At the time of his death in 1936, thirty-year-old Robert E. Howard had published hundreds of works of fiction across an astonishingly broad swath of genres. His voluminous output, according to Paul Herman of the Robert E. Howard Foundation, is estimated to have been “approximately 3.5 million words of fiction, poetry, letters and articles.” Among those millions of words were the iconic stories of Conan the Cimmerian, a character whose popularity has firmly established Howard’s reputation as the father of heroic fantasy, parallel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s place as father of epic fantasy.

But while Howard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, he was also a somewhat disorganized one and left behind a trunk of unpublished works. The so-called “Howard Trunk” contained thousands of typewritten pages by Howard. These abandoned stories and early drafts were collected and published in 2007 by The REH Foundation Press as The Last of the Trunk.

[One manuscript, however, baffled the Howard estate.]

As I said in part one of my Dragon*Con 2011 coverage, there is a lot to do at Dragon*Con. I never saw or heard an official number of attendees, but the number 65,000 was batted around by quite a few. With that many people, you cannot survive on large panels alone, no matter how many stars and ballrooms you have. Or at least, I’m glad Dragon*Con doesn’t try. No, there is quite a bit more to do, from the Exhibitors’ and Dealers’ halls, the Art Show and Artist Alley, the costume contests, the parade, and the gaming. Then there is what is for me the other half of Dragon*Con: the fan tracks. There are thirty-five fan tracks, not counting “Main Programming,” and while it is humanly impossible for me to cover or attend all of them, I did attend quite a few.

[No, they weren’t all in the Wheel of Time track!]

Arnold Schwarzenegger brought the Barbarian to the mainstream in 1982. Today, Jason Momoa brings the Barbarian back to the big screen in Conan the Barbarian.

But Conan is much more than a Hollywood icon; he is the legendary Cimmerian on a quest to conquer the pages of Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria series. Now you can follow the amazing tales of Conan brought to life by narrator Todd McLaren.

[Free audio excerpts below]

This is the first of two reflections on the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan films from the 1980s. (Check back tomorrow on Tor.com for the second one.) Both bear titles that reference the lines from Robert E. Howard’s first published Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” made famous as the epigraph to issues of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian comic series: “Hither came Conan the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.” We’ll get to the gigantic mirth soon enough with Conan the Destroyer. For now, we’ll focus on the gigantic melancholies of the first film, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, from 1982.

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Part three of a three part series. Check back at this link to read them all.

All considerations of talent and natural inclination aside, writing was important to Robert Howard for two reasons. Strictly controlled and home and resenting it, he couldn’t have lasted very long at any job where he had to obey someone else. Temperamentally, he had to be a freelance writer. After high school, he made a pact with his father, that his father would pay for him to take a bookkeeping course at a local business college. Afterwards, he had one year to prove he could make a living as a writer. Failing that, he’d have to become a bookkeeper, a career in which Robert would doubtless have gone stark raving mad very quickly.

Fortunately, he got to be a writer, but it was a near thing.

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Part two of a three part series. Check back at this link to read them all.

Robert E. Howard committed suicide at the age of thirty. While that no more sums up who he was and why he matters than it is adequate to say that William Shakespeare was a guy with a receding hairline, Howard’s self-destruction looms large in any consideration of him. Early on June 11, 1936, as his mother lay dying, Robert Howard asked the attendant nurse if she would ever recover consciousness and the nurse said gently, “No.” Howard then stepped outside and got into his car. No one present thought anything of this, because he made a daily run into town (Cross Plains, Texas) to pick up his mail. But then a shot rang out. Robert slumped over the steering wheel. He had shot himself above the right ear, the bullet passing out the other side of his head. He died eight hours later, without regaining consciousness. His mother died the next day.

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Part one of a three part series. Check back at this link to read them all.

Know, O Reader, that long before anybody thought of making a Conan movie, long before Arnold Schwarzenegger was born or Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian #1 appeared on the newstands, in 1932, to be precise, the world’s most famous Barbarian sprang to life in the pages of Weird Tales magazine under the byline of Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). Any suggestion that Conan is the work of many hands — some reference works will say “Robert E. Howard and others” is rather like saying Sherlock Holmes was created by “A. Conan Doyle and others.” No, there have been subsequent pastiches, reinterpretations, and movie adaptations, but the real, 100% bona fide Conan is Howard’s.

[Read why]

Hrmmm...this might be one of those movies where 2:14 minutes is enough. What say you REH fans? Looking forward to, or dreading, this August 19th release?

