As I’ve recounted before, during this period my younger brother Ken had developed a passing fascination with Conan the Barbarian, such that he’d begun to follow the regular monthly comic title. But he also branched out to the other regular source of Conan material available at this point: the black and white magazine SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN. Amazingly, my mother bought copies of this magazine for him probably without looking too closely at them–he would have been around nine years old at the time, and some of this content would have been seen as dicey for him. Hell, it was dicey for me, even with three more years on him.
In particular, the nudity in the magazine made me a bit queasy. For a good period during its run, SAVAGE SWORD was completely comfortable (and, indeed, actively desirous) with having its female characters parade around topless. The idea being that the audience for the magazine was clearly older than that for the comic book, and so this was still considered acceptable. Obviously, that was, at best, a self-deception, as my nine-year-old brother proved. My family wasn’t puritanical, but the subject of sex was discussed only rarely, and then with great reluctance. So I and my brothers were left to figure it all out ourselves, much as I expect my parents had been. I had learned that there was something shameful about exposed bosoms, and so this made me feel weird and uncomfortable when flipping through an issue of SAVAGE SWORD. Eventually, somebody at Marvel (Jim Shooter maybe?) came to the same conclusion and suddenly all of the women were back to wearing tops.
One of the benefits to the SAVAGE SWORD package was the increased length of its content. This allowed writer/editor Roy Thomas to produce much more elaborate adaptations of the work of Conan’s creator, Robert E. Howard. This particular issue began an adaptation of CONAN THE BUCCANEER, which had been written not by Howard, but rather L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter following in his wake. Thomas had an uneasy relationship with the non-Howard Conan material–he wasn’t permitted to reference or adapt a lot of it, depending on the time period, and so as he attempted to lay out the events of Conan’s life chronologically, he regularly found himself having to invent his own connective tissue between Howard events, even if that same period had been well-covered by subsequent prose authors.
SAVAGE SWORD was also something of an artist’s showcase, and in particular employed the efforts of a number of creators who had started working for American companies as part of what was then dubbed the “Filipino invasion”. Those artists were used to working in black and white in their native comics communities, and they had all developed texture-laden styles that took great advantage of the black and white palate. Here, Conan stalwart John Buscema has done breakdowns for the story, controlling the storytelling and the pacing and eliminating some of the odder quirks of page layout that the Filipino artists tended to try. But the finished pages were executed by Tony DeZuniga, and they are pretty lovely. DeZuniga wasn’t just an artist, he and his wife also acted as agents for a number of their fellow artists, and so he had a lengthy career in American comics. I always found him to be a bit of an overpowering inker, especially on the color book, but here he does exactly what is called for, crafting a fully-realized reality from Buscema’s basic shapes and forms.
As for the story, I have to admit not being even slightly interested in it when I was a young reader. It was well-realized, but revolved around a lot of lands and relationships that were meaningless to me. With the greater page count to luxuriate in (this adaptation ran for four issues all told, and in the neighborhood of 100+ pages) Roy takes his time with laying out the situation and the stakes. Conan himself doesn’t show up until Page 12, and doesn’t really intersect with the central action for another dozen pages beyond that. Rather, our main protagonist is Chabela, Princess of Zamora, who is dispatched on an urgent mission by the great god Mitra, and who has a tendency to lose her top along the way. But agents of Thoth-Amon are out to capture the Princess, and this puts both her and her traveling companions in danger as the journey veers into more treacherous waters.
There’s also, of course, a tomb to be raided for treasure, and thus a giant horrifying beastie to be slain along the way–if nothing else, it’s all an excuse to get Conan into action in the course of this issue. In this case, it’s a living idol which animates as pirates enter to loot the tomb it’s guarding, including Conan himself. It’s a creature against which Conan’s sword is no help, as it’s made of living stone, and so he and the rest of his party are forced to make a run for it. In doing so, Conan comes across Chabela as well as sailor Sigurd of Vanaheim who had been marooned on the island on which this is all taking place. Working together, and using Conan as the bait, the trio is able to trick the pursuing statue-beast off the edge of a high cliff, where it falls to its ruin in the waves below.
In the aftermath, the three surviving combatants introduce themselves to one another and become an uneasy party united in common cause. Even clothed, Chabela’s nipples seem pronounced all throughout the issue–DeZuniga, at least, knew what he was selling. And that’s where the story in this issue leaves things off. The rest of the issue includes the requisite number of articles and features: a piece defining all of the locations described within Howard’s fiction concerning Conan’s world, an article on the making of a couple Conan book-and-record original stories (and how one of them was also adapted for the Conan newspaper strip) and a long four-page letters page. By necessity, you got a lot of material for the dollar cover price, which was more than double that of a regular color comic.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
It seems like Sigurd is about to say The Wrong Thing when Conan cuts him off ā does anyone who remembers this story better than me know what? Or am I wrong?
