In June, 1974, the Hyborian Age was clearly in full flower at Marvel Comics.  Along with the latest installment of the publisher’s successful ongoing Conan the Barbarian series (issue #42, for the record), the month also brought the fans of Robert E. Howard’s famous sword-and-sorcery hero the first issue of a brand-new quarterly companion title, Giant-Size Conan.  This new series got off to a spectacular start, featuring the first chapter of a multi-part adaptation of Howard’s one and only Conan novel, “The Hour of the Dragon”, as written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Gil Kane and Tom Sutton.

And that wasn’t even the biggest news in Conan comics this month; rather, that distinction went to the main topic of today’s blog post, The Savage Sword of Conan #1 — the first issue of a brand-new black-and-white bi-monthly magazine devoted to the barbarian adventurer and his fellow Howardian heroes.  It was, in some ways, Conan’s third coming as far as the b&w comics market went, following as it did both the initial release of Savage Tales in January, 1971, and the subsequent relaunch of that title with its long-delayed second issue in June, 1973.  It was also the biggest black-and-white comic Marvel had yet published — a square-bound number that weighed in at 80 pages (as compared to the then standard 64), and cost a whole buck (as compared to Marvel’s other b&w offerings’ going price of 75 cents). 

Behind a painted cover by Boris Vallejo that clearly took its cues from the celebrated Conan paperback covers of Frank Frazetta (and, say, could that non-billed crimson-tressed swordswoman be the one and only Red Sonja, by any chance?), the magazine hit the ground running with an impressive inside-front cover illustration of its titular hero, contributed by Esteban Maroto…

… and then followed that with the issue’s lead story, “Curse of the Undead-Man” — an eighteen-pager written by Thomas, with art by John Buscema and Pablo Marcos, that, as Vallejo’s cover teased, does indeed reunite Conan with Red Sonja (although she won’t show up until a few pages in) for the first time since the classic Conan the Barbarian #24:

Interestingly, this story wasn’t originally supposed to appear in Savage Sword of Conan #1 at all; it had in fact been intended to run in issue #43 of the monthly Conan the Barbarian comic, but got bumped over to SSoC when the decision was made (evidently by Marvel publisher Stan Lee) to spin Conan and company out of Savage Tales into their own b&w vehicle, leaving their previous home base to to the jungle lord Ka-Zar and other “savage” sorts.  (At least, that’s the account Thomas has offered in various venues over the years.  However, there was a “next issue” promo for the story — then still going by the name of the work by Robert E. Howard it’s been “freely adapted” from, “Mistress of Death” — in the back of Savage Tales #4 back in March, suggesting that it had been intended for black-and-white publication for a while.  On the other hand, the story does slot neatly into the monthly comic’s continuity, right between its June and July-published issues… so the whole thing’s a little puzzling.)

Howard’s original “Mistress of Death”, it should be noted, wasn’t a Conan story at all; rather, it was a tale about his historical adventuress, Dark Agnes de Chastillon — or, more precisely, an unfinished fragment of a tale, which at this point had only been published in the fifth issue of the fantasy magazine Witchcraft & Sorcery (Jan.-Feb, 1971) in a version that had been completed by that magazine’s editor, Gerald W. Page.  (According to an editorial note on the letters page of Conan the Barbarian #44, Thomas worked not from this edition, but from a copy of Howard’s fragment that had been provided him by the late author’s estate’s literary agent, Glenn Lord.)

In Howard’s original narrative, the French swordswoman Agnes teams up with another adventurer, a Scotsman named John Stuart.  Based simply on that description, one might reasonably presume that in shifting the action from 16th century France to the Hyborian Age’s Zamora, Thomas would simply swap out Stuart for Conan and Agnes for Sonja.  But one would in fact be wrong: because Conan’s actions in the comics adaptation more directly mirror those of the original yarn’s Agnes, while Sonja fills the role taken by Stuart.  Why did Thomas go this route?  Probably because Agnes is the actual star of the prose tale, and thus has at least a slightly larger role.

