5 unlikely tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table

List by Danielle

"It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, from the castle of Camelot. King of the Britons, defeater of the Saxons, Sovereign of all England!"

"Pull the other one!"

From Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I've been reading Sarah Zettel's Camelot series of late - four historical fantasy romances starring Gawain and his brothers, one book per knightly brother - and took a look to see what else we've got on the Arthurian myths and legends. Turns out: a whole heap! Though less graphic novels than I'd been expecting. Yes, we've got everything from gangland Arthur to high-school-teen Arthur, through muppet Arthur and Python Arthur to some actual historical retellings of the stories made famous by authors like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory and John Steinbeck. Yes. STEINBECK.

Top 5 wild, weird Western crossovers

List by Danielle

"The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing much to say."
~ The first line of 'The knife of never letting go', by Patrick Ness

Wikipedia goes into loving detail about some of the newfangled flavours of Western out there, from the Weird West or Science Fiction Western (which seems to have a more historical setting, albeit one that plays fabulously fast and loose with real history, see 'Cowboys vs Aliens' or Cherie Priest's award-winning steampunk westerns) to the Space Western, in my heart always associated with by Joss Whedon's wonderful (and forever shiny!) 'Firefly' and 'Serenity'. Okay, the boundaries of these sub-genres are as fluid and fiddly as most genre distinctions seem to be, but the lists of films, TV, graphic novels and books cited show that there's some exciting storytelling to be exploring, out on the frontiers.