I read the latest entry by fellow Howard-Hour-of-Power Brother Steve Tompkins with the requisite amount of aplomb; I just love it when he waxes fantastic. But he should take heart, or at least, take the L-Line over to Manhattan and catch The Dark Knight while it’s on the big screen.

Not because it’s living up to its hype (and that in and of itself is pretty miraculous), and not because it’s the Batman movie we always wanted, but didn’t think we deserved (sad, but true), but because the endlessly fascinating topic of Barbarism vs. Civilization rears its gorilloid head and waves at all of the Robert E. Howard fans in the audience during the course of the movie.

It’s not giving anything away to discuss the Joker as an agent of chaos in the movie, but those of you who don’t want to know anything about the film (you know it’s got Christian Bale, right?) may want to be cautioned about possible minor spoilers, here. I’ll keep it to a minimum, I swear.

That said, Heath Ledger’s intense and creepy portrayal of the Joker set a new standard for menace and maybe even horror. Even the most jaded of the Chainsaw Generation, who tittered every time he pulled a knife out, gasped in disbelief when he torched a huge pile of cash, saying, in effect, “It’s not about the money. It’s about making a statement.” But what statement is he making? The Joker’s acts, random, uncontrolled, and even he admits, unplanned, seem to strike the very gong of chaos personified. Maybe so, but there’s a method to his madness, as he reveals at least twice in the film.

The Joker is doing his level best to strip the trappings of civilization off of Batman, Harvey Dent, and the Gotham police department. After all, when you’ve got barbarians running about, it’s easier to inflict a little chaos. Or, as Howard himself put it: “break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed.”

While Batman will go farther than the Gotham PD, both will only go so far. In fact, both entities end up compromised by the Joker, who has no such boundaries, and both pay a heavy price for their transgressions. The Joker goads one cop into participating in some good old-fashioned police brutality, and it’s that slip-up that adds greatly to the death toll. Batman compromises every aspect of his personal life and several relationships, just to get a fix on the Clown Prince. Not so for Harvey Dent, who shows us early on that for all of his high-falootin’ talk about White Knights and Progress, he’s actually the easiest of all to push out of the light, if I may quote Renee Belloq. In all cases, the end is the same; do whatever it takes to win, and they end up losing. The citizens of Gotham, by the way, are the only ones who choose to reclaim their civilized status in the end. It’s an interesting statement by Nolan, and one that betrays his thoughts on the matter. In the Howardian version of the story, the two groups of people on the ferries would have torn each other apart trying to get to the detonators.

I know that all sounds a bit cryptic, but I’m really trying not to give away the film for you. Incidentally, I predict that two weeks from now, the second wave of criticism will be a direct response to the overwhelmingly positive early reviews. Look for “It’s not THAT good,” and “Well, for a SUPER HERO MOVIE, it’s SOMEWHAT sophisticated,” and just ignore them. People who don’t have a grounding in popular culture should not review pop culture movies.

What does this mean for upcoming Robert E. Howard films? Hopefully, it proves that the critical positions are a writer who understands the source material, and a director who’s not afraid to put that source material onscreen. All movie endings don’t have to be happy. They can leave things hanging (especially in a franchise situation). You can cover meaningful and thought-provoking material in a fantasy film (Tompk knows what I’m talking about). The Solomon Kane movie is long gone and we can’t get it back. More’s the pity. But I would caution future genre film makers: Chris Nolan pulled off what was once thought to be impossible. He finally, and truly, made super heroes operatic in theme, mythic in scope, and philosophical at their core. If future film makers don’t agree to step up to the plate and try for at least two out of three, then we deserve a sequel to Elektra and a third Fantastic Four movie.

Beginning in December of 2003 and continuing through 2004’s Oscar season, The Return of the King shook the earth like a mûmakil charge. Peter Jackson’s LOTR films served up something for almost everyone not named Grin: halflings, Howard Shore, monsters, Orlando Bloom for the maenads-in-training-bras, the Shakespearean dynastic/familial crises of the House of Eorl or Denethor and his sons, a cinematic siege with a fuse as slow-burning as that of Zulu, clashes between combatants in their thousands and tens of thousands that could hold their armored heads up in the company of Chimes at Midnight, Kagemusha, and Ran (the edged weapons became even edgier on the Extended Edition DVDs), and the realization that Frodo not only fails in, but is maimed by, his mission. So why have so many fantasy films since then settled for being merely a kindergarten of unearthly delights? The most “mature” spectacle to result from the Rings phenomenon has been the paroxysm of litigation pitting Jackson against New Line Cinema and the Tolkien estate against New Line’s corporate successors.

I have no quarrel with the Harry Potter films, at least not after the helm was relinquished by a Columbus who discovered only mediocrity. In fact Alfonso Cuaròn’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban ranks with The Two Towers and Pan’s Labyrinth as the finest film fantasy of this decade—interesting that it took a Mexican director to relocate Hogwarts from an amusement park in Crassville to Gothic highlands atmospherically patrolled by the spirits of George MacDonald and Isak Dinesen as well as the Dementors.

As soon as Inklings were identified as golden egg-layers Andrew Adamson’s 2 Narnia adaptations, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) and The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) became inevitable (the more recent film has a severe case of Pelennor Fields envy, and its conquering Telmarines seem to have been airlifted straight from slaughtering the charges of eagle knights during la noche triste in Tenochtitlan).

But most of the fare has been insipid, innocuous, and in flagrant contravention of Tolkien’s dictum that “a safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.” The Sci Fi Channel’s Legend of Earthsea and David Cunningham’s The Seeker: The Dark is Rising (2007) managed to antagonize Ursula K. LeGuin, Susan Cooper, and their sizable followings without appealing to the uninitiated. New Line Cinema and writer/director Chris Weitz took a not-so-subtle knife to the heart of The Golden Compass (2007) by downplaying the extent to which Philip Pullman was spoiling for a fight with C. S. Lewis. Devotees of the source material were turned off again, and insult was piled on injury as soundbite Savonarola William A. Donohue got to strut and crow. Eragon (2006, dir. Stefan Fangmeier), based on the novelty-less novel by young master Nep O’ Tism, achieved what would otherwise have been a feat of shuttle diplomacy beyond Henry Kissinger’s wildest dreams by uniting LOTR and Star Wars fans in derision.

Just as Middle-earth congealed into what John Clute scathingly describes as the “Identikit Fantasyland” of the Tolkien imitators, a “thought-free setting” and “natural home for unambitious tales,” knockoffs like Uwe Boll’s In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2008) have confirmed that what was inspired and inspiring when Fellowship arrived after the lacerating autumn of 2001 has suffered a kind of progeria, an accelerated aging. New Zealand itself, so minty-fresh and revelatory back in 2001, so plausibly antediluvian as well as antipodean, has lately been in danger of becoming anodyne.

