Marvel Comics Eye of the Serpent

Anybody have these issues? 79 & 81?

It was created by Roy Thomas and used in Milius' CTB and to have been used in Thomas' CTD and again in Milius' KING CONAN: Crown of Iron.

http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/conan-the-barbarian/2

Also marvel may of produced a version of Thomas/Summer's movie script in CONAN THE BARBARIAN #86:

Quote :

Conan the Barbarian (May 1978)
"The Devourer of the Dead!" (Conan) / Roy Thomas, writer ;
John Buscema & Ernie Chan, artists ; Ed Summer, co-plotter.
17 p. in Conan the Barbarian, no. 86 (May 1978). -- Call
no.: PN6728.4.M3C6no.86

http://www.lib.msu.edu/comics/rri/crri/conan2.htm

plus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Summer

If anybody has thoughts and insights please share. Issues 79-86 are all around the same time frame too, from 1977-78. A time when movie scripts and ideas where floating around and being shit out.

PS

There's a little bit of the story here on issue #86:

http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix4/zula_hyborian.htm

Something about stygian pyramids, scaling city walls and killing the guard at the top and pretending to be partve a procession and killing priests and acolytes . It may worthwhile to give it a look over.

Wow, so was it supposedly to be a comic adaptation of the script?? I remember "Devourer of the dead" it was set in Stygia that looked totally like Egypt, and involved Belit and also the black companion Zula. In that issue if i'm not wrong Belit and other stgygian woman (priestess of Set) tranform herselves in both snakes to scape through a small hole, like Doom in the movie. Serpent men were also involved I think, Toth-Amon was the ruler of all the wizards in Stygia (master of the black Circle or something) thoigh there were king and queen, paharaos or something I think.

Reason why Belit and Conan were there was because belit wanted to find revenge in Stygians who killed his family when she was a child, I think.

Zula was a great character, Conan and him began not trusting and even hating each other (because Zula is part wizard, and because Conan get's pissed off with having another strong dude who doesn't follow his orders), then turn into a respecful relationship. They enter in a temple where corpses are sent to be devoured by a lovecraftian entinty called "Devourer of the Dead".


I own the scanned numbers you mentioned, those with the Eye of Set, I will share them as soon as I recover my internet connection at home. Sadly I don't own the Devourer one but i can try to find it in some of the places I know for comic downloading.


The Eye of Set issues, by the way, are pretty strange as they are inside the belit saga but Belit is not involved, she is still in Stygia while Conan is traveling through a lost valley called Iskander (can't remember the reason why they are separed). These were based in a REH's tale about a medieval warrior who finds a lost valley were the descendants of Alexander the Great built a civilization. In the comic issues Conan has sex with a girl still being supposedly with Belit. He never tells her about it, of course, she would have probably cut his penis while sleeping

MightymcT was able to send me them, but Turd if you have more on the transforming humans into snakes or the Thugra Khotan issue please share. Stone and Milius' 1st script was based on Khotan and big end battle.

*I know marvel used the Serpent Men alot and even before they had the RE Howard rights I think as well. Serpent weapons were used too throughout the Marvel universe, even in the GI JOE cartoon movie produced by Marvel back in 1986-- Serpentor takes a snake from his shoulder and straightens it out into a spear to pierce the heart of the GI JOE team leader, Duke.

The blond girl(She could easily be Valeria if give a sword,lol) with Conan in the "Eye of Set " issue is scaling the mountain and being every bit as agile as Conan, which amazes him. Then there mutant men or Egyptians which somehow end up looking like mutants,lol, throwing stones and shooting arrows down upon Conan and his female companion. The Eye of Set in the comic looks like Doom's eye banner and motif's, while the cover sports the ruby red version.



The Devourer of the Dead issue starts off pretty damn similar like Stone/Milius' script does, it even has the Tower of the Elephant being mentioned because of the similarity. So this time around its Conan that reaches the top, but instead of breaking the back of a guardian pet lion like in the cut dialogue of the movie, its a regular human guard and its seen. When they swim under the water to escape the Palace/Pyramid can be found in both CTB and CTD in variants of the same plot.

Stone and Milius had to have fed off of the Thomas/Summer version so we need this script for sure. In any event as we know Marvel Comics had a big part in the movie's production and Thomas was their throughout production.

