Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 2!

"Conan the Barbarian" (the phrase is synonymous with the character, and yet, in classic "Elementary, my dear Watson," or "Beam me up, Scotty" style, it was never actually used in the original material) became a modest, surprise hit for Marvel Comics shortly after its debut. Fans responded not only to the whole sword-and-sorcery sub-genre but to Roy Thomas' specific vision of the Hyborian Age created by Robert E. Howard for the pulp market decades before. The four-color comic sold well enough, in fact, to sustain a spin-off: "Savage Tales of Conan" was another great Thomas idea, a larger-format black-and-white magazine designed to showcase longer and more visually opulent stories than the regular comic book would usually do. And both "Conan" and "Savage Tales" drew sustained life from the pencilling talents of the same man: Marvel Comics' heavyweight fan favorite, John Buscema.

Buscema was already a legend when he came to the "Conan" titles, but they gave him a range usually unavailable in super-hero comics. In the pre-historic world Thomas was fleshing out from Howard's writings, Buscema was free to let his considerable imagination soar, without needing to conform to the super-strength and eye-beams norms of titles like "The Fantastic Four" or "The Avengers." He was far less meticulous than his predecessor Barry Smith had been, but he also never ran the risk of stylized, static lapses into which Smith's art could sometimes fall. At the height of his powers, Buscema could scarcely draw a cup sitting on a table without viewers worrying it would spill on them - his panels virtually vibrated with movement.

The result was the visual conception of an entire world - and of a character. Gone was the epicene rock star of Smith's run on the title. In his place stood a far more solid adult man, broad in the chest, wide in the waist, less the lithe superhero, more the thickset tavern-brawler. This Conan might still at certain angles have looked young, but he was unquestionably seasoned - he sported a shaggy Prince Valiant haircut, a fur loin-cloth, wide lips, and a broad, oft-smashed nose. He was a stoic, no-nonsense man of violence, and the visuals Buscema came up with issue after issue helped Thomas to refine his idea of the character to an immediate perfection seldom achieved by other writers with other characters (instinct and luck play a certain part too, and timing - think of Claremont and Byrne's Wolverine, or Miller's Daredevil). To most of us reading these issues eagerly every month, this was Conan.

The world Thomas and Buscema helped to create (the working partnership between these two was an amazing fluke on its own - both imperious control-freaks who fundamentally disliked collaboration, and yet here they were working in what seemed to be perfect tandem) was an enormous elaboration on the one Smith had begun to sketch. Monsters roamed everywhere - Buscema's talent for drawing most animals stood him in good stead as Thomas' scripts called for a veritable Noah's Ark of gigantic bears, moths, rats, lions, eels, squids, lions ... as well as the perennially-popular dinosaurs. Conan fights sabre-toothed tigers, pterodactyls, slugs the size of rhinos, and even, in a breathlessly-paced sequence, a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And through it all, Buscema's Conan is as far away from Smith's virginal quester as possible. This is a man much closer to Howard's original conception (and, with any luck, the version we'll see in only a few days when the new movie adaptation opens in a theater near you): a boisterous creature of huge appetites - some of them frankly sexual. Buscema was able to indulge to the fullest his oft-announced affection for drawing sultry women - including every kind of evil-eyed seductress imaginable (one of them ends up being made of sea weed), a stunningly re-imagined Red Sonja (Buscema replaced the jerkin-and-skirt Windsor had given the character with ... nothing much at all), and, in a long and satisfying story-arc, the corsair-queen Belit, whose death and brief resurrection marked the 100th issue of "Conan the Barbarian."

The run was immensely successful, and it defined the character for an entire generation. Even when the vogue of sword-and-sorcery started dying out, those Marvel issues kept coming: "Conan the Barbarian," "Savage Sword of Conan," "King Conan," and countless stand-alone specials and spin-offs (Thomas and Buscema spent less than a year on an adaptation of one of Howard's other great creations, King Kull, for instance, and it was a joyous event for fans of the character). Conan was drawn in this same period by other great pencillers - Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, Gene Colan, and many others tried their hands at the Cimmerian - but he belonged to Buscema, and of course to Thomas. When their time with the character finally petered to an end, it seemed almost like a Hyborian funeral was in order. Those of us who'd loved the era thought: there might be crappy knock-offs in the future (done more to keep the copyright alive than out of love or craftsmanship), but this kind of genius won't come again.

