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Red Sonja 10

Red Sonja 10

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Red Sonja 10 coverSo this story opens with Red Sonja and the inexplicably-still-unslain Suumaro on a reconnaissance mission. They’re traveling by raft into the least-fortified part of Skranos to gather intelligence on its fortifications. After I wrote that sentence, I realized that if they already know what part of the city is least-fortified, then haven’t they already scoped out the fortifications?

Never mind. They never make it into the city this issue anyway. Before the first page is turned, Sonja, Suumaro, and the retinue of soldiers they brought with them are attacked by winged demon-people. Suumaro is all-too-familiar with the creatures, saying that his sorceress mother, Apah Alah, created them as guardians. Sonja asks what she used them to guard.

A better question might be what kind of spy mission includes the leader of the resistance movement, a woman who drunkenly challenged the entire army to kill her, a dozen armed men, and their horses? How exactly were they expecting to slip in unnoticed?

Again, never mind. We’ve got harpies to fight. Well, for a page and a half. The harpies (or whatever) kill all the other men, as well as the horses. (Have I mentioned how badly horses get treated in this series?) Leaving Red Sonja and Suumaro on the shore of a forest. Capping the trunk of one of the largest trees is a castle.

Yeah, a castle is growing out of a tree. It’s just there, by the shore between Skranos and the rebel encampment. And nobody noticed a castle growing out of a tree up until now.

And since this Red Sonja, you guessed it. She freaks out for one panel, then moves on. Because mildly freaked out is just how she’s learned to function.

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Dungeon Board Game from Wizards of the Coast

Dungeon Board Game from Wizards of the Coast

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Dungeon board game from Wizards of the Coast
Dungeon board game from Wizards of the Coast

There were a lot of releases and announcements from Wizards of the Coast to get excited about in 2012, such as D&D Next, the Lords of Waterdeep board game, and the first four Dungeon Command faction packs (covered here and here). But one game slipped through the 2012 coverage here at the rooftop headquarters of Black Gate… in large part because it lacks the bells, whistles, and minis from some of these other games. But, at the same time, that’s part of its charm.

Dungeon (Amazon, B&N) is a straight dungeon crawl game at a bargain basement price ($19.99!) compared to almost any other RPG-related board game that you’ll find in the market these days. This is because there are no miniatures, just little cards and cardboard tokens.

This streamlined approach to the game design also makes Dungeon a pretty quick game to sail through. There isn’t the sort of intrigue that drew our Black Gate overlord John O’Neill into Lords of Waterdeep, but the goal is something that most gamers can get behind: the one with the most treasure wins.

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Red Sonja 9

Red Sonja 9

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Red Sonja 9 coverI really don’t want to be “that guy.” Long-time comic fans know “that guy.” The one who can say with authority whether the Batmobile is stick or automatic, how Wonder Woman can find her invisible jet, and who would win in the oldest comic grudge match: Superman or the Hulk. I don’t want to be one of those fans who tells the writer that he’s writing his characters wrong.

But I’ve been following Red Sonja for a while and I think I have a feel for how she thinks, what she values. I come back every month to follow her adventures partially because I like how she handles said adventures. So when I read a story that just goes against so much of what’s been established up to this point, it just pulls me out of the tenuous suspension of disbelief I have to enter to take any of this seriously.

When the story opens and Red Sonja is having dinner with Suumaro, a man who openly keeps a harem of a chained women, something doesn’t ring true. She set them free last issue; but there’s no mention of what happened to them. She should be helping them escape from their indifferent master or, better yet, training them into a fighting force that can exact revenge. At the very least, she should run her sword through this Tarzan wannabe.

As it is, she excuses herself from the meal to go into the nearby woods and sleep in a tree. Hey, who doesn’t have to get away from it all once in a while? After drowning one of Suumaro’s generals in mammoth innards last issue, she’s now taken over his post. The rigors of command are no doubt getting to her; but honestly, why does she want to work for this creep?

