Roquefort Raider

My name is Benoit Leblanc, but I usually go by the name Roquefort Raider on message boards.

I've been a fan of Conan since reading the Marvel comic-book "Conan the barbarian #19" in the 70s, and a REH fan since discovering his prose work in two Weird Tales anthologies and in "The dark man and others", translated in French by Fran?ois Truchaud. I forced myself to learn English so that I could read a Solomon Kane paperback ("The hills of the dead"), one of the very few REH books that made it to my very-francophone part of Canada in the 70s.

I collected everything I could find by Howard : the three French Conan books first published by Editions Sp?ciales with their unsusual Philippe Druillet covers (definitely not the Frazetta school); a great many of the REH books translated and published by the Nouvelles Editions Oswald (which, in the 80s, was really THE source for slightly more obscure Howard material, not only in French but in any language); then the Conan translations by TITRES SF...  and to this day I remain quite a fan of the Conan comics, even though they have had failures as well as successes (both in commercial terms and creativity-wise).

I am quite happy to see that there are so many dedicated fans who invest serious scholarly efforts in the work of REH, and who today help make it available to a larger public. I had thought that Fran?ois Truchaud was one of a kind but am happy to have been proven wrong.