As we covered in our discussion of Savage Tales #2 back in June, the promise made on that magazine’s last page — that the following issue would be on “on sale September 25 A.D. 1973 in this the Marvel age of swords and sorcery” — turned out to be off by almost exactly one month.  Savage Tales #3 would in fact not come out until October 23rd — its delay being a result, according to editor Roy Thomas, of business-based concerns over the title’s overall commercial viability.  And even now, the book’s future was far from secure — though we’ll wait and let Mr. Thomas deliver that fifty-year-old bad news himself per his ST #3 editorial, coming up later in this post.

For the moment, however, we’ll move right into the main event of the issue — the reason that my younger self would have continued to wait for ST #3 as long as required back in the day, and still considered the result to have been worth it: the conclusion of Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith’s adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s final story of Conan the Barbarian, “Red Nails”.

Savage Tales #2 had presented the first 21 pages of this largely faithful adaptation; issue #3 gives us the remaining 37, albeit split into two parts that open as well as close the magazine.  The first of this issue’s chapters is introduced by a frontispiece that includes Howard’s famous “Nemedian Chronicles” text introducing his famous hero (“Know, o prince…”), followed by Marvel’s version of the standard map of the lands of Howard’s pseudo-historical “Hyborian Age”.  I’ve shared both of those on the blog before, so we’ll forego having a look at their presentation here… though I will go ahead and share the handy recap of Part One that closes the page (mostly because it’ll save me the trouble of writing one of my own)…

As was noted in our Savage Tales #2 post, Windsor-Smith ran into deadlines problems in completing the art for that issue, with the result that the last couple of pages of Part One featured uncredited contributions from Pablo Marcos.  To the best of my knowledge, every bit of “Red Nails” artwork in this issue is by Windsor-Smith alone; that said, certain pages have a less-than-fully-finished look to my inexpert eye… including the one above, where not all the lines of Conan’s face completely connect.  That may just be a reproduction issue, though it could also be that the artist was trying something a little different with this installment of the story, stylistically speaking.  (Another possibility, naturally, is that your humble blogger has no idea what he’s talking about.)  At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter all that much, as the artwork remains consistently gorgeous throughout.

“And who’s this madman?” Conan asks reasonably.  Valeria introduces Techotl, and explains that he hails from one end of the city of Xuchotl, Tecuhltli, while the men they’ve just killed are mortal enemies from the other end, Xotalanc.  Techotl assures his new companions that they’ll be warmly welcomed by his people; seeing few if any other options, Conan and Valeria agree to accompany him.  They begin to make their way chamber by chamber through the completely enclosed city, Techotl cautioning the newcomers to go softly…

Techotl explains that the Crawler is a “monster — which they [i.e., the Xotalancas] have brought from the catacombs to aid them!”  None of the living Tecuhltli folk have ever seen it — only the ravaged corpses it’s left in its wake.  And no one sees it now, either, though our fleeing trio can hear it breaking down the wooden door Techotl bolted against it even before they catch sight of the brass door leading to the city’s Tecuhltli sector.  “In Set’s name — hasten!” urges Techotl as he, Conan, and Valeria sprint the last few yards separating them from presumed safety…

Conan and Valeria explain to the two royals how they’ve happened to come to their city, including their slaying of the dragon in the forest beyond.  Impressed, Prince Olmec tells them that it was the dragons who drove their ancestors to take refuge in the city of Xuchotl in the first place…

Re-reading this comic for the first time in several decades, I found Conan and Valeria’s quick acceptance of Olmec and Tascela’s offer to be somewhat difficult to understand.  Just how long do the Tecuhltli rulers expect their guests to stay in this weird city and fight for them before they’re rewarded with “all the jewels [they] can carry“, anyway?  Frankly, the scene makes more sense in Howard’s original text (which you can read online for free, here), where the deal is for the two outsiders to help wipe out the Xotalancas completely, after which the Tecuhltli warriors will assist Conan and Valeria to destroy the dragons (which the Tecuhltli insist are numerous, despite our protagonists having seen only the one), allowing them to safely depart… plus, they get the jewels.  Not an especially savory bargain, true, but at least it’s a rational one.

