(EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s always nice to get reader submissions here at the Library. Please send inquiries about submitting future articles or letters using our contact widget on the left column of the page. We’re still looking for one more reviewer to participate in our Classic Conan Countdown! Make sure to inquire if you are interested. Thanks, once more, to our guest reviewer Matt and all of our library friends.)

By MATT ARNOLD – Guest Writer

Discovering the Paint Monk’s little corner of the internet sparked me to explore what has happened to Conan since I left him forty years ago!

One day teenage me was in a bookstore in Red Bank, NJ and I turned down an aisle and I saw this:

Something about that image had a certain appeal. I bought that book and embarked on a lifelong quest to own a copy of every book with a Frank Frazetta cover (As an aside, If you know anyone who has a copy of “Are There Frogs on the Moon,” which was a Doubleday Science Fiction feature, please hook me up!)

I discovered Conan as a part of this quest; if I had to pick the ten best Frank Frazetta paintings, I suspect that Conan would be in at least six of them. 

The very first Conan comic book I bought was from the magazine shop in Union Station, Washington DC, with permission of my favorite aunt, who didn’t know it at the time, but she definitely diverted the course of my life at that moment.

I followed Conan in black and white and in color closely for four or five years, then drifted away when Heavy Metal came out, and Moebius stole my affections from John Buscema – but that is a tale for another day. I present these visual proclivities of mine so that you might grasp the delight I felt when my tour of the Library here led me to discover the Dark Horse Conan issues drawn by Tomas Giorello, whom I consider to be an absolute top-flight illustrator of the life of Conan. He gets Conan, he respects the canon, and he draws beautifully.  

As a result of all this, my Amazon suggestions are often inclined toward this genre and recently this book popped up in them:http://larquepress.com/2019/03/10/paperback-fanatic-no-41-march-2019/

We are who we are, and we must learn to accept that, and being who I am I knew that I was in the target audience (heck, I might *be* the entire target audience). The book arrived within a week.

The cover story, on Conan’s publication history, and the illustrations therein occupies the final dozen pages of the magazine, illuminated with full color images of many of the familiar and a few unfamiliar paperbacks and hardcover books, including the Sphere publication of Conan of Aquilonia. Here, Frazetta depicted an aged Conan, still swinging the old ax head. The original of the painting was stolen during the collapse of Lancer books and it’s location is unknown to this date. Only because color proofs had been sent to Sphere in England do we have a record of it. 

The author of the piece, Richard Toogood, takes us through the many ins and outs of L.Sprague DeCamp’s conflicted literary executor-ship of the Robert E. Howard estate, and its tortured history after DeCamp’s passing in 2000. He makes no bones about his disdain for DeCamp’s actions and for his literary abilities, and if anything he is too charitable to DeCamp.

The publishers who secured the rights are Ace, Lancer, then Berkley (which expanded our knowledge of Conan with books edited by Karl Edward Wagner, of all people, but only three of a planned six books saw publication. Ken Kelley painted the covers!) and Bantam, Sphere, and Tor. Conan installments by other writers including Bjorn Nyberg, Poul Anderson, Andrew J. Offutt, Karl Edward Wagner, and Robert Jordon, are described. I was surprised at how much I learned reading this short article, which has me making a list and hunting around on Abebooks for copies of some of them. The article also includes a sidebar about Roy Thomas’ contributions as well.

If this stuff is in your lane, then I’d say that the Paperback Fanatic Issue #41 is definitely worth the sawbuck.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR – Matt was born in 1959, and grew up mostly in New Jersey. He first encountered Conan in the summer of 1974 while on a trip to New Orleans when a permissive Aunt suggested he choose something to read from the newsstand in the train station in Washington DC, and he chose Savage Sword of Conan #1. The hook was set deep and permanently. Now in the latter stages of a career in Architecture, he lives in southeastern Virginia doing small projects and the occasional illustration. He’s currently working on a soon-to-debut visual novel in partnership with a New Mexico author that he has high expectations for… Excelsior!