“To Clark Ashton Smith” (1951) by Evelyn Thorne

TO CLARK ASHTON SMITH

I think quicksilver leaps along his veins,
And if you look too deeply in his eyes,
You’ll see behind the ice-thin laughter there
The smouldering glimpse of fateful sorceries.

I think that if you listen while he speaks
You’ll catch a foreign ac[c]ent on his tongue,
That hints a language built of stars and wine
A syntax all with fiery jewels strung.

I think that if you miss him some dark night
You should not be surprised or wonder where
He’s gone; look up, Arcturus greenly burns—
Do you not see him on that shining stair?
—Evelyn Thorne

The second issue of Alan H. Pestetsky and Michael DeAngelis’ fanzine Asmodeus (Fall 1951) was devoted primarily to Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft had been receiving accolades in The Acolyte in the 1940s, so it was only fair. The issue republished a poetic tribute by Lovecraft to his friend, as well as “The Cup-Bearer” (1951) by Lilith Lorraine, and buried among other works was the above dedication by Eveyln Thorne.

While she is mostly forgotten now, in the 1950s Evelyn Aixa Thorne was actively involved with science fiction fandom, not necessarily a Big Name Fan, but not insignificant either. A brief biographical essay in Poets in the South says she was born in Nebraska in 1898, educated in the College of Puget Sound and the University of Arizona, and lived all over the country “working as an interior decorator, an X-ray txnician, and a botancial illustrator” (78). She married William Richmond Tullos in 1946, they divorced in 1952, remarried in 1954, and remained married until his death in 1974.

Thorne is probably best-remembered as co-publisher/co-editor of the New Athenaeum Press with Will Tullos, which published Epos: A Quarterly of Poetry, from 1949 until 1975, which published three of Clark Ashton Smith’s poems. She was also associate-editor of Challenge (1950-1951) under Lilith Lorraine, who also published some of Thorne’s poetry elsewhere. Her books of poetry were Design in a Web (1955), Ways of Listening (1969), and Of Bones and Stars (1982); she also published anthologies of poetry from Epos.

There is a certain incestuous quality to fantastic poetry in the 1950s, an intersection between the “little magazine” movement and science fiction/fantasy fanzines which echos the intersection between amateur journalism and science fiction fandom in the 1930s. That Evelyn Thorne knew and appreciated Clark Ashton Smith as a poet is clear. The reference to “Arcturus” in particular is curious; Smith refered to Arcturus in three poems first published in The Star-Treader and Other Poems (1912): “To the Sun,” “The Song of a Comet,” and “Saturn”—all cosmic poems that echoed or were influenced by Smith’s mentor George Sterling’s “The Testimony of the Suns” (1903).

A detail Smith no doubt appreciated, when he read that tribute.

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.

Her Letters To Lovecraft: S. Lilian McMullen

S. Lilian Middleton-McMullen, whose works are now distinguished by publication in poetry magazines all over the country, is a discovery of Winifred V. Jackson’s, and an added plume in the cap of that noted poetess. She is a native of Ireland, of a loyal British Unionist family, and inherits a trace of French blood through a great-grandmother. In her heredity there is a definitely artistic element, as shewn by the fact that both her mother and sister are poets of no mean skill.

Mrs. McMullen was educated in English private schools, and originally specialised in music; being a violoncellist and pianiste of great ability, and to some degree a composer. At an early age she was given to the writing of verse, but these older specimens are notable only for grace and correctness. Amateurdom has seen two of them—“Late Autumn” in The Tryout, and “The ‘Cellist” in The United Co-operative. They are, quite obviously, juvenalia; though of unusual merit for such work.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Poetry of Lilian Middleton” dated 14 January 1922, Collected Essays 2.51-52

Susan Lilian Smith was born in Ireland on 18 February 1886. According to the 1910 Federal census, she emigrated to the United States in 1909; as did Michael J. McMullen (b. 1883). The Massachusetts Marriage Index records a wedding in 1910 in Somerville; their first child, Kenneth Barry McMullen, was born on 16 March 1910. The young family are recorded in the Bronx, New York City, with Michael J. McMullen listed as overseer of a drug warehouse. A second son, Edwin Robinson “Robin” McMullen, followed on 10 July 1913.

By the time of the 1920 Federal census, the family was situated in Newton, Massachusetts, about 7 miles from downtown Boston, in their own home on Morton Street; Michael J. McMullen is listed as a broker. By this time, Susan Lilian McMullen and her sister had already been recruited for amateur journalism, and H. P. Lovecraft took notice of her.

The Silver Clarion for February is of ample size and ample merit. Opening the issue is an excellent poem in heroic couplets by Mrs. Stella L. Tully of Mountmellick, Ireland, a new member of the United. Mrs. Tully, whose best work is in a lyric and religious vein, is one endowed with heriditary or family genius; as the Association no doubt appreciated when reading the poetry of her gifted sister, Mrs. S. Lilian McMullen of Newton Centre, in the preceding issue of The United Amateur.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Department of Public Criticism” (Mar 1919), United Amateur, Collected Essays 1.225

One of the editors of The Silver Clarion was Winifred Virginia Jackson, and Mrs. McMullen and Mrs. Tully were apparently two of her recruits for the United Amateur Press Association. Lovecraft mentions her poetry a few times in his editorials, and it was generally positive. At this stage in his life, Lovecraft was getting out and meeting amateurs more often with occasional trips to Boston, and it was on one such trip he met S. Lilian McMullen in the flesh:

Mrs. McMullen was present, & prepared to argue over a criticism I had recently applied to one of her verses; but I quickly ended the argument by calling in as my ally the omniscient James Ferdinand [Morton], from whose decisions there is no appeal. (The question had to do with the use of “mirror” as an intransitive verb. Such usage is incorrect.)[…]The best feature was Mrs. McMullen’s pathetic poem “Desiree Logier”, which is to appear in the July United Amateur. (I tried to get that poem on the front page, but Mrs. Renshaw overruled me.)
—H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, 10 Sep 1920, Letters to Rheinhart Kleiner 172

