Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring | review by Rafe McGregor

Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring by Patrick Zircher

Titan Books, paperback, £14.99, November 2025, ISBN 9781787746428

 

Robert E. Howard is best known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian (who first appeared in ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’, in Weird Tales in 1932). Together with Fritz Leiber, the creator of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (who first appeared in ‘Two Sought Adventure’, in Unknown in 1939), he established the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy fiction. When J.R.R. Tolkien popularised epic fantasy, which was pioneered by E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros (1922), with The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), the map of the fantasy landscape for the rest of the twentieth century was drawn. Howard and Leiber were both correspondents of H.P. Lovecraft, contributed to what Ramsey Campbell describes as the Lovecraft Mythos, and benefitted from their correspondent’s inspiration in their original work. Like Lovecraft, Howard was a prolific writer, publishing three hundred short stories and novellas by the time of his premature death at the age of thirty and leaving an archive of double that, much of which was published posthumously. Along with Conan, Solomon Kane was one of several of Howard’s serial characters to appear in narratives that combined fantasy with history, but he published across a wide variety of genres, including: boxing stories, tales of the sea, crime fiction, horror, comedy, and what we would now call erotica and narrative nonfiction. He was also one of the two founders of the Weird Western (along with Oliver La Farge), which was popularised on television in the nineteen sixties and in comics in the nineteen seventies.

Kane is a Puritan English swordsman who wanders the world righting wrongs at the turn of the seventeenth century, following his service in the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). Howard published seven Kane short stories in his lifetime, all in Weird Tales, beginning with ‘Red Shadows’ (1928) and ending with ‘Wings in the Night’ (1932). He left two unpublished stories, three poems, and four fragments and the complete Kane was first published as Red Shadows (1968) and then The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane (2004), with the fragments completed by Campbell. The Kane stories not only mix history with fantasy in Howard’s trademark style, but include elements of the weird that bear testimony to Lovecraft’s influence (in much the same way as it can be seen in Leiber’s Fafhrd and Mouser). Five of the seven original stories are set in Africa, however, which makes Howard’s racism impossible to ignore. Like Lovecraft, Howard was also a White supremacist, subscribing to the pseudoscientific theory that humanity is divided into biologically distinct taxa which coexist in an intellectual and moral hierarchy loosely based on lightness of skin. He also had what one might charitably call an unconventional relationship with his mother, committing suicide when she became comatose from tuberculosis and preceding her death by a day. There seems to have been a concerted campaign to sanitise Howard’s reputation posthumously, but Victor LaValle provides what I think is an accurate portrayal of the author when he fictionalises him as a pathologically racist private investigator in The Ballad of Black Tom (2016).

Though I've read only a fraction of Howard’s oeuvre, his racism seems both more pronounced in and more intrinsic to his narratives than Lovecraft’s. In the latter, racism is always an ethical flaw but rarely an aesthetic one, by which I mean constitutive of the worldview that underpins the narrative and configures one’s engagement with it. It is no defence of Lovecraft to point out that his cosmic horror is founded on a fear of all that is unknown, of interplanetary and international aliens alike (or in collaboration). In contrast, Howard’s racism is constitutive of his worldview and, in consequence, an aesthetic as well as ethical flaw, creating an imaginative resistance for all but the most insensitive of readers. Notwithstanding, the African Kane stories are, in my opinion, the best, reminiscent of H. Rider Haggard at his best, albeit at times similarly offensive, jarring, or both. What makes this bitter pill a little easier for me, personally, to swallow is that Kane’s attitudes are completely compatible with what would have been considered an enlightened disposition towards people of different ethnicities and nationalities in the early seventeenth century. History is replete with racism, sexism, and elitism and Kane is a historical character from a past increasingly alien to our present.

Half a century after Howard’s death, Kane enjoyed an afterlife in comics with a serialisation by Marvel that ran from 1973 to 1994. In anticipation of the feature film, Solomon Kane (2009), Dark Horse revived Kane in 2008. Aside from the selection of James Purefoy for the title role, I have nothing positive to say about it and wasn’t surprised by the box office failure. Plans for a trilogy were abandoned, Campbell’s 2010 novelisation was as poor as his source material, and the comic series concluded in 2011. Fourteen years later, Titan launched another revival, releasing Solomon Kane: The Serpent Ring in March and collecting all four issues as a graphic novel in November. The latest adaptation is largely the work of Patrick Zircher, a veteran artist for DC and Marvel, who is also the writer. His artistic style is mimetic and cinematic, with clearly defined and cleanly outlined figures, and a seamless integration of dynamism and narrativity in his use of panels. All of these features are evident in The Serpent Ring and the first extended action sequence, the boarding of a Portuguese caravel by an English letter of marque, is nothing short of breathtaking, as close to watching a well-choreographed action sequence on screen as is possible on the page. Zircher’s use of colour is also striking, his art here at its best when depicting the natural rather than supernatural, with a stunning African elephant and an awe-inspiring giant serpent particularly memorable.

The eponymous ring is the Serpent Ring of Thoth-Amon, a magic jewel of great power, and the narrative concerns two attempts to acquire it: a preliminary one that fails but brings Kane into contact with Rolando Zarza, a renegade Knight Hospitaller, and Abramo Bensaid, a Jewish archivist and scholar; and sets the scene for the second, which takes the three men and their entourage to the Kingdom of Ndongo, on the banks of the Kwanza River (more commonly known as the Cuanza, in northern Angola). Various clues suggest a dating of 1590, one of Kane’s earlier adventures, immediately after his service with the suicidally courageous Richard Grenville (who died at the Battle of Flores, in 1591). The origin of the ring draws on the legend of Lilith, who started off as Adam’s first wife, coupled with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and ended up a demon...which brings me to my main criticism. The artwork is excellent and the story for the most part compelling, but the mythological context – perhaps even internal logic – is an incoherent motley of Egyptian, Semitic, and sub-Saharan African, with what appears to be a touch of the Aztec thrown in. There are simply too many myths and legends involved and their abundance detracts from the suspension of disbelief. A less significant problem is the cast of characters. While Kane is indisputably the protagonist, there is no obvious antagonist and half a dozen or more point of view players seem to vary between central and supporting roles. As with the mythologies, less might have been more. Overall, the graphic novel is a disappointment, despite its many highlights and flashes of finesse. The revival is nonetheless worth continuing and I hope Zircher is given a second shot at Kane.