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Chronologically Speaking, Part Eighteen: "The God in the Bowl"

5/18/2026

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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.
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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:
  • ​We are told right away that Conan is a youth: "Arus saw a tall powerfully built youth, naked but for a loincloth, and sandals strapped high about his ankles. His skin was burned brown as by the suns of the wastelands, and Arus glanced nervously at the broad shoulders, massive chest and heavy arms. A single look at the moody, broad-browed features told the watchman that the man was no Nemedian. From under a mop of unruly black hair smoldered a pair of dangerous blue eyes. A long sword hung in a leather scabbard at his girdle."
  • Conan's characterization throughout paints him as someone who is very new to civilization. He's a bit of a rube at times: "The stranger started. 'Why did you do that?' he asked. 'It will fetch the watchman.' 'I am the watchman, knave,' answered Arus." Conan later says, "It was dark when I saw the watchman outside the Temple. When I saw him here I thought he was a thief too. It was not until he jerked the watch-bell rope and lifted his bow that I knew he was the watchman."
    • The thing that is a little tough to square is that Conan speaks Nemedian "with a barbaric accent." So Conan has been here long enough to learn some Nemedian, but not long enough to figure out how guard shifts work. This is probably just what Howard needed to do in order to make sure characters understood one another, but is admittedly a little bit of a blind spot.
  • Conan's a pretty sub-par thief so far: "'I came to steal,' sullenly answered the other. 'To steal what?' rapped the Inquisitor. 'Food,' the reply came after an instant's hesitation." His natural Cimmerian climbing skills are serving him, but he is definitely a novice. He hadn't even planned an alibi!
  • This might be one of Conan's first encounters with sorcery and seems struck a little dumb by the titular god in the titular bowl: "Conan stared in wonder at the cold classic beauty of that countenance, whose like he had never seen among the sons of men. Neither weakness nor mercy nor cruelty nor kindness, nor any other human emotion was in those features. They might have been the marble mask of a god, carved by a master hand, except for the unmistakable life in them—life cold and strange, such as the Cimmerian had never known and could not understand." That last bit strikes me as the most important: he's encountering forces that he has never known and could not understand.
  • The story ends with Conan fleeing Numalia: "Then the full horror of it all rushed over the Cimmerian, and he fled, nor did he slacken his headlong flight until the spires of Numalia faded into the dawn behind him."

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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1. The God in the Bowl
2. Rogues in the House
3. The Tower of the Elephant
4. The Nestor synopsis ("The Hall of the Dead")
5. Queen of the Black Coast
6. Xuthal of the Dusk
7. Iron Shadows in the Moon
8. The Devil in Iron
9. The People of the Black Circle
10. A Witch Shall Be Born
11. The Man-Eaters of Zamboula
12. Black Colossus
13. The Pool of the Black One
14. The Servants of Bit-Yakin
15. Red Nails
16. Beyond the Black River
17. The Phoenix on the Sword
18. The Scarlet Citadel
19. The Hour of the Dragon

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The Many Possible Sequels to "A WITCH SHALL BE BORN"

5/11/2026

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Is there a Conan story that Robert E. Howard wrote with more possible sequels than his 1934 yarn "A Witch Shall Be Born?" I've gone on record several times to note that the story is far from my favorite: its momentum halts a little too hard when the epistolary section from Astreas the Nemedian kicks in. But there's something that's very compelling about the story. Conan is at his most un-killable. The supporting cast of Salome, Taramis, and Olgerd Vladislav are some of the best in the canon. And, notably, its vengeful ending is one for the ages.

​But the story ends with Conan simply riding away.
"Conan lifted his reins and rode toward the river that shone like silver in the morning sun. Behind him the white-clad riders struck into a trot; the gaze of each, as he passed a certain spot, turned impersonally and with the desert man's lack of compassion, toward the cross and the gaunt figure that hung there, black against the sunrise. Their horses' hoofs beat out a knell in the dust. Lower and lower swept the wings of the hungry vultures."
Where does he go? I've argued that he spends time as chief of the Zuagirs before ending his desert raider tenure in "Shadows in Zamboula." But I'm far from the only person who's tried to explore what happens next. The space left open by the narrative's ending has been compelling for a great number of Conan pastiche writers, from 1955 until today. With a brand-new possible sequel to the story, I thought it was time to examine the many possible sequels.

The Flame Knife by Robert E. Howard & L. Sprague de Camp (1955)

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The earliest sequel to "A Witch Shall Be Born" did not begin its life that way. The Flame Knife is one of the four Howard stories that de Camp edited to insert Conan, and all of those are pretty good, probably because there's still so much Howard in them. De Camp makes the wise choice of bringing back "A Witch Shall Be Born's" Olgerd Vladislav as the enemy for this, even though it's otherwise unconnected to "Witch." Apparently, Olgerd is still pretty bitter about getting deposed in his original story.

There are some good fantasy elements and there's a very tense standoff in a lost mountain city (great setting!), so I actually really like this one even though I know de Camp's work isn't everyone's cup of tea.

The Flame Knife was then adapted into Savage Sword #31 in 1978.

"Black Tears" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter (1968)

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The next sequel came from the earliest Conan pastiche writers: the duo of L. Sprague de Camp yet again, along with Lin Carter. "Black Tears" first appeared in Conan the Wanderer in 1968 and is set about a year after its predacessor. Gary Romeo over at his blog brings up that this one might be better served to have its byline listed with Carter's name first rather than the traditional de Camp / Carter; it looks like this was primarily a Carter yarn with just a few edits and suggestions provided by Sprague.

"Black Tears" is a breezy, if rather forgettable sequel to "Witch" that has some solid prose in it but ultimately is ripped off from a Thongor story a little too hard, and sees Conan dispatch his final enemy a little bit too easily. It almost reminds me of a version of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," but set in the desert rather than the snows. 

"Black Tears" was adapted into comic form in Savage Sword #35.

"The Sleeper Beneath the Sands" in Marvel's Savage Sword #6 (1975)

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After "A Witch Shall Be Born" was adapted by Roy Thomas and John Buscema in Savage Sword #5, the next two issues would each feature possible sequels to it. The first is "The Sleeper Beneath the Sands," written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Sonny Trinidad, who isn't a big name in the Conan world but did contribute to a few issues here and there.

"Sleeper" tends to repeat some of the ideas from its predecessor, with Conan getting strung up out in the desert once again, and it brings back Olgerd Vladislav who Conan doesn't kill, but decides not to save. I feel like this one would've done a little bit better if it was the backup story behind a more complete feature, but it never really develops its own identity.

"Citadel at the Center of Time" in Marvel's Savage Sword #7 (1975)

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We have arrived. This story, which is actually the earliest issue of Savage Sword I own, absolutely fucking rules. Conan has moved the Zuagirs west toward Akbitana following "Witch." Pulling on some of Robert E. Howard's common themes of rapid human evolution and devolution, Conan gets a tour through time in the basement of the Citadel at the Center of Time. He sees dinosaurs, cultures from his future (our past), and Buscema's pencils embellished by Alcala's inks do the whole thing beautifully.

​This is one of my favorite Zuagir raider-set Savage Sword stories.

"Mirror of the Manticore" in Marvel's Savage Sword #58 (1980)

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This short backup story which appeared after the end of Roy Thomas's three-issue adaptation of Conan and the Sorcerer is 100% focused on Olgerd Vladislav and how he might have survived the events of "The Sleeper Beneath the Sands." It's short and simple, but I'll never say no to more of ol' Olgerd.

​Through some magic trickery, he's able to heal his deathly wounds sustained in Savage Sword #6 and regain power with the Zuagirs. I do think it's a little odd to present a short epilogue to a story... fifty-two issues after that first story appeared.

"Dwellers of the Oasis" in Titan's Savage Sword #14 (2026)

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While Jim Zub is the lead writer of the current Conan the Barbarian title from Titan, he's done only a few pieces for Savage Sword, though he's done a variety of things from full features to prose to wordless backup stories. Issue #14 featured maybe my favorite of his SSOC projects so far: "Dwellers of the Oasis." With Conan still reeling from his crucifixion, he's in the desert with his hands wrapped tight. After falling into a lost underground (undersand?) city, he encounters some very nice people with no ulterior motives whatsover.

The splash page that artist Ivan Gil does to introduce both Conan and us to this underground civilization is fantastic and the environment is sufficiently creepy thanks to the work of both Jim and Ivan. One of Jim's writing hallmarks is his embedding of subtle themes into his raucous adventures, and this one seems to be dealing with the concept of moving forward and healing in spite of intense pain, adding some layers to an already-fantastic comic book. I hope we see more from the team-up of Jim Zub and Ivan Gil soon.
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Chronologically Speaking, Part Seventeen: The Nestor Synopsis ("The Hall of the Dead")

5/4/2026

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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.
With "Red Nails," which I covered last time in this column, I reached the end of the Conan of Cimmeria stories that were published in Weird Tales during Robert E. Howard's lifetime. For a time, most of the rest of Howard's Conan stories were hidden away in a trunk. Years went by without a new story to be published, except for some items like the "Hyborian Age" essay in 1938. Sixteen years passed before a new narrative would come out.

