The Saga of Solomon Kane

After completing the reading of Kull, I will move onto another of Robert E. Howard's characters; Solomon Kane. I have to admit to never having read any comics or books about this character in the past - I only have the James Purefoy movie version to go from.

The film was OK but I found it fell into too many typical fantasy tropes and it became too much of a pastiche for my liking. That said, as I have never read anything about the character perhaps that is how he and his world is portrayed? I am looking forward to reading these comics anyway as he is a new character for me to explore.

Like with the Kull comics, I will start off with the original Marvel colour reprints by Dark Horse. These seem to be a good starting point for any major character as Marvel do tend to look after their REH characters quite well; they always seem to gather the best writers and artists to the teams that portray them.

To follow up on the colour stories, I will again go to the black and white Savage Sword equivalents; The Saga of Solomon Kane. It seems that there was only one of these volumes produced (like with the colour Chronicles). Again, it seems that the stories from each volume overlap release date wise, but I am not too fussed as I can't see there being too many continuity issues being raised.

Finally, Dark Horse released a few of their own mini-series which were then collected into TPB format. Like with my Dark Horse Kull collection, I have the comics but not the TPBs.

I like the evocative pictures on the covers of these trades. The monsters seem to be very Cthulhuesque and I can't wait to dive in and see how Solomon deals with them. Now, I am usually a medieval/ancients type fantasy gamer, so a more modern setting will be interesting to say the least. I have always capped my gaming at just prior to the black powder era - I didn't like my dwarfs in Warhammer carrying guns. Guns were the great levellers - no hero can stand against guns, whether a barbarian, a knight or, indeed, even a wizard. It will be interesting to see how much of a role guns play in these stories compared to Solomon's foil.

With regards Cthulhu (and the gaming universe of Call of Cthulhu) I was never comfortable with the 1920s setting - it was on one hand too modern for my gaming tastes (the gun thing) but not modern enough to scare me (if the stories were set today, think of the fun that could be had both on the silver screen and on our gaming tables). However, I can see its appeal for a gaming setting as so much happened in the 1920s around the world; between two major world wars, the rise of some nasty ideological political regimes, the explosion of technological advancements (motor cars, dirigibles, aircraft, steam boats etc) and on a more personal/people level we had stock market crashes leading to poverty, alcohol prohibitions leading to turf wars and so on. Actually, an ideal setting for the incursion of chaos into humans' everyday lives - who said that Cthulhu's influence wasn't everywhere? Interesting times.

Anyway, back to Solomon Kane, I think I will chronicle my reading of these tomes like I will attempt with the Kull stories. A brief listing of the stories in each collected book, a list of major writers and artists and a brief adventure hook to spark the imagination for gaming possibilities.

I think I will go back and chronicle the Red Sonja comics I have too, but only to the level I have written about in the main body of this article, i.e. what is available to read and which comics company released them. It would be too much effort to go back now and unbag and rebag each comic to see what the adventure hook was.

Comics Week and FCBD 2019

This will probably be a bit of a rambling post, so apologies in advance. This week is a shorter working week due to the bank holiday for Easter, so there will be fewer entries. Friday just gone was a bank holiday too, so last week was also a shorter week, but it passed me by due to not being in work and hence why I made a blog entry every day. I am hoping to blog every week day whilst I am not working to give me something to do as a break from looking for work and therefore keeping my sanity a bit longer. It sure beats watching day time TV (which I don't do anyway) or just staring at the same four walls (or procrastinating for hours on end). That said, I do keep myself busy by doing the household chores, going to the gym, running and prepping minatures for painting in between the hours I spend trawling the net for a new role.

So, now that all of my Lord of the Rings figures are prepped in readiness for undercoating and a bit of putty work (I still need to source some decent, easily workable stuff) I have time to re-order my comics collection some more whilst awaiting some good spraying weather - that said, I did manage to get a few miniatures undercoated on bank holiday Monday as a tester for how long they will take to do (it turns out I can do around 9 minis per 15 minutes, or 36 an hour provided all goes well).

As mentioned in previous posts I avidly collect 2000AD and Judge Dredd comics, but I also like the various Robert E. Howard characters that have made it into pictorial print (Conan, Red Sonja, Kull and Solomon Kane to name just the main ones). There are other IPs I dip into occasionally too, but these are the main ones.

As Star Wars day this year (May the Fourth) is also Free Comic Book Day, I wanted to sort out what I am going to be reading over the coming months and what I want to pick up at the three comic shops I usually visit on this year's FCBD. Also, this year, at GOSH Comics in London, they are running a children's art workshop which I am hoping to take my youngest son to.

On FCBD I usually visit three London shops (Forbidden Planet, GOSH and Orbital comics) to collect as many comics as I can, grab a few beers and a burger, and then head off to a pub to see out the rest of the evening. This year will be a little different if my youngest is with me as the beers will be replaced by soft drinks and the evening will end a lot earlier. I am sure he will want to grab a few bags full of goodies as well as working with comics artists to find out where his talents lie.

Anyway, onto what I am hoping to achieve this week. I am aiming to sort out and catalogue all of the REH character comics I have collected over the last decade but not read yet. I have been receiving a couple of small parcels of comics every month/week (American comics and Judge Dredd Megazine every month, and 2000AD every week) but they have all just been stored in a variety of boxes until I could get around to reading them. As mentioned a few times elsewhere (and therefore apologies if I am repeating myself too often), I have (re-)read 2000AD and Judge Dredd up to the end of 2014 (only 4 and a bit years to go now!), read Red Sonja and now need to sort out Kull, Solomon Kane and Conan.

I have started reading The Chronicles of Kull, so these will be the first set of comics to be featured and catalogued, followed by Solomon Kane, then Conan, and after that, I am not sure yet. I will decide as the days go by and the boxes are sorted.