Conan the barbarian by Toth...

A portfolio from a master of the black and white comic!



Toth isn't only good: he's also original! He likes to experiment!



Lovely work. Seven plates plus this issue's frontispiece.

I suppose if one was being especially generous, one could attribute this spontaneous overwhelming attraction as a mystic power of the girl (the sailors on the ship seem to have suffered a similiar effect). But honestly, this seems like too much effort to put into attempting to salvage this story.

The fangs of the serpent
Script by Michael Fleisher
Art by Gil Kane

First cracking the covers open back in '81, I was jumping up and down. Imagine: a whole issue drawn by Gil Kane, the artistic wizard behind CtB #17-18, GSC #1-4 and SSoC #47! Oh, bliss!

Alas, Gil wasn't firing on all cylinders for this story. I doubt he could provide bad art even if he tried to, but here we are treated to pretty standard stuff... A few nice shots and some good actions scenes, but scenery usually reduced to big rocks or big square houses. I'd rather have that than the work of many other artists, but it's not Kane's best. In some cases the art even looks rushed, as if it never went beyond the rough breakdown stage.

Rough stuff (with fruit): 



Sketchy events:



---

The story itself is all right, as these things go, but is entirely forgettable, with the usual plot problems that we have to set aside to enjoy the ride. For once I have little by way of criticism regarding the Hyborian Age geography, except for this recurring one: the writer makes the world far, far too small! Fleisher isn't the only one guilty on that score: many Conan writers treat his world as if it were our modern one, only with horses and swords instead of cars and guns... Communications are as efficient as today, the general population has a better grasp of geography than a typical North American, and trade is definitely global. Case in point: on the first page of the story, a Zamboulan merchant is announcing fresh oranges and melons just arrived from the orchards of Khorshemish. The distance between central Koth and Zamboula is about 2000 km as the crow flies. I don't begrudge Zamboulans their taste for exotic fruit, but I seriously doubt that melons and oranges are going to survive a 2000 km trip (half of which in the desert) on horse- or camelback and arrive in any kind of edible state.



The fangs of the serpent is another of these stories where coincidence (or fate?) thrusts Conan in a position to save the world. It starts in the desert city of Zamboula, where a marketplace soothsayer reads the Cimmerian's future in the entrails of a bird. Naturally her talents for prediction will turn out to be astonishingly accurate, for she basically tells Conan all that's going to happen in the rest of the issue! Mmmh... I enjoy a little bit of foreboding at the start of the story as much as the next reader, but to have the entire plot laid out right from the start is a bit much!



Part of the oracle's vision involves a dagger-shaped medallion. and right after Conan leaves her he is offered a dagger-shaped medallion by a tradesman, free of charge! The pendant is a gift from a Stygian lady who was visiting the souk on her sedan chair, and took a fancy to the big brawny foreigner. Not caring for the lady's attention, Conan imprudently makes some disparaging remark and ends up figthing the scorned woman's bodyguards. Unfortunately, the ruckus draws attention to the Cimmerian, who is recognized as the famous erstwhile leader of the desert-raiding Zuagirs! The fight evolves into a horse chase across the desert, taking the Cimmerian west, away from Zamboula.

Because the world is really small in this story, Conan makes it to the river Styx in two days, and crosses into Stygia. There, he has the opportunity to rescue a pretty woman who was being manhandled by a bunch of Stygian-looking fellows. (They're actually time-displaced Egyptians, as we'll learn later, but Stygians are always drawn as Egyptians anyway).

The woman tells her strange story: she is Tamera, a servant in the house of a benevolent wizard who managed to banish some evil snake god, Xka'ahk (entirely too many apostrophies in the name conjured up by Fleisher!) to another dimension. The only means to bring him back is by using two amulets, one of which he kept while the other went through many hands and is currently owned by "an evil wizard hunfgry for knowledge and power".

Why the benevolent sorcerer saw fit to leave a means of escape to the snake demon is not explained, nor why he thought it a good idea to let one of the amulets out of his sight.

