Mark Finn talks about King Conan in the afterword of Phoenix on the Sword and we prepare you for Timothy Truman's run on Hour of the Dragon!
Robert E. Howard is inarguably the architect of modern sword and sorcery; whether you believe that “Red Shadows” or “The Shadow Kingdom” was the first such effort in that genre, it’s a matter of interpretation, and anyway, you are inevitably correct. Not wishing to disparage Solomon Kane or King Kull in the slightest, but there is always one story that doesn’t receive its due share of attention: “The Phoenix on the Sword.” Why is that? It was the first story that introduced the world to (King) Conan of Cimmeria. This year is the eightieth anniversary of its publication, for Pete’s sake. This was the spark that started the bonfire of Conan.
And yet, few people include “Phoenix” among even their top five favorite Conan stories. This is a shame, and there is perhaps a reason why it’s not mentioned as often, or as glowingly, as it should be. More on that later.
“The Phoenix on the Sword” was just another story on the table of contents page of the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales magazine. It didn’t rate the cover. That honor went to Otis Adelbert Kline’s sword and planet adventure, “Buccaneers of Venus,” beautifully rendered by J. Allen St. John. If you were an avid reader, you no doubt looked forward to the final installment of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and perhaps also the newest Seabury Quinn Jules de Grandin story. Of course, you knew who Robert E. Howard was; he was one of the best writers in the magazine, and even though you’d never heard of this King Conan before, you could bet it was going to be a cracking good story.
Readers of the pulps back in the early thirties didn’t have sixty to seventy-five years of well-meaning editors fiddling with the material, changing spellings, cutting words out, re-arranging the order of the stories, and even being told that they were great fun, but nothing special. No, they had the privilege of watching Conan develop from issue to issue, over the next four years, into a legend in its own time. Weird Tales is celebrated largely because the editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright, had the good sense to publish certain authors, among them Robert E. Howard. But he was a capricious editor, and he could have just as easily rejected “Phoenix on the Sword.” He didn’t, of course, and that’s largely because Howard pitched the story directly to Wright. It was Howard’s intention all along to create a recurring character in the pages of Weird Tales in order to guarantee sales. As such, it had all of the ingredients necessary to grab Wright’s attention—and the readers of Weird Tales, as well.
Howard’s first professional sale was to Weird Tales, and it was a mainstay in his stable of magazines. Strange and unusual stories that didn’t sell elsewhere could always be reworked and submitted to (and usually bought) by Wright. Weird Tales was hanging on, just barely, having survived the shake-ups in the publishing industry that came with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of The Great Depression. It made sense that Howard would want to carve out a permanent place for himself among its wood pulp pages. Howard front-loaded “Phoenix” with the things that he knew interested Wright: history, the supernatural, and Shakespearean overtones.
Wright was a Shakespeare scholar, and so it is inevitable King Conan be warned, much like young Hamlet on the battlements, of foul misdeeds from the spectral past. Add to that a bloody, Caesar-esque assassination plot that could have come straight out of Mark Antony’s playbook, and Wright couldn’t help but notice this story.
In the initial draft, Howard included a separate history of Conan’s world called “The Hyborian Age,’ which he had intended as a companion text piece. Wright didn’t like it, but Howard was able to salvage some of what he had written, turning it into the now legendary opening, quoted from the Nemedian Chronicles:
"Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars . . . Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."
As if that wasn’t enough, when Conan enters the picture he’s already a King, with the bulk of his adventuring career behind him. There’s an additional sense of intrigue built in: who is this King? Why is the kingdom divided regarding his rule? The story only glosses over the gist of how Conan usurped the throne, because it’s not long before the would-be assassins come crashing through the King’s bedchamber door and find him wide eyed and ready for battle. Ah, fast action and singing swordplay! The hallmark of a Robert E. Howard story. “Phoenix” takes place in a single night’s time, bringing the unrest and strife to a bloody conclusion before our very eyes.
In the end, Conan is eventually rescued by his loyal subjects, who tend to his wounds and remark upon the carnage their king hath wrought. When the King reveals how he survived the assassintation attempt—he was warned by Epimetreus the Sage, no one believes him, of course, because Epimetreus the Sage has been dead for fifteen hundred years . . . but then they see the broken sword bearing the mark of the sage, and they realize not only was he telling the truth, but he was the sole witness to an extraordinary supernatural event and a sign that perhaps Conan was meant to wear the crown after all.
