Cinema (We’ve Got Back Issues): To put it bluntly, the road to Hollywood accepting that women can carry action movies has been as smooth as the back of a Stegasaurus with scoliosis, but as bad as things once were with such comic books movies spectacularly missing the point as Elektra and Catwoman, mismanaged female led fantasy flicks have been crashing and burning for a lot longer than that as 1985’s Red Sonja testifies.

Robert E. Howard (Sprague de Camp Fan): “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” was first published in Weird Tales, September 1929. It was reprinted in Skull-Face and Others, Arkham House, 1946. It was reprinted again in Avon Fantasy Reader #2, 1947. It also appeared in The Coming of Conan, Gnome Press, 1953. The first paperback appearance was in King Kull, Lancer Books, 1967.

Comic Books (CBR): Titan Comics is returning to the Hyborian Age with a brand-new creative team behind Conan. CBR can exclusively reveal that Titan Comics, working alongside entertainment studio Heroic Signatures, will be co-publishing a new, ongoing Conan the Barbarian comic book series. Launching in July 2023, the series will see the return of longtime Conan scribe Jim Zub (Thunderbolts, Uncanny Avengers), and feature the artwork of illustrator Roberto De La Torre (King-Size Conan, Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and colorist José Villarrubia (Promethea, Sweet Tooth).

Streaming (PC Gamer): The Witcher has been a big (and, I think, somewhat unexpected (opens in new tab)) hit for Netflix, and it’s done so while remaining reasonably faithful to the original source material. But according to writer and producer Beau DeMayo, not everyone on The Witcher writing team was enthusiastic about sticking to Witcher author Andrzej Sapskowski’s vision.

Forthcoming (DMR Books): Fans of pulp adventure rejoice! Next month will see the release of Swain’s Vengeance, the first of four volumes of Arthur D. Howden Smith’s rousing saga of Swain the Viking. The stories of Swain, which were based on the Orkneyinga saga, appeared in the pages of Adventure magazine in the early 20th century. With few exceptions, these tales have gone unreprinted since then.

Game (Polygon): Signalis, a new sci-fi survival horror game from developer rose-engine (aka Barbara Wittmann and Yuri Stern), opens with an excerpt of the final line from H.P. Lovecraft’s 1925 short story “The Festival”: Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

RPG (Spriggan’s Den): Starting a wilderness and stronghold building campaign setting with supernatural cosmic beings is a bit backwards, but that was one of the first things that popped into my mind and it kept running with it until it quickly turned into something that I think is really solid and might even be final already. The big inspirations I am drawing from are the ALMSIVI Tribunal and daedra from Morrowind and sorcerer kings from Dark Sun, the Deathless of Aernal and the Inspired of Sarlona from Eberron.

Review (Grim Dark Magazine): In the Night Wood is an ingeniously written Gothic horror novel by Dale Bailey, which serves as both a tribute to classic Gothic literature and a unique, riveting story in its own right. As the novel opens, the narrator, a boy named Charles Hayden, is strangely captivated by an obscure fairy tale, also called In the Night Wood, written by the enigmatic Victorian author Caedmon Hollow.

Horror (Rough Edges): Since today is Halloween, it seemed appropriate to post about a Halloween novel. I decided to read Norman Partridge’s DARK HARVEST for two reasons: he has a reputation as a very good writer, and it was handy, sitting in a stack just a couple of feet from my computer. It was a good choice. DARK HARVEST is one of those novels that takes place in only a few hours of time, something I always like. Set in 1963 in a quiet Midwestern town, it’s about a strange ritual called the Run.

Fantasy (Digital Bibliophilia): I’m going to start of with a couple of High/Epic Fantasy novels that I completed whilst on holiday in the last few weeks. Both come from the pen(s) of father and son writing partnership – Dan and Robert Zangari, and take place within their fantasy realm of Kalda. To start off, we are going to look at The Prisoner of Tardalim. The Zangaris have been self-publishing for a few years now, and have created their own publishing house, Legend of Kalda (LOK for short).

Tolkien (Nerd of the Rings): One of Gondor’s most valiant warriors, the son of the Steward Denethor, and brother of Faramir – today, we cover the life and travels of Boromir, captain of Gondor.

D&D (Grognardia): This is particularly the case with posts relating, even tangentially, to the Second Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. There is a marked increase in the pageviews and comments on posts about 2e, so much so that it frankly surprised me. There is, for example, much more interest even in posts gentling mocking the art of Second Edition than there typically is of my Pulp Fantasy Library entries.

Art (Goodman Games): Few people have influenced American comics as much as Alex Raymond. While “Jungle Jim” and “Rip Carson” may not be household names, Raymond’s most famous creation, Flash Gordon, is so ingrained into American pop culture that simply his name can be used as shorthand for a specific type of heroic, romantic science fiction. Alex Raymond’s career was short, and his death came far too soon, but his art and influence are immortal.

Cinema (Goodman Games): Ray Harryhausen’s career began under the tutelage of another master of cinematic effects, Willis O’Brien. O’Brien is best known as the special effects creator on the original King Kong film, which inspired Harryhausen while he was in high school. He arranged a meeting with O’Brien, took some sculptures of his dinosaurs, and O’Brien kept Harryhausen on his radar from there out. During that same time, Harryhausen became close friends with another creator who would rise to prominence, a writer by the name of Ray Bradbury.