Thomas/Summer's version was supposed to have used all original characters and settings because they didn't have the rights at the time or some such shit(I suppose this couldve been changed easily or whatever.)

Even if this comic doesn't have much to do with their version of the script, it still came out before the movie and served as obvious inspiration for both Stone and Milius. Maybe Thomas was angry he didn't get partial writing credit along with Milius and Stone, maybe Milius cut him out? perhaps Milius was highwinded and didn't like sharing credit with a comic book writer. If so then I can understand why he would be angry.

The Eye of the Serpent issue with the Stygian armies against the Attalian army was kinda similar to scripts too, with all the arrows and Conan's possession of the Eye and all of that kinda thing.



well, most of the Conan stories were recycled plots with changes, even Howard did the same thing, so I really cant say this is surprising,lol.

I was just reading on MOTU and Marvel's run:

Quote :

Marvel Star comic series
The Star line also includes a double-length one-shot adaptation of the 1987 Masters of the Universe live-action film. Curiously, the comic portrays all the pre-existing characters other than Beast-Man with their traditional toy/cartoon appearances rather than with the film's heavily redesigned ones. Adapted from an earlier draft of the movie script, it also features some departures from the movie such as the final battle between He-Man and Skeletor taking place high atop Grayskull's battlements rather than deep in its bowels. There is also a moment where He-Man offers his hand to his falling nemesis, who had been directly betrayed by Evil-Lyn, who spurns the offer, preferring to plummet to his apparent doom. Most significant of all is a peculiar coda not present in the film, in which the remains of two flags are discovered in the caverns of Grayskull: an American flag and one from NASA which bears the words "Starfinder 5. July 10, 2221." In a wholly unique twist to all other versions of MOTU continuity, this comic adaptation of the film suggests that Eternian humans are descended from the crew of an American space mission from the far future. While this was possibly inspired by two episodes from the Filmation series it is said that Queen Marlena was a space pilot from Earth who crash landed on Eternia, although nothing other than a vaguely futuristic spacecraft indicated that she came from the far future, nor did the children who came from Earth in the He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_the_Universe

This sounds very Marvel Comic bookish, which always used the space/ time time travel & warp stuff in their stories, plus of course Oliver Stone's CONAN script which featured a space shuttle description in one of the magical-historical rants of the mage to Yasmina plus the movie poster.

*Plus it seems the movie was a loosely based inspiration on Kirby and his Marvel run:

Quote :

Director Gary Goddard clarified this in a letter appearing in John Byrne's Next Men #26, in which he stated:

“ "As the director of Masters of the Universe, it was a pleasure to see that someone got it. Your comparison of the film to Kirby’s New Gods was not far off. In fact, the storyline was greatly inspired by the classic Fantastic Four/Doctor Doom epics, The New Gods and a bit of Thor thrown in here and there. I intended the film to be a “motion picture comic book,” though it was a tough proposition to sell to the studio at the time. 'Comics are just for kids,' they thought. They would not allow me to hire Jack Kirby who I desperately wanted to be the conceptual artist for the picture…
I grew up with Kirby's comics (I’ve still got all my Marvels from the first issue of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man through the time Kirby left) and I had great pleasure meeting him when he first moved to California. Since that time I enjoyed the friendship of Jack and Roz and was lucky enough to spend many hours with Jack, hearing how he created this character and that one, why a villain has to be even more powerful than a hero, and on and on. Jack was a great communicator, and listening to him was always an education. You might be interested to know that I tried to dedicate Masters of Universe to Jack Kirby in the closing credits, but the studio took the credit out."
”

Brian Cronin, author of the "Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed" column, concludes that "the film itself was not intended to be literally a reworked Fourth World, although the intent WAS to make the film a tribute to Jack Kirby - just a tribute to ALL of his work, not just the Fourth World."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_the_Universe_(film)

That MOTU comic is real bad, though is interesting when studing the movie. It featured the characters ala mattel style better than in the Stout designings and it made it look silly. Not much there but a prologue with Teela and Manatarms killing evil soldiers and a different presentation of Heman saving a kid or something. The last battle is silly also, they fight in the top of Greyskull and Heman offers peace to Skeletor

HEMAN -Hey buddy, let's make some love, too much years of useless fighting, don't ya think.

HELTER SKELETER -Yeah, why don't you suck my skeletal ass, "buddy".

Then Skeletor tries to kill Heman and falls from the top of the castle.

