Review: Conan the Avenger #12- Dreaming of pretty girls, wizards and monsters

Writer: Fred Van Lente
Artist: Brian Ching
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Released: 25th March 2015


Dreams of pretty girls, of wizards, monsters, and far away lands of legend, myth and adventure give you a reason to live, a reason to battle through the hangovers, a reason to keep on writing, to keep on dreaming, to keep on living.

For if there cannot be anything better in this world, write it, and live it in your mind.

I can sense that feeling of silent desperation and loneliness when I read Robert E. Howard. It’s a feeling of disconnection from his world, and a longing to go back, to be somebody else who could be brave, strong, fearless, a leader with passion in his life, a passion that drives him, that makes living not a chore, but a pleasure.

Reading ‘The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob’ by Jim & Ruth Keegan (the excellent short at the end of Conan the Avenger #12) I get a sad sense of who Conan author Robert E. Howard actually was. It’s not a happy tale. Dreaming of being somebody else, of a beautiful woman, of a ship, a monster, a beach, he wakes to reality with a hangover:

‘Dreams, and dreams and the ghosts of dreams. Last night I was drunk but there seems to be no especial hangover this morning.’ (Robert E. Howard)

Looking on the bright side, at least his head doesn’t hurt from the wasteful nothingness of the night before. He can write again, make something happen in a world that he feels no connection to.

Conan is essentially a boyish dream, a fantasy character that allows you to experience a life you want to live, but without the difficulty that real life contains. You get the muscles, the cool hair, the exotic locations, the monsters, the wizards and the pretty girls, and you don’t even have to put your pants on and leave the house to get it all.

But live there for too long and you will start to rot from the inside. You cannot hide from the real world forever. You can try, for a while, but reality has a way of getting to you, and of bringing you kicking and screaming back to that dull grey place that you don’t want to be.

Reality can be awful disappointing, and people are never as interesting or courageous, as you want them to be. If people were like the characters in Conan comic books then I would be surrounded by heroic, honest, strong, morally upright, beautiful, monstrous, interesting, passionate, deceitful, mendacious, scheming, mysterious, fascinating people. Guess what? I’m not surrounded by those kinds of people.

I’m surrounded by the bored, the lonely, the stupid, the uninteresting, the cowardly, the trapped, the dreary, the suspicious, the petty, the angry, the spiteful, the lost, the indifferent and those just stuck in an endless routine of keeping their heads down until the day that they die. That’s real life, and it’s hard to square it with what you read in a Robert E. Howard story about Conan. You end up asking, where are the heroes? Where are the villains? Where are the interesting characters? You find none, and it’s bloody depressing, so here’s my solution to the problem. If you cannot find somebody who interests you, then be the person who interests you.

Set a goal, go for it, be good at something, achieve something, increase your social status and have adventures.  You don’t have to stay indoors, and you don’t have to create worlds in your head. The real world is big enough, and although the people might seem a bit dull and predictable compared to the wonderful characters of fiction, there are real adventures waiting for you in reality.

Take the masculine essence of Conan if you want to be Conan, and achieve, achieve, achieve, and if you don’t achieve, well sod it, a good failure can be just as much fun as well. There are a million ways to do this, all you have to do is set your mind on a goal, and go for it. Having something to strive for, to get out of bed for, to live for, will be enough, and don’t worry; there will be plenty of wizards, monsters and pretty girls along the way.

Robert E. Howard wrote a lot, probably too much. He created so much, but lived too little, and when life kept kicking him in the guts there was nothing left to anchor him to the reality that he didn’t really care much for anyway.

You have to force yourself to care. Fantasy is enjoyable, but fantasy is not reality. Take the metaphors, the analogies and the moral lessons, and use them to navigate the real, but don’t get the two confused, and don’t spend too much time in a world that doesn’t exist. Fantasy can lead to unhappiness, to self-delusion, it can lead you into voting to be a slave, and reality is a lot more interesting than you might think.



Rating: 8/10 (A happy ending to the arc with some enjoyable moments of humour from a delirious Conan)