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New Worlds, Old Worlds, Lost Worlds: Picturing Prehistory in American Culture

“The Ultimate Barbarian”: Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and the Pulp Fantasy of Prehistory

Ryan Linkof

Résumés

Dans le numéro de décembre 1932 du magazine pulp Weird Tales, sous le crayon de l’auteur Robert E. Howard apparaît pour la première fois celui qui deviendra son personnage le plus célèbre : le guerrier préhistorique Conan. Ce personnage et son univers fantastique sont le fruit d’une combinaison habile de concepts historiques et scientifiques et d’une construction imaginative du monde (« worldbuilding »), reflétant les hypothèses académiques et populaires sur les premiers humains et leurs mondes sociaux. Conan, qui allait plus tard gagner son surnom de « barbare », s’est ancré dans l’imaginaire populaire grâce aux couvertures de livres de poche à succès créées par le peintre Frank Frazetta dans les années 1960 et 1970. Représenté comme un personnage aux proportions physiques invraisemblables, à la force imparable et à la puissance sexuelle irrésistible, le Conan de Frazetta a cristallisé une iconographie de la puissance masculine brute qui s’est inscrite dans une narration persistante de la préhistoire comme une mesure de la valeur adaptative de l’homme—des idées enracinées dans les manières de concevoir la « survie du plus apte ». Dans les peintures de Frazetta et les versions ultérieures du personnage qu’il a inspirées, le corps imposant de Conan est représenté comme s’il avait été sculpté par le processus de sélection naturelle.

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1Frank Frazetta’s 1966 painting The Barbarian is a monument to bodily power (Fig. 1). The imposing physique of the central figure is a knotted surface of bulging sinew, swollen veins, and mottled scar tissue. His sculptural solidity is further reinforced by the pillowy flesh of the nude female figure at his feet. The figure’s brute power is thrown into relief by the scene of ghastly horror that surrounds him: the bodies of his foes, crushed and mangled, lie vanquished presumably by his glistening, phallic sword. The atmosphere of destruction and death is punctuated by the faint imagery in the background, a spectral memento mori. The painting’s dramatic pyramidal composition, culminating in the raven-haired barbarian, reinforces his supremacy.

Fig. 1. Frank Frazetta, The Barbarian, 1966

Fig. 1. Frank Frazetta, The Barbarian, 1966

Cover, oil on canvas, cover for Conan the Adventurer
Artwork  Frazetta Girls, Conan the Barbarian  and  CPI

2This painting appeared on the cover of Lancer Books’ Conan the Adventurer, the first in a series of mass market paperbacks that catapulted the Conan character to the rarefied status of American popular culture icons. Created by the author Robert E. Howard in the late 1920s, Conan has endured for nearly a century in almost every imaginable medium, from pulp magazines to comics, feature films, Saturday morning cartoons, and video games (Bertetti). For many Howard and Conan enthusiasts and scholars, Frazetta’s paintings are the quintessential image of this prehistoric pulp hero. As filmmaker, journalist, and film scholar Paul Sammon has asserted, “Prior to 1966, no artist had truly captured the grim vitality throbbing within [Howard]’s stories—but Frazetta’s Conan the Adventurer cover did… [he] was the first artist to successfully portray Conan as many fans had already mentally pictured him” (51). Frazetta’s depiction of Conan as a paragon of masculine strength, physical brutality, and heroic domination, in other words, captured something essential about the character, conjuring an image of early humans—and so-called “barbarians”—that resonated with popular audiences.

3Howard’s worldbuilding as well as his private letters express a passionate interest in the barbarian as a historical phenomenon and in barbarism as a kind of metaphysics. On one level this was deeply personal, evidenced in his description of a recurring dream: “Always I am the barbarian, the skin-clad, tousle-haired, light-eyed wild man, armed with a rude axe or sword, fighting the elements and wild beasts” (Lord 51). Yet this investment in primordial humanity was also philosophical. As literature scholar Frank Coffman has argued, a uniting theme of Howard’s writing is the fundamental futility of civilization, and the seemingly endless cycle of civilizational collapse resulting in the devolution of humanity into a state of savagery. His stories present the figure of the barbarian—crystallized in Conan—as the primal and perhaps purest state of the human condition. This was perhaps nowhere more clearly stated than in the Conan story “Beyond the Black River”: “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind… Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph” (1935 754).

4Howard’s vision of the barbarian was romantic and idealizing, reflecting a conception of prehistoric and preliterate cultures as closely linked to nature. In a letter to his friend and fellow fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft, Howard described his imagined barbarian: “he had no mental freedom, as civilized man understands it, and very little personal freedom, being bound to his clan, his tribe, his chief… But he was lithe and strong as a panther, and the full joy of physical exertion was his” (Coffman 42). For Howard, the barbarian’s power—historically and symbolically—resided in the body, not the mind. The virility and perfection of the human form was central to his fantasy world, which was redolent with the hint of sexual conquest. In his story “The Slithering Shadow” (later titled “Xuthal of the Dusk”), he describes Conan,

like a bronze image in the sand, apparently impervious to the murderous sun, though his only garment was a silk loin-cloth, girdled by a wide gold-buckled belt from which hung a saber and a broad-bladed poniard. On his clean-cut limbs were evidence of healed wounds… At his feet rested a girl, one white arm clasping his knee. (1933b 272)

5The congruence of this description with Frazetta’s The Barbarian illuminates why the artist’s representation of the character resonated with the fans of Howard’s stories. Frazetta shared—and amplified—the author’s romanticized vision of muscular, vital, early humanity and its valorization of masculine strength.

6Rooted in Howard’s foundational texts, the Conan narrative and its many representations tapped into a network of historical, anthropological, and scientific concepts, as well as visual conventions, related to human origins and prehistoric peoples. Close examination of the lore and iconography of the character reveals how he has been constructed as a triumphant biological specimen reigning supreme over lesser physical beings in an evolutionary battle for survival. Howard’s detailed prehistoric worldbuilding found its apotheosis in Frazetta’s paintings, which in turn influenced later versions of the character, in particular, the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian. Frazetta’s paintings crystallized a vision of Conan as a prehistoric “super barbarian,” reflecting misconceptions and deeply held biases about early human societies, the formation of racial difference, and gendered power.

