Reading “Ill Met in Lankhmar” by Fritz Leiber was a formative experience for me. I was impressed by Mignola’s covers. This was not the first time Mignola drew Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, however. He also worked on a comic series by Dark Horse about the Twain with Howard Chaykin.
Read MoreRobert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber were the two most important writers of Sword and Sorcery. Both created S&S for the pulps. However, in some ways, they were very different writers.
Read MoreThere are various things about S&S that appealed to me but a big one is the outsider protagonists. Conan is often alone against a dangerous world. That feeling is something I understand. Another thing I like about it is the sense of adventure which is rare in modern society.
Read MoreThe late 1960s and early ‘70s were peak sword-and-sorcery. The Lancer Conan Saga was at its zenith of popularity, eventually selling by some estimates upwards of 10 million copies. And as the ‘60s gave way to the ‘70s a struggling magazine was about to get a signal boost from S&S’s mightiest hero.
Read MoreToday marks the thirtieth anniversary of when Fritz Leiber departed this mortal coil. At the venerable age of eighty-one, he left behind him a truly great legacy in the fields of fantasy, science fiction and horror, not to mention the realms of literary criticism and role-playing games. When he died, Leiber had already influenced the likes of Ramsey Campbell, Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Terry Pratchett, Glen Cook, Tim Powers, Neil Gaiman and Michael Chabon, demonstrating the sheer breadth of what he had wrought.
Read MoreAbout four months ago, I wrote a blog entry regarding 'pastiches' in the De Campian sense. There were several interesting comments on that post. While I thought I laid out my basic attitude toward pastiches fairly well, there are certainly various angles that I didn't cover.
Read MoreI discovered Fritz Leiber, Mike Mignola, and sword-and-sorcery at the same time. I was a teenager in the suburbs of Houston when I picked up the collection Ill Met in Lankhmar by White Wolf Publishing at a Barnes and Noble. This was a double collection that includes Swords and Deviltry and Swords Against Death.
Read MoreIt seemed to me that I should revisit my old essay for The Cimmerian blog, “The Sword-and-Sorcery Legacy of Clark Ashton Smith”. While recognition of Klarkash-Ton as the co-founder of Sword-and-Sorcery has increased since I wrote that essay in 2010—most notably in Brian Murphy’s excellent Flame and Crimson—it appears to me that Smith’s influence on the S&S genre is still very undervalued.
Read MoreMuch has been made of the correspondence between H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, but Lovecraft corresponded with more writers, including a young Fritz Leiber, Jr. His work bears much influence of the Gent from Providence and Lovecraft was somewhat of a literary mentor of Leiber.
Read MoreDungeons and Dragons has become a household name. It is firmly embedded in our pop culture. Whether you have played the game or not, you are aware of it. Within its pages, co-creator Gary Gygax shared a list of stories that inspired him. This list is known as Appendix N.
Read More