Well, I was hoping that if I kept on with the series, I'd get used to the art, but unfortunately not. Giant chins and tiny, lipless mouths everywhere.Well, I was hoping that if I kept on with the series, I'd get used to the art, but unfortunately not. Giant chins and tiny, lipless mouths everywhere. And everyone looks like a pallid corpse thanks to the questionable choice of shading all fleshtones with an unsaturated grey. It's just not pretty.
And I don't think it's some deliberate attempt at disquieting horror art, either, because low-saturation isn't the way to make unsettlingly corpselike characters. There's a whole palette of greens, blues, and yellows out there that have been used to great effect in horror comics, and that's not what we're getting. It's not realistic, nor is it stylized, which seems to be my problem with this book in general.
We've got more and more plot unfolding everywhere, but no small story or character arcs to keep us entertained in the meantime. If Hill isn't going to give us small payoffs as we go along, the one at the end is going to have to be gobsmacking to make up for it. Too many good authors have dug that hole and proved how daunting it is to escape.
So far, the main impetus for the plot is watching the fox in the henhouse and waiting for them to stop him. It's about as dynamic as a car wreck in slow motion. You see everything coming, and there's a kind of unpleasantness as Hill slowly brings about the inevitable, but I'm not sure that it constitutes 'horror'.
Horror has to surprise us, not just make us squeamish, and there aren't going to be any surprises unless they start with the characters. So far, they're mostly archetypal: tools for facilitating the plot. Hill is all about pacing and getting the plot moving, which is impressive, but without the depth, voice, and character to back it up, what's the point? It's all getting a bit tedious.
It's unusual to see someone who has polished the structure of his writing so much but who is so otherwise lacking in subtlety and style. Usually, these aspects develop in tandem, but sometimes you find authors who work to perfect one aspect of their craft so much that the rest suffers.
It's those little things that make characters stand out: turns of phrase, emotional reactions, hypocrisies; things that indicate that the character has a past and an existence outside of the story (including plot-revealing flashbacks). I'm just not getting that from Hill and it's disappointing, because I want to like this story, I want to connect with it, I want to see its ideas explored, its influences nodded to and twisted around, but so far it's all too convenient, too plainly artificial.
And yet, it doesn't save itself by relishing its own artificial nature; a strong cliche can be a lot of fun, a weak, degraded cliche rarely is. It's neither realistic, nor an adventure, and I feel like this story is really losing itself between the extremes.
The background art is still far and away the most impressive part of the comic, but unfortunately, it never becomes the focus for longer than an establishing shot. It could be very effective if the comic quietly lingered on it, shifting through scenes and places and letting them become real, like in Hellboy. But we've got a lot of expositionary dialogue and flashbacks to get through if we're going to get to the good vs. evil climax any time soon, so we march on.
I can't stand a villain without a motive, and if ours has one, there's no indication of it in his one-track personality. So far, he just feels like a tool, in more ways than one, and the way the camera lingers on him, I'm starting to think the author has an unhealthy passion for his villainy, since we see it demonstrated over and over. We get it, he's the bad guy, now make us care!
Not a bad little book, but it didn't really stand out. It takes a lot from Lovecraft (such as the name of the series and the town where it's set) but Not a bad little book, but it didn't really stand out. It takes a lot from Lovecraft (such as the name of the series and the town where it's set) but most people probably wouldn't recognize Lovecraft's influence in this story, since it doesn't come from the more popular Cthulhu mythos, but from his 'Dreamlands' stories.
These stories really touched me as an adolescent, with their depiction of an eccentric, ancient family line with magical connections to a world of fantasy. It's an appealing and rich story, but unfortunately, I don't feel that Hill has improved upon the idea. The 'Magic Key Family' with symbolic name also evokes Gaiman's Neverwhere, though whether that was deliberate, I couldn't say.
The plotting wasn't bad: fairly straightforward and with some good suspense, but it also didn't feel like a self-contained arc. It's fine to have a story that leads to something bigger, but it's always been my experience that a long story should be made up of solid, smaller stories that work well on their own. This one was too much mystery, not enough meat, and those kinds of stories usually end up like Lost: rambling, always suggesting, but never really going anywhere
We don't even really get character arcs, which are one way to create a satisfying subplot in a longer story. The characters do have internal conflict, but they don't progress very far. They tend to stall in their archetypal role, which wouldn't be a problem if Hill was content with archetypal characters, but they don't really fit with his story. Horror archetypes tend to be pretty thin on the ground and Hill keeps reaching for more.
