 We can argue about what the genre "sword & sorcery" is until the events of Jack Vance's Dying Earth actually come true if we want to. It's elusive, and like something being "punk" or "campy," people's definitions differ. Sure, a story populated with orcs, elves, and dragons seems to immediately move it into the "high fantasy" realm. But how much magic is too much magic? Can it be set in a fictional world, not just in an extremely young or old Earth? I'd argue it's probably more of a feeling than anything else. But I have a pretty solid marker of what separates sword & sorcery from other types of fantasy: S&S needs some kind of element of horror. Cozy worlds inhabit a lot of fantasy works, especially 2020s fantasy output. I don't know if I could tell you exhaustively what is and isn't S&S, but I know that a world where magic rings are sold in the market, where you want to live in Rivendell, where well-lit taverns are populated by friendly orcs... that's not it. Sword & sorcery needs seedy settlements, terrifying tombs, and un-behold-able black-eyed god creatures. As much as I love the Hyborian Age, I do not want to live there. I'd be dead in twenty minutes.  "Hellsgarde" debuted in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales. It had been a year and a half since the previous Jirel story, a Jirel-Northwest Smith collaboration between Moore and her future husband Henry Kuttner, and more than three years since the previous "pure" Jirel story, "The Dark Land." The first four stories had appeared over a timespan of just a year and two months, so I wonder if C.L. Moore why the long gap, and if she was having to dig deeper within herself to find ideas or gumption to finish this one. Additionally, she would marry Kuttner in less than a year and sadly disappear into his byline for most of the rest of her career. But "Hellsgarde" was a perfect Jirel story to leave us with. Not only is it by far the most horror-forward adventure of Moore's red-haired lady of Joiry, but it's also the best. In April 1939, horror was still coalescing into the form of the genre we know today. Frankenstein was over a hundred years old, Poe was nearing one hundred, Dracula was about fifty, and the first waves of horror had moved from silent German films into the first Universal Monster cycle, which was nearly finished. You can still see many vestiges of the Gothic genre in most of these works at the time, which was my favorite subject back in undergrad. You can see the influence especially in "Hellsgarde." We did not yet have the clearly-defined roles and lore belonging to vampires, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, etc. Instead, things were weird, which is one huge reason I'm drawn to this genre. You and I both know about a dozen ways to either kill or slow down a vampire, so it's usually not as scary. But what if your enemy is a set of strange, seemingly welcoming but ultimately off-putting normal people? What if you swore you saw them do something out of the corner of your eye, but when you look again, nothing seems to be there? That's the space "Hellsgarde" occupies. It is, in general, way scarier. At the same time horror was evolving, Weird Tales was inexorably on the downswing. The publishing company had been implementing tricks to try to improve sales and its champion Farnsworth Wright was not long for this world.  Jirel is pressured into finding Hellsgarde, a castle in a marsh that can seemingly only be approached at dusk. It is yet another controlling douchebag that Jirel- or at least the text of the story- is somewhat smitten with who sends her in that direction. In Hellsgarde is a mysterious treasure that Jirel must recover. The story is overflowing with atmosphere and spooks, starting from Jirel's approach to the castle. It appears as though there is a line of soldiers guarding the gate, but upon closer inspection, they're corpses propped up on the lances through which their entrails have been run. The inhabitants of the castle are no better. Alaric of Hellsgarde and his alleged family are creeps throughout. They're expecting the lady of Joiry when she arrives. This family unit is perhaps Moore's greatest Jirel antagonist because it works so well with her writing style. Every Jirel story features thoughts just entering Jirel's mind which we are privy to. There is much "Did I see...? Could it have been...? Surely not" throughout her adventures, and Moore uses that same convention to ratchet up the horror of Hellsgarde's hosts. "She could have sworn a look went round the semicircle before the fire, a swift, amused glance from face to face as if they shared a secret. Yet not an eye wavered from hers." In particular, I love the two young boys who terrorize Jirel with their very existence. "She saw the boys' features clearly for the first time, and her heart contracted a little. For naked evil was upon these two young faces. The others wore their shadow of deformity elusively, a thing more sensed than seen. It might be only a trick of her legend-fed imagination that put evil there. But the two young lads had the faces of devils, long faces with high cheekbones and slitted, lusterless eyes... What sort of company had she stumbled into, where the very children and dogs wore evil like a garment?" I've always loved how unsure of herself Jirel is. She's hotheaded and brash and frequently very confused, second-guessing herself, and that characterization is never used better than in "Hellsgarde." If you read all the stories in order, I can see that Moore's habit of resolving each conflict through a somewhat abstract battle of wills might have run a little bit thin by this time (Moore was always light on the "sword" in "sword & sorcery"), but the twists in this story about the true nature of the castle's residents more than makes up for it. "Hellsgarde" is Moore's crowning Jirel achievement. Bobby Derie, author of the best blog in the universe, Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, agrees that this one's a banger. I suspect it will always be overshadowed by "The Black God's Kiss" as the first tale, but it's her most bone-chilling story by far. It's the perfect encapsulation of the world created in her mind, a thing more sensed than seen.
And for the next 85 years, Jirel was gone. More on that soon.
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When I go on a trip, sometimes I like to bring a disposable camera. They take forever to develop now- gone are the days of one-hour photo. More like three-week photo. Anyway, here are my grainy, washed-out film photos from Howard Days this year!  I don't know anyone who's read Conan the Barbarian #250, from November 1991. Everyone rightfully loves Roy Thomas's first 115 issues on the title, but most bounce off by the end of that run, and some stick it through to Christopher Priest's excellent tenure. Even though Roy returns to the book with issue #241 (actually it's issue #240, just written under a pseudonym), there's not a lot of chatter about his final 35 issues before Conan was cancelled for the first time. Roy's goal was to right the ship and return the title to its Bronze Age glory. He quickly wrapped up the previous writer's altogether-pretty-garbage teenage Conan storyline and zipped us right to where he left off at issue #115 in 1980. Seriously, Roy puts us in the same physical place with the same supporting cast, 10 years later. More than that, he even decides to imply that the previous 125 issues were actually all probably just a dream. As Roy gets rolling again, we get some fun with Red Sonja and Zula, two Thomas creations that are always welcome to return, and then a riff on, rather than an adaptation of, "Black Colossus." As is his skill set, Conan #250 is an adaptation of a Robert E. Howard story: "Gates of Empire."  Robert E. Howard was born just slightly closer to tomorrow, America's semiquincentennial, than its founding (ten years exactly), and "Gates of Empire" is a more unique story in his oeuvre. It's a comedy-adventure story set in 1167 during the Crusades, starring a decidedly un-Howardian lead named Giles Hobson. Instead of the do-it-yourself, hard-as-nails adventurers that populate so many Howard tales, Giles is a fat, selfish, chronic liar who bumbles his way through his narrative, always looking to claim as much credit for his wins and distance himself from his failures as he can. The backdrop of the story revolves around Giles's adventures in Cairo during a conflict between the Muslim Egyptians and the Christian Norman Franks. As the two empires war, Giles plays a double agent, mostly accidentally. REH readers will recognize a lot of names in this one. We have an Amalric (perhaps Howard's favorite name to re-use other than Steve Costigan) and a de Chastillon household with a character named Agnes (but her last name isn't de Chastillon). It is far from the best Howard story that I've read, but it's serviceable, and it's fun to get a story full of sight gags from an author not known for them. Originally to be published in a 1934 issue of Magic Carpet, the magazine folded before publication and the story was originally published in Golden Fleece in 1939, three years after Howard died. Roy takes Giles and re-christens him "Hobb" for the Hyborian Age, still a drunk, manipulative loser who once tricked Conan into fighting his allies in the middle of the night. Only one other element of "Gates of Empire" really makes it into Conan #250, and that's the visual of being pulled up by a rope through a giant hole in the floor. We'll get there.  Hobb is kidnapped and taken to the ruins of Kuthchemes, famous residence of Thugra Khotan from "Black Colossus," where he's intercepted by Conan, Sonja, and Zula. Within Kuthchemes, there's a poisonous underground river called the River of Darkness (essentially the River Styx in our mythology, but that name's taken by Howard's Nile analogue in the Hyborian Age). While sailing on that river, Zula and the Cimmerian see visions of dead friends and family, as well as both a young and elderly Conan figure to fight. It's the kind of thing you expect in a "landmark" anniversary issue. As our intrepid adventurers (plus Hobb) finally leave the river's cave, they're pulled up through a pit opening in the floor as it's revealed that the cave is actually the flesh of a many-eyed eldritch beast. This echoes one scene toward the end of "Gates of Empire" in which Hobb has been lowered into a trap-door pit and must climb his way out. Right as his fingers and hands are about to give way, he's pulled up over the lip. In this version, Conan dives back into the pit to save Hobb from the monster, himself rescued when the rest of the crew dumps all the heavy treasure of gold coins and chests onto the tentacled thing, causing it to release its grip on the Cimmerian.  The issue ends with Red Sonja and Zula deciding to go their separate ways from Conan after nearly ten issues together again, but Conan is stuck with Hobb by his side for quite a few more. This is one of Roy Thomas's Howard adaptions that feels like it should have scare quotes around the word "adaptation," plucking just a few identifiable markers from the original and otherwise writing his own story around them. As a big anniversary issue, it's certainly smaller scale than the other big climax books on the title like Conan the Barbarian #100, #115, or #200, written by Thomas, Thomas, and Priest, respectively. But Mike Docherty's art is vastly improved-upon by Ernie Chan's inks and the various colorists on the book give the title some spark, especially the sickly green hues in the River of Darkness. Roy had only 25 more issues left before the stories of the bronzed barbarian were cancelled, destined to have no more big anniversary issues (unless you count the 50th anniversary retrospective King-Size Conan in 2020 which Roy contributed to). Pax vobiscum, fellow Americans. Happy 4th.
