"Drive home your shafts, dog-brothers!"

—Lord of Samarcand

Dog-brothers was not an oft used term by Howard. However, when he used it, it served well to intensify the image of pack behavior among men, whom he often describes in canine terms, as with the sentence below.

"The stocky Kalmucks yelped like wolves in reply..."

As Conan comic books gained popularity in the 1970s, the authors of these comic books mined Howard's often unsold historical adventure manuscripts for story lines and dialog. It was in this form of a comic book that Marc Denny, co-founder of Dog-Brothers, came upon the term describing men in action as a pack. In at least one interview, Marc Denny attributed Howard's literary influence to the naming of his cultic experiential martial arts fraternity of stick fighters.