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Thinking about the Evolution of Marvel Comics’ Star-Lord

Thinking about the Evolution of Marvel Comics’ Star-Lord

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Marvel_Preview_Vol_1_4
Marvel’s conception of Star-Lord for the 1970s and 80s.

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking lately about puzzling characters in comics and how they change over time. In the last couple of weeks, I decided to reread they comics I’ve got around with the Marvel Universe’ Peter Quill, also known as the Star-Lord.

Now, for those who’ve been living in a hole for the last decade, or for those who only know Peter Quill from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, Peter Quill made his first appearance in 1976 in Marvel Preview #4 (a black and white magazine), under the creators Steve Englehart and Steve Gan, who envisioned him as an unpleasant, introverted jerk who would go on to grow into a cosmic hero.

I love that arc, and wonder how much it was kicking around then. Around the same time, Jim Starlin wanted to do something similar with Captain Marvel, but Marvel didn’t give him the character, so he did it with Adam Warlock (see my thoughts on that in my series on Adam Warlock I, II, III).

Star-Lord didn’t reappear until Marvel Preview #11, this time under Chris Claremont, John Byrne and Terry Austin (the team that would later moved over to Uncanny X-Men from #108 to #143, famously creating the Hellfire Club, the Phoenix Saga, and the Days of Future Past).

Under Claremont, he wasn’t the introverted jerk, but a straight-faced loner, traveling the space-ways. I haven’t read the Heinlein juveniles, but it sounds like Claremont was aiming for that kind of bland square-jawed adventurer, and that persona stuck in Star-Lord’s appearances through the 70s and 80s.

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When It’s Time to Railroad . . .

When It’s Time to Railroad . . .

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DraculaI don’t think there’s anyone in the Fantasy and SF community that isn’t familiar with this concept (I first came across it in a Heinlein novel) but just in case: There’s a point at which all the necessary components to allow for an invention to flourish are in existence, and at that point – and not before – the invention takes off.

In other words, when it’s time to railroad, everybody railroads. It explains in part why so many inventors seem to file patents within weeks or months of each other, and why so many different people are credited with being the first one to invent something.

Look at it this way, Leonardo da Vinci is credited with the invention of numerous devices he didn’t actually build and/or wasn’t able to build, because the supporting industry, or the supporting technologies weren’t yet in existence.

I want to suggest that this happens in the arts as well. Consider the vampire, as an example. For all intents and literary purposes, the vampire was invented by Bram Stoker. A few other writers showed an interest, but not much was done with the idea until the latter half of the 20th century, when it became time to vampire.

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To Ride a Rathorn by P. C. Hodgell

To Ride a Rathorn by P. C. Hodgell

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oie_11225225XvvToolIt’s taken me two years, but I’ve finally returned to P. C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath Cycle, with the fourth book, To Ride a Rathorn. A rathorn is a deadly, carnivorous, horned, horse-like animal covered in heavy plates of ivory. For the Kencyrath, to ride a rathorn is to try to do something insane, and our heroine Jame is about to do just that. She has accepted her destiny as a crucial element of the final showdown with Perimal Darkling, a world-devouring force of chaos and evil. At the same time, several forces are arrayed against her: the enemies of her family, the weight of millennia of traditions, and terrible agents of utter darkness. Instead of just crawling away and hiding, Jame has decided to take on all comers, and figuratively — and perhaps literally — ride a rathorn.

Four books in, to say the series is complicated is like saying the sun is hot or the oceans wet. Hodgell has created one of the densest and tremendously detailed fantasy settings, and to even look at this book without having read its predecessors just might make a reader’s brain explode. But as I often ask: have you taken my advice and read the other books yet? Because you should have by now. To get a better understanding of what’s gone on before, you can read my reviews of the first three — God Stalk, Dark of the Moon, and Seeker’s Mask — right here at Black Gate. If you don’t have time, though, here’s a relatively brief synopsis:

Thirty thousand years ago, Perimal Darkling began to devour the series of parallel universes called the Chain of Creation. To fight against it, the Three-Faced God forged three separate races into one; feline-like Arrin-Ken to serve as judges, the heavily muscled Kendar to serve as soldiers and craftsmen, and the fine-featured humanoid Highborn to rule them. For 27,000 years, the Kencyrath fought a losing battle, one universe after another falling to the darkness. Three thousand years ago, the High Lord Gerridon, fearful of death, betrayed his people to Perimal Darkling in exchange for immortality. Fleeing yet again, the Kencyrath landed on the world of Rathilien. Since then, they haven’t heard from their god, and Perimal Darkling has seemed satisfied to lurk at the edges of their new home. Monotheists trapped on an alien world with many gods, the Kencyrath have had to struggle to find their own place and survive on Rathilien.

