 Hi everyone. This is Chichu. As always, welcome to my channel. Now what I want to do in this video is show you my savage sort of Conan collection. Just show you the covers. And this isn't, this is actually a collection that found its way to me through a friend that was leaving the country and he couldn't take all his possessions with them. And this was in the early 1990s, mid 1990s, more towards early 1990s. And he knew I collect the comic books. And I loved comic books. So he passed these on to me. And I like to show these books to you because what I'm going to do or show you the covers of them anyway. Because as far as I'm concerned, these books were sort of given to me as safekeeping until the day that he returned, right? So I like to sort of organize them and show you the covers and sort of make a note to myself of which ones I've already read. Because I've read, I've read all of these. At least twice. Some of them three, some of them four times. I've had family members read them. One family member has read them. Once at least, all of them. I've had other family members that have read some of the issues, right? So I've passed this along to some families, family members, and I've read them multiple times. And I'm pretty sure it would be amazing surprise if he actually ends up getting these, if I can track him down and send these to him. Because I know he has a family and I'm pretty sure he would love his kids to read these books as well, right? And while we're taking a look at the covers, what I would also like to do is read you an essay from sort of a graphic novel sort of compilation of Conan the Barbarian comics that Dorcos put out. This is volume one. This one is volume one and this one is volume two. And they sort of put together, this one is, which issues is this? This is the first six issues, I believe. Let me find this out. This is the Volume Clecks issue one through eight of the original Marvel comic book series from 1970 to 1971 as written here, okay? So we're not going to read these ones. Well, actually in the fourth reading set we're going to read the original Conan the Barbarian number one, right? So if you want to have a read through this, the first ever Marvel comics Conan the Barbarian story, check out reading set number four because we will be reading it. But while we're taking a look at the covers for Savage sort of Conan, what I want to do is read the essay that Roy Thomas and he was sort of co-editor at Marvel comics in the late 1960s, I believe, in 1970s and he was instrumental in bringing Conan to comic book format to Marvel comics. And he had a hand to play in many, many, many other things. But I would like to read you this sort of, I don't know if you call this short essay this medium-sized essay by Roy Thomas telling us how Conan or Marvel comics picked up Conan the rights to Conan to produce some comic book format. And I'm not sure if this essay is available online but the title is A $50 Misunderstanding, A Few Personal Notes on Conan the Barbarian by Roy Thomas. So we'll read through this while we're taking a look at the covers and if you like graphic novels and stuff like this these two volumes are really good. I have one other volume as well but I don't have number three and number four. I have number eight. But in the second volume, he's also provided an essay as well and the second volume collects issue nine to, does it say it? It should say it. Maybe it doesn't say it. It was it. This volume collects issue number nine through thirteen and sixteen of the original comic book series, okay, from 1971 to 1972. And in this essay, he, again it's just in case we can find it online it's worth the read. It says behind the swords Conan the Barbarian number nine to thirteen and sixteen by Roy Thomas, okay. And in this one, he talks about comic book censorship and how they had to sort of maneuver around the comic code to try to tell the stories that they needed to tell and how, you know, the comic code that sort of censored some of the stories to a certain degree or they self censored just to make sure they could pass the comic code, okay. And that's, you know, fairly enlightening reading that and reading how Conan came to comic books. And one note I'll make regarding Conan the Barbarian what these volumes are made from, right, from the comic book series as compared to the magazine format of Savage Sword of Conan. Because Conan the Barbarian was comic book format they had to abide by the comic code, right. So there's certain stories, there's certain things they couldn't say, they couldn't show, they couldn't do in Conan the Barbarian. In Savage Sword of Conan, because this was magazine format they didn't have to abide by the comic code from what I understand anyway and they could get away with a lot more. And they did. So if you're into reading Conan comics Conan the Barbarian is very good, okay. It's the first issues are written by Roy Thomas and most of them anyway, and penciled by Barry Windsor Smith and Barry Windsor Smith is amazing. And he did some of the inking for it as well and some of the inking is also done by John Bushima. And we've already taken a look at some comics from John Bushima in previous readings. And they're amazing. All three of these comic book creators are absolutely amazing. So Conan the Barbarian comic books are very good and we will be reading just a heads up for reading set number three or