If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by Swords of Fire 3, the third in our collections of Sword & Sorcery novellas. This one features a new Sirtago & Poet tale of 30,000 words length called “The Fall of the Golden City” by Jack Mackenzie. Jack says this tale is the first chronologically in the wild adventures of the Ka of Trigassa and his poetically minded friend. This story answers some questions from early tales like how did Sirtago get his mask? And what happened to Poet’s other dagger? As with all the Sirtago & Poet tales, you don’t have to read them in any order but here’s your chance to start at the beginning.
This post finishes our look at Don Glut and Savage Sword of Conan. Last time we looked at the Solomon Kane stories Don did. There had been three of those but Glut also wrote two more adventures set in the Hyborian Age of Conan. These are not Conan stories but like the fiction of Ray Capella, new stories set in the same milieu.
Today, with the advent of the MMORPG Age of Conan, the idea of someone playing in Robert E. Howard’s backyard may seem a given but back in 1979, with the exception of Roy Thomas, no one had really done this in comics. (When you hear they are writing a new Hobbit movie, not directly based on Tolkien’s work, you may get a little of the same vibe. Part of you is excited because you want more, but another part of you is worried because they could muddy the waters of that author’s vision.)
New works in famous authors’ settings immediately bring to mind the plethora of Conan novels that have been written with mixed results. Some of the better non-Conans include Michael Shea’s A Quest For Simbilis (1974) where Shea wrote a Dying Earth novel with Jack Vance’s permission.Karl Edward Wagner’s The Legion From the Shadows (1976) used Howard’s Bran Mak Morn with more interest than Tierney and Smith’s For the Witch of the Mist (1978) and Swords Against the Shadowlands (1998) by Robin W. Bailey that continued the adventures of Fafhrd & Gray Mouser in Lakhmar. What all these writers have in common in the skill to create their own Sword & Sorcery stories away from Howard. It takes a writer with delicacy and skill. A writer like Don F. Glut.
“This Sword For Hire” (Savage Sword of Conan #46, November 1979) has a group of drunken men hire a barbarian mercenary when their favorite dancer, Kamala, is taken by a powerful wizard. No, he is not Conan, but Atola of Aesgaard. The men follow the warrior to the wizard’s cave. Atola confronts the wizard who turns into a dragon. There is a fight but when it is over, they find the combatants fled and all their money gone. Wizard, warrior and wench ride away, on to the next town to run to their con.
“The Woman From Khitai” (Savage Sword of Conan #49, February 1980) begins with King Raka telling the wives of his harem that there is a new wife, Soosha soon to arrive. She is the woman from Khitai. Raka wonders if the rumors that Khitain women are powerful witches are true. He doesn’t fear because he has his strong bodyguard, Shorg, to protect him. Unbeknownst to the king, Shorg molests his wives behind his back. When Soosha arrives, the other wives try to warn him but the bodyguard tries to rape her. The wedding takes place as planned without issue. Shorg has gone missing, but only Soosha knows where he is, trapped inside the gem she wears.
Conclusion
These two stories aren’t so different from the handful Glut wrote for Gold Key. Don could have used these plots in one of the “Tales of Sword & Sorcery” easily enough. What was different is both stories feature female nudity. Marvel was pushing the envelope, perhaps from pressure from magazines like Heavy Metal and Warren’s 1984. The results are tame enough.
The big question for me, after reading these two adventures, is why weren’t there more of them? Roy Thomas was burning his way through every scrap of fiction Robert E. Howard had penned about Conan and many other characters. At some point new material would be required. From what I can see the editors filled that space with more artist portfolios as well as other characters such as Chane of the Golden Hair and Bront. While thematically similar to Conan, these are not Robert E. Howard based stories. Savage Sword of Conan was an ever changing magazine (before it became The Same Old Sword of Gonad in the 1980s and 1990s.) Finding enough material was an on-going challenge that Roy and others met every issue. I don’t know if Tales the Hyborian Age got dropped because of copyright issues or lack of interest from readers. It’s too bad because Don Glut brought a pleasing smaller focus to the genre that sometimes gets forgotten under the piles of battle-slain bodies.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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