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.

The Little People: A Fantastic Thread [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

History has a strange way of inspiring horror writers. In the records of the Romans there is mention of a strange race that lived in the British Isles before the Celts. Their name was simply the Picts, meaning "picture," for they were heavily tattooed. "The Picts of Galloway" supposedly intermingled with the Gaels, but to a writer of terror tales the idea that these people, and others like them, should go underground and become the inspiration for "The Little People" of legend is too tempting.

The first to grab onto the idea of this primitive and secret survival was Welsh writer, Arthur Machen (1863-1947). Machen liked to imagine that under the bucolic green hills of Wales, terrible and evil things lurked. Amongst these were savage creatures that once ruled the world. He wrote three stories about them that appeared in the same year. The first, "The Red Hand" (Chapman’s Magazine, Christmas 1895) has Dyson, Machen's occult detective of sorts, exploring a grisly murder committed with a primitive, prehistoric axe that hints at the creatures who wield it:

‘My dear fellow, I am sorry to say I have completely failed. I have tried every known device in vain. I have even been so officious as to submit it to a friend at the Museum, but he, though a man of prime authority on the subject, tells me he is quite at fault. It must be some wreckage of a vanished race, almost, I think — a fragment of another world than ours. I am not a superstitious man, Dyson, and you know that I have no truck with even the noble delusions, but I confess I yearn to be rid of this small square of blackish stone. Frankly, it has given me an ill week; it seems to me troglodytic and abhorred.’

"The Novel of the Black Seal" (The Three Imposters, 1895) provides another artifact, a black rock with weird writing:

We had dined without candles; the room had slowly grown from twilight to gloom, and the walls and corners were indistinct in the shadow. But from where I sat I looked out into the street; and as I thought of what I would say to Francis, the sky began to flush and shine, as it had done on a well-remembered evening, and in the gap between two dark masses that were houses an awful pageantry of flame appeared—lurid whorls of writhed cloud, and utter depths burning, grey masses like the fume blown from a smoking city, and an evil glory blazing far above shot with tongues of more ardent fire, and below as if there were a deep pool of blood. I looked down to where my brother sat facing me, and the words were shaped on my lips, when I saw his hand resting on the table. Between the thumb and forefinger of the closed hand there was a mark, a small patch about the size of a sixpence, and somewhat of the colour of a bad bruise. Yet, by some sense I cannot define, I knew that what I saw was no bruise at all; oh! if human flesh could burn with flame, and if flame could be black as pitch, such was that before me. Without thought or fashioning of words grey horror shaped within me at the sight, and in an inner cell it was known to be a brand. For the moment the stained sky became dark as midnight, and when the light returned to me I was alone in the silent room, and soon after I heard my brother go out.

In "The Shining Pyramid" (The Unknown World, May 15, 1895), Machen finally gives us a vivid description of the humanoids that worship the Pyramid:

It did, in truth, stir and seethe like an infernal cauldron. The whole of the sides and bottom tossed and writhed with vague and restless forms that passed to and fro without the sound of feet, and gathered thick here and there and seemed to speak to one another in those tones of horrible sibilance, like the hissing of snakes, that he had heard. It was as if the sweet turf and the cleanly earth had suddenly become quickened with some foul writhing growth. Vaughan could not draw back his face, though he felt Dyson's finger touch him, but he peered into the quaking mass and saw faintly that there were things like faces and human limbs, and yet he felt his inmost soul chill with the sure belief that no fellow soul or human thing stirred in all that tossing and hissing host. He looked aghast, choking back sobs of horror, and at length the loathsome forms gathered thickest about some vague object in the middle of the hollow, and the hissing of their speech grew more venomous, and he saw in the uncertain light the abominable limbs, vague and yet too plainly seen, writhe and intertwine, and he thought he heard, very faint, a low human moan striking through the noise of speech that was not of man. At his heart something seemed to whisper ever "the worm of corruption, the worm that dieth not," and grotesquely the image was pictured to his imagination of a piece of putrid offal stirring through and through with bloated and horrible creeping things. The writhing of the dusky limbs continued, they seemed clustered round the dark form in the middle of the hollow, and the sweat dripped and poured off Vaughan's forehead, and fell cold on his hand beneath his face.

HG Wells (1866-1946) needs mention here. He did not use this idea of ancient creatures for he had little interest in the past. He was a futurist. Despite this, one of his stories seems to have influenced later writers in conjunction with the Little People idea. The story in question was "The Time Machine" (National Observer serial, 1894) and his underground dwelling Morlocks.

In Wells' story these white-skinned cannibals are the future of the suppressed proletariat, living in their machine-run depths. Wells is careful to describe the Morlocks only in snatches, making them more mysterious. “A pair of eyes, luminous by reflection against the daylight without, was watching me out of the darkness... I put out my hand and touched something soft. At once the eyes darted sideways, and something white ran past me. I turned with my heart in my mouth, and saw a queer little ape-like figure, its head held down in a peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space...” The man from the present plumbs their dark tunnels and just barely escapes their cold, wicked plans. This image of the man trapped in the dark, armed only with a light and a solid metal bar has fused with Machen's vision of evil survivals.

Robert E Howard (1906-1936) was the writer who really brought these two together, though he was not the last. Howard's first venture into the world of the Little People was an open pastiche of Machen called "The Little People" (Coven 13, January 1970). This early tale, written in the 1920s, suffers from poor mechanics. The hero, tells his sister the lengthy history of the Little People, after perusing a copy of "The Shining People" by Machen. Later these very creatures invade their home where the narrator gives this description:

"Now I was almost upon those who barred my way. I saw plainly the stunted bodies, the gnarled limbs, the beady reptilian eyes that stared unwinkingly, the grotesque, square faces with their inhuman features, and the shimmer of flint daggers in their crooked hands..."

The narrator dives in for a Howard-sized fight, but the creatures find and attack his sister. Only the sudden appearance of a white-bearded druid saves them from the Little People. This tale contains many of the elements that will later appear in the much better constructed tales of Bran Mak Morn and Conan.

