Guest Post | Groo vs Conan: A Hyborian Romp

By GW Thomas

December 1932: Conan the Cimmerian explodes onto the pages of Weird Tales in "The Phoenix on the Sword" by Robert E Howard. Not the first sword-and-sorcery tale (that was Howard's earlier Kull tale, "The Shadow Kingdom"), but "Phoenix" did begin a fantasy franchise that is still a hit today in novels, comics, and occasionally films and television.

Sergio Aragones was born just a little under five years later, in Spain. He rose to fame as a cartoonist in Mad Magazine, drawing all those little margin cartoons beginning in 1963. Mark Evanier (who will come in this story later) estimates that Sergio drew over 12,000 of them.

In May 1982, fifty years after Conan stepped onto the sword-and-sorcery stage, Groo the Wanderer appeared for the first time in the back pages of Destroyer Duck #1. This four-page battle scene between Groo and a four-armed dinosaur ninja goes badly for the princess whom Groo is attempting to save. The strip bears only Aragones name as he had yet to team up with writer Mark Evanier (see, told ya). This he would do for a back-up story in Starslayer #5 (November 1982). A five-pager this time, announcing the coming of Groo's own comic. And so it went. First Pacific Comics, then Marvel's Epic line, then Dark Horse. He is Groo "the Wanderer" after all.

In July 2014, we finally saw the stars align and the impossible happened. Conan, superstar of sword-and-sorcery, met Groo, super parody of same, in Groo vs. Conan, a four-part series. Begun in 2011, unavoidable delays due to back surgery kept the crossover from seeing print until 2014.

The plot is made up of three threads: first, that of the creators Sergio and Mark, who are trying to save a comic shop from being closed by a ruthless lawyer. Sergio ends up in the hospital and receives multiple medicinal shots, resulting in him running around the city in a hospital gown thinking he is Conan on a glorious adventure.

The second thread is Groo's, as he is hired to stop a protest around a bakery that is being closed by a ruthless vizier. When the townsfolk hear that Groo is coming, they cry that a terrible monster has come to kill them all.

The third thread is Conan's as he leaves his home to face the terrible monster Groo. The two meet and different versions of their meeting are told in taverns around the town. Meanwhile, back in Conan's village, his second in command Olaf takes over, having heard that Conan lost to Groo and is dead. All these threads rush together in what turns out to be a fairly predictable ending. Lawyer and vizier are defeated as Groo and Conan team up to fight a common enemy (what else would happen in a cross-over!). Poor Olaf when he finds out that Conan has not fallen in battle...

[NB: It turns out this wasn't the first time Sergio Aragones appeared as himself in a comic. In Jon Sable, Freelance #33 (Febuary 1986), Aragones is invited to draw the comic book version of BB Flemm's children's fantasy called "Cave of the Half-Pints," about leprechauns living in Central Park. Aragones appears alongside characters like Jon Sable and even ends up in a hot tub with his female agent.]

The final result of Groo versus Conan is a fun romp. The Aragones art is hilarious as always. To blend the more realistic Conan art of Tom Yeates must have been challenging, but the effect is good; something similar to Pete's Dragon animation from Disney back in the day. The jokes are fast and furious, with Evanier taking good-natured shots at hospitals, health care, the police, comic book fans, and best of all, at Sergio and Mark and their long working relationship. The sword-and-sorcery jokes were not as many as I would have liked, but after thirty-two years of Groo comics, what's left? Conan plays the straight man most often, with lines about how he must endure Groo's stupidity. Like so many actors faced with acting with a comedic maniac like Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, what do you do? Stand back and let them fly.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Michael and the Tower of the Elephant

Happy New Year, everybody!

Next week we'll get into 2015 movies that I watched (and didn't watch), but to close out this week and open up the year, here's a link to a short article I wrote for GW Thomas' Genre Writer blog.

You know GW from his awesome guest posts here, so it was fun to be able to write something for him when he put the call out for pieces on favorite science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. I had to think long and hard about it, but kept coming back to Robert E Howard's "Tower of the Elephant." Visit GW's blog to see why.

Sword and Sorcery Cliche No. 1: The Ming the Merciless Haircut [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

I am currently re-reading John Jakes's entire Brak the Barbarian saga, and I was struck by an odd thought. Why do wizards in sword-and-sorcery always dress like Ming the Merciless? In "The Unspeakable Shrine," Brak meets his nemesis, Septegundus, the Amyr of Evil and high priest of Yob-Haggoth:

And from the black portal silently glided the Amyr of Evil upon Earth...The man was not of overwhelming stature. He was clad in a plain black robe with voluminous sleeves into which his hands were folded. His pate was closely shaven, his nose aquiline, his lips thin. His chin formed a sharp point, and the upper parts of his ears were pointed, too. His eyes were large, dark, staring, nearly all pupil. Very little white showed. He had no eyelids. Evidently they had been removed by a crude surgical procedure. Light pads of scar tissue had encrusted above the sockets which held eyes that never closed.

