Made plans to meet Casey Bellows at Gil's Broiler in San Marcos for lunch.  It happened to be graduation for Texas State, Farmer's Market, Christmas Festival, and an Art Show all happening at the same time downtown.  Parking was a nightmare.  But Gil's was worth it.

 We checked in at 3 after going to the wrong one on Cameron a few blocks away.  The correct Holiday Inn was on Commerce.  Further from the River Walk, but free parking, two pools, and the elevator wasn't broken like the one on Cameron. Also, no front steps so way more accessible.
​Had some tea and took a nap.  Walked down to the river and ate Mexican food and had a margarita. Found an awesome little spice and tea shop and bought 3 spice packs and 3 teas. The weather was beautiful but the River Walk was entirely too noisy and crowded.
​Free breakfast the next morning which ended at 9 so we got to sleep in and still had plenty of time to get packed up and checked out by 10 which was when SAMA opened.

Got in for $3 with our SNAP card. Musuem opened at 10.

It was on the way to the McNay and by the time we got there, there were only a few people there.  Our food was most delicious and came out really fast.

It was free with our SNAP card.  Opened at noon. This was the big attraction for me because Susan HIlferty, the costume designer from Wicked, had an exhibition going on. Museum closed at 5 so we had two hours to kill before the wedding.  

World-renowned costume and set designer Susan Hilferty has designed more than 300 productions across the globe. Hilferty’s designs include Broadway (Wicked, Funny Girl, Present Laughter, Spring Awakening, Lestat, Into the Woods, and August Wilson’s Radio Golf), over 100 off-Broadway shows, innumerable regional-theatre productions, opera, circus, live-music events and dance. Something Wicked: Susan Hilferty Costumes pays tribute to Hilferty’s process, and gives an in-depth behind-the-scenes look at everything it takes to bring designs from page to stage, across this broad diversity of forms.

Hilferty’s many honors include the US Institute for Theatre Technology’s (USITT) Lifetime Achievement Award, the Irene Sharaff Award for Lifetime Achievement, an OBIE for Sustained Excellence in Design, the Lilly Award, the Ruth Morley Design Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women, and Tony, Outer Critics Circle, and Drama Desk awards for the Broadway Musical Wicked. Hilferty is on faculty in the Department of Design for Stage and Film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, having served as chair for 25 years, and continues to design prolifically from her studio based in New York City.  

Something Wicked: Susan Hilferty Costumes is a celebration of Hilferty’s collaborations with the makers and artisans who bring her designs to life, including dress makers, drapers, tailors, shoe makers, milliners, wig makers, embroiderers, painters, and mask makers. When Hilferty received the Tony Award for Best Costume Design for Wicked, she wore an evening coat embroidered with the names of all her creative collaborators to honor them.  ​

Mediteranean food like shwarma and gyros. We were planning on having supper there before the wedding, but we ended up being there at tea time instead. So I got chai and baklava, and my husband got mint lemonade and kunafe.  We were the only ones in there because it had just opened at 4,  which was nice.  The food was great. 

Afterwards we went to a rare and used book store Cheever's.  We both sneakily bought each other Christmas presents while we were there.  I Then ate an early supper of breakfast at IHOP which was right across the street from The Witte.

Wedding started at 7.  Tapas for the reception among the dinosaurs.

John Singer Sargent painted Ellen Terry wearing this costume after he's seen her perform in it in 1888.  Until just recently, this is the only source available for what it looked like.  However, due to years of being worn and taken on tours, the dress was in desperate need of restoration.  In 2011, the National Trust spent 110,000 pounds doing just that. Textile conservator Zensie Tinker spent 5 years on the iconic dress and the results are amazing.​

When our family needed new costumes to wear to Sherwood Forest Faire, this dress was my inspiration for my costume, which you can read all about in the link to my blog.

Today I found another costume maker's blog It's all Frosting, where she recreated this gown to wear to Costume College in 2019 and I'd like to share her journey with you. I'm mostly doing this so I can find it later.

Part 1: Inspiration
Part 2: Supplies
Part 3: Patterning and Mockup
Part 4: Cutting
Part 5: Bodice and Construction
Part 6: Beetlewings
Part 7: More Beetlewings
Part 8: Skirt
Part 9: Sleeves
Part 10: Collar and Brooch
Part 11: Belt
Part 12: Wig Styling
Part 13: Crown
Part 14: Final Photos
Part 15: Final Thoughts

Broadway World Review of Do No Harm written by Zac Thriffiley.  IMO this review is very thorough and Thriffiley perfectly captures how I felt when I saw the play. I didn't see it on opening night like he did, but the technical problems he mentioned were fixed by the time I saw it two days later. Luckily, after the show they held a talk back to give the audience a chance to hear from the creative team and ask the questions. Listening to them talk was even more enlightening and watching the rapport they all had with one another.

Dallas Art Beat review of the film version.

on Soul Rep Theatre Company’s stage - BLACK art, BLACK narratives, BLACK joy, BLACK families, BLACK history, BLACK love, BLACK struggle, BLACK brilliance, and BLACK LIVES have ALWAYS MATTERED. 

In 2014, the AT&T Performing Arts Center created the Elevator Project to provide small, emerging and historically marginalized arts organizations and artists with a performance platform in the Dallas Arts District. It has evolved into an exciting, curated season of work stretching across genres, with the projects chosen through a competitive process by a panel of arts professionals and advocates.

Presentations may range from single-night performances to a two-week run for a play. They may include music, theatre, dance, spoken word, cabaret, comedy, opera, and more. Most shows are performed in Hamon Hall in the Winspear Opera House or in the 6th Floor Studio Theatre in the Wyly Theatre.

Applicants must be Dallas-based and special consideration is given to groups or artists that do not have a performance space they call home. Successful projects may include new and experimental works, ethnically and/or culturally specific projects, and performances designed for unique spaces on the Center’s campus.

​2021/2022 Season

• Sangeet Millenium / Arts Nomadic
• Soul Rep Theatre Company
• Janelle Gray (Theatre)
• Indique Dance Company
• Urban Arts Collective (Music)
• Bandan Koro African Drum and Dance Ensemble
• Justin Locklear (Theatre)
• Bombshell Dance Project

Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA), lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She creates works that explore a mysterious alternate universe full of characters that often interact with each other in tender ways. Pierre holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from Andrews University.
Pierre’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Armory Show, New York; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Perrotin, Seoul; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Nicodim Gallery, Bucharest among others. Pierre’s works are in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami; CC Foundation in Shanghai; Dallas Museum of Art; The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; and The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. Pierre was a 2019–2020 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. The works produced at the residency were on view at MoMA PS1 as part of the exhibition This Longing Vessel: Studio Museum Artist in Residence 2019–20 from December 10, 2020 through March 14, 2021. In 2021, her work will be featured in Prospect.5 New Orleans, and is the subject of a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Soundcloud interview with Dr. Roslyn Walker on Mudcloth

We went to see Fiddler on the Roof at Ursaline Academy, where MCC alum Whitney Coulter teaches costume and makeup classes.  Whitney designed the costumes for the show.  I got to meet her colleagues and her students.  The talent there is amazing, such good singers and dancers.

Now that I have the structural elements done, my husband, my daughter, and I all ended up with Covid and I was out for 12 days and couldn't work on anything, much less my own costume.  I had planned to premiere this and the new and improved Doctor Doom at a local comic con in February, but we were still home sick and besides, our costumes were nowhere near being finished.  So, I had to wait until the opera was over so I could go back to work on at least my costume for the next comic con in Waco in April, the week after the opera. 

