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.]