Dark Worlds Quarterly surveys The Lost Cities of Conan, complete with a fine if small-sized map. With a little digging I find that Cap’n’s Comics has the same 1975 map in a larger and readable form.
Conan mapped
18 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted REH
in18 Sunday Feb 2024
Posted REH
inDark Worlds Quarterly surveys The Lost Cities of Conan, complete with a fine if small-sized map. With a little digging I find that Cap’n’s Comics has the same 1975 map in a larger and readable form.
27 Saturday Jan 2024
More new free LORAs of possible interest, for use with your local AI image generation software (ComfyUI, InvokeAI, etc, running Stable Diffusion 1.5).
Death Metal artwork, in an album-cover style though one can remove the lettering (SD 1.5 doesn’t do readable lettering). Seems well-liked by those who’ve tried to work with it.
Possibly also useful for fantasy-horror needs, the new environment LORAs Fantasy Swamps (generic) and Ice Age (old and future Ice Ages, sci-fi ice worlds).
Perhaps interesting to combine in Lovecraft-y ways, the new silhouette-y Shadow Concept and the dusk-with-glows Shadow Concept.
And finally, a new Solomon Kane character LORA, based on stills from the movie.
16 Tuesday Jan 2024
Posted REH
inThe Robert E. Howard Days organisers have the event’s 2024 hour-by-hour schedule available.
07 Sunday Jan 2024
Posted REH, Scholarly works
inReleased at the end of November 2023, The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies (13.2). Howard Works has the TOCs, which reveal no Lovecraft material.
Also in Howard news, Dark Worlds Quarterly has the new and richly illustrated article surveying “The Inkers of John Buscema’s Savage Sword”.
02 Monday Oct 2023
Posted REH
inNew this week, a look at “Stephen King on Robert E. Howard”. Not just REH. Back in the day, the article finds that…
King chose to manufacture a sensationalized version of events to present H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as “mutilated personalities.
The end of the article also praises the new book of essays Beyond the Black Stranger and Others: New Essays on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft (2023). These being essays by Charles Hoffman, which I linked here last week.
28 Thursday Sep 2023
Posted Podcasts etc., REH, Scholarly works
inStreaming audio recordings from PulpFest 2023, now available. The list includes, among others…
* Sword and sorcery in “The Unique Magazine” [Weird Tales]
* Weird Tales on radio
* Those weird men’s adventure magazines
* Illustrating Conan for the commercial market
* Weird Editors
* Doc Savage and his offspring
No .MP3 downloads, but anyone handy with “Inspect element” and DIV-wrangling will find the link they want.
There are also dates for your 2024 diary. PulpFest 2024 will be in Pittsburgh, USA, from the 1st – 4th August 2024.
25 Monday Sep 2023
Posted Lovecraftian arts, REH
inNew on Archive.org, a long run of Dungeon magazine from 1986-2010. Being the official D&D magazine, by the look of it. Even if you’re not into RPGs, it has a wealth of illustrations.
Also the official news ‘zine from 1981 to 2004.
07 Thursday Sep 2023
I’ve fixed some linkrot on my links-list of free R.E. Howard audio books, originally posted 2014.
Also in REH, I see that last month Michael K. Vaughan had a YouTube podcast/video which explained the Robert E. Howard Del Rey Editions and why they’re important and much-loved.
Also, new this week at Law & Liberty magazine, “The Flame and Cycle of Civilization in Robert E. Howard’s Weird Fiction”.
05 Tuesday Sep 2023
Posted New books, REH, Scholarly works
inDetails of what’s in the annual German-language double-issue magazine from the German Lovecraftians. Printing soon, and it should be available to buy shortly.
Lovecrafter 11: special issue on Lovecraft’s poetry.
* Following the recent German publication of the volume of poems Fungi by Yuggoth and other poems, an article “will present and discuss the translation and book in as much detail as possible”. [Sounds like a ‘making of’ article?]
* Form fanaticism and nostalgia in Lovecraft’s poems. [Probably about his passion for old metres, poetic forms and subject matter?]
