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).

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

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

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

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

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

Then, the reader turns the page…

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

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

Or, perhaps, just a bit of sentiment.

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

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

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

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

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

Like Howard himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back cover text of Cthulhu #6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eldritch entities are decidedly less toad-like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was the beginning of the kidification of Conan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

¿LO CONSEGUIRÁN?

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

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

WILL THEY SUCCEED?

Back cover copy

English translation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yag-Kosha’s backstory is dealt with briefly.

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

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

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

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

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

Pre-Code Lovecraftian Horror Comics

In the years before Seduction of the Innocent and the rise of the Comics Code Authority (1954), there was an age undreamed of… Garish four-color comics of crime, horror, science fiction, the occult, and the weird filled the newsstands. The comic book had emerged as a definitive form in 1934, at first reprinting newspaper comic strips, but soon comic magazines emerged featuring original material. While the Golden Age of Comic Books is usually said to have begun with the advent of Superman in Action Comics #1 (18 April 1938), the lucrative field swiftly diversified into many different genres, not just superheroes. In the 1940s and 50s, one of the most notable and notorious genres was the horror comic.

Early comic books shared a great deal of crossover with the pulp magazines, including artists, writers, editors, and even publishers. Harry Donenfeld was the entrepreneur behind the Spicy pulp magazines that published Robert E. Howard and E. Hoffman Price—and the same magazines also published comic strips such as Olga Mesmer, The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes; Sally the Sleuth; and Polly of the Plains. Donenfeld would later expand his enterprises into the burgeoning field of comics in the mid-30s with Detective Comics, Inc.—known better today as DC Comics.

Around the same time, future Marvel Comics publisher Martin Goodman edited horror pulps. Julius Schwartz, the science fiction fan who acted as Lovecraft’s agent for At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, became an editor for DC; Weird Tales writers Frank Belknap Long, Jr., Otto Binder, and Manly Wade Wellman, among others, all wrote comic book scripts. Weird Tales artists Virgil Finlay, Matt Fox, and Frank Kelly Freas worked in comics too. So when it came time to bring their skills to comics, many of the people involved with horror comics turned to horror pulps for inspiration.

Sometimes more than inspiration:

The one instance I remember was a very awkward one. It’s curious that I remember the name of the author who complained. It was August Derleth, a well-known horror writer. It was a story in one of our magazines, called “The Ornalean Clock,” and it involved the other staff writer. Mr. Derleth wrote in (it surprised me that he was reading these comic books) and sent us the story that he wrote which was about an Ornalean clock It was clear that it had been plagiarized.

It was very awkward. Richard [Hughes] confronted the writer, who did what plagiarists always do—that is, claimed he must have dipped into his unconscious, he wasn’t aware of it, and so forth. And perhaps the only defense he had was that it was so blatant!
Norman Fruman, assistant editor of the American Comics Group, quoted in Michael Vance’s Forbidden Adventures: The History of the American Comics Group 73

Derleth’s story was “The Ormolu Clock” in Weird Tales January 1950. Derleth’s friend Frank Belknap Long, Jr. had written the first issue of Adventures into the Unknown, the first ongoing horror comic, published by the American Comics Group. Derleth was well-known for his love of comic strips, and no doubt spotted the plagiarism because he followed the horror comics after Long had brought them to his attention. Ironically, it was Derleth who would write a letter to editor Richard Hughes encouraging them to continue to publish horror comics instead of canceling the series (Forbidden Adventures 110-111).

If ongoing horror comics began in 1948 with Adventures into the Unknown, the horror comics craze was kicked off by Crypt of Terror #17 (April/May 1950) from EC Comics—better known today under its later title, Tales from the Crypt. EC’s comic stories were, for the time, often well-written and well-illustrated; they often had a moral, but they could also feature darker twist endings, and a bit of grue. The many imitators of EC were not often as conscientious in their writing or art; much like the pulp magazines, the newcomers often leaned into gore, mutilations, eye gouging, drug abuse, and nasty ends where criminals get away with their crimes.

While individual comic book publishers had their own internal codes of censorship, there was no industry-wide limitation on content except for general statutes on obscenity. So while explicit sex and nudity were largely the province of Tijuana bibles, comic books on the stand could easily present gore, mutilations, dark and mature storylines, mouldering skeletons, vampires, voodoo, cannibalism, and all the rest. Plagiarism, either of published stories or swipes from other artists, was rife. Yet the period ended swiftly.

In 1954, a moral panic swept the United States (and was echoed in the United Kingdom and other countries around the world), spurred on by Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, his many articles in newspapers and magazines, and his testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Other pearl-clutchers and parents groups added their voices, and federal oversight seemed a real possibility—so the major comic publishers came together and formed the Comics Code Authority, whose Seal of Approval would mark approved comics. Not approved? Horror.

The formation of the CCA effectively ended most horror comics publishing in the United States for a generation, and had a chilling effect on comics intended for mature audiences. They would come back—the underground comix of the 1960s and 70s especially paid tribute to EC’s horror comics, and raised a general middle finger to the censorship of the CCA, while major publishers like Marvel and DC would push back little by little with their own horror comics in the 1960s, sometimes sidestepping the CCA by publishing full-sized comic magazines. This would lead to a great flowering of horror comics magazines from publishers like Warren and Skywald in the 1970s and 80s, and lay the groundwork for comics like Heavy Metal Magazine (originally a translation of the French magazine Metal Hurlant).

Ironically, in 1954 Weird Tales also ceased publication, one of the last of the old-time pulp magazines to give up the ghost, unable to compete either against science-fiction digests or the coming men’s adventure pulps that flourished in the postwar era. An entire sub-industry was gutted almost overnight. Former pulp writers and artists who had known, talked, and corresponded to H. P. Lovecraft, who might have adapted his work to a new medium, never got that chance…well, except during the period before 1954.

While there are thousands of pre-Code comic books, there are only a handful of comics that can be positively said to be “Lovecraftian horror,” either because they directly adapt a Lovecraft story or explicitly make reference to Lovecraft’s Mythos. If one were to include other early Mythos writers like Robert E. Howard, the list would be a little longer—“Skull of Doom” in Voodoo Comics #12 (1953), for example, seems to be an adaptation of Howard’s “Old Garfield’s Heart.” But for the sake of keeping this list manageable, here are some positively identified pre-Code Lovecraftian horror comics, many of which are in the public domain and can be read for free.

A Note: Many of these early comics were completed in small studios by teams of writers and artists, working for low rates, and often without credit. As such it is not always clear who exactly worked on many of these comics, but as far as it can be determined, the names of the writers, artists, letterers, etc. will be included below.

“Captain Marvel Battles the Vampire” (March 1941)

Published in Captain Marvel Adventures #1 (Fawcett Publications), this 16-page story of Captain Marvel (now often known as Shazam) was penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Dick Briefer. The mystic hero finds himself up against one of the undead, and to better understand his foe and their weaknesses, a librarian hands him The Vampire Legend by H. P. Lovecraft. An unlikely title, but a neat homage to Lovecraft!

“Dr. Styx” (August 1945)

Published in Treasure Comics #2 (American Boys Comics Inc.), this uncredited 8-page comic presents an occult thriller whose eponymous hero is an unsung prototype to Doctor Fate, Doctor Strange, The Phantom Stranger, and John Constantine. Whoever the writer was, they must have read more than a little of the Mythos to cite Ludvig Prinn (created by Robert Bloch), Cthulhu, Abdul Alhazred, and the Necronomicon (however misspelled).

Red Dragon (Feb-Mar-Apr 1946)

Red Dragon was a mystic superhero character whose adventures ran as a back-up feature in Super-Magician Comics published by Street & Smith, better known for their pulp magazines. Whereas most of Super-Magician Comics featured stories with the fantastic adventures of real magicians like Houdini, Red Dragon could perform acts of genuine magic by reciting the mystic words of power “Po She Lo” and a bit of doggerel rhyme. Red Dragon was accompanied on his adventures by a Chinese companion, Ching Foo, and a komodo dragon.

In a three-act adventure (“The Kingdom of Evil!” v.4 #10 Feb 1946, 8 pages; “Where Time Is Not” v.4 #11 Mar 1946, 8 pages; and “End of Evil!” v.4 #12 Apr 1946, 8 pages), Red Dragon and his companions run afoul of a cult of fish-men who worship Dagon and “Chthtlu”—an entity who dwells outside of normal space and time and is a giant green malevolent interdimensional worm with a humanoid face, a bit reminiscent of Mister Mind, and possibly inspired by him. The Lovecraftian influence is scant but noticeable. Sadly, no writer or artist is credited.

“The Thing At Chugamung Cove!” (May 1949)

Marvel Comics’ first foray into horror was Amazing Mysteries #32 (May 1949), which continued on the numbering from Sub-Mariner Comics #31, and the first story in that issue was “The Thing at Chugamung Cove!” (11 pages)—which is, in effect, a highly abridged and transformed version of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” where a writer goes to the legendary deserted town and uncovers some frightful family history. No artist or writer is credited for this adaptation.

“Experiment … In Death” (May-June 1950)

Published in Weird Science #12 (EC Comics), this 6-page story co-scripted by Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein, and illustrated by Jack Kamen with letters by Jim Wroten, is clearly strongly inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s “Herbert West—Reanimator”; but the lengthy six-part narrative has been largely scrapped to get at the core idea of a reagent that reanimates the dead, two doctors performing experiments to do just that, and how the degradation of the brain renders them violent. In ditching the plot, so too is ditched most of the gore, making this more of an intellectual horror.

