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Conan (Essential Malady): Whatever the truth is, Conan the Adventurer was certainly one of my earliest introductions to Robert E. Howard’s most popular character. The show originally broadcast in late 1992 and had a longer second and final season in late 1993 but I don’t believe I watched it until a year or two after […]

Sword & Sorcery (Echoes of Crom Records): I list my top ten classic sword-and-sorcery collections by author. Knives (Blade HQ): Put simply, gas station knives cheap out on materials. Where there should be metal, there is often plastic. Where there should a blade steel with a real name and a known composition, there is mystery-meat […]

Horror (RT Book Reviews): It’s always hard to believe that such prolific and influential writers died in relative obscurity during their time. The works of authors like Poe, Hemingway, and the focus of this list, HP Lovecraft all put out numerous works during their time on earth just to die penniless and unknown, with their […]

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): So it looks like Weird Tales is back to its old habits of not providing good service to its readers and customers. This has been going on for years. A couple of people have left comments on this blog telling about their own lack of experience in receiving what […]

Fiction (Goodman Games): Born as Alice Mary Norton in 1912, Norton started writing while she was still in high school in Cleveland, Ohio. In fact, she completed her first novel while still attending high school, though it was not published until later in 1938. Wishing to pursue writing as a career, in 1934 she had […]

Sword & Sorcery (Echoes of Crom Records): Join me and Mark Dexter ( Marco Concoreggi ), the vocalist for heavy metal band, Dexter Ward as we talk about H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Dracula, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter of Mars, Dracula, Conan vs. Kull, sword […]

Hugos (Esquire): Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects to resemble a star nebula, this is the 59,000-square-foot Chengdu Science Fiction Museum, constructed at lightspeed over the course of a single year to host the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, also known as WorldCon. For writers and readers of science fiction and fantasy, it’s like the National […]

Popular Culture (Grognardia): In 1977. 7-Eleven produced a series of Slurpee cups that featured Marvel Comics characters. This was apparently the second such series, the first having come out two years prior, but I don’t recall ever seeing the original run. In ’77, I wasn’t much of a comics reader, but I did like Spider-Man […]

Comic Books (Dark Worlds Quarterly): The blending of genres continues in 1981, with many stories falling into the Science Fiction category. SF was big in the 1980s and Sword & Sorcery on the wane. We are only one year away from Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Conan. You’d expect an up-surge in interest but in many ways […]

Comic Books (CBR): The trade paperback contains all six issues of Space Western Comics that were originally released in 1952 and 1953 and starred Spurs Jackson, an Arizona rancher who is captured (along with some of his ranch hands) by some Martian invaders. Once on Mars, Spurs and his men overthrow the evil Martians and […]

Robert E. Howard (Sprague de Camp Fan): There is a scene in the Robert E. Howard biopic, The Whole Wide World, where Novalyne Price discovers REH carries a gun in his car. REH justifies its presence saying that this is dangerous country. ”Outlaws, vagrants, they’re all here.” Star Wars (Fandom Pulse): The Star Wars universe is facing […]

Reading (Free Beacon): My first vague inklings of sexuality came from Robert E. Howard’s Conan books—but, then, my first creeping sense of a malevolent supernatural, like a gateway drug for H.P. Lovecraft, came from those Conan stories, too. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World: a dive into the […]