"I Had No Idea he was a Racist Douchebag"

We just had a fan quit Robert E. Howard studies today. This person, who identified themselves only as "Red Dragon" on Facebook, announced their intention with that above line, and followed it with a short checklist of what was to come next. All of their books were to be binned, and they would unsubscribe from all of the REH lists that they were on. "I will seriously have sold my conan stuff by tomorrow and will never read another thing by him again," Red Dragon posted. Older, wiser heads attempted to prevail, but Red Dragon was presumably already long gone.

Now, I don't know anything about this person other than the fact that their picture on FaceBook was that of a woman, with blonde hair, maybe twenty-five to thirty. I make no assumptions as to if Red Dragon was truly a woman or a G.I.R.L. (Guy in Real Life). This is the Internet. Anything is possible.

But I do want to use this example to point out something: Here was a person, attracted to the writings of a long-dead author, so much so that they bought a pile of books, read them all, and jumped online and joined a number of fan groups, Facebook pages, and participated in discussions. I'd consider that to be fairly typical fan behavior, certainly well within the bounds of reason.

I don't know what Red Dragon ran across that made this sudden change happen--the popular supposition is that they read part of a discussion about a story Howard wrote when he was still a teenager called "The Last White Man." It's a bit of unpublished juvenilia about, well, you can guess what it's about. It was written in response to a letter penned by one of Howard's close, personal friends--a person who was, himself, a member of an organization that was active in the persecution of African-Americans. The story was not published in Howard's lifetime, and in fact, the only reason it was published at all was for the sake of completeness. Another gem from Howard's school days was "A Boy, A Beehive, and a Chinaman." So, you know, that's the thinking of a young Robert E. Howard, right there.

I want to say something, but it won't change anyone's mind. I'm a native Texan, and I'm over forty. This makes me the enemy in the eyes of the younger generations. But I want to walk carefully through this anyway, because it's taken me a while to get to this particular place. Maybe my journey will be of some use to someone out there. Maybe.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about Red Dragon's sudden reversal was that there was no attempt to square the things that originally attracted Red Dragon to Howard's writing, so much so that they would seek out other like-minded people, and the story in question that they heard about in an online conversation. Red Dragon basically threw Howard under the bus with the revelation that he wrote "the Last White Man." Granted, it's not Howard's finest hour, and I wouldn't recommend the story to, well, anyone--and I say that having written charitably a half million words on Howard in the last fifteen years. But this was clearly not something that Red Dragon had picked up on prior to their  declaration, and for one very likely reason: that's not the takeaway message from Robert E. Howard's work.

Oh, the Internet will tell you differently, to be sure. There are a few blog posts out there by folks who started reading Conan and were drawn up short by this monstrous, over-arching racism--or words to that effect. And then they'd blog about what a terrible person Robert E. Howard is. As if he was the first person in fantasy to write about different cultures in an insensitive way. Conan, Solomon Kane, and other stories about other characters--all racist. It's right there. It's repulsive. They just couldn't get through it.

I'm not going to defend the position that Howard isn't a racist. Partially because I think the word "racist" has come to mean something very different than what Funk and Wagnalls will tell you. I think "racist" in modern day language is another word for "outcast" or "pariah." It's verbal leprosy. Someone who is a racist is someone to be shunned, for fear that their disease, their poison, seep into your ears and eyes and rot your brain and turn you into one of them. This notion of the power of speech, or the printed word, is a new thing, I think, and certainly bears discussion somewhere else. But more to the point, "racist" implies that there's an active component in place; a willful need to infect others in a way that is impossible to defend against, like a zombie pathogen.

I won't lambast the younger generation for a lack of critical thinking skills, because that would be showing my age. But I will lambast the generation ahead of me for setting up this idea of "Political Correctness" that has led to a kind of intolerance for anything that is deemed offensive or hurtful to another person, regardless of context, meaning, and intent. Enough about that. We were talking about Robert E. Howard.

Here are some facts: Howard employed language which was well within societal norms in the 1920s and 1930s, but is certainly not appropriate now. Howard wrote about a variety of races and peoples and ethnicities, mostly in his fantasy stories, but also in a number of historical adventures. He used language that was stereotypical, and occasionally derogatory, when talking about these people. Sometimes, they were heroes. Sometimes they were sympathetically portrayed. Sometimes they were the bad guys. In a few cases, Howard wrote recurring characters of color. These characters and descriptions were based almost entirely on what he read in the pulps, and what books he was able to get his hands on. Some of those books were ten, fifteen, twenty years out of date. Other books were fictions by Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, and other classic authors. Many of the pulps he read features stories set in other countries and time periods, and these pulps also published articles and letters about foreign countries and conflicts. So, for a guy who was landlocked in Central Texas, he did the best he could do.

The other reason why I won't defend the charge of racism is because, in the context of his time and place, Howard was, in fact, a racist. And so was your grandfather. And your great grandfather. And Rudyard Kipling. And Joseph Conrad. And Jack London. And Woodrow Wilson. And just about anyone born prior to 1960 in America. Institutional racism was in full swing, especially in Texas. Separate bathrooms, lynchings, you name it. It was all out there, if not in the wide open, at least tacitly understood. There are just some places you don't go; there are just some people you don't talk to. Granted, every community was different, but by and large, people of color who were a part of a mostly white community were included as exceptions rather than as a rule.  This was the world your grandparents grew up in, by the way. Yes, them, too.

Did Howard know any black people? Sure, a few. He knew a few Hispanics, a Jewish man, and saw and observed Italians, Chinese, and other immigrants in his travels to places like New Orleans and San Antonio. Some of his descriptions were drawn whole cloth from his experiences, or from letters he wrote to correspondents like H.P. Lovecraft, who was himself a xenophobe and a monstrous bigot.