7As Howard’s most famous creation, Conan is closely linked with both his biography and his bibliography (Vick; Prida; de Camp). Born in rural Texas to a traveling physician father, Howard’s itinerant childhood in a punishing, often violent, frontier landscape—at the borderland between the modern, industrial world and the vast expanses of the American West—has been credited with informing Howard’s passionate investment in the tension between civilization and barbarism that animated the Conan stories (Franks; Weiss). His literary career began at age 18, contributing to pulp magazines such as Thrilling Adventures, Action Stories, and Spicy Adventure Stories. These small, handheld publications filled with short stories printed on cheap pulp paper—which lent them their name—emerged at the cusp of the twentieth century and helped to shape genre fiction, specializing in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and detective stories (Server; Ellis et al.). Each issue typically carried a full color image on the cover, capturing the attention of the busy urban readership as they competed for attention on newsstands. Howard built his most enduring relationship with the publication Weird Tales, which specialized in horror, science fiction, and fantasy stories with sexually suggestive undercurrents (Everett and Shanks). The first published Conan story appeared in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales, and by the time of the author’s premature death in June 1936, he had completed twenty-one Conan stories, seventeen of which appeared in that magazine.

8Conan is the ultimate artifact of the quasi-prehistoric “sword and sorcery” subgenre of fantasy literature. Howard is typically cited as the inventor of the genre through his Conan stories, although it was informed by and shares some of the narrative structure of millennia of epic, heroic tales reaching as far back as Homer (Parsons). Different in character from so-called “high fantasy,” which typically takes place in a foreign world with echoes of the European Middle Ages, sword and sorcery is rooted in a distant, vaguely prehistoric past. Historian Brian Murphy notes that the genre is “characterized by a strong, autonomous sword-wielding hero or heroes in conflict with magic and/or monsters, an emphasis on plot over character, external action over introspection, and muscular prose over sophisticated literary style” (43). Unlike in high fantasy, which typically focuses on heroic figures battling unadulterated evil, the characters in these worlds are often morally ambiguous. The narrative is typically structured around the violent exploits of self-motivated brutes rather than the noble battles of chivalric warriors. Sword and sorcery emerged from pulp magazines and is therefore a product of that specific visual and literary form, which reached its peak popularity between World War I and the end of World War II and was designed to appeal to largely male working and lower middle-class readership (Smith). In its essence then, the genre reflects a worldview of that period, that specific format, and the cultural expectations of that audience.

  • 1 The essay was published in three parts in fan-published science fiction magazine The Phantagraph: p (...)

9Howard meticulously constructed his imagined world to create a convincing approximation of the distant past, despite the overt supernatural events and themes of his stories. In 1936, Howard published an extended essay, “The Hyborian Age,” that described the histories, topographies, climates, and racial characteristics of the many tribes, kingdoms, and regions of his prehistoric fantasy world.1 The essay is a vivid and obsessively detailed narrative of brutal battles between tribes and kingdoms, and cataclysmic events that reshaped Earth before the emergence of modern human cultures. This intricate worldbuilding allowed Howard to create an internally consistent universe across the many Conan stories, with its own social order, political conflicts, and geographical frontiers. Lending his stories the patina of scientific accuracy, he borrowed heavily from archeological, anthropological, and historical theories in wide circulation in the first decades of the twentieth century. He owned copies of E. A. Allen’s The Prehistoric World, or Vanished Races (1885) and other texts that proffered highly speculative visions of early human peoples and societies (Shanks 24). Drawing inspiration from these sources, Howard’s Hyborian Age was an amalgam of the historical kingdoms and peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa. In his attempt to visualize the frontiers of the Hyborian world, he created a hand-drawn map transposed over a map of Europe and the Mediterranean region, collapsing his fantasy world with the geopolitical reality of this historically interconnected region (Sammon 34). In some cases, he borrowed from history directly, naming one of his Hyborian tribes the Picts, an historical European people, which directly blurred the line between reality and fantasy.

10In creating his heroic protagonist, Howard similarly infused fact and fantasy, loosely rooting the character in contemporaneous anthropological conceptions of early humans. Discussing his creation of his fantasy world, he wrote:

When I began writing the Conan stories a few years ago, I prepared this “history” of his age and the peoples of that age, in order to lend him and his sagas a greater aspect of realness. And I found that by adhering to the “facts” and spirit of that history, in writing the stories, it was easier to visualize (and therefore to present) him as a real flesh-and-blood character rather than a ready-made product. (Howard quoted in Shanks 30)

  • 2 Howard himself does not identify Elliot’s book by name, but it has been posited by Howard scholars (...)

11A “figure out of the dawn of time,” Conan hails from the region of Cimmeria, a gray, forested land that resembles ancient Britain or Scandinavia (Howard, 1936a 348). In “The Hyborian Age,” Howard even makes a direct attempt to connect his fictional Cimmerians (not to be confused with the actual historical civilization of the same name) with the current inhabitants of the British Isles: “the Gaels, ancestors of the Irish and Highland Scotch, descended from pure-blooded Cimmerian clans” (1936b). Howard found inspiration for his version of ancient Britain in his copy of G. F. Scott Elliot’s book The Romance of Early British Life (1909), which, in a letter he penned in 1932, he described as, “written for school-boys and told in an interesting and romantic style, probably with many historical inaccuracies” (Vick 39).2 

12The Conan stories proffered a fantasy universe that capitalized on the flimsy notions of prehistory that were commonplace in the early twentieth century. The world before recorded history lent itself to speculative and imaginative storytelling, because, by definition, it existed outside of written language and human memory, and has therefore long been subject to theory, conjecture, and artful reimagining. In his analysis of Howard’s writing, archeologist and cultural historian Jeffrey Shanks has noted, “Many of the ideas expressed [in the Conan stories], while not accepted today, were widely believed in Howard’s time. This includes the over-emphasis on theories of racial typology and migrations, rapid evolution and de-evolution, cataclysmic geology, and the like” (17). Howard drew inspiration from Lewis Spence’s books on Atlantis, which sought to prove the existence of that mythical island civilization. The first published Conan story places readers in a distant past, some 15,000 years before recorded history, “between the years that the oceans drank Atlantis…and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas” (1932 769). Howard recognized that Spence’s theories had broad popular allure, and therefore served as useful support for his prehistoric narrative.

13Howard also exploited the slippage between anthropology and evolutionary theory, and its many misrepresentations in scientific and popular sources alike. In the decades that followed the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), scientists and storytellers alike perpetuated false or even fantastical ideas about the linear march of human evolution from earlier apelike ancestors, the speed with which such transformations occurred, and the mechanisms that made it possible (Hesketh). Just as Howard was inventing his Conan stories, evolution had entered the American popular imagination through the so-called Scopes “Monkey” Trial in 1925, which reflected a woefully underinformed public about the mechanisms of evolution and further muddied the cultural understanding of human origins (E. Larson). What is more, Howard’s stories emerged only a decade after the announcement of the “discovery” of the Piltdown Man—the fraudulent fossil that was believed to be the “missing link” between humans and apes, yet was later discovered to have been assembled in an attempt to prove that modern humans emerged in Europe, specifically the British Isles (Feder, chapter 4).

