A Sword & Sorcery Comics Mystery

I found a Sword & Sorcery Comics Mystery to solve. It started when I was re-reading the first issue of Claw the Unconquered (May-June 1975). (This is the kind of thing I do as a comic detective. I wait in a room for a beautiful woman to come in and tell me to solve a strange case. While I wait for her, I drink cheap bourbon and read old comics.) In the letter column at the back was a short intro by the comic’s writer, David Michelinie.

Now let’s break this down one item at a time. That way we can remove the Mystery from the chaff.

1. He states correctly that Claw is not DC’s first Sword & Sorcery comic. That was Nightmaster, followed by Sword of Sorcery.
2. A little more problematic is Weird Worlds, which was an Edgar Rice Burroughs comic that finished off with three issues of Howard Chaykin’s Ironwolf, a Sword & Planet comic.
3. Claw is Michelinie‘s first chance to do a Sword & Sorcery comic.
4. He had tried stuff bordering on S&S in Swamp Thing and Phantom Stranger.

And there we have it: Sword & Sorcery in Swamp Thing and Phantom Stranger? Surely, I would have noticed that! (For a second I recall a swamp monster being involved in an S&S plot with a duck then remembered it was Giant-Size Man-Thing #3 (February 1975) from Marvel. Opps, wrong company!)

With a whoop of joy I headed back into my 1970s issues of those two series. (Like Sherlock, I wake from my Seven Per Cent Solution and violin jags to cry “Watson, the game is afoot!) The results are two singles that have some Sword & Sorcery elements.

Swamp Thing #21 (February-March 1973) “Requiem” has Swampy beamed aboard an spaceship where the master, Solus, sics his pet monsters on him, then puts him in a specimen jar along with many other races of space people.

Solus has a romantic interest in Cellanth, an alien girl with antennae. She frees all the other prisoners and Swampy must fight them. Cellanth ends up dead in the punch-up and finally the master and Swamp Thing fight. Solus gets thrown out into space. Swampy beams back before the ship blows up. Sword & Sorcery? Sword & Planet at best, and even that is a hard go. It feels more like 2000 A. D.’s “Black Hawk”, which wouldn’t show up for seven years.

Finding something in The Phantom Stranger was much harder but David may have meant Issue #8 (March-April 1973), which appeared around the same time. The story is called “Apocalypse”.

The Phantom Stranger, Cassandra Craft and Tannarak go to Rio to face off against Tala, Queen of Darkness and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Though the story is not S&S, the feel and images remind me of previous DC S&S comics like Sword of Sorcery.

Well, there’s the solution to the Mystery. Not exactly The Hound of the Basketballs. Did David M really write some S&S before Claw the Unconquered? No, but the sub-genre was on his mind. His definition of “Sword & Sorcery” was pretty wide-reaching including Sword & Planet. This very broad definition is common in comic books. Other DC titles like Beowulf Dragonslayer and The Warlord, as well as anthology comics like 1984, Heavy Metal and 2000 A. D. also featured an unapologetic S&S/Science Fiction mix. This was one of the trends that lead to TV shows like Thundarr the Barbarian, where adventure SF was called Sword & Sorcery because the hero had a sword. (You can blame Star Wars, too, of course.)

The average fan may not care, but it is one of my pet peeves. Authors like Roger Zelazny made a cottage industry of setting tech against magic in books like Madwand and even his classic Amber Chronicles. I enjoy works like these, just as I enjoy Sword & Planet and Planetary Romance in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mode. What I don’t like is when it all gets called Sword & Sorcery. As the name implies, it is heroic fantasy with swordplay and arcane magic. Call me a hair-splitter if you must. I will go back to my office and wait for the next dame…

Well, I may not have found a great treasure trove of lost S&S as I had hoped, but I did get one thing out of all this…I had forgotten how good Jim Aparo was. I will be enjoying his work on Phantom Stranger you can bet!