None of this was known to me when I first discovered Robert E. Howard's Conan, coming out of comics and Dungeons and Dragons. There were some folks in the Conan stories who were freed slaves, and there were black, yellow, olive, dusky, and fair skinned people in Conan's world, and they were good, or bad, or rulers, or cowardly dogs, depending on which side of Conan's sword they were on. You can call it white blindness on my part, but I never read Howard's descriptions of ebony skinned cannibals and assumed that Howard was talking about all black men. In fact, it's pretty clear in the story that it's this one city and not everyone in the region. I always liked it when N'Longa, the witch doctor, showed up in the Solomon Kane stories. He was a very different person--on purpose--from straightlaced Puritan Solomon Kane himself. N'Longa gives Kane a Ju-Ju staff, which proves to be a useful magic item in Kane's arsenal against the dark forces. This is heathen magic that the Puritan supposedly has no truck with, and yet, they formed an alliance against monsters.

This was a common pairing in Howard's stories, from Kull and Brule the Spear-Slayer to the unlikely friendships found in Howard's historical tales of the Crusades, and the El Borak stories. A white, if not implicitly W.A.S.P. man, befriends or joins forces with a non-white character for fortune, glory, survival, or friendship. Sometimes it's the end result. Sometimes it's the motive for the story.

Yes, the Africans are "wooly headed." Yes, the Shemite has a hooked nose. I know, I know. That's bad. It's a sloppy shortcut. I won't defend it. Mostly.

It's stereotypical. It's stereotyping. And while it's today considered, well, stereotyping, back in all of popular culture--books, magazines, newspapers, the radio, comics--every media in existence prior to 1945, this was accepted. It was okay, even encouraged, to make these short, sharp descriptors and even judgements about people of other ethnicities than your own. All Irish were hot tempered fighters. All Jewish people were thrifty and shrewd with money. All Italians were overly amorous.  All French people were snobs. All Swedes were big and stupid. These weren't seen as detriments, but rather simplified ways of communicating a set of cultural values and general set of traits at a time when immigration had literally flooded America with millions of people from all over the world. These folks were trying to fit in, and any chance they had to "become Americans," they took. Right up to and including laughing at themselves. Stereotyping was employed by vitually every comedian from the age of Vaudeville up through the rise of radio and later, Television. Many of these comedians moved from medium to medium with their same act, nearly unchanged for forty years.

Jack Benny, a legendary Jewish comedian (who employed a black piano player named Rochester, who spoke in a gruff parody of southern black speech himself) had a very famous bit from his radio show. He's held up at gunpoint by a mugger one evening, who says, "Your money or your life." After a pause, the gunman says, "Well?" and Benny, in his trademark exasperated fashion, says "I'm thinking it over!" One of the recordings online has the audience laughing as soon as the mugger says "Your money or your life." They know Jack Benny, and it's already funny to think that he'd be put in a situation where he has to choose something he values more than his wealth. Stereotypical Jewish behavior, rewritten as a very funny one-liner.

So, I'll cop to it on my part: I never saw what others saw in some of Howard's stories. Not until I got to "Pigeons From Hell" as a teenager, when I first encountered the word "nigger" in the story, did I stop and think about what was going on. After all, that was a word that was forbidden in my house. Well, unless my grandfather said it. Or my father. But anyway. I had to suddenly walk through the time and place of the story and ask myself, "Would a sheriff use that word in casual conversation? In 1936?" And of course, the answer was yes. Yes, he would have. Doesn't mean it's not an ugly word, and while it was certainly a stumbling block, I picked the narrative back up and soldiered on.

The stereotyping was lost on me in the Conan stories. No one likes anyone in the Conan stories. Each country is at war with other countries. People from the Southern kingdoms hate people from the Northern kingdoms. No one has a flattering thing to say about anyone. But that's not the takeaway point of Conan.

N'Longa talks much like the stereotypical educated native to Solomon Kane, and he's definitely what Spike Lee calls a "Magical Negro" in literal, if not figurative, terms. But that's not the takeaway point of Solomon Kane.

Reading "The Ghost of Tom Molyneaux," it's obvious that Ace Jessel speaks in a dialect lifted straight from Huckleberry Finn, if not Uncle Tom's Cabin. It's uncomfortable to read, but that's not the takeaway from any of the boxing stories Howard wrote.

Howard wrote about conflict, often between two cultures, and the sometimes exceptional men that arise from a life built around conflict. Roman or Pict, Moor or Turk, Gael or Dane, and yeah, even White or Black, Howard's message was about overcoming impossible odds, never giving up, never admitting defeat. Howard wrote about the struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, morality and scruples. He wrote about the character of masculinity--in other words, what makes a man. Interestingly, he also wrote a few stories about what makes a woman in a man's world, too. He wrote about the differences between civilization and barbarism and how blurred the line between them sometimes was.

That's what I see when I read Robert E. Howard's work, laid bare. And I know I'm not the only one because he's got millions of fans all over the world who see pretty much the same things. This in no way excuses the stereotyping, or some of the things he said to his friends. But as a reader with critical faculties in place, I think considering when and where he did his writing, it more than mitigates it.

Time and place have to mitigate content. Otherwise, we couldn't read Joseph Conrad, Jack London, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, or anyone else born before 1945. But, then again, there's a copy of Huckleberry Finn floating around right now with nary and N-Bomb in sight, so what do I know?

This is new thinking. I'm pretty sure the kids these days (those in high school and college) aren't willingly reading Conrad, London, Hemingway, or any of the other old, dead, white-guy authors that were "racist douchebags." I don't know when that particular attitude of condemnation for anything that doesn't conform to ones' own internal barometer of taste sprang up, but I suspect it's got something to do with the inflated sense of entitlement and the utter lack of empathy that seems to be all the rage amongst today's hard-wired mall rats.

