Two Writers, Two Rogues: The Adaptation of ROGUES IN THE HOUSE

Part I

It’s January, 1933 in Cross Plains, Texas. Though most of the town is asleep, Robert E. Howard is banging away at his typewriter, working on a new story. January of ‘33 has been abnormally warm and dry for a Texas winter, so perhaps he still has the window open to his neighbors’ chagrin, as he sits in his bedroom which faces the sleeping porch, nearly shouting the words as he writes them. 

Howard, Bob to his friends, is working on “Rogues in the House.” It’s a new Conan of Cimmeria story that he’s hoping to sell to editor Farnsworth Wright at the magazine Weird Tales. “Rogues in the House” will sell, becoming the seventh Conan story to hit the pages of “The Unique Magazine” in January of the following year. It will net him a tidy $100.

But while “Rogues” is the seventh story accepted, it’s the twelfth one Bob’s written, and to make matters worse, Weird Tales doesn’t pay him on story acceptance, but rather upon publication. The depression is bearing down on his family, and he needs money, which has mostly eluded him, like literary fame. Literary success is a persimmon that remains out of his reach, Bob says later.
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Additionally, Conan, who’s his bestselling character to date, seems to have become a bit of a chore for the writer. The three stories he’s written prior to “Rogues:” "Iron Shadows in the Moon," "Xuthal of the Dusk" and "The Pool of the Black One," have fallen into a rather predictable pattern. They’re not his best work.

Bob pens one more Conan story, “The Vale of Lost Women,” and there’s no evidence he ever even submitted it to Weird Tales. He won’t write another Conan story for around nine months.

Part II

“Rogues in the House” is an eternally underrated Conan of Cimmeria story, not only for breaking out of the slump that comprises the stories written around it, but because of how unique it is in the canon.

Conan, imprisoned at the start of the narrative, is broken out by a young noble so that Conan can do the dirty work of killing Nabonidus, the Red Priest, who is the center of power in the unnamed city. When Nabonidus’s human / ape experiment / pet Thak runs amok in his manor, it forces Conan, his young employer, and the Red Priest to spend some quality time while figuring out how to defeat Thak. 

According to Howard, “Rogues in the House” arrived in his mind essentially fully-formed and the only editing he had to do on it was to erase and re-write one single word before he stuffed it in the mailbox for his agent. I’m not sure how much I believe that, but it makes for a great anecdote.

One reason why I appreciate “Rogues” so much is for its comedy beats throughout. While Howard always maintained that Conan was a man of both gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, the scales always seemed to tip a little more toward the melancholy side. Except for in “Rogues.” 

Conan dryly domes a guard with a beef bone while robbing him of his knife and keys before leisurely strolling out of prison. That’s a great image!

Before proceeding to Nabonidus to make good on his contract kill, Conan returns to the slum area of town, The Maze, the take out some frustrations on an ex-lover of his. This unnamed woman got Conan imprisoned and his partner killed, so when Conan bursts back into her room, eyes blazing with fury, it hits all the harder when Howard pulls the rug out from under us and we watch Conan drop her into a cesspool instead of killing her. This scene has apparently upset people over the years, but I find it honestly hilarious. Like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, his lover is swearing, covered in shit, while Conan lets out a full-throated laugh. Nobody’s actually hurt, and Conan’s reaped his revenge. L. Sprague de Camp makes the odd suggestion that this scene may have been inspired by Robert E. Howard getting bullied by others in school, specifically an act we called getting a “swirly” when I was a kid.

Even the last action of the story has always struck me as ironically funny. The Red Priest, for all his scheming and scientific accomplishments, is done in by taking a fucking chair to the skull. No trickery needed, just a throw too quick to dodge.

The other thing I love so much about this story is its character work. As much as I love Howard’s writing, his characters are sometimes pretty flat. The wizards are scheming and evil. The young ladies are supple and need help. You know the score. But “Rogues” takes the time to draw memorable, fun characters unlike most of Conan’s supporting cast. It’s so seldom that Conan spends extended amounts of time with people, especially those who are at odds with his own goals. Murilo is young, foppish, and a bit of a wimp, but he’s ultimately likable, while Nabonidus is smarmy, arrogant, and occasionally charming. Thak, while certainly not fully human, has enough soul that you almost want to root for him the same way you would Frankenstein’s Creature. I’ve always loved in particular the way Nabonidus talks about Thak to Conan and Murilo, kind of proud of Thak’s abilities while at the same time, being threatened with his life by them.

