Thursday, March 27, 2014

Sailor Steve Costigan

Here's a picture of Sailor Steve Costigan, a character featured in a bunch of short stories by Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard. While I've never been particularly drawn to his sword and sorcery stuff, these brawler picaresques are exciting and very funny. Think Popeye written by Mark Twain and you'll have a pretty good idea as to the feel of the stuff. 

To my knowledge, there isn't a good collection of them in print, which bums me out, but I got mine via one of those kindle complete works for three bucks packages, so you can read 'em, easy.

4 comments:

  1. I dig your picture and I love those stories. I recently wrote a blog post about them ( http://stookodavis.com/2014/03/ ) You can read Sailor Steve Costigan tales for free online since a whole bunch o' them are public domain.

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  2. I would like to point you to two collections that are more than decent: Boxing Stories, Bison Books, University of Nebrask Press (a survey collection of Howard's boxing yarns that explored the serious, straight, and humorous boxing tales) and Fists of Iron: Rounds 1 thru 4 (The Collected Boxing Fiction of Robert E. Howard, #volumes 1 thru 4) that collects nearly every known shred of boxing related material produced by Howard (letters, his own boxing journal, poems, stories etc.) this one was printed and distributed by the Robert E. Howard foundation Press. They are both official and conform to the howard purist rule (no tampering via editing) and I should know since I put them together and edited them. Hope you enjoy!

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    1. Thanks so much, Chris! I'll make sure to get my hands on Fists of Iron, especially (though I like his other boxing stories, too, so I suspect I'll hunt down the other, also). Sounds spectacular!

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  3. Greetings, does anyone know if the collection of stories or individual stories featuring SAILOR STEVE COSTIGAN is/are in the public domain in the USA?

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