 In the modern day, a mother hawks her son's old comic books and some tapes, which are apparently interviews about some old pulp author named C.K. Cole. Some decades ago, a young biographer tapes interviews with an old woman named Lilith about her experiences in the 1930s, playing governess to an unruly girl. Her charge is the daughter of C.K. Cole. In midst of the Depression, we see the the memories of Lilith and her frustrations at taking care of the drunken hot mess that is Helen Cole. And briefly, but never for too long, we see Helen's experiences in another world: a sword & sorcery landscape replete with head-loppings and aloof gods. Helen of Wyndhorn is a 2024/25 miniseries written for Dark Horse by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, the same team responsible for the unforgettable Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. While I think it's fantastic in its own right, it feels especially so for Robert E. Howard fans. While writing pastiche of REH's writing is a dime a dozen, writing pastiche of the man himself is something I haven't seen before. As the mythology goes, Robert E. Howard wrote his sword & sorcery, western, and horror pulp narratives throughout the Depression in the middle of nowhere in Cross Plains, Texas. He said, hyperbolically as he was prone to, that it was almost as if he wasn't writing his Conan of Cimmeria stories, but just recording them as they were narrated to him by the barbarian himself. A lot of his work plays with this theme of remembrance, filtered through time, most notably the James Allison story "The Valley of the Worm." Helen of Wyndhorn takes this premise and literalizes it. What if Robert E. Howard's stories actually were records of things that had actually happened? In Wyndhorn's version, the REH analogue, C.K. Cole, spends the 30s recording the adventures of his father, Barnabas Cole, known both in literature and his other world as Othan, a great warrior. C.K. leaves behind a daughter, Helen, when he commits suicide, once again mirroring Howard (though Howard had no children), who is then brought to the family estate where she will live with her grandfather.  As Helen lives at the Wyndhorn mansion, she gradually learns the true nature of her father's writing and her grandfather's life, which we see unfold slowly. Each character in this story is so well-drawn, terribly flawed and chafing against one another, yet they're all extremely lovable. When the usually-imperious governess Lilith describes Helen as "my Helen," it becomes clear that this story is as much the story of being able to love completely lost people as it is about sword & sorcery action. You might be surprised at how much is withheld in this story, far more than is shown. I mean that in the best possible way, as it all deepens the appeal. In the final issue, a peculiar panel kicks off what may be the most important conversation in the story. During a poetry lesson, one of Lilith's word balloons is obscured behind a support column. I love when comics use the medium to create something that could not exist in film or novels. Helen goes on to ask Lilith if she is "real," saying, "Everything that's happened since father died- none of it makes any sense. This world, the Other World, I'm in one of his stories. There's something wrong with me. I'm not like everyone else, I'm being told." Helen is, of course, not real to us, but she is real in the fiction of her story.   I think this is the most compelling thing the book has to say. Helen is equally real as the stories her father so deftly recorded. Perhaps Conan and the Hyborian Age are no less real than Robert E. Howard and his Underwood No. 5 typewriter. The stories still have all the magic and power you could ever want them to. This brings me back to the frame narrative I mentioned up top. The comic sort of moves forward and backward in time at the same moment. It opens in the 70s with a biographer named Thomas Rogers interviewing Lilith about her time at Wyndhorn, but then follows Lilith's story back to the 30s and the tapes themselves forward, as they get put up for auction, sold cheaply at a fan convention, and finally seem to be unearthed one last time in a garage. Everything is layered like a palimpsest: obscuring the past each time. The book ends with Rogers saying to his husband, "You peel back layers looking for the center of a thing, and then you lose the thing itself. Maybe the nanny was right. Maybe it's better to make it all up." Maybe we're all made up, no less real than Helen, Othan, Conan, Solomon Kane, Niord... But I don't want to peel back the layers too far. Our stories are just as vulnerable to the rot of time that the pages of an ill-kept paperback are. Each time Cole's stories or Rogers's tapes pass into new hands, there's a new opportunity for someone to discover their magic, but there's also the risk that those tapes, seemingly the only copy, will be lost forever. Having gotten to know the pulp community over the past years, this struck me. People like Rusty Burke and Bill Cavalier have done four decades of work to continue the legacy of Howard. Oliver Brackenbury was the first person in 85 years to ask the C.L. Moore estate about the rights to her stories, to keep their flame lit. Without people like these, the stories become forgotten. It takes real stewardship to bring them to the next generation. If you're a sword & sorcery fan, you simply must read Helen of Wyndhorn. I know Tom King has a certain reputation for having personally cradled Dick Cheney's balls while constructing the Iraq War, but his work with Bilquis Evely is one of a kind. The art is gorgeous and the story is deeply moving and refreshing, reminding me what I love so much about this genre. I hope you pick it up. 
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I've been playing Minecraft on and off since Beta. I understand if this admission causes you to close this tab. My friends and I were there from when the world was still just a flat expanse, and I remember realizing that it was five in the morning and my eyes were bloodshot because I'd stayed up all night at my friend Mitch's house in college. This was before Minecraft was forever claimed by nine year-olds; for a while, it seemed to be almost exclusively engineering majors playing it and making complicated redstone circuits. Every few years my friends and I will make a server and play on it for a few weeks before we get bored. There's this moment that happens inevitably when you're playing Minecraft. Someone's going to turn on the cheats to allow themselves flight, or infinite building materials, or invincibility or whatever. And that's the death-knell for a Minecraft game. Suddenly, the work to build something cool isn't there anymore. The fun dries up (for me, anyway) almost instantaneously.  I think that might be how Kane feels in the short story "Misericorde." I'm pretty confident I'm the first person (and probably the last) to talk about the dark sword-and-sorcery anti-hero Kane and Minecraft in the same blog post, but I promise I'm going somewhere. "Misericorde" is maybe going to end up being a lesser Kane story for me. It's got some interesting suspense going for it as Kane operates as an assassin. A well-to-do woman approaches him with four lives she needs snuffed out, and the coin to pay for it. She remarks about criminals having their own code, and Kane replies with this: "Certain rules of the game are essential," Kane replied. "Otherwise it isn't a game. For the true adept, wealth is not the object. If I am offered a fee to perform a certain assignment, I will not accept that fee until I have accomplished it. Taking a fee by force - or accepting an assignment without the certainty that it will be carried out - would be pointless, a bore." There's that old enemy of Kane: boredom. I feel like this makes a lot of sense for someone who is immortal. When there are no stakes in your life, you must invent stakes and establish boundaries for it to have meaning. Kane, being physically imposing and nigh-invincible, wouldn't have a very fun or interesting time just shooting someone with an arrow from far away or killing someone to take their money. When you have infinite smooth cobblestone, building a gigantic pagoda isn't as fun anymore. You simply must mine. As Kane completes his contracts, he does so in an interesting way each time. Instead of a brutal kill scene, he ends each one by telling his mark to "come with" him. There's some sorcery involved that keeps it interesting.
