I don't really do a lot of what I think of as "reviews" on this blog. I know a lot of times my writing about Conan stuff verges into review territory, but I usually think of them as essays. I try to come up with an interesting take, something to actually say about the story and engage with its themes. I try to place them in chronology. And yeah, I usually include how good I felt the story is, but my goal isn't really to review.

Especially not contemporary stuff- I feel like I would lose interest profoundly fast if I had to come up with a unique angle on everything, especially just a 24-page comic each month. Sounds like a grind. And if I ever fall into the pattern of just summarizing a plot and then telling you what I liked and disliked? Take me out back behind the barn and shoot me.

But Jim Zub and Alex Horley's Conan the Barbarian #25, which came out today? Brother, I had to rush to my keyboard so I could tell you about this thing.

Most discussions of this book are starting with its unique art, understandably so. Each panel is a hand-done oil painting by longtime Titan Conan artist Alex Horley. They are universally gorgeous. Oil paints present such a different feeling than traditional comic book art. For one, it's a single artist working all the way through rather than a collaboration of a penciller, inker, colorist, and letterer. They lack the traditional outlines and blacks of de rigeuer comic book creation. They feel so tactile; in the two-page spread with the title, you can literally see the texture of the canvas under Horley's work. His deep blues, unearthly greens, and vivid reds seem to glow on the page, like the creepy, yellow eyes of the the comic's title character, "the Nomad."

I don't mean to imply that comics are a "low" art or anything (I adore them!), but there's something incredible about seeing comic art rendered as a painting. I had this Alex Ross painting of Plastic Man framed as a poster on my wall when I was like 13, and I think it was because of this hard-to-name feeling that painted comic books instill in me. It elevates everything.

I'm not usually a variant cover guy (you ever feel like comic companies are trying to scam you out of another four dollars with them?), but I had to pick up a few here. I grabbed the standard A cover, the Roberto De La Torre "Frost-Giant's Daughter" cover, and the black-and-white De La Torre sketch version too.

As much as Horley's art is going to be the hook that draws a lot of people to this issue, I don't want the spotlight to avoid Jim Zub's writing here. He's been fantastic for the last two years on both Conan and Savage Sword, but this story feels like a victory lap. 

Surprisingly, it's Zub's first King Conan story for Titan, which surprised me. Folks like Jason Aaron wrote the great "Ensorcelled" two-parter for SSOC, and I know that Jim tends to write younger Conan a little more often, but I guess I never realized he had never actually penned a King Conan yarn. With as many times as I've heard Jim in interviews and podcasts refer to the very first moment of Conan's literary existence- filling in lost corners of maps in a library in the towers of his Aquilonian castle, I guess I'd just assumed that of course he'd written an elder Conan tale.

As the gorgeous wraparound cover implies, Conan revisits many portions of his life in this issue, sprinting us through a greatest hits (and greatest stabbings and greatest crucifixions) of Conan's life. In the end, it becomes not only a celebration of what the current Conan creative team have done for the last two years, but a celebration of what keeps bringing us back to this Depression-era barbarian for a hundred years, and even of storytelling itself. Jim has some great, poignant lines in here like calling Conan the "philosopher barbarian." I have no such banger lines. Suffice it to say: this shit rocks.

Jeff Shanks's essay in the back goes down as a fitting desert to this celebration of Conan, stories, and the way they're told. I love the way Jeff is able to communicate his passion for the world of the Hyborian Age.

If this were the last Conan issue from Jim Zub and Titan, it would be a fitting way to go out. But I'm so glad it's not. Pick it up now!

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 1996 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.

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.

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?").

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.

September and October 1933 in Weird Tales were a one-two punch of short Conan stories, with "The Pool of the Black One" coming just one month after "Xuthal of the Dusk." Both of them are a bit of a downturn from the highs of "The Tower of the Elephant" and "Black Colossus," but things would bounce back soon enough with "Rogues in the House" in January of '34. Unlike the last two stories explored in this series, "Pool" didn't make the cover and it wasn't the lead story in the October issue; instead, it appeared third.

"Pool" was the first pirate Conan story to be published, but it wouldn't be the last. It features one of the coolest entrances Conan ever makes, swimming up and onto a boat out of seeming nowhere.

Honestly, I think the thing that is most illustrative about the placement of this story along the timeline is Conan's characterization himself. He is so eminently controlled, so smooth and unbothered. He keeps his mouth shut and is content to just smile and leave comments unremarked upon. We see some of his fabled "gigantic mirth" when he's gambling with the rest of the sailors. It's a Conan much more similar to the King Conan of "The Phoenix on the Sword" and "The Scarlet Citadel" to the brutish outlander of "The Tower of the Elephant" or "Xuthal of the Dusk." He seems to be even more smooth than in his considerable growth shown in "Black Colossus."

​For now, I'm placing this before the King Conan stories.

I will stop short of saying that Robert E. Howard was obsessed with the idea of ancestral memory, but I will at least say that he was preoccupied by it. The concept of reincarnation, and the reincarnated being able to in some way perceive their past lives through the veil of time, should be familiar-enough to Conan fans. The very first Conan work, the poem "Cimmeria" begins with the words, "I remember," implying a truth in it passed down through the blood of generations.

Even earlier than that, ancestral memory was the key plot point in Howard's "People of the Dark," published in the June 1932 issue of Strange Tales. Even just on the Contents page, it advertises a tale ripped "out of the past." As would-be murderer John O'Brien of the present takes a blow to the head, he accesses a past life from hundreds of years ago. Now, this story's "Conan of the Reavers" is not considered by modern consensus to be entirely the same character as Conan of Cimmeria (despite Conan also being characterize as a "reaver" in the Nemedian Chronicles), but they bear great similarities. 

In addition to the above-mentioned poem and story, Howard would use the concept as the key plot conceit in his James Allison stories, which featured a somewhat fictionalized version of himself remembering his past lives. Of these past lives as a stint as Hunwulf, the Aesir raider living in Conan's Hyborian Age.

There are a handful of James Allison stories, but only those scant two were completed or published during Howard's lifetime. 

James Allison appears in the Conan comic event "Battle of the Black Stone" from last year, and is the framing device in the novel Conan: Cult of the Obsidian Moon, released about the same time. The framing device presents this Conan story as one of James Allison's remembered tales which is being submitted to the fictional magazine Anomalous Adventures, a fun little send-up to Weird Tales.

Both the comic event and the novel follow in the tradition of smashing Howard elements together, combining the characters into classic team-up. "Battle of the Black Stone" puts all of Howard's best-known characters into a type of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen across time: Solomon Kane, El Borak, Conrad and Kirowan, Dark Agnes de Chastillon, etc. Obsidian Moon, which is subtitled "A Black Stone Novel," has Conan encounter Hunwulf and Gudrun of "The Garden of Fear." It also postulates that the winged creature who stole Gudrun in her original story was also related to the creature that killed Belit in "Queen of the Black Coast."

