 In an alternate universe, Roy Thomas and Marvel Comics acquired the rights to Lin Carter's hero Thongor, leading to the long-running comic Thongor the Barbarian, The Savage Sword of Thongor, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's star turn was as the big-screen Thongor. Maybe you're even tuning into Late Night with Thongor O'Brien. Or perhaps not (especially not that last one), since Thongor's not near as cool as Conan. But that was the goal at one point. In 1970, Stan Lee was looking for a sword-and-sorcery characters to acquire the rights to for Marvel Comics, and he called Roy Thomas into his office. Thomas listed off the pulp heroes he was aware of: Thongor, Kull, Conan, John Carter. Roy was passingly familiar with Conan, having bought a copy of Conan the Adventurer for the Frank Frazetta cover and was sort of nonplussed by "The People of the Black Circle." He'd eventually picked up a few more of the Lancer / Ace series for the Frazetta covers and liked a few of the stories within. Stan Lee was hoping to get the rights to Thongor. Stan, ever the salesman, thought the name looked better on a cover than a name like "Conan" that started with a C. I don't get why, but it led to Roy Thomas making an offer to adapt Thongor stories into Marvel books. Ultimately, the Lin Carter camp wanted too much for the rights and Marvel wasn't willing to pony up, so Thomas looked elsewhere. He ultimately wrote to Glenn Lord: Howard's estate executor and one of Conan's champions, offering $200 per issue ($50 more than Stan had allowed him to offer). Thankfully, Lord accepted and Thomas teamed with rookie artist Barry Windsor-Smith (at that point lacking the "Windsor") to adapt Conan. Side bar: if you've never read Barry Windsor-Smith's Monsters, get a copy now. It's a rejected Hulk story from the 80s, and one of the most deeply affecting comics I've ever read.  Roy Thomas circa 1970 To kind of approximate a costume like superhero comic readers probably would have been expecting, they gave young Conan a helmet with horns adorning the front and a necklace of three red pendants around his neck. Other than that, it was just a loincloth. Now, Roy and Barry didn't actually have the rights to any original Robert E. Howard material at first, and though that would soon change, it meant that the Conan the Barbarian comic for Marvel wouldn't be anything like straight adaptions of the character's stories. Unlike the original Howard stories, the Lancer books, or the eventual Savage Sword of Conan, this comic would be linear in narrative. With so much Conan stuff inherently appearing out of order, this feels like a deliberate choice now, but looking back, it was probably just the obvious move. Comic readers were used to Amazing Spider-Man #35 carrying on the story from Amazing Spider-Man #34, after all. This leads me to the chronology of Roy and Barry's Conan. I picked up the Titan Comics omnibus of the first 26 issues and was very interested in how it both mirrors and diverges from the usually-accepted chronology of Conan's life. In some places, it is remarkably similar, or even expands beautifully on throwaway lines from Howard's original stories. In other parts, it changes large aspects of Conan's history, while still sort of rhyming with the prose work, some parts of which hadn't even been written yet. I think this was on purpose. Roy Thomas is very well-versed in Conan chronologies and has said in his essays looking back on Conan the Barbarian that while he couldn't just adapt existing Conan stories, he wanted to generally follow and honor the timeline organized by past chronologizers like P. Schuyler Miller and L. Sprague de Camp. Below, I compare many of the story beats we see in those first 26 issues. Arrows between issues that are red represent direct adaptions, while arrows that are in blue represent stories that rhyme with, seem to be inspired by, or in other ways mirror Conan's prose short stories. From the north came Conan Conan's life begins in Cimmeria, being born on a battlefield. This is one of the indisputable aspects of Conan's life, though it's not shown in the Conan the Barbarian comic (which I'm going to abbreviate as "CtB" from here on). Whereas the prose stories frequently mention the Cimmerian raid on Aquilonia's Venarium fort, we don't see this is CtB. Instead, we skip to Vanaheim, where Conan is already raiding with those mentioned in "The Frost-Giant's Daughter." Conan is 17, but of course, already a great fighter. In Conan's prose adventures, he raids with the Aesir, which takes him to the castle of Haloga in Hyperborea. He's enslaved by the Hyperboreans, eventually escaping and fleeing south into the Brythunian mountains. His inquisitor is the witch queen Vammatar, who controls undead hordes. In the CtB comic, we get a progression where the details are entirely different but the broad strokes are ultimately the same. Roy Thomas wanted to waste little time getting Conan down into the "gleaming cities" of the Hyborian kingdoms, while also starting in the north like "Frost-Giant." Conan still gets enslaved in Hyperborea, but with some futuristic societies, under very different circumstances. Conan's inquisitor this time is a leader of subhuman "Beast Men" named Moira.  As Conan flees south from Hyperborea, in the third issue we get a digression from the prose stories entirely in the form of "The Twilight of the Grim Grey God," which is a really stellar issue. It has no prose equivalent in Conan's journey. There's a novel by Sean A. Moore with a similar title: Conan and the Grim Grey God, but the two seem to have entirely different plots. What Thomas was doing here was pulling a play from L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's playbook: those two authors had been adapting non-Conan REH material into Conan stories since the mid-50s, so Thomas looked to the Conanless Howard historical tale "The Grey God Passes," AKA "The Twilight of the Grey Gods," AKA "Spears of Clontarf." Honestly, the first two issues of CtB aren't that great; I think Roy was finding his footing. Roy has said he agrees. While reading those first two stories, I was a little worried I had made a mistake ponying up the whopping $125 pricetag for the omnibus, but my fears were soon assuaged. The third rebounds hard and it's a compelling, original story. "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," while not adapted yet, will appear later on.  A thief in the night As I noted above, Marvel Comics didn't have the rights to adapt any actual Robert E. Howard Conan stories when they acquired the rights to the Cimmerian initially, but after Roy Thomas was able to convince both Glenn Lord and the Marvel execs to pony up for the rights to other REH work, it wouldn't take long for Roy to seek out the rights to his favorite Conan story, "The Tower of the Elephant." It's the only Conan story that Thomas adapted three different times: once in Conan the Barbarian in 1971, again in Savage Sword of Conan in 1977, and also in the Conan the Barbarian newspaper strip that ran from 1978 to 81. In the traditionally-accepted prose progression, Conan comes down from the north into the thief city of Zamora, where his first adventure is chronicled in "The Tower of the Elephant." It makes me happy to know that Roy Thomas agrees that the thief city is unnamed and is not Arenjun, as so many authors have conflated. Conan's first thief story being "Tower" contradicts the chronology I settled on, but I don't want to complicate things too much here, so ignore me for a bit. In the Howard stories, Conan follows "Tower" with thieving in Shadizar the Wicked in "The Hall of the Dead," then going over to Nemedia in "The God in the Bowl," and finally to an unnamed city-state in Corinthia for "Rogues in the House."  