2005, pages XV=Xvi

As a writer engaged in learning the art of speculative storytelling the hard way I began dumbly enough, by simply rereading everything that had inspired me to write in my youth, hoping that I would be able to decode my own influences. An unexpected aid has been the reading of the illustrators’ notes to the various books of the Wandering Star anthologies of Robert E. Howard, particularly the Conan books, as that character has a deep 75 year old history of living in the mind’s eye of many artists. It is a fact that Frank Frazetta introduced me to Robert E. Howard.

In this brief foreword to the volume he illustrated Gregory Manchess discusses the process by which an artist gets into a character, which has a corollary in the way a writer does the same thing by different means. In his sixth paragraph Gregory puts his finger on the moment when he found ‘Conan’s essential portrait. Alert, confident, and solitary.’

Interestingly enough Gregory was unable to find his vision of the ‘stealthy, panther-like’ Conan until reading the original unadulterated Howard stories. The commercial comic book and Hollywood versions of the barbarian did not establish in his author’s eye, “character.”

[In his introduction, series editor, Patrice Louinet explains why.]

Having worked with a few artists as a writer, I have a lot of respect for how they see the nuances of the physical world and use the physical to allude to the transcendental. After reading Gregory Manchess’s foreword I gained a little more perspective on exactly how this seminal male character has been debased by the homogenized commercial media, which I think is largely a function of Howard’s character-driven worldview being at odds with that of a characterless society.

A Good example of the emasculation of Conan in art is the recent Dark Horse Comics series that amplifies Conan’s brief career with Belit, Queen of the Black Coast. This is an excellent pick for amplification and the publishers—astute businessmen—understood that the classical figure of the hyper-masculine Conan had to be toned down to a Brad Pitt-Matt Damon level handsome athleticism without too much body mass or body hair. One will see that the sizing of Conan and Belit is closer in the postmodern comics than it was in the modern stories of my youth. This youngish Conan has not been shrunken and softened to appeal to female readers, but to narrow the expanding masculinity gulf between the reader and the character.

As a writer, spanning the masculine distance between ancient, mythic concepts and the postmodern reality of extreme—even morally lethal—emasculation has thus far yawned like a chasm which I have failed to bridge. I find myself wondering now, how Howard would bridge it—or would he even try?