Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): “Lethal Consignment” by Shaun Hamill is the newest Heroic Legends Conan e-book. Shaun Hamill lives in north Texas, so he is a neighbor of mine. Perhaps he’ll make it to Howard Days on June 7th in Cross Plains. At only $1.99 Mr. Hamill’s consignment writing of this Conan short story isn’t lethal.

Fantasy (Echoes of Crom): Join me and Justin Young as we talk with Ramsey Campbell about his sword and sorcery fiction, his posthumous collaboration with Robert E. Howard, writing fiction that drips with dread, paranormal phenomenon, and much more.

Comic Books (Fandom Pulse): It’s Free Comic Book Day, and readers around the world are lining up at comic shops for various marketing and promotional material coming from Marvel, DC Comics, and others. For the most part, it marks a great day for comic book stores and the comic industry, but this year there’s a sour note, as Flying Colors, the flagship store that started #FCBD is going to be gone by this time next year.

Publishing (Monsters and Manuals): The money is basically made from four categories: classics (The Lord of the Rings, etc.), kids’ books (The Hungry Caterpillar, etc.), celeb biographies (Michelle Obama, etc.) and franchise authors (Stephen King, etc.). Everything else is almost certainly loss-making, and the numbers are surprisingly small even for books by major public figures:

Michael Moorcock (Swords & Stitchery): When it comes to Stormbringer & Mournblade from Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga no two enchanted blades have come close to matching the modern impact of these two blades on Sword & Sorcery. In Robert  Kuntz & James Ward’s Gods, Demi-Gods, & Heroes Stormbringer appears and it’s a beast; “Chaotic in nature, this sword has an intelligence of 12 and an ego of 12, is plus 5 when hitting, in the presence of Mournblade is as a Dancing Sword, and drains energy levels.

Events (Howard Days): With a mere seven weeks to go, Howard Days looms on the horizon. Actually, it will be here before we know it, so time’s a-wastin’ to make plans to attend! As seats for the Friday night Celebration Banquet at the Cross Plains Community Center are going fast, making a reservation should be your first order of business!

D&D (The Other Side): If you have been involved in academia in the past few years you likely know about the infamous “Z-Library.” This is a “shadow library” (which admittedly sounds cool) that gives you access to 1,000s of books. The legality of this, though, is on the questionable side to outright piracy. So no, I will not be linking out to it.

Pulp (Pulp Super-Fan): New for 2024 is the third edition of the excellent reference guide to the world of pulps: The Blood ‘n’ Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction, written by Ed Hulse who runs Murania Press and publishes the excellent Blood ‘n’ Thunder magazine. I read and reviewed the prior editions in 2013 and 2018 and the prior Blood ‘n’ Thunder Guide to Collecting Pulps.

Pulp (Don Herron): We haven’t had an Autograph Hound Super-Sunday rollout in awhile, and I wasn’t expecting Arthur O. Friel to be the guy scribbling the old John Hancock. From everything I’ve heard, Friel signatures — much less Friel inscriptions — are rare. Not quite non-existent, but your average hen probably has more teeth.

Fantasy (Por Por Books): This slim (160 pp.) little volume of ‘Brak’ tales was issued by Tandem Books (UK) in 1976. The striking cover art is by Bob Fowke. Some of the stories in this compilation first saw print in the mid-1960s in Fantastic Stories, while others were composed by Jakes expressly for the initial 1968 paperback printing.

History (Frontier Partisans): There is no more storied and studied battle in Frontier Partisan history than the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Contrary to casual perception, the 1876 destruction of Lt. Co. George Armstrong Custer’s command at the hands of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors was not the worst disaster to befall the American military at the hands of the Native American resistance.

Cinema (Black Gate): Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter is a classic Hammer Horror film that features supernatural horror combined with swashbuckling action. This is one of my favorites of the Hammer Horror series of films. It stars Horst Janson as the vampire-hunting swordsman, Captain Kronos; John Cater as the hunchbacked scientist, Professor Grost; and the lovely Caroline Munro as Carla, the clever assistant.

D&D (Grognardia): There were two great obsessions at the dawn of the Old School Renaissance: megadungeons and sandboxes. Each was a distinctive element of many of the foundational roleplaying game campaigns of the 1970s, like Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and Tékumel.

Events (DMR Books): It’s been a solid year since Howard Days 2023 came and went. However, Howard Days 2024 is still over a month in the future. I promised Ken Lizzi and Brian Murphy a year ago that I would do a blog entry on my share of the trip, so I’ve still got a little bit of leeway.

Star Wars (WDW Pro): Exclusive: Star Wars Secret Repair Plan Finally Coming from Disney — We Have the Evidence!

Streaming (MSN): We still don’t know what Liam Hemsworth will look (or sound) like when he takes up the role of Geralt of Rivia in The Witcher. But we do know how long he’ll be wearing the white wig: Netflix has confirmed that the show’s fifth season will be its last.

T.V. (Wert Zone): Earlier today, Amazon Television released the first season of their Fallout TV show. Millions of people wholly unfamiliar with the franchise will be tuning into the setting for the very first time. But what if you want to know more? Why do cows have two heads? Who’s the cartoon guy with the nuclear thumb? What year is it? Time for a Franchise Familiariser course!

Games (Grim Dark Magazine): The seasonal release approach to the magnificent Diablo IV is starting to really hum with the announcement of the Season of Blood, where vampires come out of the age old Sanctuary lore and shift from being a rather annoying trait of enemy elites, and becomes something far more terrifying and fun.

Horror (Fantasy Literature): When most people think of the British horror film, they probably – almost invariably – think of Hammer Studios, and for good reason; Hammer was indeed something of a relentless factory when it came to producing well-crafted horror fare in the late 1950s to early ‘70s. But the studio did have its rivals, one of the foremost of those being Amicus Productions.

Weird Western (Marzaat): After the somewhat disappointing experience of Six-Guns Straight From Hell 3, I was glad to see here many of the familiar writers from previous Riley anthologies and his magazine Science Fiction Trails.

Art (DMR Books): May Day, the first of May—as near as we can tell—has been a holiday in Western Europe for millennia. Called Beltane/Beltaine/Beltain in the lands of the Gael, it appears to have been connected in some way with the god Bel, an obscure member of the Gaelic pantheon. However, there was also a fairly major Gaulish deity named Belenos and the two are likely cognate, as are the Gaelic Nuada and the Brythonic ‘Nodens’.

Review (Matthew J. Constantine): This continues the story that began in The Verdant Passage and is the second part of the Prism Pentad by Troy Denning.  I was glad to see that the second book would focus on the character I liked most from the first novel, Rikus.  Unfortunately, I didn’t especially enjoy the novel.

Science Fiction (Poul Anderson Contributor Articles): In this article I focused on how Dominic Flandry used poker and dice games in some of the stories Poul Anderson wrote about that character.  I have noticed, while reading many of the works of Anderson, that the two games he seemed to most favor were poker and chess.

Pulp (M Porcius): A few days ago, a knowledgeable SF fan, in a comment to one of my blog posts about Edmond Hamilton, pointed out a bunch of SF stories by important writers which share plot elements with Hamilton’s “Fassenden’s Worlds,” a story we read in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Seventeen.

Paleontology (Katherine Leal): Best Documentary of All Time National Geographic Documentary – Prehistoric Predators: Killer Pig.