REH and the Question of Adaptation (or, The Kinda-Sorta Adaptations of Robert E. Howard's Works)

Robert E. Howard exists in a kind of unique space when it comes to adaptation. His works and his universe are sort of "up for grabs" in a way that other literary works aren't. Like, can you imagine if JK Rowling died tomorrow and then the publishing house which had been putting out her work suddenly went all-in on rewriting all her Robert Galbraith stories as Harry Potter books? Re-setting them at Hogwarts and adding magic? That would be phenomenally weird.

But that's what's been happening to Robert E. Howard since the 50s.

It goes the other way, too. In 1976, Lin Carter published a Thongor the Barbarian story called "Black Moonlight." And then two years later, re-wrote it to be a Conan story entitled "The Gem in the Tower," and added it to his and L. Sprague de Camp's expanded Conan mythos. Wouldn't that be wild if an author published a science fiction novel, and then two years later reused the exact same story for a Star Wars story set on Tatooine?

For most of his literary life, which extends much past his 30 brief years on Earth, Robert E. Howard's works have experienced these weird periods of half-adaptation and revision in a way that many other writers have never had. 

Following Howard's death in 1936, his trunk full of unpublished and unfinished works passed into the care of his literary estate executors, and it was picked through by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. Posthumous material would roll out gradually for the next two decades.

This was where we saw what we might call the first batch of questionable adaptations. Publisher Martin Greenberg suggested to the sci-fi writers that they turn some of Howard's unpublished stuff into Conan stories. In 1955, Howard's El Borak story "Three-Bladed Doom" was turned into the Conan story The Flame Knife, his Kirby O'Donnell adventure "The Trail of the Blood-Stained God" dropped "The Trail of" and Conan was added, his desert-set "Hawks Over Egypt" moved to Shem, and his 16th-century Türkiye romp became "The Road of the Eagles." I think I'm solidly in the minority when I say that these stories are actually pretty enjoyable, with the weakest one being "Hawks Over Shem." "The Road of the Eagles," in particular, is a really fun, memorable tale.

But like I said, this is just the first wave of weird adaptation. These stories set a precedent. Where Conan would be kinda-sorta adapted the most, though, is in comic books.

I'm mostly talking about the color Conan the Barbarian title here - Savage Sword adapted stories more cleanly (but not always!) - but Conan the Barbarian was a lot more checkered. And Roy Thomas and the rest of the Conan creative team continued in the tradition of adapting Conanless Howard stories into Conan comics for a long time, like issue #38's "The Were-Woman" coming from Howard's "The House of Arabu," but I'm not going to talk about those ones since there are far too many for a blog post. Sometimes Conan the Barbarian would half-adapt a story. Sometimes it would seemingly adapt two stories at the same time by throwing them into a blender. Sometimes it would adapt a story a second time, sort of re-writing the original adaptation!

The first of these happens in Conan #21, during the War of the Tarim arc. The credits page claims that it is "Inspired in Part" by Robert E. Howard's "The Black Stone" story. But that "in part" phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because this story feels much more like an adaptation of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's story "The Curse of the Monolith." Like "Curse of the Monolith," it's set in Conan's Turanian mercenary period. He's lured to a large, stone monolith under false pretenses, strapped to the monolith, and then an eldritch beast descends slowly down toward him from the top of the monolith. In both stories, metal bands are a secret to the whole ruse. But it's far from a straight adaptation, so it seems to kind of split the middle without making any mention of de Camp or Carter.

Issue #31 quasi-adapts "The Thing in the Crypt." Roy had been trying to get the rights to the original story, but while Lin Carter was game, Sprague was not, so he decided to write his own young Conan crypt story, replacing "Thing in the Crypt" in the timeline. What we got was "The Shadow on the Tomb," which works far better than it should have. Funnily enough, they later did get the rights to the original story and used it as the basis for issue #92.

While the supernatural element is different in both: a sentient, corporeal shadow in one and a living-dead sentry in the other, the issues are basically the same. Conan is chased into a cave by an animal, discovers a cursed sword which he disturbs, fights its protector, and then uses fire to kill the sentry. Conan #31 adds a really fun wraparound narrative that helps attach the book to the comic continuity, but otherwise are remarkably similar. We either have to accept that Conan had two remarkably similar adventures very close to one another in time and made the same mistakes in both, learning nothing from the first, or that one of these stories overwrites the other. If I remember right, Roy Thomas considers the "Shadow on the Tomb" version the more canon of the two.

Issue #37 from 1974 tries once again to adapt two stories at the same time, honestly to the betterment of both of them. It was written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Neal Adams, making me wish we got a hundred more Neal Adams-penciled Conan comics. This issue, "The Curse of the Golden Skull," simultaneously adapts Howard's unpublished short (short) story of the same name alongside de Camp and Carter's Conan yarn, "The City of Skulls." Really though, what it does is graft "Curse of the Golden Skull" onto "City of Skulls'" golden bones. It follows all the story beats of "City of Skulls:" Conan and Juma get captured and taken to a tropical bowl in the middle of a mountain range, they're enslaved for a time, the risk a daring escape, and they fight a giant monster that they end up using to kill their enslaver. The comic really just takes the villain and turns it into Rotath of Lemuria, a Thurian Age-villain transplanted to the Hyborian Age. It could be the pacing, it could be Rotath, it could be Neal Adams's incredible art, but it works a whole lot better than the prose piece it cribs mostly from. 

Stories like these occupy a somewhat odd place in the literary world. I don't want to make it sound like this has only ever happened to Howard. For example, you may know that the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie stemmed from an unrelated Tim Powers pirate novel titled On Stranger Tides, which they threw Jack Sparrow into and used as the basis for that film.

​And I didn't even touch on another whole tangle of related ideas with the debate over editing and revision to Howard stories. Since his death, writers have not just been adapting his stories very freely, but also making edits that range from a few words to entire revisions to the very structure of the text. This wasn't meant to be exhaustive, because there are dozens if not hundreds of examples of this. Which ones did I miss?