We live in an age in the entertainment industry where the story is sacrificed for political messaging. Where the heroes of yesterday, both real and imagined, are deconstructed to fit a narrative. You can't watch a superhero movie or read a comic from MARVEL or DC where the values of truth, justice, and the American Way are not considered the new evil. The pure pulp escapism that made the hero's journey of Luke Skywalker or the tales of Middle Earth legendary have died with The Last Jedi and The Rings of Power of recent years. This gave way to the question of whether pulp entertainment is dead.
No, my friends, pulp entertainment is not dead, for a new counterculture is emerging. YouTuber and author of the most recent Nightvale new pulp series have called the emerging counterculture The Iron Age, where creators of comics, books, and music are emerging out of the shadows of the culture to reshape the culture as their own. Eric July is one such figure making waves with his Rippaverse comics to compete against the culturally decimated MARVEL & DC, but he is not alone.
Enter the Daily Wire.
Yes, the Daily Wire.
The conservative news outlet is the home to Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan and is currently undergoing a Cinderella story that is taking the world by storm. Its CEO Jeremy Boering, a former organizer of the Friends of Abe organization in Hollywood, has done what was unthinkable. He decided to take his company into the entertainment business and fight the media at their own game. Utilizing the production talents of producer Dallas Sonnier with his company Bonfire Legend, the Daily Wire was officially in the movie business, and they plan to stay.
Since 2020, the Daily Wire has only churned out a handful of films, but films of quality. Most recently, their documentary film from Matt Walsh, What is a Woman? has made it's first appearance on Twitter, where it was a smash hit, to the chagrin of SJWs. On the narrative side, the company's most notable films to date have been the late Treat Williams action thriller RUN. HIDE. FIGHT. and TERROR ON THE PRAIRIE, starring actress and former MMA fighter Gina Carano in a career returning role after her cancellation by the Walt Disney Company in recent years.
Then in November 2022, at a Daily Wire Townhall, Jeremy Boering announced the company’s most ambitious project. A project that can potentially launch the Cinderella company into the stratosphere. He announced that his company had acquired the film and TV rights to an epic historical fantasy series of six books from Stephen R. Lawhead, The Pendragon Cycle. It is a series of books that Jeremy Boering described as having read as a teenager and helped shape his worldview in the town hall. It is a saga of the fall of the Roman occupation of the pagan British Isles, the rise of Christianity, and the formation of an early Great Britain under the reign of King Arthur. Jeremy Boering is acting as the showrunner for this series, and it will premiere in late 2023 on Daily Wire +. He has stated that the series will be incredible at the Townhall, and his enthusiasm sells it.
What sets The Pendragon Cycle apart from other previous tales of the Arthurian Legend is the story’s connection to the lost city of Atlantis, which serves as the setting for book one. The books were published between 1987-1997 by UK-based American author Stephen R. Lawhead who is known for his works in fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, and children’s books. The first book in the series, Taliesen, is notable for winning Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s Gold Medallion Awars for novel in 1988 and was the first of Lawhead’s books to be deeply steeped in Celtic Christianity, culture and history that remains prominent in his work to this day.
In the age of deconstruction in the fantasy genre, the Daily Wire has the potential of bringing a breath of fresh air to a genre that has in recent years suffered misfires with shows like The Wheel of Time and The Rings of Power, which have failed to measure up to the scope of The Lord of the Rings trilogy from Peter Jackson due to the Hollywood tendency to focus on the message and not story. I am very hopeful that the Daily Wire will deliver the goods based upon the fruits of their labor thus far, so a shout-out should be made to the Daily Wire, who is playing its part well in the Iron Age, and I salute them.