It's the season of giving... perhaps you'll consider donating?

The Robert E. Howard House in Cross Plains, Texas requires major repairs to remain standing. Due to its listing on the National Register of Historic Places, the preservation costs increase. I just donated $50; perhaps you could too.

I'm very much looking forward to visiting the museum this June for Howard Days, and maybe I'll see you there!

Here's a link to the donation page.

Okay, I'm kind of cheating a little bit with this one. This issue isn't some diamond in the rough that nobody's read or discussed, but it's got a great story (behind it as well as between the pages).

L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter published "The Thing in the Crypt" in the paperback collection Conan in 1967. Outside of the speculation that it probably originated as a draft of a future Thongor story, it was a wholly original little jaunt published alongside some other excellent early-life Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, and a few acceptable de Camp / Carter pastiches.

"The Thing in the Crypt," is, for my money at least, a seriously top-of-the-pile Conan pastiche. It's brisk, creepy, thematically consistent with Howard, and a whole lot of fun to read.

Six years after it came out, Roy Thomas was writing Conan the Barbarian for Marvel Comics and had convinced Glenn Lord of the Howard estate to let him adapt a couple of REH tales into the comic series. He was working on obtaining the rights of some others- Lin Carter had allowed it for "The Hand of Nergal" a few issues prior, but de Camp wasn't so sure. Thomas wanted to depict "Thing in the Crypt" as a flashback episode to take place between Conan #2 and #3, which is a little odd seeing as he considered the story to be a "lesser" de Camp story. When writing about the story, he didn't even seem that interested in it. As de Camp dragged his feet, Roy said, "Fuck it."

He decided to create his own crypt story that would replace "The Thing in the Crypt" for the Marvel continuity. When wondering what he should have Conan fight in the ancient tomb to differentiate his new version from the de Camp story, his wife Jean suggested, "Why don't you have him fight his own shadow?" Roy ran with that idea and ended up creating "The Shadow on the Tomb!" for Conan the Barbarian #31.

"The Shadow on the Tomb!" is fun, but a little sillier than the original. I think Roy's choice to connect the story to his current continuity via the frame narrative was a great choice- it feels less random and it's more unique than just having Conan fuck up by activating a curse and then run his ass out of there. It helps make it less of an adaptation and more of an original yarn.

And then just five years later, Marvel Comics had a new contract with L. Sprague de Camp that allowed them to adapt any of the Conan pastiches they wanted. For some reason, Roy decided to revisit "The Thing in the Crypt" instead of any of the other pastiches in the library. It worked out from the perspective of the Marvel office- John Buscema was out on vacation, so they needed a "filler" episode as they did from time to time. But instead of reprinting an old story, Roy enlisted Big John's little brother, Sal Buscema, to go back to the crypt. Sal is, at times, indistinguishable from his his brother anyway.

​Within the continuity of the book, it made no sense for them to adapt this story here- the end of Conan and Bêlit's adventures were heating up and they were about to attempt a coup in the city of Asgalun, but instead, we looked backward 7 years and returned to some of Conan's earliest adventures.

Roy and Sal had an entirely self-inflicted problem on their hands now: what to do with the fact that they now had two nearly identical stories in which a young Conan, fleeing enemies in the frozen north, disturbs a cursed tomb by moving a magical sword and then has to do battle with a sentry? They decided to go with the simplest, and probably least-elegant solution. Both stories would be canonical to the Marvel continuity. They added some caption boxes at the beginning noting that issue #92 would take place between Conan #2 and #3, and then added a caption at the end saying that Conan probably lost this magical sword, leaving him open to needing another just a few days later.

​Whatever, man.

Like the prose story it's based on, Conan the Barbarian #92 opens with the young Cimmerian running at full speed from a pack of ravenous wolves. While it's a great opening, I think the most interesting thing about page one is that the credits read that the issue is by "Roy Thomas & Ernie Chan," with a special guest penciller, Sal Buscema. I don't think I've ever seen the inker elevated to the spot next to the writer where the penciller usually is.