I took all the fur off my first tail and used it to cover my third tail. I safety pinned everything in place to get an idea of how it needed to sew together around the curved shape. I had been working with a scrap to begin with from the second squirrel I made for Wind in the Willows and there wasn't any more of this same fur left in the shop. I thought I was going to need more fur, so I took apart the second tail that had popped to use it.  As you can see from the photo it reads significantly darker than the original fur, so I was going to put that piece in the part of the tail that is the least seen, and theoretically would be in shadow. Once I had the whole thing pinned, I slipped it off like a sock and turned the thing inside out.  At that point I could see that I actually had plenty of fur and didn't need the extra piece.  I just did a little creative cutting and basically trimmed off two triangle shapes from the sides of the lower portion, sewed them together up the middle and then added them back upside down in the spot where the darker fur had been. Then it was just a matter of sewing all the sections together and slipping it back on the frame. I sewed bias tape on the top and bottom and ran elastic through the channel to close it up.  I sewed snaps onto my elastic straps to go around my bra straps.  Then the last thing to do was to cut slits in my jacket to run the wide straps through to go around my bra straps to keep it upright.  I guessed wrong the first time and cut the slit too high.  Luckily I still had scraps from when I altered it originally and used barge cement to patch the slit back together.  The next slit I put in below the yoke and that was the perfect height. 

 At the same time, I've now lost 30 of my 40 pandemic pounds, so I needed a new body suit as well.  I used the pattern that I drafted for my Scarlet Witch cosplay and made it up in quilted brown velveteen.  I'll use a separating zipper to close up the CB seam but install it above where the tail attaches to the lumbar support belt. After I did the first fitting I realized that I needed the leotard to come much further down to cover up more of my butt, so I patterned an inset piece to add some extra coverage.  I hemmed the legs and armholes as well as the neckline, then I installed the zipper.  After that I used twill tape to add some lingerie straps to keep everything in place since so much is riding on being attached to my bra straps. I still need to add fur trim to my bodysuit around the neckline in the front and the legs.  I have the right fur that matches my jacket, but I couldn't find it Friday, so that will have to be put on later.  Originally the bodysuit pattern called for snaps in the crotch.  I didn't want to deal with that, but now that I've worn it to a con, I realize that if I had installed snaps, then I might have attempted to use the bathroom while I was there.  As it was, I just didn't drink or eat anything for the 4 hours we were there.  And, I discovered when I got home, that my stitching had ripped almost all the way at the seam.  So I will add in an extra couple of inches there, maybe a lycra panel with some stretch to it and then install snaps,

I have been unhappy with my ears since I first made them.  I had used matching fur for the outside but a darker fur for the inside instead of pink.  I don't know why I decided to do that, but I immediately hated it and had been wanting to replace it with pink ever since. I ripped them apart and replace the brown fur with pink flannel for the insides of the ears and then restitched them back on the headband using a curved needle.

My Goodwill Uggs are difficult to walk in, they are slightly too big and have no arch support.  I bought really great insoles from Amazon and those helped tremendously.

Getting into the whole thing I can do almost completely by myself.  I need someone to zip me up in the back, but that's it.  Getting out of it though, I need help.  Once I get the tail elastic snapped around my bra straps, I can't reach them again to unsnap them.  It's the quantum.  I also can't unzip myself.  The other thing that was odd was that my tail seemed to lean heavily to my left side.  I don't know if that's an elastic issue or what.  I kept whacking people going up and down the vendor rows without meaning to.   I did get a lot of compliments on my costume.  Squirrel Girl seems to make so many people happy. I was asked to sign an autograph, I lost count of how many people took my photo.  And when I was sitting down the people behind me asked if they could pet my tail.  One guy refused to believe that it was faux fur.  Everyone asked how I made the tail.  One person thought that my wig was my real hair. 

I never did finish attaching the Doom armor for the Skellington contest and then the upper body pieces fell apart anyway because all I could get at the last minute was brads.  Plus the helmet shape was all wrong and didn't sit correctly on his head, so I'm remaking the helmet as well using the Kamuri Cosplay patterns from She Kills Monsters.

Rob and I are just in love with WandaVision.  When the Halloween episode aired I just knew we had to do that for our next cosplay.  Our anniversary is on Valentine's Day so I got us these super cute matching T-shirts.  Since I'm done with both the musical and the opera costumes way ahead of schedule, I decided to start working on this project during Spring Break.  I have never in my 20+ years of working at MCC, not had to work on the opera during Spring Break, so I am very excited that I get to do this so soon.  Hopefully we will have conventions again soon.  If Greater Austin Comic Con happens, we'll be ready.

 As you know, Amazon is my go to place these days for online shopping.  I was able to order most of the things I needed for Vision's costume.  The Sentai suit will need to have it's face cut out and it's hands and feet cut off.  I'll have to make his cape with the stand up collar out of 5 yds of yellow poly satin that I got from Amazon. Then I can use a lycra scrap for the diamond on his chest.  I'll use the scraps from the Sentai suit to make the green stripe down the sides of the shorts.  I have a ton of plastic gemstones for his mind stone too. Easy peasy.

Vision's suit was super simple to do.  I cut the hands and feet off of the morph suit, since he had shoes and sock and gloves that went over it and didn't need the extra layer.  I cut a hole in the face and used some fabric from the feet to widen the top of the forehead to give the mindstone a place to be glued to.  Then I hemmed the opening with a channel for elastic so it would fit snugly around his face.  I used some scrap yellow lycra to make the patch for the chest and used stitch witchery to heat set it in place and then zigzagged around the edges to keep it there.  I used E6000 to glue the mindstone to the morph suit.  Then all I had to do was make the cape out of the poly satin that I bought.  I used boning in the collar to keep it upright.

I have gained 40 lbs during the pandemic and as we all know, plus sized anything is hit and miss, so I decided pretty early on that I would need to make the bodysuit.  I chose red stretch velvet which I will back with coutil so that it keeps it's structure like a corset..  I'm using the Yana Han cosplay pattern for that. It calls for lacing up the back like a corset, but Rob is lousy with lacing, so I'm putting a zipper up the back instead.  On the show Wanda only wears pink tights underneath, I'll probably wear it over flesh colored tights too. My calves have always been too big for most boots, so I found boots that were shorter and much lower in the back, hopefully they'll fit. I'm also making the cape and the headpiece.  The headpiece will be out of L200 foam and painted red. I found a great tutorial on you tube, which I will share here.  I'll either wear my Nightmare Nurse or my Squirrel Girl wig, even though my hair is currently dyed red.

Check back during Spring Break for more updates!

I did the first mock up for my body suit during spring break.  That's the first and second set of photos. The legs were cut way too high and the neckline was way too low.  Also, the pattern didn't have any straps to keep the bodice up.  So I had to alter the pattern a lot. 

My second attempt was out of muslin, and even though I made the legs lower and the neckline higher, it still wasn't working. I definitely needed straps.  That's the third row of photos.

 I ended up draping a new pattern based on the design lines of the Yana Han pattern.  At that point I gave up on the idea of backing it with coutil and just went with buying a new bra and a pair of Spanx.  Also, I lost the 40 lbs I'd gained during the pandemic, so that helped a lot. That's the fourth row of photos.

At that point I felt pretty confident that my new pattern would work so I went ahead and cut it out of my four way stretch fabric, nixxed the zipper up the back and the hook and eye closure in the crotch and just sewed it together.  I put in the elatic at the legs like the pattern called for, and also put in elastic at the armholes.  I thought I might need elastic at the neckline, but as it turned out, I didn't.  That's the fifth row of photos.

