Dr Simon Reads Appendix N Part Twelve: Gardner Fox

Dr. Simon Reads Appendix N Part Twelve: Gardner Fox

This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.

This time around, I have reached the works of:

Gardner Fox

Gardner Fox was born in Brooklyn in 1911, and was apparently influenced by ER Burrough’s John Carter books at a young age. He’s mainly known as a writer for DC Comics, including very early Batman and the first Flash stories, plus a bit of brief work at Marvel in the 1970s as well. I have to admit that , beyond these two titles, and some Justice League stuff, I’ve never heard of any of the characters that he wrote, but then I’m not a comic book buff.

 The Kothar stories were written 1969-1970, with Kyrik a bit later in 1976; quite recent, really, compared to a lot of the Swords and Sorcery stuff, and probably explains why Kyrik is somewhat more sexually explicit compared to more Golden Age works. I would imagine that at the time the older works like ERB or REH seemed a little bit coy.

 

He died in 1986, still writing, it would seem. He is credited (under various pseudonyms) with about 1500 DC comic stories, and estimated (in 1971) that he’d written about 50 million words to date. That’s a pretty impressive turnout, I have to say!

There are two series recommended in Appendix N: The Kothar Series, and the Kyrik series.

Both are absolute classic Sword’n’ Sorcery tales, deliberately written to (basically) cash-in on the success of Conan and the like (We come to Robert E Howard next).

I must admit, I groaned at the introduction to the first Kothar eBook – “The Kothar adventures are fun fantasy romps, full of magic, swordplay, beautiful women, and villains to be defeated: sword and sorcery in the classic tradition.”

As you may know if you’ve been following this series, I have no snobbery about such writings, but it’d be nice to have something a little sophisticated again. But, for all that the Kothar (and Kyrik) stories are chock full of the usual fair, where our hero has “thews” and not just muscles, and all of the female characters attract adjectives such as “full”, “ripe” and “swaying”, once you dive in and get past the same old stuff, they are pretty good fun.

The difference between Kothar and Kyrik is wafer thin – nominally, the Kothar series is set in a world far in the future (like Lin Carter’s Gondwane series), whereas Kyrik is set in the past (as per RE Howard’s Hyborea). Both, however, use thinly disguised real world cultures like “Aegypton” or “Makkadonia”. Kyrik is a king that has been trapped as a statue for a thousand years, Kothar is a wild man of the north (from Cumberia), a sellsword and freebooter. But both are classic Sword and Sorcery men of action, always ready for fighting, drinking and wenching. I have to say, there’s something kind of refreshing and quaint to this in the modern era of heightened sensitivity. You can, I think, enjoy their utterly un-repentant alpha-male behaviour without necessarily condoning it as a way to behave. It does get very repetitive, and before long I was wishing for a protagonist with just a tiny bit of depth to him, but you kind of have to admire their willingness to see a job through to the end.

The Kothar series comprise five books – Kothar: Barbarian Swordsman, Kothar of the Magic Sword, Kothar and the Demon Queen, Kothar and the Conjurer’s Curse and Kothar and the Wizard Slayer.

Right at the beginning of Kothar’s story, he is given the magical sword Frostfire by the lich of a long-dead wizard, Afgorkon, in a tale highly reminiscent of Conan’s encounter in The Thing In The Crypt (which is by our old friends Lin Carter and L Sprague deCamp rather than RE Howard). The sword is cursed, however, preventing him from ever keeping any riches, which provides a nice impetus to drive the character to adventure, and would perhaps be a handy GM tool.

Throughout the Kothar story runs his love/hate relationship with the sorceress Red Lori (who, I wonder, has a sister called Yellow Lori), but, barring recurring locations, the stories are largely unconnected. In true Sword ‘n’ Sorcery fashion they feature wizards who summon demon lords to grant them power, demons with names like “Belthamquar”. Kothar tends to solve problems by hitting them very hard –there’s not a lot in the way of clever plans, although sometimes he employs a bit of cunning strategy.

Although the stories go pretty much where they must, there are some great set pieces that could be lifted into an RPG campaign, such as the raid on the pleasure barge of Emperor Kyros, and his strange artefact that connects to another world. Or the weird gardens under castle Raven Garde, where the bandit lord Torkal Moh sends prisoners to choose between the aquatic monster Pthassiass, or the deadly vegetation around its pool. But, fun though they are, these stories do end up merging into one blur of cruel rulers, secret passages, wizards and demons, and women in torn clothing.

 

The Kyrik series covers four books – Kyrik, Warlock Warrior, Kyrik Fights the Demon World, Kyrik and the Wizard’s Sword, and Kyrik and the Lost Queen. They’re pretty much the same kind of thing as the Kothar series, to be honest. Kyrik is perhaps marginally less bestial than Kothar (who has a tendency to “snarl” or “growl”), but he still likes his drinking, feasting, fighting and wenching just the same. He’s a former king of Tantagol, stuck as a statue for a thousand years, and the first story revolves taking revenge, of a sort, on the people that put him there. But a millennia as a statue has left Kyrik with a thirst for the Epicurean life, and he ends up handing his throne over to another while taking off as a wanderer with the gypsy girl Myrnis (who is occasionally possessed by his patron Illis, Goddess of Lust). Well, you would, wouldn’t you? In the last adventure, Kyrik and the Lost Queen, Myrnis is abducted and enchanted, used by a couple of sorcerers as a lookalike replacement for a queen who Kyrik ends up finding in an alleyway and mistaking her for Myrnis.

For all that he is referred to as a “Warlock Warrior”, Kyrik does very little, if any, warlock stuff himself, but the stories are full, as with Kothar, of a variety of magicians who summon up demons to do their bidding. There’s a wonderful set-up in Kyrik and the Wizard’s Sword where a wizard summons up a demon, but then dies of a heart attack before he can give that demon any commands. I love it (similar in some ways to L Sprague deCamp’s The Fallible Fiend). As with the Kyrik series, there are some fun set pieces but nothing that is massively novel or imaginative, the writing is fairly prosaic, the themes and attitudes pretty dated.

As far as barbarian warrior stories go, these aren’t as crazily inventive as Lin Carter’s World’s End sequence, and the writing is a bit more pedestrian than RE Howard, but we’ll get to him next.

I couldn’t see anything that was a direct source of inspiration for D&D, other than, again, the general theme of freebooters and adventurers in a world of swords and sorcery. You can, as I mentioned, lift some of the set-pieces and set-ups to use in general fantasy campaigns, but because Fox’s writing is nothing exciting, I didn’t find a lot stuck in my mind as options for later.