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The last two Conan stories made it into Weird Tales just before Howard’s suicide in 1936 - a mere four years after the character’s creation. It’s difficult to tell if Howard ever would have decided to give the series a clear ending - a clean and dramatic death for his most beloved character.

Over the years after Howard’s death, Conan slowly grew in popularity, inhabiting a number of books that had been written and co-written by other authors from fragments that Howard hadn’t finished. As the sword and sorcery genre grew, so too did the popularity of Conan. By 1970, Marvel had begun a comic book adaptation of the character’s exploits. (Independent Canadian Comic book creator Dave Sim did a much more expansive and accomplished variation on Howard’s themes in his Cerebus series.) Slightly more than a decade into the success of the original comic book adaptation, Conan was featured in his first big Hollywood film.

Conan The Barbarian (1982)

From the beginning, the film diverges from Howard’s writing by giving Conan a clear, concise origin. Here we see him as a child being taught a legend by his father, who is promptly killed in an invasion led by James Earl Jones. The character is thus robbed of his mystery in an apparent attempt by director John Milius (Red Dawn, Flight of the Intruder) to wrap the story up into a nice, little thematic package.

The theme in question comes from a variation on a quote by Nietzsche from Twilight of the Idols. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Milius spends much of the rest of the film illustrating that idea with a loose interpretation of the character of Conan. His family is killed and he becomes first a slave, then a gladiator. The whole Spartacus thing was already well played-out in cinema by the time Conan hit the screen, so much of the early part of the film feels very, very weak.

Milius saw to it that there would be very, very little dialogue in the film, which plays out in places like cheap, poorly executed cinematic opera. The battle scenes are executed like home movies - there’s no epic scale to the action. Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings (1978) had much more intensity to the visual poetry of its battle scenes than what we see here.

Of course, with less dialogue, the character of Conan has less to define him beyond his basic physicality. And while it’s difficult to imagine Schwarzenegger managing to be much more than a leathery prop in the film, a bit more dialogue would have backed-up the personality of the character a little bit. As the film rounds out its first half hour, we see him becoming a successful slave gladiator before being trained in far eastern arts and (for some reason) taught from ancient texts. (Okay, learning multiple languages as a rugged traveler is one thing, but why bother having a gladiator learn from texts of numerous languages?)

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