At the time the topic of today’s blog post was originally published, January, 1974, new interior comic book art by Neal Adams wasn’t yet as rare as hen’s teeth — not quite.  Still, it was a good bit rarer than it had been just a year or so earlier, and thus it was a treat to see a second full-length story illustrated by the star artist come out just one month after the last one, which had appeared in DC Comics’ Batman #255.  (For the record, there was another story by Adams that came out in December, 1973, as well — a 10-page “Green Lantern” back-up in Flash #226, which my younger self managed to miss.)  Adding to the fun was the fact that Adams did all the art in the issue, pencilling and inking the issue’s cover as well as the whole 19-page story within.  (Or, at least, that’s what the credits said; per the Grand Comics Database, Joe Rubinstein assisted Adams in the inking of backgrounds.) 

Though it was barely evident in the finished product, “The Curse of the Golden Skull!” had an unusually rocky road to publication.  If you’ve read my previous posts concerning Adams’ previous collaborations with Conan the Barbarian writer/Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Roy Thomas on the “Kree-Skrull War” storyline in Avengers, or the “War of the Worlds” feature in Amazing Adventures, you might reasonably suspect that some kind of interpersonal friction between artist and writer/editor might have been involved in this project’s problematic gestation.  As best as I can determine, however, most of the difficulties that arose over the course of Conan #37’s production were out of the control of either Thomas or Adams, and inconvenienced them both about equally; in any event, it’s one of the few collaborations between the two creators (perhaps even the only one) where their later respective accounts of how the work came to be (the ones I’ve read, anyway) mostly agree with each other from start to finish.

So, what were the difficulties?  To begin with, the Conan comic-book story we now know as “The Curse of the Golden Skull!” was originally meant to be a completely different story — an adaptation of Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp’s “The City of Skulls”, which had first seen print in 1967 in the first chronological volume of Lancer Books’ Conan series (the cover of which [in a slightly later edition that happens to be the one owned by your humble blogger] is shown at right in all its Frank Frazetta-painted glory).  Roy Thomas offers the following helpful synopsis of this tale in his 2018 book Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Volume 1:

Conan and a black warrior named Juma (a de Camp-Carter creation) are escorting [the Turanian] King Yildiz’ beautiful daughter Zosara through the mountains when the three of them are captured — the only survivors of a larger Turanian party — and are carried to a lost city ruled by a fat despot named Jalung Thongpa, who naturally decides to add Zosara to his harem.  After being briefly enslaved, Conan and Juma kill the evil ectopmorph, despite the intervention of a gigantic six-armed living idol.  By the time Zosara is returned to Yildiz, she is pregnant by Conan. End of story.

If all had gone as originally planned, “The City of Skulls” would have been the first “official” Conan prose story not written by the hero’s creator, Robert E. Howard, to be adapted into comics form by Marvel. Unfortunately, despite Thomas’ understanding that Marvel and the story’s two authors had reached an agreement to license the story, problems arose at the last minute, and De Camp ultimately withdrew his permission for the adaptation.

Or perhaps I should say that problems arose a little after the last minute, as Neal Adams had already completed pencilling almost six full pages of the story when De Camp’s “sorry, but no” was received by Marvel.  Uh oh.

In Barbarian Life, Thomas tells us what happened next:

Luckily, realizing he was pulling the rug out from under us for technical legal reasons, de Camp generously granted Marvel-one-time permission to use Juma, who was prominent in the already drawn pages; all we had to do was restructure the story from that point on so that it was no longer “City of Skulls” or anything close to it.

However much he may have appreciated de Camp’s “generosity” at the time, Thomas evidently thought it would be legally prudent to put as much distance between his and Adams’ “new” narrative and “The City of Skulls” as possible; and so, he contrived to adapt another story in the latter’s place — a brief vignette written by Robert E. Howard around 1928-29, in which his pre-Conan barbarian hero Kull of Atlantis is mentioned, but never seen — a vignette called, you guessed it, “The Curse of the Golden Skull”.  (This, incidentally, was a work of which Marvel had already made notable recent use — in the “Doctor Strange” series in Marvel Premiere, of all places.  But we’ll have more to say of that anon.)

Working the Howard material into Thomas and Adams’ narrative involved (among other things) creating a three-page prologue to come before the six pages Adams had already pencilled based on “The City of Skulls” — which might not have been all that big a deal, if not for the other major problem that had arisen regarding the project, apparently concurrently with the legal wrangling with De Camp.  Which was that a story that had been planned as a 30-plus pager for Marvel’s black-and-white Savage Tales magazine found itself transformed into a 19-page piece for the color Conan the Barbarian comic.

