I read volume 33 last year and when I was in Sandhead, I took along an ebay copy of the Zembabwei story I read on my very first visit. However, although I bought The Chronicles of Conan vol. 34: Betrayal in Zamora last September in the late, lamented Forbidden Planet Aberdeen, I didn't read it until I got to Arran, last weekend.
I wrote about the preceding volume here: https://somefantasticplace-dougie.blogspot.com/2017/08/croms-devils.html
The stories reprinted first appeared in the monthly comic between May and December 1993, right in the middle of my brief career as a professional actor. I had turned thirty that June and was buying very few comics at that time, since I was renting a room in a flat which had no storage to speak of. My interest in sword and sorcery, which had been at its peak about 15-16 years earlier, had definitely almost entirely waned (although the Virgin New Adventures of Doctor Who was keeping that particular fandom alive, interestingly.)
Death Comes Creeping/When Mountains Walk complete the adaptation of the 1986 novel, Conan the Renegade. Conan fights a sentient tree and Thomas reiterates Howard's poem The King and the Oak. The climax of the story involves the animation of a Mount Rushmore-like feature, the Sleeping God of Two Faces. Both Amalric (from Black Colossus) and the much more interesting warrior woman Ariel are killed.
The trilogy A Fire on the Lake/The Devourer Comes to Dark Valley/A Feast of Souls revives the Devourer of Souls, an early-80s demonic villain. Conan's mercenary band visits the Lake of Salts ( the Dead Sea?) and returns to Dagoth Hill, the birthplace of the doomed minstrel Laza-Lanti and his sorceror brother, Tsotha-Lanti ( from The Scarlet Citadel). Isparana falls in love and is impregnated by a homunculus, going by the clearly-ominous name of Acheron. Conan also encounters a swarm of Cthulhoid creatures like Laza-Lanti's father.
The Lords of the Lotus is a one-off story where Conan goes Frank Castle against a drug baron, having witnessed addiction and prostitution among lotus-addicts.
Demon-Wings over Zamora is a sequel to Devil-Wings over Shadizar. Conan is sacrificed to the female offspring of the bat-god/ The subtext of bestiality makes unpleasant reading.
The final story is giant-sized. Cry Kozak: Betrayal in Zamora- Swords of the Steppes/A Wind Blows from Turan depicts Conan's rise to power within the Kozaks ( preceding Iron Shadows of The Moon).
The Free Companions turn against Conan but he is rescued by the mute Turgohl. Confronted by his old enemy, the empire-building prince Yezdigerd, Conan is only saved by the magic of the Blood-Jewel of Bel-Hissar.
The storyline would then be picked up in Savage Sword of Conan and the Dark Horse b/w reprints thereof. Specifically, vol. 21 which sells on ebay for a ridiculous sum when I could've picked it up in Aberdeen's Forbidden Planet last winter for just over a fiver.
I wonder what this tpb would have looked like if Ernie Chan had been the artist, rather than Mike Docherty. I found the repeated depiction of Conan's hairy legs unintentionally hilarious.
I never warmed much to Isparana, created by the late Andrew J Offut in 1978's Conan and the Sorceror. She lends diversity to the series and has some agency within the story but her love for the homunculus Acheron is unconvincing.
As in the previous volumes, Thomas revisits the early locales and themes of the series and again , I'm disappointed that realms like Ophir and Zingara couldn't have been evoked in more detail.
There is some saucy humour in the form of Conan's idiomatic language: "thumbs up your scabbards", "no sweat off my baldric" which is amusing, if rather at odds with Seventies characterisation. While this volume, like all of 90s colour Conan, is pallid compared to its heyday, nonetheless I'd still like to read the 1994-95 Conan the Adventurer series or late 90s miniseries like Death Covered in Gold.
Coming next: The Legacy of Time
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