14The evolutionary logic of Howard’s stories was explicit. In “The Hyborian Age,” Howard traces the Cimmerians to the Atlanteans, the remaining vestiges of that once great civilization that had been reduced to a state of “savagery” after disappearing into the sea (1936b). In the 1933 story “Tower of the Elephant,” Conan encounters an ancient creature who tells the story of Conan’s world: “We saw the survivors of Pictdom and Atlantis build their stone-age empires, and go down to ruin, locked in bloody wars. We saw the Picts sink into abysmal savagery, the Atlanteans into apedom again” (1933a 319). Conan’s people, then, are the product of an evolutionary battle for survival. Through strength and intelligence, they regained their humanity, and Conan is the beneficiary of this struggle. For Howard, Conan is as much a biological specimen as a brave hero, engineered to survive a violent world in which humans battle for supremacy against other humans as well as Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, and intelligent apes. Howard’s initial introduction of the character is telling: “Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer… [destined] to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet” (1932 769). For Howard, Conan was a prehistoric warrior locked in a battle for evolutionary survival.

15This vision of vigorous masculinity, unrestrained by civilization, mirrors a broader discourse in the decades around 1900 that posited a return to a more natural, primordial state of human experience as an existential necessity. As scholars such as Gail Bederman and Jackson Lears have argued, a rhetoric of masculine virility, espoused by figures such as President Theodore Roosevelt, extolled the virtues of “barbaric man” as a symbol of virile, vital, imperial manhood. The feminizing influence of culture and the bureaucratic complexity of modern life, it was argued, could only be defeated by an immersion into raw, untouched nature, and reconnecting to the primal state through an emphasis on physical fitness. This logic proffered a paradox: the only way for Western civilization to survive was to shed the superfluous trappings of Western civilization. Howard’s Conan offered one particularly potent image of this powerful, primitive manhood that was an answer to the decadent sophistication of industrial modernity.

16In its evocation of evolutionary theory, and its connections to notions of civilizational struggle, the racial connotations of Howard’s stories are unavoidable. As an apex predator within a prehistoric Germanic world, Conan is conjured as a paragon of white male supremacy. “The Hyborian Age” repeatedly insists on metrics of racial purity, remarking, “barbarians have kept their blood pure” (1936b). The essay also attends very closely to genealogies and the vanquishing of entire races and their replacement or evolution into new racial types. Again, he connects his fantasy world to the reality of modern peoples: “The origins of other races of the modern world may be similarly traced; in almost every case, far older than they realize, their history stretches back into the mists of the forgotten Hyborian age” (1936b). In this way, the essay establishes a narrative link between contemporary Europeans and the superior strength and ability of his fantasy races. Howard concocts a unique variant of the concept of the “survival of the fittest,” which was itself a corruption of Darwin’s concept of natural selection coined by sociologist and eugenicist Herbert Spencer to advance racist objectives, which proved immensely popular in early-twentieth century America (Curell and Cogdell). These theories were part of a larger colonial rhetoric of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that argued for the idea of the superior physical and mental abilities of European peoples in a battle for civilizational survival, shifting attention away from Darwin’s focus on environmental and sexual adaptation and focusing instead on violent struggle between races (McClintock). Howard’s Hyborian genealogies bear traces of this broader discourse in their attention to the superior abilities of certain tribes and their ability to pass that to future generations. What is more, Howard’s stories trafficked in racist stereotypes. As scholar Paul Shovlin has noted, the Conan stories depict “dark-skinned races as little above animals in intelligence, sensibility, and appearance compared to white ‘savages’ in the stories. This depiction is obviously informed by racial rhetoric of Howard’s time that influenced him” (92). While the racial dynamics of Howard’s stories are extremely complex—and he understood that he was trafficking in falsehoods that had traction in his time and was not necessarily condoning them—he nonetheless deployed the racial discourse of his time to help propel his narratives.

17By borrowing from evolutionary theory, Howard’s archetypal fantasy fiction echoes some of the invented worlds of the quintessential science fiction writer H. G. Wells. Wells was a particular influence on Howard, who owned a copy of the author’s synthetic history of human evolution and social development, The Outline of History (1920). Wells’s novella The Time Machine (1895) and his novel The War of the Worlds (1897) drew heavily from evolutionary theory to create parables of the folly of humanity’s obsession with technology. These stories provided a model for connecting speculative fiction with evolutionary concepts, crafting narratives of civilizational turmoil and violent competition between peoples (Rieder). Unlike in science fiction, however, which is explicitly about the peril and potential of science, scientific concepts exist almost invisibly within Howard’s fantasy world. Evolutionary theory permeates the text, present just below the surface, helping to create the illusion of historical accuracy without distracting from the overt fantasy of the narrative environment.

18Howard understood the power of marshalling history and science in the service of fantasy, toying with the boundary between fact and fiction, and exploiting the public’s tenuous grasp on complex anthropological concepts. By situating Conan in a distant human past that mapped onto the epistemology of his moment, Howard created an alluring and mysterious world that felt truthful, despite its overt fantasy. Howard’s “Hyborian Age” offered a vision of prehistory that was at once profoundly fantastical and bracingly realistic.

  • 3 The interior masthead of the magazine read, “A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual.”

19Howard’s vision of Conan as an imposing, violent warrior was rarely captured in the visual representations of the character. The first images of Conan—the line drawings included on the interior pages and covers of Weird Tales, or the covers of the Gnome Books and Ace Books compendia published in the 1950s—often depicted him chastely, donning an ornate chest plate and kilt, with his distinctive musculature mostly hidden from view. He often appeared more like a Roman centurion than a prehistoric brute equipped with terrifying physical strength. Margaret Brundage, the artist who created the first full color images of Conan, was marginally more successful at capturing Howard’s vision of the character. The premier cover illustrator of Weird Tales, Brundage was known for her seductive images of nude or nearly nude women in precarious circumstances, which helped define the look of the magazine and its promise to shock and scandalize audiences with “bizarre and unusual” curiosities (Spurlock and Korshak).3 While most of her covers focus on the ancillary female characters in the stories—in keeping with her signature emphasis on lascivious femininity—one of her cover paintings depicted Conan in a way that at least somewhat resembled the hulking image described in Howard’s texts. The cover of the August 1934 issue, illustrating the story “Devil in Iron,” depicts a muscular male figure—sword drawn and raised to the sky—wrapped in a menacing serpent with a nearly nude woman at his feet (Fig. 2). It was this image of Conan—a powerful, muscular figure caught in a struggle for survival with savage nature and physically dominant over sexually available women—that would endure. In this way, Brundage played an important role in creating and perpetuating the enduring image of Conan as the pinnacle of masculine power.

