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Vintage Treasures: The List of 7 by Mark Frost

Vintage Treasures: The List of 7 by Mark Frost

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The List of Seven Inside Spread-small

I love buying paperback collections. Like this one, which I  found online last week. Just look at at all those gorgeous vintage paperbacks. Seriously, click on that link and look at them. I’ll wait.

Twenty-eight volumes in terrific shape, for less than twenty bucks. Including four early volumes from Neal Barrett, Jr; three vintage Lovecraft collections (one of them The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath); both Ballantine volumes of William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land; one of Lin Carter’s better fantasy collections, Imaginary Worlds; A. Merritt’s The Moon Pool; a smattering of Ursula K. LeGuin, plus C.S. Lewis, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Bellairs, and half a dozen more. There’s even a beautiful copy of Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space, which I’ve lusted after ever since Violette Malan teased me with the cover in her article on science fiction mysteries last month.

Man, I could just lay these babies down on the floor and roll around in ’em. Except that would probably dog ear the covers.

They finally arrived today, carefully packed in tightly wrapped plastic, and I gently unwrapped them and settled in to examine my new treasures. Many clamored for attention, but the one that practically jumped into my hands was The List of 7, by Mark Frost. That’s the inside front cover above, complete with mummies, gruesome spectres, ghosts, a train chase, and — speaking of Sherlock Holmes — the words “The Game’s Afoot” scrawled on parchment (click for a bigger version).

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When the 21st Century was Far Future: Frank R. Paul: The Dean of Science Fiction Illustration

When the 21st Century was Far Future: Frank R. Paul: The Dean of Science Fiction Illustration

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Frank R Paul The Dean of Science Fiction Illustration-smallI consider Frank R. Paul to be one of the most important — if not the most important — artist in the history of science fiction.

It’s odd then that so few readers today are familiar with his work. Jerry Weist set out to correct that with Frank R. Paul: The Dean of Science Fiction Illustration, a dream project of his that was released only after Weist’s death in 2011.

Paul virtually created American Science Fiction, alongside Hugo Gernsback, in the late 1920s. He was the cover artist Gernsback chose for the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories — every single issue, for over three years, until Gernsback lost control of it in 1929.

That meant Paul crafted many of the defining images of early science fiction, including his interpretation of Buck Rogers (on the cover of Amazing August 1928), H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (August 1927), and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars (Amazing Stories Annual 1927). He made exciting new concepts like space travel, picture-phones, aliens, and robots vivid and real to an America where most people didn’t even own a telephone.

When Gernsback left Amazing behind and founded a new stable of magazines — including Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories — he took Paul with him. Altogether, Paul painted over 300 magazine covers before his death in 1963, most of them for Gernsback.

Paul had numerous artistic firsts. He was the first to paint a space station, for the cover of the August 1929 Science Wonder. He painted the cover for Marvel Comics #1 in October, 1939, giving the world its first look at the Human Torch.

Paul did countless interior illustrations as well. In addition to his striking cover art, he executed a famous series of original paintings imagining life elsewhere in the solar system for the back covers of many of Gernsback’s magazines.

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Adventures on Stage: Fantasy Literature’s Missing Link

Adventures on Stage: Fantasy Literature’s Missing Link

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1002747_514919775228258_344973762_nA few weeks back, I had the good fortune to take in productions of The Tempest and Peter and the Starcatcher at the Utah Shakespeare Festival (Cedar City, Utah). As I drove away afterward, I could not but help thinking that plays, too, are literature, and that more than a passing handful of theater’s best, these two titles included, are outright, unabashed fantasies. Adventures, even.

It is admittedly difficult to keep current with theater, since stagecraft is not, as books, comics, and film/television most surely are, a truly mass media. Access is tricky; productions are both local and fleeting. Also, the habit of theater can be expensive.

Nevertheless, I’m going to make a case, here and now, that Black Gate’s readership should take stock and keep track of contemporary theater. Scripted plays, after all, predate the novel as a form by many centuries, and we would be as blind as Tiresias were we to forget that were it not for Oedipus Rex, we would know nothing of that fantasy staple, the talking, riddling sphinx.

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It’s a Strange Chemistry Book Cover Montage

It’s a Strange Chemistry Book Cover Montage

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Strange Chemistry — publishers of such marvelous titles as Martha Wells’s Emilie and the Hollow World, Blackwood by Gwenda Bond, Pantomime by Laura Lam, Christian Schoon’s Zenn Scarlett, and many others — have produced a montage displaying all of their book covers.

