When "Hellsgarde" was published in the April 1939 edition of Weird Tales, the C.L. Moore that weird fiction readers knew was almost gone. Bobby Derie points out that "Weird Tales had been sold and the offices moved to New York City; the editor Farnsworth Wright would soon be fired and, in 1940, would die. Moore’s connections to the magazine were fraying." Her final contribution to the Jirel mythos would also be her final contribution to the magazine. 

She married author Henry Kuttner in 1940 and collaborated with her new husband, mostly under his name, until his death in 1958 at the age of just 42. She had only a few years of fiction writing left, as she turned her prospects to teaching creative writing at the university level in southern California and then quit writing entirely in 1963.
​
Moore stuck around the scene for a while, receiving the World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Award in 1980 and the title of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master. She passed away in 1987 while battling Alzheimer's. And while her shelf was not completely devoid of hardware and she even has the honor of being one of the first women to be nominated for a Hugo Award, I can't help but feel like there's a dearth of C.L. Moore in the world. 

There are no comprehensive biographies, no documentary films, no C.L. Moore House & Museum historical site in Indiana. She's certainly a big name to the insular sword & sorcery community and to retro science fiction lovers, but ever since I discovered her, I've felt like it's an injustice that she's limited to that.

Her stuff in Weird Tales was generational. She produced incredible work in a very short amount of time.

And then, for more than 80 years, Jirel sat quietly.

A few years back, publisher Oliver Brackenbury came knocking on the door of the C.L. Moore estate for his excellent New Edge Sword & Sorcery magazine. There are a lot of interesting new, independent S&S mags popping up, by New Edge is the clear leader of the pack for me. Jirel's had a consistent presence in its pages; as early as the 2022 Issue #0 featured a piece from German Jirel banner-carrier Cora Buhlert entitled "C.L. Moore and Jirel of Joiry: The First Lady of Sword & Sorcery." That was actually my introduction to the character, causing me to track down and devour all of the original stories.

But the more exciting thing was that issue #3 would feature a new Jirel story, written by speculative fiction author Molly Tanzer. The Moore estate apparently gave no guidelines and had no demands about how new Jirel material needed to be written. By all accounts, they were easy to work with and just seemed excited that there was new interest in the material. The first result of these talks was "Jirel and the Mirror of Truth," which debuted in 2024.

Fret not about how difficult it might be to shake the dust of a character after so long; "Jirel and the Mirror of Truth" fully lives up to Moore's legacy. The action is exciting, Jirel's characterization is consistent, and the supernatural elements keep it grounded in the Weird Tales ballpark.

When writing her new story, the first in over eight decades, Molly realized that Jirel had always left her world and gone to another one in her original stories: an underworld, a magic painting, Pav's Dark Land, Hellsgarde, and then came back, so she wanted to reintroduce her by having her begin in this other world and then return to her own. Our lady of Joiry begins the narrative as the Lady of Coquaigne, seemingly a queen, in love with her consort Etizenne. The name Joiry means nothing to her. 

Tanzer adds the character of Thevin, Jirel's booze-loving stewardess, and I don't really think it's a spoiler to tell you that Etizenne is yet another dashing but diabolical man in the lady of Joiry's Tinder DMs. Thevin especially adds a lot to the story. It's really the first time Jirel's had another female as a confidant.

When I first spoke to Molly about her new Jirel stories, I asked if she was trying to imitate Moore's style or just remain consistent with Moore's vision, and she said the latter. She doesn't try to ape C.L. Moore's writing style, but the change isn't jarring the way jumping from a Robert E. Howard to Robert Jordan Conan story might be. She still writes Jirel as a hothead with good intuition.

And when it comes to style, Molly says she likes sword & sorcery because you can get florid in your prose and nobody tries to fight you. We're here for it.

If you've read anything by Molly Tanzer, you know she's an extremely philosophical author. Her most recent novella, And Side By Side They Wander, is basically a sci-fi art heist that masks a really heady discussion of copies, art, reproduction, and AI. So imagine my surprise when I asked if she was trying to cook deep themes into her Jirel work and she said no, that she's just swinging blades around for fun. 

Actually, I'm not that surprised. One time I told John C. Hocking I spent his whole Conan and the Emerald Lotus novel thinking it was Conan Says No to Crack and he said no, too. So I've been way off before.

Intentionally or not, Moore's work with Jirel is terribly interesting when it came to its themes, grappling with regret, bodily autonomy, revenge, and women's relationships to powerful men. I read a lot of those original stories as kind of obliquely feminist, but I'm not sure how much of that was purposefully done by C.L. Moore. It seems to me that "Jirel and the Mirror of Truth" picks up those threads. Because of the way the characters are released from a spell one by one and are originally broken from that spell through a conversation no one else can see or hear, I immediately thought that this was a depiction of whisper networks used by women to keep themselves safe from abusive men (you may know of  those "Are we dating the same guy?" Facebook groups and the like). Sharing their experiences one at a time to clue people in breaks the spell a manipulator may have on a group. I bought this up to Molly at a brewery and she furrowed her brow, and stared past her beer for a moment before saying that wasn't what she'd had in mind, but that she didn't mind the interpretation.