It's compelling to me that when Kane is doing normal things like having a girlfriend or conversing with a poet, he can be incredibly cruel. But when killing people and stealing their souls, he's remarkably civilized about it. The word "misericorde" means "compassion," so I supposed that makes sense. I don't think I liked "Misericorde" as much as some other Kane stories, but it still has some good, horror-themed adventure in it. It's just a bit more tropey and predictable than most.  Jirel of Joiry, one of the most stunningly original sword & sorcery characters I've ever read, seems to have come about by a series of accidents. Accident the first: author Catherine Lucille Moore, eventually known under her pen name C.L. Moore, was sick a lot as a kid. Without really knowing how she came into contact with them, the magazine Weird Tales became her hospital reading companion. Moore remembers that, like most literate people of her day, her family thought Weird Tales was trash, the absolute bottom of the barrel when it came to literary quality. But she loved them. And as she got older, she continued to read in that vein, if not WT itself, as her father would sneak her Barsoom and Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, away from her mother's disapproving eye. Accident the second: Moore was working on her typing speed at work one day when a proto-Jirel came dashing out of her imagination to her. After having to quit college after three semesters and find a job, most likely due to the Great Depression, Moore was lucky to find work at a bank, for jobs were hard to come by. One afternoon, when she had nothing to do but desperately wanted to look busy, she began practicing some typing exercises. She quickly grew bored with quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs, so she started to type up fragments of poetry she remembered from class. And then, she typed a few sentences about a "red, running woman," imagining a figure from 13th century France. It amused her. Why's she running?, she asked herself. Accident the third is more of just an unintentional product. Moore began typing up a couple of stories, stating with one about Northwest Smith, a Han Solo-type (or wouldn't it be more appropriate to say that Han Solo is a Northwest Smith-type?) of space ranger she began like this: Northwest Smith was a hard-boiled guy  That's the dorkiest shit ever and I'm so here for it. But, back to the accident. Moore shopped around her first Northwest Smith story, "Shambleau," and a story called "Were-Woman." "Were-Woman" was flatly rejected by Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales, but "Shambleau" was accepted. In her kitchen in Indiana, she opened a letter from Wright, complete with the information that the story had been accepted and she would be paid $100 for it. Moore screamed her head off, causing her dad to rush into the kitchen, thinking that his daughter might be the victim of some attack. But no, just $100 dollars richer, which Moore says felt like ten thousand dollars to her. The accident here is that "Shambleau" was accepted because it was so different than the rest of what Weird Tales was printing. It pulses with sexual tension between Smith and then gorgon he comes into contact with. A lot of pulp stories are sexual or salacious, but "Shambleau" approaches the erotic, which Moore wasn't trying to do. She always maintained that she wasn't really trying to imbue theme or specific philosophy into her stories, nor did she seem them as pure escapism, but that she just wrote what she wanted to read. That unique fingerprint of hers, found in "Shambleau" first, would be present for the rest of her career. That brings us to the lady of Joiry. In the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales, "The Black God's Kiss" appeared as the lead and cover story. It's the same issue featuring the second part of Robert E. Howard's "The People of the Black Circle" and Clark Ashton Smith's story "The Seven Geases." In this story, we meet Jirel, lady of Joiry, which is a fictional hegemon in France, some time in the 13th to 15th century. Jirel is a capable leader and fighter, opening the story having been captured at the end of a battle, her helmet ripped off by the enemy to reveal her curly mop of red hair and her blazing yellow eyes. Joiry has been invaded, and it looks like they've lost.  Guilluame, the leader of the conquering force, has taken control of her throne room. After ripping off her helmet ("Unshell me this lobster" should be used more often), he kisses her right there in her own hall. As has been reported many times over the years, this was essentially as far as Weird Tales was willing to go with the salacious content, but that the kiss should essentially be read as a sexual assault. That's what it would be in real life, too. Interestingly, the text of the story is somewhat infatuated with Guilluame and Jirel clearly thinks he's hot, but because of this violation, Jirel burns with a hatred for Guilluame and vows revenge. She goes to a priest friend of hers named Father Gervase to be blessed before essentially venturing down into Hell through the depths of her castle so that she can find an appropriate weapon with which to kill Guilluame. This is one of my favorite "weird" elements of this story: the passage through which Jirel goes is a round tunnel that she and Father Gervase discovered some time ago. It winds deep into the earth, and whatever created it seems to have not done so for human feet. After an indeterminable amount of time in which gravity itself seems to flip-flop on her, Jirel appears in a dark land of horror and mystery shrouded in eternal night.  After a few jaunts this way and that, she finds a strange temple-like structure containing a black god statue. As Jirel kisses the statue, an upsetting evil seems to worm its way into her body. Both physically and spiritually uncomfortable, she hauls ass back up to the world of the living in order to get the toxin out of her. As she clamors into her throne room, the story characterizes Guilluame as "magnificent" in his armor, on her throne. It repeats his name several times, unclear if it's done in an astounded or hateful way. Jirel then collapses into his arms in a way that isn't not intimate, while kissing him for a second time. This kiss passes the evil from her into Guilluame, who writhes and wretches for a moment before dying horrifyingly. The very thing that Guilluame sought from her- her sexuality- is the very weapon that she uses to turn on Guilluame to end his life. And after all of that, Jirel bows her head to hide her own tears. The Jirel that Moore creates is such a human character that she stands head and shoulders above most other S&S protagonists. She's remarkably remorseful of some things, like Guilluame's death. There's this old Jack Stauber YouTube video where a kid asks his mom, "Why do I miss people who hurt me?" Jirel was blazing with hatred and revenge, but in the end doesn't find any satisfaction and even seems to think that she might've gone too far (when you read the sequel, "Black God's Shadow," Moore doubles down on this idea). It doesn't give you any easy themes like telling you Jirel absolutely was wrong for venturing into Hell to acquire a vile weapon and get revenge on her rapist. Instead, it lets you sit in her uncertainty with Jirel. I think this is what makes Jirel so compelling to me. She's powerful, brave, a sick fighter, but she's also frequently afraid, uncertain, confused, and very realistic. Jirel cries four different times in this story, each time having been moved to tears by something horrifically sad in Hell. And maybe Guilluame wasn't such a bad guy if we'd gotten to know him; maybe he was exactly the piece of shit he starts this story as. I'm not sure. Characters like Conan and Kane sometimes experience overwhelming, tough emotions (like Conan's loss of his lover Bêlit and Kane's overwhelming loneliness) but they're never nearly as realistic as Jirel. She's incredibly true-to-life and it makes her one of the best sword & sorcery characters I've ever read.  