Conan quickly dives into the titular crypt where the wolves apparently dare not to tread... instead, they just whimper outside of it. And here's the moment that originally made me think, "Maybe I need to blog about this issue:" the following pages are completely monochrome, with only black outlines and blue coloring, to simulate darkness. Roy, and perhaps the Marvel staff in general, called these "knockout panels." When I first read that, I thought it meant that they were meant to knock the socks off the reader since they're such a departure from usual coloring. But I think it's far more likely that they got that name because they're so quick and easy for the colorist to "knock out." Anyway, colorist George Roussos deserves his flowers.

As Conan's campfire rages, the backgrounds have shifted from blue to magenta, and as Conan flips the sentry into the fire, the panels are filled with a red-orange glow that engulfs the page and I'm hoping that George Roussos got a raise or something. He worked as an inker in addition to a colorist and worked with all the greats like Jack Kirby, so I'm sure he wouldn't even remember this issue if I could ask him about it today (he died in 2000).

In the final panels, Conan is bathed in a red and yellow that looks incredible, like a sunset, as he steps away from the crypt. It's a gorgeous ending to a gorgeous comic.

​Clumsily, Roy's final caption box stutters out, "Yeah, um, I know it's weird, but Conan was soon captured by a second group of Hyperborean slavers and had a very similar experience, but this time with a shadow! Please do not invent trade paperbacks so that these stories are never republished and easily compared." At least, that's how I think it went. I didn't go back and check.

Roy Thomas didn't love "The Thing in the Crypt," but ended up adapting it twice. In terms of pop culture representation, it may be the most-often depicted non-REH Conan story. It also inspired a scene in the 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger film. It appeared again in the live action Conan the Adventurer TV show. And just about every sword and sorcery fan noticed the parallels between this and the "mound dweller" scene in Robert Eggers's The Northman.

Because of all of those, I think it's fair to say that there's something about the story that really resonates with readers.

When Conan the Barbarian returned to its regularly-scheduled programming in issue #93, it would be careening toward the end of the Conan & Bêlit saga that he had been writing for 40 issues. It was its last grasp at greatness before Roy left.

There's this remarkable cold open in episode three of animator Genndy Tartakovsky's adult animation show, Primal. A pack of wooly mammoths trudges through a blizzard in a storming tundra; unbeknownst to them, an older mammoth lags behind. The elder is missing a tusk, his fur is raggedy to the point of being threadbare, and his eyes betray an exhaustion not present in the others. He becomes separated from his pack without them noticing.

The mammoth lets out a bellow, but it goes unanswered.

After the blizzard breaks, the mammoth is attacked by the show's wordless odd-couple protagonists: the caveman Spear who wields his namesake, and the T-Rex known as Fang. Robert E. Howard fans will catch the references.

The mammoth fights back, but is overpowered by the two hunters. As his trunk lets out gasps of air, Spear raises a rock above his head. He looks into the mammoth's yellow eye and delivers the killing blow. But after the mammoth goes limp, Spear does something surprising. He places his hand gently on the mammoth's side and sees himself reflected in the eye as it closes. He stands there pensively for a moment before making himself a cloak out of the fur.

I tell you with no shame, I cried. And it was like seven minutes into the episode.

"A Cold Death," the title of this episode, is a very good episode of Primal, but it's not an unusual episode of Primal. This is a fantastic TV show that feels like the antithesis to the current media landscape. It's the kind of show we need right now.

People not so long ago used to use the phrase "the attention economy." Everyone wants your attention: your phone, your television, your radio, your game consoles, and they're all fighting for it. Just ten or so years later, that term feels painfully outdated. These days, it feels like nobody really wants your attention.

Netflix makes "second-screen content" to play idly in the background while you scroll Facebook for the hundredth time today. People are generating AI content that kind of looks like a real thing if you don't glance at it too hard, but the longer you look, the more horrifying it becomes. And the movie theater feels like it is in its final hours as nobody seems to want to give themselves over to the theater experience anymore.

