sum1

Maybe he will be.

A matter that's been bugging me: Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. One the plus side he brings immense imagination, emotional power and vigor of spirit to his work, qualities that have much value in terms of the human experience. I'll always value his work for that. Downside, I know he was writing in the 1920s and 1930s, but would he please lay off on calling black people "black beasts" and saying they have "apish speech" and stuff like that? It makes for very hard reading. Not everybody back then wrote like that. And the sexism. Here and there he writes a good female character, but he really lays on the bimbos, the rape fantasies (see his "Spicy Stories" for some really disturbing stuff), etc, and it gets very hard to stomach. His Solomon Kane stories, often set in Africa, have a particularly bad dose of his racism. But his racism and sexism keeps popping up all over the place. I've set out out to read a wide range of his work, sample every kind of story he wrote, and I've found problematic stuff popping up here there and yonder. I feel authors with offensive attitudes should be valued for their merits despite their faults, particularly if they wrote long ago, but that doesn't make it any easier to get through stories like The Vale of Lost Women. If you take the description of the black chieftain in that, it's hard to recognize that he's describing a human being at first and it only dawns on you slowly.

Sacrilegious as I once thought it, I now hold to the view that the classic Marvel comics based on his work may be better in some ways than the work itself. For starters, Roy Thomas tones down the racism, though there's still plenty sexism. Just see Red Sonja's ridiculous, impractical and probably painful to wear scale mail bikini (an insult to the character) for an example of the latter. Or the way the covers of the black and white Savage Sword of Conan comic magazine always seemed to feature barely-clad woman on the ground at Conan's feet, some of them looking a bit like they were humping his leg. I mean that's just not seeing women as people. But Roy Thomas in the main Conan comic expanded on the relationship between Conan and Belit introduced in Howard's Queen of the Black Coast, and in the process created one of the most interesting relationships I've come across in fiction. Here are two strong characters, formidable people both, masters in their skills, both leaders, and they're in a surprisingly egalitarian relationship, Belit being no no doormat screamy damsel in distress. Belit is portrayed with plenty of personality and given a sharp edge. She's no mere sex object. And yes, she's dressed in a fur bikini, but Conan is in fur underpants all the time and what they gave her to wear is a better outfit than what Robert E Howard put her in. I love when two strong characters are in an egalitarian relationship. See vampires Julian Luna and Lillie Langtry in Kindred the Embraced for a tv example (though they screwed up by having Julian turn instead to a bland human whose memory he edits). It's all too rare, relationships in fiction that don't lessen either partner and involve two uncompromisingly strong characters. So I value what Roy Thomas created there.

And yes, I'll always value Howard for his imagination and emotional vigour, but I can't say I like him as much as I once did. There's only so many stories like Skull-Face that one can take.