Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: Dawn of a New Era?

It might seem anachronistic and hopelessly optimistic in the all-digital-all-the-time 21st century, but it still happens: studios still release actual printed-pulp books as part of the advertising onslaught that precedes most big-budget movies. The assumption that there's any real connection between movie-goers and book-readers, between the experience of movie-going and book-reading, is bizarre on its face, but quixotic and charming even so. And if that kind of connection was tough to credit back when Alan Dean Foster was cashing a quick paycheck by adding participles to the "Clash of the Titans" script, how much more tenuous must it seem today, when movies cost hundreds of millions of dollars and hurl themselves at their hapless audiences in 200-mph sensory-enhanced 3-D with scratch-n-sniff vibro-massage? Once upon a time, perhaps, reading a book and watching a movie were roughly analogous: in both cases, you were the passive recipient of someone's creative output. But there's nothing passive about watching big-budget special effects movies anymore - with their Dolby eviscero-sound systems and their compulsory sensory overload, going to one is like having a rectal exam while tripping on LSD: you've never experienced anything like it, yet it leaves you stunned, sore, and vaguely unsatisfied. With high-resolution video games playing on every personal electronic device in the world, movie studios can no longer rely on anything so quaint as audiences actually paying attention, so they do their best to reach out of the big screen and grab movie-goers' faces between thumb and pointing finger, like Great Aunt Estelle zeroing in for a holiday kiss.

Surely the divide will soon be so great that studios just won't bother with the whole book-thing, but right now, they still do - especially if the original source of their movie embarrassingly happens to be literary. Such is the case with the new Lionsgate movie epic "Conan the Barbarian" starring Jason Momoa: it was born, as we've seen in the course of our Cimmerian 'Stravaganza, of Robert E. Howard's cheesy, heartfelt pulp stories almost a century ago. And let's give Lionsgate credit where it's due: facing the dilemma of producing and liscensing boring old printed books, they did the job right.

First, they commissioned somebody to do the aforementioned participle-sprinkling to the screenplay. That somebody was veteran sci-fi writer Michael Stackpole, a merry old hack who's never written a bad sentence in his entire professional career. No idea if Stackpole is, like most other sci-fi geeks, a Conan fan of long standing, and no idea what strictures the studio placed on him in the task of adapting the final screenplay, but the end result speaks for itself: his novelization, Conan the Barbarian, is that rarest of rare birds: an adaptation that can be read with enjoyment just for its own sake, without reference to (or even knowledge of) some gallumping-great movie in a google-plex near you.

Stackpole has always excelled in adding that one keen little twist, the little detail that suddenly humanizes even the most inhuman characters (this knack is on full and continuous display in his quite enjoyable Star Wars novel I, Jedi). In his Conan novelization, he slips it in at the end of a villain's rant, seen from the viewpoint of his equally-villainous daughter:

Khalar Zym began pacing, his face tightened with fury but his eyes focused distantly. He began to spin for the monks a story - yet telling it more to himself. Marique had heard it many times, told many ways, with her father in moods that ranged from the depths of despair to the heights of triumph. He spun it as a great tragedy - the defining moment of his life. It was the reason he was born and the reason he continued to live.

And yet in every telling, he forgets that I was there.

But the most intriguing sub-aspect of Stackpole's book is the string of hints he adds about our main character's past. One of his present-day fighting companions alludes to that past and gets only a guarded reflection from Conan himself, with a classic bit of Stackpole business added on at the end:

"I do wish I knew of your previous life as a corsair, for it was there you changed. Not unexpected, the loss of carefree youth ... but something replaced it."

The Cimmerian stared at the distant horizon. "I was born to battle. Courage and cunning are what Crom gives us, and I have made the most of them. Of comrades and companions I have had legions. Most have died. Many I have mourned. A few, however ..." One ...

Conan fans won't be surprised to read in Stackpole's book that one of the tales being sung about our young hero is called "The Song of Belit."

