The Solomon Kane Adventures of Don Glut

If you missed the last one…

Solomon Kane, unlike Conan, Kull or Red Sonja, never had a long-running Marvel series that required different writers to try their hand at Robert E. Howard’s game. Most of the Solomon Kane comics are adaptations, some based on whole stories, others taken from fragments. The comics here are not those. For those, go here. These three comics are the work of Donald F. Glut. For a few months in 1977-1978, Glut gave us these three stories of Kane that weren’t based on Howard’s leftovers. Don wasn’t first. Roy Thomas wrote a Kane/Dracula tie-in “Castle of the Undead” for Dracula Lives #3 (October 1973). Kane is attacked by wolves but saved from them by Dracula. Solomon goes to the vampire’s castle, runs into Drac’s blood-thirsty wives, has a sword duel and leaves, agreeing to a truce.

There were other Kane tales by writers after Don F. Glut, but DFG has a magical touch with heroes that face off against monsters: Dr. Spektor, Dagar the Invincible, Tragg, Durak. The Witcher character often feels to me descended from comics like these. Occult detective meets sword & sorcery is pretty much what the Solomon Kane tales were at times. Howard enjoyed writing stories with historical settings. Glut is no different.

“The Dragon at Castle Frankenstein” (Savage Sword of Conan #22, September 1977) is a strangely named story, with Frankenstein’s castle the setting but a story of dragons, not vampires. Near the city of Darmstadt, overshadowing the village of Niederbeerbach, sits Dracula’s castle near Magnet Mountain. There, three men are busy kidnapping a woman for the baron when Kane shows up. The Puritan bests two of them and spares the third to get information. The woman, Kathryn, wants to thank him with her body but he refuses. Kane has forsworn bodily pleasures. Kane boldly enters the castle and confronts the baron. The man bemoans that Kane’s actions have doomed the whole village.

We learn that the baron’s ancestor Georg von Frankenstein was known as the dragonslayer. The monster was killed but not before injecting the knight with his tail poison. The curse of the monster remains. Kathryn was meant as a sacrifice for the ancient beast that dwells in the swamp nearby. Kane, and a reluctant von Frankenstein, descend into a vast hole where the dragon’s offspring dwell. They find giant eggs and destroy them.

The momma dragon comes and the baron abandons Kane to fight alone. Kathryn, who is waited up top, grabs a sword and helps Solomon to destroy the beast. She dies in the fight. Kane leaves a remorseful baron, who thanks him for saving the village, but the Puritan only blames him for Kathryn’s death to the end of time. This was a dragon fighting tale as old as Beowulf but perhaps could have been in Glut’s Dagar the Invincible too, a comic he had only recently put to bed in December 1976. Sonny Trinidad’s art is more lush than most Marvel Kane artists. For more 1970s dragonslayers, go here.

“The Cold Hands of Death” (Savage Sword of Conan #25, December 1977) takes place in the Carpathian Mountains and you know what that means! Vampires. There he finds a ruin with a beautiful and alluring statue of a woman. The carving tries to take him over and he smashes it to pieces. Kane rides on to an inn, where the barmaid is horrified to hear Kane is riding onto Transylvania. The innkeeper discusses the vampire legends of the area but says the danger is not vampires but something the Romans left behind when they occupied the region.

Kane goes to bed but is visited by the succubus that looks like the statue. She almost drains him but he manages to draw his pistol and shoot. She disappears like smoke.

The next day, he returns to the ruin and confronts her again, now a wispy ghost of a creature. Another battle that Kane almost loses. This time he dispels her with his sword. He finds the head of the statue and smashes it. He rides away hoping her spirit will now be at rest. This is classic Dr. Spektor style Glut with cleaner looking art by Gan and Castrillo.

“Retribution in Blood” (Savage Sword of Conan #26, January 1978) begins with a flashback page from Roy Thomas’s Dracula Lives story and the truce the two fighters agreed to. Kane rides into a town enacting a blasphemous rite. He meets Morgit, the daughter of the missing minister and the dead woman in the coffin. The woman tells how her father went to Castle Dracula to destroy the king of the vampires after he drank her mother’s blood. Morgit’s sister, Julka, is also missing. Kane agrees to go with her to the castle but first they have to deal with bandits who try to rob them. Getting to the castle, the pair see the father’s body tied to a stake. Kane prepares for entering the castle by sharpened the bottom of a cross into a vampire-killing weapon and gives it to Morgit. Kane enters the castle alone. While he is away, Julka appears in vampire form.

Kane confronts Dracula, but the vampire becomes a bat and steals his sword. Dracula also stops Julka from biting her sister. Drac wants her for himself. Julka goes after Kane but dies by fire from a torch.

Kane goes to save Morgit from Drac and throws his burning sword into the father’s dead body. Dracula taunts him for breaking their truce and it looks bad for Kane. The burning sword lights up the dead man into a giant burning cross. Kane finishes Drac with the sharpened cross. He and Morgit leave the castle to the bandits to plunder. We finish with a shot of Dracula’s dead body with the cross, knowing one of those bandits will pull it out, wanting the jewels on it. Drac will be back! The arc started by Roy Thomas is finished off nicely here. The David Wenzel art would become the most familiar to me with the Savage Sword of Conan Kane and other stories. Wenzel went on to draw the classic comic adaptation of The Hobbit and a book called The Kingdom of the Dwarves.

Conclusion

I suppose any Glut fan knew these were going to be vampire stories. I wish Glut had done a dozen of them, with a werewolf and a mummy tale amongst the creatures. He was off to write Captain America and other superhero stuff. The Marvel experiment with Warren-sized black & white Horror comics came to an end around 1975 with only Savage Sword surviving the market. I suppose that was why these three tales ended up here at all. I appreciate all that Roy Thomas did for Howard comics but it is nice to find another writer who can handle the REH material with such fun. Donald F. Glut is a master of comics and I will go on reading and re-reading his work as long as those of Roy Thomas, Gardner F. Fox or Edmond Hamilton.