Septegundus is far from an anomaly. He is the stereotypical sword-and-sorcery wizard. Bald, weird-looking, powerful, with evil eyes. Compare him to Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings:

An old man was driving it all alone. He wore a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, and a silver scarf. He had a long white beard and bushy eyebrows that stuck out beyond the brim of his hat.

Tolkien derived Gandalf's look from the Scandinavian tales of Odin who traveled in the guise of "The Grey God," a man in a wide-brimmed hat dressed in grey. The Ming stereotype is coming from a different lineage, the gothics.

The horror tradition in fiction begins in England with The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole. These novels, especially those of Ann Radcliffe, feature creepy houses, lost heirs, fake monsters, and a lot of shocks for shock sake. This tradition would eventually dissolve into other forms of storytelling, including detective and mystery fiction and the psychological horror tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Do they feature bald-headed wizards? Not really. Though Ambrosio from MG Lewis's The Monk (1796) is certainly the most influential of all gothic characters:

He was a Man of noble port and commanding presence. His stature was lofty, and his features uncommonly handsome. His Nose was aquiline, his eyes large black and sparkling, and his dark brows almost joined together. His complexion was of a deep but clear Brown; Study and watching had entirely deprived his cheek of colour. Tranquillity reigned upon his smooth unwrinkled forehead; and Content, expressed upon every feature, seemed to announce the Man equally unacquainted with cares and crimes. He bowed himself with humility to the audience: Still there was a certain severity in his look and manner that inspired universal awe, and few could sustain the glance of his eye at once fiery and penetrating. Such was Ambrosio, Abbot of the Capuchins, and surnamed, 'The Man of Holiness'.

So how did the bald look find its way into sword-and-sorcery? You can thank Weird Tales. You have to remember that sword-and-sorcery as Robert E Howard created it was half fantasy and half horror. He had to sell these stories to Farnsworth Wright after all, and WT was a horror pulp. In the stories that Howard wanted to sell to Adventure (Stories like "By This Axe I Rule" or "Kings of the Night") he drops almost all the horror trimmings, writing something closer to a Harold Lamb or Talbot Mundy tale. He was a professional and he wanted to crack more prestigious magazines.

So, Weird Tales is the gateway. Howard introduces Thoth-Amon in "The Phoenix on the Sword" (December 1932) and this evil Stygian priest doesn't bear the look (not yet, later in the Marvel Comics and the L Sprague de Camp pastiches he would get the buzz cut.) Even though Thoth-Amon didn't get much description, his activities are similar to another character, Fu Manchu:

Of him it had been fitly said that he had a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. Something serpentine, hypnotic, was in his very presence. Smith drew one sharp breath, and was silent. Together, chained to the wall, two mediaeval captives, living mockeries of our boasted modern security, we crouched before Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Robert E Howard had written of his own version of Fu named Kathulos of Egypt in "Skull-Face" (October-December 1929):

The hands--but, oh God, the face! A skull to which no vestige of flesh seemed to remain but on which taut brownish-yellow skin grew fast, etching out every detail of that terrible death's-head. The forehead was high and in a way magnificent, but the head was curiously narrow through the temples, and from under penthouse brows great eyes glimmered like pools of yellow fire. The nose was high-bridged and very thin; the mouth was a mere colorless gash between thin, cruel lips. A long, bony neck supported this frightful vision and completed the effect of a reptilian demon from some medieval hell.

Howard, after Rohmer, is clearly working in a tradition descended from Otranto, with men reborn from Ancient Asia, whether China or Egypt, the cradle of mysterious wisdom and evil.

To make this even clearer, there are two major undercurrents in the gothics that truly pin down the evil wizard type. The first is that the underlying plot of gothic stories is about something from the past terrorizing the present. In Otranto, this is the specter of the giant knight who crushes Manfred's heir with a helmet, steps out of paintings, and ultimately destroys him. In later years this can be seen in horror fiction in any story in which an ancient object haunts a family like in "The Stone Idol" by Seabury Quinn, or in ghost stories like MR James' "Lost Hearts." In mystery fiction this is the crime that haunts the perpetrator such as the classic Wilkie Collins story The Moonstone (1868) or Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock tale, "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" (The Strand, July 1893). In the noir branch, it's the unknown crime in Cornell Woolrich's The Black Curtain (1941). In sword-and-sorcery (and other forms of fantasy), this is Bilbo's Ring or the ancient snake worshippers of Set, who harken back to the Snake Men of Prehistory. It can be any object, book, knowledge, god, or monster that returns centuries later. And that's our sorcerer buddy. He is either such a person, or works for such a deity, or possesses such an object. They buy into the idea that ancient power can make them powerful now. It is up to the barbarian hero to thwart such ideas.

