Category Archives: Robert E. Howard

What I Think of Conan the Momoan

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photo courtesy of mattrailer.com

I said in my post last Friday that I thought Conan the Barbarian was a semi-decent movie.  Now that things seem to be slowing down a little and I have time to write, I need to define that term.  Simply put, “decent” means not good but not particularly bad, either.  “Semi” means not even that good.

The problem, as more people than I’m going to try to link to have said, is that the movie simply doesn’t deliver in terms of story.  There are just too many holes in the internal logic.  I’ll discuss the things that stuck out to me, but first I’ll discuss why this character isn’t Conan as written by Robert E. Howard.

There were a couple of attempts to tie this movie to what Howard wrote.  Some of the initial lines narrated by Morgan Freeman in the opening were quotes from Howard.  One of the characters summarizes the events of “The Tower of the Elephant” in about one sentence when he’s bragging about Conan’s exploits.  Then there’s the famous quote, “I live…I love…I slay, and I am content” that was taken completely out of context and not even quoted correctly.  The actual quote is from “The Queen of the Black Coast” and is “I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”  Beyond that, there’s nothing directly from Robert E. Howard in the film.

The argument to counter this criticism is that the film captures the spirit of the Conan stories.  But even there the film falls short.  I won’t rehash the origin story criticisms.  Others have said it better than I.  Nor will I get into the depiction of Conan as a crusader against slavery.  There’s no point in throwing stones at the fight choreography.  In this type of movie, the If-I-Did-This-In-A-Real-Fight-I’d-Be-Gutted school of combat is almost unavoidable.  Instead I’ll point out a few lapses in logic that others seem to have missed.

First, Tamara.  She seems to be the only one of the female monks who has any idea how to fight, and she’s quite accomplished at it.  Why?  Is she unique in her interests and abilities in this area, or was she singled out for special training?  If she was, what explanation was given to her and the rest of the monks?

If Tamara’s such a great fighter, and tells Conan that she won’t go with him after he rescues her, why is she docilely accepting being tied up in the next scene and at no time trying to escape?  Is she into bondage?  The sex scene didn’t indicate she was, but maybe that was too racy for the R rating.  Nah.  Probably not.

In the final fight scene, Tamara falls through a bridge of wooden slats.  She has a chain on her wrist, and Conan catches the chain to save her.  The distance she falls before he catches her is enough to dislocate her shoulder if not tear her arm off.  She isn’t even bruised.  That’s pushing things a little too far.

Last gripe about Tamara.  If she was supposed to fill the role of Belit in this film (it was Belit the above quote was spoken to), why does he ride off and leave her in the end?  Belit was the one great love of Conan’s life.  There was no real reason for him to leave her.  Except maybe that since he’d bedded her, it was time for new conquests.  And he would never do that to Belit.

I can’t buy Conan deliberately allowing himself to be taken prisoner in order to get close to one of the men he’s after.  My memory may be misleading me, but I don’t recall Conan ever doing anything like that.  I do remember more than once him threatening to kill anyone who laid a hand on him.

When Tamara is kidnapped from the ship, why wasn’t there a man on watch?  Robert E. Howard’s Conan would never be so stupid as overlook a thing like that.  And earlier, when Khalar Zim first tries to kidnap her, don’t any of these people realize they’re coming.  Khalar Zim has a land ship pulled by eight elephants, fer cryin’ out loud.

I didn’t buy the scene where young Conan fights and kills the Picts early on, either.  Not while holding an egg in his mouth.

On the other hand, there were some things I liked about the movie.  The fight scene with the sand demons was exciting and (I thought) genuinely suspenseful.  Of all the scenes, I thought this one best captured the spirit of Robert E. Howard, at least until he defeats the sand demons and fights Khalar Zim directly.  Too bad more of the others didn’t.

