Savage Tales #1
Savage Tales #1 (May 1971) is the founding artifact of Marvel's black-and-white magazine era, the format that would eventually give the company its Savage Sword of Conan, Tomb of Dracula Magazine, and dozens of other Code-free titles through the mid-1990s. Its single most consequential contribution to the Marvel canon is the origin and first appearance of Man-Thing — scientist Ted Sallis injecting himself with a super-soldier serum variant to keep it from enemy hands and rising from the Florida Everglades as an empathic swamp monster — a character whose uncanny emotional power and horror-fantasy register would go on to influence a generation of writers, notably Steve Gerber, whose celebrated run cemented the creature as one of the Bronze Age's defining presences. The issue also carries the first appearances of Ellen Brandt, Atali, Niord, and Gorm, and presents Barry Windsor-Smith's adaptation of Robert E. Howard's long-unpublished 'The Frost Giant's Daughter' in its original, uncensored black-and-white form — a story so visually striking it was reprinted twice in altered versions before the decade was out. As a five-story anthology gathering Conan, Man-Thing, Ka-Zar, the Femizons, and the urban-defender Joshua under one cover, it stands as a deliberate statement that mainstream American comics could operate outside the Comics Code Authority and address genuinely mature subject matter.
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Stan Lee championed the magazine format as a way to sidestep the Comics Code Authority, and Savage Tales was his vehicle; Roy Thomas, serving as associate editor, was the creative engine behind much of the content and has recalled in interviews that the Man-Thing concept grew out of discussions with Lee in late 1970, with the two men generating several possible origin scenarios before settling on the serum-and-swamp approach that Gerry Conway then scripted. Publisher Martin Goodman had deep reservations about non-Code material and compounded those concerns when distribution problems prevented the issue from reaching Canada — roughly ten percent of the print run — giving him the pretext Roy Thomas later described as Goodman 'looking for an excuse to cancel it'; the result was a nearly two-and-a-half-year gap before issue #2 appeared in October 1973, by which point Goodman had left the company and a Conan-fueled sword-and-sorcery boom made the magazine commercially viable. The Grand Comics Database records the on-sale date as January 19, 1971, well ahead of the May 1971 cover date, and lists Stan Lee as editor with Thomas as associate editor, John Verpoorten as production manager, and Bill Everett providing production work including some alterations to character faces.
Trivia · 7 facts
- First appearance and origin of Man-Thing (Dr. Ted Sallis): plotted by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, scripted by Gerry Conway, drawn by Gray Morrow — an 11-page black-and-white story titled 'Man-Thing!'
- First appearance of Ellen Brandt, Ted Sallis's lover and A.I.M.-connected spy whose betrayal precipitates his transformation; she appears in flashback within the Man-Thing origin story.
- First appearances of Conan supporting characters Atali (the frost-giant's daughter herself), Niord, and Gorm, all introduced in Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith's adaptation of Robert E. Howard's 'The Frost Giant's Daughter' — a Howard story rejected by Weird Tales during the author's lifetime and never published before his 1936 death.
- The 'Frost Giant's Daughter' Conan story was published here in its original 11-page black-and-white form; a censored, colorized version later appeared in Conan the Barbarian #16, and a third version with ink washes ran in Savage Sword of Conan #1 (1974).
- First appearance of the Femizons (Princess Lyra, Queen Vega, Syrani, and the Sisterhood of Femizonia), a futuristic Amazon society created by Stan Lee and John Romita; their storyline continued in Fantastic Four #151.
- Ka-Zar (Kevin Plunder) and his sabretooth tiger Zabu appear in the issue's final story, written by Stan Lee with art by John Buscema, who also painted the cover.
- The Man-Thing origin story was reprinted in Monsters Unleashed #3, and the Conan story 'The Frost Giant's Daughter' has been collected in, among other volumes, the Conan the Barbarian: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus (2018), the Savage Sword of Conan: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus (2019), and Marvel Masterworks: Man-Thing (2024).
Cast · 10 characters
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Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers
▸ Reveal full plot — may contain spoilers
Carla and Ralph come to the Savage Land with a Swamp Tank to steal Ka-Zar's vibranium, but when they force him to open the door to where it is stored, the vibranium destroys the tank. Carla is carried off and killed by the Swamp Men when Ralph is not able to save her because the gun he was using only had blanks due to Carla replacing the bullets with blanks in an effort to get Ralph killed.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).