There are many characters in our society we are familiar with whether from books and comic books or television and movies. One of the characters we know from a variety of media is Conan the Barbarian but little is known about how he came into being. Conan is a character from the sword and sorcery genre created by a writer from Texas named Robert E. Howard in 1932. Howard’s Conan stories began as a series of articles submitted to the fantasy magazine Weird Tales. Howard’s influences ranged from the Greek writer Plutarch to the mythology works of Thomas Bulfinch. Howard wrote many more Conan stories over the next 4 year completing 21 stories. 
Conan books have been written and published by various different authors over the last 50 years, many of them trying to imitate the style of Robert E. Howard. The original Conan stories written by Howard were allowed to go out of print and were unavailable in their original form. In 2003 the original Howard stories were collected and printed by British Publisher Wandering Star and were republished in the U.S. by Ballantine. These volumes included Howard’s original stories but expanded on them by offering his notes and letters on the setting and for the world of Conan which provided a more complete look at the history of Howard’s ideas and the genesis of the character. Regardless of the history of the character the books, comic books, and the movies of the 80s have kept the Conan character alive and well in the imagination of society since he was first put into print in the 1930s by Robert E. Howard. 
We’ve all heard the longstanding tales of alligators running rampant in the sewers of New York City. The logic goes that baby gators were purchased as pets, either in local pet stores or by tourists vacationing in Florida. After quickly outgrowing the confines of their owners’ apartments, they were flushed down toilets and into the sewer system, where they soon bred and infested the labyrinthine network of pipes tunnels beneath Manhattan.
What isn’t largely known, however, is the origin of this famed urban legend, as recorded in the 1920s and 30s by – of all sources — the New York Times. Between 1927 and 1942, the paper ran twelve articles concerning alligator sightings – though in most instances they were in outlying areas beyond the city proper, such as Westchester County and New Jersey, and spotted in rivers or lakes, rather than drainpipes.
The craze got its first shot in the arm on June 28, 1932 when “swarms” of alligators were seen swimming in Bronx River. It was, however, later decided that the witnesses had in fact seen snakes or lizards –- but only after police had reportedly conducted a farcical search involving large quantities of beef liver and butterfly nets.
The sewer component first entered into the myth three years later, after a gang of teenage boys spotted a moving shape beneath them as they shoveled snow into an open manhole cover near the Harlem River. Using a makeshift lasso, they were able to snag the animal’s neck and haul it to surface – where they quickly realized they caught a live alligator. The gator lunged and, in response, the boys beat it to death with their shovels. After dragging the carcass to nearby garage, it was determined that the beast weighed 125 pounds and measured some seven-and-a-half feet in length.
Such up close and personal encounters, however, were few and far between. The legend broke wide in 1959 after the release of Robert Daley’s The World Beneath the City, which detailed the history of New York’s subterranean plumbing and electrical systems. A brief portion of the book recounted the story of Teddy May, the former superintendent of the city’s sewers. According to Mays’s account, after receiving numerous reports of sewer alligators – which he and others believed to be false – he commissioned an investigation in 1935 to squash the stories once and for all.
When no gators turned up, May decided to take a look for himself. Upon visiting an undisclosed location somewhere in the five boroughs, he stumbled upon a so-called “colony” of the creatures – which measured roughly two feet apiece — living in the sewers’ shallow waters. Highly distressed by his discovery, May claimed that he had all of the animals exterminated, though no corroborating account as ever emerged to verify his story.
From then on, embellished stories of an alligator infestation in New York City’s sewers have been propagated far and wide, turning up everywhere from Thomas Pynchon’s 1963 novel V. to a B-side released by British band Radiohead in 2001. Biologists, however, generally doubt the reptiles’ ability to survive a New York City winter and no sewer employee in recent memory has ever reported an encounter with the one of the elusive beasts.
