Crom's Devils

Somehow, it's already the end of the second-last week of the summer holidays. It's hard to believe it's a month since my stay in Galloway. For the last few years, I've tried to recapture the experience of reading my first Robert E. Howard stories, forty years ago on the way home from the North Rhins. If you read my post, http://somefantasticplace-dougie.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/a-perfection-of-thought.html, you'll remember that this year I read The Second Coming of Shuma-Gorath. This tie-in with Dr. Strange was a pesky "to be continued in the next volume" situation, so, rather than wait another twelve months, I bought Chronicles of Conan vol. 33 The Mountain Where Crom Dwells online.

I had a vague notion that I might fit in another day trip if the weather was good and I would take this tpb with me. However, since I'm moving back up to Elgin before the new term begins, I took the train up to the North-East to sign for and collect the keys of my new house.

So, The Mountain Where Crom Dwells/The Second Coming of Shuma-Gorath became the first comics I read in Craigbeg ( SEPA says that's the name of the house.)

In the wake of the destruction of his village, Conan teams up with some survivors of his Snowhawk tribe: Liam and his son Shon. Even though I knew Conan was a Gaelic name,  I'd begun to think of  the Cimmerian as a Scot, with his gloom and drinking, so the sort-of-Irish names were distracting. Rann the Aesir warrior woman returns and Hobb, Conan's sidekick, accidentally releases the Lovercraftian Elder God. Of course.

The monster doesn't really resemble the monocular octopus drawn by Frank Brunner, which rather defeats the point.  Although the estranged married villains Kulan Gath and Vammatar are reconciled, they are destroyed by Shuma-Gorath before Conan ultimately vanquishes the demon- god. I assume this is Kulan Gath's last appearance before his resurrection in Marvel Team-Up.

It's all rather anti-climactic but the art by Mike Docherty and Ricardo Villagran has a medieval feel that vaguely recalls John Buscema.

The next two stories are similar thematically. Scarlet Tears and Panther's Blood feature women who are physically transformed. The former features the transformation of an Aquilonian girl into a four-armed idol of Khalaari, goddess of the Vendhyan death-cult. It feels inspired by The Golden Voyage of Sinbad but is a story of curses and revenge which also reminds me of REH's Black Stranger aka The Treasure of Tranicos

The next story is a flashback to Conan's adventures in Shem and is an adaptation of a REH story, Guns of Khartum. Here, Jubali, priestess of Baast-Hathor, is a were-panther. It's all a bit pedestrian.

The Voice of Moloq is cover dated December 1992. This issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Conan. It writes out Hobb, whom I didn't warm to and interestingly, Thomas and Chua told this story before, in the Conan newspaper strip. It's a lost city story and ( mildly) amusingly, the obligatory damsel in distress falls for the sidekick rather than the barbarian. As I recall, the same twist writes out the scholar Epimus in the newspaper strip, one of my favourite Hyborian supporting characters.

White Apes and Ebon Thrones is, for my money, the weakest arc in this collection. The art is by a John Watkiss. I think he might be the Brighton-based artist who died in January. His work in this story is sketchy and a little like Chaykin but I much prefer the Docherty-Chan- Villagran comics.

This two-parter is adapted from a 30s Weird Tales story by a Clifford Ball, The Thief of Forthe. The hybrid sorcerer was inspired by the White Apes of Barsoom. the story also reintroduces the warrior-woman Isparana, who first appeared in Conan the Mercenary.

I read three of the non-carter/DeCamp Sphere books in the very early 80s but lost interest in them after that.  It only occurred to me, reading this tpb, that Isparana's Zamboula is Istanbul. Can you believe it? She's interesting in that she's not portrayed as white, unlike Valeria of the Red Brotherhood or Red Sonja. She's certainly less interesting than the latter although it's made clear that, unlike Sonja, Isparana is Conan's lover.

The final two-parter, Silver Rain/The Changeling, is an adaptation of a 1986 book called Conan The Renegade by Leonard Carpenter. Conan and Isparana sign up as mercenaries with Amalric, who first appeared in Black Colossus. They encounter a troop of warrior women, a shifty sorcerer and Conan meets the imprisoned brother of King Strabonus of Koth- the eponymous man-bat changeling.
This arc feels very like the set-up in the issues around 250, two volumes ago. It continues in volume 34, Betrayal in Zamora- but I think that can wait until next summer.
It wasn't a terrible collection but it felt a bit tired. At Christmas time, I might pick up the Dark Horse collection of the early Marvel Solomon Kane stories.

Over the last few days, I've read a bit of 60s Moorcock and a Star Trek novel, again from the early 80s, The Entropy Effect, about the paradoxes of a time-travelling terrorist.  It was very much from the "Hurt/Comfort" slash fiction tradition but it pointed the way back to some of the Alan Dean Foster books I enjoyed in my early teens. At the moment, however, I'm challenged by the complex Booker long-list novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing -when I'm not packing boxes.

Coming up: Black Lightning and the Ninth Doctor Chronicles.

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