 features a kill scene which the Robert E. Howard original specifically says involves Conan decapitating his enemies, but Roy knew that would never fly under the Code. Instead, Barry decided to have the Cimmerian deliver the killing blow out of frame and then show the evil priest of Anu's head in profile, and his obese body is conveniently not where it would be in the frame if his head were still attached to his body. An inclusion by omission, which Roy Thomas says allowed readers to draw their own conclusions. The Code didn't seem to notice. The Code did notice that Conan wasn't punished for killing a priest of all people, though. Roy countered with the fact that he would be in a dungeon at the start of the next issue (with the real start to "Rogues in the House"), but that wasn't good enough for Code administrators. Three caption boxes that previewed Conan's upcoming incarceration were added to the last few panels at the Code's behest. An intimate moment with Red Sonja was made to be re-drawn in Conan #24, as Conan's wandering hands brought up above the waterline to merely be cupping her waist, rather than clearly getting a handful.  "Moon of Zembabwei," the story in Conan #28, had the Cimmerian fighting an ape beast that Conan ultimately killed by stabbing it in the neck. For some odd reason, the Code cared less about blood of other colors than red, so they made the creature bleed black. The scene is pretty violent, but the Code didn't seem to mind, and it was printed as John Buscema originally drew it.  In Conan #37, Roy remembers wringing his hands as he wondered if the Code would object to one of Neal Adams' drawings of a gigantic slug monster looking a little bit like a vulva. The Code apparently didn't think it was objectionable enough to ask for changes, and I'm glad they didn't. When I read that issue, it didn't even cross my mind that someone might object to it, but I've talked to other readers who noticed it immediately. Sometimes, Roy was worried about not only offending the Code censors, but also the general reading public as well. He knew that as he approached the "Queen of the Black Coast" storyline, he was going to have Conan split a judge's head in two, which sends Conan running from the law and onto the nearest ship, kicking off the story. But Roy was concerned that Conan would look too much like a "wanton murderer" and it would turn off readers. He decided to hide a few clues in the story (some ostentatious rings) tying the judge to a slaver seen earlier in the story, therefore making the judge also a criminal. However, Roy admits that within the story, Conan never sees the rings or connects the dots of the two men's criminal enterprise (a caption box literally says "Conan never notices a certain ring he would doubtless recognize"). He only kills the judge because he's about to be sent to prison. So Conan was still essentially wantonly murdering, but Roy wanted something in the story to point to if the Code raised any eyebrows.  The Conan creative team wasn't always successful at working around Code censors. Included below is a panel from Conan #58 which the Code rejected, and it's approved re-drawn beneath. They didn't take issue with the scantily-clad Belit's furry britches or with a "blind flood of desire," but instead found Conan's open legs objectionable. In the final drawing, Conan's legs are to one side and he looks like he's about to fall over. Elsewhere in that issue, Code censors had Roy Thomas change the "mating dance of Belit" into the "love dance of Belit." Roy pushed back a bit: aren't those the same thing? Well, "love dance," is general, they said. "Mating dance" is specific. Roy acquiesced.  It's sad to me that the Marvel staff had to either strategize around the Code, work actively to hide their true intentions, or censor their great work. Roy did occasionally censor his own stuff- he says he wasn't really out to ruffle feathers- he did so reluctantly, and got away with what he could. Conan the Barbarian wasn't an instant success. The premiere sold pretty well, but then the next six issues lagged behind more popular books, and trended downward. It was even cancelled for about a day before the Marvel editors reversed their decision. But starting with issue 8, the series began a steady sales increase that meant it was safe from cancellation for a very long time.  