Robert E. Howard
When I was a kid and well into high school, one of my favorite fictional heroes was Conan the Barbarian. Thick-hewed, bronzed, and with a head of jet-black hair, Conan punched, hacked, thieved, and conquered his way through an endless series of tales in the 1970s, mostly comic books. This treasure trove existed primarily thanks to the efforts Marvel Comics’ writer/editor Roy Thomas, who adapted and wrote new stories for the tough-as-nails giant from the fictional land of Cimmeria both in mainstream color- and more lurid black-and-white magazine-rack offerings. I loved those books, especially the earliest stuff Thomas did with artist Barry Windsor-Smith. Conan was as different from superheroes as Danny Trejo is from Brad Pitt - Batman might beat up the Joker; Conan would take him off the board with a well-placed sword thrust, then usurp a the crown of Aquilonia for good measure.
But it wasn’t until I was about ten years old that I got my hands on some short stories written by the man who created this fictional titan, Robert E. Howard. Somebody, possibly Ace Books, put out a series of compilations of stories by Howard and some later writers of the Cimmerian’s tales which I collected with a fervor I don’t ever recall having for comics. I’ll never forget the introduction to those Conan collections, a brief biography of this enigmatic creator. Two things stood out to me about Robert E. Howard - he was from Cross Plains, Texas, and lived a short life, just 30 years. In that brief time, he created Conan along with other two-fisted tough guys such as Kull and puritan gunfighter Solomon Kane. Gripping tales of warriors and wizards and bejeweled kingdoms full of “spider-haunted mystery” - this man packed a lot into his fiction, basically inventing the sword-and-sorcery genre in the process.
I don’t feel I ever really understood Howard, though, until I moved to West Texas around 2010. There, on the bleak, featureless landscape of the Plains, I experienced firsthand the canvass on which Howard sketched out his hero of the Hyborian Age. It’s no accident that some of America’s most inspired creators are from this region (Howard, Buddy Holly, Waylon Jennings) - out in the Flatlands, there’s just dust storms and Jesus and whatever dreams you can fashion into existence with a typewriter or guitar or paint brush.
Howard’s writing still informs my own. I wish I could craft a fight scene the way he could. And I wish I had one-tenth his prodigious imagination.
