Comic Books (Rip Jagger Dojo): As far as I can remember the Eclipse Comics adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit came out of left field. I don’t remember much buzz about it at the time, but it was a period when I was less connected to comics overall. After the burst of interest in fantasy in the 70’s, largely as a result of the success of Tolkien’s epic works, the story had gotten an animated treatment in both television and in the cinema.

James Bond (MI6): Ian Fleming penned hundreds of thousands of words about 007, but he wrote very few about the man himself, James Bond. Readers came to understand the character through his actions. This is made clear in the rather fleeting depictions of Bond’s life outside his total duty to Queen and Country. In contrast, Bond screenwriters wasted no time and expended just a few words to tell us everything we need to know about the cinematic 007.

History (The Past): In the last issue of MHM, in the first of two special editions to mark the 80th anniversary of D-Day on 6 June 1944, we looked at some of the factors which would determine the operation’s success — from the brilliant Allied deception plan, which left Hitler unsure where an attack would come, to the flawed ‘Atlantic Wall’, which left German troops poorly placed to resist the greatest amphibious invasion force in history.

Comic Books (Super Hero Hype): The current storyline of Conan the Barbarian has found Cimmeria’s favorite son sent across time and space. This has brought him into contact with other Robert E. Howard creations, from the prehistoric period before the Hyborian Age of Conan. However, the latest issue reunites him with an old ally, albeit one who has not yet met him.

Cinema (High on Films): Solomon Kane (2009) Movie Ending Explained: Created by Robert E. Howard in 1928, M.J. Bassett’s 2009 action-adventure film “Solomon Kane” features James Purefoy and Jason Flemyng. The story revolves around the great warrior Solomon Kane, who refuses violence in order to stay away from hell. The film itself is very engaging, and the set design is very profound, to be frank.

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): This past week the Northern Lights have been visible in parts of the world where they aren’t normally seen. I have seen them only once in my life, in the Northern Peninsula of Michigan, in May 1997 with friends I haven’t seen in a very long time. In thinking about the lights, I remembered the image below. I can’t be sure that the Northern Lights are depicted on this cover.

Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): I was looking for something to read, and checked to see if Teel James Glenn had written anything new in his “Adventures of (Robert E.) Bob Howard” series where  an alternate universe Howard didn’t kill himself and went travelin’. He has written a third one.

Spy Fiction (Vintage Pop Fiction): The Dragon’s Eye is a 1969 spy thriller by Scott C.S. Stone published by Fawcett in their Gold Medal series. I’m afraid I know nothing about the author other than that he had certainly spent time in the Far East. This is an amateur spy tale. Michael Hawkins is a reporter covering the war in Vietnam.

Cinema (Black Gate): Some of us waited a very long time for these movies — or at least, that’s how it felt. I grew up in the 1960s reading science fiction and fantasy; my father had read pulps like Weird Tales back in the ‘30s, and when those stories were republished as postwar paperbacks, he bought them and then passed them on to me. But I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy on my own in my junior high school library, which had pristine copies of the Houghton Mifflin hardcovers with those two-color foldout maps bound into the endpapers.

D&D (Merric’s Musings): Today, I woke up to the news that Greyhawk will be included in the new Dungeon Master’s Guide as the sample world. I think this is awesome. (I also am very, very hopeful it means that Greyhawk opens up for the DMs Guild). The original release of Greyhawk was very bare bones. This was intentional. It was a springboard that DMs could set their existing campaigns in, and provides inspiration for what might lie outside the borders of the small town and dungeon the DM has.

T.V. (Book Steve’s Library): McHale’s Navy (1962-1966) was a popular ABC-TV half-hour sitcom that ran for four full seasons (after a one-off hour-long pilot) and even had two feature film spin-offs at the time as well as a modernized reboot movie more than three decades later. Like M*A*S*H, Taxi, and Barney Miller, McHale’s Navy had a great ensemble cast and was nominated for and even won numerous awards during its run.

Cinema (Flash Back Universe): Despite the attention lavished on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars, and even Star Trek or the Alien universe, I feel like the science fiction franchise most consistent in quality is the Planet of the Apes. Sure, it’s not without its duds (Burton’s film) and lesser lights (the last original film, the cartoon, perhaps), but the Wyatt/Reeves reboot?/prequel? series of the 2010s defied sequel gravity and only got better as it went along.