Sure enough, she’s not dozing for half a page before the jerk comes trolling after her. She jumps off the limb and he moves to embrace her. She pushes him away, explaining that she’s made a vow, which I have to believe is her way of being polite. I have no idea why she’s trying to be polite to this guy.

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Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See

Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See

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Rue morgues magazine's 200 alternative horror filmsI had a clever title in mind for this post, something about a book you need to see, but the name of the book was so long nothing else would fit. Rue Morgue Magazine’s 200 Alternative Horror Films You Need to See. See what I mean? Damn near had to start a new paragraph just to say it again.

200 Flicks (which we’ll be calling it going forward) is a marvelous little treasure I found on the B&N magazine rack while digging around for the latest issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I’m vaguely aware of Rue Morgue magazine (and should probably be moreso, granted), but that wasn’t what caught my eye. No, it was the title, and the fact that this perfect bound “magazine” is an impressive 162 pages.

I flipped through it, and was sold instantly. This is the kind of invaluable reference work I’ll be drawing on for years. It’s packed to the brim with text, with plenty of color stills and crisp reproductions of 200 movie posters and DVD covers. The heart of the book is the carefully-selected collection of well written and informative reviews of overlooked horror films.

A quick check showed many of my favorites are here, including a guilty pleasure or two: Session 9, Let the Right One In, Psycho II, Something Wicked This Way Comes — and plenty more that I’m not familiar with. And isn’t the joy of discovery the true reason you lay your money down for this kind of thing?

The entries are organized alpahbetically, but it’s really something you browse rather than read cover-to-cover. It has numerous lists: 10 Made for TV Terrors You Need to See, 10 Foreign Zombie Films You Need to See, plus lists covering vampire flicks, foreign zombie movies, family fright fests, gore films, slashers, and many more. There are also interviews with directors and film personalities like Guillermo del Toro, Tobe Hooper, Roger Corman, Fred Dekker, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, and others.

The book is so inexpensive (a criminally low $9.99, or $4.99 for the digital version) and so packed with content that the only way it can possibly be a money-making venture is if it’s primarily recycled material from Rue Morgue magazine. Which is fine by me — if the magazine is a fraction as interesting and entertaining, I’ll be getting a subscription.

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New Treasures: IDW’s Popeye

New Treasures: IDW’s Popeye

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Popeye Issue 2Okay. I’m fully aware that Popeye was not what you expected on a Monday morning here at your online radar for all that’s great and new in modern fantasy. But please, indulge me for a moment.

I buy comics on Saturday, on my way home from the post office. Finally finished with a busy Saturday morning packing and mailing back issues, I reward myself by browsing the stacks of new arrivals at Graham Crackers Comics in St. Charles. My point here is that, when I’m purchasing comics, I’m a bit more prone to impulse buys than I am with other forms of entertainment.

It was just such an impulse that caused me to pick up the first two issues of IDW’s new Popeye comic. Certainly it wasn’t any special affection for E.C. Segar’s character — in fact, I can’t really recall the last time I read Popeye, unless it was in the pages of Rick Norwood’s excellent Comics Revue two decades ago. Probably Bruce Ozella’s clean and dynamic art style in the first issue didn’t hurt — flipping through the pages reminded me immediately of Carl Barks and Don Rosa, and that’s a good thing.

The first issue, a 22-page epic featuring a dangerous quest to a lost island, mysterious fog, a Sea Hag, pirates, and witchcraft, reads like a Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge story too. Except here it doesn’t quite work. It’s funny, sorta, and the art is great, but the whole affair doesn’t really come off.

Fortunately, the second issue is a huge improvement. In fact, it’s a mini-masterpiece. This one is split into two tales — the first a complete farce, as Popeye discovers his girlfriend Olive Oyl is being courted by the smooth-talking Willy Wormwood. Popeye’s crazed attempts to one-up Wormwood — for example, uprooting a 100-year-old elm tree to present to Olive when Wormwood offers her flowers — reveal the essential core of his relationship with Olive. Their love and friendship, such as it is, is based almost wholly on mutual misunderstanding.

