By Crom (2012-2014) by Rachel Kahn

I am not entirely sure how to frame an introduction to a comic book that I hope, very strongly, will speak for itself. So I’m just going to extend the thank yous from the previous page to everyone else who gets these jokes. To everyone who finds my comic accessible, regardless of gender or race or age or level of Conan loremastery, thank you for proving an old artistic tenet true: the personal, made public, can transcend its source. I am completely convinced that a little magic is needed for such an act, and that magic, for me, comes in the form of a fictional character whose worldview has been a wonderful new frame through which to view my own life.

That anyone else is interested in these jokes means two wonderful things are true: I am not the only one who loves Conan this way; and I am not the only one who evaluates her fancy clothing by how fast it would allow her to run away from crap.
—Rachel Kahn, Conan the Barbarian Is My Spirit Guide, By Crom! (2013), 1

In 1936, Robert E. Howard took his own life. A friend, Thurston Torbett of Marlin, Texas, wrote of the sad event to a mutual friend, the pulp writer C. L. Moore in Indianapolis, Indiana. Moore immediately dashed off a postcard to H. P. Lovecraft in Providence, Rhode Island—and Lovecraft, it seems, wrote to nearly everyone. Dozens of letters to people across the country, written in haste, his eulogy building with each one so that we can almost trace when a letter was written by how much he has added in his grief for his Texas friend, who he had never met but had exchanged letters with for six eventful years.

In trying to sum up what made “Two-Gun Bob” Howard special, Lovecraft settled on:

It is hard to say just what made Two-Gun’s yarns stand out so, but the real secret is that he was in every one of them. Even when he made outward concessions to the Mammon-guided editors & commercial critics he had an inner force & sincerity which broke through the surface & put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote.
—H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, 20 June 1936, Essential Solitude 2.737

Yet there is another side to this. It is not just the words that Howard wrote on the page, in his small room in Cross Plains, Texas. It is the people who read them whose imaginations complete the characters. When Conan the Cimmerian, or Kull of Atlantis, or Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Sailor Steve Costigan, Breckinridge Elkins, El Borak, etc. —when these characters speak to a reader, it is because some of Robert E. Howard speaks to a reader, and the reader responds to that.

One reader might see Conan the Cimmerian as a masculine ideal; another might see him as an archetype of toxic masculinity. One reader might see him as an escapist fantasy on Howard’s part, another might see one of the many clones of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, cynically manufactured for pulp magazine consumption. Readers often look at Conan through the lens of their own lives and desires, influenced by the stories they have read, what they know of the life of Robert E. Howard, the history of pulp magazines, etc.

While everyone reads the same words, the understanding they come away with of the character and the story can vary as widely as the readers themselves do.

Howard, we can be fairly sure from his letters, did not set out to write Conan the Cimmerian or any of his characters as ideals to be followed; he wrote pulp fiction, not theology or philosophy—although having said that, Howard invested a great deal of bloody philosophy and world-weary wisdom into his characters, whose triumphs are often matched by tragedies, and whose tales are often set against the grinding movement of time which will eventually crush and subsume all things. There are veins of cynicism that sometimes give way to wonder, black rage and pity, catlike jests, and dour moods no drink can drown.

In 2012, Rachel Kahn (Shel Kahn) began a series of autobiographical webcomics, originally on Tumblr, and later collected as a ‘zine and a short series of books: Conan the Barbarian Is My Spirit Guide, By Crom! (2013), Full Colour Cromulence: Book 2 of By Crom! (2014), and a crowdfunded full collection titled simply By Crom! (2016).

What lessons can a fictional Cimmerian hold for a Canadian artist in the 2010s? At first glance, the reactions of a wandering barbarian thief, warrior, pirate, and later king might not have much relevance. This is, in part, the initial charm of the comic: the juxtaposition of this forthright, sometimes violent adventurer when faced with a young woman who often faces the trials and tribulations of everyday life, such as anxiety and medical issues.

On the other hand, sometimes Conan says exactly what she needs to hear.

The Conan that plays foil to Rachel Kahn’s alter ego in these strips is derivative of Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian, not the musclebound superhero of the comics or the films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yet it is very obviously a Conan that partakes of Kahn herself as much as Howard. In asking herself, essentially, “What Would Conan Do?” the Cimmerian dispenses advice that often affirms the kind of positive, active attitude she struggles with. Conan, whatever and whoever else he is, makes no pretense and suffers no moment of self-doubt or crisis of identity; in By Crom! he embodies the kind of easy self-confidence, self-awareness, and self-acceptance that many struggle with.

Yet he is rarely a total dick about it.

Rarely. Sometimes tough love is necessary.

In a personal essay at the rear of By Crom! (2016), Kahn elaborated on her inspiration to start the comic, how she fell into Robert E. Howard and other pulp writers, the death of her father, and her ongoing struggles to live and work as an artist with all the stress that entails. And she wrote:

And through this all, this whole time when I felt I was waging war against the whole world alone, carrying all this pain that left me isolated in my own mind, I had Conan. I had comics Conan, novel Conan, even Arnie’s cinematic Conan, who speaks less and succeeds less than any other Conan but still will not give up his quest. Conan managed, so I managed. Conan took risks, so I took risks. Conan pursued his goals despite incredible opposition, so I pushed harder at what I wanted every day. Conan followed his own moral code, so I tried to remember mine more often as well.

Lovecraft wrote that Howard’s secret was that he put himself in every story. It is appropriate that Rachel Kahn followed in his footsteps and put so much of herself into By Crom!, and her depiction of Conan shows the mingled influence. Her Conan does not strip quotes from Howard’s stories in pursuit of some dogmatic canon; she expresses the heart of who Conan was and is to her. In an interview with Jenna Lindford, Kahn wrote:

I think one of the fantasies I can obsess over as someone living with mental illness is the dream of being emotionally invincible, or perhaps, invincible to my own emotions. The futility of that, the reality that I was not a hugely resilient and self sufficient person, was either going to crush me or become something I could laugh about and thus accept, and drawing the comic really helped me choose laughter. In the end no real person can achieve the kind of simple purity of intention that Conan has, and by juxtaposing it with my own experiences I think it shows some of the absurdity of both approaches.

In terms of the fine line, well, while I made myself the butt of most of the jokes, I hope that the honest expression of my frustrations and struggles and concerns communicated a sort of self-acceptance. If I can write and draw a comic about a rage-tinted panic attack in a bra shop, I have to be able to accept myself as someone who lived that. I hope that while the comic has a sense of humour about these anxieties, anyone else who is familiar with living with them senses the acceptance and fellow-feeling, and does not feel like the butt of the joke. However, when you make something like this you have to accept that your intentions don’t dictate the results, so I don’t pretend to think the comic is invincible to other perceptions.

The reader always completes a story; a writer can control the words, but not how someone responds to those words. Robert E. Howard, typing away at his writing table in Cross Plains, Texas in 1936 could never have guessed that in 2012 what he wrote would find new manifestation with a freelance artist in Canada in 2012…yet, that happened, and Rachel Kahn’s Conan is recognizably Conan, as recognizable in his own was as any Frank Frazetta cover.

Readers can start reading By Crom! from the beginning at the Weald Comics website or on Tapas.

Physical copies of the By Crom! collections appear to be sold out, but for those who are interested in the additional commentary, essays, and pin-ups, PDFs are still available via the Gumroad store.

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

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

Les Ombres de Thulé (2023) by Patrick Mallet, Lionel Marty, & Axel Conzalbo

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.

Map on the inner pages of the French edition; not included in the English translation.

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.

Conzalbo uses color to heighten the distinction between the old man’s vision and the real-world scenes.

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.

Back covers of the French (left) and English (right) editions.

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).

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

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.

Chekov’s volcano: if a volcano appears at the start of a fantasy graphic novel, it must erupt by the end.

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:

*What if?* #39 (June 1983). Alan Zelenetz (script), Ron Wilson (pencils), Danny Bulanadi (inks), Janice Chiang (letters), George Roussos (color)

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.

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

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

Her Letters To Lovecraft: Ida C. Haughton

The Woodbee for October is edited by Mrs. Ida C. Haughton, and though not of large size, does credit both to her and to the Columbus club.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur (Mar 1917), Collected Essays 1.145

Ida Clara Cochran was born 22 July 1860 in Ohio, the first child of Samuel and Caroline Cochran. She had, apparently, little formal education. On 11 April 1883 she married Edwin S. Haughton. On 14 October 1887, their only child, Edna M. Haughton, was born. She was born, lived, and died in Ohio; and if she had any profession other than housewife it is not denoted on the federal census. Yet Ida C. Haughton had a considerable involvement in amateur journalism, one that brought her into contact—and conflict—with H. P. Lovecraft.

Organized amateur journalism in the United States began during the 19th century, when industrialization made amateur printing more feasible for individuals. There were several levels of organization, from small local groups like the Blue Pencil Club in New York City to larger regional groups like the Eastern Amateur Press Association, the New England Amateur Journalists Association, etc., and finally the national-level organizations: the National Amateur Press Association and the United Amateur Press Association—the latter of which was especially prone to faction, and by the time Lovecraft joined in 1914, had effectively split into two groups (the United Amateur Press Association with Lovecraft and Haughton, and the United Amateur Press Association of America with Elsie Gidlow). Various levels of organization were combined; so that for example the Blue Pencil Club was largely aligned with the NAPA and shared considerable overlap in membership, and the Woodbees Club in Ohio was wholly affiliated with the UAPA.

