Comingsoon.net revealed the teaser poster for the forthcoming Conan feature film. While Millennium Films promises that the “new version will be more faithful to Howard’s original creation than were the Arnold Schwarzenegger films”, I am understandably dubious.

Visions created by other hands of Robert E. Howard’s legendary creation rarely work. The first Schwarzenegger film Conan the Barbarian, though a really enjoyable sword & sorcery flick, offers a poor representation of the classic character. Conan as envisioned by Howard, is much more than a fighter. He is a thinker, a tactician, a lover, and a loyal friend. Conan is a barbarian, a thief, a mercenary, and ultimately, a king. The tales are full of political intrigue, romance, swordplay, magic, mythology, and more. Like all of Howard’s work, Conan was a vividly imaginative interpretation of a young man’s West Texas world. Sure Howard’s tales are bathed in action and bloodshed, but no one before or since writes those sequences as effectively. The Conan of the Schwarzenegger movies is a dumb 2-dimensional brute.

None of the various other prose books work. Some, most notably Karl Edward Wagner who not only wrote Conan but also created his own series of popular heroic fantasy tales about the barbarian Kane, have come close but none match the intensity and quality of the original.

When Paul Miles and I sat down to write our story for the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology Cross Plains Universe, we initially conceived of a convoluted Solomon Kane story. We both favored the vengeance-driven 15th century Puritan to other Howard creations. Paul and I failed to capture the nuances of the character. Like several of the other contributors to the book, we opted for a story about Robert E. Howard. “A Penny A Word“, a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award, is a distinctly Klaw/Miles production with no attempts to emulate Howard.

The Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord Dark Horse comic book adaptations represented the finest non-REH Conan representations to date. The duo successfully melds disparate elements of the Conan mythos into a cohesive and exciting story. While the other various Conan Dark Horse mini-series often fail to achieve the same level of success, they are all faithful to the Howard intent and vision of the character.

Previously, Marvel produced Conan comics for some twenty years. The early Roy Thomas-scripted attempts (with amazing Barry Windsor-Smith art) adapted some of REH original stories, these visions ultimately deviated and thus spawned an inferior creation. Also, Thomas often used the questionable L. Sprague de Camp-modified versions of the Robert E. Howard stories. For more details on the whole de Camp-Howard fiasco, I refer you to Mark Finn’s excellent Robert E. Howard biography Blood & Thunder,