Art by Alex Pardee

Alex Pardee is a freelance artist, apparel designer, and a writer born in the US. He is best known for illustrating The Used’s album “artwork”. He has also done works for Hurley International, Twenty Twenty Skateboards, Bay Area rapper TopR and In Flames’s “A Sense of Purpose” and “The Mirror’s Truth”.

you can check more of his work at:  Eyesuckink

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alex_gross Jozaikai

Alex Gross is a visual artist with a specialization in oil paintings on canvas. He graduated in 1990 from Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, California. Since then, he has become established as an artist in the Pop Surrealism movement while his themes are dealing with globalization, commerce, dark mayhem and religion.

www.alexgross.com

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Art By Jason Chan thrun

Jason Chan was born in Stockton, California in 1983. He studied illustration at the Academy of Art, University in San Francisco from where he graduated in 2006. Since then he has been collaborating with Wizards Of The Coast providing illustrations for “Magic The Gathering” card game series, with Blizzard for “World Of Warcraft” series and White Wold Publishing for “World Of Darkness” series, to name a few. He currently works at Massive Black Inc .

for more info visit:

http://jasonchanart.blogspot.com/

http://www.jasonchanart.com/gallery.htm

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Patrick McEvoy is a professional illustrator working primarily in the fields of comics and Fantasy/Science Fiction/Horror illustration. Before working as an illustrator since the mid-2005, he was working as an Art Director, game designer and computer animator for about 10 years. His art can be found in different types and styles of projects while some of his clients are Marvel, Wizards of the Coast, Sony Online, Upper Deck, American Greetings, Mattel, Hasbro and many others.

For more info on Patrick McEvoy visit: http://www.megaflowgraphics.com/index.htm

X-Mass are almost here and we here at Crows n Bones are gonna do what we do every year… and that is get drunk like there is no tomorrow. We hope for all of you to spend some quality time with you close ones, get some rest and relax while listening to your sweet metal music.

All the best!

CnB Crew

Tracklist for X-Mas Eve:

1.The New Year – Death Cab For Cutie
2.Thank God It’s Christmas – Queen
3.The Beatles – Christmas Time is Here Again
4.Christmas All Over Again – Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers
5.Merry Christmas I Don’t Want To Fight – The Ramones
6.Let Me Sleep (It’s Christmas Time) – Pearl Jam
7.Father Christmas – The Kinks
8.Back Door Santa – JET
9.Fairytale of New York – The Pogues & Kristy MacColl
10.The Little Drum Machine Boy – Beck
11.Don’t Shoot Me Santa – The Killers
12.Billy Nighy – Christmas Is All Around

Karl Edward Wagner was a writer of weird fiction and one of my favorite authors. He is considered a titan in the rather specialized fields of fantasy and horror and yet, he has been largely forgotten these days.

This is fucking unacceptable.

Wagner burst into the horror scene around the end of the sixties. Originally, he studied to be a psychiatrist, but found the University environment to be stifling and strict, so he turned to writing. He worked for a while in Robert E. Howard’ s milieu, writing stories about Conan and other Howard heroes and editing three volumes of Howard’s tales. At the time, Conan was far from a household name and several writers had been doing Conan stories, with little respect to Howard’s legacy. Wagner quickly became known as that rare thing: A Conan writer who understood the character and his universe.

But that was only the beginning. Soon Wagner created his most well- known character, Kane. Kane is based on the biblical Caine, the original murderer. He is a fearsome immortal warrior in a magick- encrusted, monster- filled version of pre- Medieval Europe. He is a necromancer with long red hair, a big beard and a penchant for elaborate squemes and bloody adventures. Forget the Hobbits with their quiet, cosy decency and Conan’s distrust for civilisation. Kane was a cultivated, devious, ruthless bastard. According to Wagner, “he could master any situation intellectually, or rip heads off if push came to shove”.

