A Witch Shall Be Born: An REH Classic

 

he two covers of "Savage Sword of Conan," both illustrating the famous scene from the REH classic "A Witch Shall be Born." The left one is by Boris Vallejo from back in the seventies, and the right one is by Joe Jusko for the current issue of Savage Sword. The seventies issue contains the actual adaptation of Howard's story by Roy Thomas and John Buscema. The new issue only contains a bunch of Conan short stories by current writers and artists. Good stuff, but I'd rather they'd just done a new adaptation of Howard's "Witch". For those of view unfamiliar with the story itself, it's about a good queen named Tamaris who is replaced by her evil twin sister Salome, the witch of the title. Every few generation a girl child is born with a witch's mark, and is left to die in the desert. An cruel act it would seem, only she truly is a witch, and very evil one. She is saved a wizard, and returns to get her revenge on Taramis, locking the real queen in the dungeon. Conan fingers her as an imposter, and she has the guard captain Constantius nail Conan to an X-cross out in the Turanian desert. Conan survives of course, the witch is defeated, and Taramis restored--but not before Conan slays a demonic creature Salome keeps and feeds her enemies to. And then our Cimmerian hero takes ferocious revenge on Costantius. The scene of the crucified Conan was incorporated into the 80s Conan movie, as was the Lin Cater pastiche "The Thing in the Crypt." The movie story though, is entirely different. The same thing was done with the red-cloaked ape from "Rogues in the House", for Conan the Destroyer.

People of the Black Coast: An ERB Connection

 

I first read REH's "People of the Black Coast" back in the days when I scoured the used paperback bookstores, for collections of Howard's fiction; I really hadn't known what I was missing until I read the Baen paperback: Cthulhu: Mythos and Kindred Horrors, a book that contained "Pigeons from Hell", perhaps the most terrifying story I'd ever read. The book was called "Black Canaan," the title of another Howard horror story contained within, with a cover illustrating "Black Coast" by artist Ken Kelly. The above pic is of another illustration for the same story, also by Kelly for Beyond the Borders, part of the "Robert E. Howard Library series of books released during the nineties. Both are out of print nowadays.

The story is a bizarre one: a man and his young finance are marooned on a strange island whose beach is backed by towering basaltic cliffs. While the hero is exploring to find the extent of the cliff wall, a terrible tragedy strikes; the man returns to find the girl dead and dismembered. Sick with grief, he wanders until collapsing with exhaustion. When next he wakes, to his horror he finds himself surrounded by the young woman's killers: enormous crab-monsters, whom he senses possess a vast intelligent, perhaps beyond his own. He muses that he felt as wild beasts must feel "when first confronted by men." I surmises that killed his fiance "to satisfy some useless scientific experiment." Fearsomely armed though they are, the protagonist is able to slay them with his blugeon, finding they have evolved to be less coordinated then their smaller brethren, presumably the result of their great intellect, similar to how humans have become weaker thanks to civilized degeneration. This gives our hero the advantage, and he spends the rest of his existence hunting and exterminating the creatures. The crab-monsters do, however, possess terrifying mental powers that can stun and overwhelm an attacker, perhaps to compensate their lack of physical prowess. The narrator tells us that they are at slower ebb at dawn, and that he must "strike and kill quickly, as a lion must kill an armed hunter before the victim can aim and fire." He plans he will eventually ascend up to the demon-city high in the cliffs where he will slaughter, and finally be slain himself, as a final act of vengeance. "They slew my mate, I take their lives."

Like many other non-Conan stories, this was adapted into a Conan tale by Roy Thomas called "Man Crabs of the Black Cliffs." This issue I never particularly cared for as the art by Buscema and Chan made the creatures appear more humanoid than they are in Howard's original. The crabs of the black coast have evolved sentience without evolving a form parallel to that of humans, something likely to be true of intelligent aliens, should they exist. 

But the really interesting thing about "People of the Black Coast" is that the intelligent crab scientists Howard's nearest equivalent of the Mahars, the sentient rhamphorynchoid pterosaurs of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar stories. Possessed of cold, vast intellect, seeing humans as mere curiosities to be studied and exploited, the similarity is striking, especially their frightening mental powers that can paralyze or kill a foe. There is a hint that this is also how they communicate with one another, in the same fashion as the Mahars, with powerful currents of intellect. The hero, though,  never establishes communication with them; he doesn't care to, seeking only revenge. 

