Showing posts with label Rogues in the House. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rogues in the House. Show all posts

Thursday, May 4, 2023

Going Rogue(s) with another 2023 Howard Days recap

This week I was invited to join the wonderful sword-and-sorcery podcast Rogues in the House to continue the discussion about Robert E. Howard Days 2023. You can listen to the episode here.

Joining me were Jason Waltz (publisher, Rogue Blades Entertainment) and Jason Ray Carney (publisher, Whetstone) a pair of fellow attendees whom I met for the first time last week in Cross Plains.

The show as always was a blast. Give it a listen, if for no other reason than to hear host Matt John deliver "Cimmeria" in his dead-on Arnold imitation. This had me in stitches. Dude should take this act on the road.

In addition to Howard Days recaps we also talked about the ongoing sword-and-sorcery revival. Jason Waltz and I served on the S&S panel organized by Deuce Richardson at 2023 Howard Days, while Jason Ray Carney was one of our avid front-row listeners. We get into some of the same territory here on the podcast, covering recent S&S history as well as current venues, authors, and trends. Good stuff.

Friday, June 3, 2022

(Other) stuff that got me into S&S: Rogues in the House leftovers

The RitH Army wants you!
Last night I guested on Rogues in the House, one of a handful of podcasts dedicated to all things sword-and-sorcery—or at least sword-and-sorcery adjacent. * The episode was on our origin stories, the events/media/incidents that set us down the path of sword-and-sorcery fandom and general lifelong nerdity.

This was my third guest appearance with the Rogues and as before, I had a blast. Co-hosts Matt John and Deane Geiken are great dudes, very easy to work with, and always run a good program. The show is up and you can listen here.

Even though we ran an hour and 38 minutes it was not enough time to cover all of the many childhood and adolescent influences that fueled my love of S&S. So, what follows is a more comprehensive list. I’m quite sure I’m missing a few, either forgotten to time or buried deep in my subconscious, driving urges I can no longer articulate. But this must suffice, for now.

These are the notes I was working off for the show so I’m leaving them as notes.

Toys including plastic medieval knights, little green army men, etc. Later Star Wars toys, D&D action figures, etc.

Saturday morning and after school cartoons particularly Thundarr the Barbarian and The Herculoids. Also Transformers, GI Joe, and of all things, the Gummi Bears (this became a running joke on the show).

Kids/adolescent books including The Hobbit, Fire-Hunter by Jim Kjelgaard, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Monsters by Crestwood House, Monster Tales: Vampires, Werewolves and Things. The Chronicles of Prydain/Lloyd Alexander, Dragonlance, Susan Cooper’s Over Sea and Under Stone, the Narnia books, illustrated Crusades stories, etc. In hindsight I can see how I was being inevitably steered toward sword-and-sorcery by consuming its various components; historical elements, grit and danger, monsters, tough and resourceful heroes, horror, and the weird.

Land of the Lost TV show.

Comics: Savage Sword of Conan, and other direct S&S titles (color CtB, Arak Son of Thunder, occasional issue of Heavy Metal). Also John Carter of Mars, Weird War, and Tarzan.

The comics led me to the Conan Saga Lancer paperbacks with their Frazetta covers.

Time Life Enchanted World series.

Adolescent films including Rankin-Bass Hobbit, Clash of the Titans, Dragonslayer, Krull, The Dark Crystal. Even something like Goonies, for the spirit of adventure and treasure-seeking it evoked in me.

These films inevitably led to more adult movies: Conan the Barbarian (1982), Heavy Metal animated, Excalibur, LadyHawke, The Terminator, Blade Runner.

Tabletop gaming: Tom Moldvay basic D&D (D&D in general, but this edition specifically). White Dwarf magazine, which had fiction, entertaining articles, and great artwork. Artwork in general was to be prized, prior to the internet. It sparked ideas for gaming, and my imagination in general. I later migrated to other RPGs including Runequest, Top Secret, Star Frontiers, etc. And Wargaming (Wooden Ships and Iron Men, Axis and Allies, etc.)

Computer games: Atari, which led to the early CRPGs (Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, Wizard’s Crown)

Heavy metal and its associated imagery (Iron Maiden, Manowar, Judas Priest)

Halloween—I dressed up as a viking one year, a knight another. My favorite holiday, still is.

Stephen King, including the likes of The Stand, Cycle of the Werewolf, the Long Walk, Salem’s Lot, Eyes of the Dragon, etc.

* I also recommend the likes of The Appendix N Podcast, So I'm Writing a Novel, The Cromcast, and the Dark Crusade for their coverage of sword-and-sorcery material.