Ida C. Haughton was a member of the Woodbees and the UAPA. While it isn’t clear exactly when she joined, Lovecraft begins to mention her in his review column in the United Amateur (official organ of the UAPA) in 1915. There is, at this early date, no sign of animosity; while Lovecraft criticizes her poetry somewhat for perceived technical irregularities, his criticism is always balanced with praise, e.g.:

“Dead Men Tell No Tales”, a short story by Ida Cochran Haughton, is a ghastly and gruesome anecdote of the untenanted clay; related by a village dressmaker. The author reveals much comprehension of rural psychology in her handling of the theme; an incident which might easily shake the reason of a sensitive and imaginative person, merely “unnerves” the two quaint and prim maiden ladies. Poe would have made of this tale a thing to gasp and tremble at; Mrs. Haughton, with the same material, constructs genuine though grim comedy!
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur (May 1917), Collected Essays 1.154

Photo from *Chronicles of the Cochrans* (1915)

Little of Haughton’s work has been reprinted (notably, a convention report from 1920), so we have largely only Lovecraft’s reviews to judge, but she seems to have been fairly prolific in poetry, short fiction, sketches, short essays, and involved with editing of the Woodbee and sometimes her own amateur journals. Ida C. Haughton was noted for her devotion to her family and genealogy, having published a book Chronicles of the Cochrans (1915), which includes an autobiographical portion, and was involved with family reunions and an organization of Cochran descendants. Her daughter Edna M. Haughton, a schoolteacher, was also a member of the UAPA and the Woodbees, and there are indications that Ida recruited other relatives for amateur journalism as well:

The Woodbee for October is a magazine of wonderful merit, reflecting the sound scholarship of its gifted editor, Mrs. Ida Cochran Haughton. Mrs. Haughton feels constrained to apologise because of the prevalence of material from the pens of members of her family, but she has no reason to do so, since it would be difficult to find better literature than that which she used. […] The editorial comment, news notes, and other miscellaneous matter are of that high standard which one naturally expects from a writer of Mrs. Haughton’s culture and attainments; and it is not too much for the impartial critic to say that her management of the Woodbee has set a new standard in correct and graceful editorship. The October number is an issue to which amateurdom may well point with pride as one of the most substantial achievements of the year.
—H. P. LovecraftL, “The Department of Public Criticism,” United Amateur (Jan 1918), Collected Essays 1.183

Amateur journalism was a democratic institution, and the UAPA held annual elections for officers drawn from among the membership. This led to politics, and Sayre’s law applies. At the time he was recruited and ever afterward, Lovecraft was associated with a faction of the United which emphasized literary ability, high standards in printing and criticism. Haughton and the Woodbees were more focused on the social aspects of amateur journalism, with more emphasis on amateurism and less on high-minded literary ability. After Lovecraft’s presidency (1917-1918), he was succeeded by three presidents from his faction: Rheinhart Kleiner (1918-1919), Mary Faye Durr (1919-1920), and Alfred M. Galpin (1920-1921). During this period, the columns of the United Amateur were largely dominated by Lovecraft and his friends; and the official organ reflected their efforts to project a quasi-scholar, high-brow aesthetic.

Ida C. Haughton, and many others in the United, were critical of Lovecraft & friends’ management of the organization, which we get the occasional hint of in Lovecraft’s letters:

The very boorish and puerile attack on the critical department made last year by Mrs. Haughton, is yet echoing in the United.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Edward H. Cole, 13 May 1918, LAGO 35

Since Lovecraft was the critics department, more or less, he apparently took this personally. Haughton was at this point also the head of the Western Manuscript Bureau of the United, and later Secretary, receiving new membership applications and handling recruitment, and Lovecraft was apparently not happy with how she handled her duities:

Record each application received; send the applicants their certificates, properly filled out, with suitable words of welcome; and send all credentials to one or both of the MS. Bureaux—preferably the Eastern, unless she can endure dealing with that utterly impossible Haughton creature.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Alfred Galpin, 14 Nov 1918, LAGO 218

I was very pleased to receive your recent letter with interesting enclosures, & have duly forwarded the membership application to the new Secretary—Mrs. Ida C. Haughton, 1526 Summit St., Columbus, Ohio. I am glad to welcome you as a full-fledged member of the United, & hope that your affiliation may prove permanent.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Arthur Harris, 11 Sep 1919, LRKO 239

Your failure to hear from the association officially is due to the negligence of the new Secretary, a rather eccentric elderly woman who was given the post merely because she happens to live in the next convention city. […] Smith is not a member of the United, & I fear he does not know that Mrs. Haughton is our Secretary; but I will tell him, also writing Kilpatrick. I wish Mrs. H would get some blanks printed—I have typed them till I hate the sound of the machine!
—H. P. Lovecraft to James Larkin Pearson, 19 Sep 1919, LRKO 320

While never publicly insulting Haughton, it is clear that the criticism leveled against Lovecraft and his faction must have increased in fervor and volume, at least if Lovecraft’s reaction to it is anything to go by:

It is that filthy Cleveland sewer-rat [William Dowdell] and that disgusting Columbus hippopotamus-jellyfish [Ida C. Haughton] who have done all the malevolent work by their raucous howls, and I fervently wish them both a swift and rough passage to the abode of Beëlzebub.
—H. P. Lovecraft to the Gallomo, [Apr 1920], Miscellaneous Letters 83

At the 1921 convention, Ida C. Haughton won the vote for president.

*The Washington Herald,* 12 Jul 1921, p2

Lovecraft was still Official Editor of the United Amateur, but had to deal with Haughton’s directives and her control of the United’s finances, as the UAPA collected dues from members to cover the printing of membership forms, lareaute certificates, and the United Amateur journal itself.

Since they were both officers of the organization and had to work together, Ida Haughton appears to have written to Lovecraft for the first time in 1921:

Ida has just written me that she and her Columbus henchman expect next year’s UNITED AMATEUR to be conducted in a more commonplace and democratic manner; with less of the purely artistic and more of the chatty and plebian. Only on such conditions, she implies, will the Columbus purse strings be liberally open. I have been dreadfully polite in replying, and have courteously ladled out wish to the effect that I’ll see her in hell first.
—H. P. Lovecraft to the Gallomo, 12 Apr 1921, Miscellaneous Letters 122

Part of the animosity came from Haughton’s accusation that Lovecraft had mismanaged the official organ fund. This frustration reached its peak with Lovecraft composing the satiric poem “Medusa: A Portrait”; to make sure there was no doubt who the gorgon in the poem was supposed to be, Lovecraft wrote a mocking dedication to Haughton when he sent the poem around to his close friends:

TO THE HON. IDA COCHRAN HAUGHTON, VISCOUNTESS WOODBY—
MY LADY:—

I shou’d be but a Cheater, and unworthy of the poetick Art, were I not to acknowledge to you by this Dedication the Indebtedness I ebar you. For ‘tis plain that I may my self claim but partial Credit for a Picture which, without so illustrious a Model, wou’d never have been drawn with any Sort of Fidelity. Truly, the Satirist desiring to shew certain Traits of Mind, wou’d be hard put to it, had he not before him some sort of living Example; and I am in Candour forc’d to concede, that of the QUalities I here seek to pourtray, no human Being cou’d display so great and flourishing an Abundance as your self. I shall ever count it a Piece of the greatest good Fortune, if my Satire succeed, that your Hatred of me mov’d you to slander and vilify me behind my Back; for lacking that Provocation I shou’d have neither had the Temerity to expos,e your Failings, not possessed so compleat a Fund of Lies and Calumnies from which to draw a Picture of such Venom as I never thought before to exist upon Earth.

Conscious, therefore, of my Debt, I will commend this unrpetentious Effort to your well-known Graciousness, and beg leave to subscribe my self,

MY LADY,
Your Ladyship’s most obedient,
Most devoted, humble servant,

THEOBALDUS SENECTISSIMUS, ARMIGER.
—H. P. Lovecraft to the Gallomo, 29 Nov 1921, Miscellaneous Letters 130-132

This language was only used in private to close friends; how Lovecraft phrased his reply to Ida C. Haughton is not known, since none of their correspondence is known to survive. In public, in the pages of the United Amateur, Lovecraft kept things civil, although occasional signs of frission slipped through:

It is not in a spirit of affront to him that we give preference to the plan of President Haughton, as outlined in her opening message, for the re-restablishment of a special magazine for credentials. We should be glad to curtail the official organ in the interest of such a magazine, as indeed we offered to do at the beginning of the term.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Editorial,” United Amateur (Sep 1921), Collected Essays 1.298

A “credential” was a work which demonstrated literary ability, be it a poem, short story, or essay, and which formed part of a would-be amateur journalist’s application to national organizations like the UAPA and NAPA; it was often the first piece of theirs that would be published in an amateur journal. Having a separate magazine for publishing credentials was intended to encourage new recruits, and Lovecraft seems to have largely approved of this move:

Mrs. Haughton and other assemblers of the recent New Member deserve much credit for providing a sorely needed outlet for the work of the recruit. The United should have further numbers of this or an analogous publication, and it is to be hoped that such can be made feasible. The editorial note in the present issue would gain strength and pertinence is more closely connected with the subject-matter and less fertile in accidental misstatements.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “News Notes,” United Amateur (May 1922), Collected Essays 1.317

In 1922, the presidency of the UAPA went from Ida C. Haughton to Howard Conover, and Lovecraft and members of his faction were effectively outed from all positions of leadership. In 1923, Lovecraft’s faction returned as his wife Sonia H. Greene became president, but her presidency faced issues, both from her personal difficulties and because the treasurer of the former administration refused to turn over the funds. Despite efforts to carry on with recruitment and publication, the United Amateur Press Association was moribund, and would not survive many more years.

