We're getting into some seriously, seriously nerdy territory here. And that's coming from a guy who runs a blog about a single fantasy character that hasn't really been culturally relevant since before he was born.

Let me set some background: by the mid-1950s, L. Sprague de Camp had more or less taken the reins of Conan. In 2025, we would say something along the lines that he's now the executive producer of the intellectual property or franchise, which makes me want to walk into the ocean. He's the Cimmerian's shepherd for a time. Anyway, in 1953, de Camp went from a Conan fan to a Conan creator when publisher Martin Greenberg suggested he and Lin Carter turn four unpublished Robert E. Howard stories found in the fabled Howard trunk into Conan tales. This was actually likely less than three years after de Camp had read his first Conan story. From the 50s to the early 80s, de Camp would spearhead new Conan writing.

But that doesn't mean he stopped being a fan! While writing new fiction, de Camp was also a frequent contributor to the midcentury fanzine Amra, which was focused on Robert E. Howard works. Along with de Camp, Amra was the publication belonging to The Hyborian Legion, essentially one of the first waves of superfans. In the days before message boards, in which guys in Green Lantern t-shirts and cargo shorts aggressively discuss power scaling on Reddit comment threads, there were physical, printed zines which made the rounds in which guys in sweater vests (I imagine) note how upset they were upon reading a supposed prehistoric story set thousands of years ago that has equestrians use stirrups even though stirrups wouldn't be invented until after the Roman Empire. Okay, I admit the caricatures here are too mean, but that's an actual essay within one of these books. Thankfully, the Hyborian Legion was much more erudite, measured, and interesting than the average Reddit commenter. I like to picture a person hammering away at a typewriter in a wood-paneled room with a stack of paperbacks that will eventually become vintage collector's items.

The content of Blade of Conan ranges from light, little travelogues in which de Camp visits Cross Plains to appreciations of Howard's less-celebrated works, to a four-part discussion about weaponry in the Hyborian Age and fantasy in general. I wouldn't say that most of it is too hard-hitting, but a lot of it is really enjoyable. You've probably even read some of the inclusions before, like Clark / Miller / de Camp's "An Informal Biography of Conan of Cimmeria."

There is something here from Poul Anderson that I profoundly disagree with. In his essay "The Art of Robert E. Howard," he says the following:

As the world changes, trends come and go, critical lenses get created and re-evaluated, there's always something new to say. I'd argue there are original takes left on Sherlock, Conan, and every other "exhausted" character out there. I think essays like Stephen Graham Jones's "My Life with Conan the Barbarian" prove that.

The Spell of Conan is probably the volume out of the two that I found more enjoyable. It's not as thick, but it has a wider-ranging set of topics and seems a little more focused on entertaining than informing, whereas Blade was all business. This time, the introduction is by Lin Carter, who is the Robin to de Camp's Batman. It features a section on Howard fiction ("Robert E. Howard and His Writings") that actually has some original Howard fiction included, three original fiction pieces set in the Hyborian Age written by other writers ("Swordly Stories"), a section focusing on S&S heroes mostly not named Conan ("Literary Swordsmen & Sorcerers"), some poetry ("The Skalds of Hyboria"), and finally several pieces about historical inspirations for Hyborian Age cultures ("Swords and Sources").

Spell has some really memorable inclusions! "The Ghost Camp of Colorado" is a cool piece by the boss himself. The three fiction pieces in the "Swordly Stories" section I've covered before, but they're fun! My favorite piece in the whole book is probably P. Schuyler Miller's "Lord of the Black Throne" (which is somehow an entirely different piece than P. Schuyler Miller's "Lord of the Black Throne" included in Blade...) in which Miller explores the historical Erlik as a sort of missed opportunity god for Howard to have spent some more time with in the Conan mythos.

Let's go back to L. Sprague de Camp for a minute. He apologizes in the Editor's Note leading The Blade of Conan that so much of the book is his writing. He's certainly right: he writes or at least co-authors at least ten of the pieces in Blade and an addition 14 in Spell, which makes them by far mostly his writing. When de Camp already has a bit of a reputation for having a superiority complex, it doesn't really do him any favors. He includes a piece called "Conan's Ghost," which feels a little falsely modest as it details how he came to be the shepherd of the Conan estate. He says that he was just "the man on the spot" and kind of implies that it was done to him rather than chosen by him, which doesn't really fit with the story he just told. He also says that there are other people who could've done Conan more justice and bothers to include Robert E. Howard himself, which, like... duh. It's wild to see his own timeline in which he's editing unpublished REH stories for publication a mere year after becoming a fan of his. Luckily, he also details some of his process in the inclusions "The Trail of Tranicos" (from Spell) and "Editing Conan" (which is over in Blade). I'm not a de Camp hater or REH purist by any means, but I can see why he rubbed some people the wrong way. 