Cinema/RPG (Goodman Games): The year 2022 marks the 64th anniversary of the Hammer Horror film Dracula. Why is this so important? You can thank Dracula for the creation of the cleric class, and the Hammer Horror series in general for influencing several aspects of Dungeons and Dragons (and later the Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game).

Historical Fiction (Reading the Past): Emma Donoghue’s Haven, set in early 7th-century Ireland, explores the demands of faith and obedience. Skellig Michael, a steep, rocky island off the southwestern Irish coast, is the setting for this atmospheric work, an imagined story about its early human inhabitants.

History (Castrum to Castle): Before jumping into Leap Castle Ghost stories, let’s first read the background story of this haunted Irish castle. Located in Coolderry, County Offaly, in Ireland, Leap Castle is reportedly one of the world’s most haunted castles and has a long history of legends and hauntings. One of the reasons why the Irish Castle is haunted can be because numerous people were imprisoned and executed in the castle.

Art (DMR Books): Since we’re a day or so into what the Celts considered the new year and since this is Mike Kaluta’s seventy-fifth birthday year, it seemed fitting to look back on a Kaluta project from two decades ago: his ‘Celtic calendars’ for the Celtic League. From what I understand, Alexei Kondratiev–Celtic scholar and founder of the Celtic League–commissioned art inspired by Celtic myth and legend from Mike in 2001.

RPG (Goodman Games): Weird Frontiers is now available in the Goodman Games online store! From the core rulebook through all the adventures and even into character sheets and maps, we’ve got everything you need to make adventuring in the Weird West a thing. For those who don’t know, Weird Frontiers is a stand-alone RPG that uses the DCC RPG system, and has all of the rules included in the main book.

Cinema (Tom McNulty): I had been hoping for a long time that Range Feud (Columbia Pictures, 1931) would get a Blu-ray treatment. That hasn’t happened yet but Mill Creek Entertainment has an excellent DVD transfer available as a four-movie, 2-disc set called John Wayne: Early Western Collection. In addition to Range Feud you get Two-Fisted Law and Texas Cyclone (both from 1932), and both starring Tim McCoy. The last film featured is the 1946 Republic classic, The Angel and the Badman.

Westerns (Silver Key): Lonesome Dove will probably wind up as the best book I’ve read this year.

At 860 pages, it is a lot longer than I typically prefer in my fiction. It is also a western, which aren’t typically something I gravitate to. It was a little hard to break into, a good 100-150 pages before I started to get involved in the story. But by the end I didn’t want it to be over, and plowed through the final 100 pages in a sitting.

Art (Men’s Pulp Magazines): GEORGE GROSS: COVERED is latest book in the Men’s Adventure Library series I co-edit with Wyatt Doyle, the multi-talented head honcho of the New Texture indie publishing imprint. If you’re a fan of vintage pulp magazines, men’s adventure magazines (MAMs), or action/adventure paperbacks you’ve almost certainly seen artwork by George Gross, even if you don’t know him by name.

Crime Fiction (Rough Edges): A lot of Robert Silverberg’s pen-name books have been reprinted over the past ten or fifteen years, which is a good thing. Most of them, even the so-called sleaze books, usually had some sort of crime or noir element to them, and I think he does an excellent job with them. The latest such early effort is THE HOT BEAT, originally published by Magnet Books in 1960 under the pseudonym Stan Vincent and recently reprinted under Silverberg’s name by Hard Case Crime.

Crime Fiction (Vintage Pop Fictions): Turn On the Heat, published under the name A.A. Fair in 1940, was the second of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Cool and Lam private eye novels. Gardner achieved enormous success in the 30s with Perry Mason but he started his career in the pulps so a series of hardboiled private eye novels was just the sort of thing he would be likely to be good at. And he was. The Cool and Lam PI novels were extremely successful.

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): In 1955, Blood Alley was simultaneously published as a novel and released as a film by Warner Brothers. The premise is that a U.S. Merchant Marine named Wilder is freed from a Chinese prison by a village hoping to utilize his services to escape to British-controlled Hong Kong. The book was authored by A.S. Fleischman, a popular Fawcett Gold Medal writer who specialized in exotic Asian locales to place his action-adventure novels like Shanghai Flame (1951), Malay Woman (1954), and Danger in Paradise (1953).

Fiction (Mystery File): Every collector has those books you look for over a period of years and somehow never come across a copy that is available and you can afford, and then when you do find it, it arrives in the mail, and you complete the anticipatory act of opening your acquisition when the inevitable doubt grips you. Is it any good?

Pulp (Pulp Super Fan): This year we got a new Solar Pons collection from Belanger Books that finally provides us with longer works, novellas in this case: The Novellas of Solar Pons.  For those not aware, a “novella” is a “short novel”. While there are more Solar Pons stories from August Derleth than Sherlock Holmes works from Arthur Conan Doyle, Derleth published only one Pons novella and Doyle did four novels/novellas. And only one further Pons novella was written by Basil Copper.