Fig. 2. Margaret Brundage, Weird Tales, August 1934

Fig. 2. Margaret Brundage, Weird Tales, August 1934

Cover for Weird Tales.

Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions/HA.com

  • 4 Frazetta’s paintings appeared on the covers of Conan the Adventurer (1966), Conan the Warrior (1967 (...)

20It was not until the mid-1960s that Howard’s stories found the artist who could accurately capture the spirit and allure of the character. Howard biographer Don Herron wrote: “Undoubtedly the finest visual counterpart to Howard thus far are the paintings of Frank Frazetta… Just as Howard established the form of sword and sorcery writers would work in… so did Frazetta establish the visual style the genre should be portrayed in” (Herron 51). Selling over ten million copies, the eleven Conan paperbacks published by Lancer Books between 1966 and 1971 brought Howard’s character to a new generation and a much wider audience (Sammon 44). Eight of the eleven books featured Frazetta’s paintings on the front covers, and many commentators have credited the series’ success to these paintings.4 It would be difficult to overstate the influence of Frazetta’s Conan images on the field of fantasy illustration (Hanson, 2022; Fenner). Comic artist Michael Kaluta was unambiguous: “the modern Fantasy Art Genre was born with Frazetta’s depiction of Conan the Barbarian on the Lancer paperback” (40). Frazetta’s images of Conan became the definitive depiction of the character, informing the look of the character for the next several decades in the paintings of fantasy painters such as Boris Vallejo, Ken Kelly, and Manuel Perez Clemente (known as Sanjulian).

21The seductive, charismatic intensity of Frazetta’s painting is a product of his hybrid training in academic principles and commercial illustration. As a child, he enrolled in the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under the mentorship of his teacher Michael Falanga, who trained him in the techniques of nineteenth-century neoclassical painting, with its emphasis on meticulous tonalities, proportion and shading, and theatrical lighting effects. The young artist applied these skills not as a fine art painter, but in the world of popular illustration, publishing his first comic in an issue of Tally-Ho in 1944 at age 16. He contributed to a number of popular comic strips and from 1954 to 1961 as a ghost-illustrator for Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic series.

22It was in the realm of fantasy painting that Frazetta developed his mature style that defined his career. In the early 1960s, he was commissioned to create a series of covers for the Ace Books editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories. His paintings helped popularize that character for a new generation, and in the words of Burroughs’s grandson, “Frazetta’s art for my grandfather’s books would take readers and the publishing world by storm. Not only did Frazetta’s covers help revitalize Ed’s stories, but people who did not read them were buying the book simply for the artwork” (Fenner 8). These cover art commissions allowed him to refine his depictions of muscular, semi-nude men engaged in violent conflict with wild nature and tribal peoples, which was to become the artist’s trademark. The success of his Tarzan covers positioned Frazetta as a central figure in the world of paperback illustration, carving out a space for him as a specialist in this mode of heroic fantasy painting. His paintings, including covers for Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars books, are a visual assault of visceral, ferocious energy populated by hulking, heroic males typically accompanied by athletic, voluptuous females. He fashioned a distinctive style that is best described as lurid.

23Executed with a loose, improvisational technique, his works privilege the depiction of human figures in lieu of elaborate environmental detail. He was less concerned with narrative detail than conjuring an otherworldly atmosphere that evoked emotional response. A successful work of art, he asserted, should show and not tell: “[a piece must have] all the great elements that make great art: the color, the design, the composition, the emotion it creates, all those things. If it doesn’t do that, I don’t care how skillfully done it is” (Cerio). He tended to paint directly onto his support—typically board or another solid surface, often covered with canvas—and did not rely heavily on studies or photographic references, as was common among many commercial illustrators. His human figures are often posed and lit as if they are anatomical specimens, contorted and manipulated to create the effect he desired. He was also known to add his own face to his male characters, inserting himself and his persona into the piece.

24Frazetta’s desire to imprint his works with his own authorial vision might seem incongruous with a format that was, inherently, in the service of someone else’s authorial voice. Illustration as a form has long been marginalized in histories of artistic practice, as it has been seen to be both formally and narratively slavish to external demands set by the author of the text and the editors who manage the publishing process (Bogart). While this publishing context is essential to understanding Frazetta’s paintings, it also does not entirely delimit the ways that his work can be interpreted. As his own descriptions of his work indicate, Frazetta thought of his paintings as carefully crafted statements that capture his unique creative vision. He insisted that his paintings were returned to him after the publishing process – something that very few illustrators were able to do – so that they could be kept or sold as standalone works of art (Levin). His Conan paintings, in other words, are not only illustrations of Howard’s stories, but also personal statements that reflect his very individualized artistic sensibility and intent. His Conan paintings, in other words, are best understood as a dialogue between Frazetta’s painterly vision and Howard’s narrative world.

25Frazetta’s intrusion of himself (literally and figuratively) into his compositions reveals how his investment in heroic masculinity and eroticized femininity was not just fantasy. His paintings reflected his own masculine persona and somewhat conservative ideas of gender roles and behavior informed by his working-class Brooklyn upbringing. Comics scholar Dan Nadel asserts that “Frazetta was a politically conservative paragon of the kind of all-American virility that was hostile to the counterculture,” and notes that he had a “love of imagined verdant realities where a man could have his woman and defend his land… liberated and exploratory, but still firmly rooted in traditional art, politics, and sex” (13). Frazetta’s vision of powerful, unrestrained masculinity proved profoundly appealing to the primarily male readership of pulp science fiction and fantasy publications. His covers appeared on bookshelves and magazine racks during an era that was challenging traditional notions of gender, sex, and family. Much of 1970s popular culture reinforced the strength and independence of manly working men, and Frazetta’s paintings satiated a similar cultural appetite (Nystrom). His depiction of Conan offered an opportunity to celebrate and valorize a romanticized vision of male power and dominance. As he would later put it, “I’m very physical minded. Brain, fine, but this body is put here for use. If anybody could jump around like my heroes, it’s me. Not many artists are [the] physical type. I’ve been jumped on by 20 guys in a movie theater and got out alive. In Brooklyn I knew Conan, I knew guys just like him” (Nadel 17). In this way, Frazetta’s Conan proved well-suited to its historical moment, and to the original source material that it was designed to illustrate. The artist expressed an unabashed valorization of rugged, independent masculinity, unburdened by the obligations of modern society. His fantasy characters were equal parts wish fulfillment, pulp titillation, and reactionary sexism.