Ida C. Haughton’s later years in amateur journalism are opaque; references to her in Lovecraft’s editorials and letters drop off after her term as president, although there was still considerable animosity on his part into the mid-1920s:

I may be human, all right, but not quite human enough to be glad at the misfortune of Dowdell or of anybody else. I am rather sorry (not outwardly but genuinely so) when disaster befalls a person–sorry because it gives the filthy herd so much pleasure. To be a real hater, one must hate en masse. I hate animals like the Haughton rhinoceros mildly and temperately, but for mankind as mankind I have a most artistically fiery abhorrence and execration, I spit upon them!
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 8 Mar 1923, LJM 29

Shall be glad to see The Old Timer, & hope Old Medusa gets her unshielded by Adamic censorship. But don’t fancy the old rhino is really a human being—she simply ain’t! That cow-mountain is nothing but a festering tumour of ectopic tissue, produced by fatty degeneration & morbid cell-sprouting–a senile & purulent excrescence on the race, wholly acraniate or at best microcephalic, & with muscular reactions—which produce written articles–caused by neuro-ganglial maladjustments induced by a gall-bladder dislocated by malignant elephantiasis into a position corresponding to the seat of the rudimentary brain in that species of primitive organism of which she is a noisomely decadent variant. She—or it—is a mere octopus of ugliness, nightmare, stupidity, & snarling malevolence . . . . a pitiful object that ought to be buried.
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 23 Mar 1923, LJM 34-35

When it comes to real cause for serious offence, how the devil can you think this farce even half as grave as that other old Ohio slush-brain’s attack on me in 1921? Boy, there isn’t half the real poison in the whole damn carcass of Peg-Ass-Us, that there is in one ophidian strand of the false hair of that fat cow-hippopotamus in Columbus! Put that li’l ol’ memory to work, Kid! Whilst all Witless-Cut has done is to fume picturesquely under deserved criticism, that ‘Idra Hot-One monster ran the very gamut of abuse & positive insult—culminating even in an aspersion on my stewardship of the United funds!
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, 15 Jun 1925, LMM 140

With the dissipation and collapse of the UAPA, however, Lovecraft’s ire would cool. When, at last, a bit of sad news came to him, he regarded his old enemy a bit differently.

*The Cincinnati Enquirer, 10 Dec 1934, p.13*

By the way—did you notice in one of the Oakland amateur papers the news that savage old Ida C. Haughton, my deadly foe in the early 1920s, was burned to death a year ago through the igniting of her clothing at a fireplace? Poor old gal! I’m surely sorry to hear it! I wished her a lot of things, but nothing quite as drastic as that!
—H. P. Lovecraft to James F. Morton, 12 May 1936, LJM 385

As for the continuance of the history to the finish in 1927—I really can’t tell when I’ll be able to get around to it, but I surely would like to do it some time—since no other old United member seems disposed to tackle the job. I doubt whether I’d try to revive the animosities of 20 & 15 years ago—for those issues are long dead, as indeed are some who participated in them. Poor old Mrs. Haughton, my arch-foe of 1921-22, was burned to death a year or two ago when her clothing ignited at a fireplace.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Hyman Bradofsky, 24 Nov 1936, LHB 383

It is hard to judge, from this distance, the issues which were so critical as to spark animosity between Ida C. Haughton and H. P. Lovecraft in the early 1920s. So too, we really only have Lovecraft’s side of the argument; and none of their brief correspondence survives for us to judge either Haughton’s tone or the content of her letters to him. Lovecraft’s animus, and his pity, both seem genuine; he certainly did not celebrate her death. Their quarrel had ultimately died with the United itself, and survives only in dusty editorials and old letters.

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

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

Editor Spotlight: Interview with Wendy N. Wagner

“Horror is for everyone.”
—Wendy N. Wagner

The publishing game has changed a great deal since the days of C. L. Moore and H. P. Lovecraft. Pulp magazines have increasingly given way to digital-and-print magazines, crowdfunded anthologies, ebooks, and patreons. Traditional publishing isn’t dead, but like moths and butterflies, it is undergoing a painful transition from the way things used to be done to how they will be done.

One thing remains: the world still needs editors. There still needs to be someone in the editorial trenches, reading submissions, answering queries, pitching ideas, working with authors to polish a story, push the envelope of what can be done. Their work is what enables writers’ voices to be heard, and even the most scintillant and brilliant bleeding edge of cosmic horror will go unread, if an editor can’t get a story to where people can actually read it.

Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of Nightmare magazine and the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed; she was also involved with the { } Destroy { } series, including editorial duties on Women Destroy Science Fiction! (2014), Women Destroy Fantasy! (2014), Women Destroy Horror! (2014), and Queers Destroy Horror! (2015), among others. They were kind enough to answer some of our questions on editing, cosmic horror, and Lovecraft.

※

How did you get into Lovecraft and cosmic horror?

Wendy N. Wagner: As a kid, I read a ton of Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anne Rice. I loved Halloween and anything with a gothic vibe. But I got busy with school and other interests, and horror fell by the wayside until my mid-twenties, when I started writing seriously. At that time, I wrote a couple of fantasy novels and realized that the parts of my work I loved best felt like horror, so I decided I was going to focus on writing horror short stories to improve my craft. I got a book by Mort Castle about horror writing, which included a list of the greatest horror writers and their work, and of course H.P. Lovecraft was on there. I had never read anything by him, but as someone living in Portland, Oregon, the birthplace of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, I recognized the name.

I checked out a collection from the library—I think it was the one edited by Joyce Carol Oates—and I was instantly in love. Every story filled me with the feelings I used to get reading horror as a kid. It was all so goth, so over the top, so deliciously dark. I felt like I had come home.

I started going to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, which includes a literary track, where I met a number of Lovecraftian and cosmic horror writers, and through them I started getting invited to write work for Lovecraftian anthologies. So I just kept reading and writing and watching Lovecraftian work, spiraling deeper and deeper into that weird and wonderful world. It really feels like home now.

As a speculative fiction writer and editor you have worked in the trenches of weird fiction and nonfiction for years. Have you faced discrimination for your gender or sexuality in that context?

WNW: Not that I know of? But I can’t know about what I’m not invited to because of my identity or my associations.

Your first editing project was Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. How did you get involved with that?

WNW: After I sold a short story to editor John Joseph Adams in 2010, I became fast friends with him and his partner, the editor Christie Yant. I started doing volunteer work for some of JJA’s projects, including working as an editorial assistant for three anthologies and then serving for a year as the assistant editor of Fantasy Magazine. When John closed Fantasy, I took an editing hiatus because I was writing tie-in fiction for the Pathfinder role-playing game while at the same time holding down a day job.

But in late 2013, I lost my job and started looking for a way to make a living as a full-time freelancer. Luckily for me, John Joseph Adams had just reached a point where he found running both Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines a little much on top of his anthology work. He hired me to manage the day-to-day operations of the magazines as well as handling the bulk of the line editing. He had also decided to oversee a Kickstarter campaign for a special issue of Lightspeed with a focus on women writers, to be edited by Christie Yant, and he asked me to assist some of the content production for that Kickstarter campaign.

The Kickstarter for Women Destroy Science Fiction! was an enormous success, and when it surpassed its fundraising goals, the three of us had a meeting to decide what to do next. We decided to expand the concept into Women Destroy Horror! and Women Destroy Fantasy! and brought on a crew of fabulous women to edit those works. I served as the managing editor of all these projects, on top of my regular managing editor duties. (Luckily, WDSF replaced the June 2014 issue at Lightspeed and WDH replaced the October 2014 issue of Nightmare.)

Because these issues were so well-received, we decided to repeat the project in 2015 with an emphasis on LGBTQIA creators. Because of my identity, my previous editorial experience, and of course my love of horror, Christie Yant suggested I serve as the editor-in-chief of Queers Destroy Horror!, and JJA thought it was a great idea.

You were also the nonfiction editor for Women Destroy Science Fiction! and Women Destroy Fantasy! What was that experience like?

WNW: It was an absolute blast overseeing the nonfiction for those projects! And easy, too, because we got so much email from so many people who wanted to be involved with it—there were so many women who had so many exciting ideas, and it was a joy to offer them a place to share them.

I think the best part of the Destroy projects were the micro-essays about people’s personal experiences which ran in the Kickstarter campaigns and in the Destroy Science Fiction! editions. I got to wrangle the ones for Women Destroy and for Queers Destroy, and it was amazing to read them. Over and over again, people spoke of the incredible importance of representation, the way seeing someone like themself on a screen or on a page unlocked the world for them.

It really changed something inside of me. I never set out to be an editor or a gatekeeper of any kind, but after working on the Destroy projects, I understood how important it was to make sure the world was getting a chance to read more diverse voices. I felt it in my bones: this work matters.

You joined Nightmare Magazine as managing/associate editor in 2014 and worked your way up to editor-in-chief. How has that experience been?

WNW: I’ve had so much fun at Nightmare! I was originally brought on to oversee the staff and all the production details, as well as handling the line-by-line editing of stories and articles, but I very quickly volunteered to take over the nonfiction side of things, and John didn’t mind. I’m such a giant horror fan that it was a lot more fun for me than it was for him! To this day, I think our H Word essay column is my favorite part of the magazine. We feature a different writer every month, and after all these years, I think the column is an amazing repository of thoughts on how the horror genre works and what it means to people. I am so proud of it!