Wagner expanded the Kane universe in a handful of short stories and novels, some of which even positioned the amoral adventurer in the late seventies. the books became quite popular and the iconic covers by the legendary Frank Frazetta didn’t hurt sales. His horrorific short fiction was mostly collected in two books, In A Lonely Place and Why Not You And I. These were occasionally pulpy but always elegant stories and they reflected the post- Watergate, post- Vietnam American malaise. They were also a product of Wagner’s drink and drug- fuelled personal life, along with his love for gothic novels, Lovecraft and rock ‘n’ roll.

Wagner was also a noted anthologist. He edited the annual collection The Year’s Best Horror Stories on and off for several years between 1980 and 1994. He included a huge range of stories in his selections and tirelessly championed new authors and established names, critisizing the state of the field when necessary. He may have contributed more than anyone in keeping the spirit of horror literature alive in the late eighties, when the boom initiated by Salem’s Lot and Ghost Story subsided and the public and publishers lost interest in the genre. Along with his friends David drake and Jim Groce, he formed Carcossa Press, a publishing house whose mission was to re- establish long- forgotten authors from the pulp era. They published two of my favorite collections. Hugh B. Cave’s Murgunstrumm and Others (the stories of whom were gruesome and blood- drenched) and Manly Wade Wellman’s Worse Things Waiting (charming and creepy), both with illustrations by legendary Weird Tales artist Lee Brown Coye. I think it’s fair to say that he singlehandedly saved these wonderful writers from obscurity.

Karl Edward Wagner drunk himself to death in 1994. He left behind a gloriously grotesque body of work and thousand of fans all over the world (including peers such as Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell and Peter Straub). The upcoming publication of all of his horror stories in two expensive hardcover tomes by Centipede Press might rekindle interest in his work. And I’m sure Hollywood will eventually come round to adapting Kane for the big screen (considering what they ‘ve done with Conan though, that may be a mixed blessing). Perhaps Wagner now needs someone to do for him what he did for Hugh B. Cave and Manly Wade Wellman. For those who like their eldridge fiction with a dash of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, Karl Edward Wagner is an Elder God.

http://www.centipedepress.com/masters/wagnermwt.html

http://www.popcultmag.com/obsessions/profilesingreatness/karlwagner/wagner01.html

(-Dimitris Kontogiannis-)

Christopher Burdett is an American Painter and Concept artist. He gained his Bachelor of Fine Arts, at the Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL while his so far, portfolio is just remarkable. He had worked as an illustrator for Dungeon Magazine, Fantasy Flight Games (Talisman, Blood Bowl, Warhammer Invasion, A Game Of Thrones, Runebound, Dreamblade) Paizo Publishing (Pathfinder Chronicles) while his work as concept designer/ painter in TV series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, The Shield, The Inside, The Dark, Firefly, Talk Soup and Running With scissors talks for is self.

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Check him out at:

http://christopherburdett.com/ 

Ken Russell, who died yesterday, was responsible for some great films and some terrible ones. I think he belongs to a category of filmmakers whose fierce intelligence and love for excess occasionally resulted in anarchic, sensual films that are definately not for everyone. Think Donald Cammell, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Nicolas Roeg and Álex de la Iglesia. Their stuff doesn’t always work, but when it does you are hooked.

There is nothing in the history of cinema quite comparable to Russell’s The Devils. It’s an insane howl of anger and a gleeful laugh at the face of authority. It’s beautifully acted (Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave have never been better), gorgeous looking and genuinly shocking.

And it was banned in more countries that I can remember, thanks to furious Church officials and various spineless film censors over the years. Even now, it is not widely available on DVD- let alone on a director’s cut or special edition. Perhaps now that the man is dead, the studios will stop cowering in fear and move to restore his legacy. This is the 21st century. People whose delicate sensibilities have been assaulted by this work should realise that, instead of lobbying for censorship, they can always choose to not watch it. Here’s the 1971 trailer, along with the infamous “Christ orgy” scene that freaked everyone out. The image is fuzzy and the whole thing deserves to be seen in it’s proper splendor. And yeah, it’s as blasphemous as the Catholic Church thought it was:

(-Dimitris Kontogiannis-)

artwork by Bruce Timm

For most of the sixties and seventies, British horror cinema was blooming into a specific aesthetic. Everyone knows that the film company that was behind the success of Dracula, Frankenstein and other famous monsters was Hammer. However, Hammer was far from the only one. Tigon British Film Productions (Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General, The Creeping Flesh, Curse of the Crimson Altar) and British Lion (The Wicker Man) also brought to cinemagoers a vision of Britain as a place haunted by pagan cultists, scheming sorcerers and hapless peasants. And then, there was Amicus films.