Robert M. Price, an authority on the works of Lin Carter, states in Lin Carter: A Look Behind His Imaginary Worlds, that "the Mahars are absent from (Zanthodon) Carter's version of Pellucidar." He does note that there is a species of giant vampiric leeches (the Sluggahs), which a dwarfish race called the Gorpaks worship as gods and offer human victims, comes the closest, but that "these lack the Mahars' malevolent intelligence. The professor character does perceive what seems to be an icy intellect burning in the eyes of one of the sluggahs, but basically the leech-monsters are just animals, feeding off their victims as any other animal might. Very unlike Howard's crab-monsters, who are motivated by scientific curiosity.

This wasn't the case with my own (mostly unsuccessful) attempt at writing a Pellucidar-like lost world novel myself The Eighth Continent. True Mahar analogues are present, in the form of giant cephalapoid mollusks, which survived the end of the dinosaur era, and evolved intelligence in the intervening millions of years. They developed a communication system based on skin colors and patterns, a vastly more advanced form of what octopoid mollusks actually possess. They may own their existence to Howard as much as Burroughs. I also tried to incorporate lost human civilizations into the mix as well, a concept that didn't really work well. It would have been better to have the "Great Lords", dominating a world in habited soley by "cave people", similar to the world of the Mahars.

Conan: Cult of the Obsidian Moon

 

I just got finished reading Cult of the Obsidian Moon, the new Conan pastiche novel by James Lovegrove. It turned out to be not merely THE best Conan pastiches I've ever read, but one of the best novels I've ever read period. Okay, it's not in Howard's style. No other writer could match Howard's style, of course, and that's not to be expected.  That said, Lovegrove's style, like few other writers, is very engrossing, and keeps one turning pages until the finale. 

The story involves Conan teaming up with another Howard hero, a one-shot whom relatively few might have heard of, namely Hunwulf of the short story "Garden of Fear", one of the James Allsion stories, wherein the bedridden Allison relives past incarnations.  One need not have read "Garden of Fear" to enjoy this novel; the entire story is reiterated by Hunwulf as he explains to Conan about his past. To brief it, Hunwulf and his mate Gudrun flee their Aesir tribe to escape retribution from his kinsmen, as he has slain a fellow Aesir to claim her. Gudrun, whom Howard describes as much more beautiful than any woman of the modern age, is abducted by a bizarre winged humanoid, and flown to a black tower, surrounded by a circular field of vampiric blossoms which drain to blood of anyone foolish enough to venture within. Hunwulf uses fire to stampede a herd of mammoths who crush the flowers, after which he is able to scale the tower and rescues Gudrun, slaying the winged creature in the process. The story was adapted by Roy Thomas and drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith back in the early days of the Conan comic, with Conan himself in the Hunwulf role. It is not known exactly if Howard intended Hunwulf's saga to take place in the Hyborian age, but Lovegrove assumes that it does, and who's to say he's wrong. 

Anyway, Conan befriends the couple following a bar fight in Eruk, a small Shemite town, and he learns that the two have spent most of their lives on the run from Ragnar Leifson, and his small band of Aesir warriors, bent on revenge for the slaying of Ragnar's brother. Ragnar was formerly a friend of Hunwulf's, but now he plans a most gruesome death for him and Gudrun for betraying their tribe. We also learn that Hunwulf and Gudrun now have a nine-year-old ashen-haired son named Bjorn, whom Conan befriends and teaches; Bjorn seems very like a young Conan himself. In another reference to Howard's James Allison stories, Hunwulf has knowledge and visions of past lives. This gives him the power to partially predict the future, and sues this psychic gift to win at gambling. Bjorn seems to have inherited a form of his father's powers, and can establish a psychic bond with animals, which he does with a street dog about to attack him, the first time he and Conan meet. 

As the next paragraph might contain spoilers for the middle portion of the novel, skip it if you don't want to know.