number four. We will be reading the first issue of Conan the Barbarian that came out in 1970, right, the original comic book series. So we will be reading the first issue shown in this, okay. But while we take a look at the covers of these I just want you to want to read the essay to you guys, okay. Because it was, I found it very intriguing and if you like comic book history you will find it intriguing as well. And what I want to do with these covers actually with Soviet sort of Conan is sort of put these in order as well because if I do end up tracking down my friend I do want to sort of remember which issues these were that I read and at some point I am going to get my hands on the full series of Soviet sort of Conan and start from issue number one and read it all the way through and both, I believe, Soviet sort of Conan it had 200 plus series issue run it was 235 or 25 or something like this and Conan the Barbarian, the comic book series had almost close to 300 issues it was 275 I believe plus some annuals and stuff like this, okay. So they're both well worth the read I haven't read all of them I've read way more Soviet sort of Conan than I have Conan the Barbarian they're both good but I lean towards Soviet sort of Conan, okay. So what we'll do is we won't take a look at the inside pages at some point when I do get my hands this was an amazing art this was fantastic art with the daughter of the captain of the Chinese vessel here there was no Chinese for sure we won't take a look at the inside pages for example this one was written by Roy Thomas layouts by John Bushima finishes by Tony Dizinga co-plotter Dan Thomas and letter Jack Morelli okay and I love the Soviet sort of Conan it's raw, it's brutal it's more mature they show a lot of stuff that you couldn't show in Conan the Barbarian, right. Take a look at this one fantastic issue, fantastic issue who's the artist for this? this one some of the artists for Jackie Chan Chan Earl Chan, something Chan he's an amazing artist for these issues this is again written by Roy Thomas artist Raphael Kenan very reminiscent of Bart Sears type of artwork the covers of these are absolutely amazing the letters page take this up, story Charles Dixon breakdown Gary Kowapsi Ernie Chan, finishes Ernie Chan letter Diane Albers and editor Michael Higgins so let's take a look at the covers of these and what we'll do is we'll read a 50 dollar misunderstanding a few personal notes on Conan the Barbarian by Roy Thomas and I'm going to organize these guys I believe it's in the 70s up to the 200 pluses I believe there are here so I'm going to organize these in 10s and then organize them from ascending order I guess so this is the saddest sort of Conan 127 beautiful artwork beautiful covers a 50 dollar misunderstanding a few personal notes on Conan the Barbarian by Roy Thomas if not for a little matter of 50 bucks and perhaps a certain yellow belly attitude on my part I might well never have written even one issue of Marvel Comics long running Conan the Barbarian let alone more than 200 of them back in the late 1960s a Stan Lee's associate editor and in between scripting mags like The Avengers, The Incredible Hulk, The X-Men, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, et al I had to read a lot of mail that poured into Marvel's Madison Avenue offices not as much as Stan did though our fearless leader considered his bound and duty to read every letter that the secretary marked as of more than passing interest and often he scrolled FYI or some other cryptic note atop a missive and pass it on to me to handle and one thing that both of us noticed as the decades drew to a close was that our rears were urging us to adopt fantasy from the printed media into comics format even though that was hardly something Marvel was noted for they wanted Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan, John Carter, et cetera Doc Savage, J.R. Tokens, Lord of the Rings and Robert E. Howard especially his best known character Conan and we'd listen in fact before the 1970s would end Marvel would produce comics about all of the above except token and we'd try for that one but his publishing company didn't want to know from comic books Stan himself wasn't quite certain what readers meant when they said we should do Conan or some other sword and sorcery character and for a while I had only a foggy notion myself of what sword and sorcery was a couple of years earlier when the first lance paper paperback of Robert E. Howard's work Conan the Adventure had come out I had picked it up as much for his Frank Fersetta cover as anything and I'd expected it to be something along the lines of John Carter of Mars it only took reading the first few pages of the story people of the black circle therein to know I had been misled by the word Atlantis on the back cover and I put the paperback on a shelf for two or three years sometime later I happened to read Lynn Carter's paperback Thongore and The City of Magicians another book with a Frank Fersetta cover and with a hero who combined overtones of both John Carter and as I sensed even at the time Conan the Sumerian derivative the book may have been but I liked it then one day Stan and I were kicking around all these requests for a Marvel sword and sorcery comic and he made a suggestion which changed the course of my creative life he asked me to write a memo to publish Martin Goodman to publisher