Get your mind ready for action as we pry open the tomb doors of Kara-Shehr and watch greed wake something that never wanted to be disturbed — a misty, fanged horror, an impossible sapphire called the Azure Eye, and the terrible price paid by a friend who reaches for it.

We got all that and more as Steeven dives into Conan the Barbarian #35: The Hell-Spawn of Kara-Shehr.

Expect blow-by-blow mayhem: camel raids in dawn heat, a desperate rescue in the dunes, a sandstorm that dumps our heroes before the ruined throne room, and that spine-cold moment when the skeleton’s hand closes around the jewel. Re-live the panic as an old foe returns, the room fills with living mist, and Conan charges headlong into certain death in hopes to save a friend.

But also expect the unexpected because this is a story that refuses a neat ending.

So join Steeven as he celebrates Buscema’s masterful storytelling and Glynis’s color work, riffs on Gil Kane covers and Roy Thomas’s liner notes, and leans into how sometimes the barbarian loses — and why that makes the stories hit harder. If you love Conan at his most brutal and bittersweet, tune in for an emotional ride across dunes where treasure isn’t worth the cost, and maybe don’t touch the pretty blue rock.

This issue was published by Marvel Comics in October of 1973.

Enjoy!

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