Showing posts with label el borak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label el borak. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Plagiarism is the Sincerest Form of Flattery, Right?

I also saw this recently on Amazon:

el Borak collected stories for Kindle

Apparently, an e-publishing company used the sketch I did of Robert E. Howard's el Borak for their Kindle collection of el Borak stories without asking me for permission or even letting me know they were using it. I'd be offended if:

A) I thought they were making any sales.

B) I wasn't more offended by the fact that they probably didn't get permission from REH's estate to publish these stories either.

I am however offended by the horrible typesetting they used - jeesh.

The original in all its untainted glory:





Saturday, July 3, 2010

El Borak

I just started reading a collection of some of Robert E.Howard's lesser known adventure stories, El Borak and Other Desert Adventure Tales. El Borak is the name the locals gave to the hero of the majority of the stories, Francis Xavier Gordon, a Texas gunslinger who finds himself in the wilds of Afghanistan.

So far, the stories are very good. I had always avoided Howard's 'lesser' works, assuming they weren't as good as the Conan or Solomon Kane stories, but his writing is actually very consistent in quality. I think a lot of his creations fell by the wayside since they were based on standard pulp tropes (explorers, sailors, boxers, cowboys, etc.) that are considered dated by today's standards, and not because they were poorly written.