26This combination of dominant masculinity mapped neatly onto Howard’s depiction of Conan as an apex predator, fighting for survival in a state of savage barbarism. He had an intuitive understanding of Howard’s intent with the character and the entire Hyborian world, echoing the author’s unique combination of fantasy and realism informed by historical and anthropological research. With characteristic self-aggrandizement, he later recalled how successfully he conjured this mythic barbarian: “Conan came to me at exactly the right time... I had something to prove… Howard’s stories have been around a long while and a lot of artists gave it their best shot. But when I read it, I thought, here’s something different, here’s something right up my alley, and I'm going to show the world what I can do when I really want to. And I did” (Nadel 20). His first image of Conan (Fig. 1), with its straightforward title and definite article, The Barbarian, registers his attempt to create the essential representation not only of the character but of the early European peoples that inspired it and who originally earned that epithet. As he would later boast, his Conan “was what I thought a barbarian should look like, the ultimate barbarian” (Fenner and Franzetta).

27In his assertion that he created “the ultimate barbarian,” Frazetta interpolated himself into a long tradition of images and descriptions of Northern European tribal peoples that combined historical fact with artistic fiction. Since ancient Greece and Rome, historians, artists, and archaeologists have forged an image of barbarians as brutish primitives with a penchant for destruction, violence, and rape. Paradoxically, barbarians were also seen as childlike and pure, uncorrupted by civilization. These depictions were rife with exaggeration and confabulation to service political ends, yet they nonetheless endured. The term derives from the Greek referring to all non-Greek speaking peoples, which reveals its function as a term of othering—reducing foreign peoples and the unknown to flattened caricatures and often negating the complex social and linguistic systems developed by these communities (Modzelewski; Heather; Harrison). Roman descriptions of the Gauls, the Celts, the Vandals, and the Goths that eventually subsumed the empire forged an enduring iconography that influenced the image of European tribals peoples for centuries, echoed in descriptions and representations of the so-called “wild man” of the medieval period and depictions of ancient Germanic warriors in early modern prints (Fig. 3), which in turn shaped visions of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Krebs; Goffart; Bernheimer).


Fig. 3. Philipp Clüver, 1616

Fig. 3. Philipp Clüver, 1616

Engraving, Plate 18 from Germania antiquae libri tres

Wikimedia Commons

28Edward Gibbon’s landmark study History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) played a significant role in popularizing an image of ancient Germans as “wretchedly destitute” peoples who “passed their lives in a state of ignorance and poverty” defined by a lust for battle: “A warlike nation like the Germans, without either cities, letters, arts, or money, found some compensation for this savage state in the enjoyment of liberty” (Geroulanos 32). By the end of the nineteenth century, the belligerent rudeness of the barbarians of late antiquity was an easily recognizable iconography, which was further disseminated through educational texts, magic lantern performances, history paintings, and popular satire (Geroulanos part II).

Mural, oil on canvas, American Museum of Natural History (New York)

Courtesy of the Estate of Charles R. Knight

Neolithic Man (The New Stone Age)

29“Barbarian” was also a fluid and flexible term, marked by a slippage between the historical peoples of Northern Europe and all early humans. By the early twentieth century, the image of the barbarian became blurred with archaeological and evolutionary representations of the earliest Homo sapiens. Cave dwelling peoples were often depicted as muscular white male figures, mostly nude, with wild eyes, long hair, and impressive physical proportions. Charles Knight, in his paintings for the American Museum of Natural History (Fig. 4), represented Stone Age Europeans in a way that reflected and helped constitute this image for a broad public (Knight; Milner). The iconography of prehistoric and pre-literature European peoples had hardened into cliché by the twentieth century. As a visual trope, the barbarian became increasing untethered from its original referent and spilled far beyond its traditional borders within history, anthropology, and the human sciences, becoming a fixture of the lowbrow visual culture of fantasy literature, pulp illustration, advertising, and cinema exemplified by Frazetta’s paintings.

30Frazetta’s The Barbarian (Fig. 1), then, inherited a long history of academic and popular representations of early humans: the unruly, long hair; the animal fur that constitutes the only visible scraps of clothing; the woman at his feet as a prize of conquest suggesting both sexual servitude and the reproductive victory. Conan’s regalia—bone necklaces, roughly hewn jewelry made from earthen materials, the dagger attached to his belt, and his iron sword and ornate sheath reflect a sophisticated understanding of the way that early European tribal peoples had been historically represented. This rich and detailed iconography helped to lend Frazetta’s fantastical world a feeling of authenticity, as if his paintings offered a glimpse into humanity’s deepest past—albeit glamorized and romanticized for the pulp fiction audience.

31In this figure’s stoic solidity, The Barbarian is imposing, but somewhat unusual for Frazetta’s paintings of the character. Typically, he places Conan at the center of violent action, foregrounding his physical strength and fearful skill in battle. A vivid example is Berserker, created for the cover of Conan the Conqueror (Fig. 5). It depicts a Nordic marauder in a horned helmet, eyes wide in a trancelike fury and hulking musculature glowing in the hellish light, who thrusts his blood-drenched scimitar toward a volcanic sky. He sits upon a powerful black steed, foreshortened as if threatening to charge beyond the painting’s frame. Forming the apex of the scene’s pyramidal composition, the raven-haired warrior dominates his foes, including an axe-wielding skeleton at lower right—a suggestion that the berserker reigns supreme over death itself.

Fig. 5. Frank Frazetta, The Berserker, 1967

Fig. 5. Frank Frazetta, The Berserker, 1967

Artwork  Frazetta Girls, Conan the Barbarian  and  CPI

Conan the Conquerer

32This image proffers the most direct elision of fact and fiction within Frazetta’s Conan paintings. In choosing the title Berserker, Frazetta located Conan not within the prehistoric fantasy of Howard’s Hyborian Age, but rather the very real history of Northern Europe. The Berserker, or “bear warrior,” was a fierce fighter of the Scandinavian and Germanic tribes, documented as far back as the ancient Romans and appearing in Old Norse poems and sagas and in historical descriptions of Viking raids. Frazetta’s depiction of the warrior in a state of violent possession reflects a knowledge of the Berserker’s uniquely terrifying method of fighting, described by observers as a catatonic madness, which scholars have attributed to the shamanic use of hallucinogenic mushrooms (Speidel). Berserker, then, toggles between the image of the fictional prehistoric hero of Howard’s story and that of the historical Germanic warrior who ravaged European towns and cities since at least the first century BCE.

