Helen of Wyndhorn
Writer: Tom King
Artist: Bilquis Evely
Colorist: Matheus Lopes
Lettering: Clayton Cowles
Publisher: Dark Horse
Collects: Helen of Wyndhorn #1-6
Publication Date: March 2025
Conan, the warrior king, lies stricken dead
Beneath a sky of cryptic stars; the lute
That was his laughter stilled, and sadly mute
Upon the chilling earth his youthful head.
There sounds for him no more the clamorous fray,
But dirges now, where once the trumpet loud:
About him press old memories for shroud,
And ended is the conflict of the day.
Death spilled the blood of him who loved the fight
As men love mistresses, and fought it well –
His fair young flesh is marble where he fell
With broken sword that vanquished all but Night;
And as of mythic kings our words must speak
Of Conan now, who roves where dreamers seek.
-R.E.H. Died June 11, 1936 by R. H. Barlow
On Thursday, June 11, 1936, Robert E. Howard killed himself. The writer, only 30 years old at the time and the creator of Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane, was by his mother’s bedside as she suffered a decades long battle with tuberculosis. Upon hearing that his mother would not regain consciousness, Howard walked to his car and shot himself with a .380 Colt Automatic pistol. His mother died shortly after him, and a double service was held that Sunday. A Texas newspaper reported on the day of the service “Young Howard shot himself Thursday in despondency over his mother’s illness.”
But of course, that is merely speculation.
We know Howard’s mother was sick, we know he killed himself, but we don’t know what drove him to this decision. Was he unwell himself, suffering a mental illness we didn’t have words for at the time? Or was he simply stressed? Overworked by taking care of his mother and trying to write, all the while his publisher, Weird Tales, was severely behind on payments to its contributors. Howard had no children, but his father was still alive and his ex-girlfriend, Novalyne Price, was still a part of his life. By all accounts, Howard had family and friends, not to mention the bullpen of creators that would pay tribute to him in the pages of Weird Tales.
It seems wrong to die this way, anonymously in your car when there are still people that love you; people whom you leave behind, confused and wounded. “Was it just his mother’s death or something more?” is a question that plagues us but one we can never answer. And yet if we keep circling this festering wound of ours, will it ever heal? And so we say, “Young Howard shot himself Thursday in despondency over his mother’s illness” because a plausible reason is better than the alternative, it’s better to suffer with a reason than to tolerate the agony of suffering for its own sake.
Inspired by the death of Robert E. Howard, Helen of Wyndhorn — by Tom King, Bilquis Evely, Matheus Lopes and Clayton Cowles — tells the story of the people left behind in the wake of tragedy. In this story, it is 1935, and C.K. Cole, the fantasy and pulp magazine writer, kills himself in a motel room. His 16-year-old daughter, Helen Cole, is then left to her paternal grandfather, Barnabas Cole, who sends the Governess, Lilith Appleton, to bring Helen home to Wyndhorn Manor.
Upon her arrival, Helen is justifiably irritable and distraught, prone to raiding the wine cellar and avoiding her academic lessons with Ms. Appleton. The grounds keeper, Joseph, works with Ms. Appleton in an attempt to keep order and give Helen a sense of structure, though the pair fail miserably at every turn. However, each night this defiant and angry girl comes into Ms. Appleton’s bedroom to sleep next to her, for fear of monsters in the manor and presumably to avoid her own loneliness.
Helen’s fears and confusion collide when a monster does end up breaking into Wyndhorn Manor, only to be stopped by her grandfather Barnabas, the apparent inspiration behind all of her father’s writings.
Helen of Wyndhorn reunites the critically acclaimed team of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and thus the two share a similar point of view. Both Supergirl and Helen are narrated by an observer with a rich vocabulary who is contrasted with a more crass protagonist. But this is ultimately where most of the similarities end, as King’s script and Evely’s art deviate into a more personal and simultaneously more fantastical story that results in a work that is not only superior to its predecessor, but one of the best comics anyone on this team has ever crafted.
Helen of Wyndhorn is about a very common aspect of King’s writing: the play between fiction and reality. There’s the internal fiction, that of C.K. Cole’s writing and his creation of Othan the barbarian warrior, and then the internal reality, Cole basing it on the adventures of his own father, Barnabas. Throughout each issue, the events of Helen’s journey are framed by future generations having discovered C.K. Cole: the man, the writer, and the legacy of his works in the hands of kids flipping through back issue bins. Helen, meanwhile, gets to live the adventures her father wrote about, with Barnabas alluding to but rarely ever talking about his own son and what his relationship to this magical world of sword and sorcery was.
Within this internal tension, King asks us to search for what impact the fiction may have on the reality, or vice versa. In living through the “real” childhood of her father, can Helen come to terms with who he was and how he died? Or is the truth of the man simply in the books he wrote, never to be known beyond that permanent, distant object?
