Sword and Sorcery

"Heroic fantasy" is the name I have given to a subgenre of fiction, otherwise called the "sword-and-sorcery" story. It is a story of action and adventure laid in a more or less imaginary world, where magic works and where modern science and technology have not yet been discovered. The setting may ... be this Earth as it is conceived to have been long ago, or as it will be in the remote future, or it may be another planet or another dimension.

Such a story combines the color and dash of the historical costume romance with the atavistic supernatural thrills of the weird, occult, or ghost story. When well done, it provides the purest fun of fiction of any kind. It is escape fiction wherein one escapes clear out of the real world into one where all men are strong, all women beautiful, all life adventurous, and all problems simple, and nobody even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine.

— L. Sprague de Camp, introduction to the 1967 Ace edition of Conan (Robert E. Howard)

So spake de Camp, pulp hack and defender of fantasy-for-fun.  Actually, I never thought fantasy-for-fun needed any  defending.  There's no reason in the world you can't enjoy escapist art and "serious" art.  I've been doing it my whole life.

I quote from de Camp not entirely out of agreement, but because it provides a reasonable enough defiinition for this particular genre, which was seriously popular in the 70's - a popularity reflected in a plethora of comix titles - almost all of them forgotten today.

Strictly speaking, there had been a few predecessors: in the mid-50's, DC had given us The Brave and the Bold, featuring The Viking Prince, The Golden Gladiator, and The Silent Knight - heroes whose adventures took place in medieval and ancient times.  The stories were more historical than fantastical, though, with Hal Foster's Prince Valiant being the primary incident (Foster influenced every comic book artist born before WWII, bar none).

It took until 1969, when Denny O'Neil gave Night Master a try in Showcase (82-84), for the real thing to appear.  O'Neil openly cited R.E. Howard, Michael Moorcock et al in the editorial page. Night Master was Jim Rook, a rock musician who found himself and his girlfriend magically transported to the land of Myrra, where he was gifted with a magic sword that allowed him to fight like a true swordsman, then sent on a quest against a land of evil magicians.  Night Master didn't exactly set the comix world on fire, not surprisingly - the story was pretty superficial and the anachronisms embarassing. It does feature some moderately interesting artwork from the always-weird Jerry  Grandenetti and a just-starting out Bernie Wrightson.

No, it was Conan the Barbarian, appearing on the stands about a year later (Oct 70), that put the sword-and-sorcery stake in the ground.  It took awhile, though.  After issue 1, the book didn't sell well and was nearly cancelled a year-or-so in.  It took more than a dozen issues for it to finally pay for itself, though it went on to become one of Marvel's biggest titles.

It's not hard to see why it ultimately caught on.  The early Conan issues are decidedly different.  Smith's art is crude, but distinctive and interesting.  Smith's Conan was not a muscle-bound brute but a lean, powerful-looking youth.  Early issues took a reasonable stab at adapting some of Howard's more accessible stories, and did manage to capture the grim power of his best writings.  After the first 10+ issues, Smith's artwork suddenly took a quantum leap, overflowing with art deco designs and spectacular detail, the supernaturally-haunted, decadent Hyborian world seeming to ooze off the page. 

When Conan began to strike some pay-dirt, Marvel wasted no time, grabbing up Lin Carter's Thongor (a disappointing Howard rip-off with some E.R. Burroughs touches thrown in - even a better artist than the usually unpleasant Val Mayerik couldn't overcome the source material), Edwin Lester Arnold's pre-Burroughs Gullivar Jones (who beat John Carter to Mars by a good dozen years), John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian, and Howard's own pre-Conan hero, Kull, who got his own series, which also adapted some of Howard's best stories ("The Shadow Kingdom") and featured some fine art by Marie Severin and Mike Ploog.  They also developed a one-off Howard character into Red Sonja, a female sword-master from Conan's own time and place.  Red made her debut in what is probably Smith's masterpiece, "The Song of Red Sonja" (CTB #24).  After that, she kept popping up until finally given her own series in `75.  By then, unfortunately, she'd mutated from an interesting female hero to a tiresome man-hater in a ridiculous chainmail bikini that probably was more responsible for the sales than the stories.

DC, seeing dollar signs, wasted little time either.  They already had the E.R. Burroughs license, and John Carter of Mars and Pellucidar started appearing as Tarzan back-ups, then jumped to their own shared title, Weird Worlds by fall `72.  WW had a lot of promise and some fine art, but a lack of a committed artist/writer team made it erratic, and the Burroughs stories didn't last long.  After issue 8 the title was taken over by an interesting early Howard Chaykin creation, Ironwolf, which was nominally sci-fi but had plenty of sword-and-planet action.

Gold Key, too, got in on the action, with Don Glut's derivative but fun Dagar in Tales of Sword-and-Sorcery, with impressive and distinctive art by Jesse Santos.  Meanwhile, Warren tried to get into the act, running numerous ironic sword-and-sorcery stories in Creepy and Eerie (actually, Creepy/Eerie had been running such stories from the beginning), including a few stabs at series characters such as Dax the Warrior, whose adventures were uninteresting but had unusual art from Esteban Maroto, and Jim Starlin's Darklon the Mystic, which was space opera+Dr. Strange+swordplay - very strange stuff.  I'll cover the Warren stuff more closely in future posts.  For now, suffice it to say, Warren had its foot in the game.

