Lord Samper's Library

  Page Count: 208 Pages My ongoing journey to read more of the books that I buy is going… Well… You all saw yesterday’s post :o) It’s not going brilliantly but not only do I really enjoy reading fantasy and horror, I’m also dogged and relentless with my TBR pile. Erm… Well, more the former than the latter ;o) I’ll get there, eventually… Anyway. The other day, said journey saw me take a little trek through the Hyborian Age with some quick detours along the way to take in 16th Century France and Hungary, as well as 1930s Egypt. Yep, I finally read that copy of ‘Savage Sword of Conan’, that has been been giving me reproachful looks for far too long. Lets talk a little about it :o) The second volume of ‘The Savage Sword of Conan’ collects issues #4-6 of the ongoing series and kicks things off with one of my pet hates about comic books… The humble ‘crossover’ event. That’s not the book’s fault, lets be clear, but here we are. I’m the kind of guy who settles on a title and sticks with it...

  Page Count: 128 Pages I’ve been rubbish at getting out of the house, these last few days, so yesterday lunchtime, I took myself for a little walk over to Blackheath and got some sunshine for my efforts. Actually, I need to do that more often, I think it did me some good :o) And after yesterday’s talk of not buying so many books… I ended up buying a couple of books during my wander through Blackheath. That’s the problem with second hand bookshops… If a book catches your eye, you don’t know if it will be there next time so you have no choice in the matter, you have to get it :o) And that’s what I did when I saw ‘The Heralds of Destruction’. I ended up working a little later than expected, last night, so figured it would be a good book to read over what remained of the evening. And… Maybe I should have chosen something else to read. Oh well, it happens… The Third Doctor finds himself up against a ‘hive mind’ robotic intelligence that is capable of recreating itself out of litera...

It’s a quick post today… Yesterday, I went out for a spot of Christmas Shopping, in Bromley, and not only did I find nothing (nine days to go...) but the book I took with me (to read on the bus) really didn’t work out, not for a ‘bus read’ anyway. Not sure if it’s a ‘DNF’ or not, I might pick it up again, but it left me looking at a trip home with nothing to read so… Just before I caught the bus home, I popped into ‘Piranha Comics’, just on the off-chance that the latest instalment of ‘Event Horizon: Dark Descent’ was out. It wasn’t but I did find a couple of comics to read on the way home. And here is where I tell you about them… :o) ‘The Terminator: Santa Claus Is Coming To Town’ – Ganucheau, Goode (Dynamite) Because look at that cover, I just had to buy it. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have done the same ;o) I love that there was a meeting, presumably, where Paulina Ganucheau pitched the idea ‘What if it’s Christmas Eve and a Terminator materializes outside a fancy-dress store where o...

I’ve got a few bits and pieces to sort out, over the next couple of days, so content here may be a little lighter than normal. And yep, I made a pretty big assumption, about the state of my regular content, in that opening sentence ;o) Anyway… I did a spot of Christmas shopping, the other day, and made a quick detour to pick the shelves (at Forbidden Planet) clean of some comics that I’d been waiting on. Look at me being all efficient, getting two things done in one trip ;o) Here’s some quick thoughts on the first couple of comics from that little haul… ‘Event Horizon: Dark Descent #2’ – Ward, Jones, Martin (ID Dark) The ‘Event Horizon’ continues its journey through chaos and most of the crew are now dead. The survivors must deal with Paimon having arrived on board as well as his twisted creations and the secrets of the crew, suddenly brought to awful life… Well, damn… Every time I think that things cannot get worse for the crew of the ‘Event Horizon’, they promptly go and get worse ...

  Please excuse the ‘slightly shorter than normal’ post. Not only is it my first day back in the office, after a week off (spoiler alert, I’m not enjoying it…), I’m also coming off the back of a weekend that involved a lot of watching ‘The Walking Dead’, with my eldest daughter, and not a lot of reading at all. Despite all my best ‘reading intentions’, that’s the way it went and I’ve got no regrets :o) I did manage to get a little reading done though, just a little… We were in Forbidden Planet the other day and while the girls were off looking for Manga, I pored over the shelves and found a lonely looking copy of ‘Conan the Barbarian #22’. I wasn’t expecting to find a copy quite so soon, after enjoying ‘Conan #21’ , but there it was so I made sure that it came home with me. Lets talk about it a bit… The cage may be beautifully gilded but Conan is still a slave and his barbarian soul chafes under this imprisonment. Conan is patient though and knows that if he bides his time, a cha...

