The Swordsman Of Sarn

Created initially for a cancelled Bronze Age anthology, The Swordsman Of Sarn was printed by the anything goes crew at Skywald Publishing for Issue 12 of their Psycho comics magazine, which had nothing to do with Norman Bates. The "sword and planet" genre that Edgar Rice Burroughs perfected with his Warlords Of Mars books were the inspiration for this tale of an athletic man from Earth doing his best Conan impression on another world. Set in an atompunk future, Steve Grimm is a space jockey that crashes on the uncharted planet of Sarn where he finds an abandoned city and is attacked by a savage giant. Grimm fortunately has gained the same kind of enhanced strength that John Carter got since this smaller planet has lower gravity and he was able to gut punch the gargantuan. The Earthman rescues the metal bikini-wearing Suanna of Thankor who fills the role of Slave Leia that Grimm learns the local lingo from over the course of a week. The Thankorians show up looking for Suanna as she is of course a space princess and manage to knock out the giant-slaying Grimm with their moderate strength. Grimm wakes up in a cave where he frees a cosmic being trapped in a crystal cage who rewards him with a better than average sword. He uses his newfound weapon to challenge the supposedly evil Thab Gon for Suanna's love, but as soon he kills him, the rival disappears along with Suanna and all the other Thankorians. Grimm is left standing alone in the middle of now empty castle with the narrator hinting that the question where everyone was spirited away to left hanging in the air. Considering that this story was written by Gardner Fox who created the original Flash, you would think that there was a better developed conclusion to it, but taking into account that The Swordsman Of Sarn was first created for a discontinued sci-fi series, this only makes its anti-climax mildly less stupid.