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The Nightmare Men: “The Haunted Wanderer”

The Nightmare Men: “The Haunted Wanderer”

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thumb_john_kirowanWhile Robert E. Howard is perhaps best known for creating Conan, he had his share of occult investigators of one stripe or another. There was Steve Harrison of River Street, Solomon Kane with his fiery Puritanism and cat-headed ju-ju staff and, of course, John Kirowan.

Kirowan is of an age and appearance with a number of Howard’s other characters, being tall, slender, brooding, and black haired — a Celt of the modern age. Sorrow hangs about him like a shroud, and his history is tragic. Though few agree on what form said tragedy might have taken, all believe that it has something to do with the years that he spent studying the occult arts in the black hills on Hungary and the secret places of Inner Mongolia.

What is known for certain is that Kirowan renounced these studies, and assumed the guise of a sceptic. But, when the nightmarish denizens of diabolical realms intrude upon the lives of his friends and companions, John Kirowan shows his true colours, and the haunted wanderer once more thrusts himself between the innocent and the devils in the dark.

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Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 3: The Warlord of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 3: The Warlord of Mars

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the-warlord-of-mars-1st-editionAlthough there are still eight more books to go in the Mars series, with The Warlord of Mars I can bring to a conclusion Phase #1 of the saga: this completes the “John Carter Trilogy,” and the books that follow it take different paths with new heroes. John Carter will not return to the protagonist role until the eighth book, Swords of Mars, published twenty-one years later.

At the end of the thrill-ride of The Gods of Mars, John Carter lost his love Dejah Thoris in the Chamber of the Sun within the Temple of Issus. A whole year must pass before the slow rotation of the chamber will allow Dejah Thoris to escape. She may not even be alive, since the last moments that John Carter witnessed, the jealous thern woman Phaidor was ready to stab Carter’s love. Did she kill Dejah Thoris? Or did the noble Thuvia take the blow instead?

Readers hung on through the middle of 1913 until Burroughs brought a conclusion to the John Carter epic at the end of the year and made his hero into The Warlord of Mars.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: The Warlord of Mars (1913–14)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913)

The Backstory

With a cliffhanger ending to The Gods of Mars, Burroughs was ready to roll with the conclusion. It was a ferociously busy time in his life: All-Story rejected his second Tarzan novel — one of the most comically blockheaded decisions in the history of magazine fiction; he quit his day job and became a full-time author; his third son John Coleman Burroughs was born; days later, his father George Tyler Burroughs died. In the middle of all this, ERB plunged back to working on Mars. He never developed an outline for the trilogy, and so he took the wrap-up of John Carter’s story as it came, daydreaming down on paper.

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A Few Words About The Order of the Stick

A Few Words About The Order of the Stick

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Dungeon Crawlin' FoolsDying is easy, the old saw has it, but comedy … that’s hard. Only — what happens if we’re talking about a world in which miracles happen to order, and people come back to life whenever a priest wants? Dying suddenly isn’t quite so easy. But comedy, real comedy … that’s still pretty hard.

Fantasy’s no more or less risible than almost anything else in life, and you can find comedic fantasy good, bad, and indifferent. I want to talk about one particular example. Lately, I’ve been rereading a lot of Rich Burlew’s webcomic, The Order of the Stick. It’s a successful, funny fantasy; impressive, since it looks like it should have no business succeeding as well as it does. It’s not just a fantasy comedy, it’s a gaming fantasy comedy. Clearly, the strip’s appeal is going to be somewhat limited.

The main characters are adventurers in a fantasy world that operates according to the rules of Dungeons & Dragons (version 3.5); inevitably a good part of the comedy comes from the characters consciously manipulating the rules of the game, and commenting on its conventions and mechanics. But there’s more to it. The strip isn’t just about the game, nor is it just a showcase for Burlew’s killer sense of humour. The comic’s run for over eight hundred installments up to this point, plus extra stories in various print collections; it’s developed a coherent story, and surprisingly sympathetic characters. It’s gone from a gag strip to a fantasy epic — a nice trick, given that the story’s told with stick figures.

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New Treasures: The Annotated Sandman, Volume One

New Treasures: The Annotated Sandman, Volume One

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the-annotated-sandmanFirst time I met Neil Gaiman was at the 16th World Fantasy Convention in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was 1990, and Gaiman was busy taking the comics world by storm with his new Vertigo title The Sandman, which first appeared in January 1989.

The next year he won the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story with the Sandman story “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” but in 1990 he was a relative unknown (for those who didn’t read comics, anyway). I remember thinking how cool it was that I could run into L. Sprague de Camp, Julius Schwartz, Bob Weinberg and Neil Gaiman, all at the same convention.