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We are all familiar with Batman whether it is through movies, comic books, television shows, or cartoons. We know the look of the character and the various actors that have portrayed him over the years but the history of the character is not common knowledge. Batman did not start out resembling anything like the costumed hero we all know. Batman was the creation of artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger in 1938 which was published by D.C. Comics. Kane’s original Batman sketches looked more like a Superman type of character with reddish tights, a domino mask, and some stiff wings that resembled those of a bat. Refinements of the character led to giving him a cowl and a cape, removed the red portions, and giving him gloves. The character’s personality was shaped by movies of the day and characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Zorro, and the Shadow. The main difference in costuming is that most other Superheroes have colorful costumes but Batman has a darker more ominous look which was by design. The Bruce Wayne personality was developed by Bill Finger based on a combination of Scottish legend Robert Bruce and U.S. Revolutionary General “Mad Anthony” Wayne.
Kane signed away rights to the character for, among other compensation, a byline on all Batman comic books which eventually had the line “Created by Bob Kane” for all of Batman’s stories. Bill Finger never received credit as a co-creator of Batman and Kane was criticized by some for not sharing the credit, and after Finger’s death in 1974 Kane regretted letting his ego get the best of him and not officially recognizing him as a co-creator of Batman as well as other characters and villains. Finger was credited as the creator of the Riddler by Julius Schwartz in 1965 in an acknowledgement of his work. The character has been recreated of the years as times and audiences change and Frank Miller’s epic 1986 comic series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns redefined the character for a generation and brought the character back into popularity. This is the version of Batman many of us are familiar with and spawned a series of movies which introduced him and many other characters to a new set of fans. Batman has had a long history of ups and downs but the character has had a large resurgence in recent years and shows no signs of slowing down.
In 1754, Benjamin Franklin, upset by the inability of the colonies to collaborate during an era marked by escalating conflicts with the French, Indian tribes and the British, decided to run a woodcut in his Pennsylvania Gazette that would underline his message of “Join or Die.” The resulting woodcut of serpent divided into thirteen segments, not only immediately entered the cultural lexicon of the United States, but became its first political cartoon as well.
By the 1870s, the influence of editorial cartoonists had waned little and would continue to affect the democratic process. When William “Boss Tweed,” the commissioner of New York City’s Tammany Hall, declared that newspaper reports of political machine’s corruption were inconsequential, since his constituents couldn’t read, Thomas Nast of Harper’s Weekly took it as a challenge. His response was four years worth of cartoons that exposed the greed and intimidation behind Tweed’s operation so plainly that even the city’s non-English speaking immigrant population took note. Nast’s likenesses of Tweed were so accurate and widely known that after the disgraced leader fled to Spain to avoid prosecution in 1875, the cartoons were used to identify and apprehend him. Nast later went on to design such instantly recognizable icons as the Republican Party’s elephant, the Democratic Party’s Donkey and the common red-and-white clad, jolly Santa Claus that we know today.
Another important artist in the field was J.N. “Ding” Darling of the Des Moines Register, who, from 1900 to 1949, depicted the impact of humans upon the environment. Darling’s commentaries on the subject were so apt that President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him chief of the agency now known as the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 1934. While in the service of the government, he outlined the foundations of the National Wildlife Preserve program, which today has more than 500 locations across the country dedicated to protection of threatened species and their habitats.
Many of the phrases we use on a regular basis are well known and they often seem like a cliché. Among these often used sayings is “raining cats and dogs”. We all know that when someone says it is “raining cats and dogs” it means that there is a torrential rainstorm in progress. However, like many other such phrases the actual origin is not commonly known and there are several different theories as to how it began. One of the most interesting is that the notoriously bad drainage and sewage systems of 17th century England would become rivers of debris during rainstorms. Among the debris drowned cats and dogs would be littered. Richard Brome wrote about the phenomenon in the 1652 work The City Witt saying 
There have been reports of whirlwinds dropping frogs, grasshoppers, and fish from the sky but cats and dogs have never been among the creatures actually raining down. Another idea is that an old French word catadoupe (which means waterfall) sounds similar to “cats and dogs”. These are some of the competing theories for the origin of the phrase although there is no definite winner. Regardless of which theory each of us subscribe to the saying that it is “raining cats and dogs” will continue to be a common part of the English language. 