In the mean time I made the cape.  Disappointingly, even after losing the 40 lbs, I still couldn't zip up the boots, so I removed the zippers up the back and added in a couple of inches of red vinyl on either side and then put the zippers back in.  Now I don't even have to unzip them to slip them on.

I did the headpiece last.  I used all my experience on She Kills Monsters, to do a much better job on it than I would have had I tried to do it before.  I learned so much from Jason on that show.  So I traced the pattern off the screen on the youtube video and cut the shapes out of EVA foam. I glued them together with contact cement and then painted them with two coats of plastidip.  I used gray primer, then two coats of gloss red and two coats of glossy clear coat to protect the paint job.  I used spray adhesive to back to foam with pink felt and used wig pins to attach it to my wig as per the instructions in the video.

My first experience of Conan was the Schwarzenegger movies, which I loved. About 20 years later, when my son was in daycare, we spent a lot of time hanging out with his buddy Robbie and Robbie's mom Beth at our pool on summer afternoons while both of our husbands were still at work.  She was (and still is) one of our librarians at MCC and loved REH.  Beth introduced me to a movie about his life called The Whole Wide World that had come out in 1996 with Vincent D'Onofrio as REH and Renee Zellweger as Novalyne.  I hadn't known that REH was from Texas.  The movie was very interesting and sad (I also didn't know that he'd killed himself). Beth also told me that they had a Barbarian Festival in his hometown of Cross Plains and that she had wanted to go to it.  That was such an exciting thing.  We had already missed it that year, but we wanted to make plans to go next year.  Unfortunately, that never happened.  Fifteen years later my husband and I took a trip to Odessa to see their replica of the Globe Theatre and on the way back home we drove through Cross Plains to see REH's house that had been turned into a museum.  It was 11:00pm when we got there, so we sadly took some bad photos in the dark and then went on home.  We wanted to go last year, but the pandemic cancelled everything.  So here I am, seventeen years later, finally getting to go experience this wonderful, weird experience now called Robert E. Howard Days.

 The Robert E. Howard Museum is located at the junction of Texas State Highway 36 and Avenue J in Cross Plains,Texas. The museum was the family home of author Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. The structure was added to the National Register of Historic Places listings in 1994 and this year, a Texas State Historical Marker was added to the site.

The Foundation was created in 2006 and is organized to foster understanding of the life and works of Robert E. Howard. Its goal is to honor Howard’s legacy as a skillful, prolific and successful writer of fantasy, regional, horror, action and adventure stories in a wide variety of genres. The mission of the Foundation is to promote its belief in the importance of imagination and creative writing. ​

The REH Foundation Press was created in 2007 to help insure that all of REH’s works would be available to readers in their original form as they were written, with an absolute minimum of editing. Those familiar with the history of REH publishing know that various editors over the years have taken liberties to edit as they please, changing stories and poetry in all kinds of ways. The Wandering Star series of books that began in 1998 with The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, followed by more books from Subterranean Press and Del Rey, returned REH’s most famous characters and stories to their original form, with editing by various REHF Board members. The REH Foundation Press series continues this work, extending it to ALL of the works of REH. Each book in the 22 volume REHFP series has been edited by REHF board members, and includes many works first appearance in print. REHFP also publishes collections of works related to REH’s friends, family and life, for those that want to know more about REH the person. ​

Welcome to Howard History, a repository for the Robert E. Howard-related writings of Rob Roehm.  Roehm has "written articles for all of the Howard publications that I’m aware of, contributed to most of the Howard websites, edited books, and even wrote a couple. I’ve unearthed “new” Howard letters and stories. I’ve been to every place in the United States that Howard mentions going to, and every known place that his family lived."

 Rusty Burke narrated our bus tour of the Cross Cut and Burkett areas that were significant to REH. Unfortunately, the landmarks of Bob's time have all but disappeared.  His school in Cross Cut is now a field, and even the school that replaced it has nothing left standing but the arched entryway. The graveyard that Dr. Howard would walk through to visit patients is still there.  Patients and their families would know that he was near because they could hear him whistling. 

The Howard family moved around quite a bit when Bob was young, and spent time staying at the home of another doctor in Burkett, whose house had a gazebo nearby.  Scholars located a gazebo in the correct area and assumed that it was THE gazebo and that the house had already disappeared.  After more research it was discovered that the gazebo and house belonged to an entirely different doctor and was not somewhere that REH had stayed.  The doctor whose house it actually was, was the father of Kathryn Cochran Cravens, an actress and the first female wartime radio correspondent during WWII covering Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The doctor's house that the Howard family had actually stayed at in Burkett, was only recently demolished but Rusty was able to take a photo of it the day before the demolition. The bridge  that REH would have driven over to get from Burkett to Cross Plains is still there.  That's what we got to take photos of. 

The public library owns all of REH's original manuscripts.  They were on display this week.  They also sell photocopies of them.  Rob bought "The Sword Woman" a Dark Agnes story.  They also had a display of many of the issues of Weird Tales that REH had his stories published in.  Rob and I were both delighted to see an actual Weird Tales magazine but were surprised to find out how thick they were in real life, like thicker than a National Geographic.    It was certainly obvious that what we heard in the panel was true: whoever wrote the most lurid story, got the cover painting.

I was too busy taking notes to get a photo of the panel and Rob didn't think to take one either, so here's some thumbnails from Google.  Fred Blosser has no photos up on the internet at all.  I don't know how he managed that after publishing hundreds of books. But here's a snap from the book signing.  ​

The panelists from left to right:
​
Mark Finn moderator, author of Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E Howard, Editor of the magazine The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E Howard Studies, as well as numerous essays on REH.

Jay Zetterberg: Swedish Game Designer, Entertainment VP in charge of licensing at Cabinet Entertainment.

Roy Thomas: Guest of Honor, comic book author, Marvel Editor in Chief under Stan Lee. Worked on Conan from 1970-1980 and again from 1994-1996. Co-created many other Marvel characters such as Vision, Wolverine, Ultron, Valkyrie, Red Sonja, Morbius, and Ghost Rider. Uncredited screen writing work on Conan the Barbarian, co-credited story on Conan the Destroyer. Author of the three volume set Barbarian Life: A Literary Biography of Conan the Barbarian, as well as many essays.

Patrice Louinet: French, author of The Robert E Howard Guide and numerous essays on REH and his books as well as French adaptations of the comic book.

Fred Blosser: REH/Conan historian, published numerous non-fiction books and essays on REH's writings.
 
These are my notes from the panel that I fleshed out with last names and some dates. It's mostly all paraphrased from what the speakers said.  There are some instances where the exact phrasing was important and those are noted with quotation marks.

Roy:  Readers wrote to Marvel requesting comic book adaptations of other books--LOTR, Doc Savage, Tarzan as well as REH books.  I had  bought a few  of the Conan paperback editions but never really read any of the books, just a couple of pages of the first story in 1969, because I loved the Frank Frazetta covers. Kull was the first character that was adapted.  I wrote to Len Wein who had the rights at that time.  Stan Lee offered $150 an issue, no royalties. I was embarrassed to offer so little for the intellectual property. I felt that was a "paltry sum", so I upped to $200 for Conan; I figured if they didn't sell well, Stan would take it out of my salary.  Stan Lee didn’t know anything about S&S genre so he left me alone to work on it with very little oversight.

