Savage Sword Of Conan #4 - Marvel Comics

SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN No. 4, June 2019

Shifting 27,252 copies in April 2019, at least according to “Diamond Comic Distributors”, Gerry Duggan’s narrative for Issue Four of “Savage Sword Of Conan” certainly must have pleased those Robert E. Howard fans who had been waiting to see the comic’s bronze-skinned barbarian unleash his full fearsome ferocity upon the Undead since reading this ongoing series’ previous instalment. Indeed, a good third of this twenty-page periodical is seemingly dedicated to simply depicting the Cimmerian cleaving his way past all manner of semi-armoured cadavers with nothing more than a pair of fighting axes; “No man had journeyed this far through the labyrinth, for no one but Conan had seen the map.”

Disappointingly however, this briskly-paced journey amidst the secret catacombs beneath the city of Kheshatta is eventually cut short by the party’s discovery that one of their number has been poisoned by Koga Thun, and from this point on the New York City-born writer’s script swiftly descends into a much slower affair as Suty begs his heavily-muscled friend “to send me from whence you came” with a fatal sword thrust to the chest. Of course, such an anguished, painful end to the life of one of Conan’s companions arguably conjures up some emotion in this comic’s audience. But the sheer speed of the scaly infection’s transformation upon the one-time slave’s body, coupled with an annoying series of cut-scenes depicting the sick man’s mental battle to resist the sorcerer’s sweet sounding promise of immortality if he will “let me slide into your skin”, frustratingly furnishes the final death scene with a debatably dissatisfying taste of rush and haste.

This atmosphere of ‘hurriedness’ to get to the publication’s concluding cliff-hanger is perhaps also prevalent in the scratchily-drawn storyboards of Ron Garney. At the start of this comic, the former artist on “The Amazing Spider-Man” pays his figures some tremendous attention to detail, apparently picking out every rib, tooth and vertebra possible on each of the numerous helmet-wearing ghouls he depicts the titular character contesting against. Yet by the time Suty has revealed to his horrified comrades that he now bears the red, snake-eyed pupils of Set the vast majority of the illustrator’s drawings contain little to no actual background, and many of his pencilled panels lamentably comprise of nothing more than a close-up of the competing adversaries’ determined faces.

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