Four months after Marshville was hit with a brutal winter, freezing crops in the town museum’s garden, things continue to look dire. An unseen creature continues to stalk and kill the citizens of the town, though these deaths are being kept from the public. Though the town is still getting heat, per Professor Cook, folks are not getting enough food. He meets with Meriem and Bruce and brings up that a cabin at the boundary between the town and prehistoric earth may have a stockpile of supplies. He asks Meriem if she can investigate. Bruce rejects this idea as the citizens of Marshville have treated Meriem awfully despite everything she does for them. Despite this, Meriem still accepts the mission.
Personal copy of Cavewoman “Snow” issue 3, special edition version.
She makes her way through the snow using her superhuman speed and agility and locates the cabin. Inside she finds a journal which leads her to a cellar stocked with food, ammo, and other supplies. On her way back to report her findings she is attacked by the invisible assailant.
Commentary
Issue three of Cavewoman “Snow” was published in July of 2011 with the story and art being by Rob Durham. It is the penultimate issue of the “Snow” storyline. Taking place four months after the events of issue two, issue three sees the town of Marshville in further jeopardy as its citizens slowly starve during a prolonged, harsh winter, while an unseen killer stalks the streets.
Cavewoman Snow #3 certificate of authenticity.
The prior issue had a (probably unintended) focus on how laissez-faire many integral figures of the town acted, which included blame shifting (running Meriem over with a transport truck), not taking situations seriously (dismissing the kids trying to report a murder), and putting off doing necessary tasks (maintenance on the museum gantry), which cascaded to baleful consequences, such as the museum garden getting heavily damaged by snow avalanching in from a cracking skylight, which puts the town in the predicament it is in.
Meriem’s doe eyes.
On page, during issue two, Meriem was the scapegoat for these mishaps. Sometime, off page, between issue two and this issue, Meriem is absolved by some of the townsfolk. Sensing her depression at the beginning of this issue, Bruce tells Meriem, “The two maintenance workers vouched for you” and later on Professor Cook says “the incident at the museum is over with. Almost all accept the fact that Meriem was only trying to save the garden that day.” It is important to note that these apologies occur off page, and neither said to Meriem directly nor visually shown to the reader. It sends the message that it is ok to chastise publicly but recant and apologize privately. There is also an asterisk in Cook’s statement of “almost all,” no doubt referring to the character of Martson who always has it out for Meriem but of course does not give up a chance to ogle her body (as seen in issue two when he stares at her curvy hips in the museum).
The cure to Prof. Cook’s arthritis is coffee and brandy.
This is all foundation to Meriem’s superhero dilemma: the town needs her, but will turn on her in an instant, and then come back when they need her, rinse-repeat. Issue three brings this superhero trope to the forefront in that Professor Cook wants Meriem to scout a cabin for supplies to save the town, but Bruce brings up the (rightful) observation that citizens of Marshville treat her horribly despite everything Meriem does for the town. Meriem is a true altruist here. She goes above and beyond for Marshville, but the town does not return the favour.
Meriem batters her way through the floor boards.
The last half of the issue switches from drama to action as Meriem takes off to find the cabin of supplies. When she arrives, she finds a hidden journal where the last page indicates the suppliers are hidden under the floor. Wanton destruction is the key here as Meriem bashes into the cabin’s floor, showing off her posterior in the process. Finding nothing, Meriem then realizes the cabin’s shed has a visible trap door. It is a funny scene for what has been an otherwise somber issue, while throwing in some cheesecake aesthetics as the issue has been chaste up to this point (issues one and two both had sequences of nudity). Meriem in a pinup and a sex symbol, so artist/author Durham finds a lighthearted way to insert some sexuality into the issue.
Meriem lies defeated in the snow.
The issue ends with Meriem encountering the unseen creature. The monster is still not shown to the readers, so this will be a mystery to be revealed in issue four. While Meriem gets a good elbow hit in, she is otherwise defeated by the entity. She lays in the snow, finding herself not healing. Perhaps due to the extreme cold that she has voiced concern about during the “Snow” run? Or perhaps due to low caloric intake due to food rationing? Or perhaps lack of willpower due to her depression from trying to save a thankless town? Or all of the above?
Conclusion
Issue three of “Snow” is half drama and half adventure. The first, dramatic half of the issue really sells the dire situation of the town of Marshville but also brings a heavy helping of emotional weight put upon Meriem. The last half of the issue turns into normal jungle-girl activities, though in a winter landscape rather than jungle, as Meriem traverses the terrain, does some light detective work, destroys some things in the process, and has an encounter with the beast that has been terrorizing the town. As usual, Durham’s art is fun, detailed, and heavily emphasizes not only the pinup beauty of Meriem, but also her emotions through facial expressions and posture. Though overall melancholy in tone, issue three does set up everything for an exciting finale in issue four. Will the town be saved? What will the creature turn out to be?
For more information on Cavewoman “Snow” issue three, check out the official product page at Amryl Entertainment:
June was my birthday month. Happy birthday to me! It was not an overtly productive month with only one article published at my website, but I got some other projects done, such as my cocktail recipes for this year’s New Edge Sword and Sorcery issues. Excited about that!
Review of Cavewoman “Snow” #2
New comic book review up at my website here! I continue going through my Cavewoman collection and revisiting these old issues. I am continuing with the “Snow” story arc, which puts me at issue #2 now.
Personal copy of Cavewoman “Snow” #2.
My write up of this issue can be read right here. It is a pretty good one, both in content but also in looking at themes and just, damn, people are people, and people suck, even when they live in a town that has been transported to the prehistoric past and everyday is basically life or death.
PangoBooks Bookstore
I have opened up a bookstore online at PangoBooks! I have been working on clearing shelf space, culling dups, and so on, which is resulting in me having a pile a books I no longer need. I have quite a few odd, unique, OOP, and weird stuff, so do check my store out. Purchases help me out greatly! Michele also has a store, so check that out as well.
Panthans Journal #349
The June issue of the National Capital Panthans Journal has been published. This issue contains a reprint of my review of issue nine of Vanya: The Lost Warrior. The original can be read here. If this looks sort of duplicated, it is. This review was also republished in #348 of Panthans. So, folks can enjoy it twice!
National Capital Panthans Journal #349. Cover by David Michael Beck.
Paraphrased from the zine: The National Capital Panthans Journalis a monthly publication issued as a .PDF file on the Saturday before the first Sunday of each month. Contribution of articles, artwork, photos, and letters are welcome. Send submissions to the editor: Laurence G. Dunn at laurencegdunn AT gmail.com in a Word document for consideration.
Sincere appreciation to Laurence for the opportunity to have my work published in the journal.
Scholars from the Edge of Time – Hundreds of Beavers
For the June episode of Scholars From the Edge of Time, Michele and I venture way off course from peplum films and into the world of slapstick. We watched Hundreds of Beavers (2022) and enjoyed it immensely.
Personal copy of Hundreds of Beavers on Blu-ray.
The episode can be watched on YouTube. Check it out to hear us talk about something a tiny bit off topic.
Publishing Recap
Below is a recap of my external publishing endeavors so far in 2026.
Exotica Moderne #31
“Tellers of Tales: Interview with Alex Lamb and Max Well on The Donn of Tiki” in Exotica Moderne #31, May 2026.
Here are some new pop culture CFPs that have crossed my path or I am sharing on behalf of my colleagues. Links to these will also be in the CFP page on the navigation bar.
Re-Analyzing Mad Men – Critical Essays on the AMC Series’ 20th Anniversary
2027 will mark twenty years since the ground-breaking series Mad Men aired its first episode. Since then, the world of Sterling Cooper – led by the universally talented “Mad Men” of them all, Don Draper (John Hamm) – has become synonymous with a glamorized mid-century culture, characterized by three-martini lunches, men with skinny ties, large fedoras, and huge egos; anxious women with Jackie Kennedy hairdos, form fitting skirts and bold ambitions to break the ubiquitous glass ceiling. AMC’s episodic drama still ranks in the Top Five of all television series mainly due to the fact that Mad Menbecause a cultural phenomenon, detailing America’s preoccupation with commercialism and image in the Camelot era of 1960s America while self-consciously exploring our own cultural paths with image and self-reinvention.
In 2007, the television series and cultural phenomenon Mad Men broke ground, establishing AMC as a major competitor to the likes of HBO for prestige dramas. In 2027, twenty years after its original release and twelve years since it ended, its legacy endures.
In 2011, my book Analyzing Mad Men, brought together critical approaches to, what was then, an emerging series, capturing its immediate impact and pioneering the wave of scholarship that came after its publication. In anticipation of these anniversaries, I am looking to re-analyze the series in full, presenting a new collection of essays examining the many facets of the series as it moved from those halcyon days of America’s Camelot, the 1960s, though to the end of that decade, marked by Viet Nam, the culture wars, the rise of youth culture, and the move of Madison Avenue from the streets of New York to the sunny coast of California.
