Cinema (Yahoo Entertainment): Director Marcus Nispel is speaking out after Jason Momoa criticized their 2011 movie, Conan the Barbarian. In a statement to PEOPLE, Nispel opened up about the difficulties he faced as the director of the film. “As a filmmaker in this system you are a dog on many leashes. Trying to get Conan done under those circumstances was the worst experience that I had and I was as unhappy with the result,” Nispel, 59, tells PEOPLE. “I am happy though that none of this got in the way of Jason’s career path…I always stood by the decision to make Conan with him.”

Fiction (Pulp Net): Out of the smoldering creative fires of sword-and-sorcery, in 1939 a career was born. “Two Sought Adventure” saw print that August in the pulp Unknown — the first professional sale for Fritz Leiber Jr., who would go on to become one of the most-awarded writers in 20th-century imaginative literature. The characters introduced, the barbarian Fafhrd and the wily Gray Mouser — the two best thieves in Lankhmar, and the two best swordsmen — would have many more adventures with the author till the end of his life.

Authors (Goodman Games): Appendix N of the original Dungeon Masters Guide has become a Rosetta Stone for the study of the literary roots of D&D. One figure carved on that stone is Andrew J. Offutt, who is cited not for his own writing, but for editing the Swords Against Darkness heroic fantasy anthology series. Oddly, only the third volume of the five-book series is singled out and none of the other four books are even mentioned. Who then is Andrew Offutt, and why is he enshrined with the other Appendix N luminaries?

Robert E. Howard (Sprague de Camp Fan): Robert E. Howard wrote this short story in 1928. It was submitted to Weird Tales but was rejected by editor Farnsworth Wright. It first saw publication in King Kull, Lancer Books, 1967. Kull does not directly appear in the story but is mentioned as “Kull, king of all Valusia.”

Awards (Arkhaven Comics): The Dragon Awards began as a rebellion against the Wokelings that ran the Hugo awards into the ground. The Dragon Awards is now the property of the Wokelings that ran the Hugos into the ground. That is because the methodology used to award a Dragon is in a word: Crap.

D&D (Walker’s Retreat): The goal is to turn Fake D&D into a Cult Compound. The reason for a digital-only Game As Service model is not just to squeeze whales for revenue. It’s to cultivate psychologically weak people, congregate them into a virtual cult compound, and then use that virtual space to turn them into very literal cultists. The cultist becomes psychologically dependent upon the cult–upon the cult leadership–to maintain their ability to function at all, such that denying that support is a very real and viable threat that the leadership uses to maintain control and destroy those that are liabilities.

Tolkien (Venture Beat): Video game conglomerate Embracer Group has agreed to acquire the intellectual property rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit literary works by J.R.R Tolkien.

It will do so by acquiring a secondary fights holder, Middle-earth Enterprises, which acquired the rights to motion pictures, video games, board games and other rights back in the 1970s. Peter Jackson was able to make his Oscar-winning movies based on licenses that went back to Middle-earth Enterprises.

Review (DMR Books): The Sword & Sorcery renaissance continues with the release of Volume Four of David A. Riley’s ongoing anthology series Swords and Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy. Eleven total stories. Out of the eleven authors, five are returning. Many with recurring characters. Most notably, Adrian Cole returns with another new Voidal story. As if that wasn’t enough, the book boasts another striking cover by the esteemed Jim Pitts. Pitts artwork also graces many of the pages within too!

D&D (Trolls Myth): So if you watched the trailer for the next “edition” of D&D, now called One D&D, you’ll have noticed that half of it was devoted to their upcoming virtual tabletop.  (For those of you playing developer-speak bingo, it was described as “robust” but they did not actually use the word “scalable.”)  With DRAGON emagazine vanishing once again, you’d be forgiven for thinking this feels awfully familiar…

Review (With Both Hands): Nightland Racer is Fenton Wood’s completely gonzo fable about a down on his luck former bootlegger who drives a nuclear-powered truck into the future to battle a malevolent black hole. The past, the present, and the future meet in a world where myths are truer than truth, and the stakes are nothing less than humanity and the world.

Comic Books (Icv2): Jim Zub is set to write comics starring the two top characters set in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age, Conan and Red Sonja, for different publishers in the coming months. First up is Red Sonja, originally created by Roy Thomas for Marvel Comics in 1973, and currently published by Dynamite Entertainment.

Cinema (Bounding Into Comics): The continuing march of modern day critical gender theory has claimed yet another victim, this time as a new play from Shakespeare’s London Globe Theatre is set to portray historical French icon Saint Joan of Arc as a non-binary individual who finds her strength by “questioning the gender binary”.

T.V. (Sargon of Akkad): Prey is Everything Wrong with Modern Movies.

Tolkien (Notion Club Papers): It is characteristic of those intellectuals and officers who wrote about the Great War of 1914-18, that they experienced a permanent disillusion leading to the attitude epitomized by Robert Graves’s autobiography “Goodbye to all that”. In other words, the typical effect of the Great War was some combination of a rejection of tradition generally but especially Christianity.

Comics (DMR Books): Today marks the one hundred and thirtieth anniversary of Hal Foster’s birth. Who was Hal Foster? Just the main artistic influence on Frank Frazetta, Joe Kubert and John Buscema. Also, Foster was a big influence on Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Bernie Wrightson, Michael Wm. Kaluta, Alfredo Alcala, Rudy Nebres and Gary Gianni. His overall impact on adventure comic art—especially in the realm of heroic fantasy—is literally incalculable.

