Sword-brothers, sword-sisters, it is time to pay the venerable spinner rack another visit!
76 spectacular pages of barbaric savagery in black-and-white printed on newsprint!
Inside this magnificent magazine you'll find the following treasures:
Jim Zub's introduction to his inescapable Battle of the Black Stone saga.
New Pin-Ups:
Conan by Nick Marinkovich
Conan by Fernando Dagnino Guerra
Solomon Kane by Patrick Zircher
Brissa by Dean Kotz
Conrad & Kirowan by Eryk Donovan
Dark Agnes by “The Animal” Bob Anger
El Borak by Mike Perkins
The Heroes of Man by Rob De La Torre
CONAN THE BARBARIAN: BIRTHRIGHT IN BLACK by Jim Zub and Fernando Dagnino
An homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). We are Beyond the Black River. The new Aquilonian province of Conajohara, Fort Tuscelan on the edge of the Pictish wilderness. Conan and friends are done fighting incredibly crazed, almost suicidal Picts. Conan decapitates their giant, he notices that the man mountain is wearing a bone necklace with a pendant fabricated from a fragment of the BLACK STONE incised with a familiar eye symbol (you must read Conan the Barbarian FCBD 2024).
Conan looks at the necklace and his soul is sent to prehistoric times, he is now a Neanderthal fighting rivals next to an alien monolith made of malevolent BLACK STONE. He reverts back to his modern incarnation and his given a bevy of beauties to bed. The BLACK STONE wants Conan to slay or else he will be effaced. Conan's BLACK STONE hallucination stops.
Does the barbarian destroy the mysterious eye sigil necklace? Nope, he keeps it so that it can continue to plague his subconscious.
SOLOMON KANE: BLOOD FROM A STONE by Patch Zircher
The Carpathian Mountains of Hungary. The time of Suleiman the Magnificent, when the Grand Turk swept over eastern Europe.
Kane is now working for Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Emperor).
Kane, Captain Janos Kodaly, Teo Zamparo, Bernhard Buhl and Lel Varga are being chased by Turkish Janissaries (the Ottoman Sultan's household troops). Varga gets killed.
Kane is suspicious of Kodaly, he's clearly leading them in the wrong direction.
Kane awakens to find Buhl dead... missing his heart.
The Janissaries attack, Kane and Zamparo are able to escape once again.
Kane and Zamparo find Kodaly performing a ritual with Bulhl's heart in front of a BLACK STONE obelisk engraved with strange characters.
Kodaly mentions the village adjacent to the obelisk, Stregoicavar aka Witch-Town, the village of his mother.
Kodaly thinks that "The Dark One" can free all of Hungary from the Turks.
The Janissaries reach the obelisk only to be torn apart by tentacles of darkness and The Dark One aka the Master of the Monolith, a huge monstrous entity.
Zamparo dies, Kane kills Kodaly before he can complete his ritual.
The Ungod vanishes and so does the bodies of the dead.
BRISSA: EVER AND NEVER BEYOND by Jim Zub and Dean Kotz
Brissa recalls the annihilation of Hauler's Roam in Northern Aquilonia by the zombie Army of the Lost in Conan the Barbarian #1.
Conan and Brissa were separated in Conan the Barbarian #3.
Brissa re-enters the Black Stone fortress and stumbles upon a pair of mutated zombies. The floor crumbles, Brissa falls into the abyss soup, she is teleported into the void, talks to her mother about finishing a hunt and is sent forward in time to James Allison's house (as seen in Conan the Barbarian FCBD 2024).
CONRAD & KIROWAN: HORROR FROM THE TOMB by Jeffrey Shanks and Eryk Donovan
Based on Black Eons, a fragment by Robert E. Howard.
The Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, 1935.
Professor John Kirowan (Not Quinoa) and John Conrad are riding camels en route to an archaeological excavation.
Archaeologist Brill and treasure hunter Steve (Not Kirby) O'Donnell have unearthed a sarcophagus that is not Egyptian... it's from the Hyborian Age.
O'Donnell has read the Nameless Cults/The Black Book by von Junzt,
The eye sigil on the stone coffin looks familiar, could it be from Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis/Mysteries of the Worm or the Necronomicon?