At Conan's advice, the Aesir couple leave to set up a trap for the pursuing Ragnar. They leave Bjorn in Conan's charge, but a wily, treacherous thief, whom Conan had assumed killed in an opening scene, appears, claiming he wants to treat Conan to a drink at a local tavern. Conan does not fully trust the man, but takes him up on the offer anyway (one wonders why). The thief, of course, betrays Conan to corrupt city guard, and meanwhile, Bjorn leaves his hiding place and ends up captured by Ragnar. Conan manages to bribe the guard captain, kills the man who betrayed him, and he, Hunwulf and Gudrun set out in pursuit of Ragnar and the kidnapped boy. It's at this point that, while Ragnar and his cronies are sitting about their campfire discussing their plans, with Born trussed up as bait, that we learn that Ragnar may still some measure of honor about him, but has become blinded by his desire for vengeance. One of his friends says he wants to kill the boy right there for wounding him during his capture, but Ragnar insists the boy be used as bait. Right about then a mysterious winged monsters tears out of night sky, slaying all of the seasoned warriors, save Ragnar, who is still fatally wounded, then makes off with Bjorn. When Conan and his friends ride into their camp prepared for battle, they come upon the scene of slaughter, with Bjorn nowhere in sight. The dying Ragnar relates what happened to Hunwulf, and they at least establish somewhat of a truce at the end, Ragnar seeing now only the friend that Hunwulf once was. 

Then the real quest begins.

I am not not going to relate anything further beyond this point for fear of spoilers, but I will say that I first expected that the winged monster was some kin of the creature that captured Gudrun in the original "Garden of Fear"; (references to both this, and the winged ape-like monster that slew Belit in "Queen of the Black Coast" are referenced throughout the novel), seeking some vengeance of his own. This proved not to be the case at all; the race of Bjorn's abductor (yes, there's more than one of them), are referred to as scaley and lizard-like, whereas the being in "Garden" was more manlike with ebony skin, more like Howard describes the yagas of the planet Amulric in the novel by the same name. Moreover, the creature in "Garden" and the winged ape of "Queen", themselves appear to be of disparate races, the latter being the last degenerate member of a highly advanced technological species. 

If this is ever adapted into comics form for Savage Sword or Conan the Barbarian, it would span several issues, not a single one like the Chuck Dixon novel I covered in a previous post. 

Anyway, this is very good novel, easily the best Conan pastiche I've read so far.

Titan's New Conan Comics (In General)

 

In general, as most other people are saying, Titan's new Conan the Barbarian is a return to the Conan comic's glory days, or at least as near as possible. Jim Zub is a solid writer, and Robert de la Torre, though a Buscema riff, is actually better, if anything, than the style he's riffing on. Doug Braithwaite has his own style, but is as good as most of the Old Masters of the 80s and 90s Conan comics. The first story arc, where Conan teams up with a Pictish female warrior named Brissa to defeat an army of Pict-zombies was pretty much excellent, but the Kull vs. Conan via sorcery tale that followed was even better. I believe it happened before back in the day--yes, at least once in a graphic novel. But here we get links to Conan's past (future?), notably the re-encounter with Yag Kosha, the emerald-skinned elephant headed extratrrestrial, who "remembers" what Conan did/will do for him in that future age.

Now when I first saw de la Torre's depiction of Kosha on one of the alternate covers, I suspected that they were either doing a new adaptation of that story (would have been fine by me), or just wanted to do a scene from that tale as cover, but with no connection to the Zub's current story. But now, the cover actually ties on with the story. Then, of course there is the revival of Thalsa Doom, a villain technically created by Howard, who Conan will later battle in the Hyborian Age. Note: the first Conan movie barrowed the name for the main villain played by James Earl Jones, but the original version was not the same. 

I'm not quite so sure about the new companion Savage Sword of Conan. Generally, yes, I'd say it's a return to the good old days; who would have thought B&W Conans would really be available in the old format, complete with pin-ups, editorials and all? The first issue story though, seemed just okay, as barbarian comics go. Not bad, just okay--nothing to compare the old yarns spun by Roy Thomas and Micheal Fleisher. The art looked too computery, and some readers had issues with the grayscale (I didn't so much).  Like I said it's okay, but its the back-up story Solomon Kane, that has really excellent art and story, a bit like a reverse of the old Savage Sword, where the lead stories were the ones with the better art. The quality lasted throughout the Kane story, but the second issues lead Conan tale had art that again was okay, but seemed a bit sketchy. The werewolf story in the third was drawn by Dark Horse comics; great Cary Nord, who probably qualifies as one one of the New Masters of Conan art, but his more painterly techniques he used with the Dark Horse Conan's would have been better. 

