With The Cimmerian preparing to embark on its fourth volume, let’s take a look at what the other Howard publications are up to.

Don Herron reports that Damon Sasser, editor of The Definitive Howard Fanzine has announced on the REH Inner Circle Yahoo! Group that his next issue is going to debut in five months at the 2007 Robert E. Howard Days festival (Issue #10 debuted at this year’s World Fantasy Convention). Damon has made a habit of bringing new Two Gun Raconteur‘s to Cross Plains each summer, which not only gives attendees something to look forward to — and to get signed by Damon and his contributors, many of whom attend the event — it also brings in much needed funds for Project Pride, who then uses the money to keep the Howard House in repair and to keep Howard Days running in the black.

Looking over his website, it looks as if he’s revamped most of it, adding more pages for his various products and starting up a mini-blog of sorts to clue readers in to new Howard books appearing. This is the sort of incremental use of the web I’ve been advocating for years — we need more Robert E. Howard fans either creating websites or posting to the ones already available. Just a little bit each day builds up into a mountain over time. If Damon keeps expanding his site’s content until it serves as more than a sales depot for Two-Gun Raconteur, we’ll have to put it on the Cimmerian Awards ballot for Best Website.

It says something about this new Howard Boom that Damon has now published more issues of Two-Gun Raconteur in the past three years than he did during his whole first run back in the 1970s. That he’s able to release new ones regularly even with several other competitors in the hunt for material speaks volumes about how content-rich Howard fandom is these days. The essay winners of the first Cimmerian Awards came from three different publications, all of them not named The Cimmerian, and while The Cimmerian cleaned up in that category last year it looks as if 2007’s Awards once again has lots of different venues threatening to take a Skull home to momma.

Damon’s textual discovery of the bastardized version of “Three-Bladed Doom” is not only competing in the essay category, but also the Black River Award category for Special Achievement. And Damon’s hat is in the ring for the Black Circle Award as well. Given his rock solid production at the start of this millennium, I’m guessing that Damon winning this highest of accolades is not a matter of if but when.

There’s some news over on The Dark Man website as well. Apparently the Board Members have finally had enough of Seele-Brennt’s endemic publishing delays, and as a result have pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere. This is the latest in a streak of positive moves for the journal. In the last year they have made strides in publishing fairly regularly, and their Christmas surprise issue focused on “Isle of the Eons” has received great reviews from everyone I’ve heard from. Recent Letters to the Editor have also merited attention, whether or not one agrees with the missives in question. Ed Waterman’s complete destruction of S. T. Joshi in their argument about REH and Philosophy is already legendary in knowledgeable Howardian circles, and new Board Member Jeffrey Kahan’s perverse obsession with homoerotic themes in Howard’s fiction provides many belly laughs for your Dark Man dollar, a refreshing change from the over-stodgy, self-important issues of old. That’s exactly what needs to be done to jump-start a moribund forum: think out of the box, dream up new ways to surprise and please your readers, and for Pete’s sake come out as often as possible. Dumping hapless Seele-Brennt for Lulu or some other instant publisher should go a long way towards making that happen.

The downside is that the format gets modified for TDM yet again, making those collectors who prize uniformity that much grumpier. But really, any chance at meeting that goal was blown several iterations ago, so one more change isn’t going to make it any worse. I would think, in fact, that an eclectic variety of looks might have its own appeal to collectors. Other mags like The Howard Review and Nyctalops made similar stylistic leaps over the years they were active. Besides, the Seele-Brennt format was fairly hideous to look at — one distributor told me about how it’s near-impossible for him to sell anything in that entire line due to the small, ugly footprint they make on a magazine rack or convention table. It can only get better from here, and it will be interesting to see what the Dark Man boys do to revamp their look. A more eye-pleasing design? Nicer fonts? Full color? Many possibilities to consider, and all of them doable on no budget these days.