I've been re-reading the Conan stories in publication order for this series, and now that I'm to the posthumous publications, I've got to make a decision: do I read them in the order that any version of them came out in, or by order of when we saw the original, unadulterated text penned by Howard? So many of these stories were heavily edited by L. Sprague de Camp or others and then sometimes had decades between the edited version becoming public and Howard's original story debuting later. Picking one or the other doesn't really matter for this exercise, but since I'm focusing so heavily on Howard's original intent, I'll be picking the order in which the Howard original was published. 
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Literary agent Glenn Lord acquired the Howard trunk full of thousands of unpublished pages and L. Sprague de Camp had the original synopsis for this story by 1966. L. Sprague de Camp's version, entitled "The Hall of the Dead" was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as early as 1967 and then was reprinted in the Lancer paperback Conan that same year.

The following decade, Howard's original synopsis, referred to by Conan scholars as "The Nestor synopsis" since Howard's version is untitled, was printed in the fanzine Fantasy Crossroads #1 by the Graceland College Club. Due to its unfinished nature, it has largely been overshadowed by the L. Sprague de Camp edit.

My copy of The Complete Chronicles of Conan came with the original Howard version as one of the last stories inside, but it puts de Camps's "Hall of the Dead" title at the top. Let's take a look at any chronological clues in this short piece:
  • Conan is acting as a thief in Zamora. A section of the city is referred to as "The Maul," which likely refers to the same Maul from "The Tower of the Elephant." Since the city is unnamed, it is possible that it's not Zamora the City of Thieves and that there are multiple Zamorian cities that have a slum section called "The Maul," the same way many cities have a generically-named "Red Light District" or "Chinatown" or "downtown." I think it's most likely that this city is the same as the one in "The Tower of the Elephant."
    • de Camp moves this to Shadizar the Wicked, but there's no reason to believe Howard had this in mind at all.
    • Additionally, one common hypothesis about Zamora is that the City of Thieves has no name (it's not officially "Zamora, Zamora" like "New York, New York" in this hypothesis), and this city matching many other aspects of the one in "The Tower of the Elephant" lends some credence to that idea. 
  • Conan is apparently a more skilled thief than we've seen before, as he has stolen from noblemen and merchants in the nearby Zamorian city, enraging the upper class.
  • Conan opts to allow Nestor to take all the coins and gold in the treasure room while only taking a jade serpent and set of green gems for himself. This strikes me as rather naïve, or perhaps informed by what Conan had seen of the Heart of the Elephant in Yara's tower. 
  • Conan escapes the unnamed city with a young woman, but not with Nestor, so I find it unlikely that the Gunderman mentioned in the beginning of "Rogues in the House" is necessarily the same one as Nestor. That Gunderman was specifically stated to be a deserter, but Nestor is not acting in the service of the military in Gunderland. He's a mercenary, not a conscripted solider. It doesn't really change the placement of "Rogues in the House" or anything right now, but I have a feeling I'll be moving it soon...
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With the above (which isn't much!) it seems like the only real placement we have that makes sense is that this story immediately follows "The Tower of the Elephant," with an implied time of several months elapsing between them so that Conan can become a much more skilled thief. 

Next time, we'll be looking at yet another thief story in "The God in the Bowl."

Here's the updated chronology:

1. The Tower of the Elephant
2. The Nestor synopsis
3. Rogues in the House
4. Queen of the Black Coast
5. Xuthal of the Dusk
6. Iron Shadows in the Moon
7. The Devil in Iron
8. The People of the Black Circle
9. A Witch Shall Be Born
10. The Man-Eaters of Zamboula
11. Black Colossus
12. The Pool of the Black One
13. The Servants of Bit-Yakin
14. Red Nails
15. Beyond the Black River
16. The Phoenix on the Sword
17. The Scarlet Citadel
18. The Hour of the Dragon

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Jirel of Joiry: "Black God's Shadow"

5/1/2026

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I'm going to get sentimental today. So if that's not for you, I understand.

I knew this guy in college named Matt Stevenson. My wife actually knew him a lot better than I did. Matt was Jewish and everyone knew that about him, partially because he wore a kippah daily. There were a lot of Matts at her college, so people would refer to him as "You know, Matt" and cup their hand on the back of the crown of their head.

This is relevant because it became clear during their college years that one of their acquaintances, a guy they'd had classes with and hung with occasionally, was a Nazi. I'm not using that just as a pejorative; his name was Derek Black and he was the son of Don Black, the founder of Stormfront, which was (and maybe still is) the largest white supremacist website in the world. His godfather was David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
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When the news on their college forum broke, Derek got  ostracized pretty much immediately. This was a very liberal south Florida college, so his social circle shrank to effectively nothing overnight. A car the same make and model as Derek's (but not actually Derek's) was vandalized, my wife remembers flipping him off from across the quad.

Matt was a unique thinker, though. He found it odd how Derek had made friends at their school, even without disclosing his beliefs, which he had gone from tacitly not-bringing-up to completely concealing during his time at school. He'd noticed that Derek had become close with international students, queer students, and, you know, a Jewish guy like him. He had an idea.

Matt hosted Shabbat dinners in his dorm frequently. He'd invite friends over, they would eat, play some board games, and have the kind of heady philosophy discussions you only want to have when you're in college. So one week, he invited Derek over. He wasn't sure he'd come, but Matt explicitly instructed everyone to not bring it up if he did, and just see how things went. Much to his surprise, Derek came, bearing a bottle of wine to share. 
To everyone's surprise, Derek came back the next week, and then the next. They weren't so sure what to think at first: was Derek cultivating a group of multicultural friends to use as a shield when people called him a racist? Was he trying to get dirt on them to use later? Surprisingly, no. After a while, Matt started bringing up Derek's beliefs to him and discussing. Over time, Derek not only softened his beliefs, but began to outright reject his upbringing. He told his dad he didn't want to call into his propaganda radio show anymore. He deleted his accounts on the white nationalist boards he was on. 

Matt became one of his closest friends and Derek has gone on to become an anti-racist speaker and activist. He changed his name and a whole lot else, too.
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I teach a quarter-long Holocaust literature unit every school year to 8th graders, and one time we interviewed Matt as a part of it. Why did he take the time to show kindness and patience to Derek, who deserved it least of all? Matt told me that as part of his faith, he believes that everyone has a spark of pure goodness at their core, put there by there creator. This has stuck with me ever since, and I find a lot of truth in it even as an atheist who was raised Lutheran. I try to remember what Matt told me, and to keep that spark of pure goodness in mind when I talk to people.

I think C.L. Moore understood this concept and baked it into Jirel of Joiry, most specifically in her second story "Black God's Shadow," published in the December 1934 Weird Tales, just a few months after "The Black God's Kiss."

"Black God's Shadow" is a straight sequel to "The Black God's Kiss" and picks up in the immediate aftermath of the first story. Something within Jirel rumbles with something like regret for how she quite literally damned Guilluame's soul with the magic of the black god's kiss (I mean, Guilluame damned himself plenty, but it was Jirel who kind of cut the brakes on his one-way ride into to Hell).
Jirel returns to the underground dreamworld, which has morphed to maintain its creepy, off-putting nature. Even though we've been there once before, it doesn't feel like we can ever anticipate the next thing Jirel will encounter.

That brings me to where I started this blog post. When Jirel finds Guilluame, we get this passage:
"And what subtle torment the black god's kiss had wrought upon him! To dwell in the full, frightful realization of his own sins, chained to the actual manifestation, suffering eternally in the obscene shape that was so undeniably himself—worst and lowest self. It was just, in a way. He had been a harsh and cruel man in life. But the very fact that such punishment was agony to him proved a higher self within his complex soul—something noble and fine which writhed away from the unspeakable thing—himself. So the very fineness of him was  weapon to torture his soul, turned against him even as his sins were turned."
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Guilluame deserves his punishment: the text says that what he's writing in is nothing but his own sins. But Jirel fights this ugliness with all of her positive emotions and is clearly at times protected in the story by her very human dignity. She looks into evil periodically and knows intuitively that it cannot touch her because of her goodness. 

Now, Jirel's not perfect (that's what makes her interesting!) but she has lots of goodness within her. I was talking to current Jirel author Molly Tanzer recently and she brought up that some people dismiss Jirel as being just a "girl who fell in love with her rapist." I think that's far too simplistic of a reading. In this story, Jirel is seeing the humanity of someone who didn't deserve it. She does this not because Guilluame isn't bad, but because she is good. I have a hard time imagining any other pulp hero doing that. I also find it hard to believe that with morally-moving stories like this (Is it just me? Could be.) that people can dismiss all of pulp as a format or S&S as a genre out of hand. Philosophically, this reminds me of David Foster Wallace, Superman, or certain scripture.

