Welcome to the Portrait Gallery: 1948-1953
Welcome to the Portrait Gallery… where terror hangs on the wall. Where art meets madness and talent is used for evil. The old Gothics and Read More
Bulwer-Lytton’s “The House and the Brain”
Bulwer-Lytton’s “The House and the Brain” also known as “The Haunters and the Haunted” appeared for the first time in Blackwood’s Magazine, August 1859. (Somehow Read More
Second-Hand Sword & Sorcery: Avalon’s Barbarians
Reprints of 1970s material in the 1990s gave us second-hand Sword & Sorcery. Avalon Communications, a Canadian company, published two issues of Barbarians in 1998. Read More
Jamesian Complaint: My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure
A note on “My Aunt Margaret’s Adventure” led me in the past to say that M. R. James did not approve of ghostbreaker stories. This Read More
Caveman Hero Comics
Caveman Hero Comics had a strong tradition to follow. In literature, particularly Pulp and Children’s, there were heroes who were prehistoric men. Caveman literature dates Read More
Magic Versus Science: Campbellian Fantasy After 1943
Unknown Worlds of Science Fantasy Unknown Worlds was an important magazine for Fantasy fiction. Before its run between 1939 and 1943, the fantastic genre was Read More
The Original Thongor Stories
The original Thongor stories by Lin Carter sometimes get ignored because they were not collected with the original six novels. The Thongor novels began in Read More
Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
Where do you get your ideas? Well, if you are drawing comics in the 1950s, you borrow them. From the Pulps. Here’s a case where Read More
The Art in Heroic Fantasy Films
All great heroic fantasy films begin with talented artists conceiving the wonders that will eventually appear on the screen. Many of the comic book and Read More
The Ghostbreakers: The Horror of Studley Grange
“The Horror of Studley Grange” was one of a series from Stories From the Diary of a Doctor by L. T. Meade and Clifford Halifax. Read More