When the Jackson films were breaking records and what had been deemed the shatterproof glass ceiling of expectations, various reports indicated that Elric of Melniboné and Rand al’Thor (pity the screenwriter called upon to reinvent The Wheel of Time and rescue an epic fantasy from those thousands of pages of bickering and braid-tugging). Rumor even had it that Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane might exchange the Death Angel’s for the dealmaker’s shadow. Instead the tweeners and the YA category inherited the earth. The Fionavar Tapestry, created by someone who actually worked with a Tolkien to prepare the Tolkien’s manuscripts for publication, languishes undapted. Many if not most of David Gemmell’s novels cry out (in a manly, heroic way) to be filmed. M. John Harrison’s The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings await discovery as they have for decades, and no one has seized upon the opportunities that Matthew Stover’s Blade of Tyshalle and China Miéville’s Bas-Lag novels—Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and The Iron Council—offer to a visionary (and streetfighting) director. The city of Deepgate, suspended above abysses both literal and figurative in Alan Campbell’s Scar Night (2006), awaits its closeup, as do some of the fightingest, fallingest angels since Milton’s. Imagine Hodgson’s Night Lands with the schmaltz liposuctioned out, an “Ill Met in Lankhmar”/The Swords of Lankhmar combo platter, or The Broken Sword done up right to highlight its doppelganging hero and villain, Faerie-depopulating grudgematch between warrior races, and elegantly amoral elves to seduce the demon lover demographic.

Any one of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen novels would require a budget the size of a Halliburton no-bid contract (although a take-no-prisoners, NC-17 version of Memories of Ice in particular haunts my dreams).

The same might seem to hold true for George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. However, in 2007 Martin announced that HBO would be adapting the series, with he himself pitching in as co-executive producer and scripter of one episode per season: “With 12 hours to devote to each of the novels rather than the two to three that a feature film would allow, we should be able to present a faithful dramatization of the story that will please both my own readers and HBO subscribers who have never read a fantasy novel in their lives.” Well, seeing/Tivoing is believing; were it not for missteps, HBO would have no steps at all lately (Case in point: one of the star writers on the show that put them on the world domination map brings them the (David Chase-endorsed) idea for Mad Men, and they pass…because viewers couldn’t possibly be interested in a recreation of 1960, only one of the most mythic years in postwar American history). Still, should the project survive to an airdate Tyrion Lannister, Martin’s variation on the Dick Crookback theme, might become almost as much of a signature character as Tony Soprano or Deadwood’s much-missed Al Swearengen.

In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy John Clute wrote that the appearance of LOTR in the mid-Fifties “marked the end of apology”; the appearance of the Jackson films in the Aughties should have marked the end of apology in another medium, but instead heralded an onslaught of poor excuses. We are seemingly becalmed in the bad old days of Legend and Willow; since 2005 filmed fantasy has been juvenile without being entertainingly delinquent. Adults, who are force-fed much more reality than children and tweeners and therefore are in much more urgent need of Clark Ashton Smith’s “freedom of fantastic things” as a dietary supplement for the imagination, are being poorly served.

If I long for hard-R fantasy films, it’s not just because of the sex and violence, although the former is usually welcome and the latter is often necessary. It’s because, to mangle the professor, sanitized fairylands are untrue to the world that is too much with us and the worlds to which we would fain beat feet. As a Howard enthusiast it’s not so much that I yearn for red mists around each axe-swing and sword-stroke as it is that I want those swings and strokes to be delivered in the contexts of the personal, tribal, or historical rages and hatreds that Howard devised for them, which pretty much demand the aforemenntioned adamantium-R rating.

But this far into the blog-post, instead of lamenting that John Boorman never made another fantasy film after Excalibur, or wishing that, on the evidence of “The Drowned,” his segment of Necronomicon (1994), Le Pacte des Loups (2001), and the delirious setpieces of Silent Hill (2006), Christoph Gans could be turned loose on an epic fantasy film for adults, I’m going to give thanks for the existence of Guillermo del Toro, criss-crosser of borders and genres, a citizen of the world, and the underworld, and the otherworld.

In his 2005 article “Angels and Insects: the Cinematic Spawn of Guillermo Del Toro,” David Greven says of the filmmaker’s early Cronos (1993), Mimic (1997), and Blade II (2002) “The images are audacious, ecstatic, ghoulish, and beautiful—they achieve something akin to a connective tissue binding the films together as an oeuvre that achieves intermittent greatness.” Blade II is worth lingering over for a moment: del Toro achieved the only watchable entry in the series by actually managing to surmount the tinted mirror of Wesley Snipes’ narcissism! And thereafter, from The Devil’s Backbone (2001) onward, intermittent greatness gave way to the full-time variety.

Del Toro has been a ping on my sonar screen since Cronos, but at times I’ve wondered, why so few Mexican stories? (And why no engagement with the deepest mythology, sun-baked and blood-slaked, of his native land?) Why are his two best films set during the climax and aftermath of the Spanish Civil War? Had a branch of his family emigrated from the mother country fairly recently? “I have witnessed an inordinate amount of violence in my life,” he once admitted, and in the commentary track for the Pan’s Labyrinth DVD, he recalls a street brawl in which he was beaten with a chain while a friend was beaten with a bottle, ruefully noting that the bottle never shattered as Westerns had trained him to expect. His father was held for ransom in 1997 and remained captive for months until some wealth was redistributed to the kidnappers’ satisfaction. Was the Matter of Mexico accordingly just too painful?

