 The current Conan the Barbarian title from Titan Comics did something recently that really surprised me. Jim Zub, its author, has frequently set stories in the periphery of canonical Howard classics: we see the aftermath of "Queen of the Black Coast," we see an interpretation of "The Frost-Giant's Daughter." But issue 21 goes somewhere I didn't think they would go: one of Robert E. Howard's worst, most vitriolically racist stories, "The Vale of Lost Women." When I did my first read-through of all the stories in my Conan timeline, "The Vale of Lost Women" was the first one-star review I gave, and the first real stinker. In case you're unfamiliar, here's the most basic rundown of the plot: a girl named Livia has been captured by the Bakalah tribe in the Black Kingdoms. She pleads to Conan, who is currently acting as one of their chiefs, to rescue her. The two strike a up a deal for Conan to rescue her in return for sexual favors. Livia then gets away from the tribe after Conan beheads their leader, is attacked by a demon bat before Conan saves her. Conan ultimately refuses to collect his reward and promises to take Livia to the Stygian border so that she can return to her home country of Ophir.  This story is rough for a few reasons. The last third in which Livia gets away and is attacked by the devil bat from Outer Dark doesn't really have much to do with the first two-thirds, so the plot is kind of loosely connected at best. The story is dark and violent, not a fun way, but in a gratuitous way that Howard scholar Bob Byrne describes as being "heavily charged with the imagery of rape." Most of it, though, is that the crux of the plot is extremely racist. Black characters are described throughout as disgusting, evil, violent, subhuman creatures- particularly their chief, who the prose likens to a frog. Livia is livid that Conan, a white man, would let a white woman be touched by "black dogs." "She made no effort to classify [Conan's] position among the races of mankind. It was enough that his skin was white." And, "You are a barbarian like the others—only your skin is white; your soul is black as theirs. You care naught that a man of your own color has been foully done to death by these black dogs—that a white woman is their slave!"  I could go on with myriad examples, but that feels gross. There's no evidence that Howard ever submitted "The Vale of Lost Women" for publication, so perhaps even he knew it wasn't his best work. Usually, when I have brought up Howard's racism, a few things happen. Some commenters call me a name and leave. But most fans hand-wave it and say, "He was a Texan a hundred years ago, what do you expect?" I always get the sense that when people bring up that he was a southerner decades ago, it comes with a shrug of the shoulders and the suggestion that we just never need to speak of it again. I've even seen people propose that he might have actually been progressive on race compared to other central Texans of the Depression era. L. Sprague de Camp says in his essay "Howard and the Races" in the collection The Blade of Conan, "Howard was, if a racist, a comparatively mild one" and then goes on to describe the unpublished Howard story "The Last White Man," which is almost comical in how racist it is considering de Camp's "mild" racism line. But every time someone says that Howard was no more racist than anyone else of his day, I'm reminded of one of my favorite professors from undergrad, and a phrase he used to say often: "Just because we historicize, doesn't mean we excuse." Though we understand why Robert E. Howard would be racially intolerant in a southern US state in the 1930s, doesn't make it suddenly okay. I'm not sitting here trying to advocate that we apply postcolonial theory and modern-day standards of "positive representation" or anything like that, I am merely proposing that we acknowledge that Howard was, by basically any measure, a racist. And I love most of the writings of Robert E. Howard, but I think we should talk about it. I'm not here to shame anyone or try to take a Conan story you love from you or anything, but I would like to engage honestly about what we do with pretty racist stories in today's world. It makes for an interesting problem to be solved if you're going to try to adapt one of them. Jim Zub and "The Vale of Lost Women" Here's where we get to Jim Zub's Conan #21 "Slaves of the Magi," which picks up toward the end of "Vale of Lost Women" right as Conan slays the devil bat, with a first page that mirrors the cover of Marvel's Conan #104 from 1979. Conan takes Livia north to Stygia, where they encounter a strange village that is a little too welcoming for comfort. Zub smartly reframes key aspects of this story, leaving behind the undesirable racist elements. He begins in medias res, therefore jettisoning the lackluster plot construction of the original. Instead of Conan saving Livia "simply because of the color of [her] hide" in "Vale," this is part of a calculated infiltration plan he's had with the Bamula tribe. Zub fills in some of the backstory between the Bamulas and the Bakalahs, making them long-time enemies. Now, it's a political conflict rather than a racial one. He also spends a few panels at the beginning of the issue getting readers up to speed on where Conan's been recently. The narration makes clear that Conan has befriended the Bamulas- like him, they're strong and smart, and he feels a sense of "kinship and camaraderie" with them that he's been missing recently. While the setting is the same, Conan is now a friend and equal to these characters because of who they are, not an outsider because of the color of his skin. As Conan and Livia ride north, they are accompanied by some Bamula tribesmen, of whom Livia is not afraid or intolerant. I was pretty floored. Jim was able to salvage a story I had written off entirely as an irredeemable piece of garbage and reframe key aspects that remove it from its racist context entirely. It's already been made clear that Jim Zub's an excellent writer, but that takes a very deft pen to do! Oddly enough, he's not actually the only Conan writer to have accomplished this same feat. Roy Thomas and "Black Canaan" "Black Canaan" is one of Robert E. Howard's most infamous weird tales. It carries with it a reputation of being impressively racist. This one involves an American southerner named Kirby Buckner rushing home to the land of his youth, a backwoods swampland called Canaan. The descendants of enslaved Black Americans are seemingly about to stage an uprising, banding together against the White citizens of the area to claim Canaan as a Black-only swath of land. Led by a voodoo priest named Saul Stark, the Black Canaanites use ancient tribal magic and trying to fight against the White Canaanites. The narrative is an all-around horrifying read today. I've decided to show you just one passage from "Black Canaan" to illustrate its intolerance. "What makes you think it might be an uprising?" I asked. It's always important when you come across a narrative with racist characters to interrogate whether that story is depicting racism or if it's endorsing racism. With "Black Canaan," it's obviously endorsing the racism of the main characters. The quote above is never dealt with, nobody learns a positive lesson, the Black characters are the villains not only because of the spooky voodoo of Saul Stark, but because they're the enemies of the Whites, who we're obviously supposed to side with. "Black Canaan" has only one good scene, in which Kirby Buckner comes across Saul Stark's abandoned cabin. There's some solid suspense to be had as he approaches the door, sweating about what might be contained within. The rest feels like Klan propaganda. And honestly, that kind of makes sense from a Texan. The Texas Rangers were known as "Los Diablos Tejanos" (The Texas Devils) at the time and were essentially a racial death squad that acted with impunity.  