The peak years of the 60s Italian peplum cycle and the 80s sword and sorcery cycle have many films with transgressive, subversive, erotic, or excessively violent content. The Italian wave of pepla presented overt sexuality with their portrayal of vamps, belly dancers, shirtless strongmen, harems, and sexual seductions. With lax attitudes of what could be portrayed in media, the 80s wave of barbarian films upped with violence with overt gore, but also turned retrospective with more meta and parodic content.
Iconoclastic writer J. Manfred Weichsel seeks to tap into these eras of subversiveness with his new edited anthology, Sword & Scandal. The volume contains twelve short stories of sword and sorcery that is on, as the title suggests, the scandalous side. In this interview Weichsel talks about his newest endeavor and the future where he wants to take the scandal formula with other genres.
What is your relationship with the sword & sandal and sword & sorcery genres? What got you into them? What are some of your favourite texts from these genres?
I’ve been reading sword & sorcery for as long as I’ve been reading books. I’ve probably read all the same stories everybody has; Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mauser, Kane, and stuff like that.
As for sword & sandal movies, a friend from college who first got me into world cinema, Evan A. Baker, showed me the Mario Bava Hercules movie in the late 90’s, but I didn’t do a deep dive into the Italian peplum stuff until very recently.
I’m a regular contributor to Cirsova Magazine. The publisher was doing an anthology called The Mighty Sons of Hercules, that was an homage to the old peplum movies. I was invited to contribute, so of course I did a thorough study of the genre in preparation for writing my story. And that’s how I got into it. I think my favorite one I’ve seen so far is Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules.
You’ve dabbled with the sword and sandal genre before with “Maciste in the Land of the Snakes” (from the aforementioned The Mighty Sons of Hercules anthology) and your short novel The Calydonian Boar Hunt. What was the genesis of how this story came about? What was the primary goal you wanted to accomplish with this specific book?
The Calydonian Boar Hunt is actually set during the bronze age, before there was hard metal to make swords with. I know it looks like the guy is holding a sword on the cover, but it’s supposed to be a stone knife!
The book is based on the eponymous Greek myth. I became interested in The Calydonian Boar Hunt years earlier, after seeing the famous Peter Paul Rubens painting at the Getty Museum in LA illustrating a scene from the story. Years and years after first seeing the painting, I was sitting at home during the pandemic, deciding what to write next, and I realized it was the perfect time to do a deep dive into Greek mythology. I remembered the painting and the impact it had on me and began to research the myth.
The Calydonian Boar Hunt takes place shortly after the story told in the film Jason and the Argonauts, and features many of the same characters. It’s the generation before the Trojan War, and many of the Calydonian hunters also either appear in the Trojan War as older versions of themselves, or are the parents of major figures in that story. It’s a very central myth in the Greek canon, so it gave me a lot to work with.
Of course, my books are comedies, so my retelling of the myth may be a little different in tone from what modern readers are used to. Well, many of the original Greek myths, such as the Argonautica of Rhodes, were comedies too, so my retelling is also closer in spirit to the original than many modern readers might suspect.
The Kickstarter for Sword & Scandal hinted it was looking for transgressive peplum-inspired stories, but the final collection is less sword & sandal and more sword & sorcery. Based on the types of submissions you were getting for the project, was there a commonality you noticed? Something like you didn’t receive as many peplum stories as sword & sorcery (that one genre is more popular than the other)? Or maybe you received a decent amount of stories from both genres but that the sword & sandal stories tended to be lacking in those transgressive elements that you were looking for when compared to sword and sorcery? Or something else?
Of the twelve stories in the anthology, most can be described as falling into various subgenres of sword & sorcery. For example, “Kai-zur the Godless” by David Carter is a pretty pure barbarian story. But “Windblades” by C. L. Werner is a samurai tale, and a really violent one too, like a 70’s Toei movie. And “Flesh and Ink” by Rebecca Buchanon has a really unique premise. It’s about a female assassin whose tattoos leap off her body and kill her victims.