"The Children of the Night" (Weird Tales, April/May 1931) sets up several of Howard's themes for his Little People stories, the first being degeneration and the second: reincarnation. One of Conrad and Kirowan's friends, John O'Donnell, has a strange vision while visiting the occult investigators. He sees himself in the past as Aryara of the Sword People, an ancient Celt, who encounters the Little People and falls fighting them. Upon waking, O'Donnell attacks Ketrick, one of the guests, for he has Serpent blood:

But Ketrick: to me the man always seemed strangely alien. It was in his eyes that this difference showed externally. They were a sort of amber, almost yellow, and slightly oblique. At times, when one looked at his face from certain angles, they seemed to slant like a Chinaman’s. Others than I had noticed this feature, so unusual in a man of pure Anglo-Saxon descent. The usual myths ascribing his slanted eyes to some pre-natal influence had been mooted about, and I remember Professor Hendrik Brooler once remarked that Ketrick was undoubtedly an atavism, representing a reversion of type to some dim and distant ancestor of Mongolian blood–a sort of freak reversion, since none of his family showed such traces.

Howard's dated racism can be offensive today, but within the context of the story O'Donnell would prefer any human of any color or creed over the few humans who still carry the taint of the Little People.

Howard would return to his version of the degraded half-breed creatures in several stories, the best of which was "The Worms of the Earth" (Weird Tales, November 1932). To make things even more interesting, Howard has the Picts, dark warriors living under the Roman radar as well as these even earlier creatures that the Picts displaced. Howard's Worms are half-human hybrids with the evil Serpent Men of ancient times, another lost race that once ruled the world. Bran Mak Morn, the king of the Picts, enters the Worms' tunnels (shades of Wells) to steal their sacred relic and force them to do his bidding:

And he came at last into a vast space where he could stand upright. He could not see the roof of the place, but he got an impression of dizzying vastness. The blackness pressed in on all sides and behind him he could see the entrance to the shaft from which he had just emerged--a black well in the darkness. But in front of him a strange grisly radiance glowed about a grim altar built of human skulls. The source of that light he could not determine, but on the altar lay a sullen night-black object--the Black Stone!

Howard wrote of the Worms again in "Valley of the Lost" (Magazine of Horror, Summer 1966), a tale set during the Texas feuds of the 19th Century. Little John Reynolds is fleeing the McCrills when he takes refuge in the valley where the Little People hide. He spies the strange inhabitants:

It was not their dwarfish figures which caused his shudder, nor even the unnaturally made hands and feet–it was their heads. He knew, now, of what race was the skull found by the prospector. Like it, these heads were peaked and malformed, curiously flattened at the sides. There was no sign of ears, as if their organs of hearing, like a serpent’s, were beneath the skin. The noses were like a python’s snout, the mouth and jaws much less human in appearance than his recollection of the skull would have led him to suppose. The eyes were small, glittering and reptilian. The squamous lips writhed back, showing pointed fangs, and John Reynolds felt that their bite would be as deadly as a rattlesnake’s. Garments they wore none, nor did they bear any weapons.

Reynolds flees the weird caverns, blowing up the door that leads to the outer world, then takes his chances against human enemies, his hair now stark white.

"The People of the Dark" (Strange Tales, June 1932) is a rewrite of sorts of "The Little People" with the narrator, John O'Brien, coming to Dagon's Cave to kill Richard Brent, his rival for Eleanor Bland. Howard has the characters thrust back in time using reincarnation as a method to change O'Brien into a Gaelic warrior, Conan of the reavers. Brent becomes Vertorix, a Briton, and Eleanor a Briton girl named Tamera. All three face the Worms, but only Conan survives; Vertorix and Tamera plunging to their deaths rather than succumb. O'Brien wanders the caves, finally making his way out. He encounters one last denizen of the deep, the snaky remains of the Worms in our time:

Before the Children had vanished, the race must have lost all human semblance, living as they did the life of the reptile. This thing was more like a giant serpent than anything else, but it had aborted legs and snaky arms with hooked talons. It crawled on its belly, writhing back mottled lips to bare needlelike fangs, which I felt must drip with venom. It hissed as it reared up its ghastly head on a horribly long neck, while its yellow slanted eyes glittered with all the horror that is spawned in the black lairs under the earth.

O'Brien shoots it with the revolver he had brought to kill Brent. Brent and Eleanor know they are eternal soul mates and O'Brien lets them go for he too now understands.

Karl Edward Wagner would write further of Howard's Worms in Legion From the Shadows (1975). He added little to Howard's vision, but did combine elements from several different stories, having Serpent Men, Worms, and even the Crawler from the Conan stories. His Serpent leader looks thus:

The figure was as tall as Bran, and of skeletal leanness—although little else could be discerned through the voluminous folds of his robes. The arms that protruded from the flaring sleeves were covered with the pallid scales of some ancient serpent, taloned with long, black nails. The skull above the narrow shoulders was curiously flattened at the temples, and rose to a high peak. That peaked, hairless skull was encircled in a golden band, set with sullen gems of murky hue. His ears were pointed, the nose flared and pitted as a viper’s snout, the face little more than a pallid mask of scales tight across an inhuman skull. Bright and pointed fangs made a double row along the grinning jaw. Those yellow ophidian eyes mirrored a soul of elder evil that had looked unblinking across the expanse of centuries.

Thus the Worms once looked before the long road to degeneration. Wagner would create his own race of subterranean dwellers in his story ".220 Swift" (New Terrors, 1980), borrowing the idea partly from Manly Wade Wellman and his Guardians of the Ancients from “Shiver in the Pines” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1955).

Gerald Kersh (1911-68) was a sophisticated writer of weird tales and mainstream novels, but even he ventured into the world of the Little People in "Voices in the Dust" (1950, for Judith Merrill's Shot in the Dark). An adventurer in a future world (after World War III) goes to the dead city of Annan in an area of ash and stones. Here he discovers a race of white-skinned, large eyed people:

...The light paralyzed it: the thing was glued in the shining, white puddle—it had enormous eyes. I fired at it—I mean, I aimed at it and pressed my trigger, but had forgotten to lift my safety-catch. Holding the thing in the flashlight beam, I struck at it with the barrel of the pistol. I was cruel because I was afraid. It squealed, and something cracked. Then I had it by the neck. If it was not a rat it smelled like a rat. Oh-oooo, oh-oooo, oh-oooo! it wailed, and I heard something scuffle outside. Another voice wailed oh-oooo, oh-oooo, oh-oooo! A third voice picked it up. In five seconds, the hot, dark night was full of a most woebegone crying. Five seconds later there was silence, except for the gasping of the cold little creature under my hand.