 I think of Robert E. Howard’s King Kull stories the same way I think about the band The Velvet Underground. While they might not have been quote-unquote successes, and they’re not household names (unless you live in a cool household), they are massively influential. The Velvet Underground basically invented alternative rock and art rock, and the Kull story “The Shadow Kingdom” basically invented the sword-and-sorcery genre. The band and the story just slap their respective new genres on the table and there they are, fully formed. Unfortunately for Howard, only three of his King Kull stories sold, all to Weird Tales between 1926 and 1930. Those three were “The Shadow Kingdom,” “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” and “Kings of the Night.” But Howard wrote far more than just three tales of his exile from Atlantis. There are fifteen known Kull works in some form or another, be they finished or unfinished, most just went unpublished during his lifetime. Howard thought really highly of his Kull stories: he had a great time writing them, saying in a 1927 letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, “I enjoyed writing ["The Shadow Kingdom"] more than any piece of prose I ever wrote." He thought he executed his ideas well, and as scholar Patrice Louinet puts it, “The Shadow Kingdom occupies a special place in Howard’s fiction in particular and weird fiction in general, as well as in the author’s heart.” I’m sure it also helped that when “The Shadow Kingdom” sold to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales for $100, it was more money than anyone had ever paid in one go to Howard in his entire lifetime. Shortly after “The Shadow Kingdom,” Wright accepted “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” for just $20 since it was so much shorter. But for Wright, the luster of King Kull wasn’t as strong as it was for Howard. Dr. Will Oliver guesses that this may be due to the fact that none of the accepted Kull stories had actually been printed yet, so he couldn’t gauge how popular they would be with the readers of Weird Tales. Oliver also thinks Wright might’ve been disappointed the others didn’t live up to the ecstatic highs of “The Shadow Kingdom.” "The main impediment to additional stories being published was Farnsworth Wright. As neither of the two accepted stories had been published during this writing and submission frenzy, the editor had no way to gague reader reaction to the King Kull series. Therefore, he could only rely on his own read of the stories, and, despite some being strong, he accepted none." ("Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author," pg. 248)  It seems like it was a real blow to Howard when Wright rejected a new Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!” He also sent it to Argosy and Adventure, but they rejected it, too. Maybe it wasn’t ready yet. He put the rest of his Kull material back in his trunk, with the idea to perhaps return to it later. One of those stories that Howard stuffed in his trunk was called “The Curse of the Golden Skull,” and it wouldn’t see publication until 1967 when Howard’s literary agent packaged it into the ninth issue of his fanzine The Howard Collector. We don’t exactly know when “The Curse of the Golden Skull” was written, but it was likely in late 1928 or early 1929, as Howard had returned to writing Kull after making a digression for his novel Skull-Face in 1928. It appears that three stories of Kull were rejected around this time, either from Weird Tales or Argosy, and then Howard left Kull behind entirely by the beginning of 1931. “The Curse of the Golden Skull” is very short, just a couple of pages, really. It also didn’t actually feature Kull—though he’s implied to be not far away, just offstage. It’s an interestingly-structured story. Essentially two vignettes taking place thousands of years apart, connected by one paragraph in between them. In the first vignette, Rotath of Lemuria, a great sorcerer of the Thurian Age, is dying in a shrine on Lemuria’s highest peak after having recently been stabbed. It’s interesting how much happens just out of view of the story in this short narrative—we see Rotath dying, but we don’t see the killing blow. Rotath thinks to himself about how his own mistakes brought him to this end and how he shouldn’t have revealed his powers to the king of Lemuria because it freaked him out enough to seek help to kill Rotath. Anticipating the themes of his Conan stories, Rotath, despite all his magnificent magical power, is brought to his end by nothing more than the sharp point of sword wielded by a barbarian chief. With his final breaths, Rotath curses those who might disturb his golden bones. My favorite part of this story is the one-paragraph interlude which compresses millennia into just a moment, in which “the green oceans rose and wrote an epic poem in emerald and the rhythm thereof was terrible.” This, too, connects to many of the motifs you see played out through Howard stories over the years. Cataclysms vastly reshape the earth and her denizens rapidly evolve and devolve. The changing of epochs is the only constant. In the modern day, a scientist stumbles across Rotath’s shrine and his bones. Howard was always so good with personification (cities unfurl across the land, towers reach to the sky) as a beard masks this scientist’s face and mire slimes his boots. He’s made less sympathetic by his reaction to the shrine, desiring acclaim of universities and powerful societies, so we don’t feel as bad when he gets bitten by a snake and presumably dies. Like Rotath’s lethal sword wound, the adder bite is just implied by a shriek and a stagger. The two men are connected across eons, united only by ambition, and a one-sided rage. This story does a lot while so much of the action is in absentia. I can see why it didn’t sell and at the same time, I find it pretty compelling, two men, two deaths, with centuries in between. And then, across another ocean of time… By 1970, “The Curse of the Golden Skull” had finally left the trunk via The Howard Collector. Marvel was licensing Conan the Barbarian from Glenn Lord to launch their comic of the same name. Roy Thomas was hard at work throughout the early 70s to make Conan a success for the House of Ideas, very frequently adapting Conan stories or other Howard works, fitting them neatly into his comic timeline. In 1974, Roy enlisted the help of comics legend Neal Adams to draw an issue of Savage Tales, the black and white magazine they had launched alongside Conan the Barbarian that could do longer, more mature stories, but without the constraints of the Comics Code Authority. Roy and Neal had worked together on X-Men and The Avengers, but Neal had never done pencils on a Conan story before. Since there were a bunch of creatives on the Savage Tales team and the mag’s stories didn’t appear in any specific order, Roy figured that he could assign Neal a 30-page story, and when it was done, they would print it.  Marvel was currently in talks with science fiction writers and controversial Conan banner-carriers L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter for the adaptation rights to their additional Conan stories which had been appearing in paperbacks since the 60s. In specific, Roy had his eye on the story “The City of Skulls,” which had appeared in the generically-titled Conan from Lancer Books and for my money is certainly one of their lesser collaborations. As Conan got spun off into his own magazine, from Savage Tales to The Savage Sword of Conan, the plan for Roy and Neal’s “City of Skulls” adaptation moved there. And then for other reasons unknown to us, and maybe even unknown to Roy Thomas, the adaptation was moved from Savage Sword to the monthly, comic-sized, color title, Conan the Barbarian. It was to become issue #37, with a cover date of April 1974. This meant that the planned 30 pages could suddenly run absolutely no longer than 19. And if that wasn’t enough, about the time Neal Adams was finishing penciling page six, where Conan and Juma nearly get run through by a rhinoceros, L. Sprague de Camp decided that he actually did not give his permission for Marvel to use his story, and the whole issue began to collapse.  Roy was not about to let Neal’s art go to waste, so they decided to pivot. Roy figured if they were technically adapting a different story, they would be able to use the pages Neal had already drawn as set-up, and then de Camp wouldn’t be able to say “boo” to a goose. Glenn Lord suggested a little-known, only-recently published King Kull story titled “The Curse of the Golden Skull.” If I had to guess, I’d assume that Roy liked how little action was actually depicted in the story, giving him lots of space to fill in the gaps. Roy had Neal draw three new pages, which would be the new start to the story, adapting the scene in which Rotath dies in his shrine. After that, it would cut to Conan and Juma. They worked out a deal with de Camp to continue using Juma, so the credits page now lists Roy as our writer, Neal as our artist doing both the pencils and the inks, the original is credited to Howard, and de Camp and Carter get a special shoutout for letting Marvel use Juma. I have to imagine that L. Sprague de Camp never ended up reading the issue, because it is wildly similar to “The City of Skulls” in most ways other than its prologue. In both Conan #37 and “City of Skulls,” Conan and Juma are escorting a Turanian princess when they’re attacked. They’re knocked out and chained while they are taken to a tropical depression deep within a mountain range. In that tropical depression is a hidden city where an evil ruler makes them work in a mine. They attempt a daring escape and ultimately use a giant monster to kill the ruler of the city. In “City of Skulls” it’s a god statue that steps on Jalung Thongpa, in issue #37 it’s a slug that eats Rotath’s golden bones and then spits out his skin. Roy is eager to point out minor differences, like Conan being more disinterested in the Turanian princess in their version, but they follow the story pretty faithfully. Roy says it turned out more like de Camp’s story than he would’ve wanted, but that he likes their version better. I’m inclined to agree. If you’re reading the story with the issue’s history in mind, certain points start to emerge where you can see them squeezing most of the story into the ten pages they had left, like when Conan and Juma are working in the mine and the narration tells us that we’ll skip mercifully forward past their enslavement. Sure, Roy, you’re definitely doing it for our sake. Issue #37 would end up being one of only two issues Neal Adams did pencils for. He did a few covers and he helped out with inking for an issue or two later on, but his time in the Conan orbit was small. It sucks for us, because his work is incredibly good. His figures are all unique, and his sense for action and storytelling are as solid as it gets. Due to a paper shortage caused by a labor strike, there were some hiccups in the Marvel release schedule about the time Conan #37 hit the stands. Instead of potentially getting pulled off the shelf a week or two later to make room for new comics, #37 actually stayed on the newsstand for a full month, causing it to become the bestselling Conan comic for quite a few years. It’s a fun issue, so I’m not mad about that. Rotath was dead, Neal was gone, and Roy kept plugging away. And then, across another, much smaller ocean of time… maybe a lake of time or a large pond of time…  In 1992, Roy Thomas was returning to Conan after over a decade away. He was on his second tenure writing both Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword, titles he would close out with a run on each between 1993 and 1995. As part of the Marvel Graphic Novel line, Roy was periodically a part of the creative team bringing feature-length, color stories printed on big, high-quality paper. For his final MGN, Roy returned to “The Curse of the Golden Skull” in Conan: The Ravagers Out of Time to write a sequel. Unlike the two stories it builds off of, there doesn’t seem to be any high drama in this comic’s path to the page. Despite taking place many years after Conan #37, this graphic novel has a pretty similar setup to his story nearly twenty years prior. There’s an ambush in the Turanian mountains, a trek to the hidden city, which is now a ruin, and then delving into the mines underneath. To Conan and Red Sonja’s surprise, Rotath is still down there, having taken over the mind of that giant slug that ate him all those years ago. This time, Rotath uses magic to send them all back to the Thurian Age, giving Conan and Sonja the chance to team up with the barbarian king of Valusia. Roy leans more into some of the throwaway lines like including the Ape Lords from Howard’s vignette as a major force in the story, allied against Conan and Kull. In addition to acting as a sequel to issue 37, the graphic novel also references “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” “Kings of the Night,” as well as one oblique reference to Conan #68 from August 1976, when Conan, Red Sonja, and Belit meet Kull, Brule, and Gonar. As the medium of comics so often does, the original story has been adapted and built upon until now it’s a jumble of threads of continuity. Despite its tangled timeline threads, the book does a good-enough job of saying something about people uniting, even with those not of their own time, to cooperate against evil, in some ways anticipating what they’re doing over at Titan Comics today, emphasizing the Howardverse through crossover events. Mike Docherty is not my favorite artist, but he does a solid job here and seems to have improved from his work on Conan the Barbarian: The Horn of Azoth. It’s a fun story, but won’t be anyone’s favorite. More than 60 years on from Howard’s original, unpublished vignette, there were those who still cared enough to return to his ideas. Instead of two men connected by a curse across time, we have several stories, connected only by a love of Robert E. Howard’s original ideas. And the desire to sell comic books. [Note: This blog post was originally written as the script for a YouTube video, found below.] XNOO from the Merry Mushmen made ten times its Kickstarter goal, and is going out to backers as we speak. I was glad to contribute two pieces to it (both of which you can find here on the Conan Chronology. It was fun to be a part of it and to see original art based on my drunken little arcade adventure!
Chronologically Speaking is a series focused solely on placing the Conan of Cimmeria stories in timeline order. It's an analysis of only the text of Robert E. Howard's original Conan tales. I'm examining the stories one at a time, in publication order, to show explicit chronological notes to order the stories. Twenty entries! Cheers!  The Shumballa fragment, later edited, re-written, and retitled "The Snout in the Dark" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, is an unfinished draft begun in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard. The de Camp / Carter version appeared for the first time in Conan of Cimmeria, but the original Howard version would not be made public until the Donald Grant publication ten years later in Jewels of Gwahlur. Sometimes this story is referred to as "Untitled draft (Amboola awakened slowly...)" because of the first line of the story, but I've taken to calling it "the Shumballa fragment" due to its setting. de Camp and Carter renamed the city to "Meroê." Because there's so little information about this fragment, and because Conan is in very little of it, this will probably be one of the shortest entries in this column. Let's see what we've got:
Conan ended "Queen of the Black Coast" setting his ride (Bêlit's ship, the Tigress) aflame. That would render him owning only the clothes on his back and in need of a way to get back north. This is not the strongest thread to go on, but it makes sense for the Shumballa fragment to then fall right after "Queen of the Black Coast" because of Conan's geographical and economic situation connecting the two. Here's the most recent version of our chronology with this in mind:
 It's hard not to consider modern ideas the impetus for a lot of C. L. Moore stories. Much of her work feels more recent than the 1930s, in the way that it anticipates second-wave feminism and even modern-day issues like consent. If I'm being a good former English major, I know that I shouldn't be presentist like that, but I think that speaks to the strength of C. L. Moore's creations: that they feel so prescient almost one hundred years later. "The Dark Land" is the fourth Jirel of Joiry story penned by Moore, appearing in the January 1936 issue of Weird Tales, sandwiched between a Paul Ernst Doctor Satan story and the second part of the serialized Hour of the Dragon. I can't find much about when Moore began "The Dark Land" but its seed apparently began with a drawing- the same one that graces the title page of the story in Weird Tales. She did her own illustration and meant to attach it to "The Black God's Kiss," but didn't end up using it. It worked similarly with "The Dark Land," and it seems she built the story around the idea of using the illustration again. After a bit of a dip in quality in "Jirel Meets Magic," the lady of Joiry returns with a vengeance here in what might be my second-favorite of the bunch. Jirel has been magically stolen out of her deathbed, bleeding out from a stab wound, when she's suddenly transported into the world of Romne, the Dark Land lorded over by the dark man (wizard? devil? god? demigod? dungeon master?), Pav. Pav is possibly the most terrifying antagonist in any of the Jirel stories, embodying this deep, endless blackness while also physically echoing pop culture depictions of Satan (short pointy beard, wide smile, halo of flame). He oscillates between a cool suaveness and a literal furnace blast of anger, based on how Jirel responds to him. Pav wants Jirel to shack up with him, but only if she wants to, oddly enough. He's determined to convince her to give herself over willingly. "What I take I do not lightly give up. No, there is in you a heady violence that I desire, and will not surrender. But I do not wish you against your will."  Croatian artist Saša Đurđević is doing the most incredible Jirel work today. This whole premise seems to me to anticipate the issue of bodily autonomy, not that I think that phrase even existed in 1936. In a lot of ways, it also anticipates the Roy Thomas version of Red Sonja, who will have sex with a man, but only if he bests her in combat (which Bobby Derie noticed as well). I don't think body autonomy is necessarily the right word here, though. Jirel, throughout her stories, sometimes refers to herself as "Joiry." She sits on the throne and is not just the Lady of Joiry, she is its whole. She does that here in "The Dark Land," too. "Do you think to take Joiry like some peasant wench to answer to your whims? I'm Joiry, man! You must be mad!" Jirel is Joiry and Joiry is Jirel. And interestingly enough, in this story, Pav is Romne and Romne is Pav. In this mystical place that is not a place, it's somehow an extension of Pav. The story doesn't really go into how this works (thank god) but Pav appears to be omnipresent and omniscient in Romne, able to mold the world to his liking with merely a thought. "For Pav was the center of that inferno's might, and he could be no human thing who radiated such an infinity of power. What was he? What could he be?"  With Jirel being Joiry and Pav being Romne, this question of marriage and ownership also becomes one of sovereign nations invading the other- a struggle between Joiry and Romne, so perhaps bodily sovereignty would be the better term to label what this story is about. It takes on a larger scope than just a conflict between two people, and brings it slightly more in line with most of the rest of Moore's Jirel stories, where there's usually an invading man from another realm. Jirel is defending Joiry by asserting her own agency.