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Black Gate Nominated for a World Fantasy Award

Black Gate Nominated for a World Fantasy Award

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World Fantasy AwardThe 2016 World Fantasy Awards Ballot, compiled by the voting attendees of the World Fantasy Convention, has just been released. And I’m very pleased to note that several contributors to Black Gate feature prominently, including:

Long Fiction — “Farewell Blues,” Bud Webster (BG blogger and poetry editor)
Short Fiction — “Pockets,” Amal El-Mohtar (BG blogger)
Collection — Bone Swans, C.S.E. Cooney (BG website editor)
Special Award, Nonprofessional — John O’Neill, for Black Gate

This is a tremendous honor for Black Gate, and for me personally. The awards will be presented at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio, on October 30th. I hope to see you there.

The winners in every category are selected by a panel of judges. Here’s the complete list of nominees, with links to our previous coverage:

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Regency Punk Summer Reading for Adventurous Girls: Penny Blackfeather

Regency Punk Summer Reading for Adventurous Girls: Penny Blackfeather

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Penny Blackfeather
“Brilliant!” (But the cover is less grown up than the content.)
The Girl Reads Blackfeather
“…compares well to the Goth Girl series.”

“This is brilliant...” says “The Girl,” 12, one of my son’s friends.

We’re in the cafe of the kid’s music school and I’ve asked her what she thinks of Penny Blackfeather, a Regency Punk graphic novel that Sloth Comics sent me.

She reads it until we prise it away from her so she can dash off to her recorder lesson.

The next week, we all go for coffee and she dives back in.

She still rates it as brilliant, and thinks it compares well to the Goth Girl series.

“Morgenstern”, my steampunk-loving daughter, 8, is also mesmerised.

She reads it twice and compares it to Adventure Time, her favourite cartoon, and also pronounces it, “Brilliant!”

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Noise About Xignals

Noise About Xignals

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Xignals September 1988-smallI took a break from cutting the grass around the house. It was a hot day, and the chore always took a while. “Look what I found,” my aunt greeted me, as I went indoors and dropped into a chair. She’d been cleaning up, preparing to move into the cottage, and she’d been discovering things tucked away and forgotten long before, as one does. She handed me a copy of Xignals.

Years ago, back in the twentieth century, Xignals had been the in-house newsletter of Waldenbooks’ Otherworlds Club, a buyers’ club program for science fiction and fantasy readers. I was never a member, but I’d pick up a copy of Xignals when I’d go with my aunt and grandparents over the border from their summer cottage in Philipsburg, Quebec, to have dinner in Burlington, Vermont. There was a Waldenbooks in one of the shopping malls in Burlington, where we’d stop after eating, and I’d take an inexcusably long time browsing the science fiction section before buying a book to take back to Philipsburg. And, often, grab a copy of Xignals with it.

In 2016 I sat and read this copy of Xignals for perhaps the first time in over twenty-five years. It was dated August/September 1988, which means it had come out as I was turning 15. It was a 16-page booklet, 8 sheets of 11-by-17-inch paper folded over, black and white with greyscale images and green lines and fills. I was fascinated by the thing, its edges nibbled by field mice seeking a home during some winter between 1988 and 2016. It brought to my mind not a rush of Proustian reminiscence, but a sense of significance in difference. I was made conscious of the way the future was conceived then, based on the way the world then operated, and the way the world operates differently now.

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The Conclusion to a Grand Adventure: Hobgoblin Night by Teresa Edgerton

The Conclusion to a Grand Adventure: Hobgoblin Night by Teresa Edgerton

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oie_433623CB5VCFSUHobgoblin Night (2015) is an e-book rerelease (and revision, and repackaging, along with three previously published short stories) of The Gnome’s Engine (1991), Teresa Edgerton’s charming follow-up to Goblin Moon (1991). In it, the adventures of brave Sera Vorder and dashing Francis Skelbrooke, and the evil machinations of the faerie-human hybrid, the Duchess of Zar-Wildungen, continue.

