Tagged: fantasy

Bill Willingham on “Fables” vs “Once Upon A Time”

Bill Willingham on “Fables” vs “Once Upon A Time”

  • News
  • December 5, 2011
Cover of "Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile...

Cover of Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile

Comic Book Resources gets Bill Willingham to talk about the similarities between the long-running Vertigo comic series Fables and Once Upon A Time:

For those of you who just came in, let’s start with some of the basics. “Once Upon a Time” is a weekly TV series showing on the ABC television network. It’s just over a month old now, having aired four episodes by the time of this writing. It was created by Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis.

“Fables” is a monthly comic book series, published by Bill Willingham, the author of this essay.

Both series explore the notion of popular fable, folklore and fairytale characters, native to a fantasy medieval setting, but still living today in modern day America. Let’s discuss.

via Bill Willingham on “Fables” vs “Once Upon A Time” – Comic Book Resources.

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AUCTION SITE INVITES CREATORS TO PARTICIPATE TO HELP ARTIST AND WRITER!

AUCTION SITE INVITES CREATORS TO PARTICIPATE TO HELP ARTIST AND WRITER!

  • News
  • December 1, 2011

http://magick4terri.livejournal.com/


Beloved editor, artist and writer Terri Windling is in need, and we are asking for your help in a fundraising auction to assist her. This auction will combine donations from professionals and fans in an online sale to help Terri through a serious financial crisis.

Terri is the creator of groundbreaking fantasy and mythic art and literature over the past several decades, ranging from the influential urban fantasy series Bordertown to the online Journal of Mythic Arts. With co-editor Ellen Datlow, she changed the face of contemporary short fiction with The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and other award-winning anthologies, including Silver Birch, Blood Moon and The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest. Her remarkable Endicott Studio blog continues to bring music, poetry, art and inspiration to people all over the world.

Terri Windling and her family have been coping with health and legal issues that have drained her financial resources at a critical time. Due to the serious nature of these issues, and privacy concerns for individual family members, we can’t be more specific than that, but Terri is in need of our support. As a friend, a colleague and an inspiration, Terri has touched many, many lives over the years. She has been supremely generous in donating her own work and art to support friends and colleagues in crisis. Now, Terri is in need of some serious help from her community. Who better than her colleagues and fans to rise up to make some magick for her?

Through the next 18 days, we’ll be posting personal offerings from the likes of Neil Gaiman, George R.R. Martin, Wendy & Brian Froud, and many more! Besides bidding on these beautiful items, YOU can also post your own skills, services, arts, crafts, or whatever else you’d like to offer for auction! Please see our complete About Us page for FAQ about Terri, the auction process, and other ways to get involved. Thank you!

Gutter Magic “Spells” Potential

Gutter Magic “Spells” Potential

by Alec Berry

Something about the urban landscape emphasizes the human condition. Maybe it’s the close contact of your neighbors. Maybe it’s the partial grime left exposed. Maybe it’s simply the notion and stigma that bad things happen on the streets. Whatever it is, fiction always seems to capitalize on it. Authors and artists enjoy looking toward the mean pavements to either observe or use them as a backdrop, and by the time the final product reveals itself, it’s clear the harsh, unforgiving landscape brings out the worst, or at least questionable, in its subjects. This is what writer Rich Douek gets right in this zero issue preview of the forthcoming comic, Gutter Magic.

Gutter Magic blends the fantasy genre with a hint of crime to present a story that’s really about the characters and their determined faults or problematic situations. This zero issue contains sixteen pages of more or less setup material, but within only sixteen pages writer Rich Douek manages to cover three members of his cast and somewhat establish who each of them are.

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REVIEW: Americus

REVIEW: Americus

by Sam Kusek

Neil Barton is your quintessential bookworm. Happiest when his nose is buried in the middle of his favorite young adult fantasy series, Apathea Ravenchilde, Neil is not looking forward to his transition into high school. Like many of us at that tender age of 13, Neil doesn’t exactly know who he is yet, having little means of self-expression in his quiet and very religious town of Americus. It isn’t until a local church activist group deems Apathea Ravenchilde “unfit for souls of our youth,” and his best friend is sent off to military school, that Neil has to take a stand and find out exactly what he’s made of.

