A Poor, Confused Adaptation of Howard
'The Scorpion God!' is one of the weakest Kull comics to date.
The story is adapted from the Robert E. Howard short story 'Swords of the Purple Kingdom', and as you can tell by the title, there are substantive changes that have been made to the material, and sadly, not for the better.
To begin with, in the Kull mythos, this story follows 'Delcardes' Cat'. It begins with Delcardes, once again, begging Kull to allow her to marry her sweetheart, against her father's wishes. However, given that Kull already granted her wish in issue 7, Delcardes is replaced here with 'Nalissa', another woman in the same predicament.
So, right off the bat it's a little off - but it soon goes way askew. The story opens with Kull being caught by his enemies, then flashes all the way back to Kull's assumption of the Topaz Throne, before flashing forward to a period in time after the assumption, but before the capture. At that point, another character, Brule, tells part of the story that takes place after that, but still in the past. It only gets more convoluted from there, with flashbacks-within-flashbacks and multiple points of view - making it very difficult to follow, even for someone like myself who has read the original story.
The whole story culminates in a climactic showdown between Kull and some enemy forces, led by a masked individual called 'The Scorpion' at the temple of the (unrelated) Scorpion God ( just to further push the 'scorpion' motif; in the original Howard story it was just an abandoned marble gardens). During this battle, Kull turns his back on The Scorpion in the middle of a swordfight in order to go rescue Nalissa who is at the top of a staircase with soldiers advancing on her. Somehow he gets past them to the top of the stairs and fights down toward them, until he again turns his back on this whole army(!) when Nalissa's beau arrives by scaling the back of the staircase to nowhere!
The story also features not one but two deus ex machina moments, one when the outnumbered Kull is saved by Brule's army of Picts - the old cavalry arriving in the nick of time thing - and second when The Scorpion breaks off fighting to plunder the temple (turning his own back on Kull to steal all these jewels that have been out in the open for millennia we are told - strangely never plundered before, but important that he plunder them right this instant) and then the battle is won by the second, literal deus ex machina moment as an actual scorpion, presumably sent by the Scorpion God, stings 'The Scorpion', killing him and saving the day.
The story carries on from there, but you get the idea. It's pretty much a mess that can't be saved much by the decent enough artwork.