In the CtB comic, Conan begins his thieving journey in Zamora just like he does in Howard's stories. Thomas's adaption of "Tower" is very faithful. Where he goes from there is more interesting, though. Conan leaves Zamora's Thief-City pretty quickly (at least compared to how much time he seems to have spent there in Savage Sword) and we see him next in a remote Zamorian village for issue 5, "Zukala's Daughter." Issue 5 was actually planned by Thomas and Smith prior to nabbing "The Tower of the Elephant," so it was the original issue 3 for the book. I don't think it's a great issue, unfortunately. Inspired by the REH poem "Zukala's Daughter" and pulling from other inspirational sources Roy Thomas can't quite remember, it's a one-and-done story that doesn't have any kind of equivalent in short story form. Conan then goes to Shadizar, which Roy Thomas was very excited about when writing. While Zamora is pretty well-defined in "Tower of the Elephant," Thomas was able to mold Shadizar much more to how he saw it seeing as its only appearance was in "The Hall of the Dead." We get a few issues there: the mediocre issue 6 in "Devil-Wings Over Shadizar" and then "The Lurker Within" for issue 7, which is their adaption of "The God in the Bowl." Roy made a few changes to "The Lurker Within" like changing a few names around and adding one female character that isn't in the original story, but even kept some of de Camp's lines he didn't love just so that he wouldn't deviate too much from the original. Issue 7 is a huge step up over the previous issues and, by my estimation, where the comic really finds its footing. Roy felt the same in hindsight and expressed a lot of pride in this issue. There are very few duds for the next twenty issues!  Issue 8 takes Conan to a moonlight city named Lanjau (rather than Larsha in the REH/dC version). The plot beats are quite similar, but the monsters are frankly cooler in Thomas's version, and it includes an Gunderman named Burgun who mirrors the Gunderman Nestor of the prose version, but only slightly. Roy didn't want to simply adapt de Camp's version of "The Hall of the Dead," so he took some liberties with his storytelling. For example, he adds some very cool armor to the undead sentries in the titular hall since he didn't feel like they were described in much detail and decides to reuse Burgun later on. Roy Thomas notes that issues 2-7 each saw declines in sales from the previous issue, leading to Stan Lee preparing to cancel the book. But 8 was where things started to change. It was the first book to sell better than the previous issue, and the title began an upward climb from there. For the next twenty years, he says, CtB was never on the chopping block again. Issue 9, "The Garden of Fear," is an original creation for which there's no prose equivalent.  Rogues in the temple, and then in the house CtB issues 10 and 11 are something really special. Marvel was implementing a change in which they would expand their output from 15-cent, 32-page books to 25-cent, 48-page books, which was something DC was doing at the time, too. As such, Thomas and Smith suddenly had a few more pages to play with in issues 10 and 11. Issue 10, "Beware the Wrath of Anu," seems wholly original for a while (the cover even promises "ALL NEW STORIES" somewhat deceptively). Conan is in an unnamed Corinthian city-state and happens to meet back up with the unnamed Gunderman from issue 7, named Burgun instead of Nestor. As Conan, Burgun, and an original character named Jenna burgle at temple to a bull god, all kinds of strange, cosmic shit happens. But the end of the issue reveals something: this is all lead-in to "Rogues in the House," which the comic adapts in issue 11. Roy Thomas masterfully expands on all kinds of throw-away lines and setup from the prose story to create an excellent prelude that is both wickedly entertaining and fills in all kinds of gaps. You know how they wrote that whole Solo movie around the throwaway line about how the Millennium Falcon could do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs? This is what they wish they were doing over at LucasFilm.  Conan gets thrown in jail (as he appears at the beginning of "Rogues") due to their thieving activities in issue 10. It's revealed that the woman he seeks revenge on is actually Jenna, whose role is massively expanded form the short story. It's at this point where the CtB "Rogues" meets up with the prose version and follows REH's pretty closely, albeit with a much more purely simian Thak that I originally ever pictured.  From the letters pages Now that CtB's thief stories were completed with "Rogues in the House," which Roy Thomas rightly deemed to be a high point of comics in the 1970s, the REH canon joins Conan up with the Turanians, but we don't get that yet in CtB. Instead, there's a wholly original digression for a few issues, followed by an old stand-by re-ordered in the chronology. Remember how Marvel had inflated the page count of their books for CtB 10 and 11? It was almost immediately rescinded, bringing Roy and Barry's page requirements back down into the twenties. Pushed by a close deadline, the decided to use a story they had written for Savage Tales #2 which had been cancelled, leaving the story unpublished. This became CtB's 12th issue, "The Dweller in the Dark," for which there's no analogue in prose. Even more out of the box, though, is what they did next. Roy Thomas notes in an essay that when he was writing CtB, the sum total of authors who had published anything Conan-based was limited to himself, Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg. He thought he might give someone else a shot. Opening up their bullpen to Conan pitches, issue 13 came from sword & sorcery writer John Jakes and resulted in "The Web of the Spider-God." Like the whole Grim Grey God situation detailed above, there's a Conan and the Spider God novel by de Camp that is entirely unrelated. Their next pitch came from British author Michael Moorcock, incorporating his character Elric of Melniboné, who is not nearly as dorky as he first seems. Issues 13 and 14 are a cosmic-as-fuck two-parter featuring Elric, and I enjoyed them way more than the covers made me think I would. Especially their last pages, for which the art is a serious show-stopper. These stories, with no traditional prose companions, take Conan south to the land of Koth much sooner than the short stories do. They've also caused me to look into Elric stories, which seem to be pretty awesome so far. After that, once again likely spurred on by tight deadlines, Roy and Barry reprinted their adaption of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" from Savage Tales as issue 15. This doesn't line up with where I put "Frost-Giant" in my chronology, or in the other popular placement after Conan's Turanian mercenary days, but it certainly seems like it landed here in CtB out of necessity, rather than as part of a grand plan. Additionally, the torch was passed by this point to Gil Kane as the lead illustrator, who I noted in my post about the first 100 issues of Savage Sword just... doesn't draw Conan to my liking. Barry will be back before too long. Go east, young man If one is following the original REH canon, Howard sends Conan east after his thieving days so that he can join the