Weird Tales

Last time , I ranked my top ten favourite stories from the Centenary edition of the Chronicles of Conan.
But what, by Mitra, of those other tales?
Even though I longed to read them as a teenager, I recognise that the racism of Howard's environment is glaringly apparently in many stories. Often the stories don't work because the plots are repetitive or the themes unappealing. Sometimes, it's the pacing; other times, it's the characterisation. Unlike other barbarian heroes, for example the one-dimensional Thongor or the morose Elric, Conan develops a streak of sly gallows humour ("We'll scorch King Yildiz's pantaloons yet!").But that is often absent in the earlier stories.
So here are my thoughts on the also-rans. An asterisk denotes those that were considered for the top ten...

The Scarlet Citadel*- Part dungeon horror story, part chivalric battle, it introduces a wizardly ally whom we don't see again until a pastiche novel and that S&S standby, a giant snake.
Black Colossus*- Conan is champion of the gods in this story of a revived mummy which ends very abruptly. Reworked somewhat as The Hour of the Dragon.
The Slithering Shadow (aka Xuthal of the Dusk)- An excessive, sado-masochistic story with a Lovecraftian monster. Again, reworked somewhat for Red Nails.
The Pool of the Black One- A story of Spanish pirates, a petrifying pool and the vaguest hint of homosexuality. (What is the naked young sailor's "expression of secret passion" and "lasciviousness", exactly?)
Shadows in the Moonlight (aka Iron Shadows of the Moon)- A gruesome revenge killing thrusts Conan into a moody story of pirates, a killer ape and living statues.Reworked somewhat as...
The Devil in Iron*- An elaborate trap and a living metal giant, in yet another jade-green, lost city.
A Witch Shall be Born- The infamous crucifixion story, which Conan improbably survives. The titular villainess is directly related to the Biblical Salome.
Shadows in Zamboula- A horror story about cannibalistic black tribesmen and Eastern decadence.
The God in the Bowl- A murder mystery and horror story. Very, very talky.
The Frost-Giant's Daughter- An imagistic fairy tale but its theme of attempted rape is distasteful.
The Vale of Lost Women- A throwaway African story. Sadistic and racist, with a winged monster so perfunctory, even Conan dismisses it.

Drums of Tombalku is a lengthy fragment, where the real protagonist is a third character named Amalric, unrelated to the conspirator in Hour of the Dragon or the nobleman in Colossus. Wolves Beyond the Border is a fragment of a third Pictish Wilderness story, told, unusually for REH, by a first-person narrator. The Snout in the Dark is a fragment about intrigue and magic in the quasi-African kingdom of Punt. The Hand of Nergal is an opening sequence only and The Hall of the Dead, a prose synopsis.
De Camp and Carter expanded all of these for the Lancer/Sphere paperbacks. The final books they worked on saw print in 1979, which, as I said last time, gave me the impression that it was the zenith of Sword and Sorcery in the UK.

Conan the Swordsman is a collection of original Carter/de Camp stories, none of which are as witty or well-characterised as Thomas's originals. I bought it in John Menzies, primarily for its appendix on Hyborian names, which was nerd heaven. Conan the Liberator is the story of how the Cimmerian seizes the throne of Aquilonia and is, as they say in Dr. Who fandom, pretty much Pure Historical.

I read three more Sphere books in the very early 80s: Conan the Mercenary; Conan: The Sword of Skelos and  Conan: The Road of Kings .The former, by Andrew J. Offutt ,introduced a new warrior-woman, Isparana, who also appeared in Marvel adaptations; but I don't think the books captured either REH's brooding atmosphere or the thrill-ride perils of Carter. Road of Kings by Karl Edward Wagner features living statues memorably known as the Final Guard and had a little medieval Spanish colour; otherwise, it was watered-down Hyborian intrigue.

I haven't read any other novels but I was there when Conan received a new lease of life at Marvel in the comics boom of the Nineties. First, Roy Thomas returned after a decade to write a serial about Kull-villain Thulsa Doom. That  issue of Savage Sword (above) handily retold the entire saga to date. A little later, Thomas and I think, Gerry Conway, wrote some adventures set in the Hyborian version of Japan,Yamatai. This is a great idea and one I don't recall seeing elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Thomas also returned to the colour comic. Here is a cartoony Arthur Adams cover for a serial retelling of Black Colossus.

 Adams would be terrific on The Hobbit but his style seems too whimsical for Conan. The series also pitted the Cimmerian and his allies against Marvel's original primordial vampire, Varnae (A punning reference to Varney the Vampire, the Victorian Penny Dreadful, whom Thomas also used in his 90s Dr. Strange series.)
In the mid-90s, a decidedly Barry Winsdor-Smith flavoured Conan series appeared for a while.

Amusingly, it shared its title with Conan's strangest incarnation as hero of an animated cartoon series.

 The barbarian was recast as a He-Man analogue but interestingly, the main villain is serpent-cultist Wrath-Amon and one of Conan's allies is Thomas and Buscema's magical acolyte, Zula, whom you can glimpse in a tiger-skin on the Adams cover, further above.