"Black God's Shadow" reads as a story about finding peace within yourself by moving on and forgiving those who've hurt you in the past, completely disconnected from whether or not that person deserves it, since it's not about them at all. If you're just referring to the plot events of the story, "Black God's Shadow" is has the least going on out of any Jirel story, but the character work within it and many of the lines (the black god was "coldly inimical to all things human") more than make up for any sort of lack of sword & sorcery romping. 
Please don't get me wrong or take me too literally here; I'm not saying that the way to defeat the Nazis is to befriend them. I'm not saying that if someone traumatizes you that you need to forgive them. Far from it, in fact. But I am pointing out that there is a higher ideal towards which we can strive. It's probably unrealistic in most situations in life, but it does cause me to get a little worked up and feel connected to a 92 year-old pulp story, which speaks to C.L. Moore's skill as a writer. She puts a lot of heart into Jirel, which still beats nearly a century later.

Cora Buhlert, the writer whose work introduced me to C.L. Moore, has a tremendous piece about this story that is far more eloquent than mine. Read it here.
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Chronologically Speaking, Part Sixteen: "Red Nails"

4/27/2026

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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.
"Red Nails" was the first Conan of Cimmeria story to be published after Robert E. Howard's untimely death in June of 1936. The July, August/September, and October issues of Weird Tales serialized "Red Nails" in three parts, with tributes to Howard in The Eyrie sections of the last two, in both poetry and prose form. It was the cover story for the July issue, featuring a Margaret Brundage cover that, as always, looks great.
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One reader wrote, before hearing of Howard's death:
"Glad to hear that Robert E. Howard is coming to the fore with another Conan story. I was afraid the rascally old barbarian was going to sink down in slothful ease upon the Aquilonian throne and not furnish R.E.H. with any more weird adventure material, but I guess you can't keep that wild Cimmerian blood quiet; so more power to him."
I'm sure that reader was very sad to hear of the passing of Howard, but luckily, this isn't the final Conan story we have to cover, as many had an arduous posthumous journey to publication.

Similar to The Hour of the Dragon, there are many lines in "Red Nails" in which Conan just outright states the different things that he's done in his life, which makes it pretty easy to place, but so many clues make this a bit of a longer one! ​

Starting in Chapter 2 of the story, the chronological clues really start flowing. Here's what we've got:
  • Conan states that he has spent extensive time in sea ports, meaning that he has had at least one pirate period before this story's events: "As for being penniless—what rover isn't, most of the time? I've squandered enough gold in the sea-ports of the world to fill a galleon."
  • He states that he has recently been with the Free Companions in the western ocean near Zingara and Shem: "The Zingarans sank my last ship off the Shemite shore—that's why I joined Zarallo's Free Companions."
    • As laid out mostly in "Queen of the Black Coast," the coastline of the western Hyborian Age world seems to run (from north to south): the Pictish Wilderness, Argos, Zingara, Shem, Stygia, Kush, and then the other Black Kingdoms with names we don't know.
  • Conan and Valeria are in either the southern reaches of of Stygia or the northern reaches of Kush, with Conan stating these two lines:
    • "I've been this far south, but not this far east. Many days' traveling to the west will bring us to the open savannas, where the black tribes graze their cattle. I have friends among them." 
    • "Who'd have thought to find a city here? I don't believe the Stygians ever penetrated this far."
    • This suggests that Conan thinks it's more likely they're in the nation of Kush rather than in Stygia. However, the story seems to imply that the ancient architecture of the city of Xuchotl was mostly likely built by the ancestors of the Stygians. 
    • Additionally, Conan is very familiar with survivalism in this region as evidenced by his line to Valeria: "'If we ate that we wouldn't need the bite of a dragon,' he grunted. 'That's what the black people of Kush call the Apples of Derketa. Derketa is the Queen of the Dead. Drink a little of the juice, or spill it on your flesh, and you'd be dead before you could tumble to the foot of this crag.'" So Conan is clearly culturally familiar with the people and flora of this region. This and the preceding line about having friends among the black tribes suggests that this story takes place after "Queen of the Black Coast" and possibly other southern-set stories like "Pool of the Black One."
  • Conan outright states that he was a kozak before he was a pirate: "I was a kozak before I was a pirate." This is where we run into some debate about the order of this story and others. Some Conan readers interpret this line to mean that Conan was a kozak immediately preceding this piratical period. I don't think this is necessarily the case though, as Conan merely says this to furnish the idea to Valeria that he has some experience riding horses, unlike most pirates. The whole speech goes: "Your posterior must have been sore, too, after that long ride. You pirates aren't used to horseback... I was a kozak before I was a pirate... They live in the saddle. I snatch naps like a panther watching beside the trial for a deer to come by." This obviously places "Red Nails" at least after the kozak stories in his mid-career.
  • In that same scene, he says that he was once a Zuagir raider: "Skin your teeth in that pear. It's food and drink to a desert man. I was a chief of the Zuagirs once—desert men who live by plundering the caravans." So the story clearly follows the desert caravan days of stories like "The Man-Eaters of Zamboula."
    • Another line likely signals Conan's Zuagir days, but not by name: He states, "“I've looted enough from the Khitan caravans to know what I'm talking about, that's jade!" This could also be reference to his Turanian mercenary period.
  • To finish that conversation, Conan states that he's never been a king: "'I've never been king of an Hyborian kingdom,' he grinned, taking an enormous mouthful of cactus. 'But I've dreamed of being even that. I may be too, some day. Why shouldn't I?'" So obviously, we're set prior to the king stories at the end of his life.
  • Conan appears to have been to the nation of Punt, which means this story probably takes place after "The Servants of Bit-Yakin:" "'Green fire-stones,' growled Conan. 'That's what the people of Punt call them. They're supposed to be the petrified eyes of those prehistoric snakes the ancients called Golden Serpents. They glow like a cat's eyes in the dark. At night this hall would be lighted by them, but it would be a hellishly weird illumination.'"
  • Conan also clearly references the events of "The People of the Black Circle" and his time in Vendhya: "I was a war-chief of the Afghulis who live in the Himelian mountains above the borders of Vendhya. These people favor the Kosalans. But why should Kosalans be building a city this far to the west?"
  • Conan and Valeria finish the story headed west toward the coast: "'It's a long way to the coast,' she said presently, withdrawing her lips from his. 'What matter?' he laughed. 'There's nothing we can't conquer. We'll have our feet on a ship's deck before the Stygians open their ports for the trading season. And then we'll show the world what plundering means!'"
It seems most likely that Conan and Valeria do make it to the coast and parting sometime thereafter. Eventually, Conan works his way up north toward Aquilonia where he takes a job as a scout.

Here's the chronology thus far:

1. The Tower of the Elephant
2. Rogues in the House
3. Queen of the Black Coast
4. Xuthal of the Dusk
5. Iron Shadows in the Moon
6. The Devil in Iron
7. The People of the Black Circle
8. A Witch Shall Be Born
9. The Man-Eaters of Zamboula
10. Black Colossus
11. The Pool of the Black One
12. The Servants of Bit-Yakin
13. Red Nails
14. Beyond the Black River
15. The Phoenix on the Sword
16. The Scarlet Citadel
17. The Hour of the Dragon

Included below are some items from the "Red Nails" issues addressing Howard's death.
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The first page of "The Eyrie" in the August/September issue, breaking the news of Robert E. Howard's death to Weird Tales readers
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The poem by R.H. Barlow following the conclusion of "Red Nails" in the October 1936 issue of Weird Tales
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Digitizing Images of Karl Edward Wagner's Kane from CHACAL Issue #1

4/23/2026

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A few months back, I bought a copy of an old sword & sorcery magazine called Chacal at the Bizarre Bazaar in Fort Collins, CO. I bought it because it had the names of Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore, Frank Frazetta, and Karl Edward Wagner on the cover, which is a total murderer's row.

Within is a series of plates of Kane story scenes by artist Jeff Easley, who would go on to do tons of D&D art and more. I can't find these images anywhere, so I thought I would digitize them.
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Plate One in the image above is titled, "...For Kane's eyes were the eyes of Death." This refers to Wagner's version of the "Mark of Kane." Within his stories, Kane's eyes are an intense ice blue which no person can look into without knowing his true nature. They make people pretty uncomfortable. His story "Sing a Last Song of Valdese" describes Kane and his eyes like this: "​Legend describes him as a man of powerful build, seemingly a warrior in his prime years. His hair is red and he is left-handed… But his eyes are his mark. The eyes of Kane are blue, and in them glows the mad gaze of a ruthless killer. No man may look into Kane’s eyes and not know him."
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Our next plate here is titled, "He hurled it aside and jerked his sword up." I don't remember this scene specifically, but the winter setting makes me think it's from "Reflections for the Winter of My Soul."
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Plate Three is titled, "It's a haunted night... Death hovers near," which I believe is from the short story "Mirage," but could be "The Dark Muse."
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Plate Four is titled, "Thus died Abel!" I think this is "Mirage" yet again since he fights a werewolf in that one.
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Chronologically Speaking, Part Fifteen: "The Hour of the Dragon"

4/20/2026

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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.
As Robert E. Howard's career progressed, diversifying his writing into other markets to make more money became a larger and larger concern. As​ Weird Tales would not be published in the UK until 1942, putting a book together and selling it in England was part of Howard's plan to break into a new, untapped market. He submitted a short story collection in 1933 which was rejected, and then had several false starts on original novels before crafting The Hour of the Dragon​ in 1934.  According to Willard Oliver, he began the novel on St. Patrick's Day and wrote furiously for two months.