Around the time that Conan the Barbarian #1 was premiering in 1970, Roy Thomas got a phone call from Stan Lee with an idea for a new book. It was a for a series he wanted to call Savage Tales, and Stan outlined to Roy an idea that he had for a new character called Man-Thing, an intensely tragic character turned into a swamp monster. While fleshing out the story idea from Stan and sending it to writer Gerry Conway to script, Roy wasn't immediately sold on it. He felt that Man-Thing seemed too similar to the existing character The Heap and that Marvel already had a popular hero named The Thing, not to mention the eventual title Giant-Size Man-Thing is hilarious in a way that would probably chafe against the Code. The aspect that was unique about the book, though, is that it would be a black-and-white magazine-sized comic, which was something Marvel didn't have at the time. It wasn't a completely original idea: Warren Publishing had been putting out Creepy and Eerie comic magazines since the mid-1960s. The paper size was a little bit larger, they cost more than a regular comic, and, importantly, as a magazine they were completely independent of the Comics Code Authority. Looking at early 70s comics side-by-side today, it's a little wild to think how restricted one was while the other couldn't be touched by the Code. The magazine dimensions are only about three-quarters of an inch larger than the height and width of a regular comic book. Brian Cronin at Comic Book Resources helps explain that it was essentially a stocking trick: since magazines and comic books were racked in different places at the newsstand, a non-Code magazine like Savage Tales wouldn't be sitting right next to a Code-approved Batman comic.  A visit to the comic section at the newsstand probably in early 1972. You can see Conan #12 "The Dweller in the Dark" in the upper-left. It makes sense that Man-Thing's origin story would need to appear in a comic outside of Comics Code approval. It's terribly sad, features less-than-glorious depictions of the government, and deals with drugs, corruption, and artist Gray Morrow draws a woman in basically transparent clothes. Essentially, it's everything the Code wasn't keen on. It's also dynamite! Those early Savage Tales stories featuring Man-Thing, Ka-Zar of the jungle, and Conan the Barbarian are all wonderful Bronze-Age nuggets of weird storytelling. And in case the decapitated head on the cover wasn't a big enough clue, it was printed with a notice saying that "This publication is rated 'M' for the mature reader!" It's a sort of anti-Comics Code Seal. Stan originally wanted a King Kull story instead of Conan- Stan liked how names that started with K looked on a cover better than names that started with a C, plus, they already had one Conan comic. Did they need two? For reasons unknown, Stan changed his mind and went with Conan; he and Kull are cut from the same cloth anyway.  The first chronological Conan story "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is a good fit for the first issue. It's a simple and effective episode (surprisingly brief at only 11 pages). Brevity was always a skill both Robert E. Howard and Roy Thomas possessed, and it's one I decidedly don't have (If you think this article's long, you should see how much my next one about comic history spiraled out). Roy's dialogue and Barry Windsor-Smith's art in those 11 pages absolutely kick ass. When the adaptation was reprinted later in Conan the Barbarian #16, basically every panel had to be edited on some level due to Atali's diaphanous clothes. The letter they received from the CCA said that the story needed heavy re-draws to be deemed acceptable, and "the lightest goassamer draping of the female figure, wherever it is used on the female's breasts, pubic areas or buttocks must be made opaque and to cover these areas thoroughly." Just about every panel has some note from the Code administrator, and they use the word "buttock" about two-dozen times.  Unfortunately, not everyone was as much of a fan of those early Savage Tales stories as I am. Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, who had been working in comics since 1929 and had been with Marvel since the very beginning, cancelled the book after only one issue. Roy Thomas recalled the cancelling in 2008 like this: "I never got all the inside story, but there were several things that led to Savage Tales being cancelled after that first issue. Martin Goodman had never really wanted to do a non-Code comic, probably because he didn't want any trouble with the CMAA over it. Nor did he really want to get into magazine-format comics; and Stan really did. So Goodman looked for an excuse to cancel it. I also heard we weren't able to sell the mag in Canada, which ordinarily would probably have taken maybe 10% of the print run- that somebody at the competition, DC or Warren or wherever, told the Canadians it was salacious material. But I never got any confirmation of that, and it may be an urban legend.  Roy had a second Conan story for the next Savage Tales issue already in the works, but since the book was canned, he moved it over to Conan the Barbarian. As you may have expected, the Comics Code censors made them rework a considerable amount of art drawn of female characters which Roy notes would have been "no problem" in the black-and-white pages. For a few years, Savage Tales lay dormant while Roy, Barry, John, and others chugged away at making the Comics Code-bound Conan the Barbarian a success. Goodman eventually backed Stan Lee when Stan wanted to publish an anti-drug Spider-Man comic which the Code denied. Marvel published the book anyway. Many people have noted that Stan may have gotten a little too much credit for his work in the 60s, frequently overshadowing collaborators who deserved more recognition, but Stan definitely took some principled, measured stands against the Comics Code for which he should be lauded.  