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Post by Roquefort Raider on Sept 1, 2014 9:59:39 GMT -5
The second story, also penned by Dixon, is drawn by another Enrique... Enrique Villagran. Whose name evokes another Conan artist I love, Ricardo Villagran. Apparently they're brothers, and their styles do look alike (in that great Argentina tradition that combines boldness and deft brush strokes). I don't know what it is about Argentine cartoonists... First, why are they so damn good, and second where did this type of realism come from? It has some European flavor to it, but I believe many Argentine cartoonists were already that good when Europeans came to visit (people like Hugo Pratt and even a young René Goscinny). Anyway, I never tire of it. What I do tire of is smut in comics. Here, we meet Red Sonja once again (and, I believe, for the last time in a Marvel mag). Now you may recall that Red Sonja is a character who, for years, wore a bikini made of small round pieces of steel; that's the outfit she's most associated with, and one to which she came back to in the 2000's. In the more politically conservative '80s, she dropped the bikini for a blue shirt and short pants; then in the 90s, she sported a leather armor for most of Roy Thomas' second tenure on the Conan books. I liked the leather armor. It looked practical, and although it didn't hide Sonja's charms, it looked like something one might actually wear to combat (inasmuch as Conan doesn't wear that much more himself). But Conan the savage was from a later era... after the "leather armor" period, the comics world had been caught in a bad girls trend, during which ladies with great power, a bad disposition and an overabundance of pulchritude made sixteen year old boys all too aware of their raging hormones while reading their comics. Defying gravity, these heroines might have been called DD, but not because they were female Daredevils... and they dared you to look at them in the eye. You get the drift. So Marvel turned Red Sonja into a bad girl, and she went around with her chainmail bra... and a thong! Yes, very practical in battle. Then here in Conan the savage, we got... this!!!
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Sept 1, 2014 10:07:30 GMT -5
EEEAAAAAAAGH!!!Why in tarnation is Red Sonja running around in bondage gear Has she gone insane Have the editors gone insane??? Do they really think they're going to attract new readers with that kind of sexploitation??? And if so, why not give up entirely and give us 48 pages of Red Sonja and Valeria taking a shower???You know, whenever I hear someone bemoan what a misogynist Dave Sim (of Cerebus fame) is, this is the kind of thing I think of. I am convinced that this ridiculous, exploitative and tasteless depiction of female characters in what should be an action/adventure mag is WAY more misogynistic than any of Sim's treatment of women in his comics. Ah, well. Apart from this prodigious faux pas, the rest of the story is all right. It even has Nick Fury in it (sort of). (He's actually some guy named Trajanus, but I always though Nick Fury had Italian origins anyway).
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Sept 1, 2014 10:15:23 GMT -5
Conan the savage #10Conan the savage #10 would be the last issue of the series, and the swan song for Conan B&W magazines at Marvel, putting an end to decades of generally good work. Appropriately enough, it featured what could have been the final collaboration between Roy Thomas and John Buscema on the character, and also the final chronological adventure of the Cimmerian since it was set after the story Conan of the Isles, the adaptation of which had been started in Conan the barbarian annual #7 and presented in complete form in one of the Marvel Graphic Novels. Even though this was the end of the series, Roy decided to leave us with an open ending, one which promised more adventure for the main character. As you probably know, Robert Howard did not depict the death of Conan; however, in a letter to fan P. S. Miller in 1936, he alluded to Conan eventually giving up his crown and traveling across the western ocean: (…) He travelled widely, not only before his kingship, but after he was king. He travelled to Khitai and Hyrkania, and to the even less known regions north of the latter and south of the former. He even visited a nameless continent in the western hemisphere, and roamed among the islands adjacent to it. How much of this roaming will get into print, I cannot foretell with any accuracy. The abdication and voyage to the west were the basis for L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's novel "Conan of the Isles", and here Roy picks up the storyline by linking the Conan canon to the universe of another famous Weird Tales writer, Clark Ashton Smith, who set numerous stories full of sorcery and ancient gods on the mysterious and antique continent of Zothique. (It's interesting that yet a third Weird Tales writer, H. P. Lovecraft, had been visited in previous Conan the Savage issues)! The Smith story that serves as the basis for this final issue is "Necromancy in Naat", and it tells of an island to which an exiled old sorcerer and his no-good and rebellious sons are served by a bunch of reanimated corpses. They also have a nasty familiar demon who sucks the life out of the living. The plan for this final issue was pretty good indeed, and all the right ingredients were there… but it fell short of the goal. Somehow Big John didn't appear to be particularly interested in this particular story, even if he got to ink his own pencils. It's still drawn by a man who would be incapable of producing bad art if he wanted to, but you can really tell that he's not trying real hard either. To quote Roy Thomas, whose admiration for John's skills is otherwise well-known and oft stated: "(The issue) featured a rather youthful-looking 70-year-old Conan (…) and was intended to launch the septuagenarian Cimmerian on a series of adventures in the Hyborian Age equivalent of the Americas. But it was too late. Perhaps John, knowing this was the final issue, lost heart for once. Certainly his inking on "The necromancers of Naat" is the weakest I ever saw from him; it had an almost coloring-book quality to it".