Building on the continued scholarly interest in Analyzing Mad Men and the enthusiasm of its original publisher, McFarland & Co, I issue the following call for chapters with the aim of eliciting new chapters and approaches to the series and its legacy. Suggested topics might include:
New Historical examinations of how the series uses the “Age of Camelot” and the “Death of the Sixties” to compare to our own times, particularly in respect to advertising, commerce and capitalism;
Psychoanalytic approaches to the series, particularly in the respect to the conclusion of Don Draper’s storyline; his marriages to Betty (January Jones) and Megan (Jessica Pare), and his relations to the industry shifts;
Mad Men’s approach to the selling of “self”, selling commodities, and the drastic shift in the culture toward the series’ end;
Sterling Cooper as a microcosm of culture mores, sexual politics, and changing attitudes toward capitalism;
The storylines of Peggy Olsen (Elizabeth Moss) and Joan Holloway/Harris (Christina Hendricks) who begin the series as office assistants, and end the series as representatives of the new woman in business;
The series’ approach to advertising and the shift from Madison Avenue to Los Angeles;
Mad Men’s continuing effect of fashion merchandising and furniture / décor;
Pete Campbell’s (Vincent Kartheiser) and Roger Sterlings’s (John Slattery) efforts to confirm images as “self-made” men of success and how their subsequent marriages and divorces affect their abilities as “self-made” men;
The series’ use of “the edge”: How heterosexism, homosexuality, drug culture and gender politics influence characters’ behaviors within the corporate atmosphere and in their private lives – particularly as the series progresses through the decade;
Theories of management at Sterling Cooper, reflected in Roger Sterling’s approach, Bertram Cooper’s (Robert Morse) new age tactics, and the hostile takeovers that challenge the company through the decade;
The series embracing of nostalgia in selling the series to a new (and supposedly evolved) contemporary audience. What is the legacy of Mad Men? And why has the series remained in the Top Five of all television series?
Abstracts of 500 words concerning any of these ideas or any others should be sent via email to sstoddart@saintpeters.eduby 15 August 2026. Final essays will be due by 15 December 2026 so as to make the publisher’s 01 March 2027 ideal date for release.
Geographies of Horror
Department of English Studies (University of Zadar) in collaboration with The Society for the Study of the American Gothic (SSAG)
Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University)
May 20-21st 2027, University of Zadar (Zadar, Croatia)
The study of horror has always been inseparable from the question of space. From the shadowed corridors of Gothic castles to contemporary digital voids, spaces in horror are never just passive backdrops. They function as active agents that shape perception, destabilize subjectivity, and collapse the distinction between interior and exterior, revealing how fragile our sense of spatial coherence can be. This conference seeks to understand how spaces become haunted – materially, symbolically, psychologically, and technologically, and how these hauntings articulate broader cultural anxieties, historical traumas, and epistemological uncertainties.
In Gothic and horror traditions, fear unfolds through space, guiding perception, and encounters with the unknown. Early Gothic forms, such as castles and monasteries, establish models of spatial excess, enclosure, and architectural anxiety, while the haunted house transforms domestic familiarity into something uncanny. In modern and contemporary horror, this logic extends to urban environments, where entire cities and infrastructures become haunted. While urban legends and other unsettling narratives embed fear in everyday life, abandoned malls, transit systems, and brutalist structures evoke concepts such as “non-places,” characterized by transience and anonymity.
At the same time, horror increasingly stages the breakdown of spatial logic itself. Non-Euclidean geometries, infinite corridors, and paradoxical environments destabilize perception and challenge epistemological certainty. In these instances, space becomes fundamentally unknowable, aligning with cosmic horror and philosophical pessimism. These concerns extend into digital and virtual environments, where video games, online narratives, and immersive technologies generate new forms of spatial horror. Phenomena such as The Backrooms exemplify liminal, endlessly reproducible environments that evoke both familiarity and existential dread. Simultaneously, haunted space becomes internalized within the body and mind, as psychological and body horror depict interiority as fragmented and invasive.
With all this in mind, we welcome papers from across disciplines and media that examine the spatial dimensions of horror, including but not limited to:
Gothic and classical haunted spaces
Urban and infrastructural hauntings, including “non-places”
Non-Euclidean, paradoxical, and incoherent spatialities
Digital and virtual environments (games, online narratives, immersive media)
The body and subjectivity as haunted spaces
Ecological and environmental horror
Spatial storytelling across literature, film, television, comics, and interactive media
The keynote speaker for the event will be Professor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University). He is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, where he teaches a range of courses on American literature and popular culture. He is the founder and president of The Society for the Study of the American Gothic, the founder and general editor of the peer-reviewed journal American Gothic Studies, and the co-founder and past chair of the Modern Language Association Gothic Studies Forum. He also serves as the associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books and is currently the general editor for Bloombury Publishing’s six-volume Cultural History of Monsters series.
His research focuses on the “cultural work” performed by the Gothic in its various manifestations – the ways in which Gothic texts and practices give shape to culturally specific anxieties and desires. This interest has led him from considering, for example, how nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American women made use of Gothic conventions as a strategy to express discontentment with their circumscribed roles to thinking about the ways contemporary monsters reflect shifting American fears and aspirations.
To date, he is the author or editor of 34 books and more than 100 essays and book chapters on the Gothic, American literature, cult film, and popular culture.
Abstracts of 250–300 words, accompanied by a short bio (approximately 100 words) and 3-5 keywords, should be submitted to geographyhorror@gmail.com.
The deadline for the abstract submission is October 1st 2026.
Selected papers focused on American Gothic and horror themes will also be considered for publication in the peer-reviewed journal, American Gothic Studies Journal.
New Sword and Sandal Acquisitions
The ever growing peplum research library grows with these recent sword and sandal acquisitions.
Conquest
I have seen a lot of Lucio Fulci movies (Zombi 2 4 evah!) but Conquest (1983) has eluded me. Blue Underground put out an edition a long time ago, but I just never got around to doing so.
Cauldron limited edition of Conquest.
That changes now because I have plucked up this incredible limited edition UHD/Blu-ray version from Cauldron. It even came with this rad sticker set:
Cauldron Conquest sticker set.
I think a watching for an episode of Scholars from the Edge of Time is in order! I can also consult one of my bible-books: Stephen Thrower’s Fulci book!
News from Friends
Cool kids I know have been busy lately! Here are some signal boosts I’d like to give out.
New Ride the Stream Episodes
New episodes of Michele Brittany and Travis Lakata’s vidcast, Ride the Stream, are online. The duo begin the month with taking a break from television stream to tackle a ,movie. An epic movie. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring!
Older episodes of Fan2Fan can be found at its Libsyn page or via your podcast app of preference. There is also the Fan2Fan Facebook page. Give them a like/follow!
New John 3:16 Album
John 3:16, the primary music outlet of composter Philippe Gerber, just dropped a brand new album earlier this month!
John 3:16 Album – The Beast.
The album is called The Beast and it was, appropriately, released on June 6th, 2026 (6-6-6!). The album can be purchased for $6.66 at Bandcamp, so make sure you check it out and pluck it up!
The energy crisis for Marshville has been quelched as Bruce has overseen the installation of the pump at the tar pits north of the city and getting the trucking of oil into town up and running. He returns home to his apartment, into the waiting arms of Meriem Cooper, for an amorous evening.
Personal copy of Cavewoman “Snow” #2.
The next day Meriem makes way to the town’s museum that has been converted into a food garden. En route she happens upon a set of prints in the snow that remind her of the prints she found a month prior during an expedition to the north tar pits. While examining the prints, she is hit by an oil transport truck, but walks away unscratched, leaving only an impression of her posterior in the truck’s plow. At the museum she begins work on harvesting the sunflowers.
Meanwhile an unseen entity (Animal? Dinosaur? Something else?) slays Mrs. Solomon, a woman returning home with her food ration. A trio of kids happen upon her body and inform two adults who brush off their concerns.
At the museum, snow keeps accumulating on the roof, threatening to break the skylights. Two maintenance workers attempt to clean up the mess but find the building’s gantry frozen. With glass cracking, Meriem becomes more concerned with the safety of the garden she holds so dear and ventures to the roof of the museum to assist. She uses her superhuman strength to dislodge the gantry, but in the process crashes through the window, causing snow to pour in on the crops. Professor Cook attempts to assuage Meriem, but dejected, she leaves the scene and returns home.
Commentary
The second issue of “Snow” was published May of 2011, with series stalwart Rob Durham continuing the story and art. Picking up two months after issue one, the major dilemma introduced in “Snow” #1, the power plant running out of oil and thus the ability to heat Marshville, has been solved. But, for a town transported to the prehistoric past, problems jeopardizing survival are like a game of whack-a-mole: as one is solved another arises. The town may have heat, but an unseen threat, foreshadowed in issue one when Meriem and company found the unknown tracks in the snow outside town, has now popped up, slaying Marshville citizens. An incoming storm threatens to blanket the town with even more snow, causing skylights, such as that atop the museum that houses the town’s garden, to crack under the weight.
A big theme in this issue is the spectrum at which the populace of Marshville takes seriously (or not) their role of keeping the town safe and functioning. The first page of the comic has Bruce reflecting on his role at getting the oil pump up and running and the logistics for transporting oil to town: “In some strange way the important meaning of the projects to our survival has kinda given me… purpose.”
Bruce realizes this, but it is shocking at how many citizens of the town do not, or do not care, and do not take responsibility.
