Tower of Shadows would be a nice series to Masterwork, especially if they bundled it
as a one-and-done thick volume with the Chamber of Darkness stories, too. Or they
can add in all of the non-repeat Horror stories of the Bronze Age (Journey Into Mystery
vol. 2, etc) and make it one omnibus volume.

I never liked Wally Wood on S&S. His science fiction looks beautiful, but I don't think his style suited the fantasy genre. It looks too slick, somehow.

The clean-cut barbarians.

Wow, I completely disagree. I like his take on the genre quite a bit and wish there was more.

Just some random examples on why I think Wood was so great in the S&S genre...

Man, the Hildebrandt Brothers are really something else. I wonder if this Atlantis calendar art reflects an actual story or if it's just pure imagination. Really love it.

Bet Simon and Jay would like this one --

And they're most beloved for their Tolkien work, of course...

I guess the Wheel of Time series is an epic sword and sorcery affair as well, and I've heard it said that series "Saved Epic Fantasy," too. Of course I never realized it was in danger, I'm so thick, and feel great epic works of fantasy are not diminished and still await new, young minds to find them. It's not like one can't get into epic fantasy with LotR since, well, those were written so long ago they can't still be good, right?

Anyway, I didn't read the Sword of Shannara to know how big a rip off of the LotR it was (or wasn't) but I seem to recall somebody telling me it was pretty bad. Nice to know somebody else thinks it all that.

As for the Wheel of Time series, it's good, worthy, and at 14 books, more than epic enough sword and sorcery, and it isn't really a rip off of Tolkien, either, if that would bother you. It does borrow a lot from Earth and its cultures, showing surprising parallels with it, but that's fine. Maybe it's even meant to be funny. But it is epic sword and sorcery.

I guess it's building it up as an industry and genre on its own -- it's like how Wizard of Oz and Through the Looking Glass are similar stories, but there isn't this massive subgenre and publishing arm dedicated to that specific kind of portal fantasy.

Tolkienesque fantasy is a sandbox so may creators have played in, much like Siegel and Shuster created the superhero genre as we know it today. We needed the Batmans, Wonder Womans, etc. to follow for it to be a genre than a one-off fantasy character / type.

Kind of off topic - Sword and Sorcery kind of took a back seat to Epic in the early 80's - but The Sword of Shannara was such a rip off of LoTR that it wasn't funny. I knew it was too derivative, and I was 12. The early 80s, while people were trying to find their own voices, generated a lot of bad fantasy. Kind of like how Star Wars inspired lots of straight to video quality SF movies / TV Shows. But LeGuin's Earthsea, Feist's original 3 Riftwar books, and Moorcock's Champion Eternal (notably Elric and Corum) were better than most. Brooks got better (Elfstones and Wishsong are much better than Sword), but then milked the concept, which remains a very real risk in fantasy writing. And unlike S&S, where each episode is fairly minor and self contained, Epic is dependent on risks that end the world, which can get silly if they keep coming in the same setting.

Wheel of Time is probably the most ambitious Epic Fantasy series that has been completed, but even it has it's detractors. IMO It's a very good (B+) series, but Robert Jordan's illness and subsequent death had a negative impact on the second half of the series. Sanderson did a great job with the impossible task of tying everything up, but he did lose the voice of a couple of the main characters, which was jarring. And Jordan's last few books were repetitive with a couple of side plot lines, which got very boring. If Wheel had come in at 11-12 books, instead of 14, and Jordan had been able to finish it himself, it would probably have lapped the field. But as it stands, it's close to the top, but can be challenged by a couple of active series. But until those series (Martin's ASOIAF / GoT) and Sanderson's Stormlight Archive are finished, it's not a fair comparison. And if the GoT TV show taught us anything, sticking the landing for long running fantasy series is critical to how they're seen long term.

Yep. And more importantly, we need people to find the FF, and the X-men, and the Avengers, and the Supremes; the Spawns and Savage Dragon's within Fantasy. You need kid friendly epic fantasy (Eddings), and Military Epic Fantasy (Erickson), and Gritty (Martin) and Grim Dark (Abercrombie) and Pure Epic (Sanderson). You don't just want 300 Tolkien clones running around, because you're not going to top him in what he did anyway.

Did Dungeons and Dragons help save fantasy writing in any way?

Absolutely - 3 of the gateway drug Fantasy Series - Feist's Midkemia, Weis and Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles, and RA Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels (Drrzzt) are all directly inspired by D&D / table top RPG's. Id have to look at fantasy timing between movies, D&D, and novels, to see which came first, but it's mass appeal explosion was a big part of it. Sometimes, the zeitgeist craves a concept, and it explodes across multiple media formats all at once, making it hard to determine which came first.

I am currently half way thru this book.

Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1632862794/?tag=imwan-20