The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.
Podcast News
The preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards was just announced a few days ago. Some of the books on the ballot have been the subject of a few interviews/episodes of the H. P. Lovecast Podcast. In case you missed it, here they are and I strongly encourage a listen to the episodes, checking out the work, and if you’re a voting member of the Horror Writer’s Association, consider voting for these works:
Now, because of the Stoker preliminary ballot being announced, Michele and I are going to be shifting our February schedule somewhat to better promote/leverage/accommodate our guest that month, Lee Murry. The initial schedule was that we were going to discuss Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 2 on the first weekend of the month and interview Murray on the third. However, Murray is on the preliminary ballot for two publications: Grotesque: Monster Stories under the Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection category and Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women under the Superior Achievement in an Anthology category. Because of this, we are going to flip and publish the interview the first week of the month and the discussion the third.
Outside of H. P. Lovecast Podcast news, I have two appearances on the Voice of Olympus program this week, one on Tuesday and another on Friday where Michele and I will be interviewing S. Alessandro Martinez. Also, a big heads up, it looks like I will be a guest on the Scaredy Cats podcast in April to discuss the film Slumber Party Massacre. Stay tuned for more details as we get closer to April and a date is solidified.
General Neo-Peplum News
Neo-Peplum Metal Release
Italian death/black/adventure metal band Gates of Doom released a new album earlier this month called Aquileia Mater Aeterna. Per the album’s description on the band’s Bandcamp page, Aquileia Mater Aeterna is
[a] concept album [that] focuses on the Friulian city of Aquileia, from its foundation by the Romans in 181 B.C. to its destruction in 452 A.D. at the hands of Attila. Historically, the city has been a crossroads of peoples and cultures crucial for the birth of our homeland Friûl and its identity, and it’s a great inspiration for our band.
Gates of Doom at Bandcamp
Sword and Sandal Peanut Butter Commercial
Peanut butter brand Jif has a new add that spoofs Gladiator. The commercial can be watched at Adweek.
Screenshot from the Jif commerical
Academic Panels
Dr. Ross Clare was recently on a panel called “Tolkien and the Classical World: Book Discussion.” An audio recording of that panel can be found on YouTube.
The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.
Podcast News
New episode of the HP Lovecast Podcast is online! For this month’s Fragments episode, we interview Jason Parent about his new novella, Eight Cylinders. The episode can be streamed at Buzzsprout or your podcast application of preference.
General Neo-Peplum News
Rest in Peplum
Animator Dale Baer passed away at the age of 70. He worked on quite a few sword and sandal-adjacent and sword and sorcery animated movies:
An essay from the collection Ancient Violence in the Modern Imagination: The Fear and the Fury cites Dr. Wetmore’s essay, “In the Green Zone with the Ninth Legion: The Post-Iraq Roman Film” from The New Peplum. I am not sure which, but when I find out I’ll update this citation in The New Peplum resource page.
The New Peplum also gets an extremely positive mention in the preface in Christopher Wood’s book Heroes Masked and Mythic: Echoes of Ancient Archetypes in Comic Book Characters:
“Yet we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and therefore I should like to take a moment here to give a brief nod to those scholars and thinkers who have strengthened my own resolve to write this, sometimes as a catalyst to change, and others with whom I couldn’t agree more or have said it better myself.
The New Peplum: Essays on Sword and Sandal Films and Television by Nicholas Diak is one such book. His main focus is on the modern “sword and sandal” films, and by that he means in the past 30 years rather than including the 1960s. The author views the use of technology and narrative approaches that change the end experience of the viewer as something impossible to achieve at a time earlier than now.”
– Christopher Wood, Preface to Heroes Masked and Mythic
I’m extremely flattered to receive such honour!
Call for Papers
The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.
Podcast News
The Podcast Section of the website has been updated with episode dates and titles for the next few months.
Note: This Is Horror has their public nomination period open until January 15th. If you like the HP Lovecast Podcast and want to show support, consider nominating the podcast for the non-fiction podcast category. Info on nominating can be found at the This Is Horror website here.
