Thread by @Comrade_Bullski

Alright folks, when things get out of hand they just do. I don't have any valid excuse for the time since the last thread other than that life has been very busy for me, and sadly mostly in ways not related to comics in any way.

But let's go again. Let's go back to Hyboria.

Don't worry, that G.I. Joe topic is on the way, by the way!

This will not be an extremely lengthy topic but more a discussion on something I have always been very fascinated with, namely world-building in fiction, or "secondary reality".

Now, it is no secret that Robert E. Howard didn't go into any of his fictional characters with the goal to build up a comprehensive, consistent world around them. He was a storyteller who liked to go where his whims took him, and usually his stories were written out of order.

However if you have ever read a Conan comic or a Conan prose collection then you are probably already acutely aware of what Conan's Hyborian age looked like spatially. You may even have a map like this imprinted into your spinal column.

So today, for your amusement dear audience, we shall explore how Hyboria became a defined fictional world to be explored by dozens of creative minds.

Let's look at the cartography of the Hyborian Age!

[Theology/Civilization plays]

Now one question that may have plagued you like it did me is, if these maps seen in comics and books are based on a map "prepared by Robert E. Howard" then why the heck do they not just print that map as the frontispiece to the books and stuff?

The answer to that is that the map used to create these new ones looks like this. This is the final map Howard prepared in 1936 and as you can see it... leaves a bit to be desired. The focus here is clearly on the relations of the Hyborian continent to modern Europe.

And trust me, this is the BEST map we have from REH himself. Earlier attempts usually look something like this, with almost square nations and very sketchy outlines. Hell, this is a better map of Europe today than of the Hyborian age.

The reason for this is doubtless that Howard was drifting away from fantasy writing in the final years of his life, but also I think he more considered these helpful illustrations to his "Hyborian Age" essay than documents to stand on their own.

It is very interesting to me that both Howard and J.R.R Tolkien saw the development of their fantasy worlds into our modern world as a cornerstone of their writing. There's a lot of interesting parallels between these two very different authors.

At any rate, as you can see from the 1936 map Howard was content to leave the southern and eastern areas of the Hyborian world unmapped, with only brief notes on how to get to some locations (such as Vendhya, the setting of "The People of the Black Circle" - 1934).

You will also notice that many of the nations are pretty geometric in shape. There's a lot of roughly rectangular ones. I want to say that Howard probably was more thinking of the artificial shapes of U.S states here than the more organically grown borders of European countries.

The first commercially available maps of Hyboria came in the Gnome Press releases Conan stories (which I have talked about more in a previous topic). I believe all of their books used the same map, which is this one. Now this is more familiar, right?

Now this map is clearly directly copied from Howard's own maps, probably the 1936 one. Artist David Kyle chose to stick with the superimposed European map underneath, tho it is not 100% a match for Howard's positioning of said countries.

We don't need to get into every small change but just to make an example you can see that Kyle has shifted and reshaped Aquilonia a little, giving the borders a more organic look. This is a universal feature of this map, and probably intentional.

Just to make one more quick example, you can see that Kyle has shifted the northern barbarian kingdoms around a bit from REH's original. So even this first map has slightly altered the only documents we have from REH on the matter.

But the actual juicy detail is down south. As you saw all the REH maps we have end at Shem with Stygia a mere outline and everything else indicated by arrows. Kyle gives us the locations of several of the black kingdoms and even the Zarkheba river where Bêlit met her end.

You will also see that Kyle's map actually puts most locations from then-known Conan stories on the map, whereas Howard's examples only had a few notable cities. This is doubtless to make sure to reader of the Gnome books can get a good spatial awareness when reading each story

Now if you were privy to my previous thread on Conan and pastiche Conan you also know that the Gnome editions were the beginning of this man's involvement with Conan. That's right, L. Sprague de Camp is here and Conan's world is about to exand explosively.