I can only agree with Roy on that. Here's a typical page from this issue: Note : in Alter Ego #139, Roy mentions that the story was not actually inked by John himself, but by a family member (perhaps his daughter or granddaughter). That might have been, speculates Roy, at a time John was suffering from cancer; one understands how inking a Conan story for a mag being cancelled wouldn't have been a high priority.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Sept 1, 2014 10:17:05 GMT -5
Clean storytelling, but minimal background and little by way of variety. One page in the book looks pretty good, but most of the others are merely O.K. Roy's remark about how surprisingly young Conan looks like is something that had bothered me greatly at the time. I had admired how old Conan had looked in the adaptation of Conan of the isles; old, but still tough and ornery. Granted, it could have all been the doing of inker Armando Gil more than John's pencils, but I would have thought that the editor would insist on keeping Conan looking his age; it's so rare that we let characters age and so rare that old people are depicted accurately. Here's my favourite image from annual #7; isn't that just the way a 70 year old Conan should look? So… Artwork-wise, this issue left something to be desired. Very luckily for us fans, it would finally not be the ultimate collaboration between Roy and John on a Conan story; their mini-series " Death covered in gold" (an unfortunate misspelling of the original title, " Death carved in gold") would reunite them one last time, with a John Buscema providing pencils and inks, and gorgeous ones too. In terms of continuity, it would have been fun to see how the "Zotique as America" plot would have turned out, and how it would have been reconciled with Savage sword of Conan #166 -168, precisely set in North America. But I guess that's something we'll never know.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 2, 2014 13:31:54 GMT -5
Great thread! Although about half of the pages you've posted do not loo as good as SSOC, the other half look great, and I'd still like to check the series out anyway.
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Post by Rob Allen on Sept 8, 2014 20:13:06 GMT -5
Roy Thomas is looking for copies of issues #3 and #6 of Conan the Savage. He's planning to get the whole run bound and discovered that he doesn't have those two issues. Does anyone have copies that they'd like to sell to Roy?
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Post by benday-dot on Sept 8, 2014 20:30:43 GMT -5
I'd trade 'em to him if he has any extra copies of CtB #1 kicking around. lol.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Sept 9, 2014 15:10:56 GMT -5
Roy Thomas is looking for copies of issues #3 and #6 of Conan the Savage. He's planning to get the whole run bound and discovered that he doesn't have those two issues. Does anyone have copies that they'd like to sell to Roy? Unfortunately I don't, but here's a copy of issue #3 on sale for three bucks plus shipping on ebay. ***(Adress deleted; the issue has since been sold).***
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Post by Deleted on Sept 11, 2014 21:50:41 GMT -5
Took me awhile to round up my set . Enjoyed reading them .
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Post by senatortombstone on Aug 30, 2015 18:18:13 GMT -5
My very first Marvel B&W magazine was CtS#1. I bought it when it was published and didn't really care for it very much. Up to that point, the only Conan I knew was from the movies and the Conan the Adventurer cartoon (I still love the cartoon and see it as a gateway for Conan). Eventually, I sold it for $0.25 at a garage sale. A few years back I purchased a used copies of SSoC Volume 1, 2, and 7; read them, became hooked, and purchased the entire ten issue CtS run on an Ebay auction, for $14.00 (most copies 5.0 +/-). I also purchased SSoC 160-235 for about $60.00 from a Half Priced Books location. I have not read all of these issues, yet, as I prefer to read the Darkhorse phone-book reprints, to prevent damaging the precious originals.
I found CtS#10 to be rather depressing, as well as a poor send off for Conan. I did not like seeing Sigurd suffer such an ignominious death.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 30, 2015 19:08:30 GMT -5
That's a great price on that run. I'll have to start keeping an eye out
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Post by senatortombstone on Sept 6, 2015 12:46:50 GMT -5
That's a great price on that run. I'll have to start keeping an eye out Yeah, at the time, they were offering 129-235 for $90.00, but since I already had 129-159 in Dark Horse reprints, I asked them to split it. At the time, I was not aware of how many Sonja, Kull, Kane, etc. stories that were not included in the SSOC TPBs. I regretted passing up the chance to buy 129-159 - especially at that price. Luckily, those issues languished for over a year and were lumped together with a bunch of Conan Saga and other issues of SSoC - 91 in total, for $70.00. I picked them up on Friday at 20.00% off - so now I have half the SSoC run. Unfortunately, about 20 issues have those annoying HPB price tags (from 2001!) on them, but none of the 129-159 issues, thankfully. I will probably try to lot them off on Ebay, to recoup my costs. Sadly, HPB isn't as good for deals on comic books and video games, as it once was, but every now and then, a few issues slip through the cracks. Back in 2013, I found two copies of SSoC#1 (7.0-8.0) for a dollar each! Sometimes life is fair!
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Sept 8, 2015 12:40:57 GMT -5
That's a great price on that run. I'll have to start keeping an eye out Back in 2013, I found two copies of SSoC#1 (7.0-8.0) for a dollar each! Sometimes life is fair! Goodness! I paid mine 18 bucks back in 1979! LIFE IS UNFAIR!!!
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Post by senatortombstone on Sept 12, 2015 20:53:59 GMT -5
Back in 2013, I found two copies of SSoC#1 (7.0-8.0) for a dollar each! Sometimes life is fair! Goodness! I paid mine 18 bucks back in 1979! LIFE IS UNFAIR!!! Considering that I was only one winter old at that time, I am forced to defer to the authority that your age brings you. Still, I envy the anticipation that must have filled your heart, each month at the anticipation of a new issue of SSoC. As much as I like Darkhorse, I am content to wait for the release of each new volume, especially after the abominable Belit issues.
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Post by earl on Jan 22, 2016 23:49:00 GMT -5
Some of the artwork from Conan the Savage definitely does echo Slaine. Slaine is a good read, I've been working through the trades of the series over the past couple years. Those balloon barges reminded me of the the 'sky chariots' from Mike McMahon's early story with Slaine. The artwork on Slaine is always really, really good. I dig that McMahon slightly altered his style on Slaine, it reminds me a bit of Durher woodcuts.
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