Blog Archives

Tolkien (Bounding Into Comics): The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay attempted to hype up the upcoming Prime Video series during a Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con. However, the opposite happened as the more they talked about the show, the more their professed respect love […]

Cinema (Arkhaven Comics): The trade press is going on at great length over how mega-super-great Thor: Love and Thunder is doing at the box office.  Despite a 68% second weekend crash. Yeah, it has hit the $500 million mark.  Good for them.  But it had a budget of $250 million and it was shot pre covid, so it […]

New (Wasteland & Sky): This has been a long time coming, and it is thanks to you, dear reader, that it has happened. Today is the official release of my new book, The Last Fanatics: How the Genre Wars Killed Wonder. This is a collection of essays, edited by myself, of my series on Fandom […]

Art (Stuff I Like): My friends and I didn’t read Robert E Howard, we didn’t read Terry Brooks (other than that first Tolkien pastiche). A lot of us read Tolkien, but not everyone. Michael Moorcock, though, we all read. I think my friend Karl H. told me about Stormbringer first, before I picked up anything […]

New (Wasteland & Sky): It’s been a long time coming, but today it the say Cirsova puts out their new issue. not only that, but for the first time, I have been included in its pages! You won’t want to miss out on this action-packed issue. Cirsova hasn’t missed yet. Running since 2016, it has […]

Tolkien (Pillarist): There is little doubt that, among the vast—if posthumously published—corpus of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Hurin stands out as his darkest and most openly tragic work. It is a tale of doom set against the prince and princess of the House of Hador, and worse still, the great tragedies they are entrapped […]

James Bond (Hollywood in Toto): John Glen’s “The Living Daylights” (1987) was Dalton’s first vehicle as Bond, after Roger Moore stepped away from the unliked but wildly popular “A View to a Kill” (1985) and series icon Sean Connery had embarked on the enormously successful third act of his long film career. Dalton was a […]

Firearms (Tactical Life): The M9 service handgun, the U.S. military’s version of the 9mm Beretta 92FS, has been in continuous service with the military since 1985. For several years there has been plenty of programmed concern in picking its replacement. Over a decade ago was the Future Handgun System (FHS), which merged with the U.S. […]

Sword & Sorcery (Cobalt Jade): Without dispute, pulp author Robert E. Howard invented the fantasy character trope of The Barbarian Hero, specifically with his creation Conan. But the roots were laid before that in the Tarzan tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli. Both pitted a stoic, nature-wise man (or boy) of the wilds […]

Reading (Monster Hunter Nation): Conversations with friends: why men need to read more novels. I agree with this title. More people need to read novels. That’s how I get paid. Never mind the so-called demise of the male novelist, where are all the male readers? Ash Sarkar on why we all miss out when half […]

Comic Books (Bleeding Cool): It was a note to a fan page on Facebook that did it, with a well-connected fan pointing to an upcoming Conan cover by Esad Ribic as his last, as Marvel no longer own the rights to the character. So, at Lake Como Comic Art Festival, I did a little digging. […]