“The Black Arts” (July-August 1950)

Published in Weird Fantasy #14 (EC Comics), this 7-page story by written and inked Harry Harrison, penciled by Wally Wood, and lettered by Jim Wroten is a fairly generic tale of a young man that uses a recipe for a love potion from the Necronomicon to get a young woman to fall in love with him. Nice guys don’t use the black arts to date-rape young women, so the hint of a grisly comeuppance looks like karmic justice. The standout character here is the Necronomicon itself; which features prominently in the story.

“Fitting Punishment” (December-January 1951)

Published in The Vault of Horror #16 (EC Comics), this 7-page uncredited adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s “In the Vault” was written by Al Feldstein, penciled and inked by Graham Ingels, and lettered by Jim Wroten. While stripped of much of Lovecraft’s prose and compressed to its bare essentials, Feldstein and Ingels manage to capture the essence of this very Poe-esque tale, whose climactic ending offers a vivid visual little less gruesome than Lovecraft’s original.

“Baby…It’s Cold Inside” (February-March 1951)

Published in The Vault of Horror #17 (EC Comics), this 7-page uncredited adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” was co-written by Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines, penciled and inked by Graham Ingels, and lettered by Jim Wroten. As with “Fitting Punishment,” this isn’t a Mythos story and is very much in the Edgar Allan Poe vein, but even stripped bare to the essentials it gets the message across. “Cool Air” has been one of the more popular of Lovecraft’s stories to adapt to comics, having been adapted at least five times over the decades, perhaps because of its rather straightforward plot—and the gruesome climax.

“Prisoner on Charon’s Ferry” (March 1952)

Published in Whiz Comics #143 (Fawcett Comics), this 6-page comic of Ibis the Invicible briefly features a grimoire called the Necromicon as a prop during a lecture, which an unscrupulous attendee uses to summon Charon (and later, a vulture). No artist or writer is credited, though the Grand Comic Book Database credits Bill Woolfolk with the script.

“Portrait of Death” (September 1952)

Published in Weird Terror #1 (Comic Media), this 7-page uncredited adaptation of Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model” was illustrated by Rudy Palais. As an adaptation, it’s interesting to compare “Portrait of Death” to “Fitting Punishment” and “Baby…It’s Cold Inside!” The line work and anatomy is a little cruder, the coloring a bit sloppier, and the writing takes many more liberties with the source material. Yet it is very much in the same spirit as the EC Comics adaptations.

“The Corpse That Wouldn’t Die!” (January 1953)

Published in Web of Evil #2 (Quality) this 6-page story is largely adapted from Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Return of the Sorcerer,” though the eponymous sorcerer is not dismembered and the unnamed grimoire is in Sanskrit rather than the Arabic of the Necronomicon. The story was re-worked for Eerie Publications in the 1970s.

“Beyond the Past” (November-December 1953)

Published in The Thing #11 (Charlton Comics) this brief 4-page original story illustrated by Lou Morales is a definite homage to Lovecraft and the Necronomicon, albeit slightly garbled. The story had an odd afterlife, as newspapers—and then Frederic Wertham himself—mixed up the plot and thought that the Necronomicon a blood-drinking monster, not a tome of eldritch lore!

“Invitation to Your Wake” (December 1953)

Published in The Hand of Fate #21 (Ace Magazines), this 7-page original story has no credits, although the Grand Comics Database suggests it was penciled and inked by Sy Grudko, probably because of similarities of style. Like EC’s Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, the stories in The Hand of Fate are narrated by a mysterious cloaked figure—by the stories tend to be more serious and less darkly humorous. Once again, the major Lovecraftian element is the appearance of the “Necromonicon,” as the rest of the monsters in this story are typical vampires, werewolves, etc.

There are no doubt many more pre-Code Lovecraftian horror comics out there—for a certain value of Lovecraftian. For example in “The Fish-Men of Nyarl-Amen” in More Fun Comics #65 (DC, March 1941) by Gardner Fox (writer) and Hal Sherman (art), mystic hero Doctor Fate defeats an army of prehistoric fish-men from beneath the sea. Chris Murray in Kevin Corstorphine in “Co(s)mic Horror” in New Critical Essays on Lovecraft argue this is a definite Lovecraftian influence:

The similarity to stories such as “The Call of Cthulhu,” with the sunken city of R’lyeth [sic], and also the Deep Ones who appear in “Dagon” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931) is obvious. Indeed, the name Nyarl-Amen seems reminiscent of Y’Ha-nthlei, the name of the undersea cyclopean city referred to in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” and is certainly related to Nyarlathotep. However, the potential for horror in the tale is undercut, as is so often the case in comics of the time, by some rather clunky dialogue.
Murray & Corstophine, New Critical Essays on Lovecraft 166

Is it really? Hard to say. Gardner Fox in particular was well-known for riffing off of material from Weird Tales, both in prose and comics. Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian was a definite influence on Fox’s character Crom the Barbarian who debuted in Out of this World #1 (Avon, June 1950), and Fox’s Kothar the Barbarian Swordsman novels (some of which were later adapted into Conan comics by Marvel!) So it wouldn’t be surprising if Fox was riffing off of Lovecraft in the 1940s. Yet, at the same time, Lovecraft didn’t hold a monopoly on fish-people either.

Another edge case is “The Last of Mr. Mordeaux,” penciled and inked by Joe Sinnott, which ran in Astonishing #11 (Atlas, Spring 1952). The 5-page story definitely seems to have taken inspiration from Lovecraft’s “The Lurking Fear” and “The Shadow over Innsmouth”: to prove his aristocratic lineage, the American Mr. Mordeaux travels to his ancestral castle in Hungary, and finds the remains of his family—driven underground centuries ago and degenerated into reptilian creatures, yet still bearing the hallmark bulging eyes and lack of eyebrows that Mr. Mordeaux still bears. Is this any looser of an adaptation than the other pre-Code horrors listed above? Where does the line fall between inspired-by and loose adaptation? In part, “Mordeaux” seems inspired-by because the premise is so broadly evocative of Lovecraft’s stories, but not directly evocative of any particular story. “The Lurking Fear” comes closest, but even that is a loose fit.

We get into the perennial question of: “What does Lovecraftian even mean, anyway?” Defined broadly enough, any terrible entity with tentacles or dark cult might look like stepped-on Lovecraft. In some cases, that’s probably true. With the publication of Lovecraft’s stories in hardback starting in 1939 by Arkham House, and the paperback editions that followed—including an Armed Services edition during World War II—Lovecraft’s fiction was more available than many of his contemporary pulp writers. Still, the Necronomicon didn’t appear in hundreds or even dozens of comics during these decades. It was an in-joke for dedicated fans—and perhaps that is how pre-Code Lovecraftian horror should best be understood. Something for the weird connoisseurs of the horror comic book and weird fiction.

The influence of Weird Tales and its circle of writers and artists on the early comic book industry could be a book in itself, ranging from Manly Wade Wellman’s work on Will Eisner’s The Spirit to the absolute sensation that was (and is) Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian. Yet there was a certain magic to that Wild West period before the Code came down like a heavy lid, shutting down entire comic lines. While the Lovecraftian comics above aren’t particularly gruesome even by today’s standards, certainly not among the most notorious offenders of the 1940s and 50s, they were lost to time…and while the EC Comics have been collected and reprinted, many of the others remain virtually unknown.

With the arrival of the Comics Code Authority, comic books in the United States shifted ever more toward a younger audience, and toward superheroes. Unable to publish explicit horror comics, it may be unsurprising that the next Lovecraftian comics published were superhero comics like Justice League of America #10 (DC, March 1962), where the Necronomicon makes an appearance—but that would change. Underground comix creators, Marvel’s 1960s horror comics adaptations, the success of Conan the Barbarian (1970), Warren’s horror comics magazines, and Metal Hurlant’s Lovecraft special issue in 1979—the world of Lovecraftian horror comics was only groing to grow bigger and weirder.

Yet it started here, with a handful of pre-Code horror comics, many of which have never been reprinted. While these might not be the roots from which later Lovecraftian comics would grow, they were definitely precursors, part of that flood of sometimes dark, gory, and trashy four-color horror that scared parents and publishers into censorship. The first faltering steps to bring Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror into a new medium.

Thanks to Will Murray for help and assistance.

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

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

Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman” (1975): A Refusal of Roles by Sapphire Lazuli

Much discussion has been brought to light, in recent times, to ponder what it means to identify with a gender identity. Perhaps ponder is too gentle a word, these discussions have often been led by those who oppose the idea of gender nonconformity and thus are designed to diminish the credibility of those outside of the gender binary. “What is a woman?”—the question is asked tirelessly by this crowd in an attempt to quell the happening of gender nonconformity. It is often put forth as an idea that was only recently made blurry:

… and now our culture is telling us that the differences between girls and boys don’t matter, that if you identify with something then you are that thing. (Walsh, What is a Woman 2022)

Gender is a concept that has grown and evolved over numerous cultures; the modern idea of one gender identity can seem a stark contrast to that of past times. Looking at gender across cultures brings difficulty to a single unified ideal. The idea of asking the question, “what is a woman?” is poised to be one of critical discourse, e.g.:

… if I’m talking publicly about what a man or a woman is, I’m not going to give credence to an argument that has no biological or logical basis. It doesn’t make any sense. (Shapiro 2019)

But there is quite an argument to be made that viewing gender as a single, unified concept is an uninformed idea.

I bring all this to light after having recently read through Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman,” a story I had suspected would fall victim to such uninformed ideas. Knowing of other pulp stories that had explored queer themes such as Fred Hayley’s Satan Was a Lesbian (1966), I had expected a tiring Mulan-type story with much less the feminine liberation and far more derogatory discussion of gender expression. Instead, “Sword Woman” allows its characters to explore an incredibly nuanced idea of what gender and expression can mean both within and outside of the perception of others. I was surprised to find such a story written in the 1930s at first, but this later served as a reminder of the queer happenings that this time period was littered with.