Both Nabonidus and Murilo play into Howard’s politics about the evils of civilization so well. The pair stands in for civilization’s part: Murilo is part of existing power structures and Nabonidus is the shadow government that holds the real cards. Murilo realizes this an an outburst: “You exploit a whole kingdom for your personal greed; and, under the guise of disinterested statesmanship, you swindle the king, beggar the rich, oppress the poor, and sacrifice the whole future of the nation for your ruthless ambition… You are a greater thief than I am. This Cimmerian is the most honest man of the three of us, because he steals and murders openly.”

Conan stands on the opposite side of the conflict. Uncomplicated, at least to himself, and occasionally like a simpleton in comparison to the Red Priest’s plans and inventions, he’s the only one of the three with any sort of grit to match his drive.
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There’s a lot to love here in this story. It’s brief and not a word is wasted. It’s philosophically interesting and unique in its author’s body of work. It’s got a phenomenal fight scene at the end. It’s probably not quite as good as the REH favorites: “Tower of the Elephant,” “Red Nails,” “People of the Black Circle,” but that’s not exactly slouchy company. It deserves its mention toward the top of the list.

Part III

It’s Spring, 1971 in New York City. The Marvel office at 635 Madison Avenue is abuzz like usual, and in the middle of it is Roy Thomas. It’s a time of flux for Marvel Comics: many of the old guard who helped the comic company rise to prominence have left in the last several years. Some of Marvel’s superhero characters are now 40 years old, but the average age of writers in the bullpen is 23 years old. Roy himself is only 30, but already has risen through the ranks to be Stan Lee’s right-hand man.

Roy has a thing for old characters- like, 1930s and 40s Golden Age of Comics characters. The Invaders, All-Star Squadron, the Justice Society of America, that sort of thing. And there’s this one character from 1930s pulp magazines that he’s revived: Conan the Barbarian. Stan Lee’s not sure about it because he’s not a superhero, nobody’s in a colorful costume, and honestly, he’s not even really sure what “sword & sorcery” is. But they’ve got the rights for $200 an issue, and they’ve got this super cheap but talented new British artist on the book, a 21 year-old kid named Barry Smith.

So far, this book has been really up-and-down. Roy’s had to switch the order of issues a couple of times, like pushing issue three back to issue five, while scrambling to fill the gaps for three and four. Since Roy only has the Conan character and not the rights to all the Conan stories, he’s doing what he can to play in the small sandbox he has. He bases issue #2 sort of off one paragraph in Howard’s “The Hyborian Age” essay. He adapts some non-Conan stories like “Twilight of the Grey Gods” and “The Garden of Fear,” but he’s also making stuff up out of whole cloth. He got to adapt one of the best whiz-bang Conan stories, “The Tower of the Elephant,” a few issues ago in number 4.

Unfortunately, none of that stuff has really been selling. Marvel even canceled the book a few months ago, but thought better of it and it was back on the next day. But sales have gradually been ticking up, starting with issue #7. Roy sometimes jokes that he’s just an embellisher for Howard’s stories on this title, and for the next two issues, Conan the Barbarian #10 and 11, embellish he will.

Part IV

The writers in the bullpen weren’t the only things changing at Marvel. The comic company was about to change their interior page counts from 36 pages to 52 pages in response to DC doing the same thing. But that came with a price increase, too. They made the jump from 15 cents to 25 cents a comic. Editorial was also messing with the covers a bit- giving a uniform design to them for the Bronze Age, with a band at the top reading “MARVEL COMICS GROUP” and they’re putting all the cover art into an isolated box.

The page count and price thing would last only two issues- enough for Roy to adapt “Rogues in the House,” but no longer. They’d return to 36 pages with Conan issue #12, and the price would come down, but only to 20 cents. But for a short time, with those extra pages, the story was allowed breathing room for character beats and story that it otherwise wouldn’t have been afforded.

“Rogues in the House” opens in medias res, using a super economical word count to set up the bones of the story. But for Roy, this is free real estate. He has the job of connecting the fairly independent narrative to his comic continuity, and he always did so very creatively. There are three paragraphs that open the story as prologue and they’re ripe for Roy’s taking:

1. We learn that there’s a Gunderman mercenary and a Cimmerian thief causing trouble.
2. There’s a priest of the god Anu who’s both a fence and a spy. His temple is on the edge of the slum neighborhood called The Maze.
3. A woman has betrayed them both, landing the Cimmerian in jail and the Gunderman at the end of a rope.

