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Just in time for Xmas (or whatever you celebrate this time of year)…

Just in time for Xmas (or whatever you celebrate this time of year)…

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interzone-2010Just arrived in the mail is Interzone‘s concluding issue of 2010 featuring the cover artwork of Warwick 2651Fraser-Coombe; the combined pieces of the six issues this past year form a complete work called “Playground (Hide and Seek).”  

A signed and individually numbered limited edition print can be ordered from the artist’s website.

In terms of fiction, this issue features the work of Jason Sanford with three stories and introductions by the author.  Additional stories are by Matthew Cook and Aliette de Bodard.

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Six: “At War with Ming”

Blogging Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Part Six: “At War with Ming”

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at-war-w-ming“At War with Ming“ was the sixth installment of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally printed between October 20, 1935 and April 5, 1936, “At War with Ming” picks up the storyline where the fifth installment, “The Witch Queen of Mongo” left off with Flash awaiting Ming’s recognition of Kira, the cavern kingdom he had conquered over the course of the last two installments as an official kingdom of Mongo.

Unsurprisingly, Ming rejects Flash’s claims that Azura has abdicated as valid and demands that she be vanquished before he will recognize Flash as a legitimate monarch. Sadly, just as in the real life it is a petty disagreement that is interpreted as justifiable cause for war.flashgordon2_1cvr2

Flash immediately declares war on Ming in response to the insult he received. Flash and Dale head the Black Lancers, while the Hawkman Khan heads the infantry and Dr. Zarkov heads Azura’s artillery unit. The first strip ends with Kira’s forces mobilizing for war despite being hopelessly outnumbered.

For the next five and a half months, readers thrilled to Alex Raymond’s glorious depictions of battle. It seems strange, from the vantage point of the 21st Century, to see that the attitude that a war fought over wounded egos was still considered glorious after the tragic and monumental loss of life during the First World War less than twenty years before.

 

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Goth Chick News: A Very Bradbury Christmas

Goth Chick News: A Very Bradbury Christmas

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womans-day2Last week’s post, about how ghosts and Yuletide have as close an association as brandy and eggnog, prompted a quantity of mail from you lot. Not surprisingly, the readers of Black Gate know all about the creepier part of the holidays. But you’re also sort of warm and gooey on the inside as well, going all sentimental on me about your own Christmas traditions.

And your emails reminded me about something I had forgotten for a very long time involving Christmas, Ray Bradbury and a ghost story.

Many years ago in the early fall, my beloved Grandfather passed away very peacefully in his sleep. Being nine, I was convinced that no one in the whole world could be more heartbroken than me; I had been my Papa’s only grandchild for most of my young life and he had made me the center of his whole world. However, though I remember my own first experience with grief, what I recall most vividly is seeing my own Dad cry over the loss of his Father. To this day it is the only time I’ve ever seen my stoic Dad shed a tear.

Back then, and until this day, Mom was an avid fan of Woman’s Day magazine. So much so that she kept and cataloged her back issues primarily for recipes but for other interesting tidbits as well. Some weeks after my Grandfather’s funeral, Mom went into her library of Woman’s Day and pulled out an issue from December, 1973. I remember her using a scrap of paper to mark a place in the magazine and leaving it on Dad’s desk for him to find.

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Art Evolution 15: Liz Danforth

Art Evolution 15: Liz Danforth

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Art Evolution, the project that shows the personal take on a single unifying character by the greatest artists in the RPG field, continues. But if you’ve missed some, you can find the beginning here.

After last week’s entry I had my ‘3rd Edition Lyssa’, and I was ready to move further back in my timeline. For that purpose, I got into my way-back machine and dialed in the dawn of RPGs, the year 1976.

tunnels-trolls-254If you go back further than 76’ you’re fooling yourself if you think anything a gamer played was more than an advanced miniatures game. However, in that year D&D was beginning its infant run and Flying Buffalo put out its first module Castle Buffalo for Tunnels & Trolls.

That now infamous and out of print module was graced with a cover by Liz Danforth, the Queen of the Role Playing Game. Liz was doing RPGs before the world knew what RPGs were, and although I was only five years old at the time, I would come to appreciate her grace and dedication when I later discovered Middle-Earth Role-Playing from Iron Crown Enterprises in the mid-eighties.

