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 a keyboard without tripping over one on social media.

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): Before a rare illness took his life at the young age of 38, Charles Beaumont (1929-1967) put his mark on the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror genres with his splendid short stories and screenplays. His short fiction tale “Black Country” was the first story selected by Playboy to be published in their magazine.

Biography (Frontier Partisans): They are gathering in Cross Plains, Texas, this weekend, for the annual Howard Days celebration of the great Texas pulp writer — a man whose short, incandescent arc across the literary firmament has inspired countless people to seek adventure on the page.

Horror (Too Much Horror Fiction): Enter The Snake: a 1978 thriller from a writer named John Godey. This was the crime fiction pseudonym of Brooklyn-born author Morton Freedgood, who had worked in NYC’s film industry for all the giant movie companies, like Paramount and 20th Century Fox. As noted on the cover of the 1979 Berkley paperback, Godey previously wrote The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, which was made into a 1974 movie that also captured NYC at its most lawless.

Forthcoming (Cirsova): From the pages of Cirsova Magazine and several other top-tier Sword & Sorcery publications come Cesar the Bravo!

We will be running a Kickstarter for this new collection in July.

Westerns (Western Musings): This 1955 anthology is subtitled “A Collection of Stories About Gunslingers.” It has 11 stories from Gulick, L.L. Foreman, Elmore Leonard, Thomas Thompson, Bennett Foster, John Jo Carpenter, Tom Blackburn, Steve Frazee, William Holder, Verne Athanas, and Will Brown.

Comic Books (50 Year Old Comics): Fifty years and three months ago, DC Comics’ releases for November, 1974 featured this house ad, hailing the upcoming debut of a new hero… So new a hero, in fact, that the guy apparently didn’t even have a name yet.  Though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his name was a matter of some dispute.

Fantasy (DMR Books): Linwood Vrooman Carter was delivered into this world on June 9, 1930. Born in Florida, he served overseas during the Korean War, came back to the States and launched himself into the ranks of SFF fandom. Lin made himself ubiquitous in that realm and started getting his fiction published professionally. The legendary SFF editor at Ace Books, Donald A. Wollheim, was a major factor during those early years. In fact, the two of them even collaborated on a few stories.

Cold Steel (Bjorn Andrea Bull-Hansen): Why did people in the Viking Age use such weird upside down knives? The seax was used as a tool during the iron age and there’s reason for its design.

Forthcoming (DMR Books): Next month DMR Books will release Celtic Adventures, a collection of overlooked stories from the pulp and pre-pulp eras. The tales in this collection all take place in either Ireland or Scotland, and run the gamut from purely historical to the fantastic to the weirdly horrific, with some combining elements of all three genres.

Art (Black Gate): Stephen Fabian is one of the great craftsmen in all of fantasy. It’s not merely his command of the medium and his consummate technical skill… his art is genuinely beautiful (a characteristic I frequently find lacking with some of his contemporaries). Fabian has an unerring eye for composition, perfectly positioning his knights, mermaids, and grave robbers among moonlit ruins, floating fairy castles, and more imaginative settings.

Popular Culture (Kairos): Anyone paying attention to pop culture for the last two decades has noticed it doesn’t move anymore; it treads water. And worst of all, it memorializes. But not in the poetic sense. Current Year entertainment doesn’t enshrine cultural touchstones like a Homeric poem. It’s more like a corporate memo dug out of a filing cabinet marked “Boomer Monetization Playbook: 1987.”

Fiction (Ken Lizzi): My Lord Barbarian is a slim planetary romance by Andrew Offutt. It begins with an intriguing premise and a reasonable pretext to include spaceships and sci-fi technology in a story of sword-swinging barbarians. (Again I’m reminded why Gary Gygax enshrined Offutt in Appendix N.) The pulp action picks up rather quickly after the introductory chapter and carries the story along at a rapid pace through the first couple of acts.

Pulp (M Porcius): Strange Stories, Dec ’39: A Derleth, M W Wellman and M Moravsky. We recently read our first story by Maria Moravsky, poet and refugee from the Russian Revolution.  Let’s read a second Moravsky story, this one appearing in Strange Stories in 1939.

History (MSN): Last stands are when individuals or groups make one last, desperate attempt to resist overwhelming force. They have fascinated us for centuries as they show people choosing to fight against all odds, often resulting in their own sacrifice. While they are often romanticized, last stands serve many different purposes, for example, slowing the enemy, protecting leaders, or standing up for a belief when surrender means certain death.

Pulp (Pulp Super Fan): For the last few years, Will Murray has been writing new novels featuring The Spider under the Wild Adventures of The Spider line from Altus Press through the Adventures in Bronze website.

History (Lotus Eaters): How Pompey Annihilated Piracy in The Mediterranean

Folk Culture (Celtic Source): The Celtic Summer Solstice Part 1: Customs