Weird Times 4: Demography and Race

Weird Times 4: Demography and Race

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The flag of the United States of America, with 48 stars at top and with 50 at bottom.

This post is the fourth in a series reflecting on the world of 1923, and the 1920s generally, as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things will you see?

You might, for example, see a flagpole with an American flag on it. It is a flag with a regular grid of stars in the corner, six rows of eight stars apiece, representing the 48 states of the Union. The United States in 1923 is a different place from what it will become a hundred years later, with a population that is distributed differently, different territories, a different self-image and different ideas about the nature of its peoples.

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Neverwhens: World Building in a Shared Universe– Cormac Mac Art and The Isle of Swords

Neverwhens: World Building in a Shared Universe– Cormac Mac Art and The Isle of Swords

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Cormac Mac Art: Isle of Swords, by Matthew John (Titan Books, July 28, 2026). Cover uncredited

When Titan and Heroic Signatures announced they were bringing back Robert E. Howard pastiche, not just of Conan, but of many others of his rich panoply of heroes, I sacrificed many a reading night to take a deep-dive into the first year’s worth of stories, and chronicled the results at Black Gate. You can read about that descent into Cosmic Pastiche Horror here.

The truth was that, like most pastiche — assuming one excepts the value of pastiche at all — the results were mixed. Most was admirable attempts by authors who clearly had fond memories of REH, but didn’t really remember what made HIS fiction (not their memories of it, not their memories of it via Marvel comics, film, or even other pastiche) work. A few, namely the work by Scott Oden, John C. Hocking and James Lovegrove, “got” the characters they were writing (Oden can even sound like Howard), while an equal number could only be called… well… not worth the paper they weren’t printed on.

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Forgotten Authors: Carl Selwyn

Forgotten Authors: Carl Selwyn

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Carl Selwyn

Carl Selwyn Pugh, Jr. was born on December 12, 1918 on Roanoke Island, North Carolina to Carl Selwyn Pugh and Amelia (née Myatt). He was the first of two sons.

He attended the University of North Carolina where he edited the college humor magazine. After college, he moved to New York where he attempted to sell jokes to humor magazines, achieved a small amount of success, but not enough to sustain himself.

During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps and after the war he worked as a scenario writer at the Signal Corps Photographic Center in Astoria, writing military training films.

His science fiction, published using the name Carl Selwyn, appeared during and immediately after World War II, with his first story, “The Strange Death of Richard Sefton,” being published in the January 1940 issue of Amazing Stories. his next story, “Revolt on the Earth-Star” was his debut in Planet Stories, where most of his fiction appeared.

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Dark Muse News: Reviewing SOIL by James D. Mills

Dark Muse News: Reviewing SOIL by James D. Mills

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SOIL by James D. Mills (Arcanist: Fantasy Publishing, December 2026); cover art by Henrik Karippen

This Dark Muse News post reviews James D. Mills’ soon-to-be-released, stand-alone novel SOIL (coming to BackerKit October 29, 2026; freely available for digital viewing now on Arcanist Online).  Excerpts are shared to give you a feel for the style. This article also provides a tour guide for the other books in the Dusk and Dawn series.

Just this July, we covered James D. Mills’ crowdfunding Backerkit campaign Mordschlag Sword and Sorcery Magazine. Besides publishing, he writes a fair amount too. His SOIL is a folk-horror fantasy firmly rooted in the soil, or spirit, of the British Isles. Sword and Sorcery fans will enjoy the elements of melee action, direct encounters with strange gods, and exploration of mystic temples. The world and culture are fleshed out, and super-infused with intense child-bearing motifs (more on that below). With a cast of  6+ protagonists, the book is a solid, dark-fantasy epic. It is the second stand-alone entry in the Dusk and Dawn series.

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It’s Got Its Ups and Downs: Hercules Unbound #1-#12

It’s Got Its Ups and Downs: Hercules Unbound #1-#12

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Hercules Unbound #1, by Gerry Conway, José Luis García-López, and Wally Wood (DC Comics, November 1975). Cover by José Luis García-López

Live long enough, it seems, and you will revisit the pleasures of your youth. You wonder if they still hold up, or perhaps you’re looking to learn if (or how) they shaped the person you’ve become. Which is why — for the first time since the mid-1970s — I recently reread Hercules Unbound #1-#12 (1975—1977), the complete run of a cancelled DC Comics series aimed at the 1970s’ booming sword & sorcery market.

DC’s Hercules is the demi-god of Greco-Roman myth, transposed to a post-apocalyptic then-future. The published issues of this solo series feature scripts by Gerry Conway, Cary Bates, and David Michelinie, and art by José Luis García-López, Wally Wood, Walt Simonson, and Bob Layton.

If the sheer number of creators on such a short run makes your spidey sense tingle, well, yeah. It’s not a great sign. But on this, more anon.