Strange Chemistry is known for their gorgeous cover designs, and this montage of eighteen captures all of them. Sort of makes you want to collect them all, doesn’t it? Click on the image for a full size version.

Strange Chemistry Book Button2

We’re supporters of Strange Chemistry and so we’re reproducing it here with pride. Steal this smaller button for your own blog, and check out all of their books at the Strange Chemistry website.

Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Three: The Black and Whites

Art of the Genre: I.C.E.’s Middle-Earth Roleplaying Part Three: The Black and Whites

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Sorceress PealeI’m not going to stand on a soapbox here and tell you my views on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, that released this past Christmas; but having seen it, I was prompted to once again take out my old Middle-Earth Role-Playing books and relive what I believe to be the prettiest RPG ever created.

Now I’m not saying that New Zealand isn’t gorgeous, but there is a big part of me that believes literature should stay more firmly based in fantasy, thus real actors and real sets somehow diminish the very nature of the words and images that helped define them in the first place.

In the case of The Hobbit, computers, no matter how sophisticated, couldn’t rekindle the joy I feel from the images I’ve seen painted and drawn concerning Tolkien’s world throughout my youth.

And speaking of youth, I’m constantly reminded that I’m from a quickly aging generation that now seems incredibly antiquated in the world. Technology is moving so fast, it sometimes makes my head spin to think that I grew up without cable television, cell phones, computers, the Internet, microwave ovens, and a plethora of other standard issue American items in today’s world.

I’d like to say that color was something that was always present in my favorite pastime, gaming, but again that would be fooling myself. It wasn’t really until the turn of the millennia that interior color pages were standard issue in gaming. I well remember, back in the late 1980s, how revolutionary FASA was for bringing out color interior images for games like Battletech and Shadowrun, the latter of which actually used glossy pages now found standard on all gaming material.

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Our Comics, Ourselves

Our Comics, Ourselves

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OrcaSeveral years ago, I handed my older son my pile of Avengers comics, a sequential trove dating from about 1976 until about 1985.

He read them eagerly, then threw them all over his room. I provided a storage bin and said, “If you want the privilege of reading these, treat them well.”

Message received. The comics, when not in use, lived happily in their bin.

He’s now re-reading them, out of order. He left a couple of them on his bed the other night, and rather than flip out –– “You’re grounded for life, plus I’m confiscating your cell phone! Oh, wait. You don’t have a cell phone. Hmm. Maybe I should confiscate my own cell phone?” –– I elected to simply remind him that my yesteryear treasures need to be treated well.

Then I forgot all about the reminder. I found myself hooked by the back cover of Avengers #164. It was an ad, of course –– what else would grace the back cover of a Marvel Comic? But what an ad, a movie poster extravaganza for (hold me back) Orca (1977).

With Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling, no less.

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Art of the Genre: The Top 10 Role-Playing Games of All-Time

Art of the Genre: The Top 10 Role-Playing Games of All-Time

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SFAD Cover-1In my continuing series of ‘Top 10s’, I’m very happy to be doing a subject that incorporates two things I would simply have a hard time living without: fantasy gaming art and the games themselves.  So, considering I’m currently in the middle of running a Kickstarter that not only is looking to produce an absolute load of original fantasy fiction, but also an RPG and art book,  what better time to compose a list of The Top Ten Role-Playing Games of All Time.

Now, I suppose I should mention that I’ve been playing RPGs since I was 10, and without revealing just how old I am, it must be understood there is a measurable amount of time involved there.  Certainly, I’m not the foremost expert on role-playing games, but I’m going to put myself in the upper 10% of gamers and that should give me enough perspective to comprise this list.

Having established that I can’t help but say that going back in time, weighing the impact, reach, and longevity of so many games was an absolute thrill, and so many memories came flooding back with each one.  I was also surprised at how many I’d played (all of them), even if just once during a random gaming session in some long forgotten era of my life.

These games, you see, are like time capsules of memory, and when they come up in conversation with gamers, I think every one of those in the discussion is ripped back through time to the point where they sat at a table, rolled dice, and laughed with friends most likely long out of their lives.  Only games that take place on a table-top make such an intimate miracle happen, their power unmistakable and their reach deeper than most non-gamers would ever understand.

So, without further ado, let’s get into the meat of this list and find out just what games made it in, which ones were snubbed, and how many people can disagree with my choices!