I really wanted to get John Buscema to do the art, but I couldn't afford him at the time, so my second choice was Gil Kane, but Stan wouldn't pay for him either, so he got Barry Smith, who was a newbie. I didn't want to change REH more than I needed to but I still had to appeal to Marvel readers. Plus we still had to get Comic Code Authority approval. There were a bunch of rules like you couldn't show exit wounds. Roy said, "if I'd done it 20 years later", after Marvel stopped adhering to the CCA, "I’d have done it differently."  "We did everything we could to subvert the CCA". Fairly early on we took off his horned helmet and gave away his medallion.  Eventually we realized he didn’t need a costume anymore.  “He was naked but for a loincloth.”  Roy made sure REH’s name was on the book, which was something that hadn't been done before for other Intellectual Property. 

The first seven issues of  Conan the Barbarian each sold less than the previous one, so Stan suggested to put humans on the cover, the previous ones had animals on the cover.  So the eighth issue had a human on the cover and that one sold more than the last one.  The next issue also sold more than the last one and Conan was up and running. It wasn't long before we could afford Gil Kane, and finally John Buscema. Conan was the most popular book in the mid 1970’s. For the next 20 years, humans were on the cover, and Conan was never in danger of being cancelled.
 
Fred:  Roy contacted me, in 1971, looking for story plots, for Conan the Barbarian.   In 1974 I got a letter from Roy who was starting a new magazine under the Marvel imprint of Curtis Magazines, to not just attract comic book fans, but to introduce them to the books with background articles etc.. which was Savage Sword of Conan, published in 1974, for which I finished two of REH’s unfinished stories and wrote an original that was a sequel to an original REH. (There will be more about Curtis Magazines and Savage Sword of Conan in the next panel.) My favorite book is King Kull, which took a secondary character in terms of reader interest and make him popular, with artwork by John Severin, about the time when Kull lost the throne and became a wanderer.  Kull, the panelists agreed, is an underappreciated book. Esp. the John Bolton ones. ​

Roy: Luckily others--L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter--had already pieced together the timeline of Conan’s life for the ACE paperbacks released in the 1960's, so it was easier for me to piece together stories. Roy feels that, "If you don’t like it, it’s exploiting, if you like it, it’s extended." I liked writing the Conan comics, but I don't like reading them. I quit writing Conan for 10 years when I went to DC, so I didn’t read them. When I went back to Marvel, and started writing Conan again, I had to go back and buy the 10 years worth of comics to catch up to where the character was now.

Mark: My favorite book is Conan #37 "Curse of the Golden Skull" with Neal Adams guest starring. "It wasn’t supposed to be in color", says Roy.  "It was supposed to be B&W". My other favorite book is Black Colossus. I loved the art, and the inking.

Roy on working with Neal Adams on "Curse of the Golden Skull": Neal drew an "obscene snail". I used the character Rotath and it became the best selling issue of all time, because there was a paper strike, everything went on sale and stayed on sale because they weren’t printing any more new issues.  For DC it was Kirby’s Sandman which sold great but it was supposed to be a one shot, so they ordered a second issue which didn’t sell.  ”Neal Adams was a pain in the ass to work with but his great art made it almost worth working with him… almost.”

Fred: I didn’t like any of the 80’s Conan comics because Roy had left Marvel and wasn't doing them anymore.  Eclipse Comics did an adaptation of Pigeons from Hell in 1988. It was Scott Hampton’s passion project.  I liked that run. Marvel had an enormous influence with Conan, making the movies happen, and the video games in late 80’s. 

 Roy: Stan wanted to start more horror books b/c they were selling a lot at DC. Instead they did some Lovecraft adaptations, Cthulhu stories, Harlan Ellison, more Howard. I thought if they like Conan, they’d like these stories too. My Conan stuff was still coming out in the early 80’s even after Ient to DC. Conan comics sold well throughout the early 1980's due to the movies popularity but then tanked. I had hired the artists originally and wasn’t overmanaged by Stan, but when I came back in the 90’s, I wasn’t able to choose my artists and had to get approval for things, so I wasn’t happy being micromanaged, and I quit again after two years. Marvel dropped Conan after that. 

Jay: Marvel was paying a ridiculously low, one time, flat fee per comic for the intellectual property.  Marvel was not smart to drop Conan, because later, they had to buy it back.
​
Patrice: In 1980, Roy did a comic book version of Almuric with art by Tim Conrad, for Epic illustrated, an adult Marvel imprint, not subject to the Comics Code Authority.  Almuric was originally published posthumously in Weird Tales in serialized form.  When Howard died, the first half was finished, but the second half was just a first draft and unfinished. Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, pieced them together and finished the story. At that point Marvel had the rights to sell it as a movie and it was shopped around. However, movie studio executives told them that “Tim Conrad can’t draw women” so we don’t want to buy your movie.  In 1986 Epic Illustrated was shut down due to it being too expensive to run.  The last issue was #34; in it was Death of a Legend, as tribute to REH, story by Roy and pencils and inking by Sandy Plunkett. There was no color. It was about REH’s life and death. 

Jay: I'm a little young to remember Bronze Age comics, and when I was growing up, there weren't any comics in Sweden at the time. Red Nails is my favorite. Dark Horse ran six Conan series from 2004-16.  My favorite Conan was the first series by Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord, who brought the title back from the dead. The art was only pencils and color, no inking.  It had a “weird non-focus on Conan’s face so that you can imagine what he looks like yourself.”  
 
Dark Horse published ten issues of Robert E. Howard's Savage Sword. It featured more of REH's characters besides just Conan: Kull, Dark Agnes, Solomon Kane,  Bran Mak Morn, Sailor Steve Costigan. When Marvel got the rights back in 2018 it had to fight tooth and nail to get Dark Horse to reissue the series in a three volume anthology. ​

Fred: Bob McLain, founder of Pulp Hero Press, had already published my book Savage Scrolls Vol 1: Scholarship from the Hyborian Age in 2017 in both paperback and e-book formats.  This book was purely literary criticism. Bob wanted to start a new line of sword and sorcery books and wanted to include my fiction.  It was to be called Savage Scrolls, after my previously published book, and was a collection of eight short stories in the sword and sorcery genre.  Volume One was released in 2020, Volume Two is already in the works, and there are plans for a third and fourth installment.

Patrice: I took a long rest after my PhD dissertation on REH was published in 1990.  Then I wrote the English translation of his dissertation.  Since then I have written numerous things for Howard Foundation Press.

Roy I wrote a lot of introductions to books that were translated into Spanish but I didn’t keep the original articles. Later I was contacted because (someone, didn't catch the name) wanted to reprint my essays in English, I had to track down the Spanish copies and have them re-translated back into English. I wrote a three volume exploration of my work on Conan called Barbarian Life. It reads like a director's commentary on the first 100 comics of Conan. “I don’t think I’ve done REH justice.  I’m always aware that this is the comic book version.”  

It was such a special experience to be able to tour the home with one or more docents in every room who could tell you all about each piece and answer any questions you might have.  The first room on the right of the entrance is the parlour.  There was a glassed in book case that contained all of Dr. Howard's books.  Not one medical book, they were mostly religious texts.  Another bookcase contained the remaining 68 volumes of the original 300+ of REH's books which had been donated to the Howard Payne College Library upon his death. They were returned to the Museum in 2012. The parlour connected with the dining room which had an Art Noveau sculpture of Cleopatra that REH had purchased on a trip to New Orleans with his parents when he was 13. On the table were copies of school papers with his teacher's corrections and comments in the margins.  The next room was the kitchen, then Robert's room, which was originally a sleeping porch that they had enclosed. It was roped off so that you couldn't go in there, but it was very narrow and full of furniture, a dresser, a twin bed, a chest, his writing desk and stool. As big a man as he was it's amazing that he fit in there. There was a window between Robert's room and his parents. The last room was his parents' bedroom which had windows in every wall.  His mother had tuberculosis and the windows were left open all the time to give her more air circulation.  Dr. Howard lived there eight more years after his wife and son's deaths until he died too.  Later owners added onto the house by adding an inside bathroom on the right side of the hallway after the kitchen and another bedroom on the left side after Robert's room.  That room is where the gift shop is located. The gift shop only takes cash, but there's an ATM a block away in the 7-11.  We bought matching T-shirts for $15 each.  The gift shop also has an amazing array of free items, like photocopies of his birth certificate, funeral invoice, directions to his grave, bookmarks,  etc...

