MICHAEL H. PRICE: Conan the Oilpatch Roughneck
Devotees of comics and the high-adventure pulp magazines know the story almost by heart: Before he had turned 30, Robert E. Howard, of Cross Plains, Texas, had staked out several prominent stations in American literature. He was a poet of Homeric promise, for example, and a contributor to the H.P. Lovecraft school of cosmic terrors – and a prolific South-by-Southwestern regionalist and steward of cowboy lore. And then some.
Had Howard lived past 30, he likely would have outgrown the shirtsleeves-fiction arena to find formal acceptance as a major literary figure. But the pulps – those cheaply produced mass-market publications that thrived during the first half of the 20th century – made an ideal proving ground, and a lasting monument to a talent too big to confine to a category.
A constant element is a sense of Howard’s nomadic upbringing in rural Texas, during a time when the first oil-and-gas booms were transforming much of the state into a barbaric land of violence and mercenary opportunism. In a recent book called Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard, Austin-based scholar Mark Finn makes plain the influence that the boom-town phenomenon, with its brawling new breed of citizenry known as roughnecks, worked upon Bob Howard.
Had he lived to become a more seasoned artist, Howard (1906-36) probably would not have outgrown his appetite for rambunctious adventure, whether or not he might have left behind the characters who had earned for him an eager and widespread readership. Such recurring characters include a trouble-prone Westerner named Jeopardy Grimes and the Puritan avenger Solomon Kane. To say nothing of Conan the Cimmerian, the barbaric warrior whose exploits have overshadowed the greater range of Howard’s work.
Conan remains an especially bankable attraction, 71 years after the author’s death. Dark Horse Comics offers a mounting series of new exploits, written nowadays by my old-time chum and blues-and-comics collaborator Timothy Truman. And many people still picture Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger with perhaps a smidgen of accuracy in terms of his Conan movies of a generation ago.
But Howard’s restless spirit is gaining ground on his fictional creation.
Finn’s Blood & Thunder (Monkey Brain Books; $19.95) represents more than a perceptive portrait. Taken together, separate biographical studies of Howard by Rusty Burke and Mark Finn form a persuasively definitive portrait. To a Southwestern region that has reawakened during the past several years to the possibilities of oil-and-gas exploration – a consequence of mounting natural-gas play within the Barnett Shale geological formation – Finn’s book is particularly valuable as an examination of an earlier Texas in the throes of boom-town mania.
“Howard remains to most an Oedipal figure who created [Conan] as a wish-fulfillment fantasy,” as Publisher’s Weekly has appraised Blood and Thunder. “Finn quietly and expertly demolishes these and other misconceptions [and] discusses Howard in the context of a populist writer whose dyspeptic view of civilization was forged in the corrupt Texas oil-boom towns in which he grew up.”
Every fictional character must have some basis in real-life observation or experience. Finn’s persuasive argument, interpreted from Howard’s published and private writings, holds that Conan, with his air of defiance, his appetites for mayhem and his “gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirths” (in Howard’s terminology) owes much to the oilfield social dynamics of the early 20th century – the upshot of abrupt industrialization.
And what’s Mr. Truman been up to lately, besides drawing for the Dead? Well, he’s been writing Dark Horse’s Conan series, and for the past couple months he’s been hard at work drawing the newest GrimJack graphic novel, The Manx Cat, written by fellow-GJ creator John Ostrander.
