An Age Undreamed Of

Last year, during the Easter holidays, I travelled as far south as it's possible to go in Scotland- Port Logan in the Rhins of Galloway. This summer, I have a notion to go to the Machars of Galloway and the other side of Luce Bay. I haven't been there since 1976 and our family summer holiday. We'd stayed there previously, in 1972, at the Greenmantle Hotel ( I'd never had grapefruit for breakfast before!) and the second time around, we stayed in a guesthouse run by a couple called Crawley. I remember getting these comics in Glen Luce:

 As they said in those days, you can see where my pubertal head was at: lost worlds of swordplay and monsters.The Kubert cover was a shock and a disappointment after three years of Kirby but I stuck with the Last Boy on Earth right up to the DC Implosion. Killraven was a gorgeous acid trip, freighted with McGregor's angsty, pretentious New Wave-inspired poetry. (That's the UK Sci-fi New Wave, not Nick "Basher" Lowe. If only it had beeen!)

For the long car journey home, though, I managed to get a copy of this: Panther Books Skull-Face Omnibus Volume Three. This scar-faced knight looks a bit skinny to be the Cimmerian but these were tales of Marvel's barbarians, Kull and Conan, sure enough.

I'd previously read the comic book adaptations of some of the stories in the UK version of Savage Sword of Conan but this was my real introduction to the grisly, macabre pulp writing of Robert E. Howard. By this point, I'd already read The Lord of the Rings twice and it was Marvel that had led me to it. The forbidding Norse mountains on this cover still seem exciting and mysterious after all these decades (even though, when I taught it, I found it twee and extremely slow):

But the action, the horror and exoticism of Howard, couple with the modernity of  Conan's dialogue hooked me. The following year, I pursued the Sphere books, in Glasgow's John Menzies in Buchanan Street and Grant's bookshop next to Central Station. It was a cramped, subterranean place, where I got my first glimpse of Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks. "Warrior" was the first all- Conan book I read: I can picture reading Red Nails in my bedroom on a Saturday afternoon in my dad's house and "Isles" was my first selection when I joined Strathaven Library.

In the meantime, I'd been following the Belit saga in the colour edition of Conan since its beginning:

As I've written before, the distribution of colour comics was fairly spotty and although I tried to faithfully follow the corsair series through its witty Tarzan homage, through reprints and the Dreaded Deadline Doom, I did tire a little of the lengthy Egyptian or Stygian sequence ( I still hear "St-EYE-gia" in my head, rather than "St-IDGE-ia". Foolish boy).
At the rain-lashed end of our 1977 family holiday in isolated Portobello Bay, I got this Treasury Edition in Stranraer:

Red Sonja, in her chain-mail bikini, was probably Marvel's biggest female star in the mid-70s.

It's notable because it features stories drawn by Marvel's three premiere Conan artists: Barry Smith, Gil Kane and John Buscema. The Song of Red Sonja, with its Art Nouveau minarets, treasure chests and its risque humour takes me back to the dentist's waiting room in Strathaven; the Kane story, Night of the Dark God, is violent and tragic; and Black Colossus is a lush, moody epic of chivalric battles with an undead sorceror.
 Three years later, on our family holiday to Morecambe, we visited Blackpool where I got a copy of the first Conan Treasury on a seaside stall. I don't think I appreciated what I'd found-especially considering it was five years old.

Being more interested in the Hyborian map which plotted Conan's wanderings in the comic, I was blase about the reprint of Rogues in the House, which I'll come to again later; nor was I really aware that the version of Red Nails was in colour for the first time. It truly can be described as a deluxe edition.

My Strathaven library membership permitted me to use East Kilbride library too. Having read about Marvel's adaptation of Lin Carter's Thongor in Foom, some six years earlier, I snapped up all the hardbacks I could lay my hands on:

Carter welds the barbarian-versus-sorceror trope to the forgotten science and prehistoric monsters more familiar from John Carter's Mars and Pellucidar. It's a rollicking combination but his plots are straight out of Flash Gordon and Crash Corrigan and his dialogue is painful. Like DC's Gardener Fox, Carter always has a nugget of obscure scientific or esoteric knowledge to lend his yarns respectability; for that reason, I have a fondness for his huge body of work. A particular favourite was his pastiche of the Barsoom novels: I bought it on my first visit to the "Beehive" in Amsterdam in the late 70s.

What I find particularly likeable is Carter's assertion, like Burroughs, that he is publicising the actual adventures of a Viet-vet on the Jovian moon. He goes one step further than ERB and in one book actually joins his hero on Thanator where he becomes Lankar of Callisto (Lankar = Lin Carter, natch). It's very easy to spot the Thongor stories that were recycled by Carter and De Camp to plug gaps in the Conan cycle- more of that later.
In 1979, it seemed there was a plethora of Sword-and-Sorcery books. I can still smell the incense in both the Hamilton and East Kilbride branches of Bell, Book and Candle where I used to browse the Monty Python Papperbok In EK, the shop was in the arcade, with the 4A's, the pet shop and Marina's hairdresser (where I used to go for the beginning-of-term trim).Visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCATAwQOdlM and see! Allegedly, BB and C survived until the early 90s; I definitely bought The Warrior of World's End there:

.