How did this happen? Decades after the fact, Thomas himself wasn’t sure.  Again, from Barbarian Life:

…at some early stage, it suddenly became necessary or at least extremely advisable that the story Neal was penciling go into the color Conan comic instead [of Savage Tales], which meant it could be no more than 19 pages long at that time. After all these years, I’m not sure why the change was made, for although “City of Skulls” did fit chronologically into the period [of Conan’s life] I was covering in Conan the Barbarian at the time, I had known that when I had assigned Neal the story for the black-and-white Savage Tales.

Perhaps I shouldn’t presume to try to guess at an answer that Mr. Thomas himself hasn’t proffered, but it occurs to me that his motive in moving the story over to Conan may simply have been that there wasn’t a Savage Tales for it to go into at this particular time.  As regular readers of this blog may recall from our Savage Tales #3 post last October, the revival of that title with its second issue in June, 1973 was an unusually tenuous enterprise, with an auditor for Marvel’s parent company keen to make sure the magazine was profitable before giving it the go-ahead to continue.  ST #3 actually shipped a month later than originally scheduled, and Thomas’ editorial therein struck an elegiac tone, implying that he, at least, figured that there wouldn’t be any more issues to come.  While Savage Tales was never officially cancelled after #3 — not publicly, at any rate — the fourth issue wouldn’t be released until March, 1974, a whole five months following the previous “quarterly” installment.  Again, this is purely speculative on my part, but it seems at least plausible that the reason Thomas decided to place “The Curse of the Golden Skull!” in Conan the Barbarian is that, as far as he knew, there was nowhere else to place it, and might never be.

In any event, however it happened, Conan #37 is where “The Curse of the Golden Skull!” — a 19-page color comic-book story by Roy Thomas and Neal Adams — ultimately appeared.  And while we’ll have still more to say about the behind-the-scenes aspects of its productions a bit further on, I figure we’re ready to move on to take a look at the work itself; and so, without further preamble…

In Robert E. Howard’s original story, Rotath’s curses go on for a while, growing ever more colorful.  Take this paragraph, for example:

He cursed all men living and dead, and all the generations unborn for a million centuries to come, naming Vramma and Jaggta-noga and Kamma and Kulthas.  He cursed humanity by the fane of the Black Gods, the tracks of the Serpent Ones, the talons of the Ape Lords and the iron bound books of Shuma Gorath.

Shuma Gorath?  Yep.  I mentioned earlier that Marvel had made use of this story previously for “Doctor Strange”, and that was primarily in reference to this passage, which is the only place in Howard’s writing where that name — recently utilized for the Big Bad in an H.P. Lovecraft-by-way-of-R.E. Howard-inspired epic of cosmic horror that ran from the third through the tenth issues of Marvel Premiere — ever appears.  Considering how much mileage Marvel had already gotten out of the name (and would continue to, for decades to come), it’s both ironic and amusing — and maybe even slightly perverse — that, given the chance at last to use “Shuma Gorath” in its only authentic Howardian context, Roy Thomas opted not to do so… especially since he’d previously had the brass to work the name into a comics adaptation of Howard’s story “Dig Me No Grave”, where it didn’t originally appear.  I realize that Thomas was likely more concerned at the time with trying to cram a 30-plus-page Conan adventure into 19 pages, but still…

One more brief, and unrelated, note in regards to the story’s opening page, and then we’ll proceed:  According to Barbarian Life, the small image of Kull that we see reflected in Rotath’s eye wasn’t the work of Neal Adams; rather, a drawing by Marie Severin (who’d been the penciller for Kull’s own title from its second through its tenth issue) was photostatted into Adams’ artwork.  Why was this done?  Your guess is as good as mine, since Thomas doesn’t say.  (UPDATE, 1/13/24, 1:30 a.m.:  While Thomas is correct in stating that the image of Kull is by another artist than Adams, he’s wrong in attributing it to Marie Severin; it’s actually the work of Mike Ploog, and comes from the sixteenth page of Kull the Destroyer #11 [Nov., 1973].  Many thanks to AussieStu, who posted the correction on the Masterworks Message Board’s January, 1974 “Marathon” thread.)