I don’t have any major gripes about the sets and the cast, although I know some people do.  Jason Momoa did a much better job as Conan than I expected him to.  I can see him playing this role again.  I only hope he gets to, and in a film that’s actually based on Howard’s work.  Unfortunately, the movie is doing so poorly that it will probably kill any chance for a genuine Howard adaptation for another generation.

One final thought.  The makeup Rose McGowan wore as Marique placed an image in my head that I can’t get out, so I’m going to share it with you.  Her hair reminded me of Londo Mollari from Babylon 5, while the spots on her neck and forehead made me think of Dax from Star Trek:  Deep Space Nine.  If those two ever had a love child, Marique is what she would look like.

Conan the Movie

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I just came from seeing this movie called Conan the Barbarian.  It’s a semi-decent sword and sorcery flick about this guy who has these adventures.  He just happens to be named Conan.

Interestingly enough, one of my favorite writers, Robert E. Howard, also created a sword and sorcery character named Conan who goes around having all these adventures.

Other than some place names, there’s not much more in common than that.

I’ve got to pack up the van for one last short summer jaunt before school starts for my son on Monday.  I’ll write a more detailed review sometime in the next few days.  I doubt anything I have to say will have any impact on how well the film does, but I do want my thoughts to be coherent.  I will say that the movie wasn’t as bad as I feared (an advantage to setting your expectations really low) but not as good as I’d hoped.  I’ll elaborate on the semi-decent remark in the full blown review.

Blogging Conan: The God in the Bowl

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Coming of ConanThis is one of the shorter Conan pieces.  It was probably the third Conan story Howard wrote and one of the few rejected by Farnsworth Wright when he submitted it to Weird Tales.  It wouldn’t see publication until years after Howard’s death.

This story has always been one of my favorite Conan tales.  It’s unique in that it’s at heart a police procedural, and a rather good one, even if it does have some stereotypical good cop-bad cop interplay. It’s also something of a locked room mystery.

Conan has broken into a museum of sorts, having been commissioned to steal a particular artifact.  Instead he finds the night watchman bending over the corpse of the building’s owner.  Conan thinks the man is another thief.  He realizes his mistake when the watchman pulls a cord, which rings a bell summoning the city watch.

The prefect in charge of the watch thinks Conan is the killer and wants to beat a confession out of him.  Accompanying the watch on their rounds this particular night is Demetrios, chief of he Inquisitorial Council.  He understands just how foolish such a course of action will be.

Instead of beating Conan, Demetrios interrogates him.  Conan freely admits he’s in the building to steal, but steadfastly denies killing the owner, whose name is Kallian Publico.  It’s a shame Howard didn’t write more of this sort of thing, because he seems to have had a knack for this type of dialogue.  I think this story has examples of some of Howard’s crispest, best dialogue in any of his works.  Other suspects are eventually brought in, including Kallian Publico’s chief clerk, Promero.  When the prefect orders a particularly sadistic guard to beat Promero for information, Demetrios does nothing to stop it.  In fact, Howard’s entire portrayal of Promero is one of disdain.  Conan at one point calls him a weakling and a fool.

The contrast between how the police treat Conan and how they treat Promero is intriguing.  Demetrios tends to believe Conan’s story that he didn’t kill Kallian Publico, while the prefect insists he did and on the basis of little evidence.  Demetrios respects Conan’s courage and strength while Promero’s weakness attracts only bullying.  It would be easy to dismiss the actions of the police here as entirely stereotypical of crime fiction of the day, but I think that would be a mistake.  While there is some stereotyping going on in the way the police behave, I think Howard was using that to make a point about strength and weakness.  Weakness attracts abuse.  Demetrios respects Conan’s strength too much to challenge him.  He knows he’s likely to lose.

