I haven’t posted much on the blog due to my moratorium, but I feel that this news is important to anyone who calls themselves a Conan fan. The news has come that Glenn Lord has died.

If you know who Glenn Lord is, then you know no amount of words can really convey how important he was to Robert E. Howard’s legacy. If you don’t know who Glenn Lord is, then his Wikipedia page (which was composed by Howard scholar Lee Breakiron) will show an inkling of just how vast his influence and impact was:

A Korean vet and a paper warehouse manager by trade, he discovered Howard through Skull-Face and Others (1946) around 1951. He sought out earlier publications with REH’s work, most notably the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Starting in 1956, he scoured the country for all REH stories, poems, and letters. Over the course of his life he has amassed the world’s largest collection of such publications and original manuscripts (actually typescripts).

Lord became literary agent for the Howard heirs around March, 1965, and served as such for 28 and a half years. In 1965, he tracked down the contents of Robert E. Howard’s famous storage trunk; the contents of which were then owned by pulp writer and Howard friend E. Hoffmann “Ed” Price. The contents consisted of tens of thousands of pages typed by Howard, including hundreds of unpublished stories, poems, and fragments. Using the contents of the trunk as well as his vast collection of previously published REH materials, Lord provided the source text for almost every published Howard work appearing in books, magazines, or chapbooks from 1965 through 1997, including collections of REH letters. Lord also provided introductions, afterwords, or commentary for dozens of REH books.

Tirelessly promoting Howard’s stories, Lord secured their publication in any promising venue, leading directly to the Howard Boom of the 1970s. This included books by Ace, Arkham House, Avon, Baen, Ballantine, Bantam, Barnes & Noble Books, Baronet, Berkley, Beagle, Belmont, Bonanza, Carroll & Graff, Centaur, Century-Hutchinson, Chelsea House, Chaosium, DAW, Dell, Delta, Dodd-Mead, Dorset, Doubleday, Fawcett Gold Medal, FAX, Fedogan & Bremer, Fictioneer, Five Star, Gollancz, Grafton, Gramercy, Donald M. Grant, Grossett & Dunlap, Harper Collins, Jove, Kaye & Ward, Lancer, Leisure, MacFadden, Manor, Mayflower, Meys, Morning Star Press, New English Library, Neville Spearman, Orbit, Oxford University Press, Pan, Panther, Prentice-Hall, Putnam, Pyramid, REH Foundation Press, Robinson, Ryerson, Science Fiction Book Club, Sidgwick & Jackson, Signet, Sphere, Taplinger, TOR, Tower, Underwood-Miller, University of Nebraska Press, Walker & Co., Warner Books, WH Allen, Xanadu and Zebra; periodicals such as Amazing Science Fiction Stories, Amazing Stories, Ariel, Chacal, Coven 13/Witchcraft & Sorcery, Different Worlds, Fantastic Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories/Fantastic Stories of Imagination, Fantasy Book, Fantasy Commentator, Fantasy Crossroads, Fantasy Crosswinds, Fantasy Tales, The Haunt of Horror, Heavy Metal, Lost Fantasies, Magazine of Horror, Pulp Review, The Riverside Quarterly, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, Spaceway Science Fiction, Startling Mystery Stories, Sword and Sorcery, Trumpet, Weird Tales, Weirdbook, The West, White Wolf Magazine, Worlds of Fantasy, Xenophile, and Zane Grey Western Magazine; and several series of Marvel comic books and magazines. In many cases, he was also the uncredited editor of the published version of the REH works. And this is not counting the literally hundreds of books and magazines in non-English languages to which he supplied texts, including Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Yugoslavian, nor the hundreds of amateur publications.

In the fall of 1977, he arranged with Berkley Medallion to put out three Conan paper- and hardbacks of Conan stories edited by Karl Edward Wagner, the first Conan series without any posthumous revisions and pastiches, which previous collections had in excess.

Lord published a few REH collections on his own, such as the periodical The Howard Collector #1-18 and the chapbook Etchings in Ivory. In The Howard Collector, from 1961 to 1973, Lord featured previously unpublished (or very rare) pieces by Howard, letters by REH and those who knew him, indices of poems and stories, reprints of articles related to Howard, and news about upcoming publications and other events. Thereafter, he published similar material in fanzines of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, the Hyperborian League, and the Esoteric Order of Dagon (E.O.D. — an amateur press association primarily concerned with the writings of Howard Phillips Lovecraft).

