By Crom! Mitra! Ishtar! Set! Thor! Cthulhu! Flying Spaghetti Monster! ( )

Another "phone book" collection of the Conan stories from Marvel Comics' b&w magazine The Savage Sword of Conan (#49-60 [Feb. 1980 - Jan. 1981]), published by Dark Horse, the current license holder of Robert E. Howard's (the creator of Conan) intellectual properties, this is a decent, if not outstanding, example of Marvel's work, since no REH stories are adapted here, and since writer Roy Thomas was nearing the end of his first association with Marvel and was starting to run out of gas even here; while Thomas' influence on Marvel's superhero characters was seminal (he wrote Marvel's first multi-part cosmic epic, "The Kree-Skrull War" in the pages of Avengers, and was the prime mover in starting most of Marvel's horror characters in the early 1970s, such as Werewolf By Night, Ghost Rider, Morbius the Living Vampire, Man-Thing, Satana, and Tigra), his best work for Marvel, IMHO, was on Conan, the premiere adventurer of REH's fictional Hyborian Age, set roughly 40,000 to 10,000 years ago, millennia after the sinking of Atlantis (which was the birthplace of another of Howard's fictional adventurers-cum-usurpers, Kull).

The stories & novels adapted here are L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's Conan the Liberator, which recounts how Conan became king of Aquilonia; Andrew J. Offutt's novels of a young Conan, Conan and the Sorcerer and The Sword of Skelos (though it's called Conan and the Sword of Skelos on the title pages of the three chapters; in this adaptation, Conan is drawn with a nod to Barry Smith's work on early issues of Marvel's color comic, Conan the Barbarian: horned helmet and necklace of three large discs and all); and the de Camp and Carter stories "The City of Skulls" and "The Ivory Goddess," the latter of which is a sequel to the REH story "Jewels of Gwahlur," recently adapted by P. Craig Russell for Dark Horse Comics.

The best Conan story here is the four-part adaptation of Conan the Liberator, which is a tale of Conan's late-middle, or early-late, career (and also features the sequence with the pint-sized satyrs, which another reviewer objected to here; they weren't too onerous to me, but to each his own); he's almost as wise and educated as he'll get as ruler of Aquilonia (as in the stories published in Marvel's double-sized King Conan title, later slimmed down and retitled Conan the King); and there's a poignant moment at the story's conclusion where Conan forgoes his usual round of carousing and wenching after a hard-fought victory to knuckle down to the more unglamorous (though more necessary) aspects of kingship, such as going over Aquilonia's accounts. The two Andrew J. Offutt novels book-end each other (they constitute the first and third books, respectively, of a trilogy; the second book is Conan the Mercenary, published in 1980); I'd have to give the nod to the three-part adaptation of Conan and the Sorcerer as being the better of the two stories here. Both the adaptations of Offutt's books benefit from pairing Conan against a strong female foil, a thief from the city-state of Zamboula named Isparana, who is about a decade older than Conan. Of the two short stories adapted here, "The Ivory Goddess" is slightly better than "The City of Skulls."

It's interesting to contrast Conan's characterization between the Conan the Liberator and the Offutt arcs; while Marvel's Conan was never shown as physically inept, undeveloped, or unskilled (although he does sneer at archery as a young man in his late teens in Offutt's take on him; this was a skill he would eventually pick up when he was serving in King Yildiz of Turan's army), he certainly wasn't always clever, or even particularly observant of anything that wasn't immediately connected with food, booze, fighting, loot, or, uh, "gettin' friendly;" in a fair bit of the stories in the early issues of Marvel's color Conan the Barbarian comic, Conan comes off as something of a himbo. He's far more superstitious in the Offutt arcs than he is in the Liberator arc, but he's also showing the beginnings of the wiliness and mental quickness that would eventually take him even farther than his preternatural physical strengths and skills would. That's why it's so interesting to read Thomas' take on him: he's one of the few characters Marvel had in the 1970s and early 1980s that actually had a believable mental development. (Shang-Chi, "The Master of Kung Fu," was arguably another exception, but Marvel's since dumbed him down and thrown him back into tackling various secret societies, and the occasional supervillain.)

The art here is never less than serviceable; John Buscema is the Conan artist par excellence (and, indeed, Buscema preferred drawing fantasy stories to superhero stories, although he excelled at both), and it's telling that his touches of "good girl" art (one of the pleasures for an adolescent boy to be found in the pages of The Savage Sword of Conan was the amount of line illustrations of beautiful women in various states of undress; bare breasts and bare bottoms were not uncommon sights in later issues of Savage Sword, possibly due to Marvel's attempt to compete with Warren's Vampirella b&w magazines) here exceed those of Mike Vosburg, a noted modern exponent of the genre, who illustrated, along with inker Alfredo Alcala, "The City of Skulls."

This collection also contains a short (12 pages) fix-up story called "Mirror of the Manticore," plotted by REH expert Fred Blosser and written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Kerry Gammill, featuring the villain Olgerd Vladislav, last seen in the REH story "A Witch Shall Be Born" (adapted in TSSoC #5, collected in the first volume of Dark Horse's "phone book" reprints of same): it's an attempt to resolve the inconsistencies between Marvel's original story "The Sleeper Beneath the Sands" (which originally appeared in TSSoC #6) and the de Camp and Carter sequel to "Witch," "The Flame Knife," which Marvel did not have the license to adapt at that time. (Marvel's adaptation of "The Flame Knife" appeared in TSSoC #31 & #32, and is reprinted in the third volume of Dark Horse's Savage Sword "phone books".) This story isn't a disgrace, but it's the least of the tales reprinted here. ( )

There's not much more to be said here than in previous reviews. For fans of Conan, fantasy, pulp fiction, and swords and sorcery. This whole series of omnibus reprints is a great value. ( )

This book has very good artwork, and is enjoyable in that respect.
The stories aren't as good as the previous four volumes, but I suspect that is because there
weren't any adaptations of actual Robert E Howard tales. These mostly came from other sources, and I didn't find them as compelling. I'm still puzzled as to who thought putting a satyr in a Conan story was a good idea :) ( )