What I enjoyed most about this book was Neil’s journey from young, unsure child to young adult. His experience is like so many of our own, making it extremely relatable. Throughout the book, Neil is influenced by a number of older men and women, from vegan librarians to punk music enthusiasts and begins to see a world outside of the scope the dreary small town he and his single mother live in. To further emphasize the point, the book is interspliced with scenes from the young adult novel (Apathea Ravenchilde), which features a big reveal about Apathea’s origin and family relations and the rising tension between the library committee and the activist group, providing a wonderfully complex sense of balance and allows the book to touch upon a number of the issues of young adulthood, such as relationships with lovers and parents and often feeling trapped by the society around us.

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Review: “Neverwhere” 15th Anniversary Edition

Imagine the BBC fifteen years ago, before the current explosion of science fiction and fantasy fare. It was a dowdy set of channels, working on the cheap, and not being necessarily accommodating to the needs of its shows. Instead, they often said we have a hole for X, please take your concept and make it fit.

While their schedules were not entirely devoid of genre fare, it came few and far between with offerings like [[[Neverwhere]]], which aired on BBC Two and was written by Neil Gaiman, in the flush of his success in America with Sandman. He met with producer Lenny Henry during England’s annual Comic Relief event and they began talking about a story. Lenny imagined a society below London and that was enough of a spark to get Gaiman going.

He conjured up a fully realized fantasy world and used the character of Richard Mayhew, a thoroughly typical citizen, who does a good deed and is rewarded with being plunged into this realm. The story of Neverwhere has been told and retold, first as a BBC miniseries, complete with 1996 novelization by Gaiman, and then, years later, a comic book adaptation from Vertigo. There’s been a steady stream of talk of a film version but it remains trapped in a realm of its own called Development Hell.

The BBC at the time treated it like any of its other broadcasts, giving the fantasy a budget fit for a situation comedy and then insisting it be produced in thirty-minute installments coupled with the even odder demand that it be shot on video not film. The result was an unsatisfactory event that has left Gaiman and fans demanding a Redo.

Instead, the BBC is releasing a fifteenth anniversary DVD edition of the miniseries on Tuesday. They had a Region 2 edition around for some time now but this is a first official release in the States. (more…)

Review: The Mr. Monster trilogy by Dan Wells

John Wayne Cleaver is not a serial killer; he wants you to know that up front. He’s also not, sadly, a typical American teenager, though he somewhat wishes that he could be. Thirdly, he’s not officially a sociopath — that diagnosis can only be given to an adult, and John is only fifteen. What he has is instead called Antisocial Personality Disorder — he has an almost complete lack of empathy, simply not understanding what other people’s emotions are or connecting with them directly.

So John has to work his way through life by intellectually building models of what he thinks people are feeling, and of how he should respond to those feelings, and continually adapting his models to get closer to reality. He’s not all that good at it at the beginning of I Am Not A Serial Killer, the first novel he narrates, but give him a break: he’s a fifteen-year-old boy from a small town, and his brain doesn’t work the way everyone else’s does.

To make matters worse, he’s obsessed with violent death and with serial killers — and he’s smart enough to have noticed that he has all of the standard characteristics of a serial killer: a distant, abusive father who abandoned him, high IQ, frequently bullied, a fascination with fire, even bedwetting. And he doesn’t really want to get too far away from death — the most soothing thing in his life is helping out his mother and aunt in their family business, the mortuary downstairs from their apartment. But he definitely doesn’t want to kill people, and has built up a regimen of rules and avoidance techniques to keep the thoughts of torture and death at bay.

But then a real serial killer starts stalking John’s home town — Clayton, North Dakota [1] — and John can’t help but follow the case, working up his own profile of the killer. It gets worse when John accidentally sees the killer in action — and realizes not only that the murderer is his friendly elderly neighbor, Mr. Crowley, but that Crowley is some kind of supernatural creature, taking body parts from his victims to replace his own deteriorating organs and limbs. (more…)

Realms of Fantasy is Dead Again

Realms of Fantasy is Dead Again

  • News
  • November 6, 2011
Realms of Fantasy Logo

My only current paying freelance gig has been shot out from under me yet again; Realms of Fantasy magazine is being shut down for the third (I think) time in as many years.

SF Scope has the full story. Thanks to all of the owners of RoF for pouring money into it, even though that didn’t work out the way any of us had hoped, and to everyone else who worked on the magazine. I came in very late in its life, but I’m pretty sure hiring me didn’t directly lead to any of its many deaths.

And, if there’s anyone out there looking for someone snarky to review books in that vast realm between comics and skiffy, I am your man.

2011 World Fantasy Award Winners

  • News
  • November 3, 2011

They were announced this past weekend at the World Fantasy Convention (where else?), held this year in beautiful, sunny San Diego.