As you’ve already seen, the first book I ever read was The Hobbit, so it certainly came to pass that when I.C.E. started producing role-playing in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth I was right there ready to buy a part of the experience.

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Black Gate 14: Game Reviews

Black Gate 14: Game Reviews

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cryptofeverflameWe’re finally nearing the end of the Black Gate 14 online tour, just as issue 15 nears completion. Whew! Timing is everything.

Today we’re looking at the Gaming column, edited by Howard Andrew Jones. Like Reviews Editor Bill Ward, Howard pulled out all the stops to make sure it was the best we’d ever had for our blockbuster 14th issue.  The result was 20 pages of in-depth reviews of the most exciting gaming products of the year, including:

Alien Module 1: Aslan, Gareth Hanrahan (Mongoose Publishing)
Traveller: Tripwire, Simon Beal (Mongoose Publishing)
Traveller: FASA and Gamelords, CD ROM (Far Future Enterprises)
HeroScape Expansion Pack 1-4: Blackmoon’s Siege (Wizards of the Coast)
Legends of Steel: Savage Worlds, Jeff Mejia (Evil DM Games)
Level UP Issue 1, Magazine (Goodman Games)
Far Avalon, Martin Dougherty (Avenger/Comstar Games)
Shard RPG Basic Compendium, Aaron de Orive and Scott Jones (Shard Studios)
Hero’s Handbook: Tieflings, Edited by Ken Hart (Goodman Games)
Hero’s Handbook: Dragonborn, Edited by Aijalyn Kohler (Goodman Games)
Forgotten Heroes: Fang, Fist, and Song, Edited by Aeryn Blackdirge Rudel (Goodman Games)
Forgotten Heroes: Scythe and Shroud, Edited by Aeryn Blackdirge Rudel (Goodman Games)
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Core Rulebook, Jason Bulmahn (Paizo Publishing)
Pathfinder Module: Crypt of the Everflame, Jason Bulmahn (Paizo Publishing)

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TRON: Legacy

TRON: Legacy

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tron-legacy-posterTRON: Legacy (2010)
Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Starring Jeff Bridges, Garrett Hedlund, Olivia Wilde, Bruce Boxleitner, Michael Sheen.

Disney has sunk a hefty amount of money into the making and marketing of TRON: Legacy as a blockbuster and a future franchise. Given the long-term currency of the 1982 original, this is what you would expect. The IMAX 3D release that coincides with last year’s release of Avatar makes Disney’s scheme of conquest obvious.

And yet, after watching the film, I have to wonder if Disney had any idea what they were doing with this, uhm, strange and mostly airless film. It’s decked with gorgeous neon visuals and special effects, but it is neither an action extravaganza to grab the young viewers nor an intelligent enough follow-up to the heady ideas that TRON smashed around in 1982 at the edge of the computer revolution. It appears that the revolution has not been televised. Or not screened.

TRON: Legacy is no fiasco—it will make a profit and I imagine that international box-office will make up the significant part of it—but it’s only “adequate” all around. Considering that I went into the film with the realistic expectation that it might very well suck, I can say with enormous lack of passion that I am “satisfied.” However, this won’t be a film I’ll want to revisit the way I do its predecessor, nor will it make it onto my DVD shelf. The benefit of the IMAX 3D presentation is significant enough (see it in this format if you can) that my disappointment would increase in its absence.

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Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Movie Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

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Scott Pilgrim levels up when he gains the Power of Love.
Scott Pilgrim levels up when he gains the Power of Love.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World , a live-action film based on a popular comic book limited series which was written to mimic a quasi-video game world, goes beyond “quirky” into a new realm of meta-film.

What do I mean by this? I guess the best way to explain it is that at no point during the film is the viewer really allowed to forget that they’re watching a film. Watching the film is like watching a mix of anime and video game which happens to be performed by real actors. The fight scenes are extremely impressive, a mix of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Super Mario Galaxy, with some Guitar Hero thrown in for good measure.

“Realism” has no place in this film.