In the last decade, I reacquainted myself with the recoloured Marvel reprints in the Dark Horse series of trade paperbacks. I caught up with the conclusion of the Belit saga, which I had drifted away from, rather surprisingly, as Byrne's X-Men gained prominence at Marvel. I also read a couple of the b/w phonebooks that reprint Savage Sword. I don't know how long I'd have to wait for DH  to reprint the Copper Age Yamatai stories, so maybe I'll get them on ebay.
Up here, in the real Pictish Wilderness, I've made several purchases on that site and a few of them were Conan books. Firstly The Chronicles of King Conan reprints the 1980 serialisation of De Camp and Carter's Conan of Aquilonia.

This book comprised a sequence of four novellas as a fifty-ish king pursues the super-villain Thoth-Amon to the last refuge of the Serpent Men for an ultimate showdown. While Prince Conn is a slightly irritating Wesley Crusher figure, we do see Conan's paternal side in this undramatic,Thongor-esque serial. The first chapter of Bjorn Nyberg's snoozesome Conan the Avenger is dull, bloodless stuff but the pure, muscular Buscema artwork fairly compensates.

Sadly, the artwork on the 1982 graphic novel Conan of the Isles is less impressive.Compared to Danny Bulanadi in the first half,  Dave Simons's inking leaves the figures sketchy and, where there are backgrounds, they are unimaginative. The sinister Red Shadows look ludicrously like rose petals and the Lovecraftian god Xotli makes a bathetic appearance. One can only daydream about the gorgeous undersea world or the splendour of the Antillian city as pencilled by Barry Smith. As you'll recall, I first read this book in the mid-70s in Strathaven Library and it features a sixty-ish Conan's final adventure in the New World, where he is destined to be remembered as Kukulca'an. It's pretty likely that this was material originally intended for the King Conan comic.

The Marvel Comics Super Special Revenge of the Barbarian from 1977 is delicately and experimentally coloured in painterly style by the legendary Marie Severin  and, four or five years later, would definitely have been a graphic novel too. Unfortunately, the story, adapted from a Howard original, is a dull morality tale of pirates and the ubiquitous giant snake.
 Conan Annual 2 from 1976-perhaps the heyday of Marvel in the Bronze Age- adapts the first Conan story The Phoenix on the Sword. The art by Vicente Alcazar and Yong Montano is dark, moody and atmospheric but it's not my preference. Thomas, ever the completist, rewrites somewhat to flag up the similarities to the Kull story that Howard recycled, since Marvel had previously adapted it.

 Methinks Panther's illustrator read Kane's comic...

 Supernatural Thrillers: The Valley of the Worm is a Gil Kane-pencilled adaptation set in Conan's world; a dragon-slaying story I first read in the grisly second Skull-Face Omnibus in 1980 or thereabouts.(The Solomon Kane stories are really gruesome!). It has an unusual reincarnation framing device in which the quest is a deathbed vision of a modern man.

Reincarnation also features in King of the Forgotten People- possibly Kane's last colour work on the Cimmerian, in 1981. Conan Annual 6 is also probably Thomas's final script on the colour comic before he left to write LSH and Wonder Woman at DC. The art is balletic, graceful and exciting but disappointingly, it's a flat, boring story of a would-be world conqueror with a desultory appearance of a few giant spiders.A couple of pages don't even look like Kane's own pencilling.

Happily, the adaptation of Conan the Conqueror in Giant-Sized Conan is a terrific package, in which the reader gets the best of both worlds: Kane's story is sweeping and epic (with those almost- Art Deco temples and castles I first loved in  Bal-Sagoth!) Also featured are recoloured reprints of Conan 3, 5 and 6- contemperaneous with the Red Nails treasury reprint- where Smith's Kirby influences begin to mesh with the intricacy of Art Nouveau. The scripts are also witty and cheeky: Devil-Wings over Shadizar has a bar-girl prostitute for a heroine, preceding Mantis by a couple of years; the two thieves on the first pages are an homage to Fahfrd and the Gray Mouser; a bar is named after the movie The World of Suzy Wong; and in Rogues in the House Nabonidus' servant Sivraj is an anagram of the Avengers' butler Jarvis. That flair goes away for the most part when Smith leaves, although Thomas does introduce the equvalent of Irish or Polack jokes ("What do you call a Brythunian..,") and his leonine Amra character is a dark parody of Tarzan.

As I've said, the rights for Conan lie with Dark Horse now. Another time, maybe I'll talk about Kurt Busiek's Conan comics.If Marvel were to publish a Bronze Age-style S&S book now, I'd recommend Chris Bacchalo pencilling one of these guys, Korrek or Kronak.

 Given that Marvel's Conan was the Wolverine of his day, a swordsman in the Avengers makes sense to me too. Maybe one of these guys, especially since DC has rehabilitated Rob Liefeld?

The Marvel UK Black Knight and the short-lived Heroes Reborn Swordsman

Equally, in the face of DC's relaunch this autumn, will Marvel retaliate with some product that revisits other genres? Since Chaykin is pencilling for Marvel again, could we see the return of this kind of hero?

 Howard Chaykin's version of Solomon Kane and the bounty hunter Monark Starstalker

 One way or another, I will get down to Galloway and I have the 1978 Conan Annual to read, just like I had Dark Horse's Whispering Shadows last year. Next time, some more Dr Who reviews and some more Microhero casting...

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