In 1999 my friend Andy Heidel, publicist at Avon EOS, sent me an advance proof of Gaiman’s second novel Stardust, the edition illustrated by Charles Vess, for review at the SF Site. I couldn’t find a reviewer, and begged Alice Dechene to do it. Vertigo liked her review so much they blurbed it on the collected edition. Which is why my wife has her name on the back of one of the best-selling graphic novels of the century — something I’ve never accomplished, and I’ve written about a hundred more reviews than she has.

Gaiman’s career has been meteoric ever since, but I still consider the 75 issues of The Sandman to be some of the best work he’s done. I’m not alone — The Los Angles Times Magazine calls The Sandman “The greatest epic in the history of comic books,” and it’s been in print in graphic novel format for over two decades. And our Managing Editor, Howard Andrew Jones, author of The Desert of Souls, says Sandman #50 was a crucial influence on his own writing, “and the one that fired my interest in the tales of the Arabian Nights.”

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Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and The Fantastic Four

Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and The Fantastic Four

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Fantastic Four 1There are two different stories about how it began.

In one story, there’s a writer-editor of boys’ adventure comics, who’s told by his boss — also his uncle — to create a new team of superheroes, a knock-off of the competition’s high-selling Justice League of America title. This isn’t what the writer really wants to do. But he talks it over with his wife. And he decides: I’m going to write the book the way I want to, without worrying about making perfect heroes. Maybe one of the leads will actually be a monster. Maybe another’ll be a teenager, the kind of character who in other books would just be a sidekick. They’ll bicker among themselves, and fight. They’ll be real people. And, in this story, that’s what the writer did; and it worked.

The other story has a veteran comics artist coming in to the studio of the second-rate company he’s working for. He finds the young writer-editor of the comics line crying because they’re moving the furniture out; the company’s about to close down. No problem, says the artist; you tell your uncle, the owner, to hold off folding the business. The artist, a veteran storyteller, knows how to make grab an audience. He starts cranking out the books, new title after new title. Superheroes are back in, so he starts doing superheroes like nobody ever did them, throwing everything he sees around him into his stories, everything he reads in newspapers and magazines, everything he ever found in history books and myths. Scientists. Mutants. Gods and monsters. In this story, that’s what the artist did; and it worked.

Human memory is fallible, especially when, as in this case, the two people closest to the case become estranged. What can be said for sure is this: starting in 1961, Marvel Comics, a formerly undistinguished publisher, began producing a wave of brilliant superhero comics. Most of them were written by Stan Lee, and most of the best were drawn by artist Jack Kirby — with another artist, Steve Ditko, producing two other remarkable books with Lee’s involvement. Of all the Kirby-Lee collaborations, perhaps the best was the original flagship book of the Marvel line, the first title that came in many ways to define Marvel Comics as a whole: The Fantastic Four.

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21 Questions for Ty Franck

21 Questions for Ty Franck

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Ty Franck being hugged by Jen Taylor
I first met Ty Franck online, then in person at LosCon, and we’ve been friends ever since. He blames me for a lot of things that have happened in his life, but the truth is he warps the forces of space, time, and luck to create his own mini-universe with its own rules, as you’ll see from the interview below. My story of Ty that I think gives the most accurate impression of the kind of guy he is, is one he’s probably tired of hearing me tell. But it bears retelling.

Years ago he was held up at gunpoint at his workplace, after hours. Gangsters broke in, cut the phone lines, and tied up both him and another woman who was working late. Ty managed to keep talking to get the gangsters off guard, and then when they left the room, his coworker untied him and he used the company’s internet (which wasn’t connected to the phone lines) to message another office, who in turn called 911.

Yes, this is a true story, but I haven’t gotten to the most unbelievable part yet. After the police arrived and sat Ty down for questioning. The dialogue went something like this:

“What can you tell us about your attackers?”

“Well, they were armed with a Glock 40.”

“So you know guns, then?”

“No, not really.”

“But you know Glocks?”

“No.”

“So how do you know it was a Glock 40?”

“Because they were holding it about here-” Ty mimes having a gun held to his forehead “-and you could read it on the side. It said, Glock 40.”

Ty would be my first choice of friend to have around during the zombie apocalypse. I call dibs.

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Art of the Genre: What came first, the writer or the artist?

Art of the Genre: What came first, the writer or the artist?

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As I walked into the office today Ryan Harvey was talking Avengers with Kandi at the front desk, a figurine of Captain America in his hand and a smile on his face. Now, for any of you who don’t know, Cap isn’t my favorite super hero. I’m not saying I dislike Cap, but when it comes to heroes, and the Avengers in particular, my personal hero is Tony Stark, aka Iron Man.

Ryan, for his part, can’t stand Iron Man, so the office is often a place of contention between the two heroes, and with this new movie coming out the debate has been taken up a notch.