That same rich sense of the character's past is caught best in the companion paperback sporting a new movie cover: Del Rey has issued a neat little mass market paperback reprinting six of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories - easily the six best: "The Phoenix on the Sword," "The People of the Black Circle," "The Tower of the Elephant," Red Nails," "Rogues in the House," and  "Queen of the Black Coast." This is a great way to introduce those mythical movie-motivated readers to delve directly into Howard's work - including that last-named story, which features Conan's time serving as a corsair with the legendary pirate-queen Belit whom we've met before (especially in John Buscema's great visual of her coming back from the dead to protect Conan from a marauding winged ape). It's in this story that Conan comes the closest to outlining his life's axioms, in a little speech I'm pleased to see carried over to the movie, since it makes a much, much better anthem for the character than some droning lines about "the lamuntashun of dare vimmin":

"Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is an illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and I am content."

Fitting enough that we bring our summer's Cimmerian 'Stravaganza to a close with those lines! All that's left is for America to go to the movie theaters this weekend and make "Conan the Barbarian" a hit. I'll cross my fingers and hope that it's the number 1 movie in the country come Monday - it's hugely talented young star deserves it, and more importantly, this great enduring character deserves it too.

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Knock-Off Novels!

In the wake of two successful Hollywood movies, the literary estate of Robert E. Howard opted for a little looting and pillaging of their own: the book-market flooded with Conan pastiche-novels. We've dealt with this phenomenon - and some of these novels - before here at Stevereads, but of course their name is legion. Conan Properties, Inc. got rather excessively glad-handed with its permissions, and they weren't exactly super-vigilant about vetting the manuscripts that were no doubt pouring into their mailbox - and the result was teeming multiplication of titles that usually managed to share only one thing in common: they should never have been written. The irony is that most of these books burst onto the American book market at at time when the average reader walking into a retail bookstore would have been able neither to find the original Howard stories on the shelf nor to order them ... for copyright reasons rather to abstruse to parcel out here, a decades-long period opened up in American bookstores during which the pastiches were the only game in town if you wanted to read about Conan and the Hyborian Age.

The reading wasn't very good. In fact, most of these pastiches were gawd-awful, such stiff exercises in freelance paycheck-harvesting that you almost want to offer to pay the authors to stop. One of the earliest such cases was Conan the Swordsman, a 1978 pastiche by Bjorn Nyberg, who got ample scripting, plotting, and writing help from our old friends L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter, with less than stellar results:

Conan shook a somber head. "I, too, have changed my plans. I'll head north, to see my native land once more."

The queen studied Conan's solemn mien. "You do not sound as if you liked the prospect. Do you fear to return?"

Conan's harsh laugh rang out like the clash of steel on steel. "Save for some sorcery and certain supernatural beings I have met, there's naught I fear. I may come home to trouble with an ancient feud or two - but this does not disturb me. It is just ... well, Cimmeria is a dull country after the southerly kingdoms."

Of course, not all was sheer misery. As we've noted before, such reliable hacks as Steve Perry could sometimes turn in a passably enjoyable C-rate Conan, although Perry wrote so many Conan novels that even generous readers can't expect him to be on his game all the time. His lines are devoid of art, but they're at least commonly readable, if slightly funny in an unintended way. The Cimmerian in his 1984 novel Conan the Fearless certainly wasn't afraid to talk in cliches:

"That is your plan?" Conan shook his head. "I am to scale a giant mountain, enter a castle, search perhaps thousands of rooms until I find our quarry, defeat the forces that might be mounted by a powerful wizard inside as guards, and return with three children?"

"That is my plan, yes."

"Ah. And here I had thought there might be some difficulty in this undertaking. How foolish of me! It will be simple!"

"Sarcasm does not become you, Conan. I am open to better suggestions."

The Cimmerian shook his head again. "Nay, your plan suits me well enough." He touched the hilt of his sword. "I would rather rely on my blade than on complicated posturing in any event."

"I shall go with you," Kinna said.

Conan chuckled. "Nay. I said before I work better alone."

Even an innocent reader will look at that line "I work better alone" and start conjuring parodies, and such readers will be delighted to know that their best efforts along those lines were excelled way back in 1972 by the perennially enjoyable author John Jakes (who later went on to national best-seller status for his novel The Bastard). Jakes was one of the original fans of Howard's Conan, and for all those hours of reading enjoyment, he repaid the author's memory with the highest tribute of all: rich, hilarious parody. In his novel Mention My Name in Atlantis (shamefully out of print), the ancient continent of Atlantis is rich and prospering - until it's visited by Conax the Barbarian of far-off Chimeria. Conax his huge, hairy, and hilariously hot-tempered - and he's read way too many Robert E. Howard Conan stories:

"And you come from the far north?"

