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 in Spain in People and was called “Manly el Guerrero” or “Manly the Warrior”. Translated into English, he became Dax for Eerie #39, April 1972.

Robert E. Howard (Walker’s Library): Four years doesn’t seem like a lot of time, until you consider that this was the days of the Pulps and writing for them—if you got in with an editor—could (and for a few, did) mean earning a serious income. The cost was that it was a job like any other, so Howard treated it like one; he wasn’t an Artiste- he became a master Craftsman.

Cinema (Nerdrotic): Ironheart Is an Iconic DISASTER. Everyone hates Ironheart, and so do I. The worst live action Marvel ever made.

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): William P. McGivern was a successful pulp writer that specialized in crime-fiction, mystery, and science-fiction. He was also an accomplished novelist that found his fortune in the early 1950s as the original paperback novel concept became a marketing triumph.

Conventions (Swordslore): Last week I made it down to Cross Plains, Texas for the two most important days of the year in the fandom of Robert E. Howard and his works. Many today know him as creator of Conan the Cimmerian (more popularly given the moniker “the Barbarian”), but Robert E. Howard Days helps reveal more about who the man spinning the yarns of worlds and ages of undreamed of really was.

Fiction (Arkhaven Comics): The back of Galaxy magazine in the 1950s had “You won’t read it here.” What followed featured Bat Durston. Western prose with a few futuristic flourishes as science fiction window dressing. I have to admit to not really coming across a “space western” within the science fiction pulp magazines in my earlier years.

Tolkien (Stuff I Like): Something I brought up writing about The Return of the King – the confronatation between Gandalf and the Witch King. It’s one of the most striking moments in the book and Peter Jackson left it out of the movie. He sort of included it in the extended cut, but it’s moved about and weak.

Fiction (Fandom Pulse): Louis L’Amour’s The Haunted Mesa stands as one of the strangest entries in the legendary Western author’s extensive catalog, a departure from his usual gunfighters and frontier settlements into the realm of supernatural mystery. Published in 1987, this novel represented a creative risk for L’Amour, who was venturing far from the familiar territories that had made him America’s most beloved Western writer.

Cinema (Critical Drinker): Ballerina and Furiosa – two decent movies with likeable leads, good word of mouth and solid reviews, but both of them flopped. Why? Because Girlboss Fatigue has kicked in hard, and audiences are turning away from any female-led action movies. From Marvel to Star Wars to Lord of the Rings, every major franchise has been overwhelmed by girlbosses, and people are done with it.

Fiction (Black Gate): Quite a few writers who went on to bigger names in other genres wrote some of their earliest books in Sword & Planet. Michael Moorcock was one of these. He’s mostly known for his Elric series. Elric is a kind of anti-Conan. But in 1964, at around the age of 25, he wrote three Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches set on Mars. In the introduction to a later release of these books he mentioned his early infatuation with ERB.

Horror (Bounding Into Comics): Though he eventually went on to enjoy a 20+ year career as a filmmaker, across which he would direct 13 more films and be credited as a writer on 10 of them, his first film, Re-Animator, will always be Stuart Gordon’s defining work.

History (Frontier Partisans): A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War, by Daniel E. Sutherland. This book was a game-changer in the field when it was first published in 2013, because it foregrounded the irregular warfare that conventional ACW military history has treated as a sideshow for most of the past 160 years. Sutherland did two important things: He demonstrated just how pervasive and widespread guerrilla warfare was in the South

History (Raymond Ibrahim): When Angels Fought Alongside Crusaders: Divine Fury at Antioch

RPG (Grognardia): A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the occult and esoteric roots of early science fiction and fantasy. The response to that post was enthusiastic, which got me thinking that perhaps it’s time I returned to writing more regularly about fantasy literature. Not long after, I happened to watch an old television episode in which a character mused that a writer’s deepest desire is to affect others with his words.

Fiction (Vintage Pop Fictions): A.S. Fleischman’s thriller Venetian Blonde was published in 1963. You couldn’t really come up with a cooler title for a thriller. A.S. Fleischman (1920-2010) had been a professional magician. He wrote some excellent spy thrillers in the early 50s. Venetian Blonde came later and it’s a crime thriller rather than a spy thriller.

Radio (Archive.org): A small group of men, along with a guide, journey into the Himalayas in hopes of capturing the legendary Abominable Snowman.

Publshing (Kairos): Spend enough time on social media, and you’ll see the same stale memes spammed by the same tired institutions. The latest to claw its way out of the grave is the claim—dutifully repeated by The New York Times—that men have “disappeared” from fiction reading altogether. Like every cultural lament from the Pop Cult press, this narrative isn’t just misleading; it’s projection. The hand-wringing about “where all the male readers went” isn’t a mystery.

Awards (Locusmag): The REH Foundation has announced the winners of the 2025 Robert E. Howard Awards, honoring work that is “substantively devoted to the life and/or work of Robert E. Howard” or that “carries on the spirit and tradition of Robert E. Howard, to better recognize and celebrate his influence on future generations of writers.”

Fiction (M Porcius): In 1948 Pellegrini and Cudahy published a 400-page hardcover anthology bearing the legend “20 Masterpieces of Science Fiction” on cover and spine alongside the title Strange Ports of Call.  Strange Ports of Call was edited by the tireless August Derleth, correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft and major figure in the effort to get weird material printed in book form, and this volume is full of stories by people we associate with Weird Tales.

D&D (Black Gate): It has been 50 years since the release of the first and perhaps most important supplement to Dungeons & Dragons. It was none other than Supplement I: Greyhawk, by Gary Gygax and Robert Kuntz. This pivotal, 68-page book is not likely to be celebrated by the entity that owns the rights to D&D, because they do not look upon the original materials or its creators favorably. But we don’t need them to celebrate the anniversary of this great achievement.

Review (Por Por Books): ‘Storm Season’ (305 pp.) was published by Ace Books in October, 1982, and features cover art by Walter Vellez. This is the fourth volume in the initial, six-volume launch of the ‘Thieves’ World’ shared world anthologies. Probably the best way to access ‘Storm Season,’ along with volumes five (‘The Face of Chaos’) and six (‘Wings of Omen’) is via the hardcover omnibus ‘Cross-Currents,’ published in 1984 by Nelson Doubleday.

Science Fiction (Science Fiction Ruminations): I plan on reading all 116 issues of the influential, and iconic, SF magazine Galaxy under H. L. Gold’s editorship (October 1950-October 1961) in chronological order. How long this project will take or how seriously/systematically I will take it are complete unknowns. I am a reader of whim.

Comic Books (50 Year Old Comic Books): Eerie #67 (August, 1975). At the time I originally purchased the subject of today’s blog post, way back in June, 1975, it had been over two years since I’d bought an issue of any of Warren Publishing’s black-and-white comics magazines (with one exception, which I’ll get to in a moment).  Half a century later, I’m not entirely sure how or why I’d grown so cold so quickly to Warren’s fare, given that I had been reading both Vampirella and Eerie quasi-regularly for some time prior to that (for whatever reason, I never bought more than a single issue of Creepy, at least not in this particular era).

Conan (Sprague de Camp Fan): “Conan: Coils of the Golden Empress” is a very short story by John C. Hocking that was published in The Savage Sword of Conan #8, May 2025. Chronologically it comes after “The Queen of the Black Coast.” If you read the new Titan Books novels, this story could come before Conan: The Cult of the Obsidian Moon without any continuity issues. That novel also starts with Conan in mourning for Bêlit .