Sing a son of Sonjas -Red Sonja comes to San Diego.

Before there was the internet, cosplay could be seen in the pages of the odd SSoC issue. Here we even get a photograph of writer and artist Howard Chaykin!




Solomon Kane's homecoming

A poem by Robert E. Howard, adapted by Roy Thomas
Art by Virgilio Redondo (Nestor's brother!) and Rudy Nebres.

This poem tells in a few short stanzas the life of Solomon Kane, as he comes back to his native town as an older man. Many of his adventures are mentioned in it, and a potential love interest: one Bess (Elizabeth, I suppose) by name. 



At the end, the wanderlust seizes old Solomon again and he walks away into the fog.

I quite like it a lot as well. I think Howard really excels at setting the eerie tone that drives this story. The dread emptiness, the horrific anticipation of the evident horror lurking within, and the pronounced mood of decadence that infests this disturbing and rather surreal desert outpost.

I don't argue the name change, since it is perfectly evocative of the Lovecraftian current that runs through the story. Still, the original Xuthal of the Dusk captures well the outlier exoticism that also saturates the tale.

And I was sort of taken with Natala as well. The fact that (beyond Belit and Valeria) she is one of Howard's female characters whom I am always able to successfully associate with the correct story at least shows, in my mind, that she stands out from the indistinguishable crowd.

It's true, the Stygians don't always have the best reputation in the REH universe. They are more often than not up to some sort of treachery or nasty business of sorcery. Howard definitely carefully cultivates his stereotypes (sometimes too thinly based on real ones). Thinking of the Shemites, the Black Kingdoms, the Eastern Lands (Khitai etc.), the Zamorians and even Aquilonians there are native cultures and national characters, that are all too evident at times in his work.

That is unfortunately very true, and since Howard (like Lovecraft) was a strong believer in racist ideals, in which a particular "race" has specific attributes that, undiluted, make it superior to others, only certain "races" of pure stock could find grace in his eyes. To no one's suprise, the proto-Celts (the Cimmerians) were the apex of human physical and moral virtue, while the proto-Aryans (the Hyborians, generally speaking), who were also pretty admirable in his eyes, were often made softer by easy living or (shudder!) by interbreeding with non-western peoples.

Aquilonians were slightly suspect, being based on the French and Provençal; Shemites, proto-Arabs and proto-Jews, had all the caricatural attributes typical of the times; Asians were all Yellow Menace precursors, and Stygians... well, I doubt Howard had anything against Egypt per se, but Stygia sort of represented the archetypal ancient eastern civilization gone all decadent, blended with an African darkness straight out of Joseph Conrad, one that's evoked in other tales like The Vale of Lost Women or in Black Canaan. 

Even the Stygian priest Kalanthes, from The God In The Bowl, who's been shown in favorable light in the comics, is not especially sympathetic in Howard's tale. We know he's a priest of Ibis in exile, and that his god has opposed Set since time immemorial... but that doesn't make him by default a saintly man. For all we know, the cult of Ibis forbids people to brush their teeth.

Howard's racism is often subdued in his stories, however. The most blatant racist comments are usually voiced by characters, not by the omniscient narrator, and racist characters do exist in real life. The story Black Canaan is often said to be very racist, but although the white characters use a lot of slurs, the story could be interpreted as the struggle of an intelligent and resourceful black man against an unjust oppressor. (Yes, he uses magic and stuff... but is that worse than using guns?)

In the Conan stories, even if these beliefs shine through, the main confrontation is not between races; it is between the primitive, even primordial human being and the decadent and corrupt one. 

The horror from the red tower

Script by Roy Thomas
Art by John Buscema and Sonny Trinidad

This story is based on an untitled fragment left by Robert E. Howard, featuring Conan. Howard wrote the first few chapters and left a synopsis of the rest of the story; the reason he never finished it is unknown. It must be recognized that the yarn bears some resemblance to "The slithering shadow/Xuthal of the dusk" featured in the previous SSoC issue, so perhaps Howard lost interest in this new tale: in both cases, Conan survives the destruction of a northern mercenary army by Stygian forces; in both cases there is a lost city in the desert, peopled by foreigners who are under the influence of some will-sapping power. Radium-powered globes provide light at night in both cases. The plots are quite dissimilar, but the sense of déjà vu is quite palpable. Maybe Howard didn't find the idea workable in the end because the story is really two independent adventures barely linked by a plot detail.

L. Sprague de Camp fleshed out the synopsis to produce the story "The drums of Tombalku", which was first seen in the Lancer paperback Conan the adventurer in 1966. In this comic-book adaptation, Roy Thomas decided to produce his own version. As he explains on page 4, "As a special event, writer/editor Roy Thomas invited Conan fan/expert Fred Blosser to plot out the final twelve pages of Marvel's own version (the events beginning on page 45 of this issue). And, for a variety of reasons, Roy and Fred have varied just a bit from from REH's synopsis, so that the end result is, they hope, a tale which can stand on its own two feet."