Martin Goodman to try to convince him that we should license the rights to adopt some sword and sorcery hero as a comic book character nobody in particular definitely not Conan just a sword and sorcery hero I wrote a three page memo which I wished I'd saved because it evidently made quite an impression on Goodman who mentioned to me on several later occasions when we met which wasn't often addressed in the memo that sword and sorcery while generally set in the fictitious ancient world features several elements that made it ideal for conventions conversion into comics namely there was a brawing hero there were beautiful women and there were heinous villains and even more particularly hideous and powerful monsters Goodman bought my reasoning and I was authorized to offer up to $150 per issue a larger sum than than it is now but still no pricely ransom for the rights to some character of our choosing why we didn't just make up a sword and sorcery hero of our own I'm not sure to this day that would have been more in character for Marvel but we didn't and I think the work that worked out for the best for both Marvel and Conan except that the hero I went after initially was Lynn Carter's Thongor of Lemuria it's not that Conan didn't cross my mind of course in addition to all those letters from readers which surely mention Conan far more often than Thongor I spent a lot of time with artist Gil Kane who had been a Robert E. Howard devotee since at least the 1950s when Gonon Press had begun reprinting his Conan stories and Gil was Robert E. Howard enthusiast in fact Gil owned a complete set of those volumes which I later bought from him and still own but Stan and I had figured that Conan who after all was in a number of popular paperbacks by now would undoubtedly be out of our league financially maybe Lynn whose name I knew from science fiction fanzines in the early 1960s would be more amendable so I made an offer to his agent Lynn himself liked comics and the idea of Thongor being a Marvel hero but his agent dragged his feet probably hoping with up the ante but we couldn't when Martin Goodman said $150 he meant $150 not $151 besides I seem to recall that Stan liked the name Thongor better than Conan or Cole anyway it sounded more like a comic book hero from time to time over a couple of months Stan would ask how things were coming and I had to report a lack of progress and then one night I passed a copy of the latest Conan paperback Conan of Samaria I glanced at Lynn El Sprague the camp's introduction therein and saw the name and even a dress of the literary agent for Robert E. Howard States one Glenn Lord on a whim I sent Glenn a letter that was too complicated at Marvel to get reimbursed for foam calls back then offering him the grand decline sum of $200 per issue for the rights for Marvel to publish a Conan comic book I explained politely that I had no real leeway for negotiations but that such a comic might give the hero a whole new audience and thus be worthwhile for the state amazingly Glenn concurred and we were in business that's when it sank in what I had done I had up Marvel's Martin Goodman's offer by a full third from $150 to $200 in issue because of my embarrassment at the former but what was I going to do if Goodman refused to go along with the increase up to this time I hadn't been at all certain I would be the writer of the Conan comic I might have given it say to young Gary Conway who had already sold the science fiction novel or two or to someone else to write but now I realize that I had better write at least the first issue or so myself so that if Goodman suddenly noticed the difference and wanted his extra $50 back I could take that sum off my writing fee of course at that time I was only getting something like maybe $15 a page so I would have been writing several pages for free but that was better than pounding the pavement looking for a job I figured I'd write an issue or two then give it to another writer and go back to concentrating on my beloved superheroes thus did I back unwittingly into becoming the scripture of more than 200 issues of Conan the Barbarian savage sort of Conan and even King Conan comics comic books and graphic novels two years of Conan newsprint a couple of dramatic style record albums several TV cartoons as well as being in the early 1980s a paid consultant on the movie Conan the Barbarian and co-writer of the first five drafts of its sequel Conan the Destroyer from the comics title I suggested Conan the Barbarian a phrase never precisely used word for word in any of the two doesn't published Robert E. Howard Tales because that had been the title of one of the Gnome heart covers not been used as the name of one of the newer paper packs which readers were far more familiar Stan and I never had a moment's doubt as to who should be the new Max artist it would be John Bushima with whom I had previously worked on Submariner and the Avengers John was unfamiliar with Conan but by then I made it my business to read all of Howard's paper bags and I loaned several to John he was ecstatic this not superheroes was the kind of stuff he wanted to do when do we start we didn't as it turned out oh I wrote a synopsis for a story to introduce young Conan to the readers and sent it to John but just as he was about to begin drawing it Howard came down from publisher Goodman put a cheaper artist on Conan for some reason Martin