What in Crom's name???

I wrote that and scanned the images and everything and... did I effin' delete it???

Please, Crom, let Time Machine still have it....

The crimson citadel
Script by Chuck Dixon
Art by Gary Kwapisz and Ernie Chan

Conan is still in Vanaheim, slowly making his way south. Tired of sleeping under the stars, he seeks lodgings (and perhaps work for his sword) in a small mining town he encounters.

The town has a problem. The mine that provides its livelihood used to have a certain wall marked with an eldritch, evil-looking look, and since that wall had been breached there had been strange creatures haunting the village’s streets at night, creatures that killed people from time to time.

Conan is welcome in the village but has to sleep in a barn, sharing the hay with a traveling priest of Mitra by the name of Vitellus.



The man is witty, has a sense of humour, and is clearly kind but also physically capable. During the night, the barn is attacked by mishappen creatures who try to pass the bolted doors; physical contact with Mitra’s symbol sends them running away (their skin hissing and blistered) as if they were vampires facing a cross.

The next morning, funerals are held for five victims of the nightgaunts. It’s clear nobody knows how to handle the problem but a fiery teenage girl named Kreenara insists that nothing will be achieved as long as everyone cowers in their house. Vitellus then convinces the village’s leader to give him a shot at the night creatures. With few options, the chief agrees and Vitellus tricks Conan into volunteering for the mission as well! (The clever Vitellus, who himself works only for the glory of Mitra, judiciously negotiated a salary for the Cimmerian).

The two men make their way toward the mine and are joined by a bow-slinging Kreenara, who is adamant to accompany them.



The mine reveals many corpses -even the miners’ animals were killed.

Going through the cursed breached wall, Conan, Vitellus and Kreenara find an entire subterranean city. The sound of fighting brings them to a room where a bloody battle is raging: monsters who are likely the ones haunting the village are fighting warrior women speaking an unknown tongue. Siding with the women, the newcomers help them disperse their hideous opponents.



The women’s leader seems to take a liking to Conan, and she leads him to her quarters where the lack of a common language is no barrier to a night of frolics and recreation.



Meanwhile, Vitellus busies himself reading hieroglyphs drawn on a wall. These tell of an evil race that lived in these mountains until the ancient Vanir united to banish them within the mountain, where they were sealed away. Eons changed the evil ones, with the females turning their males into a servile subspecies, a subspecies ever more misshapen. Realizing that the women they helped belong to the same species as the monsters, Vitellus uses his mitraic pendant on them, and Kreenara and him slay the ones who suddenly attack the two of them.

As this happens, Conan discovers for himself the nature of his playmate: she turns into a giant bat-thing that jumps on him. Only the intervention of a lance-throwing Vitellus saves the Cimmerian, who decapitates the monster-woman.

Trying to escape the underground city, the trio must hack its way through more male creatures even as it’s being pursued by the women.



Back in the mine, Vitellus realizes that part of it runs under a river. He sends his friends ahead while he remains behind to shift trusses and brings the mineshaft down, apparently sacrificing himself to save the Vanir village.



Conan and Kreenara escape and pay their respect to the courageous priest.


Notes:

- Vitellus will be back in SSoC #152.

- Vitellus wears a symbol of Mitra shaped a little like a cross; more precisely, it’s a capital T with a sun rising over it. The symbol works well since Mitra is a sun god (so was the historical Mitra!) and the cross reference agrees with Vitellus’ role as a Hyborian age Van Helsing.

- We learn of a Cimmerian custom: always mounting one’s horse from the left side to keep a devil from entering the beast. (Cimmerian aren’t very religious, but they are superstitious).

- As far as we can tell, this story follows the one in issue #140, with Conan still in Vanaheim. He’d therefore be 39.

B the scales of Set, I am glad I mentioned it. Thanks for writing, retrieving, and posting it; and for your entire series of reviews. I greatly enjoy reading them as an addendum to SSoC series.

A thing about timelines, though. In SSoC #190, when a mid-thirties (at least) Conan is retelling his life story to Kuchum and the Skull of Thulsa Doom, Thulsa Doom mocks Conan by insisting that all of those stories could not be true, because of no one man could have done so much in only two decades (at most). Conan becomes angry and threatens to destroy Thulsa Doom for calling him a liar.

Do you think this could have been Roy Thomas's way telling the readers that many of the stories told in previous issues, that he did not write, never actually happened?

I almost think that all the Marvel tales of Conan take place in multiple timelines. I am reading through Darkhorse reprints of the original Marvel Conan comic book, and it just does not seem possible for all of these stories to fit in a single timeline. Although, Marvel never indicated this and in fact seemed to indicate the opposite - that all Marvel Conan tales - occurred in the same timeline of Earth-616, it just does not seem possible.

For instance, the SSoC issues in which Conan becomes king are in direct conflict with the story told in late-nineties mini-series Conan The Usurper. Either one is false and did not happen or both happened, but in separate timelines.

There are so many issues that consume so much of Conan's time that it just isn't possible for all of these stories to have been about the same Conan.

