Crom (2022) by Raule, Jaunfra MB, & Alejandro TM

Depuis la nuit des temps, alors que tout n’était que téneberes et silence, les hommes osaient à peine pronouncer son nom, tant il leur inspirait de crainte. Maisie ils ignorant que Crom était né mortel, empli de rage et de haine, avide de connaître son destin dans un monde à l’agonie. Ses yeux aussi noirs que le corbeau portaient en eux le présage d’une pluie de sang éternelle et de rafales de vent tranchantes comme l’acier, semper la vengeance et la mort, anéantir Des civilisations entiéres sur son passage, peu lui important. Il aspiration à devenir le dieu Des dieux et à régner sur toute créature et toute chose. Voici son histoire.

Since the dawn of time, when all was darkness and silence, men have scarcely dared to speak his name, so great was their fear of him. But little did they know that Crom was born mortal, filled with rage and hatred, eager to know his fate in a dying world. His raven-black eyes carried the omen of an eternal rain of blood and of steel-sharp winds, sowing vengeance and death, annihilating entire civilizations in his path, mattered little to him. He aspires to become the god of gods and rule over all creatures and all things. This is his story.

Back cover text of Crom (2022).

English translation

Crom (2022) is a French-language bande dessinée in homage of Robert E. Howard and his creation Conan of Cimmeria, who swore by Crom. The script was written by Raule, drawn by Jaunfra MB, and colored by Alejandro TM. It is implicitly set long before the age of Conan, and tells what might be a pretty stereotypical blood-soaked, high-octane fantasy story, with some images that could have been ripped straight from a heavy metal album cover.

Men and monsters are killed, there’s very little dialogue and most of the story is told in pithy snippets that try not to get in the way of the artwork.

But who is Crom, really?

“They have no hope here or hereafter,” answered Conan. “Their gods are Crom and his dark race, who rule over a sunless place of everlasting mist, which is the world of the dead. Mitra! The ways of the Aesir were more to my liking.”
—Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword”

“What of your own gods? I have never heard you call on them.”

“Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?”
—Robert E. Howard, “The Queen of the Black Coast”

His gods were simple and understandable; Crom was their chief, and he lived on a great mountain, whence he sent forth dooms and death. It was useless to call on Crom, because he was a gloomy, savage god, and he hated weaklings. But he gave a man courage at birth, and the will and might to kill his enemies, which, in the Cimmerian’s mind, was all any god should be expected to do.
—Robert E. Howard, “The Tower of the Elephant”

“Such is not the custom of my people,” Conan growled, “nor of Natala’s either. The Hyborians do not sacrifice humans to their god, Mitra, and as for my people—by Crom, I’d like to see a priest try to drag a Cimmerian to the altar! There’d be blood spilt, but not as the priest intended.”
—Robert E. Howard, “Xuthal of the Dust”

Crom, the name of the god of the Cimmerians in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age adventures of Conan the Cimmerian, is invoked or named in nearly every episode, but very little is said about him. We get an idea of Crom as a sort of patron deity of Cimmerians; powerful, dark, dour, and concerned with fate, but generally uncaring. Howard does not expand on this explicitly in any of his letters, but it’s worth noting that before Conan the Cimmerian called on Crom, Conan the Reaver did:

I had clambered the cliffs—no, by the thunder of Crom, I was still in the cavern! I reached for my sword—
—Robert E. Howard, “The People of the Dark”

“The People of the Dark” (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror June 1932), features a familiar plot device of Howard’s: a contemporary individual receives a blow to the head and is thrown back into re-living an episode of a past life, in this case the Irish reaver Conan—Conan being a relatively common Gaelic name (e.g. Arthur Conan Doyle, Conan O’Brien, etc.) Howard identified as Irish-American and many of his heroes were Irish or Irish-American too—he later noted in the Hyborian Age essay that in his fanciful history of the world, the Cimmerians were the ancestors of the Celts, and thus the Irish too.

One of Howard’s major conceptual leaps in writing the adventures of Conan the Cimmerian was not just to set the stories before recorded history, but to remove the whole element of past life regression. There is no James Allison to recall his past life as Conan the Cimmerian, Conan’s adventures appear directly on the page, without any framing narrative set in the present day. However, Howard still drew on elements of real world mythology and history in crafting his Hyborian Age.

The Crom that Conan the Reaver swears by is probably intended to be Crom Cruach, a pagan deity of pre-Christian Ireland that Howard may have run across in his studies of Irish history and folklore. This Crom is only known through post-Christian legends, which paint it as an ancient figure of worship that accepted human sacrifice, until the cult-image was destroyed by St. Patrick. The fantasy Crom of Cimmeria is not quite as malevolent (no human sacrifice), and both figuratively and physically more distant, residing atop an unnamed mountain. Howard was free to fudge the details; after all, who was going to correct him?

