Single Issue Review: Conan the Barbarian #2

This comic appears at the very tail end of the Silver Age with a cover date of December 1970. It marked clearly the move to the more "adult" fare that was to come in the Bronze Age, and is nothing like most of the Silver Age comics I have been discussing.

Conan was the creation of writer Robert E. Howard in the early 1930s, a barbarian from the distant past. Howard wrote many Conan short stories and several novels before committing suicide at a relatively young age, and in the 1960s L. Sprague DeCamp, a science fiction writer, had picked up the character and written a few more novels.

A character whose adventures were currently being published in book form clearly presented an opportunity for Marvel. On top of this Marvel added the talented young writer, Roy Thomas, and a gifted comic artist, Barry Smith. The result was a very successful launch, with Conan becoming a monthly magazine effective with its fourth issue.

This story establishes one of the themes that will be repeated throughout the Conan series, that of the treacherous femme fatale, who leads Conan into a trap:



A similar situation occurred to Conan in Savage Tales #1, although there his innocence of ill intent was much more ambiguous.

Conan is enslaved by a race of ape-men, who have previously captured quite a few slaves. But the barbarian is not cut out for a life of servitude:



Kiord, the leader of the slaves, is not exactly plotting the overthrow of the ape-men. He confides to Conan that he has a dream that one day the slaves will rule, but there will be no bloodshed. Conan doesn't agree and continues to make problems, to the point where he is placed in the arena to fight an snow-lion. But when he slays the beast, the king of the ape-men orders him to be killed.

Finally Kiord has had enough:



He and Conan team up to defeat the beasts, but Kiord is slain in battle, leading to this ending:



Comments: Superb story by Thomas, excellent art by Smith. The story was reportedly nominated for an Academy of Comic Book Arts Award, although the winner that year was the Green Lantern/Green Arrow story No Evil Shall Escape My Sight.

Random Issue Review: Daredevil #50

A very mediocre cover, with mediocre elements. The villain is big and green, and he's the only person doing anything dramatic (smashing a car). Daredevil is on his knees and holding his head, while a couple of bystanders are apparently shouting. Even the literary title is well below the mean: If In Battle I Fail--! Stan's not trying very hard with that one.

The story is a continuation from the previous issue, which is one of the problems with doing single issue reviews of Marvel Comics from the Silver Age. However, this was not an uncommon problem with collecting comics; sometimes I'd pick up an issue like this at a garage sale and not find the prior one for years (if ever).

DD is battling a robot (who is actually colored purple, not green) as we begin the story. Over the course of the story we learn what's going on both with the battle (a crook named Biggie Benson hired a robot-maker to destroy Daredevil) and with the soap opera (Foggy has been elected DA and Karen and Matt are on the splits again).

Daredevil succeeds in confusing the robot so it no longer remembers who is its target. It goes off in search of its maker, with DD in hot pursuit. Seeing DD, the maker tries desperately to load his picture into the "aromascope", which will target the robot again. But by accident, he loads Biggie Benson's photo instead. As the story ends, DD has broken into the jail but is wounded and largely incapacitated as the robot breaks in.

Comments: Not a great story; the robot is a pretty dull villain. The artwork is notably not by Gene Colan, DD's regular artist, but by a very young Barry Smith. Smith would go on to great fame in the 1970s for his work on Conan the Barbarian, but this is still early in his career and he had not yet developed his own unique style and indeed seems to be trying to imitate Colan. Smith did three issues of Daredevil (#s 50-52) and showed growth with every outing. Here's one dynamic sequence:



Solid work, but not yet the transcendent art we would get from Mr Smith in the next few years.