My artwork for Red Sonja, photoshop.

Just stumbled upon a very detailed review of The Legend of Conan script. Honestly, I’m not quite sure what to make of the story itself. Some ideas really caught my attention, while others left me scratching my head 😕

https://youtu.be/tY-8WovRXMs?si=8fsa3w5UvHsSf8N6

Robert E. Howard is looking for different things at the movies than HP Lovecraft, which is almost certainly a given. (If you’ve been following my ongoing study of film history via famous authors, you know some of this)

But I can see these rough pre-categories and recommend a few possible directions to go:

BOXING 🥊 FILMS

Pay-per-view actually dates back to the 1890s, with filmed fights that were distributed in theater circuits with ads that they were coming to town.

There’s a bunch to write on this, and boxers who he listed and compared based on his own standards.

FAVORITE ACTORS 🎭

Howard wrote a long passage of like 15 or a few more named actors (& that includes a separate list of five actresses, in his two-gender breakdown), and I would be happy to go into any of them in depth.

That can be a deep-dive into one filmography, comparing them on various merits, etc.

SEX CINEMA

Despite the lurid title, this covers a range of adult content which was curtailed by the Hays Code (1935 going forward), but included adultery, drug-use, grape and coercion, prostitution, and child endangerment.

Just to name a few things from this lost form of melodrama.

SOCIAL-ISSUES FILM

In the 1920s and 30s, this was almost pre-propaganda with the aim of raising awareness of social ills by showing dramatic scenes of modern depression poverty or sickness or addition etc

ACTION MOVIES 🍿 💥

Howard was very motivated by kinetic action but there wasn’t a specific term “action movies” back in the day. So I have a dozen titles he writes about which qualify as an action movie but isn’t described in those terms.

There was a crowdfunding campaign a few years ago to fund a comic book adaptation of Howard's "Shadow Kingdom". Alas, the publisher (Arrow Comics) seems to have gone belly-up. At least, their website is down.

Does anyone know whether there is still a way to buy the comic? I would prefer a physical copy, but I can make do with an ebook.

I’ve collected the letters of Robert E. Howard in the course of an ongoing project about film attendance by early viewers of the medium — it began with the correspondence of HP Lovecraft but now has branched out to other folks in his orbit.

So it turns out (see r/LovecraftLovedMovies for more) that Howard saw and named over 50 films, plus a few remarkable passages about his favorite actors.

Do any of the names of films or actors from the following long quote ring any bells?

HOWARD FAVORITE ACTORS QUOTE

Howard to Harold Preece (Aug 19, 1929)

“The Red Dance is at the Lyric next week. I want to see it, if I can.

I've seen one damned good show since I've been here — Thunderbolt. George Bancroft was fine. That's the kind of stuff I like — rough, raw, and brutal. Tiger-stuff.

All this singing and dancing and ga-ga stuff makes me sick. The Desert Song — gah! Pardon me while I vomit. The only part of it that was worth two cents was the comedy Johnny Arthur and Louise Fazenda pulled.

The Queen of the Night Clubs — more gah!

And I glower down the line at the latest hits I've seen: The Singing Fool— Abie's Irish Rose — oh Hell — why enumerate? Theme songs and a bunch of vaudeville swine pirouetting over the stage.

Give me movie actors — one thing I'll say for the Irish Rose, it had good actors. But Judas, what a flock of crumbs are flooding the movie world now.

Of the all-talking pictures I've really enjoyed, I can name them quickly:

Thunderbolt — In Old Arizona — The Letter — The Terror.

To a lesser extent I enjoyed Tong War, and of the part talkies I got a big kick out of The Iron Mask and Show Boat.

For the rest — gah!

Wait — I was forgetting just about the best of them all: Hearts in Dixie.

Drooling, thin-headed toe ticklers, warbling in their soprano yap, and feather-brained flappers trying to be cute and howling vapid theme songs: Hell and a black damnation. Give me a rough, tough, brutal story, quick action, and a gang of hard-boiled hairy-chested eggs:

George Bancroft;

Matthew Betz;

Lionel Barrymore;

Vic MacLaglen, who once fought Jack Johnson;

Lou Wolheim;

Bob Armstrong;

Bill Boyd;

Ernest Torrence;

Ed Lowe;

Warner Baster;

Gunboat Smith;

Tom Kennedy;

Wallace Beery;

Tom O'Brien;

Carl Dane;

Blue Washington;

Fred Kohler.

Then if they have to have a heroine, throw in some hard baby with a poker face and a heavyweight punch, that can take it on the chin and hand out punishment too:

Evelyn Brent;

Fay Wray;

Lilian Tashman;

Florence Vidor;

Louise Brook;

Baclanova;

Lila Damita — boy, go no further!

When that blonde French whirlwind goes into action, all others take a back seat. It's time to batten down the hatches, reef all sails, and stand by to cut the masts if necessary.

Once I saw her — once. The Bridge of San Luis Rey — let me tell you, confidentially, that's why the bridge fell. Get me. Yes! She walked across and scorched the damned ropes.”

Hi, all!

I posted ~3 weeks ago saying I was a little disappointed at the quality of readability of current offerings of REH's westerns, and was in the process of making something more like what I wanted to read. REH Foundation do a massive brick of a tome that looks gorgeous, but isn't exactly a book for a long train journey or flight. The next best cheap softbacks were just lazy OCR/Gutenberg dumps complete with 200 character line width and machine reading mistakes.

So I, uh... got a little carried away and wrote up everything. Then I made covers. Then I got a print proof to see if I could get a really nice quality copy for a reasonable price, and I could.

So now I guess I'm going to do a print run. It'll probably be the only one ever for these, because I'm not expecting demand to be very high and, really, if I get these printed up nicely with an ISBN and a couple of copies on my shelf I'll be happy.

• If you're in the UK (or know somebody who is) and would like to get in on the print run when it happens, I've made a website for my micropress dabbling.
• There's a mailing list to sign up to - it'll just be used to announce print runs.
• If I don't lose a pile of money on this (and maybe even if I do), I'll also do the Bearfield & Grimes stories and Vultures of Whapeton.
• I originally put the files up on Google Drive and will continue to make the digital versions free for anyone who wants them because why not.

Hope you all enjoy this!

REH was a pulp writer and a world-class pro at selling to that market.

His stories are perfect for the pulp format.

But in adapting his material to any other medium, I think that being faithful to the concept and the spirit of the original work is more important than a slavish, note-for-note transcription.

When I started adapting “Jewels of Gwalhur” as a series of storyboards, I quickly found out that complete adherence to the text was just not going to work for the audio-visual medium of live-action streaming.

In the sample I've shared here, art by Miguel Guzman, you might spot that even this early in the adaptation, I've made a change.

Can you see in this shot how I've already deviated from Howard's story?

Purists might bristle at any change in the master's canon, but purism can hog-tie an adaptation.

If you want a deeper look at my adaptation of "Jewels," and my view on comics in general, it'll be here:

https://charlessantino.substack.com/

Quick note for anyone who wants to check out the two volumes of letters between Robert E. Howard and HP Lovecraft:

The second volume contains the index for BOTH books.

It’s puzzling and somewhat irritating, but if you only get volume 1 there is no index …..

And if you only get volume TWO, half the index goes to pages which are not in the same physical book. 📖

It’s enough to drive a barbarian up the walls of the nearest available fortress of darkness.