Metal Barbarian Dinosaur Comics #1: Dream That Impossible Dream

Well, my first comic - well, not my first, but the first with any degree of professionalism, and certainly the first I like enough to put on the internet - is online, along with work from my fellows, at the Greenock Comics Book page!  Be sure to check out 'The Gun,' the worst - by which I mean best - superhero ever.

But however will you know what it is, when you don't click?

Andrew Marr on Blogging

This isn't really to do with any of the usual fare of TBTTF, but since it regards the very nature of blogging, I feel it worth discussing.

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people. 

What young men has Andy been hanging around with, if he categorizes them as "bald" and "cauliflower-nosed"?  What does social competence, complexion, relationship status and housing have to do with their arguments anyway?  Hell, what does baldness have to do with it?  Doesn't seem to cause Andy any problems.

Thomas Ellison Is Not Well: Robert E. Howard and Norman Bates

So, we've had Howard compared to Tweedledum, Al Capone, and now Norman Bates.

Of course!  How could I not see it before!

Oh, that's right...

Robert Bloch was inspired to write Psycho after reading about Ed Gein’s exploits but I contend parts of the novel were inspired by Robert E. Howard’s last days as chief caregiver for his sick mother.  In Chapter Nine, Norman Bates realizes he will always be mommy’s little boy.  The only time Norman feels like a somebody is when he’s lost in a book.  Robert E. Howard could never escape being mommy’s little boy, either.  When he was writing for pulp mags or letters to friends, Howard was Two-Gun Bob, Terror of Cross Plains.  Howard had fans, admirers, and editors who wanted to publish his stories.  But in the end, Howard was just Hester Howard’s frightened little boy.  On June 11 1936, Robert E. Howard shot himself moments after he learned his mother would never awaken from a coma.  Why did the creator of Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, and many other characters end his life when he was so close to being free from the burden that had crippled his writing for so long?  Maybe Norman Bates is right  when he says “I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times.”

Lovely.  I don't see this ending up badly at all.  That said, I can see how someone could make the Bates-Howard connection if one bases it on Bloch's misconception of Howard the Oedipal, but it's clear that Thomas Ellison is saying that Bloch was basing it on fact, not misconception.

Keeping up with the Grinses

I miss Leo quite a bit.  I remember clicking on The Cimmerian, eager to read his latest news from the world of Howardom, or Tolkienalia, or Dunsanya.  I've been reading his essays in The Cimmerian journal, and I'm really rather saddened that he hasn't been around for such a while.

Luckily, though, Leo hasn't completely skipped planets, as he can be found at Big Hollywood.  Leo never made the connection between his work at TC with his work at BH, and for good reason: Big Hollywood is a site for conservative movie lovers.  Given how powerfully divisive politics can be in America - as circumstantially portrayed at TC itself, where John J. Miller, a writer and Howard fan who just happened to be a proud conservative, had his books "one-star bombed" at Amazon.com for the simple reason that his politics are not the same as another group's politics - this was unquestionably a choice for the better.  I would've hated for TC to be the recipient of such childish, petty antics, regardless of what I think of an author's political stance.

But this blog isn't TC, and I since I'm not an American, my opinions on the American political spectrum hopefully won't attract too much attention.  Not that I'm going to comment on them, of course: this blog is a politics-free zone.  There are enough things to disagree about within the realms of fiction without hauling deeply-set fundamental beliefs into it.

Anyway, reading up on Big Hollywood has allowed me a way of keeping up with Leo, and reminding me that he hasn't stalked off into the wilderness to hunt and forage.  So I come to my latest linkage and thinkage, as Leo discusses something that had been bothering me for a while: the treatment of vampires and other supernatural horrors linked with Christianity in cinema and television in recent years.

Fritz Leiber reads Clark Ashton Smith!

OK, this is the last link post for this week, I'd try to have something more substantial tomorrow.

