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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 24, 2017 11:48:17 GMT -5
To be fair...anyone between the ages of 25 and 90 likely started out with Conan either through the pastiches or the Marvel comics. I'm trying to remember the first time I saw unexpurgated Howard, but I know it was after high school so it was probably into the 90s. I get that, I certainly do. The de Camp/Carter Conan was ubiquitous through the late 60s to the mid-80s, and it wasn't until after that point that the effort to make the pure Howard texts available began. It's not the fault of those who discovered the de Camp edits and pastiches that those were the only ones available, but seeing what happened to Conan art after the Howard originals became readily available for me highlights how much the de Camp interpretation cast a shadow on depictions of Conan in art and pop culture, and how different it could have been if the Howard texts had been available. -M I'm a bit of two minds on this. And I say this being a bigger fan of some of Howard's "lesser" characters (Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn) than Conan. On the one hand, it absolutely would have been better if the original Howard had been readily available. On the other hand, I'm not at all sure that Howard would have been available without de Camp/Carter. Howard's work was pretty well forgotten until it was brought back by de Camp and Carter. The couple of books by small press publishers like Arkham House simply wasn't going to bring him back to predominance. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 12:06:26 GMT -5
I get that, I certainly do. The de Camp/Carter Conan was ubiquitous through the late 60s to the mid-80s, and it wasn't until after that point that the effort to make the pure Howard texts available began. It's not the fault of those who discovered the de Camp edits and pastiches that those were the only ones available, but seeing what happened to Conan art after the Howard originals became readily available for me highlights how much the de Camp interpretation cast a shadow on depictions of Conan in art and pop culture, and how different it could have been if the Howard texts had been available. -M I'm a bit of two minds on this. And I say this being a bigger fan of some of Howard's "lesser" characters (Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn) than Conan. On the one hand, it absolutely would have been better if the original Howard had been readily available. On the other hand, I'm not at all sure that Howard would have been available without de Camp/Carter. Howard's work was pretty well forgotten until it was brought back by de Camp and Carter. The couple of books by small press publishers like Arkham House simply wasn't going to bring him back to predominance. No doubt Conan's popularity owes a great deal to de Camp and Carter, especially de Camp for rescuing Howard from obscurity with the Gnome Editions and later the Ace paperbacks. But at the same time, he wasn't just bringing Howard's stories back, he was trying to improve them and remake them in his own image. I have no problem with pastiches, or finishing fragments, or even adapting non-Conan tales into Conan stories, but changing the Howard originals to make them "better" and to better fit with what else he was doing with Conan to me seems unnecessary at a minimum and a gross act of hubris at its core. Take the Howard originals and build around them sure, but instead he built something and then tried to fit the Howard originals in an changed them when they don't fit properly. For me, those actions speak of a fundamental disrespect for the original material despite what he said and wrote he felt over the years, and a case where an editor sought to put his voice over and above the original author's voice in the material, when the editor came into the work after it had been created. If the editor had been a part of the creative process, or collaborated with the original author, or even requested changes from the author and let him do it (I know impossible in this case) that would be one thing, but to run roughshod over a work you are editing from an already complete and published manuscript is another. If de Camp had tried to do that to any established living author, he would have been laughed out of the industry, and if he had tried to do it with a better known deceased author, there would have been an absolute uproar over it. So yes, praise de Camp (and Carter) for their role in bringing Conan to the masses, but hold them accountable for what they actually did while doing that. -M |
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Post by Nowhere Man on Aug 24, 2017 12:34:58 GMT -5
Were the original Howard stories available to the masses before the 2003 Wandering Star/Del Rey editions that collected all of Howard's original Conan stories? I realize that this was the first time we got to read the unedited versions, but were there collections that featured the edited versions as they appeared in Weird Tales pre-de Camp and Carter?
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 24, 2017 13:52:14 GMT -5
Were the original Howard stories available to the masses before the 2003 Wandering Star/Del Rey editions that collected all of Howard's original Conan stories? I realize that this was the first time we got to read the unedited versions, but were there collections that featured the edited versions as they appeared in Weird Tales pre-de Camp and Carter? Maybe. I think the Millennium / Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks editions from 2001 may have been just the original stories. But I'm not 100% sure. Before that you have to go back to the early 50s and the Arkham and Gnome Press editions. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 14:05:04 GMT -5
The Gollancz are the original Howard for the most part, they are edited to British spellings for words though, like color changed to colour etc. but not edited for content. There's also the original Weird Tales mags if you had access to them, hey were mass produced and distributed at their time. How easy they were to find is debatable, but probably easier through the 70s and 80s than now.
