Blog Archives

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 […]

Appendix N (Goodman Games): We’ve talked a lot about Fritz Leiber, whose birthday we’re celebrating today, over the last few years. Leiber, born December 24th, 1910, is most widely known among gamers as the man responsible for the fantastic Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. In the years running up to DCC Lankhmar, a lot of […]

Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB Zine): Edgar Rice Burroughs admired fellow-author Jack London enormously. Following the amazing success of his own early writings, ERB’s ambition was to become a rancher-writer, modeling his life on the one that Jack London had pursued and then abruptly lost due to his sudden death in 1916. In fact, Burroughs and […]

Robert E. Howard (Essential Malady): El Borak has the distinction of being the first character created by Robert E. Howard though the stories he appeared in had a long gestation and weren’t published until Howard had already seen a number of his much better known characters in print. The historical background to these stories is […]

Publishing (Free Press): It’s about a parallel publishing space that has risen up while the legacy publishing houses in New York have been declining thanks to a combination of threats that are both external (the internet; the upending of print) and internal (new progressive staffers; sensitivity readers; etc.). Cinema (Stephen Mark Rainey): As a diehard […]

Conan (Education Forensics): If you listen to “Ask Chuck Dixon” on YouTube or UATV, you’ll know that Dixon has written thousands of comic books. He created the character Bane, and wrote ‘Batman’ for DC for ten years. He’s also responsible for the Levon Cade series of Vigilante Justice novels. One of the things he talks […]