No getting around it; cinematic sword-and-sorcery is a world of suck. Definitional elasticity is desperately needed so that we can claim artistic successes like John Boorman’s Excalibur, John McTiernan’s The Thirteenth Warrior, and Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers for a subgenre to which they don’t incontrovertibly belong. Hell, George Miller’s The Road Warrior and Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans capture more of the feel and frisson of the best sword-and-sorcery (recall the Mann movie’s endgame of inevitable, almost Iliad-ic death-duels against an impossibly dramatic backdrop with a soundtrack that is all Celtic keening and skirling) than does anything ever dumbed down and screwed up by a member of the De Laurentiis family.

So heroic fantasy aficionados usually have to settle for table-scraps and objets trouvés, an extended sequence here or the better part of a Chronicles of Riddick there. Case in point: the 2 tentacular spectaculars of kraken-on-ship action in this summer’s Dead Man’s Chest, prodigies of special effects, editing, and stuntwork, like Jackson’s Kong-versus-three-tyrannosaurs tour de force last Christmas. Davey Jones’ kraken dragging down its tall-masted prey is probably as close as we’ll ever get to the Oraycha setpieces of Karl Edward Wagner’s sorcery-and-superscience-permeated sea battle in Darkness Weaves.

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After days of rumors, the governing body of The Cimmerian announced Tuesday that backup samples confirmed preliminary results showing the presence of tarlcaboterone, a state-of-the-art synthetic testosterone manufactured from liquified John Norman “Gor” novels, in the urine of [redacted], Rusty Burke, and Steven Tompkins, who respectively won the 2005 1st place, 2nd place, and 3rd place Hyrkanian Awards for best Howard essays. The delay in completing the carbon-isotope test used to detect tarlcaboterone, essayist growth hormone, and other banned performance boosters was blamed on the pressures inherent in producing 12 issues of The Cimmerian during the Howard Centennial.

Editor/publisher Leo Grin pronounced himself “heartsick—the timing could not be worse, with The Cimmerian just having notched a World Fantasy Convention ‘Special Award: Non-Professional’ nomination,” but emphasized that the 3 positive-testing 2005 winners, all of whom have repeatedly denied ever taking article-enhancing drugs, would be stripped of their helmeted-skull trophies and barred from competing in essayistic events everywhere “except possibly at Hippocampus Press.” Grin declined to speculate as to why Finn, Burke, and Tompkins might have risked their reputations, and tens of dollars in endorsement deals, but other Howard Studies insiders agreed to speak off the record.

Allegations have long swirled around Tompkins, who is known to enjoy movies with subtitles and, in the words of one REHupan, was “tiresomely supportive” of John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign. “You can’t tell me someone like that had enough natural testosterone to write a Hyrkanian-winning essay,” a long-time Howardist insisted. Instead of fighting to clear his name, Tompkins has fled to France, where he will adapt the Bran Mak Morn/King Kull story “Kings of the Night” into a live action Asterix/Obelix project.

Burke has attracted much less suspicion in the past, although a source who was unwilling to be interviewed at length because he had “to go slay some zooms” charged that Burke’s demeanor during a debate years back with current Weird Tales editor Darrell Schweitzer about L. Sprague de Camp’s Dark Valley Destiny’s Child was “excessively mildmannered and pushover-y, so he had to be doping when he came up with ‘Travels With Robert E. Howard.'”

For many it is Finn’s positive test results that are the most difficult to accept, and at an emotional press conference this morning the Texan was adamant that, while his essay “Fists of Robert E. Howard” was “virile as hell,” the testosterone he poured into its writing was “110% natural. The night before I pounded out the final draft, I re-read ‘Daughters of Feud.’ That’s all it was.”

Grin made it clear that all 2006 Cimmerian Award winners had been “tested so constantly, they might as well have been cathetered.”

David Gemmell cheated death, or at least a hope-denying misdiagnosis, back in 1984 when he wrote his first and most beloved sword-and-sorcery novel Legend. At its most powerful the subgenre Gemmell did so much to perpetuate has always had something inside, something to do with death, and now death has once again done something to sword-and-sorcery.

