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Here the artist discusses how he came to illustrate the first book in the Wandering Star “Robert E. Howard’s Complete Conan of Cimmeria” series, a three-volume, limited edition set that restores the original, unexpurgated Howard texts.
Ballantine Books is issuing this same series in trade paper, retaining the illustrations from the now out-of-print hardcover version. Their first volume, titled The Coming of Conan, hits the book shelves on December 2, 2004. The second volume, The Bloody Crown of Conan, is slated to appear next spring.
Though Mark Schultz’s comic book work is not voluminous, he has nevertheless risen to the top rank of artists by taking exquisite care with every assignment. He took ten years to complete his fourteen-issue Xenozoic Tales (Kitchen Sink Press, 1986-1996), but the series--inspired by classic Al Williamson and Wally Wood work--became a cult hit and award-winner (plus the basis for an animated series, Cadillacs & Dinosaurs). It has recently been reprinted as a set of graphic novels.
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Because of the scarcity of Schultz’s artwork, the new edition of Wandering Star’s Robert E. Howard library, Conan of Cimmeria, is even more of a treat. Not only does it feature Howard’s earliest Conan stories, but it contains dozens of beautiful Schultz illustrations that somehow manage to eclipse his previous art. (See Spectrum 33 for a review of the collection.)
Craig Miller interviewed Schultz by phone on June 13. The conversation was transcribed by Greg Thompson (who came through like a champ at the last minute as our deadline was fast approaching) and was edited by Craig.
CM: Conan is the fourth volume in the Wandering Star Robert E. Howard library. How did you end up getting tagged for this assignment?
MS: Not through any acumen or business sense of my own. [Laughter] I got a call from Marcelo [Anciano, Wandering Star publisher], and I was very aware of the stuff Gary [Gianni] had been doing. Gary had told me that he had recommended me to them for future work. I said, “Great,” because I was dying to do a Howard book. I had been wanting to do a Howard book since I was like fourteen years old. So Marcelo called me and said he was very aware of my work from Xenozoic Tales—he’s a comic fan—and he thought I would be someone they wanted to work with. He brought up Conan, and it floored me. I was just happy to do anything of Howard’s, but Conan, not to pat myself on the back, was kind of the flagship character of Howard’s career. I’m not sure why he thought I was the guy for that, but I’m glad he did. I know Gary wasn’t particularly interested in doing Conan. I think because there were so many, and I don’t want to speak out of turn and misquote him, different versions of Conan done and so defined in the public’s eye by what Frazetta has done, that he was more interested in creating a look for characters that weren’t as popular or as visually defined.
CM: Because of the dominance of so many other artists who have worked on Conan, obviously Frazetta, whose work is iconic, and in the comics John Buscema had a long run, and there are Barry Windsor-Smith’s early issues—as you began work on the Conan book, did you try to block out those influences as if they’d never existed, or did you acknowledge that the buyers of this new book are going to have some of these images in their minds and that your art is part of that continuum?
MS: It’s a tough row to hoe, because there are people with great loyalty to the different looks for Conan, whether it’s Frazetta’s or Windsor-Smith’s or John Buscema’s or whomever’s, and so there are these ingrained, maybe even subconscious in some cases, expectations that are going to be used to judge what I’m doing, but again, I have no control over that. All I can do is admit that there are influences out there. I don’t think that there is an artist in the latter half of the twentieth century that can honestly claim that he isn’t influenced by Frazetta to some degree. Frazetta’s vision is so strong and all-pervasive within the field that it’s ludicrous to say that there is not going to be an influence [upon others]. It may not be an obvious influence, but in some way it’s there, even if it’s something as basic as design and composition. All I can do is be aware of that, and I think that I have an advantage because, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been such a huge fan of and had an affinity for Howard’s writing, not just Conan specifically but Howard’s writing in general, since I was a kid, and I’ve wanted to do this. Since reading these as a kid I’ve formed in my mind certain impressions of how I would handle it. So I’ve had an awfully long time to filter this through my mind. It wasn’t like an assignment I got and said, “I’ve got to sit down and bone up on it.” It’s been a process of, “What would I do if I got this chance?” Over many years I’ve had this process going on in my mind.
CM: As you were growing up and seeing some of these other artists handling Conan, were you thinking, “Yeah, that’s the right way to do it; that’s the wrong way to do it,” or had you thought about it to that extent?
