I was in the comics shop today and noticed that DC has just come out with a
trade paperback collection of the first 12 issues of the John Ostrander-Tom
Mandrake version of THE SPECTRE; "The Spectre Vol. 1: Crimes and
Judgments". I didn't buy it, for reasons explained below, but I
wrote a review of it for Amazon anyway. As I've done with some
other comics-related Amazon reviews, I'm also sending the review to the
list, in case it's of interest to some of you, though it's not really Silver Age
related. It starts with a potted history of the Spectre character, intended
for Amazon readers who may not be familiar with him.
The book has a $19.95 list price, or $15.47 ordered from Amazon (or $9.99
as a Kindle e-book, though I'm not sure I want to try reading a comic book on
the small screen of my standard model Kindle). And I see that Vol. 2, "The
Wrath of God", presumably including the second year of the comic-book
series. is scheduled for publication in Jan. 2015. If they get all
the way to the end of the series, maybe I'll buy the last book just
because, as mentioned in the review, I've never managed to collect the
next-to-last issue (#61) of the original series.
Amazon review begins: This is one of those reviews of mine where
technically maybe I should not be reviewing this book, since I haven't bought or
read the actual book itself. However, I've read the original comic books
reprinted in this volume, issues #1 through 12 of THE SPECTRE series published
by DC Comics from 1994 through 1998, written by John Ostrander and drawn mainly
by Tom Mandrake. Based on that, I can give this book collection a strong
recommendation.
The Spectre is a character who keeps coming back to life even
though he's been dead for over 70 years. Created in 1940 by writer Jerry
Siegel (better known as co-creator of Superman) and artist Bernard Baily, the
Spectre was a costumed superhero who got his super powers the hard way, by
dying. He was originally Jim Corrigan, a tough police detective who was murdered
by gangsters. A supernatural power (hinted, but not explicitly said in the
original comics, to be God) raised Corrigan's ghost, charged him with a mission
to avenge his own murder and then go on to eliminate all evil on Earth, and
endowed him not only with traditional ghostly abilities such as invisibility and
intangibility but with nearly limitless magical powers. In terms of sheer
power, the Spectre made Siegel's other famous creation look like a 98-pound
weakling. And the Spectre took a much harder line with crime than most
other comic book heroes. He didn't bother beating crooks up and dropping them
off with the police; he literally scared them to death or put them to death in
various gruesome magical ways.
But apparently the Spectre was a little
too creepy for comic book readers of the 1940's. After a couple of years, he was
demoted to a backup slot instead of being a lead feature, was saddled with a
funny sidekick named Percival Popp, and became about as menacing as
Casper. Then, in 1945, he was dropped. 20 years later, after DC
Comics had successfully revived several other "Golden Age" superheroes, the
Spectre too was revived. The Comics Code and DC editorial policy wouldn't
allow him to be a death-dealing avenger as of old, but he was still almost
infinitely powerful. In his second revival appearance, he defeated
"Azmodus," a villain clearly intended as a stand-in for Satan. What do you
do for an encore after you've defeated the Devil himself? Not much; the
revived Spectre didn't catch on and was again dropped. Yet another revival
in the early 1970's was said to have been inspired after editor Joe Orlando
suffered a mugging and sought vicarious vengeance. This time, in a series
written by Michael Fleisher and drawn by Jim Aparo, the Spectre was once again a
terrifying figure of vengeance, skirting the edges of the Comics Code by killing
criminals in bizarre magical ways. Reportedly that series sold well, but
it made DC management queasy, and again the Spectre was
cancelled.
After another brief and unmemorable revival in the 1980's, the Spectre returned
again in this version by Ostrander and Mandrake (so finally we get to the
comics appearing in the book I'm actually reviewing). This was, in my
opinion, by far the best of all the Spectre series (including a couple more that
have appeared since then-- you just can't keep this guy in his grave). The
1990's have sometimes been called the "Dark Age" of comics, dominated by
psychotic anti-heroes who reveled in violence for its own sake. The new Spectre
seemed outwardly to fit into that mold, but Ostrander and Mandrake had something
deeper and ultimately more satisfying in mind. They went once again with
the idea of the Spectre as a vengeful spirit who killed evildoers at will. But
they didn't just use the idea as an excuse for "violence porn". Unlike the
earlier series, they actually went into the moral issues and dilemmas that would
apply to such a being as the Spectre. In their re-imagining, the Spectre
was an ancient embodiment of the "Wrath of God," who would appear periodically
through human history, detached from the Deity's other attributes but tethered
to a single human soul whose function was to temper the Spectre's implacable
justice with a sense of humanity. In the case of Jim Corrigan, this
restraint didn't always work out so well, since Corrigan-- as his character was
developed in a series of flashbacks back to his original lifetime in the
1930's-- was himself an angry, bitter and morally flawed mortal. And yet
not beyond redemption. Over the course of the original 12 issues
reprinted in this book-- and the total series which ran 62 issues plus several
annuals and specials-- Corrigan learns and grows, suffers tragedy and learns
about hope, and develops the compassion that his ghostly alter ego lacks.
This isn't just a psychological study; it is a superhero comic book, and the
Spectre faces off with a variety of villains, monsters and menaces in his
God-given yet ultimately impossible mission to "destroy all evil". But the
most compelling conflict is that which develops between Corrigan and the Spectre
themselves.
I originally passed up this comic-book series when it first appeared in the
1990's, but then discovered how good it was and went to some trouble to collect
the whole series (I'm still missing just one issue, the next-to-last in the
series). So I don't really need this book collection myself, but I'm glad
to see at least the beginning of the series back in print for others to discover
and enjoy.
The archives of the Silver Age Reviews Yahoo Group, celebrating that classic era of comic books published between 1956 and 1972! (And occasionally beyond!)
Book review: SECRET HISTORY OF MARVEL COMICS
Book review:by Bill Henley: THE SECRET HISTORY OF MARVEL COMICS by Blake
Bell and Dr. Michael J. Vassallo; published Oct. 2013 by Fantagraphics Books;
list price $39.99. (Like some of my other reviews, this one is not
particularly on-topic for the Silver Age, but hopefully of interest
anyway. I will also be posting the review to Amazon when I have the
chance.)
The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It's
not really a history (secret or otherwise) of Marvel Comics, though it is of
interest to readers who are already familiar with Marvel history. You
won't learn much that's new here about the origins of charactErs like Captain
America (though he's on the cover), Spider-Man or the X-Men. What this is,
is a history of the non-comics publishing enterprises of Martin Goodman, the man
who between 1939 and 1968 owned and published the comics line that came to be
known as Marvel. Goodman got started in the publishing business in 1933
with a pulp magazine, not a comic book, and continued publishing pulps alongside
comics through the 1940's and 50's. (That first pulp was a Western, and the book
suggests Goodman had a lifelong affection for that genre. Though it's not
specifically said in the book, this might help explain why Marvel continued
publishing Western comics through the 1960's and early 70's after Westerns
mostly fell out of fashion.) And he later branched out into other
types of down-scale magazines, such as girlie photo magazines, true-confessions
mags, and many others. Some of the same people who worked on Goodman's
comics also did work for the pulps, and the fortunes of the non-comics
publications had side effects on the comics. The biggest example,
probably, was in 1957-58 when Goodman lost his distribution company and signed
with Independent News. owned by National-DC Comics, to distribute his
magazines. Though Independent agreed to distribute a shrunken line of
comic books for Goodman, they were mainly interested in making money
distributing his other publications. If Goodman had been a comics-only
publisher, DC would probably have refused to distribute a rival and the "Marvel
Age" would have been strangled in its cradle. (I've often wondered if DC
management later rued the day when they made that deal with Goodman and threw a
lifeline to their future arch-rival.)
This book does not present a
flattering picture of Martin Goodman in terms of his professional practices and
ethics or as a creative mind. Goodman's general practice with his pulps
and other magazines, as with his comics, was not to blaze new trails, but to
find out what was selling well for other publishers and to flood the market with
imitations. (Though the book suggests that Goodman's company did originate
one major magazine category-- the "men's sweat" adventure magazine.) The
authors suggest Goodman had little concern for creating a quality product, or
for treating his staffers, writers and artists fairly (though he could be
generous when an impulse took him). When Goodman's line of comics became
Marvel and revolutionized comics for the future, it was thanks to Stan Lee and
the artists, mainly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and in spite of Goodman rather
than because of him. And the authors suggest that when Ditko and then
Kirby quit Marvel, it was not primarily because of disputes with Stan Lee's
editorial policy, as is sometimes suggested, but because of their resentment of
Goodman's publishing policies and refusal to pay them adequately for their
wildly successful creations.
Speaking of Goodman's ethics, we sometimes
hear that the present day is a uniquely degenerate era of popular culture with
excesses of sex and violence that would never have been tolerated in an earlier
era. One sidelight covered in this book suggests it isn't necessarily
so. During the late 1930's Goodman included in his pulp line some titles
that are now referred to as the "shudder pulps". They didn't contain just
garden-variety horror stories, but "frankly sadistic" blends of sex and
violence, as with a story and illustration in which half-naked women are thrown
onto beds of spikes to bleed to death for the entertainment of a jaded
nightclub audience. I'm opposed to virtually all censorship, but if I saw
something like this in a present-day publication, it would strain my
principles. (The book SECRET IDENTITY by Craig Yoe reveals that Joe
Shuster, during his impoverished post-Superman days, was involved in doing art
for a similar series of bondage-fetish publicatios. But those seem to have
been semi-underground publicatios sold under the counter. These "shudder
pulps" seem to have been sold on the regular stands alongside other pulps, at
least until a crackdown by the New York City government.)
Over half of
this book is devoted to a gallery of pulp-magazine illustrations drawn by "the
moonlighting artists of Marvel Comics" -- most extensively Jack Kirby and Joe
Simon during the early days of their careers, but also Alex Schomburg (best
known in comics for his incredibly crowded covers, but he was also responsible
for many of those grotesque "shudder" illustrations), Bill Everett, Carl Burgos,
Joe Maneely and many others. This makes the book a unique resource for art
aficionados who can see here artwork by Kirby and the others that would
otherwise be vanished and inaccessible except for a few pulp collectors.
This, and the detailed look at an earlier era of magazine publishing, makes this
book a fascinating read even if it isn't really very much about Marvel Comics.
Bell and Dr. Michael J. Vassallo; published Oct. 2013 by Fantagraphics Books;
list price $39.99. (Like some of my other reviews, this one is not
particularly on-topic for the Silver Age, but hopefully of interest
anyway. I will also be posting the review to Amazon when I have the
chance.)
The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It's
not really a history (secret or otherwise) of Marvel Comics, though it is of
interest to readers who are already familiar with Marvel history. You
won't learn much that's new here about the origins of charactErs like Captain
America (though he's on the cover), Spider-Man or the X-Men. What this is,
is a history of the non-comics publishing enterprises of Martin Goodman, the man
who between 1939 and 1968 owned and published the comics line that came to be
known as Marvel. Goodman got started in the publishing business in 1933
with a pulp magazine, not a comic book, and continued publishing pulps alongside
comics through the 1940's and 50's. (That first pulp was a Western, and the book
suggests Goodman had a lifelong affection for that genre. Though it's not
specifically said in the book, this might help explain why Marvel continued
publishing Western comics through the 1960's and early 70's after Westerns
mostly fell out of fashion.) And he later branched out into other
types of down-scale magazines, such as girlie photo magazines, true-confessions
mags, and many others. Some of the same people who worked on Goodman's
comics also did work for the pulps, and the fortunes of the non-comics
publications had side effects on the comics. The biggest example,
probably, was in 1957-58 when Goodman lost his distribution company and signed
with Independent News. owned by National-DC Comics, to distribute his
magazines. Though Independent agreed to distribute a shrunken line of
comic books for Goodman, they were mainly interested in making money
distributing his other publications. If Goodman had been a comics-only
publisher, DC would probably have refused to distribute a rival and the "Marvel
Age" would have been strangled in its cradle. (I've often wondered if DC
management later rued the day when they made that deal with Goodman and threw a
lifeline to their future arch-rival.)
This book does not present a
flattering picture of Martin Goodman in terms of his professional practices and
ethics or as a creative mind. Goodman's general practice with his pulps
and other magazines, as with his comics, was not to blaze new trails, but to
find out what was selling well for other publishers and to flood the market with
imitations. (Though the book suggests that Goodman's company did originate
one major magazine category-- the "men's sweat" adventure magazine.) The
authors suggest Goodman had little concern for creating a quality product, or
for treating his staffers, writers and artists fairly (though he could be
generous when an impulse took him). When Goodman's line of comics became
Marvel and revolutionized comics for the future, it was thanks to Stan Lee and
the artists, mainly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and in spite of Goodman rather
than because of him. And the authors suggest that when Ditko and then
Kirby quit Marvel, it was not primarily because of disputes with Stan Lee's
editorial policy, as is sometimes suggested, but because of their resentment of
Goodman's publishing policies and refusal to pay them adequately for their
wildly successful creations.
Speaking of Goodman's ethics, we sometimes
hear that the present day is a uniquely degenerate era of popular culture with
excesses of sex and violence that would never have been tolerated in an earlier
era. One sidelight covered in this book suggests it isn't necessarily
so. During the late 1930's Goodman included in his pulp line some titles
that are now referred to as the "shudder pulps". They didn't contain just
garden-variety horror stories, but "frankly sadistic" blends of sex and
violence, as with a story and illustration in which half-naked women are thrown
onto beds of spikes to bleed to death for the entertainment of a jaded
nightclub audience. I'm opposed to virtually all censorship, but if I saw
something like this in a present-day publication, it would strain my
principles. (The book SECRET IDENTITY by Craig Yoe reveals that Joe
Shuster, during his impoverished post-Superman days, was involved in doing art
for a similar series of bondage-fetish publicatios. But those seem to have
been semi-underground publicatios sold under the counter. These "shudder
pulps" seem to have been sold on the regular stands alongside other pulps, at
least until a crackdown by the New York City government.)
Over half of
this book is devoted to a gallery of pulp-magazine illustrations drawn by "the
moonlighting artists of Marvel Comics" -- most extensively Jack Kirby and Joe
Simon during the early days of their careers, but also Alex Schomburg (best
known in comics for his incredibly crowded covers, but he was also responsible
for many of those grotesque "shudder" illustrations), Bill Everett, Carl Burgos,
Joe Maneely and many others. This makes the book a unique resource for art
aficionados who can see here artwork by Kirby and the others that would
otherwise be vanished and inaccessible except for a few pulp collectors.
This, and the detailed look at an earlier era of magazine publishing, makes this
book a fascinating read even if it isn't really very much about Marvel Comics.
Marvel Super-Heroes # 18 (Guardians of the Galaxy)
MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #18; Jan. 1969; Marvel Comics Group; Stan Lee, editor;
featuring the tryout debut of the Guardians of the Galaxy in "Earth Shall
Overcome!" The strory is scripted by Arnold Drake, who was working for a
time as a third-string Marvel scripter after having been blackballed from
DC. (I recall as a fan at the time I was somewhat intrigued by Drake's
writing style because it was a bit different from the styles of Stan Lee or Roy
Thomas, but I didn't realize then that Drake had been the writer and co-creator
of the DOOM PATROL series which I had liked when I was a DC reader.) The
art is by Gene Colan, with inks by Mike Esposito under his "Mickey Demeo" pen
name. The cover depicts the four members of the new group marching
forward; a man in a purple bodysuit that completely covers his body and head, a
big blocky guy in a yellow space suit, a crystalline humanoid and an orange
alien carrying a bow and arrow.
Review by Bill Henley. I
decided to review this comic in honor of the upcoming "Guardians of the Galaxy"
movie-- even though, as far as I can tell from the trailers I've seen, the
membership of the movie Guardians is entirely different from the characters of
this comic book series.
Our story opens in the year 3007 AD, when all of
humanity and its colonial offshoot races are united under the banner of the
"United Lands of Earth" and the "ULE Federation". "Wars among nations long
ago ceased-- but the war of the STAR SYSTEMS has only begun..." A
"space militiaman" named Charlie-27 is coming in for a landing on his home world
of Jupiter after a six-month tour of solitary patrol duty. (It takes the
first three pages of of this 22-page story just for Charlie to finish
landing. Gene Colan was a fine artist, but sometimes his large panels and
leisurely storytelling meant that the stories he drew were skimpy on story
content compared to other Marvel comics.} Charlie is a big, bulky, kind of
obese-looking guy, but it's not that he's been hitting the snacks too hard out
on solitary duty. He's a fifth-generation Jupiter colonist, "adapted at
birth to withstand Jupiter's conditions of ELEVEN times the mass and THREE times
the GRAVITY of Earth. (But science says you're wrong if you believe that humans
could survive on Jupiter just by adding some extra bulk and muscle. As far
as is known, the planet has no atmosphere breathable by any Earth-type life
form, and it's not even certain if Jupiter has a solid surface rather than a
continuously thickening atmosphere.) Charlie has mysteriously lost radio
contact with Jupiter during his tour of duty, but his only concern seems to be
whether he will get the big party that is traditional "when a MIL-MAN returns
from SPACE SOLITARY". Once he finally touches down and emerges from his
spaceship, he shouts, "HELLO OUT THERE, FELLOW JOVIANS? HOW ABOUT A FEW
ROUSING CHEERS FOR THE CONQUERING HERO?" But the space port is eerily
empty and silent, and the only ones present to give Charlie a reception are a
pair of armed, green, scaly, lizardlike aliens. They are members of the
Badoon, an alien race which has schemed to conquer Earth since clear back in the
20th century, when they were stopped in their first assault by the Silver Surfer
in issue &2 of his original comic. Alas, the Surfer is no longer around to
help out. One of the Badoon says to the other, "There will be a MEDAL for
us, Maz! We are about to capture the LAST FREE JOVIAN!" The shout,
"HALT! In the name of the glorious EASTERN ZONE COUNCIL!" finally gives
Charlie-27 a clue as to what has happened to his world and people. But
though he may be slow on the uptake, he's not as slow physically as his bulk
might suggest. He manages to dodge the raygun fire of the two Badoon and
shove them into an "incendi-drop" garbage disposal. Charlie seeks out
"Command HQ", hoping to find other troops still fighting, but HQ is
deserted. Now his only hope is to find his own family and help them to get
off Jupiter, but this hope too is dashed when he spots his father onboard a
Badoon prison transport, being sent to a labor camp to mine deadly radioactive
"high-intensity harkovite". Before he can attempt a rescue, he is
confronted by more Badoon troopers. Charlie momentarily resolves to "die
HERE- and NOW" rather than being caught and dragged off to a death camp, but
changes his mind and decides to try to make it off-plent to join the human
forces he hopes are still fighting elsewhere. He makes for a "tele-port
depot" from which he can beam himself anywhere in the Solar System-- if he can
make it there before the Badoon get him. "Like a 20th century commuter
running to catch the 4:57, the 30th century Jovian dives for a beam that
will TRANSMIT him though space!" He is in so much of a hurry that he has
no time to set the "directional guide", but takes his chances where he will end
up, since "ANY place will be better than THIS!"
Sorry, Charlie! He
lands on the cold outer planet Pluto, which was targeted by the Badoon even
before Jupiter. Donning an "atmo-suit" to protect him from Pluto's harsh
conditions, Charlie finds Pluto as deserted of free humans as was his
homeworld-- but there are Badoon. They are tracking the one Pluvian known
to remain on the planet, with the aid of "Saturnian hound-hawks," and they are
startled when the beasts indicate there are now two "non-Badoon scents," rather
than just one. With the hawks in pursuit, Charlie tries to get back to the
teleport depot, but the hound-hawks are about to bring him down when a
crystal-covered arm reaches out and pulls him into a hidden tunnel. When
he gets a good look at his rescuer, Charlie exclaims, "BY KARSUS! You're a
CRYSTAL MAN-- a PLUVIAN!" (Well, duh. You're on Pluto, so who would
you expect to find but a Pluto inhabitant?) This Pluvian, whose name we
learn later is Martinex, seems to have a crystal chip on his shoulder.
"You mean 'rock head,' don't you? Isn't that what you always call
us? Despite the fact that we, like you, are descended from
EARTHMEN?" Charlie-27 reminds Martinex that "This is no time to fight a
RACE war!", and asks what is happening on Pluto. Martinex explains that he
stayed behind when the rest of the planet was evacuated before the Badoon
advance, in order to blow up some industrial complexes. He was about to
make his own escape through the tele-port when Charlie's arrival attracted
Badoon attention. Charlie offers to surrender to the Badoon so that
Martinex can get away, but the crystal man declines the "unnecessary
heroics". Instead, he uses a radio control to activate a horde of "robot
servants" (made to resemble Earthly butlers and maids) to attack the
Badoon. Though the robots are not built for combat, they manage to
distract the Badoon long enough for Charlie and Martinex to reach the
tele-port... this time with a defihite destination in mind. "Next stop
MOTHER-PLANET EARTH... and let's hope that it is still FREE!"
