This run covers from January
1981 to October 1981, so it took me out of high school, through the summer, and
into my first semester of college. There were beginning to be excited rumblings (including a proposed storyboard) about the coming Conan film.
Robert E. Howard, although
now firmly established in the broader Fantasy genre, was more of an all-purpose
pulp writer. In fact, when he passed away, he was publishing a series of boxing
stories. Whatever genre he wrote in, his heroes tended to be tough two-fisted
loners, cowboys, sailors, or warriors who could fight their way out of almost
any situation.
But he is most closely
associated with Weird Tales (‘The Unique Magazine’), where his Conan
stories had their debut. He carried on a correspondence with fellow contributor
H. P. Lovecraft, the cosmic horror writer. The stories in Weird Tales
were … niche, to say the least, and though nerdy were seen to be lowbrow. If
you wanted ‘real’ literature, you went to The Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s
Magazine for your high-falutin’, prestigious fix. But Howard had something,
something that persisted and grew in the popular culture, until now even
academics have to sit up and take notice.
Howard’s tales appeal to ‘adolescents
of all ages’, but especially to early teen boys, a situation parodied in National
Lampoon’s ‘Cohen the Boybarian’. It was not so much his style as his
substance that appealed, his set-up and his ‘philosophy’. Even when I was
collecting the Del Rey volumes of his work (since sold), I found it a chore
reading his prose and seldom read anything all the way through. But I HAD to be
the Fantasy Guy. And they were deeply discounted in the Bargain Books catalog.
The Savage Sword
(and later the Conan movie) was just about the right mediation level of Howard
for me, that is, when they did actually adapt his work. They had plenty of
other writers, writing plenty of new tales, all to formula. But even now I am
tempted by the hardback omnibus volume of all the old authentic Robert E.
Howard Conan tales. There is a part of me, too, that is always enduring (if only
in memory) permanent adolescence.