33In this way, Frazetta’s paintings are part of a lineage of artists representing the warlike impulses of European tribal peoples that supposedly bestowed a competitive edge in the evolutionary struggle for survival. As art historian Barbara Larson and others have shown, late nineteenth-century academic painting and sculpture attempted to incorporate anthropological and archeological findings about early humans—informed by Darwinist notions of competition and violent struggle—into representations of prehistoric Europeans (B. Larson). Paul Jamin’s 1889 painting Abduction in the Stone Age depicts three forms locked in a violent struggle (Fig. 6). Two nude male figures battle for possession of a screaming woman. Depicting an instance of so-called “wife capture” that circulated in Darwinist-influenced anthropological texts of the late nineteenth century, the piece offers a visualization of the kinds of evolutionary conflicts believed to have given rise to modern humans. Such images consolidated a variety of overlapping and competing notions about the evolutionary origins of Homo sapiens, the relationship between humans and other apes, assumptions about gendered behavior and the role of sexual coercion in reproduction, and the widespread scientific racism that presented European peoples as the victors in a biological struggle for supremacy.

Fig. 6. Paul Jamin, Le Rapt à l’âge de pierre (Abduction in the Stone Age), 1888

Fig. 6. Paul Jamin, Le Rapt à l’âge de pierre (Abduction in the Stone Age), 1888

Painting, oil on canvas, 282 × 200.2 cm, Musée des Beaux‑Arts (Reims, France)

Wikimedia Commons

34This image of the warring European primitive also had a civilizational dimension. Joseph-Noël Sylvestre’s 1890 painting The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals depicts the marauding hordes as a spectacle of physical might (Fig. 7). Shorn of clothing, the nude, muscular forms pillage the Eternal City, and at center, wrap a monumental sculpture of the emperor in a rope, signifying the decapitation of the symbolic head of the empire. The ascendant composition of Sylvestre’s canvas—dramatically accentuating the victorious nude male figure—captures the triumph of barbarian brute force over the decadent civilization of late antique Rome.

Fig. 7. Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, Le Sac de Rome en 410 par les Vandales (The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals), 1890

Fig. 7. Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, Le Sac de Rome en 410 par les Vandales (The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals), 1890

Painting, oil on canvas, 197 cm × 130 cm, Musée Paul‑Valéry (Sète, France)

Wikimedia Commons

35This progressivist vision of the so-called “barbarian invasions” was echoed in the art historical discourse of the day. As art historian Éric Michaud has argued, the discipline emerged in many ways as a nationalist project by contending that the barbarian tribes shattered the universality of Roman culture and art, imbuing it with the color, character, and cultural distinctiveness of Northern Europeans, forging a vision of art as a reflection of racial character and ability. The muscular belligerence of the barbarian, then, has served as a powerful symbol of European racial and cultural supremacy.

36Frazetta’s Conan paintings are very much a part of this visual history, updating it for the context of paperback publishing. The emphasis on the theme of violent domination—the representation of Conan as a paragon of raw strength and power—is discernable in the distinctive compositions of his paintings. Frazetta frequently repeated the motif of the ascendant barbarian, physically and compositionally dominant over his many weaker foes. In his painting The Destroyer—produced for the Lancer paperback Conan the Buccaneer—Conan is the pinnacle of a human pyramid (Fig. 8). The painting depicts him standing atop a mountain of vanquished corpses, about to inflict a final blow against his remaining enemies. These triumphant compositions borrow from centuries of heroic imagery, perhaps most famously in two Romantic icons of survival and triumph that Frazetta revered, Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, and Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Frazetta brings history painting to fantasy book illustration, lending his works an aura of gravity and linking Conan to heroes of Western civilization.

Fig. 8. Frank Frazetta, The Destroyer, 1971 (revised 1974)

Fig. 8. Frank Frazetta, The Destroyer, 1971 (revised 1974)

Cover, oil on canvas, cover for Conan the Buccaneer

Artwork  Frazetta Girls, Conan the Barbarian  and  CPI

37Frazetta’s most explicit interpretation of the Conan narrative as a violent struggle for survival is his painting Man-Ape, created for the cover of the compendium Conan (Fig. 9). The volume includes Howard’s essay that describes the evolution of the Cimmerians from their ape-like forebears, and the cover promises readers a glimpse of the “earliest, most savage battles of Fantasy-Adventure’s mightiest hero” (De Camp and Carter, cover). The book also includes Howard’s story “Rogues in the House,” in which Conan is forced to battle an intelligent apelike creature, which Frazetta depicts in his cover image—Conan, dagger drawn, straddles the wailing creature. Conan’s expression evinces a kind of ferocious animal madness that visually connects the warrior and his simian foe. The violent spectacle of the image is dramatically rendered through the vivid crimson of the cape that bisects the frame, prefiguring the bloody spectacle that is sure to follow. The painting suggests that violence is a necessity, even a biological imperative that is key to evolutionary success. He translates the slow and steady progress of evolution into a vivid cinematic moment of violent competition.

Fig. 9. Frank Frazetta, Man-Ape, 1967

Fig. 9. Frank Frazetta, Man-Ape, 1967

Cover, oil on canvas, cover for Conan

Artwork  Frazetta Girls, Conan the Barbarian  and  CPI

38Within this context, it is difficult to miss the overt racial implications of Frazetta’s picturing of triumphant whiteness. His Conan covers are part of a lineage of visual representations that cast European tribal peoples as apex specimens in the struggle for racial survival. The image of Conan as a conquering Germanic warrior inherited a history of racial theory and anthropological and biological thought informed by Darwinian theory, which, as we have seen, was central to Howard’s worldbuilding. The broad diffusion of concepts such as “survival of the fittest” mapped neatly onto depictions of victorious Germanic barbarians sweeping away the peoples and civilizations of the ancient world. In directly evoking the Berserker and other pre-Christian European peoples, Frazetta’s paintings are evocative of the kinds of images that haunted the twentieth-century fascist imagination, which posited Vikings as the ancestral “volk” that validated the ideology of white—specifically Germanic—supremacy (Richards 119-135). This is not to suggest that Frazetta was overtly racist, nor even that his images should only be read through this prism—they are after all fantasy paintings—but rather, to illustrate how his paintings were shaped by and helped to shape an evolutionary discourse rooted in a racialized ideology.

39There is of course a heavily gendered valence in Frazetta’s images, as well. The Conan stories—and Frazetta’s images—are as much about sexual and gendered power as they are about physical power. The rippling musculature and cartoonishly phallic swords that define his male characters are contrasted with female figures rendered as sexually pliant nudes and slaves. In this way, his images represent sexual conquest over women almost as much as violent domination over men. In this way, his paintings perpetuate a narrative that the earliest humans survived to perpetuate the species through sexual dominance and even coercion. Frazetta’s own gender politics certainly inform our understanding of his celebration of the male sexual prerogative, especially within the context of a prehistoric fantasy world, unrestrained by modern laws and mores.