Partially as a result of Stan's efforts, the Code began to loosen ever so slightly. Goodman retired from Marvel in 1972 and Stan assumed the role of publisher, which meant that he didn't need Goodman's approval for a certain black-and-white, magazine-sized book. Still, Stan had lots of new responsibilities as publisher and president of Marvel, so he handed the reins of Savage Tales, and the editor-in-chief role, to Roy. Most of the stories they had originally planned for the second issue had already been printed, so Roy asked if he could make Savage Tales a more Robert E. Howard-focused mag. Stan said yes. Proudly declaring that it was "Back by popular demand," Savage Tales #2 hit stands in October of 1973, only 30 months after the first issue. This time, Conan was featured on the cover and the interior had an adaption of a top-tier Robert E. Howard story: "Red Nails." While the first issue had featured a "Conan the Barbarian starring in..." tag above the title, issue 2 now read "Savage Tales featuring Conan the Barbarian" with our Cimmerian hero's name as large as the title itself. John Buscema's painted cover already hints that this is not a Code-approved book as it has a nude woman threatened by an executioner and some conveniently-placed smoke obscuring her form. Any comic version of "Red Nails" would have had to look very different under the Code. Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's adaption of it is extremely bloody and almost immediately features horrifying undead creatures. It's suggestively sexual: the words "throbs and pulses" appear together, in that order, and the story is very critical of power structures. The climax of the narrative has one fairly steamy lesbionic scene as well, all wrapped around an attempt at human sacrifice. "Red Nails" was already one of Robert E. Howard's best Conan stories, but Roy's dialogue and Barry's intricate art really do live up to their charming claim on the title page that they adapted it "with aplomb." Instead of the short 11 pages allotted for "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" in the first issue, "Red Nails" was a two-parter, spanning 21 pages for just its first installment. In addition to "Red Nails," Barry Windsor-Smith also locked in to draw an illustrated version of Howard's poem "Cimmeria" and a full-page, in-house ad. Roy convinced Robert E. Howard's agent, Glenn Lord, to write a biography of Howard for issue 2 as well. Savage Tales continued with Conan as the headline character for a few more issues, with the Cimmerian eventually sharing cover space with Ka-Zar, Lord of the Hidden Jungle. Those first five issues feature painted covers by some of the best artists working in comics at the time, covers whose intensity really lived up to the title of the book. The mag was hugely successful.  After issue 5, Conan was spun off into his own book which would bear his name permanently in the title: The Savage Sword of Conan. Savage Sword was also unconstrained by the Comics Code, meaning that it could live up to all the bloody promise of Robert E. Howard's original character. Whereas other Marvel characters played in the backup stories of Savage Tales, Roy Thomas saw Savage Sword as a Howard showcase and wanted to use characters like King Kull and Solomon Kane for the backups. According to Roy Thomas, when you were assigned to write a Marvel comic in the 70s, as soon as it was given to you, it was "due yesterday, if not the day before." As such, getting assigned the first issue of Savage Sword meant a tight deadline, so he reluctantly re-purposed the next few plots he had figured out for Conan and slotted them into the new title. It's a little awkward as a first issue: Conan meets up with Red Sonja, who he clearly has a history with, but what that history is will be mostly lost on the reader if they haven't read Conan #23. I certainly hadn't when I first stumbled across Savage Sword, so I figured it was all to be left to my imagination. It is in this issue that Red Sonja acquires her signature chain-mail bikini, which was far too revealing for a Code-bound book like Conan the Barbarian, in which she wore a full-coverage, long-sleeve chainmail shirt.  