Robert E. Howard’s Whole Wide World United

By Ron Hogan on February 8, 2006 8:52 AM

As reported in Variety, the rights to Robert E. Howard’s collected writings have been bought up by Paradox Entertainment, which has held the literary rights to the stories featuring Conan the Barbarian since 2002. Newsarama probes the deal in detail, because Conan and Red Sonja have been reappearing in all-new oomic book adaptations and original stories in recent years (as at right). None of those hot-selling titles will be affected, but here’s where things get tricky:

“Paradox does own the rights to Red Sonya, while the Red Sonja Corporation retains the rights to Red Sonja. The difference of course, being in the spelling of the last name. ‘Red Sonya,’ which Paradox now owns, is the original Howard version, a female pirate who was not a contemporary of Conan. ‘Red Sonja’ is the character derived from Howard’s works by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith in 1973. ‘Sonja’ is the character who previously appeared in Marvel’s Conan comics and her own miniseries, while ‘Sonya’ is known perhaps best to Howard aficionados.”

Specifically, in the 1934 story “The Shadow of the Vulture,” Sonya seeks to avenge her family’s death at Suleiman the Magnificent, which sets the story squarely in the 1520s. Thomas and Windsor-Smith took the title and plot, changed the y to a j, set the whole thing in Conan’s prehistoric world, and a fanboy dream was born (although the metal bikini came later).

To complicate matters a bit further, the rights to the character of Thulsa Doom, a contemporary of Kull the Conqueror in Howard’s original stories who was plopped into the first Conan movies, are also owned by the Red Sonja Corporation. But, frankly, my first hope is that the success Disney’s had with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise will generate some momentum for a Solomon Kane movie…