As for the rest of the competition, there isn’t much to mention. Dennis McHaney has publicly stated that he’s winding down The Howard Review for good, with perhaps one more blowout finale before his final bow. Personal problems and severe gafiation has Joe Marek’s The Robert E. Howard Companion looking like a one-shot wonder. And James Van Hise’s Sword & Fantasy is coming out regularly but increasingly looks to be of little interest to Howard fans aside from the occasional reprint of some bit of lost fandom minutiae. (The day I start running hilariously inept Solomon Kane pastiches written by myself in TC, you have my leave to shoot me dead.)

Believe it or not, my dream is to see Mssrs. Sasser and Hall improve their publications to such a startling degree that they start winning Aquilonian Awards for Best Publication. It wouldn’t take much to make that category a horserace — just a slow but steady improvement in quantity and quality, issue by issue, one little nudge at a time. The Dark Man especially has made a noticeable jump upwards in this year’s Cimmerian Award voting, and given the right moves and some elbow grease, that trend could and should continue.

Check out this article about the Cross Plains Public Library in the Abilene Reporter News today (hat tip: Don Herron). Apparently our favorite library (and Cimmerian archive location) has made the final cut into a new book on the best small libraries in the country.

Small wonder — REH Days attendees have marveled for years at the Library’s sizable collection of Howard materials, including original typescripts, pulps, fanzines, and assorted rare hardcovers and paperbacks. At times the Library that Howard hero Billie Ruth Loving (1920-2004) willed into existence has played host to a gallery of Gary Gianni paintings of Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn, to talks about Howard and the publishing industry by the head honchos at Paradox Entertainment, and to numerous “Meet the Author” events from writers around the state.

In fact, their latest shindig features none other than The Cimmerian Blog’s own [redacted], author of the new REH biography Blood & Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard. Mark will be in Cross Plains on February 13 to talk at the Community Center about Howard. Wish I could be there — I’m hoping that local Howard fans will show up to take photographs and record the event so the transcript can be printed here or in TC proper.

Cimmerian contributor Dave Hardy has been updating his blog regularly with book and film reviews, several of which focus on Robert E. Howard. Go here to check out the REH entries, and browse around the sidebar links for lots more content, and some interesting links to other websites.

Dave’s essay “Indomitable Wildness, Unquenchable Vitality” is up for a Cimmerian Award this year, and he’s got a short piece on REH and The Arabian Nights coming up in TC soon.

Dedicated readers of this blog will recall a post from Steve Tompkins, who last July took umbrage at the ravings of a guy on one of the REH e-mail lists, who had opined that Howard’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Novalyne Price was responsible for his suicide, and furthermore claimed that author Joe Lansdale had said much the same thing in his introduction to Wildside’s Weird Works of REH #3 (the intro in question is available for reading online here). At the time, Steve judged the claim preposterous — and guessed that Lansdale likely had said nothing of the sort in his intro.

Well, Joe himself happened onto The Cimmerian‘s blog archives recently and read the post in question. Needless to say, he agrees with Steve. Here are Joe’s own thoughts on the matter:

Read a piece on the site where it was suggested that I (“the western writer” which is probably no more accurate than horror writer or crime writer, and I’m better known for the latter two) said that Howard killed himself over Novalyne Price. No I didn’t. I did suggest that the loss of her — and his mother, among other things — were the final straw. But the straw was bent at birth, and to blame anyone for his choices is ridiculous.

I think Howard, had he lived in modern times, might have avoided an early death by the use of something along the lines of Zoloft. But it didn’t exist then and no one really understood that kind of depression. It took certain events to send him over the lip, but they could have been any events, and my guess is it worsened as he grew older. Suicide seems to have been a part of his thinking for a long time. But Novalyne sure didn’t have anything to do with it. She didn’t owe him her life to make his life a happy one, which, in the end, it couldn’t have.

Just wanted to get clear where I stood on this matter. You have to read the whole thing, not just take a line from it you like. I never bought that he killed himself over his mother, or for that matter Novalyne, just that all these factors back-to-back led him to do what he was wanting to do for sometime; it was more than he could handle, but he was the one who used the gun.

