Depicting Conan the Barbarian (and other Pop Culture characters)

Cafe Society
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Everyone knows what Conan the Barbarian looks like, right? Huge, heavily muscled guy with shoulder-length black hair, usually wears a pair of shorts (often furry) and sandals or boots. Frequently shown without a shirt. And with a big broadsword or axe, sometimes shown atop a stack of the bodies of his fallen enemies.

Except Conan didn’t look like that through the first few decades of his existence. Pulp artists when he first appeared didn’t over-muscle him. And his hair was the length of the hair of a movie star, or maybe a bit longer. Certainly not shoulder-lengthIt’s like they didn’t read Robert , Howard’s descriptions at al. Or were restrained by the editors.

In the 1950s, they often showed him dressed in a tunic or in armor, lookin g like a Roman soldier. And still with that short hair

1954 book:

Some sketches NSFW

The Original Conan Art - Dark Worlds Quarterly

As far as I know, it wasn’t until Frank Frazetta painted him for the cover of the paperback Conan the Adventurer in 1966 that we got the Full Canonical Conan – long black hair, shorts, boots, broadsword, standing atop a pile of freshly-killed enemies, with a woman curled around his leg and images of death in the bacground:

Ever since then, this is the way Conan has been depicted, in other book covers by Frazetta and by Boris Vallejo and others, in the Marvel comics by Barry Windsor-Smith and especially by John Buscema (who took over after Barry, and seemed to be translating Frazetta’s Conan for the comics), and countless others.

Why did it take so long for artists to read the description, or (more likely) for editors to allow them to depict him faithfully?

I’m not sure. It used to be that the only guys with long hair allowed were villains (Rasputin) or Jesus. It could be Marvel’s depiction of The Mighty Thor in comics starting in 1962. That’s the first unabashed long-haired hero character in modern Pop Culture I know of. Interestingly, Jack Kirby, who drew a lot of the Thor comics, had earlier depicted Thor in Marvel or Timely comics (Marvel’s predecessor) with long hair and with a beard, but the Good Guy Thor starting in 1962 had no beard.

Again, why not? Why no Beard on Thor, or on Conan, for that matter? I think there was a code – Good Guys were clean-shaven. Those earlier Thors were Bad Guys, but as a hero, Thor had to have no facial hair. And, arguably, Conan, too. Evil Viking Raiders who raped and pillaged had moustaches and beards. Rough good-guy Conan, with his own frequently-stated moral code (he might mercilessly slaughter his enemies, but he was kind to lost princesses and the like) was clean-shaven. I don’t recall Howard making an issue of it, but I also don’t recall his ever mentioning facial hair. The 1960s-70s Lancer editions and stories written by L. Sprague deCamp and Lin Carter didn’t show Conan with facial hair until he’s been King of Aquilonia for a couple of decades.

And what about Tarzan? If there’s one thing I’d expect to find on an untutored apeman living among simians it’s facial hair. Gorillas (or whatever Tarzan’s mangani werre – Philip Jose Farmer suggested some sort of extcinct everywhere but Africa anthropoid) don’t shave. Edgar Rice Burroughs actually goes into detail about Tarzan learning to shave and doing it regularly. But I’d still expect Tarzan to have longer hair. Although the first depiction of Tarzan on film by Elmo Lincoln shows him with longish hair, it’s still shorter than Conan’s in that Frazetta cover. Most depictions of Tarzan show him with short hair, or at most Elmo Lincoln-esque length. I don’t think I saw a Tarzan with shoulder-length hair until the Disney cartoon in 1999. Most popular Tarzans – Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe, Ron Ely, the comic books and strips by Russ Manning, Jesse Marsh, Rex Maxon and Burne Hogarth, all show a pretty short hairstule on this supposed Wild Man of the Jungle.

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My guess is that in the early 20th Century, long hair was more indicative of femininity than wildness, especially if your hero was wearing a costume that wasn’t recognizably a modern male suit of clothes. Prince Valiant got enough grief as it was for “wearing a dress”.

I suspect much of the facial hair issue comes down to the nature of early magazine (and especially) comic book illustration and printing. You might get away with textured hair in a close-up, but most heroes are depicted in full body action. After reduction, most hair was just a single color blob. For B&W interior art, it was even harder to show textures on something as tiny as a single face in a large scene.

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Short answer?

Because Conan looks like a pussy in those early versions and the depictions by Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo look dope AF. And of course the film portrayal of Conan by Arnold Schwarzenegger cemented our image of him. As I understand it, the book version isn’t as taciturn as Arnold’s portrayal.

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You’re using the standards of the perfect male anatomy that evolved in mid-century popular art thanks to comic books and the body building sub-culture. That kind of musculature would have looked ridiculous to a reader of pulp magazines in the 1920s and ‘30s.

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Well..some might argue that 1920s and 30s standards of male anatomy look ridiculous for a Cimmerian barbarian!

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Well, yeah - if they wore a beard, how could you tell they had a square jaw? Square jaw = hero.

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The first published Conan story was People of the Dark.

And he describes himself thus:

I ran my hand dazedly through my square-cut black mane, and my eyes wandered over my massive naked limbs and powerful torso. I was clad, I noticed absently, in a sort of loincloth, from the girdle of which swung an empty scabbard, and leathern sandals were on my feet.

Nearly-naked man with massive muscles, that’s how Howard originally wrote Conan. Note the “square-cut black mane”, which to me evokes a Prince Valiant sort of hairstyle.