Meriem is rear ended by a truck.
The first example comes early in the issue when Meriem is on her way to the museum to help in the garden. She stops to investigate a set of mysterious prints in the snow (which are, of course, a part of the grand issue of an entity stalking and killing the people of the town). As she examines the tracks she is rear ended by an oil-ferrying truck. Meriem is unscratched (though her tits pop out of her top, turning the scene into a sex-comedy gag) because of her superhuman abilities. The truck driver (named Tanis), who was not paying attention to the road, is quick to deflect responsibility of the accident from himself to Meriem by saying “Now in the future young lady you should be a little more careful.” Basically, Tanis is able to absolve himself from running over a young lady and instead deflect that responsibility back to her. Though the sequence is played for laughs, it demonstrates subconscious misogyny going on and overt not taking responsibility for one’s role in the safety of Marshville seriously.
Meriem crashes through the museum roof window.
A similar situation occurs at the climax of the issue, though this time it is played seriously and not for laughs. Cathy, who is overseeing the garden inside the museum, has asked Marstone to have the snow cleaned off the glass roof of the museum so it will not cave in. Marstone, in turn, has delegated this duty to two maintenance workers. When they finally get around to address the snow on the roof, they realize the gantry’s gears are frozen. The two have a heated exchange “Damn it, I asked you to grease the gears a week ago!” “I was getting to it!”. Meriem shows up and takes the initiative to solve the issue by using her strength to rattle the gantry loose, but she winds up falling through the skylight, taking the snow with her, damaging the garden. Marstone is quick to blame Meriem for the whole debacle, calling her a terrorist and a menace. Neither of the maintenance workers step forward to claim their culpability (after all, if they had done their job a week prior, none of this would have happened) and instead allow Meriem to take full blame. It is her fault, and not the fault of the men with authority in the scene, just like with the truck crash earlier.
While the men finger point, grumble, and skirt the responsibility of being placed in important positions integral to the survival of the town, Meriem has done nothing but step up her game. Cathy comments that no one else wants to be in the garden picking vegetables: “Glad you made it in, no one else has, and I could sure use the help!” Meriem, on the other hand, is all too happy to lend a hand and pick sunflowers so the land can be rotated to have cabbage planted. Bruce and Meriem are model citizens and go above and beyond for their community (which is one of the reasons they are so compatible together).
A kiddo tries to convey happening across the dead body.
A final scenario in “Snow” #2 that feeds into this overall theme of not taking the situation the town finds itself in seriously is when three children happen upon the corpse of Mrs. Solomon who has been slashed by the unseen stalker in the town. The children, as they are supposed to do, report the body to the adults. When the children return with two adults, (who are also the two maintenance workers that were supposed to deal with the museum roof), they find the body gone. The adults dismiss the children’s concerns (which, solidifies their general attitude of not doing anything as is evident with the upcoming scene on the roof). This is a common trope in horror films: the children witness a monsters/something bad, tell someone about it, and are not taken seriously (until it is too late). The Blob (1958) is a perfect example of this. Steven McQueen and friends are teenagers who witness the blob in action, and report it to the police, who are outright hostile to them (one of them thinks the kids are trying to get to him). Marshville is a town that has been teleported to the historic past. It is surrounded by dinosaurs and other weird creatures. The entire situation is absurd and calls for the utmost attention and seriousness. When someone is pointing out “Hey! We saw a dead body”, given the predicament the town is in, it warrants true investigation and not dismissal.
Conclusion
Issue two of the “Snow” storyline is great. Narrative-wise, this is a dense issue. There is a lot going on in the town of Marshville, and even with all the external threats going on, it is seeing the (perhaps unintentional) internal threats from its own citizens that adds to suspense and drama of the story. Real characters/people behave in different ways, and the complacent/fear of taking accountability characteristic is a legitimate character trait that adds depth and complexity. It is heartbreaking though to see Meriem try so hard for the people of the town (with her helpful personality and heroics) but still relegated to the role of outcast and spoken of negatively.
Meriem among the sunflowers.
Art-wise, Durham always brings the best in the cheesecake style. For sexploitation/exploitation purposes, Durham makes sure to showcase a small helping of nudity (as when Bruce returns home to the awaiting arms of Meriem, or when she is hit by the truck), or to draw Meriem in poses that highlight her glamorous features (as when she is picking sunflower seeds). A great issue that is both fun while not letting up on maintaining its air of suspense that any moment something will occur that threatens everyone.
For more information on Cavewoman “Snow” issue two or my other Cavewoman reviews, check these links:
It is May going on to June, so it only seems fitting that the next review I am doing of Budd Root’s Cavewoman series is the four issue “Snow” miniseries.
Personal copy of Cavewoman, Snow #1.
An early winter sets in Marshville, and Meriem, the titular Cavewoman, has to deal with brownouts, egotistical townsfolk, the bitter cold, an expedition to a tar pit, and so much more. My review for issue one of “Snow” can be read here.
Antonio Margheriti Jungle Films Boxset
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge fan of Italian director Antonio Margheriti. I’ve been collecting his work for years, did my masters thesis on his film, Castle of Blood, and continue to write about his movies every so often.
The Antonio Margheriti & The Jungles of Doom boxset.
Imagine my excitement when Severin Film put out a boxset of Margheriti’s Raiders of the Lost Ark knockoffs! Just for fun I dug out my old VHS and DVD copies of these films and put them side by side with the new Severin release. Check that out here.
Exotica Moderne #31 Released
Physical copies of Exotica Moderne #31 are officially out! This issue contains my interview with Alex Lamb and Max Well, the filmmakers behind the documentary, The Donn of Tiki.
Exotica Moderne #31
Issues, as well as bundles with this issue, can be purchased at the House of Tabu website. Here is the product link.
Troy UHD/Blu-ray Release from Arrow Video
I always get excited when a neo-peplum film gets a new release. Arrow Video officially announced on Friday the 29th that they are putting out a limited edition of the Wolfgang Petersen epic film, Troy, in both UHD and Blu-ray formats this August.
Product photo of Limited Edition of Troy from Arrow Video.
I am double exited about this release because I got to contribute to it in a small way! I was able to provide some Troy ephemera that is being reprinted in the booklet and I get to be credited as a release contributor in the notes. In other words I get to be part of a bonafide sword and sandal release! I am beyond stoked!
That, of course, means I got to spread the word. Definitely pre-order this edition of Troy. It has the theatrical cut, director’s cut, and loads and loads of extras. It can be pre-ordered at the Arrow Video web store.
Panthans Journal #348
The April issue of the National Capital Panthans Journal has been published. This issue contains a reprint of my review of issue nine of Vanya: The Lost Warrior. The original can be read here.
National Capital Panthans Journal #348. Cover by Mark Wheatley.
Paraphrased from the zine: The National Capital Panthans Journal is a monthly publication issued as a .PDF file on the Saturday before the first Sunday of each month. Contribution of articles, artwork, photos, and letters are welcome. Send submissions to the editor: Laurence G. Dunn at laurencegdunn AT gmail.com in a Word document for consideration.
Sincere appreciation to Laurence for the opportunity to have my work published in the journal.
The New Peplum Reviewed
A new review of The New Peplum pops up!
Cover art for The New Peplum
The Midwest Book Reviewhas published a positive review of The New Peplum at their website, which can be read here. Check it out, and if the review moves you, consider plucking up a copy at McFarland.
Scholars from the Edge of Time – Hercules (1983)
For the May episode of Scholars from the Edge of Time, Nicholas and Michele go back to the Italo-Disco 80s and watch the Lou Ferrigno Hercules!
Personal copy of Hercules ’83 on Blu-ray.
I liked it! Michele… not so much. Want to hear what we have to say? Give it a watch on YouTube.
Publishing Recap
Below is a recap of my external publishing endeavors so far in 2026.
Exotica Moderne #31
“Tellers of Tales: Interview with Alex Lamb and Max Well on The Donn of Tiki” in Exotica Moderne #31, May 2026.
Here are some new pop culture CFPs that have crossed my path or I am sharing on behalf of my colleagues. Links to these will also be in the CFP page on the navigation bar.
NEPCA Monsters & the Montrous Area 2026
The Monsters & the Monstrous Area of the Northeast Popular Culture Association (a.k.a. NEPCA) seeks proposals for inclusion in NEPCA’s 2026 annual conference.
The event will run as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 15th, through Saturday, October 17th. Virtual sessions will take place via Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Registration will open up in mid-July. The registration fee is expected to be around 50 USD.
The Monsters & the Monstrous Area welcomes proposals that investigate any of the things, whether mundane or marvelous, that scare us. Through our sessions, we hope to pioneer fresh explorations into the darker sides of the intermedia traditions of the fantastic (including, but not restricted to, aspects of fairy tale, fantasy, gothic, horror, legend, mythology, and science fiction) by illuminating how creative artists have both formed and transformed our notions of monsters within these sub-traditions in texts from various countries, time periods, and media and for audiences at all levels. Our primary goal is to foster a better understanding of monsters in general and to examine their impact on those who receive their stories as well as on the world at large.