An early admirer of Howard’s poetry, Lord published the first Howard poetry collection Always Comes Evening (1957) through famed Arkham House, subsidizing the costs of the printing himself. Later, he was instrumental in the publication of the Howard verse collections Etchings in Ivory (1968), Singers in the Shadows (1970), Echoes from an Iron Harp (1972), The Road to Rome (1972), Verses in Ebony (1975), Night Images (1976), Shadows of Dreams (1989), and A Rhyme of Salem Town and Other Poems (2007).

He published the first comprehensive bibliography of Howard, complete through 1973, in his The Last Celt: A Bio–Bibliography of Robert Ervin Howard (1976), a bible for REH scholars and collectors. The book also contains biographical and autobiographical material about Howard, as well as letters, story synopses and fragments, ephemera, covers illustrating REH stories, and photographs. Lord wrote many articles on Howard (e.g. in The Dark Barbarian). Lord contributed much information to the latest bibliography, The Neverending Hunt (2006, 2008), by Paul Herman and the online bibliography Howardworks.

When Conan Properties was incorporated in 1978 to establish a single entity to deal with Hollywood in negotiations that led to the two Conan movies, Lord served as a corporate director.

Lord has befriended, assisted, advised, and mentored two generations of Howard fans, scholars, and editors, providing copies of his typescripts, letters, and vast knowledge to many of them. For his dedication, achievements, and scholarship, Lord received the World Fantasy Convention Award in 1978 and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the professional fanzine, The Cimmerian, in 2005. The next year, he was Guest of Honor at the Centennial Robert E. Howard Days festival in Howard’s hometown of Cross Plains, Texas, and in 2007 was GoH at PulpCon 36 in Dayton, Ohio. He is currently Director Emeritus of the Robert E. Howard Foundation.

If you are a fan of Robert E. Howard, Conan, or any of his creations, then you owe Glenn Lord your thanks. If you picked up a Lancer or Sphere or Berkeley in the Howard Boom of the ’60s and ’70s, you can thank Glenn Lord for getting the stories printed across dozens of publishers. If you tore through an issue of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian, you can thank Glenn Lord for providing Roy Thomas with indespensible advice and assistance, and even then-unpublished stories for adaptation. If you watched Conan the Barbarian in 1982, you can thank Glenn Lord for negotiating the deal to make and film it. If you’ve enjoyed anything related to Kull, Solomon Kane, or the other creations of the Man from Cross Plains, then you owe Glenn Lord for promoting all of Howard’s work beyond just Conan. If you’ve read any scholarly material on Howard or his creations, be it a critical anthology or a wiki site, you can thank Glenn Lord for being the man to start it all.

No one in 80 years has done more for Howard and his creations than Glenn Lord.

Stonecold-mike of the Robert E. Howard Forums alerted me to this interesting development:

I was sent a note from someone saying that Solomon Kane is available as a download through Netflix.  Sadly this does not appear to be true – at least from Netflix in Canada where I am right now.  Solomon Kane remains unavailable in North America for what I now understand are stupid legal reasons that I can’t share…Maybe they’ll get sorted, maybe not. (BTW, if it is available on Neflix USA – can someone tell me.)….but this article from Salon.com feels like a small vindication.

http://tinyurl.com/3rbwbep

Though I’d love to take a crack at Conan and I don’t want to insult the people who made the new one but it wasn’t great and I could do better for a smaller budget.  How Conan got that massive release and Kane has still absolutely nothing – not even DVD – breaks my heart.  I don’t even mind of people hate my film, I’d still at least like them to have the chance to form an opinion.

Well, then…

Editorial

Folks familiar with my review of Solomon Kane and subsequent musings, the DVD, and its relation to the source material, will know I’ve been pretty tough on the film for its divergences from the source material and its historical flubs, be it comparatively minor blunders like the Union Flag appearing years before the Union Flag was designed, to more serious issues like the weird Catholo-Puritanism religious confusion. However, there’s a critical difference between Solomon Kane and Conan the Barbarian: the guy who directed Solomon Kane actually knows how to direct a film. Thus, while I shudder at what Bassett might do with Conan given his handling of Kane – my hyperbolic fear is we’ll discover his mother was a Stygian sorceress, “explaining” his hatred of civilization and sorcery while adding a Freudian subtext to his dealings with women – and considering I had serious problems with Solomon Kane, I can’t disagree that he would’ve made a more coherent, interesting and worthy film.

