Read more about Kane (Fantasy) at: Wikipedia

Official Site: Estate of Karl Edward Wagner

Kane is a literary character created by Karl Edward Wagner in a series of sword and sorcery novels and short stories between 1970 and 1985. The stories are set in a grim, pre-medieval world which is nonetheless ancient and rich in history. In some of Wagner's later stories Kane appears in the present day  — for example, as a drug dealer in "Lacunae" and as a somewhat suspect publishing magnate in "At First Just Ghostly".

Little is known about Kane's origins. In the story "Misericorde", he declares to one of his foes that his father's name was Adam and his stepmother's name was Eve, possibly making him the biological son of Adam's first wife Lilith. Like traditional depictions of Cain he is a powerful, left-handed man with red hair, said to have killed (strangled) his brother Abel, and has been cursed by a mad god with an eternal life of wandering. Nevertheless, he is vulnerable to wounds, and it is said that he can be killed "by the violence that he himself created", although his wounds heal at a rapid pace. Kane is portrayed as both an excellent warrior ("I kill things," he tells Elric in "The Gothic Touch". "It's what I was made to do. I'm rather good at it") and an accomplished sorcerer, who spends the millennia wandering from one adventure into the next. Also like the Biblical Cain, Kane is marked as a killer; those who meet the gaze of his icy blue eyes cannot maintain contact for long, for they give away Kane's true nature as a butcher of men.

He is often compared to Conan the Barbarian, but Kane is quite different in that he is a devious character with a more somber and reflective outlook on life than Conan and none of the latter's dislike of sorcery. His creator described him as a character "who could master any situation intellectually, or rip heads off if push came to shove". Some commentators have argued that the fantasy protagonist that Kane has most in common with is Michael Moorcock's

Kane also appears in "Lacunae", collected in Why Not You and I? (1987), and in "At First Just Ghostly", "Deep in the Depths of the Acme Warehouse" and "The Gothic Touch" (which features Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné), collected in Exorcisms and Ecstasies (1997). This volume also includes the fragment "In the Wake of the Night" and an early version of "Lynortis Reprise".

Kane (Fantasy) has not been a contender in any CBUB matches.