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Celluloid Heroes

Celluloid Heroes

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the-vikings1The year was 1958. I was six years-old. Life was a waking dream filled with magic, mystery, and wonder. It was a year that would have a lasting effect on me.

It was the year I first encountered the cinematic “ancestors” of the warriors and heroes I would go on to discover ten or so years later in the paperback pages of Lancer, Ballantine, Avon, Signet, Paperback Library, Pyramid, and other publishers who had taken up the banner of sword and sorcery, and heroic fantasy.

Of course, I had already become a fan of Disney’s Zorro, had seen the Errol Flynn swashbucklers on television, and had desperately wanted to become a pirate when I grew up. I would also see Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, The Mongols, starring Jack Palance, Hannibal, starring Victor Mature, and other films like Genghis Khan, The 300 Spartans, and Ben Hur a few years later. On television I would later see the silent Thief of Baghdad and Siegfried, and other adventure films of the 1930s and 40s.

But the movie theater in 1958 would have the most profound impact on my life.

The film that started it all was The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, and the wonderful Ernest Borgnine, whom I recently had the pleasure of meeting.

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Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw – Part Three

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw – Part Three

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wildside-press3yellow-claw-jacket1Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw was originally serialized in five installments in Lippincott’s from February through June 1915. The serial was subsequently published in book form later that same year by Methuen Press in the UK and McBride & Nast in the US. The novel chooses to divide the story into four sections. This week, we examine the third part.

Rohmer shifts the action back to Inspector Dunbar and Gaston Max’s investigation into the murder at the Leroux residence. Despite the press fingering Soames, the Leroux butler, as chief suspect, the detectives are sure that finding Soames will lead them to the mysterious Mr. King, the real culprit. Gaston Max suggests that Mr. King is a Chinaman with the reasoning that since the deceased was an opium addict, the murder is likely tied to Limehouse.

The French detective adopts the false identities of both Abraham Levinsky and Monsieur Gaston of Paris to infiltrate the bohemian circle that frequents the opium den. Max had stumbled onto the trail of Mr. King in Paris where the opium dealer was operating in an apartment next to the historical residence of the late Joseph Balsamo, alias the infamous Count Cagliostro. From here, Rohmer is on familiar territory at last as Max’s description of his raid on the Paris opium den is decidedly more typical of Rohmer’s Fu Manchu thrillers.

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Goth Chick News: C2E2 2012’s Best in Show

Goth Chick News: C2E2 2012’s Best in Show

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c2e2Last weekend, Chicago’s McCormick Center played host to the annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2 for you cool kids), and once again I am reminded that not all the “interesting” people have pulled up stakes for California.

Amidst the oodles of Avengers merchandise, aisles of comic illustrators (many of whom appeared to have a near cult-like following) and celebrity autograph queues, mingled individuals who seemed to have ample expendable income for use on high-end costumes.

Yes, there was indeed a costume contest much later in the afternoon, but that didn’t explain why a very thin dude in a wig and fishnets was walking around posing as Lady Gaga.

It is sights like this which remind me that should I ever venture into the San Diego ComiCon; my head would likely explode.

Still, the popularity of C2E2 continues to grow year over year; so much so that in 2012 it was relocated to a larger venue in the building across the street from 2011’s location.

And though I could have easily grabbed a spot on the floor opposite the entrance and spent the day people-watching, Black Gate photog Chris Z and I waded in with the rest of the press just before the opening bell on Saturday.

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Art of the Genre: Art of the Iconic Female #2; The Succubus

Art of the Genre: Art of the Iconic Female #2; The Succubus

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Tony DiTerlizzi does the Succubus right for AD&D's Planescape!
Tony DiTerlizzi does the Succubus right for AD&D's Planescape!

I can’t tell you for sure the first time I saw a succubus, but I’d lay money that it was in the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. The image there, done by David C. Sutherland III, has been the subject of much debate over the years [Supposedly it’s based on this picture of Sheila Mullen, a Playboy Playmate from May 1977], but one thing no one can argue is whether or not it’s sexually inspiring to teenage boys. For that, the answer is an obvious YES!

