How can I wear the harness of toil
And sweat at the daily round,
While in my soul forever
The drums of Pictdom sound?
—Robert E. Howard, “The Drums of Pictdom,” Collected Poetry 2.72
Today, historians and archaeologists tell us that real-life Picts were a people in what is now Scotland during the early Middle Ages, who in time merged with or were subsumed by the other peoples in the region. When a 13-year-old Robert E. Howard ran across the mention of them in a New Orleans library in 1913, however, the Picts were a mysterious race. Pseudohistories like the Pictish Chronicle mingled with scientific racialism, and the early archaeological and anthropological theories of the British Isles to made the Picts a race apart from Gaelic peoples like the Irish and Welsh; Germanic invaders like the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; Nordic raiders a-viking from Scandinavia; or more southernly European invaders like the Romans. The underdogs of the ancient world, the last hold-outs as waves of invaders washed over the British Isles, driven at last to one distant corner…and at last, snuffed out, to leave only a few enigmatic stone monuments behind.
Howard, with a penchant for underdogs, was enamored from the first.
Picts are one of the near-constants of Robert E. Howard’s imagination. They feature in nearly every era of his fantastic fiction, from the tales of Brule the Spear-Slayer and other Picts who aided King Kull in Valusia, to the howling tribespeople in the Pictish wilderness across the Black River in the age of Conan the Cimmerian, they play a major part in the history of the Hyborian Age, to Bran Mak Morn who fought the invasion of the Romans in the British Isles, to the time of Brian Boru when Turlough Dubh O’Brien encountered them among the small islands to the north of Britain, and into the modern day when a rumor of a surviving cult of Bran Mak Morn came in “The Children of the Night.”
Over the course of his writing career, Howard’s conception of the Picts changed and evolved. His initial depictions of them drew comparisons with the Little People, the elves and fairies of British folklore, but when he began a correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft in 1930, Howard began to differentiate the two concepts (see “Conan and the Little People: Robert E. Howard and Lovecraft’s Theory”), which eventually led to one of Howard’s most powerful stories: “Worms of the Earth,” which mingles references to Lovecraft’s Mythos with Howard’s Pictish lore (Lovecraft would return the favor by including the cult of Bran Mak Morn among others in his story “The Whisperer in Darkness.”)
While Picts are an important part of Robert E. Howard’s work, they do not tend to fare so well in adaptation and in the writing of others. Henry Kuttner, not long after Howard’s dead, began the Elak of Atlantis stories in Weird Tales, which included an antagonistic people called “Pikhts.” The success of the Conan the Barbarian comics, and by-blows like Kull the Conqueror, have seen many Pictish characters in the Hyborian and Thurian Ages, but these depictions tend to borrow from Native American imagery (which to be fair, Howard did himself in “Beyond the Black River”—see John Bullard’s article “‘Beyond the Black River’: Is It Really ‘Beyond The Brazos River?'”) Bran Mak Morn, Howard’s most singularly developed Pictish character, has had notable adaptations in the comics as well, especially two adaptations scripted by Roy Thomas: “Worms of the Earth” (art by Tim Conrad), and “Kings in the Night” (art by David Wenzel), and in prose was the subject of three notable pastiches: Legion from the Shadows (1976) by Karl Edward Wagner, For the Witch of Mists (1981) by David C. Smith & Richard Tierney, and Bran Mak Morn: Red Waves of Slaughter (2024) by Steven L. Shrewsbury.
For all that might sound like a lot, given the hundreds of Conan comics and dozens of novels, and even the dozens of Kull and Solomon Kane comics, the Picts might fair be said to have often been overlooked. Because Howard’s themes for the Picts evolved over time—covering so many disparate periods, and often involving stories not published until after his death—there isn’t really a cohesive Pictish Mythos in fiction, despite the fact that they are more of the connective tissue of Howard’s fantasy fiction than nearly anything else.
This is all a very long way to say that it’s nice to see some other creators take an interest.
Les Ombres de Thulé (2023) by Patrick Mallet (script), Lionel Marty (art), & Axel Conzalbo (colors) is a French-language bande dessinée; there is also an English-language translation available, The Shadows of Thule, released the same year, translated by Montana Kane. The story is not an adaptation of any Howard tale, nor is it specifically tied to Howard’s setting or chronology, but it is clear that Mallet & Marty took inspiration from Howard and Lovecraft, and the tale contains many Echoes of “Worms of the Earth,” “Kings of the Night,” and “The Dunwich Horror.”
The Romans have pushed deep into Britain, and they’re here to stay. The Picts are a fading people, ancient, barbarous, and wise with magic, but more desperate every year. A Roman general is manipulated by a necromancer into releasing an ancient Lovecraftian horror that had been sealed away long ago…and it might take all the swords and sorcery of the King of the Picts to deal with this old enemy.
If it sounds familiar, it is because it is. his is not quite as dark and brooding as Howard’s tales of Bran Mak Morn, and the scale of the action and magic owes more to the popular depictions of contemporary fantasy than to some of the more realistic or restrained proportions of older works. Readers today expect glowing eyes, towering tentacled terrors, and headlopping…and Les Ombres de Thulé delivers on all three.
Like other bandes desinees such as Orcs et Gobelins T11: Kronan (2021) by Jean-Luc Istin, Sébastien Grenier, and J. Nanjan and Crom (2022) by Raule, Jaunfra MB, & Alejandro TM, there is a certain aesthetic that pervades this book. Digital coloring adds a certain studied muddiness to some of the artwork that looks better than plain, flat colors but doesn’t quite replicate the texture of real paint. Minor nudity is taken for granted, as are splashes of gore. While some of the pages may seem crowded with panels, there are often huge splash pages that give moments to admire the detail that larger page sizes allow.
Mallet and Marty wear their influences on their sleeves. This is a love-letter to Howard and Lovecraft as much as anything else. An original story, but also a remix that combines some of the highlights from their favorite weird fiction. If it dips into a bit more of Celtic myth (there are some definite overtones of Michael Moorcock’s Corum Jhaelen Irsei tales), or some Dungeons & Dragons-style mucking about with eldritch blasts and healing spells than Howard or Lovecraft would have had it, that speaks to how the fantasy aesthetic has changed in the hundred years since Weird Tales began publication.
Les Ombres de Thulé / The Shadows of Thule is a fun experience, in French or English. Kane’s translation appears faithful to the original text and in keeping with the spirit of the work, not always an easy balance to achieve. It is nice to see creators who take inspiration from Howard and Lovecraft’s work without necessarily being slavishly devoted to a long and convoluted Mythos.
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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Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 