I Ain’t No Hero, See?

I Ain’t No Hero, See?

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Have Space Suit -- Will TravelI’ve got a friend I’ve known since we were nine years old who often says that we weren’t really brought up by our parents (neither his nor mine), but by the books we read. I’m not sure if we were lucky or unlucky, but those books were full of, well, heroes. The first book I ever read, by the way, was Treasure Island – I think having seen the movie helped me with the hard parts.

Aside: my parents didn’t come from cultures in which picture books were the norm, so we weren’t allowed to read them, nor comic books. Some illustration could be tolerated, but books with pictures on every page were for illiterate people.

Then my brother recommended The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. That was the first fantasy book I ever read. Almost immediately after that I read Have Space Suit-Will Travel, my first SF book.

Not very long after these came Lord of the Rings – and every other Fantasy and SF book I could put my hands on. These were the books that raised me.

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Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Three

Blogging Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon, Part Three

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2526022-fla42528342-fla5“The Awful Forest” was artist Dan Barry and writer Harvey Kurtzman’s follow-up to “Tartarus” and was published by King Features Syndicate from October 20 to December 30, 1952. The story shows a marked step forward in quality in Barry’s artwork. At times, he equals Alex Raymond, barring his love of EC-style comic grotesqueries which likely reflect Kurtzman’s involvement in the creative process.

Flash, Marla, Kent, and Ray arrive on horseback at the edge of the Awful Forest along with a party of satyr porters from Tartarus. The rain is pouring down steadily and the setting is clearly meant to call to mind Germany’s Black Forest.

No sooner do they arrive in the Awful Forest, then they encounter the figure of a gibbering madman who pleads with them to turn back, before rushing off into the woods in abject terror. Their porters recognize this strange figure as the Black Duke, Lucifan’s cousin who abducted Dale from the deposed king’s court. What should be an effective sequence of mounting suspense is let down by the depiction of the mad Duke as a comic loony who would have been at home in an early issue of Mad.

The Black Duke’s pitiable condition is enough to cause their porters to desert them during the night. Flash sets off on a fruitless quest to retrieve them and leaves Kent to care for Marla and Ray. The trio is beset by night terrors in which the strange noises of the forest give way to nightmarish visitations from a crowd of goblins and gremlins.

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Goth Chick News: Jack Is No Longer ‘All Work and No Play,’ or Toy Story Gets Redrum’d

Goth Chick News: Jack Is No Longer ‘All Work and No Play,’ or Toy Story Gets Redrum’d

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image002Characters or situations out of context always have an unsettling value to them as far as I’m concerned.  There is something highly disquieting when the supremely “normal” is turned upside down and becomes something icky.

Like Peter Straub turning a Normal Rockwell, Christmas-in-a-small-town setting and adding a horrifying entity to it in Ghost Story, an inebriated party girl going for a moonlight swim in Jaws, or the upended nursery rhyme in A Nightmare on Elm Street – safe, predictable things turning terrible is an old trick that skeevs me out every time.

So imagine the multiplied creep-factor if this happened to something as safe and innocent as Toy Story.

And what if Jack Torrence’s downward spiral at the Overlook Hotel was reenacted for us by Woody and all the toys had “the Shine” on them?

It doesn’t get more disturbing than that — and yet this is exactly what artist Kyle Lambert has dreamed up for our uneasy pleasure.

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New Treasures: The New Yorker Fiction Issue, June 10 & 17, 2013

New Treasures: The New Yorker Fiction Issue, June 10 & 17, 2013

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The New Yorker Fiction issue June 2013A while back I bought a subscription to The New Yorker. I had one in grad school and quite enjoyed it, during those rare moments when I had time to read it.

Which pretty much describes the current situation. Every time an issue arrives, I examine it with great interest and then set it aside to read later. Currently, there’s more than a dozen piled up by my big green chair in the library.

But I finally made the time to open one this week, and the occasion was the arrival of their summer Fiction issue. It’s a big double issue, thicker than most and with two dates on the cover (June 10 and 17, 2013).

