Tag: Stranger Things

Personal / Website News

Vanya Issue Seven Review

New comic book review up at my website!

Alas, I could not keep the momentum going so I missed a week, but this is still pretty prolific for me getting these reviews written and published.

My review of issue seven of the neo-jungle girl series Vanya is now online and can be read here. Technically, I am now all caught up on this series! I do have a PDF of issue eight, but not the physical copy and associated Kickstarter swag, and since I like to cover that sort of stuff, a review of issue eight will have to wait until it arrives (which should be in the near future).

Upcoming: Interview with Jeff Mariotte

Want to give a heads up to my readers to come back this Wednesday. I conducted an interview with Jeffrey Mariotte and it is going online on the 6th! You don’t want to miss it!

Uncovering Stranger Things – Italian Edition

Uncovering Stranger Things, edited by Kevin Wetmore and published by McFarland in 2018 (see their product page here) now has an Italian edition!

Publisher Cue Press has published a translated version of this collection (it looks like back in 2023?) and here is the cover art:

I segreti di Stranger Things can be purchased at Cue Press at this link here. If you want to read my essay about Stranger Things and synthwave music in Italian, it is called “Notti perse e giorni pericolosi: Il disfacimento delle relazioni fra Stranger Things e synthwave” in this publication. Check it out for sure!

Aside from a brief snippet of my Castle of Blood/Danza Macabra masters thesis being translated into French (see below!), this is the first time something I’ve written has appeared in another language (in its entirety). Career milestone unlocked!

Panthans Journal #339

The newest issue of the The National Panthans Journal has been published. This issue contains a re-print of my review of issue two of the adult/neo-jungle girl series Vanya: The Lost Warrior. Of course my write up can also be read at my website here.

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.

ECOF 2025

In September of 2025 there will be an Edgar Rice Burroughs Chain of Friendship (ECOF) event down in Willcox, AZ. This event is to celebrate the 150th birthday of Burroughs while also honoring him with a plaque in the town due to his stationing there with the 7th U.S. Cavalry in the 1890s. (Note: another ERB convention was held in Willcox back in 2019 and an event recap of that can be read at ERBZine #7059).

Here is the flyer for the 2025 event:

Here is the press release:

RENOWNED AUTHOR EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS’ CAVALRY SERVICE TO BE MEMORIALIZED IN WILLCOX, AZ

“Tarzan” Creator and Pop Culture’s Influential “Grandfather of Science Fiction and Fantasy” Commemorated for His 150th Birthday.

WILLCOX, AZ – The renowned “Master of Adventure” Edgar Rice Burroughs started his adult life as a cavalryman at Arizona’s Fort Grant in May of 1896. This September, as part of the late author’s 150th birthday celebration, his cavalry service will be memorialized with a monument at the restored Southern Pacific train depot in Willcox, where he arrived on his way to Fort Grant (35 miles north).

The influential creator of Tarzan of the Apes, John Carter of Mars, and The Land That Time Forgot series of stories wrote in his “Autobiography” that he specifically requested “to be sent to the worst post in the United States” and was then promptly assigned to Fort Grant in Arizona Territory, where his troop would spend some time hunting after the Apache Kid and other outlaws.

Many believe that Burroughs’ initial stay in Arizona influenced his first Martian story, Under the Moons of Mars, which begins with the first chapter titled “On the Arizona Hills.” The John Carter Martian stories would go on to influence generations of science fiction and fantasy books and movies, and would inspire many young people to become scientists, engineers, and astronauts. He would later author the books The War Chiefand Apache Devil, both set in Arizona during the Apache Wars of the 1860s – 1880s.

This Willcox Edgar Rice Burroughs Chain of Friendship (ECOF) Gathering will take place from September 25 to 28, 2025, with the 7th Cavalry Historical Monument formal dedication ceremony on Saturday, September 27th from 10:00 AM – 12:00 Noon near the historic Southern Pacific Railroad Depot.

The monument dedication at the Willcox train depot will include guest speakers and participation of local Buffalo Soldier reenactors. All other convention events will take place at the Elks Lodge #2131 in Willcox, and will include discussion panels, a “huckster” (vendor) room, Guest of Honor and speaker Jeffrey J. Mariotte (author of Tarzan and the Forest of Stone), Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. speakers, a Saturday night banquet/ dinner, a Tarzan movie screening, and other surprises.

These events are sponsored by the Sulphur Springs Valley Historical Society and the Apache Devils chapter of The Burroughs Bibliophiles. The celebration is open to the public for free (except for the dinner and movie), but full attendees can register for a fee that covers a goodie bag, a huckster table, and the Saturday dinner.