Savage Sword's first story, "The Curse of the Undead Man," would continue in Conan #43, which came out soon afterword. Roy lamented that since the black-and-white mag had a smaller readership than the color comic, some of its readers would miss the first half of the narrative, but people seem to have done okay. I think this kind of cross-pollination between books is much more acceptable in today's industry. The book was a success, Comics Code be damned, and Savage Sword would go on to run for more than 200 issues into the mid-90s. For many of the first 60 issues of Savage Sword of Conan, Roy adapted Howard's prose stories, but mixed in original yarns as well, jumping all over Conan's life. In addition to Roy Thomas and John Buscema, its place as uncensored playground of storytelling attracted some of the greatest talent in comics, including fantasy artist Boris Vallejo, X-Men mastermind Chris Claremont and my personal favorite Robin writer, Chuck Dixon, but Roy Thomas has always remained its greatest creator. He returned to the book in its later years after what most readers agree was a sag in quality, bringing the stories back up to their former glory for the final stretch of issues. Savage Sword is remembered as one of the peaks of the Bronze Age. While it was out of print for much of the 90s and 2000s, it's now been collected in omnibuses by Dark Horse, Marvel, and Titan Comics. The Comics Code was again revised in 1989, this time featuring much more sweeping changes. It was now presented within the text of the Code as a sort of optional seal of approval for comics which you could feel confident giving to young kids, rather than the arbiter between wholesome quality and evil smut.  A size comparison between my own copies of Conan the Barbarian #19 and Savage Sword of Conan #7 The submission procedure was changed to allow more conversation between comic editors and Code administrators. This time, editors could "discuss with the administrator the concerns raised with him and reach agreement on how the comic can properly bear the Code Seal either without being revised or within a mutually-agreeable set of alternate revisions." The standards were much more broad in the 1989 revision. They allowed for more nuance and reflected that times may change, making space for things like "contemporary styles and fashions" for character costumes. They still wanted to encourage "wholesome lifestyles" to be portrayed as desirable and for characters to be role models, but also actually acknowledged that there were comic books for adult readers. "The members of the Comics Magazine Association of America include publishers who elect to publish comics that are not intended to bear the Code Seal, and that therefore need not go through the approval process described above. Among the comics in this category may be titles intended for adult readers. Member publishers hereby affirm that we will distribute these publications only through distribution channels in which it is possible to notify retailers and distributors of their content, and thus help the publications reach their intended audiences. The member publishers agree to refrain from distributing these publications through those distribution channels that, like the traditional newsstand, are serviced by individuals who are unaware of the content of specific publications before placing them on display."  By this time, comic books had reached a new level of maturity. Many of the tropes that are recognizable to modern readers had their progenitors around this time: the modern "event" book like Secret Wars, the convoluting and then exploding of decades worth of continuity in Crisis on Infinite Earths, the long-form graphic novel and meta deconstruction of the superhero genre in Watchmen. It would be difficult for anyone to argue at that time that comics were only for kids, and Conan helped solidify that. Conan had reached new heights too with two major motion pictures and a Red Sonja movie which it seems like we all agree to be the unofficial third in the trilogy. By Mitra, I don't know a single Conan fan who considers "Kalidor" to actually be a separate character from Schwarzenegger's Conan. The Comics Code was still in effect until 2011 but with gradually diminishing influence. Marvel pulled their books from approval in 2001 in favor of giving their titles a rating in-house. Ten years later, DC pulled theirs as well, and Archie was the final publisher to withdraw later that year. It quietly disappeared, and NPR's obituary for the Code begins with the line, "I come to bury the Comics Magazine Association of America, not to praise it." The Comics Code isn't forgotten, but it's usually the butt of the jokes these days. Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo recently had me laughing out loud by using a Comics Code Seal of Approval lookalike as the censor bars when the villain Blockbuster gets cussed out at the end of Nightwing #96.  Every year, Banned Books Week falls somewhere in late September or early October. It's a celebration of our First Amendment right to read and an outward expression of resistance to censorship. It's celebrated by the American Library Association, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the National Council of Teachers of English (of which I am a card-carrying member), and more.
