Black Gate – Page 1129 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Vintage Treasures: The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi

Friday, December 28, 2012 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

It’s a great time to be a Golden Age comics fan. If you’re interested in high-priced, archival-quality reproductions of 1950s science fiction and horror comics, there are plenty on the market.

This isn’t one of them.

The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi, in fact, is a tiny marvel of affordable comics nostalgia in a sea of overpriced hardcovers. It makes no pretense of offering complete issues, or highly collectible authors and artists, or re-colored anything. But for less than the price of a crummy SF paperback, it offers 112 full-color pages of gonzo Golden Age greatness from an assortment of impossible-to-find comics.

Opening with an 8-page introduction by Tim Pilcher, covering the history of 50s sci-fi comics in surprising detail, The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi contains five complete tales, including Explanation, Please! No. 1 Falling Frogs, and Out of the Unknown No. 1: Creature From the Crater. In between are glorious covers from Outer Space, Forbidden Worlds, Adventures Into the Unknown and others, depicting crashing alien spacecraft, stolen moons, and skyscraper-destroying dinosaurs.

There are even full-color reproductions of the classic advertisements that mesmerized me as a kid, including the “Jet” Rocket Space Ship — over six feet long, with levers that work, for only $2.98! — and the 98-cent Sensational Televiewer.

The Little Book of Vintage Sci-Fi was published on April 1, 2012 by Ilex Gift. It is $5.95 for 112 pages, and is one of a set of Little Books from the same publisher, all edited by Tom Pilcher. The others cover Vintage Horror, Sauciness, Crime , Combat, Terror, Romance, and Space. Collect them all!

Blogging Marvel’s Dracula Lives – Part Two

Friday, December 28, 2012 William Patrick Maynard Comments 0 Comment

Dracula Lives was Marvel’s companion black and white companion title to the award-winning Tomb of Dracula monthly comic. As a magazine, Dracula Lives was exempt from the strictures of the Comic Code Authority, allowing for more violence and adult themes than would have been possible in the comic at the time.

Issue #8 gets underway with Doug Moench’s “Last Walk on the Night Side,” a two-part gritty urban police drama with a cop on the verge of retirement who runs afoul of Dracula. The shock ending, where the officer returns home to discover Dracula has taken his revenge on him by attacking his wife is startling. Tony DeZuniga’s artwork is first-rate throughout.

Len Wein’s “The Black Hand of Death” continues the gritty urban feel with a Roaring Twenties tale of gangsters in Rome. Gene Colan’s artwork lends immediate authenticity by providing stylistic continuity with the monthly series.

Chris Claremont’s “Child of the Storm” is a lengthy text piece. I had forgotten how these were such a fixture of the magazine. Dracula works surprisingly well as a pulp character and these stories prove that the thread between pulps and comics runs deeper than superheroes.

The fourth chapter of Roy Thomas and Dick Giordano’s faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic rounds out the issue. This chapter has the infamous portrayal of Dracula as a baby snatcher who feeds the stolen infant to his blood-starved wives with the promise they can have Harker once he is finished with him. Jonathan makes a valiant, but unsuccessful, effort to slay Dracula while he sleeps in his coffin during the day. The chapter ends with Harker despairing that he has failed to prevent the plague of the vampire from spreading to England. He knows he will never see his beloved Mina again as he awaits the fall of night, not knowing if this is the night he will meet his death at the hands of Dracula’s brides.

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Goth Chick News: 39 Years Ago This Week Regan Blew Chunks

Thursday, December 27, 2012 Sue Granquist Comments 4 comments

This week in 1973 a fourteen-year-old girl hurls obscenities, vomits and behaves like Satan himself.

Today this would be just another episode of an MTV reality show, but 39 years ago it was a move called The Exorcist which changed the horror genre forever.