The second theme that the gothics give us is the idea that old things are evil and new things are our savior. This is immediately evident when you look at the hero, Brak:

The mendicant seemed to hunch in fright cowed by the figure before him: the bigger man plainly was an outlander, a huge, yellow-headed giant whose hair was plaited in a single long braid that hung down his back. A glossy fur cloak and cowl around the barbarian’s shoulders reflected the torchglare dimly. The big man was naked save for this fur and a garment of lion’s hide about his hips.

Brak is young, well-maned, and virile. The female characters are usually voluptuous, fecund, and available. Villains such as Ariane are usually too beautiful, hinting at their deceit, and often prove to be withered crones or monsters when their magic is dispelled. The wizard is the exact opposite to Brak, old-looking, bald, and with eyes that contain evil powers. The baldness is important, for it is a sign of age, impotence and decay. In gothic texts, the authors often suggested that the Roman Catholic religion was likewise decrepit and oppressive; old, but evil. The gothics weren't anti-religion, just anti-Catholic, for the hero (no longer disguised as a peasant, returned to his true lordship) marries the heroine in a good Anglican church, with a bright future ahead. The evil, old dude gets his comeuppance and if he has time says something akin to "And I would have gotten away with to too, if it weren't for you meddling kids." This kind of shorthand works for all kinds of villains and comics certainly have had their share, such as The Red Skull in Captain America.

Lastly, to cement the point, let's consider Elric of Melnibone. Michael Moorcock created Elric as a kind of anti-Conan. Instead of strong, he is a weak albino. Instead of handsome, he is freakish. In fact, Moorcock uses many of the villain characteristics to create his anti-hero. He is haunted by his sword, Stormbringer, who must be fed souls to keep the weak body going. This sword is the object from the past that haunts his present, dooming his future. In many ways, Elric is the image of the sorcerer, not the swordsman. In some ways but not all. Elric is not bald but has a flowing white mane. He is also resourceful, able to have companions, and is capable of love. Moorcock created a hero who is halfway between the two types. This should not be surprising when you consider one of his influences was Mervyn Peake, who wrote the Gormenghast trilogy, undoubtedly the most gothic of the fantasy sagas. Unlike Tolkien, Moorcock is consciously choosing to work inside the gothic tradition, though bending and stretching it to his own ends. This opening of gothic elements helped allow sword-and-sorcery to evolve past the Howardian formula. Series like Gene Wolfe's The Book of New Sun and Samuel R Delaney's Neveryona play with these elements in fresh ways. (Though read any Conan novel by Robert Jordan, Leonard Carpenter, or others and you will find any number of baldies trying to resurrect ancient gods. Even worse, consider Skeletor from The Masters of the Universe! Alas, some like the formulas as is).

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

31 Witches | The Hyborian Witch

"There's warmth and fire... Do you not wish to warm yourself? By my fire?" -- The Witch, Conan the Barbarian (1982)

The Sword of Charlton, Part 1: Herc and Thane [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

When you say "sword-and-sorcery comics" you usually think of Roy Thomas and Barry Smith in Conan the Barbarian, back in October 1970. DC tested the waters in 1969 with "Nightmaster" in DC Showcase #82-84, then in 1971 there was a guest spot for Fafhrd and Grey Mouser in Wonder Woman #202 (August 1972), but DC didn't put them in a regular title until March 1973 with Sword of Sorcery. You would think Charlton - Marvel and DC's poor cousin - would be slow to take on the new fad of sword-and-sorcery comics, but in fact this was not the case.

Sword-and-sorcery titles exploded after Conan the Barbarian, but they had a good five-year initiation before the Cimmerian stomped the Halls of Marvel. The action was in the horror anthologies and undergrounds: Unearthly Spectaculars, Creepy, Eerie, Witzend, The Witching Hour, Web of Horror, Vampirella, House of Mystery, Chamber of Darkness, and on. Artists who became famous (or were already famous) for other kinds of comics experimented with sword-and-sorcery: Wally Wood, Steve Ditko, Gray Morrow, Reed Crandall, Jeff Jones, Tom Sutton, Alex Nino, and Berni Wrightson. The most prolific writer before Roy Thomas was Archie Goodwin. The anthologies were willing to take a chance on a sword-and-sorcery story as long as it had some horrific element. And why not? It was just one story.