army of Turan as a mercenary in the service of King Yildiz. I noted when reading through my chronology that this was one of the least-inspiring episodes of Conan's long career, and I've seen others chime in to that effect as well. However, it's kind of an important one: it's where Conan evidently learns to use a bow, to refine his horseman skills, and gains travel experience. Many note that Conan's physical description in his thief days keep him in sandals and a loin cloth, but Conan dons armors, helmets, and notably a scarlet cloak at the end of "The Hand of Nergal" that we'll see again in "Queen of the Black Coast," linking those two stories chronologically. If we're talking minutia, there's also the fact that "Nergal" mentions that Conan's horse was given to him by Murilo in "Rogues in the House," which implies that "Rogues" was shortly before "Nergal," it it's clear CtB isn't playing that same game. In Howard' chronology, Conan's Turanian days are limited to the single unfinished story "The Hand of Nergal." de Camp and Carter expanded that to six stories, though really only two of them have Conan completing a military mission given to him by King Yildiz. This is the biggest change for CtB so far, I'd say. For the next long stretch of issues, Conan is sent east, joining the Turanians, and having adventures with light connections to the Howard / de Camp / Carter stories.  Issues 17 and 18 adapt the Conanless Howard story "The Gods of Bal-Sagoth," incorporating Conan into the narrative and introducing a character named Fafnir, who becomes a bit of a partner for Conan for several issues. Roy Thomas didn't even expect for Fafnir to appear after that two-part story, but Fafnir grows into an excellent character over the course of several issues together with Conan. The end of issue 18 explicitly shows Conan and Fafnir ending up on a Turanian war galley the Vilayet Sea being hired into the service of Prince Yezdigerd of Turan, therefore exploring part of his Turanian days unseen in Howard's work. Though I'm not the biggest fan of Conan's Turanian days in short story form, many of the issues from 17 to 26 are excellent comics. While issue 19 mostly confines the action to one Turanian ship, it's a great adventure. It feels a little similar to "The Hand of Nergal" to me, but CtB will eventually adapt "Nergal" itself. Issue 20 puts Conan at odds with the Turanian government and (sort of) has him resigning his commission from the country, dramatically leaping off the ship. Issue 21 puts Conan far to the east, and while it isn't a direct adaption of "The Curse of the Monolith," it rhymes with many elements of that story. Conan is tricked into going to the monolith by a priest, he's strapped to it, and there's a creature who wants to consume him that descends from the top of the monolith. The next few issues, up to the end of the first volume of The Original Marvel Years' first omnibus, have Conan floating around Hyrkania, Turan, and Khitai. Surprisingly, it has Conan spend what I felt was a huge stretch of time in the Turanian city of Makkalet, meeting Red Sonja and folding other non-Conan stories into the mix. Issue 22 is a reprint and therefore I won't include it here. Issue 23 is freely adapted from "The Shadow of the Vulture," and 25 is "inspired in part" by "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune," both originally lacking Conan (but the second is a Kull story, so that's close!).  Freely adaptedAfter issue 24, Barry Windsor-Smith left the book for good. When Stan Lee asked Roy Thomas what he thought would happen to the book, he said that they would sell more comic books, but win fewer awards. At the end of issue 26, it seems like Conan is going to drift back west.
I can't wait to pick up the next volume of this series, which should hit shelves in just a few weeks. It's so interesting to me how Roy Thomas, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Gil Kane were able to weave elements into their Conan canon in a way that freely adapted and rhymed with other parts of the Conan universe, while also feeling adventurously original.
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 It dawns on me that Catherine Crook de Camp may be the severely under-sung hero of Conan the Cimmerian. Catherine was a double-major at Barnard College, a school that is not considered an Ivy League institution by seeming technicality alone, from which she graduated magna cum laude. She was a teacher after that (big ups to a fellow educator) before she became a science fiction writer as well as a nonfiction writer whose main concern seemed to be writing about other genre fiction. She was also, as some have noted, married to L. Sprague de Camp, a person I have mentioned on this blog probably more times than anyone other than Robert Ervin Howard. Because we've got two de Camps in this story, I'm going to refer to everyone by their first names for once. Catherine's resume says to me that she was a very skilled writer whose credits have been frustratingly erased, so we can really only speculate as to how much she did. However, it seems like she might be the mastermind behind the great 1980 Conan pastiche novel, Conan and the Spider God. Catherine's husband Sprague (Lyon?) had begun working together with Lin Carter on Conan stories in the early 1950s, eventually producing a pretty sizable body of work- at least half of this blog has to be about their writing. Gary Romeo at Sprague de Camp Fan has an excellent, illuminating post about how the two writers worked together. Apparently, Sprague, being the writer with more experience, generally had Lin write the first draft and then he would iron out the second one. He claimed that this was because the more experienced writer would be more aware of things like errors, but I feel like it betrays something else about their partnership. "In collaboration with [Fletcher] Pratt and later with Carter, the collaborators found that it worked best if the younger writer (at least, younger in writing experience) did the rough draft and the older one the final. The younger writer is apt to have greater facility and be more fertile with ideas, while the older one is more alert for errors, infelicities, mistakes of grammar, inconsistencies, etc. With Pratt, he was the older; with Carter, he was the younger. In each case we got together and roughed out the plot first; then the junior author went home, wrote a synopsis or treatment (which he might or might not show the senior author) and then did the rough draft. The senior collaborator wrote the final draft and submitted it to the junior for minor changes before sending it out. We found out that when we reversed the procedure it didn’t work well."  