General Neo-Peplum News
Spencer Alexander McDaniel has an article online about the white domestic terrorists who stormed the Capitol last week and how they used iconography associated with ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Germanic peoples. The article can be read at his Tales of Times Forgotten website.
Rest in Peplum
Director Steve Carver passed away at the age of 75. He directed the original version of The Arena (1974).
Hammer actress Barbara Shelley passed away at the age of 88. She was in Nero’s Weekend (1956).
John Richardson passed away at the age of 86. He appeared in lots of Italian filone, though not so much in pepla. He was however in On My Way to the Crusades, I Met a Girl Who… (1969) and One Million Years B.C. (1966).
Band of Warriors is a neo-peplum comic that is currently in the stages of being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. Written by Samuel George London (The S Factor, Milford Green, and Project Hoax), with art by Federico Avila Corsini (Treble, Remitente, and Maranatá) and editing by Nicole D’Andria (Miraculous), the story begins with King Minos at the height of his reign and leads to an epic, adventurous tale that incorporates both Grecian and Celtic mythologies.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what got you into comics.
I only got into comics in 2015 after finding out that the TV show, The Walking Dead, was based on a comic. I bought all the compendiums up to that point and was hooked. After that I discovered Image’s back catalogue and went down a rabbit hole of indie comics. After a year or so, I was inspired enough to give writing a go and luckily an idea came to me in the form of Milford Green, which is best described as a Victorian space adventure. I Kickstarted that in 2018 and have since successfully funded five other comics as well as having a four issue mini-series titled The S Factor published by Action Lab – Danger Zone, which is about the dark underbelly of a superhero dating reality TV show.
What was the genesis of Band of Warriors (BoW)?
My mother has a house on the island of Crete and when I visited there for the first time in 2016 I was enthralled by the history it had, both fairly recently (WW2) and even further in the past, especially the bronze age (3,000-1200 BC). That same year, I visited my wife’s family in Brittany, France. Of course, I had visited them before but this time we visited a megalith which was next to an old tin mine. For those of you not in the know, bronze is made up of copper and tin.
When investigating all of this further it turned out that bronze age tin from France and Britain (my own homeland) had been found among bronze age artefacts on and around Crete. This trading relationship between France, Britain and Crete during the bronze age got my imagination fired up and the idea of Band of Warriors began.
BoW was actually the first idea that came to me but I thought the scope of the story was far too big for me to take on as a first time writer. But now that I’ve got a few books under my belt, I thought it was high time I got it out to the world. Honestly, it hasn’t been easy trawling through all the history and mythology surrounding all of those regions to create a coherent story but I think (if I don’t say so myself) I’ve created a rather epic story.
What were your other sources of inspiration for this comic?
To name but a few; 300 (both comic and movie), Kill the Minotaur and Vikings (both comics and TV show) have all inspired BoW. The mixture of mythology, history and action really helped me see that it’s possible.
What texts did you use for research for BoW?
One that really stands out is 1077 B.C. by Professor Eric Cline. The book is an outstanding insight into the era and as an added bonus you watch a lot of his lectures online, which are also massively useful.
What was some of the most interesting things you learned while researching?
One of the most interesting things to me was just how international that time was. There were full on trading relationships from France and Britain to Crete and even to Egypt, Turkey and Afghanistan. It’s incredible to me that over 3,500 years ago this was going on.
There’s a few other comics out there that merge different mythologies: what would you say sets yours apart?
My USP, so to speak, is that I’ve grounded the mythology in actual historical events. Using actual history to try and connect the dots of mythology is time consuming as a writer but I think that it will help the comic shine for the readers.
Do you have any favourite sword and sandal texts?
This might seem vacuous but I really enjoyed the 2014 movie with Dwayne Johnson, Hercules. I thought they did a superb job of merging mythology, history, reality and action. Sure the character development wasn’t great but man was the action awesome.
What is your general thoughts/impressions of the current state of the sword and sandal genre?