Howard’s original “Curse of the Golden Skull” ends here, more or less — although in it, the unfortunate traveler’s fate is decidedly more prosaic; when he touches the skull, an adder concealed within it bites him, and he dies.  In any event, the rest of our present tale is only “inspired” by its prose namesake… well, by that, and by the need to put some distance between itself and “The City of Skulls”.

We come now to what would have been the first page of of our story, if it had in fact remained an adaptation of that Carter-deCamp yarn:

If you recall the ending of the last issue of the monthly Conan comic we covered on the blog (i.e., #26), you may be surprised to see our hero serving in the Turanian army in this one.  After all, that earlier issue’s story — the last chapter of the “Hyrkanian War” epic that had begun back in issue #19 — had concluded with Conan fleeing the sack of the conquered city of Makkalet, for which Conan had spent the last several issues fighting against the Turanian army.  What was more, he’d aroused the everlasting personal enmity of Prince Yezdigerd, commander of those conquering troops as well as heir to his nation’s throne, whose face he’d scarred at the climax of issue #20.  One might easily have assumed that Conan would have put as much distance between himself and Turan as possible in the eleven issues (and about as many months of the hero’s life) that had passed since #26’s “The Hour of the Griffin”.

Without getting into a detailed synopsis of all of Conan’s adventures betwixt #26 and #37, we’ll just note here that despite the wandering Cimmerian’s definite intention at the end of the former issue to return to the western Hyborian lands he knew best, circumstances had conspired to land him in the Turanian capital of Aghrapur as of issue #29. While there he’d gotten in trouble with the law over a matter completely unrelated to the Siege of Makkalet; given then a choice between imprisonment and enlistment in the army, Conan had chosen joining up as the lesser of two evils.  Roy Thomas managed to make it all plausible, and that’s all to the good, since he didn’t really have much choice; the more-or-less official chronology of Conan’s career which he’d committed the monthly Conan the Barbarian series to follow had the adventurer serving a stint in the Turanian army at this time in his life, so…

My sixteen-year-old self had read “The City of Skulls” in its Lancer Books edition, probably a couple of years before this, so I recognized Juma.  I recall being pleased (if a little surprised) by his appearance in this story, so I suppose I must have forgotten the details of that earlier tale’s plot; apparently, I assumed that Thomas and/or Adams had simply liked the character and arranged to “borrow” him for the occasion (which in a sense of course they had).

For anyone who might not recognize it, the last panel above is an obvious tribute by both Adams and Thomas to Frank Frazetta’s cover for Lancer Books’ Conan the Conqueror (1967).  It’s also the fourth panel in a page that ends up boasting thirteen of them — a sizeable number, by Bronze Age standards, and a reflection of the fact that Neal Adams got word about the reduction in his page-count allotment while he was still working on the first six pages of what everyone still thought was to be an adaptation of “The City of Skulls”.

In a 1998 interview published in the third issue of Comic Book Artist, Adams recalled the circumstances thusly:

I had done the first three pages and then was told that this was going to be a 19-page book!  I couldn’t go back and redo those three pages, but I had to grab the remaining story and [straining groan] compress it to remaining 16 pages.  It was in fact a 34-page book jammed down into 19 pages.  I refused in my own mind to limit the events of the book to shorten the story.

 

For that reason, the book to a certain degree suffers because of the smallness of the size.  There are a lot of little drawings in there; they’re like Sunday pages — 13 panels to a page!  So if you read that book, you almost have to mentally enlarge the pages to get the impact of the story, and there are pages that have a tremendous amount of lettering on them, simply because that much story had to be told.

I can easily understand Adams’ disappointment over how things turned out with Conan #37; on the other hand, I have to say that I don’t recall having any negative feelings about his artwork at all when I first read this story in January, 1974.  Yes, the panels were small, but that just meant there were more Neal Adams drawings to enjoy than there would be otherwise.  In any event, there’s no faulting either the clarity or the dynamism of Adams’ graphic storytelling, however compressed.

“For the suspicion with which white man views black — and vice versa — is not a thing of recent vintage.  More’s the pity.”  This is the sort of well-meaning sentiment you’d see expressed from time to time in late Silver and early Bronze Age comics (especially, it must be said, in those written by Roy Thomas).  While the idea at its core — i.e., that the fear of “the other” is a universal human trait — may be sound enough, as a response to the endemic American problem of racial inequality, this commentary rather missed the mark back in 1974; in 2024, it feels even more wincingly tone-deaf.

For the record, this is the point at which Adams’ six pages originally drawn as an adaptation of “The City of Skulls” run out; from the entrance of the “unicorn” on to the issue’s end, he and Thomas will henceforth be telling their own story.

