Sometimes We Are in the Presence of Awesome and There Simply Are No Words
Yes, that’s a Star Trek Enterprise pizza cutter.
Available for $24.99 at Think Geek.
The brief advertising video must be seen to be believed.
Blogging Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON, Part Three: “Tournaments of Mongo”
“Tournaments of Mongo” was the third installment of Alex Raymond’s FLASH GORDON Sunday comic strip serial for King Features Syndicate. Originally printed between November 25, 1934 and February 24, 1935, “Tournaments of Mongo” picked up the storyline where the second installment, “Monsters of Mongo” left off with Dr. Zarkov being knighted by Vultan for saving the Hawkmen’s sky city from crashing to the ground.
Before Vultan can host Flash and Dale’s royal wedding, Emperor Ming and his daughter, Princess Aura arrive with Ming’s air fleet demanding Flash be handed over. Of course, Aura wants Flash for herself while her father wants to see him dead. Vultan invokes the ancient rite of tournament to determine Flash’s fate and Ming heartily agrees, certain it will mean the Earthman’s doom.
The obvious change beginning with this strip is that Alex Raymond’s artwork is being granted more space than before as Raymond decreases the strip from nine equally-sized panels to a more inventively designed seven panels to better showcase his stunning artwork which was steadily growing in both complexity and sophistication.
Raymond began to move away from word balloons in each panel to more formal narrative in small print at the top or bottom of the panel, often relegated to a single corner. This allowed Raymond to concentrate on majestic paintings depicting Mongo’s people and wildlife in all their glory.
Goth Chick News – Shadowland Part Deux: Thirteen Questions for Actor Jason Contini
In case you hadn’t noticed, and I’m pretty sure you did, the Black Gate webmaster got a little worked up by my last post. Though I was telling you about my latest indy-horror obsession, Shadowland, one might have gathered from the choices of accompanying pictures, that I was instead bringing you a story about lead actress Caitlin McIntosh and her former life as a beauty queen. Somewhere, wedged between those images was my interview with Wyatt Weed, Shadowland’s writer and director; but good luck finding it.
This is what happens when there are too many boys on the staff and they are left unattended for too long.
So this week I’m personally bringing you the second installment of my Shadowland coverage; an interview with lead actor Jason Contini and co-creator of the new comic series Legacies End.
I can assure you there will be no further shenanigans involving staff members who forget their professionalism and get carried away by lust.
Now where was I…?
Supernatural Spotlight – Season Four and Five Recap
Yesterday, I described the second and third seasons of Supernatural which all built up toward Dean Winchester’s death, as part of a demonic deal to save his brother.
Dean was sucked into Hell, leaving his brother Sam on Earth with the demon Ruby, who has taken on something of a friend and mentorship role with him.
More spoilers to follow …
Season Four
Season four of Supernatural began, a year after his death, with Dean crawling his way out of the grave with no real idea how he got back. But he doesn’t appear to be a demon or any other kind of beastie … so what’s going on?
Harold Lamb’s Swords From the West and Swords From the Desert
Swords From the West
Harold Lamb
Howard Andrew Jones, ed.
Bison Books (602 pp, $26.95, 2009)
Swords From the Desert
Harold Lamb
Howard Andrew Jones, ed.
Bison Books (306 pp, $21.95, 2009)
Reviewed by Bill Ward
Harold Lamb (1892-1962) is an author in danger of being forgotten. This should not be the case, for a number of reasons. Firstly, Lamb is good — from his historical biographies that read like action-adventure novels, to his actual action-adventure stories that cemented his status as a king of the pulps, Lamb is a terrific writer. He is also a diverse writer, having achieved success in both fiction and non-fiction, magazines and books, and even as a Hollywood screenwriter.
And, not to be overlooked, he is a historically significant writer in the evolution of fiction — serving as a bridge from the pulp era to the post-war era, and as a grandfather figure to the kind of adventure fantasy pioneered by Robert E. Howard and then expanded upon by the greats of the field such as Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner, Leigh Brackett, Steven Brust, and Charles Saunders. The idiom in which today’s current crop of rising Sword & Sorcery stars work within can be traced right back to the nineteen teens and twenties, and the historical adventures of Harold Lamb that did so much to inform the approach of the future creator of Conan.
Art Evolution 2: Eric Vedder
Last week I kicked off the Art Evolution blog series, explaining my plan to collect ten of the greatest fantasy role-playing artists for a shared project to illustrate a single character in their best known style. For my first installment I chose Earthdawn and Shadowrun artist Jeff Laubenstein.
With Jeff Laubenstein and a ‘Shadowrun Lyssa‘ in the fold, I took stock of my list and imagined how I would gain other universally recognizable names. I determined that each name carried a ‘weight’, a kind of industry standard validity recognizable to other artists.
Remember, I was working this alone, without a single writing credit to my name, so I had to find legitimacy where I could. Understanding that, and without a previously established friendship with the lion’s share of these artists, I needed a greater combined ‘weight’ of already contracted artists to approach the next heavier weighted contributor on my list.