I was overthinking things. Turns out the haunted orphanage in the first draft of The Devil’s Backbone was a microcosm for the Mexican Revolution, not Spain’s Guerra Civil; the sweeteners required to secure a transatlantic co-production (the future of Spanish language cinema, as per del Toro) necessitated the shift. And the following quote doesn’t seem especially alienated:

There is a tradition in Mexico of craftsmanship that is called creating alebrijes. Alebrijes are mythical creatures that belong to no particular mythology or set of beliefs. They are fanciful five-headed dragons with the tail of a dog and the body of a cow. It doesn’t matter. They come straight from the brain of the artisan creating them. It is a culture that loves the bizarre. We love these monsters. We love creating them. The very act of doing them is the artistic gesture

“I collect any iteration of Chernabog the demon from Fantasia,” he has disclosed. Arthur Rackham is a favorite, too. As much a teratophile as Clive Barker or China Mièville, he argues “The worst thing in designing a monster is just referencing other movies,” and that negative superlative applies to much more than just monsters. Reassuringly, Del Toro is not just the sum total of the films he’s seen. In 2007 he told The Onion “I find I’m waking up really early now, just to read. Waking up at ungodly hours. But I try to keep up, religiously. When I was a kid, it used to be a book a day. Then a book a week. Now it’s a book every two weeks.” Worlds are most effectively and evocatively built with words, so the fact that this director’s appetite for same has been voracious and omnivorous is a major plus:

For many decades my main area of interest has been horror fiction: Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, MR James, LeFanu, etc and classic Fairy tales and literature about the engines of Myth: unabridged Grimm, Andersen, Wilde, Bettelheim, Tatar, etc. Now and then I indulge in Science Fiction (not hardware oriented but more humanistic things) and thus I count Bradbury, Ellison, Sturgeon and Matheson amongst my favorites.
My area of interest gets much narrower when we deal with another genre… the genre that is shelved under Fantasy. As a youngster I read Moorcock, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, Lloyd Alexander, Fritz Leiber, Marcel Schwob, RE Howard and a few others. Nevertheless I was never propelled into an aleatory addiction to sub-genres like Sword & Sorcery or indiscriminate fantasies about magical this or that–Like any other genre or subgenre there’s a great abundance that makes it hard to discern when a new “trilogy” or “chronicle” comes from as genuine a place as Tolkien’s or derives from genuine fervor–religious or otherwise–like C.S. Lewis’ did.
 But here I am now: reading like a madman to catch up with a whole new land, a continent of sorts–a Cosmology created by brilliant philologist turned Shaman.
As if he grasped an existing universe outside our Platonic cave, Tolkien channels an entire world, weaving expertly from myth and lore. The outstanding virtue is that all this scholarly erudition doesn’t reduce his tales to mere taxidermy. He achieves an Alchemy all of his own: he writes new life in the freshly sculpted clay of his creatures.
I have, through the years become familiar with the very roots of Tolkien’s myths and the roots of Fafhrd or Elric or Hyperborea and many a time I have relished the intricate ways in which demonic wolves, shape-shifter and spindly-limbed pale warriors can be woven into those many tales that become, at the end, the single tale, the single saga–that of what is immortal in us all.
In creating Pan’s Labyrinth I drank deep of the most rigid form of Fairy Lore and tried to contextualize the main recurrent motifs in an instinctive rhyme between the world of fantasy and the delusions of War and Politics (the grown man’s way of playing make-believe) and in re-reading The Hobbit just recently I was quite moved by discovering, through Bilbo’s eyes the illusory nature of possession, the sins of hoarding and the banality of war–whether in the Western Front or at a Valley in Middle-earth. Lonely is the mountain indeed.
So, no, generally I am NOT a “Sword and Sorcery” guy or a “Fantasy” guy–By the same token, I’m not a sci-fi guy but I would make a film based on Ellison in a second- or on Sturgeon or Bradbury or Matheson. I’m not into Barbarians with swords but I would kill to tackle Fafhrd and Grey Mouser… and so on and so forth… I’m a believer but not a Dogmatic. I do the tales I love (regardless of what shelf Barnes & Noble classifies the book under) and I love The Hobbit. I love it enough to give it half a decade of my life and move half a world away to do it.

I’ve seen some raised hackles in response to the dismissal of “Barbarians with swords,” but that’s silly.

As with Antaeus, the strength of (non-whimsical) fantasy comes from having its feet, no matter how bizarrely shaped, on the ground, in touch with the earth earthly, and that ground is painfully dark and bloody in Pan’s Labyrinth, the Spanish title of which is El laberinto del fauno.

The suits worried, as suits do, that Americans would confuse the words “faun” and “fawn”—another entry for the Americans Be Stoopid annals of title-rethinks; it’ll be a miracle if Quantum of Solace isn’t rebaptized Teensy Bit of Comfort on the eve of its release in November. “Pan would be too dangerous a character to put in a fable like this,” notes del Toro, who knows his Machen and Saki. In the Pan’s DVD featurette “The Power of Myth,” he observes “The true power of fairy tale is that it is at the same time very simple and very brutal,” and the film explores Dunsany’s Beyond the Fields We Know while those that we do know are killing fields.

Ofelia, del Toro’s heroine, escapes to a Perilous Realm from one just as perilous, as the Franco-style fascism of Spain in 1944 polishes its jackboots and settles in for a long stay just as its exemplars are being bloodily expelled from France and Italy.

The faun of Pan’s Labyrinth mentions “old names that only the wind and the trees can pronounce,” and such names, as well as newer ones, are whispered through that movie and Hellboy 2, del Toro’s latest. He’s cautioned Tolkien fans not to read either film as a blueprint for The Hobbit:

We made a deliberate move away from the Celtic/Nordic aesthetics present in most fantasy films because we knew we could NOT out do bigger productions (like LOTR) at that game. We are a $85 million dollar film and we tried to find our own “look” so we endeavoured to create a very idiosyncratic melange of Arabic architecture and design and Oriental motifs. We took Japanese suit of armour patterns allowed it to be imbued by Celtic motifs, etc–you can see some of that in the trailer. Our Elfland is more akin to Dunsany or perhaps even Moorcock in its aesthetics, using the stark contrast of dark against white skin and golden eyes. Our magical world is broader and freer–even surreal at times–and suits the tone of this film. I am exceedingly aware of Genres and more so when I mix them and / or mix them together. Most of Hellboy will give you almost no indication of what will come to pass with The Hobbit. There is, however a PROLOGUE done with old wooden puppets that will share some faint traces that eventually you will be able to find in certain passages in the forthcoming movie. But even then, please do not take this as a verbatim through-line. When I started Hellboy 2 I had NO inkling that The Hobbit would really come my way and I wanted to use the Fantasy Worlds that lie beneath as a metaphor of all that mankind is extinguishing with its unending greed.

Greed will certainly be a through-line spanning the two projects. With the treasure within reach, most of the characters in The Hobbit come down with “dragon-sickness” (From time to time I amuse myself, and only myself, with thoughts of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as a study of dragon-sickness in which the dragon is the Civil War). Del Toro, who opines on the Pan’s DVD that “Monsters are here in our world to help us understand it,” has already weighed in on Tolkien’s saurian vector:

Smaug should not be “the Dragon in The Hobbit movie” as if it was just “another” creature in a Bestiary. Smaug should be “The Dragon” for all movies past and present. The shadow he cast and the greed he comes to embody- the “need to own” casts its long shadow and creates a thematic / dramatic continuity of sorts that articulates the story throughout. In that respect, Smaug the character is as important, if not more important, than the dragon. The character will emerge from the writing—and in that the magnificent arrogance, intelligence, sophistication, and greed of Smaug shine through.” In fact, Thorin’s greed is a thematic extension of this and Bilbo’s “Letting go” and his noble switching of sides when the dwarves prove to be in the wrong is its conceptual counterpart (that is a hard one to get through, Bilbo’s heroism is a quiet, moral one) and the thematic thread reaches its climax in the Bilbo / Thorin death bed scene.

