Last month we took a look at Conan the Barbarian #57, an issue mostly devoted to setting up the opening chapter of writer/editor Roy Thomas’ adaptation (and very extensive expansion) of Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s 1934 short story “Queen of the Black Coast” (full text available online here).  Turning past the cover by Johns Buscema and Romita, we find issue #58 beginning exactly where #57 left off, with our favorite Cimmerian adventurer riding hard for the docks of an Argossean seaport, a contingent of the city’s soldiers in hot pursuit… 

…which, not at all coincidentally, is also exactly how Howard’s story begins.

As indicated by that pink “and Introducing” arrow-blurb above the credits box, the longstanding Conan creative team of Thomas and pencil artist Buscema is joined this issue by a new regular inker: Steve Gan, a Filipino artist associated with Tony DeZuñiga‘s “Tribe”, and one whose own pencilling skills had been on display earlier this same month in the “Star-Lord” lead feature in Marvel Preview #4.

The shipmaster, Tito, tells Conan that he and his crew are heading to the Black Coast “to trade beads and silks and sugar and brass-hilted swords to the black kings, for ivory, copra, copper ore, slaves and pearls.”  In response, Conan explains how he had hoped to find work in Argos as a mercenary soldier, but due to there not being any wars in the offing, hadn’t had any luck.  Tito accepts this, but, naturally, has to ask: “Why did those guardsmen pursue you?  Not, er, that it’s any of my business, but I thought perhaps –”

At this point, we launch into a flashback sequence, depicting events recounted by Thomas and guest artist Mike Ploog in somewhat more detail in the previous issue…

One might wonder why Thomas opted to spend almost three of his allotted nineteen story pages rehashing a few scenes from “Incident in Argos!” — but, as he later explained in his 2019 book Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Volume Two:

…I couldn’t resist the temptation to have John retell key events of the previous issue.

 

I had a ready excuse: Conan is telling these things to Tito, the captain, just as he did in REH’s prose “Queen.”  But mostly, I just wanted a chance to see John’s version of things — and, even more, I wanted a chance to adapt those wonderful two paragraphs related by Conan into captions for the readers to enjoy.  One of my self-appointed missions in writing Conan was to introduce a new audience to Robert E. Howard’s prose, and those two paragraphs of Conan in the courtroom displayed a real talent for abbreviated, understated storytelling.

Your humble blogger has to agree, at least in regards to Thomas’ second reason for reprising the sequence; there’s a black humor in Conan’s relating of what befell him in Messantia that it would have been a shame to lose.

For the next page or so we get a brief travelogue, as the Argus sails past the shores of Shem (thankfully, Thomas drops Howard’s description of the Shemites as having “hooked noses”) as well as those of Stygia, until at last the ship comes in sight of the coasts of Kush…

The men of the Argus put their backs into their rowing, but the Tigress is just too fast, and the coastline is still a mile away.  Looking to send his arrows where they’ll do the most good, Conan notes that the pirate ship’s own rowers are protected by a raised wall, so there’s no point in aiming for them…

Not counting the Buscema-Romita cover, this is our first glimpse of Bêlit — and her Marvel Comics visual is, of necessity, somewhat different than what one finds in Howard’s prose:

She was slender, yet formed like a goddess: at once lithe and voluptuous.  Her only garment was a broad silken girdle.  Her white ivory limbs and the ivory globes of her breasts drove a beat of fierce passion through the Cimmerian’s pulse…

Roy Thomas and company might have gotten away with an “accurate” depiction of Bêlit’s attire in the black-and-white Savage Sword of Conan, but there was no point in even trying such where the Comics Code-approved Conan the Barbarian color title was concerned.  And so it had fallen to John Buscema to whip up some potential new costume designs.

In Barbarian Life, Thomas recalled the process of (re-)visualizing Bêlit that preceded her debut appearance in print:

John had earlier submitted two several different versions of how Bêlit might look; these would be printed in an issue of Savage Sword (#41) that came out around the time of Conan #100…

 

One outfit looked more a bit more like the “broad silken girdle” Howard described, albeit with a top which left a considerable bare space between her breasts, much as the finished comic book would do, and with thigh-high leather boots.  I liked it, and of course John would have done others if I’d have asked for them.  But I settled on the other version, which looked a bit more like fur…  She also wore what we at Marvel tended to call “Captain America boots.”

And now that we’ve enjoyed that bit of behind-the-scenes info (and art), we can return to our sea battle…

While the death of Tito is observed by Conan (and thus by the reader) in Howard’s original story, it goes down rather differently there, as “with a sob he [Tito] sank down, a long shaft quivering in his sturdy heart.”  In Howard’s version, there’s no way of knowing just who among Bêlit’s warriors has slain the friendly shipmaster, and thus no individual foe for Conan to wish to take vengeance on (save for Bêlit herself, and that wouldn’t have worked for the author’s purposes, obviously).

