Search Results for: book club

Uncanny X-Men, Part 26: Introducing Kitty Pryde, Emma Frost and Launching the Dark Phoenix Saga in 1979!

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Well, if you’ve been waiting for my epic reread of the Uncanny X-Men to reach one of the most consequential and memorable stories in comic history, your waiting has paid off. It only took 26 blog posts, but we’ve arrived at the beginning of the Dark Phoenix Saga. This arc of the Dark Phoenix Saga, from issue #129 to #131 does some major things. First, it introduces a mutant who will over the course of the coming decades become a…

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Witches, Menacing Forests, & the True Meaning of Fairy Tales: A Tale Dark & Grimm by Adam Gidwitz

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Covers by Dan Santat The Christmas break is usually a bit of a reading vacation for me, a chance to catch up on the year’s big reads. Of course, I don’t always want to read big, important books while I’m on vacation. Sometimes (usually), I just want something fun. That’s how I ended up reading Adam Gidwitz’s A Tale Dark & Grimm yesterday, the first book in his dark retelling of favorite kid’s stories. The series was published nearly a…

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The Casablanca Letters

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I think that Groucho Marx was one of the funniest men who ever lived. And I laugh out loud a the movies he made with his brothers. Well, most of them, anyways. I strongly recommend his book. The Groucho Letters. When word was making the rounds around 1944 that the boys were going to make a movie called A Night in Casablanca, Warner Brothers threatened legal action. Jack and the boys felt that this intruded in the territory of their…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Tony Curtis Goes Yonda

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Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie in The Prince Who Was a Thief (1951) In the early Fifties, Tony Curtis was still honing his skills as an actor, but he was good-looking, athletic, and gosh, people liked him, so Universal decided to make him a star. Fortunately for us, for his first two swashbucklers Universal paired him with Piper Laurie, who was even more good-looking, athletic, and likeable than Curtis. And knowing that by the late Fifties Curtis would become a…

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A Potent Draught of Distilled Fairy Fruit: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

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I’m back with a new column. Each first Friday of the month I’ll be writing about a work of fantasy I’ve never read (or read only once a long time ago; I insist on room for maneuvering!). Because of Lin Carter’s magnificent taste, it may at times seem I’m simply going through titles from his Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, but my goal is to rummage around in the basement and attic of fantasy, exploring works that preceded, or exist outside…

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Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords: Louis Hayward, Everyman with a Sword (Part 2 of 2)

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This week we continue our review of the work of British-trained actor Louis Hayward, this time looking at the lesser-known swashbucklers from later in his career (see Part 1 here). The main general point of interest here is how these movies reflect the influence of film noir, then at the height of its postwar popularity. These are low to medium budget films, like the films noir they compare to, but they were made with professionalism and a genuine feel for…

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: James Lee Burke’s Cajun Hardboiled

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Today, I’m going to write about James Lee Burke and Dave Robicheaux. It’s not going to be like my look at Tony Hillerman and his Navajo Tribal Police series, where re-read the first nine books and dug into his autobiography. This column is due in about 36 hours. But I put Burke back on my radar Friday night, and I’m glad I revisited him. Two days after my birthday in 1987 (giving you the opportunity to do some research, find…

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A First Look At The Sword of Cepheus for (cough) Travelers in Sword and Sorcery Realms

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Art: Stephanie McAlea I don’t like complexity in my tabletop-roleplaying games. It’s not just my age, I’m also more interested in the adventure than the stacking the of feats and traits. And, as a GM, frankly, the chaotic exploding synergies of games like Dungeons and Dragons make me feel panicky. However, I don’t like it when glossing over resource management breaks genre conventions — if torches can’t run out, if food isn’t scarce, then players will turn each dungeon adventure into…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: At the Movies with Basil (Rathbone)

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I started writing a regular column for Black Gate in March of 2014. I’ve covered a lot of ground, but today we’re going to try something new. Earlier this year, I was watching Casablanca (yet AGAIN) on TCM, and I decided to do do a running commentary about it on my FB page. I know a LOT about that movie. TCM showed it again a little over a month later, so I did it again. It was fun. I decided…

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Understanding the New Order

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Since Disney’s acquisition of Star Wars and its consequent films and streaming episodic shows — the very good The Mandalorian being only the first of several planned — many would be forgiven for forgetting the very long time between The Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace. 1983 to 1999. In that time, novels and comics were the primary vehicle for keeping Star Wars stories going, including the Thrawn Trilogy of novels by Timothy Zahn, published from 1991 to…

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