Savage Sword of Conan #176, "The Three Deaths of Conan" Written by Chuck Dixon and Gary Kwapisz, art by Gary Kwapisz, Neil Hansen, Flint Henry, and Timothy Truman.
To the best of my admittedly dicey recollection, this is the last Savage Sword issue I remember buying off the newstands, and I had been reading it since around the #100's or before. I don't remember if it was a distribution thing and I wasn't seeing it on the stands, or if I was just drifting away from Conan. I read the regular Marvel Conan the Barbarian comics for years, and they hadn't been amazing that whole time, and Conan the King had it's moments but came out bi-monthly, so I usually had a vague idea at best of what was going on plot-wise, issue to issue. Oddly, while many comic readers will refer to Sandman as a comic for non-comic readers, I knew lots of people, including lots of non-comic readers; that read Conan. Or at least read mine.
Anyway, I happened onto a strong issue to go out on: D&D style, Conan sneaks into a creepy mountain fortress to steal a giant gem; but is stopped by an even-creepier witch-doctor type. The witch-doctor, who has one furry, clawed arm and a weirdly bumpy head; freezes Conan with a spell, then shows him his head collection. He really should dust those. Take some pride in your collection, man! It's always about getting the next head with you, then just throw it on the shelf...
The witch-doctor says he feels an aura of greatness about Conan, something more than a barbarian and thief. He decides to use the cards to see Conan's possible future: four cards will be drawn, three of which would show possible futures, and one showing his ultimate fate. Best tarot reading ever!
The first card's vignette has art by Neil Hansen, who wrote and drew Untamed. That book recently got a bit of a shellacking over at Comics Should be Good: perhaps not undeserved, but I like his art. It's energetic, and some of his excesses are either not present here or made more clear in black and white. Captured a psycho hill tribe, Conan scores with the psycho tribe 'witch queen,' then is thrown into the killing pit, to be torn limb from limb by the tribe's captured Sasquatch-thing. Even though he ends up eaten, Conan does gouge an eye out of the monster, a motif that would show up again in Untamed...
The next card is brought to you by Flint Henry, one of Dixon's go-to guys for action, and the detail is exquisitely gory. Lost at sea for ten days, an exhausted Conan makes shore at a dank, silent port town. Proceeding to the nearest bar (and hitting the ale pretty hard for someone so dehydrated, which for Conan probably just means a better buzz) the comely barwench tells him how the sea here had changed, fish and fishermen alike have left, "each night the horror grows." Since she's terrified, Conan stays with her, 'cause he's that kind of guy, and 'cause he's absolutely going to hit that.
That night, and there's not really another term for this, monster fishmen attack the couple, and while Conan reduces several to chum, others steal the girl. As Conan pursues them, he recognizes them as "the disciples of Dagon, who were once men, but have become one with the sea in the name of their ancient god." How would Conan know that? He must've read H.P. Lovecraft's "Shadow over Innsmouth" or "Dagon," I guess...hey!
This falls under the heading of either 'homage,' or 'swipe.' But before you start clucking your tongue to shame Chuck Dixon, keep in mind Conan creator Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft were contemporaries. I think they wrote each other letters and often tried to one-up each other's stories, a running 'can you top this?' competition. Keeping that in mind, Dixon's Conan vs. Dagon plays as a mashup of two pulp traditions coming together, in a bloody, fishy-smelling collision. Except Lovecraft probably should've been credited somewhere, since I may have had only a nodding acquaintance with his work at the time, and this story would've made me want more, had I known of it.
Although Conan is able to hack several of Dagon's worshippers into 'protein from the sea,' Dagon itself grabs him with a tentacle, and Conan and the barmaid end up lobotomized zombies, slaves to the great deep one. A big laugh for the witch doctor, though. He goes to the third card, and art by Timothy Truman, who's gone on to write Conan for Dark Horse today. The art's a little sketchier than I prefer, and a little rougher than the rest of the book, but Truman gives us a pretty solid Conan vs. flesh-eating ghouls story that also doesn't end well for the barbarian. "Death was for others...not him." Even impaled, you get the feeling Conan's never really thought that he could die.
The witch doctor has had a pleasant afternoon laughing his ass off at Conan's possible ends, and is about to flip the fourth and final card, which he figures will be Conan's final fate: his colossal head in a very big jar on the witch doctor's shelf. The witch doctor does have to admit he's not even angry with Conan's attempted robbery, as he's had so much fun with the cards, which is kind of classy, really. But although he's held in place, Conan is still able to throw a dagger through the witch doctor's mouth, like the world's worst tonsillectomy. As he dies, "the spirits of a thousand unholy pacts explode from the sorcerer to find their way home to the dark pits of Arallu and the shadowed lands beyond life." And I sometimes think I write too long of sentences here...the spirits consider trying to take Conan, who's not having it, and they disappear.
Picking up the gem to leave, Conan notices the final card, and while considering the unencouraging other possibilities, picks it up. And Conan gets his good laugh for the day, as the card is, of course, of him as a king. Now I'm not sure if Conan's laughing at the absurdity of him becoming king, or an 'of course, duh' kind of laugh. Hmm. Anyway, this was an enjoyable issue, with some great art: I like Kwapisz' art quite a bit as well, and while sometimes it could be rushed or sketchy, that's probably the price you pay for a ton of Conan pages a month. Particularly in black and white, with no color to cover yourself...speaking of which, try enlarging the pictures today, since they should show up a lot better.
No comments:
Post a Comment