I think the sword and sandal genre can be quite one-dimensional and predictable, so I think it’s important that for those of us who are passionate about it think outside the box. Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules was a great example of subverting my expectations from everything being about magic and what not when in reality it was all tricks of the eye and playing into the reputation Hercules and his team had created.
How did you go about meeting/recruiting your artist Federico Avila Corsini and editor Nicole D’Andria?
I met Nicole a couple of years ago through Kickstarter and it turned out she did freelance editing. I then hired her to work on the Milford Green series and she’s been my trusted editor ever since. Federico on the other hand, was through Reddit. A few months ago I put a call out on Twitter and Reddit for an artist to work on a story that involved both Celtic and Greek mythology and after sifting through about thirty artists, Federico stood out. Both his style and work ethic are fantastic, so he’s the ideal artist for BoW.
What were some of the biggest challenges or obstacles you encountered while creating BoW?
My biggest challenge was connecting all the dots and making the story consistent. I actually have one of those cork boards that allows me to see all the storylines side by side in chronological order. I feel like I’m trying to catch a serial killer but it really does help.
Having successfully Kickstarted other projects, what advice do you have for other folks looking to use the medium?
First and foremost, get involved with the community. Secondly, research successful campaigns. Lastly, make sure you triple check your reward and postage costs.
What is the biggest thing you want to accomplish with BoW?
Great question! We’ve got an initial six issue arc sorted but I’d love for BoW to become an on-going series that would be released every three months, direct to the people via crowdfunding. However, that’s only possible if we get the right level of support, so we’ll have to wait and see.
Thank you your time for this interview, any final words?
I’d just like to say thanks to you for taking the time to do this interview and to your readers who have read this interview. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and that you’ll check out Band of Warriors to potentially help support it.
Sorry folks, I missed a few weeks on doing a news roundup: holidays, other obligations, etc. This roundup will hopefully cover the last few weeks.
New Indie Peplum Comic and Interview
Comic book creator Samuel George London is currently crowd funding his newest endeavor, the neo-peplum comic Band of Warriors. I’ve interviewed London about his comic.
As a side note, expect more posts in the next few months as I do more write ups/reviews/interviews about sword and sandal comics I’ve Kickstarted. These include: Secret Rites, Aztlan, Teoatl, Isidora and the Immortal Chains, and S.P.Q.R.
Podcast News
Two new episodes of H. P. Lovecast Podcast are online. In the first episode Michele Brittany and I discuss “You Will Never Be the Same” by Erica L. Satifka and “Weird Tales” by Fred Chappell from Wonder & Glory Forever, edited by Nick Mamatas. The episode can be streamed at Buzzsprout or your podcast application of preference.
Second, our episode discussing Jason Parent’s Eight Cylinders is also online. Later this month we will be interviewing Parent about this novella.
The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.
General Neo-Peplum News
Dr. Jeremy J. Swist interviews power metal band Judicator about their concept album, Let There Be Nothing, which is about the Byzantine general Flavius Belisarius. The interview can be found at his Heavy Metal Classicist website.
A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (1966)
Beowulf (2007)
Spartacus (1960)
Life of Brian (1979)
Asterix: The Mansions Of The Gods (2019)
Alexander (2004)
Barabbas (1964)
Hero (2002)
The Trojan Women (2004)
Centurion (2010)
The History Of The World, Part 1 (1981)
Agora (2009)
Confucius (2010)
Rest in Peplum
Animator Doug Crane passed away at the age of 85. He contributed to many animated sword and sandal, sword and sorcery, and sword and planet cartoons:
The Mighty Hercules (1963)
The Mighty Thor (1966)
Heavy Metal (1981)
Various He-Man and She-Ra projects in the 80s
The Pirates of Dark Water (1991)
Italian actor Corrado Olmi passed away at the age of 94. He was in Satyricon (1969, Gian Luigi Polidoro).
Bond Girl Tanya Roberts passed away at the age of 65. Known for her appearance in A View to a Kill and in Charlie’s Angels, for sword and sorcery fans, she stole hearts with her appearance in The Beastmaster (1982, Don Coscarelli).
