If you missed last time….
Robert E. Howard liked ape monsters. He had Thak in our last entry from “Rogues in the House” as well as others in stories about Solomon Kane and Conan. But these were earthly apes. Large, fierce but ultimately animals. Howard’s greatest ape monster is the winged ape from “Queen of the Black Coast” (Weird Tales, May 1934). This ape was once more than a man but had lived thousands of years to devolve into its apish form:
“Cast in the mold of humanity, they were distinctly not men. They were winged and of heroic proportions; not a branch on the mysterious stalk of evolution that culminated in man, but the ripe blossom on an alien tree, separate and apart from that stalk. Aside from their wings, in physical appearance they resembled man only as man in his highest form resembles the great apes. In spiritual, esthetic and intellectual development they were superior to man as man is superior to the gorilla. But when they reared their colossal city, man’s primal ancestors had not yet risen from the slime of the primordial seas…After an earthquake that shook down the outer walls and highest towers of the city, and caused the river to run black for days with some lethal substance spewed up from the subterranean depths, a frightful chemical change became apparent in the waters the folk had drunk for millenniums uncountable. Many died who drank of it; and in those who lived, the drinking wrought change, subtle, gradual and grisly. In adapting themselves to the changing conditions, they had sunk far below their original level. But the lethal waters altered them even more horribly, from generation to more bestial generation. They who had been winged gods became pinioned demons, with all that remained of their ancestors’ vast knowledge distorted and perverted and twisted into ghastly paths. As they had risen higher than mankind might dream, so they sank lower than man’s maddest nightmares reach. They died fast, by cannibalism, and horrible feuds fought out in the murk of the midnight jungle. And at last among the lichen-grown ruins of their city only a single shape lurked, a stunted abhorrent perversion of nature.” (“Queen of the Black Coast” by Robert E. Howard)
This story, like all the best of Howard’s work, is filled with its dark pseudo-history that REH put into tales like “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” about Kull. His “The Hyborian Age” tells how the different tribes of men from Kull’s Valusian Atlantis died and suffered, devolved into apes then back into men (sometimes in as little as five hundred years). In his tales of the Aryan tribes wandering the Earth, known as the James Allison stories, because of their narrator, he spins the tale of Hunwulf who encounters a flying man in “The Garden of Fear” (Marvel Tales #2, July-August 1934):
I was within five feet of the parapet when I was galvanized by the beat of wings about my head. The black man shot out of the air and landed on the gallery. I got a good look at him as he leaned over the parapet. His features were straight and regular; there was no suggestion of the negroid about him. His eyes were slanted slits, and his teeth gleamed in a savage grin of hate and triumph…For an instant he hesitated, his wings half-lifted, his hand poising on his dagger, as if uncertain whether to fight or take to the air. He was a giant in stature, with muscles standing out in corded ridges all over him, but he hesitated, as uncertain as a man when confronted by a wild beast. (“The Garden of Fear” by Robert E. Howard)
It is not hard to see that this man with wings will descend the evolutionary scale to become the ape with wings in “Queen of the Black Coast”. (Both stories were written in 1934 and REH obviously had winged villains on the brain. Perhaps “The Garden of Fear” had been rejected and he simply re-used it for Conan?) The time of Hunwulf is thousands of years before the emergence of the Hyborian kingdoms. Howard uses the winged ape as a symbol of lingering evil, a truly Lovecraftian left-over from the ancient days. This creature has no goodness left in it, like the winged man of “The Garden of Fear”, only a superior boredom and entitlement from centuries of existence. Only supernatural intervention saves Conan from the monster’s claws. Belit’s love is so strong it transcends death to save him. This is a rare example of romance in the Conan saga. It comes not from a god but an individual, which makes sense in Howard’s universe of Darwinian individualism.
The winged ape, like the winged man, has more than wings, claws and fangs at his disposal. He also has sorcery, which takes the form of conjuring were-hyenas to do its bidding. (More on these creatures in our next post.) Conan valiantly kills these beasts to face-off against the master. He fails in that fight, allowing Belit’s ghost to famously rescue him. The scene Margaret Brundage puts on the cover, as did the unknown artist for The Avon Fantasy Reader (1948) when they reprinted it. Brundage makes the ape look more human (and Belit a shrinking violet) but the interior artist, Hugh Rankin, does not.
In comics, the very first version of this story was in Reigna de la Coasta Negra, a Mexican comic that “borrowed” Belit and Conan for a series of Sword & Sorcery adventures. The story was adapted by the evidence of this cover from Issue #16 but I doubt Belit died.
Roy Thomas converted “The Garden of Fear” (Conan the Barbarian #9, September 1971) to a Conan story with art by Barry Smith and Sal Buscema, and later for issue #100 (July 1979), did a full adaptation of “Queen of the Black Coast” with art by John Buscema and Ernie Chan.
Dark Horse did their version in 2013 with Brian Wood adapting and art by Riccardo Burchielli and Leandro Fernández.
Ablaze Publishing did a new uncensored version in 2020.
I’ve never made any secret of the fact that “Queen of the Black Coast” is my favorite Conan story (and there is plenty of competition). The winged ape is a wonderful monster to pit against Conan’s mighty thews and brain. It has a wonderful sense of Lovecraftian evil that all good Hyborian monsters have. Unlike a crawling horror like Thog the Slithering Shadow, the ape also has cunning. The sacrifice of Belit to save Conan reads magnificently, much better than the Valeria rescue scene in the film Conan the Barbarian (1982). It is hard to pull off and the film version lacks so much of what makes this story (along with a good monster) so brilliant. Howard masterfully combines Sword & Sorcery, the jungle adventure, the ghost story and a pile of Gothic images to deliver his masterpiece.
Next time…Were-Hyenas….