But yet
again our heroes' hopes will be dashed. For at that moment on Earth, a
human prisoner is being dragged to the throne of "Drang, the SUPREME COMMANDER
of the EASTERN SECTOR of the BADOON EMPIRE!" But not just any old
human. This man is named Vance Astro (later Guardians stories established
that this cheesy sci-fi name was actually short for Astrovik), and he has
a life story so unusual that he is known even to the Badoon. The Badoon
want to hear his story from his own lips, and when he angrily refuses, Vance
Astro is subjected to a painful memory probe. Back in the year 1988 (I
somehow missed hearing about all this in the news at the time), as a young and
eager volunteer, Vance Astro was selected to be the first man to attempt travel
to the stars. But even at maximum travel speed of ten million miles an
hour, a trip to another star will take lifetimes. Astro agrees to be
sealed in a copper foil "bio-suit" and placed in an icy coffin-like device in
order to make the thousand-year trip in suspended animation! He will
have to leave his girl friend and everyone else he knows behind (he tells his
girl, "It'd never have worked! I'd always be REACHING FOR THE STARS!
You LIVE, sweetie! LIVE! Otherwise you'll HAUNT me for 1,000
years!") and after he arrives he will have to spend the rest of his life
sealed in the purple bio-suit; if it is even punctured he will age 1,000 years
instantly and crumble to dust! But his reward will be to be the very first
man to reach the stars.
Except it doesn't work out that way. When
Astro lands his ship and emerges on an unnamed extra-solar world, he finds that
he has NOT gone where no man has gone before. He is greeted by cheering
human crowds! It seems that some 200 years after his departure, the
discovery of "Harkovian physics" supplanted Einstein's physics with its
limitation on traveling past the speed of light, Other humans have
beat Astro to the stars by centuries, and his hero's welcome is no
consolation. "Laughing hysterically, Astro shouts, "It was all for
NOTHING! My HOME-- my GIRL-- my FRIENDS-- HA HA HA-- all thrown away for
NOTHING!!" (This concept of the sub-light space traveler who is
outstripped and turned into a human relic by the development of
faster-than-light travel didn't originate with this story. There was a SF
short story, I think by Poul Anderson, on the theme, and later Bill Roper wrote
a memorable filk song based on the idea.)
And now Vance Astro is a
prisoner of the Badoon conquerors. They are intrigued not only by his
"bitter yet funny" story, but by "the special knowledge of a man who has lived
FORTY generations" (even if he slept through most of those generations).
Because of this, Astro is offered the privilege of being the only human allowed
to live under the Badoon without wearing a "psyke-disk" to turn him into a
zombie-like slave. The price will be betraying his own people, but Astro
says that as a castaway in time, he doesn't really have a "people". The
Badoon note that he does seem to have "one people"-- a blue-skinned alien
(rather than orange as on the cover), a native of the planet on which he first
landed. "DUMBEST people that ever LIVED! I kept him just for
LAUGHS!" Okay, then, say the Badoon; Astro can show his new loyalty to
them by killing his alien companion, who has been judged too primitive and
inferior to live even as a Badoon slave. The embittered Astro agrees
with no hesitation, but "It'd be interesting to do it with his OWN weapon"-- a
primitive-looking bow and arrow. Astro aims and fires; "Sorry, my blue
friend! But like we used to say BACK IN 1988, that's the way it
MOVES!" "You called me-- FRIEND! You were LIAR, copper-man!"
But as Astro pulls back the string and shoots the arrow, the alien whose name is
Yondu begins a strange whistling-- and instead of piercing his heart, the arrow
swerves and begins flying around the room threatening the Badoon! The
arrow is made of "sound-sensitive metal" and can be commanded by Yondu's
whistling, and it emits energy which blasts through a wall, enabling Astro and
Yondu to make their escape! Astro soars through the air thanks to a
"psyke-pusher" power he somehow developed in his centuries of suspended
animation, with Yondu clutching his heels. The primitive alien complains
about the "ugly things" the "copper-man" said about him, but Astro explains that
it was all a ploy to get his hands on Yondu's unique weapon.
Astro
and Yondu make their way to the nearest tele-port station-- where Charlie-27 and
Martinex are just arriving! In the great tradition of Marvel heroes past,
present and future, the two pairs mistake each other for enemies and fight with
each other briefly, until Charlie has a chance to explain, "We're the LAST FREE
MEN of Jupiter and Pluto-- and we're looking for a FIGHT-- but with the
BADOON!" One of whom gets Vance Astro in his ray-gun sight, but Martinex
uses his ability to focus energy through his crystalline body and melts the
ray-gun with a heat beam. Our new band of heroes reaches the tele-port
station, but where to go, with even Earth conquered? Vance Astro has heard
rumors that somewhere a "free colony" still exists, and he is determined to find
it. He wants to go to "New New York", the colony world that "took the
worst pasting from the Badoon," but which is also rumored to be where the "free
colony" started. The others are skeptical, but Astro declares, "My
friends-- I'm the OLD MAN here-- by about TEN CENTURIES! And I say we can
FIND the FREE COLONY!" And he leads the others in a rousing chorus of an
old "struggle song" from his own time, adapted to the new circumstances; "EARTH
SHALL OVERCOME! EARTH SHALL OVERCOME! EARTH SHALL OVERCOME--
SOMEDAY!"
Maybe so, but it would take a while. Though I recall that
I was intrigued by this story when I first read it, the Guardians of the Galaxy
didn't immediately win an ongoing series of their own. It wasn't until
1975 that they turned up again as guest stars in Steve Gerber's DEFENDERS, and
then got a series in MARVEL PRESENTS, initially written by Gerber. That
ended after a couple of years, and other than guest shots the Guardians didn't
show up again until they got a series starting in 1990 written by Jim
Valentino. But at that time I had largely abandoned Marvel comics, and I
never read that series at all. (Should I?)
As I watched the movie trailers I
wondered if the movie makers took nothing from the actual "Guardians of the
Galaxy" comic but the name, but I see by looking at the Grand Comicbook Database
that a 2013 revival of the Guardians title (which I didn't read and have no
great interest in reading) replaced the original lineup of Vance Astro,
Charlie-27, Martinex and Yondu with the characters who appear in the movie
such as Star-Lord, Drax, Gamora, Rocket Raccoon, etc. (But was the movie
already in the works by then, and did the new comic follow the movie script
rather than vice versa?)
To cover the rest of MSH #18 briefly; the
"Marvel Mailbag" lettercol is devoted to comments on the Phantom Eagle, the
double-identity World War I aviator-hero who appeared in MSH #16. All the
comments are complimentary, but the Eagle seems to have been the biggest flop of
any of the tryout features appearing in MSH. All of the rest turned up
somewhere again sooner or later, but I only recall one further appearance
of the Phantom Eagle, as a guest star in a HULK story involving time travel, and
he certainly never got a series of his own.
The rest of the issue is
devoted, as usual with MSH at this time, to superhero reprints from the 1940's
and 50's. A three=page segment of the "Adventures of Sub-Mariner When He
Was a Boy" from SUB-MARINER #36 (1954) depicts young Namor learning the
meaning of "Courage" as he fights a pack of wild dogs on an ice floe.
Otherwise, the reprint section is devoted to the second half of the All-Winners
Squad story (Timely/Marvel's shortlived JSA imitation) from ALL-WINNERS
#21. (The first half was reprinted in MSH #17, but I'm not digging that
issue out to review the story in detail. Per the GCD, the story is scripted by
Otto Binder, with various artists involved.) The Squad is battling a
time-traveling villain known as Future Man (and his femme-fatale assistant
charmingly named Madame Death) with each Squad member assigned to protect one
continent from Future Man's plots. Sub-Mariner prevents Future Man and his
allies, the "Pacific Pirates," from unleashing a tidal wave that will
devastate Asia. Miss America, the flying patriotic heroine, defends Egypt
and the continent of Africa from a horde of marauding mummies unleashed by
Future Man. The original Human Torch and kid sidekick Toro save North
America from being devastated by Future Man's "atomic fire," which can consume
anything, by discovering that it can be extinguished by its own ashes.
Finally, the team unites to stop Future Man from summoning a whole army from his
predatory future society to conquer the 20th century. (I'm surprised that,
with his continuity mania, Roy Thomas never retconned this story to establish
that Future Man was another incarnation of Kang.) Future Man flees to his
time machine to escape back to the future, and Captain America orders the other
heroes to let him go. It turns out that Cap has sabotaged the time machine
so it can no longer travel to the future; instead, Future Man and his assistant
are doomed to an endless trip into the distant past. "I don't think future
men will tackle the 20th century again, after one of their greatest scientists
failed to return! THE WORLD IS SAFE AGAIN! (caption) And the world
will ALWAYS be safe from any sinister plot, while the mighty All-Winners Squad
stands guard over it!" If that was so, then the world was soon in trouble again,
since the All-Winners Squad seemingly disbanded after that story.
featuring the tryout debut of the Guardians of the Galaxy in "Earth Shall
Overcome!" The strory is scripted by Arnold Drake, who was working for a
time as a third-string Marvel scripter after having been blackballed from
DC. (I recall as a fan at the time I was somewhat intrigued by Drake's
writing style because it was a bit different from the styles of Stan Lee or Roy
Thomas, but I didn't realize then that Drake had been the writer and co-creator
of the DOOM PATROL series which I had liked when I was a DC reader.) The
art is by Gene Colan, with inks by Mike Esposito under his "Mickey Demeo" pen
name. The cover depicts the four members of the new group marching
forward; a man in a purple bodysuit that completely covers his body and head, a
big blocky guy in a yellow space suit, a crystalline humanoid and an orange
alien carrying a bow and arrow.
Review by Bill Henley. I
decided to review this comic in honor of the upcoming "Guardians of the Galaxy"
movie-- even though, as far as I can tell from the trailers I've seen, the
membership of the movie Guardians is entirely different from the characters of
this comic book series.
Our story opens in the year 3007 AD, when all of
humanity and its colonial offshoot races are united under the banner of the
"United Lands of Earth" and the "ULE Federation". "Wars among nations long
ago ceased-- but the war of the STAR SYSTEMS has only begun..." A
"space militiaman" named Charlie-27 is coming in for a landing on his home world
of Jupiter after a six-month tour of solitary patrol duty. (It takes the
first three pages of of this 22-page story just for Charlie to finish
landing. Gene Colan was a fine artist, but sometimes his large panels and
leisurely storytelling meant that the stories he drew were skimpy on story
content compared to other Marvel comics.} Charlie is a big, bulky, kind of
obese-looking guy, but it's not that he's been hitting the snacks too hard out
on solitary duty. He's a fifth-generation Jupiter colonist, "adapted at
birth to withstand Jupiter's conditions of ELEVEN times the mass and THREE times
the GRAVITY of Earth. (But science says you're wrong if you believe that humans
could survive on Jupiter just by adding some extra bulk and muscle. As far
as is known, the planet has no atmosphere breathable by any Earth-type life
form, and it's not even certain if Jupiter has a solid surface rather than a
continuously thickening atmosphere.) Charlie has mysteriously lost radio
contact with Jupiter during his tour of duty, but his only concern seems to be
whether he will get the big party that is traditional "when a MIL-MAN returns
from SPACE SOLITARY". Once he finally touches down and emerges from his
spaceship, he shouts, "HELLO OUT THERE, FELLOW JOVIANS? HOW ABOUT A FEW
ROUSING CHEERS FOR THE CONQUERING HERO?" But the space port is eerily
empty and silent, and the only ones present to give Charlie a reception are a
pair of armed, green, scaly, lizardlike aliens. They are members of the
Badoon, an alien race which has schemed to conquer Earth since clear back in the
20th century, when they were stopped in their first assault by the Silver Surfer
in issue &2 of his original comic. Alas, the Surfer is no longer around to
help out. One of the Badoon says to the other, "There will be a MEDAL for
us, Maz! We are about to capture the LAST FREE JOVIAN!" The shout,
"HALT! In the name of the glorious EASTERN ZONE COUNCIL!" finally gives
Charlie-27 a clue as to what has happened to his world and people. But
though he may be slow on the uptake, he's not as slow physically as his bulk
might suggest. He manages to dodge the raygun fire of the two Badoon and
shove them into an "incendi-drop" garbage disposal. Charlie seeks out
"Command HQ", hoping to find other troops still fighting, but HQ is
deserted. Now his only hope is to find his own family and help them to get
off Jupiter, but this hope too is dashed when he spots his father onboard a
Badoon prison transport, being sent to a labor camp to mine deadly radioactive
"high-intensity harkovite". Before he can attempt a rescue, he is
confronted by more Badoon troopers. Charlie momentarily resolves to "die
HERE- and NOW" rather than being caught and dragged off to a death camp, but
changes his mind and decides to try to make it off-plent to join the human
forces he hopes are still fighting elsewhere. He makes for a "tele-port
depot" from which he can beam himself anywhere in the Solar System-- if he can
make it there before the Badoon get him. "Like a 20th century commuter
running to catch the 4:57, the 30th century Jovian dives for a beam that
will TRANSMIT him though space!" He is in so much of a hurry that he has
no time to set the "directional guide", but takes his chances where he will end
up, since "ANY place will be better than THIS!"
Sorry, Charlie! He
lands on the cold outer planet Pluto, which was targeted by the Badoon even
before Jupiter. Donning an "atmo-suit" to protect him from Pluto's harsh
conditions, Charlie finds Pluto as deserted of free humans as was his
homeworld-- but there are Badoon. They are tracking the one Pluvian known
to remain on the planet, with the aid of "Saturnian hound-hawks," and they are
startled when the beasts indicate there are now two "non-Badoon scents," rather
than just one. With the hawks in pursuit, Charlie tries to get back to the
teleport depot, but the hound-hawks are about to bring him down when a
crystal-covered arm reaches out and pulls him into a hidden tunnel. When
he gets a good look at his rescuer, Charlie exclaims, "BY KARSUS! You're a
CRYSTAL MAN-- a PLUVIAN!" (Well, duh. You're on Pluto, so who would
you expect to find but a Pluto inhabitant?) This Pluvian, whose name we
learn later is Martinex, seems to have a crystal chip on his shoulder.
"You mean 'rock head,' don't you? Isn't that what you always call
us? Despite the fact that we, like you, are descended from
EARTHMEN?" Charlie-27 reminds Martinex that "This is no time to fight a
RACE war!", and asks what is happening on Pluto. Martinex explains that he
stayed behind when the rest of the planet was evacuated before the Badoon
advance, in order to blow up some industrial complexes. He was about to
make his own escape through the tele-port when Charlie's arrival attracted
Badoon attention. Charlie offers to surrender to the Badoon so that
Martinex can get away, but the crystal man declines the "unnecessary
heroics". Instead, he uses a radio control to activate a horde of "robot
servants" (made to resemble Earthly butlers and maids) to attack the
Badoon. Though the robots are not built for combat, they manage to
distract the Badoon long enough for Charlie and Martinex to reach the
tele-port... this time with a defihite destination in mind. "Next stop
MOTHER-PLANET EARTH... and let's hope that it is still FREE!"
But yet
again our heroes' hopes will be dashed. For at that moment on Earth, a
human prisoner is being dragged to the throne of "Drang, the SUPREME COMMANDER
of the EASTERN SECTOR of the BADOON EMPIRE!" But not just any old
human. This man is named Vance Astro (later Guardians stories established
that this cheesy sci-fi name was actually short for Astrovik), and he has
a life story so unusual that he is known even to the Badoon. The Badoon
want to hear his story from his own lips, and when he angrily refuses, Vance
Astro is subjected to a painful memory probe. Back in the year 1988 (I
somehow missed hearing about all this in the news at the time), as a young and
eager volunteer, Vance Astro was selected to be the first man to attempt travel
to the stars. But even at maximum travel speed of ten million miles an
hour, a trip to another star will take lifetimes. Astro agrees to be
sealed in a copper foil "bio-suit" and placed in an icy coffin-like device in
order to make the thousand-year trip in suspended animation! He will
have to leave his girl friend and everyone else he knows behind (he tells his
girl, "It'd never have worked! I'd always be REACHING FOR THE STARS!
You LIVE, sweetie! LIVE! Otherwise you'll HAUNT me for 1,000
years!") and after he arrives he will have to spend the rest of his life
sealed in the purple bio-suit; if it is even punctured he will age 1,000 years
instantly and crumble to dust! But his reward will be to be the very first
man to reach the stars.
Except it doesn't work out that way. When
Astro lands his ship and emerges on an unnamed extra-solar world, he finds that
he has NOT gone where no man has gone before. He is greeted by cheering
human crowds! It seems that some 200 years after his departure, the
discovery of "Harkovian physics" supplanted Einstein's physics with its
limitation on traveling past the speed of light, Other humans have
beat Astro to the stars by centuries, and his hero's welcome is no
consolation. "Laughing hysterically, Astro shouts, "It was all for
NOTHING! My HOME-- my GIRL-- my FRIENDS-- HA HA HA-- all thrown away for
NOTHING!!" (This concept of the sub-light space traveler who is
outstripped and turned into a human relic by the development of
faster-than-light travel didn't originate with this story. There was a SF
short story, I think by Poul Anderson, on the theme, and later Bill Roper wrote
a memorable filk song based on the idea.)
And now Vance Astro is a
prisoner of the Badoon conquerors. They are intrigued not only by his
"bitter yet funny" story, but by "the special knowledge of a man who has lived
FORTY generations" (even if he slept through most of those generations).
Because of this, Astro is offered the privilege of being the only human allowed
to live under the Badoon without wearing a "psyke-disk" to turn him into a
zombie-like slave. The price will be betraying his own people, but Astro
says that as a castaway in time, he doesn't really have a "people". The
Badoon note that he does seem to have "one people"-- a blue-skinned alien
(rather than orange as on the cover), a native of the planet on which he first
landed. "DUMBEST people that ever LIVED! I kept him just for
LAUGHS!" Okay, then, say the Badoon; Astro can show his new loyalty to
them by killing his alien companion, who has been judged too primitive and
inferior to live even as a Badoon slave. The embittered Astro agrees
with no hesitation, but "It'd be interesting to do it with his OWN weapon"-- a
primitive-looking bow and arrow. Astro aims and fires; "Sorry, my blue
friend! But like we used to say BACK IN 1988, that's the way it
MOVES!" "You called me-- FRIEND! You were LIAR, copper-man!"
But as Astro pulls back the string and shoots the arrow, the alien whose name is
Yondu begins a strange whistling-- and instead of piercing his heart, the arrow
swerves and begins flying around the room threatening the Badoon! The
arrow is made of "sound-sensitive metal" and can be commanded by Yondu's
whistling, and it emits energy which blasts through a wall, enabling Astro and
Yondu to make their escape! Astro soars through the air thanks to a
"psyke-pusher" power he somehow developed in his centuries of suspended
animation, with Yondu clutching his heels. The primitive alien complains
about the "ugly things" the "copper-man" said about him, but Astro explains that
it was all a ploy to get his hands on Yondu's unique weapon.
Astro
and Yondu make their way to the nearest tele-port station-- where Charlie-27 and
Martinex are just arriving! In the great tradition of Marvel heroes past,
present and future, the two pairs mistake each other for enemies and fight with
each other briefly, until Charlie has a chance to explain, "We're the LAST FREE
MEN of Jupiter and Pluto-- and we're looking for a FIGHT-- but with the
BADOON!" One of whom gets Vance Astro in his ray-gun sight, but Martinex
uses his ability to focus energy through his crystalline body and melts the
ray-gun with a heat beam. Our new band of heroes reaches the tele-port
station, but where to go, with even Earth conquered? Vance Astro has heard
rumors that somewhere a "free colony" still exists, and he is determined to find
it. He wants to go to "New New York", the colony world that "took the
worst pasting from the Badoon," but which is also rumored to be where the "free
colony" started. The others are skeptical, but Astro declares, "My
friends-- I'm the OLD MAN here-- by about TEN CENTURIES! And I say we can
FIND the FREE COLONY!" And he leads the others in a rousing chorus of an
old "struggle song" from his own time, adapted to the new circumstances; "EARTH
SHALL OVERCOME! EARTH SHALL OVERCOME! EARTH SHALL OVERCOME--
SOMEDAY!"
Maybe so, but it would take a while. Though I recall that
I was intrigued by this story when I first read it, the Guardians of the Galaxy
didn't immediately win an ongoing series of their own. It wasn't until
1975 that they turned up again as guest stars in Steve Gerber's DEFENDERS, and
then got a series in MARVEL PRESENTS, initially written by Gerber. That
ended after a couple of years, and other than guest shots the Guardians didn't
show up again until they got a series starting in 1990 written by Jim
Valentino. But at that time I had largely abandoned Marvel comics, and I
never read that series at all. (Should I?)
As I watched the movie trailers I
wondered if the movie makers took nothing from the actual "Guardians of the
Galaxy" comic but the name, but I see by looking at the Grand Comicbook Database
that a 2013 revival of the Guardians title (which I didn't read and have no
great interest in reading) replaced the original lineup of Vance Astro,
Charlie-27, Martinex and Yondu with the characters who appear in the movie
such as Star-Lord, Drax, Gamora, Rocket Raccoon, etc. (But was the movie
already in the works by then, and did the new comic follow the movie script
rather than vice versa?)