Since I’ve been a judge for this award (a few years back now; the scars have completely healed), I’ve got a higher regard for the winners, and now I really need to track down a copy of Who Fears Death.

Congratulations to all of the winners. And, to the judges: you can relax now, and read something you want to, for a change.

Novel: Who Fears Death? by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
Novella: “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon” by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All-New Tales)
Short Story: “Fossil-Figures” by Joyce Carol Oates (Stories: All-New Tales)
Anthology: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Bernheimer & Carmen Gimenez Smith (Penguin)
Collection: What I Didn’t See and Other Stories by Karen Joy Fowler (Small Beer Press)
Artist: Kinuko Y. Craft
Special Award, Professional: Marc Gascoigne for Angry Robot
Special Award, Non-Professional: Alisa Krasnostein for Twelfth Planet Press
Life Achievement:Peter S. Beagle and Angélica Gorodischer

Review: “Lady Lazarus”

It has been documented that the first word a child learns to utter is, most commonly, “no”. Michele Lang’s historical urban dark fantasy, Lady Lazarus (Tor, trade Sept. 2010 $14.99, mass market June 2011 $7.99), and her heroine Magda make a fine art of “no” that turns into a resounding “yes” on the eve of WWII (up to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Sept. 1st, 1933 and the Hitler-Stalin pact), from the cafes of Buda-Pest through Austria, Germany, and Paris, to the booksellers and brothels of Amsterdam and back again. The first installment of the story, this book is as good as it gets. You cannot guess where she will take you, even in the historical bits but, once Lang gets there, it is perfectly logical and believable, even at its most outrageous.

Why? Because Lang has done her history, theology, and Bible homework and Knows her Kabbalah in a way that even some whiskery old masters do not. And she makes you believe. Even her undead, demonic, and angelic characters are utterly human and thus you are compelled to watch this tragic train-wreck of a story (after all, we know the atrocities of WWII) that is not without the insanity of hope. Her prose sings—even in her English translations the music of the German, Hungarian, Hebrew, and Aramaic remains. Amidst all the darkness, the light shines, even in some romance with an angel, Raziel (Secrets of God), whose description really is like that of a Greek god (trust me, I know one…wink).  But no clichés, here, and no punches pulled, ever—no flinching. People suffer exquisitely for what they believe in, to save their way of life, their people (Jews, witches, vampires, demonesses). Lang tortures her characters in ways unimagined by those not acquainted with the depths of the mystical lore in all its facets, beautiful and horrifying. All to a purpose.

Imagine a world where the daughters of men perpetuate their legacy since primordial times, since Eve, where angels fall for their beliefs, and a line of daughters can return from the dead and work great magics, but always at a great price (and Lang’s word painting is worthy of renderings in movies and graphic novels)? Can you stop a war? Can you stand back and not even try—hide or run? The entire story hinges on the last two lines of the book: “Who do you love? Do you seek the darkness or the light?” Only, once you read this, and I dare you to be unaffected by it, your definitions of dark and light may not remain so neat and tidy. Sweet dreams. Call on your guardian angels. They will come. They are real.

Juxtaposition: Two Books for Younger Readers with Words & Pictures

Sometimes words and pictures come together in the same story. There’s more than one way of accomplishing this — comics is the most obvious, with the story told in a sequence of pictures and text (captions and/or dialogue), but there are other options — and books for pre-adults have typically made more use of pictures than those in the more adult portions of the library.

Remember: adults are dull and staid, and must not be upset or disconcerted by mere pictures in their very, very serious books. Children are more mentally flexible, and can handle the shock of the pictorial.

Teens are somewhere in between: they usually want to be adults, but they’re still young enough to question that dull stolidity, and still, sometimes, will gravitate to books with pictures in them. The two books I have in front of me today were published to be read by pre-adults of various ages — though I think the first had an older expected reader-age than the latter — and they’re chock-full of pictures. In fact, both of them are stories told through and about their pictures, in different ways — and, more interestingly from my point of view, neither of these books use the language and techniques of comics. They both use pictures as part of their storytelling, but come at it from different traditions, and don’t tell their stories from image-to-image the way that comics do.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is the more conventional of the two books; it’s a novel by Ransom Riggs (his first), illustrated by a sequence of real, mostly unaltered vintage photographs. (Riggs is clear about the “mostly unaltered” stipulation, since some of these are quite odd photographs, as with the cover shot, showing a hard-faced girl standing rigidly still a foot off the ground.) Those photos are part of the story in the most basic, literal way — every so often, a character talks about looking at a photograph, and then, lo! the actual photo appears on the next page.

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