I'm as guilty of this as anybody. My wife will give me a hard time as she sees that even though I'm playing a PS5 game, my laptop is also set up so that I can watch a movie, but my phone magically teleports itself to my hand during loading screens. I'm paying attention to everything, but in actuality, nothing.

Primal is currently part of my cure for what ails. The show is silent, meaning it has a "storyboarder" rather than a writer. Spear and Fang, unlikely partners, traverse a fantastic anachronistic landscape together, with each episode largely being its own story disconnected to other installments.

The fact that it's silent- I mean, it's very loud at times, but has almost no spoken dialogue- is one of its secret weapons. It demands your attention. If you try to watch Instagram reels while it plays in the background, you will miss the entire thing. Once the show has your attention, I promise you that it will hold it. The animation is a gorgeous hand-drawn affair with classic painted backgrounds and thick, sometimes ragged outlines on characters. Those characters, whether they be dinosaurs, monsters, or humans, are all incredibly expressive. I suppose you would have to be if it's the only tool you have to convey emotion. Spear is blocky and bottom-heavy with nothing but screams and his face to express himself. Fang uses her whole, long body and keen nose to interact with the world, creating an entirely different mode from Spear.

Primal is a profoundly human show despite very few of its characters being actual humans. It is very violent, yes, with its crimson blood-splatters and brutal fight scenes, but it is also frequently sweet, sad, funny, and contemplative. You very quickly see the humanity in both Spear's human family and Fang's dinosaur kids as each episode invites you to sit silently and really go somewhere with it.

Later on in that episode, the mammoth kill scene plays back again almost exactly, except this time, it's Spear and his son hunting a primordial deer. Spear's son looks into the deer's eye as it dies, the same way Spear did with the mammoth. Both of them take a moment to feel what they're doing for a second and we see that this event is a common event for the cavemen. It's the way of their world, but that doesn't render it devoid of meaning. It's a lot more than you might expect from a cartoon.

The third season begins premiering in about a month, and I can't wait to watch it. 

When Robert E. Howard sat down to write "The Devil in Iron," the tenth Conan story to reach publication, it was after a period of nine months during which he didn't write anything for his sword-and-sorcery series character. He had been experiencing bouts of burnout, taking a few months between Conan stories and trying out different genres. He did the same thing right before "Queen of the Black Coast." Perhaps this long gap is why this story is so devoid of other connections to the Hyborian world.

"The Devil in Iron" was published in the August 1934 issue of Weird Tales and followed a very similar plot to the previous story Howard had written, "Iron Shadows in the Moon." Both feature islands in the Vilayet Sea, pirates, iron golem enemies, and fairly forgettable one-off companions. "Devil in Iron" was voted the best story of the issue despite how it re-tread earlier subjects and earned Howard $115.

There is very little mooring this to one single place in Conan's life.

• Conan is a new chief to the kozaks: "'That is because of the new chief who has risen among them,' answered Ghaznavi. 'You know whom I mean.' 'Aye!' replied Jehungir feelingly. 'It is that devil Conan; he is even wilder than the kozaks, yet he is crafty as a mountain lion.'
  • As a side note, I wondered in my Chronologically Speaking entry about "Iron Shadows in the Moon," why Conan bristles at the term "kozak." Seeing as this story tells us it means "wastrel," I get the sense that it's sort of a slur.
  • Conan evidently met the kozaks with nothing but the clothes on his back and quickly rose through the ranks: "This was Conan, who had wandered into the armed camps of the kozaks with no other possession than his wits and his sword, and who had carved his way to leadership among them."
• Conan refers to the black lotus of Xuthal, which places this story after "Xuthal of the Dusk:" "Her sleep was too deep to be natural. He decided that she must be an addict of some drug, perhaps like the black lotus of Xuthal." This line has vexed many previous chronologizers, because the general consensus seems to be that Conan should be a little older in "Xuthal," but since I've placed it early, this isn't a problem for me right now.
• Has Conan seen a copy of the Book of Skelos? This story seems to imply that he has: "Conan had seen rude images of them, in miniature, among the idol huts of the Yuetshi, and there was a description of them in the Book of Skelos, which drew on prehistoric sources." But where would he have seen a Book of Skelos? The copies seem to be exclusively in the hands of powerful wizards, who Conan is famously not a fan of. Or is this a strangely-worded sentence that just means that there are pictures in the Book of Skelos of the snake creatures he's looking at?
• Conan evidently understands Nemedian: "There was no door in that wall, but he leaned close and heard distinctly. And an icy chill crawled slowly along his spine. The tongue was Nemedian, but the voice was not human." This makes sense based on the placement of "Rogues in the House" well before this.