Kersh gives a long explanation -- we've heard it before -- about how the Picts had been the source of the fairies in places like Wales. The explorer follows the Little People into their subterranean tunnels, like Wells' Time Traveler, but falls and breaks his leg. The people of the dark do not threaten the man but feed him. Unfortunately, their medical skills are so primitive that the man can do nothing but sit in the darkness and wait for death. Kersh takes his inspiration from Machen and Wells, (though probably not Howard) and adds his tale to the history of the Little People. Who will be next?

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 One Hundred Year Test, or Let's Dust Off the Old Thoat [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Can you name one sports record from 1917? Football, baseball, hockey, anything? And to make it harder, a record that stands to this day? I rather doubt it. One hundred years is a long time when it comes to the ephemeral nature of pop culture.

And it’s the same for books. Looking at the top sellers of 1917, I see winners of the One Hundred Year Test (I'm a genre guy, so I'll stick to what I know): Oz books, John Buchan, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Anna Katherine Green, Sax Rohmer, Arthur Machen, Jack London, Edgar Wallace, James Branch Cabell. So what happened to the rest? Perly Poore Sheehan, Garrett P Serviss, Burt L Standish, H Hesketh Pritchard, Edgar White, Raymond S Spears, Sapper, Oscar Micheaux, and the list goes on... Any of these sound familiar? Of course not. Despite being popular magazine and book writers in 1917, they are all footnotes or known only to pulp specialists. The One Hundred Year Test (or OHYT as I will refer to it from now on) has eliminated them from the larger consciousness.

And it will happen again in 2117. Most of the writers now will be forgotten figures, too. It's a fact. Which ones will be remembered? I would not hazard a guess. I'm sure to be wrong. The top selling genre writer of 1917 was HG Wells with Mr. Britley Sees It Through (not a genre book, but a mainstream novel), followed by Zane Grey with Wildfire. Both authors have survived the OHYT, though Wells better than Grey. Most of the mainstream writers fared worse.

Genres in 1917 were largely still forming. The mystery is probably the most consolidated, recognizable back to 1841 with Edgar Allan Poe. Equally old is horror, but this would be either a Gothic tale (1765) or a ghost story (after 1820), approaching a more modern look by Dracula (1897). Adventure yarns began in earnest after Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1881) and HR Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885); the Western in 1902 with Owen Wister's The Virginian and the Northern with Jack London as early as 1897. And science fiction, still unnamed in 1917, usually called "off-trail fiction" or just "fantasy" would have to wait until 1926 and Hugo Gernsback to give it a name, though Jules Verne was popular from 1864 and HG Wells from 1895. In the actual genre “fantasy,” the books of Lord Dunsany were big.

All of these genres were evolving quickly in the magazines and early pulps. Edgar Rice Burroughs had just invented his brand of jungle lord adventure three years before in 1914 (though Kipling had his Mowgli twenty years earlier), as well as the interplanetary romance in 1912 with "Under the Moons of Mars." Hugo Gernsback was still nine or more years in the future as were the hard-boiled detective, the space opera, and the gangster crime drama.

The OHYT removes politics, commercial hype, and in some cases, unavailability. A reader in 1917 would not have found Tarzan or Oz books on the shelves of their public library. Librarians for decades campaigned against them in favor of "better" books. Readers today don't have to worry about beginning with Volume 3 in a series of 6. Nor do they have to wait for the installments that the original serial readers did. They have the complete run at their digital fingertips. They don't have to suffer banners reading "In the tradition of Robert E Howard" for a book that inspired that very writer twenty years earlier. (I speak of Harold Lamb, whose historical adventures inspired much of sword-and-sorcery. When Lamb was re-released in the 1970s in paperback he bore that very banner on the top of his books.)

The OHYT is a kind of guarantee. Not that the book will be easy to read - for there are changes in style in a hundred years, along with prejudices on race, gender, politics, and creed. No, it's a guarantee that the story is a good story, that people a hundred years ago were intrigued, excited, or felt something valuable by reading it. Because if these works were shallow, trendy, poorly executed, unimaginative, or dull, they would not pass the OHYT. The also-rans fall by the wayside and you are left with books that appealed to many people. (And it might not be “you” today - or “you” yet. I waited until my forties to enjoy Dickens, Twain, Haggard, Rohmer, and Stevenson. There is a future “me” who might one day be able to wade through Henry James or James Joyce.)

Let's look at a test case: Edgar Rice Burroughs versus Harold Bell Wright. ERB wrote sixty-nine novels from 1912 to 1950, creating iconic characters such as Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. Harold Bell wrote melodramas with a religious theme like The Shepherd of the Hills in 1907, which sold a million copies. The two men share the following similarities: they both made huge fortunes from their writing, their books were both adapted into films, the critics hated or ignored them, both moved to California, both divorced and remarried, and both affected geography. Edgar Rice Burroughs developed and named the city of Tarzana, California. Wright has a subdivision in Tucson named after him, plus his novel also popularized Branson, Missouri, making it into a tourist destination.

Where the two men differ is that Edgar Rice Burroughs survived the OHYT and Wright did not. This is why we had a John Carter of Mars film. This is why Alexander Skarsgård is the next Tarzan. One hundred years is the copyright line in most cases (varying country to country). The public domain and online technology are making hard-to-find works available again. There is no guessing how many books will be rediscovered because of this line in the sands of time. But as they say in infomercials: Wait, there’s more!