To cover the rest of MSH #18 briefly; the
"Marvel Mailbag" lettercol is devoted to comments on the Phantom Eagle, the
double-identity World War I aviator-hero who appeared in MSH #16. All the
comments are complimentary, but the Eagle seems to have been the biggest flop of
any of the tryout features appearing in MSH. All of the rest turned up
somewhere again sooner or later, but I only recall one further appearance
of the Phantom Eagle, as a guest star in a HULK story involving time travel, and
he certainly never got a series of his own.
The rest of the issue is
devoted, as usual with MSH at this time, to superhero reprints from the 1940's
and 50's. A three=page segment of the "Adventures of Sub-Mariner When He
Was a Boy" from SUB-MARINER #36 (1954) depicts young Namor learning the
meaning of "Courage" as he fights a pack of wild dogs on an ice floe.
Otherwise, the reprint section is devoted to the second half of the All-Winners
Squad story (Timely/Marvel's shortlived JSA imitation) from ALL-WINNERS
#21. (The first half was reprinted in MSH #17, but I'm not digging that
issue out to review the story in detail. Per the GCD, the story is scripted by
Otto Binder, with various artists involved.) The Squad is battling a
time-traveling villain known as Future Man (and his femme-fatale assistant
charmingly named Madame Death) with each Squad member assigned to protect one
continent from Future Man's plots. Sub-Mariner prevents Future Man and his
allies, the "Pacific Pirates," from unleashing a tidal wave that will
devastate Asia. Miss America, the flying patriotic heroine, defends Egypt
and the continent of Africa from a horde of marauding mummies unleashed by
Future Man. The original Human Torch and kid sidekick Toro save North
America from being devastated by Future Man's "atomic fire," which can consume
anything, by discovering that it can be extinguished by its own ashes.
Finally, the team unites to stop Future Man from summoning a whole army from his
predatory future society to conquer the 20th century. (I'm surprised that,
with his continuity mania, Roy Thomas never retconned this story to establish
that Future Man was another incarnation of Kang.) Future Man flees to his
time machine to escape back to the future, and Captain America orders the other
heroes to let him go. It turns out that Cap has sabotaged the time machine
so it can no longer travel to the future; instead, Future Man and his assistant
are doomed to an endless trip into the distant past. "I don't think future
men will tackle the 20th century again, after one of their greatest scientists
failed to return! THE WORLD IS SAFE AGAIN! (caption) And the world
will ALWAYS be safe from any sinister plot, while the mighty All-Winners Squad
stands guard over it!" If that was so, then the world was soon in trouble again,
since the All-Winners Squad seemingly disbanded after that story.
Captain Marvel #5, "Mark of the Metazoid!"
MARVEL'S SPACE-BORN SUPERHERO! CAPTAIN MARVEL #5 (yes, this was the full,
official indicia title of the comic as well as the cover logo at this
point. Did somebody fear that simply titling the comic CAPTAIN MARVEL
might lead to legal objections from previous owners of the name?); September
1968; Marvel Comics Group; Stan Lee, editor; featuring "The Mark of the
Metazoid!", written by "Affable Arnold Drake" and pencilled by "Demure Don Heck"
with inks by John Tartaglione and lettering by Artie Simek. On the cover,
the green and white clad spaceman whose true name and rank is Captain Mar-Vell,
is struggling to escape the gooey grasp of a creature who appears to be a
blue-black alien version of Plastic Man or Mr. Fantastic, or maybe Gumby.
Review by Boisterous, or maybe Bumbling, Bill Henley
The original
Captain Marvel was one of the greatest costumed superheroes of the 1940's, but
he wasn't published by Martin Goodman's company which off and on called itself
"Marvel Comics". The actual character of Captain Marvel was driven off the
stands by DC's lawsuit in 1954, but the name and trademark remained up for grabs
and a fly by night company named MF Enterprises used the name briefly in 1966-67
for an android character who could split into pieces. (I've never read those MF
Capt. Marvel comics, but by all accounts they were god-awful, though one account
calls them a "camp classic".) Once Martin Goodman found out the Captain
Marvel name/trademark was available again, he decided that if anybody was going
to publish Captain Marvel it should be Marvel Comcs. He grabbed the rights
to the name from the defunct MF and insisted that Stan Lee create a new
character to go with the name. And so, the "space-born superhero" with a
famous name debuted in MARVEL SUPER-HEROES during its tryout-comic phase and
then moved immediately into his own monthly title.
But though the very
busy Stan Lee worked with one of his best "second wave" artists, Gene Colan, to
create the new Captain, it seemed as if Stan didn't have the time or interest to
put very much thought into the project and create a character memorable enough
to match the name. Captain Mar-Vell was a humanoid alien belonging to the
Kree, an alien race that had recently been introduced in a Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC
FOUR story. The Kree were interested in conquering Earth, and Mar-Vell was
part of an advance team sent to scout out the planet. But he was
sympathetic to the Earth-humans, and besides he and the commander of the Kree
expedition, Yon-Rogg, hated each other. So Mar-Vell began trying to
sabotage Yon-Rogg's efforts to lay the groundwork for a Kree takeover. And
when he was seen flying around in his jet-equipped, green and white spacesuit
with a ringed-planet emblem, Earthmen took him for a new costumed superhero
called "Captain Marvel". He also acquired a human secret identity by
adopting the guise of Walter Lawson, a deceased Earth scientist.
Stan Lee
only scripted the first CM story in MARVEL SUPER-HEROES and then left the series
to his right-hand man, Roy Thomas, who worked with Colan on the second MSH
tryout issue and the ensuing series. As a teenage Marvelite I was excited
to see Marvel introduce a new hero and willingly bought the new title. But when
I picked up issue #5 I was somewhat surprised to see a whole new set of names in
the credit box. Thomas and Colan were both gone. The writer was
Arnold Drake, a name then unfamiliar to me (I didn't realize that he had been a
DC mainstay for years and had written DOOM PATROL, a comic I liked before
converting to an exclusive Marvel acolyte). The artist was Don Heck, whose
name and work was certainly familiar to me as a Marvel fan. But though
both men were highly talented, Stan seems to have viewed both of them at this
point as second or third string talents to be assigned to less important, poorer
selling Marvel titles. Though Marvel hype insisted that the "Space-Born
Superhero" was a huge hit like everything else Marvel produced, it looks like
early sales suggested the new Captain Marvel was not going to be a big success
and so was not worthy of retaining top-line talent like Thomas and Colan.
(Incidentally, the "Marvel's Space-Born Superhero" tag was removed from the
cover logo with issue #6 and from the indicia title with #7. Martin
Goodman was notoriously leery of sci-fi characters, and maybe he decided the
"Space-Born" tag was hurting the character?)
Anyway, the splash
page depicts a scene from the previous issue in which Mar-Vell slugged it out
with Prince Namor-, the Sub-Mariner. "Why are the sensational Sub-Mariner
and our ALIEN ANTI-HERO still locked in heated conflict, even though the fight
ended LAST ISH?" asks the caption. It turns out that this is a video
recording being viewed by Yon-Rogg and the other crew members of the Kree
expedition-- and its purpose, as far as Yon-Rogg is concerned, is to provide
evidence proving that Captain Mar-Vell is a traitor to the Kree! Some of
the Kree are inclined to give Mar-Vell the benefit of the doubt, assuming that
Mar-Vell was simply overwhelmed by the superior power of the Sub-Mariner.
(At this point our "alien anti-hero" really didn't have much in the way of
special abilities besides the protection and flight ability provided by his
spacesuit uniform, and a vaguely defined degree of super-strength compared to
Earthmen..) But the yucky Yon-Rogg contends (more or less correctly, as it
happens) that Mar-Vell was consciously plotting to "trample upon his allegiance
to our far-flung galactic EMPIRE!" He wants Ronan the Accuser, the one-man
Kree kangaroo court (who was earlier defeated by the FF) to declare Mar-Vell
guilty of the ultimate crime of being "un-Kree!" In the privacy of his own
thoughts, Mar-Vell acknowledges that he did indeed , amidst the battle with
Namor, destroy the experimental germ-warfare bomb he was assigned to plant in
Earth's ocean. Asked for her own judgment, Una, the female Kree
medic who is Mar-Vell's true love, gives a spirited defense of his innocence and
heroic service to the Kree cause. But Yon-Rogg is not displeased, since he
figures that Una's obvious affection for Mar-Vell will taint her testimony and
eliminate her as a credible defense witness in Ronan's eyes.
But Ronan
decides that Mar-Vell's previous record of loyal service outweighs, for now, the
"anger and concern" elicited by some of his recent suspicious actions. To
the frustration of Yon-Rogg and the temporary relief of Mar-Vell and Una, Ronan
"decides not to decide", putting off a final verdict and commanding Mar-Vell to
prove his loyalty by his "future actions". One of the actions required of
him will be to eliminate the threat of a hospitalized, coma-bound Earthman named
Jeffrey Logan who may have learned of Mar-Vell's alien origins in a previous
story. Mar-Vell manages to convince Ronan that, rather than simply killing
the human, it will attract less dangerous attention to employ a Kree "mind
eraser". And so, Mar-Vell takes off from the orbiting Kree spaceship to
return to Earth. "Once more into the void of space Capt. Mar-Vell
hurtles-- equipped with every protective device of the supreme science and
technology of Kree-- but ALONE and UNWANTED on the world he may one day be
ordered to DESTROY! For nothing can protect him from the carbon wheel of
LONELINESS that may grind even a steely KREE soul into dryest DUST!" (I
noticed quickly when Arnold Drake started writing for Marvel that much of his
dialogue and captions had a deep-purple tinge that wasn't so much present in the
more familiar scripting of Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. As a teenage fan at
the time, though, I kind of liked this.)
Meanwhile, somewhere
under Earth's sea, a submarine belonging to an unidentified foreign power
(probably Soviet Russia, but by this time Marvel was more disinclined to use
explicitly Communist villains than it had been a few years earlier) releases a
new weapon intended to threaten the U.S. and its space effort centered at "The
Cape". The weapon is not a torpedo or missile, but a living, vaguely
humanoid creature; "Now, there stalks, the METAZOID!" The creature
ruefully reflects (in more of Drake's purple prose), "Here walks the most
MISERABLE of living beings! Neither man nor beast, I live only to do the
bidding of those who MADE me thus! For once done, I am promised LIBERATION
from this ugly guise-- and the return of my OWN face and form! But is the EVIL I
must now perform an honorable price for some selfish share of
happiness?" It seems this creature was once a man found guilty by
some Eastern nation of "anti-state activity" and offered the chance to redeem
himself by volunteering for an experimental treatment to adapt his body
chemistry for survival "on the alien conditions of almost ANY PLANET! And
if we FAIL, we have lost nothing but a CONVICTED TRAITOR!" The experiment
quickly goes out of control, but the result, though not exactly what the enemy
scientists had in mind, isn't displeasing to them. The hapless convict is
turned into a massive, blue-skinned humanoid being with "the metabolism of 50
men" and "strength and survival factors (that are) equally phenomenal!"
The creature (it's not clear where exactly he gets the moniker "Metazoid") is
informed that he has been inducted into his nation's "glorious army," and that
his first mission, rather than exploring a new planet, will be "the capturing of
a leading U.S. missile expert!" And the expert they want is none other
than Dr. Walter Lawson, the man who is actually dead but whose identity is
serving as a refuge for Captain Mar-Vell of the Kree! And so, the Metazoid
crawls ashore near The Cape and cold-cocks a US Army sentry, while engaging in
more guilt-ridden, masochistic musings; "What CRIMES will a man not condone--
what PUTRID ACTS will he not embrace-- what NAKED TERROR will he not blind
himself to-- in order that he may gain some TWISTED shadow of personal--
FREEDOM!"
And meanwhile, his target, "Dr. Walter Lawson," is also
the target of a pointed interrogation by The Cape's security chief, Carol
Danvers. (Some time later, her association with Captain Mar-Vell would
lead to her gaining the Kree-based super-powers and the name of Ms.
Marvel. She would later be known by other names such as Binary and
Warbird, and, the last I heard, has herself inherited the name of Captain
Marvel, which Marvel Comics is determined not to surrender even if it can't
settle on a character to bear the name.) Carol wants to know why Walter
Lawson's personal file is bare of any previous photographs of him! The
true reason is that Mar-Vell destroyed the photos when he took over the identity
of the dead Lawson-- apparently the real Lawson didn't actually look like the
white-haired Mar-Vell. "Lawson" manages to evade her questions by saying
that he is "a missile expert, not a photographic model" and hinting that Carol's
suspicions of him are a symptom of insecurity because of her status as a woman
in what is normally a man's profession. (But you'd think
that a real security expert, male or female and even in an era long before the
Internet, would have means to seek out previous photographic records of Lawson
besides whatever was in his employment file.)
"Walter Lawson" sets
out, riding in a taxicab driven by a friendly fellow named Chester, for the
local county hospital where he intends to use the Kree "mind eraser" on the
hotel clerk who in an earlier issue may have learned about "Captain Marvel's"
alien origin. Though the eraser is untested on humans, Mar-Vell hopes it
will do the man no harm other than a "disturbing feeling one has lost a piece of
the past". But he is being stalked by the mutated Metazoid, who somehow
manages to jump on top of the taxicab and ride along without Mar-Vell, Chester
or anyone else hearing or noticing. The remarkably unobservant locals also
don't pay attention when the Metazoid crashes through a hospital wall to
confront "Lawson" and demand that he accompany the creature. "Lawson" has
his own reasons for wanting to avoid attention, but "if Walter Lawson,
scientist, can NOT fight-- Captain Marvel, super-hero of Earth, CAN!"
"Lawson" makes a seemingly suicidal leap away from the Metazoid, and before it
can pursue, the creature is accosted by hospital guards who have finally noticed
the strange goings-on and aren't sure whether they are fighting a "nutty lab
animal" or an "escaped hallucination from the alcoholic ward"! The
Metazoid brushes aside the guards, only to be attacked by the green and white
clad apparition calling himself "Captain Marvel". Mar-Vell is baffled by
his opponent, since Kree researches on Earth indicate that creatures with such
strength "ought to have died with Earth's prehistoric eras!" Nonetheless,
our quasi-hero expects his own enhanced Kree strength to win the day, but
discovers an annoying attribute of his foe; "My fists-- they STICK to this beast
as to wet DOUGH! I cannot FREE myself! What MADNESS is this?"
Even if he doesn't like his new form, the Metazoid is convinced that his
stick-to-it-iveness and other exceptional abilities will inevitably defeat this
costumed upstart, freeing him to continue seeking out his prey "Walter
Lawson". Mar-Vell makes a jet-powered leap into the sky, hoping to defeat
his enemy by an aerial assault, but the Metazoid hangs on like a limpet and
batters at his foe. And overhead, Yon-Rogg watches on a viewscreen and
roots for the Metazoid, hoping that the creature will eliminate his arch-rival
once and for all!
The Metazoid's super-strength and unbreakable grip are
indeed more than a match for Mar-Vell's Kree abilities and
weaponry. Mar-Vell bitterly reflects that after being sent to
"subvert the growing scientific and military power of an advanced people," he
appears to be doomed by "a monstrous brute that has barely stepped from the dark
cave of evolution!" (He doesn't realize that the Metazoid is actually a
product, however inadvertent, of human "scientific and military power".)
Perhaps, thinks Mar-Vell, "Yon-Rogg will strike a medal for this beast-- my
ASSASSIN!" He also doesn't realize that the only reason he is not
already dead is the inner humanity of the creature he battles, who doesn't want
to be an "assassin" even though that appears to be the only way to accomplish
his mission and win his outward humanity back.
Mar-Vell's
jet-powered suit is unable to hold the weight of both himself and the Metazoid
aloft, and both crash back to Earth. When they land in such a way that the
Metazoid's body cushions the fall enough for Mar-Vell to survive, our hero
begins to get a glimmer that maybe his foe isn't a primitive bent on his death
after all. But both of them still have missions they must fulfill, at
whatever cost to the other! And now, suddenly, Mar-Vell has an idea how to
defeat his foe. He lures the Metazoid into the hospital's radiology lab,
where he bombards the Metazoid with radition from an X-ray device. The
Kree warrior has recalled another foe once battled by the Kree, the "Vintar of
Galaxy-7". These alien beings were of "a non-finite cell structure" that
"nothing could penetrate or destroy". But at the last minute, the Kree
space fleet tried attacking the Vintar army with "giant X-ray cannons" and
discovered that that one form of radiation was the only thing that could cause
this enemy to "crumble". And so it is with the Metazoid, whom
Mar-Vell quickly discovers is not only defeated but dead! (Though one
might wonder how he can be so sure that such a bizarre life-form is actually
dead. I don't recall the Metazoid ever reappearing, though.)
Regretfully, Mar-Vell suspects the truth about his foe; "Could it be that IT,
like CAPTAIN MAR-VELL, was on some grim and ghastly mission at which its SOUL
rebelled? Was it.. or HE... a mere PAWN in some larger, deadlier game-- a
victim of men MORE ruthless but LESS courageous than he?" You got it, Marv, but
you'll never know for sure, as you still have to complete your mission of
insuring that the "mind erasure" on the human Jeremy Logan has succeeded.
As he confirms that the eraser has done its job without harming the patient,
hospital orderlies burst in and demand to know what he-- viewed by many as a new
superhero but nonetheless sought by the police-- is doing there. "I was
merely checking this man's BLUE CROSS coverage, Doctor! My apologies to
the police, but tell them CAPTAIN MARVEL had no time to WASTE!" As the
doctors check on Logan and find him awakening from his coma, albeit without some
of his memories, Mar-Vell rockets back into the sky, headed for the Kree
ship. As an image of the tragic and tortured Metazoid appears behind him
in the clouds, Mar-Vell wonders if he really is guilty of the treason of which
the evil Yon-Rogg accuses him. "Will you let a few brief moments on the
soil of an alien world rob you of your PROUD identity? You are MAN
OF THE KREE-- and THAT you must never FORGET!" And the final caption warns
him to "beware the rising TIDE of understanding and sympathy for your
ENEMY-BY-EDICT! For in those surging waters, you yourself may well be
DROWNED--!!"
Mar--Vell's position as an alien agent with divided
loyalties indeed put him in a tough position-- and not one that writers (Drake
remained on the strip through issue #12 and then was replaced by another Marvel
second-stringer, Gary Friedrich, for #13-15) could maintain indefinitely.
Eventually in issue #11, Yon-Rogg got the goods on Mar-Vell and put him before a
Kree firing squad, but our hero was (supposedly) rescued by a super-alien named
Zo who offered Mar-Vell greatly increased super-powers and revenge on Yon-Rogg
in return for becoming his servant. Then Zo turned out to be a "humbug"
(read his name backwards) and with CM #17, the book was taken over by Roy Thomas
and Gil Kane, as it was evidently decided to try to salvage the strip with a
return of first-line talent and a completely revised premise. That was
when Mar-Vell-- gifted with a new, primarily red costume-- was exiled in the
Negative Zone and empowered to return to Earth temporarily by changing places
with perennial teen sidekick Rick Jones. (All of which gave him a certain
slightly suspicious resemblance to the original Captain Marvel, with his red
costume and juvenile alter ego.) That version was cancelled after
three issues, briefly revived and cancelled again after two more-- then revived
again to feature early work by artist/plotter Jim Starlin. Eventually Starlin,
who had sort of a death fixation, killed off Mar-Vell by the mundane means of
cancer, in the noted "Death of Captain Marvel" graphic novel. Through it all,
though-- at least in my present-day opinion-- Captain Mar-Vell himself never
really became an interesting character in his own right worthy of carrying on a
famous name. Meanwhile, DC revived the real Captain Marvel under the
SHAZAM! logo, but Marvel stubbornly hung on to the Captain Marvel trademark and
has applied the name to one character after another without any of them finding
great success (though I liked the African-American energy powered heroine who
was part of Roger Stern's AVENGERS run in the 80's).
official indicia title of the comic as well as the cover logo at this
point. Did somebody fear that simply titling the comic CAPTAIN MARVEL
might lead to legal objections from previous owners of the name?); September
1968; Marvel Comics Group; Stan Lee, editor; featuring "The Mark of the
Metazoid!", written by "Affable Arnold Drake" and pencilled by "Demure Don Heck"
with inks by John Tartaglione and lettering by Artie Simek. On the cover,
the green and white clad spaceman whose true name and rank is Captain Mar-Vell,
is struggling to escape the gooey grasp of a creature who appears to be a
blue-black alien version of Plastic Man or Mr. Fantastic, or maybe Gumby.
