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 helps cement his reputation as a grand storyteller.

Gaming (Walker’s Retreat): The issue is the same as that of regulatory capture: the stakes are so great that mitigation of risk requires suborning any organization that could inhibit the mission and turn it into an asset that faciliates it instead. This goes beyond regulatory capture in that the motivation is driven by something other than ordinary greed, but takes on the character of religious fanaticism due to the utility of the collusion: to faciliate Narrative Warfare.

Comic Books (Scifi Wright): A tempest in a teapot began to rage in the ever-shrinking fanbase of Marvel comics when the Woke overlords of Marvel announced their intention to emasculate the character of their popular antihero Frank Castle, the Punisher.

This is meant to discourage policemen and soldiers from admiring him, or from displaying his badass long-toothed skull emblem on their gear or garb. Woke Marvel does not want Patriots as patrons.

Tolkien/Art (Muddy Colors): Taking a cue from the rich depths of his writings and world building, this painting is filled with many references to the realm of Middle-earth. Here we see the scholar at work at his desk in the studio at Oxford just after the publication of The Return of the King, or his he laboring in a room at Bag End?

RPG (Rawle Nyanzi): But what made my campaign go from near-collapse to heights undreamed of was how I implemented 1:1 time. It really is the key, the essential ingredient, to any tabletop role-playing campaign. Earlier, when I did 1:1 time for the first time, I made the mistake of trying to game things out day-by-day. While it created some amazing events, it was exhausting to do, and I almost soured on the campaign because of it.

Comic Books (Talking Pulp): I started with Masterworks, Vol. 3 because it is a collection of what’s considered to be the most beloved work featuring Nick Fury, as the solo star of his own stories. This also takes the character, puts him in S.H.I.E.L.D. and makes him a cool, hip superspy, as opposed to a military hero on the battlefields of war.

Tolkien/Cinema (Arkhaven Comics): Even less surprising than Baby Yoda’s choosing the armor is the clear and obvious fact Amazon’s Lord of the Ring, The Rings of Power should have been titled, The Triumph of Sauron.  The fair lands of Middle Earth have finally been overrun and despoiled. Christopher Tolkien was the good son of a great man; he steadfastly protected his father’s legacy and works.  But he is gone now.  That this pile of fetid garbage is going to stain people’s memories of his masterpiece.

Science Fiction (Marzaat): Piper scholar John F. Carr call this a minor story, and he’s right from the central premise right down to it not being published in top tier Astounding Stories but the September/October 1950 issue of Future Stories. It is notable for the introduction of Piper’s A.E. dating system. That’s Atomic Era with the year zero being 1942, the year of the first controlled atomic fission event in human history. Piper would use the system in his later Terro-Human Future History.

Science Fiction (DMR Books): Ed Hamilton started out in Weird Tales with the patently A. Merritt-inspired “The Monster-God of Mamurth”. He would go on to sell many, many stories to both Farnsworth Wright and then Dorothy McIlwraith. Hamilton’s favorite author–like so many of the young SFF pulp writers at the time–was A. Merritt. More than a few of Ed’s fictions sold to WT during the ’30s and ’40s were squarely in the Merritt mode.

Games (Jon Mollison): Chainmail is a game written to be played.  In typical Gygaxian fashion, the rules consist of a series of subsystems bloted together like some Orkish land-walker.  Like those Stompaz and Gargants, Chainmail seems needlessly clunky, bulky, and unsophisticated.  And yet, it works.  Much of game consists of the four Ms – the movement, missile, melee, and morale – but unlike modern streamlined games each of those four quadrants of the miniature wargame operated based on their own rules of engagement.

Men’s Magazines (Rough Edges): I’m running out of superlatives to describe what a beautiful publication MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY is. Every issue lovingly reprints great covers and interior art from the men’s adventure magazines of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, along with stories and features from those magazines. The fourth volume is out now, and it’s yet another fantastic issue, this time focusing on a subject near and dear to my heart ever since I first watched those early Tarzan movies: jungle girls.