Friday, February 25, 2022

In the house, with Rogues in the House

The latest episode of Rogues in the House is out, with me joining the crew for a panel session on the current state of sword-and-sorcery. Alongside stalwart S&S authors Howard Andrew Jones and Scott Oden, Matt and Deane and I discussed questions like:
  • What is the current state of sword-and-sorcery? Where is it strong, where is it not?
  • Sword-and-sorcery in gaming
  • Is the subgenre involved in a renaissance, and do we want it to be or are we better off staying off the beaten path?
  • What perception does the label have in publishing circles, and is it a help or hindrance to getting a work published?
  • Does it need a rebrand/new name to escape its past?
  • How does it differ from the more popular "grimdark" strain of hard-edged fantasy?
  • What do we hope to see in the future, and what does it need to continue to grow?
I had a lot of fun with this one, as always. The best part for me might have been seeing one of the co-hosts' legit armory pre-show. We're talking swords of all stripes, including replicas from The Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barbarian (1982), working crossbows, halberds (bec-de-corbin!), handcrafted chain mail armor, WWII armament, on and on. As I mentioned to Deane, I know where I'm going if the zombie apocalypse breaks out, or if I start seeing parachutes coming down Red Dawn style


A few notes I jotted down prior to the show... sword-and-sorcery today is a very small niche in an incredibly popular broader fantasy genre. Below are some of the interesting things going on it, but added up, it’s still quite small.

· A few good but niche publishers (DMR Books, Rogue Blades Entertainment, Pulp Hero Press, etc.).

· A good magazine (Tales from the Magician’s Skull).

· A swelling number of amateur publishing outlets (Whetstone, Flashing Swords, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, etc.).

· Some watering holes (Whetstone Discord, a small Reddit group, various small groups on REH websites, Facebook, etc.).

· Some publicity on Black Gate, blogs like my own/Silver Key, DMR Books has a great blog, as is the blog of Tales from the Magician’s Skull.

· Some new anthologies. Swords and Sorceries (Parallel Universe Publications has 3 volumes), Savage Realms. Blood on the Blade (Flinch Books)

· It’s supported by one good podcast—Rogues in the House. Cromcast has at times supported S&S, occasional episodes from likes of Elder Sign. Oliver Brackenbury’s So I’m Writing a Novel explores S&S. Appendix N Book Club covers a fair bit of S&S.

· Some good authors—Scott Oden and Howard Andrew Jones, James Enge, Schuyler Hernstrom, Adrian Cole. Keith Taylor is still writing and Michael Moorcock is still with us, with an original Elric story due to publish next year and reportedly “definitive” Elric editions coming out.

· But, it’s still a widely misused and misunderstood term, which is what I tried to help repair with Flame and Crimson. Still used synonymously with “fantasy.”

· It’s not a genre that major publishers want to take a chance on, and therefore not commercially viable.

Sunday, January 16, 2022

Latest Rogues in the House podcast is up: Deathstalker 2, and Flame and Crimson too

The Ultimate Sword-and-Sorcery podcast
The latest episode of the Rogues in the House podcast is now available for your listening enjoyment. The cast and crew of Rogues were kind enough to ask me on the show, and I have to say I had a BLAST. I mean, I spent last Thursday evening drinking a couple beers and talking sword-and-sorcery, Deathstalker 2, and the zaniness of the 1980s in general. 

We had way more fun than we had any right to, but if you can't laugh watching Deathstalker 2 you were obviously born without a sense of humor.

Check out the episode here. We also talked Flame and Crimson quite a bit as well.

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Rogues in the House: Deathstalker 2!

You won't find this level of beefcake ...
Any fans of this fun podcast, the only program wholly dedicated to sword-and-sorcery? I’m one of them, and tonight I get the pleasure of guesting on an episode.

 

The topic? Deathstalker 2: Duel of the Titans.

 

Somehow I had never watched Deathstalker 2. I look back upon my many years of renting the most exploitative videos I and my high school buddies could find, idle time spent scrolling YouTube, the additional (painful) video research I conducted for Flame and Crimson, and I wonder how this one eluded me. The only explanation I can come up with is that Deathstalker 1 is so outrageously awful, near irredeemable, that I wanted no further part of the series. 

 

In addition, I’ve consciously avoided the S&S films of the 80s. It got too depressing to see a subgenre that gave us Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, The Dying Earth, Conan and Kull, Elric, etc. handled so badly on the silver screen.

 

But, in recent years I’ve made peace with sword-and-sorcery films. I view them now as a cornball corner of pop culture history to enjoy as guilty pleasures. And, I’m already glad I got the opportunity to guest on Rogues because Deathstalker 2 is fun. Sword-and-sorcery fans will find their subgenre treated with about as much subtlety and reverence as Animal House did for undergraduate education. I would describe it as objectively a bad film, but subjectively awesome. It knows what it is, and while not a true parody like Men in Tights for example it is entirely a tongue-in-cheek take on S&S. 

 

Make no mistake, this is by any measure a bad movie. Really bad. The acting is below the level of a soap opera, the plot barely a thread, the script full of holes, and the sets and props are cheap and flimsy and entirely recycled. It lacks proof of having been backed by anything resembling a budget; in fact, there really wasn’t one. If there was, it was spent by the cast and crew in Argentinian dive bars. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s a poor man’s Army of Darkness.

 

You can currently find Deathstalker 1 and 2 on Tubi, a free movie service. My advice: Skip the first and head straight to the sequel. And look for our insights and analysis of this fine film on an upcoming episode of Rogues in the House.