This puts me in some contention with those Howard fans & scholars who liked Conan and didn’t like Kane, but all things considered, I truly think that Kane was just a better film.  It was closer to REH’s world and creation than Conan, it was more tightly edited, better choreographed, more interestingly designed, better scored, infinitely better acted – and, yes, better directed, no question.  The action scenes in Kane made me cringe in the right way – mostly because you could actually see what was happening – and the supernatural creatures were infinitely more frightening and well-conceived than the ones in Conan.  And, just like Momoa, Purefoy could’ve made a brilliant Kane in an actual adaptation.

Bassett wouldn’t be my first choice by any means, not just because of Kane, but because I’d much rather he make a fantastic Elric film. After Conan, I don’t want to see Nispel anywhere near a property I love again. So it might be damning with faint praise, but frankly, I think the Conan film franchise could do much worse. Kane didn’t even do much worse than Conan at the box office, $19 million in the foreign market compared to Conan’s $27 million – and that’s with barely a fraction of the media saturation and brand equity of Conan.

Gearing up for the big day!

The Conan 3D Facebook page has a new picture of Leo Howard’s young Conan running amid fire and chaos in his home village:

For more, you will know it by the click of the link.

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I just bought a copy of Conan the Barbarian: The Classic Original Stories That Inspired The Film,  a mass-market paperback aimed to be an introduction to Robert E. Howard’s work by myself. Now, I’m not sure if it’s the exact same edition as the one that’s been reported elsewhere, or if this is a UK-only edition. Nonetheless, here we go!

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I’m still working on my review/appraisal of the Conan 2 script, so until then, here are a couple of little snippets to tide you over.

First, a new photo of Jason Momoa’s Conan has turned up courtesy of RONON at the Robert E. Howard Forums:

Very nice, but more awaits beyond the link…

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The much-anticipated Robert E. Howard’s The Frost-Giant’s Daughter from Studio Guignol has hit the internet!

Excellent locations, good quality film, great use of stock footage, nice costumes, well-integrated special effects, original soundtrack – plus it’s all Robert E. Howard, by fans, for fans. Considering the budget and resources available, I think they’ve done a fantastic job.

Well done, guys!

DrSolarMOTA at the Robert E. Howard Forums alerts us of an intriguing new publication listed on Amazon:

Conan the Barbarian: The stories that inspired the movie [Mass Market Paperback]

Robert E. Howard (Author)

• Mass Market Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey (July 26, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 034553123X
• ISBN-13: 978-0345531230

Howard scholar Patrice Louinet dropped by to explain more:

This is a REH (and REH only!) “best of” Conan volume. I’ll see if I am allowed to post the contents here or if you’ll have to wait for the official announcement.

320 pages is likely only enough to include a comparative fraction of stories: even the shortest Del Rey volume (The Bloody Crown of Conan) had 384 pages.

“The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”

“The God in the Bowl”
“The Tower of the Elephant”

“Black Colossus”

“Rogues in the House”

“Queen of the Black Coast”

“The People of the Black Circle”

“Beyond the Black River”

“The Black Stranger”

“Red Nails”

“The God in the Bowl” and “The Black Stranger” would be particularly good choices because they aren’t available on Wikisource or Project Gutenberg, unlike the other stories printed in Weird Tales and elsewhere.

The three King Conan stories might not appear, since Conan the Barbarian is a “younger Conan” movie, and so they might not fit in with Del Rey’s plans, though “The Phoenix on the Sword” and “The Scarlet Citadel” are fine tales. Certainly The Hour of the Dragon is far too long for inclusion in a 320 page collection, despite it easily being one of the best of the Conan stories. I doubt the unfinished fragments will make an appearance. It’s always possible one of the mediocre Conan tales like “Xuthal of the Dusk,” “Iron Shadows in the Moon,” “The Devil in Iron,” “The Pool of the Black Ones,” or “The Servants of Bit-Yakin” could get a break. I doubt “The Man-Eaters of Zamboula” or “The Vale of Lost Women” stand a chance for, well, obvious reasons.

