Ed Fortune

This issue celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Toxic Avenger. (If you don’t know who that is, or what Troma is, blimey you’re in for a very specific treat.) I met Lloyd Kaufman a whole bunch of years ago, fascinating chap. The magazine has covered all things Troma in the past, but it’s nice to revisit themes.

This issue’s Roll For Damage Column is all about Play By Mail, and yes, that includes IT’S A CRIME, a game that was heavily marketed to geeks in the 80s. It was a blast researching this; I recall playing En Garde! as a student and having more fun writing the letters and the like than actually playing the game.

Brave New Words looks at women in horror, Sci-Fi and fantasy, so I get to talk about Jen Williams, Silvia Moreno Garcia, Cassandra Khaw, Kiersten White and whole bunch of other exciting authors.

Features wise, there’s a lovely tribute to works of Terry Pratchett written by myself, specifically his non-fiction and non-Discworld fiction. A lot of this about reprints of his earlier work, many of which are fascinating in terms of seeing how his work evolved.

Finally we have a piece called What They Did In Shadows, which talks about the Stranger Things stage play, First Shadow. It’s an amazing show (go see it while you can), It was an interesting set of interviews to do, and as always I asked some standard ‘silly’ questions that didn’t go into the feature but let me gauge tone and clarity (as well as establishing rapport, to be all mechanical about it.) One of those was ‘Webber or Sondheim’, which one of my standard ‘stagey’ questions, but it did get quite a response from one of the actors, who was surprised I’d compare the two.