Dark Muse News: Mordschlag Sword and Sorcery Magazine

Dark Muse News: Mordschlag Sword and Sorcery Magazine

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One of the most fun, unique aspects of Goodman Games’ Tales from the Magician’s Skull was the blending of Sword & Sorcery with Dungeon Crawl Classics statistics for the stories.  That’s a wonderful recipe that has not been reproduced, despite super-cool S&S periodicals (Dark Moon Quarterly, Battleborn, New Edge S&S, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Swords and Sorcery Magazine, Savage Realms, Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy, etc. plus loads of anthologies).

Well, this Dark Muse News post has a Press Release for The Arcanist: Fantasy Publishing’s Backerkit campaign showcasing Mordschlag Magazine! Once again, S&S adventure and RPG gaming are combined. Every pocket-sized issue of Mordschlag promises new short fiction, an article analyzing the genre, and monster stat-blocks pulled straight from the tales and ready-to-play in ShadowDark RPG.

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David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part One

David C. Smith & Robert E. Howard, Part One

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For the Witch of the Mists by David C. Smith & Richard Tierney (Zebra, January 1978) and The Witch of the Indies by David C. Smith (Zebra, June 1977). Covers by Doug Beekman and Stephen Fabian

I consider David C. Smith (1952) a friend. We’ve never met face to face but we’ve corresponded and have spoken on the phone. As with writers such as Karl Edward Wagner and Andy Offutt, I first became aware of David as an author through a connection to Robert E. Howard.

While in REHupa, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, I routinely did reviews of Howard pastiches. And so I came upon The Witch of the Indies (Zebra, 1977, cover by Stephen Fabian). Shortly after I picked up For the Witch of the Mists by Smith & Richard Tierney (Zebra, 1978, Cover by Doug Beekman).

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 3: Why Can’t Anyone (Except Darwyn Cooke) Get Him Right?

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Payback (Paramount Pictures, February 5, 1999

In the first two installments of this series, we looked at the master criminal known as Parker, and at his creator, Richard Stark, the pseudonym Donald E. Westlake used when writing spare and stark but hard-hitting prose.

Now let’s look at some of the many attempts to bring Parker to a wider audience.

The novels are extremely popular with a segment of the population, and so studios and directors have come calling from time to time, with attempts to adapt the character and his stories to film.

But they never quite get Parker right.

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Emergency! – Randolph Mantooth Passes Away at 80

Emergency! – Randolph Mantooth Passes Away at 80

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I am in the midst of my annual re-listen to Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee Navajo Tribal Police mysteries. I have yet to tire of those (I do NOT include his daughter Anne’s continuations. Because they’re terrible and I quit reading them. You should need more qualification than your last name, to continue somebody else’s terrific series).

Anywhoo…I also decided to re-watch season one of Dark Winds, which I had some issues with. But then I saw that Randy DeRoy Mantooth passed away, and I decided to write about him a bit.

Randolph Mantooth was co-lead on Emergency!, which aired 131 episodes from 1972-1979. For kids of the seventies, this and Adam-12, were the foundations of a life-long love of police and medical dramas. They even had a bit of crossover.

First with Tubi, then RokuTV, I started re-watching Emergency! earlier this year. I did the first three seasons and moved on to other shows. Though I just watched the season four kickoff and immediately recognized Hall of Fame running back Larry Csonka.

Emergency! featured Julie London, a popular torch singer from the fifties and sixties, as well as musician Bobby Troup. And man, Robert Fuller had soap opera good looks. They handled the hospital side of the medical drama. But the show was really about paramedics Mantooth and Kevin Tighe.

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

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

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Weird Tales March 1923. Cover by R. R. Epperly

The first issue of Weird Tales landed on newsstands in late February of 1923. 192 pages long, it measured about 6 inches by 9, a standard size for a pulp fiction magazine. There were two different versions of the cover, perhaps due to a printing error; the illustration’s the same, a man with knife and gun fighting a shadowy tentacled monster which has grabbed a nearby young lady, but the colouring’s different. Either way, the cover advertised “‘OOZE’ / An Extraordinary / Novelette / by Anthony M. Rud / The Tale of A / Thousand Thrills.” Perhaps most intriguing, though, was the subhead below the logo: “The Unique Magazine.”

Thanks to modern technology it’s possible for anyone with an internet connection to flip through issue 1 of Weird Tales, if in a virtual format. In a later post I’ll write about the fiction the issue holds, but today I want to consider the magazine as an object (to the extent that’s possible working from a PDF). What do we see as we page through it? What signs of its times stand out? And what can be deduced about the editorial team’s vision?

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A New Beginning: Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart

A New Beginning: Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart

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It all started because I wanted to draw a kid bowling with corpses

Mike Mignola

Maybe it was John Fultz who mentioned them on Facebook. He’s always mentioning things that lead me to acquiring more books. Maybe it came to me in a dream. I’m not really sure. Either way, I discovered that Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, the World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator ®, had drawn and written (colored exquisitely by Dave Stewart) two collections of dark fantasy stories; Bowling With Corpses (2025), and Uri Tupka and the Gods (2026). I bought them almost at once.

