Ranking Robert E. Howard's Conan stories

I've never been the biggest fan of sword 'n' sorcery fantasy, nor brute violence. Whenever I played fantasy-based video games as a teenager, I'd invariably choose to play as the most morbid or ridiculous character available, rather than the meat-axe warrior who had a much easier ride.

So it was surprising when, at one point, I got a bit obsessed with the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film. The one starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, in which James Earl Jones turns into a snake. It was around the same time I developed my Manowar problem. Was it the dark, mythic atmosphere? Ancestral memories of simpler, crueller times? The pecs? I eventually recovered... or did I?

I read Robert E. Howard's horror stories a couple of years back, to see where he stood among his pulp contemporaries. Horror didn't seem to be his forte – but then, I didn't like Lovecraft's twee fantasies either. So let's see if reading The Top 28 Conan Stories awakens anything in me, violent, homosexual or otherwise. I'm going to get sick of that soundtrack.

Ranking Alan Moore's Swamp Thing comics

There are still vast tracts of Alan Moore mindscapes I have yet to explore. I could have knuckled down to his 1,000-plus-page novel, or finally ticked off some of his less appealing ventures like Tom Strong and Promethea, but every few years, something keeps drawing me back to the fetid, squelchy, strangely erotic Louisiana swamps.

Moore's Swamp Thing stint is tediously legendary, but for the purposes of this, I'm going to ignore how revolutionary his psychecological sex scenes and feminist werewolves are and just celebrate how much I like these stories, respectively.

It helps that it's mostly episodic, and the occasional contractual crossovers and awkward Batman cameos make ranking The Top 45 Alan Moore Swamp Thing Stories less intimidating than trying to review something immaculate like Watchmen or From Hell. I wouldn't want to show myself up.