HELEN OF WYNDHORN: Frame Narrative and the Stewardship of Stories

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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.