In 1974, star comics artist Neal Adams had largely turned away from pencilling comic book stories.  But he did keep his hand in in the field in various ways, such as by turning out painted covers for Marvel Comics’ black-and-white magazine line on a fairly regular basis.  The second issue of Marvel’s new Savage Sword of Conan title is graced by one such; like most of the covers produced for the b&w line, by whichever artist, it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the magazine’s specific contents.  But I’m sure I didn’t complain when I first picked this book up half a century ago, and I doubt many other readers did, either.

Turning past that cover to the issue’s double-page frontispiece/table of contents, we’re greeted by the first published professional work of a young artist who was as unknown in August, 1974 as Adams was famous: 

Mike Zeck, then twenty-four years old, would soon begin contributing art to Charlton Comics’ line of titles, working on books ranging from The Flintstones to The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves; his full breakthrough at Marvel, however, would have to wait another few years, at which time he’d be tapped first to ink, and then pencil, Master Of Kung Fu.

Just past the table of contents, we come to the magazine’s lead feature: a 36-page adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s short story “Black Colossus”, originally published in the June, 1933 issue of the pulp magazine Weird Tales (and available to read in full for free here).  Like all Conan comics stories of this era, the adaptation’s script is by Roy Thomas, while its artwork represents the debut of a team that would arguably prove to be as definitive an artistic pairing as would ever illustrate a black-and-white Conan comics tale: John Buscema and Alfredo Alcala.

John Buscema had of course been drawing Conan comics ever since taking over the monthly color Conan the Barbarian title from Barry Windsor-Smith with issue #25, back at the beginning of 1973; he’d also drawn the lead story in Savage Sword of Conan‘s premiere issue, where his pencils had been inked by Pablo Marcos.  But Alfredo Alcala was a relatively new arrival to the roster of the Cimmerian adventurer’s illustrators, having previously turned out only a single pin-up drawing of the hero, published in SSoC #1 — though he was by no means a newcomer to barbarian fantasy comics, let alone the field of comics as a whole.

In a previous post, we discussed Alcala’s early career in the komix of the Philippines (a decades-long stint which had begun in 1948 — coincidentally, the very same year John Buscema got started as a pro), as well as how he became part of the first wave of the so-called “Filipino invasion” of the American comics industry, circa 1972.  So we’ll limit ourselves here to noting that one of the artist’s most famous achievements in his homeland was “Voltar” — a fantasy-adventure strip about a Viking hero which had been launched in 1963, seven years before Marvel brought out the first issue of Conan the Barbarian.  One must suppose that Roy Thomas — who was Marvel’s editor-in-chief at this time, as well as the writer of Conan — was well aware of this, and figured that Alcala would be a good fit with Buscema on SSoC… despite the fact that the veteran arrtist’s one and only U.S. employer until just a few month earlier, DC Comics, had used him almost exclusively on their “mystery” anthology titles.

And, indeed, Alcala’s lushly detailed rendering style, reflecting the influence of such classic illustrators as Franklin Booth, would almost immediately prove to be entirely appropriate for bringing the exotic, imaginary world of Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age to life… in glorious black-and-white.

The thief Shevatas uses his knowledge of special “projections” built into the tomb’s door sill, as well as a “long-forgotten incantation“, to gain entrance.  Proceeding within, he’s briefly given pause by the sudden appearance of a giant hooded cobra, but is able to slay it with his poison-tipped sword.  Coming to another, smaller door, he pushes it open…

John Buscema, incidentally, was never happy with Alfredo Alcala’s embellishment of his pencils; in a 2001 interview conducted by his old collaborator Roy Thomas for the 13th issue of the latter’s Alter Ego magazine (vol. 3), he said:

Alcala was a good artist, but he destroyed my drawing.  He would make these girls — now, I draw a pretty good-looking broad…  And he would put these eyelashes from 1930…

In Howard’s Conan stories, Mitra is the most popular deity of the Hyborian kingdoms, and may be seen as roughly corresponding to the God of Christianity, particularly in a medieval European context — despite his name being derived from an Indo-Iranian deity.  Ishtar, meantime, is an earth goddess worshiped primarily in Shem and its neighboring lands (basically the Hyborian equivalent of the modern Middle East); her name, of course, comes from a goddess of ancient Mesopptamia.