I could be wrong here, but this seems to me like Sprague all but admitting that he wasn't a very skilled plotter of stories (or at the very least that he was a worse plotter), and maybe I only think that because it really squares with my perception of these writers. Lin's writing seems to be a little ham-fisted and wonky, as I noted of Lin's posthumous collaboration with Robert E. Howard on "The Hand of Nergal." Many of the Conan stories written by Sprague and Lin were rewrites of stories Lin had created for his character Thongor: "The Thing in the Crypt," "The Curse of the Monolith," "The Lair of the Ice-Worm," "The Gem in the Tower..." But it seems like Sprague might have been the more skilled wordsmith- Lin without Sprague reads a little worse. Therefore, it's my belief that Lin was the person who was probably the better plotter, and responsible for most of the story elements, with Sprague punching up Lin's prose. The two had a long and fruitful partnership, but it didn't last forever. In the 1970s, Lin Carter starts to drop off the map of the Hyborian Age a bit. There are rumblings online of Lin and Sprague having a falling out between them. Details are scant, but it seems widely accepted that something happened. Lin was also struggling with alcoholism, so that may have negatively affected his ability to work with Sprague. The 1972 novel Conan the Liberator saw Lin pretty much drop the ball and exit the novel's writing process barely a month in. "Carter started on his part but pooped out early in 1972. (We began on January 27.) After some months of fiddling around and trying to get him to work, Catherine and I gave up, and Catherine did the rest of the collaboration." Though the 1978 short story "The Ivory Goddess" is credited to both Lin and Sprague, Lin apparently didn't write a word of it (though he still got paid). Who picked up the slack on Lin's end? Well, apparently it was Catherine. The same thing happened on the group's novelization of the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie: Lin sat it out, but got a writing credit and a paycheck, while Catherine collected neither byline nor bag. So how did Conan and the Spider God, a novel written without Lin Carter and credited to L. Sprague de Camp alone get to be so good? It's probably Catherine! Sprague did credit her as having provided "editorial assistance," and the Conan lay scholarship online seems to be in agreement that this novel was largely her work. Conan and the Spider God, published by Bantam Books in 1980, is definitely one of the better novel-length Conan adventures, and it's a really fun story overall. The story takes place as the endpiece to Conan's Turanian mercenary days- there's a misunderstanding that causes Conan to flee Aghrupur in Turan for the west, back toward Zamora where he spent some of his prior years. To my delight, the start of this story connects nicely to the prologue of "The Blood-Stained God," which de Camp had written about 25 years earlier. We finally get to know what that "unruly episode" was!  Conan gets blamed for the kidnapping of Jamilah, royalty of Turan, and eventually ends up at the Zamorian city of Yezud. Some of the events in the early part of the book feel a little random and like they're there to pad out the runtime, but it eventually settles in. Yezud is the home to the cult of Zath, gigantic spider god and all-around corrupt theocracy built up in Zath's temples. Conan takes an assumed identity (using his father's name, Nial) and works undercover as a blacksmith in the city for a while while getting closer to the people there. He is smitten with Rubadeh, a dancing girl and acolyte for Zath, who, unlike many women of Conan stories, has her own dreams, goals, and past, and isn't completely head-over-heels with our barbarian. Perhaps the deft hand of Catherine? Unlike many Conan novels, characters have time to become more fully-formed and we get more time to come to like friends like Captain Catigern, and loathe the villain Harpagus. It's paced well, albeit very differently than REH ever wrote. Instead of being a whiz-bang action story, it's more of a slow burn. Conan is surrounded by potential enemies: the empire of Turan is on his trail and wants him dead. The cult of Zath could find out at any moment who he really is. The high priest Harpagus probably already knows who he is but is eerily quiet about it. Conan is always in danger, well before the giant spider enters the story. The novel really begins to shine in the last 30 pages or so in which we get a daring rescue of Jamilah, a clever thievery scene that makes Conan infiltrate and work without his sword, and a truly horrifying episode in the tunnels beneath Yezud where lurks the giant spider Zath and the desiccated remains of her live meals.  This 1984 edition of the book has such a cool cover and I can't find the artist's name anywhere. Like many of the best Conan stories, Conan and the Spider God has some valuable commentary about the nature of power, especially power claiming moral authority. Perhaps the most important line in the novel is when a character points out that the priests of Zath love virtue, almost to the point of vice. Conan, and us by extension, is forced to wait and watch as a huge herd of sheep are driven in front of him to be slaughtered to the spider god, and while lambs to the slaughter isn't exactly the most original metaphor, it feels appropriate. After all, this book was published at the dawn of the Reagan administration in which the Gipper and the "moral majority" stripped away social programs and gutted services for things like education. During my masters degree, we had several courses on the history of education and it feels like three-quarters of our problems in public ed. began with Reagan. And now I'm sitting here reading this novel about a month away from the start of another criminal presidency, waiting for him to unleash his Children of Zath. I know the Conan fanbase skews conservative, so I probably just had quite a few people close the tab they were reading this on. Anyway, isn't this blog supposed to be about the chronology of Conan stories? Let's get to that. Spider God takes place at the end of Conan's Turanian mercenary period, right before "The Blood-Stained God." It says that he spent about two years with the Turanians, and now he's back in Zamora for a little more theiving before heading over to the Western Ocean for "Queen of the Black Coast." It's noted several times that the effigy of Zath in the temple is more than twice the size of the spider Conan fought in "The Tower of the Elephant," and even Zath's children are larger than that arachnid. Conan makes several comments about the barbarity of supposed civilization and is working on holding his tongue a little better, which he definitely grows at. "Guarding his tongue" and "weighing his words" are one of his biggest adjustments to civilization, he says. This is much scarier when you're hiding amongst your enemies. While researching this novel, I came across a pretty hilarious review of it which can only be accessed via the Wayback Machine. While I almost completely disagree with it, the writer had some pretty funny lines lampooning what he saw as an inexcusably bad novel. "I fear no commentary of mine will be half so successful in furnishing the rope to hang it by than the book’s own turgid prose." He says of Conan's rescue of a witch early in the book: "But before he gets to Yezud though he does interrupt his journey just long enough to save a witch called Nyssa from being burnt at the stake. Again no readily plausible explanation is forthcoming about why he should choose to do this apart from the rather limp contention that “the protection of women, regardless of age, form, or station, was one of the few imperatives of his barbarian code”. The most risible aspect of this sorry episode comes though when Conan struggles to outdistance the pursuing pack of pitchfork wielding yokels and has to be saved by the witch casting a glamour spell of illusion. Memories of “The Black Stranger” and of a limping Conan outrunning a Pictish war-party can seldom have seemed more remote." About a scene in which Conan orders a more upscale wine than he is prone to: "Hook Howard’s grave up to a generator and I reckon the dynamo revolutions produced by this particular passage could power a city block." As the reviewer careens