MS: I’ve always had enough ego to look at Frazetta and go, “That’s great, but I could do it another way, and if I got it right, it could be just as good.” [Laughter] I admit, that’s a lot of ego, and whether I pull that off or not is up to the viewer to decide. No one will ever get close to Frazetta in capturing the spirit, the essence, of the violent nature of Howard’s stories. Frazetta’s the king of that, but his paintings and drawings were pulled out of Frazetta’s own head. The actual details of his paintings are all fantasy. It doesn’t have a lot to do with any particular historical culture or technology, which was very much an important part of how Howard wrote the Conan stuff. The civilizations that existed as prehistoric Hyborian age were the antecedents of modern cultures, and there’s a very real connection between the various cultures and societies that Conan travels through and actual existing historical cultures and societies. So my angle was to stay as close as possible, and it’s not always possible to stay one hundred percent in fine with his words, and try to capture that feeling that there is an historical thread that goes though his concepts and places he created and actual historical places. That was the angle I took.
Left: Study for “Queen of the Black Coast.” Right: Finished version.
CM: There have been a number of illustrated versions of “The Tower of the Elephant.” When it came to drawing the elephant, which is such a key part of the story, was there a little bit of trepidation on exactly how you were going to lock in this description? It’s described in the Howard text, but it leaves a lot to the imagination as to what’s going on there.
MS: I didn’t have trouble with that one. A lot of the Howard stuff was part of the Lovecraftian school of including mind-lapsing horrors that are so terrible that they rip your soul out and drive you mad, and there’s quite a bit of that in the Conan stuff. And of course, in my first drafts on a number of illustrations that involve horrors of that sort, I tried to be a little more concrete in including them. And really quickly you learn it’s a losing proposition. You’ve got to leave things like that to the imagination. There’s no way you can lock that down.
But in this specific case, I felt that Howard gave enough solid description that I didn’t feel any problem coming up with this guy with an elephant’s head. A choice I made, because I thought it was important, was to include Yag-kosha pretty clearly in the condition Howard described him, being blinded and his limbs twisted and tortured. It’s such an important developmental element in Conan’s life. It’s the first time that this teenager, who is described at the beginning of that story, as so unsure of himself, so intimidated by things that are outside of his knowledge—he killed a guy for making fun of him, essentially—and that just sets up wonderfully the fact that for the first time in his life, he meets something that is alien to him, and this thing is lowly. He is able to have empathy with it; he’s able to sympathize with it. It’s a really important developmental stage in turning Conan from this kid who’s intimidated—even though he’s a huge, strong guy, he’s still intimidated by the world—and evolving him as Howard did through successive stories, to the point where he is able to become a king. He’s able to rule nations. I thought it was a very, very important single situation, instrumental in Conan’s development, and I thought we needed to see the elephant creature clearly and the relationship and Conan allowing it to touch him with it trunk.
CM: Most of your published work has been black and white, pen-and-ink stuff. Had you done much painting before?
MS: I graduated from college with a degree in painting, but I hadn’t painted in eighteen years.
CM: What was it like producing six new paintings for this book?
MS: The first one took me forever. I did the first thing just to show Marcelo I could do oil paintings. He had suggested that I just do what I do for the color plates—sort of an Arthur Rackham style where I just color in the ink drawing. I really felt that Conan needs the richness and the weight of oil. So to prove to myself, as well as to Marcelo, that I could still do it, I sat down, and I did that portrait of Conan that appears as the frontispiece, and I worked on that while working on other things, but that took two, maybe three months to do, and that’s just a little piece. I was learning all the time. I know the fundamentals of painting, but trying to make it work in the context of this particular book, I had to find a style that worked for me. Of course it involved looking at a lot of Cornwell and N.C. Wyeth and all of the usual suspects. Anyway, he [Marcelo] was happy with that, and I was reasonably encouraged.
CM: Did you have a basic design for the book from the beginning? So many color plates, so many black and whites, so many full-pagers versus small drawings, or did you all play this by ear as you went along?
MS: It was pretty strictly set out. Marcelo and I discussed the book quite extensively in the beginning as to the look we wanted for it. We knew we wanted more of a formal quality to this than to the work that Gary had done on Solomon Kane and Bran Mak Morn. We decided every chapter would have a heading that would be more or less a horizontal format. Every story would have a little emblematic, almost iconic, illustration because it’s kind of a punctuation at the end. Every story would have a full page illustration as well. Whereas Gary was doing various sizes of black and white pieces that were spotted in wherever appropriate, we had a very formal structure for this, and I believe that is what will follow through all three books in the Conan volumes.. There were fewer color plates than what Gary had to produce for the other books. Gary’s a much more adept painter than I am—he does a lot more painting than I do—so we went with a smaller number of actual color pieces. I had a very solid idea of the amount of pieces needed for the book.