Bowling With Corpses is a collection of stories, some fairytale-inspired and some detailing the setting’s complex cosmogony, opens with the following dedication:

For all those who transported me to lands unknown way back when — Howard, Smith, Lovecraft, Dunsany, Leiber, Moorcock, Lee and Kirby. And so many others. I realized now this book was inevitable.

From the first page all those influences are apparent, though I think Dunsany’s dreamlike stories such as those I reviewed from At the Edge of the World. Some follow fairytale logic, and others, dream logic. Mignola’s dark and shadow-filled art brings them to life, or death, as the case might be. In the later years of Hellboy, Mignola’s art took on a very stylized look. His work here has stepped back from that towards the more detailed style of his older work. In the afterword, Mignola describes himself as semi-retired until he realized:

“The hell with this. I love drawing comics so I’ll just keep drawing comics.”

 

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Into the Weird: An Introduction

Into the Weird: An Introduction

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Weird Tales, December 1928, October 1933, and July 1944. Cover
art by Hugh Rankin, Margaret Brundage, and A. R. Tilburne

A bit more than 103 years ago, the first issue of Weird Tales reached newsstands across North America. The magazine would be published consistently for over three decades, with the title revived sporadically ever since. The original Weird Tales would become a significant influence on the development of the fantasy and horror genres, and would lend its name to a subgenre of fantasy and a certain tone in fiction: the weird tale.

That entire first run of Weird Tales, ‘the unique magazine,’ is available at the Internet Archive. I thought it’d be an interesting project to look at it issue by issue, reading the magazine as it was published and discussing each issue as a whole. It was the venue for much of the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, as well as a home for work by Robert Bloch, C.L. Moore, and Ray Bradbury, among many others. I wondered what it would be like to read those stories in the context of the other tales in the magazine by lesser-known writers; and to consider each issue as a package, a collection, with its cover and editorials and letters. And its ads; to look at the magazine holistically is to consider the many irruptions of its era into the experience of the fiction.

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The Necessity of Memory: Fahrenheit 451

The Necessity of Memory: Fahrenheit 451

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Ballantine 1953, Joseph Mugnaini

 

As 2025 ended, I thought about the reading I would do in the new year ahead and decided that in 2026, I would place an emphasis on rereading. In fact, I vowed that I wouldn’t read a new book without first rereading an old one. A week before New Year’s I jotted down likely titles for this project, and one of the first I thought of is a book I last read a lifetime ago, in 1974 or 75, when I was in high school — Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Back then, I didn’t much like it.

This time, I set aside my half-century old initial reaction and approached the book with an open mind. So, how was it a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century? I still wouldn’t call it an entirely successful book, but at least now I’m better equipped to understand what Bradbury was doing and can more justly assess the book’s strengths and weaknesses.

You’re probably familiar with the novel’s premise, which is one of the most famous in science fiction. Sometime in the near future (the book was published in 1953, so we’re probably well past whatever date Bradbury had in mind), in an unnamed city, Guy Montag lives in his comfortable, suburban, technologically up-to-date house with his wife Millie. Millie spends most of her time… watching isn’t quite the right word… submitting, maybe, to the immersive, individually tailored programs that flash from three of their four living room walls, which can morph into gigantic television screens. Guy mostly just watches Millie; for some reason, the shows don’t entertain him. They just make him uneasy.

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Forgotten Authors: Bert Shurtleff

Forgotten Authors: Bert Shurtleff

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Bert Shurtleff

Bert Shurtleff was born on August 3, 1897 to Eugene Kassuth Shurtleff and Hattie Elma (née Cook) in Adamsville, Rhode Island. He was the seventh of ten children. When he was fourteen, he left home to try to support himself, returning to school when he was 18 and attending East Greenwich Academy for High School.

During World War I, he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve Force while attending college, eventually taking a job at a powder factory.  He eventually was activated, but not sent overseas, instead serving in New London, Connecticut and being sent for training at Brown University in Providence. When the war ended, he enrolled at Brown, where he earned the New England Intercollegiate Lightweight Wrestling Title in 1920 and played for the Brown football team, his first two years as a tackle, shifting to center his senior year. While at Brown, he also published a book of poetry.

He married Hope C. Seal on his birthday in 1922. They had three children, Jeane, Faith, and David. Hope and Shurtleff divorced at some point and in 1946, again on his birthday, he married Margaret D. Dorgan.

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A Tragedy and a Comedy: Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers

A Tragedy and a Comedy: Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy Sayers

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Murder Must Advertise (Pocket Books, 1940)

Mr. Tallboy’s eyes, roving negligently round, had fallen on Bredon’s index-card… Neatly printed on the card stood one word.

DEATH

In Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers takes murder mysteries in another new direction: not, this time, exploring an established subgenre, but hybridizing the mystery genre with what we would now call workplace drama, or sometimes workplace comedy. The setting is Pym’s Publicity, a successful advertising firm. Many incidents turn on problems in carrying out the work, friendships and tensions between staff members, and relationships with clients.

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