In the end, there is only the author's work, and the reader's relationship to it. I'm capable of cutting authors some slack when I read their dated works, but then again, I'm a doughy, pasty white guy. Technically, I'm "part of the problem." If you, as a reader, find something so objectionable in a book that it makes you fly into a rage, well, that's your journey, and who am I to say different? I've read some singularly distasteful things in my life--one that springs instantly to mind involves a rape that takes place in a Philip Jose Farmer novel called Lord Tyger. It made me uncomfortable. But after reading it, it didn't turn me into a rapist.

I've read books where the characters are utterly despicable, and say horrible things to and about other characters in the book. Reading those things brought out a number of reactions in me, but they didn't make me into a despicable person. They were just words. Fictional stories, full of words, at that. If they brought out an emotion from me, then the story did its job. Is that not the primary function of art?

Maybe instead of trying to bring the next generation of fans to Robert E. Howard, we need to be waving them off. If reading a word in a story is going to cause them to freak out and rage-quit the author, then that's more flailing about that we don't need. In the past, we've tried to put our best foot forward. We've tried to show critical examinations from both sides of a particular issue. If none of that matters because, well, he was a "racist douchebag," then why waste of of my time and effort? How can someone learn anything knew when they know everything already?

I don't have any answers. If you've read to the end of this very long post, and feel like discussing, have at it.

Ray Harryhausen Is the Father of us All

Ray Harryhausen passed away today at the age of 92. He was, in so many ways, the architect of everything that is great about fantasy movies. If you are a fan of any big, well-realized spectacle of a fantasy film from The Lord of the Rings on down, you owe a debt of gratitude to Ray Harryhausen and his movies, because he set the template, wrote the style sheet on how these movies would be filmed and executed. There isn't a special effects man in the world who hasn't heard of Harryhausen and in some way benefited from watching his work. But Ray was more than just a special effects man--arguably a pioneer in the field of stop motion photography--but he was also an incredible, talented, visionary artist who spent decades breathing life into the inanimate. He was a wizard, a sorcerer, and we have all lost something singular and profound with his passing.

Ray's inspiration for creating movie magic was seeing King Kong as a boy. He told the story often, as famous people who are asked the same questions constantly are wont to do.  It's a good story, and a charming one, but it doesn't really get across the sheer chutzpah of what he did next. He started doing his own stop-motion animation in his garage and when he had enough to show someone, he sought out Willis O'Brien, the man who created the stop-motion effects for King Kong. O'Brien hired Harryhausen as an assistant on the movie, Mighty Joe Young, where he wound up doing much of the work.

O'Brien taught Ray all that he knew, but it was Ray who took that knowledge and elevated stop motion to an art form. His ability to sketch and sculpt served him well as he created better articulated puppets to work with. But whereas O'Brien helped Ray with some technical pointers, it was Ray who began to give his sophisticated action figures individual personalities, specific body language, and emotional arcs. The fantastic creatures didn't just move, anymore; they acted. They came alive. Each one different, no two alike. The cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sindbad reacts with confusion when he encounters the sailors. Gwangi the Allosaur plays with its prey. The baboon prince in Sindbad and the Eye of the Tiger is both a monkey and a man in equal measure. Every Ray Harryhausen fan has their favorite creation. But no one disputes Ray's crowning achievement, his technical triumph, in Jason and the Argonauts.

The film's climax has a skeleton horde rising out of the ground to destroy Jason and his crew. The scene is breathtaking in execution, and mind-boggling in its complexity. Ray was in charge of animating five or six skeletons at a time, and each of them had to move a certain way, in coordination with the actor's movements (filmed on location months before), and each of them constantly in motion. You have to think about what that entails:

Skeleton #1: attacking Jason. Head moving forward, left arm moving to block with shield, right arm recovering to swing, left foot back, right foot forward. Mouth closed.

Skeleton #2: attacking sailor. Head moving back. Right arm back. Left arm connecting with sailor's sword. Right foot up, moving to kick the sailor. Left foot planted.

Skeleton #3: Running forward to battle. Head forward, left leg up, right leg down, right arm back, left leg forward.

Skeleton #4: On ground. Head is down. Right arm on forehead, dizzy. Left arm on ground. Sword still in hand. Torso twisting to right. Left leg bent, knee up. Right leg straight out, swinging left.

Skeleton #5: attacking sailor: Head down. Right hand high, sword in hand. Left arm up, shield is connecting with sailor's sword. Body is moving back from the force of the blow. Right leg stepping backward, left leg planted.

Skeleton #6: Climbing onto platform.  Left leg is up, right leg bent and backward.Arms braced on platform at the elbows. Head forward, Mouth open in a scream. Starting to close.

Annnnd, click. That's one frame of film. Now, imagine having to do that for twenty-four frames of film. That's one second of the scene. But don't take my word for it. Watch the entire sequence for yourself.

Granted, you are spoiling the movie for yourself if you haven't seen it, but if you're reading this blog, I'm betting you have, and multiple times. I still smile and gasp when I watch this sequence. The little touches he put into the sequences, like the beheading, and the way the skeletons hover and wait for the sailor to fall before leaving him for another target. Again, there's that personality at work in everything Ray did. Some days were so intensive on this final scene that he was only able to capture three frames of film in one day. An eighth of a movie second. He did that for four and a half months, in a room, by himself, with no assistance from anyone else.

That's an artist at work, folks.