As already mentioned, Tito’s killer is unidentified in Howard’s story, and so this entire episode (including the character of Odongo, whose “coal tiger” appellation seems likely to be a nod by Roy Thomas to Jack Kirby’s initial take on the character who ultimately became Marvel’s Black Panther) is original to this comics adaptation.

The addition of Conan’s fight with Odongo to Howard’s narrative serves several purposes.  To begin with, it helps stretch out Marvel’s adaptation of what roughly amounts to merely the first third of the original prose story to a length sufficient to fill this comic (something which may have also factored in to the generous amount of space given this issue’s earlier recap of events from Conan #57).  Beyond that — and perhaps more importantly — it gives our hero a victory of sorts, in a sequence which otherwise finds him squarely on the losing side… and also encourages us readers to look past the clear culpability of Bêlit for the violent death of the likable Tito (not to mention his entire crew).  After all, we’re going to be spending the next three and a half years with this woman…

Impossible as it would have been to visually depict Bêlit precisely as described in Howard’s prose during the sea-battle sequence, to attempt to hew faithfully to the original prose version of the scene that concludes this portion of “Queen of the Black Coast” would have been even more of a non-starter.  Here are the final two paragraphs of the story’s first chapter, titled “Conan Joins the Pirates” :

As they moved out over the glassy blue deep, Bêlit came to the poop.  Her eyes were burning like those of a she-panther in the dark as she tore off her ornaments, her sandals and her silken girdle and cast them at his feet.  Rising on tiptoe, arms stretched upward, a quivering line of naked white, she cried to the desperate horde: “Wolves of the blue sea, behold ye now the dance — the mating-dance of Bêlit, whose fathers were kings of Askalon!”

 

And she danced, like the spin of a desert whirlwind, like the leaping of a quenchless flame, like the urge of creation and the urge of death.  Her white feet spurned the blood-stained deck and dying men forgot death as they gazed frozen at her.  Then, as the white stars glimmered through the blue velvet dusk, making her whirling body a blur of ivory fire, with a wild cry she threw herself at Conan’s feet, and the blind flood of the Cimmerian’s desire swept all else away as he crushed her panting form against the black plates of his corseleted breast.

In Barbarian Life, Roy Thomas described how he and John Buscema opted to have Bêlit divest herself of her sword, belt, and boots, but nothing else, as well as to limit the pirate queen’s dance to a single panel.  Alas, that still wasn’t quite enough for the Comics Code Authority:

As soon as the original art pages of the issue reached the Code offices, I received a phone call from [administrator] Len Darvin.  He said the whole Bêlit thing was pretty sexy, including her garments, but he was letting that go.  I said fine, or words to that effect, as if I had expected no less.

 

But, he said, two things on the final page had to go.

 

“What things?” I asked.

 

He said we had to get rid of the term “mating dance.”

Darvin suggested “love dance” be used instead of “mating dance”; after reluctantly acquiescing, Thomas asked what the second requested change was:

He said that, in the second-from-last panel, we had to change the art slightly.  As drawn, it showed Bêlit from behind, on her belly, with one of Conan’s open legs on each side of her.

 

We had to alter the drawing so that both of Conan’s legs were off to one side.

 

I made some perfunctory objections, partly because the art changes would take more time than the re-lettering, but also because I liked the art as it was.  It didn’t occur to me, and there was no reason for it to occur to anyone else, that Bêlit was there to perform oral sex on Conan; after all, in those two final panels they were embracing, kissing…

 

Len, however, was adamant, so I gave in.  It really wasn’t worth arguing about, not in a Code-approved comic…

That wasn’t quite the end of the story, however.  Again, here’s Thomas:

By sheer happenstance, the inked version of the panel in which Bêlit crawled up between Conan’s legs did survive, in black-and-white photocopies that would later make their way, probably by accident, into the Marvel reprint magazine Conan Saga [specifically, issue #50], so that both versions of that panel have been accessible ever since.

Just for the record, the original “mating dance” line made it into the B&W Conan Saga reprint version of the story, as well.  And now you know.

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Following a brief verse epigraph from “The Song of Bêlit”, the second chapter of Howard’s story, called “The Black Lotus”, begins thusly:

The Tigress ranged the sea, and the black villages shuddered.  Tomtoms beat in the night, with a tale that the she-devil of the sea had found a mate, an iron man whose wrath was as that of a wounded lion.  And survivors of butchered Stygian ships named Bêlit with curses, and a white warrior with fierce blue eyes; so the Stygian princes remembered this man long and long, and their memory was a bitter tree which bore crimson fruit in the years to come.

 

But heedless as a vagrant wind, the Tigress cruised the southern coasts, until she anchored at the mouth of a broad sullen river, whose banks were jungle-clouded walls of mystery.

You’ll have noticed, I’m sure, that there are no specific references to the passage of time in those two paragraphs.  If we’re to go purely on the internal evidence of the original story, Conan’s sojourn with Bêlit might have lasted for months, or even for mere weeks.  So why did Roy Thomas choose to wait a whole three and a half years before allowing the Tigress to finally arrive at the mouth of the “broad sullen river” called the Zarkheba on the opening splash page of “Death on the Black Coast!” — the 33-page conclusion of his and John Buscema’s adaptation of “Queen of the Black Coast”, published in Conan the Barbarian #100 (Jul., 1979)?