And I haven't even gotten to the corpse witch, who is cool as fuck. I watched the New Edge Sword & Sorcery livestream with current Jirel author Molly Tanzer discussing this story with a few other writers, and they loved the corpse witch as much as I do. I'm inclined to believe that the story sets up enough contrasts (the white against the darkness of Romne, the line about how the witch seems so "apart" from the rest of the landscape) that she is Jirel's predecessor: the last woman that Pav decided to marry. It's cool as hell. By this point, "Hellsgarde" (which is up next) is my favorite of the Joiry stories, follow by "Black God's Kiss," "The Dark Land," "Black God's Shadow," and finally "Jirel Meets Magic." Anyway, I'm off to start a doom band called Corpsewitch. REH and the Question of Adaptation (or, The Kinda-Sorta Adaptations of Robert E. Howard's Works)6/18/2026  Robert E. Howard exists in a kind of unique space when it comes to adaptation. His works and his universe are sort of "up for grabs" in a way that other literary works aren't. Like, can you imagine if JK Rowling died tomorrow and then the publishing house which had been putting out her work suddenly went all-in on rewriting all her Robert Galbraith stories as Harry Potter books? Re-setting them at Hogwarts and adding magic? That would be phenomenally weird. But that's what's been happening to Robert E. Howard since the 50s. It goes the other way, too. In 1976, Lin Carter published a Thongor the Barbarian story called "Black Moonlight." And then two years later, re-wrote it to be a Conan story entitled "The Gem in the Tower," and added it to his and L. Sprague de Camp's expanded Conan mythos. Wouldn't that be wild if an author published a science fiction novel, and then two years later reused the exact same story for a Star Wars story set on Tatooine? For most of his literary life, which extends much past his 30 brief years on Earth, Robert E. Howard's works have experienced these weird periods of half-adaptation and revision in a way that many other writers have never had. Following Howard's death in 1936, his trunk full of unpublished and unfinished works passed into the care of his literary estate executors, and it was picked through by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. Posthumous material would roll out gradually for the next two decades. This was where we saw what we might call the first batch of questionable adaptations. Publisher Martin Greenberg suggested to the sci-fi writers that they turn some of Howard's unpublished stuff into Conan stories. In 1955, Howard's El Borak story "Three-Bladed Doom" was turned into the Conan story The Flame Knife, his Kirby O'Donnell adventure "The Trail of the Blood-Stained God" dropped "The Trail of" and Conan was added, his desert-set "Hawks Over Egypt" moved to Shem, and his 16th-century Türkiye romp became "The Road of the Eagles." I think I'm solidly in the minority when I say that these stories are actually pretty enjoyable, with the weakest one being "Hawks Over Shem." "The Road of the Eagles," in particular, is a really fun, memorable tale.   But like I said, this is just the first wave of weird adaptation. These stories set a precedent. Where Conan would be kinda-sorta adapted the most, though, is in comic books. I'm mostly talking about the color Conan the Barbarian title here - Savage Sword adapted stories more cleanly (but not always!) - but Conan the Barbarian was a lot more checkered. And Roy Thomas and the rest of the Conan creative team continued in the tradition of adapting Conanless Howard stories into Conan comics for a long time, like issue #38's "The Were-Woman" coming from Howard's "The House of Arabu," but I'm not going to talk about those ones since there are far too many for a blog post. Sometimes Conan the Barbarian would half-adapt a story. Sometimes it would seemingly adapt two stories at the same time by throwing them into a blender. Sometimes it would adapt a story a second time, sort of re-writing the original adaptation! The first of these happens in Conan #21, during the War of the Tarim arc. The credits page claims that it is "Inspired in Part" by Robert E. Howard's "The Black Stone" story. But that "in part" phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because this story feels much more like an adaptation of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's story "The Curse of the Monolith." Like "Curse of the Monolith," it's set in Conan's Turanian mercenary period. He's lured to a large, stone monolith under false pretenses, strapped to the monolith, and then an eldritch beast descends slowly down toward him from the top of the monolith. In both stories, metal bands are a secret to the whole ruse. But it's far from a straight adaptation, so it seems to kind of split the middle without making any mention of de Camp or Carter.  Issue #31 quasi-adapts "The Thing in the Crypt." Roy had been trying to get the rights to the original story, but while Lin Carter was game, Sprague was not, so he decided to write his own young Conan crypt story, replacing "Thing in the Crypt" in the timeline. What we got was "The Shadow on the Tomb," which works far better than it should have. Funnily enough, they later did get the rights to the original story and used it as the basis for issue #92. While the supernatural element is different in both: a sentient, corporeal shadow in one and a living-dead sentry in the other, the issues are basically the same. Conan is chased into a cave by an animal, discovers a cursed sword which he disturbs, fights its protector, and then uses fire to kill the sentry. Conan #31 adds a really fun wraparound narrative that helps attach the book to the comic continuity, but otherwise are remarkably similar. We either have to accept that Conan had two remarkably similar adventures very close to one another in time and made the same mistakes in both, learning nothing from the first, or that one of these stories overwrites the other. If I remember right, Roy Thomas considers the "Shadow on the Tomb" version the more canon of the two.  Issue #37 from 1974 tries once again to adapt two stories at the same time, honestly to the betterment of both of them. It was written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Neal Adams, making me wish we got a hundred more Neal Adams-penciled Conan comics. This issue, "The Curse of the Golden Skull," simultaneously adapts Howard's unpublished short (short) story of the same name alongside de Camp and Carter's Conan yarn, "The City of Skulls." Really though, what it does is graft "Curse of the Golden Skull" onto "City of Skulls'" golden bones. It follows all the story beats of "City of Skulls:" Conan and Juma get captured and taken to a tropical bowl in the middle of a mountain range, they're enslaved for a time, the risk a daring escape, and they fight a giant monster that they end up using to kill their enslaver. The comic really just takes the villain and turns it into Rotath of Lemuria, a Thurian Age-villain transplanted to the Hyborian Age. It could be the pacing, it could be Rotath, it could be Neal Adams's incredible art, but it works a whole lot better than the prose piece it cribs mostly from.  Stories like these occupy a somewhat odd place in the literary world. I don't want to make it sound like this has only ever happened to Howard. For example, you may know that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie stemmed from an unrelated Tim Powers pirate novel titled On Stranger Tides, which they threw Jack Sparrow into and used as the basis for that film.
And I didn't even touch on another whole tangle of related ideas with the debate over editing and revision to Howard stories. Since his death, writers have not just been adapting his stories very freely, but also making edits that range from a few words to entire revisions to the very structure of the text. This wasn't meant to be exhaustive, because there are dozens if not hundreds of examples of this. Which ones did I miss? Guest post by Kenyon TysklindI’m a sucker for a shared universe. Have been since I was a kid and was trying to figure out how the Universal Monster movies should be watched chronologically, or when it became clear that Superman: The Animated Series and Batman: The Animated Series shared the same world. I was introduced to Conan of Cimmeria one afternoon after school when I was 5 years old. I wasn’t able to catch every episode, but enough to know I liked it, but thanks to the wonky syndication scheduling of cartoons of the 90s, I never really got too invested. A year or so later my dad and I started watching the 1982 movie, but my mom came home and put a stop to that as I was only 6. A few years later the film “Kull the Conqueror” came out and I just made fun of the trailer. I was 11 and I wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of Hercules at the time. My dad, on the other hand, was pretty excited for the movie and told me how Kull was around long before Conan. To this day I’m not sure if he meant that Robert E. Howard created Kull first, or that Kull was set thousands upon thousands of years before Conan. But my dad clearly loved this stuff. When I was around 16 I became quite interested in H.P. Lovecraft, and started reading his stories heavily. I made a bold attempt at a Lovecraft timeline, but while doing my research and reading stories, it became very clear that several other writers were sharing Lovecraft's little universe at the time. But, anytime I tried to find any Howard, I just kept running into L. Sprague de Camp. And my dad did not have a favorable opinion about him. Finding pure Howard stories in the late 90s and early 2000s was no easy feat and it led me down a rabbit hole. I’m 40 now. Here’s what I found out: the world of the Cthulhu Mythos and the Howardverse are one and the same. Howard and Lovecraft were pen pals, along with fellow poet and writer Clark Ashton Smith, and would share ideas with each other. The Cthulhu Mythos were always built up with the help of Smith and Howard, and at the end of the day, Howard wrote more than both of them. And he was actively building his world and lore. So, in a weird way, the first expanded canon of Robert E. Howard’s work wasn’t the works of de Camp or Carter, but rather the works of Lovecraft and Smith. To be fair, this has been debated for decades, and it really comes down to preference. Now, for me personally, the more the merrier I say. The idea that the world where Satampra Zeiros was a master thief in Uzuldaroum is the same world that Steve Costigan fought Kid Camera fills me with absolute glee. In 2023, Titan Comics and Heroic Signatures began publishing their own Howardverse stories. Jim Zub and Titan Comics are really going all out on the concept of a shared universe of these characters in crossovers like “Battle of the Black Stone” and “Scourge of the Serpent”. They’ve also been publishing a whole lot of new Solomon Kane and Kull stories. Very early on in the marketing for the “Battle of the Black Stone” event, Howard’s characters were referred to as the “Sentinels”, the heroes who watch the borders between our world and the encroaching darkness. Conan, Solomon Kane, El Borak, and many other characters Howard created could be considered Sentinels. And when you throw in the likes of Nyarlathotep and Tsathoggua, you’re really gonna need somebody who is willing to throw down and fight. While statements about what is and isn’t canon haven’t really been made by Titan or Heroic Signatures (other than Howard’s original stories are the purest canon), there have been several hints about how they’re going about it. One thing that’s clear is they seem to be taking a Star Wars Legends approach to older pastiches by writers like de Camp and Jordan. It’s not canon, but events similar to those MAY have happened, but they may also be completely different. It’s the have your cake and eat it too approach, and frankly, I’m fine with it. So I made a timeline. One that incorporates all of Howard’s stories, all of the Titan and Heroic Signatures stories, and most of the Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith stories. This gives us a shared universe that covers a vast amount of time (and a fair bit of outer space) starting from roughly before 750,000 years ago to millions of years into the future. Now, some of these dates are wild speculation made purely on vague clues or pure and simple “vibes” as the kids say nowadays. Is it contradictory in places? Yes. Full of anachronisms? Yes. Would I recommend this list to someone reading these stories for the first time? No, probably not, but if for some reason you just happen to have all these stories, comics and poems at hand, and you’ve never read any of it, I suppose you could, but I would really suggest just reading them in a collection first. Also, how did you get here? Since this was originally supposed to be a simple timeline covering Titan Comics, I’ll spend most of my time here covering the Conan section, but we’ll take a quick trip through each section of the timeline. Let’s get into it then. The Titan/Heroic Signatures Howardverse Timeline V1. The Elder Age Before humanity, before civilization, before anyone was keeping records or building cities or arguing about which kingdom was the best, there was an age when the Great Old Ones walked the earth openly, just being awful. When things that should not exist thrived in the frozen dark and everything probably smelt like mildew and mold. Whenever Brule speaks of those days when werewolves were just freely roaming about like it was nothing, this would be that time frame. The poem “The Symbol” by Robert E. Howard, like many of the poems on this list, could really be placed in a lot of different places. I feel like it works as a nice introduction to the savage and weird world we’re wading into. The Zukala poems tell of a bard-like trickster god. Howard really painted this guy out to be something special and was one of the rare instances where Howard clearly made a deity-like character. He was featured in a draft of “Isle of Eons” which itself has several drafts and fragments. I didn’t give a date to those as they’re freakin’ timeless. Our earliest dated stories are Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborea Cycle. Not to be confused with Howard’s Hyperborea, Smith’s Hyperborea is essentially ancient (Miocene, or Pleistocene, according to some sources) Greenland. If you’ve never read these stories, do yourself a favor and get on that now. They’re some of my favorites among all these yarns, especially “Seven Geases”. If you’re a fan of things escalating from bad to worse to even worse than that, but in a very sardonic sort of way, you’ll enjoy it. I’ve placed them around 750,000 years ago as that’s what Clark Ashton Smith had to say about the subject. Now Lovecraft did state that he felt that his Lomar, Howard’s Valusia and Smith’s