Review (Pulp Rev): Andrew Vachss was a master of American crime noir. Where most other writers can only attempt to summon imaginary demons on the page, Vachss has stared true monsters in the eye—and locked them away. By profession Vachss was a lawyer who specialized in child protective work. He had previously worked as a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social services caseworker, a labour organizer, and as a director of a maximum security prison for aggressive-violent youth.

Review (Bloody Spicy Books): “The Jade Figurine” owes some groundwork to “The Maltese Falcon.” A tough guy lead stuck in the middle of a several double-crosses over a valuable statuette. Plus, one of the bad guys is real fat. Other than that, it’s a comfortable tale of murder and smuggling in an old B-Movie sort of way. Dan Connell is on the outs, working day labor and drinking beer in Singapore when an old buddy comes to Dan and wants him to smuggle him out of the country. Dan doesn’t do that anymore and there’s the start of a well-crafted crime tale with a dash of exotic-locale adventure story mixed in.

Cinema (Kairos): It’s often said that the mark of a good parody is that you could take out all the jokes, and it would still play well as a straight genre film. The best parodies start with that ingredient and add a deep love for the source material. That’s right. Arnold himself pinpoints Last Action Hero, the 1993 parody of his bread-and-butter action film genre as the start of his movie career’s decline.

Science Fiction (Dark Worlds Quarterly): When you say the name “Donald A. Wollheim” you have to say which one you are referring to. Is it the force behind ACE Books or the creator and publisher of DAW Books? Or the Avon editor who tried to combine comics and Pulps? Or the editor of The Avon Fantasy Reader?  Is it the editor who published the unauthorized edition of The Lord of the Rings and created the modern fantasy boom? Is it the fanzine editor who published H. P. Lovecraft, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard, A. Merritt and Frank Belknap Long?

Science Fiction (Vintage Pop Fictions): Donald A. Wollheim’s 1959 science fiction novel The Secret of the Ninth Planet was written at a very interesting time. The Russians had launched several satellites but as yet there had been no manned spaceflights. The assumption behind the novel is, intriguingly, that manned spaceflight using the technology existing at the time (chemical rockets) would not a practical or safe proposition for travelling any further than the Moon.

Fiction (DMR Books): Edgar Wallace died an untimely death on this date in 1932. Edgar Who? I can hear it from the Homestead. Edgar Wallace would be fairly interesting just from the life he led, the lives his ancestors led and the lives his children led. However, I have two words for you: King Kong.*

Guy Stuff (Last Stand on Zombie Island): Goex, a name in black powder that goes back to the 19th Century, is set to return to the market with a little help from Estes.

Estes Energetics on Monday announced it had acquired the assets of the Goex brand from the Hodgdon Powder Company, including the only remaining commercial scale black powder factory in the United States. A sister company of the famed model rocket brand, Estes Energetics plans to restart production of black powder at the Goex plant in Minden, Louisiana. Estes had previously used Goex products in its rockets.

Poetry/Kipling (Men of the West): Said England unto Pharaoh, ‘I must make a man of you,
That will stand upon his feet and play the game;
That will Maxim his oppressor as a Christian ought to do,’
And she sent old Pharaoh Sergeant Whatisname.

Pulp (Rough Edges): In 1730, Patrick Spence is an American sea captain whose ship is sunk by pirates off the Barbary Coast. Spence is the only survivor. He’s picked up by a passing British vessel and taken to Algeria, where he finds himself broke and stranded, with no prospects of getting back to America.

Misc. (Frontier Partisans): Historical drama requires additional attention to the mores, manners and material culture of a bygone age. That doesn’t mean replicating the past note for note. You have to remain accessible to your contemporary audience. The past really is a foreign country, and they do things differently there.

There’s a real art to making the language of the past sound “authentically” archaic and at the same time keeping it accessible.