Howard essentially cannibalized many of his best Conan of Cimmeria stories (a practice that wasn't unique to him), especially "The Scarlet Citadel," to create his only novel-length Conan adventure, but as I've said before, it reads more like a victory lap than an annoying retread.
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"Despite having two stories to draw upon, Howard still spent long days writing and rewriting the novel, for in the end, according to [author Patrice] Louinet, 'Howard wrote five versions of his story, with several parts of these rewritten two or three times.' Although Howard liked to lay claim to the Conan stories coming so easily to him, that was a tall tale unto itself, for Howard worked incredibly hard on his stories, this novel especially." 
​
-Willard Oliver, "Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author," pg. 370
The UK publisher of the book went bankrupt before it could publish the story, so it was serialized in Weird Tales across five issues from December 1935 to April 1936, a mere three months before Howard died.

It would later be published in book form in 1950, acquiring the secondary title Conan the Conqueror, which it would be attached to on and off for the next seventy-five years.
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Usually, I use this column to explore all the chronological markers in a story to place it in timeline order, but seeing as this story is much longer than all others and I don't want to bore you to death, I think it would be more expedient to do one thing: place it within relation to the other King Conan stories. The Hour of the Dragon obviously takes place during his kingship, so does it take place before, in-between, or after "The Phoenix on the Sword" and "The Scarlet Citadel?" Surprisingly, this is a tough question!
Let's take a look:
  • Quotes like this abound in the book and place it in Conan's very-late career: "'A devilish dream it was, too. I trod again all the long, weary roads I traveled on my way to the kingship" ... The king was an enigma to the general, as to most of his civilized subjects. Pallantides knew that Conan had walked many strange roads in his wild, eventful life, and had been many things before a twist of Fate set him on the throne of Aquilonia. 'I saw again in the battlefield whereon I was born," said Conan, resting his chin moodily on a massive fist. "I saw myself in a panther-skin loin-clout, throwing my spear at the mountain beasts. I was a mercenary swordsman again, a hetman of the kozaki who dwell along the Zaporoska River, a corsair looting the coasts of Kush, a pirate of the Barachan Isles, a chief of the Himelian hillmen. All these things I've been, and of all these things I dreamed; all the shapes that have been I passed like an endless procession, and their feet beat out a dirge in the sounding dust.'"
  • One section seems to refer back to "The Phoenix on the Sword" and Conan's experience with Thoth-Amon in that story: "Conan's scalp prickled. In Stygia, that ancient and evil kingdom that lay far to the south, he had seen such black dust before. It was the pollen of the black lotus, which creates death-like sleep and monstrous dreams; and he knew that only the grisly wizards of the Black Ring, which is the nadir of evil, voluntarily seek the scarlet nightmares of the black lotus, to revive their necromantic powers. The Black Ring was a fable and a lie to most folk of the western world, but Conan knew of its ghastly reality, and its grim votaries who practise their abominable sorceries amid the black vaults of Stygia and the nighted domes of accursed Sabatea." 
    • The tricky thing is that Thoth-Amon is never referred to as being of the Black Ring in that story. It does frequently refer to him as "Thoth-Amon of the Ring," but that more likely refers to the Serpent Ring of Set (like a physical jewelry ring, not a "ring" of sorcerers) from that story.
    • Another quote seems to suggest the same thing: "'Crom!' he muttered. 'The black hand of Set!' He had seen that mark of old, the death-mark of the black priests of Set, the grim cult that ruled in dark Stygia."
  • Conan seems to have been king of Aquilonia for at least a few years. Zenobia tells him: "And I have loved you, King Conan, ever since I saw you riding at the head of your knights along the streets of Belverus when you visited King Nimed, years ago."
    • Additionally, we get this line suggesting a few years on the throne: "Conan's volcanic temper, never long at best, burst into explosion. Not in years, even before he was king, had a man spoken to him thus and lived."
    • Likewise, "Valerius is now the rightful heir of the throne. He had been driven into exile by his royal kinsman, Namedides, and has been away from his native realm for years."
    • If we look back to "The Scarlet Citadel" for a comparison, when Pelias is awakened by Conan, he asks what has happened to King Numedides (the spelling has changed) and realizes that he's been trapped for ten years. So "Scarlet Citadel" definitely happens within the first ten years of Conan's kingship.
  • It is possible that Howard intended the cities of Tamar and Tarantia to be different cities. Some people have suggested over the years that it's not that he changed the name of the capital from Tamar to Tarantia like he sometimes changed names like "Numedides" to "Namedides" but that Conan actually had the capital of Aquilonia moved to a new city. If that was the case, it would push The Hour of the Dragon to a more certain last place. I think it's more likely that he just changed the name of the capital city.
  • Finally, there is the question of Zenobia, who Conan vows to make queen of Aquilonia in the final line of the story: "She was a slave in Nemedia, but I will make her queen of Aquilonia!" It is possible that Zenobia never made it back to Aquilonia or died between stories, so it's not a sure chronological marker that she's never mentioned in any other King Conan story. However, seeing as she was a literal king's ransom and Conan appears to win The Hour of the Dragon's conflict so decisively, I think it's most likely that she got to Aquilonia safe and sound where she did indeed become Conan's wife.
Ultimately, there isn't a dead giveaway about this story's temporal relationship to the other two King Conan stories. Instead, we're going to have to go off vibes. Within "The Phoenix on the Sword," Conan's kingship seems relatively new. Having not adjusted to their new king, the people of Aquilonia are missing the old king and his power is tenuous. Within "The Scarlet Citadel," Conan's powers seem much more settled within the Hyborian kingdoms. He seems much more well-adjusted to the position and he is challenged only by invading armies, and we get quotes like this: "Today no Aquilonian noble dares maltreat the humblest of my subjects, and the taxes of the people are lighter than anywhere else in the world."

Seeing as Conan seems to wield the full power of his kingdom and even seems to be the equivalent of a Hyborian Age superpower, I'm going to have to settle on the idea that The Hour of the Dragon is the last story. It seems most likely to me that Conan does bring Zenobia back and continues his powerful reign with her at his side. It's an all-around happy ending.

Here's our updated chronology.

1. The Tower of the Elephant
2. Rogues in the House
3. Queen of the Black Coast
4. Xuthal of the Dusk
5. Iron Shadows in the Moon
6. The Devil in Iron
7. The People of the Black Circle
8. A Witch Shall Be Born
9. The Man-Eaters of Zamboula
10. Black Colossus
11. The Pool of the Black One
12. The Servants of Bit-Yakin
13. Beyond the Black River
14. The Phoenix on the Sword
15. The Scarlet Citadel
16. The Hour of the Dragon

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Karl Edward Wagner's KANE: "Misericorde"

4/15/2026

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I've been playing Minecraft on and off since Beta. I understand if this admission causes you to close this tab.

My friends and I were there from when the world was still just a flat expanse, and I remember realizing that it was five in the morning and my eyes were bloodshot because I'd stayed up all night at my friend Mitch's house in college. This was before Minecraft was forever claimed by nine year-olds; for a while, it seemed to be almost exclusively engineering majors playing it and making complicated redstone circuits. Every few years my friends and I will make a server and play on it for a few weeks before we get bored.

There's this moment that happens inevitably when you're playing Minecraft. Someone's going to turn on the cheats to allow themselves flight, or infinite building materials, or invincibility or whatever. And that's the death-knell for a Minecraft game. Suddenly, the work to build something cool isn't there anymore. The fun dries up (for me, anyway) almost instantaneously.
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I think that might be how Kane feels in the short story "Misericorde." I'm pretty confident I'm the first person (and probably the last) to talk about the dark sword-and-sorcery anti-hero Kane and Minecraft in the same blog post, but I promise I'm going somewhere.

"Misericorde" is maybe going to end up being a lesser Kane story for me. It's got some interesting suspense going for it as Kane operates as an assassin. A well-to-do woman approaches him with four lives she needs snuffed out, and the coin to pay for it. She remarks about criminals having their own code, and Kane replies with this:
"Certain rules of the game are essential," Kane replied. "Otherwise it isn't a game. For the true adept, wealth is not the object. If I am offered a fee to perform a certain assignment, I will not accept that fee until I have accomplished it. Taking a fee by force - or accepting an assignment without the certainty that it will be carried out - would be pointless, a bore."
There's that old enemy of Kane: boredom. I feel like this makes a lot of sense for someone who is immortal. When there are no stakes in your life, you must invent stakes and establish boundaries for it to have meaning. Kane, being physically imposing and nigh-invincible, wouldn't have a very fun or interesting time just shooting someone with an arrow from far away or killing someone to take their money. When you have infinite smooth cobblestone, building a gigantic pagoda isn't as fun anymore. You simply must mine.
As Kane completes his contracts, he does so in an interesting way each time. Instead of a brutal kill scene, he ends each one by telling his mark to "come with" him. There's some sorcery involved that keeps it interesting.

It's compelling to me that when Kane is doing normal things like having a girlfriend or conversing with a poet, he can be incredibly cruel. But when killing people and stealing their souls, he's remarkably civilized about it. The word "misericorde" means "compassion," so I supposed that makes sense.