Conan and the Aesir couple become fast friends and Conan is goaded into training their son in combat. Of course, it's not long before things go sideways and send the adults after a cadre of kidnapped village children, all taken mysteriously by winged men.

In the novel, Conan is recognized as a pirate, lately of the Black Coast, and is even named Amra by a character early on. Elsewhere Conan refers to the plots of "The Tower of the Elephant," "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," and "Rogues of the House," by mentioning an elephant god and a giant spider, a snowy woman who disappeared from under his hands, and an ape-man dressed as a priest. There are several places that this novel could go, chronologically. Many stories seem to be set some time in Conan's early-to-mid career as a mercenary, mostly in Shem. It fits in nicely alongside John C. Hocking's Conan work, so it probably belongs right before "Hawks Over Shem" and "Black Colossus."

There's quite a bit to enjoy in Cult of the Obsidian Moon. The couple of Hunwulf and Gudrun are really likeable, but would definitely qualify as a Gary Stu and a Mary Sue, respectively. The novel puts Conan in proximity to children, which is kind of unique for a Conan story, so we see how he interacts with Hunwulf and Gudrun's son, Bjorn. And I'm always down for a cult of zealots and a lost city.

There's a fair bit that I think will turn off longtime Conan readers, too. The Conan of Cult of the Obsidian Moon makes me think of the cover of Savage Sword #36's cover by Earl Norem: square-jawed and mostly clean-cut, this is Conan at his absolute most friendly and superheroic. He's perhaps a bit too good with kids, instantly winning young friends effortlessly as he goes. It's also much more of a fantasy novel than a sword-and-sorcery story. There's magic abound and it's noticeably less dark than some Conan fare.

I found it a little odd that the titular Obsidian Moon cult isn't even mentioned until 189 pages into a 286 page novel. It's not a deal-breaker, I was just sitting there wondering why it was called that for at least half of the book.

Additionally, I'm not trying to nitpick too much, but if James Allison's genetic memories are supposedly of the life of Hunwulf, why is Conan the point of view character? It makes less sense the more I think about it. The novel isn't strongly connected to the comic event at all; you could read both without ever knowing the other title exists and you'd lose nothing (which I think is a plus- complicated reading orders are a scam), but the connections basically make for little Easter eggs if you've read both.

I'm not trying to dissuade you from checking out Obsidian Moon. It was pretty decent. I'm left wondering if I found it at the right time- I spent a bunch of a weekend at a campground near Buford, Wyoming reading it while people drank ale and engaged in mock combat since my wife is a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism.

​Out of Titan Books' recent Conan novels (I'm starting to think of them as the "silhouette cover set"), it's easily the middle of the pack. It doesn't reach the excellent heights of John Hocking's City of the Dead work, but it easily clears the more recent Songs of the Slain. I wouldn't mind seeing more crossovers between Howard properties, which we may see soon enough with what's happening in the pages of Savage Sword these days!

★★★☆☆

It's Cimmerian September, so it's appropriate that the next story in publication order first appeared in the September 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Appearing a few months after "Black Colossus," "Xuthal of the Dusk" was published under the title "The Slithering Shadow." Most people that I know prefer to use Howard's original and (in my opinion, at least) more unique title. Like "Black Colossus," it was the cover story, with the Margaret Brundage illustration on the front showing the characters Natala and Thalis.

So far, our entries in this series have been pretty simple to order: Conan is very mature or very young, or right in between the two. "Xuthal" is going to require a lot more interpretation than the King Conan stories or some of his first.

Here are the contextual timeline clues we have.

• Conan is primarily acting as a mercenary. "He and the girl were, so far as he knew, the sole survivors of Prince Almuric's army."
  • Conan is enlisted in Prince Almuric's army, of which he and his companion Natala are the last survivors. Almuric sounds very similar to Amalric, the general in the previous story. I had to wonder if Almuric and Amalric were intended to be the same person- after all, the former king of Aquilonia is known as both Numedides and Namedides, and the capitol of Aquilonia changes names from Tamar to Tarantia, so he's made similar spelling and name changes. However, because Amalric is stated in "Black Colossus" to be a general and Almuric is a prince, they're likely different men.
  • It's never stated exactly who Conan is fighting for in this story. Almuric's army is stated to be fighting the "defeated rebel prince of Koth," and sweeps through Shem and then the outskirts of Stygia, but we're not exactly sure where they're coming from. Ophir? Khoraja? 
  • Conan and Natala are have been pursued by Stygian horsemen, but managed to shake off the pursuit and Conan isn't recognized by anybody or implied to be in any special position in the army. If Conan was a highly-ranked commander in Almuric's army like he is in "Black Colossus," I don't think he would've abandoned the rest of the army.
• Conan is clad very simply. "Though his only garment was a silk loin-cloth, girdled by a wide gold-buckled belt from which hung a saber and a broad-bladed poniard." With only a loin-cloth (though a silk one! A gentrified loin-cloth!) and gold-buckled belt, Conan is lacking the more elaborate outfits he has in some stories. He does seem to be much better outfitted than in "The Tower of the Elephant," though.
• Conan has learned Stygian. "On a venture Conan replied in Stygian, and the stranger answered in the same tongue." In "Black Colossus," Conan had learned Kothic, spoken in a "barbarous" accent. While Natala's limited Stygian language skills are noted, Conan's are not, suggesting perhaps a proficiency at the language. 
• Conan is always a competent fighter and survivalist, but Conan doesn't seem as confident or sophisticated in this story to me as he does in "Black Colossus." He's a little more brutish. The fact that he seems like just a regular enlister in the military leads me to believe that this story probably take place prior to "Black Colossus." 
• The black lotus is seen again after making its first appearance in "The Tower of the Elephant." Natala asks Conan if he recognizes it, but doesn't wait for an answer. Perhaps it's clear to her that he does recognize it, though this lotus is a different strain than regular lotus powder, which apparently causes instant death, as Taurus of Nemedia has said. "You have heard of the black lotus? In certain pits of the city it grows. Through the ages they have cultivated it, until, instead of death, its juice induces dreams, gorgeous and fantastic. In these dreams they spend most of their time."

This is my first sort of big shakeup to my original chronology. I originally had "Xuthal" much later, based on what I would now consider a misreading of the original story. A year or so ago, I called Conan an officer in Shem's military, but I was making assumptions there that aren't really that supported by the text. It never explicitly says he's an officer. I'll be placing this one earlier in Conan's mercenary days and prior to "Black Colossus."