While a full record of her amateur and on-amateur writing isn’t available, it seems at some point between 1920 and 1921 she began to sometimes use the pseudonym Lilian Middleton. Her interests ran strongly to poetry and music, and she wrote both; Lovecraft noted:

The United takes pride in the new laurels of its scintillant and versatile members, Mrs. S. Lilian McMullen (Lilian Middleton), who is now writing songs for professional publication with the music of Ernest Harry Adams. The latest of these to appear is “The Bumble Fairy”, a dreamily exquisite piece already sung by several vocalists of note. […]

The Boston Amateur Conference of February 22, held at the Quincy House, was successful from every point of view […] A musical programme featuring Mrs. McMullen’s “Bumble Fairy” proved a delightful interlude.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “News Notes” (Jan 1921), United Amateur, Collected Essays 1.269

Lovecraft would write at rather more length about the conference in a letter to his mother, which reads in part:

Samuel Loveman’s paper was very poetic—he had asked me to read it, but Mrs. Miniter (in charge of the programme) thought she had better assign it to Mrs. McMullen, who had not felt equal to preparing a paper of her own. Mrs. McM. read it with great success—but not without having to ask me beforehand how to pronounce the name of the neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus! […] Following this, a musical programme was rendered with great success, the chief ingredient being the McMullen-Adams song, “The Bumble Fairy”, which you played the other day. Mrs. McM was reluctant to sing it, not possessing a voice quite up to her own standard of excellence; but her scruples were entirely unnecessary, since the rendition proved phenomenally pleasing. I was immensely glad to hear the piece played properly, and found that in my own crude picking out I had not correctly interpreted the time. This Ernest H. Adams is certainly a composer of the greatest possible ability, and I think Mrs. McM is singularly fortunate in her opportunity to write words for his airs. Neither suffers by comparison with the other—it is an ideal “team.”

[27] Mrs. McMullen was very glad to hear that you liked “The Bumble Fairy”, and bade me thank you for your favourable opinion. It appears to me that she is destined for professional prominence at an early date—sooner perhaps than many amateurs of even greater genius, such as Winifred V. Jackson and Samuel Loveman. […] The overwhelming majority were adherents of the rival on National Association (which is, of course, now friendly with the United), but the Jackson–McMullen–Theobald group formed a compact minority of purely United enthusiasts.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Sarah Susan Lovecraft, 24 Feb 1921, Letters to Family and Family Friends 1.26, 27

Lovecraft and McMullen were, despite any disagreement over metrical regularities, apparently on friendly terms. It is difficult to say when exactly they began to correspond, what prompted the correspondence, how extensive it was or what subjects they covered. None of their letters survive, and we have fewer hints in Lovecraft’s essays and correspondence than usual. We know that Lovecraft included her among his Christmas greetings, and we know that her poem “The Crock of Gold” appeared in his own amateur journal The Conservative (Mar 1921), which suggests she mailed it to him, unless she handed it to him in person at one of the amateur gatherings.

Yet the relationship was probably cordial, not close.

In August 1921, Lovecraft attended an amateur gathering in Boston at the McMullen’s house on Morton St.; McMullen had won the poetry laureateship for 1921:

The Hub Club meeting was yesterday, but on account of the increasing political gap between the (Nationalite) Hub element & the United, [Edith Miniter] set Wednesday as the day for conferring at length with the United element—W. V. Jackson, Miss Hamlet, Mrs. McMullen, &c. […]

[39] After a short argument at this temporary halting-place, the expedition proceeded to 53 Morton St., which I have of course seen before. Here I met Mrs. McMullen, & had the honour of breaking to her the pleasing news that she has won the United’s 1921 Poet-Laureateship. […] After this non-esssential digression the evening assumed more of the aspect of an ordinary amateur gathering, the company being augmented by the arrival of W. V. J., Miss Crist, Mrs. Wurtz, & a neighbour of Mrs. McMullen’s whose name has slipped my memory but who ought to be remembered for the menagerie which she brought with her—two large collie dogs, & the most exquisite kitten I have beheld in aeons. Mrs. McMullen averred that the latter small gentleman was brought especially in my honour, my liking for the feline species being well known in amateurdom. […] Mrs. McMullen played & sang her “Bumble Fairy”, & Mrs. Renshaw sang two songs (of which she wrote the words) in an excellent contralto, with Miss Crist as accompanist. I inflexibly refused all requests for song, & categorically denied the accusation of W. V. J., Mrs. Miniter, & Mrs. McMullen that I could sing. […] So I let mesdames Renshaw & McMullen bear off all the honours. […] Pure literature, grammar, technique, ancient balladry, & the Irish situation (the McMullens are loyal British subjects & Protestants from Ireland) all received attention; & even D. V. Bush & remunerative endeavour were discussed.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Annie Gamwell, 19 Aug 1921, Letters to Family and Family Friends 1.38, 39, 40

The Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) was a point of contention for Lovecraft, who was a lifelong Anglophile and was in favor of the British in the conflict. This put him at odds with anti-British, pro-independence amateur journalists like the Irish immigrant John Dunn, and exacerbated anti-Irish (and in a general sense, anti-Celtic/Gaelic) and anti-Catholic sentiments in Lovecraft. That the McMullens were both loyalists and protestants were both definite points in their favor as far as Lovecraft (and presumably his aunts) were concerned.

A few more notes on S. Lilian McMullen/Lilian Middleton appear in Lovecraft’s editorials. Later in 1921 he noted:

The continued successes of our Poet-Laureate, Mrs. S. Lilian McMullen (Lilian Middleton), cast additional lustre on the United as amateurdom’s chief source of authentic creative artists. Poetry by Mrs. McMullen appeared on the editorial page of the New York Times for October 15; a distinction which can be appreciated by those familiar with the standards of that celebrated publication. […303] Honours come rapidly to our poets. On November 5 The Literary Digest reprinted a poem of Mrs. McMullens’ from the New York Times […]
—H. P. Lovecraft, “News Notes,” Nov 1921, United Amateur, Collected Essays 1.302-303

The poem was reprinted in the Literary Digest and several other newspapers.