In addition, as a component of the Northeast Popular Culture Association, the Monsters and the Monstrous Area is also especially interested in fostering discussion and debate on the monsters and the monstrous of the Northeastern United States (here defined as New England and New York). Topics might include the Borden Family Murders, the Bridgewater Triangle, the Legends of Sleepy Hollow, the New England Gothic tradition, the New England Vampire Panic, the New England Witchcraft Hysteria, and the life, works, and legacies of local Gothic/horror authors such as Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joe Hill, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and H. P. Lovecraft.
NEPCA prides itself on holding conferences that emphasize sharing ideas in a non-competitive and supportive environment. We welcome proposals from graduate students, independent scholars, disciplinary professionals, junior faculty, and senior scholars. NEPCA conferences offer intimate and nurturing sessions in which new ideas and works-in-progress can be aired, as well as completed projects.
The call will be open until Monday, June 15, by 5 pm EDT. Submissions should be made directly at https://www.northeastpca.org/call-for-papers. This site offers full information on the submission process and a link to send your proposal to us. If you have any questions about the conference, please reach out to the Executive Secretary, Lance Eaton (northeastpopculture@gmail.com).
Questions on the Monsters & the Monstrous Area can be directed to the area chair, Michael A. Torregrossa (popular.preternaturaliana@gmail.com). The area maintains a series of blogs that offer resources and potential topics. Please access them at Popular Preternaturaliana: Studying the Monstrous in Popular Culture (https://popularpreternaturaliana.blogspot.com/).
Rest in Peplum: George Eastman
On May 19th legendary Italian cult film actor George Eastman (Luigi Montefiori) passed away. A true end of an era of Italian genre and exploitation cinema. He didn’t really do much peplum (Fellini Satyricon [1969]) as he arrived on the scene after that filone has passed. He started in the spaghetti westerns.
However in the 80s, Eastman was in many pasta-pocalypse films and sword and sorcery flicks, all featuring strong men, gladiators, barbarians, etc. etc. Basically, 80s pepla.
Ironmaster (1983)
The New Barbarians (1983)
2020 Texas Gladiators (1983)
The Barbarians (1987)
Personal copy of Ironmaster.
Personal copy of The Barbarians.
I’ve watched numerous films Eastman has been a part of (Emanuelle Around the World [1977] probably being my favourite). Michele and I have talked about a few of his films on Scholars from the Edge of Time:
**note – I know we talked about Endgame, I just can’t find it? It may have been a Blog Talk Radio episode.
A true #RestInPeplum for this icon!
News from Friends
Cool kids I know have been busy lately! Here are some signal boosts I’d like to give out.
New Ride the Stream Episodes
New episodes of Michele Brittany and Travis Lakata’s vidcast, Ride the Stream, are online. The duo continue their episode by episode commentary of the series Dark Winds.
Michele has a new video up at her YouTube channel, this one recapping all her loot from going to the Brass Armadillo over in Goodyear, AZ. Check it out here or in the player below.
Abandoned Asylum Kickstarter
James Chambers and Raw Dog Screaming (aroooo) Press are launching a Kickstarter on June 2nd to fund an anthology called Abandoned Asylum.
Just like the title of the Fat Boy Slim album says: “You’ve come along way, baby!”
Back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, a younger Nicholas Diak was enrolled in the liberal arts program at the Tacoma campus of the University of Washington. I was neck deep in my master’s thesis which was about Italian genre filmmaker Antonio Margheriti and his masterpiece, Castle of Blood (1964).
Aside from demonstrating the virtues of Castle of Blood and why it was an important movie in Italian film canon (it was transgressive, showed nudity, depicted lesbianism in a chaste, Italian society, etc.), I had also made a call for the reconsideration of Margheriti as an Italian director of note. I felt at the time (and still do) that he was extremely overshadowed by the likes of Bava, Argento, Fulci, and Leone, and his contributions to the various genres he operated in were not as acknowledged or appreciated as they should have been.
This was extremely apparent at the time in that Margheriti films were next to impossible to procure. While the four directors I mentioned above all had accessible filmographies, made even more available with the rise of DVDs and the emergence of boutique film labels, Margheriti films remained hard to find and obtain, much like the treasures featured in his Indiana Jones knock offs of the 80s. In order to find Margerhiti’s films, I often had to go to Scarecrow Video in Seattle, check the (albeit small) Margheriti section, note the titles and formats, and hope for the best on eBay or websites like the now defunct xploitedCinema. In time I accrued a handsome amount of other region DVDs and VHS tapes of Margheriti’s films. Many hours were spent at the UWT A/V lab transferring those VHS tapes to a DVDr. In the end, these all become my treasures.
It is now 15 to 20 years later. My writing career has been all over the map, but I have never stopped writing about and championing Margheriti. The list at the end of this write up is a consolidated list of my writings and podcast/vidcast appearances talking about the director and his films (if you’re interested). Concurrently, Margheriti’s films did find themselves being released in accessible, restored editions that they deserve.
Personal copies of the Severin release of Castle of Blood and Alien from the Abyss.
Severin Films, the masters of releasing European genre and sexploitation cinema stateside, has been kind to Margheriti. Prior they had released Castle of Blood (in a couple different editions) and Alien from the Abyss (1989), an underrated knock off of Alien(s) and Predator (1987), and technically, kinda/sorta Blood for Dracula (1974).
The Antonio Margheriti & The Jungles of Doom boxset.
The 80s were a prolific decade for Margheriti, where his filmography looked split between two different genres: the post-Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) adventure film, and the post-Vietnam men-on-a-mission film (both overlapping with jungle settings). Severin’s newest Margheriti masterpiece release, Antonio Margheriti & the Jungles of Doom: His 80s Adventure Films, is an excellent representation of the former. It is a stately boxset with new editions of Ark of the Sun God (1984), Jungle Raiders (1985), and Hunters of the Golden Cobra (1982), though each film is available individually. For fun, I’d like to show off a side by side of these new Severin releases next to what I had to work with back in the day.
Personal copies of Jungle Raiders on 4K and VHS.
Looking at DVDCompare.net, it appears that Jungle Raiders‘ only physical release after the 80s was a German DVD in 2000, the early days of the format. The long abandoned Antonio Margheriti website lists no DVDs of this film. This makes the Severin release the first truly accessible incarnation of the film, unless one happened to hold on to their VHS copy distributed by the Cannon Group (like me!). To be fair, Jungle Raiders does make a great addition to the Cannon library, along side other Indiana Jones-ish fare like Firewalker (1986), King Solomon’s Mines (1985), and its sequel, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986).
The Severin edition contains a UHD and Blu-ray format of the film, a trailer, and an interview with Edoardo Margheriti, the son of Margheriti who assisted his father in many of his films. The VHS edition does not support any special features, obviously, but I have to give it a point for having fantastic artwork. The Severin Films cover art is nice, and evokes a 1950s style, think Secret of the Incas (1954), but the Cannon VHS screams 80s ‘splosions.
Personal copies of The Hunters of the Golden Cobra on 4K/Blu-ray and VHS.
Hunters of the Golden Cobra is one of the many, many films Margheriti made with cult film star David Warbeck (read his biography put out by FAB Press many years ago, he talks fondly working with the Italian director). Like Jungle Raiders, it appears Hunters of the Golden Cobra only got one release (well, a DVD and a Blu-ray), put out X-Cess Entertainment in Germany (also lacking an entry at the Margheriti website). There’s no date for this release at DVDCompare.net, but one of the special features is a video with Dr. Marcus Stiglegger, who had contributed to Severin’s own release of Horrors of Spider Island (1960), so that makes this German release fairly recent. That means in the 40-ish years since its release in theaters/VHS, Hunters of the Golden Cobra has not been available at all.
The Severin Films release holds even more treasures than the Jungle Raiders release: two interviews, a Q&A with star Warbeck, a video essay, and trailers. The Vestron Video VHS is a neat artifact of the era, but its cover art does not quite capture the energy in the Indiana Jones-like films. The Severin release definitely takes the VHS artwork and improves upon it.
Personal copies of Ark of the Sun God on DVD and Blu-ray.
And finally, there is Ark of the Sun God. As you can probably surmise from the picture above, there are a) a lot of editions of Ark of the Sun God and b) I REALLY like Ark of the Sun God. It is, unironically, one of my top five favourite films of all time. Right up there with von Trier’s Europa (1991) and Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red (1994). Ark of the Sun God is at that level!
The first academic presentation I ever gave, at the 2009 Popular/American Culture Association Conference, was on Ark of the Sun God. If you look closely at the bottom center DVD, you’ll see, in silver marker, an autograph by Edoardo Margheriti to Michele and I. Back in the late 2000s I posted this film (and a few others) to Edoardo for him to autograph, and it has been one of the jewels in my collection. Thus, for the reasons above (and more) I have a strong affinity to this film.
The bottom row of three DVDs are, well, pretty bad in regards to image quality. They are definitely rips from VHS tapes. The AIP Studios release (bottom left) looks borderline like a Ghanaian film poster, with the cartoonish flames on the tanker and Susie Sudlow looking rather ghoulish.
