2003, The Bloody Crown of Conan, Ballantine Books, NY, pages xi-xii

In my opinion Gary Gianni is the best black and white artist to illustrate Conan the Barbarian. He was the perfect selection to illustrate the blood drenched tales in this volume and not shy away from realistic depictions of hard men and a hard world. As much as I dislike what has been done to Howard’s stories and characters in film, the one thing that John Milus, maker of the original Conan the Barbarian, did accomplish was sketching a truly brutal world. Gary does that for this volume.

Gary begins with a real event from his childhood when he saw a Mister Lill, a big man, take down an old house with a sledgehammer. For kids, that is a mythic kind of power. And more importantly, it is a kind of power not needed, asked for, or demonstrated in this softening world. It marks Gary as a little older than I, the product of a world whose boys still read of men’s power rather than their guilt, a world in which there could be virtue to destroying. This echoes Hardcore History’s Dan Carlin’s theory of political arsonists, of which Conan certainly was in the context of Howard’s mythical world of adventure.

He goes onto discuss ‘heroic realism’ which is supposed to be anathema in our feminine age, though, if one identifies the ambiguous nature of the ancient hero on which Howard modeled his characters, it fits.

Gary Gianni states that he hopes to thrill the readers with his depictions of Conan, and I can tell you that his Conan is the last in an army of Howard’s mythic literary shades that you would want to meet in the proverbial dark alley.