The only exception was a Charlton title: Adventures of the Man-God Hercules (October 1967-December 1968), predating Conan by three years. The comic ran for thirteen issues, all written by Joe Gill and drawn by Sam Glanzman. The title sticks out because during this time at Charlton the majority of their comics were either horror anthologies like The Many Ghosts of Doctor Graves or media-based comics like The Flintstones or Bullwinkle and Rocky. In 1967 there were no new Hercules films. From 1963 to 1965 there had been a spate of them starring Gordon Scott and others. On TV, the cartoon The Mighty Hercules had finished its run in 1966. For Charlton to do a new non-media-driven Hercules title, when the material seemed worn out, is unusual.

Until you consider sword-and-sorcery. Lancer books had been selling piles of Conan paperbacks starting in 1966. Someone at Charlton had noticed and that person was Denny O'Neil (scripting under the pseudonym Sergius O'Shaugnessy). In the letter columns the editors clearly identify the comic as sword-and-sorcery. A fifteen year-old Klaus Janson, who would become famous as Frank Miller's inker on Wolverine, asked why Charlton did not adapt Robert E Howard's Conan? The answer: too expensive. The public domain character of Hercules was a much cheaper alternative. O'Neil would leave Charlton for DC, giving him the chance to create Nightmaster for DC and write Sword of Sorcery, those DC titles mentioned above. Without the opportunity to explore the genre at Charlton, Denny O'Neil and DC might never have looked at sword-and-sorcery comics.

The thirteen issues of Hercules were based on the Twelve Labors of Hercules from mythology. Upon his mother's death, Hercules asks his father, the god Zeus, if he can become one of the gods. To do this he must complete twelve impossible tasks (erroneously nine in the first issue but corrected in the second). As Hercules attempts a different task each issue, Zeus' wife, the goddess Hera, tries to thwart him, since Hercules is the son of one of Zeus' lovers, Alcmene. These mighty challenges include killing the Nemean Lion, the three giants Gerion, returning Queen Alcestis from the dead and fighting Cerberus, entering another dimension and defeating the harpies for golden apples, stealing the Amazon queen's girdle, fighting the minotaur and the giant bull of Minos, the giant boar of Erymanthus, the flesh-eating horses of Diomedes, and the nine-headed hydra. Hercules ran out of labors shortly before the series ended. The feel of the series is quite similar to the films of Ray Harryhausen such as Jason and the Argonauts from 1963, with its heavenly game-players watching over the human pawns.

In terms of artwork, Sam Glanzman begins with a fairly tight style, then loosened up after the first two issues. Some letter writers complimented his art as being similar to Joe Kubert's work. By issue five Glanzman's distinctive look was in place, with Hercules' eyes being almond-shaped. There was discussion about the "slanted" eyes, but Glanzman never changed this, keeping his style the same to the end. The early issues feel stiff and dull. Though the later style is perhaps more cartoony, the lines suggests more action and flow.

It is doubtful Hercules had much influence on Conan the Barbarian as Roy Thomas had Robert E Howard's original stories to work from, but this can't be said for later comics (especially DC titles) like Michael Urslan's Beowulf: Dragonslayer and Gerry Conway's post-apocalyptic version of Hercules Unbound. The mythological hero-adventurer is part-and-parcel of sword-and-sorcery and these writers used it as well. What Adventures of the Man-God Hercules did do was get the ball rolling, allowing Marvel to establish their Conan franchise.

The back-up to Hercules was "Thane of Bagarth" (December 1967-Sept 1969) written by Steven Skeates and drawn by Jim Aparo and later San Ho Kim. This strip was set in the days after Beowulf. Hrothelac has his title of Thane of Bagarth taken from him by deceit. His enemies, including his brother, frame him for collaborating with the Swedes. In exile, he is captured by Vikings and made a slave. His ship sinks off the English coast and Hrothalec is imprisoned. He escapes with the help of the alchemist Mordwain. The series takes a weird turn at this point with time travelers coming to the past. What had been a complex tale of intrigue and power-playing shifts into science fiction. The series was partially reprinted in 1985 using fantasy-related strips from their vaults as back-ups, including Steve Ditko's "The Hammer of Thor" from Out of this World #11 (January 1959) and "Robin Hood Confounds a Rival" from Robin Hood and His Merry Men #32 (May 1957). Skeates left Charlton for Warren in 1971 where he wrote sword-and-sorcery in "The Dragon-Prow" (Creepy #39, May 1971) and "Musical Chairs" (Eerie #43, November 1972), drawn by Charlton pal, Tom Sutton.