This morning Gemmell died, at the unacceptably young age of 57. What should have been a time of celebration for heroic fantasy, with the Howard Centennial and the immensely gratifying return of Charles R. Saunders and his outcast/champion Imaro of Nyumbani, must now also be a time of mournful and (if there is any justice) never-ending remembrance.

Enter the OE, bookmarking his place in “The Black Stranger”:

Rather proclaim it, Doc Pod, online and off,
That he which hath no ideas for this Mailing,
Let him gafiate; his name from the roster stricken,
And dues refunded put into his man-purse;
We would not zine in that fan’s company
That spares not his weekend to zine with us.
This day is call’d the feast of [Tim] Marion,
He that outlives this day, and comes safe to #201,
Will stand a tip-toe when this Mailing is nam’d,
And rouse him at the thought of August of ’06
He that shall zine this day, and live to look like Burl Ives,
Will quarterly one night neglect the remote,
And say ‘Twas not always but a single section.’
Then will he fetch his stacks and show his zines,
And say ‘These printing problems I had in Mailing #200.’
All shall be Mylared; or sold off on eBay,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What pages he filled that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as usual suspects —
Indy the OE, Rippke and Trout-in-the-Dark,
Richter and Gramlich, Romeo and Sea-Burke
Be in their flowing cups beerily remembered.
This story shall the good fan teach his son;
And deadlines shall ne’er force FedEx,
From this Mailing to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered —
We few, we serconn’d few, we apa of brothers;
For he today that sheds his ink with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so minacked,
This day shall excuse his reprint;
And gentlefans at innercircle now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
That zined with us for Mailing #200.

LEO ADDS: That was wonderful. Although once we receive Indy’s package, you may change your tune to “We didn’t land on Mailing #200, Mailing #200 landed on us!”

What a relief it is to turn from the troll droppings and toxic testosterone of the Novalyne-Killed-My-Favorite-Writer mouth-breathers online to words written by those who were actually alive and alert in 1936. The first few references to Robert E. Howard in the 2002 Night Shade Books volume Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei, edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, are merely incidental, then, in a letter dated October 19, 1932, Lovecraft tells Wandrei “Just got a fine set of rattlesnake rattles from Robert E. Howard. His letter accompanying them is a veritable prose-poem with the unconquerable serpent as its theme.” How much would those rattles, known to have been handled by 2 greats, fetch at a weird fiction-themed memorabilia auction today? Ah well, chances are they would have been “borrowed” in the late 70s and never returned to whoever was their rightful owner at that point…

On March 28, 1932 HPL is still coming to grips with “a 22-page (closely typed) argumentative epistle from Two-Gun Bob, the Terror of the Plains.” On December 6, 1935, he dismisses most of the new Weird Tales: “Nothing of any merit in it except Klarkash-ton’s “Chain of Aforgomon”—that is, nothing short. Two-Gun’s serial may be good, but I never read serials until I have all the parts.” (By the time of his June 20, 1936 letter to CAS, Lovecraft had the complete Hour of the Dragon, which he pronounced “really splendid” despite some reservations about chronic carnage and the nomenclature that always affected him like itching powder poured down the back of his collar). In that same letter he reacts with amusement to “how quickly [in “The Challenge from Beyond”] Two-Gun made a rip-roaring sanguinary Conan out of the mild & scholarly George Campbell.” And then, much sooner than would be preferable, Letter #234, from Lovecraft to Wandrei on June 24, 1936, is the next in the sequence. After expressing concern about an accident that befell Wandrei’s sister-in-law, Lovecraft writes “A more tragic and less remediable blow is one which has just hit weird fictiondom in a very vital spot—a disaster which I can scarcely bring myself to believe.” He himself has learned the news “in the form of card (without particulars) from Miss Moore.”

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Members of Terry Allen’s REH Comics Group have long since learned to dread the semiliterate, borderline solipsistic posts that come from one individual whose nom de harangue used to be something like blunderbusspastprime. He now styles himself simperingflophouse (close enough) and remains impervious to irony or being showered with rotten vegetables and roadkill, so certain is he that his is a unique insight into all things Hyborian and Howardian.

