It’s pretty hard to find artwork of fantasy characters using magic items, even wands. Most contemporary artists just picture them with blasts of energy flying from their hands, which is visual shorthand for “MAGIC!” Rowena Morrill is one of the rare few who has depicted them. She actually read the books and took notes of …
Magic clothing and accessories are a staple in fantasy. There’s the Tarnkappe of German legend, Cinderella’s glass slipper, and various gloves, cloaks, shoes, hats and girdles that helped the heroes and heroines of myth achieve their tasks. Tolkien played with that rift in The Hobbit, where Frodo acquires a magic ring by bumbling, less than …
I’ve always considered Dune and its many sequels more science fantasy than science fiction. Sure, there’s starships and other planets, not to mention sandworm biology, but there’s also a Catholic-like sisterhood with sinister mind powers, swordfights, a Chosen One trope, and a feudal society with emperors, princesses, and dukes. Herbert cribbed a lot from human …
For this series so far I’ve been generating American military slang which could be used in the modern era. In previous conflicts, however, such slang existed too. Redcoats, as every school child knows (well, those who were alive during the American Bicentennial) was slang for British soldiers in the Revolutionary War, along with the less …
As I demonstrated last Wednesday, it’s pretty easy to come up with a name for a novel species of carnivorous mammal. Now let’s turn to the feline world, and the naming conventions of big cat hybrids. The “big four” Panthera species (lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars) are all capable of interbreeding with each other, as …
Here’s the book that started the erotic vampire story trend. Released in 1994, at the height of the Splatterpunk trend, Love in Vein mixed vampires and sex in a new, explicitly adult way. Featuring fantasy and horror heavyweights like Kathe Koja, Gene Wolfe, and Charles de Lint, with an opening essay by Poppy Z. Brite …
The structure of Transformers names not only opens them up to parody, but also to a certain form of sexual parody. Let’s say somewhere fanfic, artwork and videos most certainly exist with these robots getting it on, or “Knockin’ pistons” as they might say, with all sorts of extraneous apparatus attached to their normally sexless …
For the first few years of its existence Transformers was strictly an all-male universe. By universe, I mean the line of toys, comics and cartoons in the US; there may have been some distaff members in the Japanese lines, which are traditionally more accepting of females in action roles. It was not until the mid-1980s …
As the picture above ** suggests, some Transformers just never made the grade. Since part of the fun of them are those oh-so-easily parodied names, here’s a list of those Autobots and Decepticons who never should have been born. I’ll call them Aborticons. Aborticons Cosmiclutter Dirtbag Lumplizard Dinofart Kittenstrike Hysteridemic Crunkbrawl Skysnort Menhonk Hypimple …
Do you know American President Ronald Reagan is to thank for the success of the Transformers franchise? In the early 1980s Hasbro executives noticed a line of Japanese toys called the Diaclones, which were robots that transformed into vehicles. They thought the concept had merit, so the company licensed them to be sold in the …