Review by Boisterous, or maybe Bumbling, Bill Henley
The original
Captain Marvel was one of the greatest costumed superheroes of the 1940's, but
he wasn't published by Martin Goodman's company which off and on called itself
"Marvel Comics". The actual character of Captain Marvel was driven off the
stands by DC's lawsuit in 1954, but the name and trademark remained up for grabs
and a fly by night company named MF Enterprises used the name briefly in 1966-67
for an android character who could split into pieces. (I've never read those MF
Capt. Marvel comics, but by all accounts they were god-awful, though one account
calls them a "camp classic".) Once Martin Goodman found out the Captain
Marvel name/trademark was available again, he decided that if anybody was going
to publish Captain Marvel it should be Marvel Comcs. He grabbed the rights
to the name from the defunct MF and insisted that Stan Lee create a new
character to go with the name. And so, the "space-born superhero" with a
famous name debuted in MARVEL SUPER-HEROES during its tryout-comic phase and
then moved immediately into his own monthly title.
But though the very
busy Stan Lee worked with one of his best "second wave" artists, Gene Colan, to
create the new Captain, it seemed as if Stan didn't have the time or interest to
put very much thought into the project and create a character memorable enough
to match the name. Captain Mar-Vell was a humanoid alien belonging to the
Kree, an alien race that had recently been introduced in a Lee/Kirby FANTASTIC
FOUR story. The Kree were interested in conquering Earth, and Mar-Vell was
part of an advance team sent to scout out the planet. But he was
sympathetic to the Earth-humans, and besides he and the commander of the Kree
expedition, Yon-Rogg, hated each other. So Mar-Vell began trying to
sabotage Yon-Rogg's efforts to lay the groundwork for a Kree takeover. And
when he was seen flying around in his jet-equipped, green and white spacesuit
with a ringed-planet emblem, Earthmen took him for a new costumed superhero
called "Captain Marvel". He also acquired a human secret identity by
adopting the guise of Walter Lawson, a deceased Earth scientist.
Stan Lee
only scripted the first CM story in MARVEL SUPER-HEROES and then left the series
to his right-hand man, Roy Thomas, who worked with Colan on the second MSH
tryout issue and the ensuing series. As a teenage Marvelite I was excited
to see Marvel introduce a new hero and willingly bought the new title. But when
I picked up issue #5 I was somewhat surprised to see a whole new set of names in
the credit box. Thomas and Colan were both gone. The writer was
Arnold Drake, a name then unfamiliar to me (I didn't realize that he had been a
DC mainstay for years and had written DOOM PATROL, a comic I liked before
converting to an exclusive Marvel acolyte). The artist was Don Heck, whose
name and work was certainly familiar to me as a Marvel fan. But though
both men were highly talented, Stan seems to have viewed both of them at this
point as second or third string talents to be assigned to less important, poorer
selling Marvel titles. Though Marvel hype insisted that the "Space-Born
Superhero" was a huge hit like everything else Marvel produced, it looks like
early sales suggested the new Captain Marvel was not going to be a big success
and so was not worthy of retaining top-line talent like Thomas and Colan.
(Incidentally, the "Marvel's Space-Born Superhero" tag was removed from the
cover logo with issue #6 and from the indicia title with #7. Martin
Goodman was notoriously leery of sci-fi characters, and maybe he decided the
"Space-Born" tag was hurting the character?)
Anyway, the splash
page depicts a scene from the previous issue in which Mar-Vell slugged it out
with Prince Namor-, the Sub-Mariner. "Why are the sensational Sub-Mariner
and our ALIEN ANTI-HERO still locked in heated conflict, even though the fight
ended LAST ISH?" asks the caption. It turns out that this is a video
recording being viewed by Yon-Rogg and the other crew members of the Kree
expedition-- and its purpose, as far as Yon-Rogg is concerned, is to provide
evidence proving that Captain Mar-Vell is a traitor to the Kree! Some of
the Kree are inclined to give Mar-Vell the benefit of the doubt, assuming that
Mar-Vell was simply overwhelmed by the superior power of the Sub-Mariner.
(At this point our "alien anti-hero" really didn't have much in the way of
special abilities besides the protection and flight ability provided by his
spacesuit uniform, and a vaguely defined degree of super-strength compared to
Earthmen..) But the yucky Yon-Rogg contends (more or less correctly, as it
happens) that Mar-Vell was consciously plotting to "trample upon his allegiance
to our far-flung galactic EMPIRE!" He wants Ronan the Accuser, the one-man
Kree kangaroo court (who was earlier defeated by the FF) to declare Mar-Vell
guilty of the ultimate crime of being "un-Kree!" In the privacy of his own
thoughts, Mar-Vell acknowledges that he did indeed , amidst the battle with
Namor, destroy the experimental germ-warfare bomb he was assigned to plant in
Earth's ocean. Asked for her own judgment, Una, the female Kree
medic who is Mar-Vell's true love, gives a spirited defense of his innocence and
heroic service to the Kree cause. But Yon-Rogg is not displeased, since he
figures that Una's obvious affection for Mar-Vell will taint her testimony and
eliminate her as a credible defense witness in Ronan's eyes.
But Ronan
decides that Mar-Vell's previous record of loyal service outweighs, for now, the
"anger and concern" elicited by some of his recent suspicious actions. To
the frustration of Yon-Rogg and the temporary relief of Mar-Vell and Una, Ronan
"decides not to decide", putting off a final verdict and commanding Mar-Vell to
prove his loyalty by his "future actions". One of the actions required of
him will be to eliminate the threat of a hospitalized, coma-bound Earthman named
Jeffrey Logan who may have learned of Mar-Vell's alien origins in a previous
story. Mar-Vell manages to convince Ronan that, rather than simply killing
the human, it will attract less dangerous attention to employ a Kree "mind
eraser". And so, Mar-Vell takes off from the orbiting Kree spaceship to
return to Earth. "Once more into the void of space Capt. Mar-Vell
hurtles-- equipped with every protective device of the supreme science and
technology of Kree-- but ALONE and UNWANTED on the world he may one day be
ordered to DESTROY! For nothing can protect him from the carbon wheel of
LONELINESS that may grind even a steely KREE soul into dryest DUST!" (I
noticed quickly when Arnold Drake started writing for Marvel that much of his
dialogue and captions had a deep-purple tinge that wasn't so much present in the
more familiar scripting of Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. As a teenage fan at
the time, though, I kind of liked this.)
Meanwhile, somewhere
under Earth's sea, a submarine belonging to an unidentified foreign power
(probably Soviet Russia, but by this time Marvel was more disinclined to use
explicitly Communist villains than it had been a few years earlier) releases a
new weapon intended to threaten the U.S. and its space effort centered at "The
Cape". The weapon is not a torpedo or missile, but a living, vaguely
humanoid creature; "Now, there stalks, the METAZOID!" The creature
ruefully reflects (in more of Drake's purple prose), "Here walks the most
MISERABLE of living beings! Neither man nor beast, I live only to do the
bidding of those who MADE me thus! For once done, I am promised LIBERATION
from this ugly guise-- and the return of my OWN face and form! But is the EVIL I
must now perform an honorable price for some selfish share of
happiness?" It seems this creature was once a man found guilty by
some Eastern nation of "anti-state activity" and offered the chance to redeem
himself by volunteering for an experimental treatment to adapt his body
chemistry for survival "on the alien conditions of almost ANY PLANET! And
if we FAIL, we have lost nothing but a CONVICTED TRAITOR!" The experiment
quickly goes out of control, but the result, though not exactly what the enemy
scientists had in mind, isn't displeasing to them. The hapless convict is
turned into a massive, blue-skinned humanoid being with "the metabolism of 50
men" and "strength and survival factors (that are) equally phenomenal!"
The creature (it's not clear where exactly he gets the moniker "Metazoid") is
informed that he has been inducted into his nation's "glorious army," and that
his first mission, rather than exploring a new planet, will be "the capturing of
a leading U.S. missile expert!" And the expert they want is none other
than Dr. Walter Lawson, the man who is actually dead but whose identity is
serving as a refuge for Captain Mar-Vell of the Kree! And so, the Metazoid
crawls ashore near The Cape and cold-cocks a US Army sentry, while engaging in
more guilt-ridden, masochistic musings; "What CRIMES will a man not condone--
what PUTRID ACTS will he not embrace-- what NAKED TERROR will he not blind
himself to-- in order that he may gain some TWISTED shadow of personal--
FREEDOM!"
And meanwhile, his target, "Dr. Walter Lawson," is also
the target of a pointed interrogation by The Cape's security chief, Carol
Danvers. (Some time later, her association with Captain Mar-Vell would
lead to her gaining the Kree-based super-powers and the name of Ms.
Marvel. She would later be known by other names such as Binary and
Warbird, and, the last I heard, has herself inherited the name of Captain
Marvel, which Marvel Comics is determined not to surrender even if it can't
settle on a character to bear the name.) Carol wants to know why Walter
Lawson's personal file is bare of any previous photographs of him! The
true reason is that Mar-Vell destroyed the photos when he took over the identity
of the dead Lawson-- apparently the real Lawson didn't actually look like the
white-haired Mar-Vell. "Lawson" manages to evade her questions by saying
that he is "a missile expert, not a photographic model" and hinting that Carol's
suspicions of him are a symptom of insecurity because of her status as a woman
in what is normally a man's profession. (But you'd think
that a real security expert, male or female and even in an era long before the
Internet, would have means to seek out previous photographic records of Lawson
besides whatever was in his employment file.)
"Walter Lawson" sets
out, riding in a taxicab driven by a friendly fellow named Chester, for the
local county hospital where he intends to use the Kree "mind eraser" on the
hotel clerk who in an earlier issue may have learned about "Captain Marvel's"
alien origin. Though the eraser is untested on humans, Mar-Vell hopes it
will do the man no harm other than a "disturbing feeling one has lost a piece of
the past". But he is being stalked by the mutated Metazoid, who somehow
manages to jump on top of the taxicab and ride along without Mar-Vell, Chester
or anyone else hearing or noticing. The remarkably unobservant locals also
don't pay attention when the Metazoid crashes through a hospital wall to
confront "Lawson" and demand that he accompany the creature. "Lawson" has
his own reasons for wanting to avoid attention, but "if Walter Lawson,
scientist, can NOT fight-- Captain Marvel, super-hero of Earth, CAN!"
"Lawson" makes a seemingly suicidal leap away from the Metazoid, and before it
can pursue, the creature is accosted by hospital guards who have finally noticed
the strange goings-on and aren't sure whether they are fighting a "nutty lab
animal" or an "escaped hallucination from the alcoholic ward"! The
Metazoid brushes aside the guards, only to be attacked by the green and white
clad apparition calling himself "Captain Marvel". Mar-Vell is baffled by
his opponent, since Kree researches on Earth indicate that creatures with such
strength "ought to have died with Earth's prehistoric eras!" Nonetheless,
our quasi-hero expects his own enhanced Kree strength to win the day, but
discovers an annoying attribute of his foe; "My fists-- they STICK to this beast
as to wet DOUGH! I cannot FREE myself! What MADNESS is this?"
Even if he doesn't like his new form, the Metazoid is convinced that his
stick-to-it-iveness and other exceptional abilities will inevitably defeat this
costumed upstart, freeing him to continue seeking out his prey "Walter
Lawson". Mar-Vell makes a jet-powered leap into the sky, hoping to defeat
his enemy by an aerial assault, but the Metazoid hangs on like a limpet and
batters at his foe. And overhead, Yon-Rogg watches on a viewscreen and
roots for the Metazoid, hoping that the creature will eliminate his arch-rival
once and for all!
The Metazoid's super-strength and unbreakable grip are
indeed more than a match for Mar-Vell's Kree abilities and
weaponry. Mar-Vell bitterly reflects that after being sent to
"subvert the growing scientific and military power of an advanced people," he
appears to be doomed by "a monstrous brute that has barely stepped from the dark
cave of evolution!" (He doesn't realize that the Metazoid is actually a
product, however inadvertent, of human "scientific and military power".)
Perhaps, thinks Mar-Vell, "Yon-Rogg will strike a medal for this beast-- my
ASSASSIN!" He also doesn't realize that the only reason he is not
already dead is the inner humanity of the creature he battles, who doesn't want
to be an "assassin" even though that appears to be the only way to accomplish
his mission and win his outward humanity back.
Mar-Vell's
jet-powered suit is unable to hold the weight of both himself and the Metazoid
aloft, and both crash back to Earth. When they land in such a way that the
Metazoid's body cushions the fall enough for Mar-Vell to survive, our hero
begins to get a glimmer that maybe his foe isn't a primitive bent on his death
after all. But both of them still have missions they must fulfill, at
whatever cost to the other! And now, suddenly, Mar-Vell has an idea how to
defeat his foe. He lures the Metazoid into the hospital's radiology lab,
where he bombards the Metazoid with radition from an X-ray device. The
Kree warrior has recalled another foe once battled by the Kree, the "Vintar of
Galaxy-7". These alien beings were of "a non-finite cell structure" that
"nothing could penetrate or destroy". But at the last minute, the Kree
space fleet tried attacking the Vintar army with "giant X-ray cannons" and
discovered that that one form of radiation was the only thing that could cause
this enemy to "crumble". And so it is with the Metazoid, whom
Mar-Vell quickly discovers is not only defeated but dead! (Though one
might wonder how he can be so sure that such a bizarre life-form is actually
dead. I don't recall the Metazoid ever reappearing, though.)
Regretfully, Mar-Vell suspects the truth about his foe; "Could it be that IT,
like CAPTAIN MAR-VELL, was on some grim and ghastly mission at which its SOUL
rebelled? Was it.. or HE... a mere PAWN in some larger, deadlier game-- a
victim of men MORE ruthless but LESS courageous than he?" You got it, Marv, but
you'll never know for sure, as you still have to complete your mission of
insuring that the "mind erasure" on the human Jeremy Logan has succeeded.
As he confirms that the eraser has done its job without harming the patient,
hospital orderlies burst in and demand to know what he-- viewed by many as a new
superhero but nonetheless sought by the police-- is doing there. "I was
merely checking this man's BLUE CROSS coverage, Doctor! My apologies to
the police, but tell them CAPTAIN MARVEL had no time to WASTE!" As the
doctors check on Logan and find him awakening from his coma, albeit without some
of his memories, Mar-Vell rockets back into the sky, headed for the Kree
ship. As an image of the tragic and tortured Metazoid appears behind him
in the clouds, Mar-Vell wonders if he really is guilty of the treason of which
the evil Yon-Rogg accuses him. "Will you let a few brief moments on the
soil of an alien world rob you of your PROUD identity? You are MAN
OF THE KREE-- and THAT you must never FORGET!" And the final caption warns
him to "beware the rising TIDE of understanding and sympathy for your
ENEMY-BY-EDICT! For in those surging waters, you yourself may well be
DROWNED--!!"
Mar--Vell's position as an alien agent with divided
loyalties indeed put him in a tough position-- and not one that writers (Drake
remained on the strip through issue #12 and then was replaced by another Marvel
second-stringer, Gary Friedrich, for #13-15) could maintain indefinitely.
Eventually in issue #11, Yon-Rogg got the goods on Mar-Vell and put him before a
Kree firing squad, but our hero was (supposedly) rescued by a super-alien named
Zo who offered Mar-Vell greatly increased super-powers and revenge on Yon-Rogg
in return for becoming his servant. Then Zo turned out to be a "humbug"
(read his name backwards) and with CM #17, the book was taken over by Roy Thomas
and Gil Kane, as it was evidently decided to try to salvage the strip with a
return of first-line talent and a completely revised premise. That was
when Mar-Vell-- gifted with a new, primarily red costume-- was exiled in the
Negative Zone and empowered to return to Earth temporarily by changing places
with perennial teen sidekick Rick Jones. (All of which gave him a certain
slightly suspicious resemblance to the original Captain Marvel, with his red
costume and juvenile alter ego.) That version was cancelled after
three issues, briefly revived and cancelled again after two more-- then revived
again to feature early work by artist/plotter Jim Starlin. Eventually Starlin,
who had sort of a death fixation, killed off Mar-Vell by the mundane means of
cancer, in the noted "Death of Captain Marvel" graphic novel. Through it all,
though-- at least in my present-day opinion-- Captain Mar-Vell himself never
really became an interesting character in his own right worthy of carrying on a
famous name. Meanwhile, DC revived the real Captain Marvel under the
SHAZAM! logo, but Marvel stubbornly hung on to the Captain Marvel trademark and
has applied the name to one character after another without any of them finding
great success (though I liked the African-American energy powered heroine who
was part of Roger Stern's AVENGERS run in the 80's).
Doom Patrol #117, "The Black Vulture!"
DOOM PATROL #117; February 1968; DC Comics (National Periodical
Publications). The cover scene (drawn, like several late DP issues, by Bob
Brown rather than interior artist Bruno Premiani) is dominated by the figure of
the wheelchair-bound Chief cowering away from the talons of a giant bird of
prey, while, in the far lower corner of the cover the three core DP members are
walking away; "You wanted to run the whole show, Chief? Okay, the DP is
finished-- and you're on your own!" Caption: "The DP has flown! The
Chief is alone in the nest! And circling above, waiting for the kill, is--
THE BLACK VULTURE!"
Review by Bill Henley
My last couple of
reviews have been of stories scripted by Arnold Drake during his brief stint at
Marvel in 1968-69. I thought I'd do another review of a Drake story but
move backwards a bit to cover one of the later issues of the best-remembered
series Drake wrote for DC, the Doom Patrol. In my opinion, though nearly
every installment of the original Doom Patrol was produced by the same team of
writer Drake and artist Premiani, the DP series went through three distinct
phases of quality. From its debut in MY GREATEST ADVENTURE #80 through
roughly DP #98 (the DP title took over the numbering of MGA) DP was a pretty
serious and well-crafted series combining elements of traditional Silver Age DC
storytelling with the new Marvel approach. Starting around issue #99, the
series adopted more of an over-the-top "camp" approach marked by the
introduction of often goofy teen character Beast Boy, lots more jokes and
wisecracks, and more ludicrously bizarre villains. Then starting around
issue #113 or so, with "camp" wearing thin in the comics world at large, an
attempt was made to rein in the silliness and revert to the earlier, more
serious approach. The attempt wasn't totally successful, but did produce
some more readable stories until the team and the series came to an end with
issue #121.
The splash panel is another scene of the Chief cringing from
an avian adversary, but here we see that the "Black Vulture" is not a real bird
but a man in a somewhat silly-looking but nonetheless flight-capable bird
suit. "You're alone now! And you're not The Chief any more!
Just Niles Caulder, a lonely man in a wheel chair! This is the
moment I've waited for! The moment of THE VULTURE'S REVENGE!" And a
caption tells us, "The word spread like fire throughout the city! THE DOOM
PATROL IS FINISHED! Broken beyond repair-- like Humpty Dumpty or a
two-dollar watch! And as the fabulous freaks fled from their nest, a dark
shadow settled over the remaining figure, The Chief! It was the shadow of
Death, but it flew upon the wings of THE BLACK VULTURE!" (I commented in
my last review of CAPTAIN MARVEL #5 that Drake showed in his writing for Marvel
a tendency toward overwrought, purple prose. That tendency is also present
here, though executed in a slangier manner.) Traces of the camp element
are still present as the first story panel is of a hand offering the reader a
crying towel (marked "New York Mets," during a period when that team was the
doormat of baseball) if he missed "the last sensational issue". A page
worth of synopsis tells us that The Chief, attracted to Madame Rouge, the female
member of the DP's archfoes the Brotherhood of Evil, has been trying to reform
the Madame through the use of subliminal messaging. The attempt has
seemingly succeeded, as symbolized by the woman with the flexible body
fissioning into good and evil versions of herself and the good Rouge winning the
fight. But the disembodied Brain, leader of the Brotherhood, is not
dismayed, telling the gorilla Monsieur Mallah, Madame Rouge needs us more than
she knows! The evil which I carefully nurtured within her breast will not
remain asleep for long! She will return to our loving nest!"
Meanwhile, the inclusion of Madame Rouge in the "nest" of the Doom
Patrol is not doing wonders for the team's unit cohesion. The Chief and
the Madame are enjoying a peaceful and pleasant evening watching a roaring fire
together-- until they are disturbed by a loud banging on the door. It
turns out to be Robotman, who as a result of an otherwise undepicted
battle with "a maniac with an atomic ray," is hobbling around minus his right
arm and left leg. In time past, The Chief would presumably have dropped
what else he was doing to help effect repairs. but now he is so besotted
with Rouge's company that he just tells Robotman, "Please skip the gory
details! There's a torch and a soldering iron waiting for you
inside!" Then, when the energy-being Negative Man enters the room and
flies around trying to signal The Chief, our leader assumes that he's just
complaining because the kitchen is out of ham for his alter ego Larry Trainor's
nightly snack. ""Sorry N-Man, but there's loads of salami!" However,
when The Chief and Rouge themselves head for the kitchen to make some popcorn,
they find Larry there, nearly as battered and damaged as his metal
colleague. It seems that Negative Man went up solo against some enemies
who pinned his human body underneath a block of lead which kept Negative Man
from escaping. Then, when the energy man did manage to get through a crack
in the lead and flew back to DP headquarters to seek help, The Chief ignored
him. Finally, Neg Man managed to lift the lead block himself (or itself),
but The Chief takes the incident lightly; "See, you didn't need us after
all! You're getting to be very self-reliant!"