Goodman hadn't blanched or handed me my head on a platter when the short form contracts were written up requiring a payment of $200 per issue rather than the $150 he had authorized but now uncertain how big a seller Conan the barbarian would be in the 1970s he wanted to hedge his bets by counting the license counting the license fee as part of what Marvel paid for the artwork that meant that John Bushima was out because naturally he rated the company's highest page rate that would send us over budget Gil Kane who had at least a similar rate was also disqualified Stan suggested a couple of lesser artists then working for Marvel didn't think they'd bring the kind of individualistic style I felt Conan needed so I suggested young Barry Smith then residing in his native England Barry had done a bit of work on X-Men, Daredevil mystery stories, even Avengers mostly scripted by me while he had been working in the States some months earlier without benefit of green card without benefit of green card until the INS had caught up with him and given him 24 hours to get out of Dodge in fact Barry and I had done one story starring a Conan prototype we called Star the Slayer in one of Marvel's mystery titles and it didn't it hadn't gone badly so Bushima was out Smith was in and the rest as they say is pseudo-history it took us an issue or two to get our bearings as I think even a cursory glance through this volume will show I was still feeling my way with the writing and went at a few lines in Conan number one at least and I'm not sure that if I had it to do over again I would have asked for quite so graphic scene of man in space as I had Barry draw in order to establish that this was happening in a far distant past as for Barry he seemed to have literally frozen up not drawing either hero or story as well as Stan and I both knew he was capable of doing at one point he drew Conan planting a haymaker punch a king demon that became one of several panels that as the facto editor I had him cut out and replaced with new art I think it was Stan who decided his splash page should be replaced with symbolic drawing as well Dan Atkins professional inking helped a bit on the interiors as did John Purthen's publishing of the cover and yet everything was poised to come together I think for both Barry and me with number two I found a concept about white man apes in the frozen north in Robert E. Howard's pseudo historic essay The Hyborian Age and wrote a plot utilizing it Barry drew the story more as if it were slated to appear in an Edgar Rice Burroughs comic than one featuring the creation of Howard but there was no time to have him redraw it and anyway it looked pretty good far better than number one with John Bushima's younger brother Sal inking him we could afford we charged ahead the story one of only two with a 1970 cover date was quickly nominated for a Shazam award by the professional own professionals on Academy of comic book arts for issue number three I made up a tale which used Robert E. Howard name from a poem Zucala for wizard villain it was a fair to middling story he drew it well even if tigers weren't his strong point and though Zucala wound up looking a bit like a refugee from Steve Ditko's Doctor Strange I did have Barry redraw something near the end of the story he had a wing flying demon suddenly become tired at least that was the explanation he gave me and fell to his death when pushed out of tower window possible perhaps but not satisfying also we decided that Zucala's changeling daughter shouldn't die at the end as it turns out turned out though Zucala's daughter became Conan number five not number three stay tuned for number four I decided to do something different from the beginning I had wanted to adopt Robert E. Howard stories as well as make up my own but our contract with Robert E. Howard the state gave us rights only to use Conan not any particular stories now I got permission from Glen Lord in a letter to adopt the story in which the Cimmerian is chronologically youngest tower of the elephant which had quickly become my favorite Conan tale of all as an issue of Conan either Marvel or I I suspected Marvel paid a little extra for the right to adopt the story but at that this point I've totally forgotten how I swung that or how much it cost working with Howard's actual prose not just my couple of pages of accompanying notes apparently turned Barry on and he did a wonderful job on the time Barry drew tower of the elephant there was no looking back for either of us I was also aware that Howard had written other fine quasi historical stories many of which could easily be adopted into Conan tales in fact writer the sprung the camp had already done precisely that with several Robert E. Howard stories in one of GNOME hard covers and was doing more of the same in the paperbacks I thought the camp had a good idea there so I suggested to Glenn that I be allowed to do the same in the comics and he agreed again with the pittance of filthy liqueur changing hands the story I adopted first was one called The Great God Passes Sedanation Ireland and the combination of Howard's prose and the setting must have inspired Barry because there is some beautiful lyrical work in what became our Twilight of the Grim Great God at this point I realized it worked better for a chronological point of view to make Grim Great God number 3 then to utilize the tower of the elephant