Saturday night, October 29, 1977 at the World Fantasy Convention, in the Music Room of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, following the 10:00 p.m. slot with Harlan Ellison performing his, “The Man Who Was Heavily Into Revenge,” was a hard act to follow, but as the years, and decades have gone by, Fritz Leiber’s far more mellow reading of Clark Ashton Smith’s, “A Night in Malnéant,” has become an absolute treasure to hear again and again.
Having the legendary Fritz Leiber, reading Clark Ashton Smith at the World Fantasy Convention dedicated to him, in the middle of so many Lovecraftians, and beautifully capturing the audio to share now for the first time in 33 years is amazing!

I hope this recording means as much to those who download it, as finding it, still in great shape, after all these years, means to me.

I’m so very glad to be able to finally hand out this treasure:

Fritz Leiber Reading Clark Ashton Smith’s A Night in Malnéant at the World Fantasy Con III in 29-Oct-1977 Biltmore Hotel Music Room Los Angeles

Please take a few minutes to look through the many new (248!) Fritz Leiber related images in the newly opened Fritz Leiber CthulhuWho1 Flickr Collection at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/cthulhuwho1/sets/72157625066410282/

And if you’ll move on to the next post, you’ll find Fritz Leiber’s comments from the HPL Panel in Phoenix now available as a separate file…

This is so cool.  Speaking of Leiber on the HPL panel...

This is part of a series on Leiber audio files.  I'm not really as big a fan of Leiber's Sword-and-Sorcery as others - for some reason he seemed a little too light for my liking - but his horror was top notch.

Yog-Blogsothery

Once again in lieu of a real post, I present another link. Courtesy of Huge Ruined Pile (of what?  Rags?  Books?  People?  THE PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW) I've been introduced to this delightful little blog, a catalogue of Lovecraftian beasties.  My favourites are the artist's interpretation of the Voonith, Elder Thing, Yekubian, the other Whately brother, and what I believe to be the dreaded Anthropornis megalbus, though they're all really cool.

One of these days I'll be filling this blog with my scratchings: pictures, sketches, whatnot.  There's this "sketch-a-day" phenomenon on DeviantArt where a bored artist would draw pictures of a character every day for a period of time.  I might do that, get drawing again.  I have to at least catch up to One Last Sketch's Lurking Humour.  But then, I'll have to think up a name for my comic series...

H.P. Lovecraft's The Silver Key

OK, seriously, how many Lovecraft fan films have we been blessed with?  Quite a lot, I'd wager.  And they're good, real good.

Us Howard fans really have to catch up.

Guy's Lit Wire on Howard

A while back, Will Ludwigsen wrote a very good review of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian on Guy's Lit Wire.  His fellow blogger Alex Bledsoe has decided to add his own.

It's... problematic. Between the factual inaccuracies (like how Howard apparently never traveled out of his "own back yard") and the not very complimentary statements like this:

So what's my point? Simply this--he did the best he could, and with nothing but drive and imagination he created a whole new genre. And those are tools anyone reading this blog has to some degree. We often talk about what the books reviewed here mean to boys, and whether or not boys would like them; in this case, I want to use The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian as a challenge to cultivate your own drive and imagination, and apply it to creating something new. If an isolated young man in the middle of the Texas oil fields can create sword and sorcery, then what might you create?

It basically comes across like he's saying anyone reading this blog might do something better than REH.  It's the old "REH's work was immature, imagine what he could've done when he was older" thing.

I think Mr Bledsoe needs to give the books another read, myself.  With lines like these:

Yet it's also clearly the work of a young man. Most characters other than Conan are defined by a single quality, and are either good or evil, with little middle ground. In The Phoenix on the Sword and The Scarlet Citadel, Conan is the middle-aged king of Aquilonia, but none of the wounds and injuries he suffers as a younger man tell on him. There's no mention of any aches or pains, and the scars are simply marks of past adventures. Only an inexperienced young man in his twenties would imagine this as middle age. And his women, while not exactly shrinking violets (the pirate queen Belit trysts with Conan on deck, in full view of her crew), are also nothing like actual human beings, being once again defined by two simplistic qualities: how beautiful they are, and how quickly Conan gets them. Had Howard lived, I imagine his Conan stories would have grown in sophistication and depth to reflect his own life experience.

