Publication history
The adventures in Savage Sword of Conan are not always consecutive (as they are in the color Marvel title Conan the Barbarian), and they cover different eras of Conan's life. The Savage Sword stories mostly feature an older Conan, and adapt Robert E. Howard stories and pastiches starting from "Black Colossus" (according to the Miller/Clark chronology), thus following the Roy Thomas stories in Conan the Barbarian.
The first issue leads off with Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's adaptation of one of Howard's shortest but most well-known Conan tales, "The Frost-Giant's Daughter". This is one of Conan’s earliest tales chronologically. Still a teenager, he encounters a beautiful woman in the frozen north who leads him into an ambush by her giant brothers. Issue #2 featured another Howard adaptation, "Black Colossus", in which Conan faces off against a three-thousand-year-old sorcerer. This story teams long time Conan penciler John Buscema with his frequent partner Alcala. The cover of issue #5 sports a Boris Vallejo painting of Conan being crucified, from the story "A Witch Shall Be Born". This story features Conan at his most resilient, surviving a desert crucifixion to get revenge on the man who put him there.
Issues #6-10 included "People of the Dark", a 30-page tale scripted by Thomas and drawn by Alex Niño; the continued adaptation of Howard’s only full-length Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon (the first parts having been printed in Giant-Size Conan #1-4); and the adaptation of "Iron Shadows in the Moon", by Buscema and Alcala, where Conan goes from chief of the Zuagirs to pirate captain of the Red Brotherhood.
The next three years of the title featured numerous adaptations of Howard stories (many by the art team of Buscema and Alcala), including "Shadows in Zamboula", "The Devil in Iron", "The People of the Black Circle", "The Slithering Shadow", "The Pool of the Black One", "The Tower of the Elephant", "Jewels of Gwahlur", "Beyond the Black River", "The Scarlet Citadel", "The Flame Knife", "Hawks Over Shem", "The Treasure of Tranicos", and "Wolves Beyond the Border".