toward a conclusion: "As is all too painfully apparent from the above, this is a quite appalling book. Literally jaw droppingly abject in actual fact. I’m quite at a loss to recall the last time I came across a novel anywhere near as incompetently conceived and executed as this one. The whole sloppy narrative is entirely driven by contrivance and coincidence from start to finish. It is utterly impoverished in imagination and displays not even the most meagre sense of any sort of enthusiasm whatsoever on the part of the author." Unfortunately, our reviewer is not all fun and games. "And then you ventured your suggestion that the book was actually written by de Camp’s wife, and in an instant the reason for every one of the novel’s abundance of faults became blindingly clear. Simply put, this is a woman’s book and its Conan is a woman’s concept of what makes an acceptable hero... You do sound irreparably chauvinist, bud. It's sad how many times I've come across the assertion that women can't write sword & sorcery because they're somehow allergic to badassery or secretly trying to castrate male heroes. The assertion that Catherine Crook de Camp must be responsible for this book because women are more afraid of spiders than men, judging by the highly scientific study of cartoons and sitcoms is especially funny. We agree that this book was probably mostly Catherine de Camp and less L. Sprague, but I've got to say that she's done an excellent job here to outpace her husband for one of the better Conan novels. ★★★★☆   Do you ever read something that hits you a little extra hard, not really through anything in the actual work, but rather because you're in the right frame of mind to accept it? I've been thinking about aging a lot recently. I'm a baseball fan, and recently a pretty good baseball player named Juan Soto signed an absolutely massive contract (it's actually the biggest contract in the history of sports) with the New York Mets for fifteen years. I did the math in my head and realize that I'll be almost fifty by the time that contract is up. My apologies to anyone who's fifty or over reading this, but that kind of hit me like a truck. I don't think it's necessarily the number itself; I know fifty isn't really even old. But what freaked me out is the fact that this is one event- Juan Soto's tenure with the Mets- that will end when I'm 48. I think it would have felt entirely different if it hadn't been framed as me being the length of essentially one baseball contract away from my fifties. So I was already kind of thinking about aging, but then this comes up in all my feeds on Reddit and Bluesky and such: James Mangold was a little hurt by audience reception to his Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny movie from last year. I thought Dial of Destiny was fine at best, but I was a little struck by his reasoning: "It hurt in the sense that I really love Harrison [Ford] and I wanted audiences to love him as he was and to accept that that’s part of what the movie has to say—that things come to an end, that’s part of life... You have a wonderful, brilliant actor who’s in his eighties. So I’m making a movie about this guy in his eighties, but his audience on one other level doesn’t want to confront their hero at that age. And I am like, I’m good with it. We made the movie. But the question is, how would anything have made the audience happy with that, other than having to start over again with a new guy?” This just got me thinking about where my sympathies lie. Mangold is absolutely right about accepting a person where they're at, that things end, and that maybe there's something to learn there. I'd certainly have a definitive ending that goes out on its own terms than endlessly recycling the old, which pop culture loves to do these days. That ghoulish CGI Ian Holm in Alien: Romulus. Shitass AI recreations of Chris Reeve and other actors in The Flash. Star Wars endlessly looping back on itself, only allowing things to happen because they happened in older, better movies.  Later printings of the book replaced the original cover art with this righteous painting by our buddy Boris Vallejo. I guess that brings me to Conan. Conan of the Isles, the sixth Lancer book written by the team of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter (probably written by Carter and edited by de Camp?) picks up in about the twentieth year of King Conan's reign. Life has gotten immensely stale for the Cimmerian in more ways than one. Hot-blooded adventurers aren't cut out for litigating in a cushy kingship, but also I sense some reticence on the authors' part to make Conan anything but a Gary Stu king. His kingship is broadly popular. He's firm but fair. Nobody dares invade his boring, prosperous kingdom. Eventually, a mystic red shadow begins taking the lives of Aquilonian citizens both high and low. This, as it should, sends him out into the world for another adventure. For a moment, I thought this might mirror the beginning of Conan's life. The Cimmerian begins his career defending his homeland from a hostile colonizing force (remember how I said we're wondering where our sympathies lie?), I thought this might be an extended metaphor for colonizing forces defeating indigenous tribes through smallpox and the like. I was mostly wrong- it's not quite that interesting, but Conan of the Isles is still pretty decent and does indeed have something worthwhile to say. We follow Conan across the western ocean to what appears to be the islands that will one day dot the Gulf of Mexico (we were so close to being able to make "Conan retires to Florida" jokes!) judging by the Aztec- and Mayan-sounding names. I'm trying to not think too hard about the fact that the cultures in "Red Nails," over on the Hyborian continent, were also influenced by these same real-life cultures. As it ends, Conan still yearns for one last adventure or two and the book implies that he gets folded into the Quetzlcoatl myth in the New World. Much of the prose of this novel was really good. Especially in the beginning, it pounds away at this idea that Conan doesn't want to simply waste away in the tapestried halls of Tarantia. It does a great job setting up those themes. For a while, I was a freshman English major back in college reading "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" for the first time again. Conan pants, he aches, notes to himself that he used to be a little quicker. I'd imagine that it's really tough to see that you're not able to do things that used to come easy to you. Obviously, nobody is as physically capable as the superhero aptitude of Conan, but I suppose it's doubly hard for people who were once razor-sharp athletes. And whereas the two latter Indiana Jones movies are constantly winking at the audience and asking, "Isn't it hilarious that he's doing this now that he's old? Wasn't this a lot easier when Indy was in his prime?," Conan of the Isles is playing those questions straight. It is instead saying, "Wow, it sure seems like it must be hard to be past your prime."  We get a more introspective Conan here that makes this all possible, a little bit more like the one in "Queen of the Black Coast" or in Jim Zub's current Conan the Barbarian run for Titan. Conan is raging against the dying of the light, as are some of his comrades. One of the best scenes involves Sigurd Redbeard being marched toward an altar of human sacrifice. He's afraid at first, but then realizes that much like Conan, he and death are old shipmates, and Sigurd ends up laughing out loud.