As is typical in Conan stories, regardless of who’s writing them, beasts we modern folk think of as mythical are revealed to have been nothing more than regular old mundane animals, so that our tale’s “unicorn” is shown to be a rhinoceros, while its “dragon” is merely a… okay, dinosaurs aren’t exactly “mundane”.  But they are known to have existed at some point in the Earth’s history, which makes them slightly more plausible than dragons… at least in theory.

Rotath sics the baboon-like creature on Conan, who manages to elude its claws and fangs long enough for him to loop his own chains over its throat…

As noted by Thomas in Barbarian Life, the princess in Carter and de Camp’s “The City of Skulls” is the daughter of King Yildiz, rather than of the king’s son, Yezdigerd.  The latter relationship definitely makes for greater dramatic potential, thanks to the backstory Thomas and his collaborators had developed for Conan’s relationship with the Turanian crown prince during the Hyrkanian War saga — though Thomas doesn’t really do much of anything with it, either in this or in succeeding issues.

When Conan comes to, he and Juma are both underground… along with a slew of other unfortunate men, all of whom are being forced to work in Rotath’s mines…

In Barbarian Life, Roy Thomas writes:

One of the odd highlights of Conan #37 was the giant slug which slithers through the later pages of the story.  Neal didn’t fool me when he drew the slug’s “face” to resemble female genitalia.  The fact was never mentioned overtly between us; Neal simply smiled obliquely when I hinted I knew what he was up to.  But I decided to ignore it and see if the Comics Code would notice and object.  Hey, maybe I just had a dirty mind, and what Neal had actually drawn was the artistic equivalent of a Rorschach blot — you could see in it whatever you wanted to.  We’d let the Code tell us if we were going to corrupt anybody’s young mind.

 

The Code evidently preferred to see the slug’s face as just a slug’s face, so the issue was printed as penciled.  Or maybe they were busy blushing, and were afraid we’d accuse them of having a dirty mind: “What do you mean, the slug is ‘dirty’? It’s just a slug!”

Call me unimaginative, but I’m not sure I’d see what Thomas did in these drawings if he hadn’t make a point of calling it out for me; in any case, I’m certain I didn’t see it at age sixteen, when I may have had a lot of curiosity about such matters, but no experience whatsoever.

As noted earlier, at the end of “The City of Skulls”, King Yildiz’s daughter Zosara is pregnant with Conan’s child by the time she’s returned to her father.  Thomas was careful not to go there with the princess Yolinda, although the innuendo included in his story’s final panel certainly implied that something similar might just possibly happen on the road home to Aghrapur, at least if Conan gets his druthers.  In the end, however, the writer avoided using Yolinda as a character again, probably to avoid any future legal difficulties with L. Sprague de Camp…* or, more accurately, he put off using her again for twenty-one years, at which time he wrote a sequel of sorts to “The Curse of the Golden Skull” for Savage Sword of Conan.  In a three-issue storyline that reunited Yolinda with both Conan and Juma, it was revealed that the princess had in fact been made pregnant over the course of her earlier ordeal in Rotath’s domain — though neither Conan nor Juma, nor indeed any human male, had had anything to do with it.  It made for a sad tale, and an even sadder end… though for more details, you’ll need to track down SSoC #233-235 (May-July, 1995); or, if you’d rather, you can get the gist from this very informative page from The Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe web site.

Returning our attention to 1974, however… it would be back to business as usual on Conan the Barbarian‘s artistic front come issue #38, as John Buscema returned to his role as the title’s regular artist — a role he’d continue to fill admirably for many years to come.  Still, that didn’t mean that Neal Adams was all done with Robert E. Howard’s barbarian hero — not even for the year of 1974, as it turned out.  Along with contributing to the inking of Buscema’s pencils for several issues of Conan later in the year (as one of the pseudonymous “Crusty Bunkers”), Adams would also collaborate with Gil Kane on the lead story for the next issue of Savage Tales when that tile once again returned from the dead for the second time in March — and would paint that book’s cover, besides… though, naturally, that’s a topic we’ll need to defer further discussion of to another post, a couple of months from now.

 

*Several years later, Marvel finally managed to acquire the rights to the “Conan” prose stories that had been written by de Camp and others; an adaptation of “The City of Skulls” was subsequently published in Savage Sword of Conan #59 (Dec., 1980), where it was presented as a “non-canonical” adventure of the Marvel Comics version of the hero.