Amicus Productions (a joint venture between two cunning enterpreneurs, Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky) produced a great number of horror films of the time, quickly becoming a rival to Hammer. Their approach was quite different to everyone else though. Instead of focusing on gothic decadence, Victorian- era projects or the eerie Pagan roots of the British landscape, Amicus horrors were modern- day stories. They were often based on stories from EC Comics, and by authors like Robert Bloch and R. Chetwynd- Hayes- both of whom knew how to mix horror with pitch black humour. As a result, Amicus movies seem awfully cheerful and goodnatured when seen today and that’s part of their charm.

Many of the most well- loved Amicus films were horror anthologies, like Asylum, From Beyond The Grave, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Torture Garden and the EC Comics- inspired Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror. Amicus films were often nasty, but more often hilarious and the plots were gleefully insane: Alternate version Nazis, mad scientists, Blacksploitation / werewolf / Agatha Cristie hybrids, Dr. Who (played by Peter Cushing), discos for monsters, sexy vampires, dissembodied murderous hands, blue-skinned ghouls and so on. The cast was always fantastic: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Sir Ralph Richardson, Patrick MaGee, Denholm Elliott, Ingrid Pitt, Herbert Lom, Joan Collins, Donald Pleasense, Vincent Price, Ian Bannen, Tom Baker, Michael Gambon, etc.. It was an endless list of legendary actors, clearly having the time of their lives with the spooky material. Admittedly, the films are not for everyone. The silliness gets too much some times and the budjets were always low. But for a certain type of horror fan, Amicus movies are like an old friend. For those, the tome below will be the ideal Christmas present.

http://amicusproductions5.blogspot.com/2008/09/little-shoppe-of-horrors-scream-and.html     

(-Dimitris Kontogiannis-)

The just- released In Time is a sci- fi blockbuster, starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. Directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, s1m0ne), it tells the story of a dystopian future, where time has replaced money as the standard currency and people must acquire more through work and commercial means after turning 25 years of age, or die within a year. The status quo is guarded by a police force known as the Timekeepers.

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman is a famous 1965 science fiction short story. Written by Harlan Ellison, it tells the story of dystopian future, where time is strictly regulated and everyone must do everything according to an extremely precise time schedule. Being late is a crime, meaning that a proportionate amount of time is “revoked” from one’s life. The status quo is guarded by the Ticktockman, also known as the Master Timekeeper.

… Oops!

To be fair, I haven’t seen In Time, so I don’t know to what extent the two plotlines are similar. Harlan Ellison however was not amused. Ellison is one of the legends of the literature of the fantastic. In fact it would be pointless to try and summarise his accomplishments here. Suffice to say that he may be one of most influential authors of the 20th century and he does not suffer fools gladly. He can be a polarizing, even bullying presence, but he also possesses razor- sharp wit and has quarrelled with a number of people in the fields of science fiction and show business- including Frank Sinatra, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and James Cameron.

Ellison is partial to lawsuits as well. In fact, Cameron was forced to give him credit for Terminator because it resembled his short story Soldier. A similar thing happened with In Time. Ellison sued the studio and Niccol and they eventually had to settle by giving him a screen credit. And frankly, it’s hard to feel too sorry for them, considering that the studios have been fucking with the writers for ages, presenting us with blockbuster concepts that they have stolen from various books and comics.

So I guess the morale of the story is: Don’t fuck with Harlan Ellison unless you have a really badass lawyer.

(-Dimitris Kontogiannis-)