CONAN'S FIRST ADVENTURE

Behind the glamorous cover by J. Allen St. John illustrating Otis Adelbert Kline's "Buccaneers of Venus" is Robert E. Howard's first adventure of Conan the Barbarian. Technically, a character by the name of Conan (as Conan the Reaver) first appeared in the story, "People of the Dark", published in WEIRD TALES in June 1932. However, he is not depicted as the quite the same Conan whom Howard wrote about a few months later. Thus, "The Phoenix on the Sword" is considered the first Conan the Barbarian story to see print (WEIRD TALES, December 1932). In reality, the story was originally written to be a tale of Howard's King Kull with the title, "By This Axe I Rule!", but it was re-written. At first rejected by the editor of WEIRD TALES, Farnsworth Wright in March 1932, he accepted the revision for the December issue. In the meantime the proto-Conan story was published. King Kull of Atlantis can also be considered a proto-Conan character as he shares many of the characteristics of the Cimmerian. The first Kull of Atlantis story, "The Shadow Kingdom", was published several years before, in  the August 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES.

In "The Phoenix on the Sword", readers were unknowingly treated with the introduction to the story that went on to be used countless time in Conan movies, comics and other media:

"KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars—Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen- eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet.”  — The Nemedian Chronicles.

Although this may be the first Conan story, it begins with him in middle-age, as King of Aquilonia.