Just a quick post to let subscribers know that the latest orders are eeking out of Cimmerian central at the rate of four or five per business day, so if you haven’t received yours yet do not despair, it is coming. Now that the Centennial year is nearing its spiritual completion (the V3 Index is the last obligation to meet on that score) I’m going to start emailing confirmation numbers again for every order, so keep an eye in your in-box for that, which will let you know when its on its way.

The perils of running a one-man shop are becoming more apparent as time goes on. Only so many boxes can fit into a car during any one trip, only so many Cimmerian-related hours can be squeezed out of any one week, and only so many new subscribers can be added to the rolls before the task of invoicing/packing/mailing grows to near-insurmountable proportions. This, by the way, is why I don’t take subscriber money up front. Delays aren’t fun, but at least you don’t have $$$ wrapped up in them.

The good news is that those who have seen the slipcases have gone ga-ga over them. Last night the venerable Donald Sidney-Fryer, a man who has seen a lot in his day, declared that they were “among the finest examples of collector packaging I’ve ever seen.” I don’t know about that, but it was sure something to pack one of them full of Deluxe V3 issues and put it up on the shelf next to the first two. Seeing it there taking up so much space brought home how extensive the 2006 Cimmerian achievement had been. That’s a whole lot of writin’ sitting in that slipcase.

The August issue is shaping up nicely, with a Cross Plains trip report unlike any others I’ve printed, written as it is from the vantage point of a new attendee to the event. I’m going to try to get the Awards issue finished in time to mail along with the August issue, but no promises on that score.

A few new Cimmerian library booklets are nearing completion as well, some Howard-related, and some focusing on aspects of legendary genre (and REH) publisher Arkham House. Once those get up to 10 issues or so, I’ll look into making a slipcase for them, too.

On the fantasy scholarship front, check the Black Gate website this Sunday for an article by Ryan Harvey about Poul Anderson’s classic Icelandic saga homage The Broken Sword.

The news that New Line picked up the Conan movie option that Warner Brothers dropped was met with the usual spread of comments online, from “Good!” to “We’ll see,” to even “Why can’t Arnold come back?” No one in fandom can agree on what the new Conan movie should be; apparently, Hollywood feels the same way. Otherwise, Warner would have re-upped on the option because they had some sort of “take” on the character.

This is part of what bothers me about movie makers coming to Conan (and other REH properties) with the old-fashioned and now-mostly useless mandate of “Well, we have to make some changes to the character, or it just won’t fly.” Tell that to Sam Raimi. Or Chris Nolan. They seemed able to throw iconic and beloved characters onto the silver screen with nary a hiccup in what makes them so iconic and beloved in the first place.

Which brings me back to Conan. I’ve been asked this question so many times, and for so many different reasons, that I cannot even conceive of someone else finding a better way to make Conan into a movie. Here it goes: if you want to keep the feel of the stories and the intent of the author, then you have to adapt the stories into set pieces for the larger movie. It’s that simple. Don’t get bogged down on the quests, the half-nekkid women, the monsters. Ignore all of that. Focus on the Conan that you want to bring to the big screen. Do you want the comic book character? Well, we got that the first time out, didn’t we? Let’s just assume we’re going with REH’s original bad boy. Why not start him off at the beginning?

Not the Frost Giant’s Daughter. Sorry. I should have been more specific. Okay, here’s how you do it:

We first meet Conan on the outskirts of a large, bustling city. He is hot, tired, and hungry. He slips into the shadows and does what he has to do in order to regain his strength. Stealing food and drink. etc. Eventually, he is spotted by a well-dressed man and hired to do a little job for him. We go straight into The God in the Bowl. At the end, Conan escapes the guard, but he earns their emnity (and a touch of respect). His first encounter over, Conan becomes a more knowledgeable thief, but still a novice. One night, in the Tenderloin part of town, he overhears a fat thief bragging…and we go straight into the Tower of the Elephant. At the end, Conan again gives the guards the slip. Now, he’s well-known, and he has a small group of cronies that hangs with him. This leads us into Rogues in the House. At the end of that story, the guards (who have been a constant threat throughout) break in on Conan while he’s sleeping and cart him off to the magistrate–his friends have robbed him in the night, and the magistrate wants to know where they are. Conan says he doesn’t know and won’t tell anyway. The magistrate orders Conan locked up–and now we’re at the very beginning of Queen of the Black Coast, complete with head-lopping and a huge chase through town. The movie ends with Conan on the ship, the town in flames, the guards in ruin, and him vowing never to set foot in civilization again, as it’s too wild for him. Roll credits.