Michele Brittany, Tanya Roberts, Nicholas Diak in 2013The Beastmaster DVD autographed by Tanya Roberts, John Amos, and Don Coscarelli.
I’ve finally procured a copy of The Borgia Family: Rumor and Representation and was able to confirm that Jennifer Mara DeSilva’s essay “The Secularization of Cesar Borgia and the American Motion Picture Production Code” contains my intro to The New Peplum listed in the bibliography. I’ve updated the page for The New Peplum to reflect this. The book can be found for sale at the Routledge store website.
The Borgia Family: Rumor and Representation
Dr. Hannah Mueller’s essay, “Male Nudity, Violence and the Disruption of Voyeuristic Pleasure in Starz’s Spartacus” is cited in Dr. Maria San Filippo’s book, Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media. This book can be found at the Indiana University Press bookstore.
Provocauteurs and Provocations
McFarland Sale on Viking Books
McFarland is having a sale for books about Vikings in film and pop culture. From now until December 31, if you use the code VIKINGS30 during check out, you’ll get a 30% discount. The New Peplum is part of this sale, no doubt due to the presence of Steve Nash’s excellent essay “There are no Boundaries for our Boats: Vikings and the Westernization of the Norse Saga”.
Call for Papers
The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.
We’ve flipped things around this December for HP Lovecast. Usually the fragments is the third Sunday of the month, however due to other obligations going on, we’ve bumped our interview with Nick Mamatas to the first Sunday. This episode can be listened to at Buzzsprout or your podcast app of preference.
ICYMI
In case you missed it, my review for Jason Parent’s new novella, Eight Cylinders, is online here at my website. Stay tuned for next month were we will do an episode on this novella along with an interview wit Parent on HP Lovecast.
Call for Papers
The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.
Eight Cylinders is the newest novella by Jason Parent and published by Crystal Lake in November 2020. The story focuses on Seb, a mid-range Las Vegas criminal who is gravely injured during a shootout with a mobster after a deal gone bad. Seb flees Vegas in his Charger, and after consulting the magic 8-ball he plucked from the mobster’s eye, drives through the night and through the desert mountains. He awakens to find himself in a small desert camp with his wounds treated. The camp is full of other criminals and ne’er-do-wells (Earl, Malcom, Mary, Red, Sly, Helen, Skeeter, Malcolm, and Angelique) who all seem to come from different times and places. Seb and his companions are all trapped in the camp because giant tentacles shoot out from the mountains that encircle the area that whisk away unlucky persons who wander too far away. After Mary falls mysteriously ill and unresponsive, the motley crew band together to use their arsenal of vehicles and weaponry to escape the gigantic mollusk monster of the mountain and back to civilization.
Covert art for Eight Cylinders
If the above synopsis sounds fast-paced and cinematic, that is because Eight Cylinders is. Be it consciously, unconsciously, or coincidentally on Parent’s part, Eight Cylinders leverages elements from a variety of film (and video game) sources and blends them into a new narrative that gives the novella a cinematic quality. Examples of influences or apt comparisons include Fallout: New Vegas (both the game and novella begin similarly with the main protagonist being shot by a Las Vegas mobster and then being resurrected outside the city), Cube (all the characters are criminals trapped in a location they are trying to escape), Tremors (general tone of being trapped in a podunk desert locale with hidden monsters about), The Mist (characters who leave the safety of the area are quickly killed), Evil Dead 2 (similar fates for the main character at the story’s end), and Mad Max: Fury Road (climatic driving sequences through a desert) along with fast pace, car action sequences found in the likes of The Transporter and The Fast and the Furious series of films.
Though the tone is first and foremost an action centric, Lovecraftian elements seep into the story brining shades of horror and the grotesque. Overtly, the giant tentacles hidden in the mountains leverage distinctive Cthulu-ian imagery, but Eight Cylinders takes a self-aware approach to using Lovecraft elements. The antagonist character of Sly verbally references Lovecraft by equating the hidden tentacles to that of Cthulhu and referring the mountains that surround the camp as “The Mountains of Madness.” Unlike zombie films that are afraid to use the zed-word, Eight Cylinders embraces its few instances of being a metatext and uses it to full and realistic affect without relying on winking or easter egg-ing.