In mid-2020, John asked me if I’d be interested in taking over as editor-in-chief, and it was such an overwhelmingly wonderful moment. My first issue was our 101^st, and I had the cover printed up as a huge poster to hang in my office. When I got it up on the wall, I cried with happiness.

It’s been really exciting to select stories and share them with the world. My goal for the magazine is to explore the broadest possible spectrum of horror fiction, ranging from the bizarro to the cozy, from the psychological to the supernatural, to publish work that’s barely horror and to publish work that’s in the dead, scary center. I always say that our motto is “Horror is for everyone,” and I dream that the magazine’s archives contain some kind of horror that’s accessible for every kind of reader. Not because I think I can make everyone happy, but because I think horror is good for everyone, and too many people have been turned off from horror because they have this very blinkered vision of the genre. I want to help take off those blinkers. It’s basically my life mission!

In your editorial for Nightmare Magazine #132 (September 2023), you stated that “Lovecraftian” was a lazy adjective. Can you expand on that?

WNW: First because H.P. Lovecraft wrote in so many different genres and subgenres! He wrote stories of the supernatural. He wrote stories that are extremely science fictional. He wrote dark fantasy. He wrote psychological horror. I think the submissions guidelines for the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival do a great job explaining how broad and wide “Lovecraftian” work can be (I have never made a Lovecraftian film, but last year I took home the Best Screenplay award from the HPLFF, so I’ve definitely studied those guidelines very closely).

However, I think most people use the word “Lovecraftian” to refer to the realm of weird and cosmic horror, the subgenres Lovecraft is probably best known for. So why not just use the term “weird and cosmic horror”? There are a lot of other creators who have done just as much for the field as HPL has. I think about Robert W. Chambers, whose novel The King in Yellow was published when Lovecraft was five years old. Or Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” published when HPL was seven. William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland was issued when Lovecraft was eight. Those three works are three of my very favorite works of cosmic horror, and were huge influences on Lovecraft’s writing.

I suppose “Chambersian” doesn’t sound nearly as cool as “Lovecraftian,” alas.

Did you get any pushback for that editorial, or the statements you’ve made about Lovecraft in general?

WNW: I had to laugh a little at this question, because I usually feel like nobody reads the editorials! I’ve never heard a peep about any of them, at any rate.

You’re also managing/senior editor and nonfiction editor of Lightspeed. What is the difference between editing science fiction versus editing horror?

WNW: As an editor, my job is to try to put myself in the writer’s head and to strive to understand why they’ve made the craft choices they made. I’m always trying to figure out what emotions the writer is attempting to manipulate, what senses they’re hoping to stimulate, what ideas they’re trying to knit together in order to sculpt the landscape of the story. I think the two different genres tend to target different emotions, senses, and conceptual landscapes, but the job remains the same. I’m just there to make sure my writers are totally happy with their work!

Besides being an editor, you’ve written a good bit of Lovecraft-inspired and cosmic horror fiction yourself. What draws you to write it?

WNW: I grew up in a very small community in Oregon’s coast range. To get to the nearest town, we had to drive twenty-five miles on a very narrow, winding road that skirted a deep canyon and a very wide river. It rained nine months of the year, and in the summer, there was heavy fog almost every day. It might have been the West Coast, but I couldn’t have lived any closer to Innsmouth without putting a houseboat on Devil’s Reef.

I guess you could say it’s in my blood!

Do you feel that being you (female, queer) has shaped your understanding of Lovecraft and approach to body horror and cosmic horror?

WNW: When I was a young teenager, there were several ballot measures in my state that tried to limit or eliminate gay rights, and homophobia saturated the airwaves. My own father once told me he thought gay people shouldn’t even exist. I think when you grow up knowing you are hated for simply being yourself, it makes you understand horror in a whole different way.

As for body horror, I do think people with uteruses have easy access a lot of source material! Bodies, man. They can be magically disgusting.

Has writing Lovecraft-inspired fiction changed how you relate to Lovecraft and his fiction?

WNW: When Lovecraft is your job, you definitely read more of his work. I probably wouldn’t have made it through The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath if it hadn’t been required reading!

Reading some of your fiction like “Curvature of the Witch House,” I’m reminded of when W. H. Pugmire wrote “Instead of writing formula stories, we can use Lovecraftian themes as a foundation on which to try to build our own unique fiction.” Do you feel that describes your own approach?

WNW: Oh, Pugmire, you wonderful soul. Of course Pugmire would put it so perfectly!

Those words really resonate with me now after writing two novels (Girl in the Creek, forthcoming 2025 from Tor Nightfire, and a still-to-be-homed novel finished earlier this year) that are definitely cosmic horror novels. I think there are elements in both books that will really resonate with anyone who reads Lovecraft, but at the same time, those elements are totally spun out of my own obsessions. I didn’t set out to ape anything by the master, but I think I’ve spent so much time thinking about his work (and the work of related authors, especially Robert W. Chambers) that the way I approach story naturally shapes it into the realm of the cosmic and weird.

Has being an editor shaped your views of Lovecraft in your own fiction?

WNW: I think being an editor has made me see how important the cosmic and the weird are to all people. That’s one of the reasons why I object to the using the term “Lovecraftian” to mean “cosmic and/or weird.” The weird belongs to everyone! I think we’re only going to see more personal and even weirder takes on cosmic horror.

From an editorial perspective, how do you handle issues of prejudice & discrimination in the submissions you receive?

WNW: As a human, I think my most important value is of ahimsa, the Hindu and Buddhist principle non-harm or nonviolence (I’m not a Buddhist, but I think that term is the best to explain my moral stance). As an editor, I think my primary job is to put stories out into the world that don’t harm people, and my next biggest job is to make sure that the writers who send me work aren’t harmed by their interactions with me. That means I don’t publish stories that encourage discrimination, and I try to publish work from a diverse population of writers. I also try to communicate with authors in a kind way. But there is always room for improvement.

The best way to fight my own prejudices and preconceptions about literature is to read widely and to think critically about my understanding of craft and language. Last year I spent a great couple of months attending a workshop presented by the Willamette Writers about the way writing workshops can be damaging for writers from marginalized communities and identities. It was very thought-provoking, and I look forward to learning more. I’m always looking for ways to expand my horizons and to be a better advocate for diversity in our genre.

How do you encourage diversity as an editor?

WNW: I’m very inspired by our publisher, John Joseph Adams, and his editorial work, particularly Lightspeed. Lightspeed has a stellar record for publishing writers from around the globe and for celebrating marginalized voices. From the very beginning of the magazine, he made sure every issue showcased an even number of male and female writers, and he’s also been hugely supportive of nonbinary and trans authors. John is my absolute hero, and he sets very high standards for all his publications. As for my own measures, I try to invite a diverse population of writers to work with me on nonfiction, an area where Nightmare has always shone, as well as soliciting fiction from marginalized voices (last year we had two themed issues, one exploring “Lovecraftian” themes and one focused on dark fantasy, whose fiction and poetry was entirely commissioned from writers of color). I’ve also experimented with having open submissions periods strictly for people of color. Some people complain about these kinds of submissions periods, but for me, they seem helpful. I like to take more care reading these submissions, which often draw from literary styles and craft techniques that are outside of my own training (I studied literature in ’90s, and it was heavily biased toward British and upper-class American writing). I know I’m still learning a lot about how to evaluate work that doesn’t jibe with the classic European canon of fiction—sometimes I feel like I have an easier time loving poetry from other cultures than I do fiction, simply because I’ve been trained to appreciate more experimental approaches to craft in that genre. But I like to think I’m learning!

What do you see as the future of Lovecraft-inspired fiction and cosmic horror?

WNW: It’s only going to get wilder and more exciting. Our culture has changed radically since Lovecraft was writing fiction, and science has transformed our understanding of both what might lie outside our terrestrial bubble and what the very nature of reality might be. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods no longer feel terrifying in the way they did in the early 20^th century because we have begun to suspect the cosmos is far stranger than Lovecraft and his contemporaries ever imagined.

But one of the central tenets of Lovecraft’s work was always that the cosmos are weirder than our simple primate brains are ready to understand. The weirder we get, the more we prove him right. In that regard, Lovecraft will always be relevant, even if his biases aren’t.

Today’s writers stand on the shoulders of weird giants, straining toward the stars. I hope the writers of tomorrow stand on my shoulders, ready to gibber in horror at whatever is up there.

※

“Horror is for everyone.” Four words to carve into your heart. Thank you Wendy for taking the time to answer these questions. Looking forward to seeing more from you in the future.

For more on Wendy N. Wagner, check out their Linktree.

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

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

“El guardian” (2010) by Enrique Balmes & Roc Espinet and “Life After Death” (2010) by David Güell

The sixth issue of the Spanish horror comic magazine Cthulhu was dedicated to Robert E. Howard, and while not every work inside the covers is derived from or in reference to the Texas pulpster, several are.

Manuel Barrero kicks things off with “Robert E. Howard, Del terror al cómic” an essay on comic adaptations of Howard’s horror stories. Luis Miguez wrote and illustrated “La Mano derecha de la fatalidad,” a very competent black-and-white adaptation of the Solomon Kane story “The Right Hand of Doom.” The regular feature El joven Lovecraft by José Oliver, Isaac Casanova, and Bartolo Torres presents an abbreviated two-page variation on “In the Forest of Villefère,” played for laughs.