* Lovecraft’s graphology. [His penmanship, or otherwise, and presumably also trying to divine personality from the handwriting?]
* ‘Mushroom Gardens in Bloom’ – a review of H.P. Lovecraft’s Fungi of Yuggoth and Other Poems (German edition).
Lovecrafter 12: special issue on Robert E. Howard.
Parallels between “Howard’s biography and the protagonists of his stories”.
A look at “the origins and relevance of the barbaric in more detail”.
An article which “roves through the sunken temple complexes and black stone structures that leave us so unsettled in the context of cosmic horror”.
“Digital Horror Upgrade 2.0”, in which Dennis Grob examines a number of obscure and often unknown videogame titles.
And various RPG gaming material.
19 Saturday Aug 2023
Posted REH
in08 Tuesday Aug 2023
Posted REH
inDates for the 2024 ‘Howard Days’ at Cross Plains Texas, celebrating Robert E. Howard in his home town. 14th & 15th June 2024. Update: they changed their minds. Now 7th & 8th June 2024.
In 2023 the annual event was held at the end of April, which as I recall was an experimental shift to see if cooler weather boosted attendance.
30 Sunday Jul 2023
Posted Lovecraftian arts, REH
inSpiral Tower on “The Glut of New Sword and Sorcery”…
[it’s] increasingly feeling like a claustrophobic, crowded field [in novels, but in a good and ‘too much quality to read’ way]. I don’t think the glut of new sword and sorcery literature is a problem. But I do think this acknowledging this new phase in indie S&S might be helpful for writers, readers, and publishers.
Sounds good. I knew the “New Pulp” was a thing, and I’d kind of felt the wider cultural sea-change ‘bubbling under’. But the “New S&S” in novels is… new. I’m spreading the word here. See Spiral Tower’s post for various author names and titles of novels.
So it sounds to me like the new Conan publisher will be bringing their items to market at the right time. There’s a new novel series (though the first book had so-so reviews, I recall) and a new non-Marvel comics series (un-connected to the new novels, according to a recent interview I read). Both are apparently more REH-aligned than the mega-corp Marvel/Disney could have made them.
What’s probably needed then is more outreach, to build young audiences for these “new S&S” novels and anthologies, rather than simply curation and book-reviews for old hands. The old hands probably know enough to detect the good stuff by osmosis, and are canny enough to be able to winnow the good stuff into a pile of the really good stuff. But the process for young people probably goes: hear about the novels -> are there audiobooks -> are there full-cast and music unabridged audiobooks? I’m assuming that the age 13-23 market for reading multiple 600-page manly S&S novels on paper is limited these days, amidst the many time-sucking demands of videogames, anime, manga, YouTube, AI image-making, movies, drugs and booze, sports, part-time jobs, college, online eBay side-hustles and whatever the latest social-media app craze is.
On the other hand, the failing Marvel Comics thinks there’s a market for their new line of “crime novels”… so who knows? Maybe a hybrid highly-illustrated form of novel? But that’s been tried before, with not a great deal of success.
So… yes… a really high-quality crowdfunded audiobooks of the very best of this “New S&S” glut would be my starting suggestion, accompanied by a really good free magazine to curate and signpost the stuff each month. Indeed, one might bundle the magazine back-issues free with each audiobook. Such a thing, modestly priced, would be a big draw and a ‘sub-genre taster’ for many.
Audio would also mean that the old hands could cram in even more reading each month. Just slap on a pair of 300ft RF wireless headphones (not the infernal Bluetooth type), and ‘read’ while doing other things.
I’d also emphasise to young readers (probably male) the courage, pride, honour, what Lovecraft calls the barbarian virtue of “unbrokenness”, etc. Just look at how immensely popular Wilbur Smith’s manly books still are. Of course, a bit of sex never hurt either, something lacking in REH due to the constraints of his time. And perhaps a catchy new youth-friendly marketing formula, alongside the somewhat tired old “S&S”? How about MMM! — manliness, magic and maidens. Sounds like a catchy short title for the free magazine that might curate the “New S&S”.