The deal having been struck, Conan and Valeria are escorted to their sleeping quarters for the night; as they leave the royal chambers, Valeria observes Princess Tascela whispering to her maid, Yasala, but pays it no mind…

Due in part to Barry Windsor-Smith’s decision not to use gray tones for the black-and-white artwork in this story, you may not immediately notice that Valeria is topless in this scene, unless you’re paying close attention.  (I suspect that it will come as no surprise to this blog’s regular readers that my sixteen-year-old self was paying very close attention, indeed.)

Um… despite what this may look like, I’m sure that neither Robert E. Howard, nor Roy Thomas, nor Barry Windsor-Smith intended this scene of one half-naked woman whipping another to be read as having any sexual connotations whatsoever.  Uh-uh.  No, sir!  (Just for the record, in Howard’s prose story, Valeria keeps her shirt on, but Yasala is stripped completely bare; I suppose you could say that Marvel’s adaptation splits the difference.)

Mere moments later, another loud outburst takes precedence for Valeria, as well as for Conan in his room nearby: “the yelling of men and the clangor of steel“.  The two outlanders hasten as quickly as they can to the common hall, where Techotl tells them that the Xotalancas have somehow breached the great bronze door into Tecuhltli. and are attacking.  The three run towards the sounds of battle, but just before they arrive at the scene, Techotl suddenly stops:

In his 2018 book Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Volume 1, Roy Thomas writes of his artistic collaborator’s special way with blood-stained floors:

You don’t just see the (black) blood on the floor—you see the stain, and you’re able to picture how someone must have had to drag or kick the body to leave that kind of mark. I’ve never seen Sam Peckinpah, or any other movie director, use blood to better effect.

Again, here’s Roy Thomas:

The reader’s eye finds itself being literally pulled toward the scenes of carnage with all their detail, and, once again, toward the bloodstains on the floor.  This was a real battle — the characters don’t look as if they’re lying on the floor, like the actors in some corny 1940s movie, just waiting to be able to get up and grab a cup of coffee.  These bodies give the impression of being completely and irreversibly dead.

“…twenty red nails for the black column!”

Olmec is sure that the Xotalancas must have sent their complete forces against Tecuhltli — but just to be absolutely sure that every single one of the enemy is dead, he charges Conan to go to Xotalanc and search for survivors, accompanied by two other warriors named Yanath and Topal.  “Good enough,” says Conan…

Something rather odd happens at this juncture of the story, as Thomas helpfully points out in Barbarian Life:

At the end, Conan and Valeria, along with the few survivors, are covered in more blood than any other character in comic-book history, or at least in comic-book history prior to Frank Miller.  Barry made one small slip-up: in the page after their victory, Conan and Co. are covered in blood.  Then you turn the page and, all of a sudden, the blood has disappeared, as if they’d all walked through a shower tunnel.  I don’t know if Barry forgot about the blood or if he made a conscious decision to make it disappear. And I don’t remember whether this lack of continuity bothered me at the time.  Still, the artwork and the story pull the reader along…

And, sure enough:

It must be said that Howard’s original text is much clearer on the significance of the “pipes of madness” than is Marvel’s adaptation.  In the prose version of “Red Nails”, there’s a whole earlier scene where the unfortunate Xatmec (not identified therein as Techotl’s cousin) is driven near-mad by the “weird strains” coming through the bronze door (meanwhile, the invading Xotalancas have their fingers stuck in their ears to avoid being affected, requiring them to carry their swords between their teeth), until in desperation he throws open the door so he can reach and kill the piper, but is himself cut down instead.  Thomas and Windsor-Smith’s decision to cut that scene leaves the whole business of how the invaders gained access to Tecuhltli a good bit murkier than it needs to be, in my opinion.

