Likely touched off by the success of the Lancer (and Ace) Conan paperbacks, the '70s was a Golden Age of Sword & Sorcery paperback fiction. Okay, most weren't that good, admittedly--but there was stuff like Karl Edward Wagner's Kane, Charles Saunders' Imaro, and a number of works by Tanith Lee that were good, just to name a few. Also, even books that weren't all that great were often graced with Frazetta covers.
These gradually disappeared in the 80s. Sword & Sorcery was a genre born in short fiction, and while perhaps workable in slimmer novels, the multi-volume, thick fantasy series was ill-suited to telling tales of wandering swordsmen or rogues. The small press magazines that published this sort of fiction were already rare and soon disappeared entirely.
Amazon and ebooks have provided an avenue for the genre's return in something resembling its 70s glory. A number of small presses (and self-publishers) put out this sort of material with suitable, throwback covers. I confess to not having read many (well, any) of these volumes yet, though I do have a couple on my list. What's more exciting, though, is some new collections of stuff I already like.
Sorcery Against Caesar: The Complete Simon of Gitta Short Stories collects all of Richard Tierney's Sword & Sorcery tales of his version of Simon Magus of New Testament fame. He mostly fights Lovecraftian menaces cloaked in pseudo-historic references. Chaosium had a collection a couple of decades ago, but there's wasn't complete.
Charles Saunders has passed on, but his Imaro novels are back in print, and then there's Nyumbani Tales, a collection of non-Imaro stories in the same setting.
Being in sort of a Old West/Frontier mood of late, I got around the checking out a couple of things that had been on my list for a while, but I just kept never getting to.
The Nightingale (2019) is an Australian revisionist Western from the director of The Babadook. In it's basic plot, it's a tale of revenge, not unlike Hannie Caulder (1971), but the resemblance to traditional revenge Westerns, even revenge Westerns based around women, really ends at the plot synopsis. It's more interested (like many revisionist Westerns) in examining the plight of indigenous peoples, but it takes the particular angle of the allowing its oppressed Irish woman protagonist to develop empathy, through recognizes the points of similarity between her experience and that of her Aboriginal guide. While perhaps not as brutal the last Australian Western I watched, The Proposition (2006), it is tough viewing in places, particularly the assault on the protagonist and her family. Still, it's a good film on its own terms, and it's always interesting to see Western film tropes and themes played out in places besides North America.
The Wind Through the Keyhole is the last book (to date) written by Stephen King set in the Dark Tower universe. It's outside the main story of that series proper, but includes those characters in framing device. While sheltering from fantastical storm, part tornado and part polar vortex, Roland relates a tale of his youthful days as a gunslinger to his friends. Embedded in that story is another story, a Mid-World "fairytale," that his mother had read to him as a boy, "The Wind Through the Keyhole." This story within a story tells the tale of a young boy living on the edge of the Endless Wood who must contend with a malign fairy, a swamp (complete with a dragon), and his own encounter with that same sort of storm, in a trek across a dangerous wilderness to get a cure for his mother's blindness from the wizard, Maerlyn.
King's feel for his fantasy world keeps getting stronger. While there are clear points of intersection with our history, he relies less on characters or incursions from our reality (or realities like ours). The Dark Tower novels that were mostly about Mid-World (Wizard and the Glass, Wolves of Calla) were my favorites of the series, and I think this short novel does what they do even better. I wish King would write a collection of other Mid-World tales.
The authors go season by season, detailing the items of Mid-century design that appear on screen. Costuming is not covered really, presumably because there is already a book on the costume design of Star Trek. in between the season by season rundown, their are short chapters on various topics like architecture, matte paintings, and Brutalism.
The only flaw I find in the book is that it is all too short. A mere 166 pages!
At the base level you get all 4 32 page zines in pdf for $19, which is a pretty good deal given what I've seen in Zinequest as a whole.
This setting is really a labor of love for Paul (some might say an obsession!), and having be privy to much of the design discussion over the years, I can say it is unique, while at the same time being completely accessible due to a lot of familiar tropes.
It's got great 80s invoking design by Paul's brother Chris and awesome art by Steven de Waele, too!
Zinequest 3 is upon us and several of blogging and gaming compatriots have some entries for your enjoyment:
The Many Crypts of Lady Ingrade by Tim Shorts is an old school adventure with art by Jason Sholtis. I did the cover design for this one. Tim's GM Games really cranks out really table-ready, classic-gaming stuff, and I expect this one to be no different.
Through Ultan's Door #3 will reveal more of Ben Laurence's dreamlands-type fantasy setting. It's already busted is initial goal and blazed through it's stretch goals, but there's still time to jump in. The previous issues are both great physical artifacts and chock full of content.
Logos
If you are a fan of comic book (and other media) logo design, you should be periodically checking in on Todd Klein's pages, where he providers commentary on classic logo treatments and his own design process.
I also discovered yesterday that Rian Hughes (designer of all of DC's very modern Tangent line logos among others) has put out a book hos his designs called Logo-a-gogo: Branding Pop Culture.