Fantastic Jirel art by Clade Mirya  I am running out of applicable Kane images for these articles. So today I'm just going to repeatedly regale you with covers for "Death Angel's Shadow." Oooh. Ahh. "Cold Light" unfurls itself like it's sledding down a mountain: slowly at first, gaining speed until it becomes one of the most action-packed, epic Kane stories I've read yet. I say that now, but it is so hard to pick favorites among these things. Genuinely, it does start a little slowly. Kane is experiencing one of his bouts of lethargy. Boredom has just about defeated him and he lazily escapes to a desolate part of the world, clopping his horse into an all but dead town in the region of Demornte. Demornte's an odd little setting: bordered by inhospitable desert on all sides, it's a stretch of lush, green country that's seemingly inhabited by one city, called Sebbei. It would be a great little place to visit except for the fact that everyone here walks around like the living dead. That is to say, some time ago, a plague swept through Sebbei, killing all but a few hundred of its residents, and now the city is calcified in its misery. Every reaction from the townspeople is no stronger than a shrug of the shoulders.  Kane finds respite here for a while, and even companionship in the character of Rehhaile, a young blind woman with a "second sight" that allows her to tap into the minds of nearby people and see through them. Hot on Kane's trail is a band of self-styled crusaders and avengers, ready to bring the "cold light of good" and justice to our evil wanderer. Each of them has an understandable bone to pick with the red-headed immortal as he's done them all wrong at some point or another in the past. There are nine of them against Kane's one (two if you count Rehhaile), so they're confident they can take him out. The story paces itself well as we watch Kane dwindle the numbers against him one by one until he's got a more manageable load that he can fight with just his sword. There's a lot going on in "Cold Light," thematically speaking. The crusaders are confident that they are arbiters of justice and uncomplicated good while they kidnap, rape, and attempt to burn the entire city of Sebbei down in pursuit of Kane. By contrast, Kane seems like the good guy here as he's done nothing but lounge by a lake and drink wine since he's arrived. He's befriended Rehhaile and they seem to have a good thing going on. Does that absolve him of his crimes? Of course not; if Putin or Netanyahu or Trump decided to spend the rest of their days sitting by a lake, not hurting anyone else, it doesn't erase the evil that they've already wrought. Still, it inverts the usual order. It's interesting contrasting the toxic, all-consuming revenge-driven action of the "crusaders" against the toxic, do-nothing attitude of the people of Sebbei. In one climactic moment of the story, the gang closes in on Kane in an old warehouse filled with unused medicines covered in dust, symbolic of their ability to do nothing about their problems. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: both are doomed in their own ways! "Cold Light" was incredible. It clearly takes place later in Kane's timeline as he's wondering Lartroxia West. But because other characters mention Carsultyal, I wonder if it takes place a little earlier than some of the stories where Carsultyal is so ancient it's seemingly only remembered by Kane... I read on a very old Dale Rippke blog post that Wagner said all the short stories appear in chronological order in each collection, so that helps me out a bit.  One thing I really admire about Karl Edward Wagner is his restraint. The man is patient. I wonder if this turns some people off of his work; there are long, long scenes in most of the Kane stories I've read so far where people sit in a tavern or by a fire and discuss history, religion, and philosophy. If you wanted nothing but whiz-bang swordplay, you'd be out of luck. We spend most of "Sing a Last Song of Valdese" sitting in a tavern while two priests and a professor debate the above-mentioned subjects. Surrounded by a bounty hunter and a criminal, a drunk and a rich man, they're in pretty motley company. We get a little bit more about the lore of Kane here during the mens' conversation: “Actually the legend of Kane has far darker implications. His name, I have observed, reappears in all ages and all lands. The literature of the occult recurrently alludes to him. In fact, there is an ancient compendium of pre-human glyphics that Kane is said to have authored… Some occult authors contend that Kane was one of the first true men, damned to eternal wandering for some dark act of rebellion against mankind’s creator.” That's so dope. Well, it turns out that not all these men are here by accident and a stunning act of revenge takes place while Kane says little more than a few lines. This narrative is entirely a slow-burn, but it's engaging and eyebrow-raising throughout. Interestingly, there's a character named Mad Hef in this story, and there was a character named Hef in "The Dark Muse," so I spent some time trying to figure out if they're the same Hef. However, Hef dies in "Dark Muse" and this Mad Hef dies in this story, so it couldn't be. Perhaps Hef is a common name bajillions of years ago. As far as I can tell, these Kane stories thus far ("Undertow," "Two Suns Setting," "The Dark Muse," and this) are sort of generally taking place in timeline order.  The Kane of "The Dark Muse" is a very different Kane than the one we see in either "Undertow" or "Two Suns Setting." In "Undertow," he was an absolute bastard. All menace, all the time to his city and to the captive he probably thinks of as a girlfriend, or maybe more accurately, a pet. In "Two Suns Setting," he was remarkably more neutral. He assists another character on a short quest, but not out of altruism, and at least once considers ways that he could steal the spoils of the quest for himself. "The Dark Muse" presents a Kane that is much milder and more intellectual, even though there are flashes of his brutality.  Much to my surprise, most of "The Dark Muse" consists of Kane and an entourage of men sitting in a tavern, having a few drinks and discussing poetry. Kane's poet friend Opyros has been having some writer's block when it comes to his most recent verses, but Kane's eager to hear the next lines he's been drumming up, and is even willing to help him shake off his block. It's oddly tender for Kane to be almost patient and understanding with Opyros because, honestly, Opyros seems kind of hard to be around. I play in punk bands and I'm a bit of a barfly, so I've known lots of his "tortured artist" types. People with obvious talent, some charm, and a hell of a good night on offer, but you know that if you lend them five bucks, you're not going to see it back. Opyros strikes me like a lot of guys who've offered me keys with stuff on them and one day have a breakdown where they quit all their bands but actually end up doing much better for themselves eventually. It makes me wonder why Kane would spend time with the obvious hot-mess addict; it doesn't seem like he would suffer tomfoolery. Perhaps Wagner saw a bit of himself in Opyros. From what I gather, Wagner was a hard drinker and died of alcoholism at the young age of 48. I wonder if he saw a little bit of his own future in Opyros- someone who burns really brightly and then overdoes it while still wickedly productive. Who knows. Ultimately, Kane leads Opyros to some great risk with possible great reward in the dream realm and fights off a giant shadow bat. Since he's left Carsultyal and refers to its declining years as something in the past, it must take place after "Undertow" and "Two Suns." This story's not quite as incredible as the first two I read, though don't get me wrong, it's still a great time. I'd say that its main draw is seeing such a different side of Kane, who still feels like the same character, which is clearly another testament to Karl Edward Wagner's immense talent as a writer.   