August 31 is the date after which all excess unsold copies of The Cimmerian will be destroyed. If you want any after that, you’ll have to wait for already-sold copies to appear on eBay, or scavenge at the REH Museum in Cross Plains for what copies they might still have.

No, I’m not going to change my mind. No, there will be no extensions or copies held on layaway.

August 31 is the date. Get ‘em while you can.

My copy of REH: Two-Gun Raconteur #13 came in the post on the same day that a long-awaited guest arrived. Due to previously scheduled essays, I’m only now getting around to singing this issue’s praises. Morgan Holmes has already weighed in on the REHupa site, but I hope that this review will complement his.

I must admit that I never read the earlier issues of “TGR” when they were published back in the 1970s. I was but a wee lad back then. However, I have perused the “Out of Print” section on Damon C. Sasser’s website. REH: Two-Gun Raconteur has always been a worthy publication, mixing real Howardian scholarship, quality art and fannish fun. That was definitely my impression when I bought the first “relaunch” issue in 2003.

REH: Two-Gun Raconteur #13 greets you with a full-color cover depicting Kull and Brule whaling away at serpent-men. Sasser went with color covers (one of the advancements of civilization we can all be thankful for) a while back. That move got my unequivocal support at the time, and this cover changes that opinion not one whit.

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At long last, Fabrice Tortey reports that his large and meaty French tome about Robert E. Howard, Échos de Cimmérie, is at the printer and will be available shortly. It promises to be filled with interesting essays about Howard from both French and American writers. Last year Donald Sidney-Fryer read the galleys in the original French and reviewed the book in TC V5n6. I also published some of the contents of the book, translated into English, in TC V5n2.

Information on ordering the book, and a breakdown of the contents, can be found here.

UPDATE: The book is now available at Amazon here.

Like a wizard and his staff, or a dragon and its gleaming horde, heavy metal/hard rock music and fantasy literature are an inseparable pair. I haven’t seen any statistics published on the subject, but fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard just seem more inclined to listen to heavy metal than any other genre of music.

For a small sample of this trend, you need look no further than The Cimmerian’s About the Bloggers page: While I can’t speak for Leo, Steve, or Al, Deuce and I wear our metal credentials on our sleeves like Sauron’s orcs bear the Lidless Eye (for the record, Deuce is more metal than me). I don’t think it’s an aberration that at least 40% of this site’s bloggers are metal fans; there’s something to this phenomenon, even if I don’t quite understand the connection.

You don’t have to look far or dig deep to see the connections between metal and fantasy. Led Zeppelin might be the most popular fantasy-influenced hard rock band, with songs based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien (Ramble On, Misty Mountain Hop) and Viking invaders (Immigrant Song). Progressive rock band Rush also shows Tolkien influences on its early albums, including Rivendell and The Necromancer. Molly Hatchet’s album covers featured work by the immortal Frank Frazetta, he of Conan the Cimmerian Lancer fame.

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Here’s something I commissioned for the print edition of The Cimmerian but never used.

A few years ago, Charles Hoffman and Marc Cerasini undertook a revision of their old Starmont Reader’s Guide: Robert E. Howard, which was first published in the late 1980s. Wildside Press was supposed to bring out the updated version circa 2006, but — like so much else at that press — the book fell through the cracks and never appeared. At the time, I charged Steve Tompkins with interviewing Cerasini and Hoffman, and planned to have the result run in TC concurrent with the release of the book. With their revised tome MIA, however, I tucked the (lengthy and interesting, as it turned out) interview into my files, against the day when Wildside would finally get its act together.

Well, since then whole years passed, the print Cimmerian ended its run, and now Steve himself is gone. So I figure it is as good a time as any to finally unleash this interview into the world. It’s actually a very enlightening discussion — Steve asked many deep, intelligent questions, and really brought out the best in the authors. For those of you who never bought the print Cimmerian, this post is also a peek at what my TC print subscribers were regularly exposed to: Howard articles of a depth and breadth not to be found anywhere else.

So here we go: the late, lamented Steve Tompkins interviewing Howardists Charles Hoffman and Marc Cerasini about their critical volume on Robert E. Howard, plus much else. Take it away, old friend:

STEVE TOMPKINS: For each of you, what was your first exposure to Howard? If as seems likely you made the acquaintance of Conan by way of the Gnome Press or Lancer collections, please tell us what you made of the presence of posthumous collaborations and pastiches.

