I'll be completing my review of Showcase Batman vol. 6 in a future post. Last week, I took what has become virtually my annual trip to Galloway in the South-West of Scotland. I had booked it the day before my interview in Elgin in case I was unsuccessful and came back with nothing. Happily, I didn't!
Like last year, I stayed in the Tigh-Na-Mara hotel in the tiny village of Sandhead on Luce Bay, which I first visited in 1973 and for the second time in 2010. And, as before, I also paid a visit to the exotic Logan Botanical Gardens, between Ardwell and Port Logan. I was pleased to see the fish pond refilled and restocked:
Nearly forty years after we stayed there in a caravan, I walked out to Portobello Bay, north of Leswalt, up a 15 per cent gradient hill in fairly steady rain. Located in the North Rhins, it's perhaps the most isolated place I can think of. The whins and tussocks were crawling with black slugs and the only sound , apart from the crashing of the waves on the rocks, was the sound of the Irish ferry sailing from Cairnryan.
I was pleased to see that, since my last visit five years ago, the lonely memorial to the late James Drynan ,who died in 1894, had been repaired at some point. As you can see, it had split in two at some point prior to August 2012.
And since it was the 1977 Treasury Edition that most reminds me of that week - aside from the death of Elvis Presley and Nobody Does It Better- I had to have some Marvel Conan stories to read.
This is the second-last collection of the monthly Marvel title and represents Roy Thomas's final run on the book from 1992. I bought the first installment- the anniversary issue on the cover- from a charity shop on Renfield Street easily a decade and a half ago. Ernie Chan's work on the title really helps it feel like a continuation from the late 70s.
The 205th issue, Chaos Beneath Kuthchemes, is a sequel to the REH living mummy story Black Colossus which was, of course, the final story in the 1977 Treasury Edition. Conan, as the champion and lover of Yasmela, the regent of Khoraja, investigates the dead city for a ransom for her hostage brother. Conan and his companions Zula and Red Sonja then fall foul of the Zugite cult and their Lovecraftian god.
At the climax of the story, due in part to Conan's pragmatism, Zula and Red Sonja are written out for a new companion, Hobb. He's a portly confidence trickster in the vein of Star Trek's Harry Mudd. I always preferred this type of foil for Conan, like the minor wizard Erfu or the naive young cleric in the newspaper strip. Hobb is a uninspired name, however in a world of Murilos, Demetrios and Anaximanders.
After an unappealing fill-in which retells the story of Daedalus in a Hyborian context, the "Second Coming of Shuma-Gorath" begins in earnest. If you've read my post, http://somefantasticplace-dougie.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/what-long-strange-trip-its-been.html you'll be aware that this was another Lovecraftian Elder God from early-70s Dr. Strange stories; folding "it" into Conan's world strengthens ties to the MU and the Hyborian Age that really became explicit in the 80s.
The Dead of the Living Night reintroduces Queen Vammatar of Hyperborea and her Witchmen ( who previously appeared in the first issue of the monthly King Conan and in the novel Conan of Aquilonia.) Vammatar has power over the dead- and they tend to resemble the undead of Hammer vampire movies .
The Pit and the Parasite revives the wizard Kulan Gath. While the character actually made his debut in the Smith/Elric two-parter, the version here is the one established later in MTU and X-Men. The story also features a return to the city of Zahmann from The Dweller in the Dark.
This is something of a theme in this collection as Thomas has Conan turn up in locales where his earliest adventures took place and story elements are recycled. It's odd that Thomas doesn't choose to flesh out less familiar Hyborian settings like Brythunia or Ophir but I haven't read this saga in its entirety yet -as we'll see -so there may be an in-story reason.
Havoc in Hyperborea retells the grim zombie story by Carter and De Camp, Legions of the Dead, from 1978's Conan The Swordsman. It takes place in the Hyborian version of Finland, I think and was previously adapted by Thomas and Sal Buscema for SSOC in 1979.
Priests of the Purple Plague and Blood and Bones form a sequel to 1971's Keepers of the Crypt in the Barry Smith Era. Conan battles both Witchmen and giant armoured skeletons while contracting the eponymous plague.
Night Wings over Nemedia: Kulan Gath rescues Conan from imprisonment in a scenario utilising characters from God in the Bowl and Hour of the Dragon- in fact it sets up the eventual rule of King Tarascus ,from whose harem Conan's queen Zenobia will one day be rescued.
Once she gets done with this Talia/Batman roleplay, Zenobia will shoot fat Tarascus with a crossbow.
Savage Homecoming tells the back story of the relationship between Vammatar and Kulan Gath 100 years earlier. Conan is reunited with Ursla, a priestess with whom he lost his virginity (it was coyly implied) and had a child ( in what sounds like a rip-off of the Warlord/Deimos storyline by Mike Grell). Thomas respects the continuity established by his successors, no matter how poorly realised or intentioned, as he did with the Golden Age All-Stars. Conan subsequently discovers his native village has been destroyed in an archetypal grim & gritty 90s scenario.
Frustratingly, we never see the promised return of the Great Old One in this collection and I don't think I want to wait 'til next summer to read it. So, look for a post on The Mountain Where Crom Dwells soon.
I also wanted a classic summer special to read on holiday and obtained this one from ebay. I think it might complete my small collection of 70s CB spinoffs.
If you've read my blog before ( for example, https://somefantasticplace-dougie.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/this-other-eden.html, or https://somefantasticplace-dougie.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/dear-britain.html ) you'll know I'm eager to see the return of the Original CB but I might be alone in that.
This special reprints the Lord Hawk storyline where student Brian Braddock creates a robot hawk-weapon that's used by a nutty academic to create havoc. The comic seems to be testing the water for revivals of the Anglophile Marvel heroes. It also reprints the origin of the Arthurian Black Knight drawn by Joe Maneely. It's pretty but I found these episodes dull as a child when I first saw them reprinted in the late 60s and that hasn't changed. I was much more interested in the exploits of Marvel's third Avenging Black Knight.
The trippy team-up of proto-Defenders in this late 60s Thomas/Colan comic was part of my cousin Jim's collection: passed to me in the very early 70s when he went to high school.
I have often thought of this eerie, striking comic as a harbinger of Thomas's work on Conan, Kull and Red Sonja in the Seventies, which rather neatly returns us to this blog's theme of cycles and revisiting the past.
On that note, a near-future post will look at an obscure ITV series and the resonance it had when reading Number 11 by Jonathan Coe.
Coming soon: Virgin of the Secret Service
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