This sexuality is certainly the key to making the succubus an Iconic Female, and there is little doubt that countless images of feral succubus abound in any fantasy setting worth its salt. For my own fantasy gaming succubus legends, I have a couple, but I suppose my most famous comes not from the succubus herself, but from a succubus’s torrid affair with a Drow wizard that produced an Alu-demon known only as Mithelvarn’s Daughter. This character inspired a deep affection for Alu-demons which first appeared in Monster Manual II and were drawn by Harry Quinn. That tome described them as the offspring of a mating between a succubi and a human, and that these progeny are always female. Cambions, for all you playing a copy of the home trivia game, are the product of a human female mating with a demon, and they are always male.

Still, other than D&D trivia, what do we really know about the succubus other than she’s inherently hot? Well, I did a bit of digging, and what do you know, I found that there is a reason, other than sexual attraction, for me to like a good old-fashioned succubus.

You see, as far as I can tell, Succubi are really old, like the dawn of history old. When you start reading society keywords like Mesopotamian or Babylonian, you know you are getting serious about a demon’s age. In those cultures, they had references to a dream-haunting demon named Lilitu, but it isn’t until the early Jewish faith breaks onto the scene that we find Lilith, the presumed first ‘modern’ succubus, mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud. Here, Adam, product of God that we know in the Christian Bible, takes Lilith as his first wife since she was created from the same earth as he. It isn’t until he breaks with Lilith because she refuses to become subservient to him that Eve is created from Adam’s rib, and therefore a part of man instead of his equal.

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The Best of Modern Arabian Fantasy, Part I: Howard Andrew Jones and The Desert of Souls

The Best of Modern Arabian Fantasy, Part I: Howard Andrew Jones and The Desert of Souls

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howard-picThe Middle East has produced some world famous mythology and is fertile ground to base a fantasy novel, as more and more authors are discovering. Over the next several posts I will be exploring this modern day trend and interviewing many of the authors who are mining the lore and culture of the Middle East, and specifically the Arabian Middle East for their work.

My first interviewee is Howard Andrew Jones who sets his novel, The Desert of Souls, in the 8th Century, when the Abbasid caliphate was a center of trade, culture, and learning. In the following interview, I’ve asked Howard what drew him to this particular cultural milieu and how he went about doing the research necessary to create characters and compose their adventures.

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New Pulp Fiction for Our New Hard Times

New Pulp Fiction for Our New Hard Times

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the-pulpsPulp fiction is back — in print, online, in ebooks, and on iPads. Tough guys, tough women, tough prose, action and more action, blood and thunder, heroes and villains presented unapologetically as heroes and villains.

And why not? Why not have as much blood and thunder as we can handle right now, given that the last time we saw this much imaginative raw prose in the hands of readers, we were in the hard times of the early 1930s?

Fans of the original old, tough, wild pulp stories have always been here, collecting the magazines when they found them at garage sales or at science fiction conventions. But after the heyday of these magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, popular fiction in the 1950s and 1960s changed and moved on to paperbacks and digest zines and television shows.

By then, though, pulp had lost some of its edge. In the postwar boom, it became less than it had been, in the same way that the antics of rough early vaudeville, for example, changed as the routines moved to radio and then to early television and then to sitcoms.

The early 1970s saw a boom in nostalgia for the real stuff from the 1920s and 1930s — just in time for the very serious recession then. That’s when you found remaindered copies everywhere of Tony Goodstone’s big old coffee table book The Pulps, still the best introduction to the popular fiction of hard times and war time. Tons of great stories were brought back, and Bette Midler’s Songs for the New Depression sold right alongside paperback reprints of the Shadow and Doc Savage and Max Brand.

