Why the hell was this called "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and not "Morgiana ENDS the Forty Thieves."

For some reason when I grabbed this off the quarter-rack, I was sure there would be Big John Buscema art in there, but nope! From 1977, Marvel Classics Comics #30--the Arabian Nights, adapted by Doug Moench, art by Yong Montaño.

By now everybody's got a passing familiarity with the high points in the stories compiled into the Arabian Nights, like Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin's lamp, "Open Sesame." The framing device may be a little less known in western culture: a king marries a new bride every night, and kills them every morning. In some versions, the king had been cheated on by his first wife, and did this to prevent future infidelity; this Marvel version doesn't really get into that: the king likes a story every night, but still kills his bride/storyteller in the morning, until the clever Scheherazade braves it, to either save others or die herself. Scheherazade spins multiple yarns, using cliffhangers and hype ("That story wasn't bad, but it's nothing compared to my next one...") to keep getting her execution postponed, until she eventually convinces the king to spare her life, after one thousand and one nights. They had multiple kids together by that point! In this version, the king says he pardoned her back around night four: did you let her keep sweating it? Dick!

But it was the adaptation of Ali Baba that got me, since I did not know that story as well as I would've thought; or the versions I had seen had taken some liberties. Ali was a poor firewood seller, who one day out in the woods hides when he hears bandits: the forty thieves, who stash their ill-gotten loot in a cave, hidden by the magic words "Open, Sesame!" OK, this I knew already, but then we meet a bunch of other characters that I don't think are usually in western adaptations like Harryhausen movies or Bugs Bunny cartoons; and each one is crafty! Ali's wife goes to borrow some scales, to measure out how much gold Ali had got; and her sister-in-law is like, what does that bitch have that's worth weighing? She smears wax and fat on the scales, and when the scales are returned, a gold coin is stuck to it; so she goes straight to her husband, Ali's brother Kassim, steamed that they didn't have so much gold they had to weigh it! Kassim confronts Ali and threatens to narc him out, so Ali tells him about the cave and the magic words. Which Kassim forgets when he's in the cave. (Do barley, wheat, and corn sound similar to sesame in Arabic, or was he dumb? Well, this may set a precedent for forgetting the magic word.) Kassim is found by the forty thieves and killed, the body left as a warning; but Ali takes the corpse to be buried, and here we meet the real hero of the piece: Kassim's slave girl, Morgiana.

Morgiana takes pains to make it seem like Kassim was going to die of natural, not-stab-related causes; then to get her dead master buried without anyone working on it knowing who or where they were burying anything. Ali and his family then move into Kassim's, but the leader of the forty thieves still suspects someone knows, and goes to the shroud-maker, who for the right price is willing to retrace the steps he had taken blindfolded. Morgiana manages to misdirect him once, but the leader then pretends to be an oil merchant--with the forty thieves hiding in clay jars--and manages to get invited into Ali Baba's for the night. The plan goes awry, when the kitchen staff runs out of oil and goes to borrow some, and one of the jars asks if it was time yet...? Thinking quickly, Morgiana advises in a fake-man's voice "not yet," then heats up the one jar that actually had oil, and dumps oil in with each of the thieves, killing them all horribly. She later kills the head thief, shanking him after a dance! To his credit, Ali had already freed Morgiana at that point, but she stuck around because she wanted Ali's nephew, and they are wed in the end. Treat her right, man. Technically, "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" wasn't even originally part of the Arabian Nights; but added by a French translator later. Too bad, because narratively, I can kinda see why Scheherazade would open with a story where a slave straight-up murders forty men.