Alas, poor Techotl… Meanwhile, Conan and his two companions have arrived at the door to Xotalanc, which they find standing open.  Never having been so close to their enemies’ abode in their entire lives, Yanath and Topal hang back at first, while Conan pushes past them, keen on finding the Xotalancan treasury.  The Tecuhltlis eventually follow — but then, after only a short time, Conan senses that only Yanath is close behind him.  He pauses and turns…

After all the fuss made about the darkness-shrouded, door-battering Crawler earlier in the story, the perfunctory way in which its corpse is discovered and dismissed in this scene is a bit of a letdown (though I should note that Thomas and Windsor-Smith are following Howard’s text quite closely in this regard).

At precisely this point in his original story, Robert E. Howard writes: “Valeria’s tongue clove to the roof of her mouth. She sensed here a mystery darker than the degeneracy she had anticipated.”

Degeneracy?  Was Valeria expecting to be sexually assaulted?  And if so, was it the fact that it would be a lesbian sexual assault that made the act “degenerate” in her — and in Howard’s — eyes?

Apparently, the answer to both questions is “yes”.  In 1935, not long after selling “Red Nails” to the magazine Weird Tales, Howard wrote this to his friend-by-correspondence, the horror author H.P. Lovecraft:

I have been dissatisfied with my handling of decaying races in stories, for the reason that degeneracy is so prevalent in such races that even in fiction it can not be ignored as a motive and as a fact if the fiction is to have any claim to realism.  I have ignored it in all other stories, as one of the taboos, but I did not ignore it in this story [i.e., “Red Nails”].  When, or if, you ever read it, I’d like to know how you like my handling of the subject of lesbianism.*

The notion that lesbianism, or any other form of non-hetero sexual attraction and experience, is a signifier of “degeneracy” among “decaying races” is likely to be repellent to most of this blog’s readers.  (I sure hope it is, anyway.)  But it does suggest that, if nothing else, Howard had something more than cheap titillation in mind in including this material in “Red Nails”.  On the other hand, that theory doesn’t really account for the earlier whipping scene at all, as Howard surely didn’t intend for us to see the woman wielding the lash in that one — Valeria — as degenerate.  Perhaps we should just say that Howard was intrigued by “the subject of lesbianism” for more than one reason, and let it go at that.

In any case, we’ve reached the end of this chapter of Marvel’s adaptation of Howard’s last Conan story.  We’ll return for the conclusion later in this post, but first, let’s have a look at some of the other contents of this issue…

According to Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor-Smith’s magnificent frontispiece for his editorial, “An Age Undreamed Of”, began life as a rejected cover for this issue:

Barry had actually painted a cover illustration for Savage Tales #3, but Stan didn’t like it.  The figure of Conan didn’t stand out against the background, and the cover as a whole might have passed unnoticed on a packed newsstand, so at the last minute he asked John Romita to draw a cover.  Meanwhile, Barry did a greyscale drawing that was very similar to the rejected cover, and we published that alongside my editorial…

Personally, I’d have rather had a color version of this illustration than the piece by Pablo Marcos and John Romita that we got (for the record, the cover is credited to both artists on ST #3’s contents page, though only Marcos signed it); but Stan Lee’s commercial instincts may well have been right.

The editorial itself is interesting enough to be worth sharing in full, I think:

Reading this page, you get the impression that Thomas really did believe that this was probably the last issue he was ever going to be able to produce of Savage Tales.  How ironic, then, that this title’s spin-off/successor magazine, the even more “Conan-and-Howard-centric” Savage Sword of Conan, outlasted virtually all of the black-and-white comics for which there seemed to be a much more “ready market” in 1973… most of them by more than a decade.  (About the only exceptions to the latter rule were Mad and maybe a couple of its imitators — Crazy not included.)