In late 1921 or early 1922, Lovecraft wrote “The Poetry of Lilian Middleton”, the draft is dated 14 Jan 1922. It is not clear where this was intended to be published, but an abbreviated version of it was published in “The Vivisector” column in March 1922 (CE 1.315-316). How much contact Lovecraft had with S. Lilian McMullen after that is doubtful, one of his last words on her from this period was:

A special word is due the excellent portraits of eminent amateurs, among which is the first likeness of our poet-laureate, Mrs. S. Lilian McMullen (Lilian Middleton) ever published in Amateur Journalism.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “News Notes” (May 1922), United Amateur, CE 1.317

This was in reference to The Rainbow Vol. II, No. 2 (May 1922), which was edited by Sonia H. Greene, and is the only photo of S. Lilian McMullen I’ve found. Readers who turn to read Lovecraft’s “Celephaïs” in that issue may have wondered who that woman was, whose portrait and poem graced the page immediately proceeding Lovecraft’s. Now they do. Her work in that journal suggests that she and Lovecraft may have been in contact at least briefly in early 1922…but after that their relationship seems to break off, or at least the references in editorial and letters dwindle to nothing.

We can only speculate as to the reasons. It seems likely that McMullen and Lovecraft’s friendship was largely based on their common friendship with Winifred Virginia Jackson, and his relationship with Jackson cooled off after Lovecraft met Sonia H. Greene (his future wife) at that August convention in 1921. So too, the McMullens may have experienced difficulties of their own that limited S Lilian McMullen’s further participation in amateur journalism.

Taken together, these two snippets paint a picture of strained finances, and perhaps a strained marriage. Michael J. McMullen’s business either failed or his debts grew too much; the wife and children were sent out of the country while he tried to settle affairs, which probably included the selling of or foreclosure on the house at 53 Morton St. What happened to Michael J. McMullen between 1925 and 1930 is unknown; in the 1930 Federal census, S. Lilian McMullen is listed as “widowed,” and she and her sons were renting at Crafts St. in Newton.

Despite this hardship, S. Lilian McMullen persevered. She was naturalized a citizen of the United States of America on 5 April 1954, and according to her obituary finally passed away in 1981 at the age of 95, with 4 grandchildren and 8 great-grandchildren, and interred in Chatham, Mass (Findagrave).

Who was H. P. Lovecraft to S. Lilian McMullen? Like so many women who interacted with Lovecraft, there is no record in their own words to guide us. Their paths crossed just a few times in the early 1920s, and she made enough of an impression that he wrote in praise of her poetry and songs. We have, for the most part, only Lovecraft’s own sparse comments to guide us. Their legacies are different: Lovecraft’s legacy was literary, and his heirs are his readers; hers was her children, and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren. It would be interesting to know if any of her family were aware of her connection with Lovecraft…or if they still have any or her songs and poetry to remember her by.

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.

Skinny Dipper (2023) by Sex and Monsters

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of art that includes nudity. As part of this review, selected images with nudity will be displayed. As such, please be advised before reading further.

It was many and many a year ago,
   In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
   By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
   Than to love and be loved by me.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee” (1849)

Skinny Dipper was a successfully crowdfunded multimedia project by Sex and Monsters, who are best known for their retro chic combinations of horror, pulp fiction, and tiki culture to produce works like the comic/cocktail booklet Tiki Surf Witches Want Blood.

The form of this particular project is a 32-page mixed-media comic ‘zine that remixes Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and “The Night Ocean” (1936) by R. H. Barlow with H. P. Lovecraft, re-imagining them against a palette of mixed comic and photographic work by Emily Roberts, April Snellings, Jelena Đorđević, May Nguyen, Dennis Swiatkowski, Sam McKenzie, Slime Sunday, Brite Lite Tribe, and Will Penny; and a 7″ vinyl record by Nite Jewel that contains a soundtrack to accompany the piece. Various Kickstarter bonuses to the campaign add decals, instant film shots of May Nguyen, and other goodies.

The crux of the re-imagining is model May Nguyen, who appears both in photographs and as the character model for the character of Annabel Lee in the story. Told in sparse, evocative images, Annabel Lee shifts from the bright and crowded daylit beach to a lonely moonlit scene, to go skinny dipping alone in the night ocean.

Chunks of Poe’s and Barlow and Lovecraft’s texts are taken out of context and reframed as poetry. The artists are each distinctive in their style and approach to the material; the center black-lettering on black-pages at the center of the story is incredibly evocative of the dark abysses hinted at in poem and short story, here rendered visually—and the combination of Poe’s verse and select snippets from Barlow and Lovecraft work well together with the visuals, terribly suggestive of far more than appears on the page.

Kitsch is a dirty word, but in this case the artists are trying to recapture specific moods and art styles, from the Charles Atlas bully-kicks-sand-in-your-face comics of the 50s to 80s glossy magazine photo spreads that are terribly suggestive of exotic vacations, where the sea foom can lap at your feet as you read and relax on holiday. It is a deliberate effort to reproduce an aesthetic that existed, even if that exact place never did.

One thing that both “Annabel Lee” and “The Night Ocean” capture is a sense of loneliness and longing; that may be why giving Annabel in Skinny Dipper such a distinctive face adds something to the text. May Nguyen provides a sense of reality that might have been missing if this a more traditionally-made comic book; there’s a fotonovella-style sense that these could be stills to some ancient straight-to-video movie that graced the shelves of mom & pop video stories.

It is not horror in any strict sense; not int he bloody bones and a shark coughing up a limb. It’s closer to a vacation where all the time away reminds you that the one thing ou can’t get a vacation from is yourself, can’t get out of your own head. That loneliness and the endless, ageless warm waters of the ocean might swallow you up forever, given half a chance.