The video was made by the REH Foundation and highlights many of the small objects in the house.  It is narrated by Rusty Burke.

The silent auction began an hour before the banquet.  I did not expect there to be hundreds of items there. I bid on three items and won two.  Issue #1 and #2 of Valeria and Issue #3 of Conan.  They were all reprints, but I'm Ok with that.  Rob bid on a lot of things and won most of them, including a copy of "Red Nails".  He also won a 2007 Vanguard calendar
"Masters of Fantastic Art" for me. We ended up paying $17 for 9 items. All the money goes to the REH Foundation to fund maintenance on the house.

The banquet was the only thing that we had to pay for tickets for.  It was $15 a seat and they served a pretty mean chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, and green beans.  For dessert there was peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream.  We sat with a daddy/daughter duo from Utah.  He had taken his son to Howard Days in 2019, and was supposed to take his 12 year old daughter, Emma, last year but it didn't happen due to the pandemic.  So this year was her first time.  The other two gentlemen at our table were friends from Houston that had been coming for several years.  The make up of the gathering was the same as at a Rush concert, it was a real sausage fest. There were 165 attendees and I counted 24 women, not including the docents: four daughters, and the rest were wives like me.  I don't think there were any unaccompanied females all weekend. I made the joke that at least I shouldn't have to queue for the bathroom all weekend, but I was wrong.

Our Guest of Honor, Roy Thomas, spoke about his career in making Conan Comics for Marvel.  It was basically a rehash of what he said in the panel that afternoon, but longer and more focused on his work. He mentioned how his then girlfriend, Danette, now his wife, created the DC Conan knockoff, Arak, Son of Thunder, a title she created but didn't get story writing credit for until issue #12. Dann was also the model for the character Danette in the What if? story where Conan time travels to present day New York.

​The button below will take you to the recording of his keynote speech.

Table favors and program.

Guest of Honor: Roy Thomas, I didn't get the moderator's name.

​Roy is originally from Jackson, Missouri.  He said it was a very small town.  His first comic experience was as a fan boy. Roy grew up reading All Star Comics, he loved JSA, the forerunner of Justice League.  His mom used to read them to him until he learned to read before first grade. There was no Kindergarten back then, there was also no 12th grade, and you only went to 11th grade if you were going to college. "The father of comic book fandom" Jerry Bails (who also loved JSA and would soon become Roy's BFF)  had recently started up a correspondence with Gardner Cooper Fox and had bought some of his original JSA books from him in 1959. Roy had also written to Gardner also asking about JSA books and Gardner gave him Jerry's name and address.  They struck up an immediate and prolific correspondence about their love for Golden Age comics. On a later trip to New York, Jerry stopped by the DC office and saw a syfy fanzine called "Xero", which was published by Dick Lupoff  from 1960-63.  (Dick's book about this time period is called All in Color for a Dime and was published in 1970. ) Jerry immediately had the idea to make a fanzine about Golden Age comic books and enlisted Roy as co-editor. It was called "Alter-Ego",  and it was the first superhero fanzine running for 10 issues from 1961-69.

Roy graduated with his BA in Education in 1961 and taught high school English in St. Louis for a time afterward.  He got a fellowship from Scottish Rite to attend George Washington University in D.C. and had accepted an Assistant Editor job on Superman for DC in 1965, requiring him to quit his teaching job and move to New York.   He worked for DC and attended GWU for approximately two weeks when he saw an advertisement in the NY Times that Marvel was hiring writers.  Roy was given a writer’s test  which was four pages of Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four art that he had to fill in all the speech bubbles and narration blocks. Roy got a call and was asked to have a lunch meeting with Stan the next day. Stan offered him the job 15 minutes after they met but never told him what he thought about his writers' test. Roy didn't hesitate to quit his fellowship and his DC job and make the move.*see footnote for the whole story. 

When Roy first met John Romita Sr.  in 1965,  John was drawing DC romance comics,  but he'd gotten his start drawing Captain America in 1954.  Roy knew that he’d done Capt. America, which surprised John because no one else remembered him from that. Roy was hired in the first wave of college-educated comics creators like Denny O'Neil, who was hired just a few weeks after Roy.  Stan liked to hire college people, because he wasn’t able to go to college himself. Stan was 18 years older than Roy and at the time was both editing and writing. Characters that Roy co-created while at Marvel were X-Men--Wolverine, Havok, Banshee, Sunfire with Len Wein; Avengers--Vision, Ultron, Carol Danvers, Valkyrie; REH--Conan, Red Sonja, Kull; as well as Luke Cage, and Ghostrider.  Stan had been working under the publisher Martin Goodman who he liked very much. However, in 1972, Martin quit publishing the comics and gave the job to his son Chip, who Stan did not like working under.  Stan managed to become publisher of the comics division and at that point divided the company into a triumvirate. Roy became the Story Editor,  John Verpoorten was the Production Manager, and Frank Giacoia  was the Assistant Art Director, because even though Stan couldn't draw, he wanted the title of Art Director for himself. Roy said about Frank, that he had seen Gunga Din when he was 15 and it was his favorite movie.  Frank would watch Gunga Din while he was inking, usually Jack Kirby's Captain America.  Roy said that Frank probably watched that movie 50 times while they were working together.. 

Roy wasn't happy with this new arrangement and was thinking of quitting and going back to DC, just a few weeks after his promotion.  A friend advised him to stay, saying that everything would change and it did. Right after that, Stan made Roy Editor in Chief and kicked Frank back down to Artist.  After 2+ years as Editor in Chief, Roy was sort of fired in 1974 or sorta quit, depending on who is telling the story. Stan had decided that Roy wasn’t a team player, and Roy said he was a great team player if he was the captain of the team.  Roy had written a memo to Stan about some things he felt should change and Stan said that the memo should be Roy's resignation as Editor in Chief. Stan promoted Len Wein and Marv Wolfman to Co-Editors.  Roy didn’t want to work under them even though he had hired them.  Roy didn’t like being in charge of everyone, but he also didn't want to be just a writer. So Roy drew up his own unique contract allowing him to write and also be his own editor, which Stan agreed to,  so basically Roy was free-lancing for Marvel from 1974-1980.   

Towards the end of the 1970's Stan and Roy had moved from New York to California.  Roy is credited with the idea to adapt Star Wars into a comic book series which editor Jim Shooter (Editor in Chief from 1978-1987) said kept Marvel from going bankrupt in the 1980's. Roy said that at the time, Shooter was doing a great job, getting the creatives treated with more respect, getting the books out on time, but that after he fixed all of Marvel's administrative problems, he started trying to "fix" things he saw as creative problems, and that heavy-handed, my way or he highway attitude, ran off a lot of talent, including Roy.

In 1981 Roy signed an exclusive three year deal with DC after a contract dispute with Shooter. While at DC, Roy created Star Girl with his wife, Dann. Dann also created Arak ,Son of Thunder but didn't get story writing credit till issue #12. Roy ended up hating working for DC and after his contract was up, he (and Dann) went back to Marvel. Stan invited him back to be Editor in Chief once more after having gone through six other editors since Roy quit the first time.  

