A gallery for the weekend: I’ve spent a few hours (instead of working) browsing the artwork of Walter Martin Baumhofer, one of the artists that made a name for themselves in the pulps.
Baumhofer did covers for Street & Smith, and is responsible for the look of Doc Savage on the eponymous magazine covers.
You can’t be more iconic than that.
But Baumhofer was very versatile, as today’s gallery is likely to prove…
(click on any thumbnail to see a larger version of the image) Continue reading
Role models.
Everybody needs one, right?
Well, as a kid growing up in suburbia, insight of the toxic smokestacks of the FIAT plants in Turin in the 1970s, I had three role models.
One was Robert Culp, as Kelly Robinson in I Spy.
One was Patrick Macnee, as John Steed in The Avengers.
And one was Georges Descrieres, as the eponymous character in Arsene Lupin.
I’ll talk about all three, just because, in three posts; and I’ll start with the latter, just because.
In his comment to my Robin Hood post, Keith Taylor said…
Just put me down as a fan of Robin Hood from way back, and of King Arthur too.
Which came just at the right time as I had been walking down memory lane with a few friends, here, these days, reminiscing about Arthur of the Britons, a 24 episodes British series that first aired in 1972 and I caught the next year when it was distributed in Italy.
And boy I liked it! Continue reading
And so it turns out my friend Clara Giuliani, over at Scribblings, does not like Robin Hood, and actually finds a certain sympathy for John Lackland, of all things.
While I nursed my broken heart1, I thought that I do like Robin Hood and therefore, today being the eight-hundredth anniversary of the death of King John Lackland, why not make a post about the best Robin Hoods out there?
Let’s recap the basics: Robin Hood is the character in a number of ballads and folk tales, and later stories, poems and romances, whose historicity is debated and does not really interest us here right now.
From th every beginning (that is, from the 14th century), Robin is described as an anti-clerical champion of the lower classes, very respectful of women (probably because he is a devout of the Virgin Mary), and an excellent archer and an enemy of the Sheriff of Nottingham. What’s not to like, I wonder!
His companions from the start include Little John, Much the Miller’s Son, and Will Scarlett, while Maid Marian and friar Tuck will come later with the reteling of the story.
Continue reading
This post is part of the Things I Learned from the Movies Blogathon, a good opportunity to see movies in a different way, and learn something from them.
Soplease direct your browsers to the Speakeasy and the Silver Screenings blogs for a full list of the blogs involved and the various topics of this crash-course in learning stuff – for better or for worse – from movies.
And then check out what’s coming, because here on Karavansara we’ll discuss
What else would you expect? Continue reading
A quick heads-up, tonight, for a very thorough and interesting article on OpenCulture.org, about the available contents of Weird Tales magazine online.
Turns out you can download, or browse online, a number of issues of The Unique Magazine, for free.
And it is indeed an illuminating experience – if you like pulps, or supernatural fiction – because you can read the stories in their natural environment, together with the illustrations, the ads, the letters column etcetera.
Quite a different feeling compared to reading the same stories in an anthology.
The article also points to a number of other resources, and it is quite a find.
Karavansara 