Some time, later, a
late-night phone call disturbs the rest of the remaining DP member, Elasti-Girl
(aka Rita Dayton nee Farr) and her spouse, Steve Dayton (aka Mento), "the
world's richest and angriest man". Dayton is even more upset when the call
leads Rita to jump out of bed to try to prevent "the end of the Doom
Patrol". "The sooner the better!", Dayton grumbles. "I never liked
having to borrow my wife from them-- like a book from the library!" Upon
reaching DP headquarters-- actually sooner, since she can "hear the shouting
from six blocks away"-- Rita finds that the team's usual bickering has reached
an unprecedented pitch. Larry declares that his gratitude for The Chief
helping put his life back together is exhausted, and if The Chief himself no
longer cares about the Doom Patrol, neither does he! Robotman blames
Madame Rouge and her distracting The Chief, suggesting that her appearance is
part of a Brotherhood of Evil plot to "bust us up1" The Chief himself is
offended by Cliff's verbal attack on Rouge. Rita tries to smooth things
over by reminding Cliff Steele how Niles Caulder saved his life by transplanting
his brain from a fatally injured body into a robot form, and how Larry was saved
from spending his life in a lead vault when The Chief found a way to enclose his
radioactive body in special bandages. And she reminds the group of their
importance not only in fighting evil but in providing inspiration to "freaks"
and "outcasts". "We gave some hope to every gimpy, hare-lipped, fat,
four-eyed kid in the world!" (Rita might want to ease off on the
self-righteousness, considering she is the only DP member who is neither
disfigured nor handicapped. And was Drake describing his readership in the
"gimpy, hare-lipped, fat, four-eyed kid" line? If so, I resent it. I
was never hare-lipped, anyway.) The Chief doesn't help the situation by
hurling insults at the "primitive minds" of the two malcontents, and declaring,
"Apparently they don't need me-- and I certainly don't need them!"
Cliff
and Larry are not mollified by any of Rita's attempts at peacemaking, and after
threatening to commit "assault and beardery" on the Chief, they walk off and
split up with perfunctory farewells-- "Been good to know you,
robot-boddy!" "So long, mummy-guy!", though clearly neither one has a clue
what to do with his life from here. Meanwhile, Rita, now highly irritated
herself, gets in a cat fight with Madame Rouge, who disdains the childish
behavior of the two former DP members. Rita may feel that way herself but
she's not inclined to take the supercilious attitude from the interloper Rouge,
and after The Chief tells both women to stop the "cheap melodramatics," both of
them walk out, leaving him alone. "This is insane! They're all
gone! They've all left me! I-- I-- I'm-- ALONE!" But not for
long, Chief, as the bird-costumed form of the Black Vulture (who earlier was on
hand to watch Robotman and Negative Man walk away) is lurking just outside the
window. And with a shrill "SCREEEEEE" whistle, the Vulture summons an
avian ally, a giant condor capable of carrying more than its own weight, to
crash through that window and seize The Chief! But though abandoned and
lonesome, Niles Caulder is not altogether despondent or helpless. He fires
a missile of some sort at the condor, but the bird grabs and lifts The Chief,
chair and all. But The Chief gets a death-grip on the condor's neck (hey,
Chief, you better watch out. Aren't condors an endangered species?)
declaring that "the power of that a man loses in his legs is transferred to his
arms (by) the law of natural compensation!" This sounds like shaky
biology, but anyway, as his chair crashes back to the ground, The Chief manages
to hurl the condor against the floor and break its neck.
But our
villain has more than one bird in the hand, as he sends a flock of hummingbirds,
capable of flying at 500 miles an hour and with poison-tipped beaks, to attack
The Chief-- whose chair, fortunately, is armed with a miniature rocket launcher
with electronic tracking equipment to stop the birds. And so, declaring
that "we shall waste no more time with these preliminary bouts, Dr.
Caulder," the costumed Black Vulture crashes into the room himself.
The Chief has no idea who this bird-brain is or why he is out to get him, but he
is prepared with another weapon from his chair, a sub-machine gun to kill the
Vulture before he can kill The Chief. (Apparently, when you're not only
not super-powered but handicapped, and the bad guy specifically theatens your
life, the normal superhero inhibitions against killing a foe can be put
aside.) Unfortunately, "The gun jammed! I'd kill the idiot who
invented this thing-- except that I invented it!" The Black Vulture swoops
around The Chief, coming closer with his "deadly talons," but The Chief speeds
through a door with his mobile chair and sends a "supersonic signal" to slam
down a protective metal doorway. The Vulture counters by summoning a giant
eagle-- addressed as " Ahaku-- the great Thunderbird"-- carrying twin bombs in
its talons to smash through the door. (The Black Vulture may look like
kind of a bozo, but his bird servants make Batman's foe the Penguin and his
bird-crimes look lame.) The metal door is strong enough to resist the size
of bombs the Vulture is using, but The Chief is aware that if the Vulture
continues his assault, the door may be knocked off its tracks and out of
place. At this point The Chief realizes that the "sensible thing"
would be to call the police for help. But, assuming that the police would
call in his former partners, The Chief thinks, "That's an admission that I can't
draw a breath without the aid of the Doom Patrol! The devil with
that! I'll stand alone (presumably a figure of speech in his case)... or
fail!"
Meanwhile, we catch up with Robotman, walking the streets in
search of "a good robot hotel," and Larry Trainor, flying a jet over the city
because it is the only place far enough from people for him to partially unwrap
himself. Robotman rescues a pedestrian walking into the path of a speeding
car, but berates the man for his carelessness and stupidity until he realizes
that the man is blind! Embarrassed and ashamed, Robotman also realizes
that The Chief whom he abandoned is also handicapped and all but helpless (yeah,
right) and decides to go back and check on his former leader, though he hopes
Larry and Rita won't catch him "going soft". And Larry reflects that maybe
he shouldn't blame The Chief for being obsessed with Madame Rouge, since
(apparently in some unspecified earlier story I don't recall offhand) Larry
himself was attracted to the mysterious Madame!
Arriving back at
the DP mansion, Robotman observes the Chief's danger on closed circuit TV, and
decides he needs a weapon against the Black Vulture and his bird
battalion. He grabs a seemingly appropriate object, a replica "Winged
Victory" statue. But he and the statue are knocked over by the hurtling
Negative Man, for Larry has spotted Robotman slinking through the dark halls and
mistaken him for an enemy! Robotman is undamaged, but both he and the
"gauze-faced goof" are delayed reaching The Chief to aid against the real
threat-- the Black Vulture, who has finally gotten through the metal door
guarding The Chief. A "curtain of flame" across another doorway fails to
stop the Vulture, who flies through the flames at high speed, and it seems that
the villain will finally rake The Chief with his talons when Robotman and Larry
arrive on the scene! Instead of Larry sending Negative Man against the
flying foe, for some highly unclear reason Robotman hurls Larry's physical body
against the Vulture! As Larry clings to the veering villain, his extra
weight exhausts the Vulture's flying jets that aid his wings, and the bad guy
crashes to the floor and is knocked out. But as Cliff and Larry start to
haul the Vulture to a cell, Elasti-Girl arrives back on the scene and she, like
Larry before her, makes a major misjudgment. Thinking Cliff and Larry are
foes hauling the helpless Chief somewhere, she expands to giant size and swats
at them, knocking them over and giving the Vulture the chance to summon more of
his flying creatures. "Oooo! I could kick myself!" " Don't
worry, sweetheart! If we ever get out of this-- we'll do it for
you!" To further embarrass herself, Rita screams in terror when she sees
that the Vulture's new minions are not more birds but a swarm of bats!
"You tryin' to prove you're just a normal, fraidy-cat girl?" (This was
fairly untypical behavior for Rita. As I've commented before about the
Doom Patrol they were obviously a copy of, er, a homage to Marvel's Fantastic
Four. But the characterization of the token female member was one area
where the copy generally improved on the original.)
The caption refers
to a "bat bat-allion" and says, "All true lovers of bad puns please
appreciate!" (Upon rereading and reviewing this issue, I observe that the
"camp" element wasn't rooted out of these last few DP issues nearly as
thoroughly as I thought.) The bats set up such a barrage of sound waves that not
only are the DP members rendered helpless, but Robotman starts to shake
apart! But the seemingly doomed Patrol gets another chance from the most
improbable band of rescuers I can think of (at least in this context) in a comic
story-- a band of horse-mounted, screeching, tomahawk-wielding American
Indians! The Vulture cries out in fear and takes flight, but the Indian
leader (who is addressed as "White Feather," but doesn't seem to be the Inferior
Five member) leaps from his saddle and pulls the Vulture back to the
ground. "Man, I pulled a real Custer! I underestimated the
Indians!", says Robotman. And now we finally learn what the grudge is that
sent the man known as the Black Vulture to try to destroy The Chief. He is
really a man named Decker (no relation to Dwight, I imagine) and The Chief as
science maven helped use radioactive dating to stop Decker from making a
fraudulent claim to tribal land. (And yet, once again, we see a comic book
super-villain using incredible high tech and extraordinary abilities to tangle
with the heroes, when he could have used his flying suit technology and
bird-training skills to get rich in some more legitimate way.) When Rita
asks, "How your people gettum here so fast, White Feather?", the chief explains
that the tribe is rich from oil, and besides, he is a Cal Tech aerodynamics
expert with his own private jet! (I have to suspect that this whole Indian
plotline, besides being highly politically incorrect by modern standards, was a
desperate last-minute inspiration by Drake when he realized he hadn't thought
either of a reason for the Vulture's villainy or a way to get the DP out of
trouble.)
"Finally, the swinging 'redskins' leave, but some red faces
remain..." as the four DP members confront each other; "We've learned one
thing! "We've gotta all hang together..." "Or we'll all go
hang!" The Chief insists that, if he is going to be the DP "father figure"
again, Madame Rouge gets to stay on "as long as she needs to". and the DP
members consent.
But as it turned out within a few issues, the
schizophrenic Madame Rouge was a threat to the team after all, and the end of
the Doom Patrol, narrowly averted this issue, came about in DP &121 (despite an
unprecedented on-panel appeal to the fans by the editor and artist to keep the
team and the comic alive by buying more copies). But at least, instead of
an ignominious breakup, the DP stood together and went out in style as they
sacrificed their lives to save a tiny town of civilians.
Publications). The cover scene (drawn, like several late DP issues, by Bob
Brown rather than interior artist Bruno Premiani) is dominated by the figure of
the wheelchair-bound Chief cowering away from the talons of a giant bird of
prey, while, in the far lower corner of the cover the three core DP members are
walking away; "You wanted to run the whole show, Chief? Okay, the DP is
finished-- and you're on your own!" Caption: "The DP has flown! The
Chief is alone in the nest! And circling above, waiting for the kill, is--
THE BLACK VULTURE!"
Review by Bill Henley
My last couple of
reviews have been of stories scripted by Arnold Drake during his brief stint at
Marvel in 1968-69. I thought I'd do another review of a Drake story but
move backwards a bit to cover one of the later issues of the best-remembered
series Drake wrote for DC, the Doom Patrol. In my opinion, though nearly
every installment of the original Doom Patrol was produced by the same team of
writer Drake and artist Premiani, the DP series went through three distinct
phases of quality. From its debut in MY GREATEST ADVENTURE #80 through
roughly DP #98 (the DP title took over the numbering of MGA) DP was a pretty
serious and well-crafted series combining elements of traditional Silver Age DC
storytelling with the new Marvel approach. Starting around issue #99, the
series adopted more of an over-the-top "camp" approach marked by the
introduction of often goofy teen character Beast Boy, lots more jokes and
wisecracks, and more ludicrously bizarre villains. Then starting around
issue #113 or so, with "camp" wearing thin in the comics world at large, an
attempt was made to rein in the silliness and revert to the earlier, more
serious approach. The attempt wasn't totally successful, but did produce
some more readable stories until the team and the series came to an end with
issue #121.
The splash panel is another scene of the Chief cringing from
an avian adversary, but here we see that the "Black Vulture" is not a real bird
but a man in a somewhat silly-looking but nonetheless flight-capable bird
suit. "You're alone now! And you're not The Chief any more!
Just Niles Caulder, a lonely man in a wheel chair! This is the
moment I've waited for! The moment of THE VULTURE'S REVENGE!" And a
caption tells us, "The word spread like fire throughout the city! THE DOOM
PATROL IS FINISHED! Broken beyond repair-- like Humpty Dumpty or a
two-dollar watch! And as the fabulous freaks fled from their nest, a dark
shadow settled over the remaining figure, The Chief! It was the shadow of
Death, but it flew upon the wings of THE BLACK VULTURE!" (I commented in
my last review of CAPTAIN MARVEL #5 that Drake showed in his writing for Marvel
a tendency toward overwrought, purple prose. That tendency is also present
here, though executed in a slangier manner.) Traces of the camp element
are still present as the first story panel is of a hand offering the reader a
crying towel (marked "New York Mets," during a period when that team was the
doormat of baseball) if he missed "the last sensational issue". A page
worth of synopsis tells us that The Chief, attracted to Madame Rouge, the female
member of the DP's archfoes the Brotherhood of Evil, has been trying to reform
the Madame through the use of subliminal messaging. The attempt has
seemingly succeeded, as symbolized by the woman with the flexible body
fissioning into good and evil versions of herself and the good Rouge winning the
fight. But the disembodied Brain, leader of the Brotherhood, is not
dismayed, telling the gorilla Monsieur Mallah, Madame Rouge needs us more than
she knows! The evil which I carefully nurtured within her breast will not
remain asleep for long! She will return to our loving nest!"
Meanwhile, the inclusion of Madame Rouge in the "nest" of the Doom
Patrol is not doing wonders for the team's unit cohesion. The Chief and
the Madame are enjoying a peaceful and pleasant evening watching a roaring fire
together-- until they are disturbed by a loud banging on the door. It
turns out to be Robotman, who as a result of an otherwise undepicted
battle with "a maniac with an atomic ray," is hobbling around minus his right
arm and left leg. In time past, The Chief would presumably have dropped
what else he was doing to help effect repairs. but now he is so besotted
with Rouge's company that he just tells Robotman, "Please skip the gory
details! There's a torch and a soldering iron waiting for you
inside!" Then, when the energy-being Negative Man enters the room and
flies around trying to signal The Chief, our leader assumes that he's just
complaining because the kitchen is out of ham for his alter ego Larry Trainor's
nightly snack. ""Sorry N-Man, but there's loads of salami!" However,
when The Chief and Rouge themselves head for the kitchen to make some popcorn,
they find Larry there, nearly as battered and damaged as his metal
colleague. It seems that Negative Man went up solo against some enemies
who pinned his human body underneath a block of lead which kept Negative Man
from escaping. Then, when the energy man did manage to get through a crack
in the lead and flew back to DP headquarters to seek help, The Chief ignored
him. Finally, Neg Man managed to lift the lead block himself (or itself),
but The Chief takes the incident lightly; "See, you didn't need us after
all! You're getting to be very self-reliant!"
Some time, later, a
late-night phone call disturbs the rest of the remaining DP member, Elasti-Girl
(aka Rita Dayton nee Farr) and her spouse, Steve Dayton (aka Mento), "the
world's richest and angriest man". Dayton is even more upset when the call
leads Rita to jump out of bed to try to prevent "the end of the Doom
Patrol". "The sooner the better!", Dayton grumbles. "I never liked
having to borrow my wife from them-- like a book from the library!" Upon
reaching DP headquarters-- actually sooner, since she can "hear the shouting
from six blocks away"-- Rita finds that the team's usual bickering has reached
an unprecedented pitch. Larry declares that his gratitude for The Chief
helping put his life back together is exhausted, and if The Chief himself no
longer cares about the Doom Patrol, neither does he! Robotman blames
Madame Rouge and her distracting The Chief, suggesting that her appearance is
part of a Brotherhood of Evil plot to "bust us up1" The Chief himself is
offended by Cliff's verbal attack on Rouge. Rita tries to smooth things
over by reminding Cliff Steele how Niles Caulder saved his life by transplanting
his brain from a fatally injured body into a robot form, and how Larry was saved
from spending his life in a lead vault when The Chief found a way to enclose his
radioactive body in special bandages. And she reminds the group of their
importance not only in fighting evil but in providing inspiration to "freaks"
and "outcasts". "We gave some hope to every gimpy, hare-lipped, fat,
four-eyed kid in the world!" (Rita might want to ease off on the
self-righteousness, considering she is the only DP member who is neither
disfigured nor handicapped. And was Drake describing his readership in the
"gimpy, hare-lipped, fat, four-eyed kid" line? If so, I resent it. I
was never hare-lipped, anyway.) The Chief doesn't help the situation by
hurling insults at the "primitive minds" of the two malcontents, and declaring,
"Apparently they don't need me-- and I certainly don't need them!"
Cliff
and Larry are not mollified by any of Rita's attempts at peacemaking, and after
threatening to commit "assault and beardery" on the Chief, they walk off and
split up with perfunctory farewells-- "Been good to know you,
robot-boddy!" "So long, mummy-guy!", though clearly neither one has a clue
what to do with his life from here. Meanwhile, Rita, now highly irritated
herself, gets in a cat fight with Madame Rouge, who disdains the childish
behavior of the two former DP members. Rita may feel that way herself but
she's not inclined to take the supercilious attitude from the interloper Rouge,
and after The Chief tells both women to stop the "cheap melodramatics," both of
them walk out, leaving him alone. "This is insane! They're all
gone! They've all left me! I-- I-- I'm-- ALONE!" But not for
long, Chief, as the bird-costumed form of the Black Vulture (who earlier was on
hand to watch Robotman and Negative Man walk away) is lurking just outside the
window. And with a shrill "SCREEEEEE" whistle, the Vulture summons an
avian ally, a giant condor capable of carrying more than its own weight, to
crash through that window and seize The Chief! But though abandoned and
lonesome, Niles Caulder is not altogether despondent or helpless. He fires
a missile of some sort at the condor, but the bird grabs and lifts The Chief,
chair and all. But The Chief gets a death-grip on the condor's neck (hey,
Chief, you better watch out. Aren't condors an endangered species?)
declaring that "the power of that a man loses in his legs is transferred to his
arms (by) the law of natural compensation!" This sounds like shaky
biology, but anyway, as his chair crashes back to the ground, The Chief manages
to hurl the condor against the floor and break its neck.
But our
villain has more than one bird in the hand, as he sends a flock of hummingbirds,
capable of flying at 500 miles an hour and with poison-tipped beaks, to attack
The Chief-- whose chair, fortunately, is armed with a miniature rocket launcher
with electronic tracking equipment to stop the birds. And so, declaring
that "we shall waste no more time with these preliminary bouts, Dr.
Caulder," the costumed Black Vulture crashes into the room himself.
The Chief has no idea who this bird-brain is or why he is out to get him, but he
is prepared with another weapon from his chair, a sub-machine gun to kill the
Vulture before he can kill The Chief. (Apparently, when you're not only
not super-powered but handicapped, and the bad guy specifically theatens your
life, the normal superhero inhibitions against killing a foe can be put
aside.) Unfortunately, "The gun jammed! I'd kill the idiot who
invented this thing-- except that I invented it!" The Black Vulture swoops
around The Chief, coming closer with his "deadly talons," but The Chief speeds
through a door with his mobile chair and sends a "supersonic signal" to slam
down a protective metal doorway. The Vulture counters by summoning a giant
eagle-- addressed as " Ahaku-- the great Thunderbird"-- carrying twin bombs in
its talons to smash through the door. (The Black Vulture may look like
kind of a bozo, but his bird servants make Batman's foe the Penguin and his
bird-crimes look lame.) The metal door is strong enough to resist the size
of bombs the Vulture is using, but The Chief is aware that if the Vulture
continues his assault, the door may be knocked off its tracks and out of
place. At this point The Chief realizes that the "sensible thing"
would be to call the police for help. But, assuming that the police would
call in his former partners, The Chief thinks, "That's an admission that I can't
draw a breath without the aid of the Doom Patrol! The devil with
that! I'll stand alone (presumably a figure of speech in his case)... or
fail!"
Meanwhile, we catch up with Robotman, walking the streets in
search of "a good robot hotel," and Larry Trainor, flying a jet over the city
because it is the only place far enough from people for him to partially unwrap
himself. Robotman rescues a pedestrian walking into the path of a speeding
car, but berates the man for his carelessness and stupidity until he realizes
that the man is blind! Embarrassed and ashamed, Robotman also realizes
that The Chief whom he abandoned is also handicapped and all but helpless (yeah,
right) and decides to go back and check on his former leader, though he hopes
Larry and Rita won't catch him "going soft". And Larry reflects that maybe
he shouldn't blame The Chief for being obsessed with Madame Rouge, since
(apparently in some unspecified earlier story I don't recall offhand) Larry
himself was attracted to the mysterious Madame!