The other thing of interest is what is implied by the sarcophagus that everything centers around.  It seems Kallian Publico had acquired a bowl shaped sarcophagus from Stygia earlier in the day.  It had been sent as a gift from Thoth-amon (who appeared in “The Phoenix on the Sword“), priest of Set, to Kalanthes, priest of Ibis.  Ibis and Set don’t get along, so why Thoth-amon would send Kalanthes a gift is something of a mystery at first.  Kallian Publico acquired the sarcophagus from the leader of the caravan transporting it.  The caravan leader didn’t want to go out of his way to deliver it, and so left it with Kallian Publico to deliver.  Of course, Kallian Publico had no intention of delivering the sarcophagus.  Instead he opened it…and received what was intended for Kalanthes.

“The God in the Bowl” seems (to me at least) to be considered a minor Conan story.  It’s certainly not one of the ones I’ve heard talked much about at gatherings of Howard fans.  I think that’s a shame.  Howard was stretching himself as a writer with this story.  By adding the mystery/police procedural element, he was trying something new.  A careful examination of Howard’s oeuvre reveals he did this frequently when he wanted to branch into a new genre.  That fact that not all of his attempts were successful is less important than the fact that he tried and wasn’t afraid to experiment.  We would have been poorer, and Howard’s work less moving, if he hadn’t tried at all.

Blogging Conan: The Tower of the Elephant

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Of all the Conan stories, this one, “The Tower of the Elephant”, is arguably the best.  It’s one of the shortest, but it contains some of the strongest writing Howard ever did.  For example, from the opening paragraph, in which Howard describes the the Maul, the part of town smart people don’t go into after dark:  “Along the crooked, unpaved streets with their heaps of refuse and sloppy puddles, drunken roisterers staggered, roaring.  Steel glinted in the shadows where wolf preyed on wolf, and from the darkness rose the shrill laughter of women, and the sounds of scufflings and strugglings.  Torchlight licked luridly from broken windows and wide-thrown doors, and out of those doors, stale smells of wine and rank sweaty bodies, clamor of drinking-jacks and fists hammered on rough tables, snatches of obscene songs, rushed like a blow in the face.” 

That’s only three sentences.  Yet Howard managed to pack more description in those three sentences, more atmosphere and sense of place, than most writers do in three paragraphs.  He does more than paint a word picture.  He places the reader in the middle of the scene.

It’s into this scene that a young man named Conan comes. 

The plot is pretty straight forward.  Conan overhears a kidnapper bragging in a tavern.  The man mentions a tower known as the Elephant’s Tower.  He questions the man, who tells him that somewhere in the tower, guarded by more than human guards, is a priceless jewel known as the Elephant’s Heart.  The tower is the domain of the sorcerer Yara. 

When Conan says that courage is what is keeping the local thieves from stealing the jewel, the man attacks him.  Conan kills him, then decides to rob the tower himself.  While doing so, he encounters another thief named Taurus, who has been planning the heist for months.  They decide to team up. 

Taurus is killed by one of the guardians of the tower, and Conan proceeds alone.  Normally in these posts about Conan, I would have stopped summarizing by this point, but I’m going to make an exception here.  It’s what happens when Conan finds the jewel that makes “The Tower of the Elephant” stand out among Howard’s work and among works of twentieth-century fantasy.

Conan discovers the chamber containing the Elephant’s Heart is occupied by a creature with the body of a man, green in color, and the head of an elephant, with the head being disproportionately large for the body.  The creature is blind.  He’s also been tortured for centuries by Yara. 

At first Conan is horrified, then as he realizes the creature, who we learn is named Yogah or alternatively Yag-kosha, is no threat he feels a great sense of pity for him.  Yogah explains how he came to be trapped there (mentioning Valusia and Kull’s world, although not specifically naming Kull), then asks Conan to aid him in his revenge against Yara.  Conan does as he’s asks.  He kills Yogah, then squeezes his heart out on the jewel he’d come to steal.  The blood soaks into the jewel as if it were a sponge.  Conan takes the jewel to a lower level in the chamber, where Yara is in a trance.  He awakens Yara and gives him the jewel along with a verbal message from Yogah.  He then makes his escape from the tower.

What?  You think I’m going to tell you all the details of Yara’s demise?  You’ll have to read the story for that.  It’s short, and more than worth your time.