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“Sword Woman” is a burning fire of feminine rage, gender exploration, and a hard, “who cares?” To the question of “what is a woman?” The story’s lead, Dark Agnes, finds themself on a murder spree, killing men time and time again as each threatens seizure of Agnes’ free will. Murder frees them from betrothal, from slavery, and from two attempted assassinations; Agnes begins the story a mere damsel in distress and ends it as a serrated blade, sharpened by the necks of those who would oppose them.

In exploring such a presentation of gender identity and expression, it is important to understand how gender has evolved over time. It is easy to think of gender as a single, static state tied to the presence of particular genitalia, though this has not always been the case for humanity. In fact, even where such ideas have been linked, the presentation of specific genders has changed drastically over time.

In Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986), she writes about the nuance of gender in Native American cultures:

In considering gender-based roles, we must remember that while the roles themselves were fixed in most archaic American cultures, with divisions of ‘women’s work’ and ‘men’s work’, the individuals fit into these roles on a basis of proclivity, inclination, and temperament. (Allen 1986)

This kind of gender expression, one which is determined by the individual’s own experience with their identity, is quite opposed to the modern conservative perception of gender, in which it is a defined state determined for the individual rather than by them.

This is where Robert E. Howard’s “Sword Woman” follows its approach to gender identity. The story centres around Dark Agnes, a character who whisks themself and anyone around them into a whirlwind explosion of feminine rage and tyranny. Agnes begins this story as a product to be owned; they are betrothed to a man named Francois and the thought leaves a revolting taste in their mouth. So, when their sister, Ysabel offers Agnes with the means “… to free herself. Do not cling by your fingers to life, to become as our mother, and as your sister…” (Howard 1979) by handing them a dagger, Agnes refuses the proposed suicide and instead murders Francois.

Agnes does a lot at this moment: not only are they shattering the chains that bind them to the ownership of men, but they are also leaching the masculine blood to take wholly as their own. As from this point onward, Agnes refuses their position as a woman; refuses being the key word here. Thrown to the side are their betrothal, the temptation for suicide, their placidity, even their feminine garbs are thrown into a river to be forgotten. Agnes refuses everything that had once defined them and takes this moment to reinvent themself. It would have been easy for this moment to mirror the suffragettes and their seizure of the typically masculine roles, swapping one gendered cage for another, but instead, Howard allows Agnes a freedom of exploration that will go on to bring a new, personal definition of gender by the end of the story.

I have been referring to Agnes here with they/them pronouns, though it should be noted that Agnes is referred to with she/her pronouns in the book. I choose they/them here as I feel such pronouns better reflect who this character is; perhaps even he/him would be better fit, as Agnes themself proclaims at the book’s conclusion, “Remember, I am woman no more.” To which their comrade, Etienne Villiers, agrees, “[we are] brothers in arms” (Howard, 1979).

This proclamation taking place near the end of the story further cements how Agnes’ gender evolves throughout the story. As they continue their murder spree of dastardly men, Agnes finds themself constantly covered in blood. They make efforts to wash, though eventually, the blood that stains Agnes’ body sinks so deep into their skin that the blood of man and the blood of Agnes are one and the same. I hear an echo of the struggles that the Macbeths encountered after their murder of Duncan, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather…” (Macbeth 2.2.75). Unlike Macbeth, however, Agnes takes in this stolen crimson stain with pride and sanity. It is as though they becomes more wholly themselves, the more blood they leech.

Importantly, Agnes does not reject this gender identity. It is one that is somewhat thrust upon them, the idea of Agnes becoming a masculine figure is first proposed by Etienne Villiers who fears Agnes will be too recognisable by their father’s scouts dressed in their royal, feminine attire. However, the actual expression of Agnes’ identity as a masculine figure is one defined only by Agnes. Not once do they actually refer to themself as a man, only that they are no longer a woman. I think that it is poignant to point out that had this story been written today, Agnes would likely have aligned more with a non-binary gender identity rather than strictly male or female.

Agnes is the loudest voice when it comes to their newfound identity, often reminding Etienne, here they feel truly as they ought to be. Early after taking the masculine identity, Etienne jests, “By Saint Michele, in all my life I never saw a woman drain a flagon like that! You will be drunk, girl.” Which is met by Agnes’s cold reminder, “You forget I am a girl no longer,” (Howard, 1979) Interesting to note that they say girl here and not woman as they do come the conclusion, a reflection of their growth.

I think what is most pertinent here is the determination of gender. Understanding that gender can be determined not just at a singular point in one’s life, but rather at multiple points allows a much broader description of what gender is. Allen writes:

… the Kaska would designate a daughter in a family that had only daughters as a boy. When she was young, around five, her parents would tie a pouch of dried bear ovaries to her belt… and she would function in the Kaska male role for the rest of her life. (Allen 1986)

We see here a clear presentation of gender as a fluid state, with an understanding of roles existing outside of biology. Here, gender seems to be focused more on the utilitarian aspect of the community. Dark Agnes’ gender identity is not unlike this determination. They take up their masculine identity as it is better fitted to the position they find themself in, and will later take a more personal position at their meeting with Guiscard de Clisson.

Here, Agnes seeks to become a sword woman, to ride among men in the fields of battle. Only, this position they take ends in turmoil as their party is ambushed and killed. Absolutely we can understand that Agnes’ party’s deaths are not caused by their readoption of the female identity, but there is certainly a metaphorical message in that Agnes suffers when they return to the facade. This is where Agnes’s proclamation, “Remember, I am woman no more.” (Howard 1979) takes place, after losing their brothers in arms, after suffering in the position they had rejected in the beginning.

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It should not be ignored when this story was likely written either. The 1920s through to the 1930s were a period of much change; the world itself was both recovering from and about to enter a world war after all. And among all of this change, a woman named Lili Elbe had begun an exploration of her own gender identity.

Lili Elbe was the second trans woman ever to receive sex reassignment surgery ninety years ago in 1931. There is quite a lot to discuss with her story, but what is important here is the timing and widespread knowledge. Lili’s story, along with many others, should have been lost when the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was burnt down by the Nazis in 1933, however, her semi-autobiographical book, Man Into Woman (now titled Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change), received an English publication in that same year. Along with this, her story featured heavily in German and Dutch Newspapers. Lili Elbe was no unknown figure; she had become quite the public idea by the time of her death in 1931.

There is currently no evidence to suggest this novel came into Howard’s hands, importantly, he does not mention it in his letters. That being said, I still find the existence of Lili Elbe and others like her at the time to be incredibly interesting. It is as though they are surrounding each letter of the page without needing to be there at all. Our society has been incredibly queer for a lot longer than it has often been thought to be, and stories such as this, alongside real-life events, help highlight that fact. Perhaps it is no wonder then that “Sword Woman” was so open to pushing the boundaries of what gender really is.

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“Sword Woman” surprised me in ways I never would have thought it could. Often it is difficult to engage with literature from times past when so much of it constructs walls to keep ‘people like me’ on the outskirts. It is refreshing to encounter this story and leave with so few negative thoughts.

Howard’s exploration of gender is one of incredible nuance, never seeming to worry all that much about the perception of others. Instead, gender in Howard’s “Sword Woman” is an experience wholly for the individual, a definition that aligns itself so well with our current. Rather than ask the reader to question, “what is a woman?” Howard rejects the idea entirely, and states, in blood-red ink: gender is created only from the thread one chooses to sew.

While written by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s, “Sword Woman” was not published until 1975, and is still in copyright in the United States. This and other tales of Dark Agnes may be read in the Robert E. Howard collection Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures (2011).

Works Cited

Allen, P. G. (1986). The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. 2015 reprint: Open Road Media.

Folk, J. (Director). (2022). What is a Woman? [Motion Picture].

Haley, F. (1966). Satan Was a Lesbian. 2018 reprint: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Howard, R. E. (1979). Sword Woman. Berkley Books.

Lili Elbe, N. H. (2015). Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change. Canelo.

Shakespeare, W. (2015). The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Barnes & Noble Inc.

Shaprio, B. (2019, April 9). An interview with Ben Shapiro: social justice, free speech and transgender pronouns. (P. Nieto, Interviewer) Retrieved from: https://www.laloyolan.com/opinion/an-interview-with-ben-shapiro-social-justice-free-speech-and-transgender-pronouns/article_229644e1-0052-58c0-a441-e47724c05c93.html

Sapphire Lazuli (she/they) is a writer of weird horror and perverted desires based in Australia. She draws on thier experiences as a trans woman of colour and a lesbian, often doing their part to bring more queer voices into the worlds she crafts.

Their prose is often described as beautifully poetic, and adjacent to the writer, Sapphire does not write stories that will hold your hand. Though, be it cosmic entities appearing as places, gross and erotic explorations of the boundaries of form, or deep dives into the darkest ridges of the mind and desire, their horror is bound to allure you.

Twitter: @lazuli_sapphire

YouTube: @sapphicsapph

Blog: www.sapphirelazuli.com

King Conan and the Stygian Queen (2016) by Jess Thornton & “Not Quite Milked by the Yeti” (2017) by Callie Page

Robert E. Howard lived during the early years of organized science fiction fandom. Devoted fans of certain literary and popular media works had existed long before, just as science fiction existed before it had a name, but it was in the 1930s that organized fandom coalesced around the science fiction and weird pulp magazines. This first fandom in the 1930s, with its politics and controversies, its enthusiasm and creativity, its sometimes bitter arguments over definitions and big egos clashing over petty pastimes, laid the groundwork for what we think of as fandom today.