James Warren was the first publisher to get into black and white magazine of comics in 1958 with Famous Monsters of Filmland.  Roy said in another interview, "I became a buyer of the Warren mags with Famous Monsters of Filmland #1 in 1958, which I bought uptown over my lunch hour and took to my senior English class... to the dismay of my teacher.  I was her top student, and she let it be known that she was disappointed in me dragging around this magazine with a picture of a man in a Frankenstein mask and a--well, I don't know how she described the woman on the cover.  I made sure I kept it under my desk through the whole class, so it wouldn't get confiscated."  FMOF did really well and gave rise to more black and white horror titles like Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella, which ran from 1959-1983. At some point prior to the mid 1970's  James Warren offered Stan a membership at the Friar’s Club if he wouldn’t do any B&W comics that would compete with his own titles. Stan agreed, joined the Friar's Club and then pushed Goodman at Marvel to get into the B&W comics business. Goodman developed an imprint of Marvel, called Curtis Magazines. Because this new format was a magazine and not a comic, it didn't have to adhere to the CCA so more creators wanted to work on it.  It featured more adult content like profanity, nudity, and violence  and therefore drew a more adult audience. Curtis Magazines only ran from 1971-75 but in those four years it published 31 new titles, among them horror comics such as Dracula Lives, The Haunt of Horror, Master of Terror, Monster Madness, Tales of the Zombie, and Vampire Tales which were competing with Warren's  Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella titles for a share of the market.  Although the Curtis horror titles were short lived, The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Planet of the Apes, and Doc Savage ran a long time and did very well. Savage Sword of Conan was by far the most successful of all of these titles.  Roy was the editor and chief writer for the first 60 issues. The SSOC series was the longest running Conan title and ran from 1974-1995.

Questions:
What's the deal with Morbius? The CCA had previously forbidden the use of vampires and werewolves, but by 1971, it was time to update the code.  They knew readership wasn’t 8-9 years old anymore. The updated code said it was all right to use vampires, werewolves etc in “high caliber works of art:” like Dracula, Frankenstein, etc…   At that time Stan needed Roy to  take over writing Fantastic Four or Spiderman. Roy wanted to do FF, but Stan made him do Spiderman. Stan made him put in a vampire. Roy thought that was stupid but complied. Roy wanted to make the vampire character a super villain, but not Dracula. Roy decided he had a blood disease that made him drink blood.  Roy created Morbius the Living Vampire with Bill Kane. Roy wrote two stories about Morbius and then other people took it over.  Jared Leto called him and is doing a movie adaptation of it, which is coming out in 2022.
 
Talk about your work on Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer.  Roy was an uncredited consultant on the first movie. Ed Pressman, the producer, paid Roy $10,000 for 2 days of work and then Roy never heard from him again. Later Ed called him up out of the blue, after Roy had written the screenplay for Fire and Ice with Gerry Conway. The Conan movie was fixing to come out finally, after about six years of being held up in Hollywood red-tape.  Ed said, "BTW, you remember that 10 grand I paid you ? Dino de Laurentiis is going to repay me all the money I paid for the first movie. I have a check here for 10 grand but it’s made out to you."  Roy said he'd endorse it and 5 minutes later his doorbell rang and a messenger was there with the check waiting for Roy's signature.

Roy co-wrote the screenplay for the second movie with Gerry Conway. Roy said that Conan the Destroyer was a train wreck. Everything was getting cheaper, and not in a good way.  There was less budget money. The first movie was made in Spain, the second in Mexico. Roy and Gerry wrote five drafts. At the time Roy was building a home in San Pedro, and since he got paid for every draft, he kept adding to the house. Dino hired Roger Donaldson to direct Destroyer. Roy and Gerry gave Roger the draft, told him to show it to Dino, and couple days later, the movie is going forward, but without Donaldson as director. Dino pulled Roger off the Conan movie to do Mutiny on the Bounty instead.  Dino got a new director, Richard Fliescher, but Roy and Gerry felt he was just going through the motions.  Roy gave Richard a Conan comic book, to give him a better idea of what they were going for. Gerry and Roy wanted to bring Valeria back to life. Dino like that idea and kept it but got rid of Roy and Gerry and replaced them with Stanley Mann.  The only thing that got filmed as Roy and Gerry wrote it was the introduction of Zula.

Roy and Gerry were responsible for getting Grace Jones her role as Zula. In the Conan comic books there was a Black male character named Zula with Mokawk hair. He became a female warrior for the movie because although they didn't have a finished script yet they had to hire the main cast.  The casting director wanted to get an Asian actress for the role.  Gerry said he and Roy were thinking of Grace Jones.  So that’s how she got cast. Director Dino de Laurentiis had told Roy and Gerry that he didn't want any rats, priests, or leeches, in his movie. The translator had called them blood suckers, so Roy and Gerry thought he meant vampires. Roy said it was depressing working with Dino and then he fired them. The Writers Guild of America looked at all the drafts and compared them to decide who would get the writing credit.  The decision was that the credits should read, "Story by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, Screenplay by Stanley Mann". The film was already in the can so Roy and Gerry were offered $5,000 to forego the screen credit so they wouldn’t have to redo them, but they said no to the money to give the finger to Dino, and made him redo the credits to include them.

*Here's the excerpt on the Marvel Writer's Test from a conversation between Roy and Stan in May, 1998 that was published in Comic Book Artist #2.  I also included the first four of the Jack Kirby pages from Fantastic Four Annual #2 as an example of the Writer's Test.

Roy: Now—about the famous "Marvel Writer's Test": Sol Brodksy and Flo Steinberg told me that you put an ad for writers in the New York Times, and had hundreds of people applying.
Stan: It's news to me, but it sounds like something we might have done.
Roy: Did you have to read a lot of the tests?
Stan: I probably gave them to somebody else to read. I really don't remember.
Roy: The reason I'm curious is that supposedly I was hired on the basis of taking this writer's test while I was working at DC.
Stan: Then I must have been reading them.
Roy: We met the next day after I turned it in. You offered me a job a few minutes later, but you never referred to the test then or at any other time, so I never knew if you actually read it or if I was hired because I was already working for Mort Weisinger over at DC. [laughs]
Stan: I think I liked your personality.
Roy: It was always strange to me: I went in there expecting to discuss this writing test and figured that I must have passed—but you never mentioned it! And I'm still waiting!
Stan: [laughs] Maybe that's the case, Roy. I just don't remember.
Roy: We're actually going to print one page of that test in Comic Book Artist. The test was four Jack Kirby pages from Fantastic Four Annual #2.
Stan: Oh! When I wanted people to put dialogue over the pictures? That was a good idea!
Roy: You had Sol or someone take out the dialogue. It was just black-and-white. Other people like Denny O'Neil and Gary Friedrich took it. But soon afterwards we stopped using it.
Stan: That was a clever idea! I'm proud of me! [laughs] You know, I probably did read yours and most of the others, because I know I hate to read scripts, but if it was just pictures with dialogue balloons, I could have read that very quickly, and chances are that I did read them all. And chances are that I'm a lousy judge, so I probably liked yours! [laughs]

Panelists are all from Cabinet Entertainment, which now owns all of the Conan intellectual property.