It’s not just that there’s a lot of content, but the cover — the silhouette of a femme fatale clutching a mauser against a 1930s New York skyline — promised something I almost never see in The New Yorker: genre fiction. Like last year’s science fiction issue, it’s the kind of surprise that deserves to be investigated.

There are even bigger surprises in the Table of Contents, starting with “An Inch and a Half of Glory,” a new story by Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and the Continental Op novels.

Before you dash over to check Wikipedia (as I just did) — yes, Dashiell Hammett is still dead. He died in 1961.

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Art of the Genre: Kickstarter, it Really Shouldn’t be About the ‘Stuff We All Get’

Art of the Genre: Kickstarter, it Really Shouldn’t be About the ‘Stuff We All Get’

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kickstarter-logo-www-mentorless-com_Before I get into this, I want to throw out a disclaimer.  I don’t know anyone’s true costs or bottom line, only what I can hypothesize from my own experiences in running Kickstarters and cost research in the areas in question.  Certainly, costs can be mitigated to some degree by large volume orders, current pre-existing stock of product,’creative’ accounting, etc.

Good, now with that out of the way, I can certainly be accused of having Kickstarter on the brain, but I’m sure I’m not the only one out there with this problem.  As this platform continues to grow in the consciousness of our ‘incredible shrinking world’ society, and its power doesn’t seem to be dwindling, I’m going to give readers more advice that I’ve gleaned from my five successful, and one ongoing, Kickstarter campaigns.

First and foremost, I want to reiterate what Kickstarter truly is: a platform by which creative people can gain funding to create projects that otherwise would not be possible. The key word there is ‘funding’ and in the current landscape of the Kickstarter universe, that is becoming a very murky proposition.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: All Hail the Library of Congress

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: All Hail the Library of Congress

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Until the end of the summer, this will probably be my last post at Black Gate. I’m moving, and that’s a good thing. Strenuous but good. My teaching schedule is almost entirely emptied out now, and the loose ends my students and I are tying up are all about foundational stuff, grammar and vocabulary. Tomorrow the house I’ve lived in for thirteen years starts emptying out, too.

Should it have been enough to stuff all my books into boxes, number the boxes, and write the tally down on my list of household goods? For a sensible person, a non-writing person, it probably would have been. Instead, I catalogued almost all my books on LibraryThing before packing them, because the thought of losing the research materials I need for my fiction filled me with existential terror. If my books on cavalry warfare, tapestry weaving, and small sailing craft disappear in the big move and can’t be replaced, who can I possibly be when I arrive in a new house? Unless I’m writing my stories, about my characters in my own nonexistent city, requiring this particular background from the world I actually live in, I’ll be fundamentally de-personned, right? Apparently the solution to existential terror is a bar code scanner for ISBNs.

Why yes, obsessive-compulsive disorder runs in my family. Why do you ask?

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Once Upon a Time in Zang…

Once Upon a Time in Zang…

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zangcover (1)…a fugitive author and a devious cutthroat began a revolt against the nine Sorcerer Kings whose power displaced the gods themselves. Like the revolt, which began in far-flung places, the Zang Cycle of stories would grow slowly and cover a lot of ground.

Now at last the entire story cycle is complete with the publication of The Revelations of Zang on Amazon Kindle. 

It all started with “The Persecution of Artifice the Quill,” in the pages of Weird Tales #340 (2006). The cover of that issue featured a horde of the faceless warlocks known as Vizarchs, who drag Artifice the Quill away in the story’s opening scene, a scene painted by the talented Les Edwards.

WT340
The Vizarchs are coming!

The story was a turning point for me: The fulfillment of a long-standing dream (getting published in Weird Tales) and the introduction of two characters I would return to many times: Artifice the Quill and Taizo the Thief.

I wrote eleven more Zang Tales and moved the series to the welcoming pages of Black Gate, where it flourished for many issues.

The first story to grab BG founder John O’Neill’s attention was “Oblivion Is the Sweetest Wine” — a tale of Taizo and his infamous heist in spider-haunted Ghoth. It ran in BG #12 (2008). I wrote one Zang story after another over a 3- to 4-year period, building toward a single climactic tale.