Fan fiction during Robert E. Howard’s day was different, however. Fan fiction was simply amateur fiction written by fans, for fans, published in fanzines; this is what ultimately distinguished it from “pro” fiction, which was published in pulp magazines. In terms of quality, the dividing line could be nonexistent—Howard himself didn’t have any concerns if unused and rejected stories or poetry of his appeared in a fanzine, which is why he allowed The Fantasy Fan to publish “The Gods of the North”—a rejected Conan tale.

What fans generally did not do at this period was to write fanfiction as we know it today: that is, original fiction using another writer’s original characters and setting. New stories of Conan the Cimmerian didn’t fill the pages of The Fantasy Fan or any other fanzine during the 1930s, and it was rarely the case for other popular characters to get new installments in the fanzines during this period either. The concern was probably less worry about copyright strikes than propriety; the sense that it wasn’t polite to “steal” a writer’s character.

The only real exception to this was what would become known as the Cthulhu Mythos created by Lovecraft, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other writers during this period—specifically because these authors shared elements of their setting and even encouraged their use. For example, one of the earliest references to the Conan stories outside of Howard or Lovecraft’s own fiction was “Horror at Vecra” by Henry Hasse (The Acolyte #5, Fall 1943), which is a Mythos story that shelves the Nemedian Chronicles almost alongside the Necronomicon.

Finally I said, “All right, what is it this time? And don’t give me any more of that Necronomicon stuff, for I know that’s a myth.” Bruce was an authority on certain terrible lores and forbidden books dealing with such lores, and he had told me things from a certain Necronomicon that literally made my flesh crawl.

“What?” he said in answer to my question. “Why look at these! Not Necronomicons, but interesting!” he trhust a couple of worn, leather-bound volumes into my hands. I glanced at the titles. One was Horride Mysteries by the Marquis of Grosse; the other, Nemedian Chronicles. I looked up at Bruce, and saw that he was genuinely excited.
Henry Hesse, The Acolyte #5 (Fall 1943) 11

The first fanfictional use of Conan as a character is a bit more difficult to pin down. Emil Petaja’s “The Warrior” (1934), dedicated to Robert E. Howard, begins with “From ancient dark Cimmeria he came| With sword uplifted, on that bloody day”—but does not mention Conan by name. R. H. Barlow was so moved by Robert E. Howard’s death in 1936 that he wrote an elegy, titled “R. E . H.” and begins “Conan, the warrior king, lies stricken dead,” though this was published in Weird Tales Oct 1936, not a fanzine. Another early unauthorized use of Conan was in “The Man of Two Worlds” by Bryce Walton (Space Stories Oct 1952), but that wasn’t a fanzine either, though the literary borrowing was perhaps closer to what we think of as fanfiction today:

Thorston leaped back atop the sea-wall and faced them. Below him, thegiant barbarian and sveral other self-appointed discipls of theri hero, faced the mob.

Thorsten kicked the barbarian in the back. As the man looked up, Thorsten shouted: “Your name, barbarian? You used the swod well enough. It’s yours.”

“I thank you, Theseus!” the barbarian’s face stretched in a fierce grin. “I am Conan the CImmerian. I came from your land, Theseus. From the wilds of Cimmeria.”
Bryce Walton, Space Stories (Oct 1952) 43

It took a while for Howardian fanfiction in the sense that folks recognize fanfiction today to get going. In part, this was probably due to the initial lull in reprints and publications of Howard’s work after his death, and then the commercial avenues opened up in the 1950s as L. Sprague de Camp and others began to produce Conan pastiches authorized by the copyright holders of Howard’s estate, as well as reworking existing Howard stories into Conan tales. Professional writers like Gardner Fox quickly determined that it might be easier to create their own carbon-copy barbarians like Crom the Barbarian and Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman instead of getting permission to write a Conan, Kull, or Bran Mak Morn story. There is a certain irony in this, as when Marvel Comics began adapting Howard’s Conan stories to comics in the 1970s, they licensed the rights to adapt some of Fox’s Kothar stories as new adventures of Conan the Cimmerian.

As Howard’s literary legacy grew and spread into other media, more unauthorized fiction and poetry appeared; sometimes in fanzines like “I Remember Conan” (1960) by Grace A. Warren, and sometimes in foreign language markets where local authors decided to continue the adventures of a popular character. With the advent of the internet, fanfiction made the leap from fanzines to websites. The early days of Howardian internet fanfiction aren’t well-attested, and little of the early webrings and erotic fanfiction sites survive except in obscure corners of the Internet Archive, but if you know where to look it still exists—although fanfiction today tends to be based as much on derivative works like the comic books (particularly Red Sonja) and the 1982 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As the economy grew increasingly online, fanfiction went through another important change: self-commercialization. Desktop publishing, ebooks, and print-on-demand meant that instead of posting fanfiction to a website for free, practically anyone could self-publish an ebook or POD book via Amazon or another online retailer—and a handful of folks did so.

While these works are qualitatively not very different from fanfiction available for free, the commercialization of these works draws greater scrutiny. Whether or not a given usage is legal is a matter for lawyers: if a work is under copyright, the owners of that copyright (the ultimate legal heirs of Howard’s estate) certainly have an exclusive right to profit off it, though certain uses may fall under fair use if they meet the right criteria. A free Conan fanfic on a website certainly isn’t a commercial endeavor, and probably doesn’t substantially impact the market for actual Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, for example. Likewise, works that riff off of Conan but explicitly aren’t Conan like Wolff (1971) by Luis Gasca & Esteban Maroto, The Leopard of Poitain (1985) by Raul Garcia-Capella and Collwen the Cimmerian Volume One (2019) by Matthew N. Sneedon don’t appear to be infringing on anyone’s copyrights.

The issue gets a little more complicated with works that fall in the public domain (as all fiction eventually does) since these are open to being reprinted, remixed, and reimagined in any way the public wants, including new commercialization. Some characters in such works may still be covered by trademarks, which do not expire after a given term. Hence the relatively complicated status of works like The Barbarian King 1: Le Spade Spezzate (2019) by Massimo Rosi & Alessio Landi, Sangre Bárbara (2021) by El Torres, Joe Bocardo, & Manoli Martínez, El Puritano (2021) by El Torres, Jaime Infante, & Manoli Martínez, and The Song of Bêlit (2020) by Rodolfo Martínez, which may be legal in areas where the Conan stories have entered the public domain, but aren’t necessarily available in markets where the copyrights or trademarks for Conan et al. are still valid.

Still, there are a couple of other creative literary efforts that run that grey edge of commercialized fanfiction, and it’s worth taking a look at them to see what they do and don’t do.

King Conan and the Stygian Queen (2016) by Jess Thornton

In 2016, Jess Thornton published four titles publishing original stories of Robert E. Howard’s most famous barbarian, Conan the Cimmerian: Conan Returns, Conan in a Stygian Jail, King Conan and the Stygian Queen, and Conan and the Monkey Men. Three of those books are no longer available; whether this was due to a copyright strike, violation of Amazon’s terms of service, Thornton deciding to take them down or some other reason isn’t very clear, and ultimately doesn’t matter. King Conan and the Stygian Queen is still available at this time of writing.

The subtitle of this book is Beyond the Black River and Robert E. Howard is listed as an author, and for good reason: the book consists of a 68-page novella, then the entire Robert E. Howard Conan story “Beyond the Black River,” and a 3-page epilogue. The 71 pages of original fiction by Thornton effectively form a kind of wraparound story, not entirely unlike what Rodolfo Martínez did with The Song of Bêlit (2020) and Howard’s “Queen of the Black Coast.” However, where Martínez was weaving his story in between Howard’s original chapters, Thornton is trying to do something different.

Thornton’s 68-page novelette has an older King Conan, some decades after the end of “The Scarlet Citadel,” still in fighting shape due to a calisthenics regimen, traveling forward in time to Cross Plains in the 1930s to save author Robert E. Howard from the eponymous Stygian Queen, an undead weapon sent by Thoth-Amon to destroy the Hyborian Age before it ever begins. Along the way, Conan basically narrates his own adventures to Howard, which implicitly forms the basis for the Conan tales that would eventually appear in Weird Tales.

There are a lot of fannish threads to pick apart here. Howard’s legend had been tied in with his most famous creation’s as early as 1936, when H. P. Lovecraft declared:

It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr. Howard’s stories stand out so sharply; but the real secret is that he himself was in every one of them, whether they were ostensibly commercial or not. He was greater than any profit-making policy he could adopt—for even when he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and commercial critics he had an internal force and sincerity which broke through the surface and put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote.
H. P. Lovecraft, “In Memoriam: Robert E. Howard” (1936)

This was, in turn, an extension of Howard’s own personal myth-building, since he wrote:

While I don’t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present — or even the future — work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen — or rather off my typewriter — almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowed on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it.
Robert E. Howard to Clark Ashton Smith, 14 Dec 1933, Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (2nd ed.) 3.142-143

The truth was a little less poetic, as discussed in the essay on the first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword” in Hither Came Conan (2023). The ghost of Conan didn’t stand over Howard at the typewriter, dictating his adventures; Howard pounded out a draft and then revised it, often multiple times, before submitting it and often receiving corrections that required further revision. Conan may have popped into Howard’s mind full-formed, but he had many fictional antecedents, including Kull of Atlantis and Conan the Reaver, that informed the character.

So the idea of King Conan dictating his stories to Robert E. Howard is the Howardian equivalent of Lovecraft actually owning a copy of the Necronomicon or having secret knowledge that the Mythos was actually real. By itself, that’s not entirely unknown in the wider diaspora of Lovecraftian fiction; Sangre Bárbara and El Puritano both have a wrap-around story of a young Howard listening to the stories that would go on to inform his fiction. The question becomes one of verisimilitude: how does Thornton weave this supernatural visitation from Conan of Hyborian Age Past into his known history?