Cinema (Fandom Pulse): Sony Pictures Entertainment has reported a nearly 10% decrease in operating income for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. Operating income dropped from $894 million to $808 million compared to the previous year. Despite a slight increase in revenues from $10.14 billion to $10.31 billion, the decline in operating income is notable. Sony attributes the downturn in its Pictures segment, encompassing TV production, motion pictures, and media networks, partly to the impact of Hollywood strikes.The real reason is of course forced leftist ideology in flops like Madam Web.

T.V. (Lotus Eaters): Join the lads as they dive into the captivating world of Fallout and dissect the latest buzz around its new TV adaptation.

Tolkien (Thinking West): Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is full of Christian symbolism reflecting his own Catholic faith. However, he admitted later in life he meant the Lord of the Rings to be an implicitly religious, though he concluded it ended up being an explicitly religious work. What Christian elements shine through his work and the movie adaptations by Peter Jackson? The figure of Christ is one such important symbolic element in the Lord of the RIngs.

RPG (Goodman Games): Our Dark Tower Designer Diaries take an in depth behind-the-scenes look at the massive undertaking that was updating this gaming classic. Check out our entire range of Dark Tower products for 5E and DCC, and be sure to catch past and future Dark Tower Design Diaries.

Weird Western (Marzaat): Review: Gunmen of the Hollow Earth, Joel Jenkins, 2020.  It all goes awry because of the tubercular Doc Holiday. He’s waiting in ambush with the Earp brothers, Warren and Morgan, for the gang of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

RPG (Matthew J. Constantine): There is certainly no shortage of zero level funnel modules for Dungeon Crawl Classics at this point.  From the wildly over the top Hole in the Sky, the epic adventure of Sailors on the Starless Sea, to the basic dungeon crawl of Portal Under the Stars, and many, many others. You’ve got options.  Still, they’re fun.  Plus, it’s nice to have a variety of ways to start a campaign.  The funnel isn’t just about finding your player characters, it’s about setting a tone for what’s to come.  Enter Edgar Johnson’s Bloom of the Blood Garden, for something that straddles the mundane and the gonzo.

Warhammer (Lord Samper Library): I can never get my head round the ‘Warhammer 40K’ rules, and my painting leaves a hell of a lot to be desired, but the release of Tenth Edition caught my eye as it came with ‘Leviathan’, the book of the game ? I love Hinks’ fantasy work but I’d never read any of his 40K work so ‘Leviathan’ looked like the best place to jump in and see what was what. It took a little while for me to get hold of the paperback edition but I did and here we are ? Let me tell you about it. Nothing too in-depth, work was intense yesterday and looks like being similar today.

Comic Books (Grim Dark Magazine): It’s wonderful to read Creepshow: Holiday Special #1.  Daniel Kraus opens proceedings with the deliriously outrageous ‘Christmas Man.’ where the power of imagination comes back to devour the unwary.  On Christmas Eve, young Esme, a true devotee of all things Santa Claus, is baited by her bored older cousins who tell her a shaggy dog story about Christmas Man and his monstrous efforts to topple the empire Santa has built across the world.  As the cousins’ story becomes more outrageous.

Fiction (M Porcius): Girl, 20 is full of politics, starting from page 1.  Douglas tells people he has no interest in politics, but the people around him are obsessed with the topic.  The editor of his newspaper, Harold Meers, is a hardcore anti-communist who doesn’t want Douglas to write an article about a talented East German pianist because he fears it will serve as propaganda for the tyrannical GDR.

Westerns (Mad Genius Club): Western covers, that is. Like other genres, this one has it’s own codes. This last Thursday I had the chance to get an insight into it along with JL Curtis and Lawdog, live, and recorded. Now you can be amused and educated right along with us. (fair warning: these livestreams contain a lot of silliness, occasional salty language, and more than a modicum of thread drift!)

Weird Western (Marzaat): Of the current writers of weird westerns that I’ve encountered, Joel Jenkins is the gold standard. Not 24 carat gold. More like 18 carat, but we’ll get into those impure alloys later. In almost every Lone Crow story, he gets some variation of an heroic ephitet involving his magical revolver, which was “blessed by the hand of a prophet on a night when the dead arose from the salty waste”.