Robert E. Howard, I Hardly Knew You

The key to keeping my sanity this week caring for the girls is to plan a major event each day. Tuesday, it was going to Best Buy and picking up a new receiver, X-box 360, and Rock Band. Wednesday, swimming. Yesterday, a trip to Barnes & Noble. Today, we're going to Kung Fu Panda.

But first back to yesterday. Like all great bookstores, B&N has a great children's section. The girls can wander its aisles for minutes upon minutes. Once I saw them secured into books, I stole away to B&N's other outstanding section, its graphic novels. I was really looking for a book that Bill Harris recommended, about an alternative universe where Superman lands in Soviet Russia instead of the United States. I couldn't find that, but I did stumble upon this.

It's an updated version of the Conan comic book series, as only Dark Horse Comics can deliver. And it's fantastic. I took it with me back to the kid's section and when the girls' literary endeavors were exhausted, I made my way to the register and bought it.

The art and the story are fantastic, of course, but I was most surprised by a mini biography in the very back of the book about Robert E. Howard. My ignorance of Mr. Howard is so pronounced, I had no idea he did the bulk of his writing in the 30s amid the Great Depression. For some reason, based on no factual information whatsoever, I thought Howard inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, and therefore, Gary Gygax. Turns out it was the other way around.

Here's another surprise: Howard committed suicide in 1936. He was thirty years old.

Imagine, just imagine, what this man might have created if he hadn't ended his own life so tragically. Howard suffered bouts of depression throughout his life and since he create his own literary genre, he lacked contemporaries to share his craft. He father also disapproved his career choice, instead pressuring Howard to be a doctor or a bookkeeper. The whole thing almost reads like a cliché.

Now that I know a bit more about Howard (mostly that he didn't write Conan in the 1970s), I think I'm going to read some of his stuff. My good high school friend loved Fritz Leiber, the creator of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series. The little bit I've read of Howard's Conan reminds me more of Leiber than it does Tolkien or . . . well, that's it.

It's amazing to think that the billowing tower of fantasy literature that exists today was founded by a handful of men.