206 FANTASY
fi lled the void with eight Conan miniseries from 1997 to 2000, but Conan would not
appear in a regular series again until Dark Horse Comics took over the property.
Th e popularity of the Conan title prompted Marvel to try their luck with other
Howard sword-and-sorcery characters. Kull the Conqueror , the fi rst of three books with
that title, appeared in 1971. Kull and other Howard characters made appearances in the
Marvel magazines Savage Sword of Conan and Savage Tales. In 1975 there were three
issues of Kull and the Barbarians featuring Kull, Red Sonja, and Solomon Kane. Red
Sonja got the fi rst of her three Marvel titles in 1976.
Riding the sword and sorcery wave they had started, Marvel expanded beyond the
Howard characters and tried novelist Lin Carter’s Conan imitator, Th ongor, with an
eight-issue run in Creatures on the Loose , beginning with #22 in 1973. Brak the Barbar-
ian, created by John Jakes, appeared in a backup feature in four issues of Savage Tales.
Other publishers soon introduced their own imitators. Dagar the Invincible , with a cover
blurb that proclaimed tales of sword and sorcery, was published by Gold Key from 1972
to 1978. Dax the warrior stories, intricately rendered by Estaban Maroto, appeared
in a dozen issues of the Warren magazine Eerie beginning in 1972. Two other heroic
fantasy series, Haxtur and Hoggarth , followed. In 1975, Atlas published four issues of
Ironjaw , a disfi gured barbarian who was surlier than most, and DC began a 12-issue run
of Claw , the Unconquered about an otherwise typical barbarian who was cursed with a
powerful, but willful, demon hand. Claw returned in 2006 in two miniseries.
With so much Conan and Conan-like material on the market, comic book publishers
were soon looking for sword-and-sorcery heroes who broke the sullen-eyed barbarian
mold. Gil Kane’s sword and science fantasy Blackmark was published as a paperback by
Bantam in 1971, and in 1974 reprinted as a backup in fi rst four issues of Savage Sword
of Conan. Disappointed with the sales of the fi rst book, Bantam decided not to publish
the sequel Kane had already produced, and the work was not seen until it appeared
in a 1979 issue of Marvel Preview magazine. Howard Chaykin’s Ironwolf debuted in
the fi nal three issues of We i r d Wo r l d s from 1973 to 1974. Chaykin returned to the
character for the 1992 graphic novel Ironwolf: Fires of the Revolution. Perhaps Ironwolf
is more space opera than fantasy, but the stories have the look and feel of heroic fan-
tasy. Some of the most notable alternatives came from two of the titans of the heroic
fantasy genre: Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. Leiber’s mismatched sword and sor-
cery rogues, the hulking barbarian Fafhrd and the dapper Gray Mouser, made their
fi rst comic book appearance in a 1972 Wonder Woman story penned by science fi ction
novelist Samuel R. Delany. Th e following year, DC launched Sword of Sorcery featur-
ing Leiber’s duo. Th e title only last fi ve issues, but writer Dennis O’Neil , and artists
Chaykin, Walt Simonson , and Jim Starlin off ered up some excellent adaptations and
original stories. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser did not appear in comics again until a
1991 miniseries from Marvel’s Epic imprint adapted seven Leiber short stories, this
time with Chaykin writing and Mike Mignola providing the art.
Moorcock’s brooding and introspective champion Elric could hardly be farther
removed from the lusty Conan. After a couple of guest appearances in Conan the
