The more I got into last week’s Worldbuilding Wednesday post the more I realized how convoluted the history of Harley Quinn really is. For one thing, she wasn’t the Joker’s first female sidekick. That honor belongs to Duela Dent, who originated in 1976. She claimed to be the Joker’s daughter and wanted to join the …
Category: Fantasy
Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/21/2025: Let’s Talk About Batman Villains
In this post I’m going to do something I’ve wanted to do for a while: analyze Batman villain names. Batman has been all over the place for the past three decades, and plenty of folks have seen the shows, the movies, the parodies, the comicsĀ (which comprise only a small part of the franchise now), …
Monty Python and the Holy Grail Turns 50: Some Reflections
Wow, I feel old! Fifty years has passed since this cheeky film was released in 1975. It’s hard to explain, now, the effect this movie had on late Baby Boomer and Gen X geeks. It wasn’t apparent at the time of its release, which I remember was quick and quiet and certainly didn’t stick around …
Dungies and Dragons
I saw someone wearing a tshirt with this design and thought it was hilarious! The “dungie” refers to the Dungeness crab at the lower left, which are renowned as a delicacy in the Pacific Northwest. The artist’s name is Ray Troll. He’s a native Alaskan known for his unique style and scientific accuracy of the …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/7/25: Unusual Magic Books, Part 1
In the AD&D universe one of the most prized treasure items a magic-user character could discover was a book of magic, because it gained access to a range of spells and not just the one or two that the player gained with each level. That’s the way it started out, anyway. Things might have changed. …
Farewell to Tolkien March (and April)
All good things must come to an end, so does my two-month journey into all things Middle-earth. Like these guys are doing, I’m moving on to other shores. (It’s a still from a little-aired 1993 Finnish TV version of LOTR. I’m guessing, counterclockwise from the fat left, the characters are Boromir, who looks appropriately dopey …
My First Hobbit.
My first encounter with Tolkien was reading The Hobbit at age 11 or 12. I found it lying around my sister’s house while on a trip there. It was the paperback edition to the left, which was published by Ballantine in the mid-1970s. That’s Tolkien’s own artwork on the cover. For years I thought it …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/30/25: In Praise of Dwarven Women
One of the elements that got fans so excited about The Rings of Power was its focus on Dwarves and their society, including their wives and female children. Aha! We might finally see what bearded Dwarven women looked like! Well, no, they turned out to be facial-hair free. Though in one episode from Season 2, …