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, Thomas had decided at (or at least very near to) the beginning of Marvel’s publication of Conan the Barbarian that the titular hero would age more or less in “real time” — and that he and his collaborators would hew closely to what was then considered to be as “official” a chronology of the Cimmerian’s life and career as could be achieved.*  That chronology had originated with an essay, written by a couple of fans in the late 1930s, which Robert E. Howard himself had said followed his own sense of things “pretty closely” (although he did suggest a few corrections, prior to his untimely death by suicide in 1936).  According to the essay, Conan was probably “about 23” at the time of his arrival in Argos, and “26 or 27” when Bêlit died.  So Thomas was clearly coloring within the canonical lines, here — and, given the basic parameters, one can see how the decision to have the whole “Black Coast” saga end in the milestone 100th issue of Conan would be virtually irresistible.

But, in making that decision, Roy Thomas presented himself with certain problems that Robert E. Howard never faced.  Howard’s version of Bêlit shows up midway through his story’s first chapter, and makes her exit before its fifth and final one; his story never offers an explanation of how a young white woman has come to command a band of Black pirates, nor gives any other hint to her origins save her own claim (included on the final page of Conan #58, as shown above) that her “fathers were kings of Askalon [aka Asgalun]!”  And the author’s Weird Tales readership probably didn’t care overmuch, since the character didn’t hang around long enough for questions to arise… and, for better or worse, the “white person elevated above indigenous Black Africans” was already a well-worn and familiar pulp fiction trope for those readers, who could be expected to fill in the gaps from their own familiarity with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and his many imitators.

But Thomas knew that what had worked for a single short story wasn’t going to fly in the context of three-plus years’ worth of month-to-month comic-book continuity.  As he would later write in Barbarian Life, “Marvel’s readers liked origins.  They would want to know where she [Bêlit] came from, and it wouldn’t make any sense to them that she didn’t tell Conan, sooner or later.”  And so, agreeing with that logic — and also opting to go with “sooner”, rather than later — Thomas opted to devote most of issue #59’s “The Ballad of Bêlit!” to the tale of the she-pirate’s beginnings… although, as it turned out, it was the shaman N’Yaga from whom Conan heard the story, rather than Bêlit herself.

As Conan (and we readers) learned in that issue, the Marvel version of Bêlit had been quite literal in her reference to her “fathers” having been “kings of Asgalun”, as she was in fact the rightful heir to the the throne of that Shemitic city-state.  While Bêlit was still a child, her royal father had been murdered by Stygian assassins allied with his own brother; fleeing with the help of N’Yaga (who’d served the good king Atrahasis as an advisor), the orphaned princess had subsequently found refuge in N’Yaga’s own homeland of the Southern Isles.  Growing up among the islanders, most of whom accepted the shaman’s claim that she was the daughter of their own pale death-goddess Derketa, Bêlit ultimately came to rule over them — but rather than become a “jungle queen”, she’d flipped the script, opting to lead them in the ways of piracy instead (art by Buscema and Gan):

These were details that Thomas hoped would, as he said in an editorial note on the letters page of this same issue, help make Marvel’s Bêlit “a more-fully-realized (and thus more real) person”.  He also seems likely to have hoped that they would make her a more sympathetic character than Howard’s original conception — who, vividly written as she may be, never gets much of an opportunity to display any character traits beyond bloodthirstiness, avarice, and a taste for big strong (white) barbarians.

Some forty-one months later, in an article for Savage Sword of Conan #41 (which, incidentally, came out the same month as Conan the Barbarian #100 — but, according to Mike’s Amazing World of Comics, actually preceded it to stands by a week), Thomas was able at last to admit that, at least as far as the original source material was concerned, Bêlit “was, by almost any sane standard, a rather hateful character, despite her feeling for Conan.”  Later in the same piece, he added:

She was not a very lovable person.  And since I felt obliged to keep her at least largely that way during her entire three-and-a-half year tenure in the series, she was beloved by only about half the readership — and loathed by the remainder, who seemed eager for her ever-impending death, only partly (I suspect) because that would make Conan a de facto bachelor again.

Your humble blogger can only speak for himself, of course.  But while I’m pretty sure I never came anywhere near to loving Bêlit as a character, I don’t recall exactly loathing her, either.  On the other hand, I’m fairly confident that I was more than ready for the “Black Coast” era of Conan the Barbarian to end well before it did — and if I had known that Roy Thomas’ tenure as the series’ writer/editor would be coming to a close a mere fifteen issues later, I’d have probably been even more eager to see the whole business over with.

No, the Bêlit years of Conan weren’t my younger self’s favorites, by a long shot.  On the other hand, they did have their brighter moments, here and there — and, Crom and Mitra willing, I expect to be sharing some of those moments with you here in this space over the next few years.

 

*Since the 1970s, several alternative chronologies have been proposed; you can read more about ’em here.