That, right there, is what Conan is about. Three classic and impressive stories, snuggled into the theme of barbarians in a civilised land being more noble and honorable than their city-bred fellows. Action, derring-do, a couple of threats to come back later (like the cult of Set), and best of all, a built-in sequel in the Conan the pirate era. The above three stories are well-suited to set pieces because they happen in the span of one evening, a few hours worth of time. Little heists that can be part of the overarching story.

I mean, if we’re talking source material, and re-introducing Conan to the masses, and making a franchise out of the character, what else could you possibly do?

At long last, the deluxe slipcases for the Centennial year are in-house. I received word on these being finished last week, so I held off on mailing V4n3 until I got them, so that I can send everything at the same time and save most of you five bucks or so on shipping. I now turn to the process of packing and mailing these out to you, a process that will take a few days and a lot of packing popcorn.

Most of these are already spoken for, but if you want one of the last ones drop me a line and let me know. Check the slipcases page for information on their construction and for pricing.

UPDATE: There’s only eight left. Get ‘em while you can.

Marvel Comics initiates are well aware that the madder the Hulk gets, the stronger the Hulk gets. Similarly, the older Christopher Lee gets, the cooler Christopher Lee gets. Long before Saruman and Count Dooku (alas, a role as a nefarious guest star on the cover of Band on the Run had more substance to it than Lee was granted in the Lucasverse), n’er-do-wells were never done so well as Rochefort in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers (I sob openly when Michael York runs him through), Francisco Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun (Lee, a cousin of sorts to Ian Fleming, was on the author’s wish list of perfect Dr. Nos) and Lord Summerisle in the original The Wicker Man (actually the only Wicker Man that need concern us). Lee was Flay in the BBC’s Gormenghast miniseries, worked with members of Steeleye Span on a musical adaptation of The King of Elfland’s Daughter, and once confessed to John Carpenter that his career-worst misstep was turning down the role of Dr. Sam Loomis in Halloween. The expanded and splendidly retitled 2004 version of his autobiography, Lord of Misrule, is required reading.

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On our way to Howard Days this year, Don Herron and I stopped at a few Texas Forts. Way back in The Lion’s Den of TC V1n5, Gary Romeo took issue with General William Tecumseh Sherman calling Fort McKavett “the prettiest fort in Texas.” For once, I have to agree with Gary — mostly. In that letter, Gary goes on to describe Fort Griffin, Fort Belknap, and Fort Richardson as “all within a Texas-sized yell of each other.” If that is the case, Gary left out the “prettiest fort”: Fort Phantom Hill.

Easily within that “Texas-sized yell” of Fort Griffin, Fort Phantom Hill is well worth a stop for people exploring the Texas Fort Trail. Under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel J. J. Abercrombie, construction on the Fort was begun in late 1851. Abercrombie’s orders had been to build a fort on Pecan Bayou, Robert E. Howard’s old stomping grounds, but J. J. was unfamiliar with the area and built the fort on the “Clear Fork of the Brazos” instead, according to the park’s brochure. In a September 4, 1933 letter to August Derleth, Howard mentions just how close to Phantom Hill he’d traveled:

I’ve been over to Dallas a couple of times, which lies a couple of hundred miles east of Cross Plains; up to old Fort Griffin, on the Clear Fork of the Brazos; to Stamford, about a hundred and thirty miles north west of this town, where they have the big annual West Texas rodeo and cowboy reunion the third, fourth and fifth of each July.

This is interesting, for, as the park brochure states, Fort Phantom Hill “was never officially named; it was referred to as the ‘Post on the Clear Fork of the Brazos.’”

Gary hedges his bets by not naming the prettiest fort in Texas, though he does state a fondness for Fort Davis. I’ll go out on a limb and make the call, with one caveat: Fort Phantom Hill is the prettiest fort in Texas — when the wildflowers are in bloom. And I’m not alone in this opinion. Lt. Clinton W. Lear, stationed at the Fort, wrote to his wife: “We have arrived at a point known as Phantom Hill. Too much cannot be said for its beauty.”

Prettiness aside, the Fort’s location proved to be unfortunate — building materials were scarce, and the site lacked an adequate water supply — causing Lt. Lear to later say, “I cannot imagine that God ever intended for man to occupy such a barren waste.” All of these factors led to the Fort’s decline, and, by 1858, according to the park brochure, “the remaining portions of the fort, primarily those buildings existing today, were utilized in establishing Way Station Number 54 by the Southern Overland Mail on the Butterfield Trail.” The Fort was used during the Civil War, briefly, as a Confederate “base of field operations.”

Today, the Fort is a roadside curiosity. Removed from the Interstate Highways and the nearby communities, it stands as a silent reminder of days long gone. But during the spring, when the Texas wildflowers bloom, Fort Phantom Hill is, by my estimation, the prettiest fort in Texas. I’ll bet Don Herron would agree.