Now imagine my surprise when I open Conan the Barbarian #82 to see that it is adapting "Black Canaan" as a Conan story in the Marvel continuity. Like Jim Zub did this year with "Vale," Roy Thomas played with a few small aspects to distance the story from its racist origins. In moving the story to the Hyborian Age, Roy has already done something kind of interesting. He sets his version, "The Sorceress of the Swamp" and "The Dance of the Skull" in southern Stygia, on the border of the Black Kingdoms. By doing this, Roy has already shaved off some of the racial conflicts. Instead of White vs. Black, this is a story of Stygians vs. Kushites, both of whom are people of color. Conan has frequent conflicts with Stygians (I'd argue wizards from that country give him more trouble than anyone from just about anywhere else), so he doesn't join them based on skin color.  The Stygians try to enlist Conan on their side because he's clearly not Black, but is very tan and therefore kind of similarly pigmented to the Stygians. He, noting his closeness with the Black Corsairs, denies their offer based on race and says that he chooses his comrades based on things other than skin color. Instead, Conan fights against the sorcerer Toroa (this version's Saul Stark), who is clearly a malevolent psycho. Not because of his skin color, but because he's turning people into crocodile monsters in the bog. We all know how Conan feels about wizards. Elsewhere, Roy drops some of the more outdated characteristics. One character with an extremely stereotypical, uneducated, southern Black accent in "Black Canaan" speaks normally in the Conan version. I'd argue that some of Roy's touches went a long way in the 70s. When adapting "Queen of the Black Coast," Roy expands the character of the pirate N'Yaga, mentioned only twice by name in Howard's story, into a full-fledged character who acts as a loving mentor and father figure to the Shemite Belit, who is White.  What should we do about Howard's racism in 2025?So what's the proper course of action when dealing with some of Robert E. Howard's racist source material? SF and fantasy author Jason Sanford, as a father to mixed-race kids, makes a compelling argument that we just shouldn't read him anymore. Like Jason says, I struggle to imagine myself recommending a story like "Shadows in Zamboula" to one of my friends who isn't White. Scottish blogger Al Harron has a very different take in response to Jason. Part of me wonders how much experience Al has with southern, American racism since he's from the UK and if that influences his opinions. Gary Romeo, who writes the Sprague De Camp Fan blog and is someone I respect a lot, penned a very good (now-deleted) article on Howard's racism back in the day. I do appreciate that everyone I've listed above seems to come at this argument in good faith. I'd really like to hear what some Black writers, or at least some non-White authors would have to say on the subject. As far as I'm aware, there aren't too many creators of color who've worked on Conan. Christopher Priest and Larry Yakata wrote some of Savage Sword in the 80s. Stephen Graham Jones published a short story a few years ago. There were always a few Filipino artists and colorists working for Marvel in the 70s. But I'd be really interested in seeing a story by someone like comic writer and race scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates work on Conan.  I'm just a white guy from Colorado, so I'm not the expert here. I absolutely don't think we need to throw out Howard entirely. I also don't think we should just claim that he wasn't a racist and move on. I keep thinking about Disney's 1946 film Song of the South. This very poorly-aged film is not available to watch anywhere and Disney is content to let nobody know that it exists. The film hasn't been shown since a 1986 theater re-release. However, its characters in the Splash Mountain ride at Disneyland and Disney's unofficial theme song "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" live on, without many people knowing where they came from at all. I was in my 20s before I'd ever even heard of Song of the South. I don't think hiding away the darker aspects of the past are the way to do it (though I understand why Disney, as a corporation, would want to do that), but I think there are lessons to be learned here. "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" is a fun little iconic song that pretty much everyone knows. We don't need to trash it for its association with Song of the South, but I wish the film was available if only for educational purposes. That would allow people to engage with the prejudices of the past, see how things have changed, and hopefully not repeat those mistakes.  Likewise, I think we should keep Robert E. Howard's more racist tales available to read and speak openly about the outdated stereotypes, racist characterization, and time periods that allowed them to be so. Conan's a great character. I mean, I've spent a solid year reading and blogging about hundreds of stories starring him. I love spending time in the Hyborian Age. So I don't think we need to dispose of him and his world because Robert E. Howard was a racist. We should acknowledge what is racist about "Black Canaan," "The Last White Man," "The Vale of Lost Women," and others and place them in historical context. But like Jim Zub and Roy Thomas have done, I think we should work to move any of the racist elements out of newer adaptions. When writers do this, I think it's artistically interesting: what a challenge to take a story like "The Vale of Lost Women" and turn it into something new today. But it's also historically intriguing: we can see how far we've come from the 1930s and give a raggedy old yarn new life. The original "Vale" is still there and available to read, but Jim Zub's crafted a new take on it that's a more enjoyable read, goes somewhere new, and isn't poisoned by personal prejudices. Conan does have a periodically sordid past, but that doesn't have to be his future. 
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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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