SSoC#85
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The tale is set in the land of Kambuja, which you will not find in Howard's work; this Hyborian age equivalent of Cambodia (Kambuja is actually another name of that land) was created by de Camp and Carter in the novella "the witch of the mists". It seems that Conan's Afghuli tribesmen decided to follow him down from their homeland in northern Vendhya all the way down to the indochinese peninsula; a journey of more than 4 500 km that is neither explained nor even acknowledged. It's as if all the eastern countries were right next to each other, like so many New England states.

Conan is in jail when our tale open; he's been caught lying abed with princess Ayella, daughter of the god-king of Kambuja, an indiscretion that borders on blasphemy. But the god-king now has need of the Afghuli leader: Ayella has just been abducted by the wizard G'Humen Thak and spirited away to his stronghold. The god-king wants Conan to go and free his daughter, leading Kambujan troops.

Conan's newfound job doesn't last long, since his second in command can't stand taking orders from a foreign barbarian. This Kambujan general has the troops attempt to kill their leader. Conan escapes by jumping with his horse over a wide crevice. The Cimmerian loses his mount and is hit by an arrow that goes clean through his deltoids, but never fear: after a good night's rest he'll be as good as new. (Gee! His healing factor is better than Wolverine's in the early 80s!)



Rejoining his Afghulis, Conan learns that he's been replaced as their leader by one Mahmouk, whom he realizes is the one who betrayed him to the Kambujans. Killing a few hillmen and then Mahmouk himself, Conan regains his leadership and promises to lead his men to riches and slaughter. But first, he has to find those Afghulis who scattered to pillage the countryside while he was away.

Later, Conan learns that some of these plunderers make ready to attack a village of dirt-poor sheepherders. He orders a man named Brunneg to ride to them and call off the attack, but the hillman (objecting to this soft-hearted behaviour) transmits the exact opposite order.

Witnessing the massacre of the village, Conan is reminded of his own childhood and of his parent's death (AND I CALL BULLS*** ON THIS MEMORY, WHICH IS TAKEN FROM THE $%@# MOVIE!!!). He charges his own men to stop their onslaught, then learns of Brunneg's treachery, and slays him on the spot.



Conan next leads the Afghulis to G'Humen Thak's stronghold, promising them that when they plunder it they'll find riches uncounted.

Entering the wizard's city under disguise, the Cimmerian searches the inner recesses of the place's main temple until he discovers orincess Ayella's room. The girl is pleased to see him, but explains why she can't flee with him: she is kept not by chains of metal, but by the nightmares that the wizard sent her every night since she reached adulthood. It is to escape those soul-crushing dreams that she finally went to G'Humen Thak on her own, as that was his price for her to finally escape the nightmares.



Why Ayella didn't mention that to Conan when they had their tryst is not explained.

Conan declares that there's no other option: he'll have to kill the wizard.



to be continued!


Notes:

- The plot isn't that bad, even if it's really S&S by the numbers, but somehow the cake doesn't rise and there's no excitement in this story -it's really tedious. The wizard, the princess, the god-king, the Afghulis... they're all cardboard pieces, with no personality. The art is bland, bland, bland... barely sketched backgrounds of rocky slopes and little more. A few individual images look good, but that's about it.

Here are some of the best pictures (Kane + Redondo):



- Conan's parents having died when he was a little child, a concept taken from the movie, will be negated by later stories (notably issue #119, where we learn his parents died when Conan was in his 20s and he wasn't around).

- The princess's behaviour is most puzzling for a divine princess: she is the one who rode out of the capital to have sex with Conan in his tent among the Afghulis, before Kambujan troops arrived to "rescue" her and take the Cimmerian into custody. I suppose he had made a great impression when he acted as her bodyguard previously.

Savage sword of Conan #86, March 1983



Cover by Earl Norem. No frontispiece, as a subscription form takes its place.