After thirteen issues, Charlton dropped their one sword-and-sorcery title, but they weren't done with heroic fantasy just yet...

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Fantasy, Oh, Fantasy, Where Art Thou Gone? [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

The 1960s saw an explosion in heroic fantasy fiction with Ballantine's The Lord of the Rings and the Lancer Conan paperbacks. Suddenly barbarians and hobbit-like creatures were everywhere. In novels, collections, anthologies and comic books. It was a wonderful decade for fantasy readers. But by 1979, things were changing and soon a desert would be born.

What caused sword-and-sorcery to disappear after the 1980s? I believe it was a combination of things. First, publishers like Belmont were pumping out quick knock-offs to try and grab some of the riches. Books like Quinn Reade's The Quest of the Dark Lady (1969) did nothing to improve what was already seen as a limited sub-genre. Magazines like Heavy Metal (starting in April 1977) did even less, muddying the waters with a weird blend of sword-and-planet and sex. The bestseller, The Sword of Shannara (1977) by Terry Brooks also showed that even really bad Tolkien imitations could make fortunes. Why write short stories of lone barbarians when fat novels about elves and dwarves could sell millions of copies?

Secondly, the role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons (1974) had narrowed the idea of fantasy, pairing Conan and Middle Earth to create a homogenized version of what should have been a genre without limits. Elves and barbarians fight side by side in Gary Gygax's game world. The younger fantasy fans were ultimately gamers and many became writers as well. These include Raymond E Feist, RA Salvatore, Garth Nix, David Langford, Michael Stackpole, and many others.

Thirdly and irreparably, was the movie Conan the Barbarian (1982). What should have been a high-water mark that propelled sword-and-sorcery into the mainstream consciousness, the film was the best of a steadily sinking list of films that are so awful they soon became direct to video. Not until Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 would another major fantasy film wave be created.

So things were pretty bad. What's a writer of heroic fantasy to do? Well, one of the few arenas left for sword-and-sorcery fiction was the gaming magazines. Yes, D&D may have caused some of the problems, but gamers still enjoyed heroic fantasy and published it alongside articles on fighting goblins and dungeon scenarios to play with your friends.

The biggest was TSR's The Dragon Magazine, which began in June 1976 and is still running in some form today. The issues of most importance are the paper ones: #1-359 (June 1976-September 2007). These were the ones that featured fiction. The list of authors who appeared is long but looking at the names I see trends:

The first is old-timers making an appearance. These included Rob Chilson, L Sprague de Camp, Harry O Fischer, Fritz Leiber, and Gordon Linzner. These stories were welcome, but not many. There were also novelists including excerpts to promote a new book: Terry Brooks (Shannara excerpt) and Andre Norton (Quag Keep excerpt). The most interesting of the old timers was Gardner F Fox, comic book veteran and now sword-and-sorcery writer with a long series about "Niall of the Long Journeys" starting in issue #2 and interspersed to #55 (July 1976-November 1981). Ben Bova, science fiction editor extraordinaire, also wrote a series on legendary heroes set in historical Britain between issues #236-311 (December 1996-September 2003).

The second group are names that have since become well-known in other publications like Asimov's, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and paperbacks. These stars of present day publishing include Thieves' World editor Lynn Abbey, Aaron Allston, Neal Barrett Jr, John Gregory Betancourt (future editor at Weird Tales and Wildside Press), Elaine Cunningham, Diane Duane, Esther M Friesner, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Brian A Hopkins, J Gregory Keyes, Jean Lorrah, George RR Martin (Game of Thrones superstar), Ardath Mayhar, Paul J McAuley, John Morressy, Joel Rosenberg, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (future editor of F&SF), Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Charles R Saunders, Steven Saylor (international bestseller with the Roma Sub Rosa mystery series), Darrell Schweitzer (future editor of Weird Tales), Lisa Smedman, Jeff Swycaffer, Steve Rasnic Tem, Harry Turtledove (sf and fantasy bestseller), Robert E Vardeman, and Lawrence Watts-Evan.

The third group are names we know from later days when the AD&D universe would sprawl out into paperbacks about the Dragonlance saga with its dragons and drow elves. These include Adam-Troy Castro, Troy Denning, Ed Greenwood, Tracy Hickman, Paul Kidd, Roger E Moore, Douglas Niles, Mel Odom, Jean Rabe, RA Salvatore, and Margaret Weis. Many of these books were bestsellers in their own right.