The Tales of Voodoo Vol 4 DVD (bottom right) has two movies on it: Temple of Hell (which is Ark of the Sun God) and Cannibal Curse (1988). Cannibal Curse is ripped from a subtitled VHS tape, and if the subtitle is too long, it cuts off due to the cropping of the frame. The cover of this DVD looks akin to a cover a horror comic from EC Comics back in its day, though not too fitting for Ark of th – I mean – Temple of Hell, which has no voodoo or even really any gore (the character of Mohammed gets shot and bleeds, but he recovers).
The center middle DVD from Pulp Video, the one that is autographed, is my favourite DVD of the trio and the one that I have watched the most. The art on this one is great and really captures the last scene of the film when Warbeck and company find the Scepter of Gilgamesh (there is no Ark in this film) and battle with Turkish Star Wars and his minions.
Shockingly, I have no VHS copies of Ark of the Sun God, and that is because I was able to find the film on DVD(s). What I do have is the 88 Films release of Ark of the Sun God that came out in 2023. This is an import release (88 Films is in the UK), but it is stacked with extras: poster, booklet, a commentary, two interviews, and more. At the time, this looked to be the best treatment Ark of the Sun God would ever receive.
Of course, Severin Film stepped up to the plate to deliver their own release of Ark of the Sun God in early 2026. The Severin Films does not contain the same supplemental material as the 88 Films edition, instead bringing an interview with Edoardo, and interview with the film’s writer Giovanni Paolucci, and Margheriti reminiscing about David Warbeck. The cover art is a much, much better version of the AIP DVD release.
What Severin Film brings that is truly unique is a CD soundtrack that has songs from both Hunters of the Golden Cobra and Ark of the Sun God. For decades the Ark of the Sun God theme song done by Josette Martial has been unavailable, which is unfortunate because the track is an Italio-Disco banger. In 2025 the album got a digital-only release on Amazon via Cam Sugar, but here it is, in physical format for the first time, in Severin’s release. A Holy Grail, er, Holy Scepter of Gilgamesh, album release for sure.
And with that, my little retrospective of comparing old VHS tapes and DVDs of Margheriti’s Indiana Jones movies to their new Severin counterpart concludes. I hope that this boxset is extremely successful because there is a plethora of other adventure/action/jungle movies Margheriti directed in the 80s that would greatly benefit from a re-release. A double Blu-ray of the Indio movies perhaps? A triple boxset of his men-on-a-mission films with Lewis Collins maybe? These are all great, fun, films that capture that 80s action/mercenary film spirit that was prevalent at the time.
If you’ve enjoyed this fun retrospective and want to check out some of my writings on Margheriti, see the links below.
My best piece on Margheriti is no doubt my essay “Welcome to the Jungle: Fun and Games in Antonio Margheriti’s 1980s Mercenary Films” that was published at We Are the Mutants. One of the best things I’ve ever written:
A heavy snowstorm falls upon Marshville, a town that has been transported into the prehistoric past, covering the streets in two feet of snow. Due to the strain the winter has put on the powerplant, the town has instituted brownouts for the time being to conserve fuel.
The town’s leaders gather to assess the situation: Meriem the cavewoman, her boyfriend Bruce, Professor Cook, Corporal Mack, Sergeant Marstone, and a few others. Prof. Cook confirms the town’s food supply is in great standing, but heat for the populace is in jeopardy due to the fuel reserves being diminished. He proposes an expedition to the north to investigate a set of tar pits to see if oil can be obtained. Marstone expresses vehement opposition to the professor and his ideas (and in particular to the presence of Meriem), but the other townsfolk embrace Cook’s plan.
At the tar pits.
The expedition, consisting of Meriem, Bruce, the professor, and police officer Alex, set off to the tar pits, which they arrive at a day later. The professor gets to work testing the tar pits for oil while Alex, Bruce, and Meriem keep warm by the fire, drinking coffee and rum. Professor Cook returns and confirms: oil!
As the party make their way back to Marshville they encounter a farm outside town that is surrounded by prints by an unknown animal. They deduce it is an animal that has adapted to the cold.
Back in town, the professor proposes the town’s windmill pump that is on display at a museum be repurposed to drill the oil so it can be trucked in to Marshville. Bruce sets off back north to get the machinations of Cook’s plan underway.
Commentary
The first issue of the “Snow” storyline in Budd Root’s Cavewoman series was published in February of 2011, with the art and story done by Rob Durham. This is an exposition issue, light on action but upfront about the stakes Meriem and the rest of the town are in: dangerous cold and snow, lack of power to keep the town warm, hints of internal strife, and the possibility of an unknown creature lurking outside of town. The peril is real and Durham goes at lengths to establish this.
Meriem leaps through the streets.
Though not an action-centric issue, Meriem is still afforded opportunities to display her jungle girl superpowers. She uses her agility to leap gracefully through the icy streets of Marshville while Bruce stumbles and falls. Her healing ability allows her to drink rum without feeling the intoxicating effects (much to her chagrin). There is a discrepancy on how her thick skin handles the cold. At the beginning of the issue, when Meriem arrives at Bruce’s apartment, she comments that she is only a little cold due to her skin. Later on, while at the tar pits, a much more clothed Meriem is observed by Bruce and the professor to not be as adaptable to the weather, and that she is shivering.
Meriem tries on her new outfit.
On the subject of clothing, Meriem is given a new attire for this issue. Made from bits of Bruce’s old racing suit, it is a fur hood with leggings and elbow-length gloves that are leopard print. The outfit still enhances Meriem’s sex appeal, her leopard leggings looking akin to stockings. The attire does underscore her cat-like agility, demonstrated as she leaps through the town as a panther. Unlike the previously reviewed issue of Cavewoman, “Extinction,” which was more kid-centric and kid-friendly, this issue of “Snow” veers into erotic territory, with Meriem and Bruce having sex off page and Meriem going topless, showing off her large breasts, in many panels early in the issue.
Though the sex appeal is overt, Meriem and Bruce look to have a healthy, affectionate relationship, with concern for each other’s well-being. Meriem is no damsel in distress, and in perhaps a bit of gender role reversal, she plays the physically strong role in a relationship that is usually depicted as fairly traditional.
Meriem entertains the idea of being a mother.
Regarding traditional gender roles, in “Extinction” the ideas of Meriem being a motherly figure are brought up when she rescues Susie from the cave tentacle monster. In issue one of “Snow” the subject is brought back up. As she placates her cousin Lumpy and his friend Will (who also appeared in “Extinction”) with promises that she will do something fun with them after she returns from the expedition, Professor Cook remarks that she will “make a great mother someday.” Miriem bites her bottom lip as she holds the idea in thought, enchanted by it.
Marstone is not a team player. He can dish out hostility to the professor and Meriem, but whines when confronted back.
The last theme of “Snow” revolves around the notion of community in Marshville, working together to survive not just being in the prehistoric past, but also a cruel winter. Professor Cook acts as a de facto leader of the town, though no doubt under a dotted line hierarchal relationship to the town’s police force and mayor. There is, of course, dissent in the community that should be unified, particularly with the character of Marstone, who takes umbrage to Meriem and the professor, and suggests they should begin clearcutting the jungle surrounding the town for fuel. This could be a character that truly cares about his community but is extremely skeptical to having to rely on others, or he has nefarious intentions and perhaps wants to seize command to do things his way.
Conclusion
The first issue of “Snow” is off to a great start. There is the introduction of multiple dilemmas (the snow, the tar pits expedition, the unknown creature, internal communal strife, etc.) that will no doubt coalesce during the next three issues. It sounds like a lot to juggle, but Durham has done a great job at keeping everything linked together and relevant. Durham’s art style is always top notch in the Cavewoman series, especially when depicting Meriem, be it pinup style, or jungle girl heroine style. A great issue and a great beginning to a new Cavewoman storyline.
For more information on Cavewoman “Snow” issue one or my other Cavewoman reviews, check these links:
I did not get much published at my website in April, but that does not mean a lot of news didn’t happen!
GosT/Perturbator Concert Archival Write Up
James Lollar, the mastermind behind the dark/synthwave band GosT passed away earlier this month. He was a pioneer of the retrowave genre.
GosT performing.
I was lucky to have seen GosT perform with Perturbator back in 2017. I did a concert write up that was published at Heathen Harvest, but that website is long since dead. Since it has been on my radar to bring some of my old articles back online and host them here, and I want to do what I can to help keep Lollar’s memory eternal, I’ve gone ahead and dug up my concert report and put it online. I’ve also included more photos than the original publication.
It has been a few years since my last piece being published in Exotica Moderne, but I am back!
Exotica Moderne #31
Back in November 2025 I had the honour to interview Alex Lamb and Max Well, the filmmakers behind the documentary The Donn of Tiki. That interview will be published in the next issue of Exotica Moderne, which is issue #31. In fact, orders for that issue are already being taken at the House of Tabu website (product link).
I have other article ideas that have been on the back burner for Exotica Moderne, such as an essay on Secret of the Incas. It is probably a good time to realize them. Exotica Moderne has always been a great periodical and one of the best venues I have ever written for.
Vanya #10 Compendium
The neo-jungle girl comic series Vanya: The Lost Warrior (which I’ve covered extensively at my website here) had a successful Kickstarter this month to fund issue ten.