With the advent of the public domain claiming legacy works, new "unauthorized" creations are springing up. This can be a big budget film like Tarzan (1999), John Carter of Mars (2012), or The Great and Powerful Oz (2013); all cases of Disney waiting until copyright has lapsed to avoid paying royalties. Or it can be less obvious fare. With the popularity of zombie rewrites like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith, writers are coming up with some unusual ways to enjoy old classics again. The steampunk writers have taken a shine to Baum's post-Victorian fantasy and turned out some new tales from the stuff of Oz. And this is great, for let's be honest, both Burroughs and Baum are great storytellers (largely unappreciated by critics until recently), but their works are a century old and a little dated. A new spin on old novels gives modern readers a way to enjoy the innocent favorites of childhood or teen years. It also gives you a way to go back and enjoy new stories in familiar places, if you've read all twenty-six Tarzan novels, all forty-one Oz books, or the eleven Barsoom sagas.

Now you may be tempted to write your own Tarzan novel. I know I've thought about it a few times. (While Burroughs’ first novels are out of copyright, the name “Tarzan” is still protected – for now.) Look at all the Sherlocks that have been written since 1987. There could be a mad rush on new jungle adventures appearing on Amazon already. Tarzan of the Apes with Zombies. John Carter of Mars versus the Sparkling Vampires. I'm waiting. I won't read them, but it wouldn't surprise me. What I hope to see is something more like the works of Guy Adams who writes post-Wellsian novels like The Army of Doctor Moreau (2012) or JW Schnarr's Shadows of the Emerald City (2009).

There is a movement under way right now in which writers are playing in other people's backyards, for example the comics of Alan Moore or the Anno Dracula stories of Kim Newman. It's exciting, but it is also... a little dangerous. It's great if it drives new readers to old classics. This will cement the fame of these OHYT winners with new generations and continue their fame into the 21st Century. It's dangerous if it floods the Kindle shelves with very poor hackjobs and juvenile fan fiction. (Though I have to wonder what the difference is between "fan fiction" and an "unauthorized" reworking. Not much outside of court, perhaps.) The result could be a muddying of the waters that results in a lack of interest. But I don't worry about this too much. Four million bad Lovecraftian pastiches and an equal number of bad Howardian Conan copies haven't blunted their swords. The Cthulhu Mythos and sword-and-sorcery are as healthy as ever. (Cthulhu and Conan are in a kind of grey area copyright-wise and we'll see them join the OHYT crowd soon enough.)

Reader sophistication is really what we're talking about. You can read the original Tarzan of the Apes, appreciate how it broke new pulp ground, how it's more than a little racist by modern standards, scientifically impossible, and not quite science fiction, but appeals to SF fans anyway, etc, etc. How you enjoy it is up to you. You can also then read the last two authorized pastiches: Tarzan and the Valley of Gold by Fritz Leiber (1967) or Joe R Lansdale's Tarzan: The Lost Adventure (1991), a book that is 25% Burroughs and 75% Lansdale. Or Philip Jose Farmer's The Adventure of the Peerless Peer (1977), an unauthorized one! And you can decide if they hold up against ERB's wonderful storytelling. And now you can plunk down $4.99 and buy that latest novel, Tarzan and the Pyramid of Blood by Wryter B Anonymous or I Wright Kindles or whoever, and see if Tarzan pastiche is worth the time. Personally I would grab it if it was written by Joel Jenkins, the only writer I know who has captured Burroughsian excitement without slavish imitation. His Dire Planet series is as much fun as Barsoom. Your sophistication allows you to enjoy the Burroughsian or Ozian novel from a standpoint of connoisseur, as co-conspirator in a literary game that promises some new fun in old places.

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.

Clifford Ball: Apprentice to a Fallen Master [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

The world of fantasy was shattered in 1936 when Robert E Howard put a gun to his head and ended it all. The fledgling genre of heroic fantasy was at a loss. Who would take up the torch and continue on from where Howard began with his tales of Bran Mak Morn, King Kull, and especially, Conan the Cimmerian? These larger-than-life warriors had found a home in an unlikely place: the horror magazine, Weird Tales. And it was in those same pages that the next sword-and-sorcery writers would appear.

Now Robert E Howard was not the only fantasy writer at "The Unique Magazine." CL Moore had created her swordswoman Jirel of Joiry in October 1934 with "The Black God's Kiss" and its sequel "The Black God's Shadow" (December 1934). Nictzin Dyalhis had written one classic piece, "The Sapphire Siren," in February 1934. Edmond Hamilton had been writing many kinds of science fiction and fantasy for Weird Tales and could have taken up the crown of sword-and-sorcery. But none of these writers did. CL Moore would write only one more Jirel tale after Howard's death. Dyalhis and Hamilton wrote other things.

The mantle fell to a fan of Robert E Howard, the inexperienced Clifford Ball (1896?-1947?). Ball would produce three sword-and-sorcery stories for Weird Tales: "Duar the Accursed" (May 1937), "The Thief of Forthe" (July 1937), and "The Goddess Awakes" (February 1938). His next story after these was "The Swine of Aeaea" (March 1939), a tale of a modern day Circe. The two that followed that were pedestrian horror tales. Not much is known about Ball, but his bio in the magazine suggests a young man who traveled around looking for work before taking up the pen to write pulp. From his writing we can tell he was a fan of both Robert E Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. All three tales make mention of white apes: "If the guardsmen had been startled before, now they were certainly in a panic, much as if they had captured one of the terrible white apes from the hills of Barsoom..." This tidbit is telling, but jars the reader out of Ball's imaginary world. Such are the errors of youth.

In plot, "Duar the Accursed" is reminiscent of Howard's "The Scarlet Citadel" (January 1933), but also draws from other sources. Duar has been captured by the Queen Nione, who throws him into a dank dungeon known as the Pits of Ygoth. Duar is rescued by a supernatural being named Shar, who loves him and can restore his lost memories of how he was an emperor over Atlantis eons ago before its destruction and his curse. Duar refuses and instead takes on a mission for the queen: to enter the Black Tower and return with the Rose of Gaon, a fabulous and magical jewel. Duar climbs the stairs and faces the terror that none have survived to describe.

On a pillar surrounded by skeletons sits the Rose of Gaon. As the swordsman approaches he finds his limbs becoming tired and lifeless. He will stay that way until he dies of starvation. Shar reappears to remind him he is King Duar and to use his sword to destroy the Rose, for it is actually the heart of a demon. Duar rallies and destroys the gem, having power to deny the magic because of his ancient lineage. Shar offers to take him away, revive his memory, and work with him to rule the entire world again. Duar refuses and walks off to spend the rest of his years in Nione's bed. That opening scene with Duar chained before Queen Nione, defying her will seems cliché today having been used in multiple sword-and-sorcery tales since, but it may not have been so shop-worn in 1937. We have to remember Ball was the first to play with the story building blocks that Howard left behind. Lin Carter selected this story for his anthology, New Worlds For Old (1971).