-M
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 24, 2017 14:16:33 GMT -5
The Gollancz are the original Howard for the most part, they are edited to British spellings for words though, like color changed to colour etc. but not edited for content. There's also the original Weird Tales mags if you had access to them, hey were mass produced and distributed at their time. How easy they were to find is debatable, but probably easier through the 70s and 80s than now. -M I'm not sure if they were or not. The internet has made it a lot easier to find collectibles than it was in the 70s and 80s. Particularly in small towns and rural areas. I honestly don't think I ever saw a pulp magazine in the wild in that time period. Comics, Mad Magazines, old paperbacks and some digest magazines (Asimovs, F&SF) but never pulps. The combination of horrible paper and paper drives in W.W. II took a heavy toll on the pulps. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 14:38:34 GMT -5
I am just going by personal experience I guess. The one comic shop I went to in high school was owned by a guy who started in sci-fi fandom and he had an entire back room filled with pulps and old sci-fi paperbacks. He ran monthly conventions at a VFW hall, and there were at least a half dozen dealers there that had selections of pulps for sale as well as all the comics dealers. I've actually had a harder time finding pulps in the wild or on the internet since the turn of the millennium than I ever did when I was out hunting in the 80s and 90s. But agian, that's just my personal experience hunting in New England at that time.
-M
if my tastes then matched my tastes now, I would have picked up so many of those pulps, but alas I was mostly just into super-heroes then.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 24, 2017 14:46:38 GMT -5
I am just going by personal experience I guess. The one comic shop I went to in high school was owned by a guy who started in sci-fi fandom and he had an entire back room filled with pulps and old sci-fi paperbacks. He ran monthly conventions at a VFW hall, and there were at least a half dozen dealers there that had selections of pulps for sale as well as all the comics dealers. I've actually had a harder time finding pulps in the wild or on the internet since the turn of the millennium than I ever did when I was out hunting in the 80s and 90s. But agian, that's just my personal experience hunting in New England at that time. -M if my tastes then matched my tastes now, I would have picked up so many of those pulps, but alas I was mostly just into super-heroes then. I would say that at least some of this comes down to options. Until I went to college there was a single used book store in town (where I got a lot of SF paperbacks and most of the Bantam Doc Savages), yard sales and mail order. I was a big enough Doc Savage/ERB/Shadow fan that if I'd come across pulps in the wild I'd have been all over them. Even after I went to Boise to college I don't recall seeing any pulps in either of the comic shops that were there. Though at that point, monetarily, I wasn't probably looking for them. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 24, 2017 14:58:13 GMT -5
I am just going by personal experience I guess. The one comic shop I went to in high school was owned by a guy who started in sci-fi fandom and he had an entire back room filled with pulps and old sci-fi paperbacks. He ran monthly conventions at a VFW hall, and there were at least a half dozen dealers there that had selections of pulps for sale as well as all the comics dealers. I've actually had a harder time finding pulps in the wild or on the internet since the turn of the millennium than I ever did when I was out hunting in the 80s and 90s. But agian, that's just my personal experience hunting in New England at that time. -M if my tastes then matched my tastes now, I would have picked up so many of those pulps, but alas I was mostly just into super-heroes then. I would say that at least some of this comes down to options. Until I went to college there was a single used book store in town (where I got a lot of SF paperbacks and most of the Bantam Doc Savages), yard sales and mail order. I was a big enough Doc Savage/ERB/Shadow fan that if I'd come across pulps in the wild I'd have been all over them. Even after I went to Boise to college I don't recall seeing any pulps in either of the comic shops that were there. Though at that point, monetarily, I wasn't probably looking for them. Speaking of mail order, I remember seeing a lot of ads for pulps in the classifieds of CBG during my high school years too, so I'd say as well as options, it came down to knowing where to look to find them if you were looking for them. Sure the internet makes it easier to hunt things, but if you knew what you were doing in the pre-internet days and had the funds available, you could find a lot of stuff by knowing where to look. It wasn't a supply issue then, as it seems to be now, it was an accessibility issue of getting to the supply. Now that the access is easier, the supply is the issue. I still haven't made it to the Pulp Con over in Columbus that's held each year (admission is probably bigger than my budget for the whole con would be) but from what I understand among the dealers there you can get a good selection of pulps if you have the money to spend on them still. -M |
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Post by berkley on Aug 24, 2017 22:59:11 GMT -5
I did read a lot of the Busiek/Nord run when it first came out but seem to have lost my copies of those issues somewhere along the way. My memory is that it was very professionally done in all respects and that I liked Nord's artwork well enough but didn't fall in love with it. Was some of it painted? I have a bit of an aversion to painted comics, that might have had something to do with my relative lack of enthusiasm at the time. I wish I had held on to them, though, because you never know how your tastes might change over time and I'd like to look at them again now.