TROY: The Movie
By John M. Ford

Originally published in Weird Tales, Spring 1994

The wind still blows from Hisarlik
Shaking the great white sign, four letters
In painted plywooden proclamation
That this is the City of Dreams:
The Place of the Epic, Where Heroes Lived
And sometimes Died. If you will cut
As Schliemann cut, guided by the tale,
Through the hill, the cities,
Ordering the setups and scenes into continuity,
What runs through the many-gated light
Of the fabulous Moviola
Will be not Homer not Virgil not Truth
But in its own way real
As anything in the darkness:
Popcorn and figs in the lobby,
Ladies remove your hats,
The lights go down—

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Few of us realise how deep the roots of the classical past actually reach.

The written history of the Greeks doesn’t go back as far as that of say, Egypt. In fact, Herodotos, in the fifth century BC, thought that the Egyptians were the bees’ knees when it came to any number of things, the antiquity of their records among them. But the writings and art of the ancient Greeks—and their cultural emulators, inheritors, and adaptors, the Romans—have exercised an influence over European culture and imagination which is to all practical purposes unparalleled. Before the twentieth century, literature, art and architecture were saturated with classical allusions, and the so-called “classical education” was de rigueur. Even today, whether or not we realise it, we’re surrounded by classical references.

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As a teen, I was warped by reading swords and sorcery novels, painting miniature goblin and dwarf figurines, and collecting polyhedral dice. Twenty-five years later, I wrote the book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks to unearth the root of my attraction to tales of magical powers and heroic deeds. But one quest I didn’t get around to completing: making a list of fantasy and gaming’s all-time heroes.

Who is on the all-star team of fantasy authors? Which gods eternally lodge in the Valhalla of gaming (and by “gaming,” we don’t mean Texas Hold-Em, we mean Dungeons & Dragons). Who had the most influence on the genre?

I’ve given it a shot (listed here by year of birth). Several didn't make the cut. I have my biases. Of course, you’ll quibble over my selections. But isn’t that what these Top-Whatever lists are all about?

[Get out your 20-sided dice. Game on!]

Our pals at Dark Horse Comics have given us a sneak peek at the powerful cover [Edit: by Esad Ribic] for Robert E. Howard’s Savage Sword #1, which drops on December 22, just in time to save your holidays from hordes of late shoppers barbarians.

Each eighty-page issue of Savage Sword will showcase the exploits of Howard’s heroes in new comic adventures and restored reprints of classic tales, featuring the work of industry legends and talent like Barry Windsor Smith (Conan), Paul Tobin (Spider-Man & the Secret Wars), Wellinton Alves (Nova), Marc Andreyko (Manhunter), Robert Atkins (G.I. Joe), Tim Bradstreet (Punisher), and more. The first issue also includes Roy Thomas, Tim Conrad, and Barry Windsor-Smith’s Savage Sword of Conan epic, “Worms of the Earth,” recolored and reprinted in its entirety.

[Get a peek at the newest installment in Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder series, too!]

Solomon Kane premiered this week at the Toronto International Film Festival. From the trailer, it looks like a mish-mash of historical periods, brooding landscapes, and grim cloak and leather costuming.

[I suspect Robert E. Howard would have been proud.]

Allow me to return to a topic I can’t seem to milk enough: the creations of Robert E. Howard.  This time around I’d like to discuss Red Sonja/Red Sonya.

Let’s start with Red Sonja, clearly the more popular of the two Reds.  Many fans of speculative literature and comics will have heard of her.  Red Sonja is probably the most famous “chick in chain mail.”  Originally created as a foil to Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, she is the flame-haired she-devil with a sword, one of the most feared and desired warrior-women of the Hyborian Age, who will lie with no man unless he first defeats her in fair combat.

This Red Sonja—who was the premiere archetype for the scantily clad, beautiful but deadly swordswoman; who has appeared in comics, B&W illustrated magazines, novels, her own movie, and other assorted venues; who seems like a logical female addition beside Howard’s other sword & sorcery creations of Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, and Bran Mak Morn—was not created by Robert E. Howard.

[Read More About Big Red.]

Earlier, on Tor.com, Douglas Cohen’s post “The Hidden Burden of an Icon: Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian” explored the popular perception of Howard’s work versus his actual writing. I have often wondered how difficult it must be for an artist to tackle a character so defined by Frank Frazetta’s visceral barbarian and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s monosyllabic warrior. Wandering Star and Del Rey have been publishing lavishly illustrated editions of Howard’s work over a number of years, and I asked four of the artists recently associated with the Cimmerian how they were able to make the character their own considering the weight of it’s visual history.

[Mark Schultz, Greg Manchess, Jim and Ruth Keegan, and Gary Gianni talk Conan below the cut.]

I thought I’d wrap up my recent mini-series about Robert E. Howard’s recurring sword & sorcery heroes by discussing the least renowned of the bunch, Bran Mak Morn. Like Conan & Kull, Bran Mak Morn is a barbarian king. But unlike these other two, Bran is not the usurping king of the most civilized nation in the world. Instead, he is the king of his own people, the savage remnants of the once proud Picts.