"That's right. I sailed out in command of my goodly band of reavers, our dragon-sail craft bound to plunder the shipping lanes. However, that storm I mentioned caught us by surprise. Our stout vessel foundered, then broke apart. In the midst of the screaming, squalling, storm-lashed holocaust of hell -" There he went again with his heroic phraseology. But prudence prevailed; I merely nodded in an attentive way.

Fingering the hilt of his mighty sword, he went on: "- in the midst of that wailing, thundering, thrice-cursed maelstrom, we sighted the monster."

"Monster?" I replied, starting visibly.

"Indescribably phantasmagoric! A creature from time forgot! A sea-swimming dragon of them most baleful appearance. It loomed amidst the crashing waves and fixed us with its damned glowing eye. Had I been near enough to pierce it with my stout broadsword, it would have, I am certain, gushed pustulant ichor from hell!"

"That's very interesting. But are you sure this monster wasn't some figment of your imagination?"

He whipped up the sword so that its point distressed my belly. "If you're questioning my veracity, Crok knows that I'll send you shrieking to the nether fires!"

Our hapless narrator might watch his p's and q's, but the continent of Atlantis doesn't prove so circumspect, and disaster soon follows. It should almost go without saying that in terms of imagery, pacing, and mood, Mention My Name in Atlantis is by far the best Conan pastiche of them all, achieving its quality even while it's bashing its source. Like so many Conan pastiche novels, it'll make you laugh - but in a good way.

But what's the state of Conan-books now, in the present day, right on the eve of the big-budget Jason Momoa movie from Lionsgate? Our Cimmerian 'Stravaganza concludes tomorrow by answering just that question!

 

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 3!

The great heyday of the Roy Thomas/John Buscema era of Conan comics dwindled, no matter how fervently fans like myself wished that weren't the case. Buscema's pencils eventually degenerated to sleepwalking outlines, and other artists - even the legendary Gil Kane - could step in and shake things up for a bit, but the fire was gone (curiously, Thomas and Buscema's last truly fantastic Conan story wasn't even set in the Hyborian Age - it was an issue of Marvel's alternate-reality "What If?" series in which Conan finds himself transported to present-day Manhattan; he overturns a Volkswagon, thwarts a robbery at the Guggenheim, and beds a comely cab driver before he goes home - in other words, a fairly standard German tourist in the Big Apple). The series - in one form or another - limped on for years and spawned spin-offs ("Kull the Conqueror," "Red Sonja," "King Conan"), and Conan was still a viable property in book-form, as we'll see, but the marriage of the character and the comics medium seemed to have gone stale permanently.

Part of the problem was success. More than one pop culture commentator has mentioned that we shouldn't underestimate the medium-wide effect Thomas' dissemination of Conan had on young creators. Here was a character who possessed only his own raw animal vitality to make his way in the world - no pristine super-powers, no invulnerability or heat vision (or web-spinning and wall-crawling). And making his way in the world was pretty much all he wanted to do: he looked on selfless heroics with a sneer. Thomas (and Buscema's pencils) captured this nature perfectly and then expanded on it, to the point where, as noted, it struck some of us fans that any other comic book adaptation of the character would be akin to blasphemy.

One of the later generation of comics creators who caught the Thomas-Buscema bug was current fan favorite writer Kurt Busiek, and in 2004 he teamed up with artist Cary Nord and delivered the impossible: a comic book re-invention of Conan that both respected the character (and its comics tradition) and revelled in a completely different interpretation.

Busiek's Conan, it should be admitted right away, is by far the truest interpretation of the character that's ever been done outside of Howard. Roy Thomas was a meticulous and adoring Howard fan - but he was first and foremost a superhero writer, and he could never fully shed those habits when he turned to the Hyborian side of his writing duties. Buscema too, for all his frequent grousing about spurning the superhero genre, most often couldn't help himself in his physical design of the character: his Conan, no matter how rough-hewn, wouldn't have looked out of place in spandex.