Last thought: is it too PoMo to do an appreciation of an appreciation? Have we reached an infinite loop of criticism when I'm writing retrospectives on what is basically a duology of retrospectives? What am I doing with my life?

I don't think I'm super picky when it comes to comic book art. I know folks for whom small variations in art can completely make or break a book: they'll buy one just for the art or they'll drop it just as quickly if it's not up to their standards. 

I have very few of those instances. It was a tragedy when Jerome Opeña got replaced on Uncanny X-Force after issue #18 and I dropped the book shortly after. I sometimes struggle to enjoy Simone Di Meo's work since it's just so busy. Conversely, I'll consider buying almost any book that Bruno Redondo, Jen Bartel, or Dan Mora works on. But most of the time, I don't mind if comic art just gets the job done.

Conan the Barbarian: The Witch Queen of Acheron makes me want to throw all that out a window.

The Witch Queen of Acheron is part of the Marvel Graphic Novel series which Marvel published from 1982 to 1983 and pulled from the whole stable of characters that Marvel had, including Conan, periodically. I covered the 1990 MGN release The Horn of Azoth a few months ago (It wasn't great!).

I picked up Witch Queen at FanExpo Denver last week at a pretty excellent booth. In pristine shape for $20! They had three different copies of Savage Sword #1, all of which were priced exactly at $100, so I didn't grab any of those (not on my public school teacher salary). Maybe one day! 

L. Sprague de Camp has this line in The Spell of Conan about not wanting to spit in anyone else's soup, and I generally try to abide by that and write positively, but I don't think I can talk about The Witch Queen of Acheron without spitting in some soup. This graphic novel was written by Don Kraar, penciled by Gary Kwapisz, and inked by Art Nichols, and if you read my complete chronology of Savage Sword, you'll know that this isn't exactly the A-team. None of the Don Kraar-plotted issues are classics (though a few are good) and Gary Kwapisz's art never blew me away. I'm sorry to say that this 60-page story is not some of their best work.

In The Witch Queen of Acheron, Conan is at the end of a three-day bender in the Nemedian city Belverus, barely lucid, but still stalwart enough to take on a legion of Nemedian guards while half-crocked. He paid for his inn room and companions with ancient Acheronian gold pieces, which he was given by a dying man in the wilderness in exchange for burying his body. The local magistrates take notice, and Conan is goaded into helping them find where the Acheronian gold pieces came from. There's a pretty cool scene where the Nemedians threaten to dunk Conan in boiling oil, and a good time is had by all except the guy they test the oil temperature on.

The do eventually find the lost mines / sepulchers of Acheron, awaken some ancient evils, and fight some cultish zealots. The ending feels cribbed from Robert E. Howard's "The Dwellers Under the Tombs," but it's not terrible. As far as the story goes, I'm mostly just wondering why Marvel would choose to have MGN releases feature Conan when these super-sized comics are barely longer than a standard issue of Savage Sword. 

No, what really brings this thing down is the art. It's not good. The painted cover is gorgeous and I love that Conan is framed in that ring... great font choices too. But the interiors are rough.

I said up top that I try not to be overly critical, and I mean it. But take a look at the set of panels above. These come from the beginning of the novel right as Conan is being confronted by the Nemedian guards. He makes the first move by smashing a wine bottle in one's face, but what kind of face is that? One my first pass, I thought it was Conan's, cracking open the bottle of wine and happily drinking from it before realizing it was a guard. The dude looks like he's smiling with his head thrown back, not getting clocked across the chin with a cabernet sauvignon. In the bottom panel, I think Conan has punched the other guard, but he also kind of looks like he's thrown him.

In this set, the whole crew is deep in the Acheronian crypt and about to unleash a curse. But what the hell has happened between the second and third panels? It took me a minute to realize that the scribe, Balmus, has been back-handed by Prince Tarascus, but the sequence is constructed so oddly. He looks well out of the prince's reach in the second panel, but by the third panel, he's been seemingly slapped and has fallen over. But he looks like the prince has launched him about eight feet with the force of his slap. The background characters are fully another color than Balmus in the foreground, which was probably just done to save time for the colorist, but makes them look really far away. I also really don't get the geography here. Balmus was opposite the stairs from the prince in the second panel, but is now falling down them? The casket in the second panel seems to be on the wrong side of the other characters as well.

There's just too much temporal space between the second panel and the third to hold them together, let alone make them flow well for a smooth reading experience.

Here's the last shoddily-constructed panel sequence I'll complain about. The woman, Demetzia, has died in Tarascus's arms. Since she was possessed by the titular witch queen of Acheron, this horrifying parasite thing hatches out of her, Alien-style, off-panel. But, like... from where? At first I thought it crawled out of the top of her skull or something based on the trail of blood. Tarascus was holding her face right by his and the explosion of gore up onto him looks like it's right in front of him. But since her head looks fine, I guess the monster had to come from her chest or something. So I don't get why the last panel is framed so far to the right of her body.

Kwapisz's faces are frequently lacking some detail and the motion is pretty stilted throughout, making me wish Marvel had enlisted another artist for this book, maybe pulling a team that didn't normally work on Conan titles already. When you have to stop multiple times during a story to re-read panels a handful of times just to make sure you know what's happening, that really kills the reading experience.

The art is far more egregious here than the story, but I did find it funny that they did the classic "read the evil spell out loud to activate the magic trap" move that they lampoon in the movie The Cabin in the Woods.

In terms of this story's chronology, it's hard to tell where to place it. Conan comes across as young and occasionally foolish, like with his ridiculous bender where he doesn't even realize one of the women he's sleeping with has been swapped out for another. But he is also far wiser than the miserly Prince Tarascus and clearly has experience commanding military units. I'm not exceedingly confident in this placement, but I think it fits in well right before "Xuthal of the Dusk," before Conan heads south on the map for a while. He's not too far from the area after "The Star of Khorala." It seems to work decently well with what Conan's up to in that period of his life.

I'm really hoping that some of the Marvel Graphic Novels are better than the first two I've picked up. I hope they take the opportunity to do something new with the format, style, or scope that is outside the purview of a potboiler issue of Conan, but it's not looking great so far.

★★☆☆​☆

Are you familiar with the concept of a frame narrative? There are a few different uses of the term, but the one I mean is essentially a story-within-a-story. Let me illustrate with one of my favorite novels of all time: Frankenstein.

Frankenstein is a great example of frame narrative because it actually nests several together. It doesn't begin with Victor Frankenstein or with his Creature, but instead opens with letters from Captain Robert Walton to his sister, Margaret  Saville. The dates of the letters are redacted, leaving us to see that they're from some undisclosed time in the 18th century. Walton, on an Arctic expedition, has come across a haggard, half-frozen man named Victor Frankenstein on the ice. Victor's searching for someone or something, and as he convalesces, tells Walton the story of creating his Creature.

Within Victor's history, we eventually get to a point at which the perspective switches to the Creature, telling Victor the story of his early life and how he came to hate Frankenstein so much.

So, to recap, we have the novel Frankenstein. And within that novel is presented several letters, which tell a story. And within that story, another character tells a story to the letter writer. And within that further story, another character tells a story which then gets related to the letter writer. The Creature's story inside Victor's, inside Walton's, inside Mary's.

Not only that, but the letter dates are obfuscated and already from the last century, so who knows when exactly they were written? Furthermore, Margaret Walton Saville has the same three-letter initials as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, drawing a connection there. Is Margaret really Mary and she's publishing her brother's letters? Did all of this really happen?

Now I'm not a fucking idiot- I know Frankenstein is a work of fiction. But this frame narrative creates a game of telephone, allowing distance that lets you think that maybe it all happened. It reminds me of when I was in the fifth grade and a kid told me that his cousin saw a friend play as Sonic and Tails in Super Smash Bros. Melee. He didn't see it, but maybe his cousin's friend really did...?

​That frame narrative is how reading Conan of Cimmeria feels in 2025.

Almost exactly a year ago, I made my first post on this blog. I had an aspiration to read every Conan story written by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg. I'd read some of the original stories already and maybe the first fifty issues of Savage Sword when I'd set out, but I'd never done it all. I read all of that I planned to and much more (honestly, very quickly. I should've spaced the blog posts out way more than sometimes posting three a week). I wasn't sure if I'd get through it all or lose interest and forget, but Conan's become something of an obsession for me and he's been a constant for the last year.

Weirdly enough, I've always felt like everything tells me I shouldn't like Conan. My favorite books to read have always been really stuffy, admittedly lit-bro books (I am enough of a stereotype that I'm a bearded white guy and David Foster Wallace is my favorite author of all time) and people treat comic books and pulp like they're un-literary garbage. I definitely think Conan readership skews conservative, and I'm very far to the left. I've also never been a lover of escapism- I almost always want to learn something or be able to use information from a book when I read it, but here I am browsing the local antique mall for mass market paperbacks from 1967. Despite all that, something draws me to Conan.