Then there are two works back-to-back. “El guardian” is a colored six-page story written by Enrique Balmes and illustrated by Roc Espinet; a silent sword & sorcery piece where a nameless but familiar barbarian seeks some mystic elixir from a demonic guardian…that transitions, at the last, back to a more morbidly horrific reality.

Left literally unsaid is the idea that the failure of the fantasy barbarian is an echo of Howard’s own attitude, a prelude to what came next. There was no mystic elixir that would restore his mother to health. No matter how hard her fought, he could not save her. Only readers familiar with Howard’s life and legend would recognize the import of that transition, what was about to happen next.

Then, the reader turns the page…

…to the opening of “Life After Death” by David Güell, a 4-page black-and-white comic which picks up immediately thereafter.

Where “El guardian” is silent, “Life After Death” speaks directly to the deceased writer. “Cinezas a las cenizas, polvo al polvo” (ashes to ashes, dust to dust) the priest prays him into Hell, and his characters reproach him as they are dragged down into the grave with him. Until at last they end with “Ni los dioses ni la eternidad podrán separarnos” (Neither the gods nor eternity will separate us.)—and what echoes does that have? Does it recall the words of Valeria, in Conan the Barbarian (1982), when she claimed “All the gods, they cannot sever us”? Or perhaps the inscription on the headstone for the Howard family, which proclaims “And in death they were not divided” (2 Samuel 1:23)?

Or, perhaps, just a bit of sentiment.

Taken independently, neither of these stories is much. They are evocative little tone poems of graphic art. Each seeks to capture a certain mood, a certain aspect of Howard’s life and legend—and yet what the editors Lorenzo Pascual and Pilar Lumbreras have done, by putting these two pieces together, in this order, to get that transition, is to highlight an absolutely essential element of the personal mythology of Robert E. Howard.

Death and doom is a constant in the works of Robert E. Howard. While heroic fantasy is sometimes characterized as mindless manslaughter, all blood and thunder and no characterization, toxic masculine escapism…the fact is that while they may not die on the page in most of the stories penned by Howard, they are all doomed to die, and ultimately to fail. Kull’s Valusia and Atlantis are legend and dust by the time of Conan the Cimmerian; the Hyborian Age is a myth and its last peoples degenerated in the Bran Mak Morn tales. The Pictish empire that Bran forges collapses after his death, so that by the time of Turlough Dubh O’Brien it is a fading race among the British Isles, and by the time of the present Conrad and Kirowan know it survives only as a dim and almost-forgotten cult.

For all that Robert E. Howard’s heroes achieve, no peace is ever permanent, no legacy is everlasting, no kingdom eternal, no castle or monument uneroded by time, no legend remembered forever. Bloodlines fail, nations fall, peoples intermingle and old races are lost and replaced by new ones, constantly, forever. For all that some have considered Howard’s essay The Hyborian Age to be driven by white supremacy, it doesn’t take very close reading to realize that the “white” peoples get their asses kicked a lot. That’s part of the cyclical nature of the world in Howard’s fiction; and every conquering Aryan is boasting of their prowess, at the last, defeated or killed.

What’s more, Howard’s heroes know it. The best of them, the deepest of them, know it in their bones. It hangs on them like a shroud, it haunts their thoughts and leads to dour moods. Kull of Atlantis and Conan of Cimmeria come as outsiders to their thrones, and have to earn acceptance and legitimacy; their position is constantly threatened as neither has established an heir. Bran Mak Morn, who fought his way to kingship, sees himself the last of a degenerating race, an underdog against the mightiest empire in the world—Rome. In “Wings in the Night,” Solomon Kane, whose stories often reflect the popular Colonialist attitudes toward race in the 1920s, finds himself thrust into the role of defender one too many times, and fails—left with nothing else, he takes on the role of the avenger, and hunts the last of an ancient race to extinction.

Almost any victory won in Howard’s tales is a brief and fleeting thing, a temporary reprieve at best against the foregone conclusion that in the end, every man must die, and the price is often bloody. His characters are not, generally speaking, supermen; though many have superior strength, speed, skill, or simply a nearly inhuman ability to soak up punishment. They hurt, they bleed, they laugh, they sorrow.

Like Howard himself.

I do not hold that there is one single incident that drove Robert E. Howard to suicide. The long illness of his mother, the unexpectantly blunt words of a nurse, the break-up with his girlfriend, the financial stress of his mother’s care combined with the large amounts of money that Weird Tales owed him…these are all no doubt parts of it. Stressors that built and built until finally he put into action his plan.

Yet that it was a planned suicide seems clear. The thought appears in several of Howard’s letters over the years, it makes an appearance in a few of his stories, such as the opening to “Xuthal of the Dusk,” where Conan knows he has reached the end of his trail. After his death, his father Dr. I. M. Howard spoke somewhat more candidly about his son’s inclination, and perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, saw clearly that they were preparations for his demise. Robert E. Howard had bought the funeral plot. Borrowed a friend’s gun. Given instructions to his agent in case of his deceased.

Of all the letters that tackle this theme or philosophy, one has always stood out to me. On 19 June 1935, Robert E. Howard and his friend Truett Vinson set out for a road trip to New Mexico. They returned a scant five days later, having taken in the immense natural beauty of the Carlsbad Caverns and various sites of interest. In Santa Fe, the pair paused at the New Mexico Museum of Art.

We went through the art museum which is supposed to be very good, but I shall not pretend to try to pass on it. I know nothing about paintings, and, unless the painting portrays some sort of strenuous action, I care less. Most of the paintings were of New Mexican landscape, and I find the Witt Museum in San Antonio less monotonous, because Texas presents a greater variety of scenery than does New Mexico, and therefore a collection of Texas landscape paintings offers more different scenes. Only one painting stands out in my mind, and I studied that for a long time. It was a large painting of a half-naked Indian trudging over a desert country, leaning on a staff, and dragging behind him several horses’ heads, with portions of the vertebrae still attached; he was dragging them by means of raw-hide ropes fastened in deep gashes in the muscles of his back. At first glance I supposed it to portray a Penitente, but a description was affixed to the painting. It portrayed a scene the artist had witnessed in Montana, many years before. An old Crow chief had word that his favorite son had died in Carlisle University; he killed the boy’s horses, cut off their heads, gashed his back and fastened rawhide thongs into the raw flesh, and dragged those skulls all over the mountains all day long, to show that neither grief nor physical agony could shake his fortitude. Doubtless it did more to lessen his sorrow than anything he could have done. I was reminded of Chesterton’s lines, about the old Viking:

“And a man hopes, being foolish,
Till in white woods apart
He finds at last the lost bird dead,
But a man can still hold up his head,
Though nevermore his heart.”
[The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)]

When the world cracks under a man’s feet and the sky breaks and falls on his head, if he can clench his jaws and keep on his feet, and keep his head up, if for no other reason than the stubborn pride of fighting, then that’s something, at least; and if he can’t do that, he’d better blow his brains out, like a gentleman. The title of the picture was “The Stoic.”

—Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, c. July 1935, A Means to Freedom 2.872-873

It is not clear how many biographical details of Howard’s life, how many of his letters in English or in translation, that the creators of “El guardian” and “Life After Death” had when they put their work together. Yet they had the gist of it, the essence of the ending that helped catapult Howard from a popular pulp writer to a legend. In the flip of a page, the reader gets the shock of that transition, that supreme moment…and then Howard was gone.

It was up to his friends and loved ones to carry on without him.

“Ustedes no conocen lo queue significa la palabra “miedo”. No, yo sé lo queue me digo. Ustedos son soldados, aventureros. Han conocido las Cargas de Los regimenientos de dragons, El frenesí de Los mares azotados por Los vientos. Pero El miedo, else miedo queue pone los pelos de punta, see queue os estremece de horror, ése no lo han conocido. Yo sí he conocido semejante miedo… Pero no será hasta queue las legions de Las tinieblas salgan en torbellino por las puertas del inferno y el Mundo se consuma entre llamas queue ése miedo vuelva a ser conocido por Los hombres.”

“FEAR? Your pardon, Messieurs, but the meaning of fear you do not know. No, I hold to my statement. You are soldiers, adventurers. You have known the charges of regiments of dragoons, the frenzy of wind-lashed seas. But fear, real hair-raising, horror-crawling fear, you have not known. I myself have known such fear; but until the legions of darkness swirl from hell’s gate and the world flames to ruin, will never such fear again be known to men.”

Back cover text of Cthulhu #6

Original English-source, from the opening to “Wolfshead” by Robert E. Howard

If you are considering suicide or self harm, please get help now.

The International Association to Prevent Suicide offers contact information for 24-hour assistance.

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.

“The Plant-Thing” (1925) by R. G. Macready

R. G. Macready, of Durant, Oklahoma, writes to the editor: “You are to be commended on the determined stand you, as well as the great majority of WEIRD TALES readers, have taken against those who protest at the weird quality of the stories printed in your periodical. Why do not these people, who are trying to wipe out of existence the only magazine of its kind, turn their artillery upon the sex-exploiting magazines that are crowding the best magazines out of place on our news stands? Anyway, a mind that can go undiseased through that so-called literature should be able to survive the pleasantly exhilarating ‘kick’ of a good horror tale. There can be no question as to the literary status of WEIRD TALES. In it have appeared stories worthy of Kipling himself, to say nothing of Poe.”
—Weird Tales June 1925

The cover of the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales was dedicated to “The Werewolf of Ponkert” by H. Warner Munn, a story that had spun out of Lovecraft’s suggestion that no story had yet been written from the perspective of a werewolf. Lovecraft himself was present in the issue with “The Unnamable.” E. Hoffmann Price’s “The Stranger from Kurdistan,” which Lovecraft later lauded, also graced the issue; another entry in Seabury Quinn’s series “Servants of Satan,” Henry S. Whitehead’s “The Wonderful Thing,” a classic translation/reprint in “The Three Low Masses” by Alphonse Daudet—and a story from a bright newcomer, “Spear and Fang” by Robert E. Howard, his first story in the magazine.

