Gouged Eyes and Chawed Ears: Breckinridge Elkins Video Podcast

My previous video podcast of my 2011 PCA/ACA presentation was well-received when I posted it earlier this year, so I've decided to give the same treatment to my 2012 paper. The subject is Robert E. Howard's humorous westerns featuring Breckinridge Elkins, looking at the ways in which Howard used violence as a comedic motif in the tradition of 19th century frontier humor. In particular I use the theme of rough-and-tumble fighting in the Breck stories as an example of this humorous violence. This presentation began as an essay in my first REHupa fanzine in 2010, then expanded into an article for REH: Two-Gun Raconteur #15, and finally revised again for PCA. Hope you all enjoy it.

Robert E. Howard Days 2013 Trip Report

REH Comics panel: Tim Truman, Al Harron, me, and Mark Finn

After a week-long adventure driving out to Cross Plains, Texas for Robert E. Howard Days 2013, I have finally put together a trip report. It is now posted over at the REH: Two-Gun Raconteur blog. Here's a little excerpt:

And with that, the crowd returned once more to the pavilion for the traditional drinking of Shiner Bocks and swappin’ of lies. A number of folks headed over to the front of the house for the poetry reading. I made the rounds for a bit, found Rusty, Chris, and Mark and finished off the rest of the Sullivan with a toast (Slainte!), then settled down to some good conversation. The highlight of the evening of course was the now-legendary no-holds-barred, rough-and-tumble set-to between REH boxing guru Chris Gruber and hall of fame martial artist Joe Lansdale. It was a grueling, brutal display of the manly art against the gentle way as the two locked horns and strove against each of other in a titanic battle of strength and technique. And who was the victor in this magnificent struggle? Well....

Head on over to the TGR site for the full write-up.

2013 PCA/ACA Pulp Studies Trip Report

This past week I attended the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association national conference in Washington, D.C. This was my third time presenting a paper on Robert E. Howard at PCA/ACA and the Pulp Studies area is growing every year. Shortly after arriving at the hotel on the first I found my partner in crime, Mark Finn. For those who don't know Mark is the author of Blood and Thunder, the best biography of Howard out there. We were soon joined by legendary Howard scholar and editor Rusty Burke. Rusty was the series editor for the Wandering Star/Del Rey definitive editions of Howard's stories. The three of us hit the pub, while we waited for the arrival of our fourth dog-brother, Chris Gruber. Grub is the foremost expert on Howard's boxing yarns, and the editor of Boxing Stories from the University of Nebraska Press. After a fairly restrained first night of drinking beer and swappin' lies, we turned in fairly early, knowing that we would have long day on Thursday and that we needed to pace ourselves.

Creating an Age Undreamed Of Video Podcast

This week I'll be headed to Washington, DC where I'll be chairing a Pulp Studies session at the 2013 PCA/ACA Conference. I'll be joined by my fellow Robert E. Howard aficionados, Mark Finn, Chris Gruber, and Rusty Burke. My paper will be on Howard's use of anthropological theory in his "Little People" stories like "Worms of the Earth."

In the meantime, I've gone back and taken my older 2011 PCA/ACA presentation and turned it into a video podcast. This is my first attempt at doing something like this and it's little more than me reading my paper over my powerpoint presentation, but hopefully some of you will find it interesting.

The topic is on Howard's use of the Atlantis theme in his fiction and looks at several of his sources in that regard. Much of this material would make it into my recent chapter in Conan Meets the Academy.

Video after the jump. Enjoy!

Collecting Robert E. Howard Pulps - Part 3

Previous Installments:
Collecting Robert E. Howard Pulps - Part 1
Collecting Robert E. Howard Pulps - Part 2

December 1932 - First Appearance of Conan

In the last installment of this series, I discussed the issues of Weird Tales in which Howard’s work appeared, from his first published story in 1925 up to the end of 1932. During that period, Howard continued to submit his yarns to a number of publications and began to branch out into other genres such as boxing and historical fiction. Weird Tales, however, continued to be his primary publishing venue and in the December 1932 issue the character with whom Howard has always been mostly closely associated made his debut in print. Combining the fantastic imagery of his earlier Kull stories and the weird horror themes that had always been his mainstay with elements of the historical adventure he had been writing recently, Howard created an amazing new world – the Hyborian Age – and its most prominent inhabitant – Conan the Cimmerian.

Collecting Robert E. Howard Pulps - Part 2

Previous Intstallment:
Collecting Robert E. Howard Pulps - Part 1

There are few creators who are as enjoyable to collect as Robert E. Howard. His works have been published and adapted in various forms and in numerous media for over eight decades.  Howard items have an incredibly broad range in scarcity and value so that any collector on most any budget can usually find a niche within the hobby that suits their tastes and resources.

Out of all the REH collectibles out there, however, there is nothing – at least in my opinion – quite like the original pulp magazines. To be able to hold in your hands one of these relics of a bygone publishing era and read one of Howard’s yarns as his first generation of fans would have done is a special experience indeed. The primitive line drawings that comprise the interior illustrations, the smell of the pulp paper, the letters from readers arguing the tastefulness (or lack thereof) of Margaret Brundage’s latest racy cover – all these things help to connect the modern collector with that earlier time when Two-Gun Bob was still alive and well and furiously pounding away on his Underwood.

Collecting Robert E. Howard Pulps - Part 1

This is a revised version of an article I wrote for The Cimmerian blog in 2009.

Some REH items from my personal collection.

I have always been a collector by nature and collecting Robert E. Howard material can be both challenging and rewarding and most certainly addictive. I began with the comic books and paperbacks when I was young, then moved on to the books published by Donald M. Grant, Arkham House and other small presses. Today, I am primarily focused on collecting pulp magazines with Howard stories. It is as a Howard collector that I will be posting here at The Cimmerian. There are many REH experts out there whose knowledge in this area dwarfs my own, but I have picked up a few things during my obsessive attempts to accumulate obscure “Howardiana” and I hope to share some of this knowledge with you over the following weeks.

Introducing An Age Undreamed Of...

Let me provide a little background about myself. I'm an archaeologist and a historian with an avid interest in ancient cultures and mythology. But I also have a fascination with late nineteenth and early twentieth century popular culture, particularly examples of what some might consider “low-brow” pop culture – dime novels, pulps, comic strips, etc. I have always enjoyed reading good, rousing adventure fiction, but, even as a child, the speculative genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror were my favorites. I'm also a collector of various of various pop culture media, particularly books, comics, and pulps.

In the last few years I have become more involved in popular culture studies, particularly related to 1920s and 30s pulp fiction. The primary focus of my research has been on the work of Robert E. Howard, best known as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, but I am also interested other pioneers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. P. Lovecraft. I was previously a contributor to The Cimmerian blog and have written both scholarly and popular articles for several venues such as The Dark Man: The Journal of Robert E. Howard Studies, REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, and Comic Book Quarterly. On this blog I will be sharing my observations, my research, my occasional random thoughts on various topics related to popular culture though it will tend to be comic and pulp-centric. In addition to posting new material I will also occasionally post revised versions of some of my previously published work.

Finally let me close this introductory post with a word on the title of this blog. Fans of Robert E. Howard and Conan likely know the reference immediately, but for those who don't it is taken from the opening lines of the first Conan story, "The Phoenix on the Sword," which was published appropriately enough eighty years ago this month in Weird Tales magazine:

“Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of…”