Today he had this to say to Tim Truman, the well-known artist and soon-to-be writer of the Dark Horse Conan comic:

Anyway, i just read his foreword in Weird Works of REH vol 3 and was surprised that he the western writer is such a Howard fan. And i also share his view about teh main cause of Howard’s suicide-over a woman. Ms Price aint as honest in what she write about their relationship now that Howard is so famous. [a whole world of sic]

“His” and “he the western writer” refer to Joe R. Lansdale. I haven’t seen Lansdale’s introduction to Weird Works Volume 3, but I doubt that someone so talented would trot out such an oversimplification. Simperingflophouse, on the other hand, expresses himself in oversimplifications and oxymorons in much the same way as Oscar Wilde was wont to express himself in epigrams. In any event the assertion that Novalyne Done It is all over Howard-dom lately; Jim Keegan did his best to club the embryonic meme to death in a recent issue of Dark Horse’s Conan, and an innercircle post earlier this year condemning Ms. Price as a two-timing gold-digger was immediately shouted down. It’s taken us decades to give the Suicide Due to Terminal Mama’s Boy-ism rush to judgment the heave-ho, and we don’t need it replaced by Suicide Due to Bad Breakup.

The demographics are creakingly in evidence over at REH Inner Circle, where various knights of doleful countenance are bemoaning the absence of anything fast-paced or elephantiasis-free to read, pining for mass market Tros of Samothrace or Elak of Atlantis editions, and decreeing, in the case of one poster, that fantasy had better return to a supposed “original rush of adrenaline and action” PDQ.

The thing is, although midlife crises are part of the package they’re no reason to go into a fugue state or don homemade blinkers in Borders or Barnes & Noble. Twenty-six David Gemmell sword-and-sorcery outings can now be impulse-bought or if need be ordered online in the U.S., all of them starring lethal blademasters or axe-wielders who would carve Elak or Tros like Easter hams. Gemmell’s novels zoom (an alternate ‘szum” spelling is strictly verboten) by faster than the novellas of almost anyone save Howard himself, and although characters like Druss the Legend, Waylander the Slayer, Connavar the Demon Blade, Skilgannon the Damned, and the Jerusalem Man continue (despite the sincerest efforts of their many enemies) from book to book, potential readers can pick up any single novel without needing to worry about whether they’re getting in on the ground floor. Charles Gramlich is the latest in a long line of REHupans to undergo a Gemmellian conversion experience, and when I see the Englishman go unmentioned in they-don’t-write-’em-like-they-used-to keening sessions, or get frozen out at a site that is otherwise a resource-a-rama like Howard Jones’ Swordandsorcery.org, it’s hard not to shake my head and think, none are so blind as they who will not read. Not every work of heroic fantasy trafficking in thrills, chills, and kills has to have originated in a prewar pulp or a 70s paperback with a Frazetta or Jeff Jones cover. Gemmell is more than just a phenomenon—he’s our favorite subgenre’s second wind.

No, not the “-licious” kind of booty. Pirate booty. Swag. The other wages of sin. Howard Pyle prefaced his Book of Pirates with a rhetorical question: “Why is it that a little spice of deviltry lends not an unpleasantly titillating tang to the great mass of respectable flour that goes to make up the pudding of our modern civilization?” Advance word has whispered that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest will add a little spice of not-particularly-Disneyfied devilry to the great mass of not-to-be-baked-with flour-substitute that constitutes the 2006 summer releases — indeed, some genre-oriented websites are going so far as to suggest that Dead Man’s Chest is to 2003’s The Curse of the Black Pearl as The Empire Strikes Back was to Star Wars.