Commorium were contemporaries of each other (and personally this is my favorite approach), but I’ve gone with the more accepted and scholarly dates. Ice eventually consumes Hyperborea, and the world enters an age of turbulent climate changes, and massive cataclysms that change the very foundation of the world itself. The Savage Age If the Elder Age belonged to the Old Ones, the Savage Age belongs to humanity's first stumbling steps toward civilization. The ice has begun to recede, the great beasts still roam freely, and the ancestors of the Atlanteans and Picts are just starting to figure out that there might be strength in numbers. It's brutal, it's cold, and nobody is having a good time. This era owes a debt to Paul Lewis Anderson, a writer whose Ta-an stories inspired Howard enough that he created his own character living among that tribe. Anderson's stories follow the struggles of early humanity against prehistoric terrors and each other, and Howard clearly loved the concept. Bear with me here as we wade into some speculative theory and headcanon. Howard's contribution to this era comes through Am-ra of the Ta-an. Fair warning: the Am-ra fragments get pretty racist pretty quickly. It's a sharp turn too, because the first few stanzas of "Am-ra the Ta-an" are honestly great before things take a drastic turn. Setting that aside, the worldbuilding Howard managed in these fragments is genuinely interesting. Am-ra is a man who can communicate with the Wild Folk (the animals) which the Priests of the Ta-an consider heresy, and so they cast him out. His comrade Gaur, who fought alongside him in the war against the Sons of the Eagles, slays the High Priest and flees into the wilderness to join his friend. A later fragment gives us Old Gaur, now ancient, regaling the people with stories of their battles. I've always loved the idea of these stories filtering down through the ages, Am-ra becoming a mythic figure like Hercules or Gilgamesh, a name invoked around fires long after anyone remembers what he actually did. That's where "Spear and Fang" comes in. While a popular theory places it after the Hyborian Age as evidence of humanity's slow climb back from savagery, my headcanon is that Ga-nor is a descendant of Gaur, raised on stories of Am-ra's heroics, which is what drives him to take on the gur-na and eventually the Serpent Men. "Fang and Spear" by Jim Zub in Savage Sword of Conan #10 picks up directly from there, a direct sequel that ends grimly for Ga-nor and A-aea's people, but with enough of a spark of hope to suggest the fight isn't over. And as the years pass, these scattered tribes would eventually unite and wrest the City of Wonders from the Serpent Men, laying the foundation for the first true civilization. The Thurian Age If you want to understand why I love the Thurian Age, start with this: we know there are Seven Kingdoms, but nobody (not scholars, not historians, not even the people living there) knows which kingdoms are actually part of the Seven. This is a civilization so ancient that its own inhabitants have lost track of when it began. Valusia, the golden heart of the known world, has been there so long that its origins are pure myth even to the Valusians. I love that shit and it’s exactly what makes this era so compelling, and it's a big part of why I love Kull. My dad also loved Kull, which probably explains a lot of it as well. My placements for Kull lean heavily on the research of Dale Rippke, with a few personal adjustments. “Exile of Atlantis” is first, and features Kull in the wilds of Atlantis alongside Gor-na and young Am-ra (possibly named after the legendary hero from days long past), and shows how Kull gets, well, exiled from Atlantis. “The Curse of the Golden Skull” is one that I completely agree with Rippke’s assessment of the story, and have placed it before “The Shadow Kingdom”, taking place as Kull leads a band of brigands, at behest of King Borna of Valusia, to help the Lemurians deal with a rogue sorcerer. The story also features an interlude and then flashes forward to the 1920s, as an unnamed explorer has found the skull of Rotath. "By This Axe I Rule" gets placed close to "The Shadow Kingdom" because Kull specifically mentions months having passed since taking the throne, and there's a reference to a Serpent Temple that ties the two stories together neatly. I have moved “Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” away from Rippke’s placement as well. He has it much later in Kull’s life, and while I originally agreed with this assessment, Kull just seems far too naive in the story for it to be when he’s older. Plus, Brule is really his only ally in the story and it just seems odd that Kelkor is absent (granted that has more to do with the fact that Howard hadn’t created Kelkor when he wrote this story). “The Cat and the Skull” and “The Screaming Skull of Silence” both feature the character Kuthulos, not to be confused with Kathulos AKA Thulsa Doom, who is present in “The Cat and the Skull”. That’s not confusing at all, right? When it comes to Titan and Heroic Signatures, we have "The Talons of Deep Time", “The Invisible Assassin", and “The Undoomed Man”. “Talons” makes multiple references to Kull's fight with the Serpent Men and Brule's dynamic with Kull still feels very early in their friendship, so it sits near the beginning of his reign. “The Invisible Assassin” from Savage Sword #9 on the other hand has Kull carrying himself like a man who has been king long enough to have opinions about it, so it lands a bit later. “The Undoomed Man” takes place when Kull is still a slave in Valusia and so must be placed earlier in his life. I’ve placed that before “The Curse of the Golden Skull”. Titan and Heroic Signatures have more stories in the pipeline, so this section is going to grow. There's an enormous amount of untouched territory here and I cannot wait to see what they do with it. With that said, a lot of Kull’s stories are fragments or unfinished drafts, so it’ll be interesting to see how that affects the timeline. It could very well change things significantly and have stories be moved all around. “Kings of the Night” I feel is more of a Bran Mak Morn story and is placed with those tales, but I definitely feel like we’ll be seeing that be brought into the forefront in the coming years with Titan Comics, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kull aspects of that story are expanded upon in future stories. There’s a lot to play with in the Thurian Age. While Atlantis during Kull’s time was still in a state of savagery, all signs point to them reaching a prosperous period in the waning years of the Thurian Age, eventually rivalling even Valusia. But then the world breaks. The Post Cataclysm Atlantis sinks. Lemuria shatters. The great continent of the Thurian Age splinters and reshapes itself over thousands of years of geological catastrophe, and everything is swallowed by the sea or scattered to the winds. What survives does so in fragments: bloodlines, half-remembered myths, the occasional stubborn sorcerer clinging to the last scraps of the old world. And there are a lot of stubborn sorcerers. This is where I've placed Clark Ashton Smith's Poseidonis Cycle. Poseidonis is the last remaining island of what was once Atlantis. A tiny remnant of a drowned empire where the old magic still lingers and the sorcerers who remain are desperately, futilely trying to hold back the inevitable. It's elegant and melancholy and deeply weird, which is everything Smith does best. Slight spoiler: the planet Venus is involved in the finale in a way that comes completely out of nowhere and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. "The Epiphany of Death" is set in Ptolemides, a city contemporary with Poseidonis, and feels like it could be the last flickering light between the ancient world and the rise of the mysterious Acheron Empire. The gap between the fall of Valusia and the rise of Conan's world is roughly 80,000 years, longer than the entire recorded history of human civilization multiplied many times over. Civilizations rise and fall, whole peoples migrate and transform, and the ancestors of the Cimmerians and Aquilonians and Stygians slowly become who they'll need to be. Placing these stories here may be a stretch, but they’re fun and I love them. And they do directly reference Hyperborea which ties directly into the Cthulhu Mythos which ties back to Howard, so yeah. This, of course, leads us into our next section. You may have heard about it before. The Hyborian AgeThe Adventures of Young Conan the Thief  "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." This is it. This is what everything has been building toward. The Elder Age gave us cosmic horror and ancient sorcery. The Savage Age gave us humanity's first stumbling steps. The Thurian Age gave us kingdoms and kings and the first great clash between human ambition and inhuman evil. The Post Cataclysm gave us the long slow darkness between one world and the next. And now, emerging from that darkness like a barbarian kicking down a tavern door, we have the Hyborian Age. This is the world of Conan the Cimmerian. A world of scheming sorcerers and warrior queens, of kingdoms built on conquest and held together by nothing but the will of whoever happens to be sitting on the throne that week. It's loud and dangerous and gloriously alive in a way the earlier ages, for all their cosmic grandeur, never quite managed. Howard didn't just write stories set here, he wrote an entire fictional history of the age, tracing the rise and fall of civilizations with the same care a real historian might bring to Rome or Babylon. That essay, "The Hyborian Age", sits at the top of this section for a reason. Another reason is because the last lines of the Hyborian Age lead beautifully into the next item on the timeline: “The origins of other races of the modern world may be similarly traced; in almost every case, older far than they realize, their history stretches back into the mists of the forgotten Hyborian age....” And here is the first line of the poem “Cimmeria”: “I remember.” Anyway, before we get lost in the poetry of it, there’s a timeline to anchor. Most sources agree that Kull's era was roughly 100,000 years ago, and Titan Comics has confirmed that Conan lived 80,000 years after Kull, putting his birth at around 20,000 BCE. That date is the anchor for everything that follows. If we want to really get down in the trenches Conan’s birth year would be closer to 20,028 or so, but for now I’m just keeping it 20,000 BCE for simplicity’s sake. Titan Comics made an early decision not to do straight adaptations of Howard's original stories, which is an interesting creative choice that sets this run apart from every previous comic adaptation. The closest they've come is an extended riff on "The Frost Giant's Daughter" in the "Frozen Faith" arc, which grows naturally out of themes introduced in the Free Comic Book Day 2023 release "Looking For Lands Beyond" (an absolute masterpiece, for the record). Alongside the mainline comic I've been including the Savage Sword of Conan Reforged reprints as a compromise rather than incorporating the full Roy Thomas Marvel run. And here's something I noticed that suggests this is all more coordinated than it might appear: when "Spawn of the Serpent God" released in October 2025, Titan was simultaneously running the "Scourge of the Serpent" event covering "God in the Bowl" and "The Shadow Kingdom", while Savage Sword Reforged was releasing colorized versions of "Frost Giant's Daughter" and "Tower of the Elephant." The next Reforged release was "Devil in Iron", the very story “Spawn of the Serpent God” serves as a prequel to. Titan said they wouldn't adapt the older stories. They never said they wouldn't re-release the older adaptations. Tim Waggoner's "Spawn of the Serpent God" is split across two time periods (Conan at 18 and Conan at 33) and I've split it accordingly on the timeline, though I'd suggest reading it as a complete novel. A few specific placement notes worth flagging: "Forged" from Savage Sword #6 features a very young Conan but contradicts the Titan comic in a few places, so treat it with skeptical eyes. It should be noted that the next page is a pin-up by Marco Rudy depicting a drunk and sleeping Conan. Maybe it was just a dream? "Madness on the Mound" takes place after “Frozen Faith”, but Conan must’ve joined back up with Niord’s men again sometime shortly after the conclusion of Zub’s yarn. "Lethal Consignment" is a tricky one. Author Shaun Hamill intended it to take place before "Tower of the Elephant", but it places Conan in Zingara, somewhere he's rarely noted to be this early in his life. I've kept Hamill's intended order as the primary placement out of respect for his author's note while listing an alternate. Howard’s own response to questions about Conan’s life states that Conan was enslaved by the Hyperboreans for a brief period, and he escaped south, making his way towards Zamora and Nemedia. It’s not impossible that Conan traveled to Zingara before Zamora, just highly improbable. But, that’s kind of going to become a thing here. Conan travels a lot, and all over the place, sometimes in incredibly short amounts of time. And I'll be honest, I'm still on the fence about "Rogues in the House." I personally prefer it after "Tower of the Elephant", but Conan lists his adventures in issue 1 of the mainline comic as Nemedia, Corinthia, Zamora and countless other places, which feels like Zub deliberately giving us a rough order. For now it sits where Zub's geography suggests it should. Plus, Dan Yergert’s arguments for this order are pretty well-founded and my reasoning is simply due to how I originally read it so we’ll be going with “Rogues” taking place before “Tower of the Elephant”. The first half of “Spawn of the Serpent God” takes place weeks after “Tower of the Elephant” and specifies Arenjun as the setting to both stories. “The Amulet of Nakamar” by Brendan Deneen also takes place weeks after “Tower” and also is set in Arenjun and ends with Conan leaving the city for bigger and better things. From the context of “The Green God of Leng” by Gavin G. Smith we know Conan spent some time in Shadizar with a woman named Ileetha which led to him being kidnapped and forced to kill a god on the Plateau of Leng. The Plateau of Leng is a setting Lovecraft used for a lot of his stories including “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”. This story, which was released while I was already writing this, really gives credence to this whole project. Getting to read about Conan taking on fungi from Yuggoth and the satyr-like Men of Leng is the whole reason this project even started. The setting is north of Shadizar to the border of Brythunia and Zamora. He heads south from here. Conan the Mercenary  This stretch covers Conan's transition from thief to mercenary. Still