Kane has left the city of Carsultyal. Perhaps it's more appropriate to say that he's abandoned it. The vibrant growth and vigor that he saw in the city for about a century has seemingly died, and mankind's first great city has apparently atrophied in the eyes of Kane and now he's running away from his greatest enemy: boredom. This story seems to take place after the events of "Undertow," with Kane having firmly set up shop in Carsultyal in that story. As Kane wanders through an inhospitable desert, he meets the agreeable giant Dwassllir. Around fifteen feet in height, Dwassllir's cloak is more like a tent to Kane.  The first half of this narrative is eaten up by a discussion between the comparatively diminutive Kane and his temporary friend, and this was some of the shit that drew me to Kane in the first place. Dwassllir reminisces about a "heroic age," an age when his race of giants were young, vital, and dominant. That age is long past, and few giants remain. Kane represents a very different epoch. Immortal as he is, Kane argues for the new civilization of man. With the young civilizations of man growing aggressively, he marvels at his own people's accomplishments. He's careful not to push back too hard against Dwassllir seeing as the giant could probably rend him in two. I can't help but feel as though this conversation holds more weight than ever today. Dwassllir laments that humanity refuses to live in harmony with nature and instead reshapes the world to itself; while its creations are impressive, it seems like that's what humanity cares for above all else, at the expense of the natural world. It turns out that Dwassllir longs so much for the glory days of his people that he's actually looking for an ancient king's tomb. Once there, Wagner's descriptive prose kicks into high gear. This unassuming break in a wall of rock represents the highest point of Dwassllir's dying civilization, and it does indeed contain the body of the ancient king he was looking for. Multiple mishaps and cave-ins stand in the way between the dual-ruby-encrusted crown and our protagonist pair, but they manage to have a page-turning adventure. As an old enemy takes Dwassllir's life, Kane places the crown gingerly on his head: we see a much kinder side of Kane in this story as opposed to "Undertow." Perhaps this brings the story's title into play. Kane's race is obviously built in a way that will destroy itself- Dwassllir says as much when he notes that we are nothing without our "crutches" of horses and houses and weapons. But at the same time, his ancient race of giants was strong, harmonious with nature, and prosperous, they have died a slow but inexorable death, ending here with Dwassllir's life. I think Robert E. Howard would be proud at Karl's conclusions here. The suns of both civilizations are setting, no matter how hard you try. "Mankind will be master of this world. In only a few centuries I've seen our civilization grow from a sterile paradise, from scattered barbaric tribes to a vast and expanding empire of cities; villages, and farms. Ours is the fastest rising civilization ever to burst upon the world." Dwassllir is looking terminally (and somewhat pathetically) backward. Kane is looking endlessly forward. Both are doomed in their own ways.
No, this isn't Conan, but perhaps you'll indulge me. Because I'm a sucker to rule all suckers, I recently spent $182 on a copy of Midnight Sun: the Complete Stories of Kane. That was the cheapest copy out there! Kane has recently become fascinating to me from afar. Every Frazetta painting I've seen and every short article I've read about him has made me realize that I have to read about Wagner's quasi-Biblical sorcerer. His Conan novel The Road of Kings was pretty great, so why not?  Midnight Sun opens with the short story "Undertow," which is an interesting first blush with this redheaded, left-handed, immortal Kane. It's really more of the story of Dessylyn, a young woman who's somehow ended up in Kane's sphere of influence, desperate to leave it. Kane is a powerful figure in the city of Carsultyal, but it's not like he's an elected official or influential businessman; he sort of looms from his tower and his specter infects the city with fear. Everyone seems to shudder at mere mention of the name Kane. The narrative is constructed interestingly out-of-order, folding back on itself to slowly reveal what takes place when. It creates a circle at the end when it reveals that its contextless first scene takes place a few hours after the end of the book. Ultimately, it's set in two time periods, perhaps months or years apart, in which Dessylyn tries her best to escape Kane, but her inability to do so hints at the story's title. She first tries to woo a young barbarian named Dragar to save her via his strength and naïve sense of purpose, but Dragar ends up spitting out his last word along with a mouthful of blood. The other time period at hand is some undetermined while later, where it seems like Dessylyn has tried her luck with other would-be saviors. In this instance, it's the much less-impressive Mavrsal, captain of a rickety-ass ship with no crew. He makes Dragar look like Superman in comparison. As Dessylyn attempts to get both men to rescue her, it's surprising that Kane doesn't really appear in the story until the final third. He mostly exists as this creeping darkness at the edges for the rest of it. When Kane finally appears, he's in full villain mode. I frequently hear people describe Kane as an anti-hero, but that would be a serious stretch, at least in the context of this story. In two brutal fight scenes, Kane shows off his power, complete with mirthless smiles.  While Dessylyn, Dragar, and Mavrsal are all well-drawn for the limited screen time they have and the temporal construction of the story is inventive, my favorite part was what Wagner does to us once Kane actually enters the picture. He's in the middle of working necromancy, seemingly crafting something like a youth potion for Dessylyn so that she won't age - as he doesn't - listening to her beg him to let her go. What Kane responds with was a great piece of character writing. Despite how despicable Kane is (and he is despicable), I suddenly sympathize with Kane in this moment. "You'll stay with me because I love you, and your beauty will not fade, Dessylyn. In time you may understand. Did you ever wonder at the loneliness of immortality? Have you ever wondered what must be the thoughts of a man cursed to wander through the centuries? A man doomed to a desolate, un-ending existence - feared and hated wherever men speak his name. A man who can never know peace, whose shadow leaves ruin wherever he passes. A man who has learned that every triumph is fleeting, that every joy is transient. All that he seeks to possess is stolen away from him by the years. His empires will fall, his songs will be forgotten, his loves will turn to dust. Only the emptiness of eternity will remain with him, a laughing skeleton cloaked in memories to haunt his days and nights. Now, of course I don't think Kane's right to keep Dessylyn locked away with him forever. I'm actively rooting for her to leave him. But, for a moment, I kind of get where Kane's coming from. Wagner is able to distill in that passage how a god might feel toward his subjects. Do you and I feel bad when we cut a rose from the garden to put it into a vase? Do you even have a second thought when you step on a bug outside? It's an interesting thought experiment that's tempting you to empathize with both sides.