Smaug probably won’t look much like this:

I don’t know if de Toro has read Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth, but if not he’s reached Shippeyesque conclusions on his own; to quote from the book “The character of Smaug is part of a Zusammenhang: nothing could be more archaic or fantastic than a dragon brooding on its gold, and yet the strong sense of familiarity in this one’s speech puts it back into the ‘continuum of greed,’ makes it just dimly possible that dragon-motivations on their different scale could have some affinity with human ones—even real historical human ones.”

Anyway, 2011 and 2012 will get here eventually; meanwhile Hellboy 2 is a compromise between comic book-derived blockbusterdom and much of the modern fantasy tradition, but not an uneasy compromise. Del Toro’s genre syncretism reinforces Mignola’s; Hellboy in comics form has always been the bastard son of a hundred maniacs, (the Dream Warriors reference is of course intended as a compliment). The superheroic makes room for the comic (Seth MacFarlane has been recruited to voice a new character who’s impossibly rigid and Teutonic though he exists only as gaseous ectoplasm) and the tragic: chiefly the People of the Earth, the Elves of Bethmora. When they die in Hellboy 2, they crumble into chunks of statuary, like vandalized sculptures, as if to suggest that the world has lost works of art as well as humanoids who still challenge the hegemons of homo sapiens. Del Toro’s King of Elfland, Balor, in effect decides after a disturbing victory that he is no Bran Mak Morn, for there is a weapon (the Golden Army) he will not use against Rome (mankind), at least not more than once. His revanchist son feels no such compunction, and Luke Goss’ Prince Nuada is an instant villain-upgrade from Rasputin in Hellboy (for anyone who’s even been in the same room as a copy of Nicholas and Alexandra, the mad monk failed to persuade as a threat to anything save the negotiable virtue of the Romanov court’s countesses). And in addition to furthering the mystique of Fair Folk martial prowess with his spear-work, Nuada is a fierce spokes-elf for Faerie irredentism. “Proud, empty, hollow things that you are,” he spits at a captive human audience, although subsequent sneering references to parking lots and shopping malls teeter on the edge of a Joni Mitchell paraphrase.

“If our days have ended, let us fade,” Princess Nuala implores her brother. “We will not fade,” he insists in defiance of almost everything that’s been written about Elves since LOTR; and when he’s called mad, he muses “Perhaps I am. Perhaps they have made me so.” He could be Moorcock’s Corum (the Prince with the Silver Hand where Nuada is Silverlance) or Tad Williams’ Feanorian Ineluki the Storm King talking.

The Silmarillion thrums with the potential for all-out war between Men and Elves; the greatest and most combustible genius of the elder people vows “We and we alone shall be lords of the unsullied light, and masters of the bliss and beauty of Arda. No other race shall oust us!” But the tension is never quite released on a battlefield, although we are told of the War of Wrath that “a great part of the sons of Men, whether of the people of Uldor or others new-come out of the east, marched with the Enemy; and the Elves do not forget it.” In the First Age the Elves, the willfully exiled Noldor in particular, are too numerous and powerful for any hostilities to last long; in the Third Age Men are gaining a similar ascendancy. That leaves the Second Age, wherein Sauron was a more immediate threat to both. Del Toro was speaking of Pan’s Labyrinth rather than Hellboy 2 when he commented “War creates an affirmation of ethics and morality or destroys them. It has that effect, there’s nothing in between,” but the insight bodes well for his treatment of The Battle of Five Armies in The Hobbit.

A troll market under the Brooklyn Bridge straight from the urban fantasy subgenre associated with Charles de Lint, royal twins whose minds and physical wellbeing are linked, a County Antrim necropolis emptied by “a plague of silence and death,” the dark underside of the notion of tooth fairies, and a gratifying plug for Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”—Hellboy 2 has plenty with which to occupy itself between slam-bang sprees. Yet its hero is never overshadowed (as seems to be the embryonic consensus about Batman/Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight).

“Born from a womb of shadows,” in Nuada’s words, “and sent to destroy [humanity’s] world,” yet a lover of beer and TV (and cats; it’s amusing to think of the big red demon and H. P. Lovecraft bonding as ailurophiles), he cradles a baby while fighting for his life as sure-handedly as Chow Yun-Fat in Hard-Boiled. The character is a prole without being lumpen, his inner demons under control (for now) despite his infernal parentage: “So much of my aesthetic was formed by my dad,” Perlman says. “He was into Cagney, Bogart, Errol Flynn, Gable, Spencer Tracy, John Garfield.” Over at the NYT, A. O. Scott entitled his Hellboy 2 review “Like Bogey, But With a Really Big Fist.” Of Perlman’s participation in The Hobbit, del Toro promises, “If the screenplay has a character he can fit and fulfill he’ll be there. But if there isn’t we will wait for the next one.“ Perlman as the growly, ursinoid Beorn is such luminously obvious casting that the director may well shy away for that very reason.

A movie that asks “Which holocaust should be chosen?” has a mind, and has things on that mind. Hellboy 2 doesn’t smell like popcorn, but rather like the flowers that bloom in the gore of its felled Forest Elemental, carpeting an undeserving stretch of Manhattan with supernal beauty. We need more movies like this, wherein boyish exuberance and adult shadings complement each other. In his DVD prologue to Pan’s Labyrinth, Del Toro says “This movie almost destroyed me, almost killed me,” and I hope The Hobbit is an equally intense moviemaking experience for him–in the best possible way, of course—as nothing would be a better guarantor that it will turn out to be be that kind of moviegoing experience, too.

Over at his personal blog, you can read about a new podcast now available online where he discussed REH, a new REH-related book project set to benefit Project Pride, and some of the other Howard things he’s working on or thinking about doing.

Via Dirty Harry’s Place, which is far and away my favorite film blog, you can read a nice interview with Conan the Barbarian director John Milius. Deep into the discussion Milius mentions Conan and REH, an exchange which may be of interest to readers of The Cimmerian:

TG: At one point, there was going to be Conan sequel, “King Conan,” with Arnold returning and you writing the script.

MILIUS: Yeah, I did a script and the Wachowski Brothers were the producers. But they decided they were too cool for this world. That was a terrific script. We stole a lot of stuff out of it and put it in “Rome.”