Before moving on, we should also make note of Thomas’ comment at the end of Section II about how swell it would be to one day to print all the chapters of “Red Nails” together, “in color, in some mammoth format”… since, of course, that’s exactly what Marvel did do about a year and a half later, in Marvel Treasury Edition #4.  Interestingly, as of October, 1973 Marvel was still eight months away from publishing its first tabloid-sized comic (its rival DC Comics, on the other hand, had been releasing material in that format since late 1972); Thomas was evidently thinking long-term.

Following the editorial is a two-page spread of Red Sonja by Esteban Maroto, a Spanish artist who at this time was best known to American comics fans for his work appearing in Warren Publishing’s Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella magazines:

According to an introduction Thomas wrote for Dynamite Entertainment’s trade collection, The Adventures of Red Sonja, Volume I, Maroto’s visualization of the character first came to his attention when the artist sent him an unsolicited illustration of her.  That has to be counted as a fortuitous impulse on the artist’s part, since, for good or ill, Maroto’s drawings introduced the “metal bikini” costuming for the character which has, with some slight modifications, served as her defining look ever since.

Next up is a prose short story, “The Crimson Bell”, written by Ray Capella.  Similar to the Robert E. Howard mini-biography that ran in Savage Tales #2, this tale of Arquel of Argos — a sword-and-sorcery hero whose adventures are set in Howard’s Hyborian Age — is accompanied by generic but subject-appropriate artwork by Frank Brunner and Al Williamson.  Coming in at seven pages total, it’s followed by the magazine’s only actual comics-format material other than “Red Nails” — a reprint of Stan Lee and John Romita’s “The Fury of the Femizons”, which had first appeared in Savage Tales #1 (May, 1971).

It might seem somewhat brazen to reprint a ten-page story from a magazine’s first issue as early as its third; on the other hand, it had been close to three years since the original presentation of “Femizons”, and plenty of readers — your humble blogger included — had never seen it.  In any event, I don’t recall the younger me’s resenting the story’s re-presentation here.

Yep, it’s the post-“Women’s Lib” future, according to Lee and Romita — a future dominated by females!  And not just any females — but a uniformly young, white, and gorgeous group, distinguishable mostly by differences in hair color and style (or by their lack of any hair at all, as with the woman standing behind the royal throne in the opening splash panel shown above; her name is Syrani, incidentally, and she’s the primary villain of our tale).

The story focuses on Princess Lyra — sister to Vega, queen of the “New U.S.A.” — the United Sisterhood Alliance — and a staunch adherent to its creed (“Sexuality!  Solidarity!  Superiority!“)… at least in public.  In private, she has some doubts, as we learn when she retires to her private chambers, right after her victory in a personal combat that’s cost one of her “sisters” her life, and netted Lyra one handsome young male slave as her prize…

(Comics artists of the early 1970s really loved these peek-a-boo shower scenes.  But I’ll bet most of you already knew that.)

The slave tells Lyra that he’d hoped all along to become her prize, because his people know that she’s hoarding a secret cache of “brain tapes” — forbidden recordings “which reveal to the wearer the entire history of the human race!”  The “wearer”, you say?  Yes — these “tapes” come in the form of circlets that one places on one’s head, and then, voila:

Soon thereafter, the day comes when Lyra’s lover — whose name, she and we simultaneously learn is “Mogon — of the hills!” — takes her to meet his fellow rebels at their secret lair.  But, unfortunately, the rebels have been infiltrated by Syrani’s secret police (who, once they throw back their concealing hoods, can be readily identified by their bald pates)…

In the end, Lyra and Mogon are victorious against their foes’ greater numbers.  Leaving no one alive to tell the tale, they go their separate ways, hoping that without proof, the matter will end here.  But Lyra has barely returned to her palace chambers when she is summoned to attend Queen Vega in the latter’s throne room.  Upon her arrival there, she finds herself accused by Syrani of “highest treason — to queen and sisterhood!”  Proclaiming her innocence, Lyra prepares to defend her honor with the point of her sword — but then, Syrani calls on her to “Look yonder —”

“Was there really once a time when men were all like you?”  Um, sorry to have to tell you this, Lyra , but no.  Not really.