    As for the Black Stone series, its a treat to see Howard's other lesser seen heroes like Steve Allison and El Borak get the comic book treatment. But the story and art I just don't care for so far. So basically, much as enjoy the return of Conan to comic form, I'm still a bit lukewarm on the latter two. 

    

The Early Adventures of El Borak

The new collection of Robert E. Howard's El Borak tales features a T-rex-like dinosaur on its cover. Initially i supposed that this might be just a gimmick to sell the book, as non-Howard tale, as I have one El Borak collection and I was not aware of any dinosaurs anywhere in the pages.

Turns out I was wrong.

The El Borak stories are not ones I've read as extensively as the Conan ones, mainly for the reason that there's very little in the way of fantastic (not necessarily supernatural) elements in the stories, the one exception being El Borak's encounter with a carnivorous gray ape, not unlike the ones that tend to turn up in the Conan stories.

I was surprised a bit to find that the vast majority of tales here were fragments and unfinished. The cover picture is from "The Land of Mystery", a tale that pays homage to H. Rider Haggard's tales of lost realms in the heart of Africa. Now I really haven't read Haggard, because from what I know of them, they're basically lost world tales without dinosaurs. (Yes, there was that proposed movie that was a crossover with Sherlock Holmes and Quartermain, who encountered prehistoric beasts kept alive by the Flame of Irridar from Haggard's She, as I've written elsewhere--but that's not canon).

Howard, however, does not make the same mistake here. The story starts in a drawing room, wherein El Borak and some friends, including Howard's other hero James Allison, are sitting around, listening to El Borak tell of this adventure. While exploring a remote region in the Congolese Africa, El Borak enters a land inhabited by two feuding tribes, one friendly, the other hostile. He penetrates a forbidden land, and first encounters tree-living gorillas far more aggressive than ordinary ones, something like the gray killer apes of Michael Critchton's Congo. He enters a strange, eerily silent forest that all humans and even the savage gorillas shun. This is where he comes face to face with a living theropod dinosaur. The scene has an air of fantastic unreality, even for El Borak, who has experienced many strange sights. There is a certain spookiness to the encounter, something that is a signature of Robert E. Howard. He feels as though he has been transported back to a primitive era, and that the rile he carries is now a stone-age ax.

The theropod bounds toward him like an enormous kangaroo, a method of locomotion once believed to have been true of giant theropods, but is now known to be incorrect--the same was true for the allosaurus in Burroughs' The Land that Time Forgot. He manages to fell the beast with two slugs from his rifle and ventures on. He catches glimpses of the other dinosaurs in the weird forest, but none other attacks him. He makes it of the forest, across a vast swamp and plain and into an unknown range of mountains. There he encounters a lost city of strange architecture that at first appears to be abandoned. It turns out there are remnants of what must be the builders still living there, a strange white race that might be the descendents of a lost colony of--what? Atlantis? Lemuria? Mu? Howard doesn't tell us, because the story stops after the hero rescues a blonde, violet-eyed girl from large men who seem to be soldiers of some sort. Where the story would have gone after that is anyone's guess. As its merely a fragment, though a fairly lengthy one, it would doubtless have been submitted to Weird Tales. Still, it's a major find on my part and wonderful to read and own this vintage Howard Tale after I thought I'd already consumed all of his weird fiction.

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Wrarrl the Devourer (with a bit on Imhotep the Ravager)

 

Cover of SSOC #96 by Joe Jusko

Wrarrl the Devourer of Souls is a reoccuring antagonist of Conan, apparently created by Michael Fleisher, and introduced in Savage Sword of Conan #90. He is of an other-dimensional race of beings bent of conquering the earth. He he wears a bat-winged helmet that partially conceals his inhuman visage, and sometimes rides a bat-winged horse. His main magical ability is to reduce human beings to "souls" which look like worms, which he devours, hence his name. The columnist of Savage Sword, in answer to a reader's query "why worms for souls?" replied it was "Because that's how Wrarrl sees human souls. To him they're bite-sized tasty treats. Yummy!" 

   The Devourer was first summoned to this dimension by a sorcerer named Meldark, who sought a jewel that would open a door to Wrarrl's realm, from which the Devourer's legions could pour forth into Conan's world. This was when Conan first fell afoul of him. Unfortunately for Wrarrl, he tried to double cross Meldark, and the wizard caused the souls in the Devourer's pouch to grow huge and suffocate him. As with Bor'que Sharaq, it appeared that the Devourer was destroyed, but we learned later on that he was merely banished to another realm. 

