As we previously discussed in our post about Savage Tales #3 last October, back in the fall of 1973 it seemed that Marvel’s one-and-only sword-and-sorcery-centric black-and-white comics magazine was about to be cancelled — for the second time.  The first incarnation of Savage Tales had seen but one issue published in January, 1971 before Marvel’s then-publisher Martin Goodman pulled the plug; then, the second iteration, launched in June, 1972 following Goodman’s departure from the company he’d founded, had come under the scrutiny of an auditor for the conglomerate (Cadence Industries) that now owned Marvel.  According to a rather downbeat editorial by Roy Thomas that ran in ST #3, a go-ahead for producing further issues wouldn’t be given until sales numbers had been received for the relaunch; and if you read between the lines, the signs didn’t seem very encouraging.

Happily, however, March, 1974 brought us a new issue of Savage Tales after all.  As Thomas’ considerably more positive editorial for ST #4 put it, sales for the second coming of the magazine had not just met expectations, but had exceeded them, to the point that current publisher Stan Lee hadn’t just put the title back on the schedule; he’d actually increased its release frequency, from its former (alleged) quarterly to a more robust bimonthly.  Needless to say, it was very good news for Conan fans.

Marvel marked the occasion of Savage Tales‘ reprieve with the best-looking cover the magazine had seen yet; its painter, Neal Adams, was also represented within the book’s contents, beginning with its contents page:

Regarding that “collectors-item CONAN PIN-UP” mentioned at the bottom of the page: like the big black arrow indicates, it was to be found on the inside front cover… and the inside back cover, too, printed horizontally across both, so that the only way to see it complete and unobstructed was to detach the cover from the magazine — and who wanted to do that?  Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of digital reproduction, we’re able here to view P. Craig Russel’s fine (if clearly Barry Windsor-Smith-inspired) drawing as a whole piece (and in its proper vertical orientation, to boot):

From here, we move on to the magazine’s all-new, 21-page lead feature.  It’s introduced by a page which, following the standard epigraph from Howard’s fictitious Nemedian Chronicles “Know, O Prince…” goes on to let us know where this episode comes in the chronology of Conan’s long snd eventful career:

And now, on to the story proper…

As with all Marvel Conan tales of this era, the script — an adaptation of a non-Conan story by the character’s creator, Robert E. Howard — in unambiguously attributed to writer-editor Roy Thomas; the art credits, however — for “Gil Kane, Neal Adams, & Diverse Hands”, with no indication of the division of labor, and with an additional credit for Pablo Marcos for “tones” — are rather more vague.  But if one consults a couple of different accounts offered by Thomas more than four decades apart (the first coming in the letters page of Savage Sword of Conan #2 [Oct., 1974], the second in his introduction to Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus #1 [2019]), one can work out reasonably well how the job seems to have come together.

Thomas appears to have first enlisted Gil Kane to pencil the adaptation, after which Adams was brought in as inker (although he notes in his Omnibus intro that Adams’ contribution “included adding some modeling to the figures”, which suggests — at least to me — that he may have done a certain amount of pencilling, as well).  However, despite inking “most of the figures and major panels throughout the story” (quoting here from the SSoC #2 letters column), Adams ultimately ran into deadline problems (shocking, I know), which required the editor to parcel out parts of the job to other embellishers, including Frank McLaughlin, Vince Colletta, and Pablo Marcos (who was evidently also solely responsible for adding gray tones to the art); in the SSoC #2 lettercol, Thomas makes a point of giving Marcos complete credit for doing all the inking on two particular pages: the opening splash page shown above, and a second full-page splash later in the story.

As noted earlier, “Night of the Dark God” is based on a Robert E. Howard short story — more specifically, “The Dark Man”, which was first published in the December, 1931 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales (and which can be read in its entirety online for free, here).  The hero of the original tale is Turlogh Dubh O’Brien, an 11th century Irish warrior (another Turlogh story, “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth”, was previously adapted by Thomas and Kane in Conan the Barbarian #17-18), and its setting is Ireland and the Scottish Hebrides; since Howard essentially based his imaginary Cimmerians and Vanir on the real-world Celtic and Scandinavian peoples of medieval Northern Europe, the mapping of the historical Middle Ages to the fantastical Hyborian Age works pretty well, with one significant exception we’ll mention a bit further on.

