Glenn Lord's Robert E. Howard Archive To Be Housed at the University of Texas

In awesome news for scholars, more than 15,000 pieces of Glenn Lord's Robert E. Howard archive have been donated by Lord's estate to the University of Texas at Austin's Henry Ransom Center. Lord's generosity to his fellow Texans (and, by extension, the worldwide Howard fan and scholar community) is touching. What a wonderful way to preserve not only Howard's legacy but Lord's as well!

Happy 107th, Robert E. Howard!

Robert E. Howard was born 107 years ago today in Peaster, TX, and I thought I'd acknowledge his birth by (1) posting my candidate for most iconic image of Conan ever and (2) quoting a bit of Howard's writing to go with it.

Both image and text are from "Rogues in the House," not my favorite Conan story (the bit where Conan kills his former doxy's otherwise innocent boy-toy sticks in my craw a bit, although I think I can see what Howard is trying to achieve there and teach the story accordingly). My favorite Conan story is "The Tower of the Elephant." But Frank Frazetta's cover for Conan, the first volume of the Ace series of Conan stories (the first Howard book I ever bought), retains all of its power to this day:

It's those reds that do it for me, I think. Here we see Conan fighting Thak, the ape-man raised by Nabonidus the Red Priest. Thak's people are apes on their way up Howard's evolutionary slope (while humanity, especially that of the civilized variety, is on its way down). Conan defeats Thak, but I've always loved his eulogy for his fallen opponent:

Nabonidus was staring down at the still figure as if he could not believe his own eyes. Black, hairy, abhorrent, the monster lay, grotesque in the tatters of the scarlet robe; yet more human than bestial, even so, and possessed somehow of a vague and terrible pathos. 

Even the Cimmerian sensed this, for he panted: "I have slain a man tonight, not a beast. I will count him among the chiefs whose souls I've sent into the dark, and my women will sing of him."

When I teach "Rogues," I point out that Thak is possibly the most human character in the narrative—even Conan, who is ethically superior to Murilo and Nabonidus, is referred to by Howard as "beast-like" and "ghoul-like" when he kills his betrayer's new boyfriend. It speaks well of Conan that he recognizes this in the narrative and even better of Howard, a champion of the abject and abjected who never stopped evolving himself.

Fantasy Reading List for My Summer 2013 "Intro to Fiction" Course

Every so often on this blog I mention or allude to the fact that I teach in the English Department at a flagship state university. My primary research and teaching area is medieval literature (with a specialty in early English drama). But I also routinely teach fantasy fiction. In Summer 2013, I'm going to be teaching a fantasy-focused section of our "Intro to Fiction" course. Syllabi for this course usually rely on a published fiction anthology filled with mainstream "literary" narratives. When genre writers do appear, it's inevitably their least genre-marked material that shows up: the primary example here is the ubiquitous selection of Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" instead of any of her equally excellent fantasy or SF stories. I've decided to buck this trend and will be teaching a syllabus entirely devoted to genre fiction. For the sake of coherence, I'm limiting myself to story and novel-length fantasy narratives. Here's the most recent draft of the course reading list:

Lord Dunsany, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories



I had a number of Dunsany collections to choose from, but settled on this one from Dover. It's relatively inexpensive, and it contains many of my favorite Dunsany tales: "The Sword of Welleran," "The Fall of Babbulkind," "The Kith of the Elf-Folk," and "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth."

Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian



Again, lots of choices here for editions. I settled on this movie tie-in volume partially because it's cheap but primarily because the table of contents allows me to hit all of my favorite Conan stories in a way that the otherwise wonderful Del Rey collections do not: "Tower of the Elephant," "Queen of the Black Coast," and "Rogues in the House" sit alongside "People of the Black Circle" and "Red Nails." Since Del Rey publishes this text as well, it's quite possible that the texts are identical to those in the REH Library series.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit



Considerations of time were the primary factor in my decision to let The Hobbit stand in for Tolkien's work: there's just no way to teach The Lord of the Rings on the summer teaching schedule without basically abandoning the pretense of reading other authors. That said, The Hobbit is the book that turned me on to fantasy, and Peter Jackson's movie will have students primed to read the novel.

Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld



I needed a novel from the 1970s to fill in the large gap between Howard and Tolkien's 1930s texts and the books I was going to be choosing from the 2000s. McKillip is one of my favorite writers, and this 1974 novel is one of her best.

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories



Carter's 1979 collection of stories was the other book I picked to cover the 1970s. I selected it in large part because I've never read Carter's work, and this course seemed like a good opportunity to do so.

China Miéville, The Scar



My favorite New Weird novel: it's a big fat middle finger aimed at quest fantasy, and yet I love it just the same. If only this new UK paperback cover design was the American design as well! Sigh.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices



Le Guin was definitely going to be on the syllabus. I chose this book, the second in Le Guin's new Annals of the Western Shore series, because it brilliantly does everything Le Guin was trying to do with Tehanu and the second trilogy of Earthsea books but without any of the baggage that comes from revising an existing set of beloved books.

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners



Like Carter, Link is a writer I've been meaning to read for some time. This is her major collection of stories, sitting right in the midstream of the slipstream between genre and literature. It's worth noting, though, that I have an alternate in mind if it turns out I don't particularly care for Link's stories:

Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves



Russell has just exploded onto the scene recently, and whatI know of her work gives it a slightly more American feel than Link's work (i.e., Russell appears to be drawing on regional folklore as opposed to Link's more suburban and/or cosmopolitan feel). In the end, I'll go with whichever collection I like best.

So there you have the reading list. I've tried to strike a balance between American and British writers (four of each), short story collections and novels (four of each), and men and women (four of each). The books also make a decent historical survey of modern fantasy fiction: Dunsany is odd man out, sitting by himself in 1908, followed by clusters of work from the 1930s, 1970s, and 2000s. I'm looking forward to teaching the class and hope you've enjoyed this sneak preview of its contents!

Another Interview with Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan

Robot 6 has a new interview up with Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan, the writer-artist team on Dark Horse Comics' relaunch of Conan. There are some nice sample pages included with the interview. The first installment of "Queen of the Black Coast" hits next month.

Preview Pages Up for Wood and Cloonan's "Queen of the Black Coast"

Comics Alliance has just posted a six-page preview of the first issue of Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's adaptation of "Queen of the Black Coast" for Dark Horse Comics.  Cloonan's slimmer Conan is on display; I especially like the panel layout of p. 5.  One question, though: why do Cimmerians talk in pointy word balloons when everyone else uses regular round word balloons? :)

One More Interview with Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan

Sci-fi site io9 has now posted an interview with both Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan about (among other things) their plans for their Dark Horse Comics adaptation of "Queen of the Black Coast."  In the interview, they humorously address the sad sack issue of how to depict Bêlit's nudity.  (Seriously, just put some clothes on the woman--she doesn't need to be nude all the time for the adaptation to be good.  Who cares if the same fanboys who had a snit about Dejah Thoris wearing clothes in the John Carter trailer are upset?)  Cloonan also responds to the charge that her Conan is "Emo Conan."

Cloonan's Conan and Bêlit Sketches

A follow-up to yesterday's post: Comics Alliance has posted a series of Becky Cloonan's sketches of Conan and Bêlit that just whet my appetite for her upcoming Conan comic even more.  I love this younger, thinner, more expressive Conan.  As for Bêlit, well, let's just say that there's a rather nice but rather NSFW at the link that displays Cloonan's superior grasp of female anatomy.  I think Cloonan has captured the essence of the Queen of the Black Coast as well.

An Indie Comics Take on Conan the Cimmerian

Awesome news from the New York City Comic Convention today: Dark Horse has confirmed rumors that Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan, co-creators of the acclaimed indie-comic Demo, will be collaborating on a new Conan the Barbarian series beginning February 8th.  As Wood reveals in an interview with Comic Book Resources, the duo have signed up for a 25 issue adaptation of Howard's classic story "Queen of the Black Coast"--two years' worth of issues that cover not only the events of the story but the two years in-between those events that Conan sails alongside Bêlit.  When I was a kid, Roy Thomas had a similar run of stories in Marvel's Conan the Barbarian.  I'm looking forward to Wood and Cloonan's take.  (Pictured above is Cloonan's version of Bêlit, and it's already my favorite rendition of the character ever.)