“By Crom, you’re right!!” Conan exclaims.  “I owe myself a good week’s drunk, before I go enlist in some teetotaling general’s army… and, Mitra knows, I always pay what I owe!”  Thus resolved, our hero heads out into the night to find some deserving skulls to crack (and purses to empty), telling his three new acquaintances he’ll return soon…

Like the priest they were pursuing, these guys assume that Conan is their enemy; naturally, that doesn’t go very well for them.  The Cimmerian soon whittles their number down from five to two, and then,,,

For those of you not up on your classic Hollywood gangster movies, Thomas is riffing above on the final lines of Edward G. Robinson’s character in Little Caesar (1931): “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

And the random in-jokey cultural references just keep a-comin’.  This one’s a paraphrase of one of the best-known passages from Edward Fitzgerald’s 1859 English translation of the Persian poem, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on…”.

While Conan catches Red Sonja up on the last couple of years’ worth of his monthly comic’s continuity, elsewhere in the establishment a tall hooded figure is making an inquiry of its proprietor:

Conan and Sonja make a hasty exit before reinforcements arrive, and he tells her about having seen the ring of Costranno on the finger of the hooded man.  They then head for the house of Berthilda…

This double-page spread definitely helps make the case for “Curse of the Undead-Man” having been originally intended for the monthly Conan comic, as it very much appears to be one of those “drawn as one page, then turned sideways to count as two” jobs Marvel had adopted as a cost-cutting measure in the latter half of 1973.  John Buscema did about as well with these as any other Marvel artist at the time (and Pablo Marcos pulls his weight on this piece as well), but the end result, seen printed across two magazine-size pages, can’t escape the “blown-up” vibe endemic to this bastard form… though it’s still a fine drawing, naturally.

And so our two heroes go striding off into the night… and also into further adventures in Conan the Barbarian #43 and #44, before they’ll once more go their separate ways.  Even after that, though, Red Sonja wouldn’t be gone from the pages of Marvel’s comics for long.  The “She-Devil with a Sword”, as she’d come to be billed, was here to stay — an impression that would be only reinforced by SSoC #1’s very next story.

Appearing ahead of that feature, however, was Roy Thomas’ editorial, “A Hyperborean Oath”, which was accompanied by the following full-page illustration by Alfredo Alcala:

At this time, the veteran Filipino artist was best known to my younger self — and, I’d wager, to most other American comic book readers — for his prolific contributions to DC Comics’ “mystery” anthologies (House of Secrets, etc.) over the past couple of years.  This was one of the first pieces he’d done for Marvel, the publisher where much of his work would be appearing for the next half-decade or so; in retrospect, it serves as something of a teaser for his epic collaborations with John Buscema in Savage Sword of Conan, the first of which would be appearing in the magazine’s second issue.

But we’ll have plenty of time in August to discuss “Black Colossus”.  For now, let’s bring Red Sonja back to the stage (or, rather, page):

“Featuring the swordswoman created by ROBERT E. HOWARD”.  As we’ve discussed in some detail in a previous post, while Howard did indeed create a woman warrior named Red Sonya (she appears as a supporting character in a single story, the 16th century-set non-fantasy adventure “The Shadow of the Vulture” [1934]), that character — who hails from a geographical region in what’s now Ukraine, is the sister of the Ottoman sultan’s chief consort (a real-life historical figure, incidentally), and packs a pair of pistols as well as a sword — is arguably a distinctly different personage than the “she-devil of the Hyrkanian steppes” developed by Roy Thomas and his various artistic collaborators (beginning with Barry Windsor-Smith) from the prototype provided by Howard’s text.  Unfortunately for Marvel, it appears that none of the contributions their writers or artists made to the character were ever established as legally belonging to the comics publisher (versus the Howard estate), so that the “Red Sonja” now published under license by Dynamite Entertainment still carries a significant amount of DNA that originated with Marvel and its freelance talent.

The art for “Red Sonja” is credited, en masse, to Esteban Maroto, Neal Adams, and Ernie Chan (or Chua, as the artist was known at the time).  The Grand Comics Database presumes that Maroto did the pencils, while Adams and Chan handled the inks; but in his introduction to the trade collection The Adventures of Red Sonja, Vol. 1 (Dynamite, 2005), Roy Thomas says that all three artists contributed to the inking.  So who knows?  Regardless of who did what, it’s beautiful job — and remarkably consistent in style and quality throughout, at least to my eye.