CM: You mentioned earlier that your appreciation for Robert E. Howard goes back quite a few years. When did you first start discovering the Howard stuff?
MS: Must’ve been ‘68 or ‘69. I was fourteen, and I remember very clearly I had seen stuff on the stands, the Conan Lancer books with covers by Frazetta, but they were sixty cents. That was a lot of money to me back then, and seeing great covers just wasn’t enough to make me pick them up. I was a big Burroughs fan, and my bible was Richard Lupoff’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, Master of Adventure, an overview of Burroughs’ many worlds. It was an overview of all of his creations, and there is a chapter where Lupoff talks about the other authors that were possibly influenced by Burroughs, and it included Howard. It specifically talked about Conan. He said there might be an influence, but you gotta say that Howard did something totally original and went off in his own direction. He recommended him. With that I went out and bought Conan of Cimmeria, and it didn’t take me long to realize that Howard did the good stuff. All the other pastiches that surrounded him were okay, but they weren’t the same thing.
CM: So you ended up finding out about the paperbacks before the comic came out.
MS: The comic came out a year or two later.... That just floored me. “Who the hell knows about Conan in comics?” It was like two different worlds.
CM: Did you end up becoming a fan of the comic, or, after having read the original Howard stories, did it seem not quite tight?
MS: I bought it, and I enjoyed it. I’ve gotta say that out of anyone that has adapted Howard, Roy Thomas has consistently done the best job. He always stuck closest; he always seemed to understand what made Howard Howard as opposed to a lot of other people who took the character, but the setting, the philosophy, the basic atmosphere of the story would have nothing to do with Conan or Howard. It wasn’t the same thing. I bought them and enjoyed them, but it wasn’t Howard. It wasn’t what I envisioned the world to be. I didn’t see the connection to Howard’s work at all.
CM: What separates Howard’s work from all the other people who were cranking out either Conan stories or Joanne the Barbarian or whatever (there are a million of them out there)? What is distinct about Howard’s work?
MS: The thing that makes Howard’s work in general stand out from ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of all the other pulp hack writers out there is that he had a personal vision, a personal philosophy that works its way into all of his stories. You read his stuff, and it feels that you’re getting to know someone personally. They’re very personal viewpoints as opposed to other people’s, whose stories might be good, but you don’t feel you’re learning anything about the person who wrote them. They’re all interchangeable. Even Burroughs, as much as I love him— there’s nothing in Burroughs’ work that’s more than just a good, fun ride, and that’s enough. But Howard had this view of the world that seeps into everything he did, and beyond that he was an excellent developing wordsmith. His use or the English language was exquisite at times, and if he would have had time to develop that, he would have been an excellent writer.
CM: I think with a lot of the Robert E. Howard imitators, they aren’t drawing from themselves. They’re thinking, “How would Robert E. Howard write this story, and how could I try to reproduce what he would do?” instead of writing something from their own hearts.
MS: Absolutely! You see that with people who try to ape Frazetta, too. Frazetta draws like he does; there’s that sense of coiled violence and drama in his stuff, because that’s a part of him....
You have a few truly creative people, like Jack Kirby, Frazetta, Lvnch, and on and on, and everyone else is just trying to develop their own thing honestly but they just don’t have that spark of genius that these few have, or they’re trying to imitate those that do have genius, and they’re falling even further behind.
CM: Were there any aspects of the book that I didn’t get to that you wanted to discuss?
MS: I don’t know. The real important stuff is not the illustrations; that’s just the fun stuff. The real important thing about these volumes is that the editors have gone back and taken the original manuscripts, when they could find them. So all the editing that’s been done, all the various revisions over the years, has been stripped away. These are Howard’s original words, or, when they could not find original manuscripts, at least the words as they appeared in Weird Tales, with just the editing that was done by Farnsworth [Wright]. So this is pure Howard you’re getting. It’s not the diluted versions we grew up with in the Lancer stuff. There’s also a lot of great annotated material in the back.
CM: The “Hyborian Genesis” piece by Patrice Louinet is fascinating. I was just going to skim through it, but once I got to reading it, it was pretty amazing.
MS: It was great. I even loved the first version they included of “The Phoenix on the Sword” in the back.... It’s an insight to his creative process and his commercial process, where the two meet—finding something that was gold while he was still jazzed about the character and trying to get it right.
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