That bearded Aesir - besieged by a trio of yapping foes! No affar of mine. I've done my day's work for Aesir gold. Still, why should one lion die- and three jackals live? By Crom! They should not - and by Crom they shall not!!
I don't know if anyone has ever given Roy Thomas the credit he deserves, because in the halls of the Conan pastiche creators (fellows such as L. Sprague de Camp and Robert Jordan) I can't recall anyone else ever writing a speech quite like that for our Cimmerian friend. In fact, while it is singularly out of character for Conan as Howard himself wrote him to talk so much, what Roy managed to do in that passage is impressive on its own. He's encapsulated the entire style of the Howard canon (that breathless, non-stop narrative force, with its manifest disdain for civilization and civilized folk) and has used Conan himself as its mouthpiece, in keeping with Marvel's tendency towards using its characters as mouthpieces for the stories (think back to any one of Peter Parker's long soliloquies) and their themes. Nothing Roy has Conan say is anything Conan would disagree with: in fact, I'd have to say that among those that wrote stories of the Cimmerian as he reaves his way across the jeweled thrones of the earth, Roy and his co-conspirator Barry Windsor-Smith have one of the best takes on exactly who Conan is and how he'd act. It's not flawless, mind you, but expecting perfection from a comic book adaptation of another format, especially one that had to contend with the Comics Code Authority (and if you read a single one of Howard's Conan stories you'll realize that the CCA would have exploded in a shower of viscera if Roy and Barry hadn't been careful) is probably not very reasonable.
In Howard's unfortunately abbreviated career, he created many characters - the pictish king Bran Mak Morn, the adventurous Steve Costigan, the stern and relentless Solomon Kane, and the philosophical king and barbarian Kull. Yet as excellent as those characters and their stories often are (and I greatly enjoy Howard's unusual Kull stories, with their air of ancient decay and their heroic center, a king and barbarian who contemplates the meaning of his existence so often you begin to wonder if Schopenhauer wrote the stories, or perhaps Camus) the character who was the centerpiece of Howard's reputation and the one without whom we might not even know his name today is his Conan the Cimmerian, who rose from mercenary and thief to eventually become king of Aquilonia by his own had. Unlike Kull, who Conan was clearly patterned on (the first Conan story, The Phoenix on the Sword, is a revision of a Kull story, By This Axe I Rule, which was rejected for publication) the Cimmerian is not a deep thinker, he does not muse or ponder about the fetters of civilization, the meaning of his life, the duration of his memory or the memory of nations, or indeed much of anything. This isn't because Conan is of inferior intelligence to Kull or anyone else: in Howard's stories (and in Roy's, too, for the most part) Conan is in fact very intelligent with quick wits and a keen eye. However, the essential difference between Kull and Conan, and that difference being most likely what allowed Conan to rise to the top of Howard's stable of characters, is that when confronted by an ancient wonder or a time lost ruin, Kull was likely to muse and ponder. Conan was much more likely to kill and plunder. Kull might ask what it meant: Conan wouldn't care. When you combine this with Kull's relative disinterest in women (whenever a woman appears in a Kull story she's usually in love with some younger character and Kull serves, at best, to rescue and unite them, usually pretty diffidently) we begin to see that the two characters are almost mirror opposites of each other. It's hard to argue that the hard drinking, woman chasing Cimmerian doesn't make a better character for comic books.
Roy and Barry capture this aspect of Conan's personality very well in their adaptation of a non-Conan Howard story, The Garden of Fear. In it, after having dispatched a strange ebon-winged entity in a tower surrounded by carnivorous plants, Conan's traveling companion Jenna asks him if he's curious at all about this strange tower, the now-dead angelic figure who sought to throw humans to be fed upon by the bloodthirsty plants, or anything else about their situation. Conan replies that he's dropped their food pouch rescuing her and that they'd better make haste to find more. In a world of strange monsters and debauched cities, Conan does so well because he concerns himself primarily with the business at hand, reaving, stealing, killing, taking revenge on those who wrong him, not contemplating the ringing of a gong or engaging in discourse as to the nature of the passage of time with a talking cat.
The volumes of The Chronicles of Conan I picked up this weekend (which I will be going in-depth issue by issue in the next post) show that Roy Thomas developed an understanding of the character over the first five or so issues of the book, moving from plots that could well have unfolded in an issue of Fantastic Four (the story Lair of the Beast-Men in particular is not a very convincing Conan story, especially when you combine Roy's very stereotypical plot with Barry Smith's as yet still very Kirbyesque art style... it looks like Conan has somehow stumbled into an issue of The Avengers in a few places, and the scene where Conan finds the fallen beast-man's crown and sets it on the brow of the deceased chief thrall... it's not in character at all) to two excellent tales that both in art and story show that the team of Thomas and Windsor-Smith were moving in a new direction with the character. Both Twilight of the Grim Grey God and Tower of the Elephant show that Thomas is starting to get how to have Conan act like Howard's character while still appearing in a comic book and that Windsor-Smith's art is losing the Kirby influences, becoming looser, rangier, and allowing the adventures of the young Cimmerian to have that feeling of decadence and fading glory so much a part of the character. From these two stories developed the style for the best tales in these two volumes.
Next up: a story by story evaluation of Roy and Barry's take on the once and future king of Aquilonia.
Posted by Matt Rossi at March 31, 2005 11:29 AM