I've also asked her about the ending of the story, in which (actual spoilers ahead now) Jirel is shown by the strange Mirror of Truth an image of herself covered in glistening, silvery scars. The scars do not mar her image, but add to it, each one seemingly a beautiful stitch on her. I thought that this might be tied to one discovering a more true self-image, having broken free from one where you're seen as lesser. Perhaps you can finally appreciate yourself, scars and all. But nope, that seems to be my read on the story alone.

Even when she says she's just doing it for fun, writing her take on the slightly meatheaded jock with terrible taste in men that is our lady Joiry, I think she can't help but produce really interesting stuff between the lines. 

If you haven't checked out New Edge, the digital editions are pretty reasonable in price, and the new Jirel novella, Blue Fire, has been recently fully-funded, so that should be out soon enough.

We've got a live one today.

​In January of 1935, Robert E. Howard was basking in the acceptance of his story "Beyond the Black River" for Weird Tales, which editor Farnsworth Wright called "his best Conan story so far." Howard seemed jazzed about the direction of the story, telling HP Lovecraft in a letter that he would like to try his hand at a longer yarn, "of the same style, a serial of four or five parts."

"The Black Stranger" was probably written soon after, as Patrice Louinet notes in his essay "Hyborian Genesis" that there are partial drafts of other stories found on the backs of the pages of "The Black Stranger" that seem to be from the end of 1934 or very beginning of 1935. This leads Louinet to believe that it was probably written in January or February of 1935. Another thing that I love about what Louinet has to say of the story is that it is a criminally-overlooked story:

Patrice is right. For a long time, "Black Stranger" was swallowed up by the L. Sprague de Camp version, known as "The Treasure of Tranicos" as well as two other versions of the story, neither of which feature Conan. In L. Sprague de Camp's interesting but somewhat self-important essay "The Trail of Tranicos," de Camp notes that Glenn Lord thinks the story is a little older than Louinet does, perhaps written in 1933 or 34, but doesn't list any reasons why. 

The other rewritten versions of this story include "Black Vulmea's Vengeance," published in Golden Fleece and the variant "Swords of the Red Brotherhood."

de Camp's "Treasure of Tranicos" version itself had several different versions, edited by Lester Del Rey seemingly without de Camp's permission (how do you like it, Sprague?). "Treasure of Tranicos" was specifically tied more intentionally to the rest of the Conan mythos by de Camp, inserting Thoth-Amon, King Numedides, and the Aquilonian revolution that seats Conan on the throne.

Howard's original cut would not see publication in full until 1987, when it was included by Karl Edward Wagner in his first Echoes of Valor collection, a series well worth the money if you find it available. de Camp and Wagner continue to disagree about the real-life chronology of the manuscript, with de Camp saying, "There is reason to believe that the pirate version came before the Conan one" and Wagner countering, "I have the photocopy of Howard's original manuscript of 'The Black Stranger', which clearly shows Howard's efforts to change the story from the Conan to the Black Vulmea version."

I agree with Louinet that it's unfortunate that this story seems so maligned by the other versions of it that came after it (well, technically before it). It has the story threads knotted up and difficult to untangle. 

Because of de Camp's meddling, I think the story's chronology has historically been misplaced. Every single other notable chronology places this story after "Beyond the Black River," and before "Wolves Beyond the Border." But I think they're all wrong. I was wrong too. When I first blogged about this story in October of 2024, I set it as part of a "Pictish trilogy" with "Black River" and "Moon of Blood."

​But I now think that was totally incorrect. Let's look at our chronological markers.

• In the opening, Conan is described as massive and muscular, but still moving with the speed of a panther, suggesting a slightly older Conan: "Then he stalked across the glade, placing his feet with care. For all his massive, muscular build he moved with the supple certitude of a panther." The muscles become more pronounced in description past his younger days.
• Conan begins the story approaching the coast of the Western Ocean from the east, crossing the Pictish Wilderness. He's exhausted after having been chased for dozens of miles: "They were the men of the Eagle, whose villages lay far to the east, adjoining the country of the Wolf-Picts. It was the Wolves who had captured him, in a foray against the Aquilonian settlements along Thunder River, and they had given him to the Eagles in return for a captured Wolf chief. The Eaglemen had a red score against the giant Cimmerian, and now it was redder still, for his escape had cost the life of a noted war- chief. That was why they had followed him so relentlessly, over broad rivers and hills and through the long leagues of gloomy forest, the hunting grounds of hostile tribes."
• Conan is very familiar with this wilderness area, suggesting he's been there some time: "The Cimmerian knew that for a thousand miles this western coast ran bare and uninhabited except by the villages of the ferocious sea-land tribes."
  • I think it's more likely that Conan has been up and down a thousand miles of this coast by ship, rather than on foot. That will become more important in a moment.
• When Conan appears to the rest of the characters, clad in pirate garb he's clearly stolen from the treasure cave, Black Zarono notes that Conan's ship was wrecked three years ago: "'I thought you were dead,' said Zarono slowly. 'Three years ago the shattered hull of your ship was sighted off a reefy coast, and you were heard of on the Main no more.'"
  • This means that Conan has been a Barachan pirate for probably four years or more. Sancha and Zaporavo in "Pool of the Black One" do not recognize Conan, suggesting that this story takes place after that one, after which Conan has made a name for himself amongst the Barachan pirates.
  • Conan has been missing since that time, as another line notes that he was already a notorious pirate captain: "Who of all the sea-folk had not heard the wild, bloody tales told of Conan, the wild rover who had once been a captain of the Barachan pirates, and one of the greatest scourges of the sea?"
• Conan is extremely familiar with civilization by this time. He is cool, collected, and maybe even suave. He's definitely able to turn on the "civilization" lever when he wants: "The Cimmerian grinned. It was evident that he was deliberately fanning the fires of hate between the two men." This alone places it as a pretty late story. How Conan acts in this narrative is consistent with how he was portrayed in "The Pool of the Black One," where he had grown adept at adapting to pirate social cues, and he seems to be even more skilled at it now.