Conan encountering the Ape-Bat, a lycanthropic spawn of sorcery

    Wrarrl returned to Hyborian age earth, seeking revenge on Conan, and to release his minions once more in SSOC #96, in another Fleisher story called "the Ape-Bat of Marmert Tarn." The story's intertwined plot has Conan encounter a town whose windows and doors are bolted every night. The reason for this soon becomes clear, as a saber-fanged, bat-winged ape-creature is terrorizing the town after dark. After his first brush with the monster, Conan saves a girl from a giant cliff-mantis. It turns out, she is the daughter of a local wizard who lords over the town of Marmet Tarn. As for the ape-bat itself, the creature is very like the one in Howard's own tragic "Queen of the Black Coast," who kills Belit, incurring the wrath of Conan. While that beast was the degenerate last specimen of a vanished race, the ape-bat of Marmet Tarn, is of entirely different origin; Conan soon finds proof that the monster and the wizard are one. The girl's father transforms by sorcery into the creature every night to terrorize the villagers. Meanwhile, Wrarrl has returned and is seeking vengeance. A brief scene occurs early one when some cat-throat brigands mistake Wrarrl for a rich traveler--a fatal error, as one could predict!

I just happened upon this Ernie Chan pin-up of Conan and Wrarrl

    After vanquishing the ape bat, there is the inevitable showdown with the Devourer. The rescued girl reads a spell incantation from her father's tome, which temporarily steals away Conan's soul rendering him invulnerable to Wrarrl's magic, and allowing him to slay the Devourer with his sword. Wrarrl"s minons are still there, however, and immediately seek revenge for the death of their master, attempting to dismember the souless barbarian, by "rippling off his limbs, gouging out his eyes," etc. The sorcerer's daughter once again saves Conan by summoning a horde of zombified drowned sailors, but, tragically, sacrifices herself , as they drag her into the sea as well, leaving Conan to contemplate the soridness of the human condition.

    The Devourer, of course, is still not really dead. Wrarrl's next appearance was in Savage Sword #109. In the previous issue, who's main plot involved Conan's conflict with another antagonist, the  traitorous Nemedian inventor Pol Tiurno (more on him in another post), a subplot had the Devourer's minions seeking a sacrifice to summon their master back to the Hyborian realm. This involved the murder of a girl who had just been cruelly rejected, which was a bit disturbing. This sublpot leads directly to the main story of the following issue,called "The Shatterer of Worlds." 

    This was quite an atypical issue of Savage Sword, as Conan was not even the main character, and didn't even feature that much until the end. The story centers instead around a young boy who is learning a trade, and happens to be a huge fan of Conan. Yes, Conan's exploits had become widely renowned by this time, enough that he had his admirers among the Hyborian common folk! 

    In any event, the lad comes across the body of a harlot murdered by Wrarrl's minions, and overhears their plot to raise the Devourer from the dead. The boy takes the most logical course of action-- naturally, he seeks out his hero! After coming across the victims of brawls, swordfights, and a gaggle of young pretty women who have been "tired out" by Conan, the boy at last manages to track the Cimmerian down. Unfortunately, he happens to barge into to Conan's room at an inn, when Conan is in the midst of making love to another girl! Conan is understandably annoyed at this, though it's a bit of headscratcher why he does not at first take the lad's story seriously; Conan has seen far too much in his travels, even battled to Devourer twice already, not to at least consider that Wrarrl might be coming back. 

                                                          

   The truth soon becomes apparent of course; Conan's current love interest is soon captured by the Devourer's minions, and though Conan manages to save her from the sacrifice, a few droplets of the girl's blood are all it takes to revive Wrarrl, back and ripe for conquest! Unfortunately, though, the Devourer becomes enraged upon discovering his acylotes have inadvertently released another otherwordly being known as the Shatterer of Worlds. This elder-horror resembles a gigantic eyeball surrounded by writhing tentacles. Realizing that the Shatterer will simply destroy Conan's world before he can conquer it (along with Wrarrl"s own dimension!), the Devourer forges a temporary alliance with Conan. Gorging on the souls of his transformed minions, Wrarrl rises up to confront the Shatterer of Worlds. It's all over swiftly, and the world is saved once again. It's somewhat of a departure from the standard Conan formula, and a unique SS plot, though it's a bit disappointing that neither Conan nor Wrarrl feature that much until the very end. 