We were wrong, of course. But we had to wait a while.

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 1!

Our Cimmerian 'Stravaganza of 2011 kicks into high-gear this week in anticipation of the new Lionsgate spectacular premiering on the 19th and starring Iowa's own Jason Momoa in the role that made a certain once and future California governor a star. And the most natural place in the world for our ongoing 'stravaganza to, um, go next is the medium where the character, the world, the very concept of Conan the Barbarian flourished - comic books.

And when we enter that medium, one thing becomes glaringly obvious: with all due respect to creator originality and meaning no disrespect to Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian as he exists in the popular consciousness has a fully equal co-creator, and that co-creator's name is Roy Thomas.

Thomas will be familiar to the more nerdy among you (and to those of you who dote on my frequent comics-postings here at Stevereads)(i.e. the most nerdy among you). He was the organizational and conceptual workaday genius who pretty much inherited the mantle of Marvel Comics from Stan Lee when the company was bought and Lee was promoted to Publisher. Thomas took all the bursting creativity of Lee and his artistic collaborators, added a much more intuitive and comprehensive grasp of inter-title continuity, and almost single-handledly created the next great age of Marvel titles. And in 1970, he managed to convince Glenn Lord, the literary manager of Howard's estate, to allow Marvel to put out a comic titled "Conan the Barbarian."

Despite a significant amount of reader demand, publishing a sword-and-sorcery literary adaptation in 1970 was a bit of a risk for a mainstream company like Marvel, so Thomas originally had a tight budget - too tight, in fact, to allow him to have the company's first choice of artist, the fan favorite (and correspondingly expensive) John Buscema. And in retrospect, this was a blessing: it forced Thomas to 'settle' for a sexy young Brit named Barry Smith, whose pencilling work (especially when he handled his own inking) was only just starting to show signs of the lavish, unique brilliance it would achieve in part because of the leeway Thomas gave the artist on this book. As Thomas remarked at the time when presented with the choice of artists, if he'd gone with Buscema in those early days, he'd have sold more issues and won fewer awards.

Looking at that initial Smith run on the book, it's utterly amazing how fast he throws off the unconvincingly Kirbyesque style he was using in issue #1. In a remarkably short time, Smith starts to show readers the sinuous, glittering detail for which he would later become famous. Most artists mature more slowly, but even by issue #4, the landmark "Tower of the Elephant," there are clear foreshadowings of Smith's more mature look.



Those earliest issues give us a very young Conan - lithe, boyish (indeed, many of Smith's '70s big-hair panels make the character look like the baddest-ass Bee Gee of them all), savage but inexperienced, and as such they make the perfect companion to this new movie, which features a Conan just at the beginning of his incredible career. He's not yet the preposterous monolith we were given in the last movie adaptation, and let's hope he never becomes it: the real Conan was far more than a simple strong-man - he's much more a lion than a bulldozer.

And magnificently sustaining Smith's evolving visuals was the scripting of Roy Thomas, who took a personal love of the character in Robert E. Howard's stories and re-created that character and his entire world for a much, much broader readership than Howard had ever reached. Long before the original movie and long after, mention of Conan was as likely to conjure the world Thomas created as visions of Austrian weightlifters. That world, like Howard's is full of torch-lit taverns and fantastic creatures who've survived from even earlier eras in Earth's troubled history. And more: it was Thomas who perfected the driving tension in the background of Howard's stories - the tension represented by Conan himself, a mortal man without super-powers who encounters all these fantastic creatures, these stubborn hold-overs from earlier times in which even Conan the Barbarian would not have survived ... encounters them, and defeats them. Not for heroism's sake (Thomas' Conan, like Howard's, is usually indifferent to heroism), but because he insists on dominating his own world. As paradoxical as it may seem, this Conan was both a representative of Everyman and an avatar of the 'modern' world.

For all his genius, Smith was never cut out for regular comic book series work, and everybody knew it (it's precisely this quality in his work that makes his frequent forays into the genre so instantly memorable). Luckily, as "Conan the Barbarian" sales blossomed, Thomas was able to acquire an artist who was not only cut out for regular series work but gloried in it, and that artist would go on to create as definitive a visual of Conan as Thomas had created a mental one. That artist of course is the aforementioned John Buscema, and we'll look at his contribution in our next chapter!

Conan the Derivative!