Returning to the palace, Princess Yasmela is determined to obey the word of Mitra, even though she’s uncertain whether what she and her maid Vateesa just heard was in truth “the voice of a god, or only the trick of a priest.”  Wrapping herself in Vateesa’s cloak, she heads out into the streets unattended — something she’s never done in her life before this night…

And here, at the bottom of our story’s ninth page, our hero finally makes his first appearance.  It’s hard to imagine Roy Thomas structuring one of his own Conan stories in such a fashion — indeed, it’s the rare issue of Conan the Barbarian produced under Thomas’ stewardship that doesn’t prominently feature the Cimmerian on the opening splash page — and even a couple of the few of Howard’s Conan tales that had thus far been adapted in the monthly color comic had been altered to give the titular star a larger role.  But Thomas had determined that, in adapting the original Conan stories for Savage Sword of Conan, he and his artistic collaborators would endeavor to, as he’d put it a few months later in the letters column of SSoC #4, “adhere very closely to what Conan’s creator himself wrote”; though, as we’ll see later, that didn’t necessarily mean that they’d refrain from taking any liberties whatsoever.

Conan is game — as he tells Yasmela, he’s just closed down the last wine-shop in town that was still open, but the night is still young as far as he’s concerned.  He’s not even nonplussed when she leads him to the palace, assuming that she works there as a maid-in-waiting…

That Conan of Cimmeria… you take your eye off the guy for just one minute, and…

A somewhat reluctant Conan follows Yasmela behind a curtain, where her handmaids proceed to dress him in armor better suited to his new station than his present chain mail…

The foreshadowing of Conan’s eventual rise to the throne of Aquilonia that Howard offers here would have been as obvious to the regular readers of Weird Tales in the 1930s — where the very first published Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword” (1932), had found him already occupying that exalted role — as to the readers of Marvel’s Conan comics in the 1970s.

Conan isn’t at all sure he likes the idea of Yasmela accompanying the army — as he tells Malthom, “She’s supple, but too soft for this work…”  After disabusing his new commander of the notion that the princess plans to “strap on a sword and fight, the way your Cimmerian women do,” the general confides in Conan why Yasmela might fear to be left behind in the city, having heard from one of her maids “a story of something that comes in the night and frightens Yasmela half out of her wits!”  Malthus worries that the foe they ride to meet is more than mere flesh and blood; Conan’s pragmatic response is that “it’s better to go meet an enemy than to wait for him.”

Catching a stumbling Yasmela in his arms, Conan assures her that no one can harm her here — not even Natohk.  As he carries her back to her tent, she asks him if there’s anything he fears, and he answers, “Aye.  The curse of the gods.”  To which she replies:  “I am cursed, Conan — I am!”

Yasmela soon falls asleep; but when she awakes a short time later, she’s alarmed to find her protector gone…

Along with the unnatural thickness of the fog, and the convenience of its timing, Conan’s suspicions are also aroused by a slight tremor in the earth, which he can feel beneath his horse’s hooves.  And then…

Conan manages to avoid having his no-longer-helmeted head smashed in by a rock long enough to slide his knife deep into his foe’s body…

Conan pursues Natohk into the white dome, past the skeletal remains of the giant snake killed by Shevatas in the story’s opening sequence, until he arrives at “a room that glows with unholy radiance…”

In Howard’s original story, the facial features of Thugra Khotan, aka Natohk, receive no description at all; the impression given is that while the villain’s visage might be distinctive, and perhaps even fearsome, it’s still the sort of face you could imagine being engraved on a coin.  But Buscema and Alcala have gone full horrorshow with their rendering, so much so that Thomas’ phrase (original with him) referring to “a grim, time-worn caricature” is insufficient to convince us that Conan could actually recognize this skinless, oozing excuse for a countenance as the same mug he’d seen on Fahim’s Zugite coin (well, it’s insufficient to convince me, anyway).

I’m not sure what I made of the ending of “Black Colossus” the first time I read it (and that might have been in either the prose or the comics version; it doesn’t much matter, actually, since outside of the liberties taken by Thomas and co. in regards to Thugra Khotan’s face, there are no substantial differences to speak of between the two); but re-reading it in 2024, I have to say that I find the climax a little, well, anticlimactic.  Yes, I get that Conan interrupts the evil sorcerer just as he’s about to juice himself back up to full power by sacrificing Yasmela, but after building our bad guy up for more than thirty pages, having him be able to do nothing more in the final scene than pulling a highly unimpressive stick-into-snake magic trick, followed by shaking a big ugly scorpion at our hero, feels kind of lame.  Not to mention the dubiousness of a single sword-throw being able to take down a clearly no-longer-human being who’s survived entombed for three millennia, even if you do figure the scorpion’s poison into the equation.  (I have to wonder if Thomas was a little uncertain about that last bit himself, given that he’s added in the detail of Khotan’s falling precisely upon the critter’s sharp tail; Howard’s text refers only to his “crushing the poisonous monster in his grasp as he fell.”)

But, hey — as I’ve already said, I don’t recall any of those details bothering me in 1974 (or perhaps earlier, if I had in fact read the story in Lancer Books’ Conan the Freebooter first).  And the rest of the story still holds up, in either version; and the comics adaptation certainly looks splendid from beginning to end… or at least that’s what I and many other fans have thought, over the years, even if John Buscema himself never did.