I rather wish the comics had left the paperback continuations alone, as Roy was a better Conan writer than deCamp or Carter (Carter, an amazing and knowledgeable editor, was a hack in most of his published work).
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“I rather wish the comics had left the paperback continuations alone, as Roy was a better Conan writer than deCamp or Carter…”
Roy would not have been able to keep up with the schedule without relying on those adaptations. If he’d had to plot new material steadily, it’d have slowed things down a lot.
That said, I agree with you. The deCamp/Carter stories were what turned me off to Conan in the first place, and I didn’t get drawn in until I read a long stretch of Roy’s work on the color book, which spurred me to go read the original stories, unedited by deCamp & Carter.
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I had the same reaction ā it took reading all-REH collections to really appreciate him.
Fair point about the workload though.
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As a college-age reader of SSoC, I enjoyed seeing the frequent nudity. But it seemed to come and go — one issue would have topless damsels, while the next would have the strategically place strands of hair coving them up. I recall Roy commenting on this in his introduction in an SSoC omnibus, but I can’t locate it right now. I don’t remember if he gave a reason for the now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t bosoms.
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No less a writer than Robert Bloch (as a fan) wrote a letter to Weird Tales that appeared in the letter column of the November 1934 issue:
This material often has these elements. Communities can set standards. See, e.g.,, Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964) (“IĀ shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. ButĀ I know it when I see it, andĀ the motion picture involved in this caseĀ is not that.) (Stewart. J.) (emphasis added),
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”Ā I had learned that there was something shameful about exposed bosoms, and so this made me feel weird and uncomfortable when flipping through an issue of SAVAGE SWORD. Eventually, somebody at Marvel (Jim Shooter maybe?) came to the same conclusion and suddenly all of the women were back to wearing tops.”
Shooter maybe, or (Marvel president) James Galton maybe, or (Marvel sales manager) Ed Shukin most likely.
Female nipples without a front-cover disclaimer seems a big no-no for this time period. I can see complaints being filtered up through the sales department.
My first job was in an independent B. Dalton-style bookstore in Sarasota, FL. It was the early 1980s; I was in middle school. Once a week, I pulled the comics that needed to be returned, and replaced with them with the new issues. My pay was free comics. I distinctly remember the manager’s uptightness about Warren books such as VAMPIRELLA, and whether they should be age-restricted. (I didn’t handle those. My job was the spinner rack.) At the time, nippled female boobage was definitely something that would have been seen as needing an age disclaimer on the cover.
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“With the greater page count to luxuriate in (this adaptation ran for four issues all told, and in the neighborhood of 100+ pages) Roy takes his time with laying out the situation and the stakes.”
I’m not sure how much this was Roy taking his time or John Buscema doing it. What John would have gotten for a plot was a Xerox of the pages from the novel with notes in the margins where Roy thought they were needed to help break down the story for comics.
But I don’t know that Roy was giving John page-counts to hit; he may have been letting John page the story and then, once he had it all in, choosing or creating secondary material to fit the magazine’s content needs. SAVAGE SWORD carried a lot of inventory.
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There was definitely a back-and-forth regarding the amount of nudity Marvel was willing to show during SSoC’s run. Compare, for example, issue #4 (which I blogged about here), where Conan’s leading lady goes topless for the entire story, yet nary a nipple is ever shown due to strategic hair placement, etc.. As I mentioned in that blog post, I’m inclined to think that Marvel was being very cautious mid-decade, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s then-recent “community standards” obscenity ruling. Whatever the reasoning was, however, they’d evidently loosened the reins a bit by the time #40 came out in 1979.
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I think Marvel may have been responding to Warren — when Warren started doing nudity in VAMPIRELLA and other magazines, Marvel felt they needed to compete.
When Warren sank in sales, Marvel reassessed.
Another possibility, though I haven’t checked the dates or looked at the line overall, is that it was something Roy felt made the books more commercial, and when Roy left — along with most of the people who’d edited the b&w line overall — the new sheriffs in town set some new rules.
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The Marvel B+W mags still featured nudity well over a year after Shooter was named EIC…. if that’s who you mean by “the new sheriffs” it wasn’t he…. at least not quickly.
These Conan examples are pretty tame compared to the nudity (and it’s context) in Howard the Duck’ Mag’s b+w #1. Oct / 1979.
I suspect the retailers were clueless about the exact content and lumped all the b+w “funny books” in with Mad Magazine… and didn’t think there was anything off about selling them to 12 year olds.
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“if thatās who you mean by ‘the new sheriffs’ā
No, I meant whoever the new editors were on the b/w magazines.
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Gratuitous cheesecake aside, that is some damn gorgeous artwork. I actually was quite a fan of Dezuniga over Buscema, even in the color books.
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