The above montage is, of course, a recap of Thomas and Windsor-Smith’s “The Song of Red Sonja”, from Conan the Barbarian #24, and is largely faithful its depiction of that story’s events; I say “largely” faithful, for the simple reason that, while the page features the swordswoman’s original attire of long-sleeved mail-shirt and red short-shorts, it also shows that garb taking some serious damage (during Sonja and Conan’s battle with the tiara-turned-monster) that Windsor-Smith himself didn’t draw.  My guess is that Maroto (possibly at Thomas’ instigation) added that small retcon of a detail as a way of explaining why, prior to her return to Pah-Dishah, Sonja has exchanged her original duds for the Maroto-designed scale-armor bikini she wears in the “present day” of the story — the outfit which, having made its debut months before in a standalone double-page spread published in Savage Tales #3, would, for better or worse, come to define the character’s look for much of the next half-century.

King Ghannif’s albino bodyguard, Trolus, bears more than a passing resemblance to another character of Maroto’s design:  the Spanish artist’s own sword-and-sorcery hero, Dax the Warrior, English-language versions of whose exploits had appeared in multiple issues of Warren Publishing’s Eerie in 1972 and 1973 (and were in fact about to re-presented, with brand new texts, in Eerie #59, released just one month after Savage Sword of Conan #1… though the timing is probably coincidental).

Sonja grudgingly allows the other women to bathe and dress her, and soon…

But Trolus, who’s very much enjoyed the very comfortable life he’s led as Ghannif’s underling, has no interest in facilitating Sonja’s escape — just the opposite, in fact:

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time that Esteban Maroto and Neal Adams ever worked together on Red Sonja — or, in fact, on anything else for Marvel Comics — but it was hardly their last collaboration.  Roughly ten years later, Adams’ own publishing company, Continuity Comics, would bring out the first issue of Zero Patrol — an English-language version of Maroto’s late ’60s strip “Cinco Por Infinito”, featuring a new script (and revised artwork) by Adams.

Immediately following “Red Sonja” (the story) is “Red Sonja” — another full-page solo illustration by Maroto…

…which serves as a frontispiece for a text article by Fred Blosser concerning “Conan’s Women Warriors”.  This is followed by the first of the issue’s two reprints — although that description hardly seems to do justice to this re-presentation of the first chapter of Gil Kane’s Blackmark:

As explained in the introductory text box on the first page of this opening double-page spread, Blackmark was originally published in mass-market paperback format by Bantam Books in 1971.  Following in the wake of 1968’s magazine-format His Name Is… Savage,  this was Gil Kane’s second ambitious attempt to expand the traditional American comic book format and market, as well as to achieve a greater degree of personal independence for himself as a creator; while neither venture proved commercially successful in its time, both have long been acknowledged by comics historians to be important precursors of the modern graphic novel.

Roy Thomas had been promising to re-present Blackmark in a Marvel black-and-white magazine at least since Savage Tales #2, which had come out a whole year before.  As he writes in his 2019 introduction to Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus, Vol. 1, he’d pursued the reprint rights “partly for my own purposes, and partly because my friend Gil Kane was looking for a bit of extra money…”  (I would guess that it was still cheaper to give 15 pages of SSoC #1 over to Blackmark than it would have been to commission the equivalent in brand-new art and story, though that’s pure speculation on my part.)

I’m taking the liberty of presenting this first installment of Marvel’s serialization of Blackmark in full, for a couple of reasons: one being that the reformatted-for-magazine-size version that appeared in Savage Sword of Conan has never been reprinted anywhere else, as best as I can determine; the other, that it appears to be well out of print in any version, its last official edition having been released by Fantagraphics back in 2002.

Though not mentioned in the introductory text box, Kane had uncredited assistance both on the writing and artistic ends of this project.  The script was by Archie Goodwin (a fact that Roy Thomas did note in his editorial earlier in the issue, I should add), who worked from a plot outline Kane had provided (he’d previously done similar service on His Name Is… Savage).  Meanwhile, Kane sought help with the artwork from a couple of fellow comics titans: Neal Adams, with whom he’d worked on a number of other jobs (a later collaboration of theirs, the Conan story “Night of the Dark God”, had recently seen print in Savage Tales #4); and, rather more startlingly, Harvey Kurtzman, the artist, writer, and editor who’d created Mad, Two-Fisted Tales, and Frontline Combat for EC Comics in the 1950s, among his many other achievements.  Still, whatever the extent of Adams and Kurtzman’s contributions may have been, it’s hard to argue that the work as a whole reflects the style and sensibility of Gil Kane, working at what was likely the peak of his powers.