Like Howard’s other sword & sorcery heroes, Bran Mak Morn made his first appearance the magazine Weird Tales, in the November 1930 issue, with the story “Kings of the Night.” As it happens, this tale also features an appearance by King Kull, and would mark the sole crossover tale among any of Howard’s primary S&S heroes. In total, Bran Mak Morn would appear in two stories during Howard’s lifetime. If you include “The Dark Man” and “The Children of the Night”—a pair posthumous tales either about or concerning Bran Mak Morn some years after Bran’s death—that brings the total to four. If you’ve read my other articles on Howard’s creations, it should come as no surprise that in the decades following Howard’s suicide, a host of unpublished materials about Bran found their way into print.

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The character of Solomon Kane is another one of Robert E. Howard’s seminal sword & sorcery creations.  Unlike Conan and Kull—two of Howard’s creations I’ve discussed in recent posts—Solomon Kane is neither barbarian nor king.  Instead, he’s a Puritan adventurer traveling through Europe and Africa during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  Armed with his sword and pistols, he battles wickedness in the name of God wherever he encounters it.  Sometimes this means fighting common brigands and pirates, and other times it means pitting his wits and brawn against black sorcery.  He is a bit like Marvel’s Punisher, in that whenever possible Kane deals out death to those he considers evil.  The main difference between them in terms of psychology is that Kane believes he’s doing God’s work.  Kane always strives to do good as he sees fit.  The wonderful twist to this avenging angel of goodness is that Howard makes it abundantly clear that Solomon Kane is a functioning madman.

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Blogging the past few days about Robert E. Howard & David Gemmell has gotten the old sword & sorcery juices flowing, so I thought I’d post about another one of Robert E. Howard’s S&S creations, Kull of Atlantis. There are a lot of links between Kull and Howard’s more famous creation of Conan. Both of them made their original appearances in Weird Tales; Like Conan, Kull has subsequently appeared in a number of other mediums, such as movies, comics, B&W illustrated magazines, and figurines; and both of them are also barbarians with adventurous backgrounds. In Kull’s case, he was a slave, pirate, outlaw, and gladiator before he followed the path of Conan and became the general of the most powerful nation in the world (in Kull’s timeline this would be Valusia). And like Conan, Kull eventually led the revolution that allowed him to ascend to the throne. But without question, the most important connection between these two characters is that without Kull of Atlantis there never would’ve been the icon known as Conan the Barbarian.

The character of Kull preceded Conan in print by slightly over three years. Kull first appeared in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales, in the story “The Shadow Kingdom.” There would only be one other Kull story published in Howard’s lifetime, “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” which appeared in the September 1929 issue of the same magazine. Kull did appear in another story before Howard committed suicide, called “Kings of the Night,” but this story is actually about another of Howard’s primitive heroes, Bran Mak Morn, the last Pictish king—Kull’s role is secondary in this crossover tale. There was also a poem about Kull called “The King and the Oak” that Weird Tales published about 3 years after Howard committed suicide. Other than these 4 pieces, none of Howard’s works involving Kull would be published until many years after his death.

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Most authors would love to create an iconic character. And why not? It’s one of the ultimate literary achievements, to create a character that lasts through the ages, whose name is instantly recognized among mass culture. Speculative books, comics, movies, etc. have certainly contributed a number of such characters over the years. To name a few: Dracula, Frankenstein, Tarzan, Superman, Batman, the Joker, Spider-Man (I’ll leave it to the comic experts to debate what other comic characters qualify as truly iconic), Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader, and of course, the subject of this post, Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian.

The character of Conan made his first appearance back in the December 1932 issue of the magazine Weird Tales. Conan would prove to be wildly popular, and along with fellow Weird Tales authors H.P. Lovecraft & Clark Ashton Smith, Howard would go on to become one of the magazine’s Big Three during the golden age of pulp fiction. Howard sold quite a number of stories to Weird Tales and other venues before he committed suicide in 1936, but Conan was his most enduring creation. During Howard’s lifetime he sold 17 Conan stories to Weird Tales (“Red Nails,” the final Conan story to appear in Weird Tales, was published posthumously). In the ensuing years, a number of his unpublished Conan stories found their way to print, and several authors—most notably L. Sprague de Camp—completed Howard’s unfinished tales and brought those to print.

Since then, Robert E. Howard has come to mean to sword & sorcery what J.R.R. Tolkien means to epic fantasy. As to Conan, he has appeared in just about every medium you can imagine: books, comics, B&W illustrated magazines, comic strips, movies, live-action TV, cartoons,video games, RPGs, figurines ...you name it. Somewhere along the way, Conan transcended into the realm of icon among the public consciousness. The character is still going strong today, all thanks to some 17 stories published in the space of 4 years.

[Read on for more sword-swinging goodness.]