The last two stories Ball wrote did not feature Duar. Instead they are about a thief and adventurer named Rald. "The Thief of Forte" begins with two conspirators: a strange wizard name Karlk and the swordsman Rald. They enter the imperial palace to steal the royal jewels and the throne. While doing this, Rald meets Princess Thrine, the king's sister, who is very beautiful and spirited. She stalls the two long enough for King Thrall to show up and disarm the thieves. The two men are tied up and left. It is then that Karlk reveals something about his mysterious person. He has a second set of small, hairy hands that he uses to untie himself. He leaves Rald tied up as he prepares to ambush and kill the King and Princess with a magic blast. Rald can not lie by idly as death comes for Thrine, so he burns off his ropes and arrives in time to stop the wizard. Karlk is stabbed, and while dying admits why he wanted to kill the royals. Karlk is actually a woman, it is revealed as her disguise is pulled off. She is the daughter of a woman who was carried off by one the white apes (shades of Barsoom again!) so she has two sets of arms. Karlk dies horribly as the demon Nargath, who gave her her power, comes to claim her. King Thrall goes to thank Rald for saving them, but Rald has disappeared. Thrall wonders if Rald will come back. Thrine tells her brother that Rald will be back... for her.

"The Thief of Forte," like "Duar the Accursed," uses another cliche plot (based on Howard's "Rogues in the House" (January 1934): that of wizard hiring a warrior to enter a heavily or magically guarded palace or tower to steal a magical item. Henry Kuttner would use this one as well a year later in "Spawn of Dagon" (Weird Tales, July 1938) and John Jakes and Lin Carter thirty years later in "The Devils in the Walls" (Fantastic, May 1963) and "The Thieves of Zangabal" (The Mighty Barbarians, 1969).

A letter from "The Eyrie" solves a small mystery for me when WC Jr writes about Virgil Finlay, WT illustrator. He points out that Finlay liked to play practical jokes on the writers: "For instance: Clifford Ball once stated in a letter to the Eyrie, previous to the publication of his first story, that the ridiculous theme of a woman being captured and carried off by a giant ape was passé. With this in mind, Virgil selected that particular scene in illustrating Ball's 'Thief of Forthe.'" When I saw this illustration originally I had reacted with a similar dislike for the picture. There are few sword-and-sorcery illustrations before the 1960s and every one counts. To see an ape-stealing-woman picture worthy of a Jules De Grandin tale, I sighed in disappointment. Now I at least know why...

"The Goddess Awakes" (February 1938) is Rald's second adventure. This time Rald and his comrade-in-arms Thwaine have fled a lost battlefield where they served as mercenaries. They encounter women warriors who knock out Rald and take them to their kingdom inside an extinct volcano. There they learn that the women warriors rule and all men are slaves in the mines by order of Throal. The queen of the land is Cene but she is under the power of the wizard Throal and his daughter, the living goddess and statue, Hess. Rald and Thwaine are promised to die in the arena by being eaten by Hess, a gigantic cat.

This tale smacks more of Edgar Rice Burroughs than Robert E Howard. It only becomes more creepy (and therefore more Howardian) when the cat goddess calls the victims names as the moon draws the living beast out of a stone sphinx. Rald, Thwaine, and their new comrade, Ating - one of the women guards who has fallen for Thwaine - are thrown into a pit. The men try to deal with the goddess with swords, but her gigantic body is impenetrable. It is Queen Cene who saves them by throwing Rald a firebrand. One touch of the flames explodes Hess like a hydrogen zeppelin. Cene takes back her throne by killing Throal with a spear. Like a vampire, he dissolves to an ancient set of bones. His reign is over and the men of Ceipe are free to rejoin the women. The tale ends with Thwaine and Ating ruling the country while Rald and Cene take a year long break to explore the world outside. The whole thing rings more of John Carter than Conan of Cimmeria.

In one respect Clifford Ball did not follow entirely in Howard's footsteps. Ball's three stories all feature very powerful women: the being Shar, the Princess Thrine, and the Queen Cene. Having written only three stories, it is as if Ball chose to copy the longer Howard tales that featured strong female characters such as Yasmina, Belit, and Valeria. His adventure amongst the women warriors of Ceipe plays out more like the opening of Burroughs Pellucidar (1915) than Howard's "Vale of Lost Women," which Ball would not have read since it remained unpublished until Spring 1967.

In just ten months, Ball had given us his version of Howard's style of sword-and-sorcery. These three were all he would do before veering off into writing more traditional fantasy and horror. After only six stories he would disappear from the pulps altogether. But the editors of Weird Tales had a replacement. Henry Kuttner, by far a superior crafter of words, would appear in May 1938 with "Thunder in the Dawn," the first of the Elak of Atlantis stories. Kuttner would more skillfully use the legacy Howard left behind and even innovate, but Clifford Ball can take credit for being the first of a long line of pastichers that would include L Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Bjorn Nyberg, John Jakes, Andrew J Offutt, Poul Anderson, and many more.

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 Desolation of Tolkien: Not a Movie Review [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

First, a little explanation of the title. I saw that one of the chapters in John C Wright's book, Transhuman and Subhuman (2014) was "The Desolation of Tolkien" and I thought, "Finally, someone is going to talk about it!" Imagine my surprise when I read it and all Wright was doing was reviewing the second Hobbit film. (I agree with his review, but still: disappointed.) I realized after that, I'd have to write about it.

What I am referring to is: how does a fantasy writer work today? You have no choice but to decide you will ignore Tolkien, consciously write against him, or accept him and sadly give up and run down to Hobbiton. Tolkien casts a long shadow, and a wide one. You have no choice. Decide. In this way, Tolkien has desolated the fantasy field, though I doubt that was ever his intention.