The second major gaming magazine was UK's White Dwarf, which ran from June/July 1977 to this day, but did not use a lot of fiction. The little it did feature was the humorous fantasy of David Langford (along with non-fiction by future fantasy star Garth Nix and the cartoon Conan parody "Thrud the Barbarian" by Carl Critchlow).

Probably the best magazine in terms of quality was Sorcerer's Apprentice, which ran for 17 issues from the Winter 1978 to a final issue in 1983. SA published the very best of fantasy authors with Robert E Vardeman, Charles de Lint, Tanith Lee, Janet Fox, Manly Wade Wellman, CJ Cherryh, and Fred Saberhagen. Roger Zelazny reprinted several of his Dilvish the Damned stories and even wrote a new one, "Garden of Blood" for issue #3. Karl Edward Wagner did likewise with his eternal swordsman Kane. Michael Stackpole, a future fantasy bestseller, wrote many of the non-fiction articles and acted as editor.

The last of the bunch was Ares, a magazine that focused on games besides AD&D. It ran from March 1980-1984 for 16 issues plus two specials. It featured fantasy fiction by M Lucie Chin, Jayge Carr, Ian McDowell, and Poul Anderson. The best sword-and-sorcery stories were "Inn At World's End" and "The Whispering Mirror" by Richard Lyon and Andrew Offutt, part of their Demon in the Mirror series that Timescape published.

November 1982 saw the gaming world enter the world of sf publishing when TSR, owners of AD&D bought Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback's original SF magazine. They would hold the copyright until 1996. Its new editor was George Scithers, who as a fanzine editor of Amra had been godparent to the term "sword-and-sorcery," born out of discussions between Fritz Leiber and Michael Moorcock. He won two Hugos for his editing at Asimov's before moving onto Amazing. The George Scither years at Amazing (1982-1986) held a nice balance between sf and fantasy with stories from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, Nancy Springer, Tanith Lee, Pat Murphy, David Langford, Lisa Tuttle, Diana L Paxson, Rosemary Edghill, Jayge Carr, Darrell Schweitzer, John Gregory Betancourt, Harry Turtledove (as Eric G Iverson), and Esther M Friesner. Many of these authors had appeared in The Dragon previously. Scither would leave in 1986 to re-emerge as the editor of another important magazine revival, Weird Tales in 1988, one of the last places to sell sword-and-sorcery in the 1990s.

The '80s saw a few bright flashes but over-all a dwindling in sword-and-sorcery. In paperback, the Thieves' World shared world spawned several books and there were also the Red Sonja novels by Smith and Tierney, Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Tomeo Gozon series, reprints of Elric, and new anthologies such as Sword and Sorceress by Marion Zimmer Bradley. The magazine markets for short sword-and-sorcery were pretty much depleted by 1980, with the folding of Ted White's reign at Fantastic and the last of Lin Carter's Year's Best anthologies. Fantasy was moving away from adventure and derring-do towards a softer, more literary kind. It also re-branded its name, no longer using sword-and-sorcery as a tag. The gamers went one way and the litterateurs another. The 1990s were coming and that desert I mentioned stretched out ahead, with only Conan pastiches and Xena: Warrior Princess left to remind us there had been a sword-and-sorcery boom twenty years before.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

The Battle of Five Armies: Of Orcs and Epics [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

As I sat watching the last of The Hobbit trilogy of films I realized something. We take so much for granted in the 21st Century. Imagine if I had a time machine and could go back to 1936. I'd step out (fighting the desire to find a newsstand and buy copies of Weird Tales in pristine condition) and meet some fan of Fantasy (after a very long search) and we'd talk. We could discuss Lord Dunsany, perhaps the recently deceased Robert E Howard, or ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. Then I'd mention something about vast orc armies and I'd get a strange stare. Of course, Tolkien's The Hobbit hasn't been published yet. My mistake.

But it isn't the word "orc" that is the problem. It's the entire concept of vast, epic battles between men and orcs that is the stumbling block. The Battle of Five Armies is the first of these. My 1936 companion may be ready for the idea, but he hasn't got it yet. I jump back into my time machine, whispering one beautiful word in his ear, "Hobbit," and disappear. (Unfortunately the experience of seeing me disappear in my time machine drives him to read Amazing Stories or Astounding instead and we lose him from the Fantasy pool. What can you do?)