So he keeps nudging the characters, trying to dislodge them, aiming for realism, but never quite getting there, which leaves the story in limbo. I guess that's what I felt was lacking, in general: a strong authorial voice to tie things together and drive the story along. There were some good ideas there, but not enough thrust behind them.
Another reason it was hard to connect to the characters was the art. Rodriguez draws extremely stylized people in the sort of cartoon/manga style I associate with graffiti sketchbooks. It was at once cutesy and ugly, which didn't match with the book's genre or themes, at least for me. The colorist also didn't seem able to find the planes of the cartoon faces, so we got a lot of murky dodge/burn skintone that wasn't helping anything.
My favorite part of the series was easily the background work, which was precise, detailed, stylistically interesting, and beautifully colored. As Scott McCloud mentions, having a detailed, moody background can do wonders for a comic book, really transporting the reader to Another Place. Combining this with simple characters which the reader can identify can be doubly effective, as evidenced by Tintin or Cerebus, but I'm afraid the awkwardness of the character art and the lack of subtlety in their personalities prevented me from getting lost inside them.
In the end, the book feels rather conflicted, with the art stylized to the point of affectation, but the writing plain, with little style to speak of. I guess it goes to show that an author needs more than the rules of plot, structure, and suspense to excel. Not much good rushing to a suspenseful plot when you haven't made interesting, sympathetic characters to people it.
Every Busiek comic I've read feels like a workshop for telling stories in the comic book medium. He fills his books with so much character and charm, Every Busiek comic I've read feels like a workshop for telling stories in the comic book medium. He fills his books with so much character and charm, weaving long and short plot arcs and always focussing on psychological progression. He just makes it look so easy.
There is something rudimentary in this collection, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Busiek is staying very true to his sources, lifting liberally from War Stories and Fairy Tales, using all the cliches, but somehow, making us care about them again.
Solid little piece of storytelling worth studying if you have a mind to try plotting some comics. It's all streamlined, nothing superfluous, and yet he's not bashing us over the head with it.
While some authors might be inclined to rush through a story like this, supplementing the familiar with their own unpredictable twists to keep it from feeling dull, Busiek instead gives us to us straight, trusting in the depth of his characters and world to carry us through a story we have seen before.
Just goes to show, you don't have to be wacky and mind-bending to write a good story in comics these days; just because yelling is the loudest way to say something doesn't make it the best. Sometimes a quiet tone can carry more force, depending on what's behind it.
The more familiar I become with Kipling's many short, fantastical works, the clearer it becomes that almost every fantasy author of the past century oThe more familiar I become with Kipling's many short, fantastical works, the clearer it becomes that almost every fantasy author of the past century owes him a great debt. I have pointed out before that he has written works which lay out whole subgenres--blueprints which later authors like C.S. Lewis, H.P Lovecraft, Neal Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke have expanded upon.
And in this collection, we can see yet another branch of influence. In several stories spanning centuries of English history, Kipling writes of war, politics, and adventure amongst the clash of conquerors and settlers of that island. Each story is full of unusual historical details and characters, woven closely together into a rich and varied tapestry where beauty, comedy, and tragedy are depicted side by side.
It is this vividity of myriad emotions that I have come to see as the mark of a great and exciting tale of adventure. As Howard said of his greatest creation, Conan the Barbarian:
"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 sandalled feet..."
Of the many authors who have followed after Howard, the great majority are lackluster, for though they all remember the 'gigantic melancholies', none recall the 'gigantic mirth'. And indeed, these tales of Kipling's are immediately reminiscent of the wild, strange adventures penned by Howard and Leiber.
They both learned well the lesson that both magic and realism are dependent on a constant rush of strange yet naturalistic details. Any long-winded explanation is the death of a story, while innumerable implications of the greater world are its life. More than that, they resemble Kipling in form. The sorts of characters, places, events, and twists we see are immediately familiar to the connoisseur of Sword and Sorcery: piracy, doomed battles, monstrous apes, lost treasures, inscrutable foreign allies, mystery cults, ruthless generals, seers, &c.
Tying all these tales together was a frame story taken from the English fairy tale tradition, with the familiar theme of modern children accidentally coming across ancient myths (though in this case, they are only listeners, not participants). Yet what fascinated me was how fantastical the stories themselves felt, despite the fact that they were not overtly magical. Even so, Kipling maintains a consistent tone of wonderment and strangeness, often by representing the world through the eyes of the characters, themselves.
