Conan the barbarian #7 (July 1971)
As Roy Thomas informs us in A Barbarian Life, this would be the lowest-selling issue to date. Stan Lee was getting worried and suggested that the mag be cancelled so that Barry Smith might be made available for super-hero books. Thankfully the measure wasn’t implemented then and there! Stan also commented that covers might be a problem: those of issues 4 to 7 featured Conan fighting some kind of animal (a spider, a tiger, a bat and a snake) instead of human foes, and that it might turn some readers off. Luckily Chip Goodman wasn’t around to suggest putting animal masks on everybody!
Another solution that was considered to boost sales was to have Conan team up with a superhero, very likely the Mighty Thor. Although I loved What if..? #39, I really, really wouldn't have wanted Conan to meet modern characters in his regular series. Luckily, it didn't come to pass and the unwritten rule remained "no team-ups for Conan" (until Disney briefly landed the franchise).
Back to animal-themed covers... As fate would have it, the following issue would have giant skeletal warriors on the cover instead of beasts and sales would start to increase. That wouldn’t be known until issue #14 or thereabout, but this increase in sales would save
Conan the barbarian —even if it eventually briefly became bi-monthly for a little while. More on that later.
Today’s adventure is inspired by, and expands, the original Conan story
The God in the Bowl by Robert E. Howard, a tale that had been rejected by Farnsworth Wright’s Weird Tales.
The prose story is a locked-room mystery involving many characters. Roy and Barry made changes to make the plot more streamlined and visually dynamic. While I tend to favour as strict an adherence as possible to Howard’s tales, in this case I agree that all the changes were justified and better suited a comic-book. To wit: scenes were added at the beginning to introduce two of the main characters and provide a little action; a spectacular fight scene against the story’s supernatural antagonist was added (in the original it was killed without a fight); the all-male cast was modified so that at least one woman had a major role to play; many secondary characters were removed, as the comic would be more into action than talking heads; and finally, names were dropped or made less similar. (
The God in the Bowl has a Kallian Publico, a Promero, a Posthumo… That’s a lot of P’s and O’s!)
Last issue, Conan had left Shadizar after being fleeced by his faithless girlfriend of a day, Jenna. We now find him far away to the west, near the Nemedian city of Numalia. Numalia is said to be second only to Belverus in importance among Nemedian cities, so... big town.
Language barriers are still not bothered with in the
Conan series, and although no mention is made of it, we could presume that all Hyborian nations speak a sort-of common language marked by different accents, as is the case with the western folks in
The Lord of the Rings, who all speak Westron. This is pure fannish speculation on my part, though, and in the Howard stories different nations do seem to have different languages; in fact, in this very story, the prose version contains this line : If Nemedian is a distinct language, there can't be a common Hyborian tongue.
No reason is given for Conan's westward journey; wanderlust must still be driving his steps. The following months will take him to Corinthia (south and east), back to Zamora (east), then to Koth (south) and to the Vilayet sea (way to the north and east). All this traveling demands many months, and in fact Conan will age several years in the forthcoming issues. This will happily coincide with Barry drawing characters in a bulkier fashion than before, and Conan will fill out progressively as a growing young man would in the real world.
Savage Sword of Conan will take advantage of this period (that of “Conan as a young thief”) to tell plenty of stories that fit in between the CtB colour issues.
The story: The Lurker WithinScript by Roy Thomas
Art by Barry Smith, Dan Adkins and Sal Buscema.
As Conan is making his way (on foot) to Numalia, a cry for help reaches his ears. In the plain that separates a forest from the distant walled city, a horse-drawn chariot is laying its side and one of its passengers, a woman, is beset by a trio of wolves. The Cimmerian jumps into action and dispatches one of the canines, causing the others to flee. Never one to pas an opportunity to belittle the civilized nations, young Conan mentions that Nemedian wolves must be mere jackals; back home, there would be three dead wolves or one dead Cimmerian on the ground. (Yes, even
wolves are weak and decadent in his world view, if they’re from a civilized nation! Methinks the lad is compensating for something... like not knowing what fork to use for dessert).