[...]

TG: So what’s the project you’re going to make in China?

MILIUS: The movie I’m doing now is “Genghis Khan,” and I look back at how much Genghis Khan influenced me in doing the original “Conan.” There’s even quotes of Genghis Khan in there, “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women.”

TG: There’s also a great scene in “Conan” where his father hands the sword down to him as a young boy and tells him that man will betray you, woman will betray you, but the steel will not betray you.

MILIUS: That was sort of my interpretation of (Conan author) Robert E. Howard I guess. He talked all the time about trusting your sword or something, but I liked the idea of trusting steel. The steel itself was an enigma and a mystery; I always had that thing about the blade, and that comes from my other Samurai life. My wife is convinced I was a Kamikaze pilot.

TG: Maybe you were a Samurai in another life.

MILIUS: She was also convinced that I rode with Cortez!

Interesting that Milius shares REH’s more-than-superficial fascination with the possibility of reincarnation. The film Patton (which Milius touches on in the interview and admires) also delved into this subject. I read Milius’ Conan the King script a few years ago and did a (negative) review of it for REHupa, so now I’ll have to check out the now-defunct HBO series Rome to see what was cribbed for use in that series.

Even though Milius’ “Robert E. Howard the Shotgun-wielding nut” mythologizing bothered me a great deal on the Conan the Barbarian DVD documentary, I still respect the man enormously as a writer and filmmaker, and have always defended Conan the Barbarian as a fine film (albiet not a faithfully Howardian one). I’ve even had the honor of loaning my video camera and light kit to Ethan Nahté for his John Milius interview a few years back, when Ethan was in LA doing REH-related pickups for his as-yet-uncompleted documentary on the Texan. As I recall he also used my equipment to record the late, great composer Basil Poledouris, who remains one of my all-time faves.

Reuters reports that a man preparing a house for demolition in England has discovered a postcard hidden behind the fireplace address to J.R.R. Tolkien, who once lived there. The sender of the postcard? Apparently it’s none other than Howardom’s own resident whipping boy, Lin Carter.

The report goes on to mention that Carter is the writer of Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings, a book that has as poor a reputation in Tolkien fandom as Carter’s Conan pastiches do in our neck of the woods. My favorite capsule dismissal of the book comes from Tom Shippey, who wrote in his masterful The Road to Middle Earth that Carter “prepared for his commentary on Tolkien by looking up ‘philology’ in ‘the dictionary’, to little profit — maybe it was the wrong dictionary.”

Reuters goes on to describe the postcard as perhaps being worth a “small fortune.” That’s going more than a bit too far, but it’s a cool find nevertheless. In REH’s case, I think we are far from exhausting the number of Howard items left to be unearthed in various people’s basements and garages. New pictures still crop up (witness the young Dr. Howard picture from The Cross Plains Review found in 2006), as well as new typescripts (as recently as last December, The Cimmerian presented a previously unknown version of Howard’s poem “Cimmeria”).

Whenever I need to take a break from the interminable rugby scrum that is the online Robert E. Howard Fan Community, I like to make my way to Goodreads and just play around. Goodreads is the most low maintenance, no pressure social networking site I’ve ever seen. Why? Because it’s built for book nerds.

No one cares what your astrological sign is on Goodreads. No one wants to know your OMG All-Time Favorite Coldplay song. Your net-fame has no juice here, Amigo. All that matters is what you read. See, this is something that book people have known for years. How many of us, when entering an acquaintance’s home, make a beeline for the bookcase? Nearly all of us. That’s the community at Goodreads.

All you do to become a member is the usual sign-up dance (or you can be invited). Once you’re online, simply type an author (oh, like, say, for instance, Robert E. Howard) into the search box. When the books come up, you’ll notice that they are clickable. You can rate them from 1 to 5, as well. When you give the book a rating, it adds that book to your (online) library. And that’s that! Once you have acquired some books in this manner, you can add reviews or commentary, or you can tag your books (they call this ’shelving’) as To-Be-Read or any number of other tags you can come up with.

The best fun, though, is browsing your friend’s books. You can see what they are reading (if they tell you that), what they have read, how they liked certain books, etc. etc. If you see that someone is reading something fascinating and wonderful, you can click through to Amazon.com and place an order. It’s really a lot of fun. I hop on every time I finish a book and add it to my list. Other people are using it to archive their collection. It’s an all around cool thing, with no one trying to spam you, and generally people who are interested in seeing what you are reading will ask to be your friend. But even that isn’t necessary.

I think this is something that even the most socially-awkward of REH fans could do. Join up, invite a few people you know, and start showing off what you have read. If any of you want to get an instant leg up, just Friend Me and let me know you’re a Cimmerian reader. If there’s enough of us, maybe we can start a Sword and Sorcery group. The book-filled sky is the limit, here.

This morning Between the Covers host John J. Miller brings the Dungeons & Dragons True Word to the heathen masses of the Wall Street Journal, and includes several news tidbits that proved new to me. Check it out.

One of the benefits of going to Howard Days is that attendees get first crack at the latest REH-related products. One of the standouts this year was Damon Sasser’s REH: Two-Gun Raconteur No. 12. Damon’s product keeps getting better and better. TGR12 is printed on heavy, brilliant white paper, which makes the color cover of Red Sonya, by Michael L. Peters, really pop and the articles and art within stand out for an enjoyable reading experience. This is a heavy magazine.

Once readers get over the sumptuous look and feel of the magazine, they can’t help but be blown away by the contents. First up is Robert E. Howard’s own “Fists of the Revolution” (with a fine illustration by Jim & Ruth Keegan). Boxing fans take note: this is one of those rare little boxing stories that was almost impossible to find. Its only appearance before TGR 12 is the elusive Fantasy Crossroads Special Edition#1 from 1976.

After REH, Damon has assembled a stellar group of writers to round out the issue. Mark Finn brings us “The Robert E. Howard Medicine Wheel,” which he describes as “an attempt to intuitively explore various aspects of the author’s life and work through the use (or misuse, as the case may be) of Native American symbols and concepts). This isn’t your typical Howard piece, but Finn’s writing, as always, is thought provoking and entertaining.

“Medicine Wheel” is followed by a fine piece by Charles Saunders (of Imaro fame) called “Progeny of Conan”; a “Robert E. Howard Horror Portfolio,” by Jim Ordolis; “Beggars of Life” (an examination of Howard’s interest in Jim Tully) by Brian Leno; “Black Stranger, White Wolflord or, Not Out of the Woods Yet,” by Steve Tompkins (nuff said!); plus reviews, coming attractions, and piles and piles of artwork sprinkled liberally throughout. Limited to 250 copies.