I don't think I liked "Misericorde" as much as some other Kane stories, but it still has some good, horror-themed adventure in it. It's just a bit more tropey and predictable than most. 
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Chronologically Speaking, Part Fourteen: "The Man-Eaters of Zamboula"

4/10/2026

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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.
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"The Man-Eaters of Zamboula," published under the revised title "Shadows in Zamboula" in the November 1935 issue of Weird Tales, was the third-to-last Conan story that would see publication during Robert E. Howard's lifetime. In-between "Beyond the Black River" and "The Man-Eaters of Zamboula," he'd penned "The Black Stranger," but the public wouldn't see that story for some time, and not until L. Sprague de Camp had heavily edited it and re-titled it "The Treasure of Tranicos."

By mid-1935, Howard was noticeably tiring of Conan the Cimmerian. He said so in letters and to friends, and he in particular grew resentful of the fact that WT editor Farnsworth Wright owed him about $860 (multiple thousands of dollars in today's cash) because the magazine had had financial troubles. He was ready to move on. But letter-writers in "The Eyrie" liked the story, and it did grace the cover of the November issue.
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There are not a ton of chronological clues in this story, but there are enough that you can place in pretty firmly on one side of "A Witch Shall Be Born:"
  • Conan has recently been with the Zuagir raiders, which were introduced to us in "A Witch Shall Be Born," and he's been with them for some time: "You have dwelt for many moons in the tents of the Zuagirs, and you are our brother! Go not to the house of Aram Baksh!"
  • Conan has been with the Zuagirs long enough to absorb some of their culture and folk tales: "All the tales he had heard in the Zuagir tents of devils and goblins came back to bead his flesh with clammy sweat. Now the monster slid noiselessly into the room, with a crouching posture and a shambling gait; and a familiar scent assailed the Cimmerian's nostrils, but did not reassure him, since Zuagir legendry represented demons as smelling like that."
  • Conan has been in Zamboula for a week: "He had ridden into Zamboula from the desert a week before."
  • This appears to be the only appearance of the golden lotus, apparent revitalizing cousin of the black lotus: "He drew a phial from among his robes. 'This contains the juice of the golden lotus. If your lover drank it he would be sane again.'"
  • Conan rides out of Zamboula westward, appearing to leave the Zuagirs behind: "The noise followed Conan as he rode westward beneath the paling stars."
Because Conan is in the deserts between Shem and Turan and is familiar with the Zuagirs, this story seems to need to take place either right before "A Witch Shall Be Born," or right after it. Since Conan begins the story with the group but seems to be leaving them behind without word at the end, it makes more sense to me to place it afterword.

This brings our updated chronology to this:

​1. The Tower of the Elephant
2. Rogues in the House
3. Queen of the Black Coast
4. Xuthal of the Dusk
5. Iron Shadows in the Moon
6. The Devil in Iron
7. The People of the Black Circle
8. A Witch Shall Be Born
9. The Man-Eaters of Zamboula
10. Black Colossus
11. The Pool of the Black One
12. The Servants of Bit-Yakin
13. Beyond the Black River
14. The Phoenix on the Sword
15. The Scarlet Citadel

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Jirel of Joiry: "The Black God's Kiss"

4/6/2026

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Jirel of Joiry, one of the most stunningly original sword & sorcery characters I've ever read, seems to have come about by a series of accidents.

Accident the first: author Catherine Lucille Moore, eventually known under her pen name C.L. Moore, was sick a lot as a kid. Without really knowing how she came into contact with them, the magazine Weird Tales became her hospital reading companion. Moore remembers that, like most literate people of her day, her family thought Weird Tales was trash, the absolute bottom of the barrel when it came to literary quality. But she loved them. And as she got older, she continued to read in that vein, if not WT itself, as her father would sneak her Barsoom and Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, away from her mother's disapproving eye.
Accident the second: Moore was working on her typing speed at work one day when a proto-Jirel came dashing out of her imagination to her. After having to quit college after three semesters and find a job, most likely due to the Great Depression, Moore was lucky to find work at a bank, for jobs were hard to come by. One afternoon, when she had nothing to do but desperately wanted to look busy, she began practicing some typing exercises. She quickly grew bored with quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs, so she started to type up fragments of poetry she remembered from class. And then, she typed a few sentences about a "red, running woman," imagining a figure from 13th century France. It amused her. Why's she running?, she asked herself.
Accident the third is more of just an unintentional product. Moore began typing up a couple of stories, stating with one about Northwest Smith, a Han Solo-type (or wouldn't it be more appropriate to say that Han Solo is a Northwest Smith-type?) of space ranger she began like this:
Northwest Smith was a hard-boiled guy
with an iron fist and a roving eye...
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That's the dorkiest shit ever and I'm so here for it. But, back to the accident.

Moore shopped around her first Northwest Smith story, "Shambleau," and a story called "Were-Woman." "Were-Woman" was flatly rejected by Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales, but "Shambleau" was accepted. In her kitchen in Indiana, she opened a letter from Wright, complete with the information that the story had been accepted and she would be paid $100 for it. Moore screamed her head off, causing her dad to rush into the kitchen, thinking that his daughter might be the victim of some attack. But no, just $100 dollars richer, which Moore says felt like ten thousand dollars to her.

The accident here is that "Shambleau" was accepted because it was so different than the rest of what Weird Tales was printing. It pulses with sexual tension between Smith and then gorgon he comes into contact with. A lot of pulp stories are sexual or salacious, but "Shambleau" approaches the erotic, which Moore wasn't trying to do. She always maintained that she wasn't really trying to imbue theme or specific philosophy into her stories, nor did she seem them as pure escapism, but that she just wrote what she wanted to read.

That unique fingerprint of hers, found in "Shambleau" first, would be present for the rest of her career. That brings us to the lady of Joiry.
In the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, "The Black God's Kiss" appeared as the lead and cover story. It's the same issue featuring the second part of Robert E. Howard's "The People of the Black Circle" and Clark Ashton Smith's story "The Seven Geases." In this story, we meet Jirel, lady of Joiry, which is a fictional hegemon in France, some time in the 13th to 15th century.

Jirel is a capable leader and fighter, opening the story having been captured at the end of a battle, her helmet ripped off by the enemy to reveal her curly mop of red hair and her blazing yellow eyes. Joiry has been invaded, and it looks like they've lost.
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Guilluame, the leader of the conquering force, has taken control of her throne room. After ripping off her helmet ("Unshell me this lobster" should be used more often), he kisses her right there in her own hall. As has been reported many times over the years, this was essentially as far as Weird Tales was willing to go with the salacious content, but that the kiss should essentially be read as a sexual assault. That's what it would be in real life, too.

Interestingly, the text of the story is somewhat infatuated with Guilluame and Jirel clearly thinks he's hot, but because of this violation, Jirel burns with a hatred for Guilluame and vows revenge. She goes to a priest friend of hers named Father Gervase to be blessed before essentially venturing down into Hell through the depths of her castle so that she can find an appropriate weapon with which to kill Guilluame.

This is one of my favorite "weird" elements of this story: the passage through which Jirel goes is a round tunnel that she and Father Gervase discovered some time ago. It winds deep into the earth, and whatever created it seems to have not done so for human feet. After an indeterminable amount of time in which gravity itself seems to flip-flop on her, Jirel appears in a dark land of horror and mystery shrouded in eternal night.
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After a few jaunts this way and that, she finds a strange temple-like structure containing a black god statue. As Jirel kisses the statue, an upsetting evil seems to worm its way into her body. Both physically and spiritually uncomfortable, she hauls ass back up to the world of the living in order to get the toxin out of her.

As she clamors into her throne room, the story characterizes Guilluame as "magnificent" in his armor, on her throne. It repeats his name several times, unclear if it's done in an astounded or hateful way. Jirel then collapses into his arms in a way that isn't not intimate, while kissing him for a second time. This kiss passes the evil from her into Guilluame, who writhes and wretches for a moment before dying horrifyingly. The very thing that Guilluame sought from her- her sexuality- is the very weapon that she uses to turn on Guilluame to end his life. And after all of that, Jirel bows her head to hide her own tears.
The Jirel that Moore creates is such a human character that she stands head and shoulders above most other S&S protagonists. She's remarkably remorseful of some things, like Guilluame's death. There's this old Jack Stauber YouTube video where a kid asks his mom, "Why do I miss people who hurt me?" Jirel was blazing with hatred and revenge, but in the end doesn't find any satisfaction and even seems to think that she might've gone too far (when you read the sequel, "Black God's Shadow," Moore doubles down on this idea). It doesn't give you any easy themes like telling you Jirel absolutely was wrong for venturing into Hell to acquire a vile weapon and get revenge on her rapist. Instead, it lets you sit in her uncertainty with Jirel. 