Another possibility is that the stories chosen may reflect plot elements, characters and themes in the film. This is more difficult to narrow down: I suppose one could see some broad strokes of “Black Colossus” in Khalar Zym’s planned conquest of the world, a bit of “A Witch Shall Be Born’s” Salome in Marique, perhaps the dynamic between the pampered Tamara and Conan could be in the vein of Yasmina and Conan’s relationship in “The People of the Black Circle.” These are real stretches, though, and I think a plain old “Best of Robert E. Howard” volume would be the likeliest option.

My guess (don’t hold me to it): “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter,” “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Black Colossus,” “Queen of the Black Coast,” “The People of the Black Circle,” “Beyond the Black River,” and “Red Nails.” That rounds up to 307, allowing 10 or so pages for illustrations, photos and similar visual material, as well as any introductions, forewords, afterwords and supplementary material. It’s a happy coincidence that the stories are not only in written sequence, but also flow into a reasonable chronological order: Conan starts as a fierce young Cimmerian warrior in the far north; then a naive, curious thief in Zamora; then a murderous mercenary captain and general; then a bloodthirsty pirate; then a wily, ambitious warlord; then a grizzled, experienced forest runner; and finally a seasoned adventurer in the Black Kingdoms. A discernible character arc without sacrificing Conan’s intrinsically unchanging nature, and an easily followable globe-trot around the Hyborian Age.

If and when Patrice is cleared to reveal the contents, or an official announcement is made, the blog will keep you updated. Until then, why not play along at home, and think of possible choices for the volume?

“The Phoenix on the Sword” – 24
“The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” – 9
“The God in the Bowl” – 19
“The Tower of the Elephant” – 23
“The Scarlet Citadel” – 35
“Queen of the Black Coast” – 31
“Black Colossus” – 33
“Iron Shadows in the Moon” – 31
“Xuthal of the Dusk” – 31
“The Pool of the Black One” – 27
“Rogues in the House” – 23
“The Vale of Lost Women” – 17
“The Devil in Iron” – 31
“The People of the Black Circle” – 79
The Hour of the Dragon – 173
“A Witch Shall Be Born” – 49
“The Servants of Bit-Yakin” – 42
“Beyond the Black River” – 57
“The Black Stranger” – 73
“The Man-Eaters of Zamboula” – 33
“Red Nails” – 75
“The Hyborian Age” – 20

*Thanks to Jeff Shanks for the page count.

In an interview for SF Signal (hey guys!), Michael A. Stackpole mentioned a little snippet on the upcoming novelization:

MS: I’m just finishing up my latest tie-in project, the novelization for the Conan the Barbarian movie which will be out in August, 2011. I’m talking with a number of other companies about doing work in their universes. The two factors I look at when picking projects are 1) how much the property interests me and 2) whether or not it has an audience/market share which I can tap to buy my other books. Because of the digital revolution, I have a choice: either I work for someone else at a tiny percentage, or I work for myself, turning out independent books like my In Hero Years…I’m Dead. Since the payoff for the latter is much better, and the process is quicker; any tie-in properties will have to be things I really love with a huge audience. (Hence my working in the Conan universe. )

Yes, he really used a smiley there. In addition, SF Signal provided an image of the book cover, from Amazon.com:

Holy smokes, my humourous mockup from last July wasn’t that far off!

I’m presuming the photos described will include a few publicity stills, as with other novelizations, as a preview of the film. Obviously Harry Turtledove wasn’t contacted (thank Mitra) but I’m somewhat perplexed they went with that underwhelming still over the much better poster image. I also note that Robert E. Howard’s name is nowhere to be seen. But then, I’m not in marketing: this could just be a placeholder for the final cover, after all.

Editorial

Stackpole also discusses Robert E. Howard in this interview, but since it doesn’t specifically pertain to the film, I figure it’s better to discuss it in an editorial.

