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Late with my playoff picks

Late with my playoff picks

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Okay, I’m a little late with my brackets, but here they are anyway.

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Tanya Roberts as Kiri
Tanya Roberts as Kiri

Obviously, there are some odd choices and upsets here. First of all, how did Kiri from Beastmaster make it into the women’s tourney?

Pure 80s hotness. One does have to put bums in seats.

(Click on the tumbnail pics for larger images.)

You may ask what James T. Kirk and the Gorn Captain doing in a Sword and Sorcery tournament? Well, Kirk wanted in, so he rewrote the computer program allocating arena space and logistics. He doesn’t like to lose.

Still, Titus Pullo should knock him unconscious in the second round, but I expect Kirk will lose his shirt.

Titus Pullo (HBO's Rome)
Titus Pullo (HBO's Rome)

You might accuse me of basing my picks on pure emotion.

If it were that, I’d have Etain and Titus Pullo going all the way, both because 2010’s Centurion deserved better notice than it received, and I’d love to see howling Pictish fury set against the trained brutality of everyone’s favorite drunken, whoremongering Roman legionary.

Those who cry “80s nostalgia” might have a better case, but Dragonslayer‘s Galen does fall to Titus Pullo in the first round…

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First Teaser Trailer for Conan the Barbarian

First Teaser Trailer for Conan the Barbarian

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conan-3dThe first trailer for the new 3D remake of Conan the Barbarian has been unleashed this week by Lionsgate.

The trailer is quite brief (one minute), and doesn’t show much beyond a lot of smoke, a few poorly nutritioned villains, a beautiful woman, and some goofy dialog on how to achieve contentment through slaying.  That part reminded me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but with more swords and a better soundtrack.

The brief film description reads:

The tale of Conan the Cimmerian and his adventures across the continent of Hyboria on a quest to avenge the murder of his father and the slaughter of his village.

I don’t remember anything about his father in the original version. But as Howard Andrew Jones is constantly telling me, I probably need to read more Robert E. Howard.

The finished film will be released on August 11, 2011.  It is directed by Marcus Nispel and stars Jason Momoa (Stargate: Atlantis) as Conan.

The film also stars Ron Perlman, Stephen Lang, and Rose McGowan, who’s preparing her own take on a Robert E. Howard character in the upcoming Red Sonja, also scheduled for release this year.

Howard Andrew Jones and Scott Oden Surround the Sword Woman

Howard Andrew Jones and Scott Oden Surround the Sword Woman

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sword_womanAs Howard Andrew Jones month heads into the final stretch, we still have several exciting developments to tell you about.

First is the release this month of Robert E. Howard’s latest thick collection, Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures, featuring a generous selection of classic pulp adventure tales from the creator of Conan, including “The Sowers of the Thunder,” “Lord of Samarcand,” “Hawks of Outremer,” and “The Road of Azrael.” This is the 11th volume in the handsome Del Rey editions of collected Howard fiction, following The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, the two-volume The Best of Robert E. Howard, and El Borak and Other Desert Adventures.

Howard Andrew Jones teamed up with fellow Black Gate blogger and historical fiction author Scott Oden to bookend the collection: Scott wrote the introduction, and Howard the lengthy 22-page afterword, “Howard’s Journey,” which puts REH’s historical fiction in proper context with the great pulp writers who preceded him.  From his afterword:

Pound for pound Robert E. Howard’s historical fiction more than holds its weight against Howard’s other genre and series work. Over just a few years Howard fashioned a grander helping of these stories than many historical writers craft over a lifetime… It should not be assumed, though, that he wrote any of his stories in a vacuum… Professional author though he was, Howard still had to find his comfort level with the genre. He did so in part by being familiar with both history and the writers who brought it to life before him…

Scholars have noted the influence of Jack London and Rudyard Kipling in his work, as well as Howard’s familiarity with myth and legend, likely via Thomas Bulfinch. The shadow cast by adventure and historical adventure writer Harold Lamb has been noted but never discussed at length. Robert E. Howard seems to have found a kind of kindred spirit in Lamb, and progressed from modeling off his fiction until, student growing to master, Howard matched and even sometimes surpassed his skill.

Sword Woman is fully illustrated by John Watkiss. It includes 18 complete stories, over a half-dozen fragments, and detailed notes on the texts. It is available in trade paperback for $18, and clocks in at over 570 pages. The series is edited by Rusty Burke.

