Regicide

 Regicide is a dark fantasy series by writer Patrick Kindlon and artist Ludovic Lalliat published by Image. The ad copy often seems to compare it to "Dracula meets Berserk," and possibly that will become more relevant as the series goes on, but from the 3 issues available now, I definitely see the Berserk part, but I would otherwise liken to things like the film Viy or the novel Between Two Fires.

Mihas, a hulking peasant farmer in Wallachia, Romania, is ordered by the elders of his village to accompany the mysterious, metal-masked Doru on mission to kill the king. Their mission is complicated by the various demons that they will encounter along the way, hiding among humanity. 

Mihas reminds me a bit of Hellboy or the Goon; he's a working stiff sort of guy that relies on his own strength to get by. Lalliat's scratchy artwork is perfect for the gritty violence is brutal and the monstrous grotesqueness of the demons. 

Despite this content, the story isn't grim, though. Doru has an acerbic tongue and is constantly irritated by his bumpkinish assistant. There are also humorous story elements like their visit to Orasul Supunere ("City of Submission"), a form word-rejecting religious settlement, turned something like a modern BDSM club, complete with leather outfits for the townsfolk.

If you enjoy dark fantasy with a bit of humor and heroes battling a series of strange demons, then you will dig this.

Horror Hosts

I've been meaning to check out this book. The whole multi-media phenomenon of horror hosts is interesting to me. Those horror-themed employers of terrible puns, making fun of (or perhaps having fun with) whatever B-movie or vintage horror film their program was showing that week. They likely reached their greatest exposure in hosting B-movies in late night or Saturday afternoons or various local (or later cable) TV stations, and even more recently on the internet. The internet tells me the first of these was Vampira in Los Angeles from 1954-55, but the first I encountered was Zacherley (on a cheap VHS tape). Well, perhaps the first I saw was Commander USA, but he doesn't really fit the standard mold.

At least one of these TV horror hosts, Elvira, made it into comics, but comics had its own horror host history, predating Vampira. The Black Witch (MLJ) first appeared in 1942 and the Man in Black (Harvey) in 1945. Probably the most iconic of comics' horror hosts are the three "GhouLunatics" from EC Comics. starting with the Crypt-Keeper in 1950, who ultimately broke out into TV and film.

The horror host tradition was perhaps suppressed by the arrival of the comics code but came roaring back in the Bronze Age. DC's Cain, Abel, and the Three Witches are only the most famous of their many hosts. I believe Marvel only had one hosted horror title, Tower of Shadows, but it had two hosts: Digger and Gravely P. Headstone. Warren Magazine's Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie hosts of the books bearing their name got an earlier start (1964 and 1966, respectively) thanks to not being bound by the code.

So where did the horror host get started? Radio. The witch Old Nancy hosted The Witch's Tale (1931-1938). Probably a big influence on their groaner, ghoulish pun style was Raymond, host of the popular Inner Sanctum Mysteries from 1941-1952.

De Camp's Pusadian Cycle

 

Lately, I've been furthering my exploration of L. Sprague de Camp's fantasy work, with the Novarian novels, but I've also dipped into some of his earlier Pusadian series. It has sort of a similar relationship to the Howard's Hyborian Age stories that de Camp's Krishna novels have to Burroughsian Sword & Planet. That is, it's an attempt to do the same thing more "realistically" or at least in a concerted and methodological sort of way. For instance, de Camp uses current (to the 1950s) understanding of geologic change to inform his design of his landforms, and more rigorously derives his imagined countries and their names from Greek myth (mostly).

Whether any of that is necessary, every reader will have to decide for themselves, but I appreciate the thought behind it, at least. I also appreciate the less "standard fantasy" sort of setting. It's mostly a Bronze Age level of technology, with iron being the bane of magic.

I discovered that a number of the older Pusadian stories published in the pulps are available on the Internet Archive:

"The Eye of Tandyla" (1951)

"The Owl and the Ape" (1951)

"The Stronger Spell" (1953)

"The Hungry Hercynian" (1953)

"Ka the Appalling" (1958)