CONAN THE UKRAINIAN

STUDENT 1981 September  via @internetarchive

BLAST FROM THE PAST A BOOK REVIEW BY
EUGENE PLAWIUK

#CONAN THE #UKRAINIAN
By Way of An Introduction

The Internet Archive can be a terrible place or a great place depending on what is preserved there. In my case a number of articles and publications I have done in print and on the net have been preserved there apparently by some folks other than me. 

If you don't know it you should it is both a Memory Hole for archiving old internet sites since the beginning of Internet time including BBS times (Beginner Basic Sites)*

It is also the repository for digitized manuscripts from Microsoft and Google book projects. It includes digitized newspapers, old left wing and right wing hard to find and sometimes censored materials, for instance it has had the Anarchist Cookbook for download almost since its inception

You may have heard of it in the news because once Trump was elected POTUS they declared their intention to create a mirror site in Canada and to act as a depository in Canada for all the science records the Trump administration was ordering destroyed, following in the conservative footprints of our very own PM Harper. Now he is gone and the Natural Governing Party; the Liberals are back leading our social  democracy.

So I was searching the Internet Archive for an article of mine I know was preserved there when I came across this little gem from when I had just graduated from U of L and was working for the Department of Advanced Education and Labour under the Lougheed Government. 

STUDENT was the voice of SUSK the Ukrainian student union of ethnic Ukrainian Canadian Students, supported on campus by the Ukrainian Nationalist business association  KYK and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches Whats ironic is that this issue is one of the most Left Wing ever
and it covered the Crisis in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe from a Marxist Anarchist and Trotskyist analysis, the Left had taken over Student and SUSK.  I had been writing articles for them since the Left Wing Swing in 1979. 

I have also always been a comics fan, or as I spelled it in the article Comix, the Underground comics version of the spelling since I was kid. It is a big thing now, then it was a ghetto for nerd like science fiction, and I helped found the Edmonton Comic Arts and Science Fiction Society.  See Dr. Robert Runte's underground history of the Sci Fi community in Canada. We managed to publish two sets of fan journals, for Sci Fi and Comics which we published quarterly for two years.

This was just before I left for university, having been out of school and working since I was 16 I could apply as a mature adult student without requiring a High School diploma. It was then I began writing for Student as well as being an editor at the U of L student paper The Meliorist.

This article originates in my interest in Ukrainian history which I was doing independent research and self direct study on as part of my BA in History. This article about Conan's probable origins in the Ukraine are common knowledge now, and little disputed but such was not the case when I first published this.

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Comics, cartoons, and comic books, are the last vestiges of the 'pulp' medium. Be they black and white or in full color, the paper they are printed on is characteristically grainy and full of cellulose chunks. Their content can range from funny animals to outer space, from true love to wizards battling dragons. In short, the subject-matter is only limited by one's imagination.

The genre of 'barbarian' comix is as old as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan stories from the Golden Age of comix (1940s-1 950s). In the early seventies Marvel comix (the originators of Spiderman, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, etc.) launched the prototype of the adventure barbarian comic with a publication entitled Conan. It was an immediate success, mainly because of the artwork.

Conan's illustrator, Barry-Windsor Smith, introduced a new wave of seventies' art into comics while maintaining his own distinct style. Essentially, he struck upon the novel idea of creating as his main character a noble savage in a romanticized neo-classical setting. Smith stayed on for the earliest issues but later quit, because of disagreements with Marvel. He then set up his own fantasy-art workshop which is named The Studio. But Conan continued and has since spawned not only a series of imitators, but an entire genre of comics. It is not. however, the graphics but the storyline of Conan and that of a recent genre competitor, Arak the Thunderer (put out by Marvel's long-time competitor, D.C. Comics), that interests me most about this rich vein of popular literature.

Conan the Barbarian, is a Cimmerian. a mythical nationality that his author, Robert E. Howard, fabricated. In fact, Howard invented an 'alternate world' based on old myths and ancient history, populating it with Nubians, Cossacks, Ethiopian Pirates, Vikings and other peoples modelled on ancient Egyptian, Pict, Celtic and other sundry sources. Basically, the alternate world is centred in the Middle East, though it stretches from continental Europe to Mongolia and fhng of the Orient. Cimmeria is located in an area that is in the vicinity of the Crimean basin.

Significantly, some of Conan's first encounters read as if they were from a page of Ukrainian history. As a travelling mercenary in the Cossack tradition, Conan fights with Vikings from the northern regions and with alternate world Cossacks. At one point of the series, extending over several issues of the comic, Conan actually leads a group of Cossack bandits. Conan is modelled after Cro-Magnon man, but with an elevated sense of morality and principle; he robs from the rich, saves women in distress, and battles evil sorcerers.

Some of the most interesting of the stories in the Conan series have explored the dilemma that Conan faces when he encounters women mercenaries who are his fighting equals. Belit, the Pirate Queen of the Shemesh coast, and a fellow mercenary named Red Sonya are two such 'problematic' women in Conan's fantasy life. Red Sonya will not allow any man to touch her body unless he first defeats her in combat, which no man has yet proven capable of doing. The spectacle is an intriguing one: Cro-Magnon man meets Amazons who drink, fight, swear, and plot as well as he does. And how does Ukraine fit into all of this?

Well, not only is it the region from which Conan originates, but bordering countries in the alternate world border popular descriptions of Rus and prehistoric Ukraine. Of course, this is never mentioned directly, but the symbolism of Conan and the Cossacks plundering fat city merchants and fighting oppressive tyrants places Conan well within the tradition of popular 'bandit' folklore that is widespread among the Slavs. Arak the Thunderer is another interesting innovation in barbarian comics. Created by ex-Marvel writers and artists now employed by D.C. Comics, it is a newcomer on the market, its first issue having been released only two months ago. Ibwas initially previewed in another D.C. comic, Warlord #48.

In Arak the Thunderer we have a different twist, as the barbarian is an American Indian who is lost in ancient Europe. In the story we find Arak battling Vikings over amber, a gem that has very strong associations with Ukraine, where it is found in large quantities. The amber is being protected by a living dragon made of the same mineral. Add one sacrificial victim and a local priestess who speaks strangely familiar words — Volos, Kupala. Dziewanna — and we have a comic that reads like a story from the Book of Vies' In this case, however, our hero discovers that the female victim hardly needs rescuing, as she is protecting the sacred amber and controls the dragon, having tricked the Vikings and Arak into thinking otherwise. As it turns out our heroine is not just a priestess but a local goddess of the forest, who "bends tall treetops like stalks of grain!"

Although Ukrainian themes are only implied in these alternate worlds of the imagination, their presence is unmistakable No doubt, they can'probably be discovered buried within many other sources of popular culture. It just takes a critical eye to see the role of comics and other pulps in expanding the geography and the ethnicity of characters in fiction. D.C. Comics, no'doubt has discovered how popular Conan and Arak the Thunderer really are they appear appealingly different to an americanized audience Moreover, the possibility certainly exists that someday the pulps will draw upon actual events from Ukrainian history as the basis for their stories, as both its prehistoric and modern past are ideally suited to the 'barbarian-bandit' genre.

*Yes I know that BBS stands for Broadband Basic Service