Battling deadlines like I’m Conan fending off bat-winged horrors from the jungles of Zarkheba before I’m spirited away on two weeks’ vacation, I figured I’d post a SWORD AND SORCERY-themed roundup, covering essays past and projects to come.
If you’ve subscribed over the last year or so, you may not have seen many of these, some of which I’ve temporarily pulled out from behind the Agent of Weird paywall.
Remember, you can download the Substack app and listen to everything below via text-to-speech (which – frankly – is how I get through almost all my reading on Substack).
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Has short-form sword-and-sorcery pulp become more appealing in the age of corporate epic fantasies like Rings of Power? I wondered this upon discovering a forgotten fantasy heroine from the Marvel Comics vaults…
Swords, Sorcery and the She-Wolf
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July 29, 2022
Sword and Sorcery (or Heroic Fantasy) has long held a spell over me as unbreakable as the riddle of steel. I love the absorbing worlds, powerplays and sagas of Epic Fantasy. But sometimes I just wanna see a barbarian shove a yard of Cimmerian steel through a bad guy’s face.
Since writing the following essay about resurrecting British sword-and-sorcery icon Black Beth - and what it takes to write any character ‘well’ - I’ve scripted a couple more stories, including a brand-new six-pager called Eyes of the Moon for The Treasury of British Comics Annual 2027 out in November and currently up for preorder.
Beth was one of the four new strips commissioned for this collection and I got to work with the astonishing Aly Fell.
Here’s a cheeky preview pic…
Award-winning author Molly Tanzer has been busy since we did this interview in 2024 to promote Jirel and the Mirror of Truth, the official continuation of the pulp-era adventures of Jirel of Joiry by Catherine Moore.
Molly has since penned Jirel Meets Death (2025), Jirel in the Forest of Night (to be published 2026) and the first-ever Jirel novella, Blue Fire, currently available on pre-order.
In our interview Molly talks writing process, taming research, and penning the official resurrection of the first lady of sword and sorcery…
Old Sorcery, New Edge: Q&A with Molly Tanzer
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February 12, 2024
Molly Tanzer is an award-winning American novelist, short story writer and editor with a gift for combining historical fact with fantastical fiction. Reviving an iconic sword and sorcery heroine eighty-five years after her last outing, Molly is now continuing the adventures of the first lady of heroic fantasy in the pages…
This next one went viral, asking whether the genre can possibly move on from Robert E. Howard’s Conan.
How can writers feasibly innovate within this narrow fantasy subgenre? Has it grown stale? Is the sword-and-sorcery barbarian facing his last stand?
I’ve scripted two more Hawk the Slayer shorts since writing this next essay, both with art by Staz Johnson: The Call (2025) and this year’s The Feast of Lunae (appearing as part of the 2000 AD Annual 2027, out this November).
Passing a winter’s night in a pagan sanctuary, Hawk, Bella and Crow must help defend a group of druids from a band of ravening hunters.
Oh, and we’ve got a new artist on the next Hawk series: The Wicker Knight. More on that soon..
Anyway, here’s me defending a sword-and-sorcery kinda-classic…
What Hawk the Slayer Got Right
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October 25, 2024
There can surely be no rational defence of Terry Marcel’s ramshackle British sword and sorcery movie Hawk the Slayer (1980). By no sane definition can it be considered great cinema. It falters too often, its ambitions too clearly out of range of its meagre budget. Why then is it so greatly loved? Why a…
Here’s a workshop deep-dive for you writers out there.
Learn how to keep your fight scenes sharp with two classic examples of sword and sorcery…
Who Dies First? Conan the Barbarian vs. The Bloody Nine
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December 2, 2025
Epic fantasy is what you read when you want to lose yourself in a universe of archetypes strange yet achingly familiar, a chronicle that stakes the restoration of a wounded land upon the courage of the fallible and the power…
Sticking with fiction, let’s talk about what creative ownership really means, writing a sword and sorcery tale I can finally call my own, and how it all went wrong when I wasn’t writing for money…
Have a great summer!
Stay weird.
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Check out some of my latest projects, Warhammer crime caper The Wraithbone Phoenix, acclaimed Warhammer Horror audio drama The Watcher in the Rain, and sword-and-sorcery comics collection Black Beth: Vengeance Be Thy Name with art by DaNi and Conan artist Blas Gallego.
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