and to save Kula's daughter for number 5 so that's what I did and the publishing order of Conan number 3 and number 5 was thus reversed and it shows with the latter being a bit cruder than number 3 and number 4 more in line with what Barry drew in number 2 by about this time sales figures of Conan the Barbarian number 1 began to trickle in and it appeared we had a hit on our hands sales were very good albeit on a smallish print run in my own small way I became as inspired as Barry and wrote an original synopsis for number 6 Devil Wings of Shadizar I was pleased when months later both in both it and number 4 became two of the 5 stories nominated by ACBA as the best comic book stories of 1971 I was even prouder when I overheard two of my fellow co-writers talking about the story being good and being an adaptation of one of Howard's stories since every word in it is mine except for a couple suggested by Barry nobody seemed to notice that Maldese Falcon pun I slipped into the story though issue number 7 was based on a Howard Conan story The God in the Bowel but that was a slight little tale and Barry and I needed to grow it this we did one night while I was visiting London for the first time in the lobby of the hotel where my wife and I were staying Barry and I worked out scene after scene but Barry getting so carried away with fake sort thrust that a few people were looking a scans at us we changed one male villain into a female because the original story had no women characters expanded the fight scene and a few more things and we produced another of my favorite issues meanwhile though things were not going as well for Conan as first sales reports should indicate it it would take months to learn this around the time we were up to number 12 number 13 or so but each issue of the comic from number 1 to 7 decreased in sales from the one before it as I should have known he would Stan saved us Stan cheerfully admitted that sword and sorcery wasn't his thing but he was content that it had become mine now that I'd read the whole Conan canon and decided I wasn't going to relinquish the scripting reigns to anyone but would continue to write the comic myself he didn't read the stories but concerned himself mostly with the covers which were the selling point of each issue and he saw one thing he didn't feel good about too many animals he told me one day around the time of number 7 we'd had winged demons on the cover of issue number 1 that done well and man apes on number 2 and a giant god on number 3 but after that Barry and I had got very animal oriented for 4 issues in a row number 4 showed Conan facing the giant spider from the story number 5 depicted the woman changing into a leaping tigress on number 6 he was fighting a gigantic flying bat and now on number 7 he was battling a huge serpent albeit one with a human snake-haired head Stan wanted Conan's foes especially on the cover to be more humanoid well that might have happened anyway because for number 8 I had adopted a leftover Robert E. Howard Conan synopsis into an issue which featured towering undead warriors guarding a treasure still there's also beastly guardian of that ruined city which Barry had drawn exquisitely as the world's biggest gala monster and we might have we might have been tempted to depict it on the cover instead in keeping with Stan's edict I had Barry draw Conan confronting the tall skeleton skeletons in armor that he had drawn on the inside that made Stan happy and when the sale figures for number 8 came in many moons later and showed that after 7 issue decline that one was the first one to go up in sales from the preceding month I was ecstatic as a matter of fact it was the cover and sales of issue number 8 and then number 9 which brought Conan the barbarian back from the brink of extinction after it was actually cancelled for one day but that's another story behind the swords a personal pram relation through marvel's Conan the Barbarian number 9 to number 13 and number 16 by Roy Thomas by the time Conan the Barbarian had reached the issues contained in this dark horse volume I was reasonably happy with the mix that was shaping up a combination of three types of tales the occasional one based on an actual Robert E. Howard Conan saga where it fit in chronologically original stories and adaptations of non-Conan effort by Robert E. Howard into Conan comic adventures along the lines of L Sprague the Camp's prose efforts of the same type as laid out by the camp in his biographical sketches of Conan there seemed to be a stretch of months, perhaps years between the god in the bowl god in the bow expanding to the lurker within in Conan number 7 and Rose in the house which I had tentatively slated for number 12 where thereabouts so I had some time to fill creatively I hope the camps paragraph concerning Conan's life at about this time printed in 1967 Lancer paperback volume titled simply Conan as a lead-in to Rogues served as my temporal template some time somewhat disillusioned about the possibility of avoiding supernatural obstacles in the orderly pursuit of his calling i.e. thievery and having made in the media much too hot to hold him Conan drifts south again into Corinthia where in one of the small city states making up that country country he continues to occupy himself when the unlawful appropriation of private property he is about 19 at this time harder and more experience if