The Exorcist was released theatrically in the United States on December 26, 1973 by Warner Bros. On April 2, 1974 the film had earned ten Academy Award nominations, winning two (Best Sound and Best Adapted Screenplay). In the years since it has been voted the Scariest Move of All Time by Entertainment Weekly, Maxim and the UK’s The Times newspaper and according to BoxOfficeMojo, has taken in around $232,906,145 at the US Box Office and $208,400,000 in foreign markets for a combined worldwide total of $441,306,145; huge numbers for a movie with a production budget of $10.5 million.

In short, the movie wasn’t just a hit – it was a global phenomenon. If adjusted for inflation, The Exorcist would be the top grossing R-rated film of all time.

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Genre 2012: The Trouble With (no, not Tribbles) Pace

Thursday, December 27, 2012 markrigney Comments 1 comment

tangent5summer1976

One should never read one’s own notices, as many a British actor, most of them knighted, have said. Does it then follow that a writer should never read reviews of his or her work? Or, for that matter, the fine print of incoming rejections?

Tangent Online was kind enough, just recently, to give my Black Gate story “The Trade” a really glowing review, but while that review made me very happy, it also gave me pause. It forced me to reflect both on my own writing and on writing in general. Why? Because of one line, short and sweet: “The pace is fast.”

And so it is, I suppose. But consider the email I got ten days after “The Trade” debuted, a note penned by David M. Armstrong, fiction editor for Witness, a literary magazine into which I’ve been trying to jam my work for about a decade. At last, a Witness acceptance, and for their upcoming spring 2013 issue! Can you guess what Mr. Armstrong said he appreciated in my story? The pace. “This,” he wrote, “was a layered and often impressively restrained narrative.”

Let’s translate, shall we, to the realm of fantasy adventure fiction. What Mr. Armstrong just said is that my Witness story, “The Last Horse in Skopje,” exhibits a pace so glacial and plodding that it would put a charging sabre-tooth to sleep at thirty paces.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Beginner’s Mind in Hobbiton

Thursday, December 27, 2012 Sarah Avery Comments 8 comments

The students in Intro to Poetry read scared. They started the semester twitchy as rabbits. Poetry made them feel stupid. No, let’s be more specific: being asked to explain poetry made them anticipate humiliation. Their baggage from their high school English classes led them to expect, reasonably or not, that they had to be experts already, that they would be chastised in front of one another and punished with bad grades for not already knowing as much as their teachers did. They felt like newly licensed drivers trying to merge onto a freeway from a stop sign.

Before they could get anywhere with poetry, they had to embrace being beginners. Not to accept that they were beginners–some of them weren’t–but deliberately to become beginners. I didn’t want them to perform their expertise in my classroom. I wanted them to read with curiosity. I wanted them to encounter each poem we read together with questions like What is this? What does it do? How am I experiencing it? I urged the students to wait until they had read with beginner’s eyes, at least once through, before asking questions like What is my judgment upon this?

Reading with some approximation of the Buddhist concept of beginner’s mind is something I’ve been fairly good at since I first began teaching–it’s almost impossible to comment usefully on student writing without it–but the Intro to Poetry course forced me to model this kind of reading so assiduously that I have found it difficult ever since to read creative work, or even watch movies, in the mode of a judge in the sentencing phase of a criminal trial.

I watched Peter Jackson’s first installment of The Hobbit in an intermittent state of beginner’s mind, and my experience of it was so different from that of the film critics whose reviews I have seen since, one might think I’d seen a different film.

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Locus Online on the Best Fantasy Novels of the 20th and 21st Centuries

Wednesday, December 26, 2012 John ONeill Comments 15 comments

‘Tis the season for Top Ten lists. David E. Harris kicked it off here this morning with his Arbitrary Top 10: Fantasy Films (which missed Watership Down and It’s a Wonderful Life, but at least had the good sense to include Jumanji), but similar lists have been popping up all over the blogosphere.

