Conan
By Robert E Howard
Cover by Frank Frazetta
Sphere 1975

Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian first appeared in the early 1930s in pulp-fiction magazine Weird Tales. A mighty, muscled thief-turned-king who fought foul monsters and mad wizards, carousing his way across a dark and richly imagined antediluvian world, Conan was hugely popular with readers during the great depression. In 1936, Howard committed suicide, and his best-known creation seemed destined for oblivion, just another pulp hero who had had his day.

That changed in the 1960s when a US publisher, Lancer Books, began reissuing the Conan stories in paperback collections. These editions came out subsequently in the UK under the Sphere imprint and artist Frank Frazetta was commissioned to provide covers.

Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Frazetta was a precocious talent. He was enrolled at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts, aged eight. Soon after graduating he was providing covers and illustrations for countless books and comics. Famed for the speed at which he worked, he could complete a detailed oil painting within a day.

By the 1960s, however, Frazetta was in the career doldrums – until the covers he did for reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels brought him great acclaim. The Conan assignment soon followed.

His Conan covers, eight in all, are lush, dynamic and beautifully lit. They seethe with gritty vitality and a clear sense of a pre-dawn civilisation awash with violence and black magic. There’s no doubt they contributed greatly to the remarkable commercial success of the series.

The image of Conan battling a cape-clad man-ape is drawn from the story Rogues in the House, regarded by many as among Howard’s finest. Frazetta has painted it in such a way that the scarlet of the cape bleeds into the scarlet highlights on Conan’s body, hero and animal foe as one. There is bloodshed and primal anger here amid the haunting, festering shadows.