The girl explains how, a fortnight past, the evil sorcerer found out where the benevolent one was hiding, and sent his henchmen to slay him and recover the second amulet. Tamera managed to escape with it and only Conan's intervention allowed her to escape her pursuers. Now she asks Conan to help her recover the first amulet and use the two trinkets to destroy the snake demon for good, as her former master asked her to do. (Wait... why didn't her master do that himself when he first banished the snake demon?)

Conan doesn't agree on the spot, but when he and the Tamera are attacked by more Egyptians and the girl is abducted, he decides to make her cause his own. The time-displaced kidnappers are in the service of the "evil sorcerer", who turns out to be Shamash-Shum-Ukin, the Babylonian time-traveller whom we first met in SSoC #7. Now wearing a beard and having lost part of his hair, the scholar reminds us of how he first met Conan. Having learned a lot of what's to be learned on our Earth, the Babylonian now wants to go beyond the mortal plane, and he sees the demon Xka'Akh as a means to that end (hence his interest in the two amulets).



Conan interrupts Shamash-Shum-Ukin's expository speech to Tamera, and (as the wizard's castle falls to pieces around them for no particular reason), Conan fights their way out of the place, caryying the two amulets.

Tamera explains that to destroy Xka'akh, the pair are to travel to a certain temple not far away. Once there, the girl places the amulets in a certain snake statue's mouth, and she reveals herself for a conniving and ambitious individual: she is the one who killed her master, and her intentions are not to destroy the demon, but to summon it and make it her servant!

Things don't quite work out that way, as the summoned Xka'akh jumps on her and fuses with her mortal form, taking the shape of a giant snake with a mortal's chest, arms and midriff. Naturally, the demon lord now intends to destroy the world and blah blah blah. Shamash-Shum-Ukin shows up, berates the Cimmerian for having done the girl's work for her, and decides that prudence being the best part of valor, it's best to teleport away through time... and (while we're at it) pay a visit to Jesus Christ himself, who might teach him a thing or two.



Conan is left alone with the snake demon, but then he remembers the Zamboulan oracle's prophecy and he stabs the beast with his dagger-shaped pendant; this makes the thing vulnerable enough that an axe blow to the head kills it. Hurray! The world is saved!


Notes:

- Conan is past his Zuagir days and is 31 in this story.
- Geographical references are all accurate, for once, but the distances between them seem far too short.
- I'm grateful that the demon was a minor, made-up one and not a biggie like Set.
- I'm also grateful that Shamash-Shum-Ukin wasn't killed in this story. Fleisher wrote him in character.
- The Jesus reference is cute, but makes little sense: if I had access to him, I definitely wouldn't first spend time discussing the fine points of universal truths with some Stygian snake demon. I mean, I'm no Christian myself, but just objectively it seems to be a more obvious starting point. 

Savage sword of Conan #66, July 1981



Cover by Joe Chiodo, his second for the mag. It is a little stiff but could also be said to be "classical" (which sounds nicer). The guy about to be thrown off the cliff looks especially convincing in his discomfort!

Table of contents:

The sea of no return, a Conan story
Bront, a space fantasy adventure.

------------------------------------------------------------

The sea of no return
Script by Roy Thomas
Art by Ernie Colon and Ernie Chan

Roy Thomas might have been away for a few months when issue 66 came out, but there were still a few Thomas-scripted stories to be read in SSoC. Were they stories already commissioned when he left? Were they inventory stories kept in reserve for a dreaded deadline doom emergency? Only Roy could say.

The sea of no return is an original tale, and something we had not seen in the mag yet; it's essentially a locked room mystery. Most of the story occurs on a ship at sea and there is very little action; our interest is maintained by a huge cast of scheming individuals among whom hides at least one murderer.

The artwork by Ernie Colon and Ernie Chan is a case of Boston cream pie and BBQ sauce: two good things that don't go well together. Back in the '80s, poor Ernie Colon's quirky and vivaciously cartoonish pencils were often matched with inkers going for a more realistic approach, resulting in something looking like bad realistic art. Anyone remember Ernie's pencils inked by Tony DeZuniga on issue #46, or on Arak, son of thunder? You'd be hard pressed to see there the same penciller who made Amethyst, princess of Gemworld so much fun (which also holds for the John Carter-like To sleep, perchance to die in the pages of Marvel Super Special #10).



