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Month: January 2014

Goth Chick News: Artist Collective 44Flood Takes on Vampirism

Goth Chick News: Artist Collective 44Flood Takes on Vampirism

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Libretto comicWhen I see the words “artist collective” and “vampirism” in the same proximity, I am forced to look closer.

I mean, what is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an artist collective anyway? Probably not vampires.

Until today, I admittedly envisioned a commune, perhaps somewhere in the dessert or maybe Colorado, where personal hygiene is not particularly high on the to-do list. But after doing a bit of research I came to understand that unlike an artist commune, where people live together and produce art as a function of the group’s activities, an artist collective shares ownership, risk, benefits, and status of their joint work; and presumably showering more.

Okay, whatever.

Now that we are all clear on that bit, where exactly does vampirism come in?

44FLOOD is the name of an artist collective and publisher formed by Kasra Ghanbari, Ben Templesmith and Menton Mathews.  Templesmith is tapping his old 30 Days of Night bosses IDW Publishing by forming a joint venture to create Libretto: Volume 1: Vampirism.

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Syria AD256 City of Dura Europos

Syria AD256 City of Dura Europos

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484px-DuraeuropusmapTwo dozen Roman soldiers clamber into a narrow counter-mine and dress their shields. Armour clattering and grating on the rough-cut rock walls, they jog through the cool tunnel towards the Persian mine.

At stake are the walls of Dura Europos and the people they protect — the citizens and the women and children of the garrison. Can the Romans clear the tunnel before the Persians fire it, bringing down the ramparts so that they can pour in and massacre or enslave the population?

Tunnel fights are intimate scrums by lamplight. There’s no space for unit tactics. It’ll be a head-to-head fight and these Romans are a human battering ram.

The soldier behind will shove. The one in front will hack and stab like a madman until he falls and the next blunders over him to take his turn.

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Vintage Treasures: Br-r-r-! edited by Groff Conklin

Vintage Treasures: Br-r-r-! edited by Groff Conklin

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Br-r-r Groff Conklin-smallYou’ve got to admire an editor who titles his anthology Br-r-r-! You just know it caused fits with distributors, book sellers, librarians and other folks who alphabetize books for a living.

Mind you, Br-r-r-! was Conklin’s 21st science fiction anthology, and I figure by that point you’ll do anything to break up the tedium a bit. It was released in 1959; by 1964 he was so desperate for new topics he was putting out books like Great Detective Stories About Doctors (um, what?). He eventually produced 44 anthologies, before (presumably) going crazy and locking himself in a lighthouse.

In any event, Br-r-r-! looks like a terrific collection, starting with that striking and original Richard Powers cover. Put that cover on a phone book, and I still might choose to read that over a lot of other stuff on the shelves in 1959. Just sayin’.

Here’s the back-cover text. If this doesn’t bring you back to the classic era of 1950s monster movies, then your education is seriously lacking.

B R R R R ! — you’ll shudder when you meet:

THE MONSTER WORM that took 200 years to come up from the depths of the damned — it hated mankind!
THE BEETLE FROM HELL whose stinger brought slow, excruciating death — its evil eyes held the promise of something even worse!
THE LIVING CORPSE that commanded a graveyard. It sentenced a mortician to the bubbling bowels of hell!

And in “Legal Rites,” Isaac Asimov relates the fascinating — and gory — story of a blood-dripping specter fighting for its right to haunt a house. Asimov flavors pure horror with a unique brand of fantastic humor.

These are some of the blood-curdling, heart-pounding messengers of horror to be found in these bloodstained pages of evil!

Just for the record, the pages in my copy are not actually bloodstained. Or evil.

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The Church and Treasury of the Teutonic Order, Vienna

The Church and Treasury of the Teutonic Order, Vienna

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Gold crucifix and reliquary, 19th century

Vienna is home to many great treasures, such as the Kunsthistorisches Museum with its fine art collection and the Hapsburg armor and armor collection at the Neue Berg. One little museum that’s often overlooked is the Church and Treasury of the Teutonic Order.

Tucked away near Stefansdom, the city’s cathedral, it’s easy to miss with its small steeple, smaller sign, and simple front gate. Go inside, however, and you’ll be in for a treat.

First stop is the 14th century Gothic church, remodeled in the early 18th century in the Baroque style. There’s a fine triptych from Flanders made in 1520 and the walls are covered with the coats of arms of various men who have joined the Order, which is formally called The Order of The Teutonic Knights of St. Mary’s Hospital in Jerusalem.

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Observations: The Two Towers Movie

Observations: The Two Towers Movie

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The-Lord-of-the-Rings-The-Two-Towers-poster-smallLast week I wrote about The Fellowship of the Ring movie, and this week I follow up with the sequel, The Two Towers.