This image of Crom as essentially distant and dour has persisted through various adaptations; the 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie added a war with giants, a riddle of steel, and a Nordic Valhalla. Various comic adaptations from Marvel and Dark Horse have made Crom a more-or-less humanoid figure who appears only in rare circumstances. For example, in What if? #39, when Thor is sent back to the Hyborian Age, he climbs Crom’s mountain and actually meets with the (literally) dark and vaguely Nordic chief of the Cimmerian pantheon:

A notable exception is Crom the Barbarian, a Conan pastiche character created by Gardner F. Fox in the 1950s for a few comic strips; this character borrows the name, but nothing else. Like Marvel’s Thor, he even appears blond.

None of these works have really tackled Crom’s origin or expanded much on his mythology; while Conan the Cimmerian might frequently swear by or at his god (or any of the others he’s adopted along the way), there’s been very little written about Crom’s worship or past—and that mostly in roleplaying games.

This is a long way to say that Raule had a free hand when it came to the script, and Jaunfra MB and Alejandro TM could exercise their imagination however they pleased when envisaging Crom and his apotheosis. What they ended up going with was a somewhat stereotypical quest narrative: Crom goes hunting for four artifacts of power, from the ruin of the first city, long sunken to the lairs of various monsters.

With a superhuman physique and strength, Crom slaughters…everyone. Entire armies. Depicted in loving detail, sometimes. Which is really sort of what sets this book off from Conan the CImmerian as Howard first conceived him, and as he is often written.

While many people comment on the artistic portrayals of Conan as this hulking musclebound figure, more brawn than brain, capable of superhuman feats of strength, speed, stamina, and swordplay…the original Conan as Howard first conceived him is very human, very mortal. Strong, but not inhumanly so; tough, but in the way a boxer is tough, able to roll with the punches and soak up punishment, and he does. Conan in “The Phoenix in the Sword” suffers terrible wounds, and only his leonine strength, speed, and skill save him from the assassins out for his hide.

From a meta-perspective, is isn’t likely that the lead character in a successful series is going to die in every fight, and readers might well expect Conan to overcome the odds—he is the hero after all—but generally Conan is in mortal danger for at least part of the story, and tends to overcome the odds with skill and bravery more than any exercise of superhuman power (a notable exception being “A Witch Shall Be Born,” where Conan is crucified…and after he gets his hands free, pulls out the remaining nails himself!)

By contrast, Crom in Crom is nearly superhuman from the get-go, facing major foes but few major injuries, obstacles, or setbacks. This isn’t a grounded, hardboiled tale of sword & sorcery—this is a legend. So when Crom runs out of mortal foes, he faces off against the four ancestral gods.

As an adult, having read many fantasy books and comics, the idea of collecting the four themed artifacts and defeating the four elemental-themed gods may seem a bit basic. If I was a twelve-year-old pouring over the pages of Heavy Metal/Metal Hurlant, however, I’d probably be breathless in awe at how metal this all is. I think everyone involved in the creation of this book understood what they needed to do, and they weren’t going to try and squeeze a lot of metaphysical complications or complex narrative twists into this story. There’s no comedic foil, no love interest, no moral dilemmas.

Sometimes the gods have to die.

In overall style and aesthetic, there are similarities between Crom and Orcs et Gobelins T11: Kronan (2021) by Jean-Luc Istin, Sébastien Grenier, and J. Nanjan. These are artists working within a fantasy milieu where the iconic bodybuilder physique and penchant for big swords has been exaggerated almost to the point of parody; the colors are vivid, but also tend to highlight and oversaturate the atmosphere of the artwork, sometimes adding a lot of emphasis that might have been missing from the original, sparse backgrounds; sometimes muddying the line work a bit.

The real Crom may be only a broken stone figure in Ireland; the Crom of Robert E. Howard’s stories was a distant pagan figure, undefined and possibly better left that way. This is not Robert E. Howard’s Crom.

For what it is trying to be, however—an homage to the concept of Crom, and the superheroic barbarian of comics, film, games, and pastiche—Crom achieves exactly what it set out to be. This incarnation of Crom seems to be almost an over-the-top parody of the comic-book Conan the Barbarian specifically because the Conan of the comics is so often already an exaggerated superheroic figure. Crom needs to be a character that takes all the essence of the Cimmerian and makes the legendary hero into something greater.

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Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard & Others (2019) and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos (2014).

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