At this point I only had a single artist signed so I went back into the few art connections I’d made during my time trying to market my other writings. Like most struggling writers in their publishing infancy, I believed there might be a shortcut or magic bullet to getting published. J.K. Rowling couldn’t buy bread before Harry Potter, but she went out and purchased a lovely red transparent folder to place her Potter manuscript in before she sent it to a perspective publisher.
Supernatural Spotlight – Season Two and Three Recap
When last we left Sam and Dean Winchester, they’d rejoined their father, John, and confronted the demon that killed their mother (a demon with glowing yellow eyes, named Azazel), but the demon got away. Season one ended with their car being slammed into by a semi being driven by a demon.
Now, allow me to spoil a couple more seasons of the show, before the season 6 premiere on Friday.
Season Two
Season two starts immediately after the accident, with the demon trying getting out of the semi to kill them. Sam, however, is conscious, and he’s able to chase the demon off with the Colt. (Remember, the Colt is a special gun they located which can kill any demon.)
A Review of The House of Dead Maids
Last week I was contacted by Barbara Fisch at Blue Slip Media, who’s been recommending and sending review copies to me for nearly fifteen years. Barbara had flagged The House of Dead Maids by Clare B. Dunkle (author of the Hollow Kingdom trilogy), just released in hardcover from Holt, as of possible interest to Black Gate readers. And from her description, it sounded like she could be right:
The House of Dead Maids is billed as a prelude to Wuthering Heights, as it features a character who will come to be known as Healthcliff. The novel is a scary blending of Yorkshire lore and Bronte family history. The child (Heathcliff) is already a savage little creature when Tabby Aykroyd arrives at Seldom House as his nursemaid. The ghost of the last maid will not leave Tabby in peace, and her spirit is only one of many. As she struggles against the evil forces that surround the house, Tabby tries to befriend her uncouth young charge, but her kindness can’t alter his fate.
The real task, as always, was matching the ideal reviewer with the book… a bit more of a challenge for a 151-page book with an eleven year-old narrator, I grant you.
As luck would have it, I happened to have an eleven-year old reader in the house, who innocently picked up the book the day it arrived. I know when the stars have aligned, and sat down with a notepad and pen to interview her minutes after she finished reading The House of Dead Maids.
We’ll call this young reader “Tabitha,” because of what happened when her mother found out I was going to use her picture and real name on the Internet.
Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan and the Amazon
Conan and the Amazon
John Maddox Roberts (Tor, 1995)
You may have noticed that in my series of reviews of Conan pastiche novels, I have yet to review an entry from Roland Green.
That is correct. I have not. Noted. Moving on. . . .
Of the authors of the long-running Tor series of novels, which started with Robert Jordan’s Conan the Invincible in 1982 and concluded with Roland Green’s Conan and the Death Lord of Thanza in 1997, with Harry Turtledove’s Conan of Venarium as something of a “coda” in 2004, John Maddox Roberts is the most consistently entertaining. (I love the novels from John C. Hocking and Karl Edward Wagner, but as each man unfortunately wrote only a single book, the sample is much smaller.) Roberts was the first new author to take over when Robert Jordan retired from the series after seven books published over only three years. In the eight novels that Roberts wrote, he shows deft ability with storytelling and action scenes, and a thankful tendency not to overplay his hand and try to ape Robert E. Howard’s style. His first Conan novel, Conan the Valorous, is one of the best of the Tor series, and shows a superior handling of the barbarian’s homeland of Cimmeria than Turtledove would achieve in Conan of Venarium.
However, Roberts had his down moments, and alas he stumbled at the finish line.
Conan and the Amazon is the last of Roberts’s Conan novels. It’s also his poorest, although a plot description, the salacious promise of the title, and a great cover with a super-croc would indicate it has sword-and-sorcery joys aplenty inside.
Werewolves and Ghost-powered Zeppelins: Sample Chapters from The Wolf Age Now Available
James Enge tells us (rather gleefully) that “A slab of The Wolf Age is up at the Pyr samples site. Werewolves. Ghost-powered zeppelins. The usual stuff.”
The Wolf Age is the third novel of Morlock the Maker. Morlock, the soft-spoken hunchback and recovering alcoholic who may also be the finest artificer the world has ever seen — not to mention a formidable swordsman — featured in Enge’s first published story, “Turn Up This Crooked Way,” in Black Gate 8, and has appeared six times (so far) in our pages, most recently in Black Gate 14.
Tired of dominating Black Gate‘s pages with an iron fist, Enge turned to more ambitious goals, producing the first two Morlock novels Blood of Ambrose (2009) and This Crooked Way (also 2009 — it makes other writers look bad, doesn’t it?), both published by Pyr.
Blood of Ambrose was recently nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the obvious next step in Enge’s ruthless plan for domination of Western civilization.
You can read the first two chapters of The Wolf Age at the Pyr website, and see for yourself how Enge’s evil scheme is taking shape. It’s not to late to stop him.
Werewolves. Ghost-powered zeppelins. On second thought, it probably is too late. Join the Black Gate staff in line to sign up as Enge’s evil henchmen, and get your black leather tunics and infrared goggles before they’re all gone.