After leaving Gnome Press under a cloud of litigation, de Camp signed a contract with publisher Lancer, leading to a decade plus of de Camp edited Conan books which formed the "Conan saga" and a core element of these were pastiche stories by de Camp and other authors.

I had trouble finding scans of the maps in the Lancer/Sphere etc editions but they are generally the same as the Kyle map we have examined already, just with the outline of Europe removed, a much more stern and simple design and a few locations from pastiche stories added.

So let's focus on the year 1970 and the beginning of Marvel's involvement with our favorite barbarian. The very first issue of Conan the Barbarian featured this map, which seems to be directly based on Kyle's map rather than Howard's. Note the shape of Aquilonia's borders.

Now keep in mind, Marvel did not have the right to use any material from de Camp's pastiches or even Howard stories that he had rewritten heavily, so the early Marvel maps pretty much entirely lack any non-Howard material.

We can see that the additions to the map which Kyle added in 1950 are still there and have now become part of the accepted geography of Hyboria, with his black kingdoms and specifically noted locations repeated relatively exactly on every new version.

Marvel offered a plethora of versions of the map during those early years such as this one from Marvel Treasury #4 (1975) which plots out Conan's wanderings in the early issues of the comic into a coherent voyage (something that would become impossible later)

Especially fascinating is the map from Marvel Treasury #23 (1979) which attempts to show exactly how Conan and Bêlit's travels during his three years as Amra played out. These maps are notable for featuring original Marvel locations not derived from Howard's writing.

Perhaps the most artistic map produced during this era was Tim Conrad's amazingly detailed map of almost the entire Hyborian world, including regions never seen before on any previous map.

To my knowledge Conrad's map (which first appeared in the comics in Savage Sword of Conan #9 in 1975) to attempt to actually map out Vendhya and Hyrkania and also adds the pastiche countries of Iranistan and Meru to the conveniently previously unseen areas of the world.

You can generally tell if the Hyborian map you're looking at is based on pastiche material even if it only shows the western portion by this island off Kush. The Nameless Isle is from the de Camp/Carter story "Conan the Buccaneer" (1971) and does not exist on any previous maps

Let me also remind you that when this map was first printed in a Marvel comic in 1975 they still didn't have the rights to use the full de Camp library, so the map wasn't "accurate" to the comic book Conan... yet.

As you can see, through the parallel but as yet unconnected efforts of the de Camp series and the Marvel Comics Hyboria was gaining a more solid, identifiable shape. Marvel also printed the odd speciality map, like GSC #1 and its map of Acheron...

...and Savage Sword of Conan #49 and its close-up map of Aquilonia and its neighbors. These speciality maps are surprisingly rare, however.

With Marvel gaining the rights to and adapting the pastiche material into their canon, however, it was time for a new map. A bigger map. A more COMPLETE map.

Surprisingly one was not published by Marvel until 1986 and THIS monstrosity.

The Handbook of the Conan Universe was published in the period between Thomas' two tenures on Conan and the map (whose exact artist I cannot pinpoint) tries its best to incorporate everything it possibly can, from Howard to de Camp to Marvel. And it's a MESS.

The map is unfortunately riddled with spelling errors and typos ("Baacha Isles") but you can see the effort to incorporate material from different sources by the many new islands suddenly appearing off the coast of Zingara.

I can't even tell you where all these locations are from (maybe I'll do it as a challenge) but to take one example the "Isle of the Twelve-Eyed Thing" is from a SSoC story featuring captain Bor'Ahq Sharaq written by Michael Fleischer.

Since the Conrad map was drawn de Camp and Carter published "Conan of Aquilonia" where Conan finally defeats Toth-Amon in a continent-spanning struggle, and so the locations of Yanoga and Zembabwei appear on this map.

We also get even more detail than Conrad offered on the far east including Kosala, Uttara Kuru and Kambuja.

But uh. Like. I'm just saying this but maybe trying to put every location from every story ever created about Conan onto the same single map was a mistake.

I always wondered what story that little island filled with Lemurians came from. Also it's funny that nothing happens in the north. Just a big empty space. Hell even Khitai is mostly undefined.