Nite Jewel’s Skinny Dipper single is a soundtrack to the story; I’d call it synthwave or retrowave, while the tags for the album on call it chillwave and hypnogogic pop. Combined with the stylistic flourishes of the comic, it grounds the reader in that almost-never-when promised in a thousand 80s and early 90s magazines, comics, films, and music videos. The idea of the beach as this place of escape, the music a poppy invitation that’s a bit more upbeat than tiki exotica, but holds many of the same audio cues, just for a later generation.

At this time of writing, the album is the only thing available for direct purchase, although many stills and videos associated with the project are located on Sex and Monsters’ Facebook page.

Skinny Dipper is an interesting collaboration, one that showcases the abilities and visions of the individual artists that went into it. Copies are still available through the Kickstarter store (click “Order Now”), and will hopefully receive a wider release in the near future.

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.

“Violet is the Color of Your Energy” (2015) by Nadia Bulkin

Absence of much conversation is probably a permanent feature of my style, because the tales I write concern phenomena much more than they concern people.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Natalie H. Wooley, 24 Oct 1933, LRBO 193

“The Colour Out of Space” is one of Lovecraft’s most evocative and best-loved stories. It has been interpreted by different folks as an environmental horror, as a rural Gothic, a precognitive flash of the dangers of nuclear radiation. It was not set in the far ago and the long away; H. P. Lovecraft set most of his horrors in his here and now. In the 1920s and 30s, close to home in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New York. They were horrors of the moment, and while he largely eschewed flappers and rumrunners, they took on the syntax of the time and place.

Which makes them interesting to update. How many horror stories would be different, if they took place after the invention of cell phones, or the advent of the internet, birth control pills, the Civil Rights Movement? How might that change the story? Not the phenomenon itself, but the people’s response to the phenomenon. Their perspective and understanding of it.

As is appropriate for a story that’s a reworking of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” “Violet is the Color of Your Energy” is named after two songs centered on color: 311’s laidback, beachy “Amber,” and Hole’s angry, feminist “Violet.” I doubt that MRA types would like this story. In my defense, though, “The Colour Out of Space” practically demanded a feminist revision. It’s fundamentally a story about a cranky farmer who keeps his family increasingly isolated, then imprisoned, resulting in the deaths of all. There’s a neighbor who seems to check in a lot. Oh yeah, and something’s off about the water and the crops. And the woman locked in the attic is the crazy one?
—Nadia Bulkin, “Violet is the Color of Your Energy” [The Playlist]

Nadia Bulkin’s “Violet is the Color of Your Energy” is, in effect, a contemporary re-telling of “The Colour Out of Space.” One that leaves out Arkham, and shifts the point of view focus to Abigail Gardner (née Cuzak), who followed her college-educated husband to Cripple Creek to try and make a go of an old-fashioned family farm. The shift in time and space and perspective skews the story from the phenomenon (Lovecraft’s interest) to the individual. Zeroes in from the impersonal observation of everything going on to the very personal look at how this phenomenon affects Abby and her relationship with her husband and children.

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“What?” her voice broke. “Nate, the boys are right . . . .”

His shout punched down like a hammer of God. “Answer me, Abby! Was this some whore’s bargain? Said you’d jump into bed if he’d just cut your poor idiot husband a break?”
—Nadia Bulkin, “Violet is the Color of Your Energy” in She Walks In Shadows 39

The result is something like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth in prose. Things said and unsaid. A woman trapped by the decisions she’s made, the man she trusted, until she has no decisions left at all; yet this is not a morality play about a woman who made the wrong decision. Something is happening, something he won’t tell her about. This isn’t just a tale of spousal abuse, or stress turned to paranoia. Something happened, in the opening paragraph, reverberating throughout the short story. Something that works, unseen, on the corn, the animals, the water, her husband…and her.

If you haven’t read “The Colour Out of Space,” the ending might be confusing. A Shirley Jackson-esque non sequitur, like a needle skipping across a record, jumping straight to the last track. It is like a variant telling of an old and familiar myth, reminiscent of “His Mouth Will Taste Of Wormwood” (1990) by Poppy Z. Brite in that sense. Not a replacement for Lovecraft’s story, but a complement to it; an old campfire tale told to a new generation of campers, a riff on the old motif, recycled and made new again.

Boys and dogs alike asked for things—food, drink—and eventually, after the sun began to set, Teddy put down his American History book and asked for an explanation of Croatoan.
—Nadia Bulkin, “Violet is the Color of Your Energy” in She Walks In Shadows 39

There is a certain synchronicity between “Violet is the Color of Your Energy” and the 2019 film The Color Out of Space; both seek to update and adapt Lovecraft’s text, both keep the story small, centered on what a small family farm looks like in the 2010s, the breakdown that occurs as something happens beyond their control or capability to understand. The beats are not the same, but they’re working in a similar groove with a sense of isolation and desperation. Of things that have suddenly and inexplicably gone wrong, and the added stress has cracked the facade of normality, to show that maybe, things weren’t right this entire time.

“Violet is the Color of Your Energy” by Nadia Bulkin was first published in She Walks In Shadows (2015), and republished in the paperback edition Cthulhu’s Daughters (2016), as well as Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume Three (2016), and Bulkin’s collection She Said Destroy (2017).

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.

Conann (2023)

AIso I just thought it was interesting to make the character of Conan female to turn it on its head.
—[Interview] Delving into the Surrealist World of SHE IS CONANN with Director Bertrand Mandico

Conan the Cimmerian first appeared in “The Phoenix on the Sword” by Robert E. Howard in Weird Tales (Dec 1932); his immediate literary antecedents were Conan the Irish Reaver in “The People of the Dark” (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror Jun 1932), and the Atlantean barbarian Kull, who last appeared in “Kings of the Night” (Weird Tales Nov 1930). Like most of Howard’s heroes, Conan was male, and the gender politics of the Hyborian Age tended to be a combination of 1930s Texas and various historical periods and cultures as Howard understood them. There were warrior-women in Howard’s stories: Bêlit, the Queen of the Black Coast; the Valeria of the Red Brotherhood; Red Sonya of Rogatino; and Dark Agnes de Chastillon—but savage as they might be with sword or pistol, these were not barbarians per se, and they were always exceptions in male-dominated settings.