Vanya 10 Kickstarter Banner
One of the items every backer will receive with their pledge is a digital compendium that includes supplemental material, such as character bios, universe lore, a short story, and even a recap of what transpired from issues one to nine to allow folks a quick way round catch up in the story.
I was humbled and honored to be asked by the Bad Bug Editor in Chief, and writer of Vanya, Mike Tener, to write this summary to be included in the compendium! So, keep an eye out here, or the various Bad Bug outlets (Facebook link here) for news on how the development of issue ten goes.
Panthans Journal #347
The April issue of the National Capital Panthans Journal has been published. This issue contains a reprint of my review of issue eight of Vanya: The Lost Warrior. The original can be read right here.
National Capital Panthans Journal #347.
Paraphrased from the zine: The National Capital Panthans Journal is a monthly publication issued as a .PDF file on the Saturday before the first Sunday of each month. Contribution of articles, artwork, photos, and letters are welcome. Send submissions to the editor: Laurence G. Dunn at laurencegdunn AT gmail.com in a Word document for consideration.
Sincere appreciation to Laurence for the opportunity to have my work published in the journal.
Fan2Fan Podcast Appearance
I had the honour to appear on two episodes of the Fan2Fan podcast that were published this month.
First, Michele and I are both guests on the episode where the topic is the 90s monster film, The Relic.
Fan2Fan Podcast Thumbnail for The Relic episode.
It is a good movie, and a unique monster in that decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. The episode can be streamed at the Fan2Fan website here or in the player below:
Sincere appreciation to Bernie and Pete of Fan2Fan for having Michele and I on as guests!
Scholars from the Edge of Time
For Scholars from the Edge of Time for April Michele and I went old school via new school and watched the new Deathstalker film. To sum it up: it ruled.
Deathstalker the graphic novel and the Deathstalker remake on Blu-ray.
Listen to our musings about this reinterpretation of a classic 80s S&S series on YouTube.
Publishing Recap
Below is a recap of my external publishing endeavors so far in 2026.
Exotica Moderne #31
“Tellers of Tales: Interview with Alex Lamb and Max Well on The Donn of Tiki” in Exotica Moderne #31, May 2026.
Here are some new pop culture CFPs that have crossed my path or I am sharing on behalf of my colleagues. Links to these will also be in the CFP page on the navigation bar.
Dragon Age: Worlds of Power and Play
Edited by Adam Crowley (Husson University) and Daniel Reardon (Missouri University of Science and Technology)
The Dragon Age franchise (BioWare, 2009–present) stands as one of the most narratively and philosophically ambitious bodies of work in contemporary role-playing games. Across its major titles, the series constructs a world shaped by conflict, belief, and consequence—where institutions govern bodies, identities are contested, and player choice operates within systems that both enable and constrain action.
This edited collection invites scholars to examine Dragon Age as a site of meaning-making across narrative, mechanical, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. We seek contributions that engage the series not simply as a set of texts, but as a structured system in which power, identity, agency, and belief are produced, negotiated, and experienced.
This collection takes a comprehensive view of the franchise, including Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. At the same time, Dragon Age operates as a transmedia world rather than a closed set of game texts. We therefore welcome contributions that engage the broader narrative and paratextual ecosystem of the series, including novels, comics, strategy guides, codices, and reference works such as The World of Thedas volumes, as well as screen-based media such as Dragon Age: Redemption and animated adaptations. Essays may focus on a single game, trace developments across multiple titles, or examine how meaning emerges through the interaction of game systems and transmedia storytelling. We are particularly interested in work that attends to the relationship between narrative, system design, and player experience across these materials.
Areas of Interest
1. Power, Authority, and Institutions
Essays in this category may examine the structures that organize and regulate life in Thedas, including the Chantry, the Circles of Magi, the Templar Order, and the Inquisition. Approaches may include political theory, rhetorical analysis of governance, institutional critique, and studies of legitimacy, surveillance, and control.
2. Identity, Embodiment, and Otherness
This section invites work on race, gender, sexuality, and the body within Dragon Age. Topics may include the construction of elven, Qunari, dwarven, and human identities; representations of difference and marginalization; romance and intimacy systems; and the relationship between player identity and character embodiment.
3. Systems, Choice, and Player Agency
Contributions may explore how Dragon Age structures player action through dialogue systems, branching narratives, and moral decision-making frameworks. We welcome analyses of agency, constraint, consequence, and the role of the player as a co-creator within designed systems.
4. Lore, Worldbuilding, and Transmedia Storytelling
This category focuses on the narrative architecture of Dragon Age across games, codices, novels, comics, and other media. Topics may include paratexts, environmental storytelling, worldbuilding practices, and the role of distributed narrative in shaping player understanding.
5. Ethics, Belief, and Moral Philosophy
Essays may address the ethical and philosophical questions at the heart of Dragon Age, including justice, faith, sacrifice, and moral responsibility. We invite work that engages the series’ treatment of belief systems, divine authority, and the player’s role in navigating complex moral landscapes.
Please submit proposals by June 1, 2026. Drafted chapters will be due September 15, 2026.
Submission Guidelines
Abstracts: Maximum 750 words
Include: Title, abstract, and brief bio (100–150 words)
Format: Word document (.docx)
Email submissions to: reardond@mst.edu
New Sword and Sandal Acquisitions
The ever growing peplum research library grows with these recent sword and sandal acquisitions.
Goliath and the Barbarians and Goliath and the Vampires
Michele and I went down to Tucson in mid-April to catch the Ray Harryhausen exhibit (that write up is forthcoming!) but also explore a little bit of the city. We wound up going to Booksmans on Speedway and one of the treasure I found in the cult movie section was this Goliath double feature.
Personal copy of the Wild East 2 movie set of Goliath and the Barbarians and Goliath and the Vampires.
Looks like the company who put this out, Wild East, closed their doors earlier this decade. They seemed to have specialized in spaghetti westerns, with this Goliath and the Barbarians / Goliath and the Vampires DVD being their sole sword and sandal output. This looks like a lot of fun!
Rest in Peplum: Gerry Conway
At the end of April comic book legend Gerry Conway passed away. Conway appeared at many of the comic book conventions in the LA area and I had the honour to meet him a few times. Here is a picture of the first time I met him back in 2014:
Meeting Gerry Conway at a 2014 Long Beach Comic Expo.
Conway is probably best known for co-creating the Punisher, but I revered him for his contributions to the sword and sorcery genre. He wrote Conan the Destroyer (1984) and the Ralph Bakshi animated Fire and Ice (1983).
Personal copy of Fire and Ice Blu-ray autographed by Conway, Gordon, and Tataranowicz.
One of my prized sword and sorcery possessions is my Blu-ray of Fire and Ice signed by Conway, and artists/animators Steven E. Gordon and Tom Tataranowicz.
A true, sincere rest in peplum to Conway.
News from Friends
Cool kids I know have been busy lately! Here are some signal boosts I’d like to give out.
New Ride the Stream Episodes
New episodes of Michele Brittany and Travis Lakata’s vidcast, Ride the Stream, are online. The duo continue their deep dive into the sci-fi series Falling Skies.
After this Ride the Stream pivots to talk about Dark Winds. Here is their analysis of season one episode one:
Make sure to subscribe the Ride the StreamYouTube channel to see when new episodes drop. There is also a BlueSky social media as well.
New Fan2Fan Episodes
Brand new episodes of the Fan2Fan podcast are now online. Pete and Bernie continue their discussions on different monster movies. Aside from the two monster movies episodes mentioned above, here are the others that dropped in April.
Older episodes of Fan2Fan can be found at its Libsyn page or via your podcast app of preference. There is also the Fan2FanFacebook page.
The Many Worlds Interpretation of Azure Cove by Ian Welke
Author Ian Welke has a new book that just came out! It is called The Many Worlds Interpretation of Azure Cove and it is a loose sequel to The Azure Cove Assignment which came out last year. The cover art is done by Kelly Lyon-King.
The Many Worlds Interpretation of Azure Cove by Ian Welke (photo provided by Welke)
The Many Worlds Interpretation of Azure Cove can be found on Amazon.
Beyond Thirty: A World Reborn by Jeffrey J. Mariotte
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. announced that pre-orders are now open for the brand new ERB Universe novella, Beyond Thirty: A World Reborn. This book is penned by the prolific Jeffrey J. Mariotte, the guest of honour at last year’s Edgar Rice Burroughs Circle of Friendship.
Beyond Thirty: A World Reborn cover by Daren Bader.
The product page for all the different editions of this novella can be found here at the ERB website.
James Lollar, the mastermind behind the seminal synthwave outfit GosT, passed away on April 4th. A devastating loss to the genre, GosT’s album Non Paradisi and accompanying music video for “Maleficarum” helped solidify the occult elements of the burgeoning synthwave scene in the mid 2010s while going against the trend of leveraging 80s nostalgia that the genre is known for.
Back on January 7th, 2017, GosT and other influential synthwave outfit, Perturbator, played a concert at the Union in Los Angeles. Michele and I attended the amazing show, and on a whim, decided to do a write up about the event and have it published at the now defunct Heathen Harvest website.