Obviously, reading this story in 2023 carries the risk of such strenuous eye-rolling as to permanently damage one’s optic organs.  Still, it does have a certain fascination as a reflection of its times — specifically, as an example of the seeming impossibility of many men of that era to get their heads around the basic idea of equality between genders, leading to these kinds of panicked fever-dreams of women ruling over men.  (In comic books, see also: the original Valkyrie, as well as Thundra.)  Add to that the modest kink factor of strapping young men being sexually dominated by “vicious voluptuaries”, and, well, like I said:  be careful not to strain your eye-muscles with all that rolling, OK?

Speaking of Thundra — the seven-foot, super-strong warrior woman created by Roy Thomas and John Buscema, who was first introduced in Fantastic Four #129 (Dec., 1972) as a recurrent sparring partner for Benjamin J. Grimm, aka the Thing — she’d eventually be tied in to “The Fury of the Femizons”, as a three-part storyline in FF #151-153 (Oct. – Dec., 1974) revealed that she’d traveled through time (and across realities) from the very same “New U.S.A.” whence hailed Lyra and company.  Why had she come to present-day Marvel-Earth?  Why, because the Femizons’ future world was somehow merging with its multiversal opposite number, the male-ruled “Machus”, and the former’s leadership had determined that the only way to prevent this calamity was for Thundra to travel back to a point in history shared by both timelines and defeat “the Earth’s most powerful man” (i.e., the Thing) so that menfolk would “learn their lesson — for all time!”  (Yeah, this just gets better and better, doesn’t it?)

Was this Fantastic Four story arc the “sequel in perhaps the last place you’d ever expect” to “Fury of the Femizons” teased by Thomas in his Savage Tales #3 editorial?  Could be — his own script for FF #129 had left Thundra’s origin a complete mystery, and while FF #151-153 were written by Gerry Conway and Tony Isabella, Thomas did edit those issues.  And as we observed earlier in regard to the eventual reprinting of “Red Nails” in a color tabloid format, Marvel’s editor-in-chief did seem to be thinking long-term in the autumn of 1973.

In any event, to the best of my knowledge, those Thundra stories were the closest that “Fury of the Femizons” ever got to an official sequel; though I can’t leave the subject before noting that the story got yet another reprinting, in the 1977 Simon & Schuster trade paperback collection The Superhero Women — with a new introduction by that tome’s author of record, Stan Lee.  Evidently, Lee really, really liked the Femizons concept — although the story’s inclusion in this particular volume of his “Origins of Marvel Comics” series also speaks to the dearth of viable female heroes at Marvel circa 1977.

OK, enough of that.  Returning to our walk through the contents of Savage Tales #3, we next have “Red Nails in the Sunset” (ouch) — a showcase for the artwork (by H.D. Delay and Margaret Brundage) that accompanied the original magazine publication of “Red Nails” in 1936, with accompanying text by Roy Thomas.  That’s followed by another illustrated text piece — this one by artist-writer (and then-editor of the official Marvel fanzine FOOM) Jim Steranko.  Steranko’s article, ostensibly an account of the creative process behind his yet-unpublished sword-and-sorcery epic Talon, serves mostly as an excuse for presenting two pieces of artwork (shown at right and below) — and, of course, for hawking the 23″ x 32″ Talon color poster, available for $1.25 (plus .25 postage) from Supergraphics (i.e., Jim Steranko).

Fifty years later, any graphic story material featuring Talon — whether by Steranko or anyone else — has yet to materialize.  Though I see that a licensed action figure was released just last year, so perhaps there’s still hope…

Following two single-page biographies of Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith that have the distinction of feeling more like outright filler than anything else in the magazine, we come at last to our final feature — the conclusion of “Red Nails”:

That line from the dying Techotl re: Olmec’s lying about the dragons doesn’t land nearly as hard here as it does in Howard’s story, where the promised assistance of the Tecuhltlis in getting rid of the nonexistent beasts is a big part of the deal Conan and Valeria have struck with them… just sayin’.

