 By 1972, Conan the Barbarian was 40 years old, and his creator, Robert E. Howard, had been dead for 36 of them. While I wasn't alive to personally corroborate this, Conan's popularity continued to increase over the late 1950s and 1960s as L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, and Bjorn Nyberg started dreaming up the further adventures of Conan of Cimmeria. While other pulp heroes faded into the past, Conan managed to stick around in our minds. I'm not usually the kind of person to praise corporations, but it definitely seems that we owe at least a bit of that to Lancer Books. Lancer had been diligently collecting and reprinting Conan material into collections of short stories and novellas. These comprised both the original Robert E. Howard texts as well as the supplemental stuff written by de Camp & crew. Like all good Conan stuff, they were published wildly out of order. Altogether, there are 12 of these:
I kept confusing myself about their order, so I decided to make a little chart to compare their publication order and chronological order, but the second I was done with it I felt ridiculous because it was really not very helpful and now I'm going to share it here so you can laugh at me too:   Some of these stories vary from their original publications, and you could do a lot worse with your time than checking out Gary Romeo's posts about each one, as he has meticulously catalogued the changes Lancer made to each text. And can I just say how much I love the 70s stylings of the Conan of Aquilonia cover at the top? The red and purple of the "CONAN" text, the 3D lettering effect, the Boris Vallejo painting with Conan and Conn... L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter had written Conan of the Isles in 1968, which takes place very late in Conan's life after he has abdicated the throne of Aquilonia. It serves as a swan song for Conan's life, and while I'm not going to read it for this chronology, it seems as if the fellas intended it as the final chapter. [Uh-oh! I did end up reading it for this chronology and you can find my post about it here!] However, there was a decent chunk of Conan's life left unexplored between the period in his early kingship of The Hour of the Dragon and Conan of the Isles, so enter the next four stories we'll read to fill in the gaps: "The Witch of the Mists," "Black Sphinx of Nebthu," "Red Moon of Zembabwei," and "Shadows in the Skull." These were published one a year between 1972 and 1975, starting with "The Witch of the Mists" in the ailing SF / fantasy mag, Fantastic. Oddly enough, the version I read on the Internet Archive didn't have one of de Camp's patented prologues which usually set the intended chronology, but it's not hard to figure out. Chronologically speaking, "The Witch of the Mists" picks up about 15 years after Hour of the Dragon. Conan is approaching his sixties and has, against all odds, settled down into a happy marriage with Zenobia. If we're being honest with ourselves, Zenobia was little more than a bit player in Hour of the Dragon, so his long domestic bliss feels a little unearned, but at least she's one of Conan's better love interests. (Also, now that I'm thinking back to this story, do we ever even see Zenobia, or is she just mentioned?) This story is the first with a drastic change in Conan's life: Conan now has a few kids, most of whom go unnamed, but his oldest is a 12 year-old boy named Conan II, and nicknamed "Conn." I was really worried that Conn would be an annoying character; it frequently seems hard for writers to write the children of iconic characters. I honestly predicted that he would be an annoying-yet-hard-as-nails brat like Batman's son Damian Wayne (dude, I hated Damian for about ten solid years), but he isn't. Honestly, Conn doesn't have a very strong characterization either way: he's really just a mini Conan who's not quite as savage as his father. The other drastic change for this story is- get this- Conan has a mustache now! Did we all collectively miss the opportunity to have a King Conan movie starring Lemmy in the title role? Yes, we did. Will I ever be able to be happy again? No, I wont.  In this adventure, Conan is tracking his son Conn on a hunting trip, but the boy has gotten separated from the rest of the party. After Conn is kidnapped by Hyperboreans, Conan follows him alone across the Border Kingdoms and into Hyperborea where they have a showdown at the city of Pohiola. de Camp and Carter baked quite a few callbacks to previous Conan adventures into this story with references to the Khitan sorcerer Yah-Chieng from the novel The Return of Conan and Thutothmes from The Hour of the Dragon. Conan also makes a verbal allusion to "Legions of the Dead," which was only our second story! "I was a captive in Hyperborea once. What I suffered at their hands gave me no cause to love those bony devils; and what I did there, ere I took my leave of their hospitality, gave them little cause to love me!"  A page from Fantastic, complete with handlebar-mustache Lemmy Conan. The skull gate Conan passes through upon his entrance to Hyperborea is pretty fucking cool, but the story as a whole is lackluster. It often feels like fanfiction, and at that, feels more like the first chapter of a story than an entire story. Prospero (another returning character! Cool!) brings up a serious deus ex machina ending to bring the story to a bit of a thud. It is nice to have some more time with Conan and Thoth-Amon, and I'm glad he'll be sticking around for a few more stories!
After first appearing in Fantastic, "Mists" was printed in Conan of Aquilonia in 1977 and was adapted into Marvel's King Conan series as its first issue. For as mediocre of a story as this is, it really has some great art surrounding it, like the Boris Vallejo painting on the Lancer cover and the Jeffrey Catherine Jones cover done for Fantastic's August 1972 issue. Next time, we're reading "Black Sphinx of Nebthu," which means I think we're headed to Stygia! ★★☆☆☆
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AuthorHey, I'm Dan. This is my project reading through the career of everyone's favorite sword-and-sorcery character, Conan the Cimmerian, in chronological order. 
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