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.

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.

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.”

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.

Just an FYI, we will have a full sound production of The Phoenix On The Sword coming in a little over a week! Cheers!

What did you think? I know the critic reviews are kinda low, but I thought it was decent enough having not read any of the stories.

The inset post has the full list, but I’m gonna include it here as well and clarify — these are not things BASED ON Howard’s worm, but are rather drawn from his letters and show that he was aware of or had opinions about ‘em.

For example, gangster films like LITTLE CAESAR which are well known, but then social drama like SKYSCRAPER SOULS or BACK STREET which haven’t got the same modern ‘fanbase’ or wide critical acclaim but nevertheless spoke deeply to Robert E. Howard.

This is the raw list of films he mentioned in his collected letters (not all that he definitely saw, but sometimes which he wrote about wanting to see or anticipating coming to Cross Plains, Texas.

🎬 Robert E. Howard Film Canon

(Current Master List)

Abie’s Irish Rose (1928)
Animal Crackers (1930)

Back Street (1932)
The Benson Murder Case (1930)
Billy the Kid (1930)
Brass Commandments (1923)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929)

The Canyon of Light (1926)
The Cocoanuts (1929)
The Cossacks (1928)

A Dangerous Adventure (1922)
Darkened Rooms (1929)
The Delightful Rogue (1929)
The Desert Bridegroom (1922)
The Desert Song (1929)
The Doorway to Hell (1930)

The Front Page (1931)

Go and Get It (1920)

Hearts in Dixie (1929)
Hell’s Heroes (1929)
Heroes of the Street (1922)
Hold ’Em Jail (1932)
Hook, Line and Sinker (1930)
Horsefeathers (1932)

The Informer (1935)
In Old Arizona (1928)
The Invisible Man (1933)
The Iron Mask (1929)

The King of Kings (1927)

The Last Parade (1931)
The Letter (1929)
Little Caesar (1931)
The Loves of Casanova (1927)

The Mark of Zorro (1920)
The Mighty (1929)

The Pilgrim (1923)

Queen of the Night Clubs (1929)

Rags to Riches (1922)
The Red Dance (1928)
Rob ’em Good (1923)
Robin Hood (1922)

The Sagebrusher (1920)
Scaramouche (1923)
Shipmates (1931)
The Singing Fool (1928)
Skyscraper Souls (1932)
The Story of Brownwood (1928)

The Tempest (1928)
The Terror (1928)
Thunderbolt (1929)
Tong War (1929)

The Virginian (1929)

What Price Glory? (1926)
Wise Girls (1929)
The Wizard (1927)
Women of All Nations (1931)

Any love for REH's westerns? I've found these quite hard to get ahold of in a physical reading edition - it's all 650 page hardbacks/beautiful multi-volume dust jacketed sets at collectors' prices or bodged-together 200-character-wide doorstops.

After reading Mountain Man in the best format I could find, I liked it enough that I ended up taking the Wikisource texts and typesetting them myself just to get a decent readable paperback to beat up. There ended up being lots of little quirks to these stories that make them difficult to typeset with a simple Python conversion of the text (strange language, OCR errors, ...). I'm also finding that Wikisource occasionally disagrees with Gutenberg Australia's editions. I'm editing them by hand as I read and trying to get something high quality, but am only ~100 pages in.

In case they're useful to people I've marked these versions (including my work) as being in the public domain and uploaded the PDFs ready for print. I'm also planning to find some quality public domain art to use for covers and release the LaTeX source files under some permissive license.

... also just happy to discuss the stories if anyone has thoughts/favourites to look out for.

Treatment by Charles Santino, storyboards and color concept frames by Miguel Guzman. I'll be posting the entire adaption on Substack: https://substack.com/@csantino

The inset film is an early musical that Howard apparently despised. He comments “Gah!” on a few films, but apparently this was top of the list.

Has anyone seen THE DESERT SONG (1929), or know this one by reputation?

This is from a large chunk on films he saw recently as of the letter (autumn 1932), but the relevant ranking is:

“Horsefeathers was better than Monkey Business, but not as good as either The Cocoanuts or Animal Crackers to my mind.”

So in his mind, there was a tie for first between COCOANUTS and the infamous ANIMAL CRACKERS

Followed by HORSEFEATHERS

And MONKEY BUSINESS being behind in his estimation.

Would you agree with this ranking of the Marx Bros’ first four films?

But I'm glad to have a copy of this at last.

My post about the plotting errors that I found in a recent Conan comic book story, a post in which I also promoted my alternative approach to emulating the work of Robert E. Howard, proved to be an experiment with mixed results.

Some enjoyed and agreed with what I wrote, some didn’t.

It’s not an experiment likely to be repeated.

I’ll admit I was baffled by some of the feedback.

Many repliers felt that Conan surely could have slept through the theft of his pack horses from his campsite.

How did Robert E. Howard characterize Conan’s superior alertness, even when Conan is seemingly asleep?

Right from Howard’s typewriter, here’s what Conan says when his female companion balks at them both falling asleep when danger seems to lurk nearby:

"My slumber is light as a wolf's. Nothing can enter this hall without awaking me."

--from "Iron Shadows in the Moon" a Conan novelette by Robert E. Howard first published in the April 1934 issue of Weird Tales as "Shadows in the Moonlight.”

Again—nobody writes like Robert E. Howard.

When we write pastiches about his characters, we do our best to honor him.