A lot of stories put this one much further on in Conan's life, usually just before his pirate period with the Barachans as seen in "Red Nails." I wonder if there's something I'm missing. Shoot me a comment if you think there is!

"Black Colossus" is the fourth Conan story to reach publication, hitting magazine racks in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales. Howard earned $130 from Farnsworth Wright and came three months after the previous publication, "The Tower of the Elephant." As a first for Howard, the story graced the cover and was the first story in the issue's contents.

"Black Colossus" features one of the best openings in any Robert E. Howard story but Conan isn't even seen until well into chapter 2, at which point, his physical description is made clear immediately.

• Conan is clad as a captain of mercenaries, including a scarlet cloak: "He stood facing her, his hand on the long hilt that jutted forward from beneath the scarlet cloak which flowed carelessly from his mailed shoulders. The torchlight glinted dully on the polished blue steel of his greaves and basinet. A more baleful fire glittered bluely in his eyes. At first glance she saw he was no Kothian; when he spoke she knew he was no Hyborian. He was clad like a captain of the mercenaries, and in that desperate command there were men of many lands, barbarians as well as civilized foreigners. There was a wolfishness about this warrior that marked the barbarian."
  • In "The Tower of the Elephant," Conan was a young wanderer with just a worn tunic and a hand-me-down scabbard, so he has clearly made lots of progress in his career. 
  • The scarlet cloak Conan wears in this story is sometimes considered a chronological marker for Conan readers as he is noted as wearing a scarlet cloak in other stories, possibly placing them next to one another. However, they could be different red cloaks.
• Conan now understands not only social conventions of taverns, but local politics as well: "I've but come from the last wine-shop open. Ishtar's curse on these white-livered reformers who close the grog-houses! 'Let men sleep rather than guzzle,' they say—aye, so they can work and fight better for their masters! Soft-gutted eunuchs, I call them."
  • In "The Tower of the Elephant," Conan failed to understand several social cues in his interactions with others. He apparently now has a grasp of reform politics. He also understands the diplomatic relations between Ophir, Koth, and Khoraja, mentioned later in the story.
• Conan mentions having served with mercenaries of Corinthia: "When I served with the mercenaries of Corinthia, we swilled and wenched all night and fought all day; aye, blood ran down the channels of our swords." This time period in Conan's life is never explicitly shown in Howard stories.
• Conan identifies himself as a captain of mercenaries: "'Who are you?' she asked abruptly. 'Conan, a captain of the mercenary spearmen,' he answered, emptying the wine-cup at a gulp and holding it out for more. 'I was born in Cimmeria.'" He has evidently had enough time to rise in the ranks for the Khorajan army.
• Conan's kingship is previewed: "'By my fingerbones, Conan, I have seen kings who wore their harness less regally than you!' Conan was silent. A vague shadow crossed his mind like a prophecy. In years to come he was to remember Amalric's words, when the dream became the reality." 
  • "Black Colossus" must obviously take place prior to Conan's kingship in "The Phoenix on the Sword" and "The Scarlet Citadel."
• Conan's Zamorian thieving days are mentioned by a Shemite thief as a thing of the past: "By Derketo, Conan, I am a prince of liars, but I do not lie to an old comrade. I swear by the days when we were thieves together in the land of Zamora, before you donned hauberk!" This obviously places "Black Colossus" after "The Tower of the Elephant."

"Black Colossus" is not just very easy to place in our timeline so far, but it may be the most geographically-focused of all Howard's stories. Perhaps the "Hyborian Age" essay was helping him keep things straight, because the geography of the central Hyborian Age kingdoms is extremely well-crafted.

Also, Conan's birth on a battlefield is mentioned for the first time, an oft-cited characteristic of his youth. 

"The Tower of the Elephant" was the third Conan story published, appearing in the March 1933 issue of Weird Tales, which followed two months after "The Scarlet Citadel's" publication in January. According to biographers like Willard Oliver, it was not the third story written. By the time Howard banged out "The Tower of the Elephant," sitting at his computer late at night and reading his words aloud as he typed them, he had already written "The Phoenix on the Sword," "The Frost-Giant's Daughter," "The God in the Bowl," and his "The Hyborian Age" essay. Unfortunately, two of those would be rejected by Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales and the essay wasn't intended for publication. 

Though Howard sent WT "The Tower of the Elephant" before "The Scarlet Citadel," it would ultimately be published third, netting Howard $95 and the votes from the readership as the best story of the issue. If you put a gun to my head and told me to pick a favorite Conan story, it would probably be this one.

Whereas the first two published stories are at the end of Conan's life during his kingship, "Tower" zooms way back to the start, when Conan is a penniless thief who's new to civilization. Most of the chronological clues happen at the very beginning of the story.

• Conan is described as a tall, "strongly made" youth in a cheap tunic: "He saw a tall, strongly made youth standing beside him. This person was as much out of place in that den as a gray wolf among mangy rats of the gutters. His cheap tunic could not conceal the hard, rangy lines of his powerful frame, the broad heavy shoulders, the massive chest, lean waist and heavy arms. His skin was brown from outland suns, his eyes blue and smoldering; a shock of tousled black hair crowned his broad forehead." He's clearly lived his whole life outside of civilization, like a wild predator compared to city bottom-feeders.
• His equipment is sub-par: "From his girdle hung a sword in a worn leather scabbard." Seeing as Conan is just a "youth," this scabbard is likely not of worn leather because Conan has used it so much, but because it's either a hand-me-down or something scavenged. He evidently hasn't had the time, money, or ability to replace it.
• Conan can speak the local Zamorian language, but he does so with the accent of a foreigner: "'You spoke of the Elephant Tower,' said the stranger, speaking Zamorian with an alien accent. 'I've heard much of this tower; what is its secret?'" He must have been in Zamora for enough time to pick up the language. Future Conan stories will imply that Conan has an innate gift for language.
• Conan is too much of an outsider to understand the social trappings of the tavern in the Maul, and becomes embarrassed about it: "The Cimmerian glared about, embarrassed at the roar of mocking laughter that greeted this remark. He saw no particular humor in it, and was too new to civilization to understand its discourtesies. Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing. He was bewildered and chagrined, and doubtless would have slunk away, abashed, but the Kothian chose to goad him further." Not only does this contain one of the most famous lines in the Conan canon (the head-splitting part) but it shows that Conan is really young and really green. He simply doesn't understand why he's being laughed at.
• The Black Lotus powder is mentioned for the first time: "'They died without a sound!' muttered the Cimmerian. 'Taurus, what was that powder?' 'It was made from the black lotus, whose blossoms wave in the lost jungles of Khitai, where only the yellow-skulled priests of Yun dwell. Those blossoms strike dead any who smell of them.'" For chronologizers like myself, the Black Lotus is a bit of a conundrum, as we'll get to in later entries. While he comes across it here, it's not entirely clear if he recognizes it in "Xuthal of the Dusk," where it is a central plot point. Perhaps it's because the lotus he encounters in "Xuthal" is a different, cultivated strain.
• Yag-Kosha hints at Conan's Atlantean ancestry: "I know your people from of old, whom I knew by another name in the long, long ago when another world lifted its jeweled spires to the stars." This is likely referring to the city of Valusia, where Kull was king in the pre-Cataclysmic Thurian Age. In Jim Zub's Conan the Barbarian run, an older Conan travels back to Valusia where he meets Yag-Kosha again.