The sarcophagus is now missing its onyx gemstone. They discover Brill dead inside the coffin with the eye sigil carved on his chest.
They find O'Donnell possessed and chanting "not wait again rule again" "return Kathulos".
Kirowan kills O'Donnell, tentacles of darkness grab Kirowan, Conrad blows the source of the tentacles (possibly Gol-goroth) away with some dynamite.
O'Donnell's body is seen holding a BLACK onyx gemSTONE.
DARK AGNES: MATRIMONY by Fred Kennedy and Andy Belanger
We see Agnès de Chastillon being trained by Guiscard de Clisson, a leader of mercenaries and Free Companions.
Chartres (city in France). The breeches wearing Sword Woman sneaks into the grand estate of Duke Ilya Kursonovich.
Among Ilya's large arsenal Agnès spots the BLACK STONE sigil on a curtain.
Kursonovich, a sorcerer, puts Agnès to sleep, she wakes dressed as a bride in the village of la Fère. It's her wedding day. Her sister Ysabel gives her a dagger. But this time the dagger is not meant to be used to take her own life, to escape this forced marriage to a man she hates.
We are inside the church of the BLACK STONE, the red-haired girl's groom should be François, but it's now KURSONOVICH. Agnès dispatches the Duke by sheathing her dagger deep into his heart. She shoots through her startled forked-tongued bridesmaids, fights a bunch of BLACK STONE guards and flees through the forest. Like her father before them, the guards try to kill her with arrows. She trips into a stream, the hallucination ends.
Scoundrel/comrade Étienne Villiers of Aquitaine finds Agnès wearing a dirty dress (not her breeches).
Instead of going to the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey, Agnès much prefers to remain with Étienne in Chartres to pierce the mystery surrounding the BLACK STONE.
EL BORAK: BLACK OASIS by Ron Marz and Mike Perkins
The Arabian Desert. Francis Xavier Gordon aka El Borak ("The Swift" in Arabic) and a ten year old boy decide to hide out in a mysterious forbidden temple adorned with Cthulhu stone carvings. Francis sees the BLACK STONE eye glyph on one of the walls (as seen in Conan the Barbarian FCBD 2024).
Six kidnappers seeking the boy prince enter the dreaded temple. Xavier kills all six. Francis refuses to remain in the temple to heal from his wounds. Gordon brings the boy back to his father.
What I did like:
The Savage Sword of Conan will continue for another year. We are getting SIX more issues!
Robert E. Howard was only ten years of age when he created El Borak.
Archaeologist Jeffrey Shanks finally gets to write a story about Thulsa Doom aka Kathulos of Egypt (from Skull-Face).
Is Kursonovich related to Christopher Lee?
Is El Borak related to Douglas Fairbanks?
An advert for Conan: The Halls of Immortal Darkness by Laird Barron and The Heroic Legends Short Fiction Program!
2 strong women appear on the cover by Ben Caldwell and it is fantastic!
Brissa mentions Zingg Valley.
Plenty of pin-ups!
What I did not like:
The magazine should be independent, fully detached from all other Conan periodicals.
Zub is hogging the Cimmerian spotlight once again. Let other creators have a crack at Conan. This mag needs more NEW writers! The more the better!
The Brissa pin-up by Dean Kotz features animal cruelty. Disgusting!
The cover by Maria Wolf is amateurish, ugly and in poor taste.
The cover by David Palumbo looks like a screenshot from an old PlayStation 2 video game. Embarrassing.
Believe it or not, Palumbo's horrible PS2 cover is also offered as a virgin cover, but Ben Caldwell's amazing cover is not!
Kirby O'Donnell. The Harry Steele (Charlton Heston)/Indiana Jones of Robert E. Howard does not appear!
No removable poster in the middle of the magazine!
No variant cover by KyuYong Eom!
No variant cover by Puppeteer Lee!
No pin-up by Ryan Kinnaird!
No pin-up by Benjamin Marra!
Savage Sword is still only bimonthly!? It should be published monthly!
Still No essay by Fred Blosser!
No letters page!
I give it an 8/10. The Black Stone infects the entire mag, six Stone stories, almost all of them winners. The two tales by Jim Zub contradict prior events glimpsed in the comic. Still, I encourage all of you to support the Conan economy by purchasing this magazine! Go buy it!
