In Howard’s essay about the Hyborian Age, I think islands east of Khitaï are mentioned. But I don’t remember if they’re named Yamataï or if the name was given by another author.
If I can share my very unpopular opinion about this…
I think sticking to the only lore is a bad thing, it should fit in the game I agree but sticking to the content than can’t be renewed can’t be a good thing.
I think Howard would be glad we continue working on his creation.
Yamatai-koku or Yamato-koku 1st century – c. 3rd century is the Sino-Japanese name of an ancient country in Japan during the late Yayoi period c. BC 1,000 – c. 300 CE. The Chinese text
Records of the Three Kingdoms first recorded as Yamatai guo or Yemayi guo as the domain of Priest-Queen Himiko (died c. 248 CE). Generations of Japanese historians, linguists, and archeologists have debated where Yamatai-koku was located and whether it was related to the later Yamato.
It looks like Marvel Comics added to the lore of the Yamatai. The first mention of it is in “The Talisman of Tolometh Part I”, a Marvel comic series of Conan the Adventurer.
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https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42182/42182-h/42182-h.htm
Well, he doesn’t exactly mention Khitai but the only islands he mentions east of the Turian content were the islands which were the home of the Lemurians. These islands sunk during the cataclysm which ended the Turian Age and lead to the beginning of the Hyborian Age. Other than that, he doesn’t exactly mention anything about island off the east of the (modern day Aisain) continent.
Actually the Conan the Adventurer series mentions the Yamatai briefly.
“The Talisman of Tolometh Part I”
A priest of Mitra, Ixastophanisi, encounters a floating amulet that speaks to him the same night a Pict, Moru, on the run from Zingaram troops, has the same vision. Nearby, Andamo and Daedikaron in Corinthia, alongside his bodyguard Tros, see the strange amulet appear to them as well. Finally, Welyn in Aghrapur and in Shimata-Kawa in Yamatai see the talisman appear and call their names.
This series was written by Roy Thomas, who worked for Stan Lee at Marvel Comics. If not for them, Conan would have probably been just another sword and sorcery afterthought. They really popularized R E Howards books.
If you are a R E Howard purist you can go with the original books and writings, but I think that Marvel really continued the storyline of Howard without breaking tradition, or lore, they just added to it.
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Although Roy Thomas was a big fan of Robert E. Howard (he actually knew nothing about him until shortly before he started writing the comics but fell in love with his works), and tried to adapt many of Howard’s stories into comic form as faithfully as he could he was still a comic book writer with deadlines to meet. You cannot compare the two authors to one another, though I do agree that he did help to bring Conan back into the pop culture consciousness. I believe he also did some consulting work on the movie as well.
That being said, none of that should be taken as cannon. The idea of Conan fighting Wolverine and Thor and others… just… no.
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What comic book series was that? I missed out I guess.
Why not?
Howards biggest success was in a comic book style magazine before his death.
Weird Tales was an AmericanFantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine founded by J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger in late 1922. Robert E. Howard was a regular contributor, and published several of his Conan the Barbarian stories in the magazine.
Pulp fiction refers to a genre of racy, action-based stories published in cheaply printed magazines from around 1900 to the 1950s , mostly in the United States. Pulp fiction gets its name from the paper it was printed on. ( Sounds pretty comic bookish to me )
If you think he was some great novelist, you would be wrong, all of his work except the The Hour of the Dragon were short stories and series in magazines.
His greatness was in his ability to combine fact and fiction, Barbarism and civilization, magic and reality. His fame was fleeting after he shot himself, but Marvel resurrected him thru Roy Thomas. To say Thomas is incomparable to Howard smacks of ignorance of Howards life.
I think it’s fairly recent, I’m pretty sure I read he had his own avengers team, but I’ve not kept up with comics for more than a decade so my info is probably spotty at best
Actually I found it, and it has nothing to do with Roy Thomas. Looks more like something the Russo brothers would come up with. The series started in 2019.
Savage Avengers is an ongoing Marvel Comics series where Conan the Barbarian teams-up with Wolverine. The premise of their team-up is that these heroes must work together when the evil wizards of Conan’s world start trading spells with The Hand in Japan.
Again, if not for Roy Thomas and Marvel you probably would not have a clue who Howard was.
Taking liberties with Conan in 2019 is just what you would expect. I mean. look at 99.9 percent of the online games out there, just weird as hell. But weird sells, especially to the newer generations.
And then they made him an Avenger. I do not forgive. LOL
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The main thing for me is that, from the outset, CE has had darned little to do with Howard’s works. We got a mysterious land utterly outside of Howard’s work to begin with. Then, IoS, which was written of by one of the pastiche authors. So, again, not Howard. I would not be so salty about that, or even the Yamatai, if they ALSO put their efforts into giving us something that IS derived from Howard… like any of the actual civilizations and lands he wrote about.