Poorly.

While there is obviously some familiarity with Howard’s life, including his family, his relationship with Novalyne Price, the town of Cross Plains, Texas, etc., most of the details just don’t add up. Howard’s first Conan story was written and published in 1932; Prohibition ended in 1933; he met Novalyne Price in Cross Plains in 1934; and he committed suicide at age 30 in 1936. Yet when Conan first meets Howard the author is described as about 30, doesn’t recognize Conan, they drink a pitcher of beer together, and he meets Novalyne at the drug store in Cross Plains. Novalyne and Robert were also never engaged to be married and she was not in Cross Plains when he died, but she is described as his fiance and in town when he died at the end. All of the pieces of Howard’s life are there, but the timeline doesn’t jive with what we know of Howard’s life.

The prose is passable; it’s obvious Thornton has a great affection for Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and sought to reproduce, as much as he could, the flavor of the language. The “methinks!” and “he ejaculated” are laid on a bit thickly and come across less naturally than how Howard wrote Conan, but no author can exactly reproduce another’s style. The use of Thoth Amon as the antagonist probably owes a bit more toward the later Conan pastiches and comic books, since Thoth Amon only appears in one story by Howard (“The Phoenix on the Sword”) and is mentioned in another (“The God in the Bowl”).

On the surface, the inclusion of the entirety of “Beyond the Black River” may seem odd. The story appears to be in the public domain (at least according to Wikisource), but it has nothing directly to do with Thornton’s novelette of King Conan and the Stygian Queen…until you get to the epilogue. Without spoiling the ending, Thornton had implicitly inserted his version of Howard into “Beyond the Black River” as an existing character, without changing a word of Howard’s story, to give the writer what he considered an appropriate glorious death in battle and send-off. Effectively making the story of Howard’s suicide a cover for what really happened.

It doesn’t really work if you think about it too hard, since throughout “Beyond the Black River” there is zero hint of that character sharing any of the information that Howard would presumably have known, and knowing quite a lot that Robert E. Howard would not have known. It’s a well-meaning tribute, perhaps, an effort to rewrite Howard’s end as being more glorious than what it was…but for it to work, the reader has to basically turn a blind eye to who Robert E. Howard was and how he suffered and persevered through the long years of his mother’s illness, the ups and downs of his writing career, his tumultuous relationship with Novalyne Price and his other friends.

King Conan and the Stygian Queen is fanfiction in the sense that this is fiction by fans, for fans—for who else except ardent fans are going to want to read a “new” (and reprinted) story of Conan? Yet the way the story is written, the errors made in depicting Howard’s life, seem likely to alienate a lot of those selfsame fans. At least those who care for who Robert E. Howard was, warts and all, instead of an idealized image of him as the first of Conan’s fanboys.

“Not Quite Milked by the Yeti” (2017) by Callie Press

My name is Brendalee Elkins and I am from round abouts Nevady, just like my whole clan has always been, ancestors and such. We been here since Apache times, and lay claim to some pretty famous Injun-fighters, leastaways teh ones what didn’t marry into the tribes like my cousin Buckminister Elkins done. Daddy always said he weren’t no more than half anything including half an Elkins, though, and I guess that proved it to my kinfolk when he run off with his little squaw.
Callie Press, “Not Quite Milked by the Yeti” in Smutpunk Erotica Collab (2017)

Most of the derivative fiction that stems from Robert E. Howard’s original creations comes from either his Hyborian Age tales of Conan or his Cthulhu Mythos tales. Yet Howard wrote many more characters and settings; original works based on Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and even Sailor Steve Costigan have seen publication in authorized works. The comedic Western stories starring Breckinridge Elkins (or his close counterparts Grizzly Elkins, Pike Bearfield, and Buckner Jeopardy Grimes) have attracted less creative attention, although they inspired Howard’s friend E. Hoffmann Price to create his own Western character, Simon Bolivar Grimes, for a series of stories. Yet fanfiction efforts to pen new Elkins stories have been few.

“Not Quite Milked by the Yeti” by Callie Press is such a rara avis, although in this case Rule 63 has been applied, and despite continuing the use of outdated cultural depictions is set in the current day. The juxtaposition of the stereotyped backwoods hicks in a contemporary world is played for humor, much the same in 2017 as it would have been in 1967 when The Beverley Hillbillies was on the air, or when Li’l Abner and Snuffy Smith ran in newspapers during Howard’s lifetime. The broad outline of the start of the story resembles Howard’s first Elkins story, “A Gent from Bear Creek,” where occasion requires Brendalee to go into town:

Somehow he said some fellers got some nekkid pitchers of me on the internets, which as I understand it is kinda like the post, only electrical. Someone musta snuck a camera up the creek whilst I was bathin’ or something, but it befuddled me as to when.
Callie Press, “Not Quite Milked by the Yeti” in Smutpunk Erotica Collab (2017)

Press has obviously studied Howard’s Elkins stories and includes several references to the series, including names like McGraw, Bear Creek, Chawed Ear, and the Humbolts. Brendalee, like her male counterpart, is not entirely the brightest or most trustworthy narrator, and casually displays superhuman strength and endurance for comedic effect. It is a solid pastiche of Howard’s style.

Then the yeti (“albino samsquatches”) enter into the story.

While the Breckinridge Elkins stories might border on the ridiculous when describing Elkins’ strength, stamina, capacity for liquor, resistance to common poisons, and thick-headedness, they never veered all the way into outright fantasy. I have a suspicion that the popularity of the “monster sex” erotic ebook scene on Amazon in the 2010s inspired this particular narrative, and fair enough—there are stranger flavors of Howard-inspired erotic fanfiction, if one knows where to look. There is also a certain flair in this novel new element that can’t help but bring a smile:

I knowed when I stared into them other-worldly eyeballs that he wanted to milk my titties somehow, and I didn’t reckon that was gonna fly with this Elkins girl. I hadn’t never had no baby, and I such as shuckin’ didn’t plan to let them big old manglers try to perjuice milk out of my sensitive mammaries, no matter how enormous they is compared to normal gals’s teats.
Callie Press, “Not Quite Milked by the Yeti” in Smutpunk Erotica Collab (2017)

Despite the slightly racy themes and language, Brendalee Elkins’ adventure with the Yeti isn’t erotica, or even particularly raunchy; just a good bit of light-hearted fun involving some oversize genitals and an unexplained desire to induce lactation. What it shares with King Conan and the Stygian Queen is a certain fannish approach: this is a story by someone who has read, enjoyed, and above all understood the Breckinridge Elkins yarns and what makes them work. Some of the jokes are a bit crude and the changes made to the setting are a bit ridiculous, but then the Elkins stories are often ridiculous, that’s what makes them funny. While no one would ever mistake “Not Quite Milked by the Yeti” as something that could have come from Howard’s typewriter, any fan familiar with Howard’s work can definitely see when Callie Press got her inspiration and what she was trying to achieve: a bit of adult-oriented humor in a Howardian vein.

Callie Press and Jess Thornton both approach their material as fans, and the primary audience that would appreciate their efforts are also fans, since they can see the work put into these stories. Yet there is a difference in how each realizes their goals. Press’ Brendalee Elkins is patently based on Breckinridge Elkins, even more than E. Hoffmann Price based Simon Boliver Grimes off of Buckner Jeopardy Grimes, but in writing the story she made Brendalee more than just a mountain man with a big bosom. Brendalee’s character may not be exactly ladylike, but neither is Breckinridge a typical example of Southwestern manhood: they are both exaggerations played for comedic effect, and at points veritably superhuman in their attributes…but they are distinct. By contrast, Thornton set out to write an actual Conan story starring Conan; there is no clever hinting, no tiptoeing around copyrights or trademarks, just an open use of an established character.

Both of these works can be categorized as commercial fanfiction, but each also represents distinct modes of fanfiction. That is part of what fanfiction is: an opportunity to experiment, to try different things, to take characters and settings in new directions that the original author(s) never dreamed. In 1936, Robert E. Howard likely imagined that Conan and Breckinridge Elkins would effectively die with him, notwithstanding a few stories left in his trunk that hadn’t seen publication yet. He would no doubt have been amazed to see what had become of his literary creations…and in the years and decades ahead, who is to say what lies ahead for Howard fandom?

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.

“I Remember Conan” (1960) by Grace A. Warren

Conan?
The tall barbarian?
He who came with the rough gusto of the west wind?
Aye—I remember Conan!
Grace A. Warren, opening lines of “I Remember Conan” in The Conan Grimoire (1972) 138

Although Robert E. Howard died in 1936 and H. P. Lovecraft in 1937, the study of the life, letters, and work of Howard have often lagged behind Lovecraft. This was not for want of fans; Donald Wollheim consulted Lovecraft on the possibility of issuing a collection of Howard’s fiction shortly after the Texas pulpster’s death. However, circumstances were different: it took time to settle Howard’s estate, which went to his father Dr. I. M. Howard. Doctor Howard was not familiar with publishing, and with his son’s agent Otis Adelbert Kline worked to receive compensation due for stories his son had sold and to place what unpublished works remained—but various projects to get Robert E. Howard into print failed to be financially feasible, and unlike Lovecraft there was no one who thought to deposit Howard’s collected correspondence at a local university, no energetic duo like August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, who founded Arkham House specifically to put Lovecraft in print.