The second story, “John Sappo and Prof. O.G. Wotasnozzle and Saffer’s Wife Myrtle,” is even better. In fact, it is a small slice of genius. All three title characters live together in a small house, and all three have simple ambitions: Sappo wants to be left alone to read his paper; Myrtle wants to unceasingly nag her husband; and Prof. O.G. Wotasnozzle desires only to quietly work on his inventions and best his hated rival Prof. Finkelsnop. Naturally, only one can be satisfied at any moment. When Sappo asks Wotasnozzle for an invention that will block out his wife’s nagging, and a peeved Myrtle asks for something to nullify Sappo’s new Jar of Solitude, the result is an ever-escalating battle of invention and counter-invention that leads to hilariously catastrophic results. This is a comic that had me laughing on virtually every page.

Popeye is published by IDW, individual issues are priced at $3.99. Issue #1 was written by Roger Langridge and drawn by Bruce Ozella; Issue 2 was written by Langridge and drawn by Ken Wheaton and Tom Neely. Check it out at a comic shop near you.

The Weird of Oz Gabs About Groundhog Day

The Weird of Oz Gabs About Groundhog Day

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groundhog dayIn this day-after-Groundhog-Day edition of “The Weird of Oz,” I’ll consider how — and why — the 1993 film Groundhog Day has quietly joined the ranks of American classics.

First, let me quickly situate this film with regard to how it warrants discussion on a website devoted to fantasy media (an interesting issue David E. Harris raised in his post of December 26, 2012). Although billed as a comedy, and by no means a traditional fantasy or supernatural tale, it does fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction.

Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” noted that all imaginative fiction begins by posing a question: “What if?” He offers the example of someone imagining a green sun: “To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.”*

How would the world be different given the changed variable(s)? The “what if” question puts the speculative into speculative fiction. What if ghosts are real? What if werewolves existed? What if a ghost, a werewolf, and a vampire shared a flat? What if corpses began rising from the dead? What if an alien lord traveled through time and space in a British police call box?

Groundhog Day’s premise is that the protagonist wakes one morning to discover the day he just lived is repeating itself. What if a person were caught in a time loop so that he kept living the same day over and over, never aging yet retaining all his memories?

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Self-published Books: Review of Noggle Stones: The Goblin’s Apprentice by Wil Radcliffe

Self-published Books: Review of Noggle Stones: The Goblin’s Apprentice by Wil Radcliffe

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noggle stones-smallWhen I first started this series of reviews on self-published books, I had two criteria for reviewing a book.

First, it had to be a self-published fantasy novel. Second, based on the blurb and the excerpt, it had to be a book that I wanted to read. At the time, I didn’t realize that the first criterion would be the more difficult one to figure out.

I discuss some of the difficulties in deciding whether to review a book on my personal blog, but the bottom line is that I almost didn’t review Noggle Stones: The Goblin’s Apprentice. It was originally published by a small press, and only later self-published by the author. I might have still decided that it didn’t quite qualify, since it wasn’t originally self-published, but it certainly met my second criterion: . I really wanted to read this book.

If there’s one word to describe The Goblin’s Apprentice, it’s charming. From the author’s own illustrations, to the poetry, to the language. At times, it’s a bit too charming, but in the end I forgave it. The book seems to be aimed at the Middle Grade level, and it has the same sense of whimsy found in the best books of that type.

The Goblin’s Apprentice is the first book of the series Noggle Stones. The central character is Martin Manchester, an aspiring stage magician in 1899 America. His career plans are interrupted by the fact that our world has merged with a fantasy world populated by elves, dwarves, ogres, and yes, goblins. Martin soon finds himself a student of the goblin Bugbear, a scholar of Non-Logical Thought, which forms the basis of the magic system in the novel. Accompanying them is Bugbear’s scoundrel of a cousin, Tudmire. Their wandering takes them to the kingdom of Willow Prairie, which is really a small town that’s been awaiting the arrival of a king for centuries. After rescuing the dragon bride Maga from a show trial, the heroes quickly get caught up in the war against the Shadow Smith and his army of patchworks.