It’s Conan’s reaction to Yogah, even more than Howard’s prose, that lifts this story above most others.  Howard did a lot with the Conan stories to establish the trope of the thief stealing an ensorcelled item, yet in one of the earliest Conan stories he breaks the very stereotype he’s establishing by adding a layer of depth and feeling and having the thief willingly give up the item he’s come to steal. 

The popular misconception of Conan is that he’s a ruthless killer with little or no empathy for the pain of others.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Yes, there are stories in which Conan’s bloodthirsty streak is the characteristic that is displayed most prominently.  But Conan is a three dimensional character.  The compassion he shows here, while harsh, is still compassion.  He acts out of mercy, not bloodlust.  Only by killing Yogah can Conan free him from the torment he’s suffered and allow him to take revenge on Yara.  Conan genuinely feels compassion for Yogah.

It’s easy to see why “The Tower of the Elephant” is considered a masterpiece.  If you haven’t read it, or read it recently, you owe it to yourself to do so.  Then compare the storytelling you find here with what you’ll see in the movie when it comes out this week.  See if there’s a difference.  We’ll talk more about that when I review the move.

Blogging Conan: The People of the Black Circle

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“The People of the Black Circle” is one of Robert E. Howard’s best Conan tales, a masterpiece of action, adventure, and all around creepiness.  It was one of only four Conan tales included in the two volume The Best of Robert E. Howard published a few years ago by Del Rey.  It appears in The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 1: Crimson Shadowsalong with “Beyond the Black River”.  The other two stories, “The Tower of the Elephant” and “Red Nails” are in The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 2: Grim Lands.  We’ll look at all of them before this series is over.

It’s one of the longer Conan tales.  The story opens, as do many of the best of Howard’s work featuring Conan, with characters other than the Cimmerian, something we’ve discussed in other posts in this series.  In this case it’s the king of Vendhya, who is dying from some sort of supernatural afflication.  At his side are various slave girls (who seem to serve no other function than to cringe), a priest, and his sister Yasmina.  Waiting in another part of the city for the king to die are the nobleman Kerim Shah, who is working for the king of Turan to destablize the country, and a man name Khemsa.  He’s an acolyte the Black Seers of Yimsha, who are behind the supernatural assault on the king.  Before he dies, the king manages to tell Yasmina who is responsible for his death.

Conan appears later, when Yasmina has assumed the throne and vowed vengeance on the Black Seers.

The scene now shifts to a citadel outside a town on the border where seven raiders are being held prisoner.  Their captain, a foreigner named Conan, has demanded their release.  The deadline he has given is the next morning.  The commander of the citadel is writing a letter to the queen, telling her of the situation, when he has an unexpected visitor, the Queen herself.  She’s arrived secretly with a plan to use the prisoners as leverage to force Conan to destroy the Black Seers.  She tells the commander all this and retires to her chambers for the night.  Shortly afterwards, Conan climbs through the window of the commander’s chamber and demands the release of the prisoners.  It’s something of a face-off until Yasmina walks in unexpectedly.  She had seen Kerim Shah in the city, and suspicious of his presence, wanted to warn the commander about him.  Instead, she’s taken hostage by Conan, who flees out the window and into the night with her.  His intention is to use her to force the release of his men

And that’s when things take off.  Conan flees with Yasmina.  Khemsa, who is in love with Yasmina’s maid, allows himself to be talked into betraying his masters, the Black Seers, and try to make a power grab himself.  To do this, they magically kill the prisoners Conan came to free.  And Kerim Shah strikes out on his own to accomplish his mission.  And this is where you have to go and read the story for yourself if you haven’t already.

There are some truly creepy passages when Conan is in the citadel of the Black Circle.  By this time, Yasmina is their prisoner, and he’s trying to get her back.  If snakes give you the creeps, then this portion of the story will make your skin crawl.  Some of Howard’s best writing, in any of his work, is here inside the citadel, where Conan and his companions fight the members of the Black Circle. 