From Implosion to Crisis
I've also decided in the coming weeks to return to a project I mentioned about a month ago of reading all of DC's output in the years between the DC Implosion and Crisis on Infinite Earths. I believe I've settled on cover date of January 1980 as my start date (this would have been comics on the racks in October of 1979). This is about a year after the end of the implosion, so things have settled in again. It also gives me a year's less comics to read than starting in '78.
Look for this starting next week in this space.
Which can make for some pretty fun game sessions, actually. He greatly enjoyed his Halfling police procedural Southfarthing Confidential back in 2017 (has it really been that long?) at NTrpgcon. I have not played this current adventure of his, but the name says it all really: Thieves' Guild Built in the Subterranean Ruin of [Insert Generic Anthropomorphic Urban Rodent God Your Choice]'s Temple.
This is certainly the sort of thing I could run in my Azurth game, at least in broadstrokes, but I'm no real critic of adventure design. Bryce Lynch and Gus L have opined, so there you go.
Anyway, it's now available in print on demand.
Writer Al (Immortal Hulk) Ewing and artist Simone Di Meo imagine a science fiction future where, in an inversion of Galactus yarns, working stiffs mine (or perhaps "butcher" is more apt) the titanic corpses of cosmic gods for the needs of humanity. Captain Malik and the diverse crew of the Vihaan II have had enough of corporate wage-slavery, though, and devise a daring plan to escape and do what no one has ever done: find a living god.
The first few issue really only use the god corpses as a backdrop. The real focus is on the system that traps the ships crews and keeps them working for the company. It sketches the various members of Malik's crew and their reasons for wanting to risk all they've got to break free.
Ewing has an interesting premise, and Di Meo's art is like some European comics I've seen in the past decade with vibrant colors and character designs that seem somewhat animation inspiration.
The collection of volume one is due out in May.
Lumberlands is a region of Erik's Wampus Country setting, for which we are still, lo these many years later, awaiting some sort of overview setting publication. I had the privilege of playing a number of sessions in Erik's Wampus Country campaign back in the days of Google+, and so I was eager for Lumberlands.
Can it be you've never heard of Wampus Country? Well, allow me to sketch it in brief: It's an old school D&D setting that borrows its visual trappings from the American history, folklore, and fakelore to a large degree. Its fighters might be more Mike Fink or Davy Crockett (subject of the Disney series, not the real-life Congressman), than Aragorn or Conan. Still, it would be a mistake to think of it as merely "Frontier Fantasy." It has that as it's base, certainly, but Wampus Country exploits the fruitful incoherence that is D&D at its core and weaves in all sorts of sources, so that many sorts of character types and potential adventures are possible.
But anyway: Lumberlands! Lumberlands narrows the Wampus vibe geographically to a fantasy take on the Pacific Northwest and Paul Bunyan-y concerns, while in no way being bound to the imaginative parameters of that inspiration. It details the differences between the version of the classes in the setting (i.e. the traditional ones with a lumber- prefix and flannel-centric illustration). It sketches the human habitation of Squeemish, but also the squirrel city of Baudekin and the dimensionally unstable region of Portal-Land.
There are monsters with pun names (clever ones!) and a selection of humorously sketched hench-folk available for hire. And Sasquatches, which are actually arachnoid aliens.
As you may have guessed Lumberlands does not take itself to seriously, so if grim is your only mode of roleplaying well it isn't for you. But the rest of you, I urge you to check it out.
DC Through the 80s: The End of Eras, despite it's to my ear awkward title, seems more like one for the shelf. Many of the good comics reprinted here I already own, but there are others I have never read and there's some interesting supplemental material, including (supposedly) Moore's proposal for Twilight of the Super-Heroes.
What's in here that I would recommend? Well, there's Moore's and Swan's "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" Of course, you've probably already read that one. There's also story I recall fondly from my childhood: A crossover of the Earth-Two and Earth-One Batmen by Mike Barr and David Gibbons from Brave and the Bold #200--the final issue of that title. There's a less good, but still fun crossover between Lex Luthors of those same Earths from DC Comics Presents Annual #1 by Wolfman and Buckler.
Pulling from some non-supers titles of the era, we have Blackhawk #258 by Evanier and Spiegle where the Nazis destroy Blackhawk Island with an atom bomb. This whole run is probably under-appreciated.
There are a number of DC horror titles and the sci-fi anthology Timewarp represented. And there's war comics, including Weird War Tales #93--the first appearance of the Creature Commandos.
And there's a random issue of Warlord!
In a future (Sometime in the 28th Century, I believe. An exact date isn't given.) where humanity has settled all the worlds in the solar system and gradually adapted to them. The fascist dictatorship of Haskell Trask has spread from Saturn and its moons, to all the outer planets, forming the League of Cold Worlds, which now menaces the Alliance of the inner worlds.