young, still figuring out what kind of man he is, but starting to range further from Zamora and the haunts of his thieving days. "The Garden of Fear" is an interesting case. This James Allison technically takes place in the 1930s, but the heart of it is set in the ancient past. For many years most scholars placed the James Allison stories after the end of the Hyborian Age entirely, but the "Battle of the Black Stone" crossover and the novel "Cult of the Obsidian Moon" make it clear that the events of "Garden of Fear" happen roughly a decade before that book. So here it sits, opening this era. "Eastern Horizons" begins with Conan leaving Ophir and heading east in search of treasure, and it reads like his first time venturing that far in that direction, which puts it early in his mercenary days. Worth noting: he receives a necklace of three golden medallions at the story's end that's very reminiscent of his classic Marvel look, which played no small part in deciding its placement here. With that said, that same necklace from the Marvel run is worn by a young Conan in flashbacks in “Frozen Faith”. It’s a bit of an Easter Egg in both regards I surmise so I suppose using it to anchor any type of continuity is a bit shaky, but let’s be absolutely real here: most of the time, all explanations for continuity are mostly shaky headcanon. A word on the War of Tarim. In the Roy Thomas Marvel stories this conflict falls squarely in this period, and while Savage Sword did publish a sequel to Marvel issue #28 (Savage Sword #7), picking up just a few days after the events of the comic, and making references to the events of previous issues, the mainline comic has steered clear of this era so far. I'm taking the Star Wars Legends approach: something very similar probably happened, just not exactly as Thomas told it. The same goes for "Conan and the Spider God" by de Camp, which has been referenced a few times in Savage Sword and the novel “Songs of the Slain”, but clearly isn't strict canon given that Conan's father isn’t named Nial in the Titan continuity. Something similar happened. Probably. “Spawn of the Serpent God” also serves as a prequel to the “Spider God” and thus secured its placement on the timeline. There are several Belit centered stories that take place in this timeframe as well. “Bone Whispers” by Michael A. Stackpole is great and gives us a young Belit in her first year or so on the seas. “Becoming a Goddess” from Savage Sword #14 features Belit being possessed by Althea, an ancient goddess who is bound to a temple on an uncharted island. It does not go well for Althea. “Shipwrecked” by V. Castro has an alligator man who attempts to try and seduce Belit. It does not go well for Mr. Alligator Man. “Damn Thing in the Water” has Conan wearing a helmet so I’m placing it before “Queen of the Black Coast” due to the most obvious logic of all: Conan has a helmet. Recently “Grim Tidings” was released for Free Comic Book Day 2026 and is the beginning of the “Tides of the Tyrant King” storyline. I’ve placed in before “Queen of the Black Coast” mostly due to it being on the border of Argos and Zingara, and ending with Conan looking out to the sea. Until we have more clues from the future releases, this may very well be a temporary placement as I’m not too confident about it. Conan the Privateer  Belit and her story with Conan is the emotional centerpiece of his entire young life. Now, I’m not saying to split up Howard’s “Queen of the Black Coast”, but I am saying that there are a few stories that take place in between Chapters 1 and 2 of “Queen of the Black Coast”. The Marvel Comics continuity famously devoted nearly 50 issues to their time together. Titan and Heroic Signatures only have a few stories covering this era so far. "Terror from the Abyss" by Henry Herz is set during this window, and the first two parts of "Twisting Loyalties" tell the tale of a heist gone wrong during Conan and Belit's time together. The next two parts pick up after the conclusion of "Queen of the Black Coast" and follow Conan through his first raw days of mourning. "Coils of the Golden Empress" picks up directly after "Twisting Loyalties" closes. "The Child" could arguably be placed in a few areas on the timeline, but I’ve chosen this section primarily as it has Conan moving north, and by the end he's thinking about heading back to Zamora. That northward drift is what makes everything that follows geographically coherent. And this is actually the detail that got me started on this whole project. In Conan the Barbarian #5, Conan is in Shadizar mourning Belit, which is a long way from where he left her. Later it becomes clear that "Thrice Marked For Death" takes place before "Vale of Lost Women", which means Conan makes quite the journey: south to north to south again. After "The Child" pushes him north toward Shem, the events of “Cult of the Obsidian Moon” take place, which connects directly back to “Garden of Fear”. Afterwards, Conan makes way for Shadizar, and we move into "Thrice Marked For Death" and "The Age Unconquered". Conan travels back to the time of Kull and faces off against Thulsa Doom in what may be one of the coolest storylines I’ve ever read. Some people may roll their eyes at cameos by Yag-Kosha or things of similar nature, but I love it. It’s fun and that’s kind of the point, is it not? "Xuthal of the Dusk" then serves as the bridge. Its backstory has Conan joining a rebel prince from Koth, cutting a path of destruction through Shem, getting harried by Stygians, and generally having a terrible time, until he ends up stranded in the desert with a very thirsty Natala. From there Conan makes his way south. Conan the Raider  By this point Conan has put some distance between himself and the Black Coast, but the grief is still there under the surface. "The Vale of Lost Women" shows him restless and increasingly dissatisfied, which sets up everything that follows in this stretch nicely. "A Nest of Serpents" picks up right after "The Vale of Lost Women" and delivers a full Conan in Stygia adventure built around his history with Thoth-Amon. In Marvel, Thoth-Amon and Conan clashed repeatedly and dramatically, but Howard himself only ever hinted at their connection. Zub is clearly building toward something here and I for one cannot wait to see where it goes. "Conan and the Emerald Lotus", "Black Starlight" and "Conan and the Living Plague", all by John C. Hocking, take place in this same window, with Conan ranging back and forth between Shem and Stygia. These are considered genuine classics by most Howard fans and deservedly so. Hocking has mentioned having more Conan ideas in the pipeline and I really hope he gets the chance to tell them. Are you reading Heroic Signatures? There are several poems that have been featured in Savage Sword, accompanied by gorgeous artwork. Some of these poems are originally by Robert E. Howard and some are new pieces. I’ve included them in the timeline, and like many of the other poems, its placement is very much speculation. “Call Thee To Crom” is an original poem by Jim Zub and truly could be placed anywhere on this timeline during the Hyborian Age. Savage Sword stories are notoriously difficult to place and "Treasure of the Vermin Queen" is no exception. The Shem and Stygia mercenary period felt like the most logical home for it. "Ghosts and Echoes" from the mainline comic presented a similar challenge, though the Khoraja setting and the fact that Conan hasn't yet reached his generalship both suggest it belongs before "Black Colossus." I may be wrong. Hell, I may be wrong about a lot of this. But that's where it sits. And it's worth noting that Savage Sword Reforged #4 is a colorized reprint of "Black Colossus". Yet more proof in what I'm increasingly convinced is a very deliberate publishing strategy from Titan. The synergy keeps showing up. I'm all for it. "Iron Shadows in the Moon" is quite possibly the most frustrating story in this entire timeline to place. The tone feels early, with a young and impulsive Conan, but then Howard drops in a reference to Conan smirking when asked about pirates, and a comment about making Olivia the "Queen of the Blue Sea" that only makes sense if Belit is already a memory. "Spawn of the Serpent God" then confirms Conan is roughly 33 at this point, shortly after his time with the Red Brotherhood on the Vilayet Sea. That settles it. "Iron Shadows" belongs here. And now Conan is back to his pirating ways. Conan the Commander  The second part of "Spawn of the Serpent God" picks up in the weeks immediately following "Iron Shadows in the Moon", which is the final nail in the coffin for anyone who wants to place that story earlier in Conan's life. His first stint with the Red Brotherhood is recent and he is explicitly 33. The text doesn't leave much wiggle room. "The Devil in Iron" follows shortly after, and it's set on an island in the Vilayet Sea. Scott Oden's "The Shadow of Vengeance" picks up three months later and is excellent, capturing Howard's voice without trying to imitate it directly. If you haven't read it, fix that. This brings us to the Hyrkanian Steppe days, and I'll be honest, this is the section where the chronology gets genuinely messy as it’s a bit of a hodge podge of Savage Sword tales. These are stories that could arguably slot into Conan's earlier Turanian mercenary period, but something about the way Conan carries himself in most of them suggests a man with more miles on him than the young thief from Zamora. He's harder here. More deliberate. Less interested in proving himself and more interested in getting paid and getting out. It's a subtle shift but it's there if you're looking for it. A word on Liam Sharp: if you see his name on a Conan story, clear your schedule. "Tattered Wings" in particular is the kind of thing that makes you remember why you fell in love with this character in the first place. His writing and art are so wildly beautiful, it’s a crime not to be reading his stories. This stretch of stories leads us toward "The People of the Black Circle", which is widely considered one of Howard's finest achievements. A full novella with political intrigue, a memorable antagonist in the Black Seers of Yimsha, and Conan at arguably his most competent and charismatic. It's a high point before the long road to kingship begins and may be my favorite Conan story overall. That changes on a weekly basis it seems though. After the events of "The People of the Black Circle", I’ve placed “A Witch Shall Be Born” and Conan’s Zuagir days. This is another one that has bounced around a bit, and may do so again. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s all tentative. Now, Titan has released a few stories that take place after “A Witch Shall Be Born”. “Twice Paid Debts” takes place a decade after Conan and Belit were betrayed in “Twisted Loyalties”, and Conan is working with the Free Companions. “Dwellers in the Oasis” takes place eight months after “A Witch Shall Be Born” and shows how Conan’s wounds were healed. Now, “Sacrifice in the Sand” has to take place after “Twice Paid Debts” because the character Captain Nkosi is featured in both, and dies in one of them, so that kind of solidifies that. Soon after, Conan heads northwest. "Leaving the Garden" has him escorting a caravan west before turning toward colder climates, and "Wolves of the Tundra" and "The Wuthering" (another Liam Sharp story) both take place in the frozen north. There's a bleakness to these stories that feels right for this moment in his life. He's accomplished, experienced, and completely directionless. Which for Conan usually means something interesting is about to happen. Which it does. He turns into a werewolf for a bit of time and has a run in with a tavern possibly full of Serpent Men, and bears witness to an Aesir man’s final moments. Eventually, from events yet unseen, Conan ends up back on the coast and you’ll never believe what happens. Conan becomes a pirate again. Look, it happens a lot. The man loves the sea. The events of “The Pool of the Black One” take place which then leads into “The Treasures of Tortage” by Robbie MacNiven. Conan the Buccaneer  If Belit was the great love of Conan's life, Valeria of the Red Brotherhood is his equal. A swordswoman who doesn't need rescuing, doesn't want a throne, and has absolutely no interest in being anyone's queen. She's one of Howard's finest creations and one of the most underutilized characters in the entire canon, which makes this stretch of the timeline one of the most exciting in terms of what Titan Comics might do with it. S.M. Stirling's "Blood of the Serpent" gives us their first meeting and is the lead-in to "Red Nails", Howard's last Conan story and arguably one of his best. "Red Nails" is a claustrophobic, brutal yarn and features Conan fighting a dinosaur dragon. "The Sunless Isle" by Patch Zircher picks up after these events. I suspect whatever Zub has planned for the mainline comic, which at the time of writing this is coming very soon, probably takes place sometime after “Red Nails”, but I really have no idea. After Valeria, Conan heads north again. "The Halls of Immortal Darkness" and "Lord of the Mount" cover this stretch, with Conan ranging through cold country processing what he's left behind. That northward journey eventually brings him to the Pictish Wilderness where the events of the “Battle of the Black Stone” begin for Conan. The crossover spans thousands of years of in-universe time, connecting Conan in the Pictish frontier to Solomon Kane and Dark Agnes in 16th century Europe, El Borak in the early 20th century, and James Allison in a Texas farmhouse having visions of all of it simultaneously. This has to be placed before the fall of Fort Tuscelan in "Beyond the Black River". If you've never read stories featuring these characters before, this is a genuinely thrilling introduction to the full scope of what Howard created. It's a lot of fun, although I will say James Allison takes a beating that feels slightly personal on Zub's part. "Beyond the Black River" and "The Black Stranger" follow, and "The Black Stranger" in particular requires this placement as it can't come before "The Pool of the Black One", so anyone who's ever argued for moving these stories earlier in the timeline runs into a hard wall there. It's worth noting that Howard's unfinished fragment "Wolves Beyond the Border" references events four years after "Beyond the Black River". He'd revised that figure down from ten years in an earlier draft, which suggests he was thinking carefully about the timeline even in an unfinished piece. I spent a lot of time trying to factor that in, even making some major continuity blunders in the process. Considering that Titan has been pretty vague about how fragments are being handled, I decided it may not be the best idea to center everything around a quick reference in an unfinished story that may not be referenced