Arriving back at
the DP mansion, Robotman observes the Chief's danger on closed circuit TV, and
decides he needs a weapon against the Black Vulture and his bird
battalion. He grabs a seemingly appropriate object, a replica "Winged
Victory" statue. But he and the statue are knocked over by the hurtling
Negative Man, for Larry has spotted Robotman slinking through the dark halls and
mistaken him for an enemy! Robotman is undamaged, but both he and the
"gauze-faced goof" are delayed reaching The Chief to aid against the real
threat-- the Black Vulture, who has finally gotten through the metal door
guarding The Chief. A "curtain of flame" across another doorway fails to
stop the Vulture, who flies through the flames at high speed, and it seems that
the villain will finally rake The Chief with his talons when Robotman and Larry
arrive on the scene! Instead of Larry sending Negative Man against the
flying foe, for some highly unclear reason Robotman hurls Larry's physical body
against the Vulture! As Larry clings to the veering villain, his extra
weight exhausts the Vulture's flying jets that aid his wings, and the bad guy
crashes to the floor and is knocked out. But as Cliff and Larry start to
haul the Vulture to a cell, Elasti-Girl arrives back on the scene and she, like
Larry before her, makes a major misjudgment. Thinking Cliff and Larry are
foes hauling the helpless Chief somewhere, she expands to giant size and swats
at them, knocking them over and giving the Vulture the chance to summon more of
his flying creatures. "Oooo! I could kick myself!" " Don't
worry, sweetheart! If we ever get out of this-- we'll do it for
you!" To further embarrass herself, Rita screams in terror when she sees
that the Vulture's new minions are not more birds but a swarm of bats!
"You tryin' to prove you're just a normal, fraidy-cat girl?" (This was
fairly untypical behavior for Rita. As I've commented before about the
Doom Patrol they were obviously a copy of, er, a homage to Marvel's Fantastic
Four. But the characterization of the token female member was one area
where the copy generally improved on the original.)
The caption refers
to a "bat bat-allion" and says, "All true lovers of bad puns please
appreciate!" (Upon rereading and reviewing this issue, I observe that the
"camp" element wasn't rooted out of these last few DP issues nearly as
thoroughly as I thought.) The bats set up such a barrage of sound waves that not
only are the DP members rendered helpless, but Robotman starts to shake
apart! But the seemingly doomed Patrol gets another chance from the most
improbable band of rescuers I can think of (at least in this context) in a comic
story-- a band of horse-mounted, screeching, tomahawk-wielding American
Indians! The Vulture cries out in fear and takes flight, but the Indian
leader (who is addressed as "White Feather," but doesn't seem to be the Inferior
Five member) leaps from his saddle and pulls the Vulture back to the
ground. "Man, I pulled a real Custer! I underestimated the
Indians!", says Robotman. And now we finally learn what the grudge is that
sent the man known as the Black Vulture to try to destroy The Chief. He is
really a man named Decker (no relation to Dwight, I imagine) and The Chief as
science maven helped use radioactive dating to stop Decker from making a
fraudulent claim to tribal land. (And yet, once again, we see a comic book
super-villain using incredible high tech and extraordinary abilities to tangle
with the heroes, when he could have used his flying suit technology and
bird-training skills to get rich in some more legitimate way.) When Rita
asks, "How your people gettum here so fast, White Feather?", the chief explains
that the tribe is rich from oil, and besides, he is a Cal Tech aerodynamics
expert with his own private jet! (I have to suspect that this whole Indian
plotline, besides being highly politically incorrect by modern standards, was a
desperate last-minute inspiration by Drake when he realized he hadn't thought
either of a reason for the Vulture's villainy or a way to get the DP out of
trouble.)
"Finally, the swinging 'redskins' leave, but some red faces
remain..." as the four DP members confront each other; "We've learned one
thing! "We've gotta all hang together..." "Or we'll all go
hang!" The Chief insists that, if he is going to be the DP "father figure"
again, Madame Rouge gets to stay on "as long as she needs to". and the DP
members consent.
But as it turned out within a few issues, the
schizophrenic Madame Rouge was a threat to the team after all, and the end of
the Doom Patrol, narrowly averted this issue, came about in DP &121 (despite an
unprecedented on-panel appeal to the fans by the editor and artist to keep the
team and the comic alive by buying more copies). But at least, instead of
an ignominious breakup, the DP stood together and went out in style as they
sacrificed their lives to save a tiny town of civilians.
Dark Shadows #24, "On Borrowed Blood!"
DARK SHADOWS #24; February 1974; Wallace Green and Denise Van Lear,
editors; featuring "On Borrowed Blood!," written by Arnold Drake and penciled
by Joe Certa. On the painted cover by George Wilson, a sorceress sprinkles
sand downward to form a sandy image of the face of the series star, vampire
Barnabas Collins, while a man fires a small rocket at her from a crossbow-like
device. Cover caption: "Barnabas, beware! When your image is
completed by the Sorceress in Sand, your soul is doomed!" (Review based on
the reprint of the story in the book DARK SHADOWS: THE COMPLETE ORIGINAL SERIES,
VOLUME 4, published 2012 by Hermes Press.)
Review by Bill Henley.
This may seem like an odd choice for a SAR review, since not only is the comic a
bit late for the Silver Age, but I have never been a fan of either the original
DARK SHADOWS supernatural-soap-opera TV show or the comics or other spinoffs;
and I'm only vaguely aware, from TV reference books, of the characters and
storylines of the show. (If there are any DS fans on the list, you can let me
know if I miss any important character points or in-jokes.) However, I
picked up the reprint volume from the public library shelf out of curiosity, and
saw that at least two of the stories here are written by Arnold Drake.
I've been on a roll of reviews of Drake-written comics-- DOOM PATROL #117, from
DC, and MARVEL SUPERHEROES/GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #18 and CAPTAIN MARVEL #5,
from Marvel, so I figure I might as well close out the series with a review of a
story from Drake's extensive body of work at Gold Key, where he landed after his
short stint at Marvel in 1968-69. Jeff Thompson, writer of the book
introduction, calls "On Borrowed Blood" "among the greatest of the comic-book
series" and cites an Arnold Drake interview as saying "I had fun with that
(story)." Another familiar name to Silver Age experts is among the
creators here; Joe Certa, who did all the interior art for the stories reprinted
in this volume (maybe the whole series for all I know) is best remembered as the
artist of the entire Silver Age Martian Manhunter series in DETECTIVE COMICS and
HOUSE OF MYSTERY.
The introduction notes that the DARK SHADOWS TV
show had been off the air for several years by the time this comic book appeared
(the show ended in April 1971). But Gold Key kept publishing the comic
book through issue #35 in Feb. 1975. (A similar phenomenon happened with
STAR TREK; Gold Key only published two ST issues while the TV series was still
on the NBC network, but kept on publishing the comic book until 1979 when "The
Motion Picture" appeared and the license was transferred to Marvel. Arnold
Drake wrote some of the Gold Key STAR TREK comics, too.)
Part 1, "On
Borrowed Blood: The Millionaire Vampie," begins with a two panel splash in which
the sand sorceresss from the cover chants "Let the sacred sands bring death to
the one of evil!" as she creates her sand sculpture, and Barnabas Collins
screams as he falls down a staircase. The story proper begins with
good-hearted vampire Barnabas Collins enjoying a "moment of peace" with his
friend Dr. Julia Hoffman as they watch the nighttime stars and listen to the
sound of the sea. "But this is just another miniscule oasis in my desert
of torment!", declares the morose Barnabas.(The somewhat purple hue to Drake's
dialogue and captions that I noted in his DC and Marvel comics is also present
here.) Dr. Hoffman tries to console him that she is constantly
learning more about vampirism in her lab and "one day... one day.;."
(presumably, a cure will be found). Meanwhile, an arrogant millionaire is
rushing along a mountainside road to meet a plane when he misses a hairpin turn
and his car crashes onto the beach where Barnabas and Dr. Hoffman are
standing. Barnabas rushes to rescue the driver before his car blows up in
flames, but the man still is near death unless he can receive an immediate blood
transfusion. Dr. Hoffman checks the man's blood type on a medical alert
tag and finds that it is the same as that of Barnabas Collins! But
Barnabas is horrified at the thought of becoming a blood donor, since "you know
that a transfusion of my blood would doom him!" But Dr. Hoffman insists
that "we DON'T know for CERTAIN that your blood, under sterile conditions, would
transfer to the recipient!" And better to take that chance, she says, than
just to allow the man to die. At Hoffman's insistence, Barnabas flies in
bat-form to retrieve her medical kit and cooperates in the transfusion
process. As an ambulance is called, Dr. Hoffman says, "Now we can
only pray for his life!", and Barnabas replies, "It's not his life that worries
me, Doctor! It's his eternal soul!" He doesn't know whether the man
will thank them for his life "or CURSE us everlastingly!"
In the
operating room, the doctors are amazed at the vitality of their patient, whom we
learn is named Andre Markovian. ""I can't understand what kept him
alive!" "He's worth $700 million, they say! That kind of money would
keep ME alive, Doctor!" Just 90 minutes after the surgery is completed,
Markovian is in his hospital room surrounded by phones and files, making
business calls. The doctors try to insist that he rest, telling him that
"only a miracle" kept him alive. Markovian insists that the miracle wsa
his rise from impoverished immigrant boy to an oil and shipping tycoon owning
"half the Caribbean". "I AM the miracle!" The doctor responds that "Some
day you will face a problem to which money is no answer! Then we'll
see the tune you whistle!" That night, as Markovian finally falls
asleep,Barnabas Collins seeks to meet him alone and find out if he has inherited
the vampire's curse. But before Barnabas can reach him, a shadowy man
fires a gun at Markovian at point-blank range! But as Barnabas grabs the
would-be killer, Markovian wakes up apparently unharmed! As the gunman is
dragged away by hospital security men, Markovian thanks Barnabas for the rescue
effort and pulls out a checkbook to offer him a monetary reward. But
Barnabas disdains the reward and instead begins to tell Markovian of the vampire
curse. The millionaire thinks Barnabas is insane or running some sort of
con game, but Barnabas proves his point by showing Markovian the instantly
healed bullet wound and displaying a shaving mirror which shows no reflection of
Markovian. "You bear the eternal curse of the VAMPIRE!" (In traditional
vampire lore, a person bitten by a vampire has to die and spend three days and
nights dead before rising as "undead". But I guess Markovian was in too
much of a hurry for that. Or maybe the rules are different in the Dark Shadows
mythos, or for people who get the curse from a blood transfusion rather than a
bite.) Markovian reacts with laughter; he is convinced that he is now a
vampire, but he does not regard this as a curse! He now has "the one key I
lacked" to become "king of the world", starting with the Caribbean republic of
Romanique, of which he is the behind-the-scenes leader. He would have
taken power officially except that he would be exposed to constant assassination
attempts, but now that "your 'curse' places me beyond the assassin's bullet," he
can go forward with his grab for power. And he will have Barnabas Collins
himself for his second in command, or else he will expose Barnabas' vampiric
nature to the world. Of course, Barnabas points out, he has the same hold
over Markovian; "We have a brotherhood in BLACKMAIL!"
As
Markovian's plane lands in Romanique, his chief guard and his sister Christine
are puzzled by the appearance of a coffin among the cargo, but the guard
supposes this is just some "dark jest" of Markovian's. That night,
Barnabas releases Markovian from the coffin and the millionaire begins planning
to "expand (his) island empire with the power of YOUR BLOOD!" Barnabas'
private thoughts reveal that he is stringing along with Markovian not just
because of his blackmail threats, but "to guard against his misuse of the power
I gave him!" After introducing Barnabas to Christine, Markovian summons
his puppet President Alonzo and then stages a fake suicide for El
Presidente. The millionaire then orders the windows of one chamber of his
castle to be painted over in black, and supplies the building with urns of the
native earth of both himself and Barnabas, so that both vampires can function
within the "Black Chamber" in daytime without having to sleep in coffins.
Soon, Markovian arranges with his "hand-picked Senate" to name him President of
Romanique, and holds a nighttime rally for the country's impoverished citizens,
complete with free food. Christine is skeptical, however, whether her
brother's rise to power will actually lead to the end of "slavery and
starvation" for Romanique's people. As the new President walks among the people,
one man shows his lack of support for the new order by firing a submachine gun
at Markovian. But "Idiot! Do you think you can destroy Markovian so
easily!" The sight of their new leader escaping certain death inspires the
crowd to hail him as "Markovian the invincible!" And Barnabas, observing
from the sidelines, bitterly reflects, "And hail Barnabas, who brought this
unspeakable wretch to undreamed of heights!"
Part 2, "Emperor of
Darkness," begins with the execution by firing squad of the would-be assassin of
President Markovian. Before being shot, the man shouts defiantly, "I die
for my land-- for my people! But-- ESTEBAN WILL AVENGE ME!"
Markovian, however, sneers privately to Barnabas that he was warned the
assassination attempt was coming and allowed it to happen in order to impress
the people of Romanique with his invincibility. Barnabas says that he no
longer needs to feel guilty about destroying Markovian's sould with his vampire
curse, for "your soul is beyond debasing!" But Markovian thanks Barnabas
for his "unintended compliment," and indicates that he still expects Barnabas'
help in his campaign to become "emperor of all!" Later, Barnabas spots
Christine Markovian leaving the palace on "a pre-dawn errand," and decides to
follow her and find out what she is up to. She meets and embraces a
handsome young man, and Barnabas concludes that this is "an affair of the
heart," but still may be relevant to Romanique's troubles. And indeed it
is so, for the young man is none other than Esteban, leader of the underground
opposing Markovian's rule. But though Christine is impatient for Esteban
to act against her brother, he is reluctant to order a premature attack that can
only result in "mass suicide". As Christine runs off in frustration,
Barnabas approaches Esteban to offer him "a way of insuring victory".
Esteban thinks Barnabas is Markovian's spy, but Barnabas insists "I alone have
the power to destroy Markovian"-- but only if "I know you are not just another
rising despot!" Esteban leads Barnabas at gunpoint to the slum hovel where
he and his elderly mother live. His mother's family were formerly "among
the great families of Romanique," escendants of gypsy settlers who were refugees
from the Inquisition. "My mother still believes in their mysteries!"
Barnabas responds, "And do you know enough of life's secrets to be sure that
this is only madness?" The elderly woman at first greets Barnabas
hospitably, amid a delusion that she still lives in a palace of luxury, but then
looks at him suspiciously when he says he must return to the presidential palace
before daylight. "Yes! Before the first rays! I
understand! I can see it in your evil face!" She shouts to the
slum-dwelling neighbors that a vampire is among them, and for a moment Barnabas
fears he may be mobbed, but instead the neighbors laugh at the old woman's
superstitious fears.
Returning to the "Black Chamber" in the
palace which Markovian has shielded from deadly sunlight, Barnabas
encounters one Knute Bjornson, a notorious munitions dealer with whom
Markovian is dealing. Markovian boasts that he has tripled the small
nation's arsenal, including even ICBM's, and turns on a TV report by one of his
propagandists that Romanique faces attack from its neighbor country
Managuay! Shortly, says Markovian, men in Managuayan uniforms will be
found shot dead on Romanique beaches. "But those 'Managuayans' will be
from your own prisons, eh, Markovian? You provide your OWN invasion-- and
excuse for WAR!" (Here, Drake takes a leaf from real-life World War II
history. That war started with a similar plot by the Nazis, as they
dressed concentration camp inmates in Polish army uniforms and used them to
simulate an attack on Germany by Poland.) After Markovian retires
for his daily ration of vampiric sleep, Barnabas reflects on how he may actually
succeed in using tiny Romanique as a base for world conquest; "Corsica was an
island of olives and sardines-- but it gave life to NAPOLEON!" (Yeah, but
Napoleon had to go from Corsica to France, a major power of the time, before
launching his career of conquest.) Barnabas resolves to take a warning to
Christine who can relay it to Esteban, even though the "reflected sunlight will
be painful" in the palace halls outside the Black Chamber. But meanwhile,
the ancient gypsy, Esteban's mother, is taking measures against the "evil
vampire" she thinks threatens her land. As she sprinkles the "sacred sands
of Salaka," they form an image of Barnabas' face-- and as the image forms,
Barnabas is struck with pain far greater than he expected from his partial
exposure to sunlight! Barnabas falls down a stairway, realizing that
something even more dangerous than the sun's rays is destroying him.
Christine finds him lying helpless but is unable to aid him. Fortunately,
Esteban is annoyed with his mother's continued dabbling with "gypsy nonsense",
and sweeps an arm to destroy the sand image-- enabling Barnabas to make a quick
recovery. He persuades Christine to believe his story about Markovian's
vampiric nature and his evil plans, and she takes the message to Esteban-- who,
however, as a confirmed skeptic, only thinks "this wild story of vampires is a
trap for me"-- in which Barnabas and maybe Christine herself are
complicit. Then, however, his mother has a change of heart. "I knew the
man had the blood curse! But that he fought his own evil was unknown to
me! Esteban-- help HIM!"
Back at the palace, Barnabas watches the
sleeping Markovian and reflects that I could drive the stake through him,
now-- myself! But the people must do it and create their own
freedom!" Upon arising, Markovian is ready to launch his war with
Managuay, but instead he finds a war at home, as Esteban leads his rebel troops
against the palace! Markovian's armed guards get the upper hand
against the rebels, however, and Esteban realizes the only chance for victory is
to expose and exploit the dictator's vampiric nature. He fires a
submachine gun burst which shatters one of the blackened windows of the Black
Chamber-- and sunlight pours into the palace, causing Markovian to scream in
agony, as Barnabas ducks for cover. Markovian retains, however, enough
vampiric power to transform himself in a bat and try to fly away.
Esteban's gunfire is useless against the fluttering villain, but Barnabas
advises Esteban that a crossbow hanging on the wall, and its wooden shaft, can
kill Markovian! Esteban grabs the weapon and with remarkable aim shoots
the flying bat-- which falls back to the ground and reverts to the corpse of the
dictator. "The 'Emperor' is dead! Long live free Romanique!" (It
appears that the cover painter George Wilson didn't read the story very
carefully. The cover painting combines two separate scenes from the story,
the sorceress making the sand face and Esteban shooting the crossbow-- seemingly
at his own mother-- and on the cover the crossbow is firing a tiny rocket rather
than a wooden quarrel.) That night at the airport, Barnabas receives
the farewells of Esteban, Christine and the gypsy sorceress before heading
back to his home. The sorceress asks for and receives forgiveness for the
pain she caused Barnabas when she thought he was only an evil carrier of a
"blood curse," and Esteban and Christine invite Barnabas to return for a visit
after they have succeeded in transforming Romanique into a happy land.
"You'll do your jobs well-- both of you! And I shall return-- if the
shadow over me will permit such freedom!" (Don't miss the exciting sequel
in which the CIA comes in and assassinates Esteban and Christine and digs
Markovian up out of his grave and sets him back up in power.)
Not
a bad yarn, actually, but I noticed something odd about it. Though the
hero and the villain are both vampires, neither of them engages, at least
on-panel, in the traditional vampiric necessity of drinking human blood!
Now, not being all that familiar with DARK SHADOWS, I'm not sure if the would-be
good guy Barnabas had some sort of special means (perhaps an invention of Dr.
Hoffman?) to survive without attacking people for their blood. But
presumably Markovian would have needed to drink blood and would have had no
scruples about doing so, probably by attacking some of his helpless
subjects. I haven't read the entire reprint book carefully, but in leafing
through it I don't see any blood-drinking scenes in the other stories
either. Did Gold Key's strict censorship standards, more stringent than
the Comics Code, mean that though GK could publish a comic about vampires it
could not actually show them doing what vampires
do?
__._,_.___
Posted by: WRHBill@aol.com
Visit Your Group
• Privacy • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use
__,_._,___
editors; featuring "On Borrowed Blood!," written by Arnold Drake and penciled
by Joe Certa. On the painted cover by George Wilson, a sorceress sprinkles
sand downward to form a sandy image of the face of the series star, vampire
Barnabas Collins, while a man fires a small rocket at her from a crossbow-like
device. Cover caption: "Barnabas, beware! When your image is
completed by the Sorceress in Sand, your soul is doomed!" (Review based on
the reprint of the story in the book DARK SHADOWS: THE COMPLETE ORIGINAL SERIES,
VOLUME 4, published 2012 by Hermes Press.)
Review by Bill Henley.
This may seem like an odd choice for a SAR review, since not only is the comic a
bit late for the Silver Age, but I have never been a fan of either the original
DARK SHADOWS supernatural-soap-opera TV show or the comics or other spinoffs;
and I'm only vaguely aware, from TV reference books, of the characters and
storylines of the show. (If there are any DS fans on the list, you can let me
know if I miss any important character points or in-jokes.) However, I
picked up the reprint volume from the public library shelf out of curiosity, and
saw that at least two of the stories here are written by Arnold Drake.
I've been on a roll of reviews of Drake-written comics-- DOOM PATROL #117, from
DC, and MARVEL SUPERHEROES/GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY #18 and CAPTAIN MARVEL #5,
from Marvel, so I figure I might as well close out the series with a review of a
story from Drake's extensive body of work at Gold Key, where he landed after his
short stint at Marvel in 1968-69. Jeff Thompson, writer of the book
introduction, calls "On Borrowed Blood" "among the greatest of the comic-book
series" and cites an Arnold Drake interview as saying "I had fun with that
(story)." Another familiar name to Silver Age experts is among the
creators here; Joe Certa, who did all the interior art for the stories reprinted
in this volume (maybe the whole series for all I know) is best remembered as the
artist of the entire Silver Age Martian Manhunter series in DETECTIVE COMICS and
HOUSE OF MYSTERY.