That scene alone is responsible for more people getting into stop-motion than anything else. Phil Tippett is an unapologetic fan of Ray's and Tippett did the stop motion effects on the Star Wars trilogy. If you thought the tauntauns were cool, Ray was their spiritual godfather. Later, when Jurassic Park was in development, Phil was brought in to work with the computer animators to help bridge the gap between stop-motion and computer animation.  Dave Allen and Jim Danforth were also Harryhausen disciples and they produced a lot of commercial work whenever Ray was locked in his room, working on the next movie. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Q, Caveman, Dragonslayer, and so many other (and some would say lesser) movies and TV shows (remember Land of the Lost?) were created by people who were inspired by Harryhausen. Here's a Volkswagon ad that Allen produced for TV starring a familiar face:

I got to meet Ray twice in my life. The first time was during one of the late, lamented Dallas Fantasy Fairs in the Late 1980s and early 1990s. Ray was a special guest and I was over the moon at getting to meet him. I'll never forget sitting in a jam-packed conference room with maybe a hundred other people waiting for his question and answer session. The moderator stood up and said, "Ray Harryhausen needs no introduction. Instead, here's a brief reminder of why we're all here today." The lights dimmed and then a montage of scenes from Ray's various films, all of them key scenes, all of them evoking gasps and cheers of recognition from the audience. Of course, the montage ended with the skeleton fight. Of course it did! And with that, the video ended, frozen on one of the scowling skeletons' faces. Everyone surged up and gave Ray a standing ovation to thunderous applause, and it was one of the first times I thought, "Okay, I'm not alone, here. Other people get this stuff, too!"

Years later, while working at BookPeople in Austin, I got my second chance. Ray had written a couple of books looking back on his career, with tons of artwork, sketches, behind the scenes photos and more. We were having a book signing for him at the Alamo Draft House, where Ray would introduce the movie that inspired him, King Kong, and then sign copies of his book. It was probably the best signing I ever worked on. King Kong and Ray Harryhausen. What could be better?

Even at his age, Ray was a trooper and gamely signed every book that showed up, along with some other oddities. I was again touched by the crowd; sure, there were some old timers there, but there were also a lot of young dads with their kids--and it was the kids who were there to see him. That's the power of those movies. That's the magic of Ray. And he was nice, gracious, charming, and personally thanked everyone who thanked him back. I'm so glad that Hollywood awarded him a lifetime achievement award while he was alive to appreciate it.

Now everything is computer-generated, and at its best, it's amazing, and I really believe that. But I think it's interesting to note that the most amazing stuff now is essentially modeling faces directly from human actors. There's a reason for this: modern special effects people--to an extent--don't have the skill set that Ray had. They don't take acting lessons to try and understand character motivation, or light and film their own sets, or do modeling in three dimensions. I'm not talking about the effects studios like ILM and Weta. They have, as a hive-mind, people who DO still do that, and do it well. I'm mostly talking about the guys who render for a living; sitting at a computer every day, working on whatever three or four second shot has hit their desk that morning, doesn't leave a lot of room for wondering what the dragon's motivation is. Modern filmmaking doesn't work that way. There's no room for artists, not when there's all of these shots to process. And so, we've lost a step.

In the passing of Ray Harryhausen, we've lost the man who took that first step.

Thank you, Ray, for the creativity, the artistry, for the hard work. Thanks for all of it.

Rest in peace.

Finn's Six Shooter, Volume 1

Six Bite-Sized commentaries on what's going on in and around our strange world. Starting at the top of the list:

1. Superman's 75th Birthday.
Even though the character remains caught in an endless tug-of-war battle between the heirs of the original creators and the faceless megacorporation that has controlled the intellectual property for years, the fact remains that Superman is still considered our first modern super hero and has become synonymously tied to the best qualities of the American people. I hope that the movie does well later this year, but I'm not holding my breath. And while he's not my first, nor my favorite, Big Name Super Hero, at his best, when the stories are at their greatest, he's hard to beat. We need an example, now more than ever, of an ideal to strive for. In the arena of popular culture, Supes is still at the top of the list. Happy Birthday, Big Guy.

2. The Boston Bombing
I'm extremely disheartened by what has happened, and I officially take back every bad thing I ever said about Boston. No one deserves this. No one. And as its been pointed out by many others already: boy, did you guys pick the wrong city to mess with. I am very impressed with the 24 hour news networks' restrained and cautious coverage of the situation--what a refreshing change of pace. They figured out really early on that no one wanted any politicizing--they just wanted facts, information, and data. Maybe they could carry that lesson forward into their day-to-day operations, but--no, that's asking for too much.

3. The West Explosion
It's been very hard to watch the news. I love the town of West. My mother is Czech, and so I'm half-Czech, and while we don't have any family ties to the town, I have a very real spiritual kinship to the place.

4. When Tragedies Strike
A lot of people like to point to the random violences that routinely disrupt civilization and say, "How can a god who loves everyone allow that to happen?" Well, I don't claim to be any kind of religious scholar, but I don't think that's an accurate interpretation of "God's Will." I don't like that phrase, and I don't use it. I really don't like using God to try and rationalize away a tragedy, as if it's okay that houses blew up and people died. It's not okay. It never has been. But I do think this: when people turn around and run back into the blast to pull other folks to safety; when strangers run directly into hospitals to give blood; when people just start cooking food on the side of the road and giving sandwiches and blankets to their neighbors; when first responders charge into buildings knowing that an explosion is coming--there's the love of a higher power, right there--that's the presence of something greater than ourselves. It's that positive energy that we all respond to on a gut-level.

5. TV Round-Up
I'm finally caught up with Mad Men that I'm watching the new season as it's playing out. Wow. This may be the season that jumps the shark. Game of Thrones had better pick up the pace. I'm already starting to get bored. I had a flash-forward of how many TV seasons it would take to get to Book Five--charitably, 10 seasons. And GRRM says he has three books to go. I really don't know if I can hang in there that long. And let me say for the record that while I do find NCIS a wonderfully guilty pleasure, mostly for Mark Harmon, is USA contractually obligated to show the same ten episodes in a row, back to back, in perpetuity? Would it kill them to start with season 1 and just run forward with it?