These last two chronological clues are what I think are the most important.

• Conan expresses a desire to get back into the pirating world: " I've been wanting to get back on the Main for months, and this was a good opportunity!'"
• At the end of the story, Conan goes back to being a Barachan pirate: "'But what of you?' Conan grinned and indicated the Red Hand drawing swiftly inshore. 'A ship and a crew are all I want. As soon as I set foot on that deck, I'll have a ship, and as soon as I can raise the Barachans I'll have a crew. The lads of the Red Brotherhood are eager to ship with me, because I always lead them to rare loot. And as soon as I've set you and the girl ashore on the Zingaran coast, I'll show the dogs some looting! Nay, nay, no thanks! What are a handful of gems to me, when all the loot of the southern seas will be mine for the grasping?'

Most of these chronological clues above point to this story being a later one, but the last two limit how late it can be. Because Conan goes back to being a Barachan pirate at the end of it, that leads me to believe that "The Black Stranger" is the last Barachan pirate story, not the last story prior to Conan's kingship. The fact that this story takes place so close to "Beyond the Black River," geographically speaking, I think has been historically overrated. The "Tranicos" version does explicitly tie it more directly to Conan's kingship, so it makes sense to put it later if that's the version you're using, but that's not the Howard original. The traditional wisdom has been that this story acts as a bridge between Conan's scouting days and his kingship, but I argue that it would more correctly be seen as a bridge between Conan's final pirate period and his Aquilonian scouting.

I think it's likely that in the three years between Conan's ship going down in the ocean and him rearing his head again in "Black Stranger," Conan may have disappeared inland, to see the events of "The Servants of Bit-Yakin" and "Red Nails" take place, both of which mention Conan's recent Barachan pirate period. Though, if we want to assume Conan's Barachan period is longer, it could take place after "The Pool of the Black One" and prior to "The Servants of Bit-Yakin."

"The Black Stranger" is a very interesting Conan story. It feels like a cross between Howard's Pictish wilderness story "Beyond the Black River" and the Barachan pirate story "The Pool of the Black One." It's very good, and its chronology was far more interesting to mull over than I thought it would be. 

It's funny how movies change in your estimation depending on the time if your life and the state of the media landscape. For example, The Mask of Zorro came out when I was seven. When I was a kid, I thought it was pretty decent. Not incredible, just a fun distraction. Let me tell you that I know now- I was wrong.

That movie fucking rips. 

I promise we'll get to Red Sonja in a moment. 

It's kind of funny, both Sonja and Zorro technically came from the pulps (Sonya, with a "y," from Magic Carpet, and Zorro from All-Story) and these two films are continuations of those legacies. 

The Mask of Zorro really goes for it in ways that we don't see today, even from the very beginning. Zorro, silhouetted by light and fog, carves and flaming Z into the air followed by a wildcat roar and flame explosion into the title. That's tight as shit. Modern films seem pretty afraid to do anything that's pure iconography like that (remember when Batman films ended with Batman running directly toward the camera with the batsignal behind him?). The movie was originally set to be directed by Robert Rodriguez before it passed to Martin Campbell, director of Goldeneye and eventually Casino Royale, and Campbell's clearly doing a successful Rodriguez pastiche. He's not usually the most stylish filmmaker, more of a work-for-hire type of guy, but this movie is positively greased with style.

The action is classic adventure material. Sword fights, acrobatics, and western pistols are clanging and thundering throughout, pacing the film fantastically. One dude gets shot while flying through the air not once, but twice.

One of the only complaints about millennials that I agree with is that a lot of "millennial writing" in films comes across as jokey, but not actually funny. It's that "He's right behind me, isn't he?" type of writing. And once again, I promise I'll get to to Red Sonja. The humor in this film is a little cartoonish, as Zorro stabs a solider in his ass or tries to jump onto his horse only to have it move out of the way at the last second. But it all works, eliciting smiles all the way through. Antonio Banderas should be more rightfully remembered for his solid comedic timing and not just for his dashing good looks. 

The most integral piece to the whole thing might be the heart of the film. Zorro fights corruption in the upper class, for the people, and this particular incarnation of Zorro is one of the common people. It's righteous and a total blast to see the rich pricks getting what's coming to them at the end of it. It makes sense when you learn that Steven Spielberg was an executive producer whole played a heavy hand in it. 

Shot in and around Mexico City, the whole film feels tactile and real, which doesn't sound like much of a compliment, but really is when many films shot today look like they were filmed in front of a green screen in a high school gym in Atlanta. It's beautifully atmospheric when lit torches lick the walls of haciendas and caves, and it's even delightfully grimy and dusty at times. It's something I never noticed before every blockbuster movie started feeling sterile.

Seriously, for the longest time, I thought of The Mask of Zorro as just a fine movie. A seven out of ten, and I think that's similar to how most people have viewed it. But it's sharply risen in the last several years, and I now see it as a wildly entertaining movie. 