Honestly, I get why Buscema was even colder on Alfredo Alcala than on most of his other inkers (and he doesn’t appear to have been very enthusiastic about many, if any, of them).  The balance between pencillers and inkers in comics is generally understood to favor the penciller; it’s why the penciller’s name is often printed larger in the credits, as well as why their individual credit is sometimes given simply as “artist”.  But such is not the case in regards to the collaboration between Buscema and Alcala, where the inker’s style clearly contributes at least as much to the visual impact of the artwork as does the penciller’s — and, if we’re going to be completely honest, probably more.

In the end, however, it’s the final artistic results that should matter, rather than any perceived propriety of proportionate contributions; and for my money, the pairing of Buscema’s vigorous dynamism with Alcala’s lush texturing creates an alchemy that yields something that’s wonderfully, if ultimately inexplicably, more than the sum of its already very fine parts.

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Following “Black Colossus” in Savage Sword of Conan #2 comes the issue’s one and only text feature: the first chapter of a projected multi-part nonfiction series, “Chronicles of the Sword: An Informal History of Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction.”  Its author was Lin Carter, a prolific fantasy and science fiction writer and editor whose accomplishments included, among other things: contributing both to Lancer Books’ series of Conan paperbacks and to its single King Kull volume; creating the barbarian hero Thongor of Lost Lemuria, who’d recently (and briefly) held down his own comics series in Marvel’s Creatures on the Loose; and editing Ballantine Books’ Adult Fantasy paperback series, which both brought classic works by writers like Lord Dunsany and H.P. Lovecraft back into print, and published brand-new fantasy novels — two very significant activities in an era when the fantasy genre’s position in the American publishing industry was quite tenuous.

In this first four-page installment, “Kingdoms of the Dawn”, Carter emphasizes the influence of the aforementioned Dunsany and Lovecraft on Robert E. Howard and the other early S&S writers.  I’m sure that my seventeen-year-old self appreciated the piece, despite the fact that I’d have already been familiar with most of Carter’s points from a book he’d written called Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy, which had come out from Ballantine Books about a year earlier, and which considered all of these authors in the historical context of the greater literary tradition of fantasy that also included William Morris, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others.  Still, even if I hadn’t cared anything at all about the text, I’d have enjoyed the very nice spot illustrations provided by Al Milgrom, Joe Staton, ad Alan Weiss.

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Next up is the second chapter of Blackmark — which, as regular readers will hopefully recall, was originally published in paperback format in 1971 and is thus technically a reprint, though not one that I or many other readers in 1974 had seen prior to this presentation.  As with the feature’s initial installment, it’s been both plotted and drawn by Gil Kane; the script is by Archie Goodwin (though he goes uncredited here, just as he had been in the original paperback edition).

Blackmark relates to his father Zeph how the smith told him that the Psi-Lords have the ability to shape “monster-mutes” with their minds, and then “send the shapes flying like clouds”.  Zeph tells his son that he spends too much time talking to strangers, and that he doesn’t need to worry about such nonsense.  Blackmark replies that no, of course he doesn’t if the story really is nonsense.  “But if it’s true, I must!”  That night, Zeph lies awake “wondering what magics of blood change had produced this child who spoke so seriously about the future.  A future few men would dare to ponder at all.”

In the previous chapter of Blackmark, we saw Zeph mercilessly beat his wife Marnie for blasphemy when she tried to tell him about her encounter with the near-legendary King Amarix of the Westlands and his companion, the scientist Balzamo.  But here we learn that there’s more to Blackmark’s dad than superstition and blind fear… and our increased sympathy for the character makes us dread the Very Bad Things that we know are about to happen to him…

The Warlord brutally backhands Marnie, then pulls her close and begins to kiss her; meanwhile, Blackmark, held by the soldiers, is forced to watch…

In our SSoC #1 post, we noted the callbacks to the Christian gospels and Arthurian legends in Blackmark’s birth narrative; this chapter adds a perhaps less mythic, but no less familiar “revenge quest” trope to our hero’s origin story, and based on the final panel and “next” blurb, we can definitely anticipate some gladiatorial goings-on in Chapter Three. None of this breaks new narrative ground, obviously; but there’s a reason why tropes become tropes in the first place, and when familiar materials are handled with as much talent and care as Kane and Goodwin have exhibited here, your humble blogger believes that it would be petty to complain about a lack of originality.  It’s the execution that matters, in the end; and the execution here is masterful.

