Short Boxing (ep 2)

I dug up a short box of magazine-sized comics last night and it’s filled with a number of random gems, too many to list right now. Here’s a few of the first one’s I bought way-back-when that really got into my brain and stuck with me…

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Savage Sword of Conan #70 (1981): Main story by Bruce Jones, John Buscema, and Steve Mitchell
I came to comics later than some other fans. Except for the few Harvey’s (mostly Hot Stuff) I used to read while waiting to get my hair cut at Maurice’s on Main Street, I scratched that comics itch by reading Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc., etc. I had friends that read comics like X-Men, and I was always turned off by the parts where the heroes were out of costume. Conan, Aragorn and Tarzan were never out of costume.

In 1981, my brother worked in a pizzeria next to a 7-11 in Bound Brook, NJ. We’d swing by the restaurant but I couldn’t resist the newsstand next door. That’s where I spotted SSOC #70, featuring an awesome Earl Norem cover painting, and interior artwork by instant-fav John Buscema. I was thrilled by the idea that there would be more Conan to read via the comics, since I had already read all the books. The interior artwork killed me:

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Buscema was of course already “famous” for his Marvel Comics superhero work, but I was gratified years later when I read that he too hated drawing books like The Avengers because the everyday stuff bored him. Maybe that’s why his Conan work was so bad-assed: he loved doing it as far as I can tell. Frank Frazetta had painted the covers on the Conan books I had read, and he was absolutely one of my favorite artists, but Buscema’s version of Conan is the one that is seared into my brain.

SSOC_1

Savage Sword of Conan #1 (1974):
I had to have more. The idea that this was going on every month obsessed me, and I tracked down an actual comic shop (they have those???), and there on the wall was SSOC#1. It’s like you discovered the Holy Grail or something. I think I paid $25 for this one, which was an astronomical fee for a 12-year-old at the time. As a side note, when I got to high school, I started working at this shop and continued to until I left town for art school.
Anyway, SSOC#1 featured a main story by Roy Thomas, John Buscema and Pablo Marcos. More awesome Buscema artwork:

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But one of the best things about SSOC in its prime were the fantastic back-up stories. I may do another post about these because they were one of the biggest reasons I continued buying the magazine. As a Robert E. Howard fan, it was frustrating that so much of his work had been out-0f-print for decades. I knew about Kull, Bran Mak Morn, and Solomon Kane, but finding printed versions of those books was almost impossible. SSOC featured lavishly illustrated adaptations of those otherwise-out-of-print pulp masterpieces.
This one isn’t a direct adaptation, but it is lavish:

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It was hard to choose a page to display here, because every single one of them by the art team of Esteban Maroto, Neal Adams and Ernie Chua (before he changed his name to Chan) is marvelous. Roy Thomas again provides the script.

As I thumbed through the short box I wondered what it was that finally broke me. As I recall, I saw less and less of artists like Buscema in the pages of SSOC, and my interest waned. I routinely skipped issues if I didn’t like the art. So I thumbed ahead to look at the last one I bought. Probably, it was anywhere from forgettable to memorably awful:

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Savage Sword of Conan #162 (1989):
I don’t want to criticize artists, but no one I know likes everything, and this cover just ain’t my cup of tea for whatever reasons. So, my theory was holding true until I opened it…

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The main story is by Chuck Dixon with enthralling artwork by the elusive Jorge Zaffino. As soon as I saw it, I remembered loving this one. The biggest problem here was that Zaffino didn’t continue drawing every issue afterwards.

It may be that the problem had more to do with the issues that followed rather than the last one I bought. Then again, 1989 was my first year at the Joe Kubert School, and like any art student I was perpetually broke and inundated with homework, so perhaps my comics buying/reading slacked off. I joined my first band around that time too. Lots of classic reasons to put comics aside for a while.

There’s a lot more in this one particular box worth mentioning: issues of Epic Illustrated, and a bunch of European one-offs that I can hopefully get to some other time.

 

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