The lady Conan just saved is the haughty Lady Aztrias, niece of the governor. She is intrigued by the lad declaring that he’s a Cimmerian; such people from faraway lands are rarely seen. This is, I believe, an important point that would sadly be completely forgotten during the ‘80s: the Hyborian Age is *
not* our own; people do *
not* usually travel far, and communications are *
not* very rapid. To a Nemedian, I’d imagine that anything located more than two-three countries away would be as mysterious as Persia would have been to a Gaul picked at random.
She calls Conan “barbarian”, too, a term used by many cultures to designate someone belonging to… well, basically any other culture than their own. But more so when the foreigner looks a little savage, as does our fur-clad youth here.
Conan gets the chariot back on its wheels, revealing its crushed driver underneath. That’s a grisly amusing scene, but one wonders how a chariot driver manages to get pinned under the side of his own vehicle; if the chariot were to fall sideways (which it obviously did), I’d expect the passengers to be ejected sideways too, not to be caught under it. Perhaps he leaned way to the side before the thing toppled.
Aztrias hires Conan as her new driver, even if he’s never handled a team of horses before. Yes, that's something else Conan has not done yet... and please allow me to express my enthusiasm for this approach! Issue after issue, as we learn to know the character better, we also see him grown up and acquire new skills. Although it’s not stated here, we will later realize that at this point in his life Conan is a talented but unrefined swordsman, a very average rider, a lousy archer and not yet a strategist. What he does well very is climb, and of course he’s exceptionally strong.
Aztrias is a cunning lady, quick to seize an opportunity. She knows that Conan agreed to drive her back home so he could get into the city without anyone asking questions, and she realizes that he must be a professional thief that she can employ. As we’ll see later, his being a complete foreigner in these parts also makes him an ideal patsy should the need arise.
Conan isn’t much of a chariot driver, and he causes a fender bender with that of one Kallian, the very rich owner of the famous House of Relics, filled to the ceiling with precious artifacts. Conan, Kallian and a city guard named Dionus (all to meet again later in the story) bark at each other for a while, until Aztrias uses her high status to calm things down. Conan asks her who the bad tempered dog was, to which she wittily replies “which one? I saw three”!
As the pair reaches the lady’s home, she explains the mission she wants to give the youth: break into the House or Relics, there to steal the mysterious contents of a great sealed urn that was left there that morning by a caravan from Stygia.
Stygia is the Hyborian Age equivalent of ancient Egypt. Its chief god is Set, but the country is polytheistic; another of their gods is Ibis, said to be an enemy of Set. The urn left in Kallian’s care is said to be a gift from Stygians to the priest of Ibis Karanthes, who lives in the Nemedian city of Hanumar. The urn should just be kept safe in the House of Relics until other hands come to claim it and take it to its final destination.
Aztrias was present when the urn was received (she was there to ask for a loan to pay her gambling debts, as Kallian is bloody rich) and like him, she thinks the urn contains a treasure.
Here’s Conan making his way to the House of Relics… Excellent storytelling by Smith, who seems to really enjoy his work!
Conan enters and finds Kallian dead, near the opened (and empty) urn. Tools suggest that Kallian himself opened the thing. The Cimmerian is promptly discovered by the crossbow-wielding night watchman Arus, who calls the cops. Faster than you can dial IX - I - I, the city guard shows up, led by one Demetrio. In their ranks is the third the bad tempered dog from earlier, Dionus.
While Dionus is ready to have Conan charged with Kallian’s murder there and then, Demetrio is not so quick to pull the trigger, since Conan admits to being a thief but claims to have found Kallian already dead.