Page Count: 112 Pages I am the worlds worst gamer, seriously. Anything longer than a game of Fifa (where my youngest daughter still beats me regularly) and I completely lose my focus, going off in directions that I’m positive the game developers never considered. I love to watch other people play though, especially when there’s an interesting plot. My eldest daughter loves playing ‘Little Nightmares’ (1 & 2) and I’m loving the gloomy aesthetic as well as the world building that has gone into the game. I could sit there for hours and just watch Mono and Six feel their way through this broken landscape. And I do :o) I’m pet-sitting this week and came across my daughters copy of ‘Little Nightmares Vol.1’; so I thought I’d give it a go and see what else I could find out about this world… Enter the world of Little Nightmares, where a young girl in a bright raincoat must face her deepest fears… A nine-year old girl named Six is kidnapped from her home and taken to work in The Maw, a sur...

After leaving Cimmeria filled with wanderlust, a young Conan heads north in search of glory. What he finds in that cold climate will change his outlook forever, setting him on the path that will make him a legend. It’s taken me a little longer than planned to pick this book up (blame ‘Into the Narrowdark’ but in a good way, that book absolutely grabbed my attention) but I’m thoroughly enjoying Zub’s ‘Conan’ so reading ‘Frozen Faith’ was always going to be a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’. And at the risk of repeating myself. It was well worth the read. I’m definitely repeating myself but at this point, I don’t care :o) ‘Conan’ really is in the best of hands with Jim Zub who instinctively gets the character, both in terms of adapting Howard’s stories and in letting Conan search out further new adventures. And Doug Braithwaite’s artwork continues to be just superb, really capturing the essence of Conan himself as well as the wider world that he strides through. I’ll be honest… I’ve go...

I’m on call today so am making the most of it (I can’t be too far away from my work laptop and wi-fi connection) by staying indoors, even though it’s lovely outside, and trying to catch up on some reading. Okay, catching up on some telly as well :o) Who knows, today may even be the day when I finish ‘Into the Narrowdark’ but for now, lets talk a little bit about ‘Conan the Barbarian #18’ which I picked up during a brief stop in Forbidden Planet the other day. I’m still very much about collecting the trades (try as I might, I always forget to pick up single issues) but I needed some reading for the train home so, here we are :o) On the road of Kings… While resupplying in the Shemite coastal city of Kyros, Conan of Cimmeria and Bêlit, Queen of the Black Coast, sought refuge and respite at an inn known as the Hidden Haven. There, the duo indulged in drink and nostalgia, recalling their charged first meeting before retiring to the privacy of their room. But their presence was noted by a ...

It doesn’t seem like all that long ago but it was actually back in July last year that I took a look at the Fighting Fantasy background book, ‘Titan, the Fighting Fantasy World’. I love that book, by the way, but I’m not going into all that again. Have a look at my post, over Here , if you haven’t seen it already (or even if you have, I don’t mind). ‘Out of the Pit’ was the companion book, that went with Titan, and at the prices I’d seen previously, on Amazon and the like, I’d pretty much given up on ever owning a copy of my own. That was until I went into the British Heart Foundation shop, just before Christmas and saw a copy, sat on the shelf, and at a price I could afford 😊 And it went to charity so everyone won 😉 My copy is the smaller paperback edition but I'm using the larger cover art here as you can see more of it and it's worth it. I’ve been dipping in and out of this book, over the last few days, and have fallen in love with it all over again. From the darkest...

I've got a couple of books on the go at the moment but couldn't stay away from this one for too long... ;o) I'll warn anyone reading, this isn't so much a review, more a case of me going on for a bit and getting a little nostalgic for one of the few things that was good about school, reading Fighting Fantasy books. If you're still here, lets go. I had my head in a book for most of my childhood and when my head wasn't in a book, it was thinking about books I'd read and books that I still needed to read. Kind of like these days really ;o) I was just the right age to catch the Fighting Fantasy books first time round and just fell in love with them. It was like returning to all the 'fantasy book worlds' that I'd already fallen in love with (I'm looking at you in particular 'The Hobbit' and anything by Alan Garner, those were happy reading days), the difference being that I actually got to decide how each story unfolded. It's true, I ...