in any way, shape or form in the future. With that said, when Zub's run concludes at issue fifty and we have a clearer picture of how everything connects, it may turn out to matter quite a bit and I’ll probably restructure things significantly. EIther way, it all leads to the same destination, be it one month later, four years later, or ten years later. That destination is "The Conquering Crown", and it's exactly what it sounds like. Jim Zub handles it with the right combination of inevitability and surprise. Everything in this timeline has been building to this moment almost as much as it built to the Hyborian Age. Dear Conan has come a long way. This is a man who was born in a barbarian village at the edge of the civilized world, who spent his youth as a thief and his early manhood as a mercenary, a pirate, a soldier of fortune, a general, and somehow, through a combination of audacity, competence, and the kind of luck that looks a lot like destiny, ended up on the throne of Aquilonia, the most powerful kingdom in the western world. Howard didn't treat this as a punchline or a fantasy. He treated it as the logical conclusion of everything Conan is. Of course he became a king. What else was ever going to hold him? King Conan  The King Conan stories have a different texture from everything that came before. "The Phoenix on the Sword" opens his reign with an assassination plot and establishes immediately that the crown is going to be heavier than the sword ever was and gives us a nice example of the cyclical nature of time that Howard believed in, as the story was originally “By This Axe I Rule”. History repeats itself. "The Scarlet Citadel" puts Conan through genuine humiliation and loss in a way the younger Conan rarely experienced. He also meets Satha, a giant snake, who actually will be showing up later. And then there is "The Hour of the Dragon", Howard's only full Conan novel, originally written for an English publisher that unfortunately went under before the book could be released. It's Conan at his most tested and most triumphant, a story that encompasses dungeons and sorcery and political intrigue and a quest across the entire Hyborian world. It’s also essentially a rewrite of a lot of his previous adventures and has a very “Greatest Hits” feel to it, but that’s not a complaint. It's been broadly accepted for about ninety years now that Conan is somewhere around 44 or 45 during these events, which puts them a few years into his reign. "Songs of the Slain" by Tim Lebbon feels later still. If I'm reading it correctly Conan is closer to 60, though I'll freely admit I may be wrong about that. What I'm not wrong about is that it belongs after "Hour of the Dragon" and that it confirms pipes exist in the Hyborian Age. Make of that what you will. And then "The Nomad." I won't say much about it because it deserves to be experienced rather than explained. What I will say is that Jim Zub found an ending for Conan that feels true to everything Howard built. Not a final battle, not a death, not a triumphant last stand, but something quieter and stranger and more honest than any of those would have been. It's perfect. I cannot think of a better way to end our time with Conan the Cimmerian, but knowing Zub, I suspect he's got something else up his sleeve for later down the line. In fact, he confirmed it. He’s contracted to issue 50 and he plans on making it mean something. I’m so excited and I just can’t hide it, and I’m about to lose control and spend far too much time arguing with myself about the time it takes to travel from Zingara to Nemedia. And that brings us to the end of Conan’s time in the Hyborian Age. Obviously there will be more stories to come, and this section will probably keep growing for years to come. But while this may be the end of the Conan stories, the Hyborian kingdoms don't fall quietly. Some 500 years after the time of Conan, the Hyborian kingdoms begin to splinter and a Pict named Gorm takes his chance to bring ruin to the once prosperous kingdoms. Then, somewhere around 10,900 BCE, a catastrophic event, the real world Younger Dryas, a period of rapid cooling that genuinely reshaped human civilization, strikes the known world with the force of a second cataclysm. The gleaming cities crumble. The great kingdoms fragment into wandering tribes. The ancestors of the Cimmerians become the Celts, the Picts push into what will eventually be Scotland, and the Hyborian Age dissolves into the deep sediment of pre-history, remembered only in the myths and legends of the civilizations that come after. James Allison's visions of his past lives give us a glimpse of this dying world. Memories with James Allison  "The Valley of the Worm" features Niord, a warrior who faces Satha, the same ancient serpent from "The Scarlet Citadel," and steals its venom to face the Wyrm in a battle so legendary it echoes down through every dragon-slaying myth humanity has ever told. "Marchers of Valhalla" shows us the Aesir during this twilight period, the Sons of Aryas beginning their long march toward what will eventually become recorded history. And then the world changes in a quieter, stranger way. The Mythic Age As the Hyborian kingdoms crumble into the dust of forgotten history, the world enters a twilight of legend. An era of thinning veils, where the waking world and the Dreamlands frequently intersect. The Dreamlands stories here are Lovecraft at his most purely imaginative. Less concerned with cosmic dread than with the strange beauty of a world that exists just beyond the edge of sleep. If you've never read the Dreamlands cycle, think of it as Lovecraft writing a secondary world fantasy, closer in spirit to Lord Dunsany than to "The Call of Cthulhu." "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" is the one most directly connected to the broader timeline, but all of them are worth your time. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle is personally my favorite of his works. They’re just so trippy and paint these lovely little pictures in my mind’s eye. There is a bit of continuity between the stories as well. “The Cats of Ulthar” must precede “The Other Gods” and “The Quest of Iranon” must be after “The Cats of Ulthar” and “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”. “Azathoth” probably should be placed either in the 1920s or, closer to the beginning, but it’s such an odd little fragment, I’ve opted to just keep it closer with the others. Personally, I always tie “Azathoth” into “What the Moon Brings” and “Ex Oblivione” due to the concept of creepy dream shit. Robert Bloch's "Black Lotus" appears here as well. Bloch was part of the same Weird Tales circle as Howard, Lovecraft and Smith (in fact Lovecraft mentored him directly), and his contribution fits naturally into this era. I may go back and begin entering in other stories that directly tie into the Cthulhu Mythos written during Lovecraft’s lifetime by other members of his “Circle”, but for now, we’ll be sticking with the core three mostly. From this point the timeline begins intersecting with known history, introducing us to an entirely new cast of Howard's characters; Bran Mak Morn, last king of the Picts; Cormac Mac Art, Irish reaver and reluctant hero; Godric de Villehard, Norman knight; and eventually Solomon Kane, the grim Puritan wanderer who will carry Howard's themes of justice and violence into the 16th century and beyond. The Howardverse turns out to be a much bigger place than even Conan's world suggests. The Age of Antiquity The Hyborian Age has passed into myth, and in its place we see the rising empires of Sumer, Tyre, and Rome. Howard had a lot to say about this era. He wrote prolifically about ancient civilizations, Celtic warriors, and the long slow death of the old world, and a surprising amount of it is grounded in genuine historical research. For placement purposes I've largely followed the order established in collections like "Swords of the North" and the Del Rey editions, with adjustments where the historical dates are clear enough to anchor a story more precisely. The most fascinating thread running through this entire period is what happened to the Picts. They’ve fallen quite a bit from where they were in the days of Brule the Spear-Slayer. In Conan's time they were a terrifyingly savage force beyond the Black River. By the Age of Antiquity they've become a civilization in long, grinding decline, retreating before Roman legions, clinging to their identity. And at the end of that long retreat stands Bran Mak Morn, last king of the Picts and descendant of Brule the Spear-Slayer himself (and Brissa…which means he may be the descendent of Conan as well. Gonna have to wait and see). The same bloodline that stood beside Kull in the Thurian Age ends here, in the rain and mud of Roman Britain, fighting a war that's already lost. Howard wrote it as a tragedy and it reads like one. Bran's placement has a straightforward answer and a complicated one. Howard envisioned his stories taking place between 295 and 300 CE. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. But then Karl Edward Wagner wrote "Legion from the Shadows" in 1976, a full length Bran Mak Morn novel picking up directly after "Worms of the Earth", and his dating solidified the early 3rd century as the standard among most scholars. I've gone with that consensus. The biggest issue here is actually getting one’s hands on a copy of “Legion from the Shadows”. Titan and Heroic Signatures have been dropping hints that Bran in particular will be playing a significant role in upcoming mainline stories, which makes this section one of the more exciting ones to watch develop. To be fair, this has been very clear from the start. The Black Stone and Bran Mak Morn are intricately linked as Bran’s proverbial deal with the devil and his ultimate fate is centered on the Black Stone. They did publish a Bran Mak Morn short story “Red Waves of Slaughter”, but I’ve placed that story in the mid-1930s as that’s when its frame story takes place. I know that kind of goes against the grain of what’s been happening so far, especially when given consideration to the James Allison stories, but trust me on this. The story makes more sense set in the 30s than being placed with these tales here. It’s a great story. Steven Shrewsbury wrote a fun one there with a whole lot of fun references. We also have Cormac Mac Art, an Irish reaver operating in the same post Roman chaos as Bran. He's a bit different from Bran. Less tragic, more interested in survival than destiny. He was featured in his own story in Savage Sword #12, “Wolves”. Hopefully the first of many more. I feel like the fragment “Temple of Abomination” would be prime territory for a fun update. The Age of Faith and Steel    The old world is gone. The Picts have made their last stand. Rome has fallen. And in the long turbulent centuries that follow, the world Howard loved to write about takes shape. Vikings carving their names into history with axes, Crusaders marching toward holy wars that were anything but, Irish kings fighting to hold their islands against impossible odds, and wandering swordsmen who'd sell their skills to whoever was paying that week. Howard had genuine passion for this era and it shows. His historical fiction from this period is some of his most grounded and visceral writing, rooted in real events and real battles even when the supernatural creeps in at the edges. It’s good soup. Turlough Dubh O'Brien enters the timeline here, the brooding Irish warrior who Howard wrote three versions of the same story for. Granted, one of them takes place a bit later on the timeline. “Spears of Clontarf” and “The Gray God Passes” tell the same story, but one plays it a bit more straight than the other. These stories center on the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, the legendary clash where Brian Boru broke Viking power in Ireland, at the cost of his own life. "The Dark Man" connects directly to Bran Mak Morn's legacy, tying this era back to everything that came before in a way that rewards readers who've followed the full timeline. This is also where Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne Cycle takes root and flowers across several centuries. Averoigne is Smith's fictional province of medieval France. The Averoigne stories span from roughly the 12th century to the 16th, growing stranger and more melancholy as they go. They have ties back to Hyperborea and the Cthulhu Mythos here and there, but mostly they stand alone as some of the finest weird fiction of the pulp era. If you've enjoyed the Smith stories earlier in this timeline, these are even better. They pair particularly well with the Solomon Kane stories that follow. Both cycles are fundamentally about what happens when righteousness and darkness occupy the same world. Howard's historical characters multiply in this stretch. Cormac Fitzgeoffrey is a Crusader-era Irish mercenary. Brutal, pragmatic, and considerably less interested in holy righteousness than most of his contemporaries. He operates in the same tradition as Conan but grounded in actual history. He was featured in a story in Savage Sword #8. De Montour was the star of Howard’s second published story in “Weird Tales” and is notable because werewolves are frickin’ awesome. There are actually three De Montour stories, but “Wolfdung” is essentially Howard doing a parody of himself in that one. Also, it’s harder than sin to track down. Dark Agnes de Chastillon, a 16th century French swordswoman who refused every role the world tried to assign her, carved out her own existence through skill and sheer stubbornness in a time when that was genuinely dangerous. She has been featured in a few stories by Titan Comics. And was a major player in the “Battle of the Black Stone” event. Titan and Heroic Signatures have only lightly touched this era so far, which honestly makes it one of the most exciting sections of the timeline in terms of untapped potential. There's centuries of rich material here and barely any of it has been adapted. With that said, I highly doubt Titan will be touching upon Gottfried von Kalmbach and Red Sonya of Rogatino anytime soon due to the fun and confusing world of rights and licenses. So, at the tail end of the Age of Faith and Steel, we see the rise of the Puritan avenger himself: Solomon Kane. The chronology of Solomon Kane has been fiercely debated by scholars for decades. Historically, there have been a few competing birth years for Kane like Fred Blosser’s date of 1530 or Richard Toogood’s 1549. But for this timeline, I’ve gone with 1542. Why 1542? It makes his early continental adventures historically plausible, puts him in his absolute physical prime for his African odyssey, and gives his final stories a heavy, emotional weight without making him cartoonishly ancient. Our timeline kicks off in 1562 when Kane is 20 years old. “Master of the Hunt” by Patch