Against all these well-known names are a handful of other stories, but readers may be forgiven for overlooking “The Plant-Thing” by R. G. Macready. It is a minor effort, as weird tales go, and Farnsworth Wright did Macready no favors by announcing at the start “A Frightful Tale of a Carnivorous Tree,” because that quite gives the game away. In other ways, the story is too short, too full of stereotypes. Of course the Doctor has a beautiful daughter. Of course things end with one bloody and violent clash.

There are some other curious parallels with other weird stories: the Malay employees of Doctor Carter echo a certain trend of doctors or scientists having exotic servants; Lovecraft used an identical tactic in “The Last Test” (Weird Tales Nov 1928), which also coincidentally involved the sacrifice to science of a large number of animal specimens. The inhuman appetite and emphasis on farm stock to feed it was also a feature of “The Dunwich Horror” and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Whether Lovecraft ever took any inspiration from “The Plant-Thing” must remain speculation, however; there are no mentions of the story or author in Lovecraft’s letters or notes.

It was, as it turns out, to be the only story that Macready would ever publish in Weird Tales. That wasn’t unusual either; Weird Tales had a higher percentage of writers whose only credit was a single story in its pages than nearly any other pulp magazine. Editors Edwin Baird, Farnsworth Wright, and Dorothy McIlwraith might have their quirks and shortcomings, but they were all of them open to new talent.

So too, the British editor Christine Campbell Thomson must have thought it a good shocker, for she bought the reprint rights for the 1925 Not at Night anthology. When editor Herbert Ashbury brought out the American Not at Night anthology in 1928, Macready again found himself reprinted—and sharing a table of contents with H. P. Lovecraft again, as well as August Derleth, Seabury Quinn, and Frank Belknap Long, Jr., among others. Macready could honestly claim that he had rubbed shoulders with some of the giants of weird fiction.

There is one thing that makes Macready himself stand out from most of the other authors of Weird Tales, though you would have to go beyond the pages of that magazine to know it:

R. G. Macready was deaf.

Reginald Goode Macready was born 18 April 1905 in Silo, Oklahoma, and grew up (according to census reports) as part of a large family; his father a teacher and newspaper publisher. At the age of 7, R. G. Macready suffered an attack of meningitis; and though he survived, it left him “hopelessly” deaf (the exact degree of deafness is never specified, and may have been total). The young Macready thereafter attended the Oklahoma School for the Deaf, which had been founded in 1908, and did very well scholastically, graduating as class president and valedictorian. He was offered a scholarship to attend Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University), a private university that specialized in higher education for the hearing-impared. (Durant Daily Democrat 3 Oct 1922).

It isn’t entirely clear if Macready attended Gaudelet, or if he did attend whether he graduated. The dates fall in between the federal census. In 1927, his father died, which may have interrupted his studies; by the 1930 census he was back in Durant, Oklahoma, working as a printer (according to the census; more likely a linotype operator), and probably helped to support his mother. In the 1940s he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, from which he graduated with a B.A. in Journalism in 1944, and a M.A. in 1945. A newspaper article on his achievement proudly notes his publication in Weird Tales.

If Macready taught at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf in Sulphur, Oklahoma, it wasn’t for long; by 1946 he was the telegraph editor at the Galveston Daily News. Numerous bylines attest to Macready’s career as a journalist, which continued until his death in Texas in 1977 (Findagrave).

The ableness, race, gender, and sexuality of a writer, can all be invisible to the reader. They know only as much as the writer chooses to reveal. Macready made no point of it, and his last contribution to the Unique Magazine was a letter in the July 1925 issue. The average reader would have no idea that Macready had any disability at all—and many writers with disability pass through history, without leaving any trace of the difficulties they had faced and overcome in their life. How many other writers at Weird Tales might have been part of this oft-underrepresented group?

“The Plant-Thing” by R. G. Macready may be read online for free.

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.

Orcs et Gobelins T11: Kronan (2021) by Jean-Luc Istin, Sébastien Grenier, and J. Nanjan

Antarya traverse une crise des plus graves depuis que la reine Nawell a perdu la raison. Lors d’une trahison de haut vol, elle fait exécuter ses soldats. L’orc Kronan, capitaine de sa garde en réchappe. Pour lui, celle qui dit se nommer Nawell est une usurpatrice et il compte bien le prouver mais aussi se venger. Et quand Kronan se venge, il trace toujours un sillon de sang sur son chemin.	Antarya is going through a serious crisis since Queen Nawell lost her mind. In a high-level betrayal, she has her soldiers executed. The orc Kronan, captain of his guard, escapes. For him, the woman who says her name is Nawell is a usurper and he intends to prove it but also take revenge. And when Kronan takes revenge, he always leaves a trail of blood in his path.
Back cover copy for Orcs et Gobelins T11: Kronan	English translation

The publication of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), and The Silmarillion (1977, with Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay) fundamentally changed the landscape of contemporary fantasy. Not just because of what J. R. R. Tolkien created and its enduring popularity, but because his approach to fantasy races and world-building set a high standard which many writers then took as a template for their own works. While Tolkien was not alone in creating fantasy worlds—Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegāna (1905), E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922), and Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword (1954) all preceded The Lord of the Rings—Tolkien’s conception of elves, dwarves, hobbits, ents, orcs, goblins, et al. strongly influenced the public imagination. This can especially be seen in tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer Fantasy, computer games inspired by those works such as World of Warcraft, and novels such as Dennis L. McKiernan’s Mithgar series.

Robert E. Howard’s fantasy in the pages Weird Tales in the 1920s and 30s represents a very different kind of fantasy. There are fewer distinct fantasy races in Howard’s work; there are no elves and goblins per se. The Children of the Night from “Worms of the Earth” (Weird Tales Nov 1932) and other tales are inspired by the Little People stories of Arthur Machen, but shaped by Howard’s correspondence with Lovecraft, have taken a very different form. They are not servants of a Satanic Morgoth or Sauron, nor are they corrupted elves or even inherently evil in a purely good-and-evil sense. The morality of Howard’s tales is always murkier, the racial politics more complicated, and that tarnished air, that hardboiled sensibility where there is no true good and evil, no ultimate victory for the forces of light or darkness, just men and women and things beyond human ken interacting according to their own needs and desires is part of what sets Howard’s fantasy distinctly apart from Tolkien.

Whether you call it sword & sorcery, heroic fantasy, or something else, Howard’s bloodier, grimier, but very approachable brand of fantasy had an equal influence with Tolkien on later writers. Tolkien may have helped define orcs, elves, and dwarves for a few generations, but Howard helped define the thief, barbarian, and mercenary man-at-arms as iconic roles. They both had their own contributions in terms of magic rings and magic swords, and they had a penchant for taverns and themes of kingship. While their ethos and style sometimes clash, their joint influence on fantasy is undeniable…and sometimes more strongly felt together.

In 2013, French comics publisher Soleil began producing a series of bandes dessinées: Elfes Tome 1: Le Crystal des Elfes Bleus was published in 2013, and became popular enough to become an ongoing series. These were set in a very generic Dungeons & Dragons-derived fantasy world called Arran. The series was popular enough to merit several spin-off series of various levels of popularity: Nains (Dwarves, 2015), Orcs & Gobelins (Orcs and Goblins, 2017), Mages (2019), Terres d’Ogon (Lands of Ogon, 2022), and Guerres d’Arran (Wars of Arran, 2023). As with D&D itself, this is very specifically riffing off of the popular conception of fantasy races derived from Tolkien, but the world is grimier, more visceral, a bit more hardboiled—Tolkien as filtered through Howard, in a sense.

Jean-Luc Istin is a veteran of the series, having written several of the preceding volumes of Elfes and Orcs & Gobelins, and for the 11th tome in the O&G series, he partnered up with Sébastien Grenier (artist) and J. Nanjan (colorist) to produce something kind of special: a re-telling of Robert E. Howard’s “A Witch Shall be Born” (Weird Tales December 1934) set in the world of Arran, and starring not Conan the Cimmerian, but Kronan the Orc.

Copyright law in France works a little differently than in the United States. During Robert E. Howard’s lifetime, the Berne Convention would guarantee his works would remain under copyright for at least 50 years after his death (since Howard died in 1936, that would mean 1986); in France, the general term is 70 years after the author’s death (i.e. 2006). Either way, Howard’s works are generally considered in the public domain in France (although international trademarks may still apply). Even if copyright was an issue, Kronan might still pass as an homage…but not a parody.

While the concept of Conan as an orc might sound silly, the creative team between Kronan plays it very straight. Kronan is a hulking, musclebound figure that takes very strong artistic influence from the fantasy bodybuilder culture that Frank Frazetta’s paperback covers, John Buscema’s comic book Conan for Marvel, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s turn as Conan in Conan the Barbarian (1982) all helped to inspire, and readers can clearly see in the absolutely ripped muscles, the deep-set eyes, and long hair various influences from all three mashed together. Yet this is not just Conan with tusks and green face paint.