Conan promises the fisherman he’ll bring the boat back if he’s able; and, after tossing him a sack of coins for surety, sets out across the lake, leaving the other man standing “more alone with his thoughts than he has been for many a long year.”

Among the figures from past issues of Conan the Barbarian shown in this montage (the second of the story’s full-page splashes that were inked entirely by Pablo Marcos, per Roy Thomas), we have the Man-Serpent from issue #7, Yag-Kosha from #4, Borri the Grey God from #3, and Thak from #11.  (It’s possible that the young lady at top left is supposed to be Kyrie from #17 and #18, though the costume Gil Kane drew her wearing in those issues was somewhat different, and that the hooded skull-visage next to her is intended to be the Living Tarim, as seen in the last panel of #26, though he may also be simply a symbolic representation of Death.)

Conan’s reverie ends, and as the story returns to the present, he spies another boat — a somewhat larger one than his, though definitely not a Vanir vessel — drifting on the waves ahead of him.  He sees no living crew — only dead bodies, lying strewn across the deck…

Pablo Marcos’ gray tones are really lovely on the page above (I would assume he used a wash technique here, versus the screentone he employed in a story for Dracula Lives #6, published earlier this same month… but I could easily be wrong) — especially in that final panel.  Who needs color, I ask you?

Making landfall, Conan pulls his boat up on the shore, then makes his way inland across a rocky landscape until he spies the buildings of the Vanir settlement.  Before he can draw any closer, he suddenly hears a sound…

Conan remains hidden until the two men reach the main building of the settlement and carry the statue inside.  He then steals forward, but before he reaches the door, he encounters another Vanirman.  The struggle between the two warriors is brief, with Conan slaying his foe before the latter can raise an alarm…

I mentioned earlier that there’s one significant element in Howard’s original story “The Dark Man” that doesn’t make a smooth transition from its 11th century European setting to the adaptation’s imagined Hyborian Age, and that element is the role of the priest.  In the short story, Thorfel is a pagan Viking who kidnaps a Christian priest to legitimize his forced wedding to an Irish maiden who’s Christian as well.  But there’s nothing in Howard’s stories to indicate that the people of Cimmeria have any more use for the worship of Mitra — the most widely worshiped deity in the supposedly more civilized Hyborian kingdoms to the south — than do their fellow barbarian Northerners, the Vanir.  So Thorfel’s forcibly recruiting a Mitraist cleric to perform his and Mala’s nuptials, rather than simply calling on one of his own clan’s holy men, seems entirely random, and fails to carry the weight that it does in Howard’s original tale.

The narrative captions tell us that, at first, Thorfel simply stands silently in place, watching Conan carve a path through his warriors…

In Howard’s “The Dark Man”, the Picts’ god is revealed not to be Brule the Spear-Slayer, but Bran Mak Morn — the hero of several historical fantasies by Howard, all set in Roman Britain sometime around the late third century C.E..  Brule is an entirely appropriate substitute for the adaptation’s Hyborian timeframe, however, given that Howard specifically identifies him in this story as being Bran’s distant ancestor (he name-checks Brule’s good buddy, Kull, in this same scene as well, just as Thomas does above).

Fifty years after I first read it, “Night of the Dark God” remains one of my very favorite Marvel Conan stories, both for how it movingly explores a rarely seen, but very human, side of its larger-than-life hero, and for the somber majesty of its artwork — which, regardless of how many hands might have been involved in its production, nevertheless holds together as a coherent whole, at least to my eyes.

Next up in Savage Tales #4 is Roy Thomas’ triumphal editorial; that’s followed by a text article by Erwin Stevenson about the 1963 fantasy film Jason and the Argonauts, which is succeeded in turn by a 1955 comics story reprinted from Black Knight #2.  This historical adventure yarn, scripted by an unknown writer and drawn by Joe Maneely, concludes the origin story of “The Crusader”, the first chapter of which had been reprinted nine months previously in Savage Tales #2.  As in that earlier installment, the series of bloody medieval religious wars we know as the Crusades is here framed mostly as an opportunity for such figures as the fictional titular hero, the Muslim-raised El Alemain, and his newly-claimed liege lord, the historical English monarch Richard I (both shown in the panel at right) to win renown through their deeds of knightly prowess and valor.  This dated approach may earn a few points with contemporary readers for portraying the main Muslim leader, Saladin, as a figure of honor and courage equal to that of his Christian enemies, but even that isn’t likely to do much to mitigate the sense of pointlessness surrounding the whole business.