As the reader sees these fictions and realities play out, Helen too has to grapple with who she wants her own grandfather to be rather than how he’s written about. Her relationship to her father and his work is always presented with a certain mystique. We know very little from her perspective about these stories, and depend mostly on the framing devices in each issue that help us see C.K. Cole’s legacy. For Helen, however, there’s a struggle to pull from Barnabas the reality and history of her father, a story that he can never quite bring himself to tell. Here lies the central tension within this internal fiction vs reality: how the stories we tell keep us alive or deny us our existence. For Helen, her father is always a story, a series of conversations and books but never flashbacks, never a real sense of the person. Meanwhile, Barnabas’ refusal to engage, to deny Helen the chance to hear a new story, one about parts of her father she never knew and the history that Barnbas can’t bear to relive, brings these two to an impasse in their relationship.
Helen of Wyndhorn in this internal sense is about who has a right to know you? From Helen’s steadfast refusal to engage with Ms. Appleton, to Barnabas’ refusal to engage his granddaughter and the history of his son, we’re surrounded by characters whose wounds from this central death are still too fresh. No one can bear the thought of opening them up, even in the service of comparing the similarity of that pain and subsequently easing it.
Meanwhile, the framing device of each issue gives us a window into strangers, people who never knew Cole or Barnabas and are merely engaged with the fiction he left behind. Do they ever really know him and what’s the difference between them learning about C.K. Cole from writing and Helen doing the same? Each of these characters, the biographers, the collectors, the parents, etc. are digging through these objects not in search of the writer’s humanity but as some connection to their own, just as Helen vicariously lives through her father’s experiences as an attempt to bring her out of despair. Whether anyone knew C.K. ends up being less important than the impression he left on their life.
But then there’s the external fiction and reality, that of King telling a story that’s based on the real life Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian. This is not the first time where King has compounded and collapsed these two worlds, as Rorschach also famously used real life comic book creators in key issues and even repeats the story of Otto Binder losing his daughter in a car accident. One is often tempted to ask, and it’s often been asked about Rorschach in particular, whose right is it to tell these stories? Is the fictionalization of real tragedy by those outside the people impacted merely exploitative? Or is there merit to these connections, these moments of narrative disruption that remind you of the thin membrane between the real and the imagined?
Is King himself the various framers of the issues: the collectors, the biographers and auctioneers? And in this attempt to tell the story of Howard, is King merely commodifying his legacy in these spaces of pop culture where the separation between a public life and private life don’t exist?
These are fair questions and even criticisms but for what it’s worth, I found both Rorschach and Helen of Wyndhorn compelling in how they navigate this, and the result is worthwhile as a way for us to understand grief, mourning and how we turn those feelings into stories simply to process them. As much truth as their might be in the Texas newspaper attributing Howard’s suicide to grief over his mother, it’s something we can never truly know. It’s a story, one that gives reason to something that would be otherwise unreasonable, and unknowable. And insofar as we’re incapable of reconciling suffering and its lack of reason, stories help us get through it.
Within Helen of Wyndorn is the progressive commodification and narrativizing of Cole’s legacy, as a metaphor for Howard’s. People want to write about him, others have fond memories of his stories and some are collectors looking to profit off the history behind the objects. Everyone feels and latches onto different parts of Cole/Howard, but his voice is always left out. We never have a chance to ask what Cole would’ve wanted for his future, in the same way we can’t really imagine what the landscape of pulp stories would be like had Howard lived longer. The untimely death and the material left behind is the story and the legacy, anything more, any desire to instantiate a feeling or desire or reason into the lives of people who we can never know is fruitless. And so it’s fitting that Helen never tries to get us to see Cole as anything other than what the people who knew him or his work tell us. Because the work and the impression of him is all we really ever have.
The idea of reality in Helen of Wyndhorn represents a natural progression of King’s work from Mr. Miracle wherein reality’s nature is entirely subjective. Pain is real, grief is real, and so is joy. In that series, it’s not “what is real?” as much as it’s “what do you allow yourself to doubt and why?” In Helen of Wyndhorn, that idea is taken to its logical extreme when Helen asks “am I real?” With respect to these internal and external tensions of fiction vs reality, the answer is always “yes.” She’s as real as anyone else, as anyone who can be spoken about in story or in memory, she’s as real as her father can ever be, Howard is as real as anyone that we never knew personally can be.
King’s submission of these questions of identity into narrative terms is the bedrock of the popular existentialism that’s expressed throughout his entire career. Your identity is the story you tell about yourself, and every day you get to commit to telling that story again and again, because that is not only how we form ourselves but how others will remember us. Memory is narrative, self is narrative, and the question is simply who has the power to tell these stories.
Therefore, the most emotionally compelling scene in the series for me is in the final issue, when after so much resistance, after all the clawing for sympathy and sincerity by Helen, and after all the gruff, adamant refusal by Barnabas, we finally have a moment where the two truly connect and we hear for the first and only time a genuine, sentimental story of who C.K. Cole was by his own father.