It’s a great ending, and maybe it’s one of the reasons why Wright didn’t care for “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter.” Remember young Conan’s story about frozen princesses and frost giants is called into question until they see the wisp of Atali’s garment clutched in his frozen hand. The endings of the two stories are so similar in structure as to be practically identical. But “Phoenix” shares much in common with King Kull—another famous character that Howard created.
One of the many unpublished stories in Howard’s lifetime was a bombastic piece of fiction called “By This Axe, I Rule!” and it’s the culmination of the King Kull political intrigue storyline wherein his kingdom is beset within and without by the Serpent Men and the not-so-serpent men. Perceiving the King to be weak after so much strife, a small band of conspirators gather to make their final assassination plans, and, well, you can guess the rest. Missing from the Kull story is, of course, the history lesson and the enchanted sword that helps Conan defeat the demon. Instead, Kull uses a battle axe torn from the wall, but the image of the bleeding, dangerous barbarian backed against the wall, feet planted apart, daring the first man forward: “Who dies first?” is just as iconic for one Hero-King as another.
Since the story was unused, Howard took the bones and packed fresh meat onto them, creating a tale of an adventurer who had lived a checkered and colorful life and was now at the end of his career. Consider that this was the first introduction to Conan the world had ever seen. Can you imagine the thrill of that scene where the king repels his assassins, one by one? Stirring stuff.
During Howard’s lifetime, two eager fans made a timeline of Conan’s career based on text evidence, wherein they rearranged the stories in internal chronological order. This placed “Phoenix” at the end of the line, along with “The Scarlet Citadel” and “The Hour of the Dragon.” And there it stayed for decades, until members of what would eventually become the Robert E. Howard Foundation decided to reprint all of the Conan stories, without any of the previous editorial corrections, and in the order that Howard wrote them, to better understand how the character developed. When you buy the Del Rey Conan books now, you’ll find the stories in that order.
For the comic-book adaptation of this most important Conan story, Tim Truman was once again employed, along with Tomás Giorello and José Villarrubia. Truman is, by now, a practiced hand at taking Howard’s prose and rendering it in comic form. Of this process, Truman said, “Prose storytelling and visual form are two completely different animals. Howard wrote these long narrative sequences that can be so riveting and evocative in the original text. However, if we did dead-on, beat-by-beat depictions of some of those same sequences, the pace and momentum of the story might actually be slowed down. Thus, I often rely on what I often call my ‘Masterpiece Theater approach’—remain as true to the original tale as possible while at the same time editing things that, in the visualized adaptation, might hinder the forward trajectory of the tale. I have faith that Howard would certainly have done the same thing if the tables were switched. If I have to do a tweak here and there, I have to feel absolutely sure that Howard could read it over and say, ‘Yeah, okay, good call. I see what you’re doing here. Carry on.’”
One of the hardest choices when adapting original material is knowing what to leave out and what to put in to enhance the story. Truman said, “In the adaptations, my favorite parts to tackle are usually the most challenging parts. In the case of ‘Phoenix,’ the biggest challenge arose from the framing sequences I chose to do—the aged King Conan being interviewed by the scribe, Pramis, for the personal history that would become the Nemedian Chronicles. I wanted to do sequences that would both deepen the tale a bit and put a little of our own personal stamp on the adaptation, but in a way that longtime Howard scholars and die-hards would accept. Seeing Tomás’s depiction of the elderly by still powerful Conan was one of the real treats of doing the story. He absolutely nailed it. Usually Tomás surpasses all expectations. His art has evolved and deepened with every issue he's done. I was quite pleased with the first work we did together a few years back, but the work he does now blows that stuff out of the water.”
Over the years, the stories of Robert E. Howard have passed through a diverse number of hands. Those lucky few who were able to take Conan into new mediums, and thus new realms, have all considered the job to be a sacred one. Truman is no different. He describes his assignment as: “To remain as true to Howard's original story as possible, while making sure that the tale is being adapted to the graphic story medium in the most exciting and effective way possible. As I write, I try to imagine Howard looming over my shoulder, keeping a careful eye on what I'm doing.”
The storyteller, looking over the shoulder of the storyteller, writing a story about a king, telling stories about his adventures. Howard was a modern day mythmaker; his characters are now part of the pop culture zeitgeist. Just as the Greeks referenced Heracles in their day and age, we too use “Conan” as a descriptive.
—Mark Finn
Deep in North Texas, September 2012
Mark Finn is an award-winning scholar and author of Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, among other works.