Blog Archives

James Bond (Art of the Movies): Ian Fleming regarded the secret service as a “dirty trade,” and he knew better than most what he was talking about. As a Naval Intelligence man, he rubbed shoulders with his fair share of secret agents and was familiar with their business. Indeed, Fleming himself had a hand in […]

Comic Books (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Esteban Maroto made a splash in America when he drew Red Sonja in a steel bikini for Marvel then “Dax the Damned’ series for Warren Publications. Maroto would draw many other comics for the black & white publisher but he caught fire with Dax. This opulent but depressing series began […]

Review (DMR Books): Willard ‘Will’ Oliver’s Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author has been out for a couple of months now. I have read it. It is excellent. Now that I (hopefully) have Internet connectivity that allows more than an hour of online work every few days, I’m going to […]

Art (Art of the Genre): Tim Kask (heal quickly man!) once let me know with both barrels just how hard it was to get fantasy artists in the 1970s for the likes of Dragon Magazine, because basically there weren’t such an animal.  Contrast that with today, and you can’t walk your fingers an inch over […]

Fantasy (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Continuing our series of Sword & Sorcery Firsts we are technically still in the Pulp Era until 1954 or so a few of the following happened in a Pulp magazine. The Digests take over shortly thereafter. Fantasy Fiction as a whole, whether it is S&S or not, has faded from much […]

Pulp (Comics Radio): We come to the last work of prose fiction in the January 10, 1926 issue of Adventure. This one is a novella titled “He Shall Have Best Who Can Keep,” by Gordon MacCreath. Writing (Kairos): Breaking Bad distinguishes itself from most modern storytelling in many respects, not least of which being its deliberate […]

Weird Westerns (Crime Reads): The weird western is nothing new. Since at least 1932, with Robert E. Howard’s “The Horror from the Mound,” writers have been combining fantasy, science-fiction, and horror with the Old West in novels, stories, comics, and films. The genre built to a crescendo in the 1980s. The last major iteration I […]

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): Nictzin Dyalhis (1873?-1942)had his first story in Weird Tales in April 1925. So did Donald Edward Keyhoe (1897-1988). Dyalhis’ story was of course “When the Green Star Waned,” a science-fantasy set in the solar system of the future. Keyhoe’s story was “The Grim Passenger,” a tale of Egyptian archaeology and […]

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): The illustration on the cover of Weird Tales for April 1925 is for “When the Green Star Waned” by Nictzin Dyalhis. The artist was Andrew Brosnatch. It shows a man who appears to be falling into a mass of aliens that have invaded Earth. In actuality, the aliens have […]

Robert E. Howard (Jose’s Amazing World of Fantasy): Join us for an exclusive live interview with Willard M. Oliver, acclaimed author and scholar, as we dive deep into his latest biography, Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): Early on there must have been authors […]

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Walker’s Library): A Princess of Mars2 not only began on of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ many long-running series of adventure novels—alongside the Tarzan, Venus, and Pelludicar stories—but this one novel set a standard for fantastic adventure fiction that cast a shadow so long that many of you don’t realize that you’re standing in […]