Anyway, everything I spoke about positively above does not apply to Red Sonja. I decided to watch it after Molly Tanzer told me it was horrendous. She was right. Stiff, uncompelling, and completely derivative, this thing is a slog. The script is dead on arrival, the performances don't do anything to save the material, and everything looks like it was rendered on a PlayStation 3. And why's there an orc in the Hyborian Age?

Zorro's cool, though. 

In the modern day, a mother hawks her son's old comic books and some tapes, which are apparently interviews about some old pulp author named C.K. Cole.

Some decades ago, a young biographer tapes interviews with an old woman named Lilith about her experiences in the 1930s, playing governess to an unruly girl. Her charge is the daughter of C.K. Cole.

In midst of the Depression, we see the the memories of Lilith and her frustrations at taking care of the drunken hot mess that is Helen Cole.

And briefly, but never for too long, we see Helen's experiences in another world: a sword & sorcery landscape replete with head-loppings and aloof gods.

Helen of Wyndhorn is a 2024/25 miniseries written for Dark Horse by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, the same team responsible for the unforgettable Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. While I think it's fantastic in its own right, it feels especially so for Robert E. Howard fans. While writing pastiche of REH's writing is a dime a dozen, writing pastiche of the man himself is something I haven't seen before.

As the mythology goes, Robert E. Howard wrote his sword & sorcery, western, and horror pulp narratives throughout the Depression in the middle of nowhere in Cross Plains, Texas. He said, hyperbolically as he was prone to, that it was almost as if he wasn't writing his Conan of Cimmeria stories, but just recording them as they were narrated to him by the barbarian himself. A lot of his work plays with this theme of remembrance, filtered through time, most notably the James Allison story "The Valley of the Worm."

Helen of Wyndhorn takes this premise and literalizes it. What if Robert E. Howard's stories actually were records of things that had actually happened? In Wyndhorn's version, the REH analogue, C.K. Cole, spends the 30s recording the adventures of his father, Barnabas Cole, known both in literature and his other world as Othan, a great warrior. C.K. leaves behind a daughter, Helen, when he commits suicide, once again mirroring Howard (though Howard had no children), who is then brought to the family estate where she will live with her grandfather. 

As Helen lives at the Wyndhorn mansion, she gradually learns the true nature of her father's writing and her grandfather's life, which we see unfold slowly. Each character in this story is so well-drawn, terribly flawed and chafing against one another, yet they're all extremely lovable. When the usually-imperious governess Lilith describes Helen as "my Helen," it becomes clear that this story is as much the story of being able to love completely lost people as it is about sword & sorcery action. 

You might be surprised at how much is withheld in this story, far more than is shown. I mean that in the best possible way, as it all deepens the appeal. In the final issue, a peculiar panel kicks off what may be the most important conversation in the story. During a poetry lesson, one of Lilith's word balloons is obscured behind a support column. I love when comics use the medium to create something that could not exist in film or novels.

Helen goes on to ask Lilith if she is "real," saying, "Everything that's happened since father died- none of it makes any sense. This world, the Other World, I'm in one of his stories. There's something wrong with me. I'm not like everyone else, I'm being told." Helen is, of course, not real to us, but she is real in the fiction of her story. 

I think this is the most compelling thing the book has to say. Helen is equally real as the stories her father so deftly recorded. Perhaps Conan and the Hyborian Age are no less real than Robert E. Howard and his Underwood No. 5 typewriter. The stories still have all the magic and power you could ever want them to. 

This brings me back to the frame narrative I mentioned up top. The comic sort of moves forward and backward in time at the same moment. It opens in the 70s with a biographer named Thomas Rogers interviewing Lilith about her time at Wyndhorn, but then follows Lilith's story back to the 30s and the tapes themselves forward, as they get put up for auction, sold cheaply at a fan convention, and finally seem to be unearthed one last time in a garage. Everything is layered like a palimpsest: obscuring the past each time.

The book ends with Rogers saying to his husband, "You peel back layers looking for the center of a thing, and then you lose the thing itself. Maybe the nanny was right. Maybe it's better to make it all up."

Maybe we're all made up, no less real than Helen, Othan, Conan, Solomon Kane, Niord... But I don't want to peel back the layers too far.

Our stories are just as vulnerable to the rot of time that the pages of an ill-kept paperback are. Each time Cole's stories or Rogers's tapes pass into new hands, there's a new opportunity for someone to discover their magic, but there's also the risk that those tapes, seemingly the only copy, will be lost forever. Having gotten to know the pulp community over the past years, this struck me. People like Rusty Burke and Bill Cavalier have done four decades of work to continue the legacy of Howard. Oliver Brackenbury was the first person in 85 years to ask the C.L. Moore estate about the rights to her stories, to keep their flame lit. Without people like these, the stories become forgotten. It takes real stewardship to bring them to the next generation.

If you're a sword & sorcery fan, you simply must read Helen of Wyndhorn. I know Tom King has a certain reputation for having personally cradled Dick Cheney's balls while constructing the Iraq War, but his work with Bilquis Evely is one of a kind. The art is gorgeous and the story is deeply moving and refreshing, reminding me what I love so much about this genre. I hope you pick it up.