By the time Arkham House did publish the first hardback American collection of Howard’s fiction, Skull-Face and Others (1946), Dr. Howard was dead…but Robert E. Howard’s posthumous career was just beginning. Arkham House had shown the viability of small presses dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, and pulp authors from storied publications like Weird Tales were in demand among the burgeoning fan movement. Gnome Press began publishing the Conan series in 1950, and after five books had exhausted most of Howard’s finished Conan material—at which point L. Sprague de Camp produced Tales of Conan (1955), a series of Howard non-Conan stories re-written as Conan adventures, and then the original novel The Return of Conan (1957), a novel by Björn Nyberg and L. Sprague de Camp.

Although Conan and Robert E. Howard hadn’t hit a mass audience—that would have to wait for the release of the Lancer paperbacks in the 1960s with the iconic Frank Frazetta covers, the Conan the Barbarian comic book by Marvel beginning in 1970, and finally the 1982 film of the same name starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the eponymous barbarian—organized fandom activity around Howard began to pick up. Robert E. Howard had never quite been forgotten: there are many references to him and his work in the 1940s fanzine The Acolyte, which was nominally devoted to Lovecraft, for example. Yet in 1955 the Hyborian Legion was formed, and among the fanzines put out was one called Amra, named after Conan’s pseudonym among the pirates of the Black Coast.

Like most fanzines, issues of Amra weren’t intended as scholarly journals the way modern works like The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies is, but it was a step in that direction, a place where fans who wanted to talk about Howard and the characters and settings he created could share their insights and thoughts, fanfiction and poetry, art and cartoons, essays and articles. During its fairly long run, Amra attracted some interesting names (including Frederic Wertham of Seduction of the Innocent fame, who would go on to write The World of Fanzines in 1973). It took decades more work for Howard studies to be properly established, with a pure-text movement and the publication of Howard’s letters, much as had been done with Lovecraft, but Amra played its part.

But what could Conan be to me?
Father of fatherless children?
For who should train such sons to manliness?
Not I alone.
Who should shelter daughters fair?
Not I alone!
Grace A. Warren, lines from “I Remember Conan” in The Conan Grimoire (1972) 138

Grace Adams Warren (born Marguerite Grace Adams) and her husband Dana Thurston Warren appear to have been involved with organized fandom from at least the 1960s through the 1990s, though exact dates are hard to come by. Her poem “I Remember Conan” appeared in the ninth issue of Amra vol. II (January 1960), and is reminiscent of such works as “Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1942) by Virginia Anderson & “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman and “The Acolytes” (1946) by Lilith Lorraine—fan poetry, a pure expression of sentiment. She would have written that in the years between the last of the Gnome Press books, but before the Lancer paperbacks, when it really was fanzines like Amra that were keeping the memory of Robert E. Howard and his favorite barbarian alive.

It is easy now to forget how precarious memory can be—how easily the public forgets, how few characters find an audience, how many pulp authors lie forgotten, their works no longer read or published, no one much caring whether they’ve fallen into the public domain or if they were ever written at all. It is easy to overlook, in this time of corporate-driven properties and big-budget films and streaming adaptations, that such works are often only possible because of continued fan-interest, fans who take the original material and comment, study, and build on it over time. Nowadays, there are wikis and websites, discussion groups and discords to facilitate the kind of communication that was carried out at the speed of a manual typewriter and a mail carrier’s measured pace.

For Howard studies in particular, fan contributions tend to be overlooked. The pure text movement that began in the 1970s emphasized the changes that had been made to the published stories and the wider setting and Mythos of the Howard tales, by editors and pasticheurs like L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and others. And there was quite a lot of non-Howard material dealing with Conan that would be published over the years, from original novels, comic books, film adaptations, video games, tabletop roleplaying games and more. If you’re going to draw the line between Howard’s original work and a “official” (in the sense of being authorized by the estate or its agents) pastiche novel like The Return of Conan, critical interest in even more derived works like The Leopard of Poitain (1985) by Raul Garcia-Capella, The Barbarian King 1: Le Spade Spezzate (2019) by Massimo Rosi & Alessio Landi, The Song of Bêlit (2020) by Rodolfo Martínez, and Sangre Bárbara (2021) by El Torres, Joe Bocardo, & Manoli Martínez is perhaps understandably low.

Yet these derivative works are worthy of study and appreciation in their own right. They have something to say about Howard’s characters, and they represent—as Grace Warren’s “I Remember Conan” represents—how inspiring Robert E. Howard’s writing can be, that it drives fans to create and remember, long after Howard’s own untimely death.

You too will remember Conan,
The tall barbarian,
He who came with the rough gusto of the west wind—
Aye—even as I remember Conan!
Grace A. Warren, last lines of “I Remember Conan” in The Conan Grimoire (1972) 138

“I Remember Conan” was first published in Amra. Vol. II, no. 9 (1960), and was reprinted in The Conan Grimoire (1972).

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.

“The Day of the Stranger” (1947) by Novalyne Price Ellis

A couple of years after Bob’s death, I was standing on a street corner in Houston and I saw a man coming across the street that looked exactly like Bob. The incident stayed with me for several years. Finally, it wrote itself when I needed to hand in a radio script at LSU. I like the script, and it has briefly, some of the things we talked about almost as we talked them.
Novalyne Price Ellis to L. Sprague & Catherine Crook de Camp, 8 Jun 1978

Every biography ends the same way. A person dies, and whatever is left of them in this world is in the memories of those who knew them. A very few, however, take the next step. From memory to myth, from reality to fiction. Today, Robert E. Howard is as much a literary character as his creations and has appeared as versions of himself in stories (“Far Babylon” (1976) by L. Sprague de Camp, “Gilgamesh in the Outback” (1986) by Robert Silverberg), novels (Lovecraft’s Book (1985) by Richard Lupoff, Shadows Bend (2000) by David Barbour), comic books & graphic novels (The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob (2007) by Jim & Ruth Keegan), and even films (The Whole Wide World (2006), portrayed by Vincent D’Onofrio)—and that only begins to scratch the surface of Robert E. Howard’s many posthumous incarnations.

Though those characters shared Howard’s name, their characters differed. None of the writers knew Bob Howard; they had to work from letters and memoirs, biographies and anecdotes. Yet one of the earliest, if not the first, fictional character based on Robert E. Howard was drawn from the memory of one who knew him well: the eponymous stranger in Novalyne Price Ellis’ radio play “The Day of the Stranger.”

In 1947, my husband [William W. Ellis] and I were attending LSU, and my professor in radio assigned a script to be written and handed in for a semester’s grade. While I was trying to think what to write about, I remembered that incident (seeing Bob Howard get on the bus in Houston, when he’d been dead two years […]). I wrote it up as if it happened in New Orleans, got my grade, directed it for the school radio program, and sold it to a group producing amateur radio scripts.

It was copyrighted in 1949 by J. Weston Walch—Publisher of Portland, aine. I’m not sure he’s still publishing things. He published it in a book called Radio Player’s Scriptbook. It was for amateurs looking for scripts to produce. . . . The Stranger is Bob and it was as much of his regular talk as I could get it. The cry in Jeanne’s heart for a second chance was my cry. Jerry was Truett [Vinson]. The girls in the drug store were just necessary character to help put the story across.

THey changed my original title, which I thought was good. However, at that time, they were afraid that to say ‘New Orleans’ would be to give it a regional slant, and so they changed ‘New Orleans’ to ‘This.’ I’m sure they wouldn’t change it now, and I prefer the use of the city’s name.
Novalyne Price Ellis to Rusty Burke, Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 31

In 1936 when Robert E. Howard died, his sometime girlfriend Novalyne Price was attending school at Louisiana State University. She returned to Cross Plains to teach school, and for much of the next decade she continued teaching and attending courses in Texas and Louisiana. Novalyne had planned to write about Howard’s life, using her journals as material for the book—but life always got in the way. By the time of her marriage to William W. Ellis in 1947, Novalyne had extensive experience with drama, and even radio plays (“Daniel Baker College To Offer Enlarged Speech Program,” The Commanche Chief, 24 Aug 1945). “The Day of the Stranger” would be, in a sense, an early effort to capture some of the words and tone of Robert E. Howard’s character, decades before she could complete her book One Who Walked Alone (1986).

In an interview with Howard scholar Rusty Burke, she went into more detail about the play and the experience that inspired it:

BURKE: A lot of people who may read this interview may not know that there are other things you’ve written about Bob. In fact, a number [of] years ago you wrote a play in which Bob is a character, called “Day of the Stranger”. One of the things the stranger does is that, when he sees someone, he begins telling you what the person is like, what’s on his mind as he sits on the streetcar, and what he’s thinking about. Did Bob do that kind of thing?

ELLIS: All the time. That was his interest in people. Oh, ys. Fantastic stories. I remember very vividly one time, we passed a man—there was a very cold norther blowing—and we passed a man on a horse, riding along, and the man was all humped up over the saddle, trying to get away from the cold—you can imagine sitting ona saddle in a Texas norther—(shivers)—cold, yes—well, I don’t remember the story, but I remember that it was a fantastic story—pretty soon I knew everything that man thought. “Day of the Stranger” was the first thing that I had been able to write about him. I had to hand in a radio script, and all of a sudden it occurred to me. It came from an incident that had happened to me in Houston about two years after Bob’s death. It was a cold, rainy, drizzly day, and I had gone to Houston with some of my teacher friends. I was supposed to meet them somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, but it was in downtown Houston. It was time to go meet my friends. I was standing on the sidewalk waiting to cross a street, ready to step down off the crub. I looked up and there came Bob! Dressed in his brown suit with that tan hat—big man, heavy-set—and I couldn’t cross the street. There was Bob coming toward me! I’m sure, from the way people looked at me, that I made some kind of sound. But I backed up all the way across the sidewalk against a store window, and stood there until the man crossed the street. He stood on the edge of the sidewalk about 8 or 10 feet from me, and I still couldn’t get away from the fact that this was Bob. He turned around and looked at me, and I told myself I could see differences, but I couldn’t. That was Bob. He looked at me for a few minutes—I don’t know whether I was making a sound or not. Then he turned around, turned his back on me, and looked down the street. In just a moment his bus came down the street. Came down, stopped at the corner, and he got on the bus. I watched it. I watched as it went on, and I saw him take his money out and put it in the slot for the fare, and start toward the back of the bus. Then the bus moved on further. I watched it till it was out of sight. I stood there for a few minutes until I could get myself together. Then I went over and met my friends. That was a very vivid incident!