The Picts, Argossians, Cimmerians, Poitain, Turan, Khitai, Aquilonia, Acheron, Barachan Islands, Darfar, Vendhya, Vanaheim, all were creations of Howard, taken from real places but with his personal flavor added.
Not sure where the Nordheimers came from, but they would most likely be the Vanaheim, Dark Age Scandinavia. Asgard is also referenced as part of Dark Age Scandinavia, so it gets a bit confusing.
In my personal opinion, Funcom did pretty well trying to fit a bit of all of these races into an online game.
Trying to follow Howards imaginary kingdoms is quite the feat.
The original map he drew looks very much like Pangea, and his Hyborian Age is very much prehistory, set right after the sinking of Atlantis.
Pretty difficult getting all of that into a game.
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Here is a comic from 1983 of Conan battling Thor (decades before this whole Savage Avengers nonsense).
Here is a comic from 1990 of Conan battling Wolverine (again decades before Savage Avengers).
I know Roy Thomas did not write either of these stories, but they are Marvel Comic stories and that was the point I was making. Plus your comparison of Pulp Magazines to Comic Books is fallacious. During that point in time, which was back right before and at the beginning of the depression era, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and the like did not get published in novel format by major companies in America for the most part. Most authors had little recourse but to publish their works in pulp magazines as there was no other outlet for their work to be done. And yes, most of Robert E. Howard’s tales were short stories, because pulp magazines were not going to publish full novels in their magazines which features many different stories from many different authors. There is no comparison to comic books. And I am not slandering either one of them so if you took it that way then I am sorry for having made it seem so.
Oh hey - I have that second one 
It’s actually quite a fun little story - Wolvie gets dumped through some rift (been a while since I read it) and winds up in the Hyborian age. All very silly stuff, but ‘What If’ was a series that could get away with that sort of thing since the whole point was ‘this didn’t happen, but what if it did’.
I’m surprised not to see more credit going to L.Sprague DeCamp - he may not have been a great writer, but he certainly contributed significantly to Conan’s continued success. (I’d never actually considered the Marvel connection - always thought of it as a spinoff from the pre-existing popularity - but reading this thread has certainly made me think about the timeline more and I have to agree - Marvel’s success probably had a greater influence on the movie being made - DeCamp’s stuff was mostly during the 50s/60s after all),
L. Sprague DeCamp is fairly hated amongst many if not most Robert E. Howard fans for a number of reasons. Where as Roy Thomas tried his damnedest to be as faithful as he could when adapting the original stories into comic format DeCamp did not care at all about being faithful to the original works and often made changes which made little sense (and were noticeably of lesser quality). What was worse is that he had a stranglehold on the original source material so that for decades people could ONLY buy his heavily edited and altered version of the original stories (some of them were unfinished fragments which he turned into some of the worst stories you could imagine and tried to pass them off as Howard’s work).
So, he does technically have a place in the history of Conan, as he also did keep the character relevant in the (at the time) current eyes of pop culture. His “contributions” have been very poorly received once people gained access to the original source material.
I have 1000 times more respect for Roy Thomas than DeCamp. 
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I certainly can’t argue with that assessment - several of my copies of Howard’s work is as ‘filtered’ though DeCamp - and the difference is very noticeable. (I also read a couple of his own fantasy stories - hey I was young and didn’t know any better 
- and they were really terrible). To be fair - at least in the editions I have - he tended to be pretty open about which stories he had ‘finished’ and which were more ‘pure’, but that may certainly not have always been the case (and sometimes he claims to have ‘done very little’ to the story, but it sure doesn’t look that way).
I’ve always viewed him as a bad writer, but someone I was grateful to for helping ensure Conan survived. (But I always enjoyed the untouched stories more…)
Clearly I shall have to see if I can find some Roy Thomas era reprints
Spargue de Camp transformed stories featuring other characters from Howard, like El Borak and Vulmea, in Conan stories and presented them as genuine and original Conan stories.
Those two comics are What If… stories so never part of any true storylines of the characters or world. I read a bunch of What If… comics, they were pretty interesting at times with what could happen if a certain event had changed.
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I think a lot contributed to Conan still being around in popular culture. The comics certainly helped, as did the movie.
It’s easy to forget how big Arnold was in the 80s and 90s, and Conan being one of his early roles helped introduce even more people too it
I was a fan of the stories, I’m sure not all of them were all Howard’s work, but I don’t know as they were all old dog eared paper backs that I lost thirty years ago. I know they had some original Howard stories
But I also loved the movie, and I loved the comics that I did read, but again so much time has passed that I couldn’t begin to say who wrote the ones I read
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