Following “The Crusader” is another text feature, and one that’s a little more on point that the previous movie-themed article, being the first half of a two-part history (written by Roy Thomas himself) of the Gnome Press publishing program that did a lot to keep Conan alive as a literary property in the three decades between Robert E. Howard’s death in 1936 and the advent of the Lancer Books paperback series in 1966.  It’s followed by the issue’s final comics story (and final feature overall): a re-presentation of “The Dweller in the Dark”, a 16-page tale that had been originally produced by Thomas and artist Barry Windsor-Smith for the original iteration of Savage Tales in 1971, but, left homeless when publication of the magazine was suspended after the first issue, had only seen print in a slightly cleaned-up and (per comments made by Thomas in this issue’s editorial) poorly-printed color version in Conan the Barbarian #12.

Since my younger self had in fact bought, read, and still owned a copy of Conan #12, I imagine that I wasn’t especially excited about seeing its lead story reprinted here, regardless of the promised better reproduction, or even the potential for seeing a bit more female skin than was offered in the previous version.  Still, that’s no reason for me not to give “The Dweller in the Dark” the full blog treatment here, seeing as how I didn’t write a post about Conan #12 back in September, 2021 (for no better reason, really, than that I’d recently blogged about both the 10th and 11th issues) — and also considering the fact that it would be a shame not to share Windsor-Smith’s exquisite artwork for the story, given this second chance to do so.  And so, without further ado…

Writing about this story in his 2018 book Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Vol. 1, Roy Thomas admits to being initially “a bit taken aback by the stringy little ‘shirt’ he [Conan] wore, but it grew on me; at least it was different, and its swirling produced a nice motion effect in many panels, starting with the splash page.”

It’s very interesting to compare Windsor-Smith’s artwork for this story with that for his and Thomas’ much more recent adaptation of “Red Nails”, as published in Savage Tales #2 and #3.  While the artist’s skills had definitely grown and matured in the years between these two efforts, I think it’s fair to say that even circa 1971, Barry Windsor-Smith was hardly what you’d call a slouch.

One difference that’s worth noting between the two jobs concerns how the artist approached inking for black-and-white reproduction — specifically, his liberal use of screentones to add texture here (something which might have contributed to the printing difficulties Marvel encountered with Conan #12, perhaps?), versus the strict line-art technique he employed for “Red Nails”.

Conan soon settles into a comfortable routine as Queen Fatima’s captain; but, after a few weeks, he gets a little restless, and decides to see just how far his authority  — and his liberty — extends.  He is subsequently greatly displeased to discover that “his” guards have orders to slay him should he ever try to leave the palace.  “Then I’m to be kept — like some slavish lap-dog?” Conan demands to know.  “The life of a palace dog is sweet, barbarian”, one of the guards blithely replies.  “Enjoy it — while it lasts.”

As already mentioned, the artwork for “The Dweller in the Dark” had to be modified a bit for its presentation in the Code-approved Conan the Barbarian #12, mainly in the area of female semi-nudity.  Most of the differences are quite subtle — a few more bangles added to Queen Fatima’s costume in this or that panel for the color version — though the contrast is arguably slightly more dramatic here, in Yaila’s bathing scene:

A more subtle change — one that you might not even notice, unless you were looking for it — is the vertical extension of the artwork in virtually every panel, so as to make it fit the dimensions of the standard comic-book (versus magazine) page.  (Note, for example, the addition of the greenery to the top of the trellis in the last panel above.)  These alterations were evidently made in-house at Marvel by persons unknown, rather than by Windsor-Smith himself, who may have been living in England at the time.*