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Art of the Genre: Art of the Iconic Female #4: The Baroness

Art of the Genre: Art of the Iconic Female #4: The Baroness

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It seems to me the Baroness was made to be drawn by Adam Hughes...
It seems to me the Baroness was made to be drawn by Adam Hughes…

What isn’t to love about The Baroness?  Well, I suppose a great deal if you are on the side of ‘good’, but nonetheless she’s still a character that has captured the imagination of a generation of young men growing up in the 1980s.

I was a fan of action figures, and when Hasbro initially released their G.I. Joe A Real American Hero  line in 1982, I spent three days one weekend catching nightcrawlers (bait worms in southern Indiana speak) by hand with a flashlight at five cents a pop until I had enough to purchase the first run (rough calculation, I caught upwards of 1000 of the slimy little buggers).

At the time, I was eleven, and my G.I. Joe figures provided a great combat story to be told over and over again in the woods by my house, in my sandbox, on the riverbank, and on the floors of various friends living rooms, but I must admit a purely war-driven story can get tiresome without something more meaningful to fight for.

Enter Cobra, the G.I. Joe nemesis. But still, even after you could lay hands on villains to fight, there was something lacking until women were finally added to the story.  The addition of Scarlet was a turning point for me in my action figure storylines, and yet a great deal of imagination had to be used because to this point action figure manufacturing hadn’t really ‘figured women out’.  That is to simply say, female action figures weren’t all that alluring, mostly because you couldn’t effectively produce their hair.

Sure, there was Star Wars, of which I had a nice collection as well, who had Princess Leia, and that figure was fine, but they (the manufacturers) had a huge advantage because of Leia’s famous head-buns.  Those could be sculpted, but free-flowing hair was a much more difficult endeavor and so figures like G.I. Joe alums Scarlet, Lady J, and heaven forbid Covergirl (probably the ugliest figure ever created and based on a model turned soldier of all things!) never really made boys’ hearts go pitter-pat unless you were reading the Marvel comics or watching the animation.

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Adventure on Film: Flesh and Blood

Adventure on Film: Flesh and Blood

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2206Se_ores_del_AceroFlesh and Blood (1985) is neither high art nor Paul Verhoeven’s best film, but it does contain flashes of genuine magic and an exceptional eye for the grime and grit of Medieval Italy. It also carries its fair share of star power thanks to the presence of Rutger Hauer, Verhoeven’s frequent co-conspirator, as mercenary soldier Martin.

The plot in a nutshell: Martin and his band of trouble-making friends are part of Hawkwood’s Army (though which of Hawkwood’s many armies is allowably unclear), but soon enough Hawkwood turns on his scruffy, ill-mannered war-hounds, stripping them of their pay and their pickings. Demoralized but determined, Martin and company make a break for the countryside, where they kidnap Princess Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh), then hole themselves up in a rural castle in which Agnes teaches her captors, as best she can, the fine arts of civilized behavior. But of course Hawkwood comes calling, paid now to recapture the princess. The clash that follows pits swords against fumbling attempts at science, with bubonic plague waiting in the wings.

Flesh and Blood proves to be a trifle cartoonish at times, a la Robocop, but one thing Verhoeven never lacks is energy. He’s a naughty schoolboy, yes, and at times his fondness for splatter, gore, and, well, flesh, threatens to undermine the film’s highbrow, philosophical script, but he’s also a craftsman with the heart of an animator –– both the camera and its subjects are in almost constant motion –– and provided you’ve got a strong stomach, Flesh and Blood provides ample period entertainment and many a fine battle.

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Adventure On Film: Westworld

Adventure On Film: Westworld

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westworld-1How any adult, in this day and age, can approach Westworld (1973) in anything remotely close to the appropriate frame of mind is beyond me. To further complicate an open, honest viewing, the film could not possibly telegraph its intentions more bluntly. Will the tourists attending Western World, Roman World, and Medieval World have the time of their vacationing lives? Well, yes –– but in short order, they will be done in by their out-of-control hosts, robots one and all, semi-sentient machines understandably tired of living out their days getting gunned down by their rich and warm-blooded doppelgangers.

Pardon me if in the course of this review I don’t concern myself with spoilers.  If the DVD’s cover doesn’t give the game away, the first two minutes of the film surely will.

Leaving, then… what? A cautionary tale, in which we fragile mortals should learn to stop messing around with simulacrums? Or is it an adventure in which the stakes are high and the six-guns are fast?

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