This is an old-school fanzine done right.

For years now, I’ve been buying certain paperbacks whenever I come across them; authors like Richard Stark (and his alter-ego, Donald Westlake), Karl Edward Wagner, George MacDonald Frasier, Robert Van Gulik, and of course, Robert E. Howard. As a used book store junky, I will frequently run across books by the above authors, and, seeing as how the bookstore is in a town of less than a thousand, I’ll buy the book for 98 cents, secure in the knowledge that I can pass it on to someone and hook them on the same authors that I like. It’s worked countless times before, particularly with Robert E. Howard and Donald Westlake. After all, if you’re trying to get someone to try a new author, you don’t want to loan them the book. Give it to them! If it’s theirs, then they can bend the cover all the way back, dog ear the pages, lick their fingers when they are turning them, and write little notes in the margins. That way, if they don’t like the book for whatever reason, they haven’t monkeyed with YOUR valuable collectible.

Well, I came across this website from fellow Clockwork Storybooker Chris Roberson, and I was immediately intrigued. This site lets you “tag” and “release” books into the wild. Each book tag has a unique number, and folks who pick up the book are encouraged to read it and pass it on, but not before going to the site and typing in where the book was found and what they thought of it. Then the next person does the same thing, and you can simply track where all of your books go as they make their way to wherever.

I love this idea. I’m going to tag all of my duplicates and judiciously set them out in high traffic places. The website lets you register for free, of course, and they also sell kits and supplies to make book tagging easier, of course. But you can do it for free–make your own tags–and then send your charges hither and yon. I’m curious to see where my duplicate copy of Black Vulmea’s Vengeance ends up.

I’m not suggesting you gut your collection to spread the REH gospel, but hey, if you have a couple of extra copies of things and you don’t quite know what to do with them, releasing a few books into the wild (and that’s a fitting image for REH books) can’t possibly hurt. You never know who is going to be hooked next…

ROB ADDS: This is a great program. Several English teachers in my school district have been doing this for years. The first time I read Catcher in the Rye was with a Book Crossing book. I left it at the Dallas mega-airport and watched it for a while to see where it went, fun.

One drawback to the hardcovers in which Dark Horse collects the story-sequences of its Conan comic is that they look fatally attractive on one’s bookshelf, and therefore disincentivize the regular purchase of the monthly comic books themselves. Having belatedly caught up with Rogues in the House and Other Stories, the hardbound showcase for the talents of Timothy Truman, Cary Nord, and Tomás Giorello, I’m feeling so sheepish as to be at risk, or even more at risk, for anthrax, to say nothing of how unable I would be to meet the disappointed gazes of Jim and Ruth Keegan. Mea culpa, mea maxima led-astray-by-laziness culpa.

The lengthy histories of Conan the Barbarian, The Savage Sword of Conan and other Howard-derived forays into the comics medium and their role in seducing and sustaining several generations of sword-and-sorcery fans deserve much more study than was devoted to the topic in Paul Sammon’s Conan the Phenomenon (In Conan: The Ultimate Guide to the World’s Most Savage Hero, Roy Thomas elected to write from “within” the Thurian/Hyborian pseudohistorical continuum as a sort of post-Nemedian scholar, rather than as the key Marvel Comics figure that he was). I find sneers about “comic book dinks” as tiresome as “fanboy” self-hatred, and I’ve always thought that Roy Thomas was a better sword-and-sorcery writer than anyone in the Seventies except Karl Edward Wagner, Charles R. Saunders, and David C. Smith; witness “Devil-Wings Over Shadizar,” “The Hour of the Griffin,” “The Garden of Death and Life,” “The Last Ballad of Laza-Lanti,” and “The Citadel at the Center of Time.”

The Hyborian scholar part of me reacts to “Rogues in the House” as if to Sarin nerve gas. Most of us know that REH disclosed to Clark Ashton Smith: “I didn’t rewrite it even once. As I remember I only erased and changed one word in it, and then sent it out just as it was written. I had a splitting sick headache, too, when I wrote the first half, but that didn’t seem to affect my work any.” Me, I’ve often wondered if that splitting sick headache didn’t suppress Howard’s nominalist impulses; it’s hard to know where we are in “Rogues.” At a court festival [whose court?] Nabonidus the Red Priest, who was the real ruler of the city [of which city?]…Murilo contemplates voluntary exile — from where? The Maze is “frequented by the boldest rogues in the kingdom” — which kingdom? Murilo could almost be taunting us when he promises Conan a pouch of gold and a good horse: “With those, you can escape from the city and flee the country.” Gaaaahhhh.

What’s the big deal? Well, to name something is to make it more real, unless the naming is done by Michael Moorcock on a bad day. Howard or Tolkien, CAS or KEW, George R. R. Martin or Steven Erikson, I like to have my surroundings identified in a story of fantastic adventure, enjoy being able to weigh and bite down on the coinages of the author’s nomenclature, relish the chance to size up the background of a story’s foreground. Priorities differ; in his pendant article for the Rogues hardcover “Robert E. Howard: The Fourth Rogue,” Mark Finn faults the Conan adventures that preceded “Rogues” but succeeded “Queen of the Black Coast” for too great an effort “to describe the geography and the age of [Howard’s] imagined world, sometimes to the detriment of the story.” For me, too much information is never enough when it comes to a Middle-earth, a Hyborian Age, or a Nehwon.

So “Rogues” meseemeth a little underfurnished or bare-bones, perhaps because inspiration jumped Howard all at once. The kingdom goes unnamed. The city goes unnamed. Cesspit Girl and her “punk” go unnamed, and the priest of Anu is just the priest of Anu. It’s often assumed that the story takes place in Corinthia, and names like Athicus and Petreus sound Corinthian, or what we imagine Corinthian names might sound like. Nabonidus’ name is the Hellenized version of the Neo-Babylonian monarch’s name (Nabû-nã’id). In a way the person who could have settled the setting for us only added to the frustration: replying to P. Schuyler Miller, he wrote

I am not sure that the adventure chronicled in “Rogues in the House” occurred in Zamora. The presence of opposing factions of politics would seem to indicate otherwise, since Zamora was an absolute despotism where differing political opinions were not tolerated. I am of the opinion that the city was one of the small city-states lying just west of Zamora, and into which Conan had wandered after leaving Zamora.