One last thing to note here before we move on, and it’s that there is a third version of the artwork for this scene, as well as for several other panels where Windsor-Smith’s renderings were apparently deemed too racy even for the non-Code-approved B&W format.  Shown at right is artwork (first published in Comic Book Artist #2 [Summer, 1998], and currently on view at this comicartfans.com page, as are the other supposedly twice-censored panels) that’s been purported to be Windsor-Smith’s original pencils, “rescued” by the artist after they’d been photostatted, and inked by him at a later date; I use the word “purported” advisedly, since these panels clearly include the extensions that are supposed to have been added by anonymous hands at Marvel months after the original job was complete.  (In other words, I’m not exactly sure what these panels are, other than Barry Windsor-Smith’s preferred version of the scene [circa 1998] — but I figured that if I didn’t bring them up, someone else might.  So, here you go.)

And now to return to our narrative…

Coinan and Yaila are promptly marched down to a partially-submerged dungeon beneath the palace, where they are chained to the wall, then left to await the tender mercies of what Fatima ominously refers to as “the Dweller in the Dark”.  Once they’re alone, Conan asks Yaila for the lowdown on this so-called Dweller, but she doesn’t know much…

In Barbarian Life, Roy Thomas tells us:

…though I believe the original idea had only been to make the Dweller an octopoid monstrosity, when Barry drew it he gave the creature a quasi-human face.  That, in turn, inspired me to add captions during its battle with Conan to the effect that once the octopus had been as human as the Cimmerian…

Conan attempts to free Yaila, but, naturally, he’s soon snared by one of the Dweller’s tentacles as well…

Bracing his back against one side of the stone shaft and his feet against the other, while bearing Yaila’s weight as well, Conan makes a tortuous ascent, ultimately reaching the trapdoor at the shaft’s end.  Neither he nor Yaila has any idea what’s on the other side, but Conan figures it can’t be any worse than what’s behind them…

Conan’s decision to toss Queen Fatima to the Dweller evidently caused consternation for some fans when this story was first published in Conan #12 in 1971 — not so much because our hero had just ruthlessly killed an enemy in cold blood when his life wasn’t in immediate danger, but because he’d killed a woman… and Howard’s Conan was supposed to have a strict code against killing women (at least according to these fans).  Responding to these complaints in Conan #16’s letters column, Thomas allowed that he might have goofed, but wasn’t prepared to fully commit to that notion unless and until someone could supply him with “an actual Robert E. Howard quote” to back up the claim “that Conan’s code forbids him to kill a woman”.  Even so, the writer-editor confessed that he wished “he had worded Conan’s dialogue… so that he didn’t say he ‘killed’ her [as the hero does in the Conan #12 panel shown at right] — but rather that he had merely dropped her into the pit… [as Thomas would indeed change Conan’s dialogue to read in Savage Tales #4’s re-presentation, as shown above]”.

(For the record, I don’t know if any disgruntled fan ever met Thomas’ challenge to pony up a Howard quote to support their position — if they did, their letter wasn’t published in Conan the Barbarian, at least as far as I’ve been able to determine — but by the time the author wrote Barbarian Life, he was suggesting that the whole toss-Fatima-in-the-pit business might have been Barry Windsor-Smith’s idea in the first place, and stating that it was “something I wouldn’t do if I had it to do over.”)

Back when I first read this story in 1971 — or re-read it in 1974 — I’m sure it never occurred to me that Yaila might turn up again… and I’d be willing to lay odds that it didn’t occur to Roy Thomas back then, either.  Nevertheless, when the writer returned to writing Conan stories for Marvel in 1990 after a decade away, he arranged for return appearances for a number of old characters, and Yaila was among them; in Conan the Barbarian #250 (Nov., 1991), readers learned that she’d continued to reign in Zahmahn, apparently wisely and well, and had taken a nice fellow named Godrik to be her consort somewhere along the way.  It’s good to know that happy endings actually stick sometimes, don’t you think?

But, in any event, we’ve reached the end of Savage Tales #4.  All that’s left to share is this full-page ad for Savage Tales #5:

Besides the nice illustration by John Romita that graces it, this promo is notable for something else — namely, that with the exception of the second half of Roy Thomas’ Gnome Press article, none of the features listed here actually appeared in the magazine itself, when it showed up on stands in May.