The Upcoming Conan Movie

Not so sure about the recent full trailer--although it's a vast improvement over the green mists of the teaser--but I do like the new poster for the film. It's reminiscent of Frazetta's "Conan the Destroyer" without being a slavish reproduction:

"Born on the battlefield," indeed.

Conan Meets Jaws

This long weekend I've been enjoying my perusal of Jaws of the Six Serpents, an RPG published by Tim Gray's Silver Branch Games that offers a sword-and-sorcery take on Chad Underkoffler's PDQ (Prose Descriptive Qualities) ruleset.  Indeed, I'm so pleased with what I'm reading that I'm thinking of giving up the Barbarians of Lemuria rules in favor of Jaws.  As a test run of the character creation rules, I took my Barbarians write-up of "Tower of the Elephant" Conan and translated it into Jaws terms.  Game stats and commentary behind the fold . . .

Marvel's Conan the Barbarian . . . SUPERS! Style

 

As my last post intimated, work has kept me too busy for gaming over the last month or so.  Because I suffer from a form of C.A.D.D. (Campaign Attention Deficiency Disorder), that delay has meant a transfer of momentum away from sword-and-sorcery to superheroes.  The barbarians of Lemuria will ride again, of course, but first I need to work the supers out of my system.  Luckily Simon Washbourne, creator of BoL, can help me out here.  I'm running his excellent rules-lite Supers! system this coming Sunday for the children of several of my colleagues.  But I also thought I'd honor the spirit of this blog by generating a Supers! version of the Marvel Comics Conan.

Or, rather, a Marvel Comics Conan.  Since I'm using a superhero RPG system to generate the character, it makes sense to use the version that actually interacted with superheroes: the Conan of What If #43 (February 1984).  What If is Marvel's name for its on-again, off-again series devoted to superhero counterfactuals.  (Although the series predates DC Comics's Elseworlds concept by twelve years, it almost certainly owes a conceptual debt to the "Imaginary Stories" DC ran in many of its Silver Age titles.)  I didn't buy What If on a regular basis during my childhood stint as a Marvel Zombie, but I couldn't pass up this issue: "What if Conan the Barbarian Were Stranded in the Twentieth Century?"  First of all, I was a regular reader of Marvel's various Conan titles at the time.  Second, how can anyone pass up this wonderful Bill Sienkiewicz cover?

The story in issue #43 is technically a counterfactual of a counterfactual: in What If #12 (February 1979), Conan had briefly spent time in modern-day New York before he was zapped back to the Hyborian Age by magic lightning.  Issue #43 has the NYPD wrestle Conan out of range of the lightning, leaving him stuck in the Big Apple.  Conan spends some time in the slammer, masters the New York criminal scene, dresses like a pimp, and eventually ends up fighting Captain America on two occasions.  The first fight ends with the image depicted at the start of this post (Conan slicing open Captain's left arm).  The second fight ends with Cap saving Conan from the cops and offering him a place in the Avengers.  At the end of the issue, the Watcher looks on as Conan ponders making a call to Avengers Mansion and doing something more with his life than petty crime.

As a way of playtesting the Supers! rules, I've decided to assume that Conan does pick up the phone and accept Cap's offer.  What would Conan's superhero RPG stats resemble?  Check them out beneath the fold, True Believers!

Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian

The following set of stats represent Robert E. Howard's Conan as he appears at the start of "The Tower of the Elephant."  In this story, Conan is relatively new to Zamora and to urban civilization; I've therefore rated his "Thief" career at 0.  He gets "Blacksmith" at 0 as well; this career reflects his childhood in his father's smithy back in Cimmeria.  The "Mercenary" rank of 1 stems from his mercenary service alongside the Aesir (depicted in "The Frost-Giant's Daughter").  "Barbarian" is of course a no-brainer for Conan, clocking in at the highest possible starting rank of 3.

At this point in his life, Conan is as fast as he is mighty, so I devoted the same number of points (2) to both Strength and Agility.  Melee is his highest combat ability; I thought about making Brawl equal in value, but Conan's fight with the spider convinced me that he knows how to avoid getting hit (and thus merits a Defense score of 1).  "Country Bumpkin" is an obvious fault for the young Cimmerian; "Sneaky" reflects his natural stealthiness; "Marked by the Gods," his uncanny instincts that repeatedly save him just in the nick of time.