Table of contents:

Revenge of the sorcerer!, concluding the "daughter of the god-king" story begun last issue.
Lion of the waves, six full pages by Pablo Marcos with a rhymed story by Alan Zelenetz.

SSoC#86
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As the priest leads the princess and the barbarian along dark passageways, he shows the pair a pit in which a monster waits among the bones of all the victims of the wizard, victims that the creature apparently killed and ate.



Now Conan should really exclaim "By Crom! What a strong feeling of déjà vu!" because the entire scene is lifted from Conan the barbarian #43.



The priest, who was a traitor after all, pushes Conan down the pit. (What kind of sense is that supposed to make? If the bad guys knew where Ayella and Conan were, why not simply surround them with massive numbers instead of going through this complicated way of getting rid of Conan?)

Ah, well, it's a good thing that Conan lived through this exact episode in CtB#45, for he manages to face the monster in exactly the same way, with the same success he had known before. The only difference is that this time he pierces the creature's throat with a sword instead of a bone.





The priest having absconded with princess Ayella, Conan must then find the girl anew. Prowling the stronghold's corridors again, he gives Zoran an opportunity to draw some nice images.



Capturing an old priest, Conan forces him to lead him to H'Arad B'An, who is unfortunately dead from a slit throat. It seems that his wizardly master discovered his betrayal and had him slain. The old man then has to lead Conan to G'Human Thak. Interestingly enough, the wizard does not reside in his palace, which is mostly an ostentatious decoy; the man himself prefers to stay elsewhere.

Conan and the priest are suddenly the target of arrows. Their attacker is none other than general Ti-Zoh, the man who led the mutiny against Conan when he had been charged of leading Kambujan troops to save Ayella. Why Ti-Zoh is now alone is not explained, but fate managed to put him right on the trail Ayella's most recent abductor had chosen to bring the princess to G'Human Thak. Having thus recovered the princess (and killed the priest), he now wants to kill the Cimmerian before the Cimmerian kills him, over protests by the princess.

Climbing through the rocky hillsides, Conan manages to flank the Kambujan who jumps off a cliff and dies.

The princess in tow, Conan rejoins his Afghulis. Together they follow the captive priest through secret passages into G'Human Thak' domain, and finally face the wizard. The sorcerer (another bald man in a robe) brags about his great magical jewel, which allowed him to follow the movements of his enemies right from the start, and with which he now intends to slay them all. Conan throws a goblet at the wizard's hand, forcing him to drop his jewel (which shatters on the ground).



Powerless, the wizard runs away, only to be caught in the back by a thrown sword. Conan and the princess prepare to party and the Afghulis loot the wizard's treasure room. The end.



Notes:

- Conan must be around 34 for this adventure, which is set after People of the Black circle.

- If the wizard knew right from the start where everyone was, why not simply set a trap for Conan? Why let him run around his palace and kill his people like that when he could have stopped him any time? What's the deal with the slain guard at the princess's door? Who killed him and why? Why did the wizard leave a single assassin hiding behind a curtain in the princess's room instead of having twenty heavily armed guards wait for Conan? Since he can summon demons to do his bidding, as he prepares to do to kill the Afghulis at the end, why not do it sooner when they were not expecting it?


Next issue will be much better.

All this talk about bald priests reminds me: was shaving your head a requirement ofr the priesthood in the Hyperborean Age? I cannot recall ever seeing an priest who wasn't bald.

Well there is a practical reason for it in the mythos Howard set up-in People of the Black Circle Howard relates the only way the Black Seers were able to strike at the Vedhi prince form a distance was because they had a lock of his hair, it served as a link between them and their target. It is a principle of sympathetic magic, one that Frazier discusses many cultures believing in in his seminal work The Golden Bough. In People of the Black Circle, Howard had Khemsa explain the lengths people go to when disposing of lost hair, trimmed nail clippings etc. and how they acquired a lock of the prince's hair. Since the priests of Howard's world often worked magic, it's no stretch they would be aware of the dangers of allowing pieces of themselves to be used as totems in sympathetic magic. 