What had happened in the interim between issues?  As would be explained by yet another Thomas editorial — this one entitled “Savage Tales Is Dead!  Long Live Savage Tales!” — sales reports for the magazine had continued to be good… so good, in fact, that Conan (and his fellow Robert E. Howard-created heroes) were being spun off into another, larger, black-and-white magazine, The Savage Sword of Conan, the first issue of which would be coming out in June.  Meanwhile, Savage Tales would continue, but with a new headliner:  Marvel’s jungle hero Ka-Zar, Lord of the Savage Land, who had in fact appeared with Conan in Savage Tales‘ first, genre-fluid issue, way back in early ’71.

Naturally, most of the features that had originally been promised for Savage Tales #5 were held back, to be included in the first issue of Savage Sword.  And so, we had this single transitional issue of the latter title — which, behind another fine cover by Neal Adams, featured a reprint of a Ka-Zar tale that, like “The Dweller in the Dark”, had originally been intended for Savage Tales, but had instead seen print only in a slightly sanitized version in Astonishing Tales, the color comic that had been Ka-Zar’s Code-approved stomping ground for the last several years.  Savage Tales #5 also included a reprint of a story featuring author John Jakes’ knockoff Conan character, Brak the Barbarian, that had originally appeared in color in Chanber of Chills #2 (Jan., 1973), and of course there was the previously noted Gnome Press text piece.

But the lead feature — which also comprised the only new comics content in the issue — belonged to Conan himself, as the Cimmerian adventurer exited Savage Tales in high style via the 20-page “The Secret of Skull River!”, scripted by Roy Thomas from a plot by the aforementioned John Jakes, and illustrated by Jim Starlin (penciller) and Al Milgrom (inker).  Your humble blogger was greatly hoping to share this story with you more fully, but the calendar for this coming May is looking a bit too tight to afford a full post to Savage Tales #5.  So, we’ll have to content ourselves with this random, out-of-context selection of pages from the story, which hopefully will at least give you a sense of its flavor… especially if you click ’em to embiggen ’em.

Roy Thomas notes in his Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus #1 intro that the story had “perhaps more of a Marvel mainstream look than previous Savage Tales Conan stories.”  That’s probably true as far as Barry Windsor-Smith’s artwork in the previous four issues goes, but is perhaps a bit less credible in regards to Gil Kane and Neal Adams’ efforts in ST #4, considering how many Marvel superhero comics the latter two talents had drawn between them over the years (not to mention the fact that Kane was drawing the vast majority of covers for Marvel’s color comics at this time).  Still, you can sort of see Thomas’ point.  The dynamic yet design-heavy style employed by Jim Starlin in this story is very much of a piece with the stuff he was currently wowing comics fans with over in the pages of Captain Marvel; and, in the spring of 1974, served as further proof (if any was still needed) that there were many viable approaches artists could take in delineating the adventures of Robert E. Howard’s most famous hero.  And what better place to explore those approaches than in a black-and-white anthology magazine — one that had the liberty to jump around from point to point in Conan’s chronology, without worrying about the sort of issue-to-issue continuity that couldn’t easily have the Cimmerian tromping through the snowy wastes of Aesgaard in one story, and slogging through the jungles of Vendhya in the next?

Still, those were possibilities that would have to be explored in the new Savage Sword of Conan title, rather than in Savage Tales.  The latter would, however, soldier on as a showcase for Ka-Zar — as well as for jungle-themed adventure in general, with a sprinkling of sword-and-sorcery — for some time to come.  My younger self bailed on the title after the seventh issue, so I was somewhat surprised to discover while researching this post that Savage Tales lasted for another five issues, not giving up the ghost until July, 1975.  By that time, both the magazine and its star (who was also holding down his own self-named solo color title at this point) had pretty well fallen off my radar.

The Savage Sword of Conan, on the other hand, would prove a very different story… though one we’ll need to wait a few months to begin to tell.  See you in June, dog-brothers!

 

*See Craig Miller, “Still Waiting for the Absolute BWS Conan Volumes”, Spectrum Super Special Vol. 1, No. 3 (Nov., 2005), p. 134-135.