40Frazetta’s images were not only connected to a deeper history of image making—they also helped to seed a resurgence of Conan and the sword and sorcery genre in American popular culture, with its attendant valorization of the heroic barbarian. The unprecedented success of the Lancer paperbacks spawned a sprawling industry of Conan content that continues to this day. Within only a couple of years of the release of Conan the Adventurer, Marvel Comics launched the comic book series Conan the Barbarian in 1970, with its early illustrations by Barry Windsor-Smith pulling directly from the iconography of Frazetta’s book covers. The Marvel version of Conan recast the character in the vein of a superhero—not only a figure of superlative strength but an actual “superman,” to borrow a name from rival comic producer DC. The series proved immediately popular and ran for nearly a quarter century, spawning successful off-shoots, including Red Sonja, which debuted in 1973 and ran for over a decade.

41The text that solidified Conan in the broader public consciousness—and which continues to inform discussions of the character and the sword and sorcery genre—is the 1982 film version, which borrowed its name from the comic, Conan the Barbarian (Dino De Laurentiis Corporation, John Milius, 1982). The comics and the film version are connected in multiple ways. The writer and editor of the comics, Roy Thomas, played a crucial role in the production of the film, co-writing the first draft of the script with another comic writer and the associate producer of the film, Ed Summer. That treatment was later rewritten by credited screenwriter Oliver Stone and director John Milius. Thomas also compiled the initial pitch package used to sell the concept to directors, producers, and studio executives, which included Frazetta’s Lancer covers to help potential filmmakers and investors visualize the world and its central character (Sammon, chapter 4; Von Gunden, chapter 2). The pitch ultimately proved successful, selling to Dino De Laurentiis, the producer of other comic book adaptations such as Barbarella (1968) and Flash Gordon (1980).

42Executive producer Edward Pressman unsuccessfully attempted to retain Frazetta as a visual consultant on the film, yet despite his lack of direct involvement, the artist’s vision heavily influenced its aesthetic. The production designer, cartoonist Ron Cobb, acknowledged his debt to Frazetta, as did Milius, in casting the lead, Austrian actor and professional bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger. Milius recalled, “I thought Arnold was a dead ringer for all those famous Frank Frazetta paintings of Conan” (Sammon 106). The similarity between Frazetta’s Conan and Schwarzenegger is most succinctly visualized in Renato Casaro’s promotional art for the film. Casaro produced several posters, including one that directly borrowed from Frazetta’s The Barbarian, which crudely placed Schwarzenegger’s head on Frazetta’s Conan (Fig. 10). The final poster design clearly draws on Frazetta’s visual vocabulary: the triangular composition, the glistening, muscular body of the central hero, the shimmering sword held to the sky, and the female figure at his feet.

Fig. 10. Frank Frazetta, Renato Casaro, poster concept for Conan the Barbarian, 1982

Fig. 10. Frank Frazetta, Renato Casaro, poster concept for Conan the Barbarian, 1982

Poster, tempera on board

Courtesy Renato Casaro ©

43The film offers an origin story of the character, pulling from several of Howard’s original texts, mainly “Black Colossus” and “A Witch Shall Be Born.” Stone’s original concept displaced the prehistoric barbarian to a post-apocalyptic world, a conceit abandoned by Milius in his revision of the script. The film brings Howard’s Hyborian Age to life, following Conan as he seeks vengeance for the murder of his family and his Cimmerian tribe by the villainous Thulsa Doom. In his pursuit of Doom and his cannibalistic cult, Conan is joined by two companions, including the eventual love interest Valeria. Milius creates a revenge story that echoes some of the core themes of the film Dirty Harry, on which he was an uncredited writer, and his screenplay for the sequel, Magnum Force. He translates that icon of laconic masculinity and vigilante justice to Howard’s prehistoric fantasy world, which results in outrageously extravagant and gory sequences that attempt to weave together imaginative worldbuilding and brutal realism in a way that is well-matched to Howard’s stories and Frazetta’s paintings.

44The casting of Schwarzenegger, an Austrian immigrant with a thick Germanic accent, accentuated the association of the character with Teutonic and Northern European peoples. Milius sought to present Conan as “a Northern European mythic hero” (Williams 116). The actor’s remarkable physical proportions and preternatural strength were well-suited to the comic-inflected vision of Conan as an amplified superman, or perhaps, to borrow a more loaded German phrase, an Übermensch. That term, of course, derives from Fredrich Nietzsche’s 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which it was used to describe a superior type of man who overcomes the herd mentality of society and religion and whose existence validates the human race (Ansell-Pearson and Loeb). While complex in Nietzsche’s work, the concept of the Übermensch was stripped of its nuance as it permeated popular culture at the end of the nineteenth century, when it took on new currency as shorthand for a kind of social Darwinism—a turn akin to that of “survival of the fittest.” The misuse of the term found its logical extreme when it was adopted by the Nazis in the 1930s to assert the superiority of the so-called Aryan Race (Golomb and Wistrich).

45Conan’s relationship to the Übermensch is explicit in the film, raising questions about the ways that the film perpetuates the difficult racial narratives embedded in the Conan stories. Milius imbues his pulp subject with a weighty philosophical tone; it is a narrative about the power of vengeance and, to borrow another Nietzschean phrase, the will to power. The film’s epigraph, in fact, is a quotation from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, the sentiment redolent of Social Darwinism, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Noting this indebtedness to Nietzsche, film scholar and cultural critic Richard Dyer has suggested that the film and the character more broadly “mobilise a sub-Nietschian [sic] rhetoric of the Übermensch that, however inaccurately, is strongly associated with Hitlerism and crypto-fascism” (150). This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that the plot orients around Conan’s ultimately successful attempts to locate and kill his mortal foe, Doom, played by the African American actor James Earl Jones. This battle of a Germanic hero against a dark-skinned foe was noticed by film critic Roger Ebert, who, despite lauding the film as “a very nearly perfect visualization of the Conan legend,” made a point to note that he found it

a rather unsettling image to see this Nordic superman confronting a black [man], and when Doom’s head was sliced off and contemptuously thrown down the flight of stairs by the muscular blond Conan, I found myself thinking that Leni Riefenstahl could have directed the scene and that Goebbels might have applauded it. (Ebert)

46The confronting violence of the scene echoes the decapitation of Conan’s mother in the opening scene of the film, establishing narrative symmetry, but Ebert’s reaction is understandable. Such a reading is of course inflected by the racial dimension of Howard’s writing about the Hyborian Age and Frazetta’s visualization of the heroic white male figure as an evolutionarily advantageous specimen of strength and violence. And it certainly does not help that Milius referred to himself – tongue in cheek – as a “zen fascist” (Von Gunden 14).