So many authors seem to think that including some elves and dragons will make a story wondrous, but for the most part, they are known quantities, not mysterious entities. We all know what dragons are, so their appearance in fantasy could hardly surprise us. No story will be fantastical if it is fundamentally familiar and predictable. It is not the color of a creature's skin that makes it otherworldly, it is how the creature is personified. It is simply impossible to make something fantastical without a strong sense of tone.
So perhaps I should have been less surprised that I found in the thirty pages of one of these stories more complex characters, emotional depth, and sense of the mystical than I have in most five-hundred page books about yet another dragon war.
Unfortunately, I found the last few stories dragged on a bit, lacking the conciseness and immediacy of the earlier ones. Kipling's attempt to tie all the stories together into a meaningful narrative about English identity was stretched a bit thin. Likewise, there is an uncomfortable implication of 'White Man's Burden' in the way the Romans treat the Picts--but if anything, the fact that he turns the same argument on his own people suggests that it is a comment about international power relations, and not race.
Once more, Kipling shows the breadth of his imagination--the many periods, peoples, and stories he covered--and it's easy to see his influence among the best writers of fantasy and adventure.
What it is that makes Howard so much more compelling than his many imitators? To the untrained eye, it may be hard to see differences, since his faultWhat it is that makes Howard so much more compelling than his many imitators? To the untrained eye, it may be hard to see differences, since his faults are sometimes more readily apparent than his virtues, though he has plenty of both. Some might try to 'salvage him' from his pulp origins, but despite all his literary aspirations, I'm happy to call him a pulp author, and one of the best.
I have a great deal of praise for this edition in particular, volume one of a three-part series which collects for the first time Howard's Conan stories as he originally wrote them, without the meddling of either magazine editors or De Camp (who shamelessly rewrote Howard's unfinished stories to match his own views, and released them as 'originals'). It is also first to publish them in pure chronological order, eschewing all and sundry attempts to produce an official 'internal chronology'.
Howard meant the order to be somewhat ambiguous, mimicking the epics and histories that inspired the names and events of his stories. Our delightful editor plays the old Lit Crit game of connecting all the dots from the Conan tales to their origins in Plutarch, Bullfinch's Mythology, Lovecraft, or Bierce. I'm indebted to her for helping me to see Conan with new eyes by lending me the perspective of the Howard scholar.
Seeing the way his world sprang up from notes, sketches, and maps is fascinating, and the critical essays try to get a little more mileage out of Lovecraft's misunderstanding of Howard's pseudo-historical names. They are meant to be evocative of a world that, while familiar, still holds surprises. We can recognize a type, a historic conflict, terrain, and temperament without being tied down to the specificity of true historical fiction.
Howard did not want so narrow a view, and was never a stickler for small details, as evidenced by the singular madness his chronologers develop trying to account for the appearance and disappearance of Conan's red cloak and horned helm throughout the stories. Howard liked an underpinning of consistency, but excitement and story always took precedence, which is why, despite drawing names and plots from history (much as Shakespeare did), he never let them bog down his stories, always aiming, above all, to entertain.
When I say that we get Howard without editorial meddling, we must still understand that he was writing for an audience, and that much of the excitement and titillation in his tales was a sugaring of his pill for the lower denominator. Yet for all that, much of his psychology and sexual politics is deceptively complex. It is easy to dismiss him as a cliche strong man with an endless following of swooning women, but there is something more subtle at work.
Firstly, each story that shows Conan in a relationship is written from the point of view of the woman. Often, Conan does not even appear until after her character and situation are already developed. We rarely get an emotional insight into Conan, into his plans or emotions, but we do see into his heroines, which is the reverse of most fantasy romances.
In addition, Conan is often painted as the object of desire. The author's vision rests equally on the desirability of Conan and of the women, showing how and why feeling might develop between them. Conan, having been raised outside of civil society, cannot charm the women, bargain with them for favors, or fool them. His appeal is not that he has wealth, prestige, or grooming, but that he is attractive, confident, physically powerful, guileless, and does not mingle his desires with ulterior motive. He is part 'bad boy', but he is also attractive because he lies outside the arena of sexual politics--something like dating someone outside your high school to avoid the judgment, name-calling, in groups, and jealousy that would otherwise result.
The women are often the victims of civilization; that is to say, they have been carefully bred to be beautiful, desirable, and controlled. They rarely have power in their own cultures, often finding themselves at the whims of powerful men, and so it makes sense that they would seek out Conan, who is not a part of this unbalanced social system, and who has the physical and mental strength to protect them from reprisal when she abandons that culture.
