Cthulhu Behind Glass

I got back from my conference last night, so I'll be back to my normal posting schedule anon.  One last filler post for today. 

As a follow-up to my photo of my Howardian bookcase, I thought I'd show my Lovecraftiana bookcase, which includes not only works by the master, but allied works as well as references and commentaries.  The lower shelf (not fully pictured) holds the complete supernatural fiction of the Robert W. Chambers, who of course was one of Lovecraft's inspirations.

Probably the most obscure (though still readily available) volume here is Richard Tierney's Drums of Chaos wherein his historical Sword & Sorcery character, Simon of Gitta, teams up with his pulp sci-fi character John Taggart.  Oh yeah--and Jesus makes an appearance.  Other more off-beat titles include the flawed but entertaining Shadow's Bend, in which Lovecraft and Howard go on a road-trip to save the world, and Nick Mamatas's Move Underground, which is a Lovecraftian tale as written by Jack Kerouac.

Some of the Chaosium volumes are out-of-print, though, so maybe they're the hardest to come by, these days.

Warlord Wednesday: Skartaris Revealed

I'm taking a break from my issue by issue examination of DC Comics' Warlord, to offer the offical map of Skartaris.  This originally appeared in Warlord Annual #4 (1985), but essentially the same map was feature in DC Who's Who.

This was, of course, after the end of Grell's involvement in the series.  Grell has said interviews that he always resisted mapping Skartaris, as he felt that would impair the sort of fantasy-land nature of the place: "Why would you put boundaries on your imagination?"

I imagine a lot of fans felt otherwise, and it appears DC editorial staff did, as well. 

Here's the map as it appeared.  Many of the places have already appeared in my review--Kiro, Bakwele, Bal Shazar, and the forest of Ebondar.  Many others though, lie ahead.

A Brief Programming Note

I'm out of town conventioning for the next few days--navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of Big Pharma and the occasional protester--so my posts may be thinner.  By the end of the week, I expect to be back to my regular schedule.

For today, please enjoy this interesting bit of Bronze Age comic book cartography from Atlas Comics' Wulf the Barbarian #3 (1975):

Of Drifting Inspirations

For me at least, ideas tend to drift a little with time. Case in point: the setting idea I introduced as a "hard-boiled fantasy" sandbox has moved a little from the mean streets walked by Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. Not that the City doesn't have those streets--it certainly does, but consideration of the wider, weirder, world, and thinking about all the disparate elements of fantastic Americana I'd like to include has caused a shift in tone, or at least a broadening. Of late, I've been thinking of the ironic humor of perennial favorite (of mine anyway) James Branch Cabell, or, more apropos to this setting--Damon Runyon.

Anyway, with all that said, here are the current major ingredients of my strange stew of American fantasy/pulp weirdness:

Literature:
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: American fantasy at its most quintessential. W.W. Denslow illustrations help, but the classic film versions are probably influential, too.

Dashniell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon: I didn't say the hard-boiled influences were totally gone. It's got tough guy dialogue, a femme fatale, and double-dealing to get an ancient artifact.

Manly Wade Wellman, the Silver John, Judge Pursuivant, and John Thunstone stories. Fantasies that draw on American traditions--but also aren't afraid to make things up.

Comics:
Max Collins and Terry Beatty, Johnny Dynamite. The 1994 limited series.  A private dick out of Mickey Spillane takes on a criminal Faust, in a psychotronic yarn.

Eric Powell, The Goon. The title character and his side-kick against zombies and other weird menaces in a fictional (and somewhat surreal) American city in a period vaguely between the Depression and the 50s.

E.C. Segar,  Popeye. Fisticuffs, quirky characters, a Sea Hag, and a Goon (no relation ;) ).

Animation & Film:
Baccano! (2007) anime (based on the light novel series by Ryohgo Narita) about warring criminal families, immortal alchemists, and a host of other quirky characters vying for an elixir of immortality in the 1930s.

Carnivale (2003): HBO series about a secret battle between Manichean forces coming to its resolution in the Depression-era dust bowl.

7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964): An mysterious Chinese man brings his fantastic circus to a small Southwestern town. Plenty of weirdness in an American setting.

Dungeon, American Style: City Lost, Canyon Grand

"The latest news of the progress of the explorations of what is now regarded by scientists as not only the oldest archaeological discovery in the United States, but one of the most valuable in the world, which was mentioned some time ago in the Gazette, was brought to the city yesterday by G. E. Kinkaid, the explorer who found the great underground citadel of the Grand Canyon during a trip from Green River, Wyoming, down the Colorado, in a wooden boat, to Yuma, several months ago."
-- "Explorations in Grand Canyon," Phoenix Arizona Gazette (April 5, 1909)

So begins an article that describes the discovery of a "great underground citadel" with its entrance in the Grand Canyon--a real American dungeon.

Ok, maybe not real--despite what you might read on the internet about sinister Smithsonian cover-ups. But it is a American, and has the makings of a great dungeon.

The byline-less article tells the story of G.E. Kinkaid (or Kincaid, in works of a more recent vintage) who's thumbnailed as "a explorer and hunter all his life" and said to have worked for the "Smithsonian Institute" for thirty years. Kinkaid was travelling from Green River, Wyoming, to Yuma, New Mexico, down the Colorado in a wooden boat. In the Grand Canyon, in what is thought by subsequent researchers to be Marble Canyon, Kinkaid discovered the entrance to a cavern "1,486 feet down the sheer canyon wall." This cavern "hewn in solid rock by human hands, was of oriental origin, possibly from Egypt, tracing back to Ramses."