47Given the history of the character and the construction of Conan as a vision of white male supremacy, Dyer and Ebert are certainly justified in their readings of the film as racist or even fascist, yet its narrative structure, character development, and visual character suggest a more complex reading. Conan’s successes are heavily indebted to the support of his female companion Valeria and the archer Subotai, a character inspired by Mongolian warriors and played by the native Hawaiian actor Gerry Lopez. The film also attends to Schwarzenegger’s physique in a way that is not only about its brute strength, but also its appeal as a passive object of desire. One scene depicts Conan strapped to a tree, weak and defeated, presented as an almost pornographic display of homoeroticism that reminds us of Conan’s physical limitations. He is eventually freed by Valeria and Subotai. Conan is not a lone warrior able to vanquish all, but a fallible figure who relies upon and requires the support of women and people of color to keep him alive.

48As scholars such as Paul Shovlin, Winter Elliot, and Nicky Falkof have argued, the race and gender politics of the Conan stories are extremely complex (Prida). From Howard’s earliest stories and through various print and film versions, Conan is articulated as defiantly “barbaric” in a way that scrambles many of the orthodoxies of Western scientific racism, imperialism, and misogyny. Conan’s crudeness and his discomfort within the confines of civilization are evidence of his “failures” within the ideology of white supremacy that links savagery with non-white peoples. Similarly, Conan’s gender identity—despite (and possibly because of) his exaggerated masculinity —is ambiguous because he is identified so closely with his body, with nature, and with raw, unintellectual power in ways traditionally associated with non-white peoples and women. As Elliot has argued:

Conan’s body is also displayed, also fetishized, and also subjected to fantasy. Unfortunately for Conan, that fact puts him in a distinctly female position, for Western civilization, Howard, and the amorphous civilization of the Hyborian Age define femininity as vulnerability, as body on display. (67)

49Moreover, to simplistically link these Nietzschean or Darwinian themes to racist ideology is to continue the long history of misreading and misapplying those complex theoretical concepts. To borrow from those theories—even to directly reference them as in the case of Conan the Barbarian —was not necessarily an affirmation of genetic superiority of white men. Certainly, in the case of Howard, who detested fascism and Hitler, it seems inapt, especially because he was far too much of a nihilist to believe in a mode of progressivist social Darwinism or eugenics.

50The question of whether Howard’s Conan lore, the Frazetta paintings, and the 1982 film definitively or intentionally affirm a racist vision of European supremacy is complex and perhaps insoluble. The Conan universe exists in the penumbra between fact and fantasy, which results in images and narratives that willfully elude neat categorization within a preestablished scientific discourse. The presence of a white male hero does not inherently connote a celebration of white racial superiority, but it does present us with an iconography that has been used to service those ends. What is undeniable is that Conan inherited a history of racial theory and anthropological and biological thought informed by Darwinian concepts. The Conan narrative was rooted in evolutionary notions of human origins and biological fitness. At its core, the Conan image—through his many manifestations across the twentieth century and beyond—has articulated a vision of human prehistory as a brutal battle in which only the strongest survived. Conan, as one of the most enduring artifacts of early twentieth century pulp fiction, provides a window not only into the specificity of the media that produced it, but also into the ways that it reflected and helped forge broader cultural conceptions of race, masculinity, power, and the vision of prehistoric human life and experience.

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SPENCE, Lewis. The History of Atlantis. London: Rider & Co., Ltd., 1926.

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WEISS, Daniel. “Robert E. Howard’s Barbarian and the Western: A Study of Conan through the West and the Western Hero.” Conan Meets the Academy: Multidisciplinary Essays on the Enduring Barbarian. Ed. Jonas Prida. London: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2013, p. 70-90.

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Notes

1 The essay was published in three parts in fan-published science fiction magazine The Phantagraph: part 1 in vol. 4, no. 3, February 1936; part 2 in vol. 4, no. 5, August 1936; part 3 in vol. 5, no. 1, October 1936. The full text is available online: www.gutenberg.org/files/42182/42182-h/42182-h.htm. Various drafts of this essay are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Glenn Lord Collection of Robert E. Howard.

2 Howard himself does not identify Elliot’s book by name, but it has been posited by Howard scholars and enthusiasts as the likely text. See spraguedecampfan.wordpress.com/tag/romance-of-early-british-life/

3 The interior masthead of the magazine read, “A Magazine of the Bizarre and Unusual.”

4 Frazetta’s paintings appeared on the covers of Conan the Adventurer (1966), Conan the Warrior (1967), Conan the Conqueror (1967), Conan the Usurper (1967), Conan (1967), Conan the Avenger (1968), Conan of Cimmeria (1969), and Conan the Buccaneer (1971).

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1. Frank Frazetta, The Barbarian, 1966
Légende Cover, oil on canvas, cover for Conan the Adventurer Artwork  Frazetta Girls, Conan the Barbarian  and  CPI
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 434k
Titre Fig. 2. Margaret Brundage, Weird Tales, August 1934
Légende Cover for Weird Tales.
Crédits Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions/HA.com
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 412k
Titre Fig. 3. Philipp Clüver, 1616
Légende Engraving, Plate 18 from Germania antiquae libri tres
Crédits Wikimedia Commons
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 688k
Légende Mural, oil on canvas, American Museum of Natural History (New York)
Crédits Courtesy of the Estate of Charles R. Knight
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 356k
Titre Fig. 5. Frank Frazetta, The Berserker, 1967
Crédits Artwork  Frazetta Girls, Conan the Barbarian  and  CPI
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-5.png
Fichier image/png, 843k
Titre Fig. 6. Paul Jamin, Le Rapt à l’âge de pierre (Abduction in the Stone Age), 1888
Légende Painting, oil on canvas, 282 × 200.2 cm, Musée des Beaux‑Arts (Reims, France)
Crédits Wikimedia Commons
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 368k
Titre Fig. 7. Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, Le Sac de Rome en 410 par les Vandales (The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals), 1890
Légende Painting, oil on canvas, 197 cm × 130 cm, Musée Paul‑Valéry (Sète, France)
Crédits Wikimedia Commons
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 513k
Titre Fig. 8. Frank Frazetta, The Destroyer, 1971 (revised 1974)
Légende Cover, oil on canvas, cover for Conan the Buccaneer
Crédits Artwork  Frazetta Girls, Conan the Barbarian  and  CPI
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 351k
Titre Fig. 9. Frank Frazetta, Man-Ape, 1967
Légende Cover, oil on canvas, cover for Conan
Crédits Artwork  Frazetta Girls, Conan the Barbarian  and  CPI
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 305k
Titre Fig. 10. Frank Frazetta, Renato Casaro, poster concept for Conan the Barbarian, 1982
Légende Poster, tempera on board
Crédits Courtesy Renato Casaro ©
URL http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/27493/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 181k
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Ryan Linkof, « “The Ultimate Barbarian”: Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and the Pulp Fantasy of Prehistory »Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/27493 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i2c

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Ryan Linkof

Senior Curator, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art

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