This is a payoff 6 issues in the making, coming after we’d spent several months with these two and always found ourselves left out in the cold. It’s a scene that reminds us that everyone here is human, is family, and all they can do is tell stories to each other, about each other.
While all this points to a natural conclusion to King’s concepts, there is also an evolution in his scripting that makes it work in a way that it might not have otherwise. King’s comics are famous both for their rigid paneling and their sparse descriptions. On the one hand, you have works like The Omega Men which King himself is credited with doing the layouts, that ambitiously tries to mirror every issue internally and as part of the wider series, strictly adhering to a 9 panel grid and becoming a story about the grid itself. On the other hand, when a page needs a space dragon, he’ll simply write “space dragon” and leave it up to the artist to handle. That process has worked for him over the last decade, but Helen of Wyndhorn is a case where King seems to be getting out of the artist’s way by not relying so heavily on these intricate panels.
To understand this, we need to stop to talk about how reading King’s comics feels. From his earliest days up through Rorschach and Strange Adventures, his books would take me about 2 hours to read, front to back. I could crack open Vision or Mr. Miracle at 6 p.m. and be done by 8. And these were longer comics, 12-issue series many of which were longer than the standard 22 page scripts. But around the time of The Human Target and Danger Street this changed. Both of those books took several hours to read despite being about the same length as his earlier work. Conversely, comics like Jenny Sparks and Helen which are about half the length of his typical comics now take me about 2 hours to read. It’s as if his scripting has evolved to be more novelistic, more prose heavy and as such it takes longer to get through each issue.
(This again gets to how Helen differs from Supergirl. Where Supergirl was designed to be read issue by issue, with each one embodying a different emotional experience, Helen is designed to be read all together. It’s truly a graphic novel where the individual issues are simply chapter breaks.)
Consequently, King’s rigid adherence to grids in comics has softened. There are still many 9 panel grids in all his work, but the ambitious and perhaps overplayed desire to mess with how the grid works, to experiment with the layouts is nowhere near as present as it used to be. Rather than being comic scripts confined to a specific technique, this is emotionality as the first and last technique on every page.
With rare exception, Helen of Wyndhorn is not what I would consider to be a formally experimental comic by any stretch, which is shocking considering what appealed to me about so much of King’s earlier work. Instead, like Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, this is a comic that lets the scripting fall to the background. The direction and the grids are largely invisible, and what you’re left with is verbose prose and entrancing images. Because each issue of King’s comics takes longer to read now and because there’s less playing with panels, every page forces you to linger longer and longer. You are gently slowed down from the pace of a typical direct market American comic and instead allowed to wander through the ins and outs of Everly’s design work, the beautiful architecture and the complex monster designs. The script may theoretically be very much in line with King’s concerns, but the formal experimentation is abandoned to allow room for his artistic partner to flourish, which she absolutely takes advantage of.
Every page of this comic is gorgeous, every panel is entrancing, every detail jumps out at you. The sci-fi of Supergirl is replaced with early 20th Century Americana and sword-and-sorcery elements that never clash, but instead bring out the novel approach and tone of the classic pulp magazine stories that Howard wrote. Everly’s work here is right at home with what you’d expect in Weird Tales but possesses a modern humanity and expressivism that makes it all the more unique.
What strikes me in particular is her eyes. The way every expression of them is so wide, and how Lopes colors them to be brighter than human, almost magical and hypnotic.
Cole’s creation, Othan, is based on Conan the Barbarian, and Othan is in turn based on Cole’s father, Barnabas. As such, these are 3 central figures that all share a very similar look. But Evely manages to give both Barnabas and Othan a unique aesthetic that calls back to Conan without ever feeling like a parody. Othan as he’s first shown has the muscle and stature of Conan, and the page feels reminiscent of the poster for the 1982 film version. Yet, the regal accoutrements, the odd shape of his blades, and the gilded crowns all feel distinct to this comic, a marriage of the barbarian with touches of sci-fi in the spirit of Valérian.
This first page is a great contrast to the end of the first issue when we see Barnabas for the first time. His figure and red cloak indicate for us immediately that’s the same person we saw earlier. But yet something’s off. He’s old, his weapons are less fantastical and more brutal. The majesty and wonder of Othan is traded out for the reality of a man who has spent his life killing and adventuring. There’s no loving, mysterious, beautiful figure next to him but just the remnants of his barbarism, a complete shattering of the illusion Cole cultivated and Helen previously believed.
As always, there is much more I could say about King, Evely, Lopes and Cowles’ work on Helen of Wyndorn, but at the end of the day all that needs to be said is that it is a one-of-kind experience that represents the best of these creators. Evely and Lopes’ art is a level that exceeds their prior collaboration with King on Supergirl but King’s script is also perhaps the best he’s written during this phase of his career. Helen of Wyndorn was one of the best comics of 2024 during its run as single issues, and now in trade it is one of the first great releases of 2025.
A hardcover edition of Helen of Wyndhorn is due out March 5.
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