I have to wonder if he's reading the same stories I am.   Did he somehow miss how the villains of "The Phoenix on the Sword" all had independent, understandable motivations beyond "they're evil because they're evil"? If Conan was feeling aches and pains, he would be distracted and vulnerable - and dead.  Luckily, Conan's made of sterner stuff than the average soft-bellied middle-aged civilized man.  Gotta love Howard's women being "nothing like human beings": in fairness, he has clearly not read "Red Nails," "The People of the Black Circle," "The Black Stranger," The Hour of the Dragon or the other Conan stories with the best women, but at the same time, even in TCoCtC, women do not exist for Conan to "get them."

It all seems to smack of back-handed compliments.  Yet early in the article, Bledsoe says "Much as Tolkein did for epic fantasy, Howard set the initial bar so high that few have equalled, let alone surpassed what he accomplished."  Yet if few have equalled Howard, how could you possibly expect the readers of the blog to approach it?  Confusing.

I appreciate the good things Bledsoe says about Howard, but the inaccurate information and facile readings (seriously, not all middle-aged men who've been in the wars have nagging injuries, and it's quite clear Conan's a barbarian with pretty impressive healing qualities of his own) undermine it.  Hopefully he'll go back and pore over the stories with a more discerning eye, and read the other two Del Reys.  Maybe then he'll see just how much Howard has to offer beyond musing on "what could have been."

Ironclad's looking pretty grim

Yes, it does.

I'm looking forward to Ironclad a lot more than I was looking forward to Robin Hood.  Why?  Brian Cox. This guy is awesome.  Plus James Purefoy, of who I am now quite a fan, Derek Jacobi, Vladimir Goddamn Kulich!  That's in addition to setting it during a Medieval conflict that's not about the Crusades or Robin Hood, which is a plus.

Now, there are a few things I'm a bit iffy about: I really hope Kate Mara - sadly not Kate O'Mara, as I mistakenly thought - the requisite Action Chick is fairly believable (i.e. not an 80lb soaking wet waif), Purefoy is really far too young to play Marshall at this point in time, and I'm not sure about those giant double-bitted axes the besiegers were wielding.  Plus that tagline on the poster is a bit... well, it's a bit something.

THIS.  IS.  SPARTA!

Ah well.  I still want to see it.  There's been a dearth of really good medieval films, especially given the tremendous disappointments of Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood.

Swords Against the Outer Dark interviews Andrea Bonazzi

There's something about this chap that seems starkly familiar...

but I can't quite put my finger on it...

I dig Andrea Bonazzi's work. Those of you who've read my old Cimmerian entries might remember "The Letter of Glen Schuyler Hoffman," a fun little Weird Tales jaunt that recasts Lovecraft, Howard and Smith as paranormal investigators.  This was directly inspired by Bonazzi's photographs, where he digitally juxtaposes photographs of famous authors alongside sculptures inspired by their stories: most notably, the Weird Tales Troika.  Not just the Weird Musketeers: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Edgar Allan Poe and even Tolkien receive the Bonazzi treatment.  You could make a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen from them!  Well, Swords Against the Outer Dark has an interview up with the very clever chap.

I simply can't overstate how phenomenally cool his work is.  Lovecraft beside an unearthed Elder Thing tablet, Smith next to a blasphemous idol, Howard beside an uncanny statue! There's even a picture of the Weird Musketeers together, which ignited ideas of an alternate universe where they leave fiction aside to become Cthulhubusters, defending the earth from the machinations of the Black Ring, the Church of Starry Wisdom and the Brothers of the Yellow Sign.  They travel the world, sometimes teaming up with the Inklings, their British compatriots.  Sometimes they go off-world, to Almuric, Cykranosh, Yag, Yekub, Yuggoth and beyond, or to other dimensions of space and time - the Dreamlands, Zothique, the Outer Dark.

Plus the man made a Cthulhu pipe.  A Cthulhu pipe.

Ce n'est pas une pipe.

C'est glorieuse.

I must possess one.

Now, if only he could do some stuff with C.L. Moore, A. Merrit and Arthur Conan Doyle...