Let me explain better. Imagine if you will, you are a writer. You want to create a fantastic story that is not explainable as science fiction, nor intended to solely chill you like horror. It's a tale of wonders, set in an imaginary world perhaps. If you include even one non-human race your reader will wonder, are they elves or orcs or ents or somesuch? (And if you don't use any, does the reader feel cheated?) If you have cities in your world, that reader will expect that armies will march from said centers to engage in battle. You may not want to do any of these things, but the expectation is there. Lin Carter proved this with the Ballantine Fantasy Series back in 1971. According to an interview he gave Amazing Stories, the books that were most like Tolkien sold the best. According to ST Joshi, even masters of early fantasy like Clark Ashton Smith failed to sell. Carter did us a great service, introducing many forgotten books like Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword (1951), but it had elves and it did better. Enough so that Anderson wrote some new books in the series. Tolkien is everywhere.

Don't believe me? What are they calling George RR Martin, who married the popular Lord of the Rings with Dune to create A Song of Ice and Fire? The American Tolkien! Game of Thrones was sold to HBO as "Sopranos in Middle Earth." George made his decision. He can work within the Tolkien tradition. I think he does it better than Terry Brooks or Stephen R Donaldson or David Eddings or any of those endless series writers, but they all dwell in the Land of Tolkien. In Brooks' case, intentionally.

As Peter S Beagle explains in The Secret History of Fantasy (2010), the Ballantines knew what the reading public wanted, knowing The Sword of Shannara was a pale imitation, but a guaranteed money-maker. I heard Terry Brooks talk on the radio back in the 1980s. From his words you would have thought nobody had written a fantasy before that Oxford Don with the extra middle initials. And perhaps he is right? Who cares about William Morris or Lord Dunsany, ER Eddison or James Branch Cabell or... Have we learned nothing from Richard Adams' Watership Down? A bestseller that looked more to Homer than Tolkien. It can be done, but it isn't.

What of sword-and-sorcery? Robert E Howard predates Tolkien; exists without him. But Howard's shadow is almost as big. Choose one form of darkness or another. (So LOTR fans will get it, do you choose Sauron or Sarumon?) Many choose to write under Howard's umbrella, seeking their own place there, much as some horror writers are perfectly happy to lie under Lovecraft's Mythos shadow. No one exists in a vacuum, but a good writer needs to feel the sun on his or her face once in awhile. To breath the fresh air and spy out their own landscapes.

One thing both Howard and Tolkien (as well as CS Lewis and ER Eddison) would agree on is a love of the "Northern Thing." What is that? It's an old sensation that anyone reading through a copy of East of the Sun and West of the Moon or seeing the artwork of Kay Nielsen or John Bauer for the first time understands. Related to that is a love of the Arabesque, that you can find when you read One Thousand and One Nights. Does commercial chock-a-block fantasy do this anymore? Do any of these fat paperback writers make you feel that Northern breeze? The heft of the sword in your hand? The pulse of magic in the air? Would a photocopy of a photocopy of the Mona Lisa amaze you the same way as standing in front the original painting? You might glimpse some sense of Da Vinci's brilliance, but not all. Is it any different with Tolkienesque fantasy? I think not. The Ballantines created a new publishing market and that's good for writers (food and paying the electrical bills are always good), but it is bad for readers. Innovation can't dwell in the shadow of old John Ronald Reuel.

So what can we do? How do we write something new about something old? I have no idea. If I did, I'd be doing it right now. And making a killing setting up the next wave of fantasy books. Will someone some day accomplish this? I think so. It may take a century or so, but one day Tolkien will fade into the background, as did Morris, Dunsany, and the rest. In our time now, with our still-current Peter Jackson films, a Game of Thrones TV show, (not to mention The Shannara Chronicles!), video games like World of Warcraft, and all those fat paperbacks... well, we will have to wait. That long, cold shadow isn't going anywhere soon.

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 Werewolf of Walnut Grove: Far-Out Frights [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

I Was a Teenage Werewolf

I'll admit I never watched Little House on the Prairie as a kid, but I do remember my two sisters did. Instead, I watched old SF clunkers like Space 1999, Logan's Run, and of course The Man From Atlantis. All of which I find teeth-grindingly dull or silly these days. But that was TV in the 1970s. You took what you could get. Before Star Wars, science fiction and horror TV executives were few and far between: Gerry Anderson, Gene Roddenberry, Irwin Allen, and Dan Curtis. We sought out these names knowing they at least "got it."

So it should be no surprise that I missed the few forays into the weird that Little House did, like "The Lake Kezia Monster" (Episode 110, February 12, 1979), which showed that even the Ingalls couldn't get away from the '70s fascination with the Loch Ness Monster. They never encountered a UFO, but one episode did get me to sit down and watch. It was Episode 129, "The Werewolf of Walnut Grove" (January 7, 1980), written by John T Dugan (who also wrote Episode 110) and directed by William F Claxton.

Now as all good fanboys know, Michael Landon, star and producer of Little House, before his stint on Bonanza starred in a B-movie called I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), directed by Gene Fowler Jr. It was the inspiration for the Teen Wolf movies and now the TV show. I suspected that this episode of Little House was a gentle poke at that film. Would Landon don his furry make-up again? I had to see.

"The Werewolf of Walnut Grove"

The plot of the episode is far from great gothic material. A large student named Bart is bullying the teacher of the school, so Laura and Albert devise a plan to scare the bully straight. To do this, they create werewolf make-up and a papier-mâché rock. They lure Bart to the barn where Albert is wearing his Landonesque make-up, escapes his shackles, and picks up the rock to crush his victim. The plan fails when Carrie, Laura's little sister, blabs. Bart's behavior is amended when all the kids in the school thrash him. The result is laughs not chills.

On the plus side, the teacher Miss Wilder, mentions S Baring-Gould's non-fiction volume, The Book of Werewolves (1865). This unfortunately is the only werewolf information that works historically. Little House is set in the 1870s to 1880s. Being conservative, saying a sixth season episode is in the 1880s, all that follows is still inaccurate. First off, in a conversation as the young ones prepare their trap, Clarence mentions Transylvania. Such ideas came from Bram Stoker's Dracula, written in 1897, and even more so from the 1931 film made by Universal. (Bart should have said, "Where's Styria?") Any werewolf lore in the 1880s would have been grounded in Baring-Gould's book or older material. All the big werewolf novels had yet to be written, including Gerald Biss's The Door of the Unreal (1919), The Undying Monster by Jessie Douglass Kerruish (1922), and Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris (1933).