I think this is what makes Jirel so compelling to me. She's powerful, brave, a sick fighter, but she's also frequently afraid, uncertain, confused, and very realistic. Jirel cries four different times in this story, each time having been moved to tears by something horrifically sad in Hell. And maybe Guilluame wasn't such a bad guy if we'd gotten to know him; maybe he was exactly the piece of shit he starts this story as. I'm not sure. Characters like Conan and Kane sometimes experience overwhelming, tough emotions (like Conan's loss of his lover Bêlit and Kane's overwhelming loneliness) but they're never nearly as realistic as Jirel. She's incredibly true-to-life and it makes her one of the best sword & sorcery characters I've ever read.
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Fantastic Jirel art by Clade Mirya
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Karl Edward Wagner's KANE: "Cold Light"

4/3/2026

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I am running out of applicable Kane images for these articles. So today I'm just going to repeatedly regale you with covers for "Death Angel's Shadow." Oooh. Ahh.
"Cold Light" unfurls itself like it's sledding down a mountain: slowly at first, gaining speed until it becomes one of the most action-packed, epic Kane stories I've read yet. I say that now, but it is so hard to pick favorites among these things. 

Genuinely, it does start a little slowly. Kane is experiencing one of his bouts of lethargy. Boredom has just about defeated him and he lazily escapes to a desolate part of the world, clopping his horse into an all but dead town in the region of Demornte. Demornte's an odd little setting: bordered by inhospitable desert on all sides, it's a stretch of lush, green country that's seemingly inhabited by one city, called Sebbei. It would be a great little place to visit except for the fact that everyone here walks around like the living dead.

That is to say, some time ago, a plague swept through Sebbei, killing all but a few hundred of its residents, and now the city is calcified in its misery. Every reaction from the townspeople is no stronger than a shrug of the shoulders.
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Kane finds respite here for a while, and even companionship in the character of Rehhaile, a young blind woman with a "second sight" that allows her to tap into the minds of nearby people and see through them.

Hot on Kane's trail is a band of self-styled crusaders and avengers, ready to bring the "cold light of good" and justice to our evil wanderer. Each of them has an understandable bone to pick with the red-headed immortal as he's done them all wrong at some point or another in the past. There are nine of them against Kane's one (two if you count Rehhaile), so they're confident they can take him out.

The story paces itself well as we watch Kane dwindle the numbers against him one by one until he's got a more manageable load that he can fight with just his sword.
There's a lot going on in "Cold Light," thematically speaking. The crusaders are confident that they are arbiters of justice and uncomplicated good while they kidnap, rape, and attempt to burn the entire city of Sebbei down in pursuit of Kane. By contrast, Kane seems like the good guy here as he's done nothing but lounge by a lake and drink wine since he's arrived. He's befriended Rehhaile and they seem to have a good thing going on. Does that absolve him of his crimes? Of course not; if Putin or Netanyahu or Trump decided to spend the rest of their days sitting by a lake, not hurting anyone else, it doesn't erase the evil that they've already wrought. Still, it inverts the usual order.

It's interesting contrasting the toxic, all-consuming revenge-driven action of the "crusaders" against the toxic, do-nothing attitude of the people of Sebbei. In one climactic moment of the story, the gang closes in on Kane in an old warehouse filled with unused medicines covered in dust, symbolic of their ability to do nothing about their problems. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: both are doomed in their own ways!
"Cold Light" was incredible. It clearly takes place later in Kane's timeline as he's wondering Lartroxia West. But because other characters mention Carsultyal, I wonder if it takes place a little earlier than some of the stories where Carsultyal is so ancient it's seemingly only remembered by Kane...

I read on a very old Dale Rippke blog post that Wagner said all the short stories appear in chronological order in each collection, so that helps me out a bit.
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Two Writers, Two Rogues: The Adaptation of ROGUES IN THE HOUSE

4/1/2026

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Part I

It’s January, 1933 in Cross Plains, Texas. Though most of the town is asleep, Robert E. Howard is banging away at his typewriter, working on a new story. January of ‘33 has been abnormally warm and dry for a Texas winter, so perhaps he still has the window open to his neighbors’ chagrin, as he sits in his bedroom which faces the sleeping porch, nearly shouting the words as he writes them. 

Howard, Bob to his friends, is working on “Rogues in the House.” It’s a new Conan of Cimmeria story that he’s hoping to sell to editor Farnsworth Wright at the magazine Weird Tales. “Rogues in the House” will sell, becoming the seventh Conan story to hit the pages of “The Unique Magazine” in January of the following year. It will net him a tidy $100.
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But while “Rogues” is the seventh story accepted, it’s the twelfth one Bob’s written, and to make matters worse, Weird Tales doesn’t pay him on story acceptance, but rather upon publication. The depression is bearing down on his family, and he needs money, which has mostly eluded him, like literary fame. Literary success is a persimmon that remains out of his reach, Bob says later.
​
Additionally, Conan, who’s his bestselling character to date, seems to have become a bit of a chore for the writer. The three stories he’s written prior to “Rogues:” "Iron Shadows in the Moon," "Xuthal of the Dusk" and "The Pool of the Black One," have fallen into a rather predictable pattern. They’re not his best work.

Bob pens one more Conan story, “The Vale of Lost Women,” and there’s no evidence he ever even submitted it to Weird Tales. He won’t write another Conan story for around nine months.

Part II

“Rogues in the House” is an eternally underrated Conan of Cimmeria story, not only for breaking out of the slump that comprises the stories written around it, but because of how unique it is in the canon.

Conan, imprisoned at the start of the narrative, is broken out by a young noble so that Conan can do the dirty work of killing Nabonidus, the Red Priest, who is the center of power in the unnamed city. When Nabonidus’s human / ape experiment / pet Thak runs amok in his manor, it forces Conan, his young employer, and the Red Priest to spend some quality time while figuring out how to defeat Thak. 

According to Howard, “Rogues in the House” arrived in his mind essentially fully-formed and the only editing he had to do on it was to erase and re-write one single word before he stuffed it in the mailbox for his agent. I’m not sure how much I believe that, but it makes for a great anecdote.

One reason why I appreciate “Rogues” so much is for its comedy beats throughout. While Howard always maintained that Conan was a man of both gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, the scales always seemed to tip a little more toward the melancholy side. Except for in “Rogues.” 

Conan dryly domes a guard with a beef bone while robbing him of his knife and keys before leisurely strolling out of prison. That’s a great image!

Before proceeding to Nabonidus to make good on his contract kill, Conan returns to the slum area of town, The Maze, the take out some frustrations on an ex-lover of his. This unnamed woman got Conan imprisoned and his partner killed, so when Conan bursts back into her room, eyes blazing with fury, it hits all the harder when Howard pulls the rug out from under us and we watch Conan drop her into a cesspool instead of killing her. This scene has apparently upset people over the years, but I find it honestly hilarious. Like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, his lover is swearing, covered in shit, while Conan lets out a full-throated laugh. Nobody’s actually hurt, and Conan’s reaped his revenge. L. Sprague de Camp makes the odd suggestion that this scene may have been inspired by Robert E. Howard getting bullied by others in school, specifically an act we called getting a “swirly” when I was a kid.

Even the last action of the story has always struck me as ironically funny. The Red Priest, for all his scheming and scientific accomplishments, is done in by taking a fucking chair to the skull. No trickery needed, just a throw too quick to dodge.

The other thing I love so much about this story is its character work. As much as I love Howard’s writing, his characters are sometimes pretty flat. The wizards are scheming and evil. The young ladies are supple and need help. You know the score. But “Rogues” takes the time to draw memorable, fun characters unlike most of Conan’s supporting cast. It’s so seldom that Conan spends extended amounts of time with people, especially those who are at odds with his own goals. Murilo is young, foppish, and a bit of a wimp, but he’s ultimately likable, while Nabonidus is smarmy, arrogant, and occasionally charming. Thak, while certainly not fully human, has enough soul that you almost want to root for him the same way you would Frankenstein’s Creature. I’ve always loved in particular the way Nabonidus talks about Thak to Conan and Murilo, kind of proud of Thak’s abilities while at the same time, being threatened with his life by them.

Both Nabonidus and Murilo play into Howard’s politics about the evils of civilization so well. The pair stands in for civilization’s part: Murilo is part of existing power structures and Nabonidus is the shadow government that holds the real cards. Murilo realizes this an an outburst: “You exploit a whole kingdom for your personal greed; and, under the guise of disinterested statesmanship, you swindle the king, beggar the rich, oppress the poor, and sacrifice the whole future of the nation for your ruthless ambition… You are a greater thief than I am. This Cimmerian is the most honest man of the three of us, because he steals and murders openly.”

Conan stands on the opposite side of the conflict. Uncomplicated, at least to himself, and occasionally like a simpleton in comparison to the Red Priest’s plans and inventions, he’s the only one of the three with any sort of grit to match his drive.
​
There’s a lot to love here in this story. It’s brief and not a word is wasted. It’s philosophically interesting and unique in its author’s body of work. It’s got a phenomenal fight scene at the end. It’s probably not quite as good as the REH favorites: “Tower of the Elephant,” “Red Nails,” “People of the Black Circle,” but that’s not exactly slouchy company. It deserves its mention toward the top of the list.