Art Evolution 20: Keith Parkinson [1958-2005]

Art Evolution 20: Keith Parkinson [1958-2005]

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Art Evolution turns twenty, and in so doing fades from this prestigious stage provided by Black Gate, but as the name contends, art is ever changing, and so I will never say never where the process and these articles are concerned. Still, if you’ve missed any of these wonderful works, the journey’s beginning can be found here.

After the addition of last week’s ‘Demented Lyssa’, I’ll take a step back to the place where the true power of this article first struck me.

dragon-mag-106-254In late 2009 I’d just signed Larry Elmore and Wayne Reynolds, my spirits flying high as I spent my nights searching the web for artwork that might also apply to art evolution. It was during this process that a distinct sorrow assailed me in regards to the passing of Keith Parkinson.

To me, Keith represented my youth, so many of his images galvanized in my mind along the way it was difficult to think of this article without him. For the first time I regarded this journey as a thing not involving me, but instead the artists, and the lives they’d touched along the way.

Having heard so much about Keith from his fellows, I couldn’t help but feel that it would be selfish not to include him in the article because he couldn’t do a rendition of Lyssa. Lyssa was secondary to the art, after all, and the mission statement I now followed pushed for a thing greater than my ego.

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The Best KULL Comic Ever: “Demon in a Silvered Glass”

The Best KULL Comic Ever: “Demon in a Silvered Glass”

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kullsmall-1Happy Birthday, Robert E. Howard…

I am a huge Conan fan, but I have to admit that I like Howard’s King Kull stories even better. The Kull tales are more poetic, more lyrical, more mystical … and they reveal more of Howard’s Shakespearean influence than any of his Conan tales.

All of those terrific Kull tales are collected in a terrific illustrated volume from Del Rey entitled Kull: Exile of Atlantis.  If you want the true Kull experience, this book has it all. Yet of all the Kull and Conan comics produced by Marvel Comics in the 70s and 80s, there is one that stands head-and-shoulders above them all: Bizarre Adventures #26, featuring Kull the Barbarian. John Bolton’s dark, lush artwork brought Kull, Brule, and the City of Wonders alive in a work of timeless excellence.

Kull always had it rougher than Conan in the comics world. When the fantastically talented Barry Windsor-Smith put his unique stamp on the Conan character in 1971’s Conan the Barbarian #1, he and writer Roy Thomas ensured it would become a Marvel mainstay. Yet when Marvel added a Kull the Conqueror comic a few years later, they weren’t lucky enough to strike gold again. Various artists did the Kull series, and despite a terrific run by Marie Severin and a couple of great Mike Ploog issues (and later work by Alfredo Alcala and Ernie Chan), the series never approached Conan in popularity or longevity. However, in 1981 King Kull finally got his due in a true masterpiece of sword-and-sorcery: “Demon in a Silvered Glass.”

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Robert E. Howard in his Own Words

Robert E. Howard in his Own Words

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kull-atlantisIn honor of what would be his 105th birthday, I thought I’d let Robert E. Howard’s own words do the talking.

Here’s a few of my favorites culled from his Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane stories. There’s so many to pull from but I chose these because they capture the ferocity, humor, and poetic qualities of Howard’s writing.

If you got any favorite passages to share, post ‘em here.

There comes, even to kings, the time of great weariness. Then the gold of the throne is brass, the silk of the palace becomes drab. The gems in the diadem and upon the fingers of the women sparkle drearily like the ice of the white seas; the speech of men is as the empty rattle of a jester’s bell and the feel comes of things unreal; even the sun is copper in the sky and the breath of the green ocean is no longer fresh.

–“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”

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Robert E. Howard Birthday Celebration

Robert E. Howard Birthday Celebration

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solomon-kane3Here’s to Robert E. Howard, creator of my favorite genre, sword-and-sorcery, on the anniversary of his birth. Raise high your goblets and drink deep.

What is best about Robert E. Howard’s writing? The driving headlong pace, the seemingly inexhaustible imagination, the splendid cinematic prose poetry, the never-say-die protagonists? It is hard to pick one thing, so it may be simpler to state that Robert E. Howard possessed profound and often astonishing storytelling gifts. Without drowning his readers in adjectives (he had the knack of using just enough adjectives or adverbs, and knew to let the verbs do the heavy lifting) or slowing pace, he brought his scenes to life. Vividly.