Blackmark is sometimes described as a hybrid of sword-and-sorcery and science fiction; but the advanced technology employed by Balzamo is about as close to actual sorcery as the narrative ever comes, at least in this installment.  One might use the label “sword and science” for such a story, as one could also for the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and similar “planetary romances”.  Or, you could just call it “science fantasy”, and leave it at that.

Our hero Blackmark may barely be out of diapers yet, but Kane and company have already set him up with some hugely mythic shoes to fill, thanks to a birth narrative that echoes the Christian Gospels, the Arthurian legends, and who knows what else.  Will such parallels continue to apply as our hero grows to maturity?  You’ll have to come back in a couple of months to find out.

Next up in Savage Sword of Conan #1 is another text article — this one, by Glenn Lord, is called “An Atlantean in Aquilonia”, and it explains how the King Kull story “By This Axe I Rule!” (recently freely adapted by Marvel in Kull the Destroyer #11) was reworked by Robert E. Howard to become the first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword”.  Then it’s on to the magazine’s second reprint, which also serves as its final feature:  an adaptation by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith of Howard’s “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”.

This was actually the third time around for this piece, which had first appeared in glorious black-and-white in Savage Tales #1 (May, 1971), and then in a somewhat revised color version in Conan the Barbarian #16 (Jul., 1972).  Your humble blogger didn’t buy the former; and though I did pick up the latter, I didn’t write a post about it when the opportunity arose, back in April of 2022.  I’d like to tell you that I did that just so that I’d be able to share the original, unexpurgated story here and now in June, 2024; but the truth is that I probably skipped it simply because I’d recently blogged about issues #14 and #15 and was already intending to blog about #17, and, well, there were plenty of other comics from April, 1972 that I wanted to write about.

In any case, I figure no one will mind if I take a page from my Savage Tales #4 post in March and share this beautifully illustrated story here, “reprint” though it is.  (If you do mind… well, thanks for reading this far, and I hope to see you next time.)

There’s actually a case to be made that this presentation of our story, even more than the original one in Savage Tales #1, should be considered the “ultimate” or “absolute” version, due to the fact that the lovely silent title page shown above doesn’t appear in the earlier printing.  There, the magazine’s table of contents page was followed immediately by the double-page spread you’ll find below.  (The title page, drawn by Windsor-Smith specifically for the color version printed in Conan #16, had gray tones added for its reproduction in SSoC #1.)

“The Frost Giant’s Daughter” was only the second Conan story to be written by Robert E. Howard.  Never published in its original form in the author’s brief lifetime, it’s been taken by some REH enthusiasts and scholars to fall chronologically near the very beginning of the Cimmerian adventurer’s career, while others place it several years later; Marvel’s own “official” Conan comics chronology has it coming right after Savage Tales #4’s “The Night of the Dark God”, which itself follows Conan the Barbarian #45’s “The Last Ballad of Laza Lanti” — a placement which means its events occur after the Conan-Red Sonja reunion chronicled in this very issue of Savage Sword of Conan.  (See “A Chronology of Conan’s Career, as Interpreted by Marvel Comics — Chapter Two” in Conan Saga #74 [May, 1993].)  Personally, I think the story works much better as a tale of a younger, greener, more reckless Conan than it does of the rather more seasoned and responsible individual we find in “Curse of the Undead-Man” — though I’ll postpone further discussion of my reasoning on that topic until later in the post.

As noted earlier, this story had to be revised for its presentation in the Code-approved Conan the Barbarian #16.  Said revisions had mostly (though not entirely) to do with the amount of clothing worn (or not worn) by the alluring young woman referenced in the story’s title, a matter which was of some concern to the Comics Code Authority.  As Roy Thomas writes in his 2018 book Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Volume 1:

…we sent the story to the Comics Code Authority for approval pretty much as it hadappeared in Savage Tales, hoping the sheer tasteful beauty of Barry’s drawings would win them over. We erred.

We’d have to reproduce virtually the entire color version of the story if we wanted to offer a panel-by-panel comparison showing every single artistic change Windsor-Smith was obliged to make, which seems a tad excessive — so we’ll limit ourselves to the particularly striking example shown at right.