Here we can still discern some of Colon's humour, but because the inking seems to say "these are real people" rather than "these are cartoons", bodies appear twisted, heads appear too large and people seem to float in the air. It's still fun to look at, but I'm sure a purer Colon look would have been more interesting -if only because it would have offered a radically different style.

The plot reads like a Shakespearean play (which is not a bad thing to say about anything, I suppose): lots and lots of characters who engage in many, many dialogs; a royal marriage, a dastardly plot, a jester providing comic relief, adultery, past tragedies, family secrets, just a touch of on-screen violence... It's really not a typical Conan tale.

Returning to the Hyborian lands after a brief stay in Cimmeria, Conan finds himself in a tiny country (Ravonna) he's never heard of, somewhere on the coast near Argos. (A tavern waitress says it's a needle between Argos and Poitain, but Poitain doesn't reach all the way to the sea; she must mean between Argos and Zingara).

Conan learns that the local princess is to be wed to the king of another land he's never heard of, the island of Alcalais. He reflects that it wouldn't be the first time a pirate captain retired to some island and declared it his own small kingdom, and that may be why nobody's ever heard of Alcalais before. The princess herself has never seen her fiancé; an envoy came to Ravonna to negociate the marriage and the union of the two small states. Everyone seems to see the match positively, though.

The Cimmerian will join the princess's party as they all sail toward Alcalais: the ship carries enough characters that we need a checklist to remind us of who's who after everybody's been introduced.



During the sea voyage, a few murders occur; Conan stands accused, then some other passengers, and when the truth is uncovered we learn about some old and dark secrets surrounding the tragic story of the princess's dead parents. We also discover that the villain of the play is a minor sorcerer who's really got only two tricks up his sleeve: he can start fires and send his soul to inhabit freshly-dead bodies. That will not save him from his cataclysmic encounter with the Cimmerian, naturally!

I won't reveal the punch, but will say that after all this time I had forgotten who had done what exactly and quite enjoyed re-reading this tale. Refreshingly enough, not everybody is dead by the end of the story!


Notes:
- Conan would be fairly young, something like 20-ish, if this story is set after his return to Cimmeria that followed "Rogues in the house".
- Someone mentions Conan fights like a Turanian devil; that struck me as odd so far to the west.
- A one-eyed character is called "Cecilops". That way too close to "cyclops" for my taste. Joke names are distracting.

I liked this issue. Going back now it seems like the like the last few wisps of greatness knowing what we do about the years 1981-1986. 

I couldn't figure out who was guilty so that is always a good thing when it comes to a mystery story and whether or not it is a success or failure.

Ernie Colon never really did anything for me. Rudimentary and cartoony much like Joe Staton. To be as pithy as possible: I enjoy both of their work occasionally but rarely.

Meanwhile Friend... some foodie on this board is trying to figure how to make a dish with Boston Cream Pie and BBQ sauce.

All I can say is that Lord Flatus has a particularly unfortunate name (Flatus being the medical term for a fart).

Savage sword of Conan #67, August 1981



Cover by Romas Kukalis, with a dramatized scene from the main story.


Table of contents

Plunder of death Island, a sequel to the Conan story Pool of the Black One
In the desert of dreams, a Hyborian Age tale
Deliverance, the third Chane adventure in these pages.

Frontispiece by Gil Kane.

------------------------------------

Plunder of death island
Script by Roy Thomas
Art by John Buscema, Alfredo Alcala and Kerry Gammill.

This is a sequel to the classic adventure Pool of the Black One, which was adapted in SSoC#22 and 23. It is also an opportunity to show what happens to Conan's numerous girlfriends after an adventure is over, when they do not meet their demise. Conan's paramour here is Sancha, the niece of the Duke of Kordava in Zingara, who had earlier been abducted by the pirate Zaporavo and forced to become his mistress. When the Cimmerian had slain Zaporavo and taken over his ship, the Wastrel, Sancha had become his lover in turn. As is proper for a sequel, a few pages recap the events from issues 22 and 23. (I appreciate the fact that Sancha is drawn as she was in those earlier issues. The inking style of this issue also reminds us of the earlier two, making for a nice continuation. It makes uses of ink washes and gives some images a lot of depth).



