Background of Study
Robert E. Howard wrote seventeen Conan stories published in Weird Tales. The first was “The Phoenix on the Sword,” from December 1932. The last was “Red Nails,” a three-part serial from July, August/September, and October 1936. Nine of Howard’s seventeen tales of Conan were cover stories, but Conan himself was only on the cover three times. You would be right in pointing out that the title of this article isn’t quite accurate.
All nine of the Conan covers for Weird Tales covers were drawn by Margaret Brundage. The 1930s were, after all, not only the golden age of Conan but also the golden age of Brundage covers. You might think she was the wrong artist to have drawn Conan. But she was an artist of the feminine, and women–small, dainty, feminine women–were throughout Howard’s stories. There were things beyond that in Howard’s stories as well, things I think to be in very poor taste if not indicative of psychosexual problems in the author’s life and mind. Margaret Brundage depicted those things, too, in two covers, in the process softening them and making them a little less pathological.
So there are nine Conan covers. Three show Conan himself. Significantly, all three show him in peril. Two out of those three show a female character intervening between Conan and that which threatens him, and one out of those two shows her actually rescuing him. This is not our image of Conan, but it’s how Margaret Brundage first depicted him, and her interpretation is worth consideration and thought. (She was probably the first artist to depict Conan in color, at least for publication.)
Five out of the nine Conan covers show women only. Women were, after all, the cover artist’s specialty and main subject of interest. Two show scenes from Conan stories that can only be described as lesbian/sadomasochistic/fetishistic. (These are the kind of scenes that have often turned me off of Howard’s stories.) One more is marginally in that category. Two show a woman being threatened by something other than another woman. Only one–the first–shows a woman who is not obviously threatened.
https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2016/11/conan-on-cover-of-weird-tales.html
Literature Review
When the first Conan of Cimmeria story appeared in the pages of Weird Tales magazine in December 1932, nothing quite like it had ever before appeared in print.
Author Robert E. Howard had been writing stories broadly similar to it for half a decade; but it was with Conan, and the Hyborian Age story world in which he was placed, that Howard finally fully doped out the sub-genre that would become known as “sword and sorcery,” of which Howard is today considered the founding father. Conan’s origins date back to a literary experiment Howard penned in 1926 titled “The Shadow Kingdom,” featuring a new character: Kull, exile of Atlantis. The idea—Howard’s great innovation—was, at its core, historical fiction set in a faux-historical era, about which most or all of the details are “lost in the mists of time.”
That faux-historical period could contain anything Howard might like to include: evil races of sentient snake-things, sorcerers, undead creatures, demons walking upon the earth, anything. In other words, Howard was creating a secular mythology. And as with any mythology, secular or no, there would be a hero, a Ulysses or a Theseus, an exceptional man of legend striding through that myth-world, sword in hand, righting wrongs and slaying supernatural monsters and, along the way, providing metaphorical insight onto his world and ours. The trouble was, as Howard would soon discover, he’d gone too far into the past. The Thurian Age, as Kull’s milieu was named, had so little in common with the modern world that it might as well have been staged on another planet. No reader was going to feel a personal connection to
it, or be tempted to indulge the fantasy that it was a real part of the world’s history. Historical fiction draws much of its power from a sense of connection to the real world of long ago. That source of power was foreclosed to the Thurian Age; it was just too far distant in time. Nonetheless, “The Shadow Kingdom” was well received. But Weird Tales rejected several follow-up Kull stories. At roughly the same time, Howard’s Texas-style talltale-liar humor stories about the prizefighting sailor Steve Costigan were taking off like a rocket in Fight Stories magazine. So Howard dropped the Kull project after just a handful of attempts so that he could focus more energy on Costigan. At the same time, though, he was finding success with another historical-fiction-fusion innovation: The grim, savage English Puritan Solomon Kane. Kane’s world was the skull-strewn chaos of Europe and north Africa during the Thirty Years War, in the early 1600s. Little enough is known about specific events during that dark time that it was possible to take historical liberties with it as a storyworld, so that it could accommodate dark magic, walking skeletons, vampires, magic staffs, and, of course, N’Longa the witch-doctor. Howard quickly realized he was onto something with Solomon Kane. The first Solomon Kane story, “Red Shadows,” appeared in August 1928 in Weird Tales, and readers loved it. Here was a dark, brooding world of menace and witchcraft connected pseudo-genealogically to their own. It was easy for readers to “take the ride”—to suspend their disbelief and envision Kane’s adventures as a part of the real world. But, perhaps the connection with the real world was too close. The countries of 1630s Europe are well known; the causes of the conflict fully understood. There was only so much Howard could do in Solomon Kane’s world; and the fact that he sent his hero into “Darkest Africa” directly, in the very first story, suggests that he may have been feeling the weight of those constraints. Moreover, Solomon Kane is just a hard character to root for. Unlike Kull, he is, not to put too fine a point on it, really not a sane man. So it makes perfect sense that after the shadowy, prehistoric world of Kull and the dark, necromantic world of Solomon Kane, Howard would combine these two precursors to develop a world that was far enough into the distant past to be free of actual historical constraints—like Kull’s—yet close enough to the present to still exist as echoes and legends in the world’s mythologies. And so Howard created The Hyborian Age: an era some 12,000 years before the present, all archaeological traces of which have since been wiped out by a global cataclysm that hurled all of humanity back into stone-age barbarism, leaving only vague hints in ancient myths and a few modern echoes in the names of nations and peoples: Britain, once Brythunia; Aquitaine, once Aquilonia; Stygia; Corinthia; Shem; Æsgard. And to play the role of our avatar as we explore this shadowy, almost-historical world, Howard gave us Conan the Cimmerian.