Howard wasn’t alone in producing warrior-women for his fantasy and weird adventure stories, with C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry (who first appeared in “Black God’s Kiss” (1934)) being a notable peer to Conan in the pages of Weird Tales. Yet the Cimmerian’s popularity won out, and influenced generations of later media, from pastiche stories and novels to comics, beginning with Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian in 1970, and film, with Conan the Barbarian starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1982.

Many of these adaptations included warrior-women as well. Red Sonja was created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith as a foil for the Cimmerian in the pages of Conan the Barbarian, and went on to an extensive career of her own. Valeria (played by Sandahl Bergman) in the 1982 film served as Conan’s ally and later lover. Later sword & sorcery works sometimes focused on female barbarians, such as Hundra (1983), Red Sonja (1985), Barbarian Queen (1985), Amazons (1986), Stormquest (1988), and Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back (1990), but these were mostly poor pastiches that often captured the fur-bikini aesthetic but little to nothing of the character or power of Howard’s warriors, men or women.

So when French director Bertrand Mandico set out to make a film that took the popular conception of the ultramasculine figure of Conan and turned it on its head by making the barbarian female, that was an interesting premise. The resulting film is Conann, released to English audiences as She Is Conann, is a 2023 French-language film written and directed by Mandico.

However, the key aspect of this film is less Howard’s hero, and more Mandico’s definition of barbarism:

I wanted to make a film about barbarism, and tell what is for me the height of barbarism, it’s old age killing youth. So, in the figurative sense, physically, but at the same time, symbolically, by betraying convictions, etc. So I started with this idea and I invoked Conan, the character from Howard’s novels. I even went back to the source that inspired Howard. It’s a character from Celtic mythology named Conan with two n’s who was surrounded by dog-headed demons. I started from this mythology to traverse time, eras and to make a sort of survey of barbarism. All of this carried by a choir of actresses.
—Bertrand Mandico, interview with Sara Bradbury

In a purely factual sense, Mandico has erred here. The mythological Conann and the Cynocephali (Dog-Headed People) he refers to appears to be a reference to The Voyage to the Other World Island in Early Irish Literature by Christa Maria Loffler or equivalent source. In that work, Conann (or Conainn) is one of the Tuatha de Danann, and the Cynocephali are another name for the Fomorians whom the Tuatha de Danann overthrew in the conquest of Ireland, as recorded in works like the Book of Invasions. Howard was certainly familiar with some of the content of the latter, because he discusses it in letters to Lovecraft, but it isn’t clear that Howard ever read the Book of Invasions himself, and makes no reference to dog-headed people (or even Fomorians) in his stories of Conan.

Still, the point of this film is not pastiche of Howard, or even of the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film; it is a film concerned entirely with Mandico’s concept of the barbarian, which is radically different from Howard’s, and starring a largely female cast. The film stars Elina Löwensohn as Rainer; Julia Riedler as Sanja; and six actors that play the eponymous Conann at various ages: Claire Duburcq (15), Christa Théret (25), Sandra Parfait (35), Agata Buzek (45), Nathalie Richard (55), and Françoise Brion (Queen Conann and dead Conann).

The film “Conan the Barbarian” was the symbol of virilism, of virility. And I found it really interesting to take the complete opposite of this character. With “The Wild Boys” [“Les garçons sauvages”], I had already wondered about the masculine-feminine shift with fairly aggressive characters. And there, I wanted to work on this barbarity and make it feminine. Then also bring a great breath of romanticism. Because barbarism, in itself, does not interest me. What interests me is the contrast between barbarism and romanticism.
—Bertrand Mandico, Sur le tournage de Conan de Déviante, de Bertrand Mandico
cf. Le réalisateur Bertrand Mandico féminise « Conan le Barbare »

The Nanterre National Drama Center, well known for its hybrid and avant-garde exhibitions, will welcome the filmmaker from January to February 2021, for a theatrical performance on the border of living theater and cinema which “will also give birth to a film shot in film” , and “will invite the public to settle in the middle of its various paintings and stories, in a circus-hell of rocks studded with bursts of tears and blood”
—Bertrand Mandico adapte « Conan le Barbare » pour le théâtre des Amandiers

While production details are a bit hazy, French media reports from 2020-2021 or so indicate that what would become Conann started out as much more focused on the 1982 film for inspiration, which can perhaps be seen in the first act with the 15-year-old Conann, which partially seems a response to the opening of the 1982 Conan the barbarian where Conan’s mother is killed and he is enslaved. The earlier version of what would be Conann seems to have been much more of a multimedia/performance space, which may have suffered delays or transformations due to COVID-19. Yet the final film(s) that resulted seem fairly true to Mandico’s original vision as expressed in interviews and press releases.

I feel like a barbarian-adventurer myself in the way I built this project. As for Howard’s original novels, I have kept the esoteric impulse, the memory of an adaptation by Corben “Bloodstar,” but I especially see Conan as a pop figure, a war cry. In my project, Conan is girl(s) and woman(s), and they will evolve in a feminine world. I decided to offer actresses of all ages and all origins unusual characters and situations . There will be six Conans, as many as there are periods in his life. Each new Conan will come and kill the previous one because, for me, the height of barbarity is to kill one’s youth.
—Bertrand Mandico, « Conan la barbare » : Bertrand Mandico nous présente sa prochaine œuvre monstre

Mandico references Richard Corben’s novel Bloodstar, which is an adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s “The Valley of the Worm.” Understanding that Conann is not in any strict or even broadly metaphorical sense related to Howard’s Conan as put on paper is important, because viewers who go in hoping for something like an adaptation of Red Nails where a female Conan and Valeria might kiss are going to be disappointed.