I've said it before: has any fictional character ever been so poorly served as Conan the Barbarian? His creator, Robert E. Howard, gave him birth in a slapdash way, ping-ponging around a character chronology he kept largely in his head, and then abandoning that chronology when he blew that selfsame head off his body. The first Conan short story was a rewritten version of an earlier tale originally starring another Howard creation, King Kull of Atlantis (the Kull stories are fantastic in their own right, and although they tend to lack the signature vigor of the Conan stories - where Howard's heart very much resided - they do have something Conan never has: a steady, engaging supporting cast), and after Howard's suicide, the character passed from hand to creative hand like a church collection plate.

A thousand times as many people have seen the Conan movies and watched the various Conan cartoons as have ever actually read one of Howard's stories (the forthcoming big-budget Hollywood version will only multiply this), and for decades reading one of Howard's stories wasn't always as easy a thing as it sounds. Throughout the 1970s, a stream of Conan books were published (many of them "co-written" or "finished" by the great journeyman sci-fi writer L. Sprague deCamp, whose novel Lest Darkness Fall is well worth your time to find and read), many of the sporting now-iconic Frank Frazetta covers, and all of them making fine, fun reading - but they hardly represented Howard's character as Howard meant to write him.


That lack was finally supplied in 2003, when Del Rey began publishing its epic, incredible trade paperback editions of the works of Robert E. Howard, including three volumes of the Conan stories (in a wonderful nod to the pulp-fiction origins of the characters, every volume is heavily illustrated) presented in exactly the order Howard first presented them way back in the '30s.

Here you get the glories (slightly hyperventilating glories, but glories all the same) of some of Howard's best work, including such stories as "Rogues in the House," "Black Colossus," and of course "The Tower of the Elephant." Here you get that particular mixture of heady description and wry self-awareness that shines in even Howard's most, um, titillating passages:

Tanada shook back her long black disheveled hair and faced Conan. She was bleeding from a score of scratches on her breasts and thighs, her locks fell in confusion down her back, and she was as naked as the day she was born; but she stared at him without perturbation or uncertainty, and he gave back her stare, frank admiration in his expression of her cool bearing, and the ripeness of her brown limbs.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Conan, a Cimmerian," he answered.

"What are you doing in Shumballa?"

"I came here to seek my fortune. I was formerly a corsair."

These volumes do great work, but they fight an uphill battle against all the popular entertainment conceptions of Conan, most especially the atrocious movies that launched the "acting" career of a future American president. The problem is that Howard originally envisioned the Conan stories as shards of a single mosaic, random glimpses of one man's whole remarkable life - as freebooter, mercenary, corsair, general, husband, father, and king - but movies, cartoons, and comic books have tended to plop their derivative adventures down squarely in Conan's earliest days as the sword-wielding all-purpose barbarian the general public knows (a welcome exception in the comics world, "Conan the King," was short-lived and unenthusiastically received by fandom). The aforementioned Hollywood movie will continue this - the current rumored front-runner for the lead is Alan Richtson, an incredibly nice kid with lots of untapped screen charisma but who'll land the role for one reason: his muscular body (it's a risk I myself would be willing to run for the chance to get Richtson in the part, since he's especially good at the sardonic-humor-in-the-midst-of-action that is the quintessential Conan trait).

And what of books, you ask? What of the innumerable Conan spin-off pastiche novels that have come and gone since Howard blew his brains out? Well, as you can imagine, they've all stuck to the same formula mentioned above: their Conan is uniformly young, often in his early teens, and reading the books, you get the impression this is done in large part so the respective pastiche writers don't have to bog themselves down with mastering the detailed timeline that governs Conan's more adult life (was Belit after Zamora, or before? That kind of thing).


Robert Jordan's Conan novels are every bit as turgid and boring as his "Wheel of Time" books. The seasoned veteran hack Steve Perry became seasoned in large part through writing Conan books, and his are always reliably entertaining, as in a scene from the less-than-stirringly titled Conan the Formidable (guess Conan the Above Average was taken) where our young barbarian faces a group of would-be robbers on the road:

"Ah" [says the leader of the robbers]. Well, that sword you wave about so dangerously might be worth something. We could sell it."

"I am not disposed to give it up."

The man waved the morning star at his band. "There are six of us and but one of you. Give us the sword and whatever valuables you carry and you may leave here unharmed."

"Pardon me for not trusting you, but I think not."

"There are still six of us to your one."

"That can be changed."