In my Black Gate review of Goblin Moon, I wrote,

Goblin Moon is a model of what light entertainment can be. It’s not going to change your world, but it will definitely bring a smile to the face of anyone with a taste for some swashbuckling and Gothic mystery. This tale, smelling just a little of lavender and gunpowder, is a fun respite from all the bloody, cynical “realism” permeating much of modern fantasy — come to think of it, much of modern life.

Those words hold true for Hobgoblin Night, as well. There’s a little less swashbuckling and a little more Gothic mystery in this volume, but it’s just as much outright fun as its predecessor. If you have any desire to visit a world suspiciously like Europe during the Enlightenment, but with Gnomes, Fairies, Trolls, magic, and alchemy, these two books are for you.

At the end of Goblin Moon Sera, her cousin Elsie, and Jed Braun were headed off over the Alantick Ocean to the hoped-for safety of the New World. Though they had thwarted the Duchess’ evil plan to wreak dire harm on Elsie as revenge for a slight perpetrated by Elsie’s mother, they hadn’t stifled her desire for satisfaction. By stealing an ancient, mysterious parchment from the Duchess before fleeing, they had, in fact, only enraged her more.

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Reading Burroughs’ Biography as a Writer

Reading Burroughs’ Biography as a Writer

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PorgesAbout eight years ago, when I was struggling to get my short stories published, I picked up the two-volume biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Irwin Porges. I think I’d been looking for some communion with a writer I’d enjoyed as a teen; I got that and more, including a reassurance that I was on the right track.

Now, it’s difficult to discuss Burroughs in any setting without dropping some pretty big caveats. Burroughs was a product of his time, and it wasn’t a good time. By way of example, he wrote A Princess of Mars in 1911, a time when women and minorities could not vote in Canada, and a time when Jim Crow laws in the United states wouldn’t be repealed for another 50 years. His great white male hero appeared in most of his popular stories and his depiction of anybody who wasn’t white was rife with stereotypes and/or condescension.

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Announcing the 2016 Robert E. Howard Foundation Award Winners

Announcing the 2016 Robert E. Howard Foundation Award Winners

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The Robert E. Howard Foundation

The winners of the 2016 Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards were announced earlier this month at the REH Days celebration in Cross Plains, Texas. Several Black Gate contributors were honored with nominations this year, including Barbara Barrett, Bob Byrne, Howard Andrew Jones, and Bill Ward:

The Cimmerian — Outstanding Achievement, Essay (Online)

BARRETT, BARBARA – “Hester Jane Ervin Howard and Tuberculosis (3 parts)” REH: Two Gun Raconteur Blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

The Stygian — Outstanding Achievement, Website

BLACK GATE (John O’Neill)

The Black River — Special Achievement

BYRNE, BOB – For organizing the “Discovering REH” blog post series at Black Gate

JONES, HOWARD ANDREW and BILL WARD – For their “Re-Reading Conan” series at howardandrewjones.com

The REH Foundation Awards honor the top contributions from the previous year in Howard scholarship and in the promotion of Howard’s life and works. The top three nominees in each category were selected by the Legacy Circle members of the Foundation and the winners were voted on by the full membership of the Foundation.

The complete list of winners follows.

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Spider Robinson: Better a Dead Lion

Spider Robinson: Better a Dead Lion

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Robinson TelempathI’m a long-time fan of Spider Robinson’s work, and I’ve written about his Callahan’s Bar Stories and novels here, and here, but today I’d like to take a look at some of his work that doesn’t get referred to anywhere near as much.

Those of us familiar with Robinson’s work know that, even at its most humorous, it’s what you might describe as “idea-heavy.” This isn’t in the strict, hard science sense, though there’s definitely some hard science in there, but more in the social, philosophical sense.

Telempath (1983) is a post-apocalyptic thriller of the “what if?” variety, but where the end of the world as we know it comes about in a most unusual way. Sure, there was a plague, and by far the majority of the race was wiped out, but not in any expected or commonplace way. The virus that was accidentally(?) released exponentially increased humanity’s sense of smell. As a concept, it seems humorous at first – the kind of idea that people smoking dope kick around – but as Robinson shows us, if it actually happened it wouldn’t be very funny at all. For one thing, such a change would make it impossible for people to live in cities, or to support technologies that produce unpleasant odours, which is, like, all of them. Can anyone say pollution?

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