Working The Trapline — The Outer Range, Conan’s 1911 & A Texas Rangers Legend
We’re riding out for Fennario again…
The weird Western Outer Range is returning for a second season. I liked the first season OK — especially Josh Brolin — but I didn’t trust it. We’ve all been burned by high-concept weird tales that fizzled because the creators didn’t know their own story. Apparently, that was a problem — and it got fixed. Per Vanity Fair:
Season two features a new showrunner and executive producer in Charles Murray, a TV veteran known for writing on Luke Cage, Sons of Anarchy, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars; he replaces creator Brian Watkins, a playwright who made his screenwriting and producing debut with Outer Range. (He’s no longer credited as an EP on the series.) In his first extended interview about the second season, Brolin tells me that the change felt important to Outer Range’s future success. “With Brian, I think that he was given a responsibility that was irresponsible given his experience. He had never been on a set before,” he says. “It makes perfect sense to me why we were meandering at times.” Brolin felt frustrated with the lack of answers provided in the twisty mystery’s first season: “We had some people involved that were like, ‘You need to just trust’…and I was like, Yeah, bullshit. We need to know. We’re the storytellers and we create the mystery.”
You can tell from the trailer that they’ve leveled up…
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They don’t call it “weird” when it comes from Latin America; they call it “magical realism.” But it’s all rooted in the land of Fennario…
Married against their parents’ wishes, cousins José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán leave their village behind and embark on a long journey in search of a new home. Accompanied by friends and adventurers, their journey culminates with the founding of a utopian town on the banks of a river of prehistoric stones that they baptize Macondo. Several generations of the Buendía lineage will mark the future of this mythical town, tormented by madness, impossible loves, a bloody and absurd war, and the fear of a terrible curse that condemns them, without hope, to one hundred years of solitude.
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Had to watch this one, by Crom!
Actually, we kinda know…
I’ll go with the big fistful of .45, but Conan’s also gotta run a big double-barrel shotgun. Let’s arm him a Fox Sterlingworth 10 gauge, Neal Fargo’s weapon of choice… because everybody knows that Neal Fargo is a direct descendant of the Hyborian Age barbarian. A Winchester 1893 for longer-range work, and, of course, a large blade.
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Speaking of the mighty Cimmerian… John C. Hocking’s The Emerald Lotus has attained a kind of legendary status as a Conan pastiche novel, in part because it’s been out of print for close to 30 years. It’s very highly regarded. I never read it (not an anti-pastiche snob — I really liked our own John Maddox Roberts’ Tor Conan). Penguin Random House has announced that in June they’ll publish an omnibus featuring that story and the even-more-legendary never-published tale Conan and the Living Plague under the overall title Conan: City of the Dead.
The book features illustrations by Richard Pace that depict Conan actually wearing clothes.
Robert E. Howard’s Conan did not run about the Hyborian Kingdoms clad in nothing but a fur kilt. I hate that. REH was always particular in describing his dress, which tended to reflect the culture of whatever land he was operating in at the time. And he armored up for combat. Duh. Consider this description as a young woodsman encounters Conan on the Pictish frontier in Beyond the Black River:
The stranger was clad like himself in regard to boots and breeks, though the latter were of silk instead of leather. But he wore a sleeveless hauberk of dark mesh-mail in place of a tunic, and a helmet perched on his black mane. That helmet held the other’s gaze; it was without a crest, but adorned by short bull’s horns. No civilized hand ever forged that head-piece. Nor was the face below it that of a civilized man: dark, scarred, with smoldering blue eyes, it was a face untamed as the primordial forest which formed its background. The man held a broadsword in his right hand, and the edge was smeared with crimson.
Gary Gianni did right by Howard with his depiction of Conan on another frontier — a proto-Northwest Frontier (Afghanistan) in the Del Rey edition that included People of the Black Circle:
This is The Way.
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Speaking of Texans and frontiers… You might know somebody in this episode of Into the Wild Frontier:
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This just makes me happy…