This is a must-attend event for fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs and pop-culture historians alike. If you’d like to visit the place where it all began, don’t miss this very special celebration. (Note that some convention activities will require full event registration – the registration form is provided separately.)

The Holiday Inn Express & Suites Willcox is offering a special daily room rate of $119 plus taxes for the nights of 25 to 27 September for attendees. The group name is “ECOF.” You can make reservations at this rate by calling the hotel at (520) 384-3333; rooms are limited. The address is 1251 N. Virginia Ave, Willcox, AZ 85643.

If you would like more information about the 2025 ECOF event, please call Frank Puncer at 520.281.1818, or email him at fwpuncer at gmail dot com.

Here is the registration from:

Michele and I will be in attendance for this convention, so I’ve added it to the appearances section of my website as well. I’ll be doing a presentation on Tarzan as a Maciste-like peplum character in Tarzan and the Lost Empire. Hope to see yall there!

Publishing Recap

Below is a recap of my external publishing endeavors so far in 2025.

Calls for Papers/Proposals

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.

Twainian Regeneration: Adaptations of the Works, Life, and Legacy of Mark Twain

This session is sponsored by the Mark Twain Circle of America.

American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1935-1910) achieved lasting fame as Mark Twain, an identity that served as both his pen name and the persona he cultivated for the public. Twain’s writings and his distinctive character have dispersed across time and space, and the resulting Twainian tradition incorporates these elements in many ways. 

Importantly, his works and iconography have long been the focus of adaptation. This process begins with the illustrations commissioned for the initial publication of his texts, Twain’s own attempts to rework and expand his stories, and contemporary caricatures of his person, and it continues with retellings of Twain’s stories, linked texts (such as prequels, midquels, and sequels) connected to his work, recastings and restagings of his tales, and new adventures for Twain himself. These adaptations, appropriations, and transformations of Twain appear in diverse forms and formats including anime series, artworks, cartoons, comics, films, games, historical fiction texts, home video releases, graphic novels, illustrations, memorials, musical theater productions, mysteries, performances, plays, radio broadcasts, science fiction works, sculptures, song lyrics, stamps, television programming, theme park attractions, and tourist sites. 

Each adaptation regenerates aspects of Twain for new audiences revealing fresh insights into the reception of his works, life, and legacy. They also highlight both the timelessness of Twain as well as his timeliness for the present of each new text that his writings and his person have inspired. A resource guide for the session can be accessed at https://tinyurl.com/TwainianRegenerationRG.

We seek proposals that engage with these texts in the belief that each adaptation regenerates aspects of Twain for new audiences revealing fresh insights into the reception of his works, life, and legacy and highlighting both the timelessness of Twain as well as his timeliness for the present of each new text that his writings and his person have inspired.

Link to submit abstract: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21918

2025 Harry Potter Academic Conference (HPAC)

Friday and Saturday, October 17–18, 2025 (Eastern Time)
Virtual conference (digiHPAC)

Deadline for proposals (academics & community members): September 1, 2025

ABOUT: The Harry Potter Academic Conference returns for its 14th annual gathering, which will be a fully online format known as digiHPAC. We are a non-profit, interdisciplinary conference that provides a forum for scholarly inquiry surrounding the Harry Potter literature and related cultural phenomenon. Open to scholars of any experience level, from established academic researchers to community members and students, this is a space curated to be inclusive and welcoming to all. The conference is held in person at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia in even-numbered years and online in odd-numbered years.

PRESENTATIONS: digiHPAC presentations are presented over Zoom, live or pre-recorded, in 30-minute windows (20 minutes for presentations and 10 minutes for Q&A). Panel discussions, teaching sessions, or other alternative proposals may request a longer presentation time. Topics can include, but are not limited to, close textual criticism, diversity and inclusion, psychology, philosophy, political science, and film, music, religious, and fandom studies. Past presentations have been accepted on the Harry Potter book and film series, the Fantastic Beasts film series, and the Potterverse in dialogue with other works. More information about HPAC can be found at harrypotterconference.com.

PROPOSALS: Please submit abstracts of 150–250 words describing your proposal at harrypotterconference.com/submit. Multiple abstracts may be submitted but will be evaluated individually. Submission deadline is September 1, 2025, and acceptance notifications will be sent by mid-September 2025.
Any questions? Please email Patrick McCauley (mccauleyp@chc.edu) and copy harrypotterconference@gmail.com.