Locus Online conducted a poll to determine the best novels and short fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries last month, with five categories: science fiction novel, fantasy novel, novella, novelette, and short story. Since all votes were write-ins counting has taken a while, but on Friday Mark Kelly announced the results for the novel categories. The complete poll includes the Top 50 winners; here are the Top 10 Best Fantasy Novels of the 20th and 21st Centuries:

20th Century Fantasy Novel

Tolkien, J. R. R. : The Lord of the Rings (1955)
Martin, George R. R. : A Game of Thrones (1996)
Tolkien, J. R. R. : The Hobbit (1937)
Le Guin, Ursula K. : A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
Zelazny, Roger : Nine Princes in Amber (1970)
Lewis, C. S. : The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
Mieville, China : Perdido Street Station (2000)
Rowling, J. K. : Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
Crowley, John : Little, Big (1981)
Adams, Richard : Watership Down (1972)

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Merry Christmas from Black Gate

Tuesday, December 25, 2012 John ONeill Comments 5 comments

The lights are dim at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters, and there’s a light dusting of snow on all the desks. I dropped by to pick up the leftover egg nog from the Christmas party and discovered a rare thing: a deserted office. Even Goth Chick’s minions seem to have slipped their chains.

The only noise I hear comes from deep in the comic archives, where the tireless Mike Penkas is scribbling a Christmas Red Sonja post, muttering “For the love of God, there’s a giant spider right on the cover.” Not sure what that’s about, but I tiptoe away before I break his concentration.

It’s nice to see the place when it’s not bustling with activity. Everywhere I look there’s evidence of this year’s accomplishments. There’s the stack of scrolls Howard Andrew Jones used while researching The Bones of the Old Ones (Seriously, where did he find actual scrolls? That’s just showing off). There’s the whiteboard where Scott Taylor sketched out his Art of the Genre ideas, before accepting a big job and vanishing out to the west coast. Sarah Avery sits in that corner now, writing constantly and giving Skype interviews for Broad Universe. And there’s the scratching post Ryan Harvey built for his cat Cassie, in a vain attempt to get her to stop playing with the office Christmas ornaments.

And here’s the table where all the freelancers sit. They always seem to be having a lot more fun than the rest of us. They’re certainly louder, anyway. Here’s Emily Mah’s recording equipment, and Josh Reynolds’ occult detective collection. Beth Dawkins has only been here a few months, but she fit in quickly, clearing away a section of William Patrick Maynard’s vast pulp collection to make room for her paranormal romance paperbacks. Mark Rigney has made excellent use of John Fultz’s battered old writing desk, composing his own sword-and-sorcery epics, and David Soyka has vanished inside a fortress built of thousands of science fiction digests. Andrew Zimmerman Jones’ desk is clean, probably because he’s never there — he’s always on assignment at a convention these days.

The only staff member who doesn’t have a desk is the mysterious Matthew David Surridge — which I suppose is fitting. He’s been part of the team for years, but no one is 100% sure what he looks like. He’s a riot at office parties, though.

It’s been an incredible year for Black Gate. The traffic to our humble website has very nearly doubled in the last 12 months, and interest has never been higher. While we’re very proud of what we’ve done, there’s no doubt in our mind that we owe it all to you, our loyal readers. You’ve never been more supportive than you have in 2012 — with your comments, letters, and your continued interest in our endeavors large and small.

Thank you, from the bottom of our hearts. On behalf of the vast and unruly collective that is Black Gate, I would like to wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Continue being excellent — it’s what you’re good at.

Red Sonja 3

Tuesday, December 25, 2012 MichaelPenkas Comments 4 comments

You know how sometimes you’re watching the trailer to a movie and it looks really good and you suddenly realize that you’ve figured out the surprise ending of the movie just by watching the trailer? I don’t mean that you make an educated guess based on the clues in the trailer and it happens to be correct. I mean that someone actually cut a crucial scene at the end of the film into the trailer so that you’re watching the eight year-old boy change into the child-snatching goblin. And maybe you go see the movie anyway because it still could be good; but you’ve lost a little something going in, that sense of surprise, because the filmmakers spoiled their own film.

Anyway, Sortilej is a giant spider in human form. Surprise. Thanks, cover.