Could be Corinthia; ‘just west of Zamora” is the right place for Corinthia, and those “small city-states” suggest the Greek polis, just as the reference to the Corinthian mercenaries in “Black Colossus” invokes the surplus fighting men who sprouted as if from dragon’s teeth in Greece and had to be exported, not only after the Peloponnesian War but before the Persian Wars (see Scott Oden’s Homerically hard-edged novel about conquistadorial hoplites in a semi-senescent Egypt, Men of Bronze). But why couldn’t Howard have come right out and said Corinthia or Corinthian? Neither word appears in the story.

In “Xuthal of the Dusk” Conan is introduced in the second sentence of the first paragraph. In “The Pool of the Black One,” he emerges from the Western Ocean with an aplomb worthy of Joe Haldeman’s Attar the Merman in the second paragraph. “Rogues” is different from its immediate predecessors, even a little diffident. Howard first introduces Nabonidus and Murilo, then the backstory involving the priest of Anu and the Gunderman deserter. When we do see Conan, it’s through Murilo’s eyes, and “the Cimmerian” isn’t even identified as being named Conan until Murilo is back home. Conan doesn’t take over as the POV character until the second chapter, after Murilo has decided to take matters into his own aristocratic hands and discovered the corpses of the dog and Joka chez Nabonidus. While the much younger thief-phase Conan of “Rogues” clearly hadn’t yet drifted out of Howard’s purview, perhaps the more mature, assured, and ambitious character of the preceding stories impeded authorial access to him at first. It’s almost as if Murilo and not Conan stood there and told Howard the story (Incidentally, the nobleman, like Amalric in the “Drums of Tombalku” fragment and of course Balthus in “Beyond the Black River,” is one of the rare occasions when we study Conan by way of a male rather than female POV character).

Still, nomenclature-challenged and Murilo-centric though it may be, “Rogues” rocks. Howard’s perfectly phrased and placed “One fled, one dead, one sleeping in a golden bed” epigraph always reminds me of Sergio Leone’s sardonic labeling of il buono, il brutto, and il cattivo at the beginning and especially the end of the first of his two masterpieces, and Nabonidus’s derisive “Rogues together! But not fools together” neatly encapsulates the Leone ethos. Perfumed hair and cesspool-diving, assignations and assassination, a holy man fixated on this world and a barbarian who speaks unselfconsciously of the next. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Dumas’ Cardinal Richelieu (“The head, clad in the familiar scarlet hood of the gown, was bent forward as if in meditation”) cast long shadows, and the better angels of our nature are routed by the grinning apes of same — Howard came close to writing Le planète des singes decades before Pierre Boulle did.

Plus, way back in the dim dawn ages of genre expectations, this author is already turning them upside down. The archvillain’s henchman usurps his master’s part; it’s almost as if James Bond, assigned to eliminate Auric Goldfinger, were to sneak into the latter’s sanctum sanctorum only to find that Oddjob had rebelled and taken over. As for Nabonidus himself, it’s impossible to imagine him claiming, as does the Master of Yimsha, to have known “the kisses of the queens of hell.” He is less a caster of spells than someone upon whom technology has cast a spell; a set of Popular Mechanics back issues might excite him more than the iron-bound tome of Vathelos the Blind. At one point he swears by the soul of Mitra, and gains Murilo’s reluctant endorsement: “Even the Red Priest would not break that oath.” Having contained at one time both an Orastes (The Hour of the Dragon) and a Nabonidus, the Mitraic clergy is as fallible as any.

“I gradually discovered that adapting [“Rogues’] faithfully and having the gall to add two prelude chapters would be a more difficult task than I could ever have imagined. It was also one of the most exhilarating and rewarding creative endeavors I’ve ever undertaken,” Tim Truman confides. That shows in the result; his “Rogues” issues more than earn the dignity of hardcovers, reading as they do like a novella (still, the many-noveled career of David Gemmell notwithstanding, the optimum length for the best sword-and-sorcery). Nestor lingers as a character after his execution, and his corpse is spirited away to Yaralet (“The Hand of Nergal”) and what will be the next storyline. Truman’s dialogue is as free with felicities as that of Roy Thomas at the top of his game; “You’ll never die, you bastard. You’re too ugly for your people’s heaven, and too pretty for their hell” might have made Howard himself smile, and “Conan could snatch the shine from a banker’s teeth” is a testimonial-and-a-half. We learn that raiding Picts did for the Gunderman’s parents, and Conan’s reflection that “it [is] a strange and satisfying thing, to kill an enemy twice” is as effective a punchline with the errant priest of Anu as is the taloned airlift Tsotha-lanti’s noggin endures in “The Scarlet Citadel.”

Lastly in terms of Truman’s little touches that say so much, I can only imagine Mark Finn’s emotions when Conan climbs into the ring with the striped-jerseyed Stokosta the Seaman, who wants only to win enough gold to finance a return to his shipmates, and whose white bulldog growls at the Cimmerian once the sailor is out on his feet. Such is the authority of the Violet Crown Players that I heard Mark’s voice in my head playing Stokosta.

With due respect-bordering-on-veneration for the One True Frazetta, Argentine artist Tomás Giorello captures Thak as successfully as anyone has since Nabonidus scooped up the orphaned cub in the mountains at the eastern edge of Zamora. Giorello’s closeups allow us to verify that a “monstrous body [houses] a brain and soul that [are] just budding awfully into something vaguely human.” One panel presents apeman-in-motion exactly as Howard describes, “his bowed legs hurtling his enormous body along at a terrifying gait”; the frisson here is akin to watching Tim Roth’s General Thade bust a genuinely simian move in the otherwise lamentable 2001 Tim Burton version of Planet of the Apes. Where Cary Nord’s art was italics, Giorello’s is more like boldface; heavier lines and more assertiveness are comforting to those of us who grew up with inkers embellishing (and sometimes all but ousting) pencillers.

But Howard fans always want more: more of the real thing, which now that The Last of the Trunk has been released is less and less likely, and more of the Howardian source material in any adaptation, no matter the format or venue. I’m sorry the adaptation’s Conan doesn’t get to say “Well, he’s traveled the road all rogues must walk at last,” and sorrier still that he loses his “I will count him among the chiefs whose souls I have sent into the dark, and my women will sing of him” lines after he admits that Thak was a man, not a beast. The missing words beautifully illustrate, as would woad daubings or an animal-teeth necklace, the extent to which his worldview is still tribal at this early stage.

Howard’s Nabonidus delights in letting Murilo know he’s onto him: “Before he died he told me many things, among others the name of the young nobleman who bribed him to filch state secrets, which the nobleman in turn sold to rival powers,” Later, he notes of Petreus’ band: “They had the same idea you had. Only their reasons were patriotic rather than selfish.” So it’s surprising that Truman, one of the GrimJack principals, felt an idealism-upgrade was necessary for Howard’s “white-handed thief”: “For too long, corruption and unrest had spoiled the kingdom. Prince Murilo dreamed of making the empire whole again.” (Also, which empire is that now?)