6. A Personal Note to Every Single Male Gamer Currently Whining About "Fake Girls" and "Rape Culture..."
Hey, Chucklehead,
What the hell is wrong with you? Are you seriously THAT emotionally and socially retarded that you are trying to discourage girls, ladies, and women from playing the same games and reading the same comics as you? DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW LUCKY YOU ARE? No, you don't, because you're the generation of entitlement and privilege, and you've never had to work for social acceptance. I'm over the age of 40. In high school, if I wanted ANY of my girlfriends to read a comic book, I had to tie them to a chair and pin their eyelids back like in A Clockwork Orange.  And even then, it was a hassle. They didn't get it. They didn't want to. Well, those days are long gone, you little Suburban Imbeciles. Now you've got teenage girls who are--let me make this very clear--MUCH better looking than you, wanting to play games and talk about Spider-Man. Um...what's the problem again? And if you're a game manufacturer having this same issue, do us all a favor and decide to become a man, okay? Men don't rape. Men don't exclude others based on gender. In fact, I'd rather play Halo with Jill rather than Jack. And if you can't see the obvious, and not-so-obvious advantages of having girls in the treehouse, then you are Doing It Wrong and you need to self-segregate, so that the rest of us know who you are. Go over there and sit in your own juices. We'll be over here, having a Game of Thrones discussion with the Babes.
Sincerely, That Guy in GameStop Who Was Giving You the Stink-Eye Earlier Today

Raiders of the Lost Ark Made Me This Way...

Over the years, I've tried, unsuccessfully, to explain to folks just how important and influential a film Raiders of the Lost Ark was for me. It dropped into my wheelhouse as I was turning the corner on adolescence, at a time when there was no Internet, no Netflix, no YouTube, none of that crap. If you wanted to know more about any given subject, you had to read about it. In books, or magazines--Thank God for Starlog!

As a 12 year old male, Raiders forever altered my course in ways that I've noted over the years, but until you sit down and start trying to backtrack your influences, you don't realize what a tangled mess it all is. I specifically and deliberately stopped when I got to large topics--either existing interests, or newly discovered interests, as they each lead to other branching charts. That's how I was back then (okay, still am)...when I get interested in something, I want to know everything! So, in the case of Raiders, specifically, I watched the television special about the stuntmen who worked on the film, and I read every interview I could find with Spielberg, Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan. I read the novelization. I collected magazines, bubble gum cards--anything I could get my hands on that had behind-the-scenes information that I could use to decode the formula of how someone could come up with a modern-day whip wielding archeologist who fought Nazis and played with monkeys. You can see how that would appeal to just about anyone, right?

And don't get me started on the my film theory that Raiders is the first post-modern film--a movie about a type of movie, rather than the movie as genre unto itself. I submit to you that because we had Raiders of the Lost Ark, we also got Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds, and now Django Unchained. I'll go into it later, one of these days, when I have the time. But it's a great theory and it explains why the first film is so very different from the three sequels, and how that happened.

For decades, I've tried to explain it to people, and they would just nod, politely, and reply, "Well, MY favorite movie is blah-blah-blah." No, you don't GET it, I've thought more about this film and its antecedents and influences than I have any other film including Star Wars.  It's not my favorite movie because, well, I just like it, and stuff. It's a part of my creative DNA in ways that still resonate with me to this day.

Because of RotLA, I created "The Blue Menace Mysteries" courtesy of the Violet Crown Radio Players.  Sam Bowen from Clockwork Storybook owes SO MUCH to Indiana Jones. Every 1930s pulp-era Role-Playing Game session I ever ran was informed by the way Lawrence Kasdan chose to write the screenplay to RotLA.

I made this flowchart so you could really see and understand. It's not my fault I'm like this. Raiders of the Lost Ark made me this way...

Here's the chart at full size. Enjoy! The Chart, Full Sized

About Me: 2013 Edition

Mark Finn is an author, actor, essayist, and playwright. His biography, Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard, was nominated for a World Fantasy award in 2007. His articles, essays, and introductions about Robert E. Howard and his works have appeared in publications for the Robert E. Howard Foundation, Dark Horse Comics, Boom! Comics, The Cimmerian, REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, The Howard Review, Wildside Press, and he has presented several papers about Robert E. Howard to the PCA/ACA National conference, the AWC, and lectures and performs readings regularly about Howard, comics, and popular culture in general.

Finn is the author of two books of fiction, Gods New and Used and Year of the Hare, as well as hundreds of articles, essays, reviews, and short stories for The University of Texas Press, RevolutionSF.com, Greenwood Press, Dark Horse Comics, Wildside Press, Monkeybrain Books, and others. Current projects include Fruit Ninja and SCOUTS! for Ape Entertainment and a story for Monsterverse’s Bela Lugosi’s Tales From the Grave With longtime friend and collaborator John Lucas. Forthcoming projects include an essay in The Apes of Wrath from Tachyon Press, a story in Tails From the Pack from Sky Warrior Books and a short story in Ray Guns Over Texas for the 2013 WorldCon.

When he is not working in Howard Studies, he writes comics and fiction, dabbles in magic, acts as a creative consultant for media companies, and produces and performs community theater.  He lives in North Texas (over the movie theater he owns) with his long-suffering wife, too many books, and an affable pit bull named Sonya.

Happy 107th Birthday, Robert E. Howard

Author's Note: This is an artifact from the time capsule. In 2002, I was finishing up my first year in REHUPA and I wrote this review/rant in my 'zine for the month of December.  Please note the date--2002. I am pleased to report that since then, much of what I am kvetching about in this article has come to pass. Some of it, incredibly, was done by me. Other pieces and parts were picked up by others. And while I was not the first, nor the last, person to issue such a call to action, it was a shot in the arm for some folks. I've been a member of REHupa for 11 years now, and I didn't think I'd make it to year two. Shows what I know. One thing I have always tried to do is lead by example. And one of the things I've always tried to do is to do right by Robert E. Howard. Looking back on the radio shows, Blood & Thunder, all of the articles and essays, and now the ongoing academic push, I feel I've done just that. Read for yourself and see just how far Howard Studies has come. 