This was another series from Carter, set in an unimaginably distant future of science and sorcery. The whimsical, cutesy characters and the nonsensical names of the alien lands quickly became grating however. I also bought this Moorcock novel in EK, possibly on the day I saw Superman The Movie.

Again, it was Barry Smith's Conan that led me to the doomed albino sorceror-king and I liked this version slightly more than the queasy psychedelia of the editions in Strathaven Library:

 Pure heavy mental

In the August of 78, on the beach at Lendalfoot, I envisaged putting Tom Baker's Doctor and the Gallifreyan Rodan in the Flame Winds of Khitai story from Conan's colour comic. The following year, I was travelling to the hated Hamilton Grammar School and nodding with adolescent tiredness over the John Carter books:

The NEL books brought a Cecil B. DeMille glamour and spice to the dusty Edwardian prose. I'm thinking of revisiting Barsoom in prose and in the comics this holiday period too. In 1979, I bought this novel by L. Sprague de Camp- surely the best name for a fantasy author since Tolkien- but I can't remember a thing about it. I post it purely for its sheer late-70s grooviness.

By the early 80s, movies like Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja and the Beastmaster carried the genre into its next incarnation: role-playing games. I dabbled a bit in this area, with its many-sided die and Dungeon Master's Screen but I was studying English at University now and the flaws of Carter's style in particular were painfully apparent. Reading Hardy and Virginia Woolf, I became burned out on S&S; My last hurrah was on my second visit to Amsterdam, in the summer of 1981.

A Burroughsian pastiche of astral travel and giant insects on a forest planet, it carried exquisite illustrations but, for all its romance and Tibetan lore, it suffers a little from Carter's movie-serial predictability.
I read a couple of the interminable Richard Blade series in 1980 but their lunatic blend of racist cariacture, espionage, bad sci-fi and softcore porn was risible.

In latter years, I've picked up browning copies of paperbacks by JLA alumnus Gardener Fox but they're also mechanical and formulaic both in their depiction of sorcery and sex. Similarly, Brak the Barbarian is a completely forgettable Conan copy- except that he was blond.

Last week, on a trip back to Glasgow, I took the Centenary Edition of the Complete Conan Chronicles out of the GOMA library. This hefty volume reprints all the REH stories as they were originally published. It's interesting to look at them with a teacher's eye but I still got a lot of pleasure and entertainment from revisiting them. Here's my Top Ten Conan Adventures, in no particular order:

The Phoenix on the Sword- Reworked Kull story but best of the first half-dozen. Thoth-Amon seems the real protagonist though.
The Tower of the Elephant- Exotic fable of thievery, alien worlds and revenge.
Rogues in the House- Political chicanery, a monster ape-man -and no heroine.
Queen of the Black Coast- Sexy, fatalistic and hallucinatory tragedy of the pirate queen, Belit.
People of the Black Circle- Himalayan epic about a mystical cult; memorable heroine in the Devi.
The Jewels of Gwahlur - Heist story in a lost city. Echoes of ERB and an actress-heroine.
Beyond the Black River- Exciting and well-written; owes a lot to Last of the Mohicans.
Red Nails-  Lurid and gory tale of feuding in an Aztec culture with tentative lesbian subtext.
Hour of the Dragon- Globe-trotting serial with Conan deposed by an ancient super-villain.
The Black Stranger- Highly readable tale of piracy and Indian-fighting. Well-characterised.

I once read that any Doctor Who story with "Time" in the title would be disappointing : The Time Monster, The Invasion of Time, Timelash. It seems there's an inverse law for Conan and the word "black". Also, three of my top ten were published together in Conan the Warrior, that first Sphere paperback. The Picts-as- Red Indians stories are among the best, suggesting that if he had lived, Howard's frontier tales might have been highly-regarded.
I haven't said anything yet about the Conan movie that Arnie starred in; firstly, because I didn't see it until a tv screening in the late 80s and secondly because the camp appeal of Schwartzenegger's wooden acting has never charmed me, notwithstanding the protestations of Iain, my lodger in the mid-90s. However, the fact remains: it was made and it cemented a version of the character in wider popular culture. That's how vital a character Conan was in the 70s.
Next time, I'll tell you about my take on the rest of the Conan canon and the associated Marvel comics I've bought on ebay in the last couple of months.

The Legal Bit: all images are used fairly and are considered copyright of their respective owners.