Kuykendalls agreed and Lord accepted the role in March of that year, which he retained until September 1993. The first Howard boom In 1966, de Camp made a deal with struggling Lancer Books to publish the existing Howard and non-Howard Conan corpus in paperback, along with additional material contributed by himself and his colleague and collaborator Lin Carter. Together they completed recently discovered fragments of Conan pieces by Howard and wrote several of their own stories to fill out the picture of Conan's career. The Lancer Conan series became a publishing phenomenon, selling millions. Sporting a set of now-classic covers painted by Frank Frazetta, the success of the Lancers created a decade-long "Howard boom" in the 1970s. De Camp increasingly wrote introductions and short articles about Howard. Despite factual inaccuracies in these, he became seen as the leading expert on Howard and his works. At the same time Lord arranged for other Howard works to see print. The publisher Donald Grant began by reprinting Howard's first novel, A Gent from Bear Creek. With the success of the Conan stories, Lancer also began to publish other Howard stories, such as a series of Kull books. In 1970, Marvel Comics bought the rights to produce Conan comics, which included Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan. The latter of these was classed as a magazine, including articles as well as comic book sections, which allowed it to include more mature content than was allowed at the time under the Comics Code Authority. Fan works appeared as well, the most significant of which were Amra and the Robert E. Howard United Press Association (REHupa). Amra was a fanzine than began publication in 1959, created by L. Sprague de Camp and George Scithers, and grew to attract material from many famous authors and artists. Named after one of Conan's alter egos, it covered the subjects of Conan, Robert E. Howard and the sword and sorcery genre in general. It continued publication for thirty-three years. REHupa was formed in 1972 as an amateur press association, each of the small membership producing their own regular fanzine, which is sent to the Official Editor and subsequently disseminated to all members. REHupa still exists to this day. Lancer filed for bankruptcy in 1973 but managed to continue doing business for another three years. De Camp sued Lancer for unpaid royalties and was himself sued by Lord