CTB #35
The familiar team of Thomas, Buscema, and Chan give us The Hell-Spawn of Kara-Shehr. Freely adapted from "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" by Robert E. Howard. Conan and his companion Bourtai, who Conan casually calls Monkey-face, happen upon a man beset by desert nomads. Conan tries to help the guy, but the nomads spear their quarry and then run off to get some of their buddies to help handle Conan. The three of them flee and the wounded man soon spouts the usual tantalizing clues about treasure and danger that send a guy like Conan off on yet another adventure.
Conan and Bourtai get lost in a sandstorm but soon stumble upon the lost city if Kara-Shehr. The double page spread depicting the city is really nice, but also is about half of what it could have been with some better inking. I won't lay the blame entirely at Chan's door though. Given the variability in Buscema's pencils, which can range from very loose to nearly finished, Chan might have done the best he could with what was given him.
An amusing exchange follows where Conan shows good sense for a change and decides to not enter the ruined city, but Bourtai goads him into it, using Conan's own words from earlier. They discover a skeleton with a blazing azure gem in its hand. In a deliberate inversion of the trope, the skeleton does not come back to life to defend the jewel as Conan (and perhaps the reader) expected.
The brigands from earlier show up and Conan and Bourtai are soon captured. The leader is from CTB #27 and wants revenge for the cut that deprived him of sight in one eye. With a character like Conan, I'm not sure it was even necessary to connect the brigand's leader to a previous story. In the original tales someone often popped up that already knew Conan and bore him some grudge. He was the Wolverine of his day in that way. In the end, three men each touched the cursed azure stone, but only two tried to take it. They were the ones that found themselves magically skeletonized. Conan briefly mourns Bourtai's death and leaves the ruined city.
The original version of this story starred the "lean and wiry" Occidental adventurer Steve Clarney and his "big Afghan" companion Yar Ali. Some things got switched around when it was made into a Conan tale. As with pretty much all of Robert E. Howard's original stories, The Fires of Asshurbanipal is now public domain. The text can be found online, so if you want to compare the Conan comic to the original, you can get started here.
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