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 6: The Man with the Getaway Face

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 6: The Man with the Getaway Face

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The second Parker novel: The Man With the Getaway Face (Pocket Books, 1963)

What is it?

Parker has gone to a lot of trouble and expense to get a new face. Now he has to fight to keep his identity hidden, while also planning and executing an armored car heist.

A treacherous waitress and a punch-drunk former boxer complicate those matters tremendously.

This is Volume 2 of Richard Stark’s “Parker” series of crime novels. It is also the second part of the unofficial Outfit Trilogy, the first three books in the series, in which Parker goes up against an organized crime syndicate.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Bleak Noir – Jim Thompson

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Bleak Noir – Jim Thompson

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

I have a shelf full of Jim Thompson books. For A (Black) Gat in the Hand, I decided to read a couple I had not got to yet. So, Wild Town was followed by A Swell Looking Babe. Then, Nothing More than Murder. And I mixed in The Grifters (which I have read, as well as seen the movie) into my audiobook listening.

While I’ve got a post dedicated to maybe his most unusual book – The Transgressors – in the works, I wanted to bring up one common aspect in his writing.

It can be difficult to sympathize with the main character, as they’re often not very nice people. That’s a post in itself. And those characters are often saturated with bleakness. I rarely read two Thompsons in a row. I need a palette cleanse after one. He’s good. But he’s about as joyful as Full Metal Jacket.

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Into the Weird: Weird Tales, April 1923 (Volume 1, Number 2) Part 2

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, April 1923 (Volume 1, Number 2) Part 2

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Weird Tales, April 1923

The table of contents of the second issue of Weird Tales advertises “Sixteen thrilling short stories / Two complete novelettes / Two two-part stories / Interesting, odd, and weird happenings.” More specifically, one of the two-part stories, the cover story, begins this month while the other concludes. As for the “interesting, odd, and weird happenings,” I wrote about them here, so now let’s get to the fiction. (Note that discussion of one of these stories necessitates quoting an ethnic slur, directed against the French, of all people.)

The first of the tales on offer in this issue is one of the novelettes, “The Scar,” by Carl Ramus (whose surname’s misspelled in the table of contents as ‘Rasmus’). It’s the only known published story by Ramus, though his sister Sybla was a writer whose work would later appear in Weird Tales. Carl Ramus had a day job as a doctor, and as it happens “The Scar” is a tale of a dashing young doctor pulled into a kidnapping plot. It’s not a terrible story, but it’s a surprising choice to lead off the issue as there’s little supernatural about it — the heroine claims to be able to bring on a fever by willing it and the hero believes he has a knack for hypnotism — and nothing I can see as ‘weird’ in any other sense. If the magazine’s still in the process of defining itself, then editor Edwin Baird has a different sense of where he intends it to go than we might expect from our later perspective.

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The Unfinished Monument: The Steranko History of Comics

The Unfinished Monument: The Steranko History of Comics

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The Steranko History of Comics, Volumes One and Two, front covers

Imagine Mount Rushmore with only one president on it. Picture a Washington Monument that’s only 185 feet tall instead of 555. How about a Statue of Liberty missing two arms and a head? No takers? I don’t blame you; there’s nothing more frustrating than a great beginning that remains incomplete.

Take The Steranko History of Comics, a work that was intended to fill six volumes. The first two came out in 1970 and 1972… and then, nothing. It’s been fifty-four years now and I don’t mind telling you, I’m starting to lose hope.

Certainly no one was (or is — he’s still with us at the age of eighty-eight) more qualified to write a history of comics than Jim Steranko. Active in the industry as an artist and writer since the late 50’s, he did his most famous work for Marvel on their Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. title. Charging through the door that Jack Kirby had kicked open, Steranko created some images (especially his Nick Fury covers) that have become icons of the psychedelic 60’s as essential as anything by Andy Warhol or Peter Max.

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Forgotten Authors: Dave Dryfoos

Forgotten Authors: Dave Dryfoos

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Fantastic Adventures, October 1950, cover by Robert Gibson Jones

Dave Dryfoos was born on March 29, 1915 in San Francisco, California to Jesse and Beatrice (née Goodman) Dryfoos. He attended Lowell High School and attained the rank of Eagle Scott before attending the University of California at Berkeley.  He earned a law degree from the University of California’s Hastings School of Law before being admitted to the bar in 1936.

In 1942, Dryfoos married Dorothea Gallatin and shortly afterwards was drafted into the Army, serving in Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines during World War II before being mustered out in 1946 as a staff sergeant. He returned to Benicia California after the war.

Dryfoos published his first short story in the October 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures: “Lest Ye Be Judged…” Over the next six years, he published twenty-one additional short stories, including “Some Like It Cold,” “The Old-Fashioned Spaceman,” and “Younger by the Minute.” His work appeared in Galaxy, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as several other magazines. He stopped published in 1955 with “Seller of the Sky,” which appeared in the February issue of If.

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