In the end all of the political subplots are tied up nicely.  Conan wants Yasmina to go with him and share a life of robbery.  This in my opinion was one of the time Howard handled a female character with depth and subtly. 

Rusty Burke said the purpose of The Best of Robert E. Howard was to give readers, particularly readers who weren’t familiar with the breadth and depth of Howard’s work, a chance to see just how versatile a writer he was.  Because of that, there were limits on how many stories could feature series characters, such as Kull, Conan, and Solomon Kane.  It’s easy to see why “The People of the Black Circle” made the cut.

Blogging Conan: A Witch Shall be Born

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It’s been hectic the last few weeks.  I just finished two back to back conferences at which I made presentations and will fly home tomorrow.  As a result, I’ve not posted much other than a review at Futures Past and Present of a Jack Vance novel I read on the plane.  Things should start to pick back up.

“A Witch Shall be Born”, although not without flaws,  inspired the Margaret Brundage cover seen on the left.  This is one of my favorite Conan stories, even with the flaws.  Some of the strongest imagery in the whole series can be found in this story.  Also some of the most unbelievable protrayals of women.
The story opens as Taramis, the queen of the small city state Khauran, is awakened during the night.  She had a twin sister at birth, Salome, who was left to die in the desert.  A curse lies on the royal family of Khauran, so that every century a child is born with a cresecent shaped birthmark on her chest.  The child will become a witch and do much damage to the kingdom.  When Taramis and Salome were born, Salome had the mirthmark and was left in the desert to die.  Found by an eastern sorcerer returning home from a visit to Stygia, she was raised to become a powerful sorceress.  Now she’s come back to take what she claims is her birthright. 

How she can speak the language without any accent is never addressed, which was something of a stumbling block for me.
With Salome is a mercenary captain named Constantius.  He had entered the city a few days ahead of Salome and had publicly proposed marriage to Taramis.  She of course rejected his proposal.  Constantius joins Salome.  After a brief discussion, in which Salome reveals that she intends to take Taramis’ place, she goes to declare herself queen, leaving Taramis to be raped by Constantius.
She orders all the soldiers to assemble in the city’s central square unarmed.  They all do, except for the Queen’s guard, who are led by a certain Cimmerian.  They show up armed.  Conan doesn’t fall for the trap.  Instead he declares Salome an imposter.  The Queen’s guard are butchered, and Conan is crucified by Constantius outside the city gates.
One of the guard escapes, a young man named Valerius, whose devotion to the queen comes across as though he’s in love with her.  His lover Ivga tolerates this.  Why, I don’t know.  He clearly cares more for the queen than he does for her.  Ivga comes across as child-like, the way Muriela did in “The Servants of Bit-Yakin”.  This was the other portrayal I thought was unrealistic.
Still, this is a better than average story.  One of the things that Howard does is to tell the story from the viewpoints of Taramis, Salome, and Valerius as much as from Conan’s viewpoint, if not more.  In fact, we don’t actually get a passage from Conan’s viewpoint until the crucifixion scene.  A variation of this scene, by the way, was in Conan the Barbarian, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.  While this approach does lend itself to some infodumps, it has the advantage of defining Conan’s character through the eyes of others.  One thing I thought interesting was how Conan treated Taramis.  I’ll not elaborate on that, at least not in this post, since I’m trying not to give too many spoilers away.
There’s plenty of action and intrigue, with touches of the civilization vs. barbarism theme Howard included in many of the Conan works.  The crucifixions are especially well done, and the images I Howard’s words formed in my mind the first time I read this story are still with me, a quarter of a century later.  This one is worth checking out.