At the end of the book, Conan sails off to a new continent that no Hyborian has explored. There's a whole section on this book's Wikipedia page about what happens after the events in of the Isles, but dude, listen to James Mangold up there at the top of this blog post. Let it go. Things come to an end, and that's part of life. For a definitive end to Conan's life, read "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian." I'm going to be over here working on being okay with aging. ★★★☆☆  I wasn't originally going to read Conan the Buccaneer for this chronology, but now that I have, I can't remember why I was so resistant to the idea. I was at a Christmas party in Fort Collins, Colorado this weekend and toward the back of the house was a small shelf that I looked up on to see a whole slew of the Lancer / Ace books. One of the guys who lives there turned out to be a huge Conan fan with several Frazetta prints around the place, and he leant me Conan the Buccaneer and Conan of the Isles since those are the only two of the lot that I haven't read (thanks, Austin!). Conan the Buccaneer, written by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter and published in 1971 as part of the Lancer series of Conan books, is a fun little pirate adventure that takes place during Conan's days with the Barachans on the western ocean. I actually really enjoyed reading this one, but I feel like it highlights the difference between the writing of Robert E. Howard and his standard-bearers, de Camp and Carter. Conan is captain of the Wastrel, getting wasted in Zingara as he is want to do at the beginning of the novel. We are treated to the return of the "Treasure of Tranicos" character Black Zarono, which was very welcome for me- he was excellent in that story (chronologically speaking, though, this is Zarono's first appearance since "Tranicos" will take place right before Conan's kingship). The two pirate crews of Zarono's Petrel and Conan's Wastrel are at odds with one another, chasing each other down the coast to a mysterious Nameless Isle in search of treasure. We get to explore an ancient temple on that island before heading over to Kush to be reunited with Juma, one of Conan's best companions from "The City of Skulls" and we get up to all sorts of shenanigans fighting amazons and sentient trees.  Chronologically, Conan the Buccaneer takes place after "The Pool of the Black One" and before "Red Nails." It says on page 58 that "less than a year had elapsed since, in this selfsame Wastrel, he had sailed with its former captain, the saturnine Zaporavo, to an unknown island in the west, where Zaporavo and several of the Zingaran crew had met their doom. Few things in Conan's adventurous life had been stranger or more sinister than the Pool of the Black One and its inhuman attendants." Additionally, the story place's itself in Conan's life by stating that Conan is now "over 35 and past the first flush of youth." There are two chronological curiosities for me in this narrative. One, Conan ends this story aboard the Wastrel headed south, which makes sense as he heads toward Xuchotl, but I feel like there's a slightly important episode that happens between the two that we're not privy to. Conan is well-outfitted, well-respected in Zingara now, and he has his full crew aboard his ship. When we see him next in "Red Nails" he's on land, shipless and crewless. Could be a good story there to fill in the gap. And two, Conan fights a sentient evil tree in Gamburu toward the end of the novel and remarks that it reminds him of his days fighting in an arena in Messantia, but I don't recall any adventures like that. Perhaps they're in something I somehow skipped over. This story's a good time. I don't mean to make it sound like this was one of the best Conan adventures by any means, but I was kind of surprised at how good it was because it was written right before the four "Old Man Conan" stories (which constantly reference Buccaneer) and all of those were absolute garbage. My main takeaway from Conan the Buccaneer, though, is how sharply it draws the difference between Howard's writing ability and the powers of de Camp & Carter. The lone review on its Wikipedia page agrees with me: "Reasonably good plot but substandard writing." Yeah, the plotting is good, but there's just something missing in the prose itself. Take this tomb description from Howard's "Black Colossus" as an example and let's compare it to a tomb description by de Camp and Carter. From "Black Colossus:" "Gingerly stepping over it, the thief thrust against the door, which this time slid aside, revealing the interior of the dome. Shevatas cried out; instead of utter darkness he had come into a crimson light that throbbed and pulsed almost beyond the endurance of mortal eyes. It came from a gigantic red jewel high up in the vaulted arch of the dome. Shevatas gaped, inured though he was to the sight of riches. The treasure was there, heaped in staggering profusion—piles of diamonds, sapphires, rubies, turquoises, opals, emeralds; zikkurats of jade, jet and lapis lazuli; pyramids of gold wedges; teocallis of silver ingots; jewel-hilted swords in cloth-of-gold sheaths; golden helmets with colored horsehair crests, or black and scarlet plumes; silver scaled corselets; gem-crusted harness worn by warrior-kings three thousand years in their tombs; goblets carven of single jewels; skulls plated with gold, with moonstones for eyes; necklaces of human teeth set with jewels. The ivory floor was covered inches deep with gold dust that sparkled and shimmered under the crimson glow with a million scintillant lights. The thief stood in a wonderland of magic and splendor, treading stars under his sandalled feet." And from Conan the Buccaneer: "The structure was of roughly cubical shape; but its surfaces, instead of being simple squares, were made up of a multitude of planes and curves of irregular form, oriented every which way. There was any symmetry to the structure. It was as if every part of the building had been designed by a different architect, or as if the building had been assembled from parts of a score of other structures chosen at random from many lands and eras... The temple looked wrong. The style was like nothing he had seen in his far voyaging. Even the ghoul-haunted tombs of Stygia were not so alien as this irregular block of black stone. It was as if the builders had followed some inhuman geometry of their own---some unearthly canon of proportion and design."  Both of these passages describe mysterious, legend-haunted, treasure-packed, ancient, dangerous crypts, but one of them is captivating, and the other is just... fine. It's hard to even describe the difference in prose, but Howard's just feels more immediate, more alive, and like he's describing the tomb as he's standing in it rather than a game master talking about a dungeon to their players over their DM screen. The actual, physical thing de Camp and Carter are describing is even actually a little more unique than the tomb in Kuthchemes that Howard is describing, at least in its basic construction, but there's a magic in Howard's writing that is absent in de Camp and Carter's.
