Blog Archives

Appendix N (Goodman Games): We’ve talked a lot about Fritz Leiber, whose birthday we’re celebrating today, over the last few years. Leiber, born December 24th, 1910, is most widely known among gamers as the man responsible for the fantastic Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. In the years running up to DCC Lankhmar, a lot of […]

Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB Zine): Edgar Rice Burroughs admired fellow-author Jack London enormously. Following the amazing success of his own early writings, ERB’s ambition was to become a rancher-writer, modeling his life on the one that Jack London had pursued and then abruptly lost due to his sudden death in 1916. In fact, Burroughs and […]

Robert E. Howard (Essential Malady): El Borak has the distinction of being the first character created by Robert E. Howard though the stories he appeared in had a long gestation and weren’t published until Howard had already seen a number of his much better known characters in print. The historical background to these stories is […]

Publishing (Free Press): It’s about a parallel publishing space that has risen up while the legacy publishing houses in New York have been declining thanks to a combination of threats that are both external (the internet; the upending of print) and internal (new progressive staffers; sensitivity readers; etc.). Cinema (Stephen Mark Rainey): As a diehard […]

Conan (Education Forensics): If you listen to “Ask Chuck Dixon” on YouTube or UATV, you’ll know that Dixon has written thousands of comic books. He created the character Bane, and wrote ‘Batman’ for DC for ten years. He’s also responsible for the Levon Cade series of Vigilante Justice novels. One of the things he talks […]

T.V. (Art of Manliness): If you have only passing familiarity with The Twilight Zone — maybe only really knowing its iconic opening sequence — you might be forgiven for thinking that the classic television show centered on scary themes. In reality, however, while the show certainly had a dark atmosphere and included plenty of suspense, creepiness, and […]

Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): The new Conan adventures are starting to pile up faster than I can read them. This one is not really new though. It was originally serialized in Marvel Comics Conan the Barbarian (2019) issues 1 through 12. I didn’t read it then. Like most, I imagine, I decided to wait […]

D&D (Grognardia): Despite my somewhat negative assessment of the lasting impact of Tracy Hickman on the development of AD&D, I nevertheless respect Hickman’s dungeon designs. Ravenloft, for all of its theater kid stylings, includes an immense and genuinely challenging dungeon in the form of Castle Ravenloft. Fantasy (Goodman Games): We recently caught up with Howard Andrew […]