At first, you might think that things like this would ruin the film, but instead it allows you to engage with the film on a whole different level than what you’re used to … and it works.

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New Treasures: A Salute to ChiZine Publications

New Treasures: A Salute to ChiZine Publications

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monstrous-affectionsAt the end of October I found myself at the World Fantasy Convention, with Howard Andrew Jones, Bill Ward, Ryan Harvey, and pretty much the entirety of Team Black Gate — talking publishing with other small press owners on panels, attending late-night parties, and cheering on the mighty James Enge during the World Fantasy Awards.

It wasn’t all fun and games, of course. We bought a table in the Dealer’s Room, and for most of the convention I was parked behind it, selling magazines. It was a chance to meet some of our authors and subscribers face-to-face, and put Black Gate in the hands of folks who’d never beheld it before. Always a pleasure to see the looks on their faces as they hefted the latest issue, and to hear them say “Wow — this is a magazine? It’s enormous!”

There were slow moments, of course. And during those I had a chance to catch up with friends who came to hang out at the booth, like author Ted Chiang, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly editor Adrian Simmons, SF Signal‘s John DeNardo, and many others. More rarely I’d steal a moment to wander the rest of the Dealer’s Room, an Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders for fantasy readers, where you can find virtually any book, no matter how rare or obscure. I’ve made many a prize find there over the years — that’s how I ended up paying $575 for a copy of Robert E. Howard’s Skull-Face And Others, the beautiful and seminal Arkham House edition from 1946, which I bought (after some hard negotiating) at the 2006 convention.

Right across from the Black Gate table were the friendly folks of ChiZine Publications, with hands-down the most handsome and impressive collection of new releases at the con. I found myself sneaking over to their booth every chance I got, returning with a volume or two each time. Eventually I purchased over half a dozen and only now, six weeks later, am I truly beginning to realize what treasures I brought home.

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She Likes Us…

She Likes Us…

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Lois Tilton has some nice words to say about content provider (or what used to be called a magazine) Blackgate in her year-end evaluation of sources for SF&F short fiction:

blackgate-issue-14-cover-150

Black Gate put out only a single issue this year but made up for it in the sheer mass of sword and sorcery and other adventure fantasy. The quality was high; I’m happy to see this zine has given up its excessive attachment to endless story series. My favorite was “The Word of Azrael” by Mathew David Surridge, possibly the ultimate sendup of sword and sorcery.

She also cited Interzone as her favorite SF magazine.  While I hardly begin to touch the depth of her coverage, I feel the same way.  I was also interested to see her comment that,

F&SF remains one of the most diverse publications in the field, with a mix ranging from mundane science fiction to horror. It provided more stories that ended up on this list than any other publication, but I wish there hadn’t also been so many silly stories of little merit…

That’s always been my impression and I wonder if Gordon van Gelder feels compelled for some reason to publish these “silly stories” as a kind of tribute to the pulp tradition of stories that were silly even by the standards of the era.  Of course, that’s part of the charm, I suppose.  Sort of like the whole “Crouching with Dragons” phenomenon in which you’re making a purposefully bad movie, but doing it really well.  On the other hand, seeing it one time is kind of amusing, but a regular diet makes you all the more desirous of something with higher nutrition.

Blake Edwards: A Personal Remembrance

Blake Edwards: A Personal Remembrance

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peter_gunn_tie-inThis wasn’t the article I planned on posting this week. Those that know me are aware of my obsession with Blake Edwards’ work. It is also true to say that I am obsessive about the work of Hammett, Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Sax Rohmer, Ray Davies, and countless other writers. However, my love of writers and writing begins and ends with Mr. Edwards.

Blake Edwards’ passing this week brings his work back into focus again for the public at large. He was a prolific writer/producer/director with a body of work that spanned nearly eight decades and ran the gamut from film, radio, television, and theater. A native Oklahoman, the stepfather who adopted him made him the third part of a family that now boasts five generations in the entertainment industry.

His early success came in radio creating the hardboiled detective series, Richard Diamond, Private Detective which later made a successful transition to television and led Edwards to produce his own television variation in the form of the classic Peter Gunn. The latter project began an association with composer Henry Mancini that continued for over 35 years until Mancini’s death.

 

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