Add in that Stygia, the quintessential center for magic using priests in Howard's milieu, is modeled after Ancient Egypt where depictions in art indicate that holy men had shaven pates and knowing the amount of research Howard did at times into ancient cultures which fascinated him, it's not surprising that he latched onto that idea when crafting his depictions of priests and sorcerers. 

A few practical matters too-if priests had to be ritually clean to perform ceremonies, that is very difficult when you have hair in a society that lacks hair care products and still has insects and lice infestations everywhere. Also, many of the cultures represented in these adventures were from arid or "Mediterranean" climates, so a shaved head was also a matter of practicality. 

Howard often rambles on about the vagaries of ancient cultures in the letters I've read that he sent to Lovecraft and other members of the Lovecraft circle, so it is not surprising that his art imitated the areas his fascination had latched on to. 

-M

PS I am currently reading People of the Black Circle-the original Howard prose version, so the bit with the hair was fresh in my mind. 

SSoC#87
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The armor of Zulda Thaal!
Script by Michael Fleisher
Art by John Buscema and Ernie Chan

I'll admit that it's a relief to go back to the tried and true Buscema & Chan team after two issues of uninspired Kane breakdowns with inking I was not too fond of. Scriptwise, it's the same thing even if Michael Fleisher is still at the helm; while the daughter of the god-king storyline had been pretty much panned by readers, The armor of Zulda Thaal was very well received. And it's true that it's among the better Fleisher Conan stories.

The plot is essentially that of Rocky III, with a few magical objects thrown in. Conan gets creamed, gets better, and regains the top spot.

We begin as a Nemedian scholar and his Brythunian apprentice enter the long-lost grave of the wizard Zulda Thaal. The scholar is quite excited to have finally found the spot, for there he will learn the location of three magical items that the wizard hid millenia ago: a breastplate, a bow and a pair of gloves, all jewel-encrusted.

The story of Zulda Thaal is as follows: three thousand years ago, an evil tyrant ruled over the city of Kutchemes. Since his own son meant to depose the tyrant, Zulda Thaal provided him with the above-mentioned magical items, a gift from a god. The breastplate made one impervious to any blow; the gloves gave one great strength and the bow could kill dozens with only one arrow. With these, Zulda Thaal's son succeeded in his coup and became king; but he was soon to be murdered in turn.



His father, disconsolate, magically banished the godly gifts to three distant spots: deep in a cavern, inside a live volcano and at the bottom of the Vilayet sea.

I regret that Fleisher decided to use Kutchemes as the city Zulda Thaal hailed from, because that's also the city featured at the start of Black colossus (SSoC#2). We know that three thousand years ago, this Stygian city was sacked and destroyed by Hyborians, forcing the great wizard Thugra Khotan to seal himself within its great dome. Not that both Zulda Thaal and Thugra Khotan couldn't have been around at roughly the same time, but it's odd that neither story would make mention of the other; and Kutchemes being anything else than a Set-worshipping tyranny doesn't square with what we learned from Howard's prose.

We leave our two scholars to see what's Conan is up to. He's leader of the Zuagirs, a role he assumed in A witch shall be born (SSoC#5). Conan and his desert raiders outwit a troop of Turanian soldiers who had been sent to get rid of them. King Yezdigerd of Turan is suitably unimpressed when he learns of his men's failure, even if we must wonder how it is possible for anyone to have reached Aghrapur, Turan's capital, to deliver the news in so little time... If the "meanwhiles" from the captions are to be trusted, Yezdigerd learns of his men's discomfiture before Conan and his raiders even have time to get back to their own camp. Still, it's nice to see Yezdigerd again, and I'm glad when major characters like him are featured without interacting directly with Conan.



