Blog Archives

Robert E. Howard (Sprague de Camp Fan): REH hit a certain stride (and formula) with this story. It is a great action yarn with an exotic locale, interesting characters, and strong vivid prose. Weird Tales made it the cover story. REH wrote some better Conan stories but “The Devil in Iron” is good Conan and […]

Authors (Up & Down These Mean Streets): I’d moved to St. Paul, Minnesota from San Francisco and found a place on Summit Hill not many blocks away from Tierney’s rooms. Two years, 1975-76, hanging out with Dick and the weird fiction fan sub-group a.k.a. the MinnCon — Count Koblas, Joe West and others. Stopping in […]

Conan (Venture Beat): Funcom has acquired control of Conan the Barbarian and other popular culture intellectual properties with its acquisition of Cabinet Group. The Oslo, Norway-based Funcom will merge the properties into its IP studio Heroic Signatures. In addition to Conan, it is acquiring IPs such as Mutant Year Zero and Solomon Kane. The purchase […]

Comic Books (Post cards from the Age of Reason): At National Periodicals, Weisinger edited Superman- and Batman-related titles early in his career, and was the long term editor for Superman titles until 1970. Schwartz took over editorial duties on Batman in 1964, shifting the character back to the Dark Detective format. But the top titles […]

Fandom (Wasteland & Sky): Gernsback once again laid the groundwork for his own destruction, all because he misunderstood the people he was trying to connect with. But this is only the beginning. There is still much, much more to be done. The announcement of the SF: was made in the 1934 May issue of Wonder […]

Horror (Scream Archive): For this list, I’m focusing on ten of the best writers of terror who directly preceded or were contemporaries with HPL. Most of these authors had a direct impact on what would soon come to be known as the “Cthulhu Mythos.” And even those who didn’t would soon see literary (and eventually […]

Review (With Both Hands): The Book of Joe , the fifth entry in the Forgotten Ruin series, offers us a trip through a mythic underworld, some serious Rangering how-to, and giggling legionnaires. You’ve got to check this out.   When we left off in Lay the Hate, Talker had jumped into the swirling maelstrom of […]

Science Fiction (Cryptofictional Records Wing): This trend started out in 1871 with Sir George Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking”, a novella in which England is invaded by a fictional (but German-speaking) country assisted by some form of secret technology. Due to this story’s popularity with readers, other British invasion thrillers soon followed. However, while these […]

Publishing (Goodman Games): The Skull and his various minions, flunkies, lieutenants, and, yes, even interns would like to send a hearty congratulations to our sword-brothers over at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, on the occasion of their 50th issue! Heroic Fantasy Quarterly is an online magazine specializing in adventure fantasy of all kinds, from eponymous tales of […]

Comic Books (Post Cards from the Age of Reason): How do we get comics get into our hands? These are a few brief opening thoughts on comic book distribution. I will return to the topic in a later post. Much like Pulp Magazines, comic books started out their existence as print matter distributed by the […]

Review (Easily Distracted): There are Victorian tales here; there are contemporary tales; there are near-future tales, in which the very prescient threat of environmental collapse lurks in the background. There are supernatural and non-supernatural stories; there are stories of ancient magic and dark mysticism; there are stories that defy categorization. Writing (Alexander Hellene): He spots […]

New/Art (Lulu): This book is a collection of articles about the early history of the art and the illustrators who made the works of Robert E. Howard come to life. Contents include: A heavily illustrated article on some of the best artists who worked for Weird Tales by Frank Coffman. A look at Roy G. […]