Conan continues on cautiously, proceeding ever further into the Tecuhltli sector, until…

With Conan’s sword pricking his back, Olmec leads Conan through a secret passage known only to Tascela and himself.  Then, as they come to the top of a stairway, they hear a piercing scream from below…

More nudity here, of course (and not just the semi- kind, either) — though, thanks to some extraordinarily convenient shadows, nothing more is exposed to the reader’s eye than Marvel thought prudent in a 1973 comic book (even one free from the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority).

When I first read this story all those years ago, I’m pretty sure that I took Tolkemec’s weapon for some kind of magic wand or scepter — this is presumably a fantasy story, after all, not a science-fiction one.  Today, however, I feel just as certain that Roy Thomas is correct when he writes in Barbarian Life that the thing is actually “some kind of death-ray” — i.e., an artifact of long-forgotten super-science, invented by the original inhabitants of Xuchotl.  At least, that seems to be the best way to account for the weapon’s needing to be aimed at a metal surface in order for it to function.

For several tense moments, Conan and Tolemenc warily, and silently, circle one another…

Yeah, it’s been a hard day’s night for Conan and Valeria, wouldn’t you agree?  Just think about the apalling amount of bloody carnage that’s transpired since they first entered the gates of Xuchotl, a mere twenty-four hours ago.  (Or better, don’t think about it — it might give you nightmares.)

In any event, that’s it for Marvel Comics’ adaptation of “Red Nails” — and for Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith’s collaboration on Conan the Barbarian.  In recognition of the significance of the occasion, I’ll let Thomas have the (almost) last word:

“Red Nails” was my last full-story collaboration with Barry Smith, excluding writing a few Conanesque newspaper-style comic strip “dailies” that were glimpsed in the 1980s Oliver Stone horror film The Hand — and it was one of the best.  I think the illustrations for “The Song of Red Sonja” in Conan #24 are equally good; “Devil-Wings over Shadizar” is still a favorite out of the stories I scripted, and “The Tower of the Elephant” is probably my favorite collaboration with Barry, largely because the tale it’s based on also happens to be my favorite REH story.  But if we’re focusing purely on the ability of the artwork to create an impact, then I don’t think any original Conan story or adaptation comes up to the standard of “Red Nails.”

Windsor-Smith would return years to contribute covers and the like for Marvel’s Conan Saga reprint magazine, and would also write and draw a single Conan story with no involvement from Thomas (1995’s Conan vs. Rune).  But, for now, Savage Tales #3 represented his farewell to the character (his third to date, incidentally, if we count Conan #14 as well as #24) — a farewell that provides additional subtext to the valedictory full-page illustration that closes the magazine:

The dedication of “this magazine” to Robert E. Howard’s memory may be taken as covering just this particular issue of Savage Tales, but I strongly suspect that Roy Thomas chose that language on purpose, so that it could be seen as referring to the title as a whole should another issue never appear.  Happily, however, Savage Tales would return– although this time it would be not three months, or even four, before issue #4 arrived on stands, but five.  Still, as before, the wait would be well worth it, even without the prodigiously talented Barry Windsor-Smith on board… but hey, why not check back here in March, 2024, so that you can see for yourself?

 

*See “Hyborian Genesis Part III: Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories” by Patrice Louinet, in Robert E. Howard’s The Conquering Sword of Conan (Del Rey: 2005).  For the record, I have no idea whether Lovecraft’s opinion about Howard’s use of lesbianism in “Red Nails” was ever recorded; but, in any case, it’s highly unlikely that he ever had a chance to express it directly to Howard himself, as the latter author committed suicide on June 11, 1936, before Weird Tales‘ serialization of the story (in the magazine’s July, Aug-Sep., and October, 1936 issues) was complete.