Or perhaps a dark-haired version of He-Man.

I read a lot of Conan stories as a kid. My local library carried a ton of them, and I read every one. Howard seemed to stay fairly consistent in his description of Conan… Tall, dark-haired (often called “blue-black”), blue eyes that were often “smoldering”, though he moved “like a panther” rather than being a lumbering behemoth.

Conan also didn’t always run around in a fuzzy loincloth. He just wore whatever was appropriate to wherever the story took place. Maybe head-to-toe in armor, maybe in modest clothes, maybe in warm weather gear, maybe in next-to-nothing. He didn’t have a uniform or anything.

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Sort of. The classical idea of musculature for a big, strong guy, like Conan was supposed to be, was something like this:

(Sans beard, of course).

Broad shoulders, big arms, ripped abs. The only thing Frazetta really changed was adding huge pectoral muscles.

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As a nitpick, that’s not our favorite Cimmerian. That’s an Irish Conan:

Then suddenly I remembered and laughed to think that a fall on his head should render me, Conan of the reavers, so completely daft. Aye, it all came back to me now. It had been a raid on the Britons, on whose coasts we continually swooped with torch and sword, from the island called Eireann. That day we of the black-haired Gael had swept suddenly down on a coastal village in our long, low ships and in the hurricane of battle which followed, the Britons had at last given up the stubborn contest and retreated, warriors, women and bairns, into the deep shadows of the oak forests, whither we seldom dared follow.

So he should probably have looked like this:

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Yes, he didn’t hold that story in the fictional “Hyborian Age”, with lands like Cimmeria, Koth, or Aquilonia, but rather historical Western Europe. Yet the character itself was physically identical to later depictions.

As far as I can tell, this was the first story published that depicted Conan in the fictional world he was typically portrayed. “The Phoenix on the Sword”, published in December 1932 in Weird Tales.

Here is the description of Conan:

Behind an ivory, gold- inlaid writing-table sat a man whose broad shoulders and sun-browned skin seemed out of place among those luxuriant surroundings. He seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands. His slightest movement spoke of steel-spring muscles knit to a keen brain with the co-ordination of a born fighting-man. There was nothing deliberate or measured about his actions. Either he was perfectly at rest—still as a bronze statue—or else he was in motion, not with the jerky quickness of over-tense nerves, but with a cat-like speed that blurred the sight which tried to follow him.

His garments were of rich fabric, but simply made. He wore no ring or ornaments, and his square-cut black mane was confined merely by a cloth-of- silver band about his head.

Again with the “square-cut black mane”. Also, the description of his large size, and here we see his comparison to a cat and his quickness of both mind and body.

He is later described as having a “lion head”, once again referencing his “mane” of hair. And later it describes his “smoldering blue eyes”. (I was sure that I remembered the “smoldering” part correctly!)

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Before the 1960s, most men doused their hair in pomade, locking every hair neatly into place. In The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935, starring Herman Brix) there are a couple of fight scenes in which Tarzan gets his hair mussed. It was nowhere near shoulder-length, but underneath the pomade, it was a lot longer than my father (World War II veteran) would ever have allowed.

I have noticed similar scenes in other movies made between the world wars. When the hair is greased and combed, it looks prim and proper and short. But when you knock it out of place, it suddenly looks wild and disheveled, and significantly longer than you expected.

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Jerry Lee Lewis at piano-bench-kicking time.

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Another thing I noticed about the Tarzans. In movies where Edgar Rice Burroughs had influence (the later silent films, the aforementioned New Adventures), they cast actors with slimmer physiques. They were still muscular, but more like marathon runners or decathletes, rather than weightlifters. I suspect Robert E. Howard had something similar in mind for Conan.

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[Moderating]
One of the links in the OP included drawings of naked ladies. I’ve put it behind a spoiler.

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Doused? But a little dab’ll do ya…

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One thing Conan was not, was slim. He always had a large frame, wide shoulders, etc.

That being said, I also don’t think he was meant to have huge, swollen muscles, like a bodybuilder, so I agree with you there. Arnold Schwarzenegger did not bear much of a resemblance to the literary Conan as depicted. Jason Momoa was closer, I felt… The darker skin, very dark hair (though not quite black enough), and broad-shouldered (but not absolutely swollen) muscles were pretty faithful. His eyes were again the wrong color, and in agreement with @CalMeacham the hair was way too long.

Funny enough, in Justice Leage, Mamoa had blue contact lenses when playing Aquaman.

Though he changed to amber-colored lenses for the actual Aquaman film later.

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O’Brien?

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There was literally a photo of Conan O’Brien in that post.

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I’ve read a fair share of Conan books, and I’ve got to ask:

When would he have had time to shave, or get a haircut?

And who would’ve schooled him on how men styled their hair in The Far-Off Big City? Also, why would he want to look like those “civilized dandies”?

I mean, he’s a barbarian, for Crom’s sake!

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The funny thing about body builders is they probably wouldn’t make very good soldiers. They’re good at one thing, lifting a specific amount of weight a specific number of times, most often lacking the endurance necessary to be a good soldier from any era. They’re working towards an aesthetically pleasing body rather than a function one. Bodybuilding competitions are essentially beauty pageants.

I don’t think Howard’s description points to a bodybuilder physique. At least not a bodybuilder as we’d think of it today. i.e. Conan is on the lean side and muscular, but doesn’t take steroids or human growth hormones.