Savage Sword Of Conan Volume 5 [Paperback]

The final chapter to "Conan the Liberator" is just riveting. As a kid a had a couple issues of the mag and am waiting to see those stories I read and reread when younger. Black and white is a great medium when in the right hands as the entire series of Savage Sword proves.

For more than two decades, Conan the Barbarian hacked and slashed his way through his pre-ancient world with a dim notion of becoming king somewhere. Finally, well into his 40s, it all came true in the pages of Marvel's "Savage Sword Of Conan" magazine comic. By then, though, the comic itself was becoming a pale shadow of its own majesty.

The bulk of "Savage Sword Of Conan, Vol. 5," consisting of Marvel magazine issues that ran from February 1980 to January 1981, adapt L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's novel "Conan the Liberator," where Conan fights for his royal destiny by taking on the tyrannical king of Aquilonia; and two Andrew J. Offutt novels which center around a stolen object called the Sword of Skelos Conan must retrieve for a wizard who has taken his soul. Together, they account for more than 450 of the book's 540 pages, as close to epic-scale Conan stories as you find in comic form.

If you like your Conan served up with generous heaps of battle and naked women, Vol. 5 may please you more than it did me, but the absence of coherent storycraft even with Marvel's legendary writer Roy Thomas at the controls becomes jarring. Four-parter "Conan The Liberator" starts off in good form as Conan leads a campaign of rebels just outside Aquilonia, but gets lost in a odd venture to Middle Earth-style fantasy. Conan and his rebel army align themselves with demi-human forest-dwelling "satyrs." The reason why Robert E. Howard made Conan's world a more or less natural one seems lost here. The story eventually recovers enough to deliver a satisfying conclusion, but it's a warning of what will follow.

Making things more problematic are the constant shifts in art. Alternating styles clash with each other from story installment to installment. John Buscema is penciling, but like fellow Conan vet Thomas he seems on a slow fade here, lines blurry and perspectives flat, while an ever-shifting number of collaborators register quite different takes on Conan and company.

In the Sword of Skelos storyline, for example, Conan's rival for the trophy, the "bewitching Zamboulan thief-woman Isparana," goes from a strikingly exotic and individualized figure with high forehead, cat eyes, and deceptively girlish curls in the hands of one inker (Rudy D. Nebres, whose art is very unusual and also the best of the book) to a cookie-cutter hottie when the Skelos story is picked up by other Buscema collaborators.

Sword of Skelos has other issues. It boils down to a succession of meetings between Conan and various characters who either start out his enemy and wind up his friend or vice versa. People flip on a dime. The Sword of Skelos' point in the story is never explained, nor is Conan's consuming desire for finding the object once he regains his soul, a matter not covered in this comic adaptation as it was to form the story of a middle book in the trilogy that Offutt had not yet written. "You hop from thing to thing, like a toad!" Conan remarks, talking to a vengeance-crazed sand lich but offering a capsule review of the problem behind everything here.

What you get beyond the Offutt and de Camp/Carter adaptations are scraps off the table of classic Robert E. Howard Conan stories. One is just a linking piece where Conan isn't featured; a minor villain from Howard's "A Witch Shall Be Born" shows up instead. Another is a sequel story to Howard's "Jewels Of Gwahlur," with Conan and the writers just reusing the same idea. Finally, there's a strange retelling of a story first used in an issue of the Conan The Barbarian color comic years before where Conan and his comrade Juma were captured and enslaved while guarding a Turanian princess; here the villain changes from a cruel wizard to a lusty king, but the story has the same basic outcome, making it a rewrite. Thomas was about to leave "Savage Sword" for a while and seems to be marking time with these low-octane offerings.

The best way of dealing with these stories is to forget Robert E. Howard and even the Marvel Conan of earlier form, and treat them like alternate-universe Conan, a more brainless version geared toward instant gratification. You get through the pages quickly enough, but they leave a kind of hollow feeling.

A roaringly good Adventure story(s). Black and white is no problem with me. Art work excellent. A big book, lots of reading adventure. Some semi-nudity might bother some people; otherwise Highly Recommended.

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