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The final feature in Savage Sword of Conan #2 returns us to the world of Robert E. Howard, though not to the Hyborian Age; “The Beast from the Abyss” is, rather, a Kull story… more specifically, “a tale of Kull when Kull was king”, as a blurb on the opening splash page informs us:

As we also learn from the splash page’s copy, this is a graphic adaptation of the story “Black Abyss”, attributed to Howard and Lin Carter.  Howard’s contribution was an incomplete fragment (also known as “The Black City”), probably written around 1929, which was edited and completed by Carter, and published in 1967 as part of the Lancer Books paperback King Kull.

The timing of its appearance here is interesting, given that Kull’s monthly color comic had been cancelled just three months before this, with its 15th issue.  (It would return to the stands exactly two years later, but of course none of us knew that in 1974.)  At that time, the book was still following the new direction that had been set in issue #11, in which Kull was violently dethroned and forced to become a wandering barbarian adventurer, much like Conan was in his color comic — albeit an adventurer dead set on regaining his stolen crown as soon as possible.  But here, with “The Beast from the Abyss”, we’re back in the days of Kull’s reign in Valusia.  That could mean that editor Roy Thomas was having second thoughts about that latter-days change in direction for the Kull book — though it’s just as likely to have simply been a reflection of the same editorial philosophy that drove Thomas’ decision to adapt Howard’s Conan tales set in various eras of the hero’s career in Savage Sword, regardless of what was going on in the month-to-month continuity of Conan the Barbarian.

Marvel’s adaptation of “Black Abyss” was written by Steve Englehart, who’d scripted the last several issues of Kull the Destroyer; it was pencilled by Howard Chaykin, and represented the talented young artist’s first foray into the sword-and-sorcery genre since leaving DC Comics’ short-lived Sword of Sorcery title about a year before.  The inks were by “the Crusty Bunkers” — who, as we’ve noted in numerous prior posts, were an amorphous assortment of artists connected to Neal Adams and Dick Giordano’s Continuity Associates.  On any given “Bunkers” job, contributors were likely to include Adams and Giordano themselves, as well as several of their young protégés — though in this instance they also appear to have included a veteran illustrator who’d been in the business even longer than either of Continuity’s founders, as, according to an editorial note in Savage Sword of Conan #4’s letters column, “many of the faces on the Kull story in our second issue were done by one Russ Heath” — Heath having been a longtime mainstay at DC, where at this particular time he was primarily engaged in drawing “Sgt. Rock” for Our Army at War.

We’ve discussed in previous posts how Robert E. Howard’s rather unambiguous statement in the short story “Delcardes’ Cat” that “Kull was not interested in women” was pretty much completely ignored by Marvel’s writers, and Steve Englehart proves to be no exception.  (Though in all fairness, we should note that to some extent Englehart is here following the lead of Lin Carter; while all the dialogue in the page above is by the former author, the latter did write a line in “Black Abyss” regarding how “Kull’s blood heated as he watched” Zareta dance.  So this clearly wasn’t only Marvel’s problem.)

Returning to our story… Kull’s companion, Baron Ergon, tells the king that his days of being able to stay up carousing all night are behind him, and then politely excuses himself, leaving Kull to his own restless thoughts…

This moment — when Kull hears his name called by his Pictish ally and good friend, Brule the Spear-Slayer — is where both Howard’s original “Black City” fragment and the complete “Black Abyss” by Howard and Carter actually begin.  Everything we’ve seen prior to this is essentially original to the comics version (although a few of the phrases Englehart uses to describe Kull’s sojourn in Kamula are derived from Howard’s and Carter’s prose).

This is more or less the point at which Howard’s fragment ends; for the remainder of the story, our adapters are working from material that Carter came up with solo.  (It should also be noted that in Howard’s text,  the corpse of Brule’s countryman hasn’t a single mark on it, the unfortunate Pict having evidently died of sheer fright after hearing something from the far side of the door; in having Monartho more prosaically slain by a mundane dagger, Marvel is following Carter’s lead.)

Kull and Brule descend down a long, spiral staircase; just as they reach the bottom, they hear an agonized scream…

In the original story, Lin Carter introduces the action sequence depicted on the page above with the line, “Kull struck like a raging tiger!”  That was apparently enough to inspire either Englehart or Chaykin to have the image of the Atlantean’s tiger totem appear behind his head in the wordless top panel; whoever came up with the idea, it’s a nice touch.

Wrapping up in a tidy ten pages, “The Beast from the Abyss” is clearly the least of this issue’s comics features… in length, at least.  Quality-wise, it holds its own quite well against its two peers, just as Savage Sword of Conan #2 overall measures up to its excellent predecessor of two months previous — to say nothing of the five issues of Savage Tales which preceded it.  Could Marvel keep up this high level of quality in art and story, going forward?  That, naturally, is a question to be considered in future posts.