So, “The Games of Gita” starts with a fat, opulently-dressed Athosian being pulled in a rickshaw by a lean, rag-wearing Zotozian, whipping him on. Red Sonja stops the pair to demand that the Athosian lets his rickshaw-puller (What’s the word for that?) have a drink of water before he collapses. Because that’s compassion in the Hyborian Age: offering a glass of water to a slave being whipped to death.

So the fat guy shrugs off her concern by saying that he can easily replace the man if he dies of thirst or a severe beating. Then he asks Sonja if she’d like to accompany him to a banquet as his date. She says no. Technically, she says, “The fires of seven hells wouldn’t tempt me to sup with the likes of you.” (Someone please use this line the next time a jerk invites you to dinner.) And then she kicks his ass. Literally, the last panel of page three is her boot connecting with his ass.

The fat guy runs off and Red Sonja is then approached by a stranger named Mikal. He offers to escort her to the wealthy city of Athos. Mikal is very mysterious. Mikal wears a hood. Mikal has a goatee. Mikal is probably the devil. This bothers me just a little because his name is a Tolkienized version of mine.

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Ursula Vernon’s Digger

Monday, December 24, 2012 Matthew David Surridge Comments 0 Comment

Digger The Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story was first given out in 2009. The category was a nice idea, especially given the increased prominence of comics in the media landscape, but I have to admit that up to this year, I’ve been underwhelmed by the choice of winners. Or, more precisely, winner, singular: Phil and Kaja Foglio’s webcomic Girl Genius took the award three times straight. I don’t dislike the comic, but from what I’ve read, I’d be hard-pressed to identify anything in it that makes it worth a major award ahead of any number of series — Hellboy or Mouse Guard or Wednesday Comics or RASL or All-Star Superman or you name it. After their third win, though, the Foglios announced they would decline to accept a nomination for the next year, in the interest of helping to establish the validity of the award. So the 2012 Hugo went to another title: Digger, a webcomic by Ursula Vernon. I find it’s much more interesting.

Digger is a 759-page fantasy story (free online, or available in six printed volumes) about a talking tough-as-nails wombat named Digger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels, who gets lost and finds herself in a strange land filled with gods, humanoid hyenas, magic, oracular snails, and mysteries. Digger wants to get home, but it looks like some unknown force has manipulated events to bring her to the temple of Ganesh where she surfaces. Who and why? That’s the central mystery that unfolds through the tale. Digger makes friends, makes enemies, and takes several harrowing journeys before all is settled.

It’s a comedy, and an effective one, but with a number of serious themes running through it. Vernon seems to have something to say, and the talent to say it well. Her storytelling’s strong, and she handles mythology deftly — both the mythology of various cultures of our world and the mythology of the story she’s creating.

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Buy The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones for Just $1

Monday, December 24, 2012 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

the-desert-of-souls ‘Tis the season for great book deals.

Hot on the heels of the one-day $1.99 sale for the digital version of A Prince of Thorns, and the giveaway of Theo’s A Magic Broken (still available if you act fast) comes word that Head of Zeus, the British publisher of Howard Andrew Jones’ The Desert of Souls — the first installment of The Chronicles of Sand and Sword — is making the digital version of the novel available for just $1.

The special pricing is available only until January 7th. On his website Howard also writes:

Head of Zeus has cooked up a pretty nifty series introduction for The Chronicles of Sand and Sword. I like it so much I wish I’d thought of it:

The Chronicles of Sand and Sword: Baghdad, AD 790. Caliph Harun al-Rashid presides over the greatest metropolis on Earth, ruler of an empire that stretches from China to Byzantium. His exploits will be recorded in Alf Layla or, as we know it, The Book of One Thousand and One Nights.

But The Thousand and One Nights are silent on the deeds and adventures that befell two of the Caliph’s subjects: the renowned scholar Dabir ibn Kahlil, and his shield and right hand, Asim el Abbas. For their story, we must turn to The Chronicle of Sand and Sword…

For complete details and links to sites with the discounted pricing (including Amazon.co.uk and Waterstone’s) visit the Head of Zeus website here.