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Fantasy Literature): In Out of Time’s Abyss, the last volume of Edgar Rice Burrough’s CASPAK trilogy, we learn what happened to Bradley, one of the adventurers we met in the first novel, The Land that Time Forgot. As we expected, Bradley has frightening adventures on Caspak, is nearly killed by lions, bears, tigers, dinosaurs, etc, and he saves and falls in love with a beautiful young damsel in distress.

Art (Goodman Games): While best-loved by sci-fi fans for his tales of generational starships (Non-Stop) and far-future earths (Hothouse), English author and Science Fiction Grand Master Brian Aldiss was a prolific and daring writer who ranged up and down the spectrum of speculative fiction incorporating everything from straight pulp adventure to sharp satire, classic tropes of time-travel, space opera, and post-apocalyptic survival, to wild forays into non-traditional narrative technique.

Cinema (Wert Zone): News has sadly broken that German director Wolfgang Petersen has passed away at the age of 81. Petersen with best-known for his WWII submarine movie Das Boot (1981), but also directed several works of genre interest: The NeverEnding Story (1984), Enemy Mine (1985), Outbreak (1995) and Troy (2004).

H. P. Lovecraft (Tentaclii): Happy 132nd Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft. For 2022 my birthday present is a readable edition of the previously uncollected letters of E. Hoffman Price to H.P. Lovecraft. This 350-page book complements the recently-published edited volume of the letters from Lovecraft to Price.

Review (Prince of Nothing): Terror in the Streets or…groan, TiTS, is a hefty 98-page Jack The Ripper-style detective adventure set in 1630s Paris, during the precarious power struggle between Cardinal Richelieu and Marie du Medici, and involving all sorts of rioting mobs, opportunities for intrigue and the distant shadowy presence of Cardinal Richelieu hanging over the whole. The serial killer, a lunatic who is killing children to turn into a sort of skin-suit to avert what he believes is a prophesied Apocalypse, is none other then Richelieu’s Twin Brother!

Fiction (M Porcius): “The Ghost Breakers” debuted as a cover story of the July ’44 issue of Thrilling Detective, an issue which also includes a story by our pal Leigh Brackett, another SF author whose crime stories and novels we have sampled.  I am reading “The Ghost Breakers” in the Summer ’52 issue of 5 Detective Novels.

T.V. (Frontier Partisans): Back in the early 1990s, George Lucas conceived of something breathtakingly ambitious: He’d educate young people on the history of the 20th century by entertaining them with the adventures of a young Indiana Jones. The series followed the intrepid budding archaeologist from childhood through young adulthood, meeting a wide and wild range of major historical figures along the way. It was a hoot, but it cost a fortune to make and didn’t really catch fire, so it didn’t last.

Pulp (Pulp Net): While I am not a fan of westerns, I recently picked up The Pulp Western, which is considered the best book on the subject. Written by John A. Dinan, it was published in 1983 as the second in the I.O. Evans Studies in the Philosophy & Criticism of Literature from Borgo Press. It was reprinted with new material in 2003 by BearManor Media, and can easily be obtained from Amazon.

Pulp (Spectre Library): Six Gun Serenade (as noted on the cover and spine; Sixgun Serenade, as noted within) carries the byline Earle Sumner, and was published by World Distributors Incorporated, as part of their All Star Western series, likely around 1950. The artwork is signed simply “Anthon.” The novel runs from page 3 to 127. The final page lists other titles in the All Star Western Series. The interior front and rear covers are blank, wasted space. The rear cover features the following blurb for this novel:

Cinema (Wyrd Britain): 1970’s ‘Cry of the Banshee’ was director Gordon Hessler‘s third film for American International Pictures (AIP) starring Vincent Price following ‘The Oblong Box’ and ‘Scream and Scream Again’ and is by far the less successful of the three – but still infinitely better than the Kiss movie he was to make in 1978.

Cinema (Neo Text Corp): Scorsese’s Raging Bull is not your dad’s boxing movie. It’s certainly not a story of conventional redemption or hope overcoming the odds. Instead it’s mainly a troubling deep dive into a sick soul, haunted by self-loathing, sexual frustration, jealousy and anger, the ring-centred conflicts heightened, abstract and visceral extensions of the id. One man’s fear of emotional connection, expressed with his fists. The feel-good film of 1980! In the hands of director Martin Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, cinematographer Michael Chapman and the sound design of Frank Warner though, toxic masculinity never looked or sounded better.

History (First Things): The two worst things that can happen to a mercenary are dying and not getting paid, possibly not in that order. Think of it this way: Plenty of mercenaries have a death-wish; not one has ever had a not-getting-paid-wish. In 1978, “Mad Mike” Hoare was the most famous mercenary in the world, having distinguished himself in the Congo wars of the early 1960s, and he knew from experience that the only thing harder than squeezing money out of a loser who no longer has the means to pay his mercenaries is coaxing it out of a winner who no longer feels like he has to.

RPG (Goodman Games): There’s a new third-party module for MCC RPG in our online store! And it’s brought the PDF of it’s prequel with it! The Time-Lost Citadel is the latest Mutant Crawl Classics adventure from the folks at Dandyline Games, joining The Seekers of the Un-K’Nown in their post-apocalyptic stable. And now, both modules come as a print + PDF combo! Let’s look at the details!