It's a fantastic short story. It's a great way to start my Kane journey.  There's a weird little pleasure that hits whenever someone mashes up sci-fi, horror, and fantasy elements. Vampires? Cool. But Planet of the Vampires? Sign me up. I like both Red Sonja and Vampirella, but Red Sonja and Vampirella Meet Betty and Veronica? Yes, please. Eerie magazine was a fun genre playground like that for nearly 20 years in the second half of the twentieth century. From 1966 to 1983, it pumped out extremely brief stories in body horror, the macabre, dystopian futures, Gothic romance, sword & sorcery, and planetary adventure. In contrast to its sister magazine Creepy, which told one-and-done stories throughout, Eerie told serialized sagas in which characters returned from time to time for more installments.  Some of these characters have become cult classics among fans of Silver and Bronze Age comic fans: Hunter, Darklon the Mystic, the Rook. Thankfully, the Warren Publishing comics- Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella- have been collected into accessible "Archive" editions in recent decades, so they're not that hard to read. But there is not a fiendish fandom for Eerie the way that there is for many Big Two comic characters. As such, every little, unexpected horror nugget you discover in Eerie feels like you've stumbled onto something great, like finding your new favorite album in a dusty crate at the back of the record shop. I was in Loveland, Colorado a few weekends ago visiting Grand Slam Sports Cards and Comics (despite their name privileging the cards, they've actually got a pretty good comic selection), and I was digging through the mags to find any back issues of Savage Sword of Conan. They had a few, but what really caught my eye was a damaged copy of Eerie #80 from 1977. That Ken Kelly cover was unmistakable. A greenish-yellow vampire with bat wings, a Voltar helmet, a Conan loincloth, a Frank-Frazetta-nearly-nude victim, and a dramatic background of vivid red? You know I bought it. WORLD WAR III HAS COME AND GONE! DEADLY SURVIVORS... TOMBSPAWNED VAMPIRES... REMAIN! There are few taglines that absurd, and I mean that as the highest compliment. What I discovered in the issue's cover story was "Tombspawn: Pieces of Hate," which was actually part of an ongoing story. I hopped on Comic Vine to see if I could figure out in which issue the first part appeared, and it was a few issues prior, in #73 (Side note: I feel like it would be kind of frustrating to read Eerie at the time. If you dug the first "Tombspawn" story in issue #73, it would have been like ten months before you saw the next mere eight-page entry. These things are short!). I couldn't believe it for a second- I've had Eerie #73 hanging in a frame on my wall for a decade now. Back in 2015, I was playing in a punk band called the Ghoulies, and as a send-up to my all-time favorite band The Mummies and their Runnin' on Empty Vol. 2 comp, I bought a horror comic for us to mug at, and it became the back cover to an album we were putting out. I'm sure I read the comic like ten years ago, but hadn't opened it since. It's been displayed along with an issue of Creepy and Vampirella in my office ever since.   But let's get back to "Tombspawn." Gerry Boudreau wrote the series, while artist Gonzalo Mayo did the pencils and inks. The world of "Tombspawn" is an interesting mash-up, like its genres. Set in 1992, it is the distant future of our recent past, taking place around fifteen years on from when it released. The world has bombed itself into oblivion, returning its technology and lifestyle back to something comparable to the stone age. A post-apocalyptic wasteland of irradiated monsters is left where the United States used to be. Craggy rock faces and rotting stone ruins dot the landscape. High above, unbeknownst to any characters, a space war cartel watches the remnants of humanity, responsible for keeping the world dependent on war. Maybe it's just me, but Gonzalo Mayo's landscape design conjured sickly greens and unnatural purples in my mind to fill in his grayscale landscape. In this world, humanity is limping by.  Our main characters with classic sword & sorcery names, uh... Stevie and Biff, make references to Sunday football games, Miller High Life, household appliances, and other touches of midcentury American life while looking like Frazetta paintings in each panel. Their physique is chiseled out of marble, their loincloth and helmet garb is classic S&S, and their speech is straight out of sitcom. "No cheap horror flicks for kids to seen on Saturday afternoons," Stevie remarks, "Today, the Earth is one massive horror show. We've got it all, except for the stale popcorn." They are hunters for their primitive tribe, but they're not great at what they do. The first installment, titled "Day of the Vampire 1992" shows Stevie and Biff trying to take down an irradiated land-based hammerhead shark (oh fuck yeah they are) but they both fail to shoot it. Seeing them curse their wide shots at a shark flopping around on dry land evokes the cliché of somehow actually failing to shoot fish in a barrel. Stevie and Biff soon stumble on a ruin full of horrifying stone carvings. Lying in seeming suspended animation is a beautiful, nearly-naked woman. A hologram of an old-world scientist, rendered in spectacular special effect detail, tells the fellas that this woman is a vampire, captured and placed in this monster-laden crypt so that future generations will know not to disturb her even if they can't understand the spoken English of the scientist's hologram.  Stevie, of course, decides to chance it with the vampire girl of his dreams and chooses to press the button labeled "REVIVE," placed right next to the better option of "DESTRUCT." I'm not kidding. The vampire woman is immediately revived, and as vampire stories often go, Stevie is thrown into a spiritual and physical ecstasy while his body is drained of blood by the vamp in question. She, in turn, flies all the way up into space where she is spotted by the alien space cartel. The space cartel nukes her out of existence in an instant. This short ten-pager ends with Stevie, now a vampire, completely overtaken by the idea of vampire superiority, deciding to turn Biff as well. We conclude on a freeze-frame as he leaps forward with one more reference to horror movies and stale popcorn. The Howardesque sword & sorcery themes are apparent from the first few pages. Society is destined to destroy itself while staying focused on superficial comforts like beer and circuses. We have destroyed all our progress and don't even seem to be capable of processing it- we just grab bows and arrows and feel nostalgic for easier times. Americans have been reduced to a state of barbarism, which they're adjusting to with varying degrees of success. Readers liked the story, with the letters column "Dear Cousin Eerie" in the following issue featuring several positive reactions of "Vampire 1992." One mixed review was mostly whinging at the Eerie editorial staff because he felt like they didn't know whether they wanted to be a horror mag or an adventure mag. He felt "Tombspawn" and another story leaned too hard into adventure.  