In an effort to keep Lollar’s/GosT’s memory eternal, I have dug up my old concert review and republished it here at my website. Included in this write up are more photos of the concert that were not part of the original article. Note, these were all taken with a mid 2010s camera phone, so they are not the best quality, but they still do an admirable job at documenting the night.
𐕣Rest in peace James.𐕣
Concert Report
The first week into a brand-new year was already off to an excellent start for American synthwave fans. Legendary French synthwave act, Perturbator begin their first North American tour in the first week of January, playing a series of shows on the west coast in Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco before making their way east to Chicago, New York City, Montreal and concluding in Boston. Joining Perturbator for the west coast stops is another prominent synthwave outfit, GosT. What follows is a concert report of both projects’ performance in Los Angeles on Saturday, January 7th.
The concert was held at the Union Nightclub, west of downtown Los Angeles on Pico Blvd. A fitting location for a Perturbator show, in that the movie The Terminator has an iconic scene in the fictitious Technoir night club, right on Pico Blvd and of course, Perturbator has a song called, “Technoir” complete with samples from said film. The venue was huge: multi-story, multi-roomed, multiple bars everywhere. The magenta neon-signage directing folks to the different rooms only added to the (incidental) outrun aesthetics for the show. For all purposes, for this night, the Union was the Technoir.
The concert itself ran immaculately. When the doors scheduled to open at 9:00 pm, they were actually opened on the dot without delay. Security was in the queue to ID attendees and marking the underage kids with Xs on their hands to keep them nice and x-straight-edge-x, but also to keep the line moving swiftly. The show properly took place in the Union’s upstairs disco room, a huge dance hall with a full bar, elevated wall seating around the circumference, and even bottle service. A swag table was set up outside in the loft room, with only a few GosT releases for sale, but a treasure-trove of Perturbator CDs, vinyl and a new Metropolis-inspired T-shirt.
The show started at 10:30pm and thankfully without any filler acts, as this was a night to focus on two of the seminal pillar acts of the synthwave genre. GosT entered the stage after an intro of synthesized, evil chanting and proceeded into his hard-hitting masterpiece, “Maleficarum.” The GosT stage setup was fairly minimal: a cloth covered table with his equipment and accompanying lights from the venue’s stage. However. GosT himself was extremely animated: jumping up and down, rapidly bobbing his head, launching himself from the speakers, blowing kisses, and strutting up to the front row to high five and interact with his audience. At one point an attendee assumed he could do the same, got up on stage, jumped from the speaker and promptly injured his leg and had to be pulled offstage by security.
GosT performing.
GosT performing.
GosT performing
GosT performing.
GosT performing.
GosT dancing.
GosT dancing.
There is a significance about the whole performance: GosT himself dressed in all black with his sinister skull mask, dancing with wanton abandon, as if he were conjuring his music from his equipment. This echoes a great lineage of the ‘skeleton dance.’ From the Camille Saint-Saëns poem “Danse Macabre” (based on text from Henri Cazalis), to Georges Méliès’s silents L’Antre des Esprits (1901) and Le Monstre (1903) to the Walt Disney cartoon The Skeleton Dance (1929), there is an actual history rooted in this occult performance by GosT and not just simple dancing, retrowave theatrics. The comparison, intentional or not, is extremely apropos. GosT played a gamut of songs from his catalog, with some favourites of Non Paradisi including “Arise” and “Lake of Fire” before ending his set at 11:20 to a satisfied crowd.
At 11:45pm, Perturbator took the stage and launched into “Neo-Tokyo” followed by “Disco Inferno.” His set focused mainly on content from Dangerous Days and The Uncanny Valley, including songs (roughly in the following order) “Raw Power,” “She’s Young She’s Beautiful She’s Next,” “Diabolus Ex Machina,” “Future Club,” “Satanic Rites,” “Complete Domination,” “She Moves like a Knife,” “Humans are such easy Prey,” “Venger” and “Weapons for Children.” However, the club friendly song “Technoir” from I am the Night made an appearance early in the set, making it a fulfilling and dense playlist.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
Peturbator performing.
While GosT was overt and animated in his performance, Perturbator was concise and reserved. He didn’t interact with the audience, save an occasional head bow while looking sinister from behind his hoodie, however he had additional theatrics in the form of LED lights set up behind him. The lightshow that went with the rumbling synthwave was a huge compliment to the performance: if one wasn’t deafened by the electro beats, they were blinded by the strobes. The BPM on many songs was increased and the floor quaked from the music as well as the dancing bodies. If there was a word to describe Perturbator’s set, it would be relentless – there were no pauses between songs and they all flowed together without a moment to catch one’s breath. This was an endurance. Perturbator ended their set a little before midnight. After the crowd chanting “One more song!” he reappeared to perform “Welcome Back” and “Perturbator’s Theme” from Dangerous Days as the encore before departing the stage as ominously as he had arrived.
An excellent performance from both acts, there is no doubt why both Perturbator and GosT are lauded the way they are: their studio output is immaculate and their live shows are engaging and raw. This evening at The Union was a testament to both project’s artistry.
A new Vanya review is now up and online at my website! Check out my write up of issue nine right here.
Vanya #09 cover by Zoran Jovicic.
This effectively puts me back to being current with all the published Vanya issues so far (digital and physical), so that means my next review won’t happen for quite a few months as issue ten gets made. In the meantime, to fill that gap, I’ll be busting out reviews for three other comics: Death Nell, Becca Boo, and Budd Root’s Cavewoman. Death Nell is a completed series, so I will get that reviewed soon (think I have three issues left?). Becca Boo is ongoing, but I am a few issues behind. For Cavewoman, I have a stack of issues I collected back in the 2010s that I want to revisit, do reviews/retrospectives of, and have those parallel published both here at my website and at the National Capital Panthans Journal.
Cavewoman: “Extinction”
And with the above in, here is a Cavewoman review!
Personal copy of Cavewoman: “Extinction”.
I’ve got a whole stack of Cavewoman in my collection from when I was collecting it from 2011 to 2014, though I have many gaps. I am going to try to cover them chronologically as they were published. With that in mind, my write up of the single shot issue “Extinction” is online and can be read here.
The next Cavewoman issues I’ll be jumping on is the four issue “Snow” series. I am going to be ambitious and shoot to publish one a month along with my other articles and projects. Cross fingers!
Hercules and the Captive Women Blu-ray Compares
A final article for my website this month (three articles in a month! wow!) is comparing the new Blu-rays of Hercules and the Captive Women.
The two Blu-rays of Hercules and the Captive Women.
It has been a hot minute since I’ve actually did something sword and sandal related, time to rectify that! Check out my write up here.
Panthans Journal #346
The March issue of the National Capital Panthans Journal has been published. This issue contains a re-print of my micro fiction/short story “Journey to Agharti”. This story was originally published in Trickster’s Treats 3: The Seven Deadly Sins back in 2019, however that anthology has been out of print for quite a while now. It is nice that the story has a second life in the Panthans journal.
National Capital Panthans Journal #346.
Paraphrased from the zine: The National Capital Panthans Journalis a monthly publication issued as a .PDF file on the Saturday before the first Sunday of each month. Contribution of articles, artwork, photos, and letters are welcome. Send submissions to the editor: Laurence G. Dunn at laurencegdunn AT gmail.com in a Word document for consideration.
Sincere appreciation to Laurence for the opportunity to have my work published in the journal.
Scholars from the Edge of Time
For the March Scholars from the Edge of Time Michele and I discuss the mid 90s fighting mecha film Robo Warriors (1996).
Personal copy of Robo Warriors on Blu-ray.
Giant robots fighting each other gladiator style? How can one go wrong? Well……
The episode can be watched on YouTube. As a side, one of the villains in the film, Quon, was played by James Tolkan (probably best known from Back to the Future). Tolkan passed away on the day we recorded this episode. RIP sir. 🙁
For April we are going to be discussing the new Deathstalker (2025) movie, so we are excited about that.
Publishing Recap
Below is a recap of my external publishing endeavors so far in 2026.
National Capital Panthans Journal #344.
“All E.T.’s Aren’t Nice: Vanya 06” reprinted in National Capital Panthans Journal #344, January 2026.
“Journey to Agharti” reprinted in National Capital Panthans Journal #346, March 2026.
New Sword and Sandal Acquisitions
The ever growing peplum research library grows with these recent sword and sandal acquisitions.
Samson and His Mighty Challenge (Crappy DVD)
From the 2000s to the mid-2010 was probably the halcyon days of the DVD. They could be made cheap, and releases ranged from ornate editions to bottom of the barrel bargain releases. Companies like Alpha Video, Sinister Cinema, Something Weird Video, Mill Creek Entertainment, Brentwood Home Video, and many, many others released low cost, quasi-bootleg-ish genre videos on home video. Sometimes these were single DVDrs with a generic graphic design, sometimes they were mega multiple movie pack boxsets with names like “50 sci-fi greats”.
Right, wrong, indifferent, this was a thing and it filled a void. Sometimes the only way to see an old genre film was via these means. This, unfortunately, perpetuated shoddy releases of films that deserve better. Heavily cropped and edited films, ripped from five generations of VHS tapes was the norm.