I’m not the first author to notice that this is the arrival of a golden era for writers. We can explore our worlds and characters in ways, as you suggest in your question, that haven’t been open to us since the days of the pulp magazines. Because of some projects, and as research into ways we can approach fiction, I’ve been dipping back into the stories from the 1890s up through the 1950s. If Robert E. Howard were writing today, we’d never have heard of Conan because he only wrote one Conan novel in his life, and that was a paltry 75,000 words long. Right now traditional publishing doesn’t have a use for anything that doesn’t fit into the 100,000 word long novel box; but readers have a voracious appetite for it. Shorter and medium-length works will be coming back with a vengeance.

Being something of a rabid pedant (shocking, I know) I don’t like playing this sort of game. If Robert E. Howard was alive today, how do we know he’d be writing short fiction, as opposed to the exact stuff that sells? Stephen King did short fiction, but he adapted, and started writing the doorstoppers people seem to crave nowadays. Why shouldn’t Howard attempt the same when that’s where the money is? Then again, how do we know Howard would be an author in today’s environment at all? Too many variables were involved in Howard writing the way he wrote: he listened to the stories of people who experienced Indian raids and the Civil War firsthand, black people who grew up in slavery, friends and family who come from a world utterly different from nowadays that are impossible to replicate. And what about his family situation: since tuberculosis is readily treated in the western world, and Cross Plains is not the same as it was at the turn of the 20th Century, who’s to say his life would be anything like how it was in the 1930s boom town? Indeed, considering Howard did write Conan, how do we know what western fantasy would be like without his influence – would his modern Conan be influenced by The Lord of the Rings or The Broken Sword? (You see what I mean by being a rabid pedant?)

In any case, Stackpole makes an interesting observation on the difference the Internet has made to authors:

More importantly, writers get to return to being what we have always been: entertainers. Sure, stories can deal with lofty themes that illuminate the human condition; but they can do that in short forms as well as massive novels. Readers get to vote directly with dollars and with their opinions because of the net. Every author’s website becomes his living room, and readers can interact with him there, asking questions, letting him know what they’d like to see more of. And the digital age makes it so much easier to interact with other authors, sharing things back and forth.

And my remark about the living room is never more true than when you look at being able to do a Twitter #hashtag chat in real time; or when you use something like Second Life where folks can come and actually hear an author doing a reading. I hold weekly office hours in Second Life, where readers and writers can come into one location, as questions about stories and their writing, hear about what’s going on in the industry and all. And I do readings there, affording folks a chance that they only get if I come to a convention near them.

Contrast that with Robert E. Howard living in the middle of nowhere in Texas and only being able to interact with his fans and peers by snail-mail or when someone like E. Hoffman Price decided to drive to Cross Plains to meet him. Heck, I’ve had conversations in Second Life about some of my books with people who’ve read them in translations I didn’t even know had been made.

It is an incredible time to be a writer, and is only going to get better.

Following up from the not-yet-totally-official Conan the Barbarian Blu-Ray release, an intrepid unknown with a camera phone has taken what could be a snap of the Blu-Ray’s cover. While it’s small and practically illegible, it’s possible to discern some interesting factors – particularly the extras, which include a first look at the new Conan the Barbarian!

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Here’s a nice Christmas post for everyone: in an interview for Comic Book Resources, Luke Leibmen, the executive producer for both projects, still has them in the running.

The article is mostly of concern to those following the Red Sonja comics from Dynamite, where apparently the current series posits that the Norse Gods are around in the Hyborian Age, and live north of Vanaheim — I’ll spare you what I think of that). Of particular interest is this snippet:

“It sounds like they are lining up a new director for ‘Sonja.’ I think ‘Conan’ is hitting theaters soon, and if that proves itself in the market, it will bode well for both ‘Sonja’ and ‘Thulsa.’ On ‘Thulsa,’ we just finished the script and are looking for financing partners. Hollywood is always ‘hurry up and wait.’ Using ‘Conan’ as an example, this new incarnation took more than 10 years to hit screens. Warners had it, put it through countless rewrites and directors, Warners lost it, now Lionsgate is finally releasing it.”

So it seems Red Sonja Redux and Thulsa Doom: Origins are still in the pipeline: if Conan the Barbarian (2011) is a success, that could mean more Sword-and-Sorcery at the cinema. I’m sure Red Sonja and Thulsa Doom fans will be thrilled. Maybe it would finally result in a cinema release for Solomon Kane. Merry Christmas, all!