Mandico’s approach to filmmaking is very much surrealist, gritty, and avant garde compared to Conan the Barbarian and its sequel and pastiches. Director Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) has been described as an Acid Western, and Mandico’s Conann might be described as Acid Sword & Sorcery. It has that punk aesthetic, not just in the sets, the wardrobe, the props where swords look forged out of scavenged bits of rebar, but in the attitude of the characters, which is often nihilistic, focused on the moment, and ultimately self-destructive—just as the darkest part of punk has always been a disenfranchised generation preying on itself.

But is it any good?

I realized, almost while making this film, that it concludes a trilogy. A trilogy that began with “Les garçons sauvages” [The Wild Boys], and continued with “After Blue” [Paradise Sale/Dirty Paradise]. So “Les garçons sauvages” would be paradise, “After Blue” the purgatory, and “Conann” hell. So there’s hell in my paradise, but there’s also a romantic dimension in my hell.
—Bertrand Mandico, interview with Sara Bradbury

If you like Mandico’s other films, you’ll probably like Conann. If you haven’t seen his other films, it’s important to go into Conann with an open mind. There is a deliberate sense of theatricality: according to an interview, the sets were built inside a big warehouse in Luxembourg, and there’s a conscious sense that these are sets, not location shots. The camera moves, but it stays close, there’s no peeking around corners, and the narrative structure plays to that sense of place.

From the standpoint of pure cinematography, there are some beautifully shots, even when the subject is ugly; Mandico shot on film instead of digital camera, and that reality comes through in almost every frame. The contrast between the black-and-white and color segments works well. The practical effects come across very well, much like an 80’s horror film, and the visceral presence of the gore effects often blends with the rather surreal nature of the narrative. Costume and makeup deserve all due praise; the dog-like face mask of Ranier in particular is an effect that seems fundamentally simple but effective, as in the Twilight Zone episode The Masks. By contrast, the action sequences are not the best-choreographed; while there is plenty of bloodletting and bladework, the tone of the film and the shape of the narrative doesn’t build up much tension.

If there’s a major turn-off for audiences expecting something more akin to the nearly-dialogue-free first twenty minutes of Conan the Barbarian (1982), it is the script. There’s a lot of dialogue, a lot of philosophy, and a lot of narration, to the point where sometimes the best parts of the film are those rare moments when the characters stop talking and do something. Yet the philosophy is in a large sense why Mandico is here; the story is being told because this is how he puts barbarism—or at least his conception of it, the self-destructive Ouroboros that eats its own tail—on display. You either appreciate the film for what it is, or you don’t.

I want to adapt Conan the barbarian on stage. With only women. Several generations of women, who kill each other, fuck, betray each other, embrace, and love one another in a world doomed to disappear.
—”Rainer, A Vicious Dog in Skull Valley”

Filmed alongside Conann and featured on the BluRay as bonus features are “L’Emission a déjà commencé” (“The Show Has Already Started”), an introductory segment to three short experimental/surrealist/metafictional films: “Rainer, A Vicious Dog in Skull Valley”; “Nous le Barbares” (“We Barbarians”), and “The Last Cartoon -Nonsense, Optimistic, Pessimistic.” These are much more in the deliberately arthaus vibe, but can be seen as meta-commentary and interactive with Conann as a film. By their nature, they tend to showcase different aspects of the film and its lead actors’ performances. If you like Conann, it’s worth watching these short films too.

“Rainer, A Vicious Dog in Skull Valley,” for example, is a meta-commentary on the difficulties of filming during the COVID-19 pandemic. A director reading Lips and Conan (a fictional paperback) wants to produce a play and makes a deal with the dog-faced demon Ranier to produce Conann. “The show must go on. At all costs.” The short film can say outright things that the film itself cannot say without breaking character.

Conann is very consciously a queer narrative. The eponymous Conann, in all of her incarnations, is primarily sexually interested in women, but their sexuality is fluid, especially in the short films, with relationships marked by violence, death, and betrayal. While the majority of the cast are women, some of the cast is deliberately more ambiguous: Christophe Bier is presented in drag throughout; Elina Löwensohn’s Ranier is consistently described as male, and all of them have a sexuality, implicit or explicit.

The nudity in the film isn’t particularly egregious as far as Sword & Sorcery cinema goes, but unlike those films the titillation doesn’t seem to be solely targeted for the male gaze. Women aren’t stripped to show vulnerability, but to tease titillation with violence: a recurring image is a breast with a vicious spike growing from the nipple. Sex and violence are often combined, but not in the sense of rape, but more in a BDSM-inflected sense of pain as an enhancement or counterpart of pleasure. Mandico plays with certain fetishistic images, but steers clear of anything to explicit; whatever else Conann may be, it is not sexploitation.

Of all the weird cinema with some strand of Robert E. Howard in their literary DNA, Conann and its bevy of short films are probably the strangest to yet see widespread release—and it can be very difficult, if you haven’t gone back through the interviews and press-releases, to see how Bertrand Mandico got from Conan to Conann. Yet if you are willing to watch it with an open mind, and appreciate the spectacle and the craft, the performances and the ideas on display, then Conann is at least an interesting film, far more than just another Sword & Sorcery pastiche.

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

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Red Sonja and Conan: Hot and Dry (1977) by Randy Crawford

Eldritch Fappenings

This review deals with a work of pornography, and the history of erotic art and writing. As part of this review, selected images with cartoon depictions of genitalia and/or sexually explicit contact will be displayed.
As such, please be advised before reading further.

It was a woman, dressed as von Kalmbach had not seen even the dandies of France dressed. She was tall, splendidly shaped, but lithe. From under a steel cap escaped rebellious tresses that rippled red gold in the sun over her compact shoulders. High boots of Cordovan leather came to her mid-thighs, which were cased in baggy breeches. She wore a shirt of fine Turkish mesh-mail tucked into her breeches. Her supple waist was confined by a flowing sash of green silk, into which were thrust a brace of pistols and a dagger, and from which depended a long Hungarian saber. Over all was carelessly thrown a scarlet cloak.
—Robert E. Howard, “The Shadow of the Vulture” (The Magic Carpet Magazine Jan 1934)

In his stories, Robert E. Howard had written a number of warrior-women. Bêlit, the eponymous Queen of the Black Coast; Valeria, the pirate; Dark Agnes de Chastillon, who rejected the role of woman in medieval France to take up the blade; and Red Sonya of Rogatino, a fiery-tempered mercenary in the wars against the Ottoman Empire.