The titular trio are the most famous outlaws in the solar system: John Thorne of Earth, Sual Av of Venus, and Gunner Welk of Mercury. It turns out they aren't really outlaws at all, but special agents for the Alliance, pretending to be criminals so the Alliance has plausible deniability regarding their actions against the League.
With war looming, the only hope of the Alliance to defeat the massive League war fleet is an experimental new weapon which requires the ultra-rare substance radite to work. Good news is there sufficient radite on the trans-Plutonian world of Erebus. Bad news is no one has ever returned from Erebus alive. Well, no one except, it's rumored, a former renegade turned space pirate. Said pirate is now dead, but his daughter reigns as pirate queen in the Asteroid Belt.
Besides the classic space war plotline, Hamilton gives a lot of space opera color: "joy-vibration" addicts, hunters in the fungal forests of Saturn, and the deadly secret of Erebus. It could be easily shorn of some it's old-fashionedness and moved outside of the solar system. Pieces would be easy to drop into Star Wars or any other space opera game.
If you do like some of those things....well, you might like it.
I think for most people Hal Jordan Green Lantern might be a bit of a hard sell. I'm sure there are folks out their that love him (Geoff Johns writes for them, apparently), but I don't know anyone that views him as their favorite. Morrison's take gives him some characterization that he hasn't had before, but I'd hesitate to call it depth. He is stalwart, and cocky, and mostly unafraid. He is also not terrible success at much other than being good at facing down danger and being a hero.
That sort of character stuff mostly takes a back seat to gonzo sci-fi superheroics. Morrison's view of DC galactic and multi-dimensional society is incoherent in the sense that it's hard to discern much when it's coming at you out of a firehose. It's perhaps a bit like Guardians of the Galaxy, perhaps, in a "just go with it" sort of way, but it's also very DC Silver Age filtered through modern sensibilities. It's grounded with the often very police procedural approach taken to the Green Lanterns' job and the tribulations they face. Barely surviving an onslaught from an antimatter universe is followed by a day in court, where the perps play on the judge's sympathies. It even touches on police brutality early in the run, but wisely that's a bit a misdirection. The bubble Morrison is building would probably pop in the face of too much realism.
While the series doesn't lack for action, cleverness and problem solving are often the solution to the stories' central dilemmas, in Silver Age fashion. Liam Sharp's art certainly supports the action and the sometimes trippiness of the setting, but I occasionally sort of wish for someone a bit cleaner-lined to make some scenes a bit clearer and as a counterpoint to Morrison's flights of fancy rather than a henchman. José Luis García-López would have been great for this.
Anyway, it's not my favorite of Morrison's mainstream DC works, but it keeps me coming back. I'm also hoping (like with his Action Comics run) that it has some surprises at the end that make what came before seem even better. We'll see.
You might want to check out the other Forgotten Futures rpgs are well.
A couple of DC Omnibuses I've been waiting for sometime are finally available.
One was solicited over a year ago, then cancelled only to be resolicited again. As of last week, it was finally released. The Legion of Super-Heroes: Five Years Later Omnibus vol. 1 collects the series by Keith Giffen and Tom and Mary Bierbaum that imagined a darker future for the United Planets and the now adult members of the Legion.
This was the run that got my interested in the Legion of Super-Heroes.
The publication of the Batman by Grant Morrison Omnibus vol. 3 was probably never in doubt, but it's been one I've been eagerly anticipated since they embarked on this series. Batman RIP has good, but marred by changing ideas of what the series was going to be and the need to fit in with the Final Crisis event. Batman and Robin was better still, but to my mind Batman Incorporated is the best of Morrison's work it takes the Silver Age-y flourishes with a modern sensibility that had surfaced from time to time in the early portions of his run and makes it the centerpiece of the seris.
It would be reasonable to ask what's the use of a print episode guide to a TV show in an age where the internet makes the basic information readily available on the likes of Wikipedia or IMDB? If you're dead set against it, I won't be able to convince you, but I would say a good episode guide doesn't just relate facts easily amenable to one internet search. At a minimum, a print episode guide should collate information that would likely require multiple searches to get, but a truly good episode guide presents a depth of research not generally achievable on the internet. It moves beyond the basic facts to give insight into episodes for someone already familiar with the basic facts.
If it has a flaw, it is that it is not concise. Every season is its on volume, and every volume is sizable. But then, the audience for this sort of detail would just go Wikipedia if they wanted surface detail.
Where Kesler's book resembles Alan Asherman's The Star Trek Compendium in being a similar sort of thing to These Are The Voyages, but much less detailed and confined to one volume, Palmer's book only gives a detailed plot summary of every episode, a list of the primary actors involved (with pictures), and a number of stills from the episode. In the number of photos it exceeds the other works mentioned, but that's the only way. There is not insight into the creation of the episodes. It doesn't even list the screenwriters.
So is it valueless in this age of the internet? Well, it does contain information you'd need to go to Wikipedia, IMDB, and Aveleyman to get, so it simplifies your searches, but it's got a high price tag for that. My recommendation would be Kesler's book, if you can find one.