Cary Nord tore all that down and re-worked it from the basics. In the first few issues of Busiek's re-launch of the character for Dark Horse Comics, Nord's Conan is virtually an anti-superhero. He's a much younger Conan than any we've seen (even Smith's big-haired boy spent half his panel-time looking like Ted Nugent), and he's decidedly non-iconic: a slope-browed, jut-jawed troglodyte. Nord (at Busiek's urging, I'd guess) is utterly unafraid to make his Conan look by turns homicidal and oafish, and that's exactly how Busiek writes him. This is a Conan who gets just as drunk as Buscema's - but looks ridiculous when he does it, not noble. This is a Conan who punches bartenders, women, and children just as readily as Buscema's (or more so) - but in this case they're innocent, and he's just being, well, barbaric. Readers of these fantastic issues teeter between thrilling to the young Cimmerian's exploits and deploring his small-town boorish ways. It's great, great stuff - and great fun.

Busiek is clearly having a ball in these issues. His pace is more leisurely than Thomas could ever get away with, of course - Thomas didn't write in the Age of the Inevitable Trade Paperback, but that age has now engulfed the comics market; creators tailor virtually everything they do with an eye toward the trade paperback collection that will spring up a day or two after their latest story-arc is finished. I doubt I'll ever be a complete fan of this tailoring - I've found it often erodes a writer's willingness (or ability) to engage in long-term storytelling or continuity, tends to lock them into fairly purblind six-issue cycles. But even I have to admit it's served to increase the issue-by-issue quality across the entire superhero comics spectrum; writers who are now thinking about the books their issues will soon comprise tend, I think, to do sharper and bigger work than writers who are just plugging away issue by issue, with no square-bound immortality in sight. There are exceptions of course, and Busiek has written a couple of them - but it hardly matters in this case anyway, since his heart is so clearly in the project on an issue-by-issue basis.

He tackles some of the same epic stories Thomas famously did - "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is here, as is "The Tower of the Elephant" - but in completely different ways. This Conan's smile is quicker, his temper is shorter, and, thanks to the rather bloodthirsty house standards over at Dark Horse, his sword-work is far more gruesome (Nord excels himself at decapitations). There are still beautiful women, evil sorcerers, and disgusting nightmare-creatures, and the work that's gone into differentiating them from the sprawling comics tradition that came before them is evident on every page. This is a Conan for the 21st century - post-heroic, intensely human but still fundamentally noble.

The Busiek-Nord Dark Horse Conan trade paperbacks are must-haves for any Conan fan, and their run brings us to the end of our look at Conan in the funny books - although surely not the end of the subject! Conan will certainly continue to be interpreted and re-interpreted as long as comics survive in some form or other. But it's nice to close out the subject on such a high note.

Up next: the glut of non-canonical Conan novels as our Cimmerian Stravaganza continues to count down to the new movie!

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 2!

"Conan the Barbarian" (the phrase is synonymous with the character, and yet, in classic "Elementary, my dear Watson," or "Beam me up, Scotty" style, it was never actually used in the original material) became a modest, surprise hit for Marvel Comics shortly after its debut. Fans responded not only to the whole sword-and-sorcery sub-genre but to Roy Thomas' specific vision of the Hyborian Age created by Robert E. Howard for the pulp market decades before. The four-color comic sold well enough, in fact, to sustain a spin-off: "Savage Tales of Conan" was another great Thomas idea, a larger-format black-and-white magazine designed to showcase longer and more visually opulent stories than the regular comic book would usually do. And both "Conan" and "Savage Tales" drew sustained life from the pencilling talents of the same man: Marvel Comics' heavyweight fan favorite, John Buscema.

Buscema was already a legend when he came to the "Conan" titles, but they gave him a range usually unavailable in super-hero comics. In the pre-historic world Thomas was fleshing out from Howard's writings, Buscema was free to let his considerable imagination soar, without needing to conform to the super-strength and eye-beams norms of titles like "The Fantastic Four" or "The Avengers." He was far less meticulous than his predecessor Barry Smith had been, but he also never ran the risk of stylized, static lapses into which Smith's art could sometimes fall. At the height of his powers, Buscema could scarcely draw a cup sitting on a table without viewers worrying it would spill on them - his panels virtually vibrated with movement.

