Cover art by Ed Emshwiller illustrating "Executioner No. 43" by Ron Phillips. Published in Venture Science Fiction (September 1957).
When looking for a high quality scan of SSOC #19 I noticed that Kenneth Morris repainted the cover for the UK reissue: less blood, less saturation, Conan's face is softer. It's almost as if he asked "what if Jeff Jones had painted this instead of me?"
Frazetta was known to fiddle with his own work, and earlier pulp covers were often repainted for modesty. Can any of the grognards in the group speak to how often comic covers were repainted? For different markets?
Morris repainted the cover for the UK reissue: less blood, less saturation, Conan's face is softer. It's almost as if he asked "what if Jeff Jones had painted this instead of me?"
The poem first appeared two years after Howard's death, in Weird Tales (August 1938), and first reappeared at the end of Skull-Face and Others (1946). I found its rejection of literary immortality especially moving, if so far misplaced.
(Apologies for quick delete and repost; I had provided the wrong date and titles are not editable).
Jusko appears to have had Valeria Golino in mind when he painted the cover, although I wasn't able to find confirmation.
Macabros #43.
I posted this cover two years ago, but figured it was worth a repost after tracking down the original art.
Freas is famous for his comic space adventures but I don't think he gets enough credit for how convincingly he paints hardware. You can feel the weight of the gear in this picture. While I couldn't find evidence that he was inspired by the Italian divers of the Decima Flottiglia MAS, a man can dream.
He said of this painting:
> As I have mentioned (often!) before, one of the greatest pleasures for the illustrator is to have an author tell him that he has caught in his painting exactly what the author had in mind. When the author is also an accomplished painter—and backs his praise with hard cash to purchase the original ... well, you begin to believe him, y’know?
The original art is collected in Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction (1977).
Image from the collection of Joe Jusko. Collected in The Art of José González.
Collected in Dream Makers (1988) as "Leviathon." Whether that's a typo is a mystery known only to Chris Moore and his editors.
The article makes the case that since Cimmerians were direct ancestors of the Gaels, we can figure out what they ate by looking at Iron Age Ireland and Scotland. If you don't want to click through, it's:
barley porridge → bread → cheese/curds → pork stew → butter → hazelnuts/apples → ale
Or we can read Hour of the Dragon: "She gave into his hands a wooden dish heaped with dried fruits, cheese and barley bread, and a great pot of the heady upland beer, brewed from barley grown in the high valleys."
This is one of my favorite paintings of Elric: nearly spectral but still human.
Flipping through an Azpiri art book, I came across an image unhelpfully captioned "cover for a book about Conan." Turns out the cover is for La canción de las espadas: fantasía heroica en Robert E. Howard, by Javier Martín Lalanda (1983), an early Spanish study of Howard's heroic fantasy.
Here are the passages that struck me most. The quotes are machine translated (I don’t speak Spanish); the headings and summaries are mine.
> Howard, a man uncomfortable with his own age, created characters who were precisely what he himself could not be: adventurer, swordsman, traveler, pirate, mercenary, king. And he gave them the specifically American character of the self-made man. > > Thus an entire world emerges that reflects the external demons to which he was subjected: wild beasts are dangers; priests and rulers, forever telling us what we must do, are the impositions of society; and the sorcerers who fight the hero—sometimes attempting to win his submission—are false prophets offering easy roads and prosperous goals at the price of personal degradation and the loss of one’s humanity.
Lalanda argues that later adaptations overemphasized machismo, aggression, and eroticism, simplifying Conan into a marketable icon.
> Conan—individualistic but not antisocial, no friend of laws, anarchic in tendency, always jealous of his rights—has become yet another consumer product within the devouring machinery of our “Western” culture. He who had no master, whose only god was distant Crom, has after his “death” become a slave, monopolized by Conan Properties Inc.
Lalanda distinguishes the magician, a person possessing power, from the sorcerer, who turns that power toward domination.
> For Howard, a magician is a man with power, or “a man of power.” If he directs that ability toward his own benefit without regard for others, or uses others in his “lust for power,” he becomes a sorcerer. The distinction between the two is social and moral, and the boundary separating them is not especially clear. > > People in our own real world fit this very broad definition of sorcery. Perhaps Howard thought something similar: that the structures of power and oppression change their forms but are never destroyed, as though subject to a universal law of conservation.
> In the Conan series we find the barbarian’s, the nomad’s, contempt for the great urban centers, mingled with superstition. For in the end they represent death: they repress life and imprison it within four walls. > > Howard reflects the spirit of barbarians who, before becoming acculturated, would not dare sleep within cities they had conquered, preferring the security and freedom of their huts outside the walls.
Discussing the dragon in Red Nails, which the inhabitants of Xuchotl supposedly revived from fossil bones:
> Death has been made into life.
Lalanda sees two different conceptions of Conan.
> From the panther-like agility, restlessness, and search for destiny that one senses behind Barry W. Smith’s Conan—a reflection of the artist’s personal world, which coincides, at least in Conan, with Howard’s—we arrive at the security and calm of the lion that emanates from John Buscema’s Conan. > > I prefer B. W. Smith’s Conan because I believe he preserved the bond linking the Cimmerian hero to Howard’s other characters, whereas Buscema regarded Conan as different from the others, something he made evident in his drawing.
Panther versus lion.
> Howard’s heroic fantasy, considered character by character, constitutes a homage to the berserker of modern times: the “fallen” warrior who has lost his social recognition and therefore placed himself beyond society’s commandments, practicing an autonomous morality and governing himself according to his own precepts.
He then runs through the pattern:
My takeaway: Civilization periodically needs a man it cannot itself produce.
Lalanda doesn't give a single definition of Sword & Sorcery, but he describes it as a subset of heroic fantasy and implies these elements:
Lalanda also discusses Julius Evola at some length, particularly in connection with ancestry, heroic action, and immortality; I’ve omitted that material here for reasons of scope.
I’m especially curious whether any of these ideas—particularly the city as death, sorcery as exploitative power, and the Howard hero as a socially obsolete berserker—were already common in Howard criticism by 1983.
I feel like it's a stretch posting this in cool sci-fi covers when the painting itself was given the space of a postage stamp. Nevertheless, it's a cool image even if the publisher short-changed it.
I wasn't able to track down whether Azpiri painted this cover for the de Camp book, or whether the publisher repurposed it. Regardless, it's a shame they gave the image the space of a postage stamp.