I had known that. I heard he mailed two suicide letters. One to his wife. One to Hugh Hefner.

I...I...I just have no words. 

I have one, WHA.........? (or is it WAAAAUGH?)

Sometimes I think that a character that any writer can pick up and do something with isn't great, just generic so that one size fits all.

Part of being great is that it has a unique voice, but if it is bland enough that anyone can pick up the puppet strings and make it dance effectively, to me it means there's could be something lacking there.

Characters can achieve iconic status-some of the mythological characters come to mind, but then the great stories using those characters are ones that have a unique voice or take and it is not the character per se that makes those stories great, but the ability of the storyteller. If the storyteller lacks ability, the story will stink no matter how iconic or "great" the character is. Pastiche is almost always a pale imitation of the original storytellers work, even when it is good pastiche.

As an example I will use Conan. Howard is the definitive voice and take on Conan. De Camp and Carter did pastiche and editorial work which reignited the popularity of the character but it strayed from the original take in a lot of ways, and while it was good it didn't compare with the original Howard stuff. Then along comes Roy Thomas, who riffs off the deCamp & Carer edits and pastiches rather than the original pure Howard material, and it is good bordering on great pastiche, but it is in itself a shadow of the previous pastiche which is a shadow of the original Howard stuff and it is lacking some of the elements that made the Howard stuff so good (part of that could be attributed to the blunting effect of the CCA, and the SSoC stuff was a slight step up in some of those regards than the code approved books-not for the violence or the depiction of scantily clad women, but the thematic stuff that was at the core of Howard's writing that a lot of the pastiches missed when they embraced the trappings of Conan stories but not the heart). The come those who followed Thomas on the book riffing off the pastiche of a pastiche of the original and a lot of it fell short. Later, Busiek comes along and ignores a lot of the pastiche and goes back to the Howard originals (which are much more readily available at that time then they were in the late 60s early 70s I will admit) and he does his take which is very, very good, but still a pastiche of the Howard stuff and a shadow of it even if it is quality stuff, because again Conan's heart as a character is Howard's world view and as good or bad as every other writer is who wrote Conan after Howard, none of them looked at the world the way Howard did and could give that worldview a voice through the Cimmerian.

So while there is some excellent post-Howard Conan material, what made the character great is something that none of those followers had, and that was it being a vehicle for Howard to express his experiences and worldview through the lens of a savage barbarian and his world.

Conan the character doesn't confer greatness on those who use him. He is a character well or poorly used by writers who have affinity and talent for him and those who don't. The great Conan stories come from storytellers who use the character well, and none did so as well as Howard himself because the character had a unique voice and purpose for Howard. Other good or great storytellers have used the character well enough to create good (even very good and possibly great) stories with him but in the hands of lesser storytellers, a lot of bad to terrible Conan stories were produced because the character isn't what makes it great.

As a side note, I think the creator who most closely achieved what Howard did with Conan, i.e. using the character as a vehicle to express his own thematic views of the world and experiences through the lens of Conan was Frazetta. His paintings of Conan don't try to mimic what Howard did as pastiche, they do what Howard's stories did and let you see the world through the lens of Frazetta via Conan, his art using Conan a way of voicing his worldview and experiences. But again, it wasn't Conan who made those visual stories/painting great, it was the person creating them.

-M

Hell, see you and raise.  

The characters that succeed over a long period of time are the ones that can be reinterpreted for a new audience.  The reason that Batman stuck around and the Shadow didn't is that Batman was successfully and radically reinterpreted to work for different audiences that were decades apart and were very different in taste.  The Shadow (or the original Captain Marvel, or the Executioner) just kinda stayed the same and therefore was ignored as soon as public tastes changed.