Mr. Smith Goes to Hyboria

About ten days ago, I was in the Rhins of Galloway on my annual visit to my childhood haunts, including exotic Logan Botanic Garden ( as seen briefly in The Wicker Man).The weather, as you may know, was glorious so I didn't have much time for the reading matter I had packed.

  It's become my tradition to evoke the summer of '77 with Marvel's Conan. This year, I wanted the authentic experience of b/w Curtis Magazines and tracked down Savage Sword of Conan Super Annual Issue number 1 online. Ironically, by the end of the summer of 1975, I would have read all the stories it contains in the pages of the UK Conan weekly.

Beware the Wrath of Anu: a young Conan joins forces with a pair of professional thieves but they fall foul of a corrupt priest, fencing the spoils. Conan's friend is hanged in a powerful, silent sequence and when he avenges the execution, the priest summons a  celestial man-bull as his protector.

This is all set-up for the adaptation of Rogues in the House in the next issue but is my favourite of the two Conan strips in the mag. Smith is at his most baroque and still channeling Kirby for action. However, the muddy shading overwhelms the delicacy of the pencils. Thomas really captures the cosmic forces alluded to by REH in the scripting. It's that element ( and the monsters!) that made me a devotee of the Sword-and-Sorcery genre at 12 or 13.

The Forbidden Swamp: my introduction to the scar-faced king from Craig's in Strathaven in the spring of 1972. Ironically, I learned more about Tolkien from the letters page- the Nazgul sounded amazing.
Hunting down the Serpent Men, Kull encounters the forebiddingThulsa Doom- a "man of science". Maybe an ancestor of Victor Von Doom? This violent and grim tale by Thomas and the Severins seems set in a more primeval world than Conan, with echoes of ERB's Pellucidar.

The Death-Dance of Thulsa Doom: this was the staggered continuation of Marvel's interrupted Kull the Conqueror series. Thulsa Doom is revealed to be a skull-headed creature and his M.O. is very like the two mummified wizards from the Howard Conan stories, Thugra Khotan and Xaltotun.

Using his powers of illusion and teleportation, the "quasi-human, timeless thing " contests with Kull but is apparently destroyed as Libra and Thanos would be: "..to be a part of everything is also to be nothing". Heavy.
This story ends with dour Kull beset by visions and "dreams of power". This is the key to Kull's failure as a series, I think. The gloomy, contemplative hero has only one arc: discovering power is worthless and subsequently losing his throne. Conan, the less cerebral character, perhaps had a more general appeal. Nonetheless, it's a beautiful strip, redolent of exotic atmosphere.

Web of the Spider-God: this Conan story was plotted by John Jakes, who went on to tv success with  an American Civil War miniseries, North and South. Jakes also created a Conan pastiche, Brak the Barbarian, whom Marvel featured in Savage Tales: stories I've yet to read.

Conan is ambushed at an oasis in this adventure and Smith graphically depicts the effects of concussion and dehydration on the Cimmerian. A mirage of a giant spider prepares us for Omm the Unspeakable later in the strip, when Conan mounts a rescue of his deliverer's daughter.
Cynical Roy sells the horror of the spider-god's captives as a man pleads, trading the lives of his wife and sons for his own. There follows a three-page fight with Omm; the old farmer is killed by a mob and the entire city is destroyed by a minor supporting character who's an engineer -cum -spy.

It's strong on spectacle but rather hackneyed, re-using the "sacrifice to a monster" motif from issue 6 ( and not for the last time!). It may also be the first time Conan doesn't ride off with the maiden at the end. If I had read this in the Seventies, I don't think it would have made as vivid an impression as the second Conan Treasury.

Returning to my holiday: at once very pretty and in a dramatic setting, Portpatrick was my base for the second year in a row. We didn't visit it as children in 1976- we were in the Machars of Galloway at Port William- but if we had, I would have liked a copy of a Lin Carter paperback: the other reading I took on holiday.

In the Green Star's Glow ( Jan '76) is the fifth book of Carter's Burroughsian pastiche featuring a reincanated hero on a planet of giant trees. There's a Frankenstein homage with a dwarfish villain whose m.o. is a carbon copy of Ras Thavas, The Master Mind of Mars. Carter's heroes also have to contend with an army of giant, intelligent ants. It's a derivative and charmingly silly pulp adventure that recycles scenes and plot devices from Carter's Thongor and Jandar series. I first read Under the Green Star in Amsterdam in 1981, so it's taken over thirty years to complete the cycle.


Coming soon: the Wolverine  and the audio adventures of Tom Baker
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