We’re back there now. We’re in the Lesser Depression, as Paul Krugman has identified it. And just as in the hard times of the early 1970s and the very hard times of the early 1930s, pulp fiction is here to fulfill its commitment to giving us outlandish, big top entertainment.

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Clarkesworld #67

Clarkesworld #67

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cw_67_300The April  issue of Clarkesworld is currently online. Featured fiction: “Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” by Tom Crosshill, “Draftyhouse” by Erik Amundsen and “The Womb Factory” by Gary Kloster.  Non fiction by Brian Francis Slattery, Jeremy L.C. Jones and Danile Baker.  The cover art is by Steve Goad.

All of this is available online for free; there’s even an audio podcast version of the Crosshill story read by Kate Baker. However, nothing is really free. The magazine is supported by “Clarkesworld Citizens” who donate $10 or more. There’s also a Kindle edition.

We last covered Clarkesworld with issue #66.

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw – Part Two

Blogging Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw – Part Two

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yellow-claw-jackettantor1Sax Rohmer’s The Yellow Claw was originally serialized in five installments in Lippincott’s from February through June 1915. The serial was subsequently published in book form later that same year by Methuen Press in the UK and McBride & Nast in the US. The novel chooses to divide the story into four sections. This week, we examine the second part.

Rohmer shifts gears unexpectedly by focusing Part Two of the novel on Soames, the Leroux butler who skipped out when Inspector Dunbar arrived at his employer’s home to investigate a murder. We learn Luke Soames fled because of his chequered past (he was dismissed by his previous employer for theft) that led him to falling prey to the sinister Mr. Gianapolis who arranged for Soames’ employment in the Leroux household. Soames is aware that Mr. Gianapolis works for a mysterious Mr. King who has some secret connection to Mrs. Leroux, but for awhile Soames is content to question little and perform the few curious extra duties that Gianapolis requests of him.

When Soames learns of a dead woman in his employer’s home and the arrival of Inspector Dunbar, he panics and flees fearing his criminal past will be uncovered by the detective. Coming to his senses, he contacts Gianapolis. The Greek takes him into Mr. King’s household and tells him he will find other employment for him, but warns him that if he fails them again, he will be handed over as an accessory to murder. Soames recognizes the fact that Gianapolis has complete control over him for without Gianapolis and the mysterious Mr. King who employs him, he would be a ruined man.

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Amazon.com Announces Pre-Orders for J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy

Amazon.com Announces Pre-Orders for J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy

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rowling1Amazon.com has announced that J.K. Rowling’s next novel, The Casual Vacancy, will be available September 27.

From the description it’s not immediately clear if the book has an fantastic elements at all, and in fact it may be a straight-up literary thriller:

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the town’s council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations? Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.

The Casual Vacancy will be published in hardcover for $35 by Little, Brown and Company on September 27, 2012. No details on page length are available, and the publisher has not yet released the cover art.

Complete details on Amazon.com here.

Goth Chick News: Vampire Novel of the Century? I’ll Be the Judge of That

Goth Chick News: Vampire Novel of the Century? I’ll Be the Judge of That

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interview-with-vampireLast week, beloved editor and big cheese John O’Neill told you about the 2011 Bram Stoker Award winners which included what I consider a travesty of justice perpetuated on the vampire-genre-loving community by the Horror Writers Association (HWA).

In January the HWA, an international association of writers, publishing professionals, and supporters of horror literature, in conjunction with the Bram Stoker Family Estate and the Rosenbach Museum & Library, announced the nominees for the one-time-only, Bram Stoker Vampire Novel of the Century Award.  The Award was to mark the centenary of the death in 1912 of Abraham (Bram) Stoker, the author of Dracula.

A jury composed of writers and scholars selected, from a field of more than 35 preliminary nominees, the six vampire novels that they believe had the greatest impact on the horror genre since publication of Dracula in 1897.

Eligible works must have been first published between 1912 and 2011, and published in or translated into English.

Beyond this, the criteria for consideration seem a tad vague, but from the descriptions of the six finalists described by the HWA, here are the other points considered.

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