I never said what “simperingflophouse” said I said, at least it’s more as if he took the line, which I did say, out of context with my intent. That may have been my fault, but it wasn’t the thesis I was after. I’ve always disliked the idea Howard did it because of his mother or his girlfriend, but think that they were the final straws that broke his depressed back that day. It could have been most anything, really.

Thanks. Joe

Check out this morning’s Wall Street Journal for a nice article on Howard by respected political/culture writer John J. Miller. The Cimmerian gets name-checked, and John pits three words of my conservative optimism against a burst of Rusty Burke’s liberal pessimism. Fun for the whole family.

John is National Political Reporter for the National Review, and does a lot of freelance writing for the WSJ and other publications. Last year he wrote a good article about Lovecraft in the same paper, which you can read here, while in 2002 the WSJ published his piece on Christian values in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

As for the National Review, it always has solid pop-culture material — read John’s take on Dungeons & Dragons, his column on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, some thoughts on the ghost stories of Russell Kirk, or browse through his excellent coverage about last year’s Narnia craze:

Back to Narnia

Narnian Order

The Lion King

X-Mas in Narnia

Getting Howard some good press in one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers serves as a nice bookend to January’s coverage of him in The Washington Post by Pulitzer Prize winning critic Michael Dirda, and is a fine way to wrap up the REH centennial. Thanks, John.

UPDATE: John also blurbed his article and this website at National Review‘s The Corner, one of the cooler conservative blogs out there. Check it out.

UPDATE #2: Another National Review veteran, S. T. Karnick, offers his own brief exegesis of Howard’s relevance at his personal blog.

The following article recapping the World Fantasy Convention’s Cross Plains bus trip appeared in the Cross Plains Review for Thursday, November 9, 2006:

Mystery Tour Bus — The Rest of the Story

Many folks noticed the huge chartered tour bus in town last week-parked in the restaurant district, downtown and out by the Robert E. Howard Museum. At each stop, a collection of travelers stepped out with digital cameras to record everything and everybody. After all, how often does a group from around the world get to visit Cross Plains and see life in the slow lane up close and personal?

Some folks might have recognized Leo from Los Angeles, Rusty from D.C. and Mark from Vernon, Texas. These fellows are part of the faithful group who attend the annual Robert E. Howard Days. Patrice has visited our area before, but admitted it had been several years since he has traveled from France to Texas. Others were first time visitors from England, Canada and seven states, besides a range of cities in Texas.

The group was given a special tour of the Museum by Project Pride members. The trip had been arranged as part of the pre-convention activities of the World Fantasy Convention being held in Austin. The Fandom Association of Central Texas played host to over 700 writers, scholars, artists and aficionados of the entire genre of fantasy, science fiction and speculative fiction works from around the world.

In addition to touring the Museum, the Cross Plains Public Library and the general downtown area, the group enjoyed a local lunch before returning to Austin and the remainder of the convention.

[redacted] was especially impressed with the new Meet the Author display in the library as he is the next author on that agenda. He will be here in February to discuss Howard as a Texas writer, influenced by Texas history, economy and geographic environs. One of Howard’s more famous characters, Breckinridge Elkins, is pure larger than life Texan, and will be a key feature of Finn’s presentation.

Several members of the traveling group were delighted to find some of their writings on the shelves of the Museum book shop and quickly autographed the copies. Project Pride was equally delighted to meet more of the authors of the publications that are for sale locally.

Okay, the success of Happy Feet (which edged out the most Flemingesque Bond film since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service to be the #1 movie last weekend) following the 2005 March of the Penguins phenomenon moves me to protest this current status as the feel-good flightless fowl of the 21st century. Enough with the cutesification; where are the weird fiction penguins? Where are the mutant penguins, the albino penguins, the birds who can intimidate leopard seals and feral Shoggoths or freeze Miskatonic expeditions in their tracks with a single well-timed “Tekeli-li!”

Give us penguins Who Know Too Much (consult Chaosium’s 1996 The Antarktos Cycle for details), red-eyed and raucous-voiced witnesses to the cosmic tragedies and iniquities that have unfolded on the austral icecap for the last few million years. Children of all ages need nightmares and today’s animators just aren’t getting the job done.