The young woman is quite literally leading Conan on — and at this point, one might reasonably suspect that she wants him to catch her, eventually.  But such is not in fact the case…

Interestingly, the changes that the Comics Code Authority demanded for this story’s presentation in Conan #16 included textual revisions, as well as artistic, according to Thomas’ account in Barbarian Life:

I recall a page or so of stern notes from the Code people, who also felt the whole story was too violent, since Conan’s intentions toward the fleeing Atali seemed not entirely pure. Thus a line of REH dialogue used in Savage Tales—“I’ll warm you with the fire of my own blood”—had to be changed to “Perhaps it [your flesh] will be less cold—when warmed by a barbarian’s kisses.”

I have to confess, I’m not entirely sure what the CCA people thought they were accomplishing here.  Did they think that the new dialogue supplied by Thomas indicated that all Conan wanted to do was kiss the girl he’d pursued across the snowy wastes?  Because if that was the intended meaning, I’m pretty sure it was lost on me as a fourteen-year-old reader in 1972.

In 1974, I was well aware — as I had been in 1972 — that R.E. Howard had lifted the figure of Ymir directly from Norse mythology.  Still, having first encountered the awesome Frost Giant in the form in which he’d been envisioned for the Marvel Universe by Jack Kirby, I had a hard time getting past that particular graphic interpretation.  Clearly, there wasn’t a lot of family resemblance between the Frost Giant’s daughter — or her brothers, for that matter — and the fellow whom I’d watched go rampaging through the nation of Wakanda in Avengers #61 (Feb., 1969).  But, of course, the ways of the gods are not our own…

There’s a reading of “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” (in either its original form or in its comics adaptations*) that frames Conan’s behavior towards Atali as attempted rape, full stop.  And it’s hard to argue with that interpretation, at least as far as what we as readers witness happening on the page.  Especially in those last moments before Atali calls out to Ymir for aid, Conan’s ultimate intention towards her person is quite clear, and there really isn’t anything else to call it but rape.

There is another point of view taken by some readers, however, that holds that Conan is not actually in control of himself for most of the action of the story.  These readers point to passages such as the speech delivered by Gorm on the last page above, where he speaks of how, wounded, he “lay howling like a dying dog” because he couldn’t chase after Atali, and posit that the warriors who are “chosen” by the Frost Giant’s daughter aren’t simply aroused by her beauty, but are literally enchanted by her supernatural powers; they can’t help but behave in the way they do.

I believe that’s a valid interpretation, although I’m less than convinced that that was Howard’s conscious intent (or, for that matter, Roy Thomas’, based on his quip that I quoted above about Conan’s intentions seeming “not entirely pure”).  In the end, however, it’s up to the individual reader to decide what any given text means for them.

Personally, I think that there’s enough ambivalence in how Howard describes Conan’s “madness” that, in the end, I’m simply not sure how responsible he is, or isn’t, or his actions.  Which is, perhaps, the main reason why I prefer to see this as a tale of the character’s earliest days, before he was even out of his teens.  Not that youth is any excuse whatsoever for sexual violence, but it at least allows me the option of believing that the guy whom I’m reading about here gets better; that even though it would clearly be a mistake to see Conan, at any stage of his career, as the moral equivalent of a conventional Marvel superhero, I can at least view him as someone on whose side I’m comfortable being for the duration of a story… most of the time, anyway.

And with that, we come to the end of Savage Sword of Conan #1, and of this rather lengthy post.  Next time, we’ll be looking at a good ol’ standard 32-page American color comic… which I expect will mean less of a demand on your time and attention than today’s undertaking has, but who can say?  Either way, I hope to see you again on Saturday.

Additional cover art credits, per the Grand Comics Database and Mike’s Amazing World:

• Conan the Barbarian #42 (Sep., 1974) by Gil Kane and Ernie Chan.
• Giant-Size Conan #1 (Sep., 1974) by Gil Kane, Ernie Chan, and John Romita (?).
• Conan the Barbarian #43 (Oct., 1974) by Gil Kane and Dan Adkins (?).
• Conan the Barbarian #44 (Nov., 1974) by John Buscema.
• Zero Patrol #1 (Nov., 1984) by Neal Adams.
• Conan the Barbarian #16 (Jul., 1972) by Barry Windsor-Smith.

 

*There have been at least two other comic-book adaptations of the story in addition to Marvel’s: one by Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord that was published by Dark Horse in 2004; and, more recently, an expanded version by Robin Recht, published as a three-issue miniseries by Ablaze in 2020.