MARC CERASINI: I can recall my first exposure vividly. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen years old and had purchased issue # 11 of Castle of Frankenstein magazine for thirty-five cents. Inside Lin Carter had a column touting the new publishing releases and he covered the Conan books extensively. Now, the first Lancers had just come out and I was eyeing them anyway because of the beautiful Frank Frazetta covers (I knew Frank’s work from Creepy and Eerie — Vampirella had not come out yet.) On Lin’s recommendation — and the fact that my parents were going to Expo ’67 and felt guilty about leaving me behind and so footed the bill for a shopping spree — I went to my local mall and purchased the first four Conan books, and an Aurora model of Blackbeard the Pirate.

On a sunny afternoon in June I read “The People of the Black Circle” and I was hooked — changed forever. Prior to my exposure to REH, I was reading a limited amount of science fiction and horror (The ABC’s of course — Asimov, Bradbury and Clark; as well as some John Wyndham; HG Wells and Jules Verne; and the classics Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore). I also read too many comics: Marvel superheroes (which I discovered with Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man), DC war comics like Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace, Johnny Cloud, the Navajo Ace, Star Spangled War Stories where U.S. Marines battled dinosaurs and the Japanese on remote South Pacific Islands during World War II, and even movie and television tie-in books. One irony of my writing life is that I grew up reading Michael Avallone’s Man From U.N.C.L.E. novels and now I’m writing 24 novels for HarperCollins.

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This has been an incredibly hard post to compose for a myriad of reasons. Steve Tompkins was nonpareil. His wit, his style, his awe-inspiring intelligence, his impact on Howard studies (and weird literature studies in general), his sheer output; there simply has not been any commentator on our beloved genre(s) quite like Mr. Tompkins. Many writers have pontificated about this or that aspect of weird/fantastic literature. Not one did so in quite the way that he did, nor did they do it quite so well, in this blogger’s opinion.

I never met Steve Tompkins (though we had a near miss at WFC ’06). I corresponded with him for about right on four weeks. Many others who knew him much better have already weighed in with praise for the man and his work. I can only give my perspective as a fan and as someone who hoped to call Steve Tompkins a friend someday.

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Just a heads-up to all Howard fans out there looking to increase their holdings of REHupa mailings. In the coming days I will be posting a bunch for sale. The first five are already up, with more to follow in the coming days. For information about why REHupa mailings are so collectible, go here.

Also, for those of you looking to complete your Deluxe sets of The Cimmerian, there have been some lots for sale at eBay that include some of the out-of-print issues you are looking for. The latest is here.

Read enough Robert E. Howard and you start to see him everywhere, particularly in the works of his contemporaries. Case in point: I recently listened to an audio version of Ernest Hemingway’s non-fiction treatise on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, and my Howard-addled brain began to piece together tenuous, but perhaps not entirely unfounded, connections between the disparate authors.

Hemingway and Howard are alike? Didn’t one write about traumatized and/or impotent war veterans named Nick and Jake, and the other about unstoppable, larger-than-life heroes from impossibly ancient times with names like Conan and Kull? I’ll admit that if the only Hemingway you’ve read is The Garden of Eden or A Moveable Feast, you’ll find little in common with these tales and Howard’s Hour of the Dragon or “The Vale of Lost Women.” But Death in the Afternoon is a very different animal than Hemingway’s softer stories. It’s a raw, unflinching look at a sport many consider barbaric and cruel, but which Hemingway admired very deeply. And then it struck me: What is Death in the Afternoon if not heroic fantasy? What are the Spanish bullfighters of Hemingway’s work if not modern-day gladiators, heroes with swords? Wealth, fame, and great heights are theirs for the taking, but are entirely dependent on their bravery, grace, and skill with cape and sword.

Could Howard have derived some inspiration from Death in the Afternoon and/or Hemingway’s stories in general? We know Howard read Hemingway. According to the REH Bookshelf, an invaluable resource painstakingly compiled by Howard scholar Rusty Burke, Howard had a copy of “Winner Take Nothing” on his bookshelf. This collection contains “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and “A Natural History of the Dead” (this latter must-read vignette also appears in Death in the Afternoon), among other short stories. Given his prodigious appetite as a reader Howard may very well have read Death in the Afternoon. Although he didn’t have it on his bookshelf at the time of his death, Howard’s sensibilities are splashed on its pages like the blood of a soft, city-bred Nemedian on a Pictish axe.

While Death in the Afternoon may not bear the aspect of swords and sorcery, if you swap out Madrid and muletas for Aquilonia and broadswords, the lines between the two authors become quite blurred. Death in the Afternoon tells the stories of men — some brave, some cowardly, others just doing a job — who deal in death and place their lives on the line for the wages of blood. With their athletic grace and killer’s eyes, they are very much like Howard’s prize-fighters and treasure-seeking swordsmen.

