Conan the Barbarian #153 – “The Bird Men of Akah Ma’at” – Michael Fleisher/John Buscema/Ernie Chan
This one starts with Conan crossing a rickety wooden plank bridge … a bit too rickety, as it breaks beneath him. Conan makes it to safety, but his horse doesn’t, so he heads to the nearest town (Syterna) to “acquire” a new one. He sees an attractive woman (Alhambra) being accosted by some soldiers. It seems she’s been chosen as the local baron’s latest conquest, but she has no interest in the dubious honour. Syterna’s doing pretty well for herself against the guards, but Conan takes exception to them shoving him around and joins the fray. The two of them
are captured by the city guard and tossed in a cell, but Alhambra uses a magic ring to blast a hole in the wall so they can escape. After fleeing the town, Alhambra introduces herself but before she can tell Conan who she is, they’re attacked by men riding giant mosquitoes. Conan is surprised to find out Alhambra has wings, which she uses to go after the oncoming horde. Conan manages to take out another attacker and commandeer his giant mosquito, just in time to catch Alhambra after she’s knocked out. Conan’s mosquito is wounded, so he and Alhambra crash-land in a lake. They stay under long enough for the attackers to assume them dead and leave, then Conan nurses Alhambra back to health. She tells him she’s part of a winged race called the Akah Ma’at, 
who live in a floating city far up in the sky. The Akah Ma’at have been fighting their mortals enemies (the Ur-Xanarrh) for centuries, using a magic-powered cordon of rods to keep them out of the city. But the rods have to be recharged periodically and before the latest recharging, a traitor called Thaltar stole the power cylinder. He was blasted and fell to earth, so Alhambra and others were sent to retrieve the power cylinder. By travelling in the direction the mosquito riders went, Conan and Alhambra come upon a castle, located near where Thaltar must have fallen. They find the bodies of Alhambra’s friends and a wizard (Raskos B’quen) who took the power cylinder from the dead Thaltar. Raskos has been spying on them and now knows the cylinder’s secret, so he orders his mosquito-riders to kill them. Conan wastes them,
but Alhambra takes an arrow in the back. Conan goes after Raskos but has to fight a three-headed lizard, kinda like a hydra but luckily without the regenerating heads. Conan kills the lizard, but Raskos gets away and with her last breath Alhambra begs Conan to save her people. This is an all right issue, although it has more of a sci-fi feel to it than sword & sorcery. Mike Fleisher must have a thing about bird-people and soldiers on flying mounts … I think he featured those in a few Warlord issues as well. I noticed that Fleisher sets most of his stories in or near Cimmeria, which seems a bit strange to me. Robert E. Howard’s Conan was a wanderer, rarely returning to the land of his birth.
Conan the Barbarian #154 – “The Man-Bats of Ur-Xanarrh” – Michael Fleisher/Gary Kwapisz/Bob Camp
Continuing right from the above issue, Conan pursues Raskos on a flying insect as the wizard heads to the sky city of Akah Ma’at with the power cylinder. Conan is ambushed by winged warriors from the city and captured, but Raskos gets through to the palace of the Ur-Xanarrh and demands to see their leader, figuring the cylinder is the perfect bargaining chip. In Akah Ma’at, Conan tells the king he knows where the power cylinder is and swears to recover it, so the king frees him. In Ur-Xanarrh, Raskos tries to bargain with the king, but the princess (Lyzala) kills the wizard and the king prepares to invade Akah Ma’at. Conan is given a giant eagle as a mount and intercepts some of the Ur-Xanarrh, but the eagle is
killed and Conan crash lands in the castle where he’s captured. Naturally, he won’t answer the king’s questions, so he’s taken to the torture chamber to be broken. Luckily for Conan, Princess Lyzala has the hots for him and lets her guard down long enough for him to break free. He finds the power cylinder in the king’s treasury and takes Raskos’s giant dragonfly to escape, shooting down several pursuers with a bow. Conan makes it back to Akah Ma’at with the cylinder and leads the winged warriors against the Ur-Xanarrh attackers. Conan fights the army leader and kills him but gets ambushed by Lyzala, who’s still pissed off about him using her to escape. Before she can finish him off, 
she’s killed by Alhambra, who apparently wasn’t dead, just wounded. She takes Conan back to earth, leaving him with a peasant family to see to his care. This issue is better than the previous one, although the sci-fi elements are still there. It was cool to see Conan wasting the Ur’Xanarrh, and I liked the big fight between them and the Akah Ma’at. I did think Alhambra’s miraculous recovery and rescue of Conan were a bit convenient, but whatever. I like Gary Kwapisz’s art too; he does good action scenes and certainly knows how to draw beautiful women (including Lyzala, who looked pretty good for a demon-girl).