OK, so perhaps you’ve heard some of the rumors swirling around Cross Plains Universe, the book that contains a variety of fictional tributes to REH written by various Texan writers, and which was given away to everyone at the World Fantasy Convention a few weeks ago.

The book itself was a success, hammering home to convention-goers — many of whom knew little about Howard — the importance of both his achievement and his status as theme of the convention. And as stated in a previous post, the book is already selling on eBay for twice its cover price, mere days after its first appearance. All in all, a pretty good burst of publicity for Howard. Not bad.

But those of us who attended the convention were surprised when, during the Con, we heard a lot of grumbling about the various hoops and gauntlets the book’s producers were allegedly made to jump through by Paradox’s legal team at the last minute. Without rehashing the complaints we heard, the sum total of the various gripes was to make Paradox out to be a boogeyman stomping over the spirit of the project in a fit of paranoia over their properties and copyrights. More than a few Howard fans walked away from those conversations wondering if this boded ill for future projects, and for relations with the new owners of Howard’s work. Was the honeymoon over?

Over the last week I’ve talked to Paradox about these issues. While I’m in no position to vouch for the validity of anyone’s version of what happened, I can say that — in addition to flatly denying that there was anything approaching the level of problems gossiped about at the con — they seem genuinely hurt that they would be perceived in this light, given all the ways they have striven to connect with fans and rejuvenate Howard’s reputation. Leigh Stone, Paradox’s licensing manager, has the following to say:

As the Licensing Manager at Paradox Entertainment, I worked closely with the editor Scott Cupp on producing the Robert E. Howard tribute book titled Cross Plains Universe that was generously distributed at the World Fantasy Convention. Our dealings included a licensing contract and approvals process for the book in full — including proper legal text and copyright. As rights holders and REH fans ourselves here at Paradox, we were thrilled about the book and pleased with its outcome and contents.

Shortly after the World Fantasy Convention, we began to hear rumblings of negative rumors surrounding the production of the book. Saddened and surprised by the complete untruths that we heard, I contacted Scott Cupp to find out where these rumors surfaced and asked for his version of events in writing (see below). I hope this will continue to confirm that — as the new estate owners of the REH library — we are committed to our fans, dedicated to putting out a good product, professional, and pleasant with which to work.

Scott Cupp, the co-editor of Cross Plains Universe, agrees with Paradox’s position, and has written the following open letter to all the people who heard the con rumors floating around:

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Scott Cupp and I am the co-editor with Joe Lansdale of Cross Plains Universe: Texans Celebrate Robert E. Howard, an original anthology produced by FACT/Monkeybrain Books for the World Fantasy Convention held in Austin, TX in November 2006.

It has come to my attention that there are many rumors swirling throughout the field regarding the role of Paradox Entertainment with regards to this book. I wish to set the record straight on several points. I was the major contact point for Paradox as Joe was out of the country. All dealings with Paradox went through me.

1) Paradox Entertainment and Robert E. Howard Enterprises were supportive of the project throughout its genesis and were excited about the prospect of the book introducing REH to people not fully aware of the impact of his work.

2) When presented with the manuscripts to the story (at a time late in the production — my fault — not theirs) they requested some changes to certain stories. These changes generally involved the removal or changing of some copyrighted names, places or objects. In two cases, a very slight rewrite of a passage was involved. In every case, the change did not materially impact the story and was worked out with the writer of the piece. The reason for these changes relates to American copyright laws. Remember that the copyrights to all characters except Conan had recently been acquired. The use of certain things without specific challenge could result in the loss of copyright to these characters. These requests were made with that information in mind and I was very aware of that issue. The number of changes required were minimal for each individual story. I have heard the number “200” bandied about. There is no way that this number is accurate. Not all stories were involved, but those which were generally required under five corrections. The Bill Crider/Charlotte Laughlin piece required a few more as the name of the artifact which was changed is mentioned multiple times.

3) Changes were made at the last minute because I did not get them a manuscript to review until the copyedited version was made available to me. Because of the tight timeframes involved in this project, there was a great deal of stress and rushing about to get it completed. The invitation letters were sent out in January and the finished book appeared at the end of October — super fast for this type of project.