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So far 2009 has been a lousy year for fantasy fans who like the feel of good old-fashioned print publications in their hands. Right here on this Web site, we’ve lost the award-winning Robert E. Howard journal The Cimmerian. Elsewhere, long-running fantasy fiction and reviews magazine Realms of Fantasy is closing up shop, ending its 15-year run with the April 2009 issue. And, to top off the bad news, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, a well-regarded “best-of” anthology that spanned 21 years, has also been discontinued.

I’m not about to indulge in hyperbole and declare that print is dead, but there’s no doubt that the void left by these losses feels like, to quote J.R.R. Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, “another piece of Mordor.”

On some level I feel like a hypocrite for mourning the loss of these publications since I’m not a subscriber or regular buyer. Now, in my defense I wasn’t even aware of The Cimmerian until I came across it after starting my blog, The Silver Key, back in September of 2007, and found it only after some fortuitous Googling.

As for the other two publications, Realms of Fantasy was a bit too “high fantasy” for my tastes, too much folklore and winged fairies and not enough shield walls and treasure plundering heroes, though I have purchased a few issues of the magazine from newsstands. As for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, I’ve always found anthologies to be largely hit-and-miss, and this series to be no exception. I do own a few copies, but these were purchased second-hand from used bookstores.

However, as a fantasy fan and old-fashioned lover of paper (as my three groaning bookshelves, and my disapproving wife, can attest) I find it very sad to see these publications go. Worse, there are now three less places for aspiring writers of fantasy fiction and non-fiction to be published. A void where the next Robert E. Howard may have made a sale.

It would be easy to lay the blame for the loss of these and other print publications at the feet of declining literacy. While there may some truth behind that, The National Endowment for the Arts reported on January 13 that the number of adult readers actually increased for the first time in over a quarter-century.

I happen to think people are reading more, but increasingly, they’re turning away from print and doing it online. Why pay for a print publication and wait for it to arrive in the mail when you can surf the Web and get free fantasy content on fan sites, blogs, and self-published PDF journals?

Of course, the one major problem with this argument is that many Web sites generate their content from commenting upon and/or sucking the blood from the work of established writers who struggled to break their way into print. What happens when these well-vetted, skillfully edited source materials disappear? Will they all eventually migrate online? I’m not so sure.

Another reason for the demise of print is cost. Print products take more time and more money to produce than electronic media. Blogging software has made it easy for anyone to “publish” (hello, self) at minimal to no cost. But that doesn’t mean the writing produced is particularly good or memorable (ditto, self).

From everything I’ve heard and read, editor Leo Grin worked himself to the bone to get out The Cimmerian. I can attest first-hand that the essays he published required considerable, skillful chisel blows, and in some cases Thor-like hammering. A typical essay went through multiple drafts, was fleshed out and reworked, and strengthened with additional references. They were then professionally laid out, printed, and shipped. This process naturally takes a good deal of time. For a single editor working as a labor of love, it’s nothing short of a sacrifice.

In summary, the loss of these publications should teach us this: If you value something, put your money where your mouth is and purchase it. Or someday they’ll be gone. Print may not be dead, but it’s certainly bleeding.

Right about now there are seemingly two kinds of people, those who are already missing TC-as-a-print journal, and those who aren’t in a position to miss it, because for reasons best known to themselves they’ve been missing out ever since the spring of 2004. The good news is, it is still possible to remedy the latter delinquency, to escape the darkling plain where certain ignorant armies persist in clashing by night, by pouncing in a swell foop on the back issues Leo will be selling for a little while longer. The alternative is, I suppose, to repair to a repurposed fallout shelter and read the exciting Princess-Sumia-gets-abducted-yet-again scenes in old Lin Carter paperbacks to one’s action figures.

As a student of the American classics, Leo must be feeling a little like Tom Sawyer at the moment, kibitzing at his own funeral. He gave TC a Viking-by-way-of-the-coast-south-of-Kush sendoff with “A Cimmerian Coda” at the end of V5n6, and the motif is reinforced by the seagoing synchronicity of Donald Sidney-Fryer’s “A Ship Sails Out to Sea”:

The moon came up just as the sun went down,

Leaving behind a blaze, a fiery crown,

A coronal of purple, gold, and flame:

Inside this blaze the ship appeared to drown

Better a coronal than a coronary, nicht wahr? And how perfect that The Last of the Courtly Poets should be The Last Cimmerian Poet as well.

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