I've been reading up on the history of Atlantis as depicted in Marvel Comics recently, drawn from such diverse sources as their Conan the Barbarian and Sub-mariner comics, and it seems as though some of it doesn't entirely gel very well. For example, a map on the Marvel Wikia website depicts Atlantis prior to its destruction as being a fairly large continent covering a wide area of the Atlantic Ocean with its boundries near to those of Europe and the Americas. But the stories of King Kull and Conan, which are supposed to be in continuity with Marvel, always depicted Atlantis as a rather small continent surrounded by other smaller islands, such as the Pictish Isles, and Antillia from L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's novel Conan of the Isles. Frankly, it doesn't look as though there'd be much room left with an Atlantis that large.
Robert E. Howard's other character Solomon Kane has also been incorporated by Marvel, and one of Howard's stories adapted by them had Kane discover the Atlantean colony of Negari built in West Africa supposedly prior to the Great Cataclysm that destroyed that land......but in his Hyborian Age essay West Africa didn't exist in the Pre-Cataclysmic and Hyborian Ages. Marvel even published a sequel to this story where Kane travelled back in time and met Conan who was in the city!!
The depiction of the civilization on the Atlantean mainland also differs. In Howard's Kull stories Atlantis was an uncivilized backwater populated by primitive tribes, whereas the Carter/de Camp tales and Marvel indicate that it was more advanced when it fell. However, some have reconciled this by saying that in the centuries between the time of Kull and the Great Cataclysm Atlantean culture picked up and developed advanced technologies, but this doesn't explain why Negari and the Atlantean colony on Europe shown in a Man-Thing story looked so primitive.
Stories written in the 1970s had Atlantis ruled by a King Kamuu just before the Cataclysm. But in the third volume of the Man-Thing comic in the 1990s, a story was written showing Atlantis as having been ruled by Atlas, the son of Poseidon and Cleito and the grandson of Evenor, as per the original Greek myth, but this doesn't gel with either Howard's or Marvel's interpretation of things.
Now I'm a very big fan of Marvel's Conan stories, so I'd hate to have to disregard them, so what to do? Thoughts, opinions?
Robert E. Howard's other character Solomon Kane has also been incorporated by Marvel, and one of Howard's stories adapted by them had Kane discover the Atlantean colony of Negari built in West Africa supposedly prior to the Great Cataclysm that destroyed that land......but in his Hyborian Age essay West Africa didn't exist in the Pre-Cataclysmic and Hyborian Ages. Marvel even published a sequel to this story where Kane travelled back in time and met Conan who was in the city!!
The depiction of the civilization on the Atlantean mainland also differs. In Howard's Kull stories Atlantis was an uncivilized backwater populated by primitive tribes, whereas the Carter/de Camp tales and Marvel indicate that it was more advanced when it fell. However, some have reconciled this by saying that in the centuries between the time of Kull and the Great Cataclysm Atlantean culture picked up and developed advanced technologies, but this doesn't explain why Negari and the Atlantean colony on Europe shown in a Man-Thing story looked so primitive.
Stories written in the 1970s had Atlantis ruled by a King Kamuu just before the Cataclysm. But in the third volume of the Man-Thing comic in the 1990s, a story was written showing Atlantis as having been ruled by Atlas, the son of Poseidon and Cleito and the grandson of Evenor, as per the original Greek myth, but this doesn't gel with either Howard's or Marvel's interpretation of things.
Now I'm a very big fan of Marvel's Conan stories, so I'd hate to have to disregard them, so what to do? Thoughts, opinions?