That means that every year, I teach about the Comics Code to my students. We'll dissect book bans spearheaded by anti-free speech groups like Moms for Liberty. We'll evaluate the PMRC's censorship of music and the "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" label on music. We'll make the case for kids' rights to have access to books. And if I have time, I get to bring up some great comic book creators and how they fought censorship with everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character. Titan Comics recently revived the Savage Sword mag for a new print run which features some of the coolest writers and artists in comics today. It even throws back to classic Savage Sword artists like Joe Jusko doing painted covers again. Everyone loves it and you should check it out. Or, find the original run here.  About halfway through reading through every Conan story, I had the idea of trying to place every original Savage Sword of Conan story into the chronology to see where they fit. Savage Sword is my first love of Conan: it's where I was introduced to him and it's probably my favorite format to read his adventures. Published by Marvel Comics from 1974 to 1995, Savage Sword was a black-and-white bronze age comic series. It was magazine-sized to skirt the restrictive Comics Code Authority's regulations on violence and adult content, and it's so good. I love this comic. It has some of the best creators of the 70s and 80s working on it: shepherded by Roy Thomas for the first 60 or so issues and then mainly by Michael Fleisher for the years after that, Savage Sword mostly adapted stories of an older Conan. While there are several early stories that made it to the mag, almost everything after "Hawks Over Shem" was adapted. Many of the stories were originals, and those are the ones I'm going to try to fit into our chronology here. Some of them were adapted from Robert E. Howard's historical short stories and poems. Some adapted Conan pastiches. Some were truly original Conan stories from the likes of Barry Windsor-Smith, Roy Thomas, Chuck Dixon, Chris Claremont, and Michael Fleisher. I don't own every issue of the comic- far from it. But I own the first 11 omnibuses published by Dark Horse, so I have a little more than the first 100 issues. They include a few other titles in them occasionally like Savage Tales of Conan the Barbarian. I could be way off on some of these, and others I'm pretty confident of my placement. I looked at a number of factors to try to place stories:
It seems like Conan's Zuagir raider period and his time as a Barachan pirate are particular favorites among Savage Sword writers seeing as a disproportionate amount of stories refer to Conan as a Zuagir chief or a Barachan buccaneer. I'm assuming that's because they're kind of flexible roles that could happen over a large swath of the map. I sort of thought that there would be more stories in these issues about his time with Aquilonia (either as a scout or as a king) or over in Vendhya around "The People of the Black Circle," but I was wrong on both accounts. There are very few original King Conan stories in these first 100 issues. Below is my best attempt at fitting them into Conan's career. Stories added into the chronology by Savage Sword are marked in red. If a story was not adapted into a story in Savage Sword, but there is a comic adaption from one of the other Bronze Age anthology Conan books like Conan the Barbarian, King Conan, or Savage Tales, I've marked those as well, but I'm certainly not trying to collapse all Conan comic material into one timeline or anything like that. Let me know what you think! The Conan Chronology + Savage Sword of Conan's first 100 issuesSSOC adds two stories of Conan's early life before leaving Cimmeria before adapting several of the L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter stories that detail Conan's earliest career events. "Rite of Blood" - Savage Sword 89
"Hunters and Hunted!" - Savage Sword 83