On April 16th, 2015, I did something that I never thought that I would do. I stopped the class I was teaching to show the kids a new YouTube video. I was teaching a science fiction literature class to middle school students and with a glance at my iPhone realized I had about five texts asking some version of, "Did you see the video yet?" There was a new Star Wars movie trailer.

I stopped what the kids were doing, pulled up the trailer for the newly titled Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens and we all watched together. I'm not kidding you- a tear welled up in my eye as the fanfare blasted out of my sub-par public school computer speakers and the Millennium Falcon ripped through the sky once again. An 8th grader muttered "hoooly shit." I let it go.

I marked this moment with my students (hilariously, thinking about it now) with the same gravity that I had marked the Queen dying a few years ago. It seemed so far away from the night we all went to our local mall movie theaters and cheered wildly during the opening of The Revenge of the Sith, because, after all, that was supposed to be the last Star Wars movie. The second "long gap" was over and we were now primed to enjoy what was the true end to the Star Wars story... right?

I wonder if sword-and-sorcery fans had that same feeling as they loped past their local book store in 1955 to see Tales of Conan, a brand new Conan the Cimmerian hardcover, sitting in the display window (I wasn't around in 1955, so I don't actually know if a Conan book would've ever made the display window. Pulp's always been pretty frowned upon, right?). They'd seen the posthumous publication of two old stories, sure, but a whole new book? Robert E. Howard had been dead for nearly twenty years, but somehow, like Xaltotun from the crypt, he had been resurrected to contribute to four new Conan stories.

​Well, not really.

After Howard's suicide in 1936, most of his unpublished stories and fragments sat in some for or another in a trunk that, in 1951, was shared with science fiction and fantasy writer L. Sprague de Camp. Trunk steward Marty Greenberg gave de Camp the manuscripts in '51 and two years later suggested that de Camp revise some of the stories to add Conan to them. de Camp has always maintained that it was an easy-enough job: change the names of the settings, a few of the characters, and add something supernatural. The stories in published in Tales of Conan are now 70 years old as of 2025, and they would certainly not be the last.

L. Sprague de Camp is wildly controversial amongst heroic fantasy readers; if you drop into any blog comment section or Reddit thread about him, you'll see the argument. And it gets heated from time to time. Some folks call him a vulture: a moderate talent who happened to strike gold just by being in the right place at the right time. They'll say he mined Howard's work for his own glory and benefit. The other side will say that he's an accomplished science fiction writer in his own right who stewarded Conan between Howard's death and his resurgence in the 1960s. Honestly, I think they're both kind of right. 

I would argue that the stories in Tales of Conan, "The Blood-Stained God," "Hawks Over Shem," "The Road of the Eagles," and "The Flame-Knife," are actually pretty good. "Eagles" and "Flame-Knife" especially are killer reads. They've got the adventuresome Howard flash that good Conan stories have. I know those statements are going to ruffle some feathers, but if you read those stories with only a focus on the text, they're pretty solid sword-and-sorcery tales. Of course, most of the credit for that probably goes to Howard himself, who wrote the meat of those tales.

Just two years after Tales, those same readers might have been once again loping past their local bookshop only to have the misfortune of coming across The Return of Conan, the first wholly original pastiche starring Conan to be published. Of the more than 70 Conan prose stories I've read, it's one of the absolute worst. Swedish writer and Conan fan Bjorn Nyberg teamed with L. Sprague de Camp to produce some seriously inessential fantasy dreck. At its best, it just re-heats Howard's nachos. At worst, it fundamentally misunderstands what makes Conan good. Two books in and the batting average of the Conan pastiche ballclub was down to .500.

de Camp and his protégé Lin Carter returned throughout the sixties and seventies to continue adding their own spin on the Conan library. I honestly think a lot of them are good. "The Thing in the Crypt," Conan and the Spider God, "The Star of Khorala," and several more are definitely worth a try, at least.

Bantam Books published a few more (I'd say four of them are worth reading). Tor then tagged in to publish an eye-watering forty-three new Conan novels, very few of which feel much like Howard's world at all. I've read two of those, but they go down like seltzer waters: just not a lot of flavor of any kind. I've never blogged about them because, even worse than the Conan pastiches I hate (Conan the Liberator, all of the Conan of Aquilonia stories), they don't make me feel anything at all.

For the last three years, Titan Books has taken over and given the pen to exciting fantasy and sci-fi authors, publishing some really good short stories in ebook form and some pretty decent novels.

This is all completely ignoring fifty years of comics and movies, too. 

It seems like the best course of action with Conan pastiche today is to read some online reviews from reviewers you trust. You take some, you leave some.

As I look at the media landscape, I can't help but feel like the spirit of Conan pastiche is all over the place in 2025. The Star Wars franchise finished that aforementioned trilogy, but the stuff keeps coming. They dragged Ewan McGregor back, they produced roughly one and a half good TV shows, and they seem to be really confused as to whether or not Daisy Ridley should return as Rey. Some way, somehow, they even got the grumpiest man in Hollywood and the biggest Han Solo hater of all time, Harrison Ford, to bring his growly voice back to a galaxy far, far away.

Elsewhere in Hollywood, the corpse of the Jurassic Park series continues to shamble through summer cinemas every couple of years, each one more pointless than the last. 

But weirdly enough, narrative in film and print are not the only places where it feels like those in charge of your media are "pulling a de Camp." Johnny Cash died over twenty years ago, but we've gotten a couple of polished, re-worked albums from out of his catalogue (I guess he was right- ain't no grave really can hold his body down). Producers have re-arranged his work to produce records like Songwriter, an almost-ghoulishly titled record in which Cash's vocals have been nestled into entirely new recordings written thirty years after the original sessions. Cash might be the songwriter, but he sure didn't get to have a say in anything else on the album. The Beatles did the same thing in 2023, using AI to isolate John Lennon's vocal parts to "Now and Then" to churn out a "new" Beatles song featuring performances by John and George, both dead for decades.