When Weird Worlds passed on, DC tried again in `73 with Sword of Sorcery, adapting Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser characters.  Unfortunately, sub-standard art by Howard Chaykin and Walt Simonson (good artists, though my take on Chaykin is ... complicated, but then just starting out and not at their best) and rushed stories by Denny O'Neil failed to capture the spirit of Leiber's often-excellent stories.  SoS was laid to rest after 5 issues.

DC then left the sword-wielding crowd dormant for a couple years.  But with Conan, now under the less interesting pencils of John Buscema (inker Ernie Chan added the best aspects), going strong both in his own color title and the black-and-white mag Savage Sword of Conan, which allowed for more of the sex and violence of the Howard stories to show, s&s was far from deceased on the four-color page.

Short-lived rival company Atlas produced two short-lived titles, Wulf the Barbarian and Ironjaw.  Wulf was a blondie, son of royalty in some Norse-like kingdom, forced into exile when an evil sorceror took out his royal parents.  It combined Conan-eque grittiness with Tolkein-esque magic.  The artwork was nice anyway.  Ironjaw roamed an allegedly post-nuclear world, thrown back to medieval culture and full of mutants (he rode on a unicorn).  Ironjaw was dumb as a post but had the distinguishing feature of having his lower jaw replaced by a sawtooth metal prosthetic.  The last three issues had some nice art by Pablo Marcos but otherwise Ironjaw was just another anemic Conan knock-off.

DC, meanwhile, was not about to miss the boat.  They spun off a new host of s&s titles. 
First off the presses came Beowulf: Dragon Slayer, followed quickly by Stalker, Claw the Unconquered, The Warlord and finally, about a year later, Starfire.

Claw basically was Conan only with a furry, clawed right hand.  It came from Dave Michelinie and Keith Giffen (mostly).  Claw was pretty forgettable stuff, but ran longer than most of the others, maybe because it was an easy read.  Beowulf was too. But despite being a bit empty-headed, and full of embarassingly dumb jokes, I still have a soft spot for Beowulf.  Maybe its just the nice art, and every issue had a cool monster in it.  In any case, Beowulf was essentially the Beowulf of legend, sent on a quest that took him away from Castle Hrothgar, and threw in the companionship of animal-skin bikini-clad chick warrior Nan-Zee, and The Shaper, a constantly grinning magician. The more sci-fi oriented Starfire, too remains a sentimental fave for me, given a female hero who was a lot more interesting than Red Sonja, and sexier too if you ask me, leading a peasant revolt against a ruling class of cruel, conquering aliens on some distant, future Earth (or was it Earth?  I'm not so sure).  My favorite, though, was Stalker.  Genuinely different, Stalker was a scullery lad who yearned to be a bold knight.  He offered up his soul to a warlike demonic god, and got his wish - he was granted superhuman fighting prowess, skilled with any weapon known to man.  But he'd lost his humanity.  The short-lived title dealt with his quest to get it back.  With striking art by Wally Wood and Steve Ditko and a genuinely different, often eerie story, Stalker was a real gem.  It was laid to rest after 4 issues.

After all of those, it was The Warlord that hit pay dirt.  The Warlord was Travis Morgan, an air force pilot flying a reconnaissance mission over the north pole when he loses control of his plane, plunges through a hole in the earth, and ends up in a hollow-earth world called Skartaris, which is essentially a rip of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar.  Skartaris was a rough place, as every issue reminded us:

"Here, beneath an unblinking orb of eternal sunlight, one simple law prevails: if you let your guard down for an instant you will soon be very dead"

That was because Skartaris was full of monsters (especially dinosaurs - but also yetis, cat-demons, prehistoric animals, and anything else they decided to throw in), warring primitive civilizations, evil wizards, and lots of folks running around with swords and spears.  It followed not only Burroughs-ian ideas, but even Burroughs-ian storylines and structure, with Morgan instantly falling in love with the scantily-clad, sword-wielding Tara, then having to rescue her from evil sorcerer Deimos, ending up tossed into a gladiator pit, then leading a gladiator revolt.  Issue 6 even went with one of Burroughs favorite tricks - time and space displacement, with Morgan returning to the surface world to find that 8 years have passed, then returning to Skartaris to discover that years have passed there!  The next story arc concerned his attempts to find Tara and discover what had happened to the underground world in his absence.  

The Warlord was simplistic as could be, and that was probably part of its appeal.  Stories were straightforward and wrapped up in a single issue, and almost all followed a simple formula: Morgan meets monster. Morgan fights monster.  Morgan rides off into sunset.  That - and the artwork was gorgeous.  It was definitely one of the best-looking comix on the stands in them days, though even D&D-glutted kids certainly must have realized how superficial it was.  It could safely be said The Warlord was all beauty and no brains.  But airheads need love too.

Regardless, as 1975 tumbled into 1976, Conan and The Warlord and Red Sonja were the last swordspeople standing.  Nothing else had taken.  It's not hard to see why, since most of the titles were either Conan knock-offs or half-hearted.  Still it was a glorious time, and you can't have my copies of Stalker.