Zircher takes place on All Hallow’s Eve, and “The Lair of Mari Lwyd” by Shaun Hamill takes place on Christmas. I love this as I’m a fan of holiday specials. By 1563, Kane made his way into Europe. In “Blood from a Stone” at 21 Kane finds himself as a soldier in the Carpathian Mountains during the Habsburg-Ottoman conflicts, working for Ferdinand I. This story has to take place before July 1564, as that’s when ol’ Ferdinand died. This story also ties directly into “The Battle of the Black Stone” event, placing Kane in Stregoicavar. We’ll be returning to Stregiocavar in a few hundred years in Howard’s “The Black Stone”. Next up is “The Serpent Ring” in 1566. This comic has a massive geographic sweep, taking Kane from an English galleon on the Barbary Coast, to Venice, and eventually down to Pungo Andongo in Angola. Kane’s later adventures in “Red Shadows” take place in the dense West African jungles, where he acts like he’s seeing the landscape for the first time. Because “The Serpent Ring” takes place in the rocky Angolan highlands, it preserves that continuity. After a four year gap, which likely contains some Mediterranean privateering, Kane enters 1570 with “Rattle of Bones”, “The Castle of the Devil” and “Death’s Black Rider”, fighting evil in the dark taverns and creepy castles of the Black Forest. In 1576, Kane is in Ireland for “The Wolves of Dundalk” (a date confirmed by the writer, Enrique Duenas, which actually helped me anchor a lot of this list!). At 34 years old, Kane is navigating the Elizabethan plantation era and the Desmond Rebellions while dealing with goblins. Fighting goblins is one thing, but doing it in a country steeped in extreme religious and political tension between English Protestantism and Gaelic Catholicism gives Kane’s service to the Queen a ton of heavy moral texture, but more importantly, goblins are cool and I like seeing Kane fight goblins. After his time in Ireland, Kane heads back to a life on the sea in “The Blue Flame of Vengeance”. This is typically placed a bit later in 1589 during the time of the Spanish Armada, but we have a hard date set by “The Battle of the Black Stone” event that kind of forces “Blue Flame” to be placed a few years earlier due to the lack of the Staff of Solomon which he has by 1584. Not going to lie, I completely blanked over this and had things placed a lot differently, but that’s the nature of doing a timeline sometimes. You hyperfixate on one thing and something super obvious goes unseen. By 1578, we hit a hard historical anchor: “The One Black Stain”. This poem ties Kane to Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe, specifically the execution of Thomas Doughty in Patagonia. Separated from Drake’s fleet in the Pacific, Kane ends up shipwrecked in Japan during the Azuchi-Momoyama period in 1579’s “Banquet of Souls”. Apparently, everyone in 16th century Japan speaks perfect English. It’s pulp fiction. Just roll with it. After finding his way back from the Pacific, we hit a massive milestone in 1581 with “Red Shadows”, Howard’s very first published Solomon Kane story. At roughly 40 years old, Kane is in the absolute prime of his life, fully formed as the relentless wandering avenger Howard originally envisioned. He tracks the French villain Le Loup from Europe all the way to the dense jungles of West Africa. This story is crucial not just because it's his debut, but because it marks his first meeting with the shaman N'Longa. Thus begins his great odyssey, encompassing classics like “The Moon of Skulls” and “The Hills of the Dead”, where he is gifted the Staff of Solomon (or Juju Staff) by his blood-brother, N'Longa. The poem “The Return of Sir Richard Grenville” has to take place sometime after 1591 as that’s when Grenville died. I’ve set it a year later, with Kane still in Africa. This then brings us to “Wings in the Night” where Kane finds the tattered remnants of a tribe called the Bogonda who have been recently attacked by a race of terrible winged bat men. Not a stretch to think that these malevolent beasts are the same that Conan dealt with so many thousands of years ago who possibly came here from the planet Almuric where they are known as the Yagas. There’s some pretty heavy connections to Atlantis in this tale too. It’s a classic. In the middle of all of this we have Ivan Sablianka, a Cossack hunting down a ruthless Ottoman corsair whom he may have a connection to from his past. This is “The Road of the Eagles” which was famously turned into a Conan tale by de Camp, and I kind of like that it takes place smack dab in the middle of the Solomon Kane stories. Next we have “The Hound of God” by Jonathan Maberry which is set in 1598 and forgets to include the staff entirely. A soft continuity error we'll just have to forgive. Considering the next few stories by Howard don’t feature the staff either, I suppose it’s actually really easy to forgive. This eventually leads us to a 63 year old Kane in Shaun Hamill’s “Suffer the Witch”. This novel opens brilliantly with references to the events of “Death's Black Riders”, using that encounter as a haunting memory from Kane's past. This sets the stage beautifully for an older Kane who is no longer in his prime. Called away back to England from hunting down a coven of vampires, Kane visits a Puritan town that has been plagued by a series of bizarre murders the townspeople blame on a so-called witch. This is a great book. The testimony of Solomon Kane in the trial of the young witch Sybil is absolutely outstanding. This is followed up by “Where the Whitehorn Meets the Black” where we see Kane still in England dealing with bizarre happenings in a tavern, which then leads to “The Skull in the Stars” and “The Red Right Hand of Doom” where Kane has traveled to Torkertown. The staff isn’t mentioned by Howard in these tales, and originally I had placed them much earlier, but there’s a reference to “the King’s men” in “Right Hand” and that kind of solidifies it has to be set after 1603. So, here we have Kane’s Torkertown duology. Finally, in 1610, a 68 year old Kane earns his “rest” in the poem “Solomon Kane's Homecoming” where retirement proves to be too boring for the Puritan Avenger who hits the road one last time. Solomon Kane rules. Pure and simple. A man out of time even within his own era, wandering without fixed purpose, kicking ass and taking names for the Lord. The fact that scholars, writers, and fans have spent decades arguing over his timeline is a testament to how fully realized Howard’s Puritan truly is. And with Titan Comics preparing to launch another Kane mini-series soon, I’m sure I’ll be updating this list again. Color me excited. The Wild Frontiers   The world expands. The age of Crusader knights and Puritan avengers is giving way to something newer and louder and considerably more gunpowdery. We’re treated to adventures on the high seas, horrors in the desert and the might of Breckinridge Elkins. Cowboys and pirates are the main focus of this timeframe and here’s something absolutely shocking: Howard wrote a lot of westerns. He was quite prolific when it came to westerns and near the end of his life it was becoming more and more his main focus for his writing. Several of his pirate tales are rewrites of previous adventures. “Swords of the Red Brotherhood” is “The Black Stranger” with a different coat of paint and “Blades of the Brotherhood” is “The Blue Flame of Vengeance” with Malachi Grimes instead of Solomon Kane. Howard rewriting his older stories to make a new story set in a different time frame goes hand in hand with his thoughts of the cyclical nature of time so it works well for the timeline. Now, when I say that Howard wrote a lot of westerns, I cannot stress to you how much this man wrote. We're talking weird westerns, straight westerns, funny westerns, tragic westerns, westerns that are barely westerns and westerns that are nothing but. Most prevalent of his western characters is the mighty Breckinridge Elkins. A modern day Hercules (well modern in 1885) and all of his stories are told to us, the reader, by Breckinridge in his own words. They’re outstanding and ridiculous. He was given a story in Savage Sword #7 where he fights a zombie witch bear. Howard would occasionally rewrite Breckinridge slightly and sell the result to a different magazine under a different name. These would be the adventures of Pike Bearfield and Buckner J. Grimes. Sometimes that cyclical nature of time happens within a five year period. There’s also Steve Allison AKA The Sonora Kid, who seemingly had adventures ranging from the 1870s to the 1920s. I’m going with Matthew Baugh’s research on this one and just saying that one is clearly Steve Allison Jr. The research and work of the great chronologers of the Newton Wold Theory are some of the best out there and it would be a foolhardy thing to ignore them. Now, clearly, if Titan or Heroic Signatures decide to make some stories for the Sonora Kid and begin laying down a new foundational year for stuff, I’ll be shifting things about. But for now, much respect and kudos to the Newton Wold Theory. As we edge closer to the 20th century, the creeping dread of Lovecraft’s tales begins slithering in. A lot of the dates for the Lovecraft stories have come from several different sources, but seem to be generally agreed upon by most scholars. We’re also introduced to Kirby O’Donnell AKA Ali el Ghazi. An adventurer in Afghanistan and although chronologically he is the first of the “modern day adventurers” from Howard, in all reality, El Borak was first. But that’s because El Borak was Howard’s first character. The dates for the Kirby O’Donnell and Lal Singh stories come from the research of Rick Lai and his excellent “Legend of El Borak” essay. Again, Newton Wold. The Age of Modern Dread         This section covers a lot. We have Howard’s Middle Eastern adventures, his Sonora Kid stories, pretty much the entirety of Lovecraft’s work and a whole lot of Clark Ashton Smith. This doesn’t even begin to include what Titan Comics and Heroic Signatures have been doing in this time either. As of writing this, I’ve already had to make a few changes based on the Free Comic Book Day 2026 issue of Conan the Barbarian where it establishes that “Skull-Face” takes place in 1924 and not 1927 as I originally had placed it. Granted, that date came from the research of Matthew Baugh so I can’t really make the claim to that, but that means I would expect a lot of these stories to shift here and there. Again, a lot of the dates for the Lovecraft stories come from James Bowman’s “Cthulhu Mythos Timeline”, or the Omnimulti Timeline. It’s been around for years now as I was going to it when I was in high school. It’s a fantastic resource and that timeline is far more complex than my long list. Getting into the specifics of this era alone is its own article really so forgive me if we just kind of take a quick looksie and move along. The way the stories are presented via this timeline gives us an interesting dynamic. The 20th century starts with high adventure across the deserts of the middle east and the declining wild west. From there, as the world falls into war, the horror of Lovecraft begins to seep in, and in response, we also see the rise of the boxer stories. As the 1920s are roaring, cosmic horror is becoming more and more a weekly event, and the heroes of the past have been relegated to hashish addicts and foul-mouthed sailors. And then, when the Great Depression hits, we get to start seeing the seedy and strange side of things with Steve Harrison. It’s a wild time. Clark Ashton Smith’s contributions to this era are many and plenty, giving us that same beautiful, but sardonic style that I’ve come to love. It pairs nicely with Lovecraft and Howard. John Kirowan and John Conrad are two big Howard characters of this timeframe and have played a part in two of the big events from Titan Comics. They’ve been featured in a handful of Howard’s Cthulhu Mythos adjacent stories, and are both gentlemen of high intellect. They seem to know more about the ancient pre-history of the world than most, and even what they know is very little, but that’s half the fun. If I was betting man I’d say they’re gonna play a part in the grand finale Grim Jim Zub has planned for us, someway, somehow. As we reach the end of this section, the stories begin to turn more and more into science-fiction, leading us into the future. The Future   The future as written by men born more than 100 years ago. You may notice some Howard titles are missing from these sections, and to be quite frank, this list requires you to turn a blind eye to a lot of blatant racism. A lot. I’ve included most stories, even if they’re not great and really racist, but there are a few I’m just not gonna even bother with that take place in the so-called future of 1999. This is me acknowledging them. With that said, Smith gave us a whole lot of delightful future tales that are just fucking grotesque and beautiful all at the same time. Smith’s Mars Cycle is an interesting take on a common idea, and his Xiccarph tales are hauntingly surreal. But the real stars of this section are Zothique. While his Hyperborea tales showed us an ancient civilization that was destroyed by ice, the Zothique tales give us the final era of Earth under a red sun. A terrible time with necromancers like Mmatmuor and Sodosma who attempt to enslave corpses in “The Empire of Necromancers”, or the sorcerer Namirrha who knew how to hold a grudge in “The Dark Eidolon”. Or the necromancer who used a horde of crabs to fight his enemies in “The Master of the Crabs”. Zothique is a strange time and place and it’s a beautiful capstone to a timeline composed of mostly weird tales. It felt only appropriate to end the timeline with Howard himself though. “The Gondarian Man” is a fun tale with a pretty predictable twist, but done really well and “The Last Laugh” which just seemed like the best ending. A dark haired warrior laughing as he takes on something far larger and more powerful than he. And that’s that. That’s the timeline. There’s a lot I didn’t cover, and to be fair, this was originally just made to cover the Titan Comics. It kind of ballooned out of control. I found myself looking for a discussion on the Titan Comics continuity that led me to Dan Yergert’s article on guessing the Titan continuity. From there I just kind of built off of that, and then starting adding more and more until somehow eventually winding up here, somewhere between the frozen jungles of Hyperborea and the dying red sun of Zothique, trying to argue that a foul-mouthed sailor and an ancient Cimmerian king and a Puritan avenger with a staff he got from a West African shaman all live in the same world. They do. I'm absolutely sure of it, and I think my dad would agree. And I'm already looking forward to updating this when Titan Comics proves me wrong about half of it. You can find Kenyon's full spreadsheet here.
