What if young Goodman Brown was so affected after what he saw in that midnight clearing (taking the ‘spectral evidence’ as fact and not dream) that he devoted himself fully to the cause of vanquishing evil with cutlass and flintlock? Well, you’d have Solomon Kane, the meanest S.O.B. of a Puritan since Sheriff Corwin pressed Giles Corey to death under a pile of rocks. Actually, Oliver Cromwell was kinda tough too in a warty, Lord Protector kinda way. Single-mindedness can be such an amazing weapon.

 

Back to Kane… Not to cast aspersions on Stephen Sommers but it seems that he and his costumers cribbed their Gabriel Van Helsing from right out of one of Robert E. Howard’s Kane stories. They re-jiggered his look a bit, adding beaten leather to the dude’s overwhelmingly black outfit (Puritan garb asks for some color) but it’s essentially the same design.

 

But for all the people out there trying to cop his style there’s really only one Solomon Kane… who fought his way across the continent of Africa, thunder-punching one hundred-fold his weight in demons, witch doctors and other creeping things. Who put buckled boot to the vampire queen of Negari. Who allied himself with the shaman N’Longa (possessor of the Secret) and in return received the mythic Staff of Solomon, an artifact as aged as the Earth herself. Who fights the shadows, a man, part shadow himself, his flintlocks providing only brief illumination to his form.

 

Whether he ultimately perished in his ongoing fight is unknown... Maybe his mystical staff granted him long life so that he could take his zealot’s war against the forces of evil into new centuries.