While Kronan follows the general outline of Howard’s story, and includes adaptations of many of the famous scenes—including Kronan on the cross, which was borrowed into the 1982 film—in adapting the story from Hyboria to Arran, the creators have shifted many of the details to fit the new setting. Instead of Crom, Kronan swears by the Orc deity Gor, for one example. In adapting the prose text to comic format, they’ve also veered away from some of the hallmarks of Howard’s narrative style in this story.

It is a weird penchant in Howard’s works that in several of the Conan stories, Conan himself takes a while to appear. The first chapter of “A Witch Shall Be Born” doesn’t mention Conan at all; it features Queen Taramis in her bed chamber, confronted by her twin sister. When Conan is first mentioned in chapter two, it is just that—a mention. The soldier Valerius is telling his sweetheart what happened. So we don’t actually see Conan in the story proper until he is crucified and on the cross.

In Kronan, by contrast, the narrative device is shifted: it is an older orc on a throne that is telling the story. We skip the bedroom scene with the queen (Nawell in place of Taramis) and see her attack her loyal army and citizens, and has Kronan crucified (as seen in a flashback-within-a-flashback). Where Howard had chapter 3 as a letter written to Nemedia about what all has happened, in the comic Kronan meets someone who tells him some these things, and we get a glimpse of Kronan doing some investigations of his own, breaking into a library to learn a bit of eldritch lore at knife-point.

Some aspects of the story are removed or simplified; we don’t actually see Kronan pull the nails out of his own flesh, as we did when Roy Thomas and John Buscema first adapted “A Witch Shall Be Born” to comics in Savage Sword of Conan #5 (1975); the crystal ball and acolyte by which the witch surveys the battle doesn’t feature either. Much of the architecture and landscaping is, for lack of a better term, more generically fantasy in aspect, with huge towers and walls, vast arched libraries carved into the solid earth, huge domed chambers like pagan cathedrals, etc. Arms and armor are likewise much more generic fantasy in design, less realistic than Howard’s descriptions, but more in keeping with the setting of Arran.

Eldritch entities are decidedly less toad-like.

However, we do get some rather inspired artistic decisions. Kronan is the only Orc in the entire book, much as Conan was the only Cimmerian in Howard’s series; the one greenskin among a group of otherwise human characters makes him stand out all the more. Also, the occasional epic page-spread that really gives a sense of scale worthy of the series.

Taken together, the changes streamline the story and focus it more on Kronan himself. A lot of the exposition where a character talks about Conan become tales told to Kronan, or scenes that the reader sees directly; Kronan takes a more active and central role in unraveling the central mystery of the witch in the narrative, and there are fewer secondary characters to keep track of. The bones of Howard’s story are there, but Kronan is much more the focus, and the world is much more one familiar to gamers and Tolkienian fantasy fans than the Hyborian Age.

Yet for all that, it’s fun. There’s never been an adaptation quite like this, and never one that didn’t veer into winking at the reader or lapsing into parody, as when Mark Rogers adapted Howard’s Conan tale “Beyond the Black River” (Weird Tales May-Jun 1935) as “Beyond the Black Walnut” in The Adventures of Samurai Cat (1984). It is faithful to the mood and tone of Howard’s story, and Howard’s conception of Conan, while also making allowances for the different medium, the different setting, and the artistic allowance where a fantasy orc barbarian can ride a massive horned ox into battle while wielding a fifty-pound sword one-handed.

Perhaps needless to say, this is also fun. Sébastien Grenier’s art hits that sweet spot between the almost self-parody of Warhammer Fantasy and the more realistic tone or the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition Player’s handbook. J. Nanjan’s coloring work is solid; while I might like to see what a black & white version looks like some day, the vividness of the colors used on the cover really makes the banners pop, and the use of light and darkness on the interiors in muted tones really works. I think a different colorist would have been tempted to make things brighter or darker, which would have ruined the effect and made the whole work much too cartoonish.

While the series has begun to be translated into English, Orcs & Gobelins Tome 11: Kronan is still available primarily in French.

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.

“Listen, World!” (31 December 1937) by Elsie Robinson

In the annals of weird fiction, the name Elsie Robinson (Elsinore Justina Robinson) does not loom large. During her lifetime, Robinson’s fame came mostly as a syndicated columnist for the Hearst newspapers, and at the height of her fame millions read her column “Listen, World!,” that often featured a flippant, sarcastic tone; dealt seriously (if cynically, and often humorously) with issues of marriage, romance, and daily life; and were sometimes illustrated with her own cartoons or poems.

Which is why the column for “Listen, World!” for 31 December 1937 (or 1 January 1938, or 3 January 1938, depending on when the syndicated material was run) stands out a bit from the corpus of her work, because the bulk of the article is an severe (and somewhat humorous) abridgement or synopsis of Edward Lucas White’s bizzare classic of weird fiction, “Lukundoo”—a story first published in Weird Tales November 1925, and then in White’s collection Lukundoo and Other Stories (1927), Dorothy L. Sayers‘ The Omnibus of Crime (1929), and many other places. White’s story also served as the direct inspiration for Henry S. Whitehead’s “The Lips” (Weird Tales September 1929).

This New Year’s recapitulation shows the odd ways weird fiction gets out into the world, the different forms it takes and the odd influence it can have, even on such an aggressively mainstream and popular journalist as Elsie Robinson.

※
LISTEN, WORLD
by Elsie Robinson
LUKUNDOO!

New Year’s Day!

So many desires, so many resolutions, springing again in your tired, suspicious spirit! So much furious hope that you’ll “get your break at last!”…

Yet, tucking in beside the resolutions, ready for instant use—the same old score of excuses and alibis!

New Year ahead! What will it bring? And whose fault will it be if it doesn’t? The Other Fellow’s? Some outer circumstance over which you had no control…bad breaks you couldn’t buck…will these cause your failure and frustration in the year that opens today? Will defeat come from OUTSIDE? Or is there another danger you need to face? Think…listen…

* * *

Stone was dying. Dying a hideous mysterious death.

(You’ll find the story in Dorothy L. Sayers’ “Omnibus of Crime.”)

What lay behind that closely guarded tent in the black heart of the African jungle? Nobody knew. Dusky Zanzibar and Mangbattu bearers might come slinking through thr night, peering, sniffling—their great nostrils quivering like curious beasts. But no one knew. Not even Etcham, the Englishman, Stone’s devoted friend, could tell the meaning of the thing he had seen.

Panting, exhausted, Etcham rested after a five days’ incredible trek for help. And the other Englishmen—their hunting trip interrupted—listened. Stone dying? But why? What were the symptoms? Coma…fever…some strange and frantic urge which forced him to hide within his tent, forbidding anyone to follow. And carbuncles—only they weren’t carbuncles. But whatever they were, Stone was dying of them.

A crazy explanation. But there was agony in Etcham’s eyes. So the others had followed. Come at last to the camp. Seen Stone, lying in a stupor, his huge, collapsing body bound in bandages.

The wounds? They told nothing. Strange bulgings, here and there, on the body, “as though something hard and blunt were being pushed up through the healthy flesh.”

Nothing to do but wait. So the night had come…and with the night the two voices, as Etcham had said there would be…two voices speaking together, pleading, sneering, arguing, screeching, out of the tent where only one man lay in deadly stupor.

Two voices speaking out of Stone’s body! They could not believe it! But they had crept nearer…then they had seen.

The bulgings had broken, one after another. And out of them had come—incredible awfulness!—little heads! Little savage heads…low browed, beastial…gibbering, screeching! Heads that, at first, Stone had tried to cut off with his razor. but they had come again…and again…and again. Heads, arms, clawing hands…forming within, bursting out of Stone’s body. Secret horror—long concealed—bursting at last through the haunted flesh.

So this was it! This ws the secret horror that was killing the man they had loved! Someone had wished it on him…some foul devil! But he should not conquer! His friends would save him!

Eagerly they rushed forward—knives in hand. But even as they slashed at the horror, Stone spoke… “Let me be! Let me die in my own way…You can cut off ten, a hundred, a thousand heads, but the curse you cannot take off… The curse is not put on me; it grew out of me. Even now I go!”

And with that admission, he wrenched—twisted to his side—was dead.

* * *

New Year’s day. So many dreams…so many dreads—so many excuses if your dreams do not come true.

But the excuses will be in vain. There is only one reason for weakness, and the failure that follows weakness. Like Stone’s curse, it is “not put on you, it grows out of you.” Grows out in all its vicious horror…out of your hidden savagery, your cowardice and greed, your fear and dishonesty.

New Year’s day!

What will come out of it?

WHATEVER YOU PUT INTO IT.

※

There are a few quirks of presentation in different papers, as different folks laid out portions of the text with bold, italics, all caps, or just plain type, presumably as need or aesthetics demanded. At least one paper substituted “You Make Your Own ‘Breaks.'” in place of “LUKUNDOO!” for a sub-header. The text above combines a features from different iterations of the article.

Robinson’s synopsis is judicious; while she encapsulates most of the essential characteristics of the horror, she leaves out many critical details. Her quotations from the text are approximate, not exact; perhaps she worked from memory. Perhaps she had picked up the Omnibus of Crime around Christmastime, in search of a ghost story, and was inspired; perhaps it was simply odd reading that struck her as meat for an article. Either way, Robinson put her own characteristic interpretation on the material. She was a self-made woman who had struggled as a divorced single mother in the early 20th century, and had succeeded as a writer and journalist by dint of her own effort—she very much made her own breaks, often out of necessity (see Famous Author To Write Daily Column in NEWS for a brief biography).