You may have even noticed what hilarious Youtuber and musician Pat Finnerty has dubbed "The Fuckin' Songs," a collection of pop hits that absolutely refuse to die. The charts have been filled with interpolations of well-worn classics like "Isn't She Lovely?" and "Take Me Home, Country Roads" in soulless, cash-grabby bullshit.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's hard to not feel a little cynical as you look around and see that today's risk-averse media companies want to just endlessly recycle the old hits. They slap a quick coat of paint on them, be they your favorite childhood movies, the songs you liked it high school, or the books you read in the back of the library. It's happened enough times that it feels like we're just Weekend-At-Bernie's-ing our own youth.

With the way intellectual property rights work, it's probably only going to get worse. Creative industries, comics especially, do everything they can to make sure the rights to your favorite stories are owned by media conglomerates instead of their writers. 

Am I happy that we now have 70 years of additional stories featuring my favorite barbarian? Honestly? Yeah, I am. I'll go on as many adventures as I can with the big guy. Am I going to buy new Titan books and comic series? A bunch of them, most assuredly. I'm part of the problem.

But when I see that nearly all of the entertainment industry is following de Camp's model where they take what works and put it on the assembly line, I feel cynical. It makes me want to side with the de Camp naysayers: maybe Conan should've stayed in the Depression. I guess Conan pastiche would've happened by now if it hadn't started in 1955.

L. Sprague de Camp and Conan pastiche aren't really unique, they just happened to get started early.

Don Kraar is something of a mystery when it comes to the history of Conan comics. He's not a well-loved mover-shaker type like Roy Thomas or Kurt Busiek. He's not exactly one of the architects of Savage Sword's flop era like the Saturday morning cartoon weirdness of Michael Fleisher or the paint-by-numbers adventures by Chuck Dixon. In total, he wrote 21 stories for Savage Sword, which is actually quite a few compared to how many issues of Savage Sword you and I have written. But none of them are remembered particularly well, though he had some good installments in there (SSOC #112 "The Blossoms of the Black Lotus," anyone else...?). He contributed some issues to Conan the King and a few DC titles.

There seems to be one picture of Don that exists in total on the entire internet. I couldn't find any interviews.

So I wasn't exactly sure what I'd get when the Marvel Graphic Novel Conan the Reaver arrived at my door, complete with a noticeable coffee stain on the back cover. The previous two that I read- The Horn of Azoth and The Witch Queen of Acheron- weren't great. And Don write the latter.

Conan has enmeshed himself with the thieves guild in the Turanian capital and is helping them get information out of the city guards in a spectacular fashion. Forcing the captain of the guard to walk a tightrope above a pit of flames, Conan strikes up a deal to get the keys to the great treasure room under King Yildiz's castle. Posing as a new member of the castle guard, he quickly proves his sword to be a valuable addition to Turan's militias and is shown the treasure room. His general decency, in fact, pretty quickly endears Conan to everyone as he gets to know Aghrapur, but the secret assassins of the Red Mist are threatening not only the king's plans, but his as well. Everyone in the civilized city has their own machinations, but our barbarian hero just wants some loot, and he's okay with killing a few corrupt guards or nobles to get there.

Kraar does an excellent job of weaving together solid suspense into a thieving sword and sorcery story. Though you might not be completely surprised at a twist or two, the plotting is really fun.

I've read descriptions of John Severin's art describe him with phrases like "a master at work," and I don't know if I agree entirely at this juncture. He has very serviceable panel layouts and paces the action well (something that those other two MGNs completely failed at) but his art, especially his character designs, strike me much more as Prince Valiant than they do as gritty Conan the Barbarian. He renders faces strongly and his close-ups are excellently detailed. However, a lot of his backgrounds are empty, solid colors, and he clothes everyone to look like an ancient Roman.

Chronologically, this graphic novel seems to fall after the rest of Conan's thieving stories and before his service to the Turanian army that pretty much begins with "The Hand of Nergal." I suppose this implies that Conan goes way further south and east from Shadizar than many of us originally pictured, seeing as Aghrapur sits on the coast of the Vilayet Sea, nearly to Hyrkania. But this story also works as a bridge between the thief stories and the first set of mercenary stories.

If you read my other posts about these MGNs, I did some complaining about the cash I had to drop to get them. Conan the Reaver was the cheapest of all three so far, so I'm finally getting my money's worth! I really wish I had a half-star icon to rate it a three-and-a-half out of five.

Now, if only I could find anything else out about Don Kraar...

★★★☆☆

The temporal relationship between "The Phoenix on the Sword" and "The Scarlet Citadel" is not as clear as some would like you to think it is.

Appearing in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales, "The Phoenix on the Sword" was the first Conan story published. It's well-documented that this story didn't spring to Howard in fully original form, but that he had a few warm-ups to creating Conan. His "Cimmeria" poem written earlier that year (though not published until 1956) introduced Conan's homeland.  "People of the Dark," published in June 1932 in Strange Tales had introduced a barbarian character named Conan (the Reaver, not the Cimmerian). And "Phoenix on the Sword was cribbed from the unsold King Kull story "By This Axe I Rule!"

Though it's dead simple to know where this story takes place in Conan's life, the narrative gives us tons of interesting chronological notes. Conan is obviously older, having lived his barbarian life and is now king of Aquilonia.

• Conan seized the crown of Aquilonia: "Yes. The fat fool claims it by reason of a trace of royal blood. Conan makes a bad mistake in letting men live who still boast descent from the old dynasty, from which he tore the crown of Aquilonia."
• The previous king was named Numedides: "I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams."
• Conan is established as having come from the barbarian north: "Alone of us all, Rinaldo has no personal ambition. He sees in Conan a red- handed, rough-footed barbarian who came out of the north to plunder a civilized land. He idealizes the king whom Conan killed to get the crown, remembering only that he occasionally patronized the arts, and forgetting the evils of his reign, and he is making the people forget. Already they openly sing The Lament for the King in which Rinaldo lauds the sainted villain and denounces Conan as 'that black-hearted savage from the abyss'. Conan laughs, but the people snarl."
• Enough time has passed between Conan overthrowing Numedides and the opening of the narrative for people to have erected a statue to the former king in the Temple of Mitra: "When I overthrew Numedides, then I was the Liberator—now they spit at my shadow. They have put a statue of that swine in the temple of Mitra, and people go and wail before it, hailing it as the holy effigy of a saintly monarch who was done to death by a red-handed barbarian." The conventional wisdom that you may hear on the internet is that "Phoenix" takes place during the first year of his kingship, but there's nothing in the text to get that exact. It has been a minimum of a few months, but could be a year, or even several.
• Conan notes to his advisor Prospero that he has been to Asgard and Vanaheim, which Prospero believes may have been myths. It becomes well-established in the Hyborian Age that faraway countries are usually believed to be legend by those sufficiently distant: "The maps of the court show well the countries of south, east and west, but in the north they are vague and faulty. I am adding the northern lands myself. Here is Cimmeria, where I was born. And—" "Asgard and Vanaheim," Prospero scanned the map. "By Mitra, I had almost believed those countries to have been fabulous."