Now that you mention the original REH stories, I realise that that might be part of why I haven't been attracted to the comics for a while: I plan to read and/or re-read a lot of Howard's stuff sometime over the next few years so it's probably been in the back of my mind that I want to do that before checking out the comics, at least in a big way. If I ever see something that really catches my eye, I'll certainly go for it.
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Post by lordyam on Aug 27, 2017 2:08:06 GMT -5
I would say that at least some of this comes down to options. Until I went to college there was a single used book store in town (where I got a lot of SF paperbacks and most of the Bantam Doc Savages), yard sales and mail order. I was a big enough Doc Savage/ERB/Shadow fan that if I'd come across pulps in the wild I'd have been all over them. Even after I went to Boise to college I don't recall seeing any pulps in either of the comic shops that were there. Though at that point, monetarily, I wasn't probably looking for them. Speaking of mail order, I remember seeing a lot of ads for pulps in the classifieds of CBG during my high school years too, so I'd say as well as options, it came down to knowing where to look to find them if you were looking for them. Sure the internet makes it easier to hunt things, but if you knew what you were doing in the pre-internet days and had the funds available, you could find a lot of stuff by knowing where to look. It wasn't a supply issue then, as it seems to be now, it was an accessibility issue of getting to the supply. Now that the access is easier, the supply is the issue. I still haven't made it to the Pulp Con over in Columbus that's held each year (admission is probably bigger than my budget for the whole con would be) but from what I understand among the dealers there you can get a good selection of pulps if you have the money to spend on them still. -M Terry Allen emailed DH. They said they still have plans for Conan, so I don't think they're ditching it completely yet. I think they'll still wring another year out of it. |
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Post by Deleted on Aug 27, 2017 16:24:52 GMT -5
Speaking of mail order, I remember seeing a lot of ads for pulps in the classifieds of CBG during my high school years too, so I'd say as well as options, it came down to knowing where to look to find them if you were looking for them. Sure the internet makes it easier to hunt things, but if you knew what you were doing in the pre-internet days and had the funds available, you could find a lot of stuff by knowing where to look. It wasn't a supply issue then, as it seems to be now, it was an accessibility issue of getting to the supply. Now that the access is easier, the supply is the issue. I still haven't made it to the Pulp Con over in Columbus that's held each year (admission is probably bigger than my budget for the whole con would be) but from what I understand among the dealers there you can get a good selection of pulps if you have the money to spend on them still. -M Terry Allen emailed DH. They said they still have plans for Conan, so I don't think they're ditching it completely yet. I think they'll still wring another year out of it. Plans are fine, but nebulous and can change. They had plans to do the Roy Thomas Tom Grindberg Conan project too, yet that's not happening now. We will only know for certain if they are moving forward with something Conan-related after The Conan/Wonder Woman x-over when something actually get solicited. Until then, plans are like wishes, they're not real until something materializes from them. If the Wonder Woman x-over under performs, those plans will likely change. -M |
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Post by lordyam on Aug 27, 2017 17:35:40 GMT -5
Fair enough but I don't think they're going to ditch it yet. They've been loosing money ever since Star Wars returned to marvel, and even Buffy isn't as hot as it once was (it was breaking 80,000 in 08).
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Post by Deleted on Aug 27, 2017 17:40:44 GMT -5
Fair enough but I don't think they're going to ditch it yet. They've been loosing money ever since Star Wars returned to marvel, and even Buffy isn't as hot as it once was (it was breaking 80,000 in 08). And continuing to pay for licenses that under-perform isn't going to help their bottom line any. If a book is only going to sell 5-10K copies, better for their revenue stream if it doesn't cost them licensing money to publish it so they can keep more of the revenue it generates. They make more selling 5K of a book with no license than 5K copies of a book with a license fee attached. If they are going through sales doldrums and sales aren't going to increase, you need to start cutting costs, and shedding licenses that aren't doing well is one way to do that. -M |
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Post by lordyam on Aug 27, 2017 18:27:33 GMT -5
I actually chatted with Tomas Giorello. He said that DH wanted him around but they kinda waffled on what to do with him and he had bills to pay.
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