On the surface, "The Vale of Lost Women" is the story which most condemns Howard as a chauvinist (and racist), but there is a subtle subversion within the tale that shows Howard as a much more canny student of the human condition than most give him credit for. The premise of the story doesn't do Howard any favors, and certainly hasn't aged well: a well-bred white woman has been captured by a barbaric pseudo-African tribe by whom Conan has found himself employed.
He finds the woman accidentally, during a revel, chained up in a tent, and she begs him to release her, saying that surely not even a barbarian like him would leave a white woman in the hands of the cruel black chief. It's hard to read without feeling a lump of political correctness rise in our throats--but socially and historically, it's neither and absurd statement, nor an insulting one.
'Odalisques' or white, virgin girls were the most valuable in trade for Barbary pirates to Moorish harems. Even today, Black women get fewer responses in online dating than any other race/sex group. Just because it's unpleasant doesn't mean that it isn't socially true, and just because it is a current social fact doesn't mean that it is an ultimate, universal truth.
We can say it is a social fact that women have been historically controlled and judged by the slut/virgin dichotomy, but that doesn't mean that they desire to be controlled, or to be sluts or virgins. It also doesn't mean that stories which portray this unfortunate dynamic necessarily support it. As students of Nietzsche and Machiavelli know, saying 'this is how the world is' is not the same as saying 'this is how it ought to be'.
Let me say that again: just because a writer presents white women as more culturally valuable doesn't mean that they are any more attractive, intelligent, or worthwhile than any other person. Cultural values are funny things, and don't necessarily align with real values. Just because someone is willing to pay $500 for a rare Beanie Baby doesn't mean that a Beanie Baby is somehow intrinsically better than a comparatively cheaper encyclopedia or road atlas.
It's easy to get hung up on what the author is specifically saying, and hard to step beyond it and look at how and why it's being said. A character's statement is different from an author's, and Howard is surprisingly careful to keep social observations in the mouths of characters, and out of the omniscient narrative voice. After her appeal to racial loyalty, the woman offers herself to Conan in exchange for being freed from the tribe--aghast at the lengths to which she must go. But Conan laughs.
He laughs and tells her that she is sadly mistaken if she assumes that she can merely trade sex for favors, as she has been taught to do in civilized society. It's this simple observation that shows that Howard (and Conan) are better students of the human condition than they get credit for. For Conan, sex does not have this connotation of a social trade, it is an act engaged in out of desire, not coercion. He scorns the 'civilized' notion that women are property to be bargained for. This separation is the same conclusion Angela Carter makes about De Sade in her incomparable Sadeian Woman: that the trade value of sex must be unveiled and demystified in order to approach any kind of sexual equality.
We must recall that this understanding of sex is enforced on both sides, and that if women have an artificially increased value in sexual social trade, it will eclipse any other value they have, or that they might wish to have, and few will consider them as anything else.
But Conan, being outside of that system, values women differently. After his moment of insight, he shocks us back with his barbarism, saying he really couldn't leave a white girl like her in the hands of the chief, and that he's tired of 'black sluts', which is unpleasant and unsympathetic enough to clamp our minds shut again, though whether it might be true to the world or the character (who has hang-ups with his own racial identity), I leave up to you. After all, it is rare that a person raised under one set of signifiers for attractiveness learns in later life how to appreciate a completely different idea of beauty.
He does decide to save her, but not in trade for sexual favor, which once again separates Howard from the thud and blunder writers who followed him. Again and again, if we look at Conan's scattered romantic relationships, we see that he is only interested in the fulfillment of mutual desire, and that the woman's side of the relationship is often the one Howard chooses to explore. Conan rejects the notion of coercing women, let alone forcing them, as beneath him.
He doesn't pressure women, or conquer them, or trade for sex, and the women are constantly surprised at his lack of overture, his refusal to make a game out of the whole thing--or a schoolboy's lovesick obsession. But then, Conan is less interested in an 'erotic victory' than in mutually beneficial pleasure, even if that pleasure is not socially condoned, and is, instead transgressively focused on female desire. Conan's outsider status as a barbarian allows him to approach women on more-or-less equal terms, giving them an opportunity to reject the values which otherwise bind them and to choose for themselves.
Sure, the relationships and their consummation might be idealized and romantic--they're still pulp--and I'm not claiming Howard didn't harbor certain racist and sexist opinions, but the way these themes develop psychologically in his work is rarely so simple. Howard, like Conan, was a man of contradiction and surprising subtlety.
His language also makes his work stand out from the pack: high-energy, evocative, and well-paced, his world and characters are always alive and active on the page. He takes generously from his historical and literary influences, playing with vocabulary and style to evoke a far-off period without growing so distant that he risks losing the uninitiated, as an eccentric linguist like Eddison is liable to do.
