Conan the Barbarian #149 – “Deathmark” – Bruce Jones/John Buscema/Ernie Chan
This one starts with Conan riding through a forested area near Cimmeria. He hears a cry of pain and finds a dead man who’s missing an arm. He sees a rider hurrying away and assumes it’s the killer, but when he catches the rider it turns out to be the dead man’s son. The kid tells Conan they were going to Travania to meet his father’s friend Valik, so Conan offers to take him there. But Valik is lying dead in the middle of town, also missing an arm, and the villagers blame Conan. He beats them back and leads the kid back to the
forest, where the kid tells him his father and Valik were in the same regiment and were supposed to go to a twenty year reunion of their unit. When they happen upon a funeral procession and Conan learns the dead man had his arm torn off and was heading north for some kind of reunion, he figures someone is killing all the members of the old regiment. The kid leads Conan to the reunion (which is taking place on an old battlefield), where Conan finds the regiment’s leader (Captain Pendak) and some recruits being attacked by Picts. Conan helps run them off and notices Pendak is missing an arm. When Pendak mentions a tattoo 
he used to have on the arm, the kid says his father had one too. Conan gets suspicious but Pendak insists the tattoos were just a drunken bonding thing amongst the soldiers and he has no idea who’s killing them off now, nor why. Two more of the old unit show up (Sim and Carth) and tell Pendak that there were eight of them when they started out, but the others were all killed and their arms were torn off. That night, Carth is killed while fetching water (and his arm is torn off) and Sim freaks out and runs off, babbling about someone named Bolar. Pendak tells them that he and the others were really brigands who invaded a gypsy camp where the leader told them of a treasure buried in a swamp that dries up every few decades. It was due to dry up again in twenty years, but none of the brigands
trusted each other, so they tattooed parts of a map onto their arms and agreed to meet again in twenty years. But the brigands wanted to rape the gypsy leader’s daughter before they left, with only Bolar objecting. In the confusion of the argument, the gypsy girl escaped so the brigands decided to kill Bolar and cut off his arm to get his portion of the map before going their separate ways. When Sim staggers into camp missing an arm and says Bolar attacked him, Pendak figures he’s crazy but whoever the attacker is has almost all the arms now. (I’m not sure how legible the map fragment on Pendak’s severed arm would be after putrefying for twenty years, but whatever.) Conan has Pendak draw a tattoo on his arm and leads them to the dried-up swamp. A zombie-type 
version of Balor attacks Conan but when it notices the paint wash off his arm it leaves. They find the other arms have been stolen, so Conan figures zombie Balor must have an accomplice. They track the thief to a cave where they find the gypsy girl who was almost raped and whose father was killed by the brigands twenty years ago. She admits she found Balor in the embers of her village and saved him so he could have his revenge, even though his mind is now gone. Balor attacks Pendak and Conan kills him, but not before Balor kills Pendak. The gypsy woman admits her father was lying and there is no treasure in the swamp, but she does agree to take the orphaned boy in as her own. This is a pretty good issue, with a rather macabre way of dividing up a map. It’s interesting that the whole thing turned out to be bullshit, but it was cool to see Balor and the gypsy girl get their revenge.
Conan the Barbarian #150 – “Tower of Flame” – Michael Fleisher/John Buscema/Ernie Chan
This one starts with Conan saving a beautiful woman from a mob of scumbags. They head out of town, not realizing that a baron named Turb’eq (who looks a lot like Marvel’s version of Odin) is looking for the woman. The woman seems rather naïve and tells Conan she spent her whole life in a tower in the middle of an ice-bound inland sea. She escaped to see the real world but found herself sickened by the cruelty and misery that abounds there. Turb’eq catches up to them and demands Conan turn the girl over to him. Naturally Conan refuses and
starts wasting Turb’eq’s men. When the girl is cornered by a couple of soldiers, we see she’s not quite as helpless as she looks, since she can shoot some kind of light from her hands and blind them. Conan gets her away from the baron and his men, taking her to an inn to rest (since her use of the light powers seems to have weakened her). The innkeeper gathers some thugs to grab the girl, hoping he’ll get a reward from the baron. Conan starts pounding them and the girl uses her power to save him, passing out afterwards. Conan finishes off the thugs and takes the girl to 
safety, but she’s getting weaker all the time and says she has to return to her tower. It turns out to be a tower of blue flame and when Conan gets her back inside, she transforms into her true form, a sort of protoplasmic creature from some other world or dimension. Turb’eq and his men find them and the baron admits he wants the creature for the otherworldly knowledge it possesses. Conan defends the creature, killing the baron and his men and restoring the creature’s faith in humanity. It dies and the tower crumbles, giving Conan just enough time to escape before it vanishes completely. This is an interesting story, with vaguely
Lovecraftian vibes although this otherworldly creature turns out to be sympathetic. It also reminds me of Tower of the Elephant, where Conan also meets a grotesque creature from another world and helps it instead of automatically feeling disgust towards it.