Like many of de Camp and Carter's Conan forays, this story pulls from different parts of the Conan canon, bringing back characters and elements from previous stories, which, while something that Howard almost never did, is fun to see. Conan the Buccaneer was adapted in Savage Sword issues 40 through 43. I've now read the first 117 issues of Savage Sword and none of them have taken the opportunity to explore how Conan loses the wastrel and ends up near Xuchotl, but maybe one will soon... If you're interested at all in this book, you should check out the great video that Grammaticus Books did on it a few months back. Since I also borrowed Conan of the Isles, I suppose I'll read that one next!  About halfway through reading through every Conan story, I had the idea of trying to place every original Savage Sword of Conan story into the chronology to see where they fit. Savage Sword is my first love of Conan: it's where I was introduced to him and it's probably my favorite format to read his adventures. Published by Marvel Comics from 1974 to 1995, Savage Sword was a black-and-white bronze age comic series. It was magazine-sized to skirt the restrictive Comics Code Authority's regulations on violence and adult content, and it's so good. I love this comic. It has some of the best creators of the 70s and 80s working on it: shepherded by Roy Thomas for the first 60 or so issues and then mainly by Michael Fleisher for the years after that, Savage Sword mostly adapted stories of an older Conan. While there are several early stories that made it to the mag, almost everything after "Hawks Over Shem" was adapted. Many of the stories were originals, and those are the ones I'm going to try to fit into our chronology here. Some of them were adapted from Robert E. Howard's historical short stories and poems. Some adapted Conan pastiches. Some were truly original Conan stories from the likes of Barry Windsor-Smith, Roy Thomas, Chuck Dixon, Chris Claremont, and Michael Fleisher. I don't own every issue of the comic- far from it. But I own the first 11 omnibuses published by Dark Horse, so I have a little more than the first 100 issues. They include a few other titles in them occasionally like Savage Tales of Conan the Barbarian. I could be way off on some of these, and others I'm pretty confident of my placement. I looked at a number of factors to try to place stories:
It seems like Conan's Zuagir raider period and his time as a Barachan pirate are particular favorites among Savage Sword writers seeing as a disproportionate amount of stories refer to Conan as a Zuagir chief or a Barachan buccaneer. I'm assuming that's because they're kind of flexible roles that could happen over a large swath of the map. I sort of thought that there would be more stories in these issues about his time with Aquilonia (either as a scout or as a king) or over in Vendhya around "The People of the Black Circle," but I was wrong on both accounts. There are very few original King Conan stories in these first 100 issues. Below is my best attempt at fitting them into Conan's career. Stories added into the chronology by Savage Sword are marked in red. If a story was not adapted into a story in Savage Sword, but there is a comic adaption from one of the other Bronze Age anthology Conan books like Conan the Barbarian, King Conan, or Savage Tales, I've marked those as well, but I'm certainly not trying to collapse all Conan comic material into one timeline or anything like that. Let me know what you think! The Conan Chronology + Savage Sword of Conan's first 100 issuesSSOC adds two stories of Conan's early life before leaving Cimmeria before adapting several of the L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter stories that detail Conan's earliest career events. "Rite of Blood" - Savage Sword 89
"Hunters and Hunted!" - Savage Sword 83
 "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" - Savage Tales of Conan 1 "Legions of the Dead" - Savage Sword 39 "The Thing in the Crypt" - Conan the Barbarian 92 The thief stories begin with "The God in the Bowl." "The God in the Bowl" - Conan the Barbarian 7 "Rogues in the House" - Conan the Barbarian 10 - 11 "The Tower of the Elephant" - Savage Sword 24 "The Darksome Demon of Raba-Than" - Savage Sword 84
"The World Beyond the Mists" - Savage Sword 93
"The Sorcerer and the Soul" - Savage Sword 53
"The Stalker Amid the Sands" - Savage Sword 54
"Black Lotus and Yellow Death" - Savage Sword 55
"The Sword of Skelos" - Savage Sword 56
"The Eye of Erlik" - Savage Sword 57
"For the Throne of Zamboula" - Savage Sword 58
"The Cave Dwellers" - Savage Sword 77
"The Palace of Pleasure" - Savage Sword 81
"The Blood Ruby of Death" - Savage Sword 98
"The Hall of the Dead" - Conan the Barbarian 8 "The Hall of the Dead" is the end of the thief stories. Other than one small digression in SSOC 91's B story, the Turanian mercenary stories begin immediately. "The Beast" - Savage Sword 91
 "The Chain" - Savage Sword 91
"The Gods of Bal-Sagoth" - Savage Sword 13
"The Hand of Nergal" - Conan the Barbarian 30 "The City of Skulls" - Savage Sword 59 "The People of the Summit" "The Curse of the Monolith" - Savage Sword 33 "Night of the Rat!" - Savage Sword 95
"The Secret of Skull River" - Savage Sword 5
"The Colossus of Shem" - Savage Sword 72
"The Colossus of Shem" in SSOC 72 is functionally the end of the Turanian mercenary stories. In several original stories along with a few adaptions, Conan wanders west afterword. "The Blood-Stained God" - Marvel Super Special 9 (and reprinted in Conan Saga 80) "The Curse of the Undead Man" - Savage Sword 1
"The Forever Phial" - Savage Sword 8
"The Lair of the Ice Worm" - Savage Sword 34 "Child of Sorcery" - Savage Sword 29
"The Sea of No Return" - Savage Sword 66
"Queen of the Black Coast" marks the beginning of Conan's first pirate period. His first pirate crew is aboard the Tigress with Belit. "Queen of the Black Coast" - Conan the Barbarian 58 - 59 "The Leopard Men of Darfar" - Savage Sword 97
"Lion of the Waves" - Savage Sword 86
Conan comes ashore ending his first pirate period and here begins to wander north from the Black Kingdoms in his next experiences as a mercenary. "The Vale of Lost Women" - Conan the Barbarian 104 "The Castle of Terror" "The Snout in the Dark" - Conan the Barbarian 106 - 107 After "The Snout in the Dark," we move into a period of Conan's life unseen in the original REH canon where he acts as a mercenary for various city-states in Corinthia. "The Lurker in the Labyrinth" - Savage Sword 71
"Demons in the Firelight" - Savage Sword 78 - 79
"Devourer of Souls" - Savage Sword 90
 "The Ape-Bat of Marmet Tarn" - Savage Sword 96
"Forest of Fiends" - Savage Sword 91
"The Dweller in the Depths" - Savage Sword 70
"The Gamesmen of Asgalun" - Savage Sword 89
"Eye of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 69
"Hawks Over Shem" - Savage Sword 36 "Black Colossus" - Savage Sword 2 "At the Mountain of the Moon God" - Savage Sword 3
"Shadows in the Dark" "Colossus of Argos" - Savage Sword 80
"The Wizard-Fiend of Zingara" - Savage Sword 61
 "Death Dwarves of Stygia" - Savage Sword 94
"Children of Rhan" - Savage Sword 64
"The Temple of the Tiger" - Savage Sword 62
Conan here heads east to the Vilayet Sea and begins his second pirate period, this time with the crew known as the Red Brotherhood. "Iron Shadows in the Moon" - Savage Sword 4 "Sons of the White Wolf" - Savage Sword 37
"The Road of the Eagles" - Savage Sword 38 Here is the beginning of Conan's period as a Zuagir raider. This period is often visited in SSOC. "A Witch Shall Be Born" - Savage Sword 5 "Mirror of the Manticore" - Savage Sword 58
"Sleeper Beneath the Sands" - Savage Sword 6
"Citadel at the Center of Time" - Savage Sword 7
"Black Tears" - Savage Sword 35 "The Curse of the Cat Goddess" - Savage Sword 9
"Moat of Blood" - Savage Sword 63
"Isle of the Hunter" - Savage Sword 88
"Shadows in Zamboula" - Savage Sword 14 "The Star of Khorala" - Savage Sword 44  "The Hill of Horror" - Savage Sword 95
"The Country of the Knife" - Savage Sword 11
"One Night in the Maul" - Savage Sword 99
"When a God Lives" - Savage Sword 100 (!)