Happy Birthday, Bob. Thanks for the inspiration.

 A Bad Reputation: Robert E. Howard and the Indifference of the Academics

The Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers

By Lee Server ISBN: 081604578X

From the early days of dime novels to contemporary mass-market paperbacks, pulp fiction is a vital part of popular culture. This volume offers a survey of the scores of well-known and unsung heroes of popular literature. It seeks to cover the entire spectrum of pop literature's greatest entertainers and artists; the multimillion-copy bestsellers; and the inventors of the modern genres, such as the western, the hardboiled detective novel, the spy thriller, science fiction, horror, the legal thriller, crime fiction and the erotic/romance novel. The work also profiles colourful but lesser-known underground figures, as well as a wide variety of talented paperback authors who were never given their due. Each of the 200 entries includes a brief biography along with a list of the author's writing credits. The authors covered include: V.C. Andrews; Ray Bradbury; Jackie Collins; Lester Dent; Ian Fleming; Erle Stanley Gardner; David Goodis; Zane Grey; Chester Himes; Louis L'Amour; H.P. Lovecraft; Mario Puzo; Jacqueline Susann; and more. (REPRODUCED FROM CONTENT ON AMAZON UK)

It was a new book, fresh off the presses, and I had it in my hands. Clearly, this book had my name written all over it. It was also written by Lee Server, and that name was familiar. It only took a second to realize that this was the same guy who had written Danger Is My Business back in 1993, the first illustrated book about the Pulps since Tony Goodwin’s titular effort in the 1970’s. Server had also written Over My Dead Body, about the lurid paperback novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s, and Baby, I Don’t Care, a great biography about Robert Mitchum.

Ever curious, I eagerly flipped to the H section. There he was, roughly two pages worth: Howard, Robert E. The entry was a mixed bag. I won’t reprint the article verbatim for reasons that will become apparent below, but I will show some highlights, both good and bad.

Howard, Robert E.

(1906-1936) Also wrote as Sam Walser

Robert E. Howard, one of the great discoveries of the magnificent pulp magazine Weird Tales, wrote larger-than-life fantasy adventure tales for most of his brief but dazzling career. Much of his work belongs to a genre now called “sword and sorcery,” a category Howard himself helped to invent.

Robert Ervin Howard was born in 1906 in the small Texas town of Paster. When he was nine, the family moved to another small community, Cross Plains, where he would live with his mother and father for the rest of his life. Interested in writing from a very early age, he was greatly inspired by books of western lore. The pulps had begun to come into their own as Howard reaches his teen years. It was the heyday of Adventure magazine, Western Story, and other publications that offered a battery of new, imaginative, and innovative fiction writers, like Talbot MUNDY, with his combination of exotic locales, bizarre adventures, and touches of the occult and the magical, and his fearless, mighty superhero from the ancient world, the seafaring Tros of Samothrace; Harold Lamb, with his sweeping historical sagas and thundering warriors, Gordon Young, with his two-fisted, nihilistic, globe-trotting warriors; and H.P. LOVECRAFT, with his grim, disturbing horror stories and their stark portrayals of evil. These and other writers of the day would spark Howard’s own bursting imagination to empower his writing and the amazing body of work to come.

Outside of the typographical error of “Pastor” for “Peastor” and the exclusion of Howard’s other pseudonyms, these first two paragraphs aren’t so bad.

It was to Lovecraft’s pulp home, Weird Tales, that Howard made his first professional sale, Spear and Fang, which was printed in the July, 1925 issue. It was a momentous occasion. Howard would become a regular contributor to Weird Tales, and would also come to be known as one of that unique magazine’s three greatest contributors, with Lovecraft and Clark Ashton SMITH (though many of WT’s other regulars also had their rabid acolytes). Howard, unlike the other two members of the triumvirate, saw himself as a professional writer, and did write for other publications and in other genres—straight adventure, westerns, boxing stories—though he did not have much success in breaking into the mainstream prestige pulps (such as Adventure, Argosy, and the like). In retrospect, the ornate, daring, out-of-the-mainstream pages of Weird Tales were the perfect place for a writer as different and powerful as Robert E. Howard.

His stories were intensely imagined, action-packed, ruthless, and blood-drenched, written in a vivid, harsh, muscular prose. He created an assortment of fierce, pitiless warrior-heroes. There was Bran Mak Morn, leader of the Caledonian Picts against the legions of ancient Rome; Solomon Kane, an Elizabethan Puritan, battling savagery and sorcery in darkest Africa; Kull, a king in the antediluvian Atlantis; and his most popular and still thriving creation, Conan, the barbarian adventurer.

Okay, two more paragraphs that I won’t quibble with. Factually acceptable and not misleading in any way. So far, so good, from Mr. Server. But I had the strangest feeling I had seen some of this before. Especially in the next long paragraph, which talked about the Hyborian Age and how Howard jumped around chronologically in telling the Conan stories. He quoted from Conan in “Queen of the Black Coast,” the passage about life being an illusion and burning with life. “I love, I slay, and am content.” The next paragraph is very interesting.

Physically, Howard had grown up to be a powerful-looking young man who might well have served as a model for the illustrations of the sword-wielding heroes who strode across his pulp stories. But there was psychic autobiography at work in those pages, too. In dreams Howard often saw himself as an ancient barbarian, and some of that self-absorption and passionate identification with the character gave Conan and other Howard characters their vivacity. It is part of the mythos of Weird Tales, part of what put that pulp in a category apart from all others of the 20’s and 30’s, the hectic golden age of pulp hackery—the notion that writers like Howard were stranger characters than the other pulp pros, in some way or other more closely a part of the material they invented, whether from artistry or psychological disturbance. For the readers, anyway, the result was stories that could have an intense, hallucinatory force and yet felt very real. Howard put readers right inside those barbaric, imaginary landscapes. His typewriter caught the blinding glare on flashing steel, missed no splash of crimson blood, described landscapes that were at once familiar and bizarre, but three dimensional, pumping with life.

This is damning with faint praise, in my opinion. It’s nice that Mr. Server notes that there’s a mythos to the lunacy of the WT writers, but doesn’t really refute anything said about Howard. His comments about Howard’s prose are spot-on, but again Server leads with the crazy vibe. Apparently one can’t write well unless they are bonkers. The next paragraph continues this thought.

Fantasy and “weird” stories and publication in the marginal, little-read Weird Tales was not considered a particularly admirable accomplishment in some areas of America in the 1930s. In the constricted community Robert Howard lived in, writing for Weird Tales—particularly as a result of the sexual, bosom-heaving cover art of Margaret Brundage—looked not unlike writing pornography. (Adding insult to injury, Weird Tales was often very far behind in its payments to contributors, even—or perhaps especially—to regular contributors like Howard.) Though as a young man he participated in the typical masculine rites of hunting, fishing and drinking, Howard was not a typical Texas boy at all. With his brooding, his daydreaming, and his bizarre imagination, he clearly stood apart from the simple farmers and small-town mentalities of Cross Plains, and was generally thought to be something of a strange duck among the locals. Howard once wrote, “It is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign to the people among which one’s lot is cast.”

This is now the third usage of the word “bizarre” in this article. Clearly, it’s the only adjective that really applies to Howard and his work, since it’s so frequently referenced. And while the facts in the above paragraph may be accurate, the slant in the writing shows that Mr. Server is at best uncaring or at worst antagonistic about the details of Howard’s personal life. The very next paragraph:

Howard was known to have been unusually devoted to his domineering mother. He was prone to bouts of despairing self-reflection and spoke of suicide on a number of occasions (though depression did not seem to slow his productivity, as thousands of pages of prose, poetry, and correspondence flowed from his battered Underwood typewriter).

In the spring of 1936, Mrs. Howard became gravely ill. On the morning of June 11, after a sleepless night at his comatose mother’s bedside, Robert was informed that she would never recover. At the typewriter in his workroom he wrote some lines of poetry, then went outside to the family’s ’31 Chevrolet sedan. From the glove compartment he took out a Colt .380 he had borrowed from a friend, thumbed the safety, placed the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

There it is. Howard and his mother. Again. What’s nice about this is the intimation that Howard wasn’t depressed enough to not write, just depressed enough to kill himself over his mother.

The next paragraph is a long quote from Jack Scott (and that same anecdote, yet again, about the lines and the coroner). Following that is the eulogy from Farnsworth Wright that ran in Weird Tales. The article ends with a completely inaccurate bibliography of Howard’s works, the only parts of which that are correct is the list of the Conan stories. All other material is mislabeled, missing altogether, or just wrong.

As you can imagine, this entry angered me and sent me into my own books, looking for my copy of Danger Is My Business. There, on pages 43-45, I found just about the same information, in a different order, as what was listed in the Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers. To his credit, Mr. Server had updated his material slightly, removing the reference to “his love life—or lack of it—has been the subject of much speculation” just prior to mentioning his domineering mother and unusual devotion. So, it’s a step forward, I suppose, but in my mind, it’s still a baby step.

The fact is, Mr. Server simply reworked what he had already done some ten years ago and stuck it in the book. While there was no mention of, for example, Cornell Woolrich’s alternative lifestyle in his entry (it must have just slipped Mr. Server’s mind), I can’t think of any reason why Mr. Server would have wanted to rewrite any of his material on Howard...especially since no one has published anything to the contrary in any visible form since 1993.

There have been exceptions, to be sure. James Van Hise put out a great book a few years back (The Fantastic Worlds of Robert E. Howard) that was, in fact, a collection of scholarship from REHupa. I have a second printing of the book, because the first printing sold out. After I got my copy, I never saw another one again. Then there was Cross Plains Comics’ Short Biography of REH, written by our own Rusty Burke. Sold primarily to comic shops, it was marketed more like a graphic novel/art collection than any kind of serious scholarship. We can count in this short list The Whole Wide World, based on One Who Walked Alone. It got an art house release and then went straight to...well, laserdisc. No current DVD plans at this time, at least not that I have heard. Let’s see, have I left anyone out? Oh yes, Wandering Star. Currently aimed at the collector’s market, with affordable trade paperbacks due out in the next year or two...hopefully.

This in no way diminishes the value of the above work. I enthusiastically supported and publicly applauded all of the above endeavors, and will continue to do so. But on the thirtieth anniversary of REHupa, and on the heels of Leo Grin’s well-reasoned rant about how much money these newsletters cost and how many copies of REHupa are to be distributed, I say to you that we are doing it wrong.

Every time Howard gets omitted in anthologies like The American Fantasy Tradition, every time Howard’s name and deeds are crucified by idiotic directors on special edition DVDs, every time the inaccurate facts and “crazy” bias of Howard’s biography get reprinted over and over, we all write emails, articles in REHupa, and bitch to each other and to our significant others. Well, it’s our fault that it happens.

How long has Dark Valley Destiny been out, been available in shops? In 2003, it’ll be twenty years. Isn’t it time for a new Howard biography? How about some serious examinations of his work, his influence? Better still, is there any reason at all for these kinds of things to not be available to as many people as want to see them?

There is a pop culture/American culture association, made up of college professors and other academics, with national and regional groups. I stumbled onto their listserv and told them I was a writer. They signed me up. I’m stunned at the paper topics that get presented; it’s stuff that we wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Buffy and Lesbian Culture. The Role of Board Games in the Twentieth Century. I’m not kidding. There was an X-Men question that ran through the listserv about two months ago. College professors and doctors with PhDs were scrambling to wax factual about Magneto.