But alas, most of these knock-off novels are ruinously dreadful. The ongoing Conan comic book series is a bright light in this regard, always excellent and well worth your time, but a truly great Conan novel has never been written, not even by the creator of the character himself. This is an odd but consistent failing Conan has in common with a surprising number of other characters from the pulp era - there's no one stand-out great novel of Doc Savage either, or the Shadow. Tarzan has both Tarzan of the Apes and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, but all three of Robert E. Howard's great creations, King Kull, Solomon Kane, and Conan, live most fully in the short stories he crafted for them. And until the creative bar is raised - until Conan comes to stand in the reading imagination for more than quaffing ale and beheading people - that's likely to remain the case. Maybe someday a visionary director will come along and make the great, exciting, heartbreaking movie "The Tower of the Elephant" begs to be, and suddenly the character will undergo a renaissance.


But in the meantime, the forthcoming movie has at least one thing going for it: Nicholas Cage won't be playing Conan.

Essential Fantastic Four, volume 6

Our book today is the sixth volume of Marvel Comics’ ongoing reprint series, ‘Essential Fantastic Four #6,’ collecting issues 111 through 137 of the Fantastic Four’s monthly comic book from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The sheer number of you we lost just now with that little description is a sorry reflection on the cultural snobberies of our age, but we shall persevere, not only in the hopes of changing that status quo, but also because Kevin, Elmo, and all the other scattered faithful will appreciate the effort to level the playing field.

So: the Fantastic Four. For those of you languishing in ignorance (you know who you are, and you’ll need to be up to speed if you’re to take in the religious event known as ‘Fantastic Four - the Rise of the Silver Surfer’ in theaters as we speak), that means Reed Richards, the world’s smartest man, Sue Richards, his fiery and compassionate wife, Ben Grimm, his crusty old-school best friend, and heartthrob Johnny Storm, Sue’s younger brother. They go up into space in a stolen spacecraft, accidentally get exposed to cosmic rays, and get transformed into the Fantastic Four: Mister Fantastic, who can stretch his body like silly putty, the Invisible Woman, who can fade from sight and generate equally-invisible force fields, the Thing, rocklike monstrosity of enormous physical strength, and the Human Torch, a living firebrand capable of hurling flame.

They were Marvel’s flagship title, a super-group that was first and foremost a family, with squabblings and interpersonal dynamics that were, in the early ‘60s, virtually unheard of in comic books. Their identities are known to the public - indeed, they’re celebrities, and Stan Lee is a fine, funny chronicler of the ups and downs of that status. Far from a Fortress of Solitude or a Batcave (and we should remember that the Justice League originally hung out in a cave), our heroes make a Manhattan skyscraper their headquarters.

The list of Stan Lee’s innovations on this one title alone virtually defy tabulation, and they get taken for granted by today’s over-pampered comics-reading set, who think all the gritty givens that form the basis of every comic out there were somehow ALWAYS there. They weren’t. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby invented them.

This presents problems in an of itself, namely: what do you do when the creating ur-titans get older and want to retire, or seek out new pastures? How do you pass the torch on something so newly minted?

In the case of Marvel comics, the answer is: pretty bloody awkwardly. Stan Lee insisted on being credited as writer long after he’d lost interest in the title and ceded actual scripting chores (writing and re-writing dialogue, checking continuity, etc) to three of the greatest wunderkins ever to grace a comic book company: Gerry Conway, Archie Goodwin, and Roy Thomas. DC Comics, during their own transitionary period, could only have dreamt of caretakers so conscientious (well, OK, they had one - Julie Schwartz - but he was unique).

But first, we have to get through the dwindling of the old order, and in the case of the Fantastic Four, that was a long, protracted, severely depressing trough of truly terrible issues (the sack of crap collected in Essential Fantastic Four #5 is a thing you wouldn’t drop on the head of your worst enemy).

Luckily, thanks to the growing influence of the trio named above, by volume #6 some light is breaking through the clouds. Stan Lee is credited with writing a great number of the early issues collected here, but he didn’t; Thomas and especially Goodwin were generating every word of dialogue, altough often enough under Lee’s heavy influence.

It must be admitted right up front that this volume’s worst misstep is also a really, really big misstep: the second coming of Galactus is botched so badly we here at Stevereads challenge any of you to tell us how that particular story ends, or even what-all happens in it.

