Carrie Vaughn’s popular WT story “For Fear of Dragons” is now available as an audio download from PodCastle.org!
Vaughn’s dragon roars
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
The 85 Weirdest, Day 22: Neil Gaiman
Friday, April 18th, 2008
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
Among the great invented mythologies of the 20th century — the Cthulhu mythos, Middle-Earth, the Star Wars galaxy — must also be numbered NEIL GAIMAN’s (1960– ) spooky “Endless” cosmology of the landmark graphic novel series The Sandman. From there, Neil has gone on to become the most beloved weird storyteller of a generation, the Bradbury of the multimedia age, spinning tales like American Gods, Anansi Boys, and Coraline. To top it all off, he seems to have personally actualized the life of Jubal Harshaw. Sir, we salute you.
Neil Gaiman will appear tonight at the New York Comic Con’s fundraiser for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Also, tomorrow at the NYCC: the Weird Tales 85th anniversary panel discussion, featuring Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, WT editorial director Stephen H. Segal, artist Molly Crabapple, pulp historian and horror editor Stefan Dziemianowicz, and more!
The 85 Weirdest, Day 21: Bill Plympton
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
You have to love the artist who foists his particular brand of weirdness on an unsuspecting world in the sneakiest of ways. Take animator BILL PLYMPTON (1946– ), for instance. His brilliant celebrations of the body grotesque have sold you everything from tacos to operating systems. Infiltration via MTV before it sucked? Check. The ’toons even spawned a snarky comeback (“So’s your face”). “More fun than nitrous oxide!” says a guy on the Internet. We couldn’t agree more.
Bill Plympton is a guest this weekend at the New York Comic Con. Also, Friday at the NYCC: the Weird Tales 85th anniversary panel discussion, featuring Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, WT editorial director Stephen H. Segal, artist Molly Crabapple, pulp historian and horror editor Stefan Dziemianowicz, and more!
The 85 Weirdest, Day 20: Margaret Brundage
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
At the very peak of Weird Tales‘s classic run in the 1930s, the magazine’s visceral appeal was arguably due as much to MARGARET BRUNDAGE’s (1900–1976) lush cover paintings as to the incredible prose behind them. She showed us violently smoldering viragos bearing whips, decades before the boom in the gothic fetish craze; she showed us a “Bat-Girl” in black leather, years before the comics gave us such a character; she showed us art-deco skulls long before anyone ever imagined a heavy-metal album jacket.
The 85 Weirdest, Day 19: Osamu Tezuka
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
Walt Disney, Hanna & Barbera, and Alex Toth aren’t on this list — but if they had all merged into one, single, ultra-historic, gestalt super-cartoonist? Now that would be weird. And that’s OSAMU TEZUKA (1928-1989). The father of Japanese anime, Tezuka effortlessly danced back and forth over the boundaries between storytelling styles and genres, remixing them as he went, from the all-ages android allegory of Astro Boy to the more mature mythic immortality quest of Phoenix to the demonic imagery of Dororo.
What’s new: In 2008, Dororo will become the latest of Tezuka’s manga to be published in English.
The 85 Weirdest, Day 18: Lon Chaney Sr.
Monday, April 14th, 2008
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
LON CHANEY SR. (1883–1930) wasn’t merely a great actor; he was the first person in Hollywood to truly understand the emotional force that could be wrought by enhancing a human performance — his own — with weird visual tricks. The “Man of a Thousand Faces” almost singlehandedly invented effects make-up; as the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera, he made monsters sympathetic. Ray Bradbury said it best: “He . . . acted out our psyches. He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them on-screen.”
The 85 Weirdest, Day 17: Joyce Carol Oates
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
JOYCE CAROL OATES (1938– ) publishes at will. In The New Yorker one month, in a mystery pulp or fantasy magazine the next. Novels, essays, poems, plays, reportage on boxing: she’s written everything. In the future, there will be no Joyce Carol Oates scholars because nobody will have time to read it all. The gothic runs through her work like veins; Oates is arguably the darkest and weirdest writer to be fully embraced by the mainstream since Poe himself, and even he only managed the trick posthumously. When she asks the question “Where are you going, where have you been?” the only answers are “Anywhere but here,” and, “God, you don’t want to know.” But we do, and Oates tells us.
The 85 Weirdest, Day 16: Nick Bantock
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
Ominous. Foreboding. Reading NICK BANTOCK’s (1949– ) indescribable postcard-scrapbook-collage-novel Griffin and Sabine is like listening to the familiar rhythms of reality give way and break under the discordantly building cacophony in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.” Bantock brings two gifts to bear in his 15-year wave of groundbreaking literature: that talent for conjuring the massing Fates, and the ability to weave a narrative through text to visual art and back again in a way most writers, illustrators, and cartoonists could never even conceive, much less pull off.
The 85 Weirdest, Day 15: Rev. Ivan Stang
Friday, April 11th, 2008
The March/April 85th anniversary issue of Weird Tales features our big list of “The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years.” We’re breaking it down online, too: one honoree per day, in no particular order, for 85 days!
The prophet of the invertedly iconoclastic and surprisingly enduring Church of the SubGenius — a postmodern movement of “Schizophreniatrics, Morealism, Sarcastrophy, Cynisacreligion” — the REV. IVAN STANG (1953– ) is also, presumably, its founder, despite his insistence that it was started in 1953 by a pipe-smoking clip-art face named “Bob.” Stang’s elaborately bizarre tracts have inspired the likes of Devo, Pee-Wee Herman, and John Shirley — not to mention declaring as holidays the Feast of St. Cthulhu (Nov. 10) and the Martyrdom of St. Kenny (Dec. 9).
Weird Tales and Hellboy’s creator at New York Comic Con
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
We’re coming to New York! Come join us for a Weird Tales panel discussion celebrating our 85th anniversary and the 85 Weirdest Storytellers next Friday, April 18, at the big New York Comic Con in Manhattan. Panelists scheduled to talk include con guest of honor and WT-inspired Hellboy creator Mike Mignola; WT illustrator and Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School founder Molly Crabapple; horror editor and WT historian Stefan Dziemianowicz; and WT editorial & creative director Stephen H. Segal. The talk is at 4 p.m. in room 1E10 of the Javits Center — see you there!