One of the first things I noticed about this film was the short, choppy sequencing of scenes. This mainly occurred in the first hour, and it made for a slightly disjointed viewing experience.

The movie picks up right where Fellowship left off, starting with a gorgeous panorama shot of snow-capped mountains. Then we relive Gandalf’s fall from the bridge of Khazad Dum, but this time we get to see more of his battle with the Balrog, which is sheer awesomeness.

The perspective switches (get ready for a lot of this) to Frodo and Sam, tired and lost, as they make their way through the razor cliffs of Emyn Muil. We see that the Ring is getting heavier for Frodo, who feels its pull more than ever before, and certainly more than old Bilbo ever seemed to exhibit (except for brief spells.) This wandering phase is rather dull until the arrival of Gollum, who has been following the hobbits with plans to steal back the Ring. They catch him in the act and truss him up with elven rope. Frodo decides to free Gollum in exchange for leading them to Mordor; Sam doesn’t trust him (with good reason).

I want to pause a moment here to say that the portrayal of Gollum by actor Andy Serkis is – without a doubt — the highlight of this movie. The Two Towers has always been my least favorite book of the trilogy, sometimes tedious in its depression, but Gollum elevates this movie to being almost as good as the first one. A vicious little beast who can turn so sweet and cute, he is a masterstroke of acting and CGI genius.

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New Treasures: The Big Book of Adventure Stories, edited by Otto Penzler

New Treasures: The Big Book of Adventure Stories, edited by Otto Penzler

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The Big Book of Adventure Stories-smallIt shouldn’t be a surprise that I love these big omnibus collections, and The Big Book of Adventure Stories is much bigger and omnibus-er than most. Weighing in at a generous 896 pages, it’s Penzler’s generous gift to those of us who love fast-paced pulp adventure… or just need a door stop (for a bank vault).

The massive volume is divided in 11 intriguing sections, including Sword & Sorcery, Man Vs. Nature, Island Paradise, Go West, Young Man (pulp westerns), Future Shock (science fiction), Yellow Peril (sinister Asian villains), and by far the largest, In Darkest Africa.

You can pack a lot of great authors into nearly 900 pages, and Penzer doesn’t disappoint, including Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Philip Jose Farmer, Harold Lamb, Rudyard Kipling, Ray Cummings, Rafael Sabatini, Sax Rohmer, Cornell Wollrich, Louis L’Amour, and many others. Among other fascinating tales are the one that introduced The Cisco Kid, O. Henry’s 1907 “The Caballero’s Way,” and Edgar Rice Burrough’s complete novel Tarzan the Terrible.

Everyone loves adventure, and Otto Penzler has collected the best adventure stories of all time into one mammoth volume. With stories by Jack London, O. Henry, H. Rider Haggard, Alastair MacLean, Talbot Mundy, Cornell Woolrich, and many others, this wide-reaching and fascinating volume contains some of the best characters from the most thrilling adventure tales, including The Cisco Kid; Sheena, Queen of the Jungle; Bulldog Drummond; Tarzan; The Scarlet Pimpernel; Conan the Barbarian; Hopalong Cassidy; King Kong; Zorro; and The Spider. Divided into sections that embody the greatest themes of the genre — Sword & Sorcery, Megalomania Rules, Man vs. Nature, Island Paradise, Sand and Sun, Something Feels Funny, Go West Young Man, Future Shock, I Spy, Yellow Peril, In Darkest Africa — it is destined to be the greatest collection of adventure stories ever compiled.

Featuring: Lawless open seas, ferocious army ants, deadeyed gunmen, exotic desert islands, feverish jungle adventures.

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Ancient Worlds: But Is It True?

Ancient Worlds: But Is It True?

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220px-Homer_British_Museum
Homer

Before we go any further in the discussion of the origins of fantasy and science fiction in ancient literature, I wanted to address a basic question:

Did the Greeks believe any of this was true?

When we sit down to read a work of fantasy, we are very aware of reading about a constructed space. We know we are temporarily inhabiting an imagined world, and much of our delight comes from that work of imagination. Our appreciation of any verisimilitude comes attached to that sense of creation: it is exciting to us that the work we are reading is believable even though it is pretend.

(This is, of course, what non-geeks often don’t understand about those of us of the geekly persuasion. How, they wonder, can you spend so much time arguing over the minutiae and plot holes of a story in which a basic premise is “we live in space and , even more unbelievably, do without money”? The answer is that even a pretend world needs internal consistency, and we argue because tolerances on that consistency vary. I can’t stop tearing my hair out at the messed up timeline of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, my husband thinks this is hilarious, I love him anyway.)

