With this post, we’ve arrived at the penultimate installment of Marvel Comics’ five-part crossover between Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja, She-Devil with a Sword, as originally published in the summer of 1976 — although, if you’ve been following along the last couple of months, you might be feeling that, three chapters in, the story seems to have barely gotten started.  After all, the first two installments (in Marvel Feature #6 and Conan #66) were basically solo adventures that served to set up a face-to-face confrontation between the two principals on their respective last pages.  And the subsequent episode (in Conan #67) moved the main storyline forward only incrementally, as its primary focus was a sidequest by Conan on behalf of a couple of his former comrades, Tara and Yusef, in which Sonja didn’t figure at all. (Though for what it’s worth, Conan’s current partner in both adventure and romance, the pirate queen Bêlit, didn’t play an active role in those proceedings, either.)

But, assuming we can trust artist Frank Thorne’s cover for Marvel Feature #7, both Big Red and her Cimmerian co-star will be front and center for this fourth chapter — which, we may hope, will see some further progress in their competing quests for a single page from the Iron-Bound Book of Skelos, regardless of which of the two adventurers fortune ultimately favors.  So, without further ado, let’s turn to this issue’s opening splash page to pick up our narrative where we left off…

As with Marvel Feature #6, Frank Thorne is responsible not only for pencilling and inking this issue’s story, but for lettering it as well.  Meanwhile, Roy Thomas continues as both writer and editor for the entire crossover.

As Red Sonja gallops away, she silently mulls over recent events — which, naturally, allows for Thomas and Thorne to provide a tidy recap of the major beats of the storyline thus far.  As the sequence ends, Sonja wishes that she could have confronted Conan before leaving, “to get it all over with, one way or the other!”

Upon returning to his living quarters, the nameless Stygian sorcerer makes the necessary preparations for the performance of an arcane ritual…

Writing in his 2019 book Barbarian Life, Vol. 2, Roy Thomas confessed that, while he’d definitely lifted the names “R’lyeh” and “Yuggoth” from the Cthulhu Mythos fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, he wasn’t sure where “Tublat” had come from.  But if your humble blogger had to guess, he’d go with the great ape of that name who’s an early enemy of Tarzan in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first novel about that character.

Having already crossed swords (albeit briefly) with Red Sonja, Bêlit now departs the narrative for the remainder of this chapter, leaving the field clear for the cover’s promised one-on-one “clash of titans”.

For the last panel above, Frank Thorne has offered a pretty faithful recreation of Howard Chaykin’s depiction of the same scene, which (as Thomas notes) had appeared as part of Red Sonja’s origin story, published in the black-and-white Kull and the Barbarians #3 about a year before this.  Your humble blogger has some serious issues with that origin; but since I discussed them at some length in my Conan the Barbarian #24 post back in 2022, I’ll refrain from rehashing them here.

Naturally, Karanthes is eager to take possession of the long sought-after page, but before she hands it over, Sonja feels obliged to give the priest of Ibis a piece of her mind.  “I did not appreciate your using your store of magic to nearly kill my pursuers, Karanthes!” she tells him.  “I fight my own battles.”  “And I mine,” comes the reply.  “But are you positive I caused that rockslide?”

At this point, anyone who’s previously read more than a couple of sword-and-sorcery stories knows that, before our story is done, someone is indeed going to “disturb those bones”, and there will then be hell to pay, of one sort or another.  It’s only a matter of time…

Throughout this story, we find Frank Thorne making innovative design choices — such as the multiple tweaks to the ordinary conventions regarding panel borders seen on the page above — to add extra visual interest to his artwork .

Speaking of Frank Thorne’s approach to design, Roy Thomas made the following observation concerning the page shown just above in his Barbarian Life:

One reason that there are five captions running down the left side of the 14th page is that I had probably written a different caption for each of several panels as originally laid out by Frank.  When he saw them, he decided to stack them that way, both to give him a bit more breathing space for the art, and as an added design element to the page.

Another thing before we move on… I know I said I wasn’t going to get into my issues with Red Sonja’s origin in this post, but I can’t resist pointing out how this scene demonstrates one of its major problems: if Sonja’s strength and skill are (at least in part) the gifts of a supernatural entity, why should it matter that Conan is of “superior size“?  Logically, magical fighting prowess shouldn’t be dependent on weight or mass.  But, of course, in this sequence it has to be — because however much Roy Thomas may enjoy writing Big Red, there’s no way he’s ever going to let her be portrayed as the physical equal of his main man, Conan.

Gee, that fight with the python was over so quickly that it hardly seems worth the trouble of setting it up.  On the other hand, it did interrupt Conan and Sonja’s fight, and put them back on the same side, more or less.  And just in time, too, it seems…

Huh.  I guess if you can sprout big leathery wings and long, sharp talons, why do you really need a name, anyway?  But in any event, that last page reveal makes for a very suitable cliffhanger to set up the concluding chapter of “this tale of tales”… so be sure and return next Saturday for our coverage of Conan the Barbarian #68 — a book we can expect to not only bring Bêlit back into the action, but also to introduce a fourth major player into Marvel’s big summer sword-and-sorcery event — none other than King Kull, himself.  How will Roy Thomas and his artistic collaborator, John Buscema, ever pull that off in just 18 pages?  We’ll all find out together in a week.