This is where it becomes really fun if you know the original story prior to reading its comic adaptation. Roy begins setting this stuff up in previous issues.

1. That Gunderman mercenary gets set up in issue #8, which is a loose adaptation of the Howard synopsis finished by L. Sprague de Camp called “The Hall of the Dead.” That story features a Gunderman and seems to take place chronologically close to “Rogues in the House,” so people have long guessed that the Gundermen mentioned in both are the same person. Roy goes all in on that idea, renaming the Gunderman to Burgun rather than Nestor, for no reason in particular.
2. That priest of Anu who is both a fence and a spy becomes the focus for issue 10.
3. And the woman that has betrayed both of our characters, now Conan and Burgun, would be Conan’s recent traveling companion, Jenna.

The cover for issue #10 promises “ALL NEW STORIES,” and that’s mostly true. Issue 10 fills in our backstory about how Conan would end up in prison for the real start of “Rogues.” It’s all rendered beautifully in Barry’s pencils topped with inks by Sal Buscema. No colorist is listed, so I’m assuming it’s Barry, but the blues and golds of the city at night give it this mythical quality that looks great. By this point, Barry’s art has begun its trajectory to its uniquely ornate style that he will eventually settle on, but you can still see plenty of Jack Kirby influence in these issues.

After a thief job, Conan and Burgun are hunted by the guards, with only Conan able to get away. He watches Burgun get hanged, drenched in pale blues and rain, before going back to the corrupt priest of Anu for revenge. Roy adds the fantastical element of this giant bull avatar of Anu which almost destroys the whole temple. 

In order for Conan to exact revenge on the priest, the team was going to have to get creative. Howard explicitly says that he cut the priest’s head off, but that was never going to fly under the restrictive Comics Code Authority. Instead, we see five panels in which Conan approaches, each background growing darker until the last is a blood red, and Conan strikes out of the panel. We then see the priest’s head conveniently relieved of his body in the last panel. In the end, it doesn’t feel at all like a workaround. Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite good enough for the comics code and three caption boxes were hastily added to the final panels to ensure readers that Conan would be punished for killing a priest, no matter how evil.

Issue #11 follows the prose narrative to “Rogues in the House” pretty faithfully, with the added bonus that we actually get to see the moment when Conan is captured thanks to Jenna selling him out.

We meet Murilo in the prison making me sad once again that we don’t have a colorist to thank- the shadows and the reds, purples, and blues are gorgeous. Murilo has big, 70s Barry Manilow hair, perfect for his character. A raging Conan drops Jenna into the cesspool and makes his way to the estate of Nabonidus, who seethes evil, but isn’t quite as charming as Howard’s version. 

In one of the only times I can remember, the regular Conan book is split into parts like they would usually do with Savage Sword. Barry’s Thak is much more simian than, for example, Frank Frazetta’s, and the Thak fight here is basically Conan v. gorilla. And instead of tossing a stool at Nabonidus, Conan impales him with a knife throw to end this version of the story.

Spread across two king-sized issues, “Rogues in the House” is one of the most meticulously-adapted Conan stories in the Bronze Age comic. As Bob Byrne points out in Hither Came Conan, about 79 pages are dedicated to adapting the short story, which means it has about 30 more pages than even some of the more epic adaptations done in Savage Sword. Issue #11 was also the longest Conan the Barbarian issue until the super-sized issue #100 which concluded "Queen of the Black Coast."

Letter-writers to "The Hyborian Page" in issue #14 praised the adaptation and Marvel noted that Conan gets as much overwhelmingly favorable mail as any mag which Marvel had ever published, but noted that it would be a while before they directly adapted any other Conan stories. He even said years later that he thinks it’s nobody’s favorite.

“Rogues in the House” is a classic though- one of my favorite Conan stories. And its comic adaptation, also a banger. The story is small in scope despite the oversized nature of the comic version, but every aspect of it works for a memorable product. For Robert E. Howard, it was the last story published of his first Conan period, for Roy Thomas, it showed what he could do, but he was just getting started.

Hey folks, this is a bit of an experiment for me. Usually, my YouTube videos start as blog posts and then get adapted for video, but this one began as a video and I decided to share the script here as well. I hope you enjoyed. It's been really fun to do this for two years now and I appreciate all the support and comments people have left!