The introduction notes that the DARK SHADOWS TV
show had been off the air for several years by the time this comic book appeared
(the show ended in April 1971). But Gold Key kept publishing the comic
book through issue #35 in Feb. 1975. (A similar phenomenon happened with
STAR TREK; Gold Key only published two ST issues while the TV series was still
on the NBC network, but kept on publishing the comic book until 1979 when "The
Motion Picture" appeared and the license was transferred to Marvel. Arnold
Drake wrote some of the Gold Key STAR TREK comics, too.)
Part 1, "On
Borrowed Blood: The Millionaire Vampie," begins with a two panel splash in which
the sand sorceresss from the cover chants "Let the sacred sands bring death to
the one of evil!" as she creates her sand sculpture, and Barnabas Collins
screams as he falls down a staircase. The story proper begins with
good-hearted vampire Barnabas Collins enjoying a "moment of peace" with his
friend Dr. Julia Hoffman as they watch the nighttime stars and listen to the
sound of the sea. "But this is just another miniscule oasis in my desert
of torment!", declares the morose Barnabas.(The somewhat purple hue to Drake's
dialogue and captions that I noted in his DC and Marvel comics is also present
here.) Dr. Hoffman tries to console him that she is constantly
learning more about vampirism in her lab and "one day... one day.;."
(presumably, a cure will be found). Meanwhile, an arrogant millionaire is
rushing along a mountainside road to meet a plane when he misses a hairpin turn
and his car crashes onto the beach where Barnabas and Dr. Hoffman are
standing. Barnabas rushes to rescue the driver before his car blows up in
flames, but the man still is near death unless he can receive an immediate blood
transfusion. Dr. Hoffman checks the man's blood type on a medical alert
tag and finds that it is the same as that of Barnabas Collins! But
Barnabas is horrified at the thought of becoming a blood donor, since "you know
that a transfusion of my blood would doom him!" But Dr. Hoffman insists
that "we DON'T know for CERTAIN that your blood, under sterile conditions, would
transfer to the recipient!" And better to take that chance, she says, than
just to allow the man to die. At Hoffman's insistence, Barnabas flies in
bat-form to retrieve her medical kit and cooperates in the transfusion
process. As an ambulance is called, Dr. Hoffman says, "Now we can
only pray for his life!", and Barnabas replies, "It's not his life that worries
me, Doctor! It's his eternal soul!" He doesn't know whether the man
will thank them for his life "or CURSE us everlastingly!"
In the
operating room, the doctors are amazed at the vitality of their patient, whom we
learn is named Andre Markovian. ""I can't understand what kept him
alive!" "He's worth $700 million, they say! That kind of money would
keep ME alive, Doctor!" Just 90 minutes after the surgery is completed,
Markovian is in his hospital room surrounded by phones and files, making
business calls. The doctors try to insist that he rest, telling him that
"only a miracle" kept him alive. Markovian insists that the miracle wsa
his rise from impoverished immigrant boy to an oil and shipping tycoon owning
"half the Caribbean". "I AM the miracle!" The doctor responds that "Some
day you will face a problem to which money is no answer! Then we'll
see the tune you whistle!" That night, as Markovian finally falls
asleep,Barnabas Collins seeks to meet him alone and find out if he has inherited
the vampire's curse. But before Barnabas can reach him, a shadowy man
fires a gun at Markovian at point-blank range! But as Barnabas grabs the
would-be killer, Markovian wakes up apparently unharmed! As the gunman is
dragged away by hospital security men, Markovian thanks Barnabas for the rescue
effort and pulls out a checkbook to offer him a monetary reward. But
Barnabas disdains the reward and instead begins to tell Markovian of the vampire
curse. The millionaire thinks Barnabas is insane or running some sort of
con game, but Barnabas proves his point by showing Markovian the instantly
healed bullet wound and displaying a shaving mirror which shows no reflection of
Markovian. "You bear the eternal curse of the VAMPIRE!" (In traditional
vampire lore, a person bitten by a vampire has to die and spend three days and
nights dead before rising as "undead". But I guess Markovian was in too
much of a hurry for that. Or maybe the rules are different in the Dark Shadows
mythos, or for people who get the curse from a blood transfusion rather than a
bite.) Markovian reacts with laughter; he is convinced that he is now a
vampire, but he does not regard this as a curse! He now has "the one key I
lacked" to become "king of the world", starting with the Caribbean republic of
Romanique, of which he is the behind-the-scenes leader. He would have
taken power officially except that he would be exposed to constant assassination
attempts, but now that "your 'curse' places me beyond the assassin's bullet," he
can go forward with his grab for power. And he will have Barnabas Collins
himself for his second in command, or else he will expose Barnabas' vampiric
nature to the world. Of course, Barnabas points out, he has the same hold
over Markovian; "We have a brotherhood in BLACKMAIL!"
As
Markovian's plane lands in Romanique, his chief guard and his sister Christine
are puzzled by the appearance of a coffin among the cargo, but the guard
supposes this is just some "dark jest" of Markovian's. That night,
Barnabas releases Markovian from the coffin and the millionaire begins planning
to "expand (his) island empire with the power of YOUR BLOOD!" Barnabas'
private thoughts reveal that he is stringing along with Markovian not just
because of his blackmail threats, but "to guard against his misuse of the power
I gave him!" After introducing Barnabas to Christine, Markovian summons
his puppet President Alonzo and then stages a fake suicide for El
Presidente. The millionaire then orders the windows of one chamber of his
castle to be painted over in black, and supplies the building with urns of the
native earth of both himself and Barnabas, so that both vampires can function
within the "Black Chamber" in daytime without having to sleep in coffins.
Soon, Markovian arranges with his "hand-picked Senate" to name him President of
Romanique, and holds a nighttime rally for the country's impoverished citizens,
complete with free food. Christine is skeptical, however, whether her
brother's rise to power will actually lead to the end of "slavery and
starvation" for Romanique's people. As the new President walks among the people,
one man shows his lack of support for the new order by firing a submachine gun
at Markovian. But "Idiot! Do you think you can destroy Markovian so
easily!" The sight of their new leader escaping certain death inspires the
crowd to hail him as "Markovian the invincible!" And Barnabas, observing
from the sidelines, bitterly reflects, "And hail Barnabas, who brought this
unspeakable wretch to undreamed of heights!"
Part 2, "Emperor of
Darkness," begins with the execution by firing squad of the would-be assassin of
President Markovian. Before being shot, the man shouts defiantly, "I die
for my land-- for my people! But-- ESTEBAN WILL AVENGE ME!"
Markovian, however, sneers privately to Barnabas that he was warned the
assassination attempt was coming and allowed it to happen in order to impress
the people of Romanique with his invincibility. Barnabas says that he no
longer needs to feel guilty about destroying Markovian's sould with his vampire
curse, for "your soul is beyond debasing!" But Markovian thanks Barnabas
for his "unintended compliment," and indicates that he still expects Barnabas'
help in his campaign to become "emperor of all!" Later, Barnabas spots
Christine Markovian leaving the palace on "a pre-dawn errand," and decides to
follow her and find out what she is up to. She meets and embraces a
handsome young man, and Barnabas concludes that this is "an affair of the
heart," but still may be relevant to Romanique's troubles. And indeed it
is so, for the young man is none other than Esteban, leader of the underground
opposing Markovian's rule. But though Christine is impatient for Esteban
to act against her brother, he is reluctant to order a premature attack that can
only result in "mass suicide". As Christine runs off in frustration,
Barnabas approaches Esteban to offer him "a way of insuring victory".
Esteban thinks Barnabas is Markovian's spy, but Barnabas insists "I alone have
the power to destroy Markovian"-- but only if "I know you are not just another
rising despot!" Esteban leads Barnabas at gunpoint to the slum hovel where
he and his elderly mother live. His mother's family were formerly "among
the great families of Romanique," escendants of gypsy settlers who were refugees
from the Inquisition. "My mother still believes in their mysteries!"
Barnabas responds, "And do you know enough of life's secrets to be sure that
this is only madness?" The elderly woman at first greets Barnabas
hospitably, amid a delusion that she still lives in a palace of luxury, but then
looks at him suspiciously when he says he must return to the presidential palace
before daylight. "Yes! Before the first rays! I
understand! I can see it in your evil face!" She shouts to the
slum-dwelling neighbors that a vampire is among them, and for a moment Barnabas
fears he may be mobbed, but instead the neighbors laugh at the old woman's
superstitious fears.
Returning to the "Black Chamber" in the
palace which Markovian has shielded from deadly sunlight, Barnabas
encounters one Knute Bjornson, a notorious munitions dealer with whom
Markovian is dealing. Markovian boasts that he has tripled the small
nation's arsenal, including even ICBM's, and turns on a TV report by one of his
propagandists that Romanique faces attack from its neighbor country
Managuay! Shortly, says Markovian, men in Managuayan uniforms will be
found shot dead on Romanique beaches. "But those 'Managuayans' will be
from your own prisons, eh, Markovian? You provide your OWN invasion-- and
excuse for WAR!" (Here, Drake takes a leaf from real-life World War II
history. That war started with a similar plot by the Nazis, as they
dressed concentration camp inmates in Polish army uniforms and used them to
simulate an attack on Germany by Poland.) After Markovian retires
for his daily ration of vampiric sleep, Barnabas reflects on how he may actually
succeed in using tiny Romanique as a base for world conquest; "Corsica was an
island of olives and sardines-- but it gave life to NAPOLEON!" (Yeah, but
Napoleon had to go from Corsica to France, a major power of the time, before
launching his career of conquest.) Barnabas resolves to take a warning to
Christine who can relay it to Esteban, even though the "reflected sunlight will
be painful" in the palace halls outside the Black Chamber. But meanwhile,
the ancient gypsy, Esteban's mother, is taking measures against the "evil
vampire" she thinks threatens her land. As she sprinkles the "sacred sands
of Salaka," they form an image of Barnabas' face-- and as the image forms,
Barnabas is struck with pain far greater than he expected from his partial
exposure to sunlight! Barnabas falls down a stairway, realizing that
something even more dangerous than the sun's rays is destroying him.
Christine finds him lying helpless but is unable to aid him. Fortunately,
Esteban is annoyed with his mother's continued dabbling with "gypsy nonsense",
and sweeps an arm to destroy the sand image-- enabling Barnabas to make a quick
recovery. He persuades Christine to believe his story about Markovian's
vampiric nature and his evil plans, and she takes the message to Esteban-- who,
however, as a confirmed skeptic, only thinks "this wild story of vampires is a
trap for me"-- in which Barnabas and maybe Christine herself are
complicit. Then, however, his mother has a change of heart. "I knew the
man had the blood curse! But that he fought his own evil was unknown to
me! Esteban-- help HIM!"
Back at the palace, Barnabas watches the
sleeping Markovian and reflects that I could drive the stake through him,
now-- myself! But the people must do it and create their own
freedom!" Upon arising, Markovian is ready to launch his war with
Managuay, but instead he finds a war at home, as Esteban leads his rebel troops
against the palace! Markovian's armed guards get the upper hand
against the rebels, however, and Esteban realizes the only chance for victory is
to expose and exploit the dictator's vampiric nature. He fires a
submachine gun burst which shatters one of the blackened windows of the Black
Chamber-- and sunlight pours into the palace, causing Markovian to scream in
agony, as Barnabas ducks for cover. Markovian retains, however, enough
vampiric power to transform himself in a bat and try to fly away.
Esteban's gunfire is useless against the fluttering villain, but Barnabas
advises Esteban that a crossbow hanging on the wall, and its wooden shaft, can
kill Markovian! Esteban grabs the weapon and with remarkable aim shoots
the flying bat-- which falls back to the ground and reverts to the corpse of the
dictator. "The 'Emperor' is dead! Long live free Romanique!" (It
appears that the cover painter George Wilson didn't read the story very
carefully. The cover painting combines two separate scenes from the story,
the sorceress making the sand face and Esteban shooting the crossbow-- seemingly
at his own mother-- and on the cover the crossbow is firing a tiny rocket rather
than a wooden quarrel.) That night at the airport, Barnabas receives
the farewells of Esteban, Christine and the gypsy sorceress before heading
back to his home. The sorceress asks for and receives forgiveness for the
pain she caused Barnabas when she thought he was only an evil carrier of a
"blood curse," and Esteban and Christine invite Barnabas to return for a visit
after they have succeeded in transforming Romanique into a happy land.
"You'll do your jobs well-- both of you! And I shall return-- if the
shadow over me will permit such freedom!" (Don't miss the exciting sequel
in which the CIA comes in and assassinates Esteban and Christine and digs
Markovian up out of his grave and sets him back up in power.)
Not
a bad yarn, actually, but I noticed something odd about it. Though the
hero and the villain are both vampires, neither of them engages, at least
on-panel, in the traditional vampiric necessity of drinking human blood!
Now, not being all that familiar with DARK SHADOWS, I'm not sure if the would-be
good guy Barnabas had some sort of special means (perhaps an invention of Dr.
Hoffman?) to survive without attacking people for their blood. But
presumably Markovian would have needed to drink blood and would have had no
scruples about doing so, probably by attacking some of his helpless
subjects. I haven't read the entire reprint book carefully, but in leafing
through it I don't see any blood-drinking scenes in the other stories
either. Did Gold Key's strict censorship standards, more stringent than
the Comics Code, mean that though GK could publish a comic about vampires it
could not actually show them doing what vampires
do?
__._,_.___
Posted by: WRHBill@aol.com
Visit Your Group
• Privacy • Unsubscribe • Terms of Use
__,_._,___
Gunmaster (and Bullet the Gun Boy!) #89
GUNMASTER Vol. 5 #89; Oct. 1967; Charlton Comics; Dick Giordano, managing
editor; featuring the Western masked hero Gunmaster and his teen sidekick Bullet
the Gun Boy (who gets a cover logo of his own nearly equal in size to that of
Gunmaster) in "Deadly Alliance!" The cover is drawn and signed by "Rocke"
(Charlton regular Rocco Mastroserio) and depicts an Indian with an elaborate
hawk headdress leaping down from above to attack the mounted Gunmaster while
Bullet shouts a warning. The same scene is depicted on the splash panel of
the interior story, which is credited to Joe Gill, writer, Bill Fraccio,
penciller, Frank McLaughlin, inker, and lettering by that famed Charlton
stalwart, "A. Machine".
Review by Bill Henley
Pursuant to my
occasional habit of reviewing a really obscure Silver Age title, here's
Gunmaster, a Charlton masked Western hero/quasi-superhero who first appeared
starting in 1960 as the lead feature in a Charlton Western title SIX-GUN HEROES,
and then got a title of his own. It ran four issues numbered #1-4
alongside SIX-GUN HEROES and then the GUNMASTER title assumed the numbering of
SIX-GUN HEROES. But this issue numbered #89 was the last in the series
(and there was an oddity here, even for the weird and wonderful world of
Charlton issue numbering, which I'll get to later). Gunmaster himself is
in normal life a wandering gunsmith named Clay Boone, who when danger threatens
the innocent, adopts the white leather costume and bandana mask of
Gunmaster. As his name suggests, his approach to fighting crime is a basic
one, involving ordinary guns rather than the elaborate weapons and gimmicks used
by most contemporary superheroes. Somewhere along the line, Gunmaster
picked up a sidekick named Bullet, whose real name is Bob Tellub (spell it
backwards). I have to admit that I picked out an issue of this series (I
only own one or two) to review based partly on what by modern standards is the
bizarre aspect of having a firearm-wielding "Gun Boy" kid sidekick, now that
enlightened folks frown on kids having any involvement with
guns.
However, neither Gunmaster nor Bullet are seen (except in the
splash panel) in the first few pages of this yarn, which are devoted to
the backstory of the issue's main adversary. And quite a story it is; the
caption tells us, " incredible enough to be a legend... but it happened in
exactly this way..." (Well, if you say so, guys, but personally I'd go
with "legend," or maybe "complete bird droppings"). It seems that, years ago, a
hawk swooped down and seized an Apache papoose lying on the ground in a
cradleboard, and carried the infant off to its nest. "The baby did not
cry! He was not afraid!", and, apparently impressed by this fortitude, the
mother hawk adopted the child into its brood of chicks instead of having him for
lunch. "The child flourished in one of the strangest relationships in the
annals of man," until the kid outgrew the nest and mama hawk decided he had to
go. She carried him back to the ground where he was found and recognized
by his original Apache parents. He was named "Hawk" (what, after all that
you expected him to be named "Sparrow" or "Buzzard"?) and grows up to be a
mighty warrior, skilled not only with knife and bow and arrow, but with the
firearms captured by the Apaches from their white enemies. One day,
another Apache lays claim to a horse stolen from the tribe by a "hardcase" white
interloper, and the white man shoots down the unarmed Indian. Hawk arrives
on the scene quickly, and he is not unarmed; when the white man draws his gun,
Hawk pulls and fires his pistol faster.
"Now Clay Boone, itinerant
gunsmith, entered the picture," finding the white man injured but still
alive. While Bob Tellub stays to care for him, Clay dons his Gunmaster
costume and rides in pursuit of the Apache shooter. When Gunmaster catches
up to Hawk, the Indian again resorts to his own firearm. "The mighty
Apache didn't miss! His slug smashed against Gunmaster's chest... and
Gunmaster kept coming!" (I'm really not all that familiar with Gunmaster,
but I take it his outfit included an early model bulletproof vest.)
Gunmaster leaps and pulls Hawk off his horse, and the two engage in a
hand-to-hand battle. "The fight was a classic... it raged for 30
minutes... and lesser men would've stopped from sheer exhaustion!" At last
Gunmaster gets the upper hand over his Apache foe, who says defiantly, "I have
no weapon! Go ahead-- kill me!" Gunmaster has no intention of doing
that, but he does intend to take Hawk in to stand trial for the shooting he
committed. "Indian no get fair trial!", Hawk says (probably accurately,
though Gunmaster insists otherwise). Suddenly Hawk spots one of his
namesake birds, circling in the sky, and gives a call, "KREEGAHHH!" That
used to be Tarzan's call for "beware," but I guess it means something different
in hawk language than ape language. The hawk swoops down to attack
Gunmaster, and while our hero fends off the bird's talons, Hawk the Apache
seizes his chance to escape. Gunmaster recognizes that Hawk will be future
trouble, but decides to resume his Clay Boone identity and check on his sidekick
and the injured man. Even though the Indian who was originally shot and
wounded by the white man has corroborated Hawk's story that the white man was at
fault, Boone is determined to bring him in for trial; "He is waging his own
private war against the rest of the world!" Once again suiting up as
Gunmaster, he rides again in pursuit of Hawk while advising Bullet to keep watch
for other Apache ambushers. And now Hawk turns the tables, leaping on
Gunmaster from above and knocking him off his horse. Another hand-to-hand
scuffle ensues, but Bullet settles it by shooting Hawk from the side. The
defeated and wounded Indian faces trial and imprisonment, for "other crimes
against the U.S. Army and homesteaders" even if he got off on the charge of
shooting the man who shot his fellow Apache. But nonetheless he swears
vengeance; "You are Hawk's enemy, Gunmaster! Some day, Hawk will
kill you!" And so, sensibly, Gunmaster draws his gun and shoots Hawk
through the heart... no, not really; neither Gunmaster's heroic code of honor
nor the Comics Code would allow that.
Part II of the story, "The Alliance
Is Formed," indicate that Gunmaster doesn't only have Hawk to worry about.
As he Indian is sentenced to two years at hard labor and arrives at the state
penitentiary (the state is unnamed), we find that the prison is the site of Old
Home Week for Gunmaster's old enemies. They include Brains, an "evil
genius" who first appeared in the July 1965 issue of GUNMASTER and whose
"gargantuan body lives for vengeance against Gunmaster!"; Dr. Dynamite, whose
"explosive talents were first seen in SIX-GUN HEROES #80, Sept. 1964"; Prince
Kukov, whose "dreams of an empire on the North American continent" were foiled
by Gunmaster in issue #1, Sept. 1964, of GM's title; and The Barker, also from
GM #1, whose "hypnotic genius" was no match for Gunmaster, also in GM #1.
When Hawk (still clad only in his Indian loincloth rather than prison greys) is
shoved into Brains' cell, the "evil genius" is at first hostile to his new
Indian cellmate but then intrigued when he finds out they share a common foe in
Gunmaster. Soon Brains sends out a message by prison grapevine; "We've got
the one man we need!" He figures that once the fearsome foursome make
their escape from behind prison walls, Hawk will be able to lead them across the
desert to freedom. Hawk insists, however, that killing Gunmaster is the
first priority; only after that can the "alliance" make their way to permanent
freedom.