As Demetrio inspects the murder scene and the open urn, he reflects that it is odd for Stygians to send a gift to a priest of Ibis, seeing as most Stygians worship Set. Before he can go further in his reflections, however, the Lady Aztrias shows up; she probably learned that the theft hadn’t gone as expected and that the police was now involved, and she decided to cut her losses and sacrifice her agent! She claims that Conan left her house earlier and that she suspected he wanted to get even with Kallian, on account of their previous altercation in the street.
The Cimmerian is infuriated at this base betrayal, and he reveals Aztrias’ plot to steal the urn’s contents. She denies it theatrically (“He lies! HE
LIES!”) and Conan opines that if she were a man, she’d now be headless! This is no empty boast, either, because in the prose story
The God in the Bowl, Aztrias IS a man, and Conan DOES decapitate him for his betrayal!
Meanwhile, the night watchman Arus has been making the rounds to find more evidence of Kallian’s killer’s whereabouts… and what he finds in a certain room causes him to scream in anguish and fall dead, his final words being “the god has a long neck… a cursed long neck”.
The entire cast gets into the room. Among piles of priceless objects, they also find a gilded screen from behind which a head emerges; the head of some kind of statue, with snakes for hair (Medusa-like) and features of unearthly beauty. Aztrias is mesmerized and approaches, reaching out to it… when the statue talks!
One of the guardsmen, better inspired than most, shoots a quarrel through the screen where the thing’s body must be… and what a body it is! The beautiful head is set atop the coils of a giant snake!
Spookily impassive, the man-serpent starts crushing Aztrias as the Numalian guards flee, Demetrio excepted. It comes to a mano-a-mano brawl (wait… snakes don’t have hands!) between the creature and Conan, who manages to kill it by hitting it repeatedly on the head with a broken crossbow. When he rises, Conan checks whether Aztrias and Demetrio still live; she doesn’t, but he will live to show up again in CtB#257.
Finally, curious, the youth peers into the empty urn where the man-serpent must have been lying in wait until the greedy Kallian opened its lid; at the bottom, he sees a fantastic image of Thoth-Amon, the Stygian wizard introduced in the first Conan story,
The Phoenix on the Sword.
Suddenly struck by the dreadful concept of ancient children of Set waiting in the caverns beneath the ancient land’s pyramids, Conan flees the House of Relics, stealing Aztrias’ chariot to get as far away as possible from Numalia.
Comments:The original story was pretty good, but this is an outstanding example of a comic-book
adaptation. Sure, it changes its general feel from cosmic horror to horror-tinted action, but I think that the transition really works beautifully—especially for this visual medium.
Barry might be even better here than he was last issue, which was already amazingly beautiful. I love the way he depicts the Stygians, the look he gives Karanthes, and the intricacy of his backgrounds.
His depiction of Thoth-Amon is an instant classic; those ram horns that may or may not be part of his skull look absolutely brilliant. (In later issues and in Savage Sword of Conan, we’ll see that they’re actually a headgear. But in the last issues of
Conan the King, a reincarnated Thoth-Amon will have horns grow straight out of his skull, as in this image from a Barry Windsor-Smith portfolio. But then Barry also gave Thoth hooves there!)
On Thoth-Amon, let me say a few things. He was re-defined by L. Sprague deCamp as Conan’s main opponent; he would be the Cimmerian’s Moriarty, his Lex Luthor, his Bloefeld; his Doctor Doom. I personally think that while it is an understandable marketing tactic to give a hero a recurring villain, it goes against what Howard actually wrote. In the only story where Thoth-Amon’s plays a role, when Conan is already a king, the magician doesn’t care at all about the Cimmerian; it’s as if he doesn’t even know him. While his importance as a background character justifies his being mentioned in two other Conan stories (and in a non-Conan story set in the modern age), I very much doubt that Howard meant him to be a special foe of our hero.