Here's the really tricky question about placing this story: Are the Free Companions / kozaks essentially the same group as the pirates of the Red Brotherhood? Consider this line about the kozaks.

If the barriers between the kozaks and the pirates are permeable, which this line seems to imply they are, then when we see Conan "carving" out leadership in the group, perhaps this is the same event we see at the end of "Iron Shadows in the Moon," when Conan meets the Red Brotherhood and immediately starts rising in the ranks. In the previous stories in which Conan is a mercenary, he's apparently just of the rank-and-file members, not in leadership, so those stories would go before this.

Some fellow Conan chronology nerds like Dale Rippke have hypothesized that Conan is younger in "Iron Shadows" because of how he approaches the Red Brotherhood (they would argue he does so naively), but that's not an impression I agree with.

Other timelines place this story chronologically right before "The People of the Black Circle," in which Conan is the hetman of the Afghuli hillpeople. That's possible, but I'm inclined right now to place it right after "Iron Shadows in the Moon." That way, he isn't traipsing back all over the world and spends some time on the Vilayet before going anywhere else. I'm not opposed to changing its placement if that makes more sense in the future, but right now, I think it works best immediately after its twin "iron" story.

Appearing in Weird Tales in May 1934, "Queen of the Black Coast" is the ninth Conan of Cimmeria story published and appeared just one month after "Iron Shadows in the Moon." In the last four stories published, three of them are pirate stories, and this is the third time in nine that Howard's made use of the black lotus powder as a plot device. However, these are more quirks of publishing rather than a throughline in Howard's writing. "Queen of the Black Coast" had been written and set to Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales by August 1932, but wouldn't be published for almost another two years. Howard was paid $115 for it.

There are lots of interesting chronological markers in this story!

So what do we know for sure?

• This story must take place after his thieving days. The places it firmly after "Rogues" and "Tower."
• This story takes place after he is a mercenary for Turan, where he learned archery.

What events are probable, but not 100% clear?

• Conan has been to Nordheim and Nemedia.
• Conan doesn't seem to have ever been a pirate before.
• Conan probably hasn't come across the "Xuthal" version of the black lotus.

What is possible?

• Conan has been to Aquilonia, to get his sword.
• Conan has been to Koth, to get his armor.
• Conan has been to Ophir, to get his cloak.

Here's the thing: I don't think we should give that much weight to his clothing. Argos is a city that is usually portrayed as a hub of commerce. The mercenary bands which Conan has been with are universally described as extremely diverse, motley crews. I find it far more likely that he's simply bought these clothes or picked items off dead bodies on the battlefield. In later stories, he's frequently clad in just a loincloth, which means that he's probably rapidly gaining and losing articles of clothing anyway. 

Therefore, we should focus on Conan's characterization and other clues. He's after his thieving days, during his mercenary days, but probably before "Xuthal of the Dusk." Additionally, if we look back to "Iron Shadows in the Moon," Conan smiles enigmatically about pirates and makes a crack at the end by calling Olivia "the Queen of the Blue Sea," which might be a reference to his time with Bêlit. So this story is probably set before "Iron Shadows" as well.