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A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)

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Godzilla01Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)
Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

Sayanora, Tsubaraya — and Sayanora, Golden Age of Japanese Cinema

The end of the Golden Age of Japanese Giant Monster movies coincided with the end of the most productive era for the Japanese film industry. Starting in the early 1950s, the country’s film industry experienced a meteoric rise. The major studios released a combined average of 450 movies to theaters each year. But the growth of television in the 1960s started to erode film attendance. In the late-‘60s, audience levels dropped precipitously, numerous theaters closed, and the studios faced cutbacks. Contract directors and stars were released, departments were scaled down or eliminated, and the studio responsible for the “Gamera” and “Daimajin” films, Daiei, was forced out of business entirely.

Science-fiction and monster movies had it particularly rough because of the growth of television. Popular superhero TV shows offered a cheaper alternative for young audiences to get their giant monster fix. The children who increasingly made up the viewership for Godzilla movies could now see kaiju action daily from their living rooms.

Ironically, the person most responsible for the growth of SF television was Eiji Tsubaraya, Toho Studio’s master of visual effects and one of the four “Godzilla Fathers.” Tsubaraya formed his own independent company, Tsubaraya Productions, in 1963 to create special-effects television programs. The 1966 hit show Ultra Q led to the monumental success of Ultraman the next year. Each week, Ultraman pitted its giant-sized title hero against a new monster. Clone shows sprouted everywhere, and the monsters of cinema screens started to bring in less money.

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Ol’ Standbys

Ol’ Standbys

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holmesI first encountered roleplaying games in late 1979, which means that, by year’s end, I’ll have been rolling polyhedral dice and pretending to be an elf for 35 years. The mind boggles when I ponder this, since it attests to the fact that, with a few notable exceptions, like breathing and eating, I’ve spent more time playing RPGs than I have almost any other activity in my earthly existence.

As I make my way through mid-life, I find myself thinking back to my early days of gaming often. One of the things that strikes me is how focused my friends and I were on a handful of games, which we played with incredible gusto. It must be remembered that, even back in those days, there were an incredible number of RPGs available – not as many as today, certainly, but more than even a group of tweens and teens as gung-ho for roleplaying games could play. That’s not to say we didn’t dip our toes into a lot of pools, so to speak; I’d venture to guess that, between 1979 and 1984, the period during which our mania was at its zenith, we tried many dozens of games (you find a fairly complete list of all the RPGs published, by year, between 1974 and the present here – there are a lot of them).

Despite that, we had our favorites, the ones to which we’d return again and again, after the shine had worn off the latest boxed set to appear on the hobby shop’s shelves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these games were all among the earliest ones to which we’d been introduced by the older kids and adults who acted as our “mentors” as we learned the ropes of this strange pastime. But what is surprising, I think – at least to me – is that, for the most part, these same RPGs are the ones that still hold my attention today. Granted, I’m not a neophile; I don’t instinctively seek out new games as soon as they’re released, as many of my fellow gamers do. Even so, I must confess to being a little shocked to discover that, if I look back on the gaming I’ve done over the last decade or so, it was almost entirely devoted to the same three games I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid.

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Griots: Sisters of the Spear edited by Milton J. Davis and Charles R. Saunders

Griots: Sisters of the Spear edited by Milton J. Davis and Charles R. Saunders

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oie_1432818nsZyAwhJAs I’ve written before, we are living in a S&S renaissance. A genre that was stuck in a loop of rote characters — fighting the same wizards, stealing the same temple treasures and damsels’ virtues — and virtually extinct from bookstore shelves, has come roaring back to life in the past decade. It may not command the same attention it did forty years ago, but it is rousing and alive.

Something that’s proving to be incredibly reinvigorating to the genre is sword & soul.  Charles Saunders, coiner of the term and creator of Imaro and Dossouye, two of the best heroic fantasy characters, describes it this way:

Fantasy fiction with an African connection in either the characters or the setting…or both.  The setting can be the historical Africa of the world we know, or the Africa of an alternate world, dimension or universe. But that’s not a restriction, because a sword-and-soul story can feature a black character in a non-black setting, or a non-black character in a black setting.  Caveat: Tarzan of the Apes need not apply.

About six years ago Milton Davis started writing and publishing his own sword & soul fiction (though this predates the actual term). When a friend sent one of Davis’ manuscripts to Charles Saunders (which he reviewed in Black Gate), one thing led to another and soon they were collaborators in fostering the creation of more sword & soul stories. Their efforts resulted in the terrific Griots anthology in 2011. As I wrote when I reviewed it at my site last year, it is exciting to see a genre I love evolving in real time.

Two years later Davis and Saunders are back with a sequel anthology, Griots: Sisters of the Spear. One of the driving forces of sword & soul is to present characters not often seen in standard-issue S&S. As Saunders writes in the forward, with this volume he and Davis found authors with characters that:

can hold their own and then some against the barbarians and power-mad monarchs and magic-users of both genders who swings swords and cast spells in the mostly European-derived settings of modern fantasy and sword-and-sorcery.

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