"Drums of Tombalku" is a title given to an untitled synopsis and fragment left behind by Robert E. Howard, first published in 1986 as the fragment and then in 1988 as its synopsis. The untitled work, set near and in an ancient city named Gazal, was given its "Drums of Tombalku" title by L. Sprague de Camp when he heavily edited the work and prepared it for publishing in 1966's Conan the Adventurer.

Patrice Louinet notes in "Hyborian Genesis" that Howard's 29-page draft originated as his attempt at a novel, probably written in mid-March 1934 after he wrote "The People of the Black Circle." While the novel ultimately didn't come to fruition in this form, Louinet notes that one line  about an invasion of Aquilonia from Nemedia would become the framing device for Howard's successful novel attempt: The Hour of the Dragon. 

The Gazal fragment is a little peculiar in that Conan is really only a supporting character who shows up toward the end of the fragment. I will defend this fragmentary narrative insofar that it has one near-great horror sequence within the red tower of Gazal.

And I wonder how many copies of The Complete Chronicles of Conan have the same typo mine has: Amalric is referred to as "Almaric" on page 827. Was that Howard's typo, or just the book's?

​Let's see what sort of chronological markers this thing has:

Due to Howard's penchant for making subtle changes to things like names (in all likelihood, just forgetting what he had done the first time), I believe all the above accounts are of the same time in Conan's life. It seems like after Conan left the Black Corsairs at the end of "Queen of the Black Coast," on his way north he became part of the Free Companions who were working in service of Koth's army. Or perhaps the Free Companions tenure grew out of his time with Koth, continuing on with some of the other veterans following the dissolution of the Kothian army.

Since the story must follow "Queen of the Black Coast" and is in conversation with "Xuthal" and "Iron Shadows," it seems to be the eighth or ninth story in our chronology right now. Actually though, I think this story is so close in premise and structure that I would probably consider it non-canonical. It rhymes far too much with "Xuthal of the Dusk" to ignore - "Xuthal" is clearly the completed version of this fragment. But if it goes anywhere on the chronology, it goes adjacent to it. 

These stories are not traditionally grouped very close together. The chronologies from Miller/Clark/de Camp, Robert Jordan, Dale Rippke, and William Galen Gray all have them fairly spread out. Only the Joe Marek chronology really groups them very closely.

We can argue about what the genre "sword & sorcery" is until the events of Jack Vance's Dying Earth actually come true if we want to. It's elusive, and like something being "punk" or "campy," people's definitions differ. Sure, a story populated with orcs, elves, and dragons seems to immediately move it into the "high fantasy" realm. But how much magic is too much magic? Can it be set in a fictional world, not just in an extremely young or old Earth?

I'd argue it's probably more of a feeling than anything else. But I have a pretty solid marker of what separates sword & sorcery from other types of fantasy: S&S needs some kind of element of horror. 

Cozy worlds inhabit a lot of fantasy works, especially 2020s fantasy output. I don't know if I could tell you exhaustively what is and isn't S&S, but I know that a world where magic rings are sold in the market, where you want to live in Rivendell, where well-lit taverns are populated by friendly orcs... that's not it. Sword & sorcery needs seedy settlements, terrifying tombs, and un-behold-able black-eyed god creatures. As much as I love the Hyborian Age, I do not want to live there. I'd be dead in twenty minutes.

"Hellsgarde" debuted in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales. It had been a year and a half since the previous Jirel story, a Jirel-Northwest Smith collaboration between Moore and her future husband Henry Kuttner, and more than three years since the previous "pure" Jirel story, "The Dark Land." The first four stories had appeared over a timespan of just a year and two months, so I wonder if C.L. Moore why the long gap, and if she was having to dig deeper within herself to find ideas or gumption to finish this one. 

​Additionally, she would marry Kuttner in less than a year and sadly disappear into his byline for most of the rest of her career.

But "Hellsgarde" was a perfect Jirel story to leave us with. Not only is it by far the most horror-forward adventure of Moore's red-haired lady of Joiry, but it's also the best.

Jirel is pressured into finding Hellsgarde, a castle in a marsh that can seemingly only be approached at dusk. It is yet another controlling douchebag that Jirel- or at least the text of the story- is somewhat smitten with who sends her in that direction. In Hellsgarde is a mysterious treasure that Jirel must recover.

The story is overflowing with atmosphere and spooks, starting from Jirel's approach to the castle. It appears as though there is a line of soldiers guarding the gate, but upon closer inspection, they're corpses propped up on the lances through which their entrails have been run.

The inhabitants of the castle are no better. Alaric of Hellsgarde and his alleged family are creeps throughout. They're expecting the lady of Joiry when she arrives. This family unit is perhaps Moore's greatest Jirel antagonist because it works so well with her writing style. Every Jirel story features thoughts just entering Jirel's mind which we are privy to. There is much "Did I see...? Could it have been...? Surely not" throughout her adventures, and Moore uses that same convention to ratchet up the horror of Hellsgarde's hosts.

In particular, I love the two young boys who terrorize Jirel with their very existence.

I've always loved how unsure of herself Jirel is. She's hotheaded and brash and frequently very confused, second-guessing herself, and that characterization is never used better than in "Hellsgarde." 

If you read all the stories in order, I can see that Moore's habit of resolving each conflict through a somewhat abstract battle of wills might have run a little bit thin by this time (Moore was always light on the "sword" in "sword & sorcery"), but the twists in this story about the true nature of the castle's residents more than makes up for it. 