The second chapter, contained in issue #80, was the "Pieces of Hate" story with the Ken Kelly cover I was initially drawn to. After six panels of recap, we pick up with Stevie and Biff on a campaign of vampire supremacy, convinced that they need to turn as many remaining humans into blood-suckers as they can. These vampires grow not only fangs and an uncontrollable vampire-chauvinist mindset, but a set of heavy metal bat wings bursting out of their shoulder blades. I find it spine-chilling on an existential level when genre fiction has characters retain their fundamental personality while horrifyingly changing one key aspect (in this case, they're pretty much the same characters, just ravenous for their vampire cause now) without comment. Issue #80 is very much a middle chapter, and two pages shorter than its predecessor for a slim 8-page run, but ends by setting up a conflict between the space cartel and the vampires. Initially mistaking the cartel UFO occupants for a mystical enemy called "Russians," the two groups decide on a "Most Dangerous Game" type of contest to see who gets the US. It's the classic mashup like Yankees v. Red Sox, Taylor Swift v. Katy Perry, and vampires v. space aliens. What the second issue lacks in plot it makes up for in philosophical discussion. Author Gerry Boudreau goes in deeper on the themes of the first issue, mostly unchanged since the 30s but somewhat updated for 1977. Stevie narrates, likening the wave of vampire infections to a rekindling of the pioneer spirit, but realizing immediately the self-destructive path its set them on.
Letter-writers in "Dear Cousin Eerie" were now raving about "Tombspawn." They loved its lack of clearly moral characters, the Gonzalo Mayo art, and painted Ken Kelly cover. "This is going to be an excellent series!" wrote Jack Marriot of Toledo, Ohio.  For those following "Tombspawn," the wait was significantly shorter for the third issue than it was for the second. Chapter three, titled "The Game is Afoot," appeared in issue #82 just two months later and Gonzalo Mayo is joined this time by legendary artist Carmine Infantino. The recap is contained to one page, spiraling in on itself while you turn the magazine to view it from all sides. At the page's center, our vampires Stevie and Biff shake hands with the Space CIA agents against whom they've decided to compete. The vampire everymen then fight an atomic pterodactyl, and I need to pause for a moment because I'm afraid I may never get to write a sentence like that ever again. The aliens try to contend with the barbarian vampires' physical superiority by using holographic tricks and mind-control guns. Between bouts, Stevie once again waxes philosophical while turning a sort of Cro-Magnon man into a monstrous neanderthal bloodsucker ("cavampireman?" "australopithenosferatu?"). "Vampires, at least according to legend, are sterile. I suppose it has to do with the balance of nature. In granting eternal life, nature takes away the power to propogate [sic] new life. If we win this contest, our 'super-race' will be immortal, but it will also be stagnant. There would be no new blood."  Humanity is still quite literally sifting through the fallout of its own bad choices, and it can't help but plot its next downfall. Stevie and Biff, our two himbo Joe Schmo vampires, are able to ask the question of what their wanton consumption might bring, but are never focused long enough to think it through. They can't investigate, can't plan. Instead, they're once again consumed by bloodlust and you turn the page. In the final pages of the third issue, Biff is bitten in half, seemingly in one devastating chomp, while the friends navigate what they think is another illusion from the space aliens. Stevie vows to avenge his fallen friend and that space cartel will not win. But that was the last we saw of the barbarian vampires in space. In "Dear Cousin Eerie," one reader proposed an "all-Tombspawn" issue for the future of the mag. After one letter-writer expressed a desire to see "Tombspawn" continue in the very next issue, Eerie editorial responded that the series would return, but it would be a while since Gonzalo Mayo was working on a "book-length VAMPIRELLA epic" in the meantime. Since the Eerie team frequently responded to concerns about the return of well-liked series (around this time they spend a column inch or two assuring readers that their time-travel trilogy will indeed conclude, it just got delayed a bit) that they could have communicated a cancellation of "Tombspawn," but it was quietly dropped. I searched through the next two-dozen issues' worth of letters pages and couldn't find another mention of it. We never got a fourth chapter of "Tombspawn," so we'll never know who won the game or what happened to Stevie. Gerry Boudreau teamed with Gonzalo Mayo for more horror adventures in Eerie #90, but this time told an 8-page story called "Carrion" rather than returning to their previous creation (reader reaction to "Carrion" was not pleasant). I'm sad to see that it never concluded; I could've gone for ten more chapters of "Tombspawn" just to see what other misadventures a couple of former couch potato vampires could've gotten into. To see the logical conclusion of the vampire epidemic would've been fun, too. I can't help but speculate whether it would've ended all life on Earth, like Marvel Zombies, or if the aliens would have launched even more nukes. I guess I'll never know.  I really enjoyed Gerry Boudreau's world-building and characterization in this series. It's not often you get to see a barbarian with gigantic bat wings and a death's head emblem on his loincloth make Elton John references. The themes evoke Howard, Lovecraft, and Burroughs while also transplanting the darkness of Depression-era fantasy into the consumerist 70s. But I think my favorite thing here is Gonzalo Mayo's art. He conjures Frank Frazetta using just black and white. But he also mixes it with what feels like a recreation of Marlon Brando's Jor-El in Superman, and old (even then!) science fiction TV like The Twilight Zone. He uses stark contrast between black and white to create a dark, salacious, damned planet that I want to spend more time on. Character designs just don't look like that anymore. For the rest of the late 70s, Eerie was dominated by The Rook, its time-travelling Bill Dubay character who pretty much became the magazine's flagship series for a while. The popular "Hunter" series returned for "Hunter III." Eventually, creative teams found the grind too hard to keep up with and Eerie began publishing issues with fewer stories in each issue. There was always a lot of talent behind the mag, and always a wild variation in quality between the stories. I'm really glad I happened to crate-dig my way to Eerie #80. Who knows what other incredible nuggets are in the archives of Warren Publishing? I know there are a few send-ups to 70s anthology horror out there like Vampiress Carmilla, but Eerie will always feel special. Is there more sword & sorcery goodness out there to find? Let me know if you've got a good one you want to share.  "The world was dying! The long prophesied endtime spread across the earth in the form of the first of seven dread scourges.  