Doesn't need to be an alternate earth if it's not "in continuity" for the accepted Conan timeline...famous figures of history (and/or myth) have stories told about them that have no basis in fact, but audiences come to believe is true-think Washington Irving's "biographies" of figures like George Washington and Christopher Columbus that are filled with apocryphal stories that keep getting passed on and have become integral parts of the myth (I cannot tell a lie, I chopped down the cherry tree, or the hero of science proving the world was round when science had already accepted that since Ptolemy's Geography and Aristotle's Physics). The stories told about a figure like Conan would be like that. with most of the audience not knowing which was true and which was not (and even canon stories like oh meeting a Frost Giant's Daughter in the plains of a battle) might be considered apocryphal by much of the audience. A figure like Conan who rose form obscurity to rule the most powerful of the Hyborian nations would have an entire body of stories built around him beyond the Nemedian Chronicles-much of which would have survived as oral tradition and recorded in many altered formats by later writers and survived as the biography of the king, even if they were untrue. It is much easier to explain the stories that don't fit as this type of tale than alternate earths Conans, etc. etc. And it makes looking at de Camp and Carter (et.al.) as those much later writers recording altered versions of the oral tradition a little more palatable too.

-M

Of course (and this ma be blasphemous to some) I think of Roy in the same light as de Camp and Carter as adding to the Conan apocrypha, though Roy is among the best to do so, and the only actual tales of Conan are those penned by Howard himself. Everything else is apocrypha, so I don't really worry about how it all fits together, just whether it is a story I enjoy or not.

-M

Have any of you ever watched the animated feature: Turtles Forever? Basically, it combines the teams of turtles from the 1987 series with those from the 2003 series. I believe it is the 2003 series finale. The two teams of turtles join forces to stop the Utrom Shredder from destroying the turtle-multi-verse. Utrom Shredder believes that if wipes out the very first turtles, the team created by Eastman and Laird in 1984, then all turtles and all inhabitants of their respective universes will cease exist (including Utrom Shredder). Utrom Shredder and the two teams of turtles face off on Turtle-Prime, the world of the 1984 turtles.

I view REH's Conan and his world as the Conan-Prime from which all subsequent Conans sprang. Now I know that there will never be a "Conan Forever" movie, but I can't help but imagine how the Conan from Conan the Adventurer would react when his star-metal sword finally drew blood. So, yes, to me, it all happened, just to too many different Conans to count.

Blood and honor
Script by Don Kraar
Art by Val Mayerik

After several issues written by Charles Dixon, Don Kraar comes back for one adventure (even if the table of contents credits Dixon for the writing, probably out of sheer habit). Kraar is however properly credited on the first page of the tale, and to settle the case once and for all the first thing anyone says in it is “agheeeeeee”. Only Kraar characters go “agheeeee” instead of “aaaaah”, “aaaaaargh”, or even “aieeeeee”.



The artwork by Mayerik is very stylized, a bit like the one Luke Mcdonnell used in his Dreadstar or Suicide Squad days. It looks pretty good, I must say.

The story is once again set in the Pictish wilderness, where Conan is scouting for the Aquilonians. Kraar makes use of a character he created in Conan the king #29, the Pictish chief Shooz Dinj. We saw Dinj again in CtK #30 (when he was executed) and in SSoC #112. Shooz Dinj and Conan hate each other, but it is a hatred tempered by respect; a honest hatred, if you will, the kind that Conan missed when he started tangling with “civilized” enemies.

Once again, a fort manned by Aquilonian troops is threatened by a large number of Picts. Settlements have been burned, settlers have been killed, and Conan just saved a young girl from being captured by Pictish raiders. A relief column is expected, but might arrive too late as the Picts are on the move.



We readers (but not the Aquilonians) learn that part of the Picts’ anger is due to the actions of a Hyborian merchant who started selling them steel weapons but then stole a priceless relic: the fingers of dead children, including some of Shooz Dinj’s sons. The merchant having been saved from his Pictish pursuers and brought to the fort, the natives are ready to sacrifice plenty of men to put it to the torch.

Not that the Picts are all that united: there is a feud between Shooz Dinj and the shaman Zinga Dur. The war chief Shooz Dinj, in particular, is losing patience after the shaman’s magic fails them again and again.



When Conan discovers the merchant’s duplicity and a pouch containing the precious fingers, he ties the man up and boldly brings him into the forest to trade to the Picts.



Appearing unexpectedly at Shooz Dinj’s campfire, he is almost speared by the natives before the chief orders his men to stand down: “the Cimmerian has safe conduct until first light”.

Conan’s offer of a deal is this: the merchant against the shaman. (Conan emphasizes how the man’s magic is a puny thing that does not serve Shooz Dinj, but in actuality the Aquilonians would much rather be free of attacking sabretooth tigers and water elementals. The shaman is not as useless as he's made out to be).

Conan throws the duplicitous merchant into the campfire, and as Zinga Dur protests that there is no way the Picts will honour the deal, Shooz Dinj stabs him in the back: “one worthless thing for another”.

He and Conan then agree that there is honour among savages and barbarians, and the Cimmerian is given leave to run as fast and as far as he can before the sun rises, because at that moment the chase will be on.

The Cimmerian barely eludes the pursuit, and as he reaches the fort only the timely arrival of the Aquilonian relief column saves his skin. Shooz Dinj is wounded and falls to the ground, and Conan is the first to reach him. The Cimmerian nevertheless allows the Pict to go away, because he doesn’t want such a honest enemy to be delivered to Tarantia’s torture chambers.




Notes:

- Conan is roughly 39; this stopry probably occurs a little while before Beyond the Black river, adapted in SSoC #26-27.
- Conan wears a helmet with front-facing horns, like the one he had in CtB #1-6. My guess is that it’s a typical Cimmerian helmet, something that would be easily available in those parts.



Pin-ups:

Several images by a handful of artists, including Conan the king artists Mike Docherty & Fraja Bator, and the always-welcome Geoff Isherwood.