For the most part, it’s been great fun watching the Wikipedia “community” have at the long biographical entry I wrote for Robert E. Howard’s Wikipedia page last year. I haven’t agreed with many of the tweaks made, but the mere fact they are being attempted is a sign of how many people out there are Howard fans to some degree. There have been literally hundreds of edits to the page, every one of which is logged here. It’s fun to browse through this log, select two different versions using the radio buttons at the left, and hit “Compare Selected Versions” to see exactly what was done in each edit.

There have been a few edits that clearly have been controversial. One guy refuses to allow any hint that Lovecraft was influenced in any way by REH, although like the rest of us he grants the opposite equation (that HPL of course influenced REH). Some editors have again and again subtly introduced non-neutral points of view regarding de Camp. One guy deleted my reference to de Camp as a “science fiction grandmaster,” considering it editorializing on my part, although in fact he won the Grandmaster Award and is technically exactly that. Others have tweaked the language surrounding the de Camp passages to defend him, insinuating that the charges of his critics are merely the opinions of a minority rather than the clear consensus in the field. There have been numerous “copy edits” by guys intent on making the prose not only encyclopedically neutral but as dull as possible. The copyright status of various REH stories has been fought over, with Paul Herman’s reasonable assessments challenged by someone who every few months insists on promulgating the lie that:

Since Robert E. Howard died 70 years ago, all his works and characters (including Conan) have now fallen into the public domain and are free for all to use as they wish. No institution may lawfully claim any right to them what-so-ever.

This despite the education he has received from other visitors on the ins-and-outs of current copyright law.

However, all in all my initial posting of text has held up rather well, a bit frayed at the edges but with the core information sitting out there like a rock with the waves of editors crashing against it day after day. I was pleased to note at the WFC that panel moderator Steven Gould had educated himself about Howard in preparation for his panel with Glenn Lord and myself by printing out a copy of the entry. Getting Howard’s entry up to scratch was worth the time invested for sure.

But check out this page, which shows in red type a series of changes instituted by an anonymous, unregistered editor. It makes you wonder who would go so far out of their way to modify REH’s page in this way, and why. Clicking on the IP Address of the vandal in question shows that he also has selectively edited some entries dealing with Islam, tweaking words like “militant” into “terrorist” and so forth. To me his actions seem contradictory: I assume his calling REH a Jew is meant to color our perception of REH in a negative way, whereas his other Wikipedia edits seem to be anti-Muslim. Or perhaps he feels that his bogus revelation of REH’s heritage is a badge of honor. Who knows, and ultimately who cares. Anyone who would harp so incessantly on someone’s ancestry clearly has ugly personal issues that transcend any attempt to rationalize them.

Like most other instances of vandalism to Wikipedia pages, this guy’s was quickly deleted by an observant reader. What’s doubly strange is that this is the second time I’ve seen Howard painted as Jewish this month — readers of the soon-to-ship V4n3 can check out Paul Shovlin’s Contributor’s Blurb to get the lowdown on the other incident I am speaking of, one that confirmed for me that “peer-reviewed” publications are often not what they are cracked up to be. Steve, I’d love to read your opinion of this odd new Jewish Question in Howard studies.

(the image used at the head of this post was taken from an especially apropos article at The Onion, the most famous news-spoofing site on the web.)

Reacting to Volume One of The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard, earlier this week Leo wrote “This is the kind of thing that tends to shake loose all kinds of scholarship that would otherwise never have been written.” Scholarly scholarship is beyond my reach even when I’m at my best, and I’m never ever at my best on a Friday afternoon, but I’d like to cheat by riffing on a passage from Howard’s August 9, 1932 letter to Lovecraft that will appear in the middle Collected Letters volume.

Most of us are familiar with Fritz Leiber’s observation that the Texan “knew the words and phrases of power and sought to use them as soon and as often as possible.” So, too, did he know the symbols and images of power — an excardiated heart, for example. The organ in question, even when divine or alien, might be a thuddingly, or throbbingly, obvious symbol, but we can all name authors who would do well to be less wary of the obvious and more wary of the obscure.

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Head on over to Rehupa.com to read Official Editor Bill “Indy” Cavalier’s thoughts on this year’s Howard Days. Lots of Howardian merrymaking and mayhem told in our Benevolent Dictator’s inimitable style.