Those days are gone. With streaming services as the dominate medium to watch films, physical releases are the exception. In order to compete with streaming services, physical editions have turned to being released by boutique labels, like Vinegar Syndrome and Severin Films, to stand out form the crowd. This means there is really no market for the inferior, made on the cheap, DVD/DVDr releases from 15 years prior.
Some companies still (kinda) hold on to this old model, and CFV Ent. (no website that I could find) is one of them. I say kinda because instead of making cheap releases to sell at a budget price, they are making cheap releases to sell for much higher markups.
The other month Michele and I did a Scholars from the Edge of Time episode on Hercules Returns (link here). The Vinegar Syndrome release of the film already had an original version of Samson and High Mighty Challenge on it, but I wanted a solo release. I turned to eBay and saw a copy from CFV Ent. (slide show below).
Samson and His Mighty Challenge, CFV version, how it really looks.
Samson and His Mighty Challenge, CFV version, how it really looks (back side)
Looking at the eBay picture, it obviously is a mockup, but it presents itself as a DVD in a slipcover. Though if you look at the bottom right of the image, the artwork and the sleeve appear to veer away from each other. I knew this was a cheap affair, but I was actually curious how cheap would it be. Was there a company out there actually putting care into releasing peplum films and giving them a modicum of dignity?
Heck no. Click through the slide show above to see what I got. Definitely not a slipcover. The DVD is in a red, rather flimsy case. The exterior insert is made from a home printer. The copyright notice on the back is hilarious:
This film (or version of film) has never been released on digital media in the United States. It is therefore considered public domain.
I am not expert on copyright law, but I am 99% sure that is not how that works.
Anywho, I wanted to share this release. This is sort of a caveat emptor post, I do want to highland the difference between how product is depicted vs. how product really is as there are a lot of these releases on eBay. But mostly to illustrate how the market has changed, especially on these old peplum films. Still no love on physical release, but at a higher price tag for even dodgier editions.
Wizards of the Demon Sword
During my research for Robo Warriors I fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and somehow ended up discovering cult film director Fred Olen Ray made a sword and sorcery film. It’s called Wizards of the Demon Sword (1991) and stars Michael Berryman – hells yea!
Personal copy of Wizards of the Demon Sword on DVD.
He was in The Barbarians (1987) which was a great 80s S&S film, so I could not pass plucking this one up! Though it does have Troma literally written all over it, so this could be rough.
News from Friends
Cool kids I know have been busy lately! Here are some signal boosts I’d like to give out.
New Ride the Stream Episodes
New episodes of Michele Brittany and Travis Lakata’s vidcast, Ride the Stream, are online. The duo continue their deep dive into the sci-fi series Falling Skies.
Hercules and the Captive Women (1961, Vittorio Cottafavi) is a classic peplum from the golden age of Italian sword and sandal films of the late 50s to early 60s. Focusing on the more fantastique elements of the genre (that fight with Proteus!), the film received a second life and renewed longevity when it was riffed on a season four episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, joining the ranks of other pepla such as Hercules Unchained (1959, Pietro Francisci), Hercules Against the Moon Men (1964, Giacomo Gentilomo) who were also honoured on the series.
Aside from its appearance on MST3K, Hercules and the Captive Women has another unique facet to it: its availability in physical releases that sports a print/cut of the film in a decent condition. The peplum cycle contains a few hundred entries, but a vast majority of them have not seen re-released in an accessible fashion, and those that have are often released on subpar editions derived from generations of VHS recordings, cropped, stretched, degraded, blurry, and so on, but released by budget labels such as Brentwood and Alpha Video. These are epic movies, but the viewing experience for many of them is anything but. So, when a classic peplum title gets a release that has a quality image to it, that is a big deal!
Back in 2021 The Film Detective released a Blu-ray of Hercules and the Captive Women. This release was jam packed, not just with an HD version of the film, but also the MST3K version, a commentary, documentary, essay, and other supplemental features. The sleeve states the movie is a “4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative”. This sounds like a great thing!
The website PeplumTV did a review of The Film Detective Blu-ray of the film (which can be read here) and found the release to be disappointing regarding its image quality (especially with colours). The website did a vast number of comparisons between the Retromedia DVD, an Italian TV broadcast version, and the Blu-ray edition of the film, and visually, well, there are some huge differences.
Technical specification of a film is not my forte since I am more into the textual aspect of a movie, so I cannot really comment if The Film Detective version is inferior or superior, only that it is different (at least colour-wise). Since this edition purports to come from the original negative, I have to assume it captures Cottafavi’s original vision of the film as close as possible, which could mean the colours are actually correct (note: I have not dived into all the supplemental material on this release, so this matter may be overtly addressed). Or it could mean it is a botched restoration.
DVDBeaver, whose specialty is comparisons of physical releases of a film, doing not just frame comparisons but dive into hard technical subjects like bitrates, codecs, etc., also has a write up about The Film Detective release of Hercules and the Captive Women (which can be read here). Surprisingly, their write up does not do a frame comparison to other physical releases (but that is like their thing!) like the PeplumTV review does. They do provide lots of screenshots, praise the supplemental material, but do state that the film looks
“..abnormally faded. The source density appears compromised in the beginning but eventually holds up reasonably well. The overall 1080P is modest, mostly flat without an abundance of grain but some colors have depth (more in the second half – plenty of burnt orange) and it has instances of showing a pleasing image.”
This statement, coupled with PeplumTV’s write up, paints the picture that, though HD, this is a lackluster edition of the film.
The two Blu-rays of Hercules and the Captive Women.
Cut to five years later. Film Masters, who specializes in restored editions of classic films, though go the route of bare bones on supplements, release their edition of Hercules and the Captive Women. The cover simply states “restored in HD.” In my February news roundup at my website (link here), I briefly talk about picking up this new copy of Hercules and the Captive Women and thought about doing a comparison between it and The Film Detective version for fun. So, let’s do it! Let’s see what I can add to the dialogue about this film and its HD editions.
Firstly, I lack the technical prowess that DVDBeaver has, and like I mentioned before, film specs are not my forte. I want to make sure I make that overt as I put this write up here. My methodology for this:
I used a Pioneer BDR-XD08S Blu-ray player to read these discs.
I used MakeMKV (I’m at vesion 1.18.1) to import the movies onto my Mac.
Watched the movies using VLC (version 3.0.20).
Skimmed through the movies looking for scenes with different colours or lots of objects in the mise-en-scene. Used the snapshot function to take a picture of the frame.
I noted the time stamp, put the other movie in, fast forward to that time stamp as close as possible and used snapshot (so it is possible I may be a few milliseconds off between the frames).
Because my webhost has limits on image size, I opened up each image, resized each one so the longest side was 1000 px (note: I do this with all images I upload to my website). These snaps were not altered in any other way (such as using a cropping tool).
Of quick note:
The Film Detective Blu-ray had four files on it (three being the supplemental material) with the movie coming in at 19.18 gb.
The Film Masters version had only one file (the movie) which came in at 21.51 gb. The difference in file size could be attributed to compression?
Film Detective – 22 seconds.
Film Masters – 22 Seconds.
On the title card, the Film Masters edition looks slightly redder.
Film Detective – 5 minutes, 11 seconds.
Film Master – 5 minutes, 11 seconds.
Film Masters looks darker, but only by a little bit.
Film Detective – 12 minutes, 10 seconds.
Film Masters – 12 minutes, 10 seconds.
Again, not much of a difference save Film Masters appears darker, most noticeable in the hair.
Film Detective – 20 minutes, 29 seconds.
Film Masters – 29 minutes, 29 seconds.
Both versions have a very thin, vertical “scratch” near the top right of the frame. It looks equally pronounced in both. Though my timing skills are lackluster at capturing the exact frame, (side by side Hercules moves a bit), looking at the rock background and all the nooks and crannies, everything lines up. This tells me that both versions are at least cropped the very same and show the exact same information in each frame.
Film Detective – 33 minutes, 40 seconds.
Film Masters – 33 minutes, 40 seconds.
Again, only a subtle difference in the Film Masters being a tad bit darker, mostly noticeable in the background stone roof.
Film Detective – 44 minutes, 9 seconds.
Film Masters – 44 minutes, 9 seconds.
Unlike the title screen in which the red was “redder”, that is not the case here. Both frames looks equally orange-red, with Film Masters, again, being darker.
Film Detective – 69 minutes, 11 seconds.
Film Masters – 69 minutes, 11 seconds.
Last set of images, again, Film Masters looks darker, more apparent in this already dimly lit scene.
Overall, both The Film Detective and Film Masters version of Hercules and the Captive Women look comparable to each other. There is not a huge, glaring difference in colour between these two Blu-ray releases, unlike the PeplumTV article which shows radical differences between the editions it examines. The biggest difference of these two release is the Film Masters iteration looks darker. I am not sure why, perhaps The Film Detective version has contrast boosting? However, the title screen of the Film Masters edition has more pronounced reds, which overall, is a colour that has been orange-ified in both Blu-rays. With that in mind, that means the Film Masters version is probably closer to being the version with the most ideal presentation of the film between these two specific releases. In my opinion, both are fairly interchangeable with each other, and both convey the movie in a nice resolution. Aside from The Film Detective having more supplemental materials, either version of the film will do for a pleasing viewing experience.