"Hellsgarde" is Moore's crowning Jirel achievement. Bobby Derie, author of the best blog in the universe, Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, agrees that this one's a banger. I suspect it will always be overshadowed by "The Black God's Kiss" as the first tale, but it's her most bone-chilling story by far. It's the perfect encapsulation of the world created in her mind, a thing more sensed than seen.

​And for the next 85 years, Jirel was gone. More on that soon.

When I go on a trip, sometimes I like to bring a disposable camera. They take forever to develop now- gone are the days of one-hour photo. More like three-week photo.

Anyway, here are my grainy, washed-out film photos from Howard Days this year!

I don't know anyone who's read Conan the Barbarian #250, from November 1991. Everyone rightfully loves Roy Thomas's first 115 issues on the title, but most bounce off by the end of that run, and some stick it through to Christopher Priest's excellent tenure. Even though Roy returns to the book with issue #241 (actually it's issue #240, just written under a pseudonym), there's not a lot of chatter about his final 35 issues before Conan was cancelled for the first time.

Roy's goal was to right the ship and return the title to its Bronze Age glory. He quickly wrapped up the previous writer's altogether-pretty-garbage teenage Conan storyline and zipped us right to where he left off at issue #115 in 1980. Seriously, Roy puts us in the same physical place with the same supporting cast, 10 years later.

More than that, he even decides to imply that the previous 125 issues were actually all probably just a dream.

Robert E. Howard was born just slightly closer to tomorrow, America's semiquincentennial, than its founding (ten years exactly), and "Gates of Empire" is a more unique story in his oeuvre. It's a comedy-adventure story set in 1167 during the Crusades, starring a decidedly un-Howardian lead named Giles Hobson. Instead of the do-it-yourself, hard-as-nails adventurers that populate so many Howard tales, Giles is a fat, selfish, chronic liar who bumbles his way through his narrative, always looking to claim as much credit for his wins and distance himself from his failures as he can. The backdrop of the story revolves around Giles's adventures in Cairo during a conflict between the Muslim Egyptians and the Christian Norman Franks. As the two empires war, Giles plays a double agent, mostly accidentally.

REH readers will recognize a lot of names in this one. We have an Amalric (perhaps Howard's favorite name to re-use other than Steve Costigan) and a de Chastillon household with a character named Agnes (but her last name isn't de Chastillon).

It is far from the best Howard story that I've read, but it's serviceable, and it's fun to get a story full of sight gags from an author not known for them. Originally to be published in a 1934 issue of Magic Carpet, the magazine folded before publication and the story was originally published in Golden Fleece in 1939, three years after Howard died.

Roy takes Giles and re-christens him "Hobb" for the Hyborian Age, still a drunk, manipulative loser who once tricked Conan into fighting his allies in the middle of the night. Only one other element of "Gates of Empire" really makes it into Conan #250, and that's the visual of being pulled up by a rope through a giant hole in the floor. We'll get there.

Hobb is kidnapped and taken to the ruins of Kuthchemes, famous residence of Thugra Khotan from "Black Colossus," where he's intercepted by Conan, Sonja, and Zula. Within Kuthchemes, there's a poisonous underground river called the River of Darkness (essentially the River Styx in our mythology, but that name's taken by Howard's Nile analogue in the Hyborian Age). While sailing on that river, Zula and the Cimmerian see visions of dead friends and family, as well as both a young and elderly Conan figure to fight. It's the kind of thing you expect in a "landmark" anniversary issue.

As our intrepid adventurers (plus Hobb) finally leave the river's cave, they're pulled up through a pit opening in the floor as it's revealed that the cave is actually the flesh of a many-eyed eldritch beast. This echoes one scene toward the end of "Gates of Empire" in which Hobb has been lowered into a trap-door pit and must climb his way out. Right as his fingers and hands are about to give way, he's pulled up over the lip. In this version, Conan dives back into the pit to save Hobb from the monster, himself rescued when the rest of the crew dumps all the heavy treasure of gold coins and chests onto the tentacled thing, causing it to release its grip on the Cimmerian.

The issue ends with Red Sonja and Zula deciding to go their separate ways from Conan after nearly ten issues together again, but Conan is stuck with Hobb by his side for quite a few more.

This is one of Roy Thomas's Howard adaptions that feels like it should have scare quotes around the word "adaptation," plucking just a few identifiable markers from the original and otherwise writing his own story around them. As a big anniversary issue, it's certainly smaller scale than the other big climax books on the title like Conan the Barbarian #100, #115, or #200, written by Thomas, Thomas, and Priest, respectively. But Mike Docherty's art is vastly improved-upon by Ernie Chan's inks and the various colorists on the book give the title some spark, especially the sickly green hues in the River of Darkness.

Roy had only 25 more issues left before the stories of the bronzed barbarian were cancelled, destined to have no more big anniversary issues (unless you count the 50th anniversary retrospective King-Size Conan in 2020 which Roy contributed to).

Pax vobiscum, fellow Americans. Happy 4th.

I think of Robert E. Howard’s King Kull stories the same way I think about the band The Velvet Underground. While they might not have been quote-unquote successes, and they’re not household names (unless you live in a cool household), they are massively influential. The Velvet Underground basically invented alternative rock and art rock, and the Kull story “The Shadow Kingdom” basically invented the sword-and-sorcery genre. The band and the story just slap their respective new genres on the table and there they are, fully formed.

Unfortunately for Howard, only three of his King Kull stories sold, all to Weird Tales between 1926 and 1930. Those three were “The Shadow Kingdom,” “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” and “Kings of the Night.” But Howard wrote far more than just three tales of his exile from Atlantis. There are fifteen known Kull works in some form or another, be they finished or unfinished, most just went unpublished during his lifetime.

Howard thought really highly of his Kull stories: he had a great time writing them, saying in a 1927 letter to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith, “I enjoyed writing ["The Shadow Kingdom"] more than any piece of prose I ever wrote." He thought he executed his ideas well, and as scholar Patrice Louinet puts it, “The Shadow Kingdom occupies a special place in Howard’s fiction in particular and weird fiction in general, as well as in the author’s heart.” I’m sure it also helped that when “The Shadow Kingdom” sold to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales for $100, it was more money than anyone had ever paid in one go to Howard in his entire lifetime. 

It seems like it was a real blow to Howard when Wright rejected a new Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!” He also sent it to Argosy and Adventure, but they rejected it, too. Maybe it wasn’t ready yet. He put the rest of his Kull material back in his trunk, with the idea to perhaps return to it later.

One of those stories that Howard stuffed in his trunk was called “The Curse of the Golden Skull,” and it wouldn’t see publication until 1967 when Howard’s literary agent packaged it into the ninth issue of his fanzine The Howard Collector.

We don’t exactly know when “The Curse of the Golden Skull” was written, but it was likely in late 1928 or early 1929, as Howard had returned to writing Kull after making a digression for his novel Skull-Face in 1928. It appears that three stories of Kull were rejected around this time, either from Weird Tales or Argosy, and then Howard left Kull behind entirely by the beginning of 1931.

“The Curse of the Golden Skull” is very short, just a couple of pages, really. It also didn’t actually feature Kull—though he’s implied to be not far away, just offstage. It’s an interestingly-structured story. Essentially two vignettes taking place thousands of years apart, connected by one paragraph in between them. In the first vignette, Rotath of Lemuria, a great sorcerer of the Thurian Age, is dying in a shrine on Lemuria’s highest peak after having recently been stabbed. It’s interesting how much happens just out of view of the story in this short narrative—we see Rotath dying, but we don’t see the killing blow. Rotath thinks to himself about how his own mistakes brought him to this end and how he shouldn’t have revealed his powers to the king of Lemuria because it freaked him out enough to seek help to kill Rotath.

Anticipating the themes of his Conan stories, Rotath, despite all his magnificent magical power, is brought to his end by nothing more than the sharp point of sword wielded by a barbarian chief. With his final breaths, Rotath curses those who might disturb his golden bones.

My favorite part of this story is the one-paragraph interlude which compresses millennia into just a moment, in which “the green oceans rose and wrote an epic poem in emerald and the rhythm thereof was terrible.” This, too, connects to many of the motifs you see played out through Howard stories over the years. Cataclysms vastly reshape the earth and her denizens rapidly evolve and devolve. The changing of epochs is the only constant.

​In the modern day, a scientist stumbles across Rotath’s shrine and his bones. Howard was always so good with personification (cities unfurl across the land, towers reach to the sky) as a beard masks this scientist’s face and mire slimes his boots. He’s made less sympathetic by his reaction to the shrine, desiring acclaim of universities and powerful societies, so we don’t feel as bad when he gets bitten by a snake and presumably dies. Like Rotath’s lethal sword wound, the adder bite is just implied by a shriek and a stagger.

The two men are connected across eons, united only by ambition, and a one-sided rage. This story does a lot while so much of the action is in absentia. I can see why it didn’t sell and at the same time, I find it pretty compelling, two men, two deaths, with centuries in between.

And then, across another ocean of time… 

By 1970, “The Curse of the Golden Skull” had finally left the trunk via The Howard Collector. Marvel was licensing Conan the Barbarian from Glenn Lord to launch their comic of the same name. Roy Thomas was hard at work throughout the early 70s to make Conan a success for the House of Ideas, very frequently adapting Conan stories or other Howard works, fitting them neatly into his comic timeline.

In 1974, Roy enlisted the help of comics legend Neal Adams to draw an issue of Savage Tales, the black and white magazine they had launched alongside Conan the Barbarian that could do longer, more mature stories, but without the constraints of the Comics Code Authority. Roy and Neal had worked together on X-Men and The Avengers, but Neal had never done pencils on a Conan story before.

Since there were a bunch of creatives on the Savage Tales team and the mag’s stories didn’t appear in any specific order, Roy figured that he could assign Neal a 30-page story, and when it was done, they would print it. 

Marvel was currently in talks with science fiction writers and controversial Conan banner-carriers L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter for the adaptation rights to their additional Conan stories which had been appearing in paperbacks since the 60s. In specific, Roy had his eye on the story “The City of Skulls,” which had appeared in the generically-titled Conan from Lancer Books and for my money is certainly one of their lesser collaborations. 

As Conan got spun off into his own magazine, from Savage Tales to The Savage Sword of Conan, the plan for Roy and Neal’s “City of Skulls” adaptation moved there. And then for other reasons unknown to us, and maybe even unknown to Roy Thomas, the adaptation was moved from Savage Sword to the monthly, comic-sized, color title, Conan the Barbarian. It was to become issue #37, with a cover date of April 1974. This meant that the planned 30 pages could suddenly run absolutely no longer than 19.