In February 1973, Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian was coming close to the end of its second year. Writer Roy Thomas had freely adapted some of Howard’s Conan stories, and written some original stories of his own, generally following the outline of Conan’s career. Now, with issue #23, Thomas and artist Barry Windsor Smith (inked by Sal Buscema, John Adkins, and Chic Stone, adapted one of Howard’s non-Conan tales—”The Shadow of the Vulture” as a Conan tale, following the example provided by L. Sprague de Camp. Where “The Shadow of the Vulture” was set during the Siege of Vienna in 1529, Thomas borrowed from Howard’s references to Turan in stories like “The People of the Black Circle” and set it during a series of Turanian wars.

So Red Sonya of Rogatino was re-envisaged as Red Sonja of Hyrkania.

Only a couple of pages later, Red Sonja turned up—dressed in a mailshirt and something which can only be described as red “hot pants,” a type of skimpy garment worn briefly (in every sense of the word) by young women in the early 1970s. This wasn’t the way I had seen Red Sonja in my mind, but Barry was the artist, and I didn’t feel like second-guessing him. Besides, he was a good enough artist to pull it off.
—Roy Thomas, Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, Vol. 1 (2018) 134

The new character elicited interest, with issue #24 titled “The Song of Red Sonja.” Then, she and Conan parted. She would not reappear until 1974, in the first issue of The Savage Sword of Conan, a full-sized comic magazine—where she played a prominent role. The cover features Conan and Red Sonja by Boris Vallejo; the first story “The Curse of the Undead-Man” was adapted by Roy Thomas from Robert E. Howard’s “The Mistress of Death” (a Dark Agnes fragment), with art by John Buscema, inked by Pablo Marcos, featured Sonja as a supporting character, and later on Red Sonja appeared in her first solo adventure “Red Sonja” written by Roy Thomas, and illustrated by Esteban Maroto, with inks by Neil Adams and Ernie Chau (often credited as Ernie Chan). Only this time, Red Sonja’s outfit had changed:

Maroto had never done any work for Marvel (he would later contribute to Vampire Tales #s 3 and 4), but he clearly admired its books and had seen the two issues of Conan the Barbarian in which Sonja had made her debut. maroto was fond of drawing fantasy women in revealing outfits and decided to send an illustration of Sonja, rendered in this fashion, to the Marvel offices. The response was huge, and Thomas saw no reason why Sonja couldn’t wear a chainmail bikini if Conan paraded around in a lioncloth. In terms of the practicality of it, Thomas “came up with a mildly twisted rationale for her wearing clothing that deliberately tempted men when of course she’d cut off their fingers if they tried to go touchy-feely on her” (“A Fond Look Back at Big Red”). […]

Thanks to his unsolicited illustration, Maroto was assigned the penciling chores of Thomas’ Sonja story, which featured the She-Devil’s new duds and was simply called “Red Sonja.”
—Matthew Stephen Sunrich, Drawn Swords: An Unauthorized Exploration of Red Sonja and the Artists Who Brought Her to Life (2017) 14

So Red Sonja traded her mail-shirt and hot-pants for what would become an iconic chainmail bikini. She also gained a vow:

Sonja would continue to reappear periodically in the pages of Conan the Barbarian, Savage Sword of Conan, and the short-lived Kull and the Barbarians both as a recurring character with Conan and in solo stories like “Episode” in Conan the Barbarian #48 (script by Roy Thomas, art by John Buscema, inked by Dick Giordino) but while she had received a great deal of character definition—an iconic outfit, and non-romantic foil to Conan who could fight as well as he could but didn’t let him or anyone else manhandle her—she hadn’t developed much backstory or lore. Like Jirel of Joiry, Red Sonja’s adventures were fantastic and at the same time disjointed. Any fan could pick up any comic with a Red Sonja story and need not have read any of the others. Yet between the cheesecake outfit and serious attitude, Red Sonja developed a fanbase.

So it was that in Marvel Feature #1 (1975), “Red Sonja” by Thomas and Maroto was reprinted in color, with a new story “The Temple of Abomination” written by Roy Thomas with art by Dick Giordino (backgrounds inked by Terry Austin, colors by Michele Wolfman) to fill out the issue. These were still random episodes from an adventurous life, and most of the rest of the stories in Marvel Feature, which despite the title was essentially a soft-launch of a Red Sonja solo comic, are the same: random sword & sorcery adventures with little connective tissue to each other or the wider Hyborian world—except when Conan makes a guest-appearance in her comic for a change!

Yet in Kull in the Barbarians #3, Red Sonja got an origin story in “The Day of the Sword,” with a plot by Roy Thomas, script by Doug Moench, and art by Howard Chaykin. It’s not a pretty story: Sonja’s family is murdered, she’s raped, and then a goddess grants her the power for revenge…at a price. She cannot know the love of man unless defeated in battle. The origin of the vow mentioned back in Savage Sword of Conan #1.

Much ink has been spilled over this decision over the years. The rape-revenge origin was probably only possible because Kull and the Barbarians was a magazine and not a comic book, and so didn’t need to go through the Comics Code Authority; the divine vision is reminiscent of Joan d’Arc, the heroine of France, and there’s a touch of Dark Agnes in Sonja’s early desire to not be treated just like any other woman. The vow of chastity probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but it is needless to say the men writing and drawing Red Sonja probably didn’t ask any women what they thought of the idea.