stylistically, Howard’s pseudohistorical-fiction works— after 1932, at least—are tightly paced and extraordinarily evocative. At their best, they are dark, misty, hypnotic experiences, like half-remembered dreams, peppered with flashes of terse, evocative action that split them like flashes of lightning across the night sky. At their worst, they are still elementally powerful narrative experiences, and very much worth reading. Throughout, the influence of Howard’s training as a poet is plain and clear. By far the best description of Howard’s primary storytelling talent comes from a later pulp writer, Michael Moorcock, in his biography of Howard, Two-Gun Bob. Moorcock—who is not always uniformly complimentary of Howard—writes, “The ability to paint a complex scene with a few expert brush-strokes remains Howard
greatest talent. And such talent, of course, can’t ever be taught.” That last assertion is highly questionable, but L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter certainly had trouble matching Howard’s work in the pastiches they cobbled together to flesh out their 12-volume set of Lancer/Ace paperbacks in the late 1960s. barbarian philosophy. Philosophically, the spirit that undergirds Howard’s work from the Conan era is distinctive and important as well. The late 1920s were a very difficult time, psychologically speaking, for a lot of people. It had been a decade since the underpinnings of Victorian and Edwardian civilization had been discredited and destroyed by the global bloodbath of 1914-1918.
Following that social trauma, the Western world had staggered forward into a world grown suddenly cold, shorn of its faith in both religion and the “modern” state—and in the whole system of world governance that had developed out of the Peace of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War, which transferred power from the church to the heads of states.
Those heads of states had built their empires to include as many subject peoples as possible, caring little what their ethnic and cultural background was so long as they paid taxes; kings’ and princes’ loyalties lay with their fellow aristocrats, not fellow countrymen. Thus, the Emperor of Austria had plenty in common with the king of England, but any Austrian or Hungarian commoner might as well have been of a different species. And among those commoners, the important characteristic was status as an imperial subject, not being from a similar ethnic bloodstock. Then had come 1914, and the illusions of the western world were burned away in
a four-year-long storm of fire and steel, and in quest of victory all the nations of Europe had focused their resources on galvanizing ethnic patriotism of their people, getting them to think of themselves as members of an ethnically-defined national “family.” Following that conflict, there was a new spirit abroad in the world—and not a benevolent one. That spirit was the transfer of personal loyalty away from the head of state (and, to an increasing degree, away from religious faith) and onto a semi-mythical construct of ethnic community—a spirit we know today as ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism bound a people together with ties of blood and culture. And so the exploration of those ties in fiction was very much in vogue as the 1920s ripened into the 1930s. The literary air of the time was thick with fantasies of ancestral memory and reincarnation and mythical progenitor-kings ruling over ethnically pure ancient kingdoms, in which the reader could vicariously participate by dint of shared blood. Howard was in the thick of this literary genealogical mania, exploring with avid interest his own Irish Celtic heritage.
Description:
Finding their take on Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian popular with readers, the editors of Marvel Comics tried their hand with another of the pulp author’s creations, the Atlantean exile Kull, King of Lemuria. The character was given his own comic in 1971: Kull the Conqueror, the title changing to Kull the Destroyer with issue number 11. The comic ran for 29 issues, ending in 1978.
Howard, considered the originator of “sword and sorcery fantasy,” introduced Kull prior to his most well -known character, Conan. It is not surprising that the two heroes share many similarities, as Conan’s first adventure emerged from a reworking of a failed Kull story. In his lifetime Howard published only three Kull stories, with more of the prehistoric King’s adventures released posthumously.
Over time, other writers have interpreted the character in new books and comics. A feature film, Kull the Conqueror was released in 1997, starring actor Kevin Sorbo in the title role.
References:
https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2016/11/conan-on-cover-of-weird-tales.html
https://pulp-lit.com/assets-bundles/27-conan/Robert-E-Howards-Conan-the-Cimmerian-Barbarian-278.pdf
https://www.dunyazad-library.net/a/howard–kull-bran-turlogh.pdf