Tentaclii has gone a bit quiet on Robert E. Howard and Conan et al. It’s not because I’ve lost interested, but because the material isn’t there to note. There seems to have been a lack of suitable items recently, other than the new cash-in comics and foreign translations and suchlike so ably tracked by Messages from Crom.

But now the Robert E. Howard Days (aka Howard Days) in Cross Plains, Texas, are just over six weeks away. It may be that various scholarly and thoughtful publications are being timed to appear for that.

In the meantime I see that Exploring the Worlds of REH Omnibus collects Fred Blosser’s themed ebooks (Howard’s Weird Texas, etc) into a single paperback. Along with eight new articles. I see he also has the survey ebooks Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes and More Sons of Ringo.

One item I thought might be of note was Conan the Barbarian Epic Collection: The Original Marvel Years – Queen of the Black Coast. This was a chunky Marvel 1970s Buscema/Thomas reprint volume released last Christmas. But be warned that the cover and title is misleading. On reading the details you find this is only the run-up to his meeting Belit the ‘Queen of the Black Coast’ (issues #43-59). Conan meets her in #58 and then #59-to-#100 or thereabouts is the rest of the Belit run, as ably collected in Dark Horse’s earlier reprint book Chronicles of Conan, Volumes 8-12. So, be warned that you’re not getting the run that the new ‘Original Marvel Years’ cover seems to promise.

I took a look to see if I had missed anything else in the last year or so, and noted “Der Barbar aus dem Norden: Nordenbilder in Robert E. Howards Conan-Erzahlungen”, in the journal NORDEUROPAforum, 2020. On ‘images of the ancient North as they appear in R.E. Howard’s Conan’. It may interest some readers here, especially because it’s under full Creative Commons Attribution and is thus available to be translated from the German.

Also there’s now a new and mighty-thewed blog-post category here at Tentaclii, REH. I’ve gone back and retrospectively tagged as many posts as I can find.