not more given to unprofitable caution than when he first appeared in the southern kingdoms if Conan had a real life traveler of course we might assume he simply had an uneventful journey between media and Corinthia but with an issue with an issue or three to fill I had to come up with adventures that could occur on the road of kings thus since Robert E. Howard's Corinthia was a far less centrally organized kingdom than the pseudo-germanic media I looked for exploits that didn't involve a city as rogues would have an unburdened urban setting by this time thanks to Robert E. Howard's literary agent Glenn Lord I had read nearly all of Robert all of Howard's writings that had appeared in print by that time and I recalled the story the Garden of Fear originally published in a magazine called Marvel Tales from July to August 1934 this Marvel Tales had no connection with the pulp magazine put out by Martin Goodman future publisher of timely Marvel comics in Garden a crippled modern day man named James Allison mentally relives his pre-Ice Age life as Han Wolf a barbarian of the nomadic Aries people after killing a rival who traveled to abduct his beloved Gondron he flees with her to a valley where they stumble upon a friendly hill tribe held in a thrall by an ebb and skinned wing tyrant Han Wolf a hero cut from much of the same cloth as Conan rescues Gondron by stampeding a herd of mammoths through the carnivorous carnivorous flowers that surround the wing man's tower I had buried dropped James Allison racial memory bit and since Conan was already traveling the seat full Jenna after number 8 we could lose the battle with the rival the mountain tribe and the winged man were enough to sustain a 19 page story I like to think Barry and I added a few nice touches in our adaptation of gardens into Conan tale I worked out just enough of the tribes language that I knew exactly what each tribesman is saying in the early pages of the story but crumb could strike me, but crumb could strike me dead before I could tell you today the meaning of nada trodan on the splash I believe it was Barry's idea to have Conan walk amongst the mammoths and establish an almost symbiotic relationship with them I doubted Robert E. Howard's plan would have done such a thing but I wasn't 100% sure you wouldn't so I went along with Barry's instincts Barry may well have suggested that the 8th story page be wordless and I loved the third panel on that page where Barry showed the influence of refracted light on Conan above and below the surface of the water something quite common in comics in the 1970s in one area though Barry and I definitely conspired against the comic code on the 11th page panel 3 to 5 depicted on Conan's eye view of the flowering plants around the tower into which the wingman had just tossed one of the tribesmen the barbarian sees something startling enough to make him drop his knife but from the art of captions there's no way to tell precisely what when we had the colorist Mary Severin evolve the flowers' hues hues over the three panels from pink, tinting white to solid pink to bright red the clear idea at least when the reader saw the panel in color was that the carnivorous plants had imbibed the hillman's blood the earlier reader for the code however had seen nothing but an innocuous black and white tree of panels and thus could not demand us as he, she might well have done otherwise that the sequence was too horrific and had to be changed. I have no recollection that anyone at the code noticed the way we had outflanked them when the book was published maybe nobody at the code really read comics except in the original art page I'm glad because editor Stanley would probably have skinberry and me alive for flaunting the code that way he knew that if the people of the code got angry about one thing they could find a million ways to get revenge on future stories we recall that several readers were also surprised and impressed when panel four of the second from last page of the story was left silent with no caption or word balloon as Conan and the wingman hurled through the smash shards when the top of the tower collapsed beneath them nowadays of course is hard to figure out what all the fuss was about but in the context of Marvel's Marvel comics in 1971 that panel stood out Conan the barbarian number 10 by sheer coincidence came at a time when publisher Martin Goodman had up the interior pages of all this comics from 32 pages to 48 pages for 25 cent cover price which meant filling about 34 of those pages with new material since Marvel didn't have access to a lot of truly old material to reprint so the lead story became 23 pages long instead of 19 of course back in the mid 1950s all time the comics had contained 24 pages of art in the story for one thin dime we might have used issue number 11 to adopt the Conan story rose in the house except for one little detail in the first long paragraph of that story Robert E. Howard spins a colorful if not telescope telescope flashback relating how Conan found himself in the jail cell at the start of the tale there was enough meat in that paragraph to serve at the spring board for an entire issue so Barry and I set about to expand it the prose flashback tells of Conan as revenging himself upon a disreputable priest of the god of Anu because the latter calls the thief friend of his, the gunderman referring to a region of civilized