That man's name?... Voltar! I cannot tell you how pleased I've been to recently discover Voltar, a comic book sword-and-sorcery hero created by frequent Savage Sword of Conan artist and inker Alfredo Alcala. I'd never even heard of the character until Reddit user and frequent r/ConantheBarbarian poster u/Man_Out_Of_Time_2 purchased some Voltar art. Voltar's pretty fantastic. If you picture John Buscema's Conan and then slap a winged Thor helmet on him, you've got Voltar. That description might lead you to believe that Voltar's just a ripoff of those two characters, but Voltar debuted in 1963, a full seven years before Conan would make his comic book debut by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith and only one year after Thor first appeared in Journey into Mystery. Clearly inspired by Robert E. Howard's Conan and a couple of other evident sources (Lord of the Rings, Norse mythology, Bible stories), Voltar is not so much a barbarian but rather a military officer in the army of the fictional kingdom of Elysium.  Magic Carpet #1's wraparound cover Alfredo Alcala was one of the most prominent Filipino artists in the 60s and 70s who eventually made his way over to the States. In search of cheap creative labor, Marvel did a lot of hiring artists, writers, and inkers from the Philippines in those years, many of whom went on to produce classic work, including Alcala, who'd been a fan of American comics for decades. When the Philippines was invaded by Japan in 1941, Alcala was a teenager. He buried his collection of American comics under the floorboards of his house to protect them and he went to work using his art skills against the Axis powers. He'd ride his bike by military encampments and Japanese gun positions and then draw them from memory, handing the artwork off to the American forces in the area. Those first Voltar comics in the early 1960s are damn hard to track down, though. You can see a few images online, but I'm not able to find any complete stories or even anything for purchase- not that I'm confident I'd be able to read them even if I could get my hands on them- are they written in Filipino or English (or even Tagalog)? In fact, I'm not even sure whether they're in comic strip or comic book form. Perhaps my research skills fail me (There's an omnibus of some of his work, but that one's in Portuguese!). If you know any you want to share... comments are down below! I was, however, able to read what seem to be the only two Voltar stories to be published in America. The first is a copy of Magic Carpet #1 from 1977. This issue doesn't seem to be anywhere online, so I sprang for a copy of it on Ebay. There doesn't seem to be too much demand out there, so prices are reasonable. It also features a backup story titled "Buccaneers on the Skull Planet," which may be the coolest title in the history of fiction. The other Voltar story is a seven-issue serialized story for the Warren Publishing magazine The Rook, issues #2 through 9 published in 1979 through 1981. Both of these stories are simply titled "Voltar" within, but they're very different stories. Because so little about these stories is out there, I thought I might recap them a little more than I normally would. Magic Carpet #1 (1977) This 25ish-page story was written by Manuel Auad, obviously with pencils and inks by Alcala. As Alcala is listed as the sole creator of Voltar but doesn't have a story credit or anything like that, it's hard to tell if he did any direction of the writing. An evil wizard named Kan is attacking the Tower of Zimar, the denizens of which send a desperate plea to Voltar via carrier falcon. Being a good guy, Voltar springs into action. He is warned by a blind, old man that what is sees is not always the truth, which Voltar more or less ignores at first blush. On his way to the tower, Voltar comes across several trials that are more or less previewed on the cover of the issue- he meets a tricky satyr, an aggressive centaur, an illusion-casting sorceress, and a dragon monster. When he arrives at Zimar, he's actually able to dispatch Kan pretty easily since Kan's magic is almost too powerful and seems to have deluded him, but Voltar, remembering the words of the old man, is able to just kind of stand there and then deliver one killing blow. Like early Conan the Barbarian comics, Voltar's sword more explodes off his enemies than cuts them. Most of these encounters with fantastical enemies are told pretty episodically- Voltar meets a character, they fight for a few panels, and by the time you turn the page, he's victorious and moving onto the next one. I'm not against a picaresque. The character and creature designs are a lot of fun here, with creepy monsters and imaginative illusions that are cast before Voltar during his journey. None of the prose storytelling is outright incredible, but we're all here for the art, not necessarily the words on the page. The Rook #2 - 9 (1979 - 1981) While the title pages only bill this story as Voltar once again, I've seen some sources call this one Voltar: Comes the Endtime or simply Voltar: Endtime, so that's how I've been thinking of this arc to differentiate it from Magic Carpet. This is easily the better of the two stories, this time written by Bill DuBay under the pen name "Will Richardson" as the backup stories in seven issues of the time-traveling Rook's magazine. It helps that having seven issues of storytelling gives the story a lot more space to breathe, but the central conceit of the story is a lot stronger, too. Chronologically, Endtime takes place much later than Magic Carpet's tale, with Voltar being an older warrior on the edge of retirement (though you'd never know it based on how Alcala draws him- he still looks like the world's most jacked 25 year-old). The goblin armies of Gog and Magog are marching on Elysium, and the country is looking for a messiah. Is Voltar that messiah, or will they only tease us with that idea before making a last-minute switch? I'll never tell. Voltar once again goes on a journey here to save his people, with most issues including a one-off villain for Voltar to defeat with either his brains or his brawn before moving closer to Gog and Magog. This story ratchets up the continuity and worldbuilding. Voltar has evidently been away from Elysium for a long time, which allowed the goblin armies to invade. We meet Antiochus, king of Elysium and Voltar's father, who also tells us of Voltar's sister and mother. Voltar implies that he might actually be immortal, despite the story telling us he's getting old. What I didn't tell you earlier is that Magic Carpet #1 didn't even make any mention of Elysium, leaving the story in an unnamed setting. These seven issues are so much fun.  There's also a constant drumbeat through Comes the Endtime where characters or the narration bemoan the stench of war, violence, and destruction. It's always presented as a plague or a rot that disgustingly invades your nose, and I'm left wondering how much input Alcala had on this story. It would make sense for a Filipino who saw his land invaded by the Japanese during WWII to see the effects of war as a plague. Or maybe it was the California kid who wasn't even born until after the war... I don't know! If you like sword and sorcery, or 70s comics, or just classic adventure stories, Voltar is a total blast. He feels very much like a cousin of Conan while maintaining some of his own unique traits story beats, like his obnoxious winged helmet and referring to himself in the third person. But let's talk the art. We're all here for the art. It's incredible. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the scant few pages of Voltar that exist are some of the most beautiful Bronze Age comic art in existence. Alcala's ornately-designed pages are completely lush with detail, giving life to every inch of the page. In Endtime, every few pages is a bold double-barreled splash page. It helps the stories feel like more than the straightforward adventure tales that they are, giving them a mythical quality. I could gush about Alcala's work all day. His character designs are excellent, and it's interesting to see that Voltar looks (without his helmet, at least) exactly how Conan will be drawn by legions of artists in the coming decades, but this Voltar design got there first.  Voltar and the other fighting characters ripple with muscle that is always posed with dynamic, interesting movement. The bad guys have angular, pointy helmets or jutting goblin jaws that betray their allegiances. The landscapes are fantastical: high castles jut out of severe rock faces, beams of light shoot through impenetrable cloud masses. It makes me wish that Alcala had more chances to do the pencils and the inks on Savage Sword, because he's a master of his craft. Now, Voltar's not really much of a barbarian; he doesn't seem to be from outside civilization, he's not a berzerking rage monster. Calling him "Voltar the Barbarian" feels like a bit of a misnomer, but it's an epithet that people seem to attach to him frequently, so here we are. Like Thongor of Lemuria, he's one of Conan's descendants. They've all got two-syllable names and a country or "the Barbarian" on the end. If you want to check out Voltar for yourself, you can pick up a copy of Magic Carpet #1 on Ebay for a fairly reasonable price, but I'd suggest googling the Rook issues, because they're all online for free if you know which sites to go to, if you know what I mean. They're worth the risk.  Yeah, Thongor's a different barbarian, technically. This is the first time I've written something not exclusively about Conan on this blog. Sometimes it's fun to look into Conan's descendants: other characters with the epithet "...the Barbarian!"  This first printing is the copy I have. There's this thing I like to tell my students when I'm teaching writing: stealing is good. Sometimes students get a little silly with this- last year, some students tried to make "Stealing is good" their class yearbook quote, but most of the time it goes over well. Here's what I mean by that. Plagiarism is bad, but stealing is good. When you're just starting out, "stealing" from our influences is how you develop your own creative skills. I'm sure if you've ever tried your hand at creative writing, you looked back at your draft later and realized you were just ripping off your favorite authors, even if you weren't conscious of it. When I started writing songs with my first band when I was 17, I was completely and totally just ripping off Green Day, Blink-182, and the Misfits, even though I wasn't necessarily trying to. Heck, this blog basically started with me aping Tom Breihan's "The Number Ones" concept but with Conan stories. But I think this is a very important part of someone's development as a writer or artist or musician. When you see a turn of phrase you like from your favorite author, steal it. When you are stuck while writing a song, ask yourself, "How would [musician I really admire] write this?" That's how you become better. Ultimately, you get to a point where you've sort of developed your own voice and you're chasing your own ideas, and you don't have to steal anymore, you just have your influences that you're standing on.  I get the sense that when Lin Carter was writing The Wizard of Lemuria, later retitled Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria, he was kind of still in the stealing phase. That doesn't mean this 1965 novel, which was Carter's first, is terrible or anything, but it does seem that he's wearing his influences on his sleeve a little bit too much. Thongor is a powerful barbarian character in a fictional past set several thousand years ago who, in The Wizard of Lemuria, meets Sharajsha of Zaar and attempts to stop an even older race of Dragon Kings from recapturing the earth in a hostile takeover. It's certainly a serviceable-enough sword and sorcery story. Carter wouldn't help write any Conan material until about two years after The Wizard of Lemuria would hit shelves, but Carter was obviously a Conan fan already. I kept track of all the suspiciously-similar elements while reading, mostly for my own amusement.
 Now having read The Wizard of Lemuria, it makes a lot of sense that Carter was easily able to uproot his story "Black Moonlight" and turn it into the Conan tale "The Gem in the Tower" so easily. I've been digging into Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series recently. In spring I read A Princess of Mars and I'm currently working my way through the second title, The Gods of Mars. It's almost impressive how much The Wizard of Lemuria reads like a John Carter story that Lin Carter shoehorned Conan into. Heck, there are a couple of lines in The Gods of Mars that seem lifted wholesale into Thongor's. John Carter at one point narrates in a moment of desperation, "To think, with me, is to act." Likewise, "For Thongor, to conceive of a plan was to attempt it." I just happened to read those two lines on the same exact day and got deja vu. Lin Carter writes a hell of a lot like Burroughs- a lot more than he writes like Robert E. Howard, and that's something that separates his work a little more from Conan.  I'm not here to make an hbomberguy-style plagiarism argument or anything (remember, I said up top that I think stealing can be good). I do think it's interesting how Carter developed as a writer. I noted in a couple of my blog posts while creating my Conan chronology that I get the sense that Carter was a better plotter than his Conan writing partner, L. Sprague de Camp, but de Camp was a much better prose writer. He could construct a sentence far better than Carter seemed to be able to do. It seems to me like he got quite a bit better between this novel and when he started writing the Cimmerian. I mean, I really enjoy "Legions of the Dead," "The Thing in the Crypt," "Shadows in the Dark," Conan the Buccaneer, and Conan of the Isles.
It seems like I'm fairly in line with the common opinion that Thongor is fine. Any time I've read reviews for The Wizard of Lemuria, people seem to shrug their shoulders, note the clear influence of Howard and Burroughs, and move on. I really enjoy Fletcher Vrendenburgh's breakdown of the Thongor books over on Blackgate. I might pick up more of Carter's barbarian if I find the right deal or if I'm bored, but I wouldn't bet money on it. At least I can feel a little better about having a Thongor Frazetta painting in my sidebar for the last year now that I've covered one of his books. But let's be real- if you didn't already know that was Thongor and not Conan, would you have noticed? |
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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