At one point he mentions his donation to the Silent Auction, a “carved REH plaque.” Indy does all sorts of artistry, wood carving, and sign making at his day job, so a project like this is right up his alley. Back in 2005 he donated a similar plaque to the Silent Auction with (as I recall) only red and black colors in the mix. Carved from wood just like this one, hand-painted, suitable for hanging on your wall, with an accurate facsimile of Howard’s original signature at the bottom. At the time I thought the plaque way cool and unique, but ended up giving it up to another drooling fan.

When I saw this new and improved one on the auction table this year, I had to have it. I ended up bidding $100 to take it home, and I’m sure you can see from the photo above why I’m glad I did. I’m not much of a collector — my entire Howard collection takes up about three feet of bookshelf — but having this lovingly crafted item reminding me about one of my best friends in the field is worth a thousand Jenkins Gent from Bear Creeks.

At least until I break it over someone’s head during the next rowdy Howard get-together….

Last weekend, hours before learning of the simultaneous Herron and Burke Black Circle inductions, I had occasion to look something up in the second zine I ever contributed to a REHupa Mailing: #135, back in October 1995. My offering shared Section One of the Mailing with not only a letter from L. Sprague de Camp (wherein he directed “Mr. Tompkins” to his “Barbarians I Have Known” article) but also Rusty Burke’s Seanchai #76, in which he returned from an absentee phase to find that “the state of his beloved REHupa” was “NOT GOOD” (The fall of 1995 was a Time of Troubles — no staplers went missing, but a good deal of perspective did — that almost culminated in a breakaway APA; imagine the Seventies absorption of the Hyperborian League, only in reverse).

Seanchai #76 makes for interesting reading in 2007. While de Camp is nowhere accused of pontiff-buggering, Rusty does have this to say in his Mailing comments to the Tritonian Ringbearer: “The only explanation I can think of for the quite substantial changes you made to ["The Frost Giant's Daughter," "The Black Stranger," and "The God in the Bowl"] is that you thought they weren’t very well written and you could do better.” There’s an endearing outburst about Milius’ Wheel of Pain — “An utterly stupid conception. What the hell was the damned thing for? It didn’t appear to do anything” — and another about the Marvel Conan’s being “largely responsible for the popular misconception of Conan as a fur-clad hulk, and for making pimply-faced, snot-nosed, greasy-haired, whale-bellied subliterate adolescents think they’re Conan and/or REH fans.” Rusty didn’t know the half of it; as we’re now aware, Marvel’s non-Roy Thomas stories even made some of them into staunch supporters of the unsinkable armada that is the Nemedian navy, ready to burst into “Anchors Away” every time the state-of-the-art shipyards of Belverus and Numalia turn out another dreadnaught.

Most striking of all was this, after a denunciation of the incorporation of the post-Howardian bridging paragraph from the 1967 King Kull in the actual text of the 1978 Bantam and 1995 Baen versions of “Exile of Atlantis”: “Until some enterprising publisher decides to make me the editor of the definitive REH editions, such mistakes will continue to be propagated, no doubt.” Marcelo Anciano didn’t become a member of REHupa until months later, so Rusty can’t have already been in secret talks with the Wandering Star bibliomancer…Another comment that jumped out at my 2007 self was this, to James Van Hise: “I really don’t know why it’s so hard to get literate REH fans to write about his work. The comments I get from guys like Don Herron, Dick Tierney, etc., is that they’ve pretty much said what they have to say about REH and unless they were to suddenly get inspired, well, they’ve moved on.” One Barbaric Triumph, multiple articles, and one Doom of Hyboria later, it is clear that inspiration took its own sweet time, but did show up eventually.

Burke and Herron (Sequenced thusly the names sound too close to Burke and Hare for comfort, don’t they?) are now right where they belong. With Glenn Lord enjoying the emeritus lifestyle (and perhaps reflecting on how living longer is the best revenge where grande dames and their dismissive references to “truck drivers” are concerned), the two junior Black Circlers can get to work on stationery, T-shirts, podcasts, and maybe even a microbrewery. This was definitely the preferable outcome — had their rivalry continued vote after vote, they might have become the Howard Studies equivalent of the black/white guy and the white/black guy in the third season Classic Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” locked in unending combat on an otherwise dead world.

Congratulations to Don and Rusty. But why was it spelled “Hyperborian” instead of “Hyperborean” back when the League and its REH/CAS agenda were around?

As usual, I’m on the lookout for reminiscences, anecdotes, and photographs from all of you who attended Howard Days this year. With more things going on than any one person can cover, it really helps to get some different perspectives. Plus there are always choice one-liners and pithy observations that are remembered by some and forgotten by others.

Everyone who sends stuff in gets a free Limited Edition copy of the August issue (V4n4). So put all of those memories into an email and pop it over to Cimmerian Central. If you don’t, these two guys are going to come looking for you: