“Jirel of Joiry: Into The Violet World” (1987) by C. L. Bevill and “Werewoman” (1994) by Roy Thomas, Robert Brown, Rey Garcia, and Susan Crespi

Why aren’t there more C. L. Moore comics?

Catherine Lucille Moore was a contemporary and correspondent of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft; she was published in the same pulp magazine, Weird Tales, even collaborated with them on the round robin “The Challenge From Beyond” (1935). Her first story, “Shambleau” (1933), was an immediate hit with readers and weird fiction writers alike, and introduced the world to Northwest Smith, who would go on to star in a series of tales from Moore’s typewriter. Her next creation for Weird Tales, the flame-tressed swordswoman Jirel of Joiry in “Black God’s Kiss” (1934), was hailed as a female Conan.

In general outline, the Conan and Jirel publishing timeline largely lines up as well. Conan’s last original story in Weird Tales was in 1936; Jirel’s in 1939. Gnome Press published the first Conan hardcover in 1950, and the Jirel hardcover collection in 1954; paperback reprints for both appeared for both characters in the 60s as part of the general paperback Sword & Sorcery/fantasy boom. Sure, there were more Conan stories and they were more popular—is that the only reason why Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian got the big break into comics when Jirel didn’t?

The boring, practical answer is probably “money.” Licensing a character, even an old pulp character, costs money, and anyone who did want to license Jirel for comics would have gone through C. L. Moore’s agent. Even relatively big publishers like Marvel had to balance cost versus popularity; according to Roy Thomas in Barbarian Life vol. 3, Marvel first approached Lin Carter’s agent about licensing Thongor of Lemuria because they thought Conan would be too expensive. Demographics might also have played a role; women warriors in fantasy have a long history, but in print and in comics, male characters dominated, as Nancy Collins noted when a very different red-haired swordswoman hit the page:

I was thirteen years old when I first saw Red Sonja. It was her debut appearance in the Conan the Barbarian comic book written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith, back in 1973, and she was wearing a slightly more practical scale-mail tunic and leather hot-pants ensemble, but all the elements of her basic personality were there: bravery, skill with a sword, and the brashness necessary to go make a name for herself in the savage, male-dominated world of Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age.

She immediately grabbed my attention because there were so few strong female heroic characters back then, not just in comics but popular culture in general. (Moreover, the fact this outspoken and capable woman of action and I shared the same hair color did not hurt.) [I]t may be hard for today’s audience to understand, but in the 1960s and 1970s, with the notable exception of Wonder Woman and the Black Widow, most of the female characters in comics were either the girlfriends/wives whose role was to be menaced and/or kidnapped by the arch-nemesis of their heroic Significant Other (Lois Lane, Iris Allen, Gwen Stacy), young and far less seasoned distaff versions of well-established male heroes (Supergirl, Batgirl, Hawkgirl, Mary Marvel), superheroines with powers that precluded physical strength (Saturn Girl, Marvel Girl, Sue Storm, Dream Girl), or were symbolically devaluing (Shrinking Violet, The Wasp.)

Nancy Collins, foreword to Drawn Swords: An Unauthorized Exploration of Red Sonja and the Artists who Brought her to Life vii

Red Sonja as a property has enjoyed on-again/off-again success; the audience for a strong female character-led fantasy comic has been there since she first debuted, but the will and ability to keep her published in her own ongoing series hasn’t always been. Other swordswoman characters spun off from Conan like Age of Conan: Bêlit (2019, Marvel), Age of Conan: Valeria (2020, Marvel), and Bêlit & Valeria: Swords vs. Sorcery (2022, Ablaze) have enjoyed much less success in standalone miniseries—and maybe Jirel of Joiry would suffer the same fate, not quite clicking with audiences. It has to be remembered that of the thousands of characters created for pulp and magazine fiction, only a rare few like Doc Savage, Tarzan, The Shadow, Conan the Cimmerian, and Elric of Melniboné enjoy long-term popular and economic success.

So where does that leave Jirel? In the hands of the fans.

Jirel of Joiry: Into The Violet World (1987)

JIREL OF JOIRY: INTO THE VIOLET WORLD

Panel 1: Over Guiisard’s [sic] fallen drawbridge had thundered Joiry’s warrior lady, sword swinging, voice shouting hoarsely inside her helmet. For a while there was umult unspeakable. There under the archway, the yellow of fighting men and the clang of mail on mail and the screams of stricken men.

Jirel’s swinging sword and her stallion’s tramping feet had cleared a path for Joiry’s men to follow and at last into Guisard’s court poured the steel-clad hordes of Guisard’s conquerors.

Panel 2: She had waited impatiently in the courtyard until she had finally dismounted. Throwing her helmet away from her and her eager angry voice echoing hoarsely in the courtyard.

Jirel: Giraud! Make haste, you varlets! Bring me Giraud!

