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News Roundup W/E 2020-10-25

Personal / Website News

The New Peplum Citation

Dr. Claire Elizabeth Greenhalgh sites myself, Hannah Mueller, and Jerry Pierce from The New Peplum in their PhD thesis, “The Depiction of Slavery in Ancient World Television Drama: Politics, Culture and Society.” The thesis can be read here and the citation has been added to The New Peplum page.

Podcast Appearances

Michele and I interview author Janet Joyce Holden on the Scholars from the Edge of Time show.

Michele and I were interviewed on the Chatting with Sherri show. The episode will be published on 2020-10-29 at Blog Talk Radio.

Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference

The CFP for the Ann Radcliffe Academic conference is still open until the end of November. It can be viewed at the StokerCon 2021 website.

General Neo-Peplum News

New Netflix Show

Netflix premiered a new neo-peplum miniseries on Friday called Barbarians. The brief description reads: “Torn between the mighty empire that raised him and his own tribal people, a Roman officer’s conflicted allegiances lead to an epic historical clash.”

Literature

The folks at Lousy Book Covers feature a Biblical peplum book with a, well, lousy book cover: Unworthy: A Soldier. A Servant. A Savior by T. M. Hedlund.

Amy Wolf recently published The Further Labors of Nick, book 2 of their Mythos trilogy.

Immortals Fenyx Rising

A demo for Immortals Fenyx Rising is available to play online via the Stadia service. Access to the demo ends on 10/29.

Rest in Peplum

Marge Champion (better known as a model at Disney on many of their animated features) passed away at 101. She was in Jupiter’s Darling (1955, George Sidney).

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News

News Roundup W/E 2020-10-18

Personal / Website News

The Call for Papers for the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference at StokerCon 2021 is still open until the end of November. Details can be found at the StokerCon 2021 website.

The Podcast Appearances has been updated:

General Neo-peplum News

Rest in Peplum / #RestInPeplum to Rhonda Fleming who passed away at the age of 97. The classic artist started in rather big time historic epics:

  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949, Tay Garnett)
  • Serpent of the Nile (1953, William Castle)
  • The Queen of Babylon (1954, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia)
  • The Revolt of the Slaves (1960, Nunzio Malasomma)

Polish actor Ryszard Ronczewski also passed away at the age of 90. He was in the historic epic An Ancient Tale: When the Sun Was a God (2003, Jerzy Hoffman)

Spanish actress Marisa de Leza passed away at 87. She was in Alexander the Great (1956, Robert Rossen)

Dynamite Entertainment is launching DIEnamite – a big cross over comic series with lots of IPs they have the licenses of. This include John Carter and Red Sonja.

Categories
News

News Roundup W/E 2020-10-04

Personal / Website News

Book Citation

Emily Anctil’s essay “Not a Bedtime Story: Investigating Textual Interactions Between the Horror Genre and Children’s Picture Books” from Horror Literature From Gothic to Post-modern: Critical Essays has been referenced in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly Fall 2020 Vol 45 No 3.

McFarland Book Sale

McFarland is doing their yearly October sale for their horror books. If you use the code “HORROR” (without the quotation marks) you will receive 40% off the order from now until Friday, October 16. There are numerous horror books I am a part of that you can purchase: Horror in Space, Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern, and Uncovering Stranger Things. If you want to support my academic endeavors, purchasing copies of Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern benefits me greatly.

New Episode of the H. P. Lovecast Podcast

New episode of the H. P. Lovecast Podcast is now online. In this episode Michele and I talk about two short stories from the Swords Against Cthulhu anthology: “Modu” by Mark Sims and “The Sword of Lomar” by Jason Scott Aiken. The episode has been added to the podcast appearance index.

General Neo-Peplum News

The book, Xena: Their Courage Changed Our World was recently published by AUSXIP Publishing. The large book is a collection of essays from the Xena fandom and the impact of the show on their lives. The book can be ordered from the AUSXIP web store or Amazon in a variety of formats: e-copy, soft cover, hard cover.

Per Deadline, Netflix looks to be developing a live action Conan the Barbarian series.

Paul A J Lewis has written an article at The Film Magazine called “Loincloths, Muscles, Sorcery and the Rock of Uranus: A Journey Into the Realm of the Italian Peplum (c.1958-1965).

Screen Rant ranks the 10 best gladiator films.

  1. Spartacus (1960)
  2. Ben-Hur (1959)
  3. Gladiator (2000)
  4. The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)
  5. Barabbas (1961)
  6. Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954)
  7. Cabiria (1914)
  8. Centurion (2010)
  9. The Eagle (2011)
  10. The Arena (1974)

Article at Deutsche Welle called “What Hollywood got wrong about the gladiators of ancient Rome.”

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News

News Roundup W/E 2020-09-20

Here is a news round up for weekending September 20th, 2020. On these weekly posts, I’ll list not only personal and project news, but I’ll be rounding up neo-peplum news that has occurred in an attempt to aggregate and promote the genre.

Podcast News

New episode of the H. P. Lovecast Podcast is now online. In this episode Michele Brittany and I discuss Gou Tanabe’s manga adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Nameless City.”:
URL: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1022692/5521708-hplcp-fragments-ep-02-gou-tanabe-s-the-nameless-city

This upcoming week I’ll be on a sword and sandal cinema segment on Hercules Invictus’ Voice of Olympus program on Tuesday the 22nd followed by Michele’s and my monthly Scholars from the Edge of Time segment Thursday the 24th. For that episode we will be interviewing cosplayers Tiffany Carmel Lake and Steven Lake. Links will be added to the podcast page when they are live.

The next episode of the H. P. Lovecast Podcast will be on stories from the Swords Against Cthulhu anthology.

General Neo-Peplum News

Ubisoft, publishers of the historic epic/neo-peplum video game series, Assassin’s Creed, announced two titles later this year that are in the sword and sandal genre: Immortals Fenyx Rising (trailer) and a remastered version of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (trailer). This is in addition to the prior announced next entry in the Assassin’s Creed series, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (trailer). I’m saddened that Kassandra’s storyline from Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is officially at an end, but happy to see Ubisoft continuing to pump out neo-peplum video games. I look forward to writing about these titles after they are released.

Late last week I received my copy of issue 0 of Elysian Fields by Michael Oden and published by 9 Realms Publishing. I’ll be interviewing Oden and doing a write up about this comic in the very near future. More info about the comic can be found at the 9 Realms Publishing Facebook page or at the Indiegogo campaign page for the comic.

Issue one of the neo-peplum/Lovecraft comic Isidora and the Immortal Chains by G. A. Lungaro just concluded their Kickstarter campaign.

I’ve also backed a neo-peplum comic on Kickstarter that takes place in the Mesoamerican period that is called Aztlan. I’m always excited for sword and sandal that is outside traditional antiquity.