One thing the reader must come to terms with in order to enjoy him is Howard's repetition. He has favored words, phrases, and descriptions that come up again and again throughout the stories, and sometimes they feel like crutches. Part of it is that these were to be consumed as single stories, so some repetition would not likely have been noticed--but it happens even within a story.
At these points, I am tempted to compare Howard to the deliberate repetition of the epic tradition of the 'Homeric Epithet', an oft-repeated poetic phrase that becomes part of the rhythm of the text, such as "wine dark sea" or "long-haired Acheans"--or the way every warrior in the Shahnameh is described as a lion, and every beautiful woman is a cypress. Howard knows that there is power in phrases, and by repeating them, he creates motifs, identities, and connections. But, as usual for Howard, it's a combination of highs and lows: we get glimpses of his powerful, poetic language intermixed with his less effective, florid attempts.
But more than even his most effective prose (and occasional, surprisingly unoffending poetry), what sets Howard apart is his pure storytelling. His sense of pacing is admirable, often cutting out unnecessary scenes that other writers would not have realized were redundant. The stories flow along, drawing equally from the verisimilitude of historic tales and the archetypal form of the adventure story.
He moves fluidly through themes and styles, combining romance, war stories, supernatural horror, political thriller, and treasure hunting all in one story, maintaining a lilting, surprising pace without losing the story's center. His stories as a whole also work to build a grander world, much of it left for the reader to complete between hints and loose threads. There is a definite sense of historical discovery in this style, and the first three Howard stories give us Conan as a king, as an untried youth, and as a wary reaver.
Read a hundred pages of Conan and you will get a picture of a whole life, a man in different stages, changed by the world. We also get a glimpse of that world, and understanding of its places and ways without being explicitly told what they are. Compare this to almost any other fantasy writer, and they will come up short.
A hundred pages of Tolkien, Jordan, Goodkind, or Wolfe, and you haven't even left the protagonist's home. You won't get a view of the world, nor character growth. You might read a thousand pages of a fantasy series and see less growth than you would in a few Conan stories.
My question has always been: what do we gain from those thousands of extra pages? A more exciting story? A more complex world? A deeper character? Sadly, the answer is often no. Few authors seem to have taken Howard's lesson that saying more isn't as easy as simply writing more.
But then, Howard set the bar pretty high. There's nothing wrong with pulp, because pulp is written for an audience. Too often, these days, one seems to find authors obsessed with a kind of 'pure' writing that refuses to bow to any audience, editor, or sense of fun, and all you're really left with is pretension.
Pulp often gets a bad rap--the unshy way that it approaches sex, race, and politics can make a modern reader feel awkward, but at least these stories are actually, in a very real way, confronting and exploring those issues--and forcing us to do so, as well. Though the next two volumes of Conan stories never quite reach the vivacious heights of these early outings, I have to say: for all his flaws, it's still hard to find a fantasy writer who can better Howard.
Picked this up because it was a cheap binding of many of Howard's Conan stories. I've since gotten the much more thorough and accurate Del Rey collectPicked this up because it was a cheap binding of many of Howard's Conan stories. I've since gotten the much more thorough and accurate Del Rey collection, which I suggest highly. This edition doesn't include any of the stories De Camp altered and finished, publishing them under Howard's name posthumously, so one need not worry about bowdlerization or other tampering.
Curiously, this edition was published in Thailand, which is likely cheaper, but I wonder if they are also profiting by the fact that in most countries besides America, Howard's stories recently entered the public domain, which isn't likely to happen here as long as the Mickey Mouse Laws keep getting passed.
What marks this book as particularly cheap are the slapdash illustrations, one of which is featured on the cover in blotchy color. If this is the same John Ridgway who made a name for himself in 2000AD, Hellblazer, and Judge Dredd, I'm at a loss to explain the sad quality of the art here. There are occasionally signs of quality in the hatching or backgrounds, but for the most part the drawings are indistinct, lacking in chiaroscuro dynamic, and the anatomy is flat and ungainly. Perhaps it was a rush job, perhaps Ridgway is suffering from a recent hand injury--or perhaps the publishers decided it would be cheaper to publish his roughs rather than pay for completed pieces.
I mean, this is the internet age, there are tons of great, young artists out there just giving their work away for free, so it shouldn't be a problem to actually get some solid Conan art, even if they don't have name recognition. I was reading a few stories in here, but now that I've found my Del Rey, I think I'll switch to that.
J.G. Keely
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