Part III

It’s Spring, 1971 in New York City. The Marvel office at 635 Madison Avenue is abuzz like usual, and in the middle of it is Roy Thomas. It’s a time of flux for Marvel Comics: many of the old guard who helped the comic company rise to prominence have left in the last several years. Some of Marvel’s superhero characters are now 40 years old, but the average age of writers in the bullpen is 23 years old. Roy himself is only 30, but already has risen through the ranks to be Stan Lee’s right-hand man.
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Roy has a thing for old characters- like, 1930s and 40s Golden Age of Comics characters. The Invaders, All-Star Squadron, the Justice Society of America, that sort of thing. And there’s this one character from 1930s pulp magazines that he’s revived: Conan the Barbarian. Stan Lee’s not sure about it because he’s not a superhero, nobody’s in a colorful costume, and honestly, he’s not even really sure what “sword & sorcery” is. But they’ve got the rights for $200 an issue, and they’ve got this super cheap but talented new British artist on the book, a 21 year-old kid named Barry Smith.

So far, this book has been really up-and-down. Roy’s had to switch the order of issues a couple of times, like pushing issue three back to issue five, while scrambling to fill the gaps for three and four. Since Roy only has the Conan character and not the rights to all the Conan stories, he’s doing what he can to play in the small sandbox he has. He bases issue #2 sort of off one paragraph in Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” essay. He adapts some non-Conan stories like “Twilight of the Grey Gods” and “The Garden of Fear,” but he’s also making stuff up out of whole cloth. He got to adapt one of the best whiz-bang Conan stories, “The Tower of the Elephant,” a few issues ago in number 4.

Unfortunately, none of that stuff has really been selling. Marvel even canceled the book a few months ago, but thought better of it and it was back on the next day. But sales have gradually been ticking up, starting with issue #7. Roy sometimes jokes that he’s just an embellisher for Howard’s stories on this title, and for the next two issues, Conan the Barbarian #10 and 11, embellish he will.

Part IV

The writers in the bullpen weren’t the only things changing at Marvel. The comic company was about to change their interior page counts from 36 pages to 52 pages in response to DC doing the same thing. But that came with a price increase, too. They made the jump from 15 cents to 25 cents a comic. Editorial was also messing with the covers a bit- giving a uniform design to them for the Bronze Age, with a band at the top reading “MARVEL COMICS GROUP” and they’re putting all the cover art into an isolated box.

The page count and price thing would last only two issues- enough for Roy to adapt “Rogues in the House,” but no longer. They’d return to 36 pages with Conan issue #12, and the price would come down, but only to 20 cents. But for a short time, with those extra pages, the story was allowed breathing room for character beats and story that it otherwise wouldn’t have been afforded.

“Rogues in the House” opens in medias res, using a super economical word count to set up the bones of the story. But for Roy, this is free real estate. He has the job of connecting the fairly independent narrative to his comic continuity, and he always did so very creatively. There are three paragraphs that open the story as prologue and they’re ripe for Roy’s taking:
  1. We learn that there’s a Gunderman mercenary and a Cimmerian thief causing trouble.
  2. There’s a priest of the god Anu who’s both a fence and a spy. His temple is on the edge of the slum neighborhood called The Maze.
  3. A woman has betrayed them both, landing the Cimmerian in jail and the Gunderman at the end of a rope.

This is where it becomes really fun if you know the original story prior to reading its comic adaptation. Roy begins setting this stuff up in previous issues.
  1. That Gunderman mercenary gets set up in issue #8, which is a loose adaptation of the Howard synopsis finished by L. Sprague de Camp called “The Hall of the Dead.” That story features a Gunderman and seems to take place chronologically close to “Rogues in the House,” so people have long guessed that the Gundermen mentioned in both are the same person. Roy goes all in on that idea, renaming the Gunderman to Burgun rather than Nestor, for no reason in particular.
  2. That priest of Anu who is both a fence and a spy becomes the focus for issue 10.
  3. And the woman that has betrayed both of our characters, now Conan and Burgun, would be Conan’s recent traveling companion, Jenna.

The cover for issue #10 promises “ALL NEW STORIES,” and that’s mostly true. Issue 10 fills in our backstory about how Conan would end up in prison for the real start of “Rogues.” It’s all rendered beautifully in Barry’s pencils topped with inks by Sal Buscema. No colorist is listed, so I’m assuming it’s Barry, but the blues and golds of the city at night give it this mythical quality that looks great. By this point, Barry’s art has begun its trajectory to its uniquely ornate style that he will eventually settle on, but you can still see plenty of Jack Kirby influence in these issues.

After a thief job, Conan and Burgun are hunted by the guards, with only Conan able to get away. He watches Burgun get hanged, drenched in pale blues and rain, before going back to the corrupt priest of Anu for revenge. Roy adds the fantastical element of this giant bull avatar of Anu which almost destroys the whole temple. 

In order for Conan to exact revenge on the priest, the team was going to have to get creative. Howard explicitly says that he cut the priest’s head off, but that was never going to fly under the restrictive Comics Code Authority. Instead, we see five panels in which Conan approaches, each background growing darker until the last is a blood red, and Conan strikes out of the panel. We then see the priest’s head conveniently relieved of his body in the last panel. In the end, it doesn’t feel at all like a workaround. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite good enough for the comics code and three caption boxes were hastily added to the final panels to ensure readers that Conan would be punished for killing a priest, no matter how evil.

Issue #11 follows the prose narrative to “Rogues in the House” pretty faithfully, with the added bonus that we actually get to see the moment when Conan is captured thanks to Jenna selling him out.

We meet Murilo in the prison making me sad once again that we don’t have a colorist to thank- the shadows and the reds, purples, and blues are gorgeous. Murilo has big, 70s Barry Manilow hair, perfect for his character. A raging Conan drops Jenna into the cesspool and makes his way to the estate of Nabonidus, who seethes evil, but isn’t quite as charming as Howard’s version. 

In one of the only times I can remember, the regular Conan book is split into parts like they would usually do with Savage Sword. Barry’s Thak is much more simian than, for example, Frank Frazetta’s, and the Thak fight here is basically Conan v. gorilla. And instead of tossing a stool at Nabonidus, Conan impales him with a knife throw to end this version of the story.

Spread across two king-sized issues, “Rogues in the House” is one of the most meticulously-adapted Conan stories in the Bronze Age comic. As Bob Byrne points out in Hither Came Conan, about 79 pages are dedicated to adapting the short story, which means it has about 30 more pages than even some of the more epic adaptations done in Savage Sword. Issue #11 was also the longest Conan the Barbarian issue until the super-sized issue #100 which concluded "Queen of the Black Coast."

Letter-writers to "The Hyborian Page" in issue #14 praised the adaptation and Marvel noted that Conan gets as much overwhelmingly favorable mail as any mag which Marvel had ever published, but noted that it would be a while before they directly adapted any other Conan stories. He even said years later that he thinks it’s nobody’s favorite.

“Rogues in the House” is a classic though- one of my favorite Conan stories. And its comic adaptation, also a banger. The story is small in scope despite the oversized nature of the comic version, but every aspect of it works for a memorable product. For Robert E. Howard, it was the last story published of his first Conan period, for Roy Thomas, it showed what he could do, but he was just getting started.
Hey folks, this is a bit of an experiment for me. Usually, my YouTube videos start as blog posts and then get adapted for video, but this one began as a video and I decided to share the script here as well. I hope you enjoyed. It's been really fun to do this for two years now and I appreciate all the support and comments people have left!
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The Unsung Sword of Conan - Conan the Barbarian #175: "The Scarlet Personage"

3/26/2026

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With The Unsung Sword of Conan, I'm trying to highlight under-appreciated works in the Conan canon.
Do me a favor: take a look at the two comic pages down below. Compare them for a second. How do they feel to you? Which one do you like better?
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The left page is taken from Conan the Barbarian #172. It was written by Christopher Priest, penciled by John Buscema, inked by Bob Camp, and colored by George Roussos. The page on the right is from Conan the Barbarian #175. It was once again crafted by Priest, Buscema, and Roussos, but with Ernie Chan doing the inks.

If you're like me, you probably think the page from issue #175 is a better final product. It might even be hard to nail down why it's better, but I'll propose a few ideas. The content isn't too dissimilar: there are some action packed panels at the top (and both have an open panel in the upper-right), as well as a few dialogue-focused panels, with a mix of close-up and wide shots. They have the same number of panels and even a similar flow. But there's something about the one on the right that is leagues better than the one on the left. While I like that the panel in #172's upper-right is an open panel, helping it feel less moored to time, it seems to come out of nowhere. It's not exactly clear what happens next. Do the two Picts get hit by the flying axe? How? They don't look like they're standing close enough together. They drop their weapons, and then there's a beat, and then they fall over dead? The action is just not clear, making it hard to follow. Plus, the backgrounds are extremely basic. some green grass, some blue sky. It looks generic and boring. Even Conan's face looks empty and generic, with pupils that seem to be crying out to be filled in black. 