The riding Zuagirs's attention is drawn to giant bats that seem to harass two people near a ruined building. Conan recognizes the beasts as the winged devils he faced earlier in in SSoC#75, although none of his men do... either they have poor memory, or every single Zuagir that accompanied Conan during that earlier adventure has been replaced. Which is not that unlikely, if truth be told, since there are so many SSoC stories where Zuagirs are slaughtered that their ranks must have had a high turnover.

We readers, who remember the tale, might wonder how the bat riders escaped the collapse of their subterranean kingdom. Maybe they're like Hydra or the Hand: you never really get rid of them.

Conan and his raiders push the attacking bats back and go help their victims. They are the Nemedian scholar we met earlier (now dead) and his apprentice, named Darius. Darius explains about the three jewelled artifacts without mentioning that they are magical, and the enthusiastic Zuagirs convince him to use his master's directions to lead them to these treasures.

SSoC#87
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Conan wakes up many weeks later in the humble house of a fisherman and his wife. The kind couple found his broken form and have been trying to nurse him back to health, despite the odds that his multiple broken bones would be the end of him. They tell him of "Darius the conqueror", who has recently chased king Yezdigerd from the throne of Turan thanks to his magical weapons.

Conan then undergoes several months of convalescence and training (altogether probably around nine months) before bidding farewell to his benefactors and travelling to Aghrapur to settle matters with Darius.



In the Turanian capital he meets his own Zuagirs, who have been made courtiers by their new leader but long to return to the desert. They help Conan reach Darius's chambers, where the young conqueror is quite pleased to have an opportunity to kill the Cimmerian again.

Conan decides to play it smart and starts by cutting the magic bow in two. But Darius is wearing the breastplate and the gloves, and things don't go as easily with him. The Cimmerian keeps him off-balance to prevent him from landing a crushing blow, goading Darius into following him.



A feint allows Conan to throw the youngster out of a tower window, but the breastplate's power absorbs the impact as Darius lands on a roof. The Cimmerian follows, and once again prompts Darius to attack him recklessly, causing him to fall into the chimney of a smithy. Darius is burned down to ashes, leaving only his magical equipment behind.





Notes:

- The problem with a story requiring such a long time is that it's hard to fit in the continuity. Conan was about 30 when he joined the Zuagirs and 31 when he left them; since this story takes the better part of a year, it doesn't leave much elbow room for the rest of the Zuagir-era adventures.

- The gloves don't seem to have been affected by their fall into the smithy's fire (which isn't surprising, since they spent three thousand years inside the caldera of a live volcano). Why Conan doesn't recover them isn't explained.

- The geographical names are all good in this story; the Kezankian range, Koth, the Vilayet sea, the Kharamun desert, all are in their proper place. (They just seem to be too close together, as we've mentioned earlier regarding the speed with which messages reach Turan's capital). The swearing is mostly right, except that the fisherman swears by Mitra (it should be by Tarim, the Turanian god, or at least some eastern deity; certainly not the Hyborian Mitra) and that Darius swears by Erlik's eyes. Erlik is a Hyrkanian god all right, but Darius himself is from Brythunia... he should swear by Mitra.

- There is quite a bit of humour in this issue. An extended scene of mayhem is accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek series of captions: "At the palace gate, a minor difference of opinion ensues... In no uncertain terms, the guards inform the barbarian that he may not enter. For his part, Conan is equally adamant... within a matter of moments however, a harmonious compromise is reached..." (everybody's dead) "In the palace corridor, the barbarian encounters more guardsmen with argumentative attitudes... A lively exchange of viewpoints ensues... But gentle persuasion carries the day" (everybody's dead once again).

- It is extremely uncommon to see Conan hurt so badly in a story. That too might have been taken from the Conan movie, but the analogy to Rocky's defeat and retraining in Rocky III strikes me as a better fit (especially since in that movie, Apollo had told Rocky that he simply couldn't defeat Clubber Lang by accepting to get pummelled. He had to be the better man, not the better punching bag.

Considering that he had been crucified six months earlier, Conan no doubt considered changing his line of work once or twice during his convalescence here.