And so each of these bad hats puts his special talent to use in
the escape plan. Dr. Dynamite utilizes his ability to "create exposives
from ordinary materials found anywhere!" Prince Kukov arranges for horses
to be brought near the prison, using gold he had secretly stashed. The
Barker is able to hypnotize an entranced guard into opening the cell doors, and
Dr. Dynamite's homemade explosive blows through the wall. Prince Kukov, a
Russian Cossack, masters the skittish horses, and Hawk "deals with" the
remaining prison guards in an unspecified but presumably unpleasant way.
The criminals ride off into the "trackless desert," but Hawk is able to locate
water and food for them with aid from his friendly hawks. And Brains
reveals he has learned that Gunmaster and Bullet are "camped near Sundance,"
ripe for ambush before the heroes learn of their escape.
Those folks who
say that "kids and guns don't mix" may have a point, for the title of Part III
of this tale is "Bullet the Gunboy Dies!" When the clanging of an alarm
bell warns that "something is wrong in town," Gunmaster rides to check out the
situation, leaving Bullet alone to guard their remote camp. The Gun Boy is
suspicious of the large hawk which is circling the camp; "If I didn't know that
Apache is behind bars, I'd..." In fact Hawk is a lot closer than he
thinks, and he emerges from hiding, decoying Bullet with a plea not to shoot,
only to summon his hawk-friend to savage the Gun Boy with its talons. Then
"Brains", leader of the gang, puts a bullet in Bullet from the back! The
others want to go on and kill Gunmaster, but "Brains" has a different and even
more cruel thought; "We have killed the boy and Gunmaster loved him like a
son! This is worse than death to him... he will spend his life in grief,
knowing that we, his enemies, destroyed the life he valued most!" As the
others agree that this is the perfect vengeance, Hawk notes that heavy rains are
coming which will wipe out their tracks and prevent Gunmaster from pursuing
them. With the purpose of their "alliance" achieved, "Brains" orders, "All
of you take separate trails and we will never meet again!"
After learning
that the alarm bells warned of the escape of the "five evil men," Gunmaster
returns to camp to "smell death" and find Bullet lying seemingly lifeless on the
ground! "The cowards... five of them against one boy... and every bullet
was in the back!" Detecting a "faint heartbeat," Gunmaster takes the
Gun Boy back to town in his Clay Boone cart, though he has little hope for the
boy's survival. He resumes his Clay Boone civilian identity to leave Bullet in a
doctor's care, as he makes plans to ride after each of the guilty men.
Boone directs the doctor, "Take care of the... the final rites, will you?", when
the inevitable happens, for he has a rite of his own to perform, a rite of
vengeance. After Boone departs, the doctor reflects to his nurse that
though the gunsmith Clay Boone is known as a peace-loving man who "lets people
shove him around," "the glint I just saw in his eye... wasn't exactly
peaceable!"
"Brains" seemingly has second thoughts about his strategy to
increase Gunmaster's suffering by leaving him alive. Even though he hires
"the deadliest gunmen in the West to guard his corpulent cracass," "Brains"
shivers in fear of the thought that sooner or later Gunmaster will come for
him. And indeed, as his bodyguards sit in the outer room of his hotel
suite, Gunmaster crashes into the bedroom through a window! Gunmaster has
to use his guns only to disarm the two gunmen, for "Brains" himself screams and
faints at the first sight of the hero! "Sheer fright! I'd say he's
been living in fear quite a while!", a doctor explains. Next on
Gunmaster's little list is The Barker, the hypotist. As Clay Boone, he
tracks down the Barker doing his usual act of putting a sideshow crowd into
hypnosis in order to rob them of their valuables. But by means of sheer
will, Boone resists the Barker's hypnosis, and while the villain is distracted
by rifling the audience, he makes his costume change to Gunmaster. "I've
come about Bullet!" He doesn't need his trademark guns, only his fists, to
defeat the Barker and turn him over to the law for "the murder of one Bob Tellub
and other crimes".
"Ten days and a thousand miles south," it looks
like Gunmaster may not survive to finish his quest of vengeance, for he is lost
in the desert of Apache country without water. But when he spots a
hawk circling in the sky, he knows he will not die that way, for the hawk must
belong to the Apache renegade, who must be nearby-- and near a waterhole.
Like "Brains," Hawk has been expecting Gunmaster to come after him, and the
Indian warrior sights his rifle and fires six shots-- but Gunmaster does not
fall! "His medicine strong! Hawk cannot kill!" (You'd think a
mighty and crafty warrior might suspect a bulletproof vest and try for a head
shot. But I guess not.) Even driven by vengeance, Gunmaster does not
shoot to kill, but smashes a bullet through Hawk's gun arm and then leads the
injured and defeated Apache off to return to prison. He doesn't even need
his guns to deal with the last two miscreants, Prince Kukov and Dr.
Dynamite. They have fled to Mexico, but when Gunmaster finds them, they
blubber and beg for mercy and our hero snorts contemptuously, "You make me sick
to my stomach! I'll let the courts deal with you!"
Returning to
the town of Sundance where he left the seemingly dying Bullet, our hero
enters the hospital room-- masked and costumed as Gunmaster, even though he left
the boy in his Clay Boone guise-- and finds that the boy is still with us,
having taken an unexpected turn for the better. Grateful for this miracle,
Clay Boone resolves to take up the peaceable life he previously only feigned,
and not keep on dragging his juvenile "Gun Boy" ward into gunfights that will
sooner or later really take his life! Well, no, that's not really what
happens in this story. But it might as well have. This was the last
issue of GUNMASTER, and as far as I know the last apperance of the character in
a new story, though apparently he made a few reprint appearances in the 70's and
80's. As I said, the numbering of this last issue is a bit screwy even for
a Charlton title. The GUNMASTER comic had actually been cancelled by
Charlton over a year earlier, with issue #88, March-April 1966, and Charlton
passed on the numbering of GUNMASTER to the new JUDOMASTER title with issue
#89. (Contrary to what you might suppose, this didn't involve Gunmaster
deciding to renounce lethal weaponry and take up martial arts instead.
Judomaster was an entirely diffferent character, a costumed superhero operating
during World War II.) But a year later Charlton decided to publish one
more GUNMASTER issue after all-- probably there was an inventory story to be
used up-- and so this issue was numbered GUNMASTER #89 even though #89 in the
series had already appeared under the JUDOMASTER title.
The issue
contained two short backup filler stories. One, "The Hunter," is a
leftover tale of Black Fury, the wild stallion who was a member, along with
Trigger and Silver, of the elite stable of horses who had their own comic-book
titles for a time. (Black Fury's ran an impressive 57 issues from 1955-66.
I own one issue, maybe I'll review it sometime.) A spoiled kid mistreats
his horse to the point that the horse tries to kill the kid, but Black Fury
saves the kid from the horse and from a rattlesnake, and they make friends to
the point that the kid rides Black Fury and declares himself a "wild horse
tamer". The four-page story ends so abruptly that I suspect somebody took
the first few pages of a longer inventory Black Fury story and dropped the
rest. However, there is also a three page "Ray Deeto, Range Detective"
story, in which the sagebrush sleuth deduces that some bad guys are evil
ranchers posing as Indians, by the fact that there are horseshoe tracks and the
real Indians don't use horseshoes. Duh.
editor; featuring the Western masked hero Gunmaster and his teen sidekick Bullet
the Gun Boy (who gets a cover logo of his own nearly equal in size to that of
Gunmaster) in "Deadly Alliance!" The cover is drawn and signed by "Rocke"
(Charlton regular Rocco Mastroserio) and depicts an Indian with an elaborate
hawk headdress leaping down from above to attack the mounted Gunmaster while
Bullet shouts a warning. The same scene is depicted on the splash panel of
the interior story, which is credited to Joe Gill, writer, Bill Fraccio,
penciller, Frank McLaughlin, inker, and lettering by that famed Charlton
stalwart, "A. Machine".
Review by Bill Henley
Pursuant to my
occasional habit of reviewing a really obscure Silver Age title, here's
Gunmaster, a Charlton masked Western hero/quasi-superhero who first appeared
starting in 1960 as the lead feature in a Charlton Western title SIX-GUN HEROES,
and then got a title of his own. It ran four issues numbered #1-4
alongside SIX-GUN HEROES and then the GUNMASTER title assumed the numbering of
SIX-GUN HEROES. But this issue numbered #89 was the last in the series
(and there was an oddity here, even for the weird and wonderful world of
Charlton issue numbering, which I'll get to later). Gunmaster himself is
in normal life a wandering gunsmith named Clay Boone, who when danger threatens
the innocent, adopts the white leather costume and bandana mask of
Gunmaster. As his name suggests, his approach to fighting crime is a basic
one, involving ordinary guns rather than the elaborate weapons and gimmicks used
by most contemporary superheroes. Somewhere along the line, Gunmaster
picked up a sidekick named Bullet, whose real name is Bob Tellub (spell it
backwards). I have to admit that I picked out an issue of this series (I
only own one or two) to review based partly on what by modern standards is the
bizarre aspect of having a firearm-wielding "Gun Boy" kid sidekick, now that
enlightened folks frown on kids having any involvement with
guns.
However, neither Gunmaster nor Bullet are seen (except in the
splash panel) in the first few pages of this yarn, which are devoted to
the backstory of the issue's main adversary. And quite a story it is; the
caption tells us, " incredible enough to be a legend... but it happened in
exactly this way..." (Well, if you say so, guys, but personally I'd go
with "legend," or maybe "complete bird droppings"). It seems that, years ago, a
hawk swooped down and seized an Apache papoose lying on the ground in a
cradleboard, and carried the infant off to its nest. "The baby did not
cry! He was not afraid!", and, apparently impressed by this fortitude, the
mother hawk adopted the child into its brood of chicks instead of having him for
lunch. "The child flourished in one of the strangest relationships in the
annals of man," until the kid outgrew the nest and mama hawk decided he had to
go. She carried him back to the ground where he was found and recognized
by his original Apache parents. He was named "Hawk" (what, after all that
you expected him to be named "Sparrow" or "Buzzard"?) and grows up to be a
mighty warrior, skilled not only with knife and bow and arrow, but with the
firearms captured by the Apaches from their white enemies. One day,
another Apache lays claim to a horse stolen from the tribe by a "hardcase" white
interloper, and the white man shoots down the unarmed Indian. Hawk arrives
on the scene quickly, and he is not unarmed; when the white man draws his gun,
Hawk pulls and fires his pistol faster.
"Now Clay Boone, itinerant
gunsmith, entered the picture," finding the white man injured but still
alive. While Bob Tellub stays to care for him, Clay dons his Gunmaster
costume and rides in pursuit of the Apache shooter. When Gunmaster catches
up to Hawk, the Indian again resorts to his own firearm. "The mighty
Apache didn't miss! His slug smashed against Gunmaster's chest... and
Gunmaster kept coming!" (I'm really not all that familiar with Gunmaster,
but I take it his outfit included an early model bulletproof vest.)
Gunmaster leaps and pulls Hawk off his horse, and the two engage in a
hand-to-hand battle. "The fight was a classic... it raged for 30
minutes... and lesser men would've stopped from sheer exhaustion!" At last
Gunmaster gets the upper hand over his Apache foe, who says defiantly, "I have
no weapon! Go ahead-- kill me!" Gunmaster has no intention of doing
that, but he does intend to take Hawk in to stand trial for the shooting he
committed. "Indian no get fair trial!", Hawk says (probably accurately,
though Gunmaster insists otherwise). Suddenly Hawk spots one of his
namesake birds, circling in the sky, and gives a call, "KREEGAHHH!" That
used to be Tarzan's call for "beware," but I guess it means something different
in hawk language than ape language. The hawk swoops down to attack
Gunmaster, and while our hero fends off the bird's talons, Hawk the Apache
seizes his chance to escape. Gunmaster recognizes that Hawk will be future
trouble, but decides to resume his Clay Boone identity and check on his sidekick
and the injured man. Even though the Indian who was originally shot and
wounded by the white man has corroborated Hawk's story that the white man was at
fault, Boone is determined to bring him in for trial; "He is waging his own
private war against the rest of the world!" Once again suiting up as
Gunmaster, he rides again in pursuit of Hawk while advising Bullet to keep watch
for other Apache ambushers. And now Hawk turns the tables, leaping on
Gunmaster from above and knocking him off his horse. Another hand-to-hand
scuffle ensues, but Bullet settles it by shooting Hawk from the side. The
defeated and wounded Indian faces trial and imprisonment, for "other crimes
against the U.S. Army and homesteaders" even if he got off on the charge of
shooting the man who shot his fellow Apache. But nonetheless he swears
vengeance; "You are Hawk's enemy, Gunmaster! Some day, Hawk will
kill you!" And so, sensibly, Gunmaster draws his gun and shoots Hawk
through the heart... no, not really; neither Gunmaster's heroic code of honor
nor the Comics Code would allow that.
Part II of the story, "The Alliance
Is Formed," indicate that Gunmaster doesn't only have Hawk to worry about.
As he Indian is sentenced to two years at hard labor and arrives at the state
penitentiary (the state is unnamed), we find that the prison is the site of Old
Home Week for Gunmaster's old enemies. They include Brains, an "evil
genius" who first appeared in the July 1965 issue of GUNMASTER and whose
"gargantuan body lives for vengeance against Gunmaster!"; Dr. Dynamite, whose
"explosive talents were first seen in SIX-GUN HEROES #80, Sept. 1964"; Prince
Kukov, whose "dreams of an empire on the North American continent" were foiled
by Gunmaster in issue #1, Sept. 1964, of GM's title; and The Barker, also from
GM #1, whose "hypnotic genius" was no match for Gunmaster, also in GM #1.
When Hawk (still clad only in his Indian loincloth rather than prison greys) is
shoved into Brains' cell, the "evil genius" is at first hostile to his new
Indian cellmate but then intrigued when he finds out they share a common foe in
Gunmaster. Soon Brains sends out a message by prison grapevine; "We've got
the one man we need!" He figures that once the fearsome foursome make
their escape from behind prison walls, Hawk will be able to lead them across the
desert to freedom. Hawk insists, however, that killing Gunmaster is the
first priority; only after that can the "alliance" make their way to permanent
freedom.
And so each of these bad hats puts his special talent to use in
the escape plan. Dr. Dynamite utilizes his ability to "create exposives
from ordinary materials found anywhere!" Prince Kukov arranges for horses
to be brought near the prison, using gold he had secretly stashed. The
Barker is able to hypnotize an entranced guard into opening the cell doors, and
Dr. Dynamite's homemade explosive blows through the wall. Prince Kukov, a
Russian Cossack, masters the skittish horses, and Hawk "deals with" the
remaining prison guards in an unspecified but presumably unpleasant way.
The criminals ride off into the "trackless desert," but Hawk is able to locate
water and food for them with aid from his friendly hawks. And Brains
reveals he has learned that Gunmaster and Bullet are "camped near Sundance,"
ripe for ambush before the heroes learn of their escape.
Those folks who
say that "kids and guns don't mix" may have a point, for the title of Part III
of this tale is "Bullet the Gunboy Dies!" When the clanging of an alarm
bell warns that "something is wrong in town," Gunmaster rides to check out the
situation, leaving Bullet alone to guard their remote camp. The Gun Boy is
suspicious of the large hawk which is circling the camp; "If I didn't know that
Apache is behind bars, I'd..." In fact Hawk is a lot closer than he
thinks, and he emerges from hiding, decoying Bullet with a plea not to shoot,
only to summon his hawk-friend to savage the Gun Boy with its talons. Then
"Brains", leader of the gang, puts a bullet in Bullet from the back! The
others want to go on and kill Gunmaster, but "Brains" has a different and even
more cruel thought; "We have killed the boy and Gunmaster loved him like a
son! This is worse than death to him... he will spend his life in grief,
knowing that we, his enemies, destroyed the life he valued most!" As the
others agree that this is the perfect vengeance, Hawk notes that heavy rains are
coming which will wipe out their tracks and prevent Gunmaster from pursuing
them. With the purpose of their "alliance" achieved, "Brains" orders, "All
of you take separate trails and we will never meet again!"
After learning
that the alarm bells warned of the escape of the "five evil men," Gunmaster
returns to camp to "smell death" and find Bullet lying seemingly lifeless on the
ground! "The cowards... five of them against one boy... and every bullet
was in the back!" Detecting a "faint heartbeat," Gunmaster takes the
Gun Boy back to town in his Clay Boone cart, though he has little hope for the
boy's survival. He resumes his Clay Boone civilian identity to leave Bullet in a
doctor's care, as he makes plans to ride after each of the guilty men.
Boone directs the doctor, "Take care of the... the final rites, will you?", when
the inevitable happens, for he has a rite of his own to perform, a rite of
vengeance. After Boone departs, the doctor reflects to his nurse that
though the gunsmith Clay Boone is known as a peace-loving man who "lets people
shove him around," "the glint I just saw in his eye... wasn't exactly
peaceable!"
"Brains" seemingly has second thoughts about his strategy to
increase Gunmaster's suffering by leaving him alive. Even though he hires
"the deadliest gunmen in the West to guard his corpulent cracass," "Brains"
shivers in fear of the thought that sooner or later Gunmaster will come for
him. And indeed, as his bodyguards sit in the outer room of his hotel
suite, Gunmaster crashes into the bedroom through a window! Gunmaster has
to use his guns only to disarm the two gunmen, for "Brains" himself screams and
faints at the first sight of the hero! "Sheer fright! I'd say he's
been living in fear quite a while!", a doctor explains. Next on
Gunmaster's little list is The Barker, the hypotist. As Clay Boone, he
tracks down the Barker doing his usual act of putting a sideshow crowd into
hypnosis in order to rob them of their valuables. But by means of sheer
will, Boone resists the Barker's hypnosis, and while the villain is distracted
by rifling the audience, he makes his costume change to Gunmaster. "I've
come about Bullet!" He doesn't need his trademark guns, only his fists, to
defeat the Barker and turn him over to the law for "the murder of one Bob Tellub
and other crimes".
"Ten days and a thousand miles south," it looks
like Gunmaster may not survive to finish his quest of vengeance, for he is lost
in the desert of Apache country without water. But when he spots a
hawk circling in the sky, he knows he will not die that way, for the hawk must
belong to the Apache renegade, who must be nearby-- and near a waterhole.
Like "Brains," Hawk has been expecting Gunmaster to come after him, and the
Indian warrior sights his rifle and fires six shots-- but Gunmaster does not
fall! "His medicine strong! Hawk cannot kill!" (You'd think a
mighty and crafty warrior might suspect a bulletproof vest and try for a head
shot. But I guess not.) Even driven by vengeance, Gunmaster does not
shoot to kill, but smashes a bullet through Hawk's gun arm and then leads the
injured and defeated Apache off to return to prison. He doesn't even need
his guns to deal with the last two miscreants, Prince Kukov and Dr.
Dynamite. They have fled to Mexico, but when Gunmaster finds them, they
blubber and beg for mercy and our hero snorts contemptuously, "You make me sick
to my stomach! I'll let the courts deal with you!"
Returning to
the town of Sundance where he left the seemingly dying Bullet, our hero
enters the hospital room-- masked and costumed as Gunmaster, even though he left
the boy in his Clay Boone guise-- and finds that the boy is still with us,
having taken an unexpected turn for the better. Grateful for this miracle,
Clay Boone resolves to take up the peaceable life he previously only feigned,
and not keep on dragging his juvenile "Gun Boy" ward into gunfights that will
sooner or later really take his life! Well, no, that's not really what
happens in this story. But it might as well have. This was the last
issue of GUNMASTER, and as far as I know the last apperance of the character in
a new story, though apparently he made a few reprint appearances in the 70's and
80's. As I said, the numbering of this last issue is a bit screwy even for
a Charlton title. The GUNMASTER comic had actually been cancelled by
Charlton over a year earlier, with issue #88, March-April 1966, and Charlton
passed on the numbering of GUNMASTER to the new JUDOMASTER title with issue
#89. (Contrary to what you might suppose, this didn't involve Gunmaster
deciding to renounce lethal weaponry and take up martial arts instead.
Judomaster was an entirely diffferent character, a costumed superhero operating
during World War II.) But a year later Charlton decided to publish one
more GUNMASTER issue after all-- probably there was an inventory story to be
used up-- and so this issue was numbered GUNMASTER #89 even though #89 in the
series had already appeared under the JUDOMASTER title.
The issue
contained two short backup filler stories. One, "The Hunter," is a
leftover tale of Black Fury, the wild stallion who was a member, along with
Trigger and Silver, of the elite stable of horses who had their own comic-book
titles for a time. (Black Fury's ran an impressive 57 issues from 1955-66.
I own one issue, maybe I'll review it sometime.) A spoiled kid mistreats
his horse to the point that the horse tries to kill the kid, but Black Fury
saves the kid from the horse and from a rattlesnake, and they make friends to
the point that the kid rides Black Fury and declares himself a "wild horse
tamer". The four-page story ends so abruptly that I suspect somebody took
the first few pages of a longer inventory Black Fury story and dropped the
rest. However, there is also a three page "Ray Deeto, Range Detective"
story, in which the sagebrush sleuth deduces that some bad guys are evil
ranchers posing as Indians, by the fact that there are horseshoe tracks and the
real Indians don't use horseshoes. Duh.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)