Clearly, obviously, this story is easy to place. I'm bored just sitting here writing it. So let's compare it to "The Scarlet Citadel." Despite being the second Conan story published, "The Scarlet Citadel" was not the second written, but probably the fourth.

In Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author, Willard Oliver postulates that "The Frost-Giant's Daughter" and "The God in the Bowl" were written between the two King Conan stories, but neither of those tales would be published until much later. "The Scarlet Citadel," though, would be published in the January 1933 issue of Weird Tales, just a month behind its predecessor.

I was surprised in my revisiting of these two texts that their temporal placement was not as strong as I remembered. The commonly-accepted chronology is that "Citadel" takes place about a year after "Phoenix," but there's nothing quite so clear in the narratives. I find that it's most likely that "Phoenix" takes place first because there has to have been time for a "whole cycle of hero-tales" to have been written and to become famous, but the one-year difference is not really there. Gary Romeo examines a Conan chronology by P. Schuyler Miller which postulates that "Citadel" takes place right after "Phoenix," perhaps within the same year. "An Informal Biography of Conan the Cimmerian" (found in The Blade of Conan these days) also thinks "Citadel" takes place right afterword. 

If you're only looking at the texts, I don't think it's that clear.

Our final chronology for this post is as follows.

Crossing into Texas feels like you've entered a different realm, irrespective of the introduction of "Don't mess with Texas" signs.

I woke up at five in the morning because I had a long drive ahead of me. The arid front range of Colorado gave way to the smooth, volcanic hills of New Mexico as I descended out of Raton Pass. There, in mid-June, was not a tree to be seen, but there are gentle slopes up isolated mountains covered in surprisingly green grass. I was listening to the second John Carter novel, The Gods of Mars, as I reached Texline, Texas.

Texline is aptly named, nestled just inside the Texas side of the north-south border of New Mexico and the panhandle. As soon as you pass it, the landscape changes. The empty plains are taken over by farmed fields and pasture and silos you can see through haze. From my Coloradan perspective, the elevation is pretty low, but you find yourself on long, high stretches of road which allow you to see for dozens of miles in every direction.

Even though I grew up in La Junta, CO, a southeastern Colorado town that's only about two hours from Texas, the Lone Star State has always felt like it was its own world away.

I started this blog almost exactly a year ago, and somewhere along the way, I decided that I wanted to make the trip down to Cross Plains, Texas for the annual Howard Days. It's a long drive- about 11 and a half hours from Denver, and with stopping for gas and such, it's more like 13 hours. But I've so wanted to see where the boss man lived and worked, so it would be worth it.

A few months prior to Howard Days, Howard historian Jeff Shanks offered me the opportunity to speak at the Glenn Lord Symposium, one of the sessions at the festival, and my brain just about exploded. That sounded like just about the coolest thing I could conceive of, but there was a problem. One of my cousins was getting married the exact same weekend as Howard Days. I hemmed and hawed for a while, but I came to the conclusion that if I skipped the wedding for the festival, my family would probably hate me forever. So I went to the wedding instead (it was lovely).

Since I was on summer break from the school where I teach, I figured I might make the trip down to Texas anyway. I do this thing sometimes when I can swing it: go on Google Maps and search "comic shops" in a city I haven't been to, and start seeing what the options are. Dallas-Fort Worth, the biggest metro area near to Cross Plains (I mean, it's still like two and a half hours away, but the state is fucking gigantic, so in Texas terms it's practically in the same zip code) has dozens. I would not make another person suffer through me just bouncing around in comic shops and bookstores, so I set off to crate dig for comics, Conan goodies, and visit some historic sites, alone.

A few hours after I passed through Texline, I entered Amarillo, which feels like an island in the middle of a corn-field-and-dirt sea. Charley Crockett's version of "Amarillo By Morning" played softly on my car speakers as I rolled into the west side of town and stopped at the Cadillac Ranch. I visited the first comic shop of the trip, Whataburger was had, and it was disappointing. Put the gun down, Texans. 

The landscape changes in that part of Texas very gradually. Your altitude is descending the entire time, so it gets more verdant and fecund by inches. It becomes clear how lonely Texas is while you're making this drive. It's not only because I was doing it solo, but because each town I passed was no more than a few thousand people with one little main street, maybe a coffee shop, and a few church steeples recessed from the interstate. It was about the time I was due north of Cross Plains when an accident on the highway ahead of me left shards of glass on the road, putting a puncture in my tire. I scrambled to find a mechanic just about the point when I realized this was too long of a drive for one person to do. A single tire shop was still open in town that was able to fix me up, and I was on my way.

By the time I pulled into Dallas, I had been on the road for about 15 hours. I had finished The Gods of Mars and got a good ways into Conan the Unconquered because it was the only Conan audiobook I could find on YouTube I hadn't read before. It was still hot as hell, and way stickier than I'm used to. There were also far more donut shops than I've see anywhere else. I guess that's just a Texas thing.

One of my nights there, I found a micro brewery and sat on the patio drinking a beer. I actually brought my Dark Horse Savage Sword of Conan Vol. 2 for this purpose: I wanted to re-read Savage Sword #16 - 19's "People of the Black Circle" adaption while sitting in the heat. Trying to actually enjoy the heat and knowing I would miss it dearly when I was scraping snow off my car at six in the morning a few months from now, I went to the Hyborian Age analogue for India. It's a very different kind of place than the patio of a Dallas brewery, but it funnily enough didn't feel jarringly different.

​We're all born in a strange land. And Texas is a strange land. It's belonged to six different nations. It's extremely diverse in people and environment. Every road and plaza is named for a famous person or president who was born or killed here. I tried to picture Howard, hammering away on his typewriter late into the night with the windows open for airflow as I tried to ignore beads of sweat on me while reading the comic.

Zamora, with its epithet-laden cities Zamora the Accursed and Shadizar the Wicked, has always been one of my favorite Hyborian Age nations. It's not a large country, but it's always seemed to be filled to the border with scoundrels and treasure and danger. But I've always had one issue: Robert E. Howard uses the term "Zamorian," while many other authors have used the term "Zamoran." Which is more proper?

In terms of stories either written or outlined by creator Robert E. Howard, Zamora appears in "The Tower of the Elephant," "The Hall of the Dead," and "The Blood-Stained God," the last two of which were posthumous collaborations by L. Sprague de Camp. Howard uses the term "Zamorian" to describe the denizens of Zamora in both "Tower of the Elephant" and the two-page synopsis that would become "Hall of the Dead." In turning a Kirby O'Donnell story "The Curse of the Crimson God" into a Conan story set in the Hyborian Age, de Camp followed suit by using the term "Zamorian." But to be honest, it always felt a little more natural to me without the "i." It's not Zamoria.