Please see our website for HPAC’s statement on our commitment to maintaining an LGBTQIA2S+ inclusive space in the fandom.

Cinema’s First Epics in Focus: Silent Epic Film from Literary Adaptation to Contemporary Epic Narratives

Though epic cinema is most commonly associated with the mid-century triumphs of Hollywood, its origins extend far deeper into the history of the medium, reaching back to the earliest days of film, long before the advent of sound. The first documented uses of the term “epic” in relation to film stem from the nascent Italian industry, where monumental productions like L’Odissea (1911, dir. Francesco Bertolini, Giuseppe de Liguoro, Adolfo Padovan) not only astonished audiences with unprecedented scale but employed vast promotional efforts to assert a distinctly national— and as Maria Wyke and Pantelis Michelakis have noted, overtly nationalistic—cinematic identity. This movement towards epic during the silent era, often drawing inspiration from classical epic poetry and Christian narrative, has been understood to be important in the broader context of the nationalist fervor that swept through Europe in the years leading up to and following the First World War, yet has been curiously overlooked by film scholars, due in large part to the fragility of early film materials and inconsistent archival practices which have led to the loss of many key works. This neglect is particularly regrettable when we consider that the silent epic was central to the major artistic and ideological shifts that defined the early cinematic project, deeply enmeshed in the ontological debates over cinema’s status as a visual and rhythmic art—debates that were especially vibrant in early French and German cinema—and later in the drive toward naturalism that would come to dominate Hollywood, championed by figures such as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. The continued presence of the epic, from the silent era through to the sound era, underscores its fundamental role in cinema’s dialogue with other arts as well as its longitudinal development, and in recognizing the centrality of early epics to the history of film, this edited volume seeks to reassert their study, not only as historical artifacts but as key contributions to an ever-evolving art of cinema.

Building on the conversations initiated during the Cinema’s First Epics in Focus conference (May 2025), we aim to build a comprehensive edited volume which gathers a selection of expanded papers from the event, complemented by new scholarly contributions that critically engage with the silent epic and its reverberations across film history, media theory, and related fields. We hope to move beyond the framework of film philology completely, opening up the field to more interdisciplinary approaches that consider aesthetics, temporality, material culture, and the shifting meanings of “epic” across media in interconnected relation. We believe this collection would fill a significant gap in the scholarship and could serve as a foundational reference for future work on both epic and early cinema as, to our knowledge, no existing volume addresses the silent epic across such a broad yet coherent set of methodologies and global perspectives. We are particularly interested in contributions that interrogate the intersections between epic form and silent cinema through innovative and open methodologies—whether from film and media studies, classical reception, visual culture, performance studies, or archival research. By foregrounding these diverse perspectives, the volume seeks to move beyond narrowly textual or genealogical approaches, and instead open up a wider discursive field through which the silent epic can be understood as a transmedial and transhistorical phenomenon.

While the volume retains the conference’s original focus on adaptation, national identity, cinematic scale, and the episteme of early film, the discussions brought forth by participants have revealed key thematic axes that we now wish to foreground:

Genre:

The volume seeks to examine the epic as a contested and evolving genre. Contributions may explore the tensions between prescriptive and descriptive models of genre, the shifting boundaries between epic and tragedy across media, and the historical and theoretical slippages in the definition of “epic” across literature, cinema, and other arts. We welcome work that revisits classical, romantic, and modern theories of genre in light of early cinematic practice.

Time and Temporality:

Essays may address the intersections between epic time and cinematic time, considering how film reconfigures notions of epic duration, rhythm, and repetition. We are particularly interested in studies that employ film theoretical methodologies—such as montage theory—to reframe literary epic, and vice versa.

Material Culture and Reception:

We encourage research on the material and institutional contexts of silent epic film: distribution networks, live musical accompaniment, promotional ephemera, newspaper reception, and archival challenges. To what extent do these material elements participate in constructing the epic as a form? How might production and reception conditions shape our understanding of the epic mode in film? How important was this surrounding context for the epic’s formation as a cinematic mode in the silent era?

The Silent Era:

What makes the silent period uniquely generative for the epic form? We invite proposals that attend to the technological, stylistic, social, economic and industrial specificities of the silent era, and their formative impact on the emergence of cinematic epic traditions.

Adaptation and Intermediality:

How are epic modes rearticulated through the visual and narrative strategies of early film? What happens to epic’s narrative authority, scale, or temporality when it migrates across media? How does medial transposition function for the epic—what is gained, lost, or transformed in the process of adaptation? We welcome contributions that consider the semiotic logics at work in each medium and how these shape the reception and reinterpretation of epic structures, characters, and themes.