Eighteen years later my machine takes me to see Tolkien give us more with The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's vast ideas are starting to light new fires like Carroll Kendall's The Gammage Cup in 1959, with its army of mushroom warriors. I jump another ten years to see the campuses of America (along with an unauthorized paperback edition) drive Tolkien's popularity to the point where Led Zeppelin is singing of Gollum and Ringwraiths. We are approaching critical mass...

In 1972, Gary Gygax is about to sit down with a bunch of buddies and Dungeons & Dragons is on. Those stats-driven warriors need something to fight. Of course, it has to be a goblin. After Tolkien's estate and Gygax hash out the copyright of certain terms, the deal is done. Pairing this with the success in 1977 of the Tolkien clone, The Sword of Shannara, epic fantasy is now set to boil. The creation of Derivative Fantasy! Anybody can write of such creatures! The world of Fantasy now has its generic monster, the Orc. In any video game, any book, any RPG, the orc is the opponent in armor that warriors face everywhere.

But it wasn't always so. That is my point. The idea took a long time to get here. As scholars such as Michael Drout point out, it began in 1872 with a children's book by a Scottish minister. The book was The Princess and the Goblin by George Macdonald. Scholars and fans make a lot of noise about William Morris starting off the Modern Fantasy genre with his pseudo-Medieval novels like The Wood Beyond the World (1894), and he was vital in insuring that Fantasy would become a genre dominated by novels. But it is Macdonald that gave us the goblin foe; who gave Tolkien the leg up to write The Hobbit; who gave CS Lewis the inspiration to write of animal and monster armies in Narnia. Macdonald's tale of Curdie and the princess Irene seems quaint by today's epic, grand scale. A common boy and a restless princess discover a plot by the goblins to attack the castle, which eventually leads to an armed conflict. Despite the fight being appropriate for children, it did open the door to Fantasy tales in which humans are versed against an inhuman army. Eddison would use it to create two human armies in The Worm Ouroboros (calling them Demons and Witches), but it was Tolkien's The Hobbit that cemented the idea for all time.

And one hundred years later that, resulted in the genrification of the orc as common military assailant. World of Warcraft; Orcs Must Die!; the latest hack Tolkien-esque bestseller. It's everywhere and its not going away any time soon. For better or worse, Fantasy has an epic scale today. The quaint, personal-sized Fantasy tale, be it the glorious works of Thomas Burnett Swann or even the Howardian tale of the lone barbarian, is awash in a sea of orcs and battle. There's not much you can do...

For example, back around 1988, I met L Sprague de Camp at a convention in Calgary. I spoke with him about a project I had abandoned, that of converting his Novaria novels to an RPG setting. He thought I should keep at it, but I knew ultimately it wouldn't work. Why? No orcs. No elves. Novaria is a Fantasy world filled with humans. There are demons and magic, but all the armies are men. You can't fight the tide with your bare hands.

So there I sat this Christmas, watching what I felt was the best of the three Hobbit films, thinking: all Fantasy writers today have to make their peace with Tolkien and his orc armies. Either you accept them as part of what you are writing or you have to reject them and write something that is inherently anti-Tolkien. There is no middle ground any more. A book I read over the holiday made this even more evident to me. It was Conan the Invincible (1980) by Robert Jordan. In that rather pedestrian tale, Conan's enemy wizard has a race of scaly-skin henchmen called the S'Tarra. They are hidden in his castle fortress, breeding and preparing for the taking over of the world. Is it any surprise Jordan gave up writing Conans for pseudo-Tolkien in The Wheel of Time series?

Another author of note, one who shares Tolkien's double middle initials (Raymond Richard, not Ronald Reuel), is George RR Martin. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice shows a new ingenuity with this Tolkien dilemma. Martin has combined the two most commercially successful Science Fiction (Dune) and Fantasy (Lord of the Rings) franchises to create the Game of Thrones books. This sounds like I am disparaging him but this is far from the truth. I have the highest respect for GRRM. First off, for his amazing story writing before Game of Thrones with classics like "Way of Cross and Dragon" and "Sandkings," but secondly for his masterful control of character, which allows us to watch or read a story with dozens of distinct characters, each worthy of a tale of their own. So I glibly say "combined the political essence Dune and the fantastic world of LOTR," but go ahead; try it.

