Savage Sword Of Conan #2 - Marvel Comics

SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN No. 2, April 2019

Despite having supposedly gone “back and read some of the classics from Robert E. Howard”, Gerry Duggan’s narrative for Issue Two of “Savage Sword Of Conan” debatably must have depressed many of the comic’s audience with his ponderously plodding plot depicting the Cimmerian’s arrival at the city of Kheshatta. Admittedly, the barbarian’s journey to this former “jewel of Stygia” provides a modicum of action when he brains a pair of Koga Thun’s demonic-looking cultists with a severed flaming limb for daring to suggest that they’d eaten the god Crom after he’d “sobbed like a child”. Yet these few fleeting panels, buried deep within the twenty-page periodical, hardly reflect the sort of sense-shattering shenanigans which the Hyborian Age adventurer’s creator imbued his novellas with, and certainly doesn’t inject “an opportunity for a laugh” into the storyline as its New York City-born writer apparently believed.

Indeed, arguably all “Go Ask Crom” provides its readers with is a sedentary, lack-lustre tale involving Conan uncharacteristically scouring a Scroll and Tome vault for “a book of historical maps of Ancient Kheshatta”, being ambushed by a crossbow-wielding Keeper of the Library, and then laboriously discussing with his companion Suty the fact that “the city’s landmarks are being pulled down, making a map much harder to decipher.” Such dialogue-heavy, mediocre meanderings are hardly the sort of content which “the first great fantasy editor” Farnsworth Wright would have agreed to have printed in “Weird Tales” during the Thirties, and probably lessened the blow to the book’s fans when “Comic Book Resources” announced in February 2019 that Duggan (along with artist Ron Garney) would be leaving the title in just a few months' time.

Just as disconcerting as this publication’s poor pace though is debatably the increasingly annoying relationship between the Sword and Sorcery hero and his fellow escapee, Suty, which bears a disconcerting resemblance to the on-screen buffoonery between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tracey Walter’s Malak in the 1984 film “Conan The Destroyer”. The Cimmerian has always been known for his chivalry, albeit towards “damsels in distress”, and clearly owes his life to “his newfound companion” following “a pirate attack that destroyed both ships.” But the cowardly ex-slave’s ill-fortune persistently marks him out as a significant hindrance to the success of the barbarian’s mission rather than an asset, and probably made many a bibliophile wonder just why the black-maned experienced explorer would be happy to undertake so dangerous a mission with such a debatably dangerous disadvantage in tow; “Suty, You clod! I told you to wait outside.”

Writer: Gerry Duggan, Artist: Ron Garney, and Colorist: Richard Isanove