Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian (Volume 1) by Roy Thomas

Author:Roy Thomas [Thomas, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: robert e. howard, sword and sorcery, marvel comics, conan, red sonja
Publisher: Pulp Hero Press
Published: 2018-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

issue #27

“The Blood of Bel-Hissar”

Welcome to the first issue of Conan the Barbarian ever illustrated by John Buscema!

What’s that? You say that Conan #25 and #26 already introduced Big John’s artwork to Conanophiles?

That’s true. However, the story I called “The Blood of Bel-Hissar!” was actually drawn before either of those.

At the time in late 1971 that I learned Barry Smith was leaving Conan (again), I was still uncertain exactly where Barry’s and my last issue together would take us, and I wanted to know a bit more before I got John started on his first contribution to the War of the Tarim. Also, due to Barry’s time-consuming work, we were not exactly ahead on the schedule, so I thought having John draw a story which Marvel could use two issues down the line was a good idea. (I need not add that Marvel’s production manager likewise thought it a good idea; after all, he had suffered not just through Conan and other deadline problems, but through the super deadline problems experienced with artist Neal Adams’ collaboration with me on first X-Men, then Avengers. I felt the poor guy deserved to catch a break.)

Although John’s two chapters of the war would be original stories not based on ones by Robert E. Howard (except to the extent that the King Kull tale “The Mirror of Tuzun Thune” was incorporated into them), I thought it might help to orient him if I made his first assignment an adaptation of an REH story.

However, the next-earliest chronological Conan story even partly written by REH would be “The Hand of Nergal” (see the upcoming Conan #30), which has the young Cimmerian in the service of the Turanian army. I wanted to take several issues to show how he got from the eastern shores of the Vilayet Sea to northern Turan on its western shores. Nor, having had Conan desert from Turan’s army and changing sides in the War of the Tarim, did I want to stretch credibility by having him join that army again in the ruins of Makkalet; after all, in deserting, he had given Turan’s Prince Yezdigerd a permanent scar, and would have been put to death the instant any Turanian soldier recognized him.

So I went looking through the many non-Conan stories by REH, which the ever-helpful Glenn Lord had recently made available to me. And since the War of the Tarim had been intended as a sort of combination of the Trojan War and the Crusades, it seemed natural to go to what are often loosely grouped as Howard’s “Crusader” stories.

Many of these were published in the early 1930s in the pulp magazine Oriental Stories (whose name was changed for its final issue to Magic Carpet), put out by Popular Fiction Publishing Co., in Indianapolis, Indiana, the same firm that published Weird Tales, in which the original Conan prose stories appeared. Oriental Stories and Weird Tales even had the same editor: Farnsworth Wright. Oriental showcased stories set in the so-called “mystic East,” starting in what we tend to call the Near East and set mostly (though not always) in the past.

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