Man-Shaped Monster

Stories like Capt Marryat's "The Werewolf" (1839) or Alexandre Dumas' The Wolf-Leader (1857), which would have been available to the Ingalls, feature men who turn into wolves. The werewolf is essentially 'wolf shaped.' This is another anachronism, the man-wolf, such as Landon played in 1957 and as Albert looks when wearing his make-up. This idea of a 'man-shaped' monster was first done by Robert E Howard in "Wolfshead" (Weird Tales, April 1926), but didn't really catch on until Endore's novel was filmed as The Werewolf of London with Henry Hull in 1935. We simply have to accept that this concept of the lycanthrope is a reference to Landon's film and not accurate historical information.

John T Dugan, who wrote both episodes, was aware of the current interest in cryptoids and monsters, and appealed to his 1970s audience's frame of reference rather than being strictly accurate and therefore too obscure. Dracula was at least ten years away from the Ingalls' time. The Surgeon's Photo of the Loch Ness Monster was five decades in the future, but they were known to mom and dad and the kids sitting there in front of the TV. Inaccurate as these 1970s icons are, they are fun and fascinating, whether it is Kolchak: The Nightstalker or Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of... Having lived though the decade of hippies to disco, these Little House episodes make me look back and laugh. Not until Chris Carter's The X-Files would TV take such an interest in the unexplained again. The truth is out there. And it is in Walnut Grove.

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.

Fanciful Tales of Time and Space: Fan Fire [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Reading a scanned copy of the original Fanciful Tales #1 (Fall 1936) fills me with so many conflicting emotions. Most of them good. On the one hand, just looking at the contents pages delights me with names of authors I love. We have HP Lovecraft, Donald A Wolheim, Robert E Howard, David H Keller and August Derleth. All we need is Clark Ashton Smith and it would be perfect. With the exception of some like William S Sykora, Duane W Rimel and Kenneth B Pritchard, these names are weird fiction royalty. More importantly, I can glean the fannish zeal with which the project was done. I know that "fan fire," that desire to place words and images in a new way that will thrill (hopefully thousands of) readers (more likely less than a dozen). Fanciful Tales' single issue is a perfect example of a "fanzine," created in a flash of inspiration (that doesn't necessarily include a lot of proofing). I have created not a few similar works of my own.

Looking at the contents of Fanciful Tales #1, I see DAW (as Don Wolheim was known) had some great connections with published writers and active fans, filling his zine accordingly. All are quite short, little longer than flash fiction. Let's take a look at each one and consider them individually:

"The Nameless City" by HP Lovecraft is a fan reprint from 1921. HPL was a professional, but this story appeared before his rise in Weird Tales, in the amateur press magazine The Wolverine, November 1921. The story was later rejected twice by Farnsworth Wright but appeared in November 1938 after HPL's death. The story is considered the first of the Cthulhu Mythos tales.

Wolheim

"Umbriel" by Donald A Wolheim is a short science fiction tale that DAW never reprinted. It's not surprising why. The story is a supposed report on why space travelers don't go to the moon Umbriel. Short on plot, the idea is good - a moon as worm-riddled corpse - but undeveloped. It's the kind of idea Clark Ashton Smith wrote to 11,000 words for Gernsback's Amazing Stories.

"The Forbidden Room" by Duane W Rimel is a traditional ghost story about a pirate and his treasure that haunt a room in his house after his death. A typical Weird Tales-style filler, it is a little too thin for the pulps. The author also contributed his art to the issue. Rimel was largely forgotten until ST Joshi uncovered his work with HP Lovecraft in this century.

"Solomon Kane's Homecoming" by Robert E Howard is a poem that recaps Kane's career outside of England, his sea battles along with Richard Grenville, his combats against sorcery in Africa. This was the first appearance of the poem that would be included in all Solomon Kane collections in the future, even adapted by Marvel Comics. It is likely Howard sent in the piece before his suicide or it was submitted by his executor, Robert H Barlow.

"The Typewriter" by David H Keller MD is about a writer who mysteriously buys a typewriter and uses it to pen a bestseller. His wife becomes jealous of the imaginary woman in the novel and destroys the machine in an attempt to get her husband back. This tale is similar to many he wrote for Weird Tales, based on the psychosis he saw in his day job as psychiatrist.

Derleth

"The Man From Dark Valley" by August W Derleth is a typical Derleth ghost story. He wrote literally dozens of these for Farnsworth Wright (this one using astral projection), but he would resell this one to Wright's competition, Strange Stories, four year later. The American setting is a little different as many of his ghost stories are set in England.

"The Globe" by William S Sykora is the only story this active fan ever published. It's referred to as a "midgetale," 1936-speak for flash fiction. The brief plot involves a globe that sucks people's souls out and feeds them to the globe's owner. Sykora was one of the charter subscribers to Amazing Stories in 1926, a member of the Greater New York Science Fiction League along with Wolheim and Sam Moskowitz, and was involved with SF in many ways, including publishing and filmmaking.

"The Electric World" by Kenneth B Pritchard is the longest story in the issue and is described as "scientific words as long as your arm plus humor..." Accurate, a tale within a tale, but the electrical version of reality is confusing and really not funny, so I guess we shouldn't be sad it was Pritchard's last. He had published a few pieces in another famous fanzine, The Fantasy Fan in 1934-5. After Fanciful Tales he disappeared into the mists of fandom.

The fact that no Fanciful Tales of Time and Space #2 (featuring "Judgement of Netheris" by J Harvey Haggard, "The Psycho Traveler" by Ralph Milne Farley, and "The Escape" by Robert Bloch) appeared is not a surprise. In the world of fan publishing, a run of six issues is a grand achievement. Published on a shoe-string, with no distribution, little advertising, and a proscriptive price (twenty cents was a lot in 1936), the story is the same to this day. It's hard to compete.