Fred Malmberg is the Founder of Swedish toy company, Target Games (table top and RPG games) and CEO of Paradox Entertainment, which was started by Fred to adapt all of the Target games into video games. Paradox Entertainment bought the intellectual rights to Conan before Paradox was split into different companies but Fred retained control over the video game segment as well as the rights to Conan intellectual property, Fred moved his company to LA to be closer to Hollywood and to pursue film and tv licensing opportunities. Paradox was later bought out by Cabinet Entertainment in 2015, Fred said that Conan is more popular in Europe than the US. 95% of fans live there and they have more people) Very popular in Norway and they think like Conan.  Turkish people believe Conan is Sumerian.    

Charles "Steve" Booth is the American CEO of Cabinet Entertainment which owns the intellectual property of Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane, among others, and licenses it for film and television production. They were responsible for the 2009 Kull the Conqueror with Kevin Sorbo, as well as the 2011 Conan reboot with Jason Momoa. It also creates table top games, video games, toys, collectibles, apparel, and other related merchandise of their intellectual property.  Cabinet Entertainment donates both money and products to the continuing support of the REH Museum. the REH Foundation, and Howard Days.

Jay Zetterberg is also Swedish.  Jay started out at Cabinet being in charge of the licensing for the comics division. Jay is currently in charge of all creative licensing approvals for everything that Cabinet owns, Jay was a member of Friday's panel as well, as his particular area of expertise is Conan comics.

Background on the REH Intellectual Property and what's being done with it

Books:
Here's a short publication history of REH works :
Gnome Press gathered all the known REH material at the time and published it in seven volumes in hardback between 1950-1957. Lancer/Ace published twelve volumes of Conan stories in paperback between 1967 and 1977 but they were heavily edited by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter and not all of it was original Howard material.  However, with fantastical cover art by Frank Frazetta they caught the popular imaginations and sold very well. Donald M Grant published eleven illustrated volumes of REH's original Conan stories from 1974-89.  Berkley published three volumes also of REH Conan stories in 1977. Bantam continued in the Lancer/Ace tradition of publishing seven more non-REH Conan stories from 1978-82. Tor published 43 volumes of new, not REH Conan stories from 1982-2003, as well as re-issuing all the Bantam volumes, plus three omnibuses. Del Rey published three illustrated volumes called Conan of Cimmeria between 2003 and 2005 that included notes, rough drafts, and manuscripts,

The REH Foundation Press is currently continuing the work that Del Rey started by bringing Conan stories back to their original form.  The REH Foundation acquired all REH publishing rights in 2007 for first edition print runs of REH's letters, poems, fiction, and biography. They have since published all of REH's work in its original, unedited, unexpurgated form. 

Fred Copyright has a time limit everywhere but it is different between countries and copyright laws vary.  All Howard stories are copyrighted for 70 years in most countries, so all of them are now in public domain. Cabinet currently  has ten federal lawsuits  in litigation for copyright infringement.  Here's an example of copyright infringement.  Anyone can publish "The Tower of the Elephant" by REH, however, if they were to publish a story as "Conan and the Tower of the Elephant, that would be a copyright infringement because Cabinet owns the intellectual property of the Conan character.

Steve: Perilous Worlds is a new imprint of Cabinet Entertainment that publishes new Science Fiction and Fantasy titles set in the IP worlds of REH and others.

Comic Books
Jay: Comic Book rights were held by Marvel from 1970-2000 and then Dark Horse from 2000-2018, and now the rights are back at Marvel.  Whatever new Conan stuff that Marvel invents, Cabinet owns it. Including arms and armor, by Museum Replicas. We love to work with new creators and we very seldom take a license back from a licensee. 

• Savage Avengers, had Conan teaming up with other Marvel characters to fight the bad guys from the Hyborian Age.  The preview was issued for Free Comic Book Day in 2019. 
• The first issue of Dark Agnes was published in Feb, 2020, but the title got cancelled due to Covid.  They are now working on getting out more issues.
• Solomon Kane comic three issues are still on hold due to Covid. 
• Conan: Serpent War, four issue mini series about Conan , Solomon Kane, Dark Agnes, and others set in Howard’s House, published 2019-2020.
• They Just made a deal with Titan books editor, Steve Saddle who was formerly an editor at Del Rey. The first Conan ebook will come out in spring 2022, the print edition will  come out later in the fall of 2022.  

Games:
Fred was into war games as a kid. He brought role playing games to Sweden. His favorite game was Call of Cthulhu the tabletop game released in 1981.  Cabinet games must be kid friendly, appealing to existing fans, and not offensive to a 15 yr old girl, because gamers skew younger than the average Conan fan plus they skew female these days.  

• Conan, a board game, was released in 2016. You can play as Conan, Valeria, Hadrathus, Shevatas, or Belit.  1-5 player game. 
• Conan Exiles is a video game that was released in 2017 and has been adding new downloadable content ever since, expanding the world of the game. Your character starts naked chained to a tree and Conan rescues you.  So you get to pick the gender and race of your character and then design their look, including their skin color, hair color, and eye color. The male designers had made a slider so that you could change the breast size of the female characters.  The lone female designer saw that so she made  a slider option for changing the penis size of the male characters.  She said it was only fair. I found out when we got home from a friend (who owns the game and bought it for that very reason) that the penis slider option is not available in the games made for the US market due to censorship by the ESRB.
• Serpent’s Bluff card game from the Marvel series, Gems of the Gambler. It’s the card game that Conan plays in the story.  A free print and play pdf was released in 2019,
• Conan Chop Chop: a kids video games that looks a lot like the Lego games. for 1-4 players. It just came out earlier this year.
• Conan the Cimmerian: Tower of the Elephant game  just came out this month after a successful Kickstarter campaign  It has 4 minis.  We got to see it first before they released it to the public. They brought several of them to donate to the museum's gift shop. We bought it but haven't played it yet.  See photos below.
• Red Nails, 2nd prototype which is being beta tested.
• Conan the Barbarian the movie game.  Straight to retail, they already have a designer. Audience is nostalgic 45 year old parent (dad)  playing with his kids. ​

Every year after the BBQ, REH's poem, "The Cimmerian" is read in multiple languages. I didn't get everyone's name, from right to left: Bill Cavalier (author and MC), Mark Finn (author) read in English, Patrice Louinet (author) read in French, Barbara Baum (author) is from Venezuela and read in Spanish, Mrs. Cavalier read in German,  the next man read in Italian, and the young man who is from New York read in Swedish. Each person read one stanza.  After the poem concluded, then it was open mic for anyone else who wanted to read something. We listened to a couple of other pieces but there was no shade in the front of the house and it was 102 degrees, so we went on back to the hotel.  Check out the guy in front in his Conan helmet.  That was the lone bit of cosplaying the entire weekend.  Props to him because his brain must have been roasting in there.

Although his home is in Cross Plains, the family was actually buried in Brownwood. The cemetery is easy to find plus REH's grave is pinpointed on Google maps in case you didn't pick up the directions at the gift shop.  The headstone is in almost the exact middle of cemetery  and with the addition of the historical marker and the permanent shade structure, you really can't miss it. We were not surprised to see that people had left offerings on the grave: Shiner beer, candles, and a novel.  On the front of the stone, someone left a tiny cross made of tinfoil.

Novalyne Price met REH while she was teaching at Cross Plains High School.  She was introduced to him by a mutual friend. Novalyne pursued a friendship with Bob because he was getting his stories published and although she wanted to be a writer, she hadn't had much success in that area yet. They were close friends/romantically involved the last three years of his life.  She wrote the two memoirs that the film is based on.  She is buried in Clear Creek Cemetery in Bangs, TX, not far from Brownwood, alongside her husband William Ellis.