And if that wasn’t enough, about the time Neal Adams was finishing penciling page six, where Conan and Juma nearly get run through by a rhinoceros, L. Sprague de Camp decided that he actually did not give his permission for Marvel to use his story, and the whole issue began to collapse. 

Roy was not about to let Neal’s art go to waste, so they decided to pivot. Roy figured if they were technically adapting a different story, they would be able to use the pages Neal had already drawn as set-up, and then de Camp wouldn’t be able to say “boo” to a goose. Glenn Lord suggested a little-known, only-recently published King Kull story titled “The Curse of the Golden Skull.” If I had to guess, I’d assume that Roy liked how little action was actually depicted in the story, giving him lots of space to fill in the gaps. Roy had Neal draw three new pages, which would be the new start to the story, adapting the scene in which Rotath dies in his shrine. After that, it would cut to Conan and Juma.

They worked out a deal with de Camp to continue using Juma, so the credits page now lists Roy as our writer, Neal as our artist doing both the pencils and the inks, the original is credited to Howard, and de Camp and Carter get a special shoutout for letting Marvel use Juma.

I have to imagine that L. Sprague de Camp never ended up reading the issue, because it is wildly similar to “The City of Skulls” in most ways other than its prologue. In both Conan #37 and “City of Skulls,” Conan and Juma are escorting a Turanian princess when they’re attacked. They’re knocked out and chained while they are taken to a tropical depression deep within a mountain range. In that tropical depression is a hidden city where an evil ruler makes them work in a mine. They attempt a daring escape and ultimately use a giant monster to kill the ruler of the city. In “City of Skulls” it’s a god statue that steps on Jalung Thongpa, in issue #37 it’s a slug that eats Rotath’s golden bones and then spits out his skin. Roy is eager to point out minor differences, like Conan being more disinterested in the Turanian princess in their version, but they follow the story pretty faithfully. Roy says it turned out more like de Camp’s story than he would’ve wanted, but that he likes their version better. I’m inclined to agree.

If you’re reading the story with the issue’s history in mind, certain points start to emerge where you can see them squeezing most of the story into the ten pages they had left, like when Conan and Juma are working in the mine and the narration tells us that we’ll skip mercifully forward past their enslavement. Sure, Roy, you’re definitely doing it for our sake.

Issue #37 would end up being one of only two issues Neal Adams did pencils for. He did a few covers and he helped out with inking for an issue or two later on, but his time in the Conan orbit was small. It sucks for us, because his work is incredibly good. His figures are all unique, and his sense for action and storytelling are as solid as it gets.

Due to a paper shortage caused by a labor strike, there were some hiccups in the Marvel release schedule about the time Conan #37 hit the stands. Instead of potentially getting pulled off the shelf a week or two later to make room for new comics, #37 actually stayed on the newsstand for a full month, causing it to become the bestselling Conan comic for quite a few years. It’s a fun issue, so I’m not mad about that.

Rotath was dead, Neal was gone, and Roy kept plugging away.

And then, across another, much smaller ocean of time… maybe a lake of time or a large pond of time…

In 1992, Roy Thomas was returning to Conan after over a decade away. He was on his second tenure writing both Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword, titles he would close out with a run on each between 1993 and 1995.

As part of the Marvel Graphic Novel line, Roy was periodically a part of the creative team bringing feature-length, color stories printed on big, high-quality paper. For his final MGN, Roy returned to “The Curse of the Golden Skull” in Conan: The Ravagers Out of Time to write a sequel. Unlike the two stories it builds off of, there doesn’t seem to be any high drama in this comic’s path to the page. Despite taking place many years after Conan #37, this graphic novel has a pretty similar setup to his story nearly twenty years prior. There’s an ambush in the Turanian mountains, a trek to the hidden city, which is now a ruin, and then delving into the mines underneath.

To Conan and Red Sonja’s surprise, Rotath is still down there, having taken over the mind of that giant slug that ate him all those years ago. This time, Rotath uses magic to send them all back to the Thurian Age, giving Conan and Sonja the chance to team up with the barbarian king of Valusia. Roy leans more into some of the throwaway lines like including the Ape Lords from Howard’s vignette as a major force in the story, allied against Conan and Kull. 

In addition to acting as a sequel to issue 37, the graphic novel also references “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” “Kings of the Night,” as well as one oblique reference to Conan #68 from August 1976, when Conan, Red Sonja, and Belit meet Kull, Brule, and Gonar. As the medium of comics so often does, the original story has been adapted and built upon until now it’s a jumble of threads of continuity. Despite its tangled timeline threads, the book does a good-enough job of saying something about people uniting, even with those not of their own time, to cooperate against evil, in some ways anticipating what they’re doing over at Titan Comics today, emphasizing the Howardverse through crossover events. 

Mike Docherty is not my favorite artist, but he does a solid job here and seems to have improved from his work on Conan the Barbarian: The Horn of Azoth. It’s a fun story, but won’t be anyone’s favorite.

More than 60 years on from Howard’s original, unpublished vignette, there were those who still cared enough to return to his ideas. Instead of two men connected by a curse across time, we have several stories, connected only by a love of Robert E. Howard’s original ideas. And the desire to sell comic books.

[Note: This blog post was originally written as the script for a YouTube video, found below.]