Howard

Looking at this attempt at becoming (I have little doubt) another Weird Tales - a painfully disappointing task many of us have tried to accomplish and failed - I am not filled with smugness or derision. I tip my hat at the attempt. Of course, in 2015 we know that the names of Lovecraft, Howard, and Derleth live on. Back in 1936, there was no reason to assume any of these writers would endure. Howard was dead by suicide, Lovecraft had less than a year left, while Derleth's Arkham House was still seven years in the future. In fact, all that possesses me when I read these old bleary pages is the desire to start another magazine, another (not my first) try to create a meeting place for future Lovecrafts and Howards, Bok and Finlays, a place that is made of well-printed text matched with intriguing artwork, a solid, beautiful gem locked in time.

But I resist. Not because the chances of success are so narrow. They were in 1936. They still are in 2015. But because the days of print are gone. I could do the same in a digital format but... it's not the same. Not for me. I need to see those pages printed and saddle-stapled. I need to smell the photocopy ink, the envelopes, that list of buyers (always too few). The agonizing process of collation, folding, stapling, etc. is life's blood to the editor of a fanzine. It is the wellspring from which Donald A Wolheim began, before he became the editor of the Avon Fantasy Reader, the Ace paperback series, and eventually CEO and head editor of DAW paperbacks, a line that continues to this day run by his children. I can imagine the "fan fire" that burned for DAW as he held each of these projects in their final form. Robert Silverberg has said DAW was the most important individual in 20th Century science fiction publishing. It started with Fanciful Tales #1, Fall 1936, a tiny spark of "fan fire".

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.

The Adventures of Santa Claus [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, Pere Noel. Whatever you call him, he is a busy guy. Every year he has to make billions of toys and deliver them all in one night. When would Santa have time to have any adventures? Well, he gets around more than you'd think.

In 1901, L Frank Baum who had recently seen his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz sell well was looking around for another idea. Why not the story of Santa Claus? What child could resist a tale of Old St. Nick? What Baum produced was The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902), a minor Fantasy classic in its own right, though it wasn't followed by multiple sequels like Dorothy's adventures in Oz.

Santa begins life as a foundling in the mythical forest of Burzee, home to Fairies, Knooks, Ryls and Nymphs. There, Ak the Master Woodsman rules and he allows the baby to be raised by the nymph Necile. He is given the name Claus, which means "little one", and "Ne" is added when he is adopted, "Ne-Claus" or Nicholas. In this way, Baum explains Christmas tradition after tradition, making up new and intriguing ways to explain everything from toys to mistletoe.

Now the plot could be pretty dull if Claus didn't have enemies to face. These are the Awgwas, creatures halfway between the fairy immortals and humans. They are giant in size and able to go from one place to another with magical speed. Their only agenda is to cause pain and suffering wherever they can. So, of course, they plan to steal Claus's toys that he makes to please the suffering masses of humanity.

This leads to a fantastic battle between Good and Evil (that Santa misses) with fire-breathing dragons, Goozle-Goblins, the Giants of Tartary, and many other fantastic monsters against Ak and his amazing ax. Baum doesn't give us Robert E Howard style blow-by-blow (the pity), but Good wins and Claus can go about his business of making toys.

The rest of the novel falls short of that great battle scene but Santa slowly figures out how to deliver the toys all in one night. When he reaches old age, Ak gives him immortality so he can go on lightening the hearts of humankind forever. The episodic tale does a good job of blending a new myth with an old holiday.

Baum had one last chance with Santa when the Jolly Old Elf made an appearance, accompanied by his friends, in The Road to Oz (1909). In this odd volume, Baum ties all of his series together in a multiverse worthy of Michael Moorcock. Children's books would now feature Santa on a more regular basis, since Baum had opened the door, but CS Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1951) is probably the most memorable. His Father Christmas gives out swords and bows, not just tea cakes. Lewis's battle scene between Good and Evil is much more detailed, though St. Nick doesn't take part.

But the kids weren't having all the fun. In January 1938, Weird Tales' popular author who usually wrote of the occult detective Jules de Grandin, presented what many consider his masterpiece, "Roads." Seabury Quinn builds his story slowly, beginning at the birth of Christ and ends in the 16th century. The story was illustrated by Virgil Finlay, and these drawings were used in the 1948 Arkham House edition.

Quinn tells the story of Claus in three parts. In the first section, "The Road to Bethlehem," we meet Claudius, a gladiator in the time of King Herod, a blond giant of a warrior. He wins his freedom in the ring and then wishes to return home. Before he can do this, he saves a baby from the purge that Herod's men are making. This is the baby Jesus, who makes Klaus immortal and sets him on a road to a great destiny.

In the second section, "The Road to Calvary," Claus, now a Roman Centurian, witnesses the death of the baby, now grown to a man. At the passing of Christ there is an earthquake, and Claus rescues the love interest of the tale, a girl named Unna. Quinn's action sequences take a page from Robert E Howard's prose style and spirit. Howard had been dead just eighteen months when Quinn wrote "Roads" and his red-dipped pen was sorely missed.

In the last part of the tale, "The Long, Long Road," we follow Claus and Unna, both immortal, as they move through history. Fleeing humanity's ills, Claus finds the elves and begins the last transition to becoming Santa Claus. As the baby Jesus tells him, his fate is not to die in battle but to become a person whom all children love and adore. Like Baum before him, Quinn peppers his tale with explanations on how certain Christmas traditions came about. Sam Moskowitz said that "Roads" was  “the greatest adult Christmas story written by an American.” Quinn had achieved for adults what Baum had done for children.

The idea of an heroic Santa, sword-swinging and powerful, a Hyborian Claus if you will, appeals to me on so many levels. And I'm not alone. Sony Studios is producing a new version of Baum's novel (now in the public domain) called Winter's Knight, featuring an ax-wielding Santa like you've never seen. This isn't the quiet Rankin-Bass adaptation from 1985, nor the less interesting Robbie Benson cartoon of 2000. It's not even the boisterous Santa of William Joyces's Rise of the Guardians (which borrows the spirit of Baum). It's a Roadsian version, a Howardian version, filled with violence and magic and blood. I can't wait.

Viking Santa art above is by Caio Monteiro. Art below is by Jakob Eirich.

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.