4) The people I dealt with at Paradox were Leigh Stone, Thommy Wojciechowski, and Fredrik Malmberg. They were always courteous in their dealings with me and I handled these phone conversations as business meetings. The discussions were respectful and mutually amicable.

Other than the stress of having a short deadline (again, brought about by myself), we had a pleasant relationship and I would gladly work with them again in the future.

If anyone wishes to discuss these issues further, please contact me at scottcupp@earthlink.net.

In light of all this, it sounds as if any problems some people had with the project amounted to miscommunication combined with the usual pressures and messy compromising at play whenever a book needs to be rushed out to meet a deadline. Now mind you, the stories we heard at the con were detailed and convincing — some of the requested changes sounded ridiculous to us assembled fans, and when Scott says here “the use of certain things without specific challenge could result in loss of copyright,” one immediately wonders why a simple contract couldn’t be drawn up granting the one-time-only use of such terms. But all of that is water under the bridge at this point, and none of my business to boot.

The fact is, when you think back over the last year, Paradox’s record regarding its treatment of Howard and his fans is impressive. Again and again we find them going above and beyond to do things for Howard’s legacy that most other companies — the pre-Paradox, 1980s Conan Properties, anyone? — would scoff at. The two head honchos at Paradox, Peter Sederowsky and Fredrik Malmberg, attended Howard Days last June just to touch base with Howard’s staunchest fans, listen to their concerns, and keep them in the loop. Licensing Manager Leigh Stone attended the World Fantasy Convention and made the long bus trek to Cross Plains and the Howard Museum. Stone and Thommy Wojciechowski have attended cons and spoken on panels to get the word out about Howard, including at GenCon where they have masterminded a yearly Robert E. Howard Day set to start in 2007. Since Paradox has acquired the Howard copyrights there has been lots of movement on the movie, video game, comic, role-playing, and collectible fronts. And the new REH Foundation created by Paradox is set to release lots of original Howard that fans have been begging for since the 1970s, things like the Complete Letters of REH and the unpublished poetry.

If this is grumble-worthy, give me more of it.

MARK ADDS: I’ll second Leo’s sentiment above. Paradox has been nothing if not extremely cooperative with both the fans and the pros. I had a specific situation of my own in the CP Universe book, one involving a character I am actively writing. Two quick emails later, everything was smoothed over, proper copyrights were assigned, and all were happy. At no time was it ever a problem. Everyone at Paradox has my full trust and support.

While you are waiting for the November issue of The Cimmerian, you can get some preliminary trip reports on the web from a variety of authors:

James Reasoner at Rough Edges. (James is a prolific fiction author and former member of REHupa)

Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine: Here, Here, and Here. (Bill is a longtime Howard fan who contributed to the Con’s Cross Plains Universe book.)

Angeline Hawkes at Something to Talk About (along with her husband Christopher Fulbright, Angeline is a fiction writer and Howard Days attendee).

Jayme Lynn Blaschke’s Gibberish blog (some good photos of Jayme’s specially brewed and bottled REH beer, which was served at [redacted]’s Blood and Thunder release party).

MidAmerican Fan Photo Archive. (lots of con photos)

Many people have asked if Cross Plains Universe will be available for purchase even if you didn’t get to the Con. I believe that is still in the planning stages, but the likelihood is high that it will be released in a wider format. If not, it shouldn’t be too hard to score a copy off of eBay eventually.

In addition to The Cimmerian, two other Howard magazines have released new issues this month. Damon Sasser had the new number of his REH: Two-Gun Raconteur at the World Fantasy Convention, where the copies quickly disappeared. You can check out the contents at the mag’s website.

Meanwhile, The Dark Man website reports that their latest issue is “off to the printers,” so with luck this means that it will appear before the end of the year. Go to their site to see a list of contents.

When this year is over and the total number of publications is tabulated, the resulting list should be impressive. And the Cimmerian Awards next year should be a blast with so many nominees in different categories.