In the original story Nabonidus revels in the messy quietus of Petreus & Company: “They are all down, and the living tear the flesh of the dead with their slavering teeth.” Unlike Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith back in Conan the Barbarian #11, Dark Horse doesn’t have the old Comics Code breathing censoriously down their neck, so I wish this detail hadn’t been omitted, not because I’m a gorehound but because it’s the most graphic possible demonstration of how Thak reduces a group of men to the bestial state he himself is seeking to escape. Giorello wonderfully delivers on the twist that, in an abode full of death-traps, the villain’s undoing is a stool, but more could possibly have been done with Howard’s visual joke of the post-impact Red Priest who, although divested of his robes, lies “etched in crimson.”

My equally opinionated blog-brother Finn objects to “scrying mirrors that belong in some Clark Ashton Smith Atlantis story.” Actually the mirrors are used for spying, not scrying, and I’m not sure they’re out of place in the Hyborian Age. Think of the inhabitants of Xuthal, the lotophagous scions of “mental giants” who illumined their city with wall-jewels “fused with radium”; their food is not grown but concocted. Livia and her luckless brother in “The Vale of Lost Women” are members of the “house of Chelkus,” blueblooded scientists, and if we recall the “glassy knob which glowed with a golden radiance” in “Tombalku” and Xuchotlan gewgaws like Tolkemec’s crimson-knobbed, energy beam-firing jade wand in “Red Nails,” Nabonidus’ home security system can’t really be categorized as Smithian. The lost cities of Conan’s time (a few of which the Red Priest might have visited) would seem to be peopled by not only relict populations but early adopters.

Speaking of weird science, once the nationalists are as dead as they can be in Truman’s adaptation, Murilo turns on the Red Priest and possibly works a Richard Matheson allusion into his rebuke: “You’ve created unholy things for this hell-house, Nabonidus. Your soul will be damned for such magic!”

The other man isn’t having it: “Magic? Fool, this is no magic. I practice the arts of intellect, not superstition. The day will come when the power of magic will wither and be cast aside like the old gods, and only science will rule!” An succinct invocation of enlightenment as “endarkenment”; Nabonidus, a premature technocrat, would do very well indeed as a member of the Inner Party in a superstate like Oceania. Now it is Conan’s turn to speak up, and return us to the eternal severities of the Hyborian Age: “If that’s true, then answer this, priest — why are we in these pits, hiding from some animal? Someday, when all your science and civilization are likewise swept away, your kind will pray for a man with a sword.” So Nabonidus predicts the victory of sorcery’s callow rival science, whereupon Conan trumps him with the victory of steel, in a swordsman’s hands, over both. Note the echo of Conan’s farsightedness in ‘Beyond the Black River”: The time may come when they’ll see the barbarians swarming over the walls of the eastern cities.” I hope Mr. Truman will continue to summon Howard’s demons from out the vasty deep like this.

He’s not an outsider looking in at sword-and-sorcery; in his intro to Rogues in the House and Other Stories he recalls transferring Gardner Fox’s Kothar, Barbarian Swordsman from a drugstore rack to his hot little hands back in 1967. Any mook can mention Thongor or Brak; Kothar is more insidery:

Kothar opened my eyes to a new genre — one that combined the elements of every sort of story that I was drawn to: the action of comics, the sense of otherwordliness and wonder of science fiction, the darkness and menace of horror, the drama of historical stories, and the timeless heroism of mythology.

I was disappointed when Kurt Busiek left the Dark Horse comic, and be damned to the squalling about the “bitch-slap” episode (a child cuffed during a couple of panels in a single issue, endlessly denounced by one fan in particular, strident as a human car alarm, whose gag reflex oddly never seems to have kicked in no matter how much the de Camp and Carter pastiches required him to swallow). I thought Busiek did mostly good work, with a standout sequence filling us in, much more memorably than did the Conan the Swordsman offering “Legions of the Dead,” on the reason for the Cimmerian’s lifelong detestation of the Hyperboreans. Rather than borrowing from the Kalevala (Pohiola, Vammatar) as did de Camp and Carter, Busiek played with the old, old Greek conceit of Hyperborea as a paradise secreted behind the North Wind, a preserve strolled by savants of lordly longevity but built on the corpses of captives drained of their life-force. But reading Rogues in the House and Other Stories turned out to be an act of contrition for my lack of faith in the Truman Administration: this West Virginian may not have been genetically engineered to be a Conan comics writer, but he’s certainly been generically engineered, through his work on GrimJack, Scout, Wilderness, and Straight Up to See the Sky. In his foreword to The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, another artist, Mark Schultz, described the Conan of “Black Colossus” as “the veteran mercenary who begins to understand that he has it within him to go all the way, ” (those who are too quick to lump the story in as part of the Conan-and-the-ankle-clinger-of-the-month grouping should regard Schultz’s as a cautionary insight) so it’s serendipitous that a writer with a merc-antihero than whom there is none grittier in his background will be scripting Dark Horse’s back-to-#0 Conan the Cimmerian, which will deal with the barbarian-as-sellsword.

The editors and creators have moseyed on down the timeline a bit with miniseries like the chintzy chinoiserie of Conan and the Demons of Khitai and P. Craig Russell’s rather too Melnibonean adaptation Conan and the Jewels of Gwahlur. Given Scout, set in a postapocalyptic Southwest where the Apache skillset of Truman’s Emanuel Santana is the only birthright that isn’t a death sentence, and Wilderness, a graphic novel about turncoat/turnskin and dark-side-of-Dan’l-Boone Simon Girty (among the dastards called for jury duty in The Devil and Daniel Webster), here’s hoping they turn Mr. Truman loose in the Pictish Wilderness, where “Wolves Beyond the Border” characters like the Girtyish Lord Valerian and Kwarada would be perfect for him. And his website treats us to a preview of an Edda-steeped project called Odin: The Wanderer; in the excerpt the one-eyed king of the Æsir opts to bring Loki back to Asgard, the decision that will breed so many stories and so much sorrow. The characters are conceived as armed-to-the-teeth ursinoids, so I wonder if Mr. Truman is already sick of questions about Iorek Byrnison and the other panserbjØrne (armored bears) in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. In any event, a yen for “the Northern thing” bodes well for any Conan the Cimmerian stories that cast a cold eye in a Nordheimrly direction.

So thanks to Messrs. Truman and Giorello, I’ve seen the error of my hardcover-awaiting ways and will revert to being a monthly buyer.