An offhand remark made in the course of the story informs us that instead of acting in the general interest of the Zingaran crown (as many Zingaran buccaneers do), Conan simply turned the Wastrel into a "renegade" pirate ship. This disagrees with Sprague de Camp's vision of things (and with SSoC 40-43), but agrees with Howard's writings. I always thought it made sense for Conan, after his crew was severely depleted at the end of Pool of the Black One, would take the Wastrel to the Baracha islands to find replacements and break a few heads.

The Wastrel is being followed by a Zingaran warship that starts catapulting rocks at it. Realizing his own craft will not long resist such punishment, Conan orders his men to head for the warship and board it. The following clash turns to the pirates' favor, and they manage to capture the Zingaran captain, figuring that a guy who insists on shouting his name aloud (Heronan Da Varza) must be from a big enough family to warrant a ransom. A minor wizard who accompanied him is however slain when he tries to hypnotize Conan, as seen above.

Notice the nice dynamic shot of Conan pushing his mistress away from an incoming missile:



Next on the agenda is the search for a treasure that Zaporavo had a map to. The map shows where a certain boat, the Phoenix, crashed on a reef as it was carrying a fortune in gold: the pay for a mercenary army that Argos had raised to fight Stygia. (That is the same army Conan and Amalric belonged to before the events from SSoC#21, so the Cimmerian knows about the Phoenix).

Trouble pops up from an unexpected direction: Sancha, who knows Heronan Da Varza, asks Conan to let her go back to Zingara with him when the nobleman is ransomed; she finds the sea life to rough and wants to return to her family. Conan, uncharacteristically, makes excuses to refuse. He seems to be really taken with his young mistress. Sancha seems to acquiesce to his reasons, but then plans to free Heronan da Varza and his captive men.

An opportunity presents itself after the Wastrel reaches the Phoenix, which is indeed where the map had claimed, jammed on submerged rocks near a volacinc island surrounded by strange red waters. The pirates break open a cask of wine to toast their upcoming operation, but Sancha drugs it and they all fall asleep. The Zingarans capture the pirates easily.

Da Varza, who has to atone for his loss of a ship, wants to bring Conan back to Kordava as a prisoner despite Sancha's pleas to free the Cimmerian, and also to recover the loot from the Phoenix.

The treasure ship is unfortunately still occupied: its sailors, stuck on the wreck those many months ago, have imprudently drunk the red sea water and have been transformed into monstrosities. The Zingarans have to fight for their life.



Meanwhile, Conan has freed himself from his chains (naturally!) and has reached the Phoenix, noticing as he goes that even the fish around the island are mutated monsters. Killing many of the transformed sailors, he allows the Zingarans and Sancha to flee the doomed ship which is set on fire, leaving the treasure behind.

Back on the Wastrel, Conan apologizes to Sancha for having tried to keep her with him against her will. He then says that he's willing to accept a truce if Da Varza agrees to set him ashore before the Wastrel reaches Kordava.

Now that last point poses a problem. It is supposed to explain how Conan lost the Wastrel, of course, but... we know, from SSoC 40-43, that Conan keeps the Wastrel after Sancha leaves it. There are also more stories of Conan losing a ship to violent events than there are of him getting one, so it would be parcimonious if the Wastrel was one of them. There is also the fact that as this story concludes, Conan's pirates are in charge, not Da Varza's outnumbered Zingarans; why in hell would the Cimmerian give up his ship? And finally, it's not like him to give up anything as precious as his own boat.

My interpretation is that Conan was momentarily shamed by his unfair behaviour, and was tempted to punish himself by drinking that bitter cup to the end. He doubtless thought better of it after he had time to think about it, and simply let Sancha and Da Varza return to their homeland.

Notes:

- Conan is about 37.
- Many good points in this story, that I actually enjoyed more today than in 1981: the wizard who does not turn out to be a major adversary, the animals being affected by the toxic waters the same way as men, Sancha liking Conan but not being in love with him, and finally Conan's honesty regarding his own actions.