I'd love to know whether "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau read Robert E. Howard's El Borak stories to prepare for his "Sorkh Razil" aka "Red Rascal" storyline. Red Rascal is the alter ego of one of Doonesbury's youthful slacker characters, Jeff Redfern. El Borak, aka ex-gunfighter Francis Xavier Gordon, no slacker in the least, is the protagonist of Howard's Son of the White Wolf, among other Middle Eastern adventure stories.
And perhaps even more so than Conan, the alter-ego of Howard himself.
After all, Howard made Gordon a Texan, like himself. And as Rusty Burke notes in the introduction to The Best of Robert E. Howard, Howard had lived the El Borak stories longer than any of the others, creating the character when he was only ten.
In Doonesbury, young Redfern has been channeling his alter-ego's adventures for years, while his parents wait for him to get a real job -- dare we say, as Howard's parents might have? In the comic strip, Redfern has attained seven-figure book advances for a book about the Rascal -- Howard could only have dreamed of this! But, as with so many of Sorkh Razil's exploits I keep wondering if the book is "real" in the storyline or will turn out to have been only a dream.
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| image: wikimedia commons |
(If you've read this blog very long, you know I can't resist searching for the influences behind many fictional characters: King George VI as Roman Emperor Claudius, the aged, grieving Queen Victoria as the very aged, grieving "She." How about "Mad" Bavarian King Ludwig as the king of Bohemia?)
It's a particularly irresistible game in the case of Son of the White Wolf, in which El Borak combines traits of T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) and explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. (Frederic Leighton's painting of Sir Richard -- the Victorian explorer, not the actor -- illustrates this post. I find the resemblence to El Borkak's dark hair and eyes striking.)
And could the story's "Olga" -- a pseudonym, of course, have existed without the inspiration of intrepid British traveler Gertrude Bell?
In his appendix to The Best of Robert E. Howard, Steven Tompkins called the likes of Lawrence and Bell one of the few "glamourous" sideshows of the Great War. And despite a relatively realistic setting, there's more than a trace of glamour in Olga -- young, beautiful, brave -- and a spy.
Son of the White Wolf finds El Borak in the middle of Ottoman Turkish territory in the waning days of World War I, where a Turkish outpost deserts in favor of a rebel leader whose banner carries the image of a white wolf. In their retreat, the deserters destroy an Arab village which has given shelter to Olga and her guide. One of Gordon's followers, also wounded in the attack, survives long enough to warn his leader, who promises revenge.
As Howard wrote, "(Gordon) not only understood the cry for vengeance, but he sympathized with it. And he always kept his promise."
How? Well, telling you that might spoil your own fun in reading the story in Grim Lands: The Best of Robert E. Howard, volume 2, or quite possibly your local library.
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That's all for now, on this final session of REH Days 2026 (70th anniversary of Howard's death). But I'll post pictures and tips from the editors of the inaugural class of REH Emerging Writers!