BURKE: That would certainly shock a person.

ELLIS: It shocked me! As I think about it now, I’m shocked by it, I can remember the strange feeling I had. TO see somebody coming across the street that you know has been dead about two years! When I got ready to write my play, I thought about that. I wrote “Day of the Stranger” in order to say some of the things I was still worried about—in order to get some of the old frustrations out of my mind. You say, “Now, in 1947 you were happily married and you had one beautiful child”—I just hadn’t gotten over the feeling of guilt. It’s a feeling that I think everybody who knows a friend or a family member who commits suicide feels. The feeling of guilt has this to do with it—you say, “If I hadn’t said thus-and-so, if i’d been more sympathetic, if I hadn’t sent that book back to Bob, if I’d gone by that morning, if I’d answered his letter”—all these things that you say. It doesn’t matter that maybe your reasoning mind can tell you “Oh, well, this would not have done it”—you still think it. I wrote that play to relieve my own heart. I used that play myself. It was produced a good many places, but after writing it, I felt better. After you were here earlier I read it again, while making the copy; I hadn’t written nearly as much about his Egyptian beliefs as I thought it had.
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 19-20

At least by 1956, Novalyne had adapted the radio play into a script for a one-act play or dramatic reading suitable for high school dramatics:

Lafayette High School’s Dramatics department has been experimenting with the “Readers’ Theatre” technique since the 1956-57 school year. That year they presented a drama quartet called “The Day of the Stranger,” a radio play written and adapted to the new medium by Novalyne Price Ellis. The quartet, composed of Celia Guilbeaux, Marilyn Montgomery, Gerald Hernandez, and Pauline Harding, performed for the Louisiana State University Workshop in drama and interpretation and at the Northwestern Theatre Festival at Natchitoches.
“Lafayette Drama Class To Present Five Readings,” The Daily Advertizer, Lafeyette, LA, 15 Nov 1966

At least one dramatic reading was directed by her husband William Ellis (The Daily Iberian, New Iberia, LA, 18 Nov 1957), and it it is likely there were several more, either carried out by the Ellises over the years or various amateur groups using the script in Walch’s book.

The script itself is very brief, for five characters with some bit parts and direction for music, appropriate for dramatic radio production. The crux of Novalyne’s eerie experience is retained, but the scene was shifted to a drug store on Canal Street in New Orleans. The character based on Novalyne was named Jeanne, the Robert E. Howard equivalent in the story was named Craig Blair…although it is only the Stranger who gives his voice.

MARY: Why, early this morning when there weren’t many customers in here, I was getting a chocolate malt ready for a fellow. I had my back to the bar. (SOMEWHAT DRAMATIC) Then all of a sudden a voice said: “Hey, my little bunch of onion tops, give me a cup of black coffee, the blacker and stronger the better.” (POINTED) WEll, you know who’d say it like that, don’t you?

JEANNE: (SUDDENLY ALARMED) No. No. I don’t.(t)

MARY: Well, honey, you could have knocked me over with your little finger because when I turned around…well, Craig Blair was sitting in that chair.

JEANNE: (EMOTIONAL) That’s not true. You know that’s not true.
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 34

The real Robert E. Howard didn’t drink coffee, generally; but the line about “my little bunch of onion tops” could have come straight from his letters to Novalyne Price. Fact and fiction are thus mixed together in this scenario, but readers familiar with Novalyne’s later One Who Walked Alone or the film The Whole Wide World based on it can see many parallels between things the Stranger says in the play. For another example:

JEANNE: (WONDERINGLY) So you still think people live more than one life?(t)

STRANGER: (LAUGHS) Oh, well, I’ve always thought it was possible, if that’s what you mean. Who knows for sure? NOw, I didn’t go to school much—just to the eighth grade, but I’ve read a lot. The Egyptians used to believe you kept being born over and over until you got all your hopes and desires attended to. Pretty confusing thought, I think.

JEANNE: That’s a crazy thing to think, and you don’t really believe. You used… (CONFUSED) …that is… Craig Blair used to say the same thing, but he didn’t believe it. People talk and talk, and they never believe half of the things they say. I think—
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 36

Robert E. Howard wrote many stories about reincarnation and past lives, from the James Allison tales like “The Valley of the Worm” and “The Garden of Fear” to the Conan the Reaver story “The People of the Dark.” How much he himself believed in reincarnation has always been and probably always shall be an open question. Novalyne Price Ellis would interpret such ideas through her own experiences.

ELLIS: TO me, what Bob said about that was just a fascinating idea. Just another fantastic story to weave. I was down in the dumps. So he says, “Now here I was in Brownwood. I met this man, and we disliked each other the minute we saw each other. Maybe way back yonder somewhere, maybe he stole my woman or the bear I’d killed for food”—which was the most important to him I don’t remember. How could anybody take him seriously? I mean, that was spur-of-the-moment.
Day of the Strange: Further Memories of Robert E. Howard (1989), 21

Whether or not the Stranger is the ghost or reincarnation of Robert E. Howard—or Craig Blair in the setting of the play—it is indubitably an effort to capture something of Howard’s character and mannerisms.

As a piece of drama, “The Day of the Stranger” has legs: the identity of the “stranger” is never revealed, and all of the conflict is in Jeanne’s head, the tumult of emotions as she is torn between the memory of a dead man and the more unimaginative man she’s dating now. Yet on another level, for those familiar with the outlines of Novalyne and Bob’s relationship, it reads as a kind of catharsis—a way for her to work out many of the lingering emotions she might have had, to put a sense of closure on a relationship which ended on an unresolved chord.

*The Trail*, yearbook of Daniel Baker College, 1947

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.

Collwen the Cimmerian Volume One (2019) by Matthew N. Sneedon

“KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen- eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”
—The Nemedian Chronicles
Robert E. Howard, “The Phoenix on the Sword”

Know, you scholars of the occult, that during the patriachal years of Hyborian Age the crazy and decadent kings established their totalitarian kingdoms under the sky: Nemedia, with its spurious and imprecise chronicles; Ophir; Brythunia; Zamoa, where young girls were forced to prostitute themselves in dark temples; Zingara and her presumed knights; Koth, who sold their daughters as slaves to the harems of Hirkania to be covered with silk and gold chains. But the greatest and most powerful was Aquilonia, the tarnished jewel of the West in the hands of conceited and incapable men.

And from Cimmeria came Collwen, a free and indomitable woman from the north, with black hair as the firmament, eyes as intense blue as the hottest flame and the animal profile of a wild mountain panther; sword in hand and ready to crush with her footsteps the arrogant patriarchs of the world.

Imagine that the ultimate hero of sword and sorcery, no matter how much the misogynist chronicles had distorted it, was a strong and indomitable woman. Imagine that a daughter of CImmeria would have been the protagonist of thousands of adventures as mercenary, pirate and chief of men; and that her inimitable feats, marked with the tip of her sword, deserved not to be forgotten again.
Matthew N. Sneedon, Collwen the Cimmerian Volume One

Most of Robert E. Howard’s heroes were men. A survey of the pulp magazines those characters appeared in during his life such as Weird Tales and Oriental Stories showed that this focus on male protagonists was common. It was unusual for there to be women protagonists in those pulps, and rare indeed to see a woman serial character such as C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, who first saw life in “Black God’s Kiss” (1934).

When Jirel appeared, two years after Robert E. Howard’s Cimmerian first took to the page in “The Phoenix on the Sword,” readers of Weird Tales hailed her as a veritable female Conan—but that wasn’t strictly accurate. Jirel was not an alternate-gender version of Howard’s most famous barbarian, nor were the stories of Jirel of Joiry the same kind of hardboiled fantasy rooted in historical adventure fiction that the Conan tales were. If there were any characters like that, they were in Howard’s own stories: Bêlit, the Queen of the Black Coast; Valeria of the Red Brotherhood; Red Sonia of Rogatino; and Dark Agnes de Chastillon—the latter of whom never saw print during Howard’s lifetime, but Moore would read her story and gush about it in her letters with Robert E. Howard.

The first pastiches of Howard’s particular style of fantasy did not see print until after his death. Weird Tales tried to fill the gap the pulpster had left in their pages with Clifford Ball’s fantasies “Duar the Accursed” (WT May 1937) and “The Thief of Forthe” (WT Jul 1937), and Henry Kuttner’s Elak of Atlantis in “Thunder in the Dawn” (WT May-Jun 1938), “Spawn of Dagon” (WT Jul 1938), “Beyond the Phoenix Gate” (WT Oct 1938), and “Dragon Moon” (WT Jan 1941). Very likely, the dismissal of Farnsworth Wright and the ascension of Dorothy McIlwraith as editor of Weird Tales signaled an editorial policy shift away from heroic fantasy, a field that was rapidly becoming competitive.

Musclebound barbarians of any gender were not the norm in fantasy fiction during the 40s and 50s, although male protagonists still dominated in fantasy fiction such as Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword (1954) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1955). The 1960s, with its paperback reprints of Howard’s Conan and other fantasies, saw a revival of interest with a new generation of writers. Michael Moorcock created Elric of Melniboné with “The Dreaming City” (Science Fantasy No. 47, June 1961), and Joanna Russ created her swordswoman Alyx with “I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard” (Orbit 2, 1967), among others.