a colony to be hanged by the neck until dead Conan takes his revenge cutting off the priest's head interestingly in the one page Robert E. Howard in his offices we used as the basis of issue number 8 the barbarians part foe part companion had been a gunderman and it is tempting to suspect that Howard meant them to be the same man beware the wrath of Anu had its moments including some that gave us a bit of trouble with the comic code for one thing hanging was a rare event in comic book in comic books in those days less than 2 decades after so called crime comics had caused such a stir when Barry showed hanging in a 5 panel sequence albeit only the lower part of the gunderman's body as it went from struggling life to lifelessness I was afraid the code would make us redraw the entire sequence in an issue that was running a bit late because it's story was several pages long in the previous but the code didn't object bless them and I loved the way Barry solved the matter of Conan's beheading the evil priest since decapitation was a probable no-no in those dear departed days the priest was a shall we say ample man who clearly loved his anti-fatty foods so when on the second from last page Conan walks behind from the upturned head of the priest he's killed and there's no heavy gutted middle looming up to block our view that was Barry's subtle way of indicating it's because the head wasn't connected to its body but was lying some distant away from it of course we could've denied any such attempt to sneak anything by the code but they didn't seem to notice so what did they notice which we had to alter before they would give the issue their seal of approval well Conan kills the admittedly dishonest and very evil priest in the story and he isn't punished therein for his deed contrary to comic code as written in the 1950s in vain I did argue with code head Len Darwin an attorney who I liked on a personal level that Conan would get his computants in the next issue which would start with him in prison cell Len insisted I rewrite the captions in the story's final panel Conan stands over his Gunderman friend's grave I did so toss him in a vague and convoluted phrase about how no dungeon which looms in Conan's unglimpse future can ever reave his barbarian's heart like the death of a friend betrayed that modified Len and the issue was stamped approved fit for consumption by the youth of America Conan number 12 was another double-sized issue and Barry and I decided to bite the bullet and try to tell the entire story of Robert E. Howard's rogues in the house in the 34 pages we had rather than split it between two issues and fill in the latter half of the magazine with reprints or non-Conan material as I done in issue number 11 once again things just seemed to fall into place at the end of issue number 8 it had seen right that to have Conan flee the law with the faithless blonde Jenna she had she who had stolen his gold in Shandazar the wicket back in issue number 6 Jenna in name I never recall seeing before 1970 though I've seen it often since had been a handy substitute for Han Wolf's Gondron in number 9 and in number 10 she had fit right into events told in Robert E. Howard's introductory paragraph we used as a starting point for that issue Conan is in a cell at the beginning of rogue because he's been betrayed to the authorities by a faithless woman Jenna hadn't existed in Robert E. Howard so Barry and I had been forced to invent her Robert E. Howard's pose doesn't especially say Conan is in bed with the faithless harlot when he's captured that seemed a logical way to go once again Barry chose to push the boundaries a bit showing Jenna clearly nude in bed seen from the back and down slightly below her waist a pretty racy shot for 1971 trust me on this even here though Barry had an extra touch flies buzzing around for no greater purpose add atmosphere to the seamy Corinthian hotel room in the area of the city called the maze as opposed to the mall a nice punt on mall in tower of the elephant it was a real pleasure working with Emma at this time after that he and I followed the events of rogue closely for most of the story Robert E. Howard never says precisely when you see them it takes place it's only the camp who made it Corinthia but that didn't matter again on page 11 when Conan stabs Jenna's boyfriend co-conspirator Barry indicated that Conan's dagger thrust had gone through his torso in a way that didn't show any blood and the code let us get away with it while they they could be unpredictable I honestly believe Len and his readers saw that Conan was a cut above most comics that crossed their desks and they gave us a bit of leeway when they could but maybe that's just my imagination at any rate Barry's sequence of five panels at the bottom page 11 I think is quite masterful two long shots depicting the same view of the stairs with sequential action and then a tree of panels shot from the top of the stairs and Conan's glowing face moves closer closer the scene in which Conan tosses his betraying wench into a cesspool with some similar muck is one of the most famous in Robert E. Howard Conan and I think we did it proud the only real change we made in the story was the substitution of a black leopard for a second gang of thieves that coincidentally happened to be raiding Nabon Nides mansion at the same time the Samaritan was since they served little purpose