In the context of comics, however, the idea that Conan would have one major vilain who could show up from time to time and provide a feeling of major urgency is par for the course; think about the times Galactus would show up in the ‘70s and instantly make a story more important. The only thing to avoid when following such a strategy is overexposure; you want every appearance by The Big Enemy to be something special. And that is exactly what Roy did! For more on Marvel’s treatment of Thoth-Amon, please see
this old post from our sister thread.
The presence of wolves near Numalia is interesting. As there is ample foliage in the trees, the predators are not driven to the vicinity of a major town by scarcity of game and by hunger; we are led to conclude that as was the case in Europe during the Middle-ages, wolves could be seen roaming fairly close to human populations. This in turn suggests that there weren’t that many people around and that wolf habitats were not as degraded as they are today.
While the original story has all the Nemedians swear by Mitra (as is expected), here, Demetrio swears twice by Ishtar, a Shemite goddess whose cult is more common further south and east (in places like Khoraja, for example). We can suppose that the cult of Ishtar does make inroads in all the Hyborian nations, to some extent, as does the cult of Asura that comes from much further east (and as we’ll see in
The Hour of the Dragon). What I find interesting (and which might be due to a coincidence) is that right after Demetrio swears by Ishtar for the first time, Dionus roughly addresses Conan and tells him to “Speak up,
heathen!” His use of “heathen” instead of the usual “barbarian” or “savage” is accurate (to a Mitraist), but perhaps Dionus chose it precisely because he resents his boss being a devotee of Ishtar and wants to passively-aggressively stress that anyone who doesn’t follow Mitra is a godless heretic. (Mitra and Ishtar are not part of a common pantheon).
Notes: - Nemedia is called “the second greatest Hyborean kingdom”. Roy is slowly building up this make-believe world. He doesn’t even need mention the fact that Aquilonia would be the first of these kingdoms; all things come to those who wait!
- The last lines read “Nor does he slacken his headlong flight— until the shimmering spires of trice-cursed Numalia fade into coming dawn behind him—!” If the dawn is at his back, that means Conan is fleeing due west. But next issue will find him in Corinthia, which is to the south and east. Maybe Conan just left by the first road he found and later changed his course.
- Conan has a sword at the start of this issue; we do not know where he obtained it. But of course, a lot can happen when you go on foot from Shadizar to Numalia.
- I wonder what would have happened if the urn had made its way to Karanthes. As a priest of Ibis, I certainly would have been wary of a great container sent by unknown parties in Stygia, especially one that (as told in the prose story) looks like an old-style sarcophagus. Of course, that is because I am used to Marvel (and then Dark Horse) treating Karanthes as a wizard; maybe in Howard’s mind he was just a kindly old priest of Ibis who would never suspect that one would wish him ill, let alone send him an eons-old monster in the mail.
- There's one dead horse that still hasn’t been flogged enough! When Conan enters the House of Relics, he comes face to face with a stuffed elephant. His reaction? He says “
Yag-Kosha!”, thinking it's the alien being he met in issue #4. Because Conan has never seen an actual elephant yet! The first thing that comes to mind when he sees an elephant is that it looks like Yag-Kosha!
NOT like the god Bel, with whom he is familiar!!! Bel is
NOT an elephant-headed god!
- The man-serpent seen here is so named to differentiate it from the serpent-men who were such a thorn in King Kull’s side. There would be more men-serpents later in the series (no longer looking handsome) and they would lose much of their mystique; they end up beiong treated as one more odd zoological species. The one here seems above the frailty of us mere mortals, and it is that very alienness that had made the prose story so spooky. The Howard story made no mention of the snake-like hair; visually speaking, it was a great idea.
- In The God in the Bowl, Conan is not sent by Aztrias to steal the run's content, but another item in the House of Relics. The change makes sense, I believe, even if stealing just any object of value would have helped Aztrias settle his gambling debts, the coincidence of sending Conan precisely on the night there's a mysterious urn in the museum is one we do not need.
- Karanthes is called Kalanthes in the original tale.