If you read the trivia on the IMDB and Wikipedia pages, you'll find out that the movie was made in my hometown of Bastrop, and surrounding areas of Rockne, Bartlett, and Austin. The Howard home in the film is in Bastrop  at 1310 Hill Street, as is the 1832 Tavern, at 809 Main Street, where Novalyne and Bob go to get a drink.

We have wanted to do a Harry Potter cosplay for a long time now.  I even went so far as to order three sets of Gryffindor robes for the kids two years ago.  Rob and I were going to be Snape and McGonagall or Hagrid and Professor Trelawny, but it just never manifested.  Halloween 2019 was difficult with the death of Rob's dad.  I didn't make anything for anyone.  We pulled out the Gryffindor robes at the last minute for Sarah so she could go trick or treating and found out that the Small we ordered was entirely too small and wouldn't fit her anymore.  She wore one of the Larges that we bought the boys and we gave the Small one away. 

When we chose Puffs for our second slot, I donated the Gryffindor robes to the cause of the show. While watching the show, which was super cute and fun, it occurred to me that we could do a HP photoshoot and send it out for Christmas cards.  The first idea was a Slytherin family photo with Rob as Voldemort, me as Bellatrix, Sarah as Malfoy, Sylvan as Crabbe, and Seth as Goyle. The school uniforms fit the kids perfectly, which was a lucky coincidence with the casting. Voldemort's robes were one size fits all.  The only thing I had to do was come up with a new Bellatrix costume since I'm twice as big as the actress who played that character in Puffs. I chose a black corset, a long sleeved net shirt, and a ruffled black skirt with a cape.

The family showed up at 1:00 and it was a tight schedule to get everyone dressed with wigs and makeup in the Ghosts costumes.  We had to do those first because Rob had to shave afterwards to be Voldemort.  I really needed another hour to do a better job with the wigs and makeup, but as it was literally the shortest day of the year, hurrying had to happen or we would lose the light.

 Krista took a ton of photos, which are really great.  The only problems were the girls' wigs weren't on very well and you can see our hairline in the close ups. Also, there's a reason I'm not an actress.  I don't take great photos, especially when I'm supposed to be cruel like Bellatrix or haughty like the Grey Lady.  However, all things considered, the photoshoot was a rousing success.  We celebrated with pizza and Christmas tv shows back at our house.

Did I mention that Krista is also great wit Photoshop?  Check out the awesome Dark Mark and Hogwarts castle she gave us. She also managed to make Rob's arms white after I did his Voldemort makeup on his face and neglected to do his arms as well.  He also forgot to take off his Fitbit, so she got rid of that too.

I put this little playlist together while waiting for Tristan and Isolde to upload to you tube tonight.  It started at 3pm and still hasn't finished uploading and it's after 11 pm. But here's a bunch of fun Spooky Season historyical/vintage/cosplay/sewing videos. Enjoy!

https://www.mclennancostume.com/blog/squirrel-girl 

As you may recall two years ago I started these cosplays.  I finished mine but was never happy with the tail.  I got stuck on Dr. Doom's armor, because it got ruined when I tried to do all the spray painting when it was both too hot and too humid. The final straw was when I ruined the thermoplastic mask.  Luckily, all things eventually work out and I used the ruined Dr. Doom mask for Rob's Swamp Thing mask, for which it worked perfectly. You can click on the above link to read all about it.

I took Darlisha's advice and had Rob sand all the old paint off of the armor pieces from two years ago.  I then repainted them in cooler weather.  Two coats of the hammered silver paint.  Then I went back in with flat black acrylic and did some antiquing. Once that dried, I did a clear coat of protective satin gloss.

I couldn't find the two shin pieces so I'm having to remake those with the new helmet. The shin pieces were easy to recreate.  The helmet gave me a lot of trouble. The foam I bought from Joanne's back in May was too thick, and didn't want to be heat formed nearly as well as the previous stuff. The pieces didn't fit together as well as I'd hoped either so there's quite of bit of hot glue showing on the face. It was really cold outside yesterday so I was doing the heat gun part inside the house and I was using a styrofoam head to form the EVA foam on top of.  And yes I was fully aware of how toxic styro is when melted.  However it didn't occur to me that I could melt styro that was underneath the foam.  I started smelling something so I picked up the top piece that I had been working on and underneath the head was all melted in on itself. YIKES!  I took the whole thing outside, put the styro head in the trash and then ran around opening all the doors and windows and googling inhaled poison info. We're fine.

I got the first coat of plastidip on at 6:00 and waited 30 minutes in between all the other coats of plastidip, grey primer, and hammered silver.  I brought the pieces in for the night at 9:30.  And yes, I did most of the painting in the dark under the porch light with a flashlight.  I had the brilliant idea to attach most of the pieces to each other with long brads but Office Depot closed at 7 and doesn't open again until 10 am today, so I'm doing the antiquing this morning and the clear coats before I send Rob out on that errand.

We started putting all the armor together at 11 and I worked on it till noon. We only got the upper body put together in time for the costume contest at Skellington.  That's OK because we won anyway.  There were only three entrants in the couples category, us, Sarah and Katryna, and another married couple who were Aragon type rangers.  They had bought their pieces from Pyramid Collection, I know because I get their catalogue and ordered that same belt for a show. Anyway, we won, and the girls came in second.

 So, I gained 35 pounds during the pandemic, so none of my Squirrel Girl costume pieces still fit, except the jacket.  Also, I found new boots that are better than the ones I had last time.  I ordered new things from Amazon because I just didn't have time to build things from scratch.  I bought grey leggings brown shorts, a brown corset, a new better looking wig, and a much smaller and lighter squirrel tail.

The shorts are really long, so I cut them down to a 1" inseam and then sewed fur trim around the hem. I washed the fur trim to make it match the fur around my jacket and the boots.

Sarah and her friend Katryna are planning a couples cosplay for Halloween this year. Since all the cons and Renfaires got cancelled this year I'm indulging their every wish.

Sarah wants to be this character from Avatar: The Last Airbender with her friend Katryna. Here's what I bought from Amazon in the gallery below.
​Total cost: $115.85

Everything fit except the skirt was about 3" too big in the waist. I'm going to remove the waist band and then take off about 5" from the top to shorten the length without sacrificing the fullness at the hem. Then I have to make the three tabs that hang down from the waist and do the trim on the skirt. The sew it all back together with a smaller waistband. Also I have to make the red choker for the pendant to be sewn on. And she wants me to dye her hair brown.

I made the tabs on Thursday and bought some brown satin blanket binding for the trim.  I got that sewn on Friday and then did the skirt trim out of bias binding I made from a darker brown fabric.  I reused the old waistband that I'd cut off, cut it down three inches and gathered the skirt and put the waistband back on.  I did a fitting Friday night and will attach the tabs Saturday.  I also made her a belt out of an old brown strap that was missing its buckle and the new alligator buckle I wasn't using for Sylvan's costume.

Katryna wants to be this character from the spin-off show. Here's everthing I bought from Amazon in the gallery below.
Total cost: $84.81

Everything fit very well except the pants were about 3" to big in the waist.  I'm going to dye the shirt a darker blue and make the brown fur thing around her waist. Also we need to cut the fingers off of the gloves. So when I dyed the shirt, it came out great, but two of the metal frog closures came off and a third was about to come off.  I resewed  the loose one, then reattached one of them but when I turned around to get the other one it had disappeared.  I looked for an hour and still couldn't find  it so I gave up and ordered more in silver which will match her belt.  so now I'm going to have to remove all 5 of them and then sew the new ones on. The silver ones showed up Friday night.  I had bought some white piping and silver elastic Friday morning and sewed that on too, and Friday night I sewed the silver frogs on.  It is all done and looks great.