except to get killed by the humanoid gorilla Thak we dispensed with them and got a nice leopard fight out of it Barry left the snarls etc to me and I had fun playing with them the inspiration for the scene I suppose especially Thak holding up the dead lepers limp dead lepers limp paw to make sure is really dead is the fight with the T-Rex in King Kong right after this Ben decided to end his experiment with 48 page comics and reverted to 32 pages now for 20 cents which perhaps is just as well for producing 34 page 34 page had left Barry and me behind the 8 ball on schedule I could make up as the writer but the only thing that saved us art wise was the fact that we just happened to have an original page story, Conan's story laying around in basically finished form the dwellers in the dark had been penciled and inked by Barry and sent in from London fully finished after a transatlantic phone conversation conference where I wrote dialogue and captions and had them post pasted on the story contained a bit of nudity which we had to redo after past the code the original version of the story would later be printed in a black and white comic but otherwise it was no problem the octopoid monster we came up with wasn't the strongest image we ever had in the book so I added a couple of captions that indicated it had once been human that seemed to give it much more of an impact a few readers took us to task because if Conan doesn't exactly kill a woman in the story contrary to his own code but fortunately not the comics code he allowed the octopoid to kill her and these readers may well have been right I was ambivalent about it myself at the time but it was a nice little story for Conan the barbarian number 12 meanwhile for number 13 I had a vague notion for a tale I wanted to do but decided to bring someone else into the Conan equation author John jakes prior to becoming a best-selling historical novelist in the bicentennial years and since had been writing science fiction western and a little bit of everything for prose magazine I liked his Conan hero Brach the barbarian so I invited him to plot a story set in Yazut the city of the spider gods which is mentioning in a Conan adventure John wrote a synopsis of a few double space pages which became the basis of Conan number 13 Web of the spider despite all the success he'd had since I'm proud to say John has never denied comic books in fact he still owns the splash page of the issue which I gave him after Barry and I split up the art of the issues he's a classy guy is John jakes and now fellow transplanted South Carolonian whom I run into occasionally at functions at the University of South Carolina with issue number 14 and 15 Barry and I decided to spread the net of Conan still further but that's a story to be told in the third volume of this presentation as he finished drawing number 15 however Barry decided that doing Conan had simply become too much work for him and he felt it was time to move on however both he and I had the same idea independently to put together one more issue by the two of us together since Marvel's black and white comic Savage Tales number 1 with its lead off story our adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Conan story the Frost Giants daughter had had such spotty distribution we took the 11 page outing added a few splash pages to make it 12 pages the original splash page was a spread so had to appear on page 2 to 3 in Conan number 16 and were home free when Howard had first written the story in the early 1930s it had been rejected by the editor of the Pult magazine Weird Tales and hadn't been published in its Conan form until the 1960s it was a minor but beautiful tale which probably with a few word changes Robert E. Howard should have been set around the time of the events of Conan the Barbarian number 1 not later our main problem was that there had been a bit of tasteful nudity in the story as drawn by Barry for the non-code Savage Tales that was easily handled and at least the original uncensored version was still kicking around out there in black in back issues we also had to soften the prose in a balloon or two since it's clear that what Conan intends to do to the taunting atali if and when he overtakes her would be called rape by any clear minded judge we paired Frost Giant's daughter with a backup story The Sword and the Sorcerers starring a hero called Barry which Barry and I had done pre-Conan for one of Marvel's quasi horror titles and we had a nice little package all of Barry's sword and sorcery work for Marvel to date was now in view albeit in slightly censored form in some cases in first 16 issues of Conan the Barbarian and Barry was gone for two whole issues Roy Thomas has been a writer and often editor in the comic book field since 1965 mostly for Marvel and DC in a 1999 comic buyer's guide poll comics, fans and professionals voted him the fifth favorite comic book writer of the century and the fourth favorite editor he considers Conan among his favorite projects in his long career he currently writes an occasional comic and its alter ego a monthly magazine of comics history since 1991 he has lived in a sizable spread in rural South Carolina with his wife Dan and a zoo consisting of toucans, hornbills chilcholas chilcholas, dogs donkeys, pigs Scottish Highland cattle guinea pigs, ducks and capybaras none of which have ever appeared in the comic book cover