 "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" - Savage Tales of Conan 1 "Legions of the Dead" - Savage Sword 39 "The Thing in the Crypt" - Conan the Barbarian 92 The thief stories begin with "The God in the Bowl." "The God in the Bowl" - Conan the Barbarian 7 "Rogues in the House" - Conan the Barbarian 10 - 11 "The Tower of the Elephant" - Savage Sword 24 "The Darksome Demon of Raba-Than" - Savage Sword 84
"The World Beyond the Mists" - Savage Sword 93
"The Sorcerer and the Soul" - Savage Sword 53
"The Stalker Amid the Sands" - Savage Sword 54
"Black Lotus and Yellow Death" - Savage Sword 55
"The Sword of Skelos" - Savage Sword 56
"The Eye of Erlik" - Savage Sword 57
"For the Throne of Zamboula" - Savage Sword 58
"The Cave Dwellers" - Savage Sword 77
"The Palace of Pleasure" - Savage Sword 81
"The Blood Ruby of Death" - Savage Sword 98
"The Hall of the Dead" - Conan the Barbarian 8 "The Hall of the Dead" is the end of the thief stories. Other than one small digression in SSOC 91's B story, the Turanian mercenary stories begin immediately. "The Beast" - Savage Sword 91
 "The Chain" - Savage Sword 91
"The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" - Savage Sword 13
"The Hand of Nergal" - Conan the Barbarian 30 "The City of Skulls" - Savage Sword 59 "The People of the Summit" "The Curse of the Monolith" - Savage Sword 33 "Night of the Rat!" - Savage Sword 95
"The Secret of Skull River" - Savage Sword 5
"The Colossus of Shem" - Savage Sword 72
"The Colossus of Shem" in SSOC 72 is functionally the end of the Turanian mercenary stories. In several original stories along with a few adaptions, Conan wanders west afterword. "The Blood-Stained God" - Marvel Super Special 9 (and reprinted in Conan Saga 80) "The Curse of the Undead Man" - Savage Sword 1
"The Forever Phial" - Savage Sword 8
"The Lair of the Ice Worm" - Savage Sword 34 "Child of Sorcery" - Savage Sword 29
"The Sea of No Return" - Savage Sword 66
"Queen of the Black Coast" marks the beginning of Conan's first pirate period. His first pirate crew is aboard the Tigress with Belit. "Queen of the Black Coast" - Conan the Barbarian 58 - 59 "The Leopard Men of Darfar" - Savage Sword 97
"Lion of the Waves" - Savage Sword 86
Conan comes ashore ending his first pirate period and here begins to wander north from the Black Kingdoms in his next experiences as a mercenary. "The Vale of Lost Women" - Conan the Barbarian 104 "The Castle of Terror" "The Snout in the Dark" - Conan the Barbarian 106 - 107 After "The Snout in the Dark," we move into a period of Conan's life unseen in the original REH canon where he acts as a mercenary for various city-states in Corinthia. "The Lurker in the Labyrinth" - Savage Sword 71
"Demons in the Firelight" - Savage Sword 78 - 79
"Devourer of Souls" - Savage Sword 90
 "The Ape-Bat of Marmet Tarn" - Savage Sword 96
"Forest of Fiends" - Savage Sword 91
"The Dweller in the Depths" - Savage Sword 70
"The Gamesmen of Asgalun" - Savage Sword 89
"Eye of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 69
"Hawks Over Shem" - Savage Sword 36 "Black Colossus" - Savage Sword 2 "At the Mountain of the Moon God" - Savage Sword 3
"Shadows in the Dark" "Colossus of Argos" - Savage Sword 80
"The Wizard-Fiend of Zingara" - Savage Sword 61
 "Death Dwarves of Stygia" - Savage Sword 94
"Children of Rhan" - Savage Sword 64
"The Temple of the Tiger" - Savage Sword 62
Conan here heads east to the Vilayet Sea and begins his second pirate period, this time with the crew known as the Red Brotherhood. "Iron Shadows in the Moon" - Savage Sword 4 "Sons of the White Wolf" - Savage Sword 37
"The Road of the Eagles" - Savage Sword 38 Here is the beginning of Conan's period as a Zuagir raider. This period is often visited in SSOC. "A Witch Shall Be Born" - Savage Sword 5 "Mirror of the Manticore" - Savage Sword 58
"Sleeper Beneath the Sands" - Savage Sword 6
"Citadel at the Center of Time" - Savage Sword 7
"Black Tears" - Savage Sword 35 "The Curse of the Cat Goddess" - Savage Sword 9
"Moat of Blood" - Savage Sword 63
"Isle of the Hunter" - Savage Sword 88
"Shadows in Zamboula" - Savage Sword 14 "The Star of Khorala" - Savage Sword 44  "The Hill of Horror" - Savage Sword 95
"The Country of the Knife" - Savage Sword 11
"One Night in the Maul" - Savage Sword 99
"When a God Lives" - Savage Sword 100 (!)
