Conan the Barbarian #57 – “Incident in Argos” – Roy Thomas/Mike Ploog
This one starts with Conan, Tara, and Yusef arriving in Messantia, capital of Argos. Conan is looking for mercenary work and is very disappointed to find out Argos has just signed a peace treaty with Stygia. He takes out his frustrations on some arrogant guardsmen who think they own the streets. Conan and the others take off but realize all the city guards will be looking for them. Conan figures they should change their appearance, taking Yusef and Tara to a clothing shop and having them dressed as more respectable citizens
(over Tara’s vociferous objections). Conan heads out to get some more armour and is waylaid by a press gang who are selling people as galley slaves. We don’t see the face of the man purchasing Conan, but he’s wearing a pretty fancy ring. He directs his men to take Conan to the galley, but the barbarian wakes up and busts loose, fighting the thugs and some of the galley crew. He gets clawed in the face and jumps in the water to hide. An old seer named Momratha misdirects the slavers and takes Conan into her house. She tends his wounds and gives him a glimpse of his future in her enchanted bowl. Momratha then 
shows him what’s happening with Yusef and Tara, who are waiting at a tavern for Conan to join them. Conan watches as the guard captain they tangled with earlier comes into the tavern and puts the moves on Tara, who fights back. Yusef ends up stabbing the captain and they take off. When the vision fades, Conan heads straight to the tavern and runs into a bunch of guardsmen, who capture him. He’s taken before Ephemero Portus, the “maiming Judge”, who asks where Tara and Yusef are since he knows Conan was seen with them. Conan tells the truth: he doesn’t know where they are and wouldn’t betray them even if he did. That’s not good enough for Portus, who orders Conan thrown in the
dungeons to rot. Naturally, Conan doesn’t like that and starts pounding the shit out of the guards, getting hold of a sword and splitting the judge’s skull before taking off. We see (although Conan doesn’t) that the judge was the same guy who was supplying captives to the slave galley. Conan grabs a horse and heads for the docks, figuring he’ll be harder to catch out at sea. This is a pretty good story that leads into next issue’s meeting with Bêlit. Roy based this story on Conan’s recounting of his adventures in Argos to the crew of the ship he ends up on at the beginning of “Queen of the Black Coast”. Robert E. Howard just gave it a 
couple of paragraphs, but Roy expanded on it and made Yusef and Tara the nameless characters mentioned in the original, which gives some deeper context for Conan’s actions. Roy was a bit worried about Conan looking unheroic, so he made the judge corrupt, showing us that he was in league with the slavers. That detail wasn’t in REH’s original story; there, Conan killed the judge because he was frustrated with the narrow-minded hypocrisy of “civilized” people, but Roy thought he should make the judge crooked so he would “deserve” his fate.
Conan the Barbarian #58 – “Queen of the Black Coast” – Roy Thomas/John Buscema/Steve Gan
This continues straight from last issue, with Conan riding to the docks and jumping onto a departing merchant galley (the Argus) to escape the pursuing guards. He quickly impresses the ship’s master (Tito) with his story of why he was fleeing the guards and Tito invites him to stay aboard as hired muscle, which suits Conan just fine. The Argus is a small ship, only twenty-four crew, and she’s bound for Kush to trade various items for gold and ivory. They sail south and Conan gets a first look at lands like Shem and Stygia (neither of which the ship stops at, although
some “sirens” try to lure them to the Stygian shore) before seeing the Black Coast. But when the ship puts in at a village where Tito has had good trade in the past, they find the place decimated. Tito recognizes it as the work of pirates but says he isn’t afraid of the corsairs, except for one … Bêlit, the she-devil who commands the Tigress. Bêlit is from Shem but has an all black crew and is the most dangerous pirate on the seas. Of course, they run into Bêlit’s ship and end up fighting for their lives. When Tito is killed, Conan freaks and starts wasting Bêlit’s men, boarding her ship and laying waste to all within reach. 
That impresses the she-pirate and she calls for Conan to fight her best warrior if he wants his life to be spared. Naturally, it’s the same warrior who killed Tito and after a hard fight, Conan gleefully throws him to the sharks. Bêlit is really impressed now—and apparently pretty turned on too—so she asks Conan to become her pirate king, doing a sexy mating dance for him right there on the deck. I guess it works, because Conan agrees to join the crew and ends up making out with Bêlit after she finishes her dance. This story comes from the first part of Queen of the Black Coast, Robert E. Howard’s tale of how Conan became a pirate. The original story glosses over Conan’s time with Bêlit, which Conan scholars estimate to be about three years, but Roy wanted to detail Conan’s
career as closely as possible, so he ended up giving us three years of Conan/Bêlit stories, all of which he came up with himself since REH didn’t give much detail about Conan’s time with the pirates. Roy followed the opening part of Queen of the Black Coast pretty closely, but had to change a couple of details to keep the issue Code-friendly. In the original story, Bêlit was topless and she and Conan banged on the deck after her “mating dance”, but obviously that couldn’t be shown in a mainstream comic book in the 70s, so those aspects were toned down.