Blogging Conan: Jewels of Gwahlur/The Servants of Bit-Yakin

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This was one of the last Conan stories Howard wrote.  Only four more would follow, but those four contain two of his greatest masterpieces, “Beyond the Black River” and “Red Nails.”  Howard’s title was “The Servants of Bit-Yakin”, but Farnsworth Wright changed the title to “Jewels of Gwahlur” when he published it in Weird Tales.  That’s the title it was known by until the Wndering Star/Del Rey editions, which restored the original title.  However, there are some collections in print which are using the Weird Tales versions of Howard’s stories, so you might find it under either title.  Unlike some of Howard’s work, there’s no difference between his preferred version and the version that appeared in Weird Tales.

This isn’t one of the better Conan stories.  The plot requires swallowing a pretty large pill, namely that a treasure as valuable as the Teeth of Gwahlur (as they’re called in the story) could remain unmolested in a lost jungle city for so long.  Also, the heroine is way too hysterical.  She’s certainly no Belit.
The basic setup involves Conan working as a mercenary in the Black Kingdoms.  He’s there because he’s heard rumors of a great treasure in a lost city, Alkmeenon, and is waiting around to find out the details.  When an old enemy, the STygian Thutmekri, shows up and bribes some of the priests to take him to Alkmeenon, Conan is able to find out where it is.  Knowing Thutmekri is working for the kingdom of Zembabwei and the whole thing is a set-up for an invasion, Conan leaves ahead of them.
Alkmeenon is hidden in a natural amphitheater surrounded by sheer cliffs.  Not knowing the location of the secret entrance to the valley, Conan climbs the cliffs.  Near the top he encoutners a small cave in which he finds a mummy holding a tube containing a parchment.  Of course he takes it.  This was one of the more powerful images in the story for me.  Conan is hundreds of feet above the ground and comes face to face with a corpse.
I’m a sucker for lost city stories, particularly those that take place in jungles.  The thing that makes this one unique is that so much of it is set in a series of caves and underground passages beneath the city.  We know that Howard was inspired by a visit to Carlsbad Caverns when he wrote this one. 
Another powerful scene, occurring about halfway through the story, is when Conan is attempting to sneak up on one of the people who have not followed but preceded him to the valley.  Knowing the location of the secret entrance has its advantages.  It’s dusk, and Conan sees the white of his face contrasted against the darkness of the forest.  When he approaches the man, Conan discovers its only the man’s head he sees, tied to a branch by the hair.  The valley is supposed to be deserted…
“TheServants of Bit-Yakin” (or “Jewels of Gwahlur” if you prefer) isn’t the best Conan story, but it isn’t the worst either.  It’s simply an adventure story, and a better than average one at that.  While there are some problems with the characterization and some of the plot details, it still has its moments.  In my opinion, it’s worth reading.

Blogging Kull and Conan: Of Axes and Swords

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And so we reach the end of our look at the Kull stories (almost; I’ll have some general comments in a separate post) and the first of the Conan posts.  I’m looking at both of these because the first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword”, is a rewrite of an unsold Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!”.

“By This Axe” isn’t a bad story, but it isn’t a particularly good one, certainly not be the standards Howard had set in some of the other Kull installments.  There are two main aspects to the plot.  First, a group of dissatisfied men, two noblemen, a guard captain, and a poet, have recruited a former diplomat turned bandit, Ascalante, to help them overthrow Kull.  This portion of the story is the better half. 

The second portion of the plot concerns a young nobleman who wishes to marry a young slave girl who happens to be owned by one of the conspirators.  This type of situation seems to be a recurrent theme in the Kull series, mostly in stories not published in Howard’s lifetime.  Kull’s Councilor Tu insists that for a nobleman to marry a slave is simply not done; it would violate a centuries old law.

Kull sneaks out of the palace to wander the woods for a few hours.  He feels like a slave himself.  There’s a great deal of discussion on Kull’s part at various places in the story about how holding a throne is much more difficult than taking it.  During his walk in the woods, he encounters a young girl weeping.  Not recognizing him, she tells him that she’s a slave in love with a nobleman, who went to the king to request permission to marry.  Kull is sympathetic, but argues the king has to abide by the laws himself.

