Editorial

Jack Magazine ISSN: 1939-0351 Five years ago Michael Rothenberg and I founded Jack Magazine. We had some goals back then, and accomplished them! We talked about minimalism, the beat generation, and so many things that Jack could include: articles about ecological and political issues as well as particular worldly renaissances. Jack has come a long way, and while maybe never totally going off the path of its original concept, has ventured out into several African countries, Spain, Nepal, and Cuba. It has been to London, Paris, and the Arizona desert. It has met surfers, professors, painters, writers, monks, and people from all walks of life. This issue ventures from the experimental to the fantastical, which is a broad genre and includes worlds of myths and legends. Myths describe the activity of gods, while legends describe the activity of men. Both often merge together into the same road despite their various cosmologies. Fantasy itself is often categorized into time periods or geographical areas in which a fantasy came about--primordial to classic to post-Tolkien or Greek, Roman, East Indian, etc. Then there are types of fantasy, including fairy tale, science-fiction, even something as specific as vampiric. Whatever fantasy induces, it usually takes place in a realm outside our world as we know it and usually borrows from previous beliefs or works. Most of us learn what fantasy is when we are children and read fairy tales, fables, or religious parables, and in some way learn a valuable lesson. But often such stories are cruel and harsh, even to an adult's mind. Not only are there dragons, trolls, behemoth beasts, and strange magics, but there are also acts of hostility, many of which have been translated, transferred, and toned down for our modern day's gentler ears. Or, in many cases, fairy tales have been recast to convert the ribald tale into the moralistic story. Early stories scared us into quiet submittal to authority, but as we grew older, we turned back to these adventuresome tales, not so much for lessons anymore, because we already learned those, but because it's fun to read about how Ulysses traveled and continued to win against the bad guy, even if it was simply poking out his eye with a sharp thing. It takes us outside what can be a boring routine in regular old life. When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and other stories, he not only borrowed from creatures of myth and legend but created new fantastical ones, and when Lord of the Rings hit the big screen in the past few years, a resurrection of interest grew in the popular media of a genre that had been followed for years by more silently by serious gamers and readers of fantasy who might have never dreamt that Aerosmith's Steven Tyler's daughter would play the part of beautiful elf Arwen or that Annie Lennox would add to the soundtrack. World of Warcraft, highly drawing from a Tolkienesque type of realm, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Blizzard Entertainment. As of November 2006, it has an active playerbase of 7.5 million. This surpasses previously popular games such as Final Fantasy, EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot, Neverwinter Nights, Lineage, Guild Wars, and so on. While Blizzard's WoW is going into its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, Turbine, Inc. has put a new MMORPG--Lord of the Rings--into beta.

(c) Joanna Barnum Sci-fi/fantasy sections in libraries and bookstores for decades have been active and growing, and every few years a new movie or game comes out that people flock to. Movies and books like the Harry Potters series, Chronicles of Narnia, and even Finding Neverland have attempted to re-bestow upon us the magical quality of fantasy, which bends time and space to take us somewhere else, where we can conquer monsters, no matter how much they scared us when we were younger. It all may be metaphorical, yes, but the tactical parts of the journeys are as powerful as the figurative aspects of the trip.

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