An expedition under the "S.A. Jordan" (another figure whose existence is difficult to verify) started mapping the cavern in good adventurer-style. Highlights include two large chambers, radiating passages, assorted idols, mummies wrapped in bark, mysterious hieroglyphics, and a "grey metal" that baffled scientists, but resembles that most valauble of D&D coinage metals, platinum. And one other intriguing random treasure: "Strewn promiscuously over the floor everywhere are what people call "cats eyes', a yellow stone of no great value. Each one is engraved with the head of the Malay type." The whole 1909 article is helpfully provided here, rich with cool detail.

Even better, Jack Andrews, a researcher on the topic, offers a map in the article on his website:

Admittedly, The layout's a little plain as dungeons go, but a location that can only be reached by climbing nearly 1500 feet down the wall of a deep gorge, or up from a fast moving river, is actually the sort of place adventurers ought to be going. Probably there'd be some nonhuman inhabitants in a fantasy game, but cranky mummies or even rival treasure-hunters would work in a pulp setting or wild west.

I wonder what those "cat's eyes" stones will appraise for?

Settings I'd Like to See

Hey, full games are fine--I'm not picky--but its these settings in particular that I'd like see:

Once Upon A Time in the West
I know we've had "elves and dwarves in the Old West" and "let's have a lot of fantastic things going on in an alternate history Old West", but I'd like to see something more like the post-Apocalyptic, sort of Arthurian, fantasy Old West of Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I'd settle for the more-coherent-than-Deadlands alt-history fantasy of Mark Sumner's The Devil's Tower, or Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, which is even better, but really pre-classical Western era.

Bedeviled Dinosaurs
Hairy primitives and their dinosaur companions (or vice versa) versus more belligerent hairy primitives, prehistoric monsters, and space aliens. In other word's Jack Kirby's Devil Dinosaur series exploding into rpg form.  It would be a lost world well worth finding.

Giants in the Earth
Take parts of Exalted, but emphasize the Biblical inspirations, and combine it with some wild-eyed von Daniken-esque fantasizing, preferably in the key of Kirby's (him again!) Eternals and put it all in a Sword & Sorcery prehistory.  Nephilim tread the jeweled thrones of the earth under their sandaled feet.

A Different (Head-)Space
I'd like an action/adventure space opera with a little bit more of the trippiness of Dune, particularly as it would have been adapted in Heavy Metal or Epic magazine. Star Wars informed less by Alex Raymond derring-do, than by Jim Starlin psychedelia. Something more like Dreadstar, Metamorphosis Odyssey, or European imports like The Incal, or Metabarons.

Warlord Wednesday: All Men Are Mine

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"All Men Are Mine"

Warlord (vol. 1) #14 (August-September 1978)

Written and Illustrated by Mike Grell

Synopsis: Machiste and Mariah keep a worried vigil at the side of an unconscious Morgan. The events of last issue left Morgan weak from loss of blood, and infection has set in. Despite her best efforts with Stryker's first aid get, Mariah worries that Morgan is dying.

Within the depths of his perhaps-fevered mind, Morgan finds himself falling through darkness. Then, in some sort of cave, he encounters a woman shrouded in shadow who calls to him in a sultry voice "with a touch of fire and ice." The woman calls him beloved and says she has been his companion since before he came to Skartaris--when he was hunting as a boy in Wyoming, and when he was flying missions over Vietnam. She says he has served well as her champion, but now she beckons him to her embrace, offering "the sweet blackness of eternal sleep."

She is Death.

Morgan, sword raised, snarls at her to stay away. Death, seemingly stung by his refusal, repeats that she offers him release from the suffering and give him a place in the Hall of Heroes. Though he acknowledges that life brings pain and anguish, he still refuses--violently--as he tries to run her through.

Death is unfazed, and calls him a fool. She can be tender or terrible, she reminds him. And life can be terrible, too. Her touch on his sword sends a chill through it that sends Morgan reeling. Her blasts of "nether energy" drop him into a realm of nightmare. He battles demonic creatures at overwhelming odds, but he still refuses to take her hand and the succor she offers.

Next, he finds himself hanging on a torture rack in a dungeon. Still Morgan rejects her embrace. Death asks why, and Morgan's only reply is to scream out the name "Tara." Spurned for another woman, Death tells him to go and suffer hardships and agony, but promises that one day he will cry for her kiss. Morgan denies that, and flippantly says he's got things to do other than think about that--but he'll see her around.

Death replies that indeed he will. "In the end," Death reminds him, "all men are mine."

No sooner is that admonition given, than Morgan awakens, much to relief of his two companions.

Things to Notice:

• Again, the cover bears little relationship to the events of the issue. It does look a lot like DC horror covers of the Bronze Age

Where It Comes From:
The conflict with Death in this issue seems part of the general Bronze Age comic tradition--compare Starlin's portrayal of Death in Captain Marvel, and numerous DC horror and war comics, which of course in influenced by a host of other media.

The physical appearance of Death is a bit of a depature from the usual. Despite the traditional Grim Reaper on the cover, death is a voluptuous Skartarian woman in the issue, with some Indian flourishes to her attire. In fact, given her belt of skulls, Grell may have been inspired the Indian goddess Kali, who often similarly accessorizes: