WOLVES BEYOND THE BORDER

One of my biggest obsessions when I was between about 5 and 10 was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (along with Batman and Pokémon). In the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, premiering about 18 months before I was born, there's a stellar opening sequence where you are titillated over and over again about seeing the turtles. This was their first time being seen in live action, after all, and they were built by the Jim Henson Creature Shop for this risky independent movie.

The film holds off quite a bit. First, the turtles destroy a lightbulb, so while they're fighting some would-be muggers, we don't get to see them as they're in total darkness. Right afterword, we see only Raphael's eyes lit intermittently by flashing police lights. After the music picks up and move into the sewers, we hear the boys celebrating their win and we can see their shadows around a corner. And at the last moment, as you're hyped as fuck to finally see the turtles, Leonardo jumps. You think that this is it, but for just one moment longer we're denied seeing them because we're hit with a freeze frame and the title card. And then, finally, they appear in all their glory.

It's great how they hold off on showing them to great effect. But we eventually do get to see them.

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"Wolves Beyond the Border" is unique in the Conan canon in that it's the only story in which Conan does not appear at all. He's mentioned a couple of times, but we never actually see him, as he's off leading the revolt in Aquilonia against King Numedides.

This is one of those stories which was abandoned by Robert E. Howard for one reason or another during his lifetime, so it never saw publication. Howard's fragment truly feels like half a story, and it ends extremely abruptly, with only about 18 pages of text. L. Sprague de Camp found the fragment of the story in 1965 in a pile of Howard's papers given to him by Glenn Lord, whose praises I've previously sung. de Camp did his best to complete the narrative, but I can't say it's super compelling. 

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I thought it might be interesting to spend a full story with someone in the periphery of Conan's path, but it was a lot less satisfying than I'd guessed. We've spent time with other characters in this world throughout this chronology; stories often don't introduce Conan until a good way in when we've met commoners, thieves, sorcerers, or others, and it just wasn't that compelling to spend time with Gault Hagar's son. "Black Colossus," for example, opens with an incredibly compelling dungeon dive without Conan. Then, we hold off even a bit longer while we see people praying to Mitra for help. But we eventually get Conan in on the action.

I've seen some people claim that the main character is unnamed, referring only to his dad, but I feel like this is a naming convention in his region: his name is Gault, and he's Hagar's son. He's not unnamed, his name is Gault Hagar's son. If I remember right, this is how last names like Johnson and Harrison came about. They were John's and Harris's sons. 

Anyway, this story just isn't very compelling and it doesn't help that I'm rather bored with the Picts after four straight stories in which they're the villains. While the western setting of "Beyond the Black River" was interesting and fresh and "The Treasure of Tranicos" kept it alive by adding the pirate element and dense plotting, right now I'm yearning to return to marbled domes and lost cities and horrifying monsters.

​This is probably the shortest column I've written for this chronology, and I'm okay with that. "The Phoenix on the Sword" is next.

★★☆☆​☆

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