The captain’s-share of the credit for the phenomenon that the first Pirates of the Caribbean became goes of course to Johnny Depp and his inspired tribute to the woozy body language and woozier speech patterns of Keith Richards, who in his protracted heyday treated everything life had to offer as one defenseless Spanish treasure fleet. But Captain Jack Sparrow’s scurvy groove and raffish glide stood out all the more against the backdrop of a supernatural pirate story, for Gore Verbinski’s film belonged, much to the delight of a few of us, to a subgenre of a subgenre. We learned early on that the Black Pearl had “black sails, [was] crewed by the damned, and [was] captained by a man so evil that Hell itself spat him back out”–Geoffrey Rush’s Barbossa, whom vindictive Aztec gods (and why wouldn’t they be vindictive?) afflicted with a death-in-life condition in which he and his men were unable to eat, drink, or be merry. Not to be outdone, the crew of tentacle-bearded soul collector Davy Jones’ Flying Dutchman in Dead Man’s Chest, all of them recruited from sinking vessels, are transmuting into anthropomorphic sea creatures whose shore leave options will soon be limited to Innsmouth.

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One need not necessarily like the work of H.P. Lovecraft to like that of Robert E. Howard — witness biographer/blogger [redacted], who has been known to break into the Special Collections section of the Brown University Library in Providence for the sole purpose of rubbing spoiled seafood against the Lovecraftiana kept there. But one can’t be a serious Howard aficionado without recognizing that REH really liked HPL’s weird fiction and striving to understand why. And being forced, or forcing oneself, to choose between the 2 writers, championing one while cold-shouldering the other, is a form of self-inflicted impoverishment like forcing a choice between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Sure, it can be done, but why would one want to? Joseph Curwen and Xaltotun both make life better (although they might not be pleased to hear it).

It won’t be long before a set of shelves designed in accordance with non-Euclidean geometry will be required to house all the new books “by” or about Lovecraft. One of the most enjoyable is Andrew Migliore and John Strysik’s The Lurker in the Lobby: The Guide to Lovecraftian Cinema, which has been expanded and updated from the 2000 edition. The fact that expansion and updating were so obviously warranted serves to underscore the realization that an equivalent book for Howard would cry out for a title like The Hours of the Drag-On or Clay Pigeons from Hell and make for brief and depressing reading. The Lurker in the Lobby comes tricked-out with a preface by S.T. Joshi and “Pickman’s Gallery,” a full-color midsection of “preproduction art, movie stills, and promotional posters” by Richard Corben, Mike Mignola, William Stout, Bernie Wrightson, and other artists.

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I thought about inaugurating this blog by pointing out just how mistaken Patrice Louinet, the prolific and otherwise perceptive Howard scholar, is in his belief that Monica Bellucci would make a better Dark Agnes de la Fere than would the French actress Virginie Ledoyen — mais non! Bellucci would be hard pressed to get out of the way of her own mammaries while fencing. But instead I’m going to revisit TC V3n5, which is fondly remembered in Tompkinsian precincts as The Special Apoplexy Issue. Gary Romeo’s “Viagra for the Soul,” Richard A. Lupoff’s “Long Ago and Far Away,” and Leon Nielsen’s “Pseudo Boom” all contained assertions that had me glimpsing the world through an echt-Howardian crimson mist for hours after I encountered them.

Each and every paragraph of Nielsen’s “Pseudo Boom” could not be more sincere in its concern, from a bookseller-cum-collector’s perspective, about How Well Howard Is Doing. Such a perspective is of course valid and valuable, but hardly panoptic — monitoring eBay transactions can tell us a lot about copies sold, but next to nothing about worlds rocked and doors opened. Nielsen overlooks or under-esteems significant developments while bizarrely fawning upon the Baen Books Howard paperbacks of the mid-90s, which he applauds for their “higher degree of textually pure versions” and “Ken Kelly’s splendid cover paintings.” (Splendid? Seriously, splendid? Like I said, Special Apoplexy Issue) He contrasts the scads of reprintings of the Lancer/Ace/Sphere Conans — Gary Romeo used to hand them out at homeless shelters and Vegan restaurants once a month — with the lone printing of the Baens, but we need to keep in mind that the latter were packaged with covers representing Kelly at his worst rather than those that represented Frazetta at his best, and were unified as a series only by their author, not by a gigantomorphic protagonist.

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