Savage Sword Of Conan #5 - Marvel Comics

SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN No. 5, July 2019

Considering that Gerry Duggan’s screenplay for Issue Five of “Savage Sword Of Conan” contains little in the way of excitement or even the titular character’s famous swashbuckling swordplay, it is easy to understand just why this twenty-page periodical was selling some six thousand copies less than its sibling ongoing series “Conan The Barbarian” in May 2019. In fact, seeing as the New Yorker’s conclusion to his pedestrian-paced “Cult Of Koga Thun” long-running storyline is simply to have this comic’s Cimmerian protagonist set a long forgotten ship aflame before riding out alone from the City of Kheshatta on horseback, it’s arguably quite a feat that the “Marvel Worldwide” publication actually sold 25,935 copies. Let alone attained a following strong enough to see it comfortably sit within the month’s Top 100 best-selling publications in eightieth position.

To begin with, the emotionally-charged close combat between the Hyborian Age hero and the scaly, zombified corpse of his companion Suty, is over before the clash has even really started, and despite it apparently providing Koga Thun with an opportunity to pass his vile venom into the heavily-muscled adventurer’s veins, this ‘poisoning’ doesn’t debatably do any lasting damage to the savage’s awe-inspiring strength. Instead, “Conan’s horrifying fate” simply seems to have been used to help pad out a good dozen panels of Duggan’s humdrum plot which depressingly could easily have been covered in a much more pulse-pounding manner, considering the pirate slave had previously saved the bronze-skinned fortune hunter’s life.

Such lack-lustre, unimaginative penmanship really does haunt the WGA Award-nominee’s narrative as Conan seemingly just goes through the motions of discovering that the long-sought treasure is “nothing but worthless parchment”, his last surviving party member is not all she seems, and that the “filthy wizard” stalking him throughout this ponderous tale has apparently known what was going to happen all the time through a remarkably contrived feat of omnipotence; “I paid a dear price to cast the spell that would deliver the map to me. I watched it all unfold through the captain’s eyes. I saw you steal my box, Conan.”

Even illustrator Ron Garney questionably appears to have tired of this particular five-part pencilling assignment, crudely sketching the book’s laudable lead as someone who can bemusingly be bested by a short-handled, snake-shaped stick one moment and then depicting the black-haired conqueror riding a terrified steed in an utterly over-blown splash page the next. Indeed, considering that Gerry’s script peters out with Thun’s beheading two-thirds of the way through the comic, the main purpose of this “artist on every Marvel character that ever walked” would appear to have been to take as long as he could to draw Conan escaping Kheshatta.

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