To make matters even slightly worse, there seems to be much confusion about Zamora. L. Sprague de Camp (mistakenly) re-named the City of Thieves to Arenjun rather than Zamora, a revision that has persevered throughout loads of Conan media despite most people with an opinion on the subject saying that it's wrong.

You may be the type to say, "Howard used 'Zamorian,' therefore it's 'Zamorian,' next question, please," and that's valid. But so many other authors playing in Howard's sandbox have used the term "Zamoran," so I wanted to delve a little deeper and see if there's a form that it should take.

When we say "Zamorian" or "Zamoran" to describe a ficitonal person from the fictional land of Zamora, what we're doing is employing those terms as demonyms. A demonym (or a "gentilic") is a word that identifies a group of people in relation to a place. Essentially, it's the adjective form of a place's name. They're frequently created simply by adding an -n on the end of the name of the place, but not always.

But even more than that, "Zamorian" and "Zamoran" can also function as ethnonyms. Much like demonyms, these terms denote a group of people in relation to an ethnicity. So you could scurry your way up Yara's tower and steal heaps of Zamorian jewels, but you could also get into a tavern brawl with some Zamorian bruisers. Each nation in the Hyborian Age has an ethnonym attached to it, but I can't find any that waffle back and forth between two options like those from Zamora do.

I thought that the answer to my question might be as simple as looking online into the real-life region of Zamora, Spain. Like the Hyborian Age region of the same name, the capital of Spain's Zamora is also named Zamora. Unfortunately, the demonym for these particular Spaniards is "Zamorano" and "Zamorana," so it's not an exact match.

Even a cursory look into demonyms and ethnonyms reveals that they aren't always as simple as merely adding an -n to the end of the name of a place. In fact, it's very often irregular. Adding -ian, -er, -ish, and many other suffixes, while also changing or dropping the end of words are ridiculously common.

Howard even did this with other ethnicities and demographics within the Hyborian Age, but as far as I've ever read, nobody has ever offered alternative demonyms for them.

Sometimes demonyms and ethnonyms even get extremely irregular. They may change the spelling of the place or be completely unrelated to the root word. This might be based on all kinds of things like phonemes in a word, a historical circumstance, or a sports mascot.

Seriously, you could go on and on about non-standard demonyms for hours. I bet you know a few that are a little strange near where you live. 

If we stick with cultures from the Hyborian Age, most stick with the standard demonym form, but there are quite a few that are irregular!

There are even several cultures that I don't think we have a demonym for. What do we call people from the Border Kingdoms? How about residents of Punt? Are the citizens of Ophir Ophirians (or Ophireans)? If you're from the lost city of Kuthchemes, are you a Kuthchemer?

I've always found the "word of God" answer of "Howard used 'Zamorian,' so that settles it," to be rather boring, but after looking into how many irregular demonyms and ethnonyms there are, there really isn't any reason for the correct term to not be "Zamorian." The Hyborian Age has always had contradictions of which even Robert E. Howard is guilty. Hey Bob, is the capital of Aquilonia Tarantia or Tamar? Because it varies by story. 

From now on, I'll more confidently use the term "Zamorian" to refer to that ancient race of people who swear by Bel slink through the Maul at night, and I wish future authors would be consistent in using just one of them.

It's 97 degrees out, so I've driven five minutes to the nearest Barnes & Noble and I've already started sweating in the sun. Slipping into an air-conditioned book store and sitting around for an hour or two sampling books isn't a bad way to beat the heat, though. Nothing in this B&N seems to have been updated since 2002 except for the seating options, which are less comfortable than they used to be. So I sit in a wooden chair with the intention of reading the first few chapters of Conan: Songs of the Slain by Tim Lebbon, which came out about two weeks ago.

Across from my chair in this aisle is a shelf of Star Wars books, one of the many Star Wars shelves they have. And I see Tim Lebbon's name on the spine of one of the novels. 

Star Wars books get churned out like cans of Coors Light at a baseball game, always have. The first one even hit shelves a few months before the original film even came out, and it's been a steady pace ever since. They've released ten of them in 2025, and we've still got four months to go in the year. Whenever I see a fiction factory like that, I can't help but feel any kind of interest completely dry up. 

When that many books are coming out, they cease to register to me as any kind of lit or art or anything, and just feel to me like product. Books pitched by a boardroom, to fill a quota, to get something else on the shelf, written by hired guns. I've had students who devour Star Wars novels, and I'm always happy if something gets kids to read, but they're just not for me.

When you look at the authors' names on the spines, you notice a lot of repeats. There is a certain brand of author who seems to only write Star Wars books, which feels similar to the brand of author who only writes movie novelizations. I'm sure that's its own set of skills, like ghostwriting a book for a celebrity, but it's just not one I'm interested in. And to be clear, this is a company problem, not an author problem. I don't blame the writers.

Tim Lebbon, author of Conan: Songs of the Slain and a seeming nice dude, bills himself on his Twitter account as a "Horror author," but it seems to most people that he's "A guy who wrote a Star Wars novel" (the colon-abusing Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void in 2013). He's got original books as well, but quite a few tie-ins to existing franchises. I bring this up because I guess I'm always just a little less excited to read something when it feels like it came off a shrink-wrapped palette at the Novel Factory.

Conan novels have suffered from that vibe before (the Tor Books, sometimes the Dark Horse comics), and seem to be just barely avoiding it in the current Titan era. We're moving at about the pace of two novels a year. Is that sustainable for quality? I don't know. My real conclusion about this current novel is that I think your mileage will vary, but it didn't really work for me.

Songs of the Slain is a very middle-of-the-road Conan novel featuring King Conan dusting off his sword to go fulfill a promise to someone he made forty years ago (based on a true story told to Lebbon by his grandfather!). King Conan stories are kind of interesting in one way: you always have to get Conan off the throne. He has to be at least a decently good king or the whole thing looks silly- you don't want Conan to be incompetent or vindictive in ruling Aquilonia. But by making him necessarily a good king, you've usually got to keep him out of his own castle to have a good adventure (except in "The Phoenix on the Sword"). 