If there is an element in Eight Cylinders that seems out of place, it is that of the hero, Seb. In Crystal Lake’s promotional material for the novella, they quote author James Chambers who equates the story to a redemption tale, which Eight Cylinders certainly is. The issue is that Seb does not seem like a character who needs redemption. Though his character is a criminal, his portrayal in the story is extremely noble and he often thinks of others and their wellbeing. The few instances of selfish moments are quickly pushed aside to showcase his more positive leadership qualities as he puts others before him. If Parent was trying to write a criminal, anti-hero like that of Vin Diesel’s Riddick character, then it did not quite come across. Seb is still a fantastic character, easy to identify with, to follow along and root for, but he does not come across as a character who has done a tremendous amount of egregious activities in his past to merit his punishment in the desert mountains with the other characters.
Regardless of Seb’s portrayal, his predicament is extremely relatable to readers, especially in the current period. Though probably written in the “before times,” Eight Cylinders manages to tap into the fears and emotions many are feeling during the COVID-19 pandemic: trapped and wanting to escape, but unable to leave their homes (desert camp) due to a deadly virus rampaging around (mountain tentacles). The purgatory nature of the book echoes the never-ending nature of the pandemic that currently does not seem to have an end in sight.
Clocking in at 102 pages, Eight Cylinders moves as fast as the cars within. The novella combines aspects of the pursuit genre with Lovecraftian monsters to create a gripping (be it armrests or steering wheels) tale that is fully loaded.
Links
Eight Cylinders can be purchased at the Crystal Lake store or at your bookseller of preference.
Jason Parent can be reached at the following platforms:
Apologies, I missed putting out a news roundup for 11/22, so this post will cover both weeks.
Podcast News
Michele and I interviewed Michael Oden (creator of the Elysian Fields comic) on the Scholars from the Edge of Time segment of the Voice of Olympus show. Episode has been added to the podcast index and can also be streamed here.
For H. P. Lovecast Podcast, the upcoming schedule is going to look like this:
2020-12-06 – Wonder and Glory Forever
2020-12-20 – Interview with Nick Mamatas (already recorded)
2021-01-03 – Eight Cylinders
2021-01-17 – Interview with Jason Parent
Call for Papers
The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.
General Neo-Peplum News
Rest in Peplum
David Prowse, better reknown as the actor who portrayed Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy, passed away at the age of 85. His contributions to the sword and sandal genre include:
Dr. Who “The Time Monster” (1972). He was a minotaur
Up Pompeii (as an muscular extra)
Jabberwocky (1977, Terry Gilliam)
Daria Nicolodi passed away at the age of 70. She was known for her many contributions to Italian cinema in the 70s and 80s and her collaborations with Dario Argento. She appeared in Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989, Enzo G. Castellari)
Miscellanea
The folks at Comicon have quite a few articles that have gone up in the past two weeks:
“Hercules’ Self-fashioning on Screen: Millennial Concerns and Political Dimensions” by Jean Alvares and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell
“Warriors, Murderers, Savages: Violence in Steve Moore’s Hercules: The Thracian Wars” by Katherine Lu Hsu
Unfortunately I don’t know which essays within The New Peplum these two essays cite, but as soon as I find out I’ll update the citation page accordingly.
Podcast News
New episode of H. P. Lovecast Podcast Fragments is live. This is the episode we interview Robert P. Ottone. Check it out on Buzzsprout or your podcast app of preference.
Call for Papers
The Call for Presentations for Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference is live. The CFP can be read at the StokerCon 2021 website.
The Call for Abstracts for my collection of essays on neo-medievalism is live. The CFP can be found here.
General Neo-Peplum News
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
The newest neo-peplum title in Ubisoft’s long running Assassin’s Creed series, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, was released this past Tuesday. Lots of news to round up.
Lakeshore records released the soundtrack via Bandcamp.
YouTube cocktail channel How2Drink has created a libation for AC:V called The Horn of Eivorr.
