A very Conan Christmas

Last year my friend Charles Rutledge had written a nice character piece where he shares a meal at Waffle house with Conan and Elric and tries to explain Christmas to them. (This is different from the Conan at Cracker Barrel piece on his blog.) It was a clever bit of fan fiction, playing off the conflicting philosophies of the three diners.

Less clever by far was my response, an attempt to capture the voice of Robert E Howard's fiction in a Christmas story. It arose from discussions on the structure of sword and sorcery and my recognition of it's similarity to a popular Christmas story. It represents the lowest form of pastiche/parody, but these days every series needs it's Christmas episode, just as every singer needs a Christmas single, so I'm reprinting it here as my attempt at a Robert E Howard Christmas special.

Or at least a Christopher E Appel Christmas blog.

The Frost Golem's Dance

a story fragment

...the last of the Picts fell beneath the Cimmerian’s blade, his blood staining the snow red. Conan had no time to enjoy his triumph. A muffled cry reminded him of the girl tied to the primitive altar behind him. He spun to face the tribal shaman.

The withered old woman was staggering past the girl on the carved stone. Conan's dagger was still deep in the witch's back. Her objective was the grotesque carving of snow and ice made in imitation of a hulking human form. The Picts had adorned the idol in their rough fashion, forming a crude face out of stones and ornaments. As the barbarian's volcanic blue eyes locked on the two coal-black stones set high on the thing's face, the hairs on his neck stirred as if from some deep racial memory. Despite his upbringing among the frozen wastes of the north, Conan's lungs burned from the unnatural cold.

The old shaman approached the idol carrying some form of headdress unknown to the Cimmerian. This was the barbarian's objective, the stolen talisman the strange sorcerer required him to recover. Conan gritted his teeth as he thought of the unholy bargain he had been forced to strike with the wizard.

With the last of her breath the old crone reached up and placed the object on to the ice sculpture's misshapen head. As her harsh cackle trailed into a death rasp, the witch fell at the feet of the man of snow. Dark blood pooled at the feet of her white god.

Conan's knuckles went white on the hilt of his broadsword. The girl on the altar screamed. The dark eyes of idol began to gleam with an eldritch intelligence. The barbarian was frozen in place by that malevolent gaze. Through the red haze in his mind, Conan realized that there must have been some magic in that old encircling crown, for when the shaman placed it on the creature’s head it began to dance around.

"Crom!" cried Conan. With a great effort he broke the spell which held him motionless. Stretching his mighty thews, he vaulted the stone altar and interposed himself between the snow demon and the helpless girl. In the same moment his sword described an arc over his head and buried itself to the hilt in the idol’s chest. Snow and ice showered Conan's face, but the creature seemed unaffected by the blow. Its great bulk lunged at the Cimmerian.

Carried forward by his charge, even the barbarian's battle-honed reflexes offered no escape from the white god's grasp. Great arms encircled Conan and burned coldly into his naked flesh. As the Cimmerian struggled to free himself from that icy trap, he heard the creature rasp out its challenge.

"Happy birthday!" the monster exclaimed.

A strange interlude

I am a baby boomer. There are those that would argue that point-- I was born in 1966 and some who like to look at dates would say I'm GenX. They would be wrong. My father fought the second world war and then came home and started a family. Although I'm the youngest of my family by far, I am a baby boomer as surely as my older brothers.

Baby boomers share certain common cultural bonds. One of the most defining is a shared experience of television, a device which was essentially new to our generation, despite it's pre-war roots. Those who came after us know it as a different animal from the bulky black and white device which brought three commercial networks and a few odd local and public broadcasting stations to us for 18 to 20 hours a day. With fewer programming choices, baby boomers shared a common pool of pop-culture memories that subsequent viewers will not experience in quite the same way. We ALL watched Lucy. We ALL saw EVERY episode of Andy Griffith, Gilligan's Island and the Beverly Hillbillies. I don't think the most popular programs today have quite the following that programming of our generation developed through pure repetition.

The other morning I started my day listening to some opera music my wife, MarKay, was playing as she drank her morning coffee. As I went about my morning rituals, that music transported me back to my TV roots. As I showered I found myself singing along to the Toreador's Song from Carmen--not the words to the actual opera, but the words to the musical version of Hamlet as produced by the castaways on Gilligan's Island.

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
Do not forget
Stay out of debt!
Think twice, and take this good advice from me,
Guard that old solvency.
There’s just one other thing
You ought to do,
To thine own self be true."

Through the miracle of stream of consciousness, my mind moved onto other shows from that time period. I found myself thinking of the episode of Andy Griffith where they introduced the Gomer Pyle show. To help Pyle's transition into the service, Andy let's Sgt. Carter think that Gomer is related to Gen. Lucius Pyle. As I remembered that episode, I was struck by something odd.

I frequently can't recall the name of someone I was introduced to the day before, or a shopping item I neglected to put on a list only an hour before, or why I came into a room seconds earlier, but I was able to recall the name Lucius Pyle-- and the words to that Hamlet song-- after at least thirty years absence from watching the episodes they came from. I know I'm not unique among boomers in my ability to pull the most inane facts out of the air about these programs.

The radio generation before mine and the cable generations after certainly have favorite shows that evoke memories. But I think there is a universal imprint that a small group of syndicated television programs made on every person during the years that I was growing up that will never really be duplicated. It made a mark on our time, like the iridium clay layer that marked the end of the dinosaurs and the rise of the mammals. If civilization ended tomorrow, some future archaeologist could sift through my possessions and, finding my books on Andy Griffith, Gilligan, Star Trek and other TV shows, and declare he had hit the baby boomer strata.

"Here is the point in history when man found his brain completely filled with trivia he didn't even know was there," he'll say, "Subsequently, he wandered aimlessly from room to room, unable to remember what he had misplaced. The end of his civilization came soon after."

My world and welcome to it...

This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine. All the kids are doing it.

I'm an illustrator, a husband and a father (among other things). I plan to use this page as an outlet for rants about the publishing industry, illustration, old movies, poor customer service and general observations. I'll try to make it interesting for you, but as Groucho Marx said, they can't all be winners.

Thanks for stopping by,
Christopher Appel