At times, Songs of the Slain feels like a legacy sequel to "The Scarlet Citadel" and at other times feels like a riff on Unforgiven. But as other bloggers and reviewers have noted, it's perhaps time to leave the term "pastiche" behind, because most of these authors, especially Lebbon, aren't really trying to ape Howard's style anymore. I re-read "The Scarlet Citadel" to refresh myself on it, and it reads entirely differently. Lebbon's got a workmanlike prose that doesn't have much flash; entirely different than the unseen, but felt, shadows that creep at the edge of Howard's dungeon crawl. As other bloggers and reviewers have noted, sometimes the writing style here feels off. Characters swear in modern ways ("I don't give two shits") and there is indeed the very strange inclusion of "plastic tubes" at one point, after which Conan pulls up Google Maps on his iPhone to see the quickest way to Koth (kidding).

This novel starts a little stronger than it ends, with a flashback to young Conan in Shadizar before moving forty years in the future. An exciting scene involving gem-hunters rappelling off a cliff introduces the villain of the piece, Grake (rhymes with "Jake"), who is essentially who Conan would be if he was more of a playground bully. This novel made me realize that one likeable thing about Conan is that he never really brags or displays explicit ambition- he doesn't say, "One day, everyone will know the name of Conan, who will be the greatest king in the world!" Instead, we get lines like this from "Red Nails:"

But Grake leans into being an ambitious, mean, more brutish version of Conan. He's not a bad villain, but Conan calling him "Grake the fake" at the end felt embarrassing. There's at least one really funny scene where Grake is dreaming of defeating Conan: Conan crumples before him, begs for mercy, and shits his pants. It's so ridiculous that I had to laugh. 

Genuinely, I don't want to be too negative here. There's a lot that works! A good cold open. Conan's old acquaintance Baht Taan is likeable. Lebbon includes quite a few women characters and writes them better than many other Conan authors. There's a fight scene with a zombie horde. Conan's old age has left him a little pudgy and he believably struggles. But most of the book fell flat for me. I just don't think the singing troupe The Last Song is a very strong central conceit, and Conan never really goes anywhere very interesting.

Chronologically speaking, this story goes well after the end of The Hour of the Dragon and The Return of Conan, but before the four "old man Conan" stories in L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's Conan of Aquilonia collection. You can mostly tell this because of his son Conn- Conn has been born but (and is a completely unseen character) but is talked about like he's just a child.

Let me know if aspects of this novel worked more for you than they did for me- I wanted to like this one more than I did.

Welcome back to another episode of "John C. Hocking Kicks Ass." I just finished Conan and the Living Plague, and I know I'm late to the party since it came out around this time last year, but I don't feel that bad about it since Living Plague just won Mr. Hocking the Costigan Award for creative writing at this summer's Howard Days festival. He and his work deserve it- we've got another excellent Conan novel from him here.

Following Conan and the Emerald Lotus and "Black Starlight," Conan is still in Shem, selling his sword to make some coin. Due to his obvious skill, he's roped into being a part of a unit that is tasked with breaking into the plague-ridden city of Dulcine to steal its treasure which is, presumably, just sitting there for the taking since everyone's too afraid to approach the deadly walls. In an interview over on BlackGate, they describe it as feeling like a heist novel, which is an apt description. How do you get past an enemy army and into the walls of a city ravaged by a deadly virus? Well, creatively. I don't need to spoil it for you.

Eventually, we do get into the city, there's some eldritch-flavored magic, and basically the zombies from 28 Days Later, but they've got swords. While I wouldn't call them horror stories, Hocking's Conan work always leans toward the horrific.

Like Emerald Lotus and de Camp & Carter's "Shadows in the Dark" before it, Living Plague makes great use of a supporting cast with which to surround Conan. There's the friendly and unshakable soldier, Shamtare. The extremely likeable young buck of an archer, Pezur. The up-to-something sorcerer Adrastus. The quiet and deadly Balthano. And prince Eoreck, who is a total fucking prick and so much fun to see contrasted with the rest of the cast, who are actual men of action. Giving Conan a compelling supporting cast has always made the stakes of the story more personal and interesting.

Not only is his characterization stellar, but Hocking is gifted in directing action sequences that pace his work effectively. In the beginning, I found myself comparing it to Conan the Magnificent, a Robert Jordan novel I read a few months back (and haven't blogged about because I could think of nothing interesting to say about it). In the first third of Magnificent, there's this overlong scene of Conan in a mercenary camp one-upping the other soldiers. The scene isn't that interesting to begin with, but it drags and drags, leaving me thinking, "Robert E. Howard would never stay in one place for this long, let alone this locale. Let's get a move on!" Living Plague starts somewhat similarly- Prince Eoreck is looking for a few men to demonstrate their strength, including Conan. But whereas Jordan had Conan predictably splitting his own arrows for an interminable length of pages, Hocking presents a more unique test of skill that's a blast to read and then moves on quickly to the adventure.

Let me give you one more example of some propulsive action that makes the book well-worth a read. I make notes in a Google Doc while I read stories for this blog, and at the halfway point in the book, I wrote down a scene I wanted to remember to talk about, and found myself describing it like this: Conan and crew get cornered by the plague zombies in an alleyway, they climb some crates into a window, they jump out onto another roof, and Conan lights an inferno to keep the zombies at bay. I looked at this sequence of events and was astounded with the fact that I had described pretty much exactly what happened, but in the novel, it's a thrilling survival scene that was nipping at my heels the whole time. It was my favorite scene in the book and literally a heart-pounder. Hocking does so much with a very simple setup.

​Every time I read or watch a story with zombies in it, one of my favorite pastimes is figuring what the zombies mean to the writer at that point in time, because zombies always mean something. In Night of the Living Dead is was those standing in the way of the racial progress of the 60s. In Dawn of the Dead, they were the consumer of the 70s. In 28 Days Later, they were the threat of terrorism. In The Last of Us, they reek of climate catastrophe. I don't care to share my ideas here, since I was so far off interpreting aspects of Emerald Lotus the first time. I know he has no interest in writing a politically relevant story, but I feel like they come from somewhere. Maybe I'd bring it up if I got to talk to Mr. Hocking about it. 

I did get some Covid flashbacks when the central cast was donning masks to protect themselves from plague and the wizard was covering himself in oil that wards off the plague... I couldn't help but think about my parents wiping down their groceries with Clorox wipes. Then I found out that Hocking wrote this in 1996 and just felt like he got things depressingly right. 

Hocking tells excellent Conan stories in a way that feels like they have all the right Weird Tales elements but aren't slavishly recreating REH's style or anything. Notably, his villains and sorcerers are usually pretty likeable; they're certainly more human than Thoth-Amon or the Black Seers of Yimsha. Hocking is particular in how he depicts the desire for power as a devastating plague or a consuming addiction.

Hocking has said once or twice that he's outlined some more Conan stuff: something up in Asgard and Vanaheim, something titled "Conan in the City of Pain." I really, really hope we don't have to wait 20 years to see his next batch. And if he puts out something that's not Conan-related, I'll be first in line at the book store!

★★★★☆

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. ​

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.

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.

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.