The Slap Heard Round The World

The Slap Heard Round the World

By Dale E. Rippke

This essay originally appeared in REHUPA #197

TM & (c) 2006
by Conan Properties Inc.
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

Writer: Kurt Busiek

Artist: Cary Nord

Color: Dave Stewart

Early on in the summer of 2005, an event occurred that provoked mixed reactions from the fans of Conan the Cimmerian, the literary character created by Robert E. Howard. The reactions ranged from true outrage to ironic bemusement. This is my take on the whole affair.

Dark Horse Comics has been publishing a comic magazine featuring the Conan character for the last couple of years and it was within its pages that the “event” transpired. In the pages of issue #16, in a story called Horror on Uskuth Hill, Conan was seen to, in a fit of pique, slap a child. It seemed to me to be pretty trivial at the time, since Conan is a violent character and the slap didn’t seem to be particularly out of character.

Others saw the slap in quite a different light. Emotional reactions, the likes of which are usually reserved for child molesters, erupted like an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.” Conan would NEVER, EVER, harm a child!” “It goes against his ‘code of honor’!” “The character of Conan has been unfairly besmirched!” “Obviously Kurt Busiek, the story’s author, doesn’t really “get” Conan!” Those are some of the more printable ones…

The outrage, centered mostly on the REHcomics Yahoo internet group, was confined to only a handful of very vocal fans. But these fans bent over backwards to prove that they ‘knew’ Conan better than Mr. Busiek, and their escalating personal attacks against him got positively vitriolic. At its height, these fans were actively accusing the author of condoning child abuse and threatening him with physical harm. It didn’t matter if they were right or whether they were overreacting. They demanded their pound of flesh. Finally the group’s moderator pulled the plug on the whole argument and it sort of died away.

My take on this whole thing is that in order to generate real debate, you should stick to facts and offer proof to bolster your argument. And let me tell you facts were in short supply with this group. The only person that could definitively state whether Conan would slap a child is the late Robert E. Howard. Since actual answers won’t be forthcoming from him, we should instead take a look at his work on the Conan corpus and try to see if we can make sense of it all.

The first thing that you should know is that there isn’t a single statement in the whole series that proves it one way of the other. Howard did, however, sprinkle clues throughout the saga like so many breadcrumbs and we should be able to make sense of this whole mess.

The first step would be to see how Conan deals with children around him. Unfortunately, over the course of the saga, there appears to be only a single child that we can use as an example. In The Black Stranger, the child Tina states that “Conan would not harm us”, due to his “barbaric code of honor”. This statement has been used to justify the argument that Conan wouldn’t harm any child, ever. In reality, this only tracks if Tina’s statement is taken out of context. The gist of her comments, in context, is that Conan wouldn’t harm Belesa or her because he isn’t a sadistic rapist or pederast, unlike the predatory pirates. He hasn’t voluntarily discarded his honor. Also, Howard states in the story several times that because of Conan’s particular code of honor, he won’t allow white people to be slaughtered by people of another race. You can also find examples of Conan feeling protective of the female sex in practically every story Howard wrote. Howard’s Conan wouldn’t harm her because she’s a helpless girl and his interest in her lies in the fact that she can’t protect herself from the Picts and pirates. To suggest that he won’t harm her only because she’s a child is disingenuous at best. The upshot of all this is that we don’t really know how Conan perceives children and can’t make the claim otherwise.

One of the arguments on the newsgroup broached the theory that Celtic barbarians (the template for Howard’s Cimmerians) loved their children and didn’t believe in physically disciplining them. While I understand the sentiment, this is a fairly lame argument, since we are comparing real-world barbarians with literary ones; they don’t have to be the same animal. However, this is a promising avenue of approach, since it moves the argument into a Nurture vs. Nature venue.

To accurately scrutinize the nurture part of the equation, a single question needs to be addressed; “How did the Cimmerians treat their children?” Sadly, there is little real information on the subject, except for the interesting fact that Cimmerian parents used to toss their newborns into a snow bank, in an attempt to insure that their children were tough enough to survive in Cimmeria. It seems to me that this implies that the race didn’t coddle their children, practicing a Nietzschean belief that “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. This sort of “tough love” would be considered child abuse in today’s society, which is interesting in light that one of the charges laid at Mr. Busiek’s feet was a glorification of child abuse.

Also, we learn in Beyond the Black River that the Cimmerians butchered men, women, and children during the destruction of the Aquilonian fort-town of Venarium, so apparently their love of children doesn’t extend to the kids of other races. Conan proudly states that, as a teenager, he was one of that one of that ravening horde, and Howard certainly doesn’t write about Conan feeling remorse or regrets over his actions during the massacre. Thus, a circumstantial argument can be advanced that Cimmerians (Conan included) will harm the children of another race under the right conditions.

To examine the nature part of the equation, we need to take a close look at Conan himself. He is, at the time of the story, around sixteen years of age, hardy the best age to exhibit a large degree of self-discipline. Luckily enough, Howard helps us out here. In a couple of the chronologically earliest stories, God in the Bowl (Aztrias Petanius) and Queen of the Black Coast (the judge) Howard’s writings display a very definite progression in the way that he approaches the build-up of Conan’s hair-trigger temper and his subsequent loss of control.

In both stories, Conan starts by getting emotionally stressed; outwardly exhibiting anger and annoyance, but inwardly choking his ire and holding his peace. He emotionally snaps when a catalyst is provided that “pushes his emotional button”, playing on his feelings that he’s been wronged. The end result is that Conan lashes out directly at that person, showing no compunction in murdering an unarmed man because of it. It is interesting to me that Conan’s outburst is always directed at the person who pushes his button, even though the people surrounding him are usually armed and dangerous.

Now in the comic story, Conan has been robbed and is in a foul mood and blaming “civilization” and its “cheating, dishonest inns” for his problems. A young boy approaches him and offers the services of his father’s inn; apparently the wrong approach because it pushes Conan’s emotional button. The Cimmerian, losing his temper, hauls off and slaps the child. Honestly, the boy was lucky Conan didn’t kill him.

It is my opinion that due to the weight of the (admittedly circumstantial) evidence that Kurt Busiek didn’t do anything out of character by having Conan slap the boy and in fact, actually “gets” the character far better than his detractors. In fact, they offered no actual (textual) proof to back up their attacks; just the nebulous feeling that Conan just wouldn’t have done such a heinous act against a child. If they want to win this argument they need to back up their claims with something substantial. Otherwise they are just projecting their own beliefs onto the character and “reading into” the Conan stories something that just isn’t there.

So I have to beg the question; "Where’s your proof?"

03/11/06 03:09 PM