The page on the right does so much better at all these things. The action takes place between different skirmishes on a battlefield, but the unified backgrounds and poses helps them feel tied together. The faces are more detailed and unique. Even though the red-headed Delmurio is a rugged rapscallion like Conan, they both have totally different vibes and face shapes. The inking feels darker in the shadows and more complete. Everything is more competently done here.
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I chose these panels to illustrate the difference between the first few issues of Christopher Priest's run on Conan the Barbarian and how it eventually comes together. Priest, writing then under the name Jim Owsley, has a rough couple of first issues, and it's really not his fault. He picks up from the previous writer at #172, and the first three books he writes just feel terrible. Instead, I feel the need to lay the blame at comic legend John Buscema.

Perhaps the crew was still figuring out how to work together. Priest has said that he didn't really like Conan all that much. Buscema very famously didn't even like comic books that much... maybe they needed some time to gel.
When Buscema pencils a page that doesn't turn out ideal, most people lay the blame at the foot of the inker, including Buscema himself. While there were some sub-par inkers that really change John's work for the worse, and this was even a time in which he did more "breakdowns" while an inker provided the "finishes," he's got to bare some of the blame here. The breakdowns in these first few books just suck. They have unclear action and a lack of backgrounds, rendering the action inert and the stories somewhat lifeless. The covers (mostly also by Buscema) seem phoned-in as well. Conan's fighting someone in an empty space. Ish #174 is a small step up from the first two, with an improvement to the story but still sub-par art. When the team gets to issue #175, suddenly things just lock into place. Buscema bounces back and Priest's writing takes a huge step forward.

Conan's been on the western side of the continent for a couple of issues, fighting some Picts, occasionally aiding some Zingaran armed forces, gathering companions. One of Christopher Priest's foremost goals was to "Marvelize" Conan by giving him a supporting cast and maybe even some Clint Eastwood-style line reads. Issue #175 represents the first time that would really work out.
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From the first page of the issue, things feel different. Our splash page is more lush and detailed than anything the past several issues. By this point, Conan is with his longer-term travel buddies, Tetra and Delmurio. Not only is there brief exposition, but we get to see some comedy and fun character bits. Giving Conan a regular cast allowed Priest the chance to do more character work than other Conan writers.

​Our three protagonists are looking to charter a ship from the Zingaran coast; they end up aboard a dinky little vessel headed by a cloaked captain with a creepy aura about him. If you've already guessed that he's secretly the villain, congratulations, you win nothing since everyone else saw it coming too. 

But that's not the fun part!

Conan and co. are sail into a creepy rock face inlaid with a human maw at which point Conan is apparently back home in Cimmeria. Howard purists might bristle at this depiction of Cimmeria, which seems more akin to the snowy wastes of Vanaheim than the leaden clouds and rolling hills of Conan's youth, it's not exactly paramount to the story. Conan gets "the Line" in a way that really works for the first time: "I am a son of Cimmeria. For me, there is no other way."
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Warned of "the Scarlet Personage" by other trapped Cimmerians, Conan fights a ninja-like dude with a great design. He rips off his mask, revealing the Scarlet Personage underneath. Conan takes his enemy down, of course. Priest saw Conan as not quite a hero, but more of a problem-solver, and Conan's no-nonsense, let's-get-this-shit-over-with attitude here represents Priest's version of the character perfectly. 

Eventually, Priest's track record on Conan would even out a little bit. He actually figures himself out even faster than Roy Thomas had in 1970 and 1971. As Conan fights Imhotep the Ravager of Worlds, Wrarrl the Devourer of Souls, and even his companion Tetra, fun times were to be had by all. By the time Conan arrives in the Shemetish city of El Shah Maddoc in issue #179, Conan the Barbarian was on a serious upswing.
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Karl Edward Wagner's KANE: "Sing a Last Song of Valdese"

3/24/2026

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One thing I really admire about Karl Edward Wagner is his restraint. The man is patient. I wonder if this turns some people off of his work; there are long, long scenes in most of the Kane stories I've read so far where people sit in a tavern or by a fire and discuss history, religion, and philosophy. If you wanted nothing but whiz-bang swordplay, you'd be out of luck.

We spend most of "Sing a Last Song of Valdese" sitting in a tavern while two priests and a professor debate the above-mentioned subjects. Surrounded by a bounty hunter and a criminal, a drunk and a rich man, they're in pretty motley company. 
We get a little bit more about the lore of Kane here during the mens' conversation:
“Actually the legend of Kane has far darker implications. His name, I have observed, reappears in all ages and all lands. The literature of the occult recurrently alludes to him. In fact, there is an ancient compendium of pre-human glyphics that Kane is said to have authored… Some occult authors contend that Kane was one of the first true men, damned to eternal wandering for some dark act of rebellion against mankind’s creator.”
That's so dope.

Well, it turns out that not all these men are here by accident and a stunning act of revenge takes place while Kane says little more than a few lines. This narrative is entirely a slow-burn, but it's engaging and eyebrow-raising throughout.

Interestingly, there's a character named Mad Hef in this story, and there was a character named Hef in "The Dark Muse," so I spent some time trying to figure out if they're the same Hef. However, Hef dies in "Dark Muse" and this Mad Hef dies in this story, so it couldn't be. Perhaps Hef is a common name bajillions of years ago.
As far as I can tell, these Kane stories thus far ("Undertow," "Two Suns Setting," "The Dark Muse," and this) are sort of generally taking place in timeline order.
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Chronologically Speaking, Part Thirteen: "Beyond the Black River"

3/19/2026

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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.
After the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales went to print with no Howard stories included (though it did have an Otis Kline and a Clark Ashton Smith), Robert E. Howard's most popular character came back in the May and June issues with one of his best stories ever. "Beyond the Black River" was serialized over those two early-summer editions.

Willard Oliver says in his biography Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author that Howard told Novalyne Price around this time that he tries to bang out an adventure story or a western every now and then, but "mostly" goes along with Conan. "Beyond the Black River" is firmly Howard's most western Conan story; much has already been written about that.
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The chronological clues in this story firmly place it toward the end of Conan's wanderings and even foreshadow his king stories pretty hard, which would pick up very soon after this one:
  • ​Conan tells Balthus of the siege of Venarium in the very beginning of the story. The way they talk about it makes it sound like it happened at least ten or fifteen years ago: "'My uncle was at Venarium when the Cimmerians swarmed over the walls. He was one of the few who escaped that slaughter. I've heard him tell the tale, many a time. The barbarians swept out of the hills in a ravening horde, without warning, and stormed Venarium with such fury none could stand before them. Men, women and children were butchered. Venarium was reduced to a mass of charred ruins, as it is to this day. The Aquilonians were driven back across the marches, and have never since tried to colonize the Cimmerian country. But you speak of Venarium familiarly. Perhaps you were there?' 'I was,' grunted the other. 'I was one of the horde that swarmed over the hills. I hadn't yet seen fifteen snows, but already my name was repeated about the council fires.'"
  • Conan states that he has been to the mountains beyond the Vilayet Sea and implies that he has been south to Kush, indicating wide travels in his past and also putting this firmly after his Turanian mercenary days and Black Coast pirate days: "'I saw it carved in the rock of a cave no human had visited for a million years,' muttered Conan, 'in the uninhabited mountains beyond the Sea of Vilayet, half a world away from this spot. Later I saw a black witch-finder of Kush scratch it in the sand of a nameless river."
But really, all you need are the two following quotes which Conan says toward the end of the narrative:
  • Conan has already been a Barachan pirate, which we already know takes place later on in the timeline: "And the coast is dangerous to ships. I've sailed along it when I was with the pirates of the Barachan Isles, which lie southwest of Zingara."
  • Conan describes in detail his extensive travels and experiences: "'I've roamed far; farther than any other man of my race ever wandered. I've seen all the great cities of the Hyborians, the Shemites, the Stygians and the Hyrkanians. I've roamed in the unknown countries south of the black kingdoms of Kush, and east of the Sea of Vilayet. I've been a mercenary captain, a corsair, a kozak, a penniless vagabond, a general—hell, I've been everything except a king, and I may be that, before I die.'"
    • So "Beyond the Black River" is clearly after his pirate periods in "Queen of the Black Coast" and "The Pool of the Black One." I'm noticing we haven't seen much of the Red Brotherhood yet.
    • It's after his mercenary captain periods in "Xuthal of the Dusk" and "A Witch Shall Be Born."
    • It's after his kozak experiences in "Iron Shadows in the Moon," "The Devil in Iron," and "The People of the Black Circle."
    • It's after his penniless vagabond days as a thief in "The Tower of the Elephant" and "Rogues in the House."
    • It's after his general experiences in "Black Colossus" and "The Servants of Bit-Yakin."
    • And of course, his kingship is coming soon.
Even without those incredibly explicit chronological markers, the character of Conan in this story is cool, controlled, and mature, much more like King Conan than thief Conan.

Here's our updated chronology as we reach the final stories that would be published within Robert E. Howard's lifetime:

​1. The Tower of the Elephant
2. Rogues in the House
3. Queen of the Black Coast
4. Xuthal of the Dusk
5. Iron Shadows in the Moon
6. The Devil in Iron
7. The People of the Black Circle
8. A Witch Shall Be Born
9. Black Colossus
10. The Pool of the Black One
11. The Servants of Bit-Yakin
12. Beyond the Black River
13. The Phoenix on the Sword
14. The Scarlet Citadel

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    Hey, 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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