"The Haunters of Castle Crimson" - Savage Sword 12
"The Fangs of the Serpent" - Savage Sword 65
"Dominion of the Bat" - Savage Sword 76
"The Blood of the Gods" - Savage Sword 28
This is the end of Conan's Zuagir period. "The Slithering Shadow" - Savage Sword 20 "Drums of Tombalku" - Savage Sword 21  "Escape from the Temple" - Savage Sword 87
"The Devil in Iron" - Savage Sword 15 The Flame Knife - Savage Sword 31 - 32 "The Daughter of the God King" - Savage Sword 85
"Revenge of the Sorcerer" - Savage Sword 86
"The People of the Black Circle" - Savage Sword 16 - 19 "Black Cloaks of Ophir" - Savage Sword 68
Here is the beginning of Conan's third pirate period, this time with the Barachans. "The Gem in the Tower" - Savage Sword 45 "The Pool of the Black One" - Savage Sword 22 - 23 "Plunder of Death Island" - Savage Sword 67
"The Changeling Quest" - Savage Sword 73
 Bor'aqh motherfucking Sharaq "The Temple of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" - Savage Sword 75
"The Demon in the Dark" - Savage Sword 82 - 83
"The Jeweled Bird" - Savage Sword 92
"A Dream of Blood" - Savage Sword 40
"The Quest for the Cobra Crown" - Savage Sword 41
"The Devil-Tree of Gamburu" - Savage Sword 42
"King Thoth-Amon" - Savage Sword 43
"The Informer" - Savage Sword 99
"Red Nails" - Savage Tales of Conan 2 - 3 "Jewels of Gwahlur" - Savage Sword 25 "The Ivory Goddess" - Savage Sword 60 Here is the end of Conan's Barachan pirate episodes. Next, we see a few wandering stories before his time as an Aquilonian scout.  "The Armor of Zuulda Thaal" - Savage Sword 87
"Lady of the Silver Snows" - Savage Sword 74
"The Night of the Dark God" - Savage Tales of Conan 4
Here is the beginning of Conan's time in Aquilonia. First as a scout, then as king. "Beyond the Black River" - Savage Sword 26 - 27 "The Dark Stranger" - Savage Sword 88
"Moon of Blood" - Savage Sword 46 "The Treasure of Tranicos" - Savage Sword 47 - 48 "When Madness Wears the Crown" - Savage Sword 49
"When Madness Wears the Crown" - Savage Sword 50
"Satyrs' Blood" - Savage Sword 51
"The Crown and the Carnage" - Savage Sword 52
"Wolves Beyond the Border" - Savage Sword 59 "The Phoenix on the Sword" "The Scarlet Citadel" - Savage Sword 30 The Hour of the Dragon - Savage Sword 8 - 10 The Return of Conan - King Conan 5 - 8 Here is the end of Conan's young kingship and we see a time jump of around 10 years past the birth of his children. "The Witch of the Mists" - King Conan 1 "Challenge" - Savage Sword 93
 "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" - King Conan 2 "Red Moon of Zembabwei" - King Conan 3 "Shadows in the Skull" - King Conan 4 Conan of the Isles "Death-Song of Conan the Cimmerian" - Savage Sword 8 "People of the Dark" - Savage Sword 6
Stories that were impossible to placeThere were a few stories told in Savage Sword that were just completely impossible to place. Unless I'm really missing something, they don't contain any contextual clues: Conan doesn't seem specifically young or old, there are no lines that indicate where the story takes place geographically, and there are no characters, items, or skills that give away a general time in Conan's life. Those are as follows: "The Lady of the Tower" - Savage Sword 98
"The Gift" - Savage Sword 100
 I wrote in my little "Welcome" post this past summer that I wasn't sure how long it would take me to read every Conan story or if I would even finish, but finish I did, and it feels to me like it went pretty fast. Part of me is sad about that: I love middle chapters where you're deep into an adventure but still have a lot to go. Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers, Temple of Doom... I guess I'd sort of like to live forever somewhere around "The People of the Black Circle" if I could. But here I am at the end of reading 45 short stories, one novella, three novels, one essay, two poems, and a shitload of comics in between (130 stories in the original Savage Sword and 5 in the relaunched title, with 26 in Marvel's Conan the Barbarian and 12 in Titan's) that basically comprise my own Conan headcanon. I also got to read several metatextual books on Robert E. Howard, Weird Tales, and their satellites, interview writer Jim Zub and talk to essayist Jeff Shanks, all of which were really great experiences. Mainly, I read every shred of Conan the Barbarian material written by Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg, Catherine Crook de Camp, and a few other assorted authors. So where am I at with all of this? Well, I've consistently tired to avoid hagiography when writing about Howard. I find it trite when people hold up writers, especially ones as flawed and commercially-minded as Robert Ervin Howard, to be unassailable gods of their craft. While I think I did a decent job of not writing that way throughout this chronology, I have to admit that the best stories of this bunch really are those written by Howard. When I ranked all the original Howard material, then all the stuff that Howard wrote that may have also been edited or revised by someone else, and then just every story I read, the narratives written by anyone else didn't even crack the top ten. To be far, the bottom two stories also belong to ol' Bobby Howard. I kind of feel like I've read an incredible epic: a life chockfull of adventure. While I used to say that I didn't care so much for Conan as a character and really just wanted to ride shotgun on his adventures, I've reached a much deeper appreciation for the Cimmerian himself and the themes of these books. Conan is not a simple character despite what a shallow reading might suggest. In reading The Dark Barbarian by Don Herron, I came across a quote from John D. Clark quipping: "Don't look for hidden philosophical meanings or intellectual puzzles in the yarns- they aren't there." L. Sprague de Camp agreed with him. I, decidedly, don't. I felt the tension in that continuing battle between the savage simplicity of barbarism and the complexities of civilization much more deeply after reading all this material. These books can be throwaway adventure fare, but at their best, they do have worthwhile messages and something you can really connect with. Issues to resolve with the chronologyAfter trying to place every Conan story on a linear timeline, there are still some issues I think I need to address. The first is my methodology- I decided to do this for fun, so I wanted a roadmap to follow, and I'm left wondering how my chronology would look different if I had simply read the stories in publication order without using a pre-existing chronology as a template. However, like I said, this was mostly for fun, so it was never a scientific endeavor. There are still a few stories that present issues, as well. I'd like to clear those up here. I've deleted my "Progress" page on this site and combined everything into the page just as "The Chronology" now. I've re-ordered everything into where I think it goes chronologically, and I broke up and color-coded different periods of Conan's life just for easier viewing. That full PDF is down below for your viewing. As I look at my finalized chronology, I feel like it mirrors both Joe Marek's and Dale Rippke's in a few ways. Here are the big takeaways: 1. "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" is the first Conan story. |
AuthorHey, I'm Dan. This is my project reading through the career of everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, in chronological order. 
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