Really what George was doing was that thing we must all do as modern Fantasy writers. Dealing with Tolkien. I believe GRRM has chosen to accept Tolkien, and though we haven't seen much of it yet, "Winter is Coming." What does that mean? Orc (or White Walkers and Wildings) armies. Tolkien is coming and George has the cajones to make us wait through six fat books for it. Long live the orc! He's going to be with for some time yet.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

17 Movies I Liked Okay in 2011

37. The Eagle



The more I think about it, the lower on the list I think I should have put this. I love an historical action film and the Roman Empire had some great visual style, but I'm remembering that the story here didn't make any sense. That's the problem with making this list at the end of the year; I forget stuff like that. Still, my recollection isn't that I disliked it, so the visuals and action must have been pretty good? Maybe I just blocked out the worst parts. I dunno; you tell me. I'm certainly not watching it again to find out.

36. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy



An intriguing drama with some great actors, but very, very slooowww.

35. Sucker Punch



Awesome visuals and set-pieces; confusing message about female empowerment. Hell, just confusing in general.

34. Beastly



Beauty and the Beast for the Twilight crowd. And me, apparently. Not exactly original, but I'm a huge sucker for that particular fairy tale and Beastly hit the right beats to make it work for me. Vanessa Hudgens doesn't give me a ton of reasons to believe Alex Pettyfer would fall that hard for her, but he's great in it and sells the attraction anyway.

33. Drive Angry



Great grindhouse schlock. Didn't exactly make me love Nicholas Cage all over again, but it's my favorite thing he's done in years.

32. Conan the Barbarian



I've seen the Schwarzenegger Conan movies countless times, but I don't hold the first one in as high regard as most fans do. In fact, I like Conan the Destroyer a lot better. Which is to say that my standard for this movie was pretty low and it met my expectations just fine. It's not a great movie and it's not everything a Conan movie should be, but compared to the rest of the sword-and-sorcery movie genre that exists in reality and not an ideal world, it's toward the top of that pile.

31. Our Idiot Brother



I loves me some Paul Rudd, but this is not his best movie. It's funny in parts, but the message is overly simple: that uptight women need to chillax like the bros.

30. The Adjustment Bureau



A good thriller marred by a rushed ending. Still, I love Matt Damon and I totally bought the romance between him and Emily Blunt.

29. Moneyball



I also love Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill (and Philip Seymour Hoffman, but he's wasted in this movie). The game-changing formula that this movie is based on is fascinating; I just never got a great feel for what the movie is trying to say about it. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? A little of both? If it's a little of both, why does it matter enough to make a movie about it? The film works a little better as a drama about Brad Pitt's character, but even then I'm left unsure what it's trying to say and I've spent some time thinking about it.

28. The Green Hornet



I probably would have hated this movie had I been a Green Hornet fan, but I'm not and I don't mind its light-hearted approach. I allow myself one Seth Rogen movie a year so's not to get burned out and I enjoyed this one. Kind of wish I'd held out for 50-50, but oh well. This was fun, if dumb.

27. Fast Five



Speaking of dumb fun, Fast Five could have squandered the opportunity of putting Vin Diesel and The Rock in the same movie together. The cynical me actually expected it. But it didn't. Not only did it make the most of their screen time together, it built a storytelling engine that will easily (and interestingly) power this series for the next few movies. On the other hand, them dragging that safe down the street at the end was helladumb.

26. The Mechanic



I only have vague memories of the Charles Bronson original version, but what I do remember was handled more to my liking in this one. I know that's cryptic, but I'm mostly talking about the last five minutes of both movies. Anyway, a better-than-average Jason Statham vehicle, improved by the presence of Ben Foster.

25. Source Code



Nice scifi story. It didn't stick with me like a great movie should (maybe 'cause I figured out what was going on too early?), but it kept my attention and I rooted for Jake Gyllenhaal to figure out a way to save and end up with Michelle Monaghan's dead character.

24. Bridesmaids



Very funny and I like the meta-message it sent about gender equality in Hollywood films. I didn't buy into the romance like I was supposed to (mostly because I didn't like Kristin Wiig's character much), but it was still a funny movie with actresses I love and some nice heart.

23. Arthur



My friends who've seen the original tell me that I'm not supposed to like this, but - like with Green Hornet - I have the luxury of getting to judge it purely on its ability to make me laugh. Which it did. And the relationship between Russell Brand and Helen Mirren was awesome and touching.

22. Friends With Benefits



An almost perfect romantic comedy foiled only by a resolution as cheesy as those in the other romantic comedies it mocks. Between this and Bad Teacher though, I'm right on board the Justin Timberlake Is Awesome train now. I was already there with Mila Kunis, whom I've loved since That '70s Show.

21. Real Steel



Unambitious, but it does what it does - tell a sentimental story about a man's redemption, both to himself and to his son - really well.

It seems that men like women warriors

Soon:









Conan, how can you be so wise and such a dork at the same time?