I've been thinking about this for a long time now: despite all of that, what draws me back over and over again to the Hyborian Age? I think a huge part of it is the frame narrative idea I brought up before. I was born in 1991, so Two-Gun Bob had been dead for 55 years before I was even alive. The Conan movie was almost a decade old, and Roy Thomas was publishing Savage Sword #190, his return to the book, just a few days before I was born.

I'm trying to say with some level of tact that this stuff is getting up there in years. The oldest Conan stories are nearly 100 years old, which means that not only is reading the Hyborian Age a trip to the past, but reading Robert E. Howard's work feels like peering into a long-bygone era as well. Book covers do not look anything like Frank Frazetta paintings these days. And I've had so much fun trying to track down digitized or print versions of six-decade-old magazines or essay collections, sometimes getting lucky to find them preserved through scans on the Internet Archive or in some old forum post in which someone transcribed a text.

Conan is so different than modern fantasy that it reads as fresh and interesting as it nears triple-digit ages. In my own estimation, modern fantasy books are frequently trying to be Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. You're reading a blog about Conan right now, so I know that you have heard of these books even if you haven't read them (I haven't, but my wife did, God bless her soul). This series has 3,077 characters, a total of 12,892 chapters, and collectively weigh about as much as a Subaru Forester. Epic fantasy is the name of the game today, with complication being mistaken for complexity, and everything being an aspiring series of at least a handful of books.

Conan is the exact opposite of those titles. 20 stories, two fragments, and a synopsis, told quickly. One reason why I was able to read so much Conan in the last year is that these stories read like lightning. Howard is a literary workhorse- his work doesn't feel rushed, but it never lingers in one place too long and is economical to a fault in his storytelling. Not all of them abide by Edgar Allan Poe's "unity of effect" in which they have to be short enough to be read in one sitting, but every word certainly contributes to the overall effect.

If modern day fantasy isn't trying to be The Wheel of Time, it's trying to be The Lord of the Rings or D&D, with extremely well-defined systems of magic, complete histories in which you can know everything about every in-world ruler and war and wizard, and world-building that may seem more important than emotion and character growth. It seems to frequently cling so tightly to established tropes that there's much less fantastical about fantasy than ever.

Conan never gives you that. We see every story from over Conan's shoulder or not too far away, small glimpses of hushed conversations and spider-haunted tombs, but we're never shown everything. It lets the world remain shrouded in mystery and fantasy and the fog of your own imagination. If you'll permit me to use a second video game example in a single blog, check out this video from Youtuber Any Austin. Austin examines overlooked and "uninteresting" portions of video games (though he always makes it terribly interesting), and as he recently explored Mario Kart World's open areas, he realized that it was a lot more fun to imagine and wonder what was just beyond reach of the player than to actually get to see it.

The last thing I'll bring up is Hollywood. To me, at least, a majority of mainstream films today feel so workshopped by boardrooms, written by nobody, and focus-grouped until they're essentially nothing. The theater is dominated by tentpoles and megafranchises and reboots. Exploring Howard's imagination feels so far away from that; it feels like stories that poured out of a restless mind because they had to exist, not because a slate of- *shudder*- intellectual properties got announced at a shareholders' meeting three years ago. A singular voice's fingerprints are all over the stories and are unmistakably his. Most of REH's Conan stories are deceptively deep and philosophically pretty interesting which have quite a bit to say, if you're willing to dig.

There's something very seductive about Conan and his world in 2025, because it's unlike so much of what the modern world gives us. It's hard to be optimistic about the future these days, so instead, I think I'll go down to a little town in Texas where Robert E. Howard likes to claim a whole cycle of stories were given to him, narrated from just out of sight over his shoulder. And I'll allow the power of that frame narrative to take me over. Maybe it really did happen, just like that.

I missed Howard Days this year because my cousin was getting married on the exact same weekend, but I plan to go next year. Who knows what Conan will mean to me a year on from now? It's been a real pleasure in the last months to get to interview Jim Zub, exchange emails with Jeff Shanks, Roy Thomas, and John C. Hocking, and to get to read tons of great writing from Mark Finn, Gary Romeo, Frank Coffman, Vincent Darlage, and more.

This blog was quite a bit more personal and off the cuff than I normally write, but I felt like reflecting on how I spent the last year. Thanks for reading!