The rest of the story concerns the conspiracy attempting to assassinate Kull and failing.  In the end, he uses his axe to smash the stone tablet on which is written the law forbidding slaves and nobility to marry.  He declares that he is the law.

It’s easy to see why Farnsworth Wright rejected this story when Howard submitted it to Weird Tales.  The whole romance subplot basically ruins the story.  The slave girl comes across as both childish and childlike.  She speaks of being spanked as punishment by her master at one point.  She’s weepy and clingy.  And her dialogue reminds me of early Shirley Temple movies or child characters in Victorian novels, all sweetness and earnestness.  There’s was no way I was buying that this girl and the nobleman were madly in love.  That whole aspect of the story had an almost pedaeophilic tone to it.  I’m sure Howard didn’t intend anything of the sort.  It’s just a combination of his still developing skill as a writer and my twenty-first century cultural concerns coming together.  Still, the whole thing gave me the creeps.

One thing did make me wonder just what Howard was dealing with in his own life when he wrote this story. At one point the girl deeclares: “Why should laws not change? Time never stands still! Why should people today be shackled by laws which were made for our barbarian ancestors thousands of years ago-” It sounds like Howard may have been feeling a little bit shackled and enslaved by the culture he was living in. I know from first-hand experience that small towns in that part of Texas can be extremely conformist in their outlook, and in the 1920s I’m sure it was much worse. Howard was in his early 20s when he wrote this, and I suspect was still feeling some of the natural rebellion of youth that questions why things have to be the same as they were. This is entirely speculation on my part, but it fits with what I know about Howard and my experiences in similar environments.
 

“The Phoenix on the Sword”, while not one of Howard’s best stories, and certainly not the best of the Conan tales, is clearly the work of a more mature writer.  Howard drops the whole romance subplot, and instead introduces a villain whose hand would be felt in a couple of other stories, the Stygian sorceror Thoth-amon.  He’s a slave to the bandit as the tale opens, having lost a ring by which he maintains his power.  Of course he finds it, and uses it to wreack his revenge by sending a creature from the Outer Darkness against the bandit.  This is the only thing that saves Conan.  The creature attacks during the assassination attempt.  In the Kull story, it’s the nobleman who saves the day.
There’s also a new scene in which Conan in a cream meets a wise man who died fifteen hundred years earlier.  This man tells Conan that his fate and that of Aquilonia, the kingdom Conan rules, are entertwined.  He places a phoenix emblem on Conan’s sword, which is what allows Conan to kill the supernatural creature.
The scenes retained from “By This Axe”, portions of the conspiracy, Conan complaining about the duties of ruling, and the assassination scence are to a large extent unchanged except for some of the names.  Only when Howard made significant changes to the plot, such as the addition of the creature in the fianl fight, does he engage in any extensive rewriting.  Since the parts he retained were by far the better passages, this doesn’t hurt the story any.
Unlike the Kull series, the Conan stories weren’t written in any kind of chronological order, but jumpmed about throughout the character’s life.  Also, Kull has no interest in women.  Conan has plenty.  Even a casual reading of the two series will reveal that, while there are similarities, Kull isn’t simply Conan-lite.
So, we’ve looked at all the Kull stories mostly in the order they appear in the current edition from Del Rey.  I’ll be jumping around more with the Conan stories, looking at whichever one I’m in the mood to read at a given time.  I’ll also be giving fewer spoilers in the Conan posts.  With the movie less than a month away, I suspect I’ll pick up one or two new readers.  I don’t want to spoil any of the fun for those who haven’t read the originals.

New Post at Home of Heroics

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I’m in the middle of trying to put together presentations for back-to-back conferences next week, so I’m a little late in mentioning this.  (Plus Blogger and Firefox don’t seem to be on good terms lately, forcing me to use a idfferent browser; what’s up with that?)  The latest installment of my column Dispatches From the Lone Star Front is up at Home of Heroics.  It deals with Robert E. Howard’s legacy, so if you’re a Howard fan (if not, why not?), check it out.