Appropriately enough, the art changes for the second part. The first part, which pretty much sticks to Howard's prose, is drawn by Buscema and Trinidad; the second, where Roy and Fred craft their own ending, is drawn by Buscema alone. The transition is a bit brutal, but I'm not complaining: Trinidad is a favorite of mine in Marvel's B&W mags (less so in color, as is often the case with Filipino artists, whose style I believe works better without coloring), and Buscema is of course a master of his craft.

The break in art style, however, gives the impression of a book that had to be assembled in a rush; that impression is made worse by a remarkable number of typos that suggest proofreading was performed in a hurry. We'll mention a few of these as we go along.

Let's begin!

As we've just mentioned, the first part of this tale does not feature Conan. This is an approach Howard used in a few Conan tales, such as Beyond the Black River: the Cimmerian appears later on, and not being the point-of-view character, appears even more impressive than usual. Our hero here is a young Aquilonian outcast named Amalric (no surprise there, right?), who is in some southern desert in the company of two local brigands. Amalric is apparently tolerated because a small band of thieves can never have too many sowrd arms, but he's clearly in a subservient position. The leader of the band, a colossus of a man named Tilutan, rejoins the group on a horse: he's found a blond-haired girl lost in the sands and intends to commit unspeakable acts on her as soon as they can manage to revive her with water. As all Howard heroes, Amalric, for all that he's currently a desert raider, has a chivalrous streak; he distracts two of his comrades by suggesting that they play dice to decide who will have the girl next.

In Gazal, people are friendly but vapid and disinterested; everything is slowly decaying, all informations about the outside world is 900 years old, and Amalric has the impression of having walked into a waking dream. One building appears less ruined than the rest: a great red tower, which people fear to even mention, and which is said to predate the Kothic city. (The latter was actually built over a much older town). 

Lissa tells Amalric of her people's story, and of how there is some kind of horror in the red tower; one that captures people in the night and never gives them back. Making clear that she wants out of this place, she gets the Aquilonian to promise he'll take her away with him on the morrow. In the middle of the night, a scream of horror wakes them up; Lissa confirms that it must be the horror from the red tower who's taken someone from the streets. Amalric decides they're leaving right away and instructs the girl to prepare for the journey while he saddles the horses. From the stables, shortly thereafter, he hears Lissa scream in turn!
Certain that she has also been taken to the tower, he gets there in a hurry, and sees a human-like shape carrying an inanimate form behind it (and that's the page I remembered from years ago):



Climbing up the tower's stairs, the Aquilonian interrupts a ghastly scene, as a hideous creature has just decapitated a woman. (In Howard's yarn, the creature was of surprising beauty… but hey, a hideous one works too). The monster's form starts to shimmer as if about to vanish in thin air, but then Amalric remembers how a witch doctor has recently (and extremely conveniently) told him about the evil god Ollam-Onga, and how a certain spell could bind him to his mortal form. Just the kind of thing one casually mentions in a conversation. (Howard's yarn made this coincidence far less obvious, in my humble opinion). Thanks to the spell, Amalric does indeed bind Ollam-Onga to his mortal form, with an emphasis of the "mortal" part. It takes many sword strokes and some throwing of marble chairs, but the thing finally falls dead. As it dies, it utters a scream that is answered from somewhere in the skies. 

Amalric then discovers that Lissa is climbing up the stairs; she was not the decapitated woman after all! She explains that she witnessed Ollam-Onga dragging a body behind it, screamed, and hid herself. When Amalric failed to return from the stables, she correctly guessed that he must have thought her abducted and must have rushed to the red tower to save her (clever girl!) and so pursued him there despite the danger. The two embrace and ride out of the city.

They're not out of the woods yet, though: seven dark riders pursue them, even if there are no horses in Gazal! These guys appear supernatural, and are pretty much the Hyborian age version of the Nazgul!!! They chase Amalric and Lissa through the night and the next day, and as darkness falls again so does Amalric's horse. 

People fight everywhere, and plump and fun-loving King Sakumbe, doing his best with his spear, discovers too late that years of easy living left him ill-prepared for this kind of work. He's killed by Aphaki soldiers, which enrages Conan to the point that his anger messes up captions.



Cutting his way through the battle, the Cimmerian rushes to help his Aquilonian friend who's still exchanging blows with the sky creature. His longer reach and stronger sword arm manage to dispatch the pterodactyl-like thing which decides to remove its shirt (oops, I mean that it topples off the roof)!



The three friends see that there is nothing left for them in Tombalku; king Zehbeh is killed by the black warriors, and Conan predicts that whoever becomes the next king in Tombalku won't want a white barbarian as his general. As the trio prepares to escape the city, they are met with the wizard Askia who attempts to cast a spell on them, but he is quickly killed by… well, it's hard to say. According to the image, it is Amalric; according to the word bubbles, it is by Conan. But both had good reasons to perform the deed.



Riding off into the sunset (ah! just kidding, they're going north) the three prepare to join a caravan and accompany it to the Hyborian lands; Amalric and Lissa to live a life together, and Conan to become a pirate again. The end!