Identity:

We welcome analyses of the epic as a cultural and political form, examining how epic narratives serve as mediators of national, social, or class identity. How does the epic negotiate questions of inclusion, exclusion, and transformation within diverse sociopolitical contexts, both in its production and reception?

In addition to these central themes, the volume remains open to broader considerations of silent epic film, including (but not limited to):

• Representations of mythological, biblical, or historical themes;
• National cinemas and epic aesthetics;
• Theatricality, realism, and expressionism in silent epic form;
• Gender, class, ethnicity, colonialism, and spectatorship in early epic cinema;
• Archival recovery and the status of lost or restored epic films;
• Scale and mise-en-scène in silent epic film;
• Modern cinema and silent epic film;
• Comparative studies of silent epic film, particularly on marginal or non-angloeuropean film.

We are currently preparing a formal book proposal to be submitted to a major academic press, with Blackwell and Routledge among our intended publishers.

Submission Details:

Please submit your complete text (maximum of 8000 words), along with a short biographical note (max. 150 words), to the editors by September 15th, 2025. Contributions may be written in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese, but accepted papers must be submitted with an English version for publication.

Contact:

Vítor Alves Silva (University of Porto) – up202204445@up.pt

João Paulo Guimarães (University of Porto, ILCML) – guimaraesjpc@gmail.com

Larson Powell (University of Missouri Kansas City, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Film – Emeritus) – powelllar@umkc.edu

We look forward to receiving your proposals and continuing the vibrant conversations sparked by the conference.

Miscellaneous Tidbits

Some fun things I shared online from these past few weeks. Highlighting things from my personal collection of pop culture artifacts. Or artifacts I’m digging out of the archive. Just, general cool or unique things to show off.

Autographs from the Archive

Here are some autographed treasures I’ve shared on social media recently.

Lord of the Rings (Bakshi Version)

Decades before Peter Jackson amazed audiences with his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Ralph Bakshi put out the rotoscoped masterpiece of The Lord of the Rings. I’m a huge Bakshi fan (Cool World FTW!), and I remember watching this movie when I was young and, frankly, being kind of terrified by it.

Anywho, I met Bakshi once, at SDCC back in 2006, where he signed some of my other movies, but at the time I didn’t have a copy of LOTR. However, in the years since I’ve procured a copy and had it signed by two folks.

The first is Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn, but who also did the screenplay of the Bakshi LOTR. He was a guest at a Glendale Vintage Paperback Show where he signed my DVD.

Next animator/cartoonist Steven E. Gordon sign my DVD. Gordon worked with Bakshi on a couple of projects (like Fire and Ice). He is a staple of the different comic book conventions in the LA area. He did a pinup girl commission for me one time – I’ll have to share that!

New Sword and Sandal Acquisitions

The ever growing peplum research library grows with these recent sword and sandal films acquisitions.

Hercules and Hercules Unchained Blu-rays

Hercules (1958) and Hercules Unchained (1959) have two brand new HD/Blu-ray releases from Artus films! Check these bad boys out:

If Artus Films sounds familiar, it is because they are the ones that put out that ornate Castle of Blood (1964) release (see my post about that here) that cites my Castle of Blood masters thesis in French!

As far as I can tell (looking at dvdcompare.net) there has not been an English/state-side Blu-ray release of either Hercules or Hercules Unchained yet (which is rather strange since they are iconic, important films in the peplum genre). So if you want a Blu-ray of these films, Artus seems to be the only release currently (but there is no English audio or subtitled on either). PeplumTV.com has a few musings about the possible print source of these releases, which can be read here.

News from Friends

Cool kids I know have been busy lately! Here are some signal boosts I’d like to give out.

New Fan2Fan Episodes

Bernie and Pete have some new episodes of their Fan2Fan podcast online.

Here is their part two of discussing the documentary American Scary:

Here is their part one discussion of filming locations:

And here is their part two discussion of filming locations:

Older episodes of Fan2Fan can be found at its Libsyn page or via your podcast app of preference.

Cyanide Constellations and Other Stories

Poet and dark fiction author extraordinaire Sara Tantlinger has a new collection coming out this autumn! It is titled Cyanide Constellations and Other Stories and featured wicked bad ass artwork by Devin Forst.

Sara’s new book can be pre-ordered from Dark Matter Ink – here is the book’s product page. The release date is October 21st, just in time for Halloween!