The result was the visual conception of an entire world - and of a character. Gone was the epicene rock star of Smith's run on the title. In his place stood a far more solid adult man, broad in the chest, wide in the waist, less the lithe superhero, more the thickset tavern-brawler. This Conan might still at certain angles have looked young, but he was unquestionably seasoned - he sported a shaggy Prince Valiant haircut, a fur loin-cloth, wide lips, and a broad, oft-smashed nose. He was a stoic, no-nonsense man of violence, and the visuals Buscema came up with issue after issue helped Thomas to refine his idea of the character to an immediate perfection seldom achieved by other writers with other characters (instinct and luck play a certain part too, and timing - think of Claremont and Byrne's Wolverine, or Miller's Daredevil). To most of us reading these issues eagerly every month, this was Conan.

The world Thomas and Buscema helped to create (the working partnership between these two was an amazing fluke on its own - both imperious control-freaks who fundamentally disliked collaboration, and yet here they were working in what seemed to be perfect tandem) was an enormous elaboration on the one Smith had begun to sketch. Monsters roamed everywhere - Buscema's talent for drawing most animals stood him in good stead as Thomas' scripts called for a veritable Noah's Ark of gigantic bears, moths, rats, lions, eels, squids, lions ... as well as the perennially-popular dinosaurs. Conan fights sabre-toothed tigers, pterodactyls, slugs the size of rhinos, and even, in a breathlessly-paced sequence, a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

And through it all, Buscema's Conan is as far away from Smith's virginal quester as possible. This is a man much closer to Howard's original conception (and, with any luck, the version we'll see in only a few days when the new movie adaptation opens in a theater near you): a boisterous creature of huge appetites - some of them frankly sexual. Buscema was able to indulge to the fullest his oft-announced affection for drawing sultry women - including every kind of evil-eyed seductress imaginable (one of them ends up being made of sea weed), a stunningly re-imagined Red Sonja (Buscema replaced the jerkin-and-skirt Windsor had given the character with ... nothing much at all), and, in a long and satisfying story-arc, the corsair-queen Belit, whose death and brief resurrection marked the 100th issue of "Conan the Barbarian."

The run was immensely successful, and it defined the character for an entire generation. Even when the vogue of sword-and-sorcery started dying out, those Marvel issues kept coming: "Conan the Barbarian," "Savage Sword of Conan," "King Conan," and countless stand-alone specials and spin-offs (Thomas and Buscema spent less than a year on an adaptation of one of Howard's other great creations, King Kull, for instance, and it was a joyous event for fans of the character). Conan was drawn in this same period by other great pencillers - Gil Kane, Jim Starlin, Gene Colan, and many others tried their hands at the Cimmerian - but he belonged to Buscema, and of course to Thomas. When their time with the character finally petered to an end, it seemed almost like a Hyborian funeral was in order. Those of us who'd loved the era thought: there might be crappy knock-offs in the future (done more to keep the copyright alive than out of love or craftsmanship), but this kind of genius won't come again.

We were wrong, of course. But we had to wait a while.

Cimmerian 'Stravaganza: The Comics - Part 1!

Our Cimmerian 'Stravaganza of 2011 kicks into high-gear this week in anticipation of the new Lionsgate spectacular premiering on the 19th and starring Iowa's own Jason Momoa in the role that made a certain once and future California governor a star. And the most natural place in the world for our ongoing 'stravaganza to, um, go next is the medium where the character, the world, the very concept of Conan the Barbarian flourished - comic books.

And when we enter that medium, one thing becomes glaringly obvious: with all due respect to creator originality and meaning no disrespect to Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian as he exists in the popular consciousness has a fully equal co-creator, and that co-creator's name is Roy Thomas.

Thomas will be familiar to the more nerdy among you (and to those of you who dote on my frequent comics-postings here at Stevereads)(i.e. the most nerdy among you). He was the organizational and conceptual workaday genius who pretty much inherited the mantle of Marvel Comics from Stan Lee when the company was bought and Lee was promoted to Publisher. Thomas took all the bursting creativity of Lee and his artistic collaborators, added a much more intuitive and comprehensive grasp of inter-title continuity, and almost single-handledly created the next great age of Marvel titles. And in 1970, he managed to convince Glenn Lord, the literary manager of Howard's estate, to allow Marvel to put out a comic titled "Conan the Barbarian."

Despite a significant amount of reader demand, publishing a sword-and-sorcery literary adaptation in 1970 was a bit of a risk for a mainstream company like Marvel, so Thomas originally had a tight budget - too tight, in fact, to allow him to have the company's first choice of artist, the fan favorite (and correspondingly expensive) John Buscema. And in retrospect, this was a blessing: it forced Thomas to 'settle' for a sexy young Brit named Barry Smith, whose pencilling work (especially when he handled his own inking) was only just starting to show signs of the lavish, unique brilliance it would achieve in part because of the leeway Thomas gave the artist on this book. As Thomas remarked at the time when presented with the choice of artists, if he'd gone with Buscema in those early days, he'd have sold more issues and won fewer awards.

Looking at that initial Smith run on the book, it's utterly amazing how fast he throws off the unconvincingly Kirbyesque style he was using in issue #1. In a remarkably short time, Smith starts to show readers the sinuous, glittering detail for which he would later become famous. Most artists mature more slowly, but even by issue #4, the landmark "Tower of the Elephant," there are clear foreshadowings of Smith's more mature look.



Those earliest issues give us a very young Conan - lithe, boyish (indeed, many of Smith's '70s big-hair panels make the character look like the baddest-ass Bee Gee of them all), savage but inexperienced, and as such they make the perfect companion to this new movie, which features a Conan just at the beginning of his incredible career. He's not yet the preposterous monolith we were given in the last movie adaptation, and let's hope he never becomes it: the real Conan was far more than a simple strong-man - he's much more a lion than a bulldozer.

And magnificently sustaining Smith's evolving visuals was the scripting of Roy Thomas, who took a personal love of the character in Robert E. Howard's stories and re-created that character and his entire world for a much, much broader readership than Howard had ever reached. Long before the original movie and long after, mention of Conan was as likely to conjure the world Thomas created as visions of Austrian weightlifters. That world, like Howard's is full of torch-lit taverns and fantastic creatures who've survived from even earlier eras in Earth's troubled history. And more: it was Thomas who perfected the driving tension in the background of Howard's stories - the tension represented by Conan himself, a mortal man without super-powers who encounters all these fantastic creatures, these stubborn hold-overs from earlier times in which even Conan the Barbarian would not have survived ... encounters them, and defeats them. Not for heroism's sake (Thomas' Conan, like Howard's, is usually indifferent to heroism), but because he insists on dominating his own world. As paradoxical as it may seem, this Conan was both a representative of Everyman and an avatar of the 'modern' world.

For all his genius, Smith was never cut out for regular comic book series work, and everybody knew it (it's precisely this quality in his work that makes his frequent forays into the genre so instantly memorable). Luckily, as "Conan the Barbarian" sales blossomed, Thomas was able to acquire an artist who was not only cut out for regular series work but gloried in it, and that artist would go on to create as definitive a visual of Conan as Thomas had created a mental one. That artist of course is the aforementioned John Buscema, and we'll look at his contribution in our next chapter!

Conan the Derivative!

I've said it before: has any fictional character ever been so poorly served as Conan the Barbarian? His creator, Robert E. Howard, gave him birth in a slapdash way, ping-ponging around a character chronology he kept largely in his head, and then abandoning that chronology when he blew that selfsame head off his body. The first Conan short story was a rewritten version of an earlier tale originally starring another Howard creation, King Kull of Atlantis (the Kull stories are fantastic in their own right, and although they tend to lack the signature vigor of the Conan stories - where Howard's heart very much resided - they do have something Conan never has: a steady, engaging supporting cast), and after Howard's suicide, the character passed from hand to creative hand like a church collection plate.

A thousand times as many people have seen the Conan movies and watched the various Conan cartoons as have ever actually read one of Howard's stories (the forthcoming big-budget Hollywood version will only multiply this), and for decades reading one of Howard's stories wasn't always as easy a thing as it sounds. Throughout the 1970s, a stream of Conan books were published (many of them "co-written" or "finished" by the great journeyman sci-fi writer L. Sprague deCamp, whose novel Lest Darkness Fall is well worth your time to find and read), many of the sporting now-iconic Frank Frazetta covers, and all of them making fine, fun reading - but they hardly represented Howard's character as Howard meant to write him.