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Poetry in Action: The Return of the Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Poetry in Action: The Return of the Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Return of the Mucker FrazettaThis upfront: The Return of the Mucker is less effective a novel than last week’s topic, The Mucker. The strange genre-mashings of the first book give way to the more familiar settings of the American southwest and northern Mexico. The Return of the Mucker plays as an outright Western for most of its length, and offers nothing as lunatic as samurai cannibals. As a story, it doesn’t hold together as well as The Mucker, getting weighed down with too much plot “business” while the first book stripped away extraneous aspects the farther the story advanced until it came down to only the hero and heroine, Billy Byrne and Barbara Harding.

Yet The Return of the Mucker is still a strong work that glosses over its shaky plot elements with a breakneck action finale, fitting developments of Billy Byrne’s personality that merge together his extremes, and one of Burroughs’s most intriguing characters: a hobo-poet hero named Bridge.

Burroughs’s working title for The Mucker’s sequel was Out There Somewhere, the name of a poem that inspired the character of Bridge. (More about that later.) Burroughs submitted the novel to All Story in March 1916, soon after completing it. Editor Thomas Newell Metcalf purchased the story immediately, and the first of five installments appeared two months later under its more marketable title. The Return of the Mucker was published in hardcover in 1921 from A. C. McClurg as Part II of a volume simply called The Mucker.

When the story begins, Billy Byrne is no longer “the mucker.” ERB makes that clear as a cloudless blue sky in the second paragraph: “Billy Byrne was no longer the mucker.” Barbara Harding cured Byrne of his criminal life and coarse ways: everything that defines the now outdated slang term “mucker.” But Billy Byrne surrendered his love for Barbara so she could marry William Mallory at the conclusion of the first book, and he’s now a man without direction — or a complete personality. If he isn’t the mucker, and he’s not with the woman who changed him, what is he? …

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Red Sonja 8

Red Sonja 8

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Red Sonja 8 coverWhen we last left Red Sonja, she was about to be hung for killing some guy twenty issues ago. Last month, Oryx, a mammoth-riding bully, decided to turn her in to the victim’s family for a reward. Apparently, he opted for the dead option in dead or alive.

This issues begins with Sonja managing a few more insults and even a good kick before she’s cut free of the noose by Suumaro, Oryx’s brother and local outcast.

His motive? Why, he wants to make Red Sonja his wife, of course. Poor Suumaro.

So after a rooftop fight with a couple of thugs, Sonja and Suumaro (oh, both their names start with S – they could use the same monogrammed towels) are out of the fort and into the surrounding hills, where they find his military camp. It seems that Summaro wasn’t the only one cast out of the fort. He apparently sneaks back in every now and again to gather intelligence against the day when his army takes it back. And after watching Red Sonja fight, he invites her to join his army.

Thing is, Red Sonja’s been around the block a few times. She knows how this thing goes. And she’s met her share of guys claiming to be impressed by her prowess in battle, when in fact they’re just trying to get her out of her chain mail. She asks Suumaro point-blank if he’s got a wife and his answer is, “I’ve got several … but that is of little consequence to me at this moment.”

Red flag. Two red flags, actually. Red flag one? He’s got multiple wives. Sonja’s just escaped the noose for murdering one polygamist and this could be a terrible trend. Red flag two? His wives are of little consequence to him.

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A Slew of Old D&D (and AD&D) Books Now Available Digitally

A Slew of Old D&D (and AD&D) Books Now Available Digitally

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Fiends Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition
Fiend Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition

Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast officially released the first wave of backlist products available in digital format. These books are available in PDF format through DriveThruRPG, and you can access all of the Wizards of the Coast titles there … or through their new website, DnDClassics.com.

The move to make their classic backlist titles available was originally announced back at their GenCon keynote (which I liveblogged back in August). The ultimate plan is to have every Dungeons & Dragons resource ever published available, but that’ll obviously take a while.

They appear to have started with collection of about 86 products, ranging from some core rulebooks, adventure modules, setting manuals, and so on. Even in just this first wave of products, we’ve got access to some truly classic material, such as the Basic Set Rulebook and the original Fiend Folio for Advanced D&D.

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