Conan the Barbarian #45 – “The Last Ballad of Laza-Lanti” – Roy Thomas/John Buscema/Crusty Bunkers
This one starts with Conan drinking in a tavern in Shadizar, trying to forget Red Sonja. A minstrel sings a sad ballad and Conan takes a liking to it, so when local toughs start giving the minstrel a hard time, Conan kicks their asses. The bard (Laza-Lanti) turns out to be a fighter too and saves Conan by tossing a dagger into a thug trying to sneak up on the barbarian. Conan and the bard decide to leave, but run straight into the city guard and are thrown in jail. Laza-Lanti sings another song, this time telling Conan his own life story. Basically, he was told by a midwife that he should beware
the Lord of Dark Valley (where Laza-Lanti was born) and he later thought he saw some kind of monster in the forest. Laza-Lanti thinks the Lord of Dark Valley may be his father and wants to go back there to confront him. He produces a hidden dagger from his lute and they escape, Conan deciding to accompany the bard since he saved his life at the tavern. When they reach Dark Valley, they come upon some peasants leading their cattle to Dagoth Hill as a sacrifice to the monster that lives there. Conan labels them cowards, but is rather impressed to see a beautiful young woman leading some cattle into the forbidding hillside. Conan and Laza-Lanti follow the woman (who Laza-Lanti finds somewhat familiar) and watch as she presents the cattle to an amorphous C’thulhu-esque monster. Laza-Lanti fears for the girl’s safety and attacks the 
monster, so Conan naturally jumps in to help. While Conan keeps the thing busy, Laza-Lanti kills it by severing its antennae. But instead of being grateful, the woman is pissed off and full of grief. She tells them she’s not as young as she looks, more like forty years old, which Laza-Lanti has trouble believing. The woman (Timara) tells them how she was once a dancing girl and joined a travelling minstrel show that ended up camping close to Dagoth Hill. She was taken by the monster and bore twin sons to him, one of whom is Laza-Lanti himself. Timara claims that she truly loved the “monster” because she saw into its soul, but now that it’s dead she reverts to her true age (although the way she’s drawn she looks way older than forty). She can’t live without her true love, so she kills herself and when Laza-Lanti realizes he’s responsible for the deaths of both his parents, he kills himself too. This is a pretty good story, even though it sometimes seems more like Laza-Lanti’s story than
Conan’s. This was a Roy Thomas original, although it was inspired by a villain named Tsotha-Lanti, who appeared in Robert E. Howard’s Scarlet Citadel, a Conan tale that’s set much later in the barbarian’ life. Roy decided to take a page from the Dunwich Horror and say that Tsotha-Lanti had a twin brother who wasn’t evil like him. Throw in a little Freudian theory, with Laza-Lanti symbolically castrating his father to save the hot woman who turns out to be his mother, and add a dash of real-life with the name Dark Valley (which was the place in Texas where REH lived as a child) and you get an interesting mix that makes a cool story. As I mentioned, Conan will eventually meet Laza-Lanti’s evil twin, but that’s a long way off.
Conan the Barbarian #46 – “The Curse of the Conjurer” – Roy Thomas/John Buscema/Joe Sinnott
This one starts with Conan riding through the wastelands of the Border Kingdoms, harried on all sides by demons called Yemli. He’s ready to die fighting them, but runs into a strange sorcerer named Merdoramon, who feeds him before mentioning that he needs Conan to do something for him. Merdoramon wants Conan to deliver a magic crystal amulet to a man named Themas Herklar in the city of Phalkar. Thema has two sorcerers beside him at all times and even though they helped bring him to power, he now needs the amulet to protect him from their evil magic. Conan agrees to deliver the amulet and the wizard vanishes, but leaves enough food for the
next day’s breakfast. Conan heads towards Phalkar, but stops at a village called Sfanol on the way. The villagers have a girl (Stefanya) tied to a stake ready for burning. They accuse her of consorting with a wizard named Zoqquanor, who they’ve already killed, although she denies it. When Conan objects to their treatment of the girl, he’s forced to kill some villagers before being allowed to leave with her. Stefanya tells him Zoqquanor must still be alive, since he put a binding spell on her so that if he dies, she dies as well. (Apparently, he was a real asshole to Stefanya and used the binding spell to make sure she didn’t stab him in his sleep.) Stefanya wants to find Zoqquanor’s body and hide it so nobody can kill it, thus ending her life too. Conan agrees to 
help and they go to the burnt ruin that was once Zoqquanor’s castle. They search the remains of the place but find more than they bargained for … a giant rock monster called Shokkoth. Conan wrecks his sword trying to kill the monster, before noticing that some spilled acid is dissolving it. He hurls more acid, completely disintegrating the monster and follows Stefanya into the next room, where Zoqquanor’s body lies somewhere between life and death. Stefanya swears she’ll bring him back to life or die trying. This story is based on “Kothar and the Conjurer’s Curse” by Gardner Fox, a name that will be familiar to fans of classic comic books. Fox’s Kothar stories were obviously Conan pastiches, but took a lot of inspiration from fantasy writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith (hence the complicated sorcerer names
and the Shokkoth, which sounds suspiciously like Shoggoth). Marvel seemed to have trouble keeping inkers on the book when Ernie Chan was away; the last two issues had “Crusty Bunkers” (which means Neal Adams and whatever apprentices happened to be in his studio at the time) and this issue has Joe Sinnott’s only contribution to the title. Next issue will have another inker (Dan Adkins) as well as the next chapter of this long adaptation of Gardner Fox’s Kothar book.