Marvel Comics obtained a license from the Robert E. Howard estate, and in 1970 published Conan the Barbarian, which would run for decades and hundreds of issues, spawning many different series, graphic novels, and related works. In Conan the Barbarian #23 (1973), series writer Roy Thomas and artist Barry Windsor Smith introduced the character of Red Sonja—inspired by Howard’s Red Sonya of Rogatino from “The Shadow of the Vulture,” Red Sonja was created to be a female swordswoman in the Howardian mold, a female counterpart but not clone of their successful Cimmerian. Red Sonja would go on to have her own series, guest star in various comics, serve as the protagonist in six fantasy novels by David C. Smith and a 1985 film, and her adventures continue today.

Unlike Conan, Red Sonja had no single main writer, and because she is a licensed character, her continuity has seen a great deal more flux. Where most of the official Conan pastiches by writers like L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Robert Jordan kept the Cimmerian firmly grounded in Howard’s Hyborian Age, Sonja’s career has been more varied. There is no single “Probable Outline of Red Sonja’s Career,” the way there is for Conan. While her comics often have long story arcs or reoccurring characters like the villainous wizard Kulan Gath, they do not exist in a single rational chronicle.

Many of these stories are little more than generic quasi-medieval European fantasies with a female swordswoman protagonist who happens to be Red Sonja—and various writers and artists have taken advantage of this fact by writing their own versions of the She-Devil. Marada the She-Wolf (1982) by Chris Claremont and John Bolton was originally planned as a Red Sonja story, but was changed because of licensing issues. Frank Thorne worked on Marvel’s Red Sonja stories, and when he left the book created his own, more explicitly erotic version of the character, Ghita of Alizarr in 1979.

There are many many more examples that could be cited. For instance, Jessica Amanda Salmanson’s Amazons! anthology in in 1979, which introduced the Sword & Soul character Dossouye, inspired by the real-life women warrior society of Dahomey; and Marion Zimmer Bradley began the long-running Sword and Sorceress anthology series in 1984. The point of this brief history is threefold:

There are plenty of women protagonists in heroic fantasy.
They are not just Conan the Cimmerian with the serial numbers filed off and a pair of breasts.
Their stories are not simply Robert E. Howard pastiches.

These are important points to keep in mind when considering Collwen the Cimmerian Volume One (2019), because this is a work which exists in a specific context, and it has to be evaluated both for what it is, and what it is trying to be, as far as the author Matthew N. Sneedon has stated in his introduction.

Unlike Jirel, Red Sonja, Dossouye, etc., Collwen the Cimmerian is a deliberate and explicit gender-swapped version of Conan the Cimmerian. While their adventures are not identical, the basic descriptions, attitudes, and activities of the characters are substantially similar, and they are operating in the same milieu: Sneedon has set Collwen’s adventures in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age, in the cities and countries from the Conan stories. In this respect Collwen the Cimmerian is perhaps a bit closer to fanfiction or The Song of Bêlit (2020) by Rodolfo Martínez than any of the original heroic fantasy women about such as Jirel or Alyx.

There are two stories in Collwen the Cimmerian Volume One: “The She-Master of the Dark Conclave” and “The Offspring of the Depths.” Both are serviceable and straightforward pastiches; “The Offspring of the Depths” has some initial similarities to Howard’s Conan story “Gods of the North” but turns into something more Lovecraftian before the end. Collwen is a perfectly adequate female pastiche of Conan, played absolutely straight: there are no jokes, no sly asides about gender trope reversals like rescuing and bedding princes, and very little about Collwen’s sexuality at all. The one time it comes up in any substantial way is a single passage:

Collwen had left her homeland to travel the world on her two powerful legs, not on a palanquin. She did not wish to spend years lying on a couch surrounded by maidservants to fatten up and let a round merchant impregnate her with a dozen cubs. She was not motivated by gold or gems. She just wanted to make the most of life; to see all the forgotten corners and wonders of the world, from the western coasts of the Picts to the eastern jungles of Khitai; to eat, drink, love and, above all, fight. She had not board to Stygia to obtain a sack full of gold, but to relish the war that had seen her being born.
Matthew N. Sneedon, Collwen the Cimmerian Volume One

Robert E. Howard’s Conan never explicitly denied the desire to settle down with a wife and have a bunch of kids after a big score. He never had to: there were fewer social expectations for men in the 1930s to settle down and procreate compared with women. Most male protagonists in heroic fantasy don’t have to consciously address or even acknowledge the gender and sexual expectations of their period; by contrast, women fantasy protagonists like Jirel and Red Sonja have had to explicitly deal with these social norms and mores, and how these issues are brought up and dealt with has changed over time.

In her own series of Marvel comics, for example, Red Sonja was noted for an oath to maintain her virginity unless defeated in battle—a point which allowed the series to titillate in her chainmail bikini but avoided the appearance of promiscuity that Red Sonja would have had if she had engaged in as many casual sexual liaisons as Conan did. Her oath of celibacy was essentially a hard-coded example of the double standard about sexual experience between men and women in the 20th century. Gail Simone’s 2013 soft reboot of Red Sonja discarded both the character’s celibacy and her heterosexuality, making Sonja both bisexual and removing the supernatural onus against casual sex; writers since have played with both ideas in their own interpretations of the character.

Sneedon doesn’t spend much time on this particular aspect of Collwen’s character, nor does he necessarily have to: having a female character doesn’t necessarily require talking about such issues any more than a male character might. However, in the context of the opening paragraphs to these two stories, it is interesting to note that Sneedon spends little time or effort to actually depict the patriarchal nature of the Hyborian Age. There are a few echoes of the casual sexism that punctuated Robert E. Howard’s Conan series (like calling a grown woman “girl” as a diminutive), but less sexual discrimination or efforts to violently enforce gender norms than perhaps might be expected given the explicit contrast apparently intended between Conan and Collwen’s sagas.

If the patriarchy that Collwen is supposed to rebel against isn’t well-defined, Collwen the Cimmerian Volume One unfortunately fallen into one of the traps of pastiching fantasy fiction from the 1930s: racism in the setting. Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age was marked by a combination of contemporary racial attitudes and ahistorical social conventions. Slavery existed, and it was largely slavery as practiced in antiquity or Biblical times—not restricted to a single race or by skin color, as was the chattel slavery of the South before the American Civil War. Yet when Howard speaks of that slavery he sometimes casts it in explicitly contemporary racial terms:

“Valerius does not protect his subjects against his allies. Hundreds who could not pay the ransom imposed upon them have been sold to the Kothic slave-traders.”

Conan’s head jerked up and a lethal flame lit his blue eyes. He swore gustily, his mighty hands knotting into iron hammers.

“Aye, white men sell white men and white women, as it was in the feudal days. In the palaces of Shem and of Turan they will live out the lives of slaves. Valerius is king, but the unity for which the people looked, even though of the sword, is not complete.[“]
Robert E. Howard, The Hour of the Dragon

In the 1930s, Howard could get away with explicitly exporting contemporary racial attitudes into his mythical Hyborian Age simply because they were so utterly common and widely-held that few readers or editors would find fault with such sentiments; he would lean more heavily into such ideas in describing the racially segregated society in “Shadows in Zamboula,” and would be most explicit about the racial and sexual dynamics in “The Vale of Lost Women”(1967).

Writers who choose to pastiche Howard thus face a challenge: how to be faithful to the spirit of the world Robert E. Howard created and maintain continuity with his stories without explicitly continuing or endorsing those same racial prejudices and attitudes in their own fiction. It can be a fine dance: it is appropriate in a historical story to have a character with historically accurate racial prejudices; it is not appropriate for that character’s prejudices to be portrayed by the narrative as true or accurate. The failure of writers like L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter to observe this distinction in their own Conan pastiches was specifically called out in “Die Black Dog! A Look At Racism In Fantasy Literature” (1975, rev. 2011) by Charles R. Saunders.

Sneedon has not managed to find the correct balance. For example, one character states:

Ngozi is my servant. She was a real princess in her tribe, but here she’s worth less than nothing. We must fear nothing of her. She’s a brute and an ignoramus, incapable of understanding what we expect. But she does understand what would happen to her if she tried to betray me.
Matthew N. Sneedon, Collwen the Cimmerian Volume One

Having a character be racist toward another character is unpleasant, but can help to define a character as unsympathetic or evil, and the relationship between the characters can be defined by that tension of racial prejudice with its arrogance and potential violence. Yet at no point does Sneedon do anything with Ngozi to disprove this prejudice, or to develop this relationship along those lines. Ngozi has no agency, no real voice for her own perspective, no chance to defend herself or deny or defy the stereotypes. The betrayal never takes place, and perhaps was not even planned. It is an attitude that a Howardian villain might well have expressed in a Conan story, but it was written in the 2010s, not the 1930s…and that is terrible. Sneedon should have known better.

Whenever a reader or critic comes across a work like this one, which takes a familiar character and setting and then changes some fundamental aspect like the gender of the main character—questions have to be asked: why Collween the Cimmerian? What is it about the Hyborian Age in particular that made it the correct setting for Collwen as a character? How is Collwen different from Conan, and how is that difference integral to the stories written about her? Is it just fanfiction, or is there any deeper purpose to these pastiches that serves as contrast to and comment on Robert E. Howard’s stories?

Unfortunately, answers aren’t very forthcoming.

Collwen the Cimmerian Volume One (2019) by Matthew N. Sneedon is available on Amazon Kindle.

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