"The Haunters of Castle Crimson" - Savage Sword 12
"The Fangs of the Serpent" - Savage Sword 65
"Dominion of the Bat" - Savage Sword 76
"The Blood of the Gods" - Savage Sword 28
This is the end of Conan's Zuagir period. "The Slithering Shadow" - Savage Sword 20 "Drums of Tombalku" - Savage Sword 21  "Escape from the Temple" - Savage Sword 87
"The Devil in Iron" - Savage Sword 15 The Flame Knife - Savage Sword 31 - 32 "The Daughter of the God King" - Savage Sword 85
"Revenge of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 86
"The People of the Black Circle" - Savage Sword 16 - 19 "Black Cloaks of Ophir" - Savage Sword 68
Here is the beginning of Conan's third pirate period, this time with the Barachans. "The Gem in the Tower" - Savage Sword 45 "The Pool of the Black One" - Savage Sword 22 - 23 "Plunder of Death Island" - Savage Sword 67
"The Changeling Quest" - Savage Sword 73
 Bor'aqh motherfucking Sharaq "The Temple of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" - Savage Sword 75
"The Demon in the Dark" - Savage Sword 82 - 83
"The Jeweled Bird" - Savage Sword 92
"A Dream of Blood" - Savage Sword 40
"The Quest for the Cobra Crown" - Savage Sword 41
"The Devil-Tree of Gamburu" - Savage Sword 42
"King Thoth-Amon" - Savage Sword 43
"The Informer" - Savage Sword 99
"Red Nails" - Savage Tales of Conan 2 - 3 "Jewels of Gwahlur" - Savage Sword 25 "The Ivory Goddess" - Savage Sword 60 Here is the end of Conan's Barachan pirate episodes. Next, we see a few wandering stories before his time as an Aquilonian scout.  "The Armor of Zuulda Thaal" - Savage Sword 87
"Lady of the Silver Snows" - Savage Sword 74
"The Night of the Dark God" - Savage Tales of Conan 4
Here is the beginning of Conan's time in Aquilonia. First as a scout, then as king. "Beyond the Black River" - Savage Sword 26 - 27 "The Dark Stranger" - Savage Sword 88
"Moon of Blood" - Savage Sword 46 "The Treasure of Tranicos" - Savage Sword 47 - 48 "When Madness Wears the Crown" - Savage Sword 49
"When Madness Wears the Crown" - Savage Sword 50
"Satyrs' Blood" - Savage Sword 51
"The Crown and the Carnage" - Savage Sword 52
"Wolves Beyond the Border" - Savage Sword 59 "The Phoenix on the Sword" "The Scarlet Citadel" - Savage Sword 30 The Hour of the Dragon - Savage Sword 8 - 10 The Return of Conan - King Conan 5 - 8 Here is the end of Conan's young kingship and we see a time jump of around 10 years past the birth of his children. "The Witch of the Mists" - King Conan 1 "Challenge" - Savage Sword 93
 "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" - King Conan 2 "Red Moon of Zembabwei" - King Conan 3 "Shadows in the Skull" - King Conan 4 Conan of the Isles "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian" - Savage Sword 8 "People of the Dark" - Savage Sword 6
Stories that were impossible to placeThere were a few stories told in Savage Sword that were just completely impossible to place. Unless I'm really missing something, they don't contain any contextual clues: Conan doesn't seem specifically young or old, there are no lines that indicate where the story takes place geographically, and there are no characters, items, or skills that give away a general time in Conan's life. Those are as follows: "The Lady of the Tower" - Savage Sword 98
"The Gift" - Savage Sword 100
 Just right off the bat, like Conan and the Sorcerer, I didn't actually read the novel here, I'm just including it because I read the Roy Thomas adaption while reading through Savage Sword. Savage Sword of Conan issues 49, 50, 51, and 52 are a four-part adaption of Conan the Liberator, the novel by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. The four stories: "When Madness Wears the Crown," "Swords Across the Alimane," "Satyr's Blood," and "The Crown and the Carnage" were written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Sal Buscema, each with a cover by Nestor Redondo. This story, showing Conan become King of Aquilonia, is a direct sequel to "The Treasure of Tranicos," and opens with Conan offloading that treasure. Howard & de Camp's “Treasure of Tranicos” was published in 1953, and this sequel was published in 1979, with the comic adaption in Savage Sword being published just one year later. Conan is about 40 years old here, as corroborated by a line in one issue, and is well-known enough that should he fail his military campaign against the king of Aquilonia, he laments he won’t be able to slink away into anonymity like his younger years. This one leans much more heavily on political intrigue, with spies and plants in Conan’s army as they prepare to attack Aquilonia’s mad king.  