1989 saw the publication of GURPS Conan, the first semi-comprehensive official Conan RPG and it bore this charming but stripped-down map. The GURPS module largely followed the de Camp canon but had some nods to the Marvel stories, tho the map is unique.

Thus at the beginning of the 1990s the Hyborian world was very well-defined and most maps that Marvel printed in its last few years of publishing Conan followed the same general if not exact layout as the ones we just looked at.

Though sometimes you get reprints of older maps even in this era such as this one from Conan Saga #34 (1990)

The last few Conan comics from Marvel which were presented in a nearly continous number of mini-series often didn't even include maps, and when they did they were plain reprints of older ones.

As you may remember from my previous thread, the 2000 publication of the complete, unedited series of Howard stories was a huge milestone for the character. Finally people were able to enjoy the original stories as written and the pastiche Conan novels began falling out of favor.

Interestingly, when DK published Conan: the Ultimate Guide in 2006 the map they featured was a beautiful painted rendition which incorporated elements from the pastiche maps of the past.

Despite this volume clearly labeling any story not written by Howard as a "legend", the map includes locations from the pastiche stories such as Yanoga and the Nameless Isle, and seems based largely on Conrad's map.

It does not retain the additions to the map from the Conan Handbook one, but otherwise it is a fairly complete offering and one of the best versions of this "pastiche" maps out there.

When Conan returned to Marvel briefly between 2018 and 2022 we saw a few new maps used, though they tended to more be stripped-down versions of the older Marvel maps. Some pastiche locations survive here, notably Iranistan.

A different approach can be seen on the very basic map used by Ablaze who publish Glenat's French Conan comics in English. This map is very close to Howard's own and probably referenced from the Kyle one from all the way back in 1950.

Not only have we shed the extreme clutter of the 1986 Marvel map, we have also expunged every reference to pastiche stories such as the Iranistan arrow and the Nameless Isle. All we have here is the map as envisioned for the Gnome editions.

So what about the current run of Titan's Conan the Barbarian? Well issue one features a variant wraparound map cover by Francesca Baerald (check out her amazing mapwork!) and it's very interesting.

You can see that the map has been done referencing one of the pastiche maps, presumably the Ultimate Guide one. There's the Nameless Isle (though not noted), Iranistan and Zembabwei...

In fact I'm pretty sure it's referencing the Ultimate Guide map as there's a bit of a game of telephone going on up here. "Nordheim" is the collective name of Asgard and Vanaheim and placed near them on the Ultimate map, but here it seems almost like a distinct land north of them

The east of the map is also interesting as it includes the Great Wall of Khitai which is often excluded, but Meru and Kambuja are gone and Kosala has moved from one side of Vendhya to the other to take Kambuja's place!

This is of course just a variant cover and not indicative of anything about the direction the Titan Comics will take, but I wanted to discuss it as an interesting capstone to how far Hyborian cartography has evolved.

I hope you find the evolution of a fictional space through almost nine decades of storytelling as fascinating as I do, and maybe that this little thread has sparked an interest in you to check out more stuff like this.

As a final little fun anecdote, the first Japanese releases of the Conan books included unique little maps showing the geography of the immediate area of each story, so the reader would know exactly where Conan was and where he was going. Amazing stuff!

Special thanks goes out to the EXHAUSTIVE behind-the-scenes material in the del Rey Conan books (a must-read), Roy Thomas for his comics editorial pages and all the wonderfully talented artists who worked on the maps in this thread.

Comments? Corrections? Praise? Scorn? Leave it in the comments, by Crom! We shall settle the matter as our forefathers did... by posting angry tweets at each other.

And thank you for reading.

If you enjoyed this thread or any of my previous ones please consider tipping me at . Seriously, any form of support helps me a ton with day-to-day life and helps me prepare more content.

Please feel free to retweet my content freely and I'll see you all https://t.co/lKV6Uzc4FAko-fi.com/comradebullski