Friday, June 17, 2022

Tales From the Magician's Skull Blog Roundup - June 17th 2022


Skull Minion of the Eleventh Order, Bill Ward, continues to guard the threshold between reality & fantasy (via the Tales From the Magician's Skull Blog).  With Robert E. Howard Days occurring (a tribute to REH who died June 11th), and with the passing of master painter Ken Kelly, the focus turned to the masters who have traversed realms. Read on, in honor of heroes!

MAY 31 - Classic Covers: More Roger Zelazny

Multiple-award-winning and best-selling author Roger Zelazny’s popularity wasn’t just confined to his native United States. Winner of France’s Prix Apollo, translated into dozens of languages, Zelazny’s reach was international and his appeal universal. While many of us will only ever appreciate him in one language, the multitude of artistic interpretations of his highly imaginative stories is something we can all enjoy with yet more Classic Covers.

 

JUN 3 - A Look at Caveman Stories by Fletcher Vredenburgh

That Robert E. Howard’s first professionally published story, “Spear and Fang,” was a caveman story should mean something to the history of heroic fiction and sword & sorcery itself. Perhaps, because it’s not a very good story, it never had the effect a better one might have. But I’m not totally sure; teenage Robert E. Howard already had a sure grasp of the elements that hook a reader craving action and adventure in their stories.

There’s not very much to “Spear and Fang” (1925). Pretty Cro-Magnon girl A-aea is forcefully accompanied into the woods by the haughty and threatening warrior Ka-nanu. Very quickly, they’re set upon by a ferocious, animalistic Neandertal who proceeds to dismantle Ka-nanu. Later, A-aea is saved by the object of her affections, the brave (and artistically inclined) Ga-nor. All ends well and love will bloom in the savage dawn of mankind.

 

JUN 7 - Dehumanizing Violence and Compassion in Robert E. Howard’s “Red Nails” by Jason Ray Carney

Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery tale “Red Nails,” published as a three-part serial in Weird Tales in 1936, tells the story of the city of Xuchotl, the enduring, blood-soaked war between the Tecuhltli and the Xotalanc, and the dehumanizing effect of sustained hatred and violence. “Red Nails” engages with several ancient literary tropes, but the one that centers “Red Nails” is what I term “the stalemate war.” By focusing on the stalemate war between the murderous Tecuhltli and insane Xotalanc, I hope to bring into focus a surprising facet of Robert E. Howard’s most famous sword and sorcery character, Conan of Cimmeria: the way the barbarian maintains his humanity through compassion.

First, let me briefly clarify what I mean by the literary trope of “the stalemate war.” Identifying tropes and patterns in literature and popular culture is more an art than a science, but it’s fun and often reveals surprising dimensions to works. Why storytellers hew to these enduring patterns, who knows? Some speculate that these mythic patterns are evolutionary residues, instinctual psychological narratives that unconsciously narrate the crucible of our evolution. Their origins notwithstanding, there are undeniable recurring structures of story that resonate with us, and so storytellers return to them over and over, hone them, and reinvent for their own purposes. Robert E. Howard did this with “Red Nails,” and he did this masterfully.

 

JUN 10 - Classic Covers: Frank Frazetta’s Lancer/Ace Conans

Second only to Robert E. Howard in importance in the development of the perception of Conan, Frank Frazetta’s explosively elemental take on the Cimmerian achieved instant cultural cache and has become the defining image not only of Howard’s most famous creation, but of the barbaric hinterlands of fantasy fiction itself. Frazetta’s frenzied depictions of havoc and battle, his iron-muscled killers taut with violent fury, his churning vistas of bodies in conflict beneath rust-red skies, presented a gritty, dynamic vision of the bloody world of sword-and-sorcery fiction — a graphical apotheosis for a sub-genre that was no longer tucked away in moldering pulps, but instead enthusiastically smashing through the doors of mass culture.

The long-running Conan series helmed by de Camp and Carter was the entry point for a generation of readers newly discovering the original tales of Robert E. Howard’s barbarian adventurer—along with a mixed bag of pastiche and repurposed stories from other Howard heroes.

 

JUN 14 - Classic Covers: Ken Kelly

The world of fantasy illustrators has lost one of its most prolific and long-running practitioners, Ken Kelly (May 19, 1946 – June 3, 2022). From the classic Berkley Medallion line of collected Robert E. Howard to the modern Baen reissues, Tor Conan pastiches, and Wildside/Dorchester Weird Works of REH — and the thousands of fantasy and science fiction books from every major publisher in between — Kelly’s art was a ubiquitous presence on the paperback rack for half a century. Tutored by “Uncle Frank” Frazetta, the undisputed master of brooding sword-and-sorcery illustration, Kelly incorporated Frazetta’s high-contrast interplay of light and dark and sinuous, dynamic character modeling into his own brand of frenetic, physical, and fantastically explosive art.

While many remember Kelly for his work on album covers for bands like Kiss and Manowar, or his equally dynamic covers for horror and film magazines, comics, and even toy advertisements, for those of us at Tales From the Magician’s Skull he will forever be honored as one of the major voices in sword-and-sorcery illustration, a direct connection between our contemporary age and the era in which rediscovered pulps boomed across the collective consciousness and sparked a revolution in fantasy story-telling — both in print and in art.

 

JUN 17 - Lin Carter: Enthusiast of the Fantastic by Brian Murphy

Born this month 92 years ago, the late Lin Carter (1930-1988) was, perhaps more than anything else, an enthusiast. He heard the Horns of Elfland, and they called to him like few fans of the sacred genre before or since.

Author of Thongor. Creator of worlds. Self-mythologizer. Awards organizer of the Gandalf, for whose statuettes he paid out of his own modest pocket. Founder of the (mostly fictitious) Swordsmen and Sorcerer’s Guild of America, or S.A.G.A. Generous with his praise, both for the fantasy GOATS, and his peers and contemporaries. Editor of the esteemed Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (BAFS), which breathed new life into old classics and helped codify the fantasy genre. Frequent contributor to Amra. Capable steward of multiple anthologies including Year’s Best FantasyFlashing SwordsKingdoms of WizardryRealms of Wizardry, the Zebra Weird Tales paperback revival, and many others.

Carter wrote lots of fiction. Most of it was of mediocre pastiche quality, with a few sparkles amidst the detritus. But what he never lacked was a boundless enthusiasm for it all.