Galactus this time around is heralded by Gabriel, perhaps his lamest-assed herald (Terrax was bad, but perhaps not quite so bad) Galactus has had so far. Gabriel walks on air like an angel and signals the end of the world - i.e. the world’s being gulped down whole by planet-chomping Galactus - by blowing on his horn. Get it?

He fights the FF almost to a standstill, despite the fact that he ends up being a friggin robot who they should have trashed in about four panels of trying. But that’s not the worst of it: when Galactus shows up, he displays his awesome presence and power by ... well, by talking a lot of trash and hanging out a lot at Coney Island. Suddenly, Galactus is Vinnie Pastoranza, the bad boy of Our Lady of Perptual Grace in Brooklyn. The story is so bad that we don’t even care a) when the Silver Surfer shows up, b) why he shows up, or c) what the hell he does once he’s there.

No ultimate sacrifice this time around. No Ultimate Nullifier. Galactus wears shortpants and plays around with the Cyclone for a weirdly unseemly amount of time, and all through it, you get the impression that this whole thing went wrong for the exact same reason so many Hollywood blockbusters go wrong: too many cooks, too much creative interference, or, as my somewhat disturbed old friend Franco always said, too many hands down the boy scout’s pants. (in case you’re wondering, it was at that exact moment that this review got Beepy’s attention)

You’d think nothing could save a collection that manages to feature a bad Galactus storyline, but you’d be wrong: there’s some strong stuff here, beginning with the volume’s first story-arc, featuring a big, fat baddie named the Over-Mind and a wonderful, protracted Thing/Hulk battle that displays some of John Buscema’s finest penciling on the title (the crisp inking by Joe Sinnott works perfectly here, where it would have been disastrous on, for instance, Kirby’s pencils). In the course of that battle, and in the course of the Over-Mind battle that follows, the FF inflict a great deal of property damage on Manhattan - for which they’re threatened with eviction by their landlord, and for which they’re actually arrested by the police (Reed Richards writes out a check for their $20,000 bail) - today’s readers will be forgiven for seeing seeds of Marvel’s recent wretched ‘Civil War’ storyline, and yesterday’s readers will be forgiven for wistfully wondering what glories could have been wrung from that premise by writers like Thomas or Goodwin.

It’s in this series of issues that Johnny Storm loses his sometime-girlfriend, Crystal of the Inhumans, to none other than Quicksilver, who’s just mutie-bastid enough to rub Johnny’s face in it. This is also the period in which Medusa of the Inhumans joins the team, and re-reading these issues gave us a fresh appreciation for how she’s portrayed: mature, capable, with just a hint of the disdain that might come naturally to royalty (this volume also features a great little sequence where heartsick Johnny looks up his old sweetheart Dorrie Evans - and finds her to be a cheery, plump house-frau mother of two... at a time in American history when even the squarest melvin could get some groovin, Johnny can’t catch a break)

The highlight of this volume, though, is also one of the single-issue highlights of the Fantastic Four’s entire history. It’s a story called “Three Stood Together,” in which the Black Panther, traveling incognito to the white supremacist African nation of (somewhat disappointingly) Rudyarda, is thrown in jail for being black, and the Thing and the Human Torch go there to break him out (and stop the bad guy, of course)(who’s Klaw, of course). From the start, the two heroes are disgusted by the country’s separate but equal doorways labeled ‘Europeans’ and ‘Coloreds,’ but the story raises a broad spectrum of racial issues (like, for instance, when the Thing questions why T’Challa is temporarily calling himself ‘The Black Leopard’ and T’Challa answers: “I contemplate a return to your country, Ben Grimm where the latter term [Black Panther] has ... political connotations. I neither condemn nor condone those who have taken up the name - but T’Challa is a law unto himself”).

At the end of the issue, after the bad guy has been beaten and all set right with the authorities, our heroes encounter once again a stone wall inset with separate doorways for ‘Europeans’ and ‘Coloreds,’ and the Thing, steaming over the whole concept, abruptly tears down the whole wall, and the three walk out over the shattered labels. It’s a little hokey, but when you consider how many times apartheid or black power movements had been mentioned in comics prior to that (i.e. never), you recall the power the issue had when you first read it.

The next volume of Essential Fantastic Four will contain, by our reckoning, five real high points in the history of the title. But this volume has its share of nifty bits and is by no means despicable. Despite some notable missteps (cosmic bikers? a big furry creature with a WWII land mine for a head?), this volume is well worth your handful of fivers.