The Scarlet Citadel

SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN — Issue no. 30, April 1978

Book: Savage Sword of Conan

Issue No.: 30

Published: April 25, 1978

Title: “The Scarlet Citadel”

Cover Price: $1

The main feature of this black-and-white sixty-plus page Conan magazine is a story called “The Scarlet Citadel,” written by usual Conan scribe Roy Thomas and drawn by Frank Brunner. And though he only gets a credit under “Staff and Such,” I am 99 percent sure the great Tom Orzechowski did most of the lettering — I can almost recognize Orzechowski’s style as easily as my own handwriting. “Citadel” is adapted from the 1933 short story of the same name by Conan creator Robert E. Howard.

Of all of the Marvel Conan stories I’ve read so far, this one might be my favorite. The magazine format gives the creative team more room to work than in usual Marvel seventeen-pages-of-story comic book — this story is more than 40 pages long. And it has most everything I want from a Conan story — action, intrigue, sorcery, and weird monsters. It takes place later in Conan’s life, when he was King Conan of Aquilonia. The plot basically involves him getting mixed up in a years-long feud between two sorcerers. But the fun is in the details, such as Conan hitching a ride on a pterodactyl-like flying reptile and (spoiler) a sorcerer’s decapitated body not dying but wandering blindly in search of its head.

Because they weren’t technically “comic books,” these Marvel magazines weren’t subject to censorship by the Comics Code Authority. So this Savage Sword story delivers a little more violence than would probably fly in a 1978 Comics Code Authority-approved book, including Conan splitting one dude’s skull and completely decapitating another (that poor wizard I just mentioned).

I’ve read that the extra pages plus lack of CCA oversight attracted top artists to the Savage Sword of Conan magazine, and Frank Brunner’s work here definitely backs up that argument. Brunner’s layouts are endlessly inventive — I don’t think he does a basic six-panels-in-three-rows page in the whole issue. And on top of that, the guy can just flat-out draw.

The story is followed by a text feature with the very long title of “A Gazeteer of the Hyborian World of Conan Including the World of Kull and an Ethnogeographical Dictionary of the Principal Peoples of the Era.” I had to look up “gazeteer” and found “gazetteer” — defined as a geographical dictionary — at Merriam-Webster.com. After a long intro explaining the history of maps of Conan’s world, the actual “gazeteer” begins, covering Hyborian locales beginning with the letter “A.” My assumption is that this geographical dictionary will continue in future Savage Sword issues.

Plus there are a few pin-ups that focus on another of Robert E. Howard’s characters, Bran Mak Morn, and one of the pin-ups features one Bran’s female co-stars topless. That definitely would not be Comics Code Authority-approved!

Plus there’s a two-page fan mail column that closes out the issue. These Conan magazines really deliver a lot of bang for the (1978 cover price) buck.

Next time — Howard the Duck! Probably.