Is there any reason that anyone can give me why some, if not all of the REHupans, aren’t involved with this organization? Has anyone introduced themselves to Carlton Stowers, who wrote that great article about REH in the free Dallas weekly last year? Where’s your website with your section devoted to your REH scholarship? Going to Cross Plains isn’t going to cut it, not if you are looking for a literary conversion. Put your face out there. Write your book (or finish it) and then speak to others about it. We need to be who people ask about Robert E. Howard, not Lee Server, or John Milius.

All of you are accomplished writers, with passionate arguments about REH and a strong desire to see his name restored and his literary works made available. It is time to reach out of the bubble and step forward with your knowledge. Sitting on your hands isn’t going to do it; not anymore. If we want to repair Howard’s image, we need to assume that no one else is going to do it for us.

I intend to present a paper on REH at the 2004 Southwest Pop Culture/American Culture Conference. I want some, if not all of you to be there with me. Let’s wake up the rest of the academic world and restore REH’s place in literary history.

Our Abusive Relationship With Firearms (and Why Breaking Up is Hard to Do)

Jones' incendiary delivery managed to completely
obscure any real points he made during his appearance.  

I really didn't want to write a blog post about this, especially after so long a meaningful absence, but after watching Austin-based conspiracy-ophile Alex Jones lose his marbles on National Television the other day, I realized that while we do seem to be having a discussion about gun control, it's really more of a shouting match engendered by the lunatic fringe.

I know, I know, tensions are high, and why not take away automobiles, and only criminals will own guns, and look what Hitler did, and blah blah blah blah. Yeah, I get it. Everyone is mad. And I know so many gun owners--that I know personally--are worried about this. I'm very surprised that this fear is even on the table. Worse--Texans...TEXANS...are fearful.

Let me tell you why this is all ridiculous.

Catching Up Just in Time to Cross it Off

I know I haven't posted anything in months, but I can explain myself: I've been writing my ass off. It's funny but I've never been able to balance out the blogging (which, weirdly, I'm not getting paid for) with writing assignments that actually bring me a paycheck. It seems I can do one or the other, but not both.

I resolve to work on that in 2013. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Despite this year just sucking for personal bad news, friends' bad news, and in general bad news, I got a lot done and really pushed myself in terms of promoting me as a writer. That turned into a lot of writing assignments, everything from commercial website writing to landing a gig as the Fruit Ninja writer for Ape Entertainment. I got to work on some long-time dream projects, placed some short stories and articles into some anthologies, and entertained my usual bewildering array of interesting offers, all of which I said "yes" to, in the hopes that they came to pass. They haven't yet, but you never know.

I'm going to try and build on that momentum for 2013. My convention schedule is aggressively full right now and includes a trip to San Diego, Washington D.C., Rochester, Minnesota, and San Antonio, Texas. And that's not the half of it.

For now, I've got a few days left on 2012. I intend to spend it cooking, writing, and resting. It's a big year coming up. All of the Apocalypses (apocalypsi?) are behind us now. There's nothing left but to play the cards we are dealt. I fully intend to rake the pot in for myself.

Hope you all have a safe and prosperous New Year. I'll see you after Elvis' Birthday!

Our Political Climate: Elvis Clones, Area 51 and the Necronomicon

In the days of my misspent youth, I was fascinated with conspiracy theories. My first, and favorite, was of course, Area 51 and the Roswell UFO crash. After all, I was a child of the seventies and space was on every kid’s brain. UFOs and governmental cover-ups found their way into all of the popular television shows of the day. Where do you think Mork and Mindy came from?

I was too young to hear about the faked moon landing conspiracy theory that eventually found its way into that great O.J. Simpson vehicle, Capricorn One. It’s probably just as well. Whatever marginal entertainment value the idea of a faked space program contained, there was just too much facts, evidence, and truth to give it much credence.  I think that’s part of what makes a good conspiracy theory. There has to be a lot of interesting coincidences, or incidents that can’t be explained, or questions that have no answers, in order to be really compelling.

My FenCon Schedule and Why You Should Care

This is my first appearance at FenCon IX this year and I am really happy to be attending as a regional guest. This year I really expanded my "local show footprint" to include some shows that have asked me to attend before, but I was unable to due to other commitments, time, funding issues, etc.

If you've never been to FenCon, and you live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, click on the link above and consider coming out for it. There's a good group of folks running it, and a nice, wide spread of guests, so there really is something for everyone.

The other reason why you should come out is pure selfishness on my part: I want to see you. I have so many friends in the Metroplex area that I never get to visit with. Even if you just come hang out at the bar, I would love to be your evening's entertainment. So, think about it. And hey, while we're on the subject, here's my panel schedule, below:

The Future of Comics Friday  8:00 PM  Addison Lecture Hall

FenCon Squares Saturday  10:00 AM  Trinity I - IV

Autographs Saturday  11:00 AM  Gallery

Reading *Brunch With Barbarians!* (See Below) Saturday  12:00 PM  Pecan

Sherlock v Holmes Saturday  1:00 PM  Red Oak

WTF, Zombies?!? Saturday  7:00 PM  Pecan

50 Years of Web-Spinning & Smashing Saturday  8:00 PM  Live Oak

80 Years of Conan Sunday  2:00 PM  Addison Lecture Hall

But It's Funny! Sunday  3:00 PM  Red Oak

*Brunch With Barbarians* is actually my reading slot and Heroic Fantasy Quarterly editor Adrian Simmons' reading slot mooshed together to make one hour long happening. We'll have food and drink for anyone who wants to come listen to our readings from Noon to 1 PM on Saturday. That's right, we're THOSE guys.