Paneling: Savage Sword Of Conan #96

I swear I don’t really plan on this feature being all-Conan, all the time.

But as I’ve been making my way through the omnibus collection of the original Marvel series, the thief/reaver/slayer with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth has been on my mind a lot lately, and a batch of stories I’ve landed on featuring the return of an old enemy as well as the general state of things brought a certain panel to mind.

Of course, as you can tell from the title, that panel isn’t from Conan the Barbarian, and it’s one that often comes to mind anyway.

Let me, as is the way of my posts here, explain.

In the run of Conan stories I’m currently reading, written by Christopher Priest – going by Jim Owsley back then – the villain working unseen by Conan, who’s busy leading a rebellion against the emperor of Koth, is a character known as the Devourer of Souls who was first introduced in SSoC.

That’s the only place I’d ever seen him, as I was no longer reading Conan the Barbarian when these issues came out.

I commented on Bluesky that it was odd to see him in color, as I had only ever seen him in black and white – except for the limited color palette he sports on the cover of this issue, which I’d forgotten about – in my previous encounters with him.

Who is the Devourer of Souls? As the name suggests, he’s a devourer. Of souls.

He’s an otherworldly demonic creature who wears a dragon helmet and has the power to transform people into wriggling worms that he then eats or tucks away in a pouch on his belt like Napoleon Dynamite storing some tots to eat later.

In those stories, as noted, the Devourer is working behind the scenes after having been resurrected by some wizards, with everything that’s happening all leading up to a big confrontation in the 200th issue of the series.

This story from Michael Fleisher, John Buscema, and Ruby Nebres, however, is the one in which – spoiler – he dies, necessitating the later resurrection*, but here, as there, Conan has no idea that the Devourer is on his trail, as the last time the two had encountered each other, the Devourer had seemingly been killed, consumed by the very souls that provide him sustenance, as we see in a flashback.

*Update: Apparently, he came back again and died again in later issues of SSoC, which I did not remember, so his resurrection was actually from that death.

However, he had actually retreated to another dimension, but now he’s back and he’s on the hunt for revenge against Conan.

For his part, Conan is busy Conaning.

After fending off an attack by a gorilla with bat wings – as one does – he’s encouraged by the townsfolk who’d watched his fight from the safety of their homes to go find the monster and kill it.

Along the way to the tarn – a mountain lake – where the ape-bat is said to dwell, he rescues a lovely young widow named Lia from a giant praying mantis and gains the gratitude of her invalid brother-in-law, Zvevo, and a place to stay.

The long story short on that part is that Lia falls for Conan, the two do what comes naturally, and it turns out that Zvevo, who wants Lia for himself, given the power to transform by a spell from an ancient grimoire, is the ape-bat. They fight. Conan wins. Zvevo dies.

However, the danger isn’t over, as the Devourer has summoned more of his kind from his home turf and he shows up at the castle with his crew.

Conan makes a deal with the Devourer – real name Wrarrl – that if Conan can defeat him in single combat, his homeboys will agree to return to their own dimension. Wrarrl agrees, even though it’s not actually possible for them to return, as he’s confident in his victory.

With good reason – not only is he stronger and faster than Conan, his lightning sword has a numbing effect on the person wielding any blade it strikes.

The fight, like every soul he hasn’t eaten yet, is in the bag.

Or so it seems! While he definitely has Conan on the ropes, his downfall comes when he tries to administer the coup-de-grace and hits the Cimmerian with his soul-stealing vapor action…and nothing happens.

It’s as if Conan doesn’t even have a soul.

That’s actually the case, as prior to the fight, Conan arranged for Lia to use Zvevo’s grimoire to cast a spell to temporarily remove the barbarian’s soul. Stunned by this, Wrarrl has no defense as Conan runs him through.

Wrarrl’s crew doesn’t take kindly to him killing their leader, and though they can’t consume Conan’s soul, they can rip him to shreds.

However, once again Lia saves the day.

The grimoire Zvevo used to become an ape-bat, and Lia used to remove Conan’s soul, was a treasure found by Lia’s late husband. As he and his ship full of men returned with the tome, their ship crashed into a reef in a storm. Zvevo rowed out to the ship, murdered his brother and the few other survivors, took the grimoire, and then made up a story about becoming paralyzed while trying to rescue his brother.

And now Lia had used the grimoire to restore those dead men in the tarn to a semblance of life to save Conan, the man she has come to love.

As a weary Conan falls to his knees, his dead saviors make short work of the soul-eaters.

Lia restores Conan’s soul, and he compliments her on her quick thinking with the corpse army.

However, it’s not exactly a happy ending. There is, after all, a price that has to be paid, one Lia was willing to pay to save the life of the man who had saved her life so many times.

As Jason Voorhees can tell you, it’s lonely at the bottom of a lake even when you’re dead, and the only way the dead men would answer Lia’s call…

Conan is aghast, and tries to prevent it from happening, but he’s outnumbered and overpowered, and after one of the corpses knocks Conan out with a blow to the head, Lia is hauled away to her gruesome fate.

By the time he regains consciousness, it’s too late for Conan to do anything other than what he does in the final panel on page 56, the panel that prompted this post and so often pops into my mind, especially in trying times that leave me feeling powerless.

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