Panel 3: There was such bloodthirsty impatience in that hollowly booming voice that the men who were returning from searching the castle hung back as they crossed the court toward the lady in reluctant twos and threes, failure eloquent on their faces,

Below: Based on a story ‘Jirel Meets Magic’ by C. L. Moore

This piece came to via eBay, the only comic art of Jirel I’d ever seen, and illustrating a bit of her third adventure “Jirel Meets Magic” (Weird Tales July 1935). For a couple years I’ve just enjoyed it, but eventually I decided to look up the artist—easy enough as it’s signed and dated—and was surprised to find out that it is author C. L. Bevill. Even better, she was willing to answer a few questions about this piece, how it came to be, and how I ended up with it:

When my sister and I were kids in the 70s we loved, loved, loved all things sword and sorcery. Conan, Robert Howard, Lord of the Rings, you name it. Both of us were artists and we did our own comics. So one of our favorite authors was C.L. Moore, who was a pulp writer in the 30s. Her most famous work is the Jirel of Joiry stories. I think she did those as a serial. (Forgive me if you’ve already looked up the information.)

I believe I did the piece for my sister as a birthday gift, but I don’t recall exactly. I don’t think she liked it but she was too nice to say anything. She died in March 2020 and I found the piece in her stuff, hidden away with a few other things she didn’t like from me. (I don’t hold it against her.) So I cleaned out her stuff after she died and was completely overwhelmed. (If you noticed the date, it was right at the beginning of Covid and she probably died from that.) Her landlord offered to take care of all the stuff and subsequently either sold it in a yard sale or gave it to charity. So if you got it from Washington state that’s likely how it ended up on ebay.

[…] if it’s still in a silver frame, there’s some comic artwork on the inside of the back there that I stuck in there for my sister. It was stuff we did as kids. I’m curious if it’s still there. […] Oh, we were incurable romantics as kids so the comic art in the back is something from a movie we liked as kids. Grayeagle. Terrible movie but we were very young.

C. L. Bevill, personal communication

That last note made me curious as well, so I popped open the frame:

On the back of the piece is a faint inscription:

To Cat,
with Love
your sister
Caren
Dec 25th 1987
—one year too late
Sorry
Dec 25th 1988
Still Love you
Cackie!

It is a lovely piece of fan-art, and I’m glad to finally have the story behind it—and the secret it has been hiding all these years.

“Werewoman” (1994)

By a quirk of publishing, “Werewoman” (1938) by C. L. Moore was first published in a fan-magazine, and fell into the public domain. This fact was not immediately recognized for some decades, but the ever-enterprising fan/scholar/anthologist Sam Moskowitz took advantage of this lapse to to republish it (without Moore’s permission or compensation) in his anthology Horrors Unknown (1971). While this has widely been considered as somewhat uncouth, it was technically legal—and if Moskowitz could do it, so could anyone else.

So it was in 1994 “Werewoman” was adapted to graphic format for Savage Sword of Conan #121 (May 1994). Roy Thomas provided the script, Robert Brown, pencils; Rey Garcia, inks; and Susan Crespi, lettering. Originally a story of Northwest Smith and set on Mars, the revamped story was adapted to feature Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian in place of Smith, and the setting changed to a rather generic fantasy corner of the Hyborian Age.

Roy Thomas was at this point a veteran hand at such adaptations. When he had started out writing Conan the Barbarian for Marvel, it had been adapting Howard’s original stories and filling in the gaps on his own; later the series would adapt works by other authors, either non-Howard Conan stories like Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp’s novel Conan of the Isles (1968), which became a graphic novel of the same name, or non-Conan fantasy stories such as Gardner F. Fox’s Kothar and the Conjurer’s Curse (1970), which became Conan the Barbarian #46-51.

So why do C. L. Moore?

1994 was well into the Dark Age of Comics, and Robert Brown’s artwork is strongly reminiscent of Rob Liefeld’s work on X-Force and Youngblood, but aggressively 90s as it is, and lacking the more somber depth of shadow that characterized many of the better stories in Savage Sword, it kind of works, especially with Rey Garcia’s inks adding some real depth and definition to the lines.

While it may seem odd to adapt a Northwest Smith story as a Conan tale—imagine replacing Harrison Ford with Jason Mamoa in Star Wars—the hazy, dreamlike atmosphere of the story lends itself well to a kind of fever-dream episode in the adventures of everyone’s favorite Cimmerian, while the inherent wildness of running with the pack is almost more suitable to Conan than to Smith. As a Conan story, it’s middling; as a C. L. Moore adaptation, it’s better than nothing—which is, by an large, what readers have lived with.

Readers interested in the full story can find it reprinted in Savage Sword of Conan Omnibus Vol. 21.

Aside from these two works, there is little else to say about C. L. Moore in the comics. A few early horror comics may be unofficial adaptations of or inspired by her works, though this is based on similarity of plot more than anything else. There is another notable graphic adaptation of C. L. Moore’s “Shambleau” that was published in France in 1955, but that is worthy of a longer and more in-depth look on its own.

---

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.