Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and ninety-fifth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.

As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

Marvel initially wanted to license Lin Carter's Thongor instead of Conan the Barbarian.

STATUS:

True

IN HONOR OF CONAN THE BARBARIAN'S 50TH ANNIVERSARY IN COMICS, THIS INSTALLMENT WILL BE ALL CONAN LEGENDS! Maybe even the next installment.

Anyhow, as you might know already, Marvel's 1970 license of Conan the Barbarian, which turned out to be a MASSIVE success for the company, was due to the forethought of Roy Thomas, who pushed Marvel to do the license.

Roy Thomas explained to ICV2 how the Conan license came about for Marvel in 1970:

I wasn’t a reader of that type of fiction particularly. I had read Edgar Rice Burroughs, his Martian novels, as a kid. And I started collecting the Lancer Conan paperbacks when they started coming out about 1966 or so, mostly because I liked the Frank Frazetta covers. He’d been doing a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs and related fantasy covers and I liked the Conan covers but I didn’t get into the one story I tried to read, Conan the Adventurer, so I never really tried again for a couple of years.

Marvel’s readers kept writing us letters saying we should pick up the rights to a few of these things that were coming out in the bookstores as well as doing superheroes. One thing they suggested a lot was a sword and sorcery title, and especially Robert E. Howard and Conan were being mentioned. I was somewhat familiar with them and Stan really wasn’t. He asked me if it was a good idea and we discussed the general concept of what sword and sorcery was. Stan didn’t really have any idea. He asked me to write the publisher Martin Goodman a memo, a couple of pages or so, saying why we should license the rights to a sword and sorcery character. So I did.

I must have been fairly convincing because Martin Goodman said it sounded like a good idea to him. I know I told him in the memo that after all we have a brawny powerful hero, we have a lot of beautiful women, perhaps clothed for a warm climate, we have a lot of sorcerers who were almost like super villains, plus a lot of monsters. That sounded pretty good. I didn’t stress the fact that it would also look like it was in an ancient or medieval world, so he OKed me to go after the rights to a sword and sorcery character, although Conan was not the one I actually went after. I didn’t think it would be within our little price range, the little amount of money that I was authorized to offer.

Although the original deal didn’t quite work out I ended up contacting Glenn Lord as the literary agent for the Robert E. Howard estate. His name was mentioned in the introduction to one of the Conan volumes that came out, about the time I was getting frustrated by the other deal. So I contacted him and said, ‘We don’t have much money to offer but this might increase Conan’s market a little bit by introducing him to a lot of readers who wouldn’t ordinarily read the paperbacks and that made sense to Glenn so we began a partnership of sorts that was good for Conan, good for me, and good for Marvel.

So, what was the original character?

As it turned out, Thomas first went to license the Thongor character from Lin Carter.

Thongor, you see, was a bit of a tribute by Carter to both Robert E. Howard's Conan stories as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars novels, so basically Conan in science fiction settings. It was a big hit, but it was such a big hit that it inspired L. Sprague de Camp to make a push to bring Conan to trade paperback and he enlisted Carter to help him do it, and Carter agreed, thus sort of putting his own character on the backboard in the process...

In any event, Thomas felt that Thongor, as a newer character, would be cheaper to license than Conan and the name Thongor seemed PERFECT for Marvel, right? Alas, Carter balked at the deal and it eventually took so long that Thomas just went out and licensed the bigger character instead, with Conan the Barbarian soon becoming a major hit for Marvel...

Amusingly, it became SUCH a big hit that Marvel was soon willing to try to license OTHER sword and sorcery characters, like Gullivar Jones. And, soon enough, Thongor DID make his comic book debut for Marvel in 1972's Creatures on the Loose #22, in a story by George Alec Effinger (himself a science fiction novelist of a great deal of acclaim) and artists Val Mayerik and Vince Colletta. The feature ran in Creatures on the Loose for eight total issues.

Can you even imagine how different comic book history would have been had Carter just accepted the original licensing deal? Would we be celebrating the 50th anniversary of THONGOR now? Would Arnold Schwarzenegger have done a THONGOR movie? Probably not, but imagine!

SOME OTHER ENTERTAINMENT LEGENDS!

Check out some other legends from Legends Revealed:

1. Did Zack Snyder Really Say That He Couldn’t Get Into ‘Normal Comics’ When He Was Younger Because of the Lack of Sex and Killing?

2. Did George Lucas Want to Destroy All Copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special?

3. Did the Authors of Curious George Escape From the Nazis on Bicycles With a Copy of the Manuscript?

4. Did Bob Dylan Really Write “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” About the Cuban Missile Crisis?

PART TWO SOON!

Check back later for part 2 of this installment's legends!

Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com