Cormac Mac Art: The Comics

The Savage Sword of Conan served up a monthly dose of Conan the Cimmerian along with secondary tales of Robert E. Howard’s other characters such as Solomon Kane, King Kull and Bran Mak Morn, plus the Howard/Roy Thomas amalgam Red Sonja. In the 235 issues, from August 1974 to July 1995, the Howard character, Cormac Mac Art, never appeared. Despite a collection of tales from Donald Grant, The Tigers of the Sea in 1974, then a paperback version from Zebra books in 1975 and later Ace and Baen, Marvel never got around to old Cormac. Was it because he was late to the party? Not big enough with only a handful of stories? A series of new novels by Andrew J. Offutt in 1975-1975 and then two more with Keith Taylor in 1980-82 should have raised an eyebrow or two. Or was it that he wasn’t all that different from other Howard characters like Turlough O’Brien? What happened to Turlough? He got rewritten as a number of Conan stories.

Savage Sword ended in 1995 (some said, not soon enough) but Cormac got his comic five years earlier, and not at Marvel. It was Dark Horse Comics, still young and not yet the powerhouse that it is today, and a familiar name we all know, Roy Thomas. In 1990, Thomas, who had finished with Robert E. Howard, but not Sword & Sorcery (having written the movies Fire and Ice (1983) and Conan the Destroyer (with Gerry Conway) in 1984) as well as the under-appreciated Arak, Son of Thunder at DC, surprised comic fans by choosing to do a Cormac comic.

Let’s talk about Roy Thomas. The guy has said quite openly that he was not a big Sword & Sorcery nut. His first love is super-heroes. If you don’t believe me, consider that he has published the top super-hero fanzine, Alter Ego, since 1997. In his editorial to the first Cormac volume he says he never planned to make Conan comics a carrier. He was simply getting things set up before returning to The Avengers. Only it didn’t go that way. Five thousand pages of Conan-and-friends later, Roy leaves Marvel. What does he do? For some reason I can’t quite fathom, he creates Arak for DC in 1981. DC probably wanted to piggy-back on the expected success of the first Conan film in 1982. Ultimately, Roy phoned in the second half of the series (which haters dubbed “Conan the Indian”) and moved on. So why go back to the S&S trough? Why not stick to capes and spandex forever?

The only reason I can think of was it was a chance to work with Dark Horse Comics. The 1990s were a turbulent time for comics. Roy worked less and less for Marvel and DC and published with smaller independents like Topps, for which he wrote Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena, Warrior Princess (some of the other rare ’90s openly S&S comics). The 1990s were also hard times for Sword & Sorcery as a genre as book publishers moved away from obvious Howardian fantasy, preferring to chase Tolkien-clone bestseller dollars.

So there you have it. Dark Horse Comics. Roy Thomas, Cormac Mac Art. In a four issue mini-series, Dark Horse based their comic on all four of the stories from Tigers of the Sea. To draw Roy’s version of these stories was Eufronio Reyes Cruz, better known as E. R. Cruz, one of the distinctive artists to come from the Philipines after Alfred Alcala, like Ernie Chan, Tony DeZuniga, Alex Nino, Steve Gan, Jess Jodloman, Sonny Trinidad and Ruby Nebres. Cruz is best remembered for horror comics in the 70s and 80s. He also worked occasionally on Marvel magazines like Savage Sword. Naturally, Roy Thomas would remember him and want to work with him again. Some might criticize this choice, saying Thomas should have picked someone closer to John Buscema’s style but I am glad he did not. As much as I enjoy Buscema, especially when inked by Alcala or Chan, my favorite S&S pieces are often the ones that go against the grain, such as Alex Nino’s “The People of the Dark” (The Savage Sword of Conan #6 (June 1975) (see below). Cruz gives the images Thomas penned a new, refreshing feel. The covers by John Bolton are also nicely different and I think Howard would have liked them especially for their historic feel.

The first issue adapts the most supernatural of the four tales, “The Temple of the Abomination” which like “Tigers of the Sea” was completed by Richard L. Tierney (though the comic fails to mention this.) I suspect it was Tierney who added all the Cthulhu Mythos stuff. (In the intro to the book he says he wrote the last 500 words.) Howard would have been writing with the prestige Pulp, Adventure, in mind. The other three tales lack any monsters or magic and clearly show the direction the series was taking. The adaptation’s plot has Cormac and Wulfhere and the Vikings stranded on a remote island. At the center is a temple housing weird goat-like abominations and a druidic priest who is the last descendent of the Serpent Men. In a pit below the temple dwells an unseen shoggoth. The stained sword with which Cormac dispatches the druid follows him through more adventures until the blood resurrects the dark druid and the colossal shoggoth (which looks more like an 1990s action figure than a proper Lovecraftian shoggoth). Ultimately the creature is defeated by the statue of Bran Mak Morn from “The Dark Man”, another Howard story, in a creature explosion worthy of Ghostbusters.

In the final analysis, Roy Thomas plays with all the building blocks (both Howard’s and Lovecraft’s) of the four stories, combining characters, incidents and details in a mash-up to create a final Sword & Sorcery novel that Howard never wrote. Much as what Peter Jackson did with The Hobbit, it has the feel of the original but moves to a different purpose and tells another’s story. The end result is typical 1970’s Howard pastiche that is probably what most fans wanted anyway. I would have preferred Thomas had stuck to the original material such as Michael Allen Nelson did with Hawks of Outremer from BOOM Studios in 2010, and trusted that Howard fans could enjoy the tales without so much derivative meddling.

John Buscema may be the only person to have done as much work on Conan comics as Roy Thomas. Unlike Roy, I think he enjoyed drawing Sword & Sorcery. His images dominated the sub-genre so it can be nice to take a break from them sometimes with renderings that go in another direction. Here are a few of my favorite non-Buscema type Conan artists:

The original Barry Windsor Smith is always a fav. His last work on “Red Nails” was particularly good. His later work in the 1990s was a treat.

I mentioned Alex Nino’s single Savage Sword appearance. This is the color version used in Marvel Treasury #19.

Alcatena’s black & white work for Conan the Savage has a British feel to it reminiscient of both John Severin and Nemesis the Warlock. He is a master at complex but pleasing images.