There are also a few folk tales in the mix. For example, “The Baron with a Thousand Cats” by Gary Every is a retelling of an Italian tale about a groom who must save his bride from suffering prima notte with a grotesque baron. And “The Harem of Al’Azeri” by Jasiah Witkofsky is set in the Arabian world in 1,001 Nights. There’s even a weird tale the anthology in “Vermina’s Creature,” by Bitter Karella.
I really only received two submissions that read like peplum movies, and while both were great, they shared the same problem, which was that I was looking for stories that placed their focus on sex, and these stories placed their focus on the violence. So, they were good, but they weren’t great fits for the anthology.
Sword & Scandal is overt in its want to feature stories heavy on sex, nudity, and violence. Aside from these facets, there other means to push genre boundaries to their limits. What are other transgressive and avant garde elements featured in Sword and Scandal?
The most subversive element you can put into fiction nowadays is humor. If you look at old books and movies, even if they weren’t comedies, they still had humorous elements, such as, for example, irony. But nowadays, humor is so absent from popular entertainment that audiences don’t know what to do when they encounter it. And because they don’t know what to do, they become frustrated, and respond by getting angry at the book or movie for frustrating them. This had led to a pervasive idea in our culture that if something is funny, that must mean it’s bad.
I want to help society get beyond this prejudice. This shouldn’t be terribly hard a task. It’s such an ingrained part of human nature, that it should be obvious what you are supposed to do when you encounter humor. You’re supposed to laugh! So, I actively looked for stories that were funny, in order to reintroduce humor into popular entertainment.
One of the funnier stories in Sword & Scandal is “Abduction from the Seraglio” by David J. West. This is about a sellsword who is hired by a man to rescue his girl from a harem, but… well… I don’t want to give the punchline away. Another funny story is “Shaven Beards” by Ross Baxter. This one is full of rude British humor!
Were there any specific stories in Sword & Scandal that blew you out of the water because you had never read anything as uncompromising/perverted/graphic/etc. before?
Every single story in Sword & Scandal was one that, the moment I read it, I knew I needed it in the anthology. Many of the stories contain graphic sex, but not all of them. That wasn’t a prerequisite. A few were chosen not because they have sexual content, but because they have sexual themes. I was looking for stories that were dangerous in some way, and I think that describes all the tales in the book, whether they are graphic or not.
But, to answer your question, the sex scenes in “The Gateway of Pleasure” by Jim Lee are insane, like, really hardcore. This is a story where a knight rescues a damsel in distress, and she rewards him with a blow job and a lot of sex. “The Snow Princess” by Pip Pinkerton is, in part, an outrageous porn parody of Disney’s Frozen, with a great scene where the girls use magic to create an Ice Golem and then have sex with it. There’s lot of lesbian sex in this one too. And “He Who Sows” by Austin Worley is about two female thieves who break into a temple to steal the stone phallus from a fertility God, only to become enchanted by it and start playing with it.
In 80s sword & sorcery cinema terms, on a scale of Deathstalker I (for sex and nudity) to Deathstalker II (for irreverent humour), how would you situate Sword and Scandal?
I love both the Deathstalker movies for different reasons. Jim Wynorski has a few movies like Deathstalker II, where they were sequels to bigger budget movies, but instead of going for a cheap cash grab like other directors in such situations would, he created really unique movies that, while they don’t have much to do with the original, are a lot of fun. 976-EVIL II is probably my favorite out of these.
As for your question, there is a lot of sex and a lot of irreverent humor in Sword & Scandal. Enough to satisfy fans of either film.
Sword & Scandal was financed via a successful Kickstarter campaign. What were some of the obstacles you encountered while running the Kickstarter? Will crowdfunding be a model you will use go forward for other entries in your Scandal series?
I got the idea to use Kickstarter because Cirsova used it to raise money for The Mighty Sons of Hercules, a book I mentioned above. I made sure to play an active role in the Kickstarter, both to help that anthology happen, but also to learn about fundraising so I could run my own campaign one day.
Kickstarter was great because it allowed me to do so much more than I would have been able to otherwise. I mean, without Kickstarter, I wouldn’t have been able to offer payment to the writers or have interior illustrations! I would have just written the book myself like I normally do, which was my actual backup plan had the campaign failed. So, I will definitely use Kickstarter for any future anthologies I do, including my next one, Jungle Scandals.
My process was a little different from Cirsova’s. He asked the writers to write stories up front, and then used the table of contents in his fundraising campaign as he raised the money to pay us. I ran the Kickstarter first and then had an open call for submissions. I like doing it this way because it gives me the greatest flexibility in choosing the stories that are best for the anthology.
Your contribution to Sword and Scandal, “Confessions of a Wicked Harpastum Player,” was the result of one of the Kickstarter perks where the pledger could design their own story. That pledger, Alexander Joyner, wanted “a tale with a female protagonist, about women’s soccer, with torture and lesbians.” That is quite the order – how did you go about tackling this compared to stories you pen yourself?
Well, instead of soccer, I used Harpastum, which is an ancient ancestor of modern soccer. Then I added a lot of sword & sorcery elements, such as having them play the game with a severed head instead of a ball. I came up with a sexy plot involving torture and lesbians, and voila.
Overall, writing it was a fun experience. I often start outlining a story with an image or a few images in my head, so outlining one where the images were given to me didn’t change my process very much. If anything, it forced me to be more creative and to think outside the box. It was a fun experience, and one I hope to repeat in the next book.
Aside from your introduction to the book, you also gave space for your artist, Apolonster, to share his musings and importance of working on the project. How did you connect with Apolonster? How did you two collaborate on the interior artwork, juggling artistic asks, feedback, and so on.
When I want to hire an artist, I usually go onto websites like DeviantArt and search artists until I find one that is already doing what I want to do. Then, I contact the artist to see if they are looking for work.
I found Apolonster when I was looking for somebody to do the cover to my novel Into the Bush. The moment I saw his portfolio, I knew I wanted to hire him, because he had some pictures that were exactly in the style I wanted.
I knew Sword & Scandal would be a much more complex project than that one was, because it needed a painted cover as well as interior illustrations. Apolonster is a talented and versatile artist who was classically trained at a European art academy, so when I started thinking of people to ask to do Sword & Scandal, he was my first choice.
My process for working on illustrations is that I write a worksheet that usually ends up being a couple of pages describing for the artist what I want, and then the artist gives me concept sketches. I pick one, and the artist makes the art.
Unfortunately, Apoloonster won’t be available for the next anthology for personal reasons. I already have the painting for the cover, and I’m looking for somebody right now to do the interior illustrations.
The next anthology in your Scandal series is going to be Jungle Scandals. What is some news you can share about that project? And aside form Jungle Scandals, what can folks expect to see from you in the near future?
I’m currently writing a science fantasy book called Space Escapades, which I plan to be the final book in my Action Girls trilogy of books about three ditzy wannabe Hollywood starlets.
I am creating the Kickstarter campaign as we speak. I hope to launch it early next year. I’m also working on a novel for the first time since my last one came out in March. Exciting things are on the horizon.
Do you see yourself revisiting the sword & sandal genre? If so, where would you like to take it next?
I want the “scandal” to be its own genre. I get into this in the introduction to Sword & Scandal. So, I want to do a bunch of differently themed books in the Scandal anthology series. The next one is Jungle Scandals, and then after that I want to do a science fantasy themed book, maybe called Planet Scandals or Outer Space Scandals. I’m going to do one called Scandal & Sorcery at some point, and might also do one called Sword & Scandal vol. II. I’m really taking them one at a time right now, so we will see what the future holds!
I do know that Cirsova is thinking of doing another Mighty Sons of Hercules anthology, and I really want to be a part of that if he ends up doing it.
I’ll probably revisit peplum at some point regardless. The thing is, if you look over my website, I have a pretty restless imagination and my books tend to all fall into different genres. I never really know what I am going to write next until I finish the book I’m working on.
Sincere appreciation to Weichsel for his time for this interview. For more information on Sword & Scandal, J. Manfred Weichsel, and Apolonster, check out the following links: