I don't want to speak for dupont2005, but when I read his post my first reaction was that he was talking about the two specific images that mars referred to. Those are the two that scream "bad 90 art" to me.

I've never understood the appeal of Jim Lee. I don't find his figures nearly as clean and effective as those of Byrne at his best (late 70s, IMO). But then I'm one of those readers who was turned off by the mere look of Marvel & DC comics on the stands in the 90s and avoided them like the plague. I now regret missing a lot of good Vertigo stuff for that reason, but I have no regrets about missing most of the regular DC and Marvel output from that era.

I don't mind the Bisley, though. Even though his style is often described as "pumped" or "roided up", which makes it sound similar to the "bad 90s" art mentioned above, I think it's a different kind of thing - Bisley being Bisley, rather than Bisley following the trend of the day.

That is a very interesting question. Popular wisdom says that it is so, especially since the final issues of both titles (CtB and SSoC) go for fairly high prices and are always advertised as "rare - low print run". I couldn't find the actual numbers for CtB 275 and SSoC 235, but here are the numbers presented in comics near the end of each title:

Conan the barbarian # 267: 138 400 copies

Savage sword of Conan # 231: 64 225 copies

Neither figure strikes me as a case of "must be cancelled immediately!", but then again this was back in the early 90s before the comic-book field imploded. (It's ironic that in today's world, these numbers would mean very healthy sales indeed!)

What to do when half your population has turned into monsters and you can't drink the water? Well, first you switch to wine and second you hire people to sort out the problem. A local lord who fancies himself a man of knowledge offers his flying ship and zombie-like bodyguards, the leathermen, that he apparently cooked up in his laboratory from the body of deceased citizens. Something in the attitude of this gentleman suggests that he's probably less than entirely trustworthy. But his leathermen look very cool indeed.



Other members of the group of hirees include Conan (of course), and a woman warrior who doubles as a priestess of Dana, a goddess we've never heard of before in the Conan mags. (But then in "Conan the savage", we often get that kind of spurious invention. Some characters will swear by "Tamir", which is Chuck Dixon misspelling of the Turanian Tarim, probably, and the people doing the swearing being Hyperboreans they should have sworn by Ymir or Bori anyway. But I digress).

Bent on discovering the source of the contamination, the entire crew takes wing on a boat attached to "floating globes" that look like hot air balloons but are magical in nature.

The back-up feature in those two issues is something I should have liked, but somehow didn't. As in, "not at all".

It does feature an adaptation of a non-Conan tale by Robert E. Howard, and that should be good. It does feature a script by Roy Thomas, who's my favorite Conan writer after Howard himself. It's got art by Geoff Isherwood, whose work on Conan the king was some of the best I saw in the entire 80s. But the combination here doesn't work for me.

First, the Howard story was one of his weakest efforts. Roy's script was okay, considering what he was using as reference material, but Geoff's art was a big disappointment. This master of the chiaroscuro, who long ago proved his mastery of the tiny scratchy line, here uses a grey wash that drowns everything and actually makes it hard to see what's going on. Plus, departing from his previous accurate rendering of the human form, Geoff chooses to exaggerate movements, contortions and muscle size, resulting in something that's closer to an early 90s Image style than to Isherwood's old style. This style was also used in the Conan the barbarian limited series "flame and the fiend".




Next issue: The return of an old fan-favorite, artist Gary Kwapisz.

I've alluded to this once or twice before but allow me to get concrete: There was nothing like the 'gray wash' or charcoal effect, or 'tones' to ruin a good issue of Savage Sword... or... in this case Geoff Isherwood's art.

With a half-dozen issues under its belt, Marvel continued with the same formula: two stories per issue, emphasis on the art, no text piece of any kind. The text pages of Savage Sword of Conan had given that mag a certain aura of scholarly achievement; excellent contributors like Jim Neal and Fred Blosser would analyze the world of the Hyborian Age with the dedication of Benedictine monks and enrich our understanding of that engrossing make-believe (but coherent) universe. Letter writers like the late and regretted Steve Tompkins would do the same as well.

With Conan the savage? Well... a letter page did pop up. In which someone asked if Conan and the Hulk were related.

In issue 7, the first story is again written by Chuck Dixon, and drawn by the excellent Gary Kwapisz (who's one of the hardest artist to track down on the internet)! Kwapisz was a mainstay of the '80s Savage sword, and I always admired the natural look he gave characters as well as the wonderful backgrounds he drew; especially when he had to picture the natural world. This would be his only contribution to Conan the savage.

The plot? Oh, some quest for a lot of gold somewhere in Hyperborea, where the natives now swear by Tamir (probably a misspelled "Tarim", who's a Hyrkanian god, not a Hyperborean one. But that's normal in a Conan book not written by Thomas, Busiek or Truman). Some recurring characters appear: the Iron Damsels, an all-girl band of mercenaries/thieves/gentleladies of fortune created during the '80s. They and Conan had a few run-ins in the past and remained careful allies who like to insult one another. Kwapisz makes them look quite pretty, though, with faces far less comic-booky than in standard comic art.



So... we get the usual mix of lost temples, secret passages, hidden traps, and the coveted gold is finally lost to all as our entire crew is flushed out of the tunnels they had been exploring. Admire if you will the beauty of the scenery: Kwapisz was never stingy with his efforts and often provided backdrops that were as interesting as the actual action.



All in all a light tale, but enjoyable enough... which seems to be what this mag's editorial mandate is all about. Action/comedy.

The second story is a Rafael Kayanan fest, all done in splash pages that can be aligned to form a panorama (if you're willing to purchase two issues and cut them up). It's about some Picts chasing Conan in tall grass, and about Conan killing them all. Kayanan is a big fan favorite, but I seem to have the same reaction to his work than to Jim Lee's. Sure, it's beautifully rendered, with something of a Barry Smith approach, but... I don't know, it seems to be too "genre-like" for my taste. People pose a lot. They have limbs replaced by weapons. They wear ungainly, cool-looking but impractical armor (one guy here has at least a dozen human skulls strapped to his back; a beautiful effect, but wouldn't they get in the way?) Conan jumps into complex fighting stances, hitting his opponent from five different directions at once. The artist is a master of Eskrima and Kali, Filipino martial arts, and he probably uses his own expertise to draw real-life based moves amped up by the freedom of the comic page; still, I'd find that more appropriate for Iron Fist than for Conan. Conan is a western barbarian, not an oriental martial artist. All very pretty, perhaps, but I prefer a stronger dose of earthiness to my Conan art; something that looks real, not idealized.



That being said, for Kayanan fans this must have been a dream come true!