Still, there’s an interesting note about both heroes, and that is the depth in which people are vested in them. Comic book characters, by their very nature, should inspire people to both discuss and enjoy what lies beneath the costume even more than what happens while the person is in it.

Some might argue that comics are about the art, and there have been times when this was abundantly true, but the hard reality is that at their core it’s really the story that matters. In the world of comics, everything America knows and loves about its heroes was the creation of a writer, the art involved that helped galvanize their place in our subconscious a simple technicolor window-dressing that was added later to an already solid foundation, or so I would contend.

Walking by Ryan, I lifted his Captain America figure from his hand, unceremoniously dumped it in the trash, and then went into my office to write the beginnings of a tale I hope you’ll all find interesting. Now granted, I’m biased here, but since no one jumped up to storyboard this particular piece, it will have to stand on the words alone [although there are pictures… there are always pictures, because John O’Neill once told me that if you want readers for your blog you need to include lots of images because people love them… go figure.]

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Worth 1000 Words: An Interview with “Comic Critiquer” John Bonner

Worth 1000 Words: An Interview with “Comic Critiquer” John Bonner

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Click Through For LARGER IMAGE!

I don’t remember who first directed to me to John Bonner’s Comic Critique of Gene Wolfe’s latest novel Home Fires.

I think maybe I saw it on Facebook.

Partly because I adore Gene, partly because I thought the medium was so clever, I immediately contacted Bonner to beg for an interview.

He was receptive. I procrastinated. After a not-so-brief hiatus, I actually sent him my questions. He answered.

Eventually, months after it all began, now that the, uh, stars are in alignment and the entrails of my oracular pig have disported themselves with a measure of amiability, I have the interview for your reading enjoyment here.

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Free Knights of the Dinner Table Online Strips

Free Knights of the Dinner Table Online Strips

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kodt-webcomicThe talented Jolly Blackburn, creator of the comic Knights of the Dinner Table, has posted an epic KoDT comic strip online for your enjoyment.

Knights of the Dinner Table is the finest gaming comic ever made. It follows the misadventures of a group of misfits from Muncie, Indiana, whose love of gaming routinely trumps normal social conventions, and occasionally even their sense of self preservation.

This latest online strip, “Not Up To Speed,” finds the gang involved in an impossibly ambitious  live-action recreation of the D-Day landing in a vast convention hall at Gary Con.

Long time readers will recognize the characters Eddie and Sara, who appear in the KODT Java Joint strip in the pages of Black Gate magazine.

The latest issue of the Knights of the Dinner Table print magazine is #180 (October 2011), making it one of the longest-running independent comics in history.

Knights of the Dinner Table magazine is 64 pages of comics, reviews and gaming fun for just $5.99. It’s available at better comic and game shops around the country, or online at KenzerCo, and it gets my highest recommendation.

Gunpowder, Treason, and Occupation: V For Vendetta

Gunpowder, Treason, and Occupation: V For Vendetta

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V For Vendetta 1I’m taking a bit of a break from the Romanticism and Fantasy posts, as I’ve got a few other things I’d like to write about. To start with, since I discussed Alan Moore’s Marvelman a few weeks ago, I thought I’d take a look now at V For Vendetta. V started as a series that ran, like Marvelman, in the early 80s in the black-and-white anthology magazine Warrior. Though the story was left incomplete when Warrior folded, in 1988 the series was republished in colour by DC Comics, and Moore and artist David Lloyd were able to finish it as they’d hoped. (Some spoilers for the book follow; also spoilers for Watchmen, oddly enough.)

A bit of cultural background may be in order here to explain V’s iconography, themes, and why the main character’s mask is suddenly turning up in protest movements in metropolitan centres. Guy Fawkes was a militant Catholic in early 17th-century England, part of a group of confederates led by Robert Catesby, who planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament and kill King James I. Fawkes was apprehended underneath Parliament, near the conspirators’ vast store of gunpowder. There has been much discussion since about how much England’s intelligence services knew about the plot; it seems that James’ spymaster Robert Cecil may have known about the scheme in advance, and let it proceed in an effort to capture higher-placed Catholic agents. In any event, Fawkes was tortured and executed along with seven other conspirators. The anniversary of what would have been the date of the explosion, November 5, became an annual celebration in England, marked with bonfires and the burning-in-effigy of Guy Fawkes.

Moore and Lloyd used that imagery when they created V For Vendetta. They had planned, at the suggestion of Warrior editor Dez Skinn, to create a comics series focussing on a pulp-era gangbuster figure. As they talked over that idea, it turned into a near-future adventure series, following a heroic anarchist out to overthrow a fascist totalitarian state. They used the iconography of Guy Fawkes as the visual inspiration for their hero, dressing him in 17th century garb and a smiling mask, and began the series with the destruction of the Houses of Parliament that the historical Fawkes couldn’t accomplish.

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