The essay by Jeff Shanks included in Titan Comics' Savage Sword #3 (from 2024) describes Conan as “qualified good versus unqualified evil,” which felt very fitting for this tale of Conan as a “liberator.” While his rebel army of the lion is hailed as breakers of chains where they go, it’s not like Conan ever really seems to have the good of the people at the forefront of his mind and while the story clearly considers him the good guy, it comes across more as a power grab and hatred for the mad king Numedides than a desire to be a champion for the common man. He’s not conquering Aquilonia out of altruism, anyway, and I feel like the story’s just a bit weaker for the lack of motivation there. While Thulandra Thuu is definitely unqualified evil, Conan can only be said to be qualified good. Maybe Conan the Regime Changer or Conan the Slightly Better would be fitting titles. Because Conan is mostly confined to wooded camps and basic prairies and canyons, it’s missing some of the more adventuresome elements to the best Conan tales, though there are some magicians and satyrs and spells.  The parts with the king Numedides being enchanted by a Khitan magician named Thulandra Thuu are probably the best parts. We don’t often get to see the far eastern side of the Hyborian map, so it’s fun to have a character from Khitai (Howard’s stand-in for China) at the center of it. I don't think we've seen many people from Khitai since "The Curse of the Monolith." It seems that the authors were aiming for a story epic in scope, but the pacing feels a little drawn-out to me, we decently long stretches of little happening between Conan being poisoned, armies being ambushed, and Conan’s army of liberation marching on Tarantia, capital of Aquilonia. It is a great scene when Conan finally confronts Numedides and Thulandra, becomes king, and then quickly begins to regret it. Everybody loves paperwork. Howard often borrowed from the Cthulu mythos of his friend and contemporary HP Lovecraft, and Thulandra Thuu calls out the names of a few deities like Cthulu and Nyarlathotep during Conan’s attack. Because of how this story confines Conan to thoroughly unimaginative settings and mostly sticks to just politicking, I can't say it's a great story. While I didn't hate it, it's certainly a lesser one. Lucky for me, "The Phoenix on the Sword" and "The Scarlet Citadel" are up next! "Phoenix" I already know I love, but I've never read "Scarlet Citadel!"
Conan and the Sorcerer (not the most specific title- it describes what feels like 80% of Conan stories), or the three chapters “The Sorcerer and the Soul,” “The Stalker and the Sands,” and “Black Lotus and Yellow Death” takes place just weeks after "The Tower of the Elephant." Conan is stealing items of petty value in the City of Thieves, which is explicitly called Arenjun in this version, and gaining skills as a thief. The first issue is excellent, with twists and turns aplenty in the house of the sorcerer. I feel like the Zamorian thief-city (be it Arenjun or not... probably not) is one of the most fun cities in the Hyborian Age because it always feels like anything can happen.
Seeing as this entry was all Savage Sword all the time, I promise I won't even mention it when we do "The Hall of the Dead" next time. I know this is a deviation from my chronology, and there are those who will find it inconsistent to include this story, but not its two sequels. My advice is to look on this one as a quick diversion into some other stories and to perhaps treat it as an apocryphal Conan yarn. And to not take it too seriously. ★★★★☆  |
AuthorHey, I'm Dan. This is my project reading through the career of everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, in chronological order. 
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