Savage Sword Of Conan #176, page 10

Here's an action page from SSOC #176. This ish was published in August 1990 and was the first Conan work I did. It was a jam issue with a few artists on a single but changing storyline, and I drew sixteen and a half pages for my story arc. (I did not write the story.)

Here, Conan has been taken captive and is being marched, with many other captives, along a cliffside trail to a hidden fortress where his doom awaits. After he gets laid, of course. In the Hyborean Age, doom always waits for sex. It should be like that for our age, too. But I digress.

The captives are all tied along a single rope, like you see little kindergarten kids all tied to these days walking downtown. Only these captives are adult, and walking along a cliff side rather than downtown intersections. The cliffside march for these captives is not as dangerous as the downtown walks for kindergarten kids, but it's still plenty dangerous enough for a Conan story.

Some clumsy idiot captive up ahead on the rope slips, dragging other stupid and expendable captives over the cliff with him. Conan starts to slide, too, but with his strong legs manages to hold himself from being dragged over. Since they're attached by rope, he's also keeping the men dangling over the cliff from plummeting to their deaths.

Naturally, the captors want to save a powerful slave specimen like Conan:
Slaver 1: "Quick, he's holding them up, we can pull the rope up and save them all!"
Slaver 2: "F*** those a$$40les. Have you seen this big guy's huge, superhuman breeder-loins?! And those thighs are to die for! I'd like me some of that, and I'm straight! The queen will love him in her bed. He'll probably last twice as long as the other scrawny fools she beds. So cut those other idiots loose and save this stud. Hey, enjoy your flight to the ground, guys!"

Okay, maybe the dialogue didn't go exactly like that. But it SHOULD have. They should have asked me to write it.

The paper we were given to work on SSOC was nifty: it had very light blue crosshatching. We were given two little jars of clearish liquid. We used a small paint brush, and one liquid would turn the crosshatch lines in one direction to black, like a chemical reaction. The other liquid would turn BOTH line directions black. It allowed for some extra tones. You have the white of the page, the black of your inked lines, then the fine lines in one direction for a light-grey-looking shading, and fine lines in both directions for dark-grey-looking shading. It's a little faded on this page, plus my photo of it sucks, so you can't see the tones that well. But they're there. Ingenious way for drawing paper to allow two tones of grey.

Thanks again to Carl Potts for the return of this page.