I can’t help but wonder how many readers shuddered over Robinson’s abbreviated story—and how many later sought out White’s “Lukundoo” to read the full story, with all of its hints and added details. We will never know; while Elsie Robinson encouraged readers to write in, I haven’t found any sequels to this episode in her syndicated columns.

For anyone interested in learning more about Elsie Robinson, check out Listen World: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman (2022) by Julia Scheeres and Allison Gilbert.

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.

Barbarian Kids 1: La Torre del Elefante (2023) by Nacho Golfe & Dani Peña

When Robert E. Howard sat down at his typewriter to pound out another adventure of Conan the Cimmerian, there is no indication that he had any explicit age range in mind for the audience. Weird Tales was not an all-ages magazine by any stretch of the imagination, but anecdotes show its readers ran from young teens to college students, to grown men and women well into their professional lives. The artistic and literary content leaned toward a more mature audience, what with the occasional nudity, graphic violence, scary monsters, and dabbling in blasphemy and the occult, sometimes even torture and guarded references to more salacious fare such as incest and castration.

Conan the Cimmerian was right at home in Weird Tales, his adventures seldom as spicy as the Spicy pulps, or as gruesome as the Shudder pulps, but definitely at the upper limit of what was deemed acceptable by editor Farnsworth Wright—who sometimes censored stories that went too far over the line in some particular. It can be fairly said that whomever Conan was for in the 1930s, he was not explicitly aimed at kids.

The general audience for Conan remained somewhat ambiguous in the decades after Robert E. Howard’s death. The Gnome Press hardback collections of Conan’s adventures in the 1950s were priced above what the average kid could afford; the paperback reprints and collections put out in the 1960s and 70s were more affordable and accessible, but while the Frank Franzetta covers no doubt caught a few eyes and won a few converts among the younger audience, the paperbacks weren’t explicitly marketed to children.

Then in 1970, Marvel Comics published Conan the Barbarian #1. The formation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954 substantially altered the comics landscape in the United States over the subsequent decades; where before comics had been written, illustrated, and marketed for many audiences, some for children and others for adults, the blanket censorship of the CCA meant that nearly all of the comics sold on newsstands and to the direct market were now aimed almost exclusively at children and teenagers. While Conan the Cimmerian didn’t run around in body-hugging spandex fighting Communists, he still had to conform to a code that resigned in the gore, the sex, and sometimes the morality.

It was the beginning of the kidification of Conan.

Not that the Cimmerian went down without a fight. Marvel launched The Savage Sword of Conan in 1974 through its Curtis Magazines imprint, which allowed it to bypass the CCA and tell stories with more nudity and gore. The 1982 film Conan the Barbarian was given an R rating for nudity and violence—despite the fact that Mattel, who was trying to develop a Conan toy line, asked them to ease up:

Kalinske also worried that the Conan film might be too violent or sexually suggestive to merit an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, and he proposed that they “discuss how we might deal with that.”
—Conan Properties, Inc. v. Mattel, Inc., 712 F. Supp. 353 (S.D.N.Y. 1989)

Conan the Destroyer (1984), cut down on both sex and violence, and was able to secure a PG rating. The success of the films led to a Universal Studios attraction, The Adventures of Conan: A Sword & Sorcery Spectacular (1983-1993, video), and an animated show Conan the Adventurer (1992-1993), a highly bowdlerized version of the character far removed from Howard’s original conception. The follow-up animated series, Conan and the Young Warriors (1994) was aimed even more directly at younger viewers.

No gore, no sex, and not much in the way of moral ambiguity or complex plotting.

All during this same period, plenty of Conan material was being published for older audiences, from New pastiche novels to reprints of Howard’s original. Conan’s career in the comics waxed and waned with the decades, but has fairly consistently remained aimed primarily for more mature readers, without slipping into either outright pornography (except through bootleg productions like the Red Sonja & Conan: Hot and Dry Tijuana bible) or the more gory excesses of some small press comics like Crossed from Avatar Press.

The question might be asked: so why was Conan kidified at all?

We might as well ask why Norse mythology was bastardized into the blonde, blue-eyed Thor of Marvel Comics, or why Count Chocula wears an opera cape in the style of Bela Lugosi. The writers and artists that shape these works are drawing freely from the original source material, but without excessive concern for accuracy—they’re recycling and repurposing the material for their own ends. As with any adaptation, the end result may barely be recognizable. The Cthulhu plushies sold, cute and cuddly and green as they are, share little more than a name with H. P. Lovecraft’s hulking mountain of an extraterrestrial High Priest of the Old Ones in sunken R’lyeh.

These new works have to be read on their own merits. There’s no point in comparing Lovecraft’s original works to Howard Lovecraft and the Three Kingdoms or Mary Shelley’s School for Monsters: La Llorona in the Machine; the intended audiences and implicit sensibilities are completely different. So it is with Robert E. Howard’s “The Tower of the Elephant” and Barbarian Kids 1: La Torre del Elefante.

¡¡¡Descubre la leyenda de CONAN y su pandilla de amigos, los BARBARIAN KIDS!!!

En unas tierras repletas de acción, magia oscura ya hechicería, un joven guerrero llamado CONAN se alía con ATALI, la hija del gigante de hielo, y TAURUS, el príncipe de los ladrones, para correr la aventura más extradorindaria de todas: entrar en la legendaria Torre del Elefante y hacerse con su tesoro.

¿LO CONSEGUIRÁN?

Discover the CONAN legend and his gang of friends, the BARBARIAN KIDS!!!

In a world full of action, dark magic and sorcery, a young warrior called CONAN teams up with ATALI, the frost giant’s daughter, and TAURUS, the prince of thieves, to run the most extraordinary adventure of all: enter the legendary Tower of the Elephant and get their hands on its treasure.

WILL THEY SUCCEED?

Back cover copy

English translation

Barbarian Kids is an illustrated novel in Brazilian Portuguese by Nacho Golfe (writing) & Dani Peña (illustrations) which tells a highly bowdlerized version of Howard’s epic tale of a young Conan in Shadizar. In this story, Conan is adolescent, and his partners-in-crime are Taurus (from the original story) and Atali (very loosely adapted from “The Frost Giant’s Daughter,” but with powers reminiscent of Elsa in Frozen, and prefers to generate ice daggers). The trio successfully brave the tower’s difficulties, encounter the elephant-headed Yag-Kosha…and then overcome Yara, the evil wizard who imprisoned Yag-Kosha. In a duel of magic, the evil wizard is vanquished into a gem, the Heart of the Elephant…and everyone lives happily ever after.

The 144-page book switches between mostly text with illustrations, to full-on comic pages. The script is fairly dialogue-heavy.

For a fantasy adventure aimed at the younger market, it’s easy to see why “The Tower of the Elephant” was chosen: this is the story with one of the chronologically youngest Conan (“The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” is presumably younger), and is as close to a traditional dungeon crawl adventure as Conan ever went on. Many of the changes made are sensible. Making Conan younger makes him more identifiable to younger readers; adding Atali to the mix makes it more attractive to girls; there is very little blood, and nobody dies. This is supposed to be a fun adventure for impressionable little minds, not a horror story to scare them.

Golfe and Peña do their jobs; the story moves along at a quick pace, the text is designed to be engaging, the more action-packed sequences are rendered as comic panels in a half-graphic novel layout, there’s a puzzle involving gems, a lesson about teamwork is learned, and the heroes are rewarded for saving Yag-Kosha and overcoming the wizard.

Rather than human guards, Conan & Co. face mechano-magical guardians, a lion, a snake, a giant venomous spider, and a puzzle involving various gems.

What they have achieved is fine. Kids will no doubt love it. Yet they have also robbed the story of any depth. There’s no reason for this to be a Conan story anymore. When Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith adapted “The Tower of the Elephant” in Conan the Barbarian #4 (1971), comic book readers used to seeing heroes defeat and slay evil monsters were confronted with a tragic figure, broken on the rack. A creature that had flown through space, now confined to its tower in a crippled body. There was only one escape possible, and the stroke that Conan gave was one of mercy—and vengeance.

Like many artists, Yag-Kosha is depicted as having a literal elephant’s head.

Roy Thomas notes in Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian Vol. 1, that in the latter half of the story, Conan is little more than a spectator, first as Yag-Kosha recounts how he came to this place, and then as a witness as the Cimmerian brings the Heart of the Elephant to Yara. This was not an uncommon device of Howard’s; many of his stories begin with a stirring opening, but feature a long and evocative historical narrative, vision, or dream that fills the expository needs of the story, explaining or hinting at some of the vast and shadowy background, so that the conclusion of the story is often the conclusion of a historical epic.

Yag-Kosha’s backstory is dealt with briefly.

In Barbarian Kids 1, the epic of Yag-Kosha’s backstory is about four pages. The confrontation with Yara is not the foregone conclusion it is in Howard’s story; the three principals fight Yara in a duel of swords and sorcery. There is no mercy-stroke, no sacrifice. The idea of Conan as a witness to the end of some great history has vanished. The grandeur and cosmic sweep of Howard’s story are gone…and there is something inexpressibly sad about that, because that was what made “The Tower of the Elephant” so special.

It is a different story. Not a bad story, it is entertaining enough, the art is lively, the mix of fonts and lettering is eye-catching and probably perfect for younger readers. Perhaps, when the kids who read it get a bit older, they’ll read Howard’s original story and find out what they’ve been missing. I hope so.

Coming soon: volume 2: Red Nails and volume 3: The Phoenix on the Sword.

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.