Napoleon and Illya Join the Circus

The evil organization THRUSH is running a jewel smuggling operation in Europe, so U.N.C.L.E.'s plan to break this up is to have its too best agents join the circus.

This is the situation we find in Man from U.N.C.L.E. #13 (July 1967--writer unknown; art by Mike Sekowsky.)

Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin at first think their boss Mr. Waverly might be off his rocker, but the plan actually does make sense. A small circus can travel around Europe, stopping in locations in which smuggling activity has been detected and thus allowing the agents to quietly investigate.

In fact, "The Flying Clowns Affair" is a very well-constructed story. Of course, it's a story set in the universe of the Man from U.N.C.L.E., so it is by nature over-the-top. But even taking that into consideration, the story follows a perfectly logical progression.

In a French border town, Napoleon and Illya get a line on some smugglers using a local winery as a hide-out. But the circus strong man is a THRUSH agent. Tailing the good guys to the winery, he trys to run them over with a truck, only to end up getting killed when the truck slams into a giant vat of wine.

They capture a couple of THRUSH agents and find a cache of red rubies hidden inside a cask of red wine, but the villains are executed by a sniper before they can answer any questions. THURSH does not have an attractive benefits package for their employees.

The good guys do recover the radio the dead strongman used to contact his THRUSH boss. They are able to trace the signal to an area around the German border and begin to search that area. So THRUSH agents try again to get rid of them, this time by rigging the cannon used by Illya in a human cannonball act. The charge inside is set far too strongly, firing the hapless U.N.C.L.E. agent well clear of the circus, with Napoleon desperately running after them.

It's here that you can argue the otherwise well-plotted story fails to hit its mark, since it depends on pure dumb luck for its next plot twist. Illya happens to land in a haystack just outside the barn in which the THRUSH smugglers are hiding. They have a limo parked there which is equipped with a number of secret hiding spots for stolen jewels.

The limo tries to make a getaway with Solo and Illya handing on to the top. Napoleon blinds the driver with his over-sized clown coat. The limo crashes, killing the THRUSH agents inside and finishing off the smuggling operation.

Mike Sekowsky's art is not on many people's Favorite Artist list, but he does tell a story well and more often than night manages to make Solo and Illya look more or less like Robert Vaughn and David McCallum. And his panels showing the agents in their clown get-ups are a lot of fun.

The unknown writer does a fine job of constructed a logical plot. Even the dumb luck of Illya dropping into that haystack isn't too bad--the reasonable detective work they had done to get close to the smugglers makes it feel as if they had earned that bit of luck.

Next week, we'll return to Batman and the Penguin again. I reviewed Penguin's first appearance a few weeks back. So it seems only right to look at his second appearance as well, which happened in the very next issue. After that, since we've been to the DC Universe a number of times recently, we'll pay a visit to the Marvel U.