Last year when I went to Texas, I wrote something up for it. But this time I figured I would just make a video of the experience. Travel with me here to my first (but certainly not last) Howard Days! Presenting at the Glenn Lord Symposium was the highlight of my week. My new compatriot Lion from Sword & Sorcery Book Club put together his own video here: Dog brother Evan from Stygian Dogs also has begun putting up a bunch of stuff over on his channel, too! Whereas Lion and I both did a single package video, he's posting stuff in bits, so watch his work! Below are some photos from the week! Chronologically Speaking is a series focused solely on placing the Conan of Cimmeria stories in timeline order. It's an analysis of only the text of Robert E. Howard's original Conan tales. I'm examining the stories one at a time, in publication order, to show explicit chronological notes to order the stories. "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," like many posthumously-published Conan stories, had a pretty circuitous path to publication. I spent a while talking about that path in a recent video I did called "The First(?) Conan Story: The Frost-Giant's Daughter." If you want to go in-depth about the very interesting publishing history of the story, you can watch that video, but here's the much-abbreviated version. "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" was written in March 1932, very soon after "The Phoenix on the Sword," making it the second Conan story written, and the first conceived as a Conan story. It was rejected by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright. Howard sent the story to the fanzine The Fantasy Fan in late 1933 after having made edits to it, retitling it "The Frost King's Daughter," before the zine published it under the title "Gods of the North" in March 1934. L. Sprague de Camp made further edits to the story and published his version in 1953 in the magazine Fantasy Fiction and then the Gnome Press book The Coming of Conan.  But the original, unadulterated Howard cut of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" would not be widely available until it was published in 1976 collection Rogues in the House from the publishing house Donald Grant. That's almost 45 years from pen to publication! It also really muddies the waters as to what version you're reading at any given time. Many places online will present the edited de Camp text or the original Howard text and yet attribute them to The Fantasy Fan's '34 version. But enough about our real-life placement of the story. This is one of Howard's shortest Conan stories (about 3000 words) and one of the most difficult to place chronologically. It's not overflowing with timeline markers and those that are there need to be interpreted pretty heavily. 
 While this is great art, a small part of me always bristles at dark depictions of this story. The story is blindingly bright. With just the above to guide us, I don't think that the story is very strongly anchored to any specific point in Conan's life. In this series, I ignore all paratext and focus only on the text of Howard's stories, but just for fun, let's see what others have said. John D. Clark's revised chronology places the story after "Queen of the Black Coast," but I think his reasoning is thin: Conan wears a horned helmet in both: "His horned helmet was such as was worn by the golden-haired Aesir of Nordheim." As I've explored before, I find it more likely that Conan wears or comes across or owns similar items like a horned helmet or red cloak more often than once. Howard himself had a word on the subject in his famous correspondence with Clark and P. Schuyler Miller that helped birth "A Probable Outline of Conan's Career" in 1936. Howard wrote, "There was a space of about a year between Vanarium and his entrance into the thief-city of Zamora. During this time he returned to the northern territories of his tribe, and made his first journey beyond the boundaries of Cimmeria. This, strange to say, was north instead of south. Why or how, I am not certain, but he spent some months among a tribe of the Aesir, fighting with the Vanir and the Hyperboreans, and developing a hate for the latter which lasted all his life and later affected his policies as King of Aquilonia. Captured by them, he escaped southward in time to make his debut in print." So it seems likely that Howard considered this the first story too, even prior to its official publication. Dale Rippke's Dark Storm Chronology, which I think is one of the best out there, opines that "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" may have been moved out of first place because of the rapey vibes, choosing a more palatable story to be the introduction if someone was choosing to read chronologically. Here's a fun side note: in the "Gods of the North" version published in The Fantasy Fan in 1934, Conan is swapped out for "Amra of Akbitana." This version, assuming Amra and Conan have the same life trajectory, would have to place the story much, much later in the chronology, since Amra states exactly how far he has wandered: "Far have I wandered, from Zingara to the Sea of Vilayet, in Stygia and Kush, and the country of the Hyrkanians; but a woman like you I have never seen." This would place the story at least after a mercenary and pirate period. Ignoring everyone else's two cents on the subject finally brings me to sharing my placement. I am indeed putting "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" as the very first Conan tale. This is not because I think it's strongly tied to his youth - it's not - but because it doesn't really fit anywhere better. Howard had conceived of Asgard and Vanaheim and the wars between their people in "The Phoenix on the Sword," the very first Conan story to be published, so perhaps he felt he'd expand on the idea in the second. In relation to other tales, it probably needs to happen before "Queen of the Black Coast," which I have listed sixth. But the characterization of Conan seems closer to the "God in the Bowl" Conan than any other, so I place it first. Here's the updated chronology:  Art by Clade Mirya I seem to be somewhat in the minority in thinking that "Jirel Meets Magic" is probably the worst of the Jirel of Joiry stories. It's a little bit hard to tell since there aren't a lot of people out there writing about Jirel, but most of the blogs and other reviews I can find really enjoy this piece, perhaps with the exception of Bobby Derie over at Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, who calls it "a very generic heroic fantasy story" and "a solid, enjoyable potboiler." Published in the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales, this is the third Jirel story that had made the page, following October 1934's "The Black God's Kiss" and December '34's "Black God's Shadow." Bobby includes a quote from an HP Lovecraft letter that I think really nails it: "July W T is pretty mediocre—though it was refreshing to see Hectograph Eddie with a new plot. The Moore item was excellent—even though it seems to shew a tendency of C L M’s to drop into a rut." I agree: Jirel seems to be in a bit of a rut.  Looking back through the Weird Tales letters column, "The Eyrie" (which I always want to pronounce like "eye-ree," but I commonly hear people pronounce it the exact same as "eerie" and the WT staff themselves apparently pronounced it as a rhyme with "dairy"), it's clear that readers contemporary to publication also really loved this story. I love old-fashioned letters columns like this. I imagine that in a time like the 1930s, it provided a real sense of community in readership and a total rush if you happened to see your name published in your favorite mag. Clifford Shine of my home of Denver wrote in the September '35 issue, "My favorite stories in the July issue are Jirel Meets Magic by C. L. Moore, and The Avenger from Atlantis by Edmond Hamilton. My two favorite authors are Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore." B.M. Reynolds from up in Massachusetts wrote, "C. L. Moore, with a long line of successes already to her credit, certainly gave us the best to date in Jirel Meets Magic. Moore's stories are following, more and more, a trend toward sheer fantasy, of which there is a pitiful lack in present-day fiction. Parts of this story were strongly reminiscent of A. Merritt's imaginative descriptions, and I hardly believe a better compliment could be given a writer than to compare one with the incomparable." Carleton C. Ames from Minneapolis wrote, "I have just finished the July 1935 issue. The leading story therein, in my opinion, is C. L. Moore's Jirel Meets Magic. As far as that goes, Moore's stories are the best that you have published." A letter-writer known only as C. B. H. from NYC said, "Jirel Meets Magic was the best Jirel story, in my estimation, that I have ever read. Jirel is my favorite character." And sometimes writers ignorant of the fact that C. L. stood for "Catherine Louise" would sometimes assume that Moore was a guy while heaping praise on her, as Jerry Laird from Topeka does in the August '35 Eyrie: "I find your magazine highly entertaining, especially those masterpieces of fantasy by C. L. Moore. His inimitable style and word pictures, combined with an unbounded imagination, certainly put him in a class with Merritt and Lovecraft. Julbi, in my opinion, surpassed anything else he has written, with the exception, perhaps, of Shambleau." I wish I felt the same way about "Jirel Meets Magic." In speaking with modern-day Jirel author Molly Tanzer recently, she noted that in every Jirel story, Jirel enters some kind of magical land (except in one of hers!), and you can see that pattern here. In the first two stories, she crossed over into a hellish dreamland deep underground. In this one, she goes into a purple-skied world through a magic window. Soon, we'll see her go into The Dark Land and then into Hellsgarde, but all in good time. The setting here is, at least in my estimation, not quite as alien-beautiful as her underground hellscape or as utterly terrifying as the Dark Land, or as indelible as Hellsgarde. Unfortunately, I don't find Jarisme to be quite as engaging of an antagonist either, nor Giraud, probably because their emotional stakes with Jirel aren't ratcheted super fucking high like they are in previous stories. Also, what's with this title? Jirel has met magic before, at least twice. Why is this the one that's called "Jirel Meets Magic?" I know it's not that C.L. Moore had forgotten- page 36 of the story says, "Jirel shrugged after a moment's bewilderment. She had met magic before." Don't count me a total naysayer, though. This story still has a bit of fun to be had. Specifically, it continues to show off Moore's skills as a fantastic character artist. Jirel's early exchange with Jarisme in which Jirel "smiled her sweetest, most poisonous smile" is filled with great character moments. The two of them spar verbally for a moment, and Jirel shows that she would make a decent battle rapper, responding to a question essentially asking "You think I can be bought?" with "You will forgive me. At the first glance at you I did not think your price could be high..."
I've always wondered if Jirel was less of a favorite character to Moore than Northwest Smith, and so perhaps she was a little less invested in the yellow-eyed maiden of Joiry than other characters. Either way, even C. L. Moore's most mediocre is pretty much anyone else's best.  XNOO is a new sword & sorcery mag from the Merry Mushmen, and the Kickstarter goes live soon! They hit me up a few months ago and wanted to snag two pieces of my writing for it! I just got the unedited proofs today, and it's a wild feeling to see a printed byline (my first!) and original art! There's a focus on comics, so there's tons of cool original comic art in here! I hope you check it out! Here's a link to the Kickstarter.Chronologically Speaking is a series focused solely on placing the Conan of Cimmeria stories in timeline order. It's an analysis of only the text of Robert E. Howard's original Conan tales. I'm examining the stories one at a time, in publication order, to show explicit chronological notes to order the stories. If you've been following this series, you know that we're now past the end of stories which Robert E. Howard saw published in his lifetime. Like the Nestor synopsis, better known under the title "The Hall of the Dead," given to it by L. Sprague de Camp, was not released in its original REH form for decades. Likewise, "The God in the Bowl" was out for decades, with heavy de Camp edits, for over two decades before the original was published. The de Camp version made the page in the magazine Space Science Fiction (a fitting place to publish it, since it is definitely a science fiction story set in space) in September 1952, though it had been written as just the third Conan story, all the way back in 1932. The version that appeared in Space Science Fiction was heavily edited by L. Sprague de Camp, and the original Howard version wouldn't see print until 1975 in the Donald Grant "The Tower of the Elephant" publication. As a reminder, I'm not only using the Howard version for this column.  This story is quite a bit shorter than most of Howard's Conan stories, but is really interesting, chronologically speaking. There's quite a bit of debate about the earliest Conan stories ("The Frost-Giant's Daughter" and this one in particular are rather controversial) and which order the thief stories occur in. The traditional wisdom is that the thief stories take place in an east-to-west direction: that is, we go from Zamora to Corinthia to Nemedia ("The Tower of the Elephant," "The Hall of the Dead," "Rogues in the House," then "The God in the Bowl"). That's the way I thought it should go, and it's the way I followed when I did my first chronology. But I think a close reading of the stories supports the idea that it should go from west-to-east, starting with Numalia in Nemedia before going to the unnamed Corinthian city-state, and finishing in Zamora the Accursed, AKA the City of Thieves. I also think that the pendulum is shifting in this direction, as it appears to be the chronology that Heroic Signatures and Titan Comics are following as well. Here are our chronological hints:
I think the traditional wisdom stated up top makes a little more sense if you're also including the L. Sprague de Camp material in your chronology- "Legions of the Dead" and "The Thing in the Crypt" send Conan more eastward across Hyperborea, but the fact that Conan seems so naïve (I love the line in which Arus indignantly tells him "I am the watchman, knave!" That shit is hilarious) and poor at thieving puts this story more to the front. If you'll notice, this moves "Rogues in the House" up several placement as well. Additionally, I think there's a not-insignificant desire to put "The Tower of the Elephant" as the first thief story (if not the first Conan story altogether) because it's such a good one and works as a fantastic introduction to the character and the world, but if we're applying a formalist approach to the chronology, we have to ignore that. I have to place it as the first of the thief stories. That brings our chronology to this:
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AuthorHey, I'm Dan. This is my project reading through the career of everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, in chronological order. 
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