The cycle’s penultimate story, “Return of the Quill,” wherein Artifice finally returns to Narr and sparks a revolution, was featured in BG #13 (2009). By this time, Artifice has embraced the sorcery that he once loathed and learned to alter reality with his Great Art. He is the leader of the mystical troupe known as The Glimmer Faire.

Meanwhile, Taizo has taken his own dark journey through tragedy, sorcery, and suffering toward vengeance. These two main characters only meet twice during the cycle: Once in the first story, and once again in the last.

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Vintage Treasures: The Radio Planet by Ralph Milne Farley

Vintage Treasures: The Radio Planet by Ralph Milne Farley

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The Radio Planet AceAnd so we come to the third volume of Ralph Milne Farley’s Radio Men series, The Radio Planet.

Like the first two, The Radio Man (aka An Earth Man on Venus, which I discussed here) and The Radio Beasts (here), The Radio Planet was originally published in Argosy All-Story Weekly, in six installments starting in June 26, 1926, following the previous novel by some fifteen months.

Farley wrote several more Radio novels, including The Radio Menace, The Radio War, The Radio Pirates, and The Radio Flyers, between 1930 and 1955. Only a few were even loosely connected to the first three; most of them were futuristic pulp adventures set on Earth, and Ace didn’t bother to reprint them.

Yes, that’s right. After three popular Radio Men novels, Ralph Milne Farley continued to merrily put Radio in every one of his titles, even though most had nothing to do with Myles Cabot, Venus, or Mars. Apparently, the man had only a rudimentary concept of brand marketing. And liked radio.

In any event, The Radio Planet was the last novel to feature Myles Cabot. Two other short adventures followed: “The Radio Man Returns,” a short story from Amazing Stories (June 1939), and “The Radio Minds of Mars,” originally published in the January 1955 issue of Spaceway magazine.

Fortunately for young teenage fans in the 1970s, such as yours truly, there were two inexpensive paperback editions of The Radio Planet, which kept it in print for roughly a decade. Both were from Ace Books.

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Our Comics, Ourselves

Our Comics, Ourselves

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OrcaSeveral years ago, I handed my older son my pile of Avengers comics, a sequential trove dating from about 1976 until about 1985.

He read them eagerly, then threw them all over his room. I provided a storage bin and said, “If you want the privilege of reading these, treat them well.”

Message received. The comics, when not in use, lived happily in their bin.

He’s now re-reading them, out of order. He left a couple of them on his bed the other night, and rather than flip out –– “You’re grounded for life, plus I’m confiscating your cell phone! Oh, wait. You don’t have a cell phone. Hmm. Maybe I should confiscate my own cell phone?” –– I elected to simply remind him that my yesteryear treasures need to be treated well.

Then I forgot all about the reminder. I found myself hooked by the back cover of Avengers #164. It was an ad, of course –– what else would grace the back cover of a Marvel Comic? But what an ad, a movie poster extravaganza for (hold me back) Orca (1977).

With Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling, no less.

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First Full-length Trailer Released for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

First Full-length Trailer Released for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

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the-hobbit-the-desolation-of-smaug-posterCurse teaser trailers and their teasing ways! I was teased as a kid, teased all through high school, and now I have to put up with teaser trailers. The universe, it is a cruel place.

Fortunately, teaser trailers are followed by full-length trailers. Eventually. As has now happened with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second installment in the three-part Hobbit epic from New Line Cinema and WingNut films. The story picks up where last year’s billion-dollar blockbuster The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey left off, following Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin and their dwarven companions into the Kingdom of Erebor, the dark heart of Mirkwood and the Necromancer’s lair, Esgaroth, and finally the human town of Dale to confront the dragon Smaug.

The trailer has some nice surprises, including plenty of scenes of Orlando Bloom as Legolas and Lost alum Evangeline Lilly as the elf Tauriel. If you watch closely, you can see the spiders of Mirkwood, the barrel escape down the river, and our first look at the terrifying Smaug himself.

The trilogy will conclude next year with The Hobbit: There and Back Again. All three films are based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit, originally published in 1937.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was directed by Peter Jackson and written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson. It stars Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Elijah Wood, Christopher Lee, and A-lister villain Benedict Cumberbatch as both Smaug and The Necromancer Sauron. Check out the complete trailer below.