    That was Wrarrl's last appearance in SSOC. But unlike Bor'aque Sharaq, who was never seen outside SSOC, the Devourer did reappear in the Conan the Barberian color comic, under Jim Owsley's reign. This occured shortly after a rather lengthy story arc by Owsley, in which involved Conan and a few allies (including Keiv, a man turned into a plant-creature by sorcery, a guy who didn't like Conan named Delmario, and a girl named Tetra) with a mad Kushite called El Sha Madoc, who fancied himself a god, and presided over a Kothian city-state by the same name. Tetra, by the way, a girl whom Conan was in love at the time, died and was replaced by a demonic entity that was a duplicate of her, who absorbed her feelings and was love with Conan! But that whole story is way to convoluted to relate here, other than it involved a lot of political intrigue. 

    Well, one other thing is notable: Owsley invented an otherworldly antagonist of his own named Imhotep the Ravager (not to be confused with the real-life historical pharaoh of the same name). This entity wore blood-red robes, and ALSO rode a bat-winged stallion (though the horse, too, was blood-red), ALSO commanded a legion, and was bent on world conquest. Imhotep and his legions are ravaging across the Hyborian realm, leaving city after demolished city in their wake. El Sha Madoc lies straight in their path when Conan and his allies become embroiled in local politics. It is during a battle that Imhotep finally shows up, and he and Conan battle, in what seems like a duel to the death. But Conan manages to best Imhotep, and the latter calls a truce between them. After the rule of Madoc is shattered, Imhotep rides off into the sky, promising Conan that when they next meet "it will not be as allies." This proves not to quite the case however, when Imhotep once more returns, but this time in SSOC, under the new reign of Roy Thomas, when he again strikes a bargain with the Cimmerian against a common foe. 

    But back to Jim Owsley and Wrarrl. A sect of wizards known as the Council of Seven, seeking to assume political power over the city of El Sha Madoc ressurect the Devourer as an ally to their cause. The Council does not want Jahli, a young boy and heir who stands in their way, to ascend to the throne, and have him murdered. Conan fails to save Jahli's life, and swears vengeance on those responsible. I recall the final scene of one issue, in which one smarmy little man "fears later facing the Devourer," and taunts Conan that he killed the boy himself, and enjoyed doing so. Conan responds accordingly by hacking him to pieces. The cult member who actually committed the murder is, in fact, later transformed by Wrarrl and devoured! I kept think thinking that the poor kid would actually turn up alive. Unfortunately for Jahli, it never happened. Jim Owsley was a very good, but also very depressing writer, who had little hesitation in killing off any character. Sort of like the Stephen King of Conan comics. 

    The Devourer was still around for several issues more however, also written by Owsley, in which he was in more direct conflict with Conan, but when Buscema left and a different artist was brought, I really didn't collect many more issues of Conan the Barbarian, so I can't really say much, save to look up online sources for him. I don't know if there was a final fate for the Devourer, but as he seems essentially immortal, we have not likely seen the last of him. There is a new action figure based on Wrarrl. I'm still waiting to see if Wrarrl will ever come into to conflict with Sharaq. Or with Imhotep, which would be a far more even match. 

 Wrarrl capturing a young girl who apparently harbored powers, from later in Owsly's reign.  According to online sources, Wrarrl attempted to transform her and devour her soul, but since the child was innocent, it backfired, and the child was restored to life! This was a Jim Owsley tale, apparently in a Conan annual. I don't have the issue, but apparently Owsley sometimes spared character's lives after all

Titan's Conan #9

 This Roberto del Torre cover for Titan's comics' Conan The Barbarian 9 got my hopes up that they were adapting Howard's "Tower of the Elephant." Del Torre IS returning for this story arc, but so far as I can tell, it's a brand new story. Howard fans will recognize the scene in which Conan confronts the elephant-headed alien, Yag-Kosha, and it is a much better rendering than Cary Nord's for Dark Horse, as accomplished an artist as Nord is. But shouldn't Kosha be green? I suppose it's the lighting. Anyway, it appears they are NOT adapting the story, so no one get their hopes up. Or is it possible that Conan and Yag-Kosha will cross paths again? Doubtful, this DOES appear to be a scene from that story--Kosha is chained to the throne, presumably by the evil sorcerer who has enslaved him.