Writer Eric Knight may have most succinctly described this particular aspect of Howard’s power in an article on Solomon Kane:

“’Wings of the Night’ features a marathon running fight through ruin, countryside, and even air that only a team of computer animators with a sixty-million dollar budget and the latest rendering technology (or a single Texan from Cross Plains hammering the story out with worn typewriter ribbon) could bring properly to life.”

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Robert E. Howard: The Day That I Was Born

Robert E. Howard: The Day That I Was Born

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Robert E. Howard, author and poet, was born on January 22, 1906. In an undated letter to his friend Clyde Smith (“Salaam/Again glancing…), Howard wrote of this day in the poem, “I Praise My Nativity.”

“Oh, evil the day that I was born, like a tale that a witch has told;
I came to birth on a bitter morn, when the sky was dim and cold.
The god that girds the loins of Fate and sends the nighttime rain,
He diced my game on an iron plate with dice carved out of pain.
“This for the shadow of hope,” laughed he, as the numbers glinted up,
“This for a spell and this for Hell, and this for the bitter cup.”
A Shadow came out of the gloom of night and covered me with his cowl
That carried the curse of The Truer Sight and the blindness of the owl.
Oh, evil the day that I was born, triply I curse that day,
And I would to God I had died that morn and passed like the ocean spray.”

While he may have wished to God that he had died that morn, as one of his legions of fans, I’m grateful that he didn’t. And I have about twelve hundred reasons for my gratitude: the over four hundred short stories and more than seven hundred poems that he wrote.

Unlike many of the Black Gate readers, I’m relatively new to the writings of Robert E. Howard. I became interested in him when I saw the movie The Whole Wide World in 2006. I started with the Del Reys: The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane and Kull Exile of Atlantis. I also read my way enthusiastically through all the Conan stories and then everything else of Howard’s I could get my hands on. I haunted the REH eBay offerings looking for the books and stories I didn’t have.

My efforts were rewarded. I was *there* when Dark Agnes, Valeria and Howard’s strong women flashed their swords and fought beside men as equals. I laughed out loud at Meet Cap’n Kidd and the other Breckenridge Elkins tales, relished Lord of Samarcand and chewed my nails during Pigeons in Hell.

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Tolkien and Howard still The Two Towers of fantasy

Tolkien and Howard still The Two Towers of fantasy

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jrr_tolkienNot to beat the subject, like Fingon, to death, but neither writer is trod into the mire by a comparison to the other. The shortest distance between these two towers is the straight line they draw and defend against the dulling of our sense of wonder, the deadening of our sense of loss, and the slow death of imagination denied.

–Steve Tompkins, “The Shortest Distance Between Two Towers”

With my first Black Gate post of 2011 I thought I’d kick off the New Year with one of those big, bold, declarative, prediction type posts. So here it is: J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard are firmly ensconced as the two towers of fantasy, and as the years pass they will not only remain such, but perhaps will never be dethroned.

Although they arguably did not blaze the trail, Tolkien and Howard set the standard for two sub-genres of fantasy — high fantasy and swords and sorcery, respectively — and no one has done either better before or since.

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Vexed Hierarchies

Vexed Hierarchies

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Heroes in the WindAnother year’s drawing to a close, and with it the first full decade of the twenty-first century. It’s a time for looking back, for thinking over what’s happened and what’s going on, in fantasy fiction and elsewhere. I don’t pretend to be in a position to make any worthwhile assessment of fantasy as a whole; but I do want to write about a change that seems to be in process right now. I think it’s a positive change, and potentially a radical one. And I can remember the moment I realised it was happening.

It was when I saw a collection of Robert E. Howard short stories published by Penguin Books.

Let me firstly explain why this was a shock. When I was a kid, Penguin seemed to be a publisher of self-consciously literary books; orange-spined paperbacks featuring mostly English people doing resolutely ordinary everyday things. This wasn’t accurate, as Penguin published sf writers, from Fred Hoyle to Keith Laumer to Fred Saberhagen, as well as mysteries, and writers like Ian Fleming and P.G. Wodehouse; but the perception was that the orange-spined books were realist fiction, and ambitious on a level above the rest. They didn’t interest me at the time, but I gathered from the adults around me that these books represented, in some way that was never clearly articulated, a literary quality beyond the sf and fantasy that I was reading.

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