That lack was finally supplied in 2003, when Del Rey began publishing its epic, incredible trade paperback editions of the works of Robert E. Howard, including three volumes of the Conan stories (in a wonderful nod to the pulp-fiction origins of the characters, every volume is heavily illustrated) presented in exactly the order Howard first presented them way back in the '30s.

Here you get the glories (slightly hyperventilating glories, but glories all the same) of some of Howard's best work, including such stories as "Rogues in the House," "Black Colossus," and of course "The Tower of the Elephant." Here you get that particular mixture of heady description and wry self-awareness that shines in even Howard's most, um, titillating passages:

Tanada shook back her long black disheveled hair and faced Conan. She was bleeding from a score of scratches on her breasts and thighs, her locks fell in confusion down her back, and she was as naked as the day she was born; but she stared at him without perturbation or uncertainty, and he gave back her stare, frank admiration in his expression of her cool bearing, and the ripeness of her brown limbs.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"Conan, a Cimmerian," he answered.

"What are you doing in Shumballa?"

"I came here to seek my fortune. I was formerly a corsair."

These volumes do great work, but they fight an uphill battle against all the popular entertainment conceptions of Conan, most especially the atrocious movies that launched the "acting" career of a future American president. The problem is that Howard originally envisioned the Conan stories as shards of a single mosaic, random glimpses of one man's whole remarkable life - as freebooter, mercenary, corsair, general, husband, father, and king - but movies, cartoons, and comic books have tended to plop their derivative adventures down squarely in Conan's earliest days as the sword-wielding all-purpose barbarian the general public knows (a welcome exception in the comics world, "Conan the King," was short-lived and unenthusiastically received by fandom). The aforementioned Hollywood movie will continue this - the current rumored front-runner for the lead is Alan Richtson, an incredibly nice kid with lots of untapped screen charisma but who'll land the role for one reason: his muscular body (it's a risk I myself would be willing to run for the chance to get Richtson in the part, since he's especially good at the sardonic-humor-in-the-midst-of-action that is the quintessential Conan trait).

And what of books, you ask? What of the innumerable Conan spin-off pastiche novels that have come and gone since Howard blew his brains out? Well, as you can imagine, they've all stuck to the same formula mentioned above: their Conan is uniformly young, often in his early teens, and reading the books, you get the impression this is done in large part so the respective pastiche writers don't have to bog themselves down with mastering the detailed timeline that governs Conan's more adult life (was Belit after Zamora, or before? That kind of thing).


Robert Jordan's Conan novels are every bit as turgid and boring as his "Wheel of Time" books. The seasoned veteran hack Steve Perry became seasoned in large part through writing Conan books, and his are always reliably entertaining, as in a scene from the less-than-stirringly titled Conan the Formidable (guess Conan the Above Average was taken) where our young barbarian faces a group of would-be robbers on the road:

"Ah" [says the leader of the robbers]. Well, that sword you wave about so dangerously might be worth something. We could sell it."

"I am not disposed to give it up."

The man waved the morning star at his band. "There are six of us and but one of you. Give us the sword and whatever valuables you carry and you may leave here unharmed."

"Pardon me for not trusting you, but I think not."

"There are still six of us to your one."

"That can be changed."

But alas, most of these knock-off novels are ruinously dreadful. The ongoing Conan comic book series is a bright light in this regard, always excellent and well worth your time, but a truly great Conan novel has never been written, not even by the creator of the character himself. This is an odd but consistent failing Conan has in common with a surprising number of other characters from the pulp era - there's no one stand-out great novel of Doc Savage either, or the Shadow. Tarzan has both Tarzan of the Apes and Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, but all three of Robert E. Howard's great creations, King Kull, Solomon Kane, and Conan, live most fully in the short stories he crafted for them. And until the creative bar is raised - until Conan comes to stand in the reading imagination for more than quaffing ale and beheading people - that's likely to remain the case. Maybe someday a visionary director will come along and make the great, exciting, heartbreaking movie "The Tower of the Elephant" begs to be, and suddenly the character will undergo a renaissance.


But in the meantime, the forthcoming movie has at least one thing going for it: Nicholas Cage won't be playing Conan.