Blog Archives

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. […]

Gaming (Game Spot): Activision Blizzard’s stock price started the day on Wednesday, November 3, down by more than 14% on the New York Stock Exchange following an earnings release on Tuesday where the company announced delays for Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV and made other announcements that might have spooked investors. Activision Blizzard posted revenue […]

Fiction (Withnail Books): In the mid-1930s F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, wrote a short story set in medieval France, with a lead character, ‘The Count of Darkness’, based on the young Ernest Hemingway. It also featured a witch cult, drawn from a research source which greatly inspired the work of H.P. Lovecraft. […]

Fantasy (Ken Lizzi): I’ve written about Roger Zelazny before in my sporadic Appendix N series of posts. My recent reading of the entirety of the Dilvish the Damned sequence of tales requires that I add this supplemental. Because Dilvish is worthy of the effort. Now, the culmination of Dilvish’s saga (The Changing Land, 1981) postdates […]

Books (Talking Covers): Editor Gary Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries, a paperback imprint of Random House, in September 1984. There were seven initial titles. By decade’s end, there would be close to 100. The line was a mix of reprints and originals, and nearly thirty years later the checklist found in the back of the books […]

T.V. (Arkhaven Comics): If Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert had had a baby it would look like Apple TV’s Foundation…No, that isn’t it.  How about, if Apple TV’s programming chief wanted to buy Dune and it wasn’t available it would look like Apple TV’s Foundation?  Yeah, that’s the ticket. Foundation by Isaac Asimov is one of the […]

Review (Brave New World Media): A new, expertly edited collection of J. R. R. Tolkien’s writing on his elaborate mythology reminds us of its greatness. When J. R. R. Tolkien (b. 1892) passed away in 1973, he left an immense amount of unpublished writings — much of which consisted of his own personal Middle-earth mythology, known […]

Publishing (Rawle Nyanzi): Understand something right now: If you talk about an IP, you are marketing it. It doesn’t matter if it’s praise or critique, squeeing or shouting down. All of these video complaints about modern American pop culture only strengthen it because all the attention makes it relevant, no matter what that attention is. […]