Cromulus, about the possible remains of Thomas/Summer script on the final movie, I -speculatively- think that the death and resurrection of Valeria could come from the Thomas script. Belit was taken to the comics by Thomas in 1977, sametime the script was being also conceived, and that Belit saga become the favourite and most beloved by Thomas on the comics. I think it's very possible that he desired to include Belit on his screenplay.

About the CTB comic issue #86 with script by Summer and Thomas, I am unsure that could actually be a whole screenplay for a whole movie, it's actually very anecdotic (Conan and pal enters in a unholy temple, kills a monster, goes out alive). But some very specific details from the screenplay could have been thrown into that comic enough to credit Summer. Summer indeed isn't credited as co-writter but as co-plotter (which means he participated in some concrete ideas of the storyline but didn't created the comic per se). It fits with the idea of Thomas being the one who turns that "plot ideas" into the comic script.

Some of them could perfectly be the scene where 2 women (Belit one of them, another a priestess of Set) transforms into a snake to scape from their enemies thgough a tiny hole, just like Doom later did.

But what I find strange is that all these details where in Summer/Thomas screenplay, then not in Stone's, then surfaces again on Millius? Is this making some sense, somehow? I mean, that implies that Milius wasn't only rewritting Stone's script, but also Thomas/Summer's. And that while he based the start on Stone's, all the rest came very much from Thomas/Summer...



Wikipedia say that SUMMER work on this CTB issue was specifically the idea of the origin of the Egiptian pyramids. (Now I can't remember what was said about that in the comic... but maybe there were a Pyramid on the screenplay, later turn into the Mountain of Power?) The pyramid in the comic had a monster (related to Set) in the catacombs, which eated human flesh (like the giant snake in Milius' Tower).



Another thing I wonder is if ZULA (the black warrior friend of Conan, later transformed into a female in CTD) was also in Thomas screenplay... It's weird because there's no sign of a black companion of Conan in the later drafts... Only that black cannibal warrior from the pits and Subotai wich isn't black but mongolian.....


Man, I just would LOVE to read that Thomas/Summer shit RIGHT NOW.

Yes, that was one of my ideas. Milius was rewriting and cribbing down stuff from not only Stone but also Marvel. His 1st script was very much Marvel-like. *I think was also re-writing Thomas/Summer too and incorporated bits from Marvel as well.

In the CTB issue #86, the credtis say:

"WITH A CO-PLOTTING THANKS TO ED SUMMER".

So, it sound like possible that Thomas was simply taking a couple of ideas from Summer, more than Summer actually working on the comic.


_________________________________________________________________________

Quote :

Thomas/Summer's version was supposed to have used all original characters and settings because they didn't have the rights at the time or some such shit (I suppose this couldve been changed easily or whatever.)

What did you meant, Cromulus? Sorry, the phrase is confusing to me.


___________________________________________________________________________________


Interesting is that all these references to Marvel comics from STONE's draft:

https://conancompletist.forumactif.com/conan-the-barbarian-f3/some-oliver-stone-s-script-possible-inspirations-i-found-t1307.htm

with the ones you also found, they all are dated pre-1977.

It would made more sense that Stone took these details from the script of Thomas... I mean, Roy Thomas being the one who used all these references as he knew perfectly by himself (as he was the author), more than STONE reading all these comics to pick up all these little details...

...so could all these references in STONE came from the Thomas script?

Cromulus, I just read in an article by Roy Thomas in a spanish comic-book edition that the (most possible) reason why Thomas got so pissed off was he didn't receive one penny from Marvel by the 2 Conan movies, because he was working on DC comics so Marvel simply ignored him.

Aparently, after leaving Marvel and going to DC, he lost all the rights for his creations that would have shared with Marvel if he would have stayed with the company.

He had been clever with RED SONJA, though, and had sold half of the rights of the character to Conan Properties Inc during the 70's, so SONJA was 50% Marvel and 50% C.P.I.

When De Laurentiis paid to Marvel and C.P.I. for the rights of the SONJA movie, C.P.I. paid some money to Thomas tahnking him what he had done in the 70's.



BTW, in these articles he talks about a lot of interesting things abou the making off the CTB comic collection, but NEVER mentions the screenplay with ED SUMMER..... looks like he doesn't want to remember that AT ALL. (curiously enough, he does mention the Destroyer screenplay several times.....)