In the years and decades to follow, Red Sonja’s origin—like her outfit—would be both iconic and problematic, and subject to redesign and reinterpretation from generations of creators, including Gail Simone, Nancy Collins, and Christopher Hastings. Through different series, Sonja has been both sexually active and celibate, worn the iconic chainmail bikini and exchanged it for different outfits, been saved by a goddess and saved herself without any divine help. Fans have alternately applauded Red Sonja’s strength and independence and lamented the focus on her sexuality, and the explicit idea that the only way to have sex with her was through violence.

The second issue of Marvel Feature (1976) was much of the same as the first, with a new Red Sonja story titled “Blood of the Hunter,” scripted by Bruce Jones with all art by Frank Thorne. As the series went on, Thorne would write as well as illustrate most of the Red Sonja stories for the remainder of Marvel Feature‘s 7-issue run. When the character got her own ongoing series Red Sonja in January 1977, it was Thorne who drew her—and would continue to do so through issue #11, when he left the series.

Thorne’s run on Red Sonja is notable for not using much of what was established in “The Day of the Sword,” and for his strong involvement with the Red Sonja fanbase, dressing up as a wizard at conventions and judging cosplay contests. Thorne’s Sonja doesn’t dwell over much on her origin or her oath, and continues on fighting monsters and more human villains, kicking ass and looking good while doing it. Thorne’s artistic take on Sonja was marked by eyes that seemed rimmed with kohl, and a warrior who was both vicious and voluptuous, but with a flirtatious sense of humor.

His last feature was “The Wizard and Red Sonja” in Savage Sword of Conan #29 (1978), a rather bizarre out-of-continuity story where a wizard (modeled on Thorne himself) accidentally summons several different versions of Red Sonja.

This is, in part, meta-commentary, noting the many different ways that Red Sonja had been written and drawn at this point. She had been conceived without a real character arc, without even a comic of her own, and while she was popular, Red Sonja’s stories outside of her interactions with Conan had little continuity. Random fantasy adventures, often wildly different in tone and style.

Red Sonja #11 was Frank Thorne’s final issue; he left the series, and worked on others for which he had more creative control and artistic license…including Ghita of Alizarr, a fantasy swordswoman who was in many ways Red Sonja without the oath of celibacy and with graphic sexuality.

If Ghita of Alizarr was an X-rated Thorne’s Red Sonja with the copyrighted and trademarked serial numbers filed off, well…he wasn’t the only one thinking along those lines.

THORNE: One of the prouder moments is when some guy advertised an eight-page Tijuana bible of Red Sonja in The Buyer’s Guide. [Groth laughs]. I ordered a dozen! [Laughs.]

The title: Red Sonja and Conan, Hot and Dry.

GROTH: [Laughs.] That’s great.

THORNE: I keep, in the first of my really big scrapbooks. I’m just finishing filling up the fourth. These scrapbooks are like two by three feet and two inches thick. Sonja got a ton of media attention.

—Gary Groth, “The Frank Thorne Interview”

Red Sonja and Conan: Hot and Dry was an 8-pager (also called a Tijuana bible or bluesie) put together by Randy Crawford, who released a number of other parody sex comics in 1977 including Star Trek: Spock in Heat and a Plastic Man 8-pager. Tijuana bibles had first emerged in the 1930s, often crudely written, drawn, printed, and bound together with a staple or two—but these sexually explicit comics were incredibly popular. They often featured the unlicensed use of existing comic strip characters, popular athletes, Hollywood stars, and politicians, and even early comic book superheroes like Superman, Batman, and the Captain Marvel family.

Interest and production waned during the 1940s and 50s, but still carried on sporadically; the later Tijuana bibles published after the institution of the Comics Code Authority often seem to have crossover with underground comix, and might feature established characters such as Captain Ameria, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and the Archie gang, but publication and distribution were shifting. Within a year or so of Marvel publishing Conan the Barbarian in 1970, the first pornographic parody “Gonad the Barbarian” appeared in the San Francisco Ball, an adult-oriented underground newspaper in mocking parody of the San Francisco Call.

Red Sonja took a little longer. It’s clear from the cover image that Randy Crawford was looking at the Marvel Feature/Red Sonja (vol 1.) Frank Thorne-era Red Sonja for inspiration, with the straps, armlets, gloves, and pauldrons which would gradually be dropped from her wardrobe. There’s no mention of her origin, oath, goddess, or need to battle before the action begins.

Conan is an even rougher figure, although clearly John Buscema’s take on the character. Something of the notched nose and posture recalls Conan’s second meeting with Red Sonja.

Readers can judge for themselves. Sorry for the roughness of these photos, these are the only ones I could get.

The inside rear cover includes a reprint of the cover for Crawford’s Plastic Man 8-pager

Erotica tends to be ephemeral: only 1,250 copies of Red Sonja and Conan: Hot and Dry were published, and they very rarely come onto the second-hand marketplace. Many have no doubt been lost or discarded, or damaged because of their fragile construction. Yet the crude content and art are the point. While today with the internet readers can find dozens of pornographic comics featuring Red Sonja, some lovingly rendered by digital artists, in the 1970s this kind of erotic fan-product was not just illegal (copyright violation, and possibly deemed obscene depending on the jurisdiction), it was representative of a seriously fringe commercial activity.

How the hell do you advertise a Red Sonja/Conan Tijuana bible? Without getting caught?

Randy Crawford apparently published an ad in the Comic Buyer’s Guide, but this was the sort of thing that would probably have been sold under the table at conventions, or by mail-order in severely plain envelopes. It was illicit fare for the true post-pubescent comic nerds to geek out over. It represents almost the opposite of Frank Thorne’s approach with Ghita of Alizarr—none of the characterization, the beautiful artwork, the erotic atmosphere—just a gonzo narrative, straight to sex and ending with a climax.

Frank Thorne, no doubt, got a good laugh out of it. Yet he was an artist; he may have wanted to see his favorite flame-haired swordswoman in flagrante delicto…but he also wanted to do right by her as a character. Nothing quite illustrates the difference between an avid fan’s pornographic fantasy and a dedicated artist’s erotic epic than to look at something like this, and see how crude the work could be, tossed out quick and printed on the cheap to make a few bucks.

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.

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).

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