Conan the Barbarian #53 – “Brothers of the Blade” – Roy Thomas/John Buscema/Frank Springer
This one starts with Murilo and his Crimson Company (which includes Conan and his new squire, Tara) approaching the city of Ronnoco. The city leaders have hired them to recover the Ring of the Black Shadow, but their reception isn’t too warm, with archers firing at them from the walls. The misunderstanding is soon cleared up (although Conan’s still pretty pissed off about it) and the Prince of the city (Vanni) takes them to meet his
father, Belzamo. He explains that Ronnoco is engaged in a “commercial rivalry” with a couple of other cities, Carnolla and Pergona. Yvonna, the daughter of Pergona’s leader, is even now on her way to wed the son of Carnolla’s ruler (who by all accounts is no prize). Belzamo proposes that Murilo and his company kidnap Yvonna and bring her to Ronnoco to marry Vanni. Once the marriage is sealed, Yvonna’s father will have no choice but to ally with Ronnoco against Carnolla and with the Ring of Black Shadow on his finger, Belzamo will be the most powerful ruler in Ophir. Yvonna is being escorted by three warriors with various weapons grafted to their bodies, so Conan comes up with a plan to take them by surprise. He and Tara pretend to be 
beggars to get into the camp, but soon run into trouble when the mercenaries try to make sport of them. Yvonna protests (although she’s quite condescending about it), but is overruled. Conan ends up fighting two of the mercenaries while Tara takes care of the other one, performing her first kill. Conan wins and Murilo and his men sweep in to take care of the rest of the escort. Tara tosses a bucket of water on Yvonna when the princess suggests she take a bath, which Murilo finds hilarious. Meanwhile, the men Murilo left to guard the Ring of Black Shadow disobeyed orders not to touch the Ring and were swallowed up by a shadow. Murilo has sent some men with a special container for the Ring, but they’re also consumed by the shadow, which gets bigger every time it swallows someone up. This is a pretty good story, although a lot of it set-up
for the next issue or two. I like the intrigue between the Ophirian city-states (which Roy based loosely on the real-life rivalry between Milan, Venice, and Florence), and I like the contrast between the prim Lady Yvonna and the more down-to-earth (and kick-ass) Tara. It was interesting to see her reaction to killing someone for the first time. Tara seems to have the hots for Conan, but he implies that she’s too young for him; she’s said to be seventeen, which wasn’t all that young in those days, but I guess in a Comics Code-approved book a relationship between Conan and a teenager wouldn’t really work.
Conan the Barbarian #54 – “The Oracle of Ophir” – Roy Thomas/John Buscema/Tom Palmer
This one starts with Murilo and company arriving in Ronnoco with Yvonna, who’s been demanding to be returned to her father ever since they grabbed her from her escort last issue. While Conan and Murilo take Yvonna to meet Belzamo and his son Vanni (her future husband), a rider comes into town exhausted, his horse running wild. Tara gets the rider off the horse and recognizes him as Yusef, one on the men sent to get the Ring of Black Shadows. But Yusef has bad news and he and Tara push their way into the throne room to see Murilo. Yusef tells them how the shadow
swallowed up the entire cohort and they’re at a loss as to what to do. Conan suggests consulting an oracle and Belzamo mentions one only a few days’ ride away. Vanni proposes that Conan be the one to go see the oracle and Murilo agrees, sending Tara and Yusef along too. Conan figures Vanni is hoping something bad will happen to him, since he decked the Prince upon their first meeting. The trio head out to the mountains where the oracle lives, not noticing that someone is watching them. They encounter the oracle’s priest (Mustapho), who says Conan has to sacrifice his sword arm as payment to consult the oracle. Naturally, Conan refuses and they fight. Conan wins and takes the dead priest’s sword as payment before crawling into a narrow tunnel to see the 
oracle. She gives him a couple of cryptic prophecies and he’s shocked to see she’s just a skeleton sitting on a stone chair. After Conan leaves, we see a twisted old man named Renquis, who is apparently the voice of the oracle; she really is just a skeleton but Renquis uses ventriloquism to make her “talk”, sometimes even carrying out conversations with her … in other words, he’s crazy and talks to himself. Outside, Conan is ready to head back to Ronnoco when he finds he can’t leave. He remembers the oracle’s words and realizes that he’s taken the place of the man he killed, bound to this spot until someone else comes along and kills him in turn. But Conan can’t accept that and pushes his way through the mystic barrier, finding a soulless simulacrum of himself waiting. The two Conans fight, but the doppelganger is tireless. Conan recalls more of the priestess’s words and puts the sword back into the hand of the man he killed. The dead priest rises and fights the Conan
doppelganger, killing it before turning to attack the real Conan. But the barbarian is outside the radius of the spell’s influence, so the priest is condemned to be the oracle’s guardian again. Conan is rather freaked out by seeing himself die and ponders the priestess’s words about the Black Shadow as he and the others head back to Ronnoco. This is another pretty good story, although it’s mostly filler leading up to the climax of this multi-part tale. Roy took the guardian who’s replaced by the person who kills him from Frazer’s Golden Bough, and the ventriloquist talking through (and to) a skeleton is straight out of Psycho with Norman Bates and his mother.