Cover Cavalcade

 

A Walt Kelly cover from 1943.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Our Miss Brooks: "Clay City Football Game" 10/31/48

Miss Brooks agrees to drive Mr. Boyton to a nearby city to watch the Madison High team play an away game. She assumes that it could be a nice, romantic drive with just the two of them. But Walter, Harriat, Principal Conklin, Mrs. Conklin, and a bullfrog named MacDougal all end up coming along. The trip does not go smoothly.

Click HERE to listen or download.

A Bank Robbing Double Feature, Part 2

 

Last week, we looked at the 1958 drive-in film Machine Gun Kelly. That was released as a double-feature along with The Bonnie Parker Story. 

Directed by B-movie and TV veteran William Witney, Bonnie Parker isn't quite as good as Kelly, but it's still a fun movie. Like Kelly, it follows the broad strokes events of the real-life Bonnie and Clyde, but fictionalizes details and characterizations.

We meet Bonnie Parker when she is working as a waitress at a greasy spoon, the only job she can get because her husband is a crook (and is currently serving 175 years in the slammer). That job falls through when the only way she can keep it get rather personal with the cook. But then someone else comes into her life and offers her a ticket to the big time.

That someone is Clyde Barrow. No, waitaminute. His name is... "Guy Darrow?"

I have no idea why they changed the name for the film. Later on, when Guy's brother joins their gang, the brother changes from the real-life Buck to the movie Chuck.  I can't imagine that there were legal issues with the Barrow family, but what do I know? Perhaps the names were changes simply to allow us to focus more on Bonnie as the center of the story.

Which is fine. Dorothy Provine plays Bonnie as a tough gal who wants something better than what she has. Like Guy, she turns out to be a sociopath, but she's realistic enough to eventually realize she and Guy are doomed. And an encounter with a "nice guy" (an archtecture student who doesn't know she's a crook) leaves her aware of what she can never have.

Guy is played by Jack Hogan, who is best remembered for playing chronic complainer Pvt. Kirby in Combat! In that show, Kirby used a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR). As Guy Darrow, he uses a Tommy Gun. There's a bit of irony in that, as in real-life Clyde Barrow used a BAR. For us Combat! fans, it would have been pretty nifty to see Hogan wielding what would have become his signature weapon.

Anyway, Bonnie and Guy rob places like bars and gas stations, kill some people and are soon known and wanted no matter where they go. Bonnie, who was promised the Big Time, is getting disillusioned. It's not long before she asserts her strong personality and takes over. In fact, for most of the rest of the movie, she's the one carrying the Tommy Gun, making plans and showing more physical courage than other members of the gang. All the time, though, she clearly knows that sooner or later, they are going to die.

She also busts her husband out of prison to beef up the gang. Guy isn't happy about that, but by now Bonnie is keeping both Guy and her husband on a short lease. She no longer interested in either of them romantically or physically. She simply needs them to pull off profitable bank jobs.

The movie's biggest flaw in the character of Tom Steel, a Texas Ranger clearly based on Frank Hamer (the Ranger that tracked down Bonnie and Clyde). He's effectively played by Douglas Kennedy and he's supposed to be a relentless lawman who never gives up. He pops up several times throughout the film. But because Bonnie and Guy keep getting away from him, he comes across as ineffectual. Yes, he does get them in the final scene, but by that time it comes across as just dumb luck.

By the way, a few years after making Bonnie Parker, William Witney would direct Jack Hogan in a movie titled Cat Burgler. You can read my review of it HERE. 

The Great Darkness Saga, Part 2

 

Legion of Super-Heroes #291 (September 1982) picks up right where the last issue took place. That previous issue ended with the capture of one of the Servants of Darkness. Brought back to Legion HQ, the Servant is examined and discovered to be a clone of an ancestor of Shadow Lass.

It's an effective way of bringing us back into the story after waiting a month for the next issue. We are finally fed a little bit of information about the bad guys, but its only enough to be intriguing and a little creepy without giving away too much. 

Writer Paul Levitz and artists Keith Giffen (breakdowns) & Larry Mahlstedt (finished art) then continue to pile more stuff on, with examples of just how powerful the villain is. He releases Mordru, the evil wizard who is described as being equal in power to the entire Federation civilization. But then he almost casually zaps Mordru, draining the wizard of his power.

The same thing happens to another villain with god-like powers when the Time Trapper is also drained of power.

Dream Girl gets a premonition that her sister, White Witch, is also going to attacked. Forewarned, the Legion manages to save her.

It's during this battle that Invisible Kid tries to slip through one of the space warps that the Servants use to see who the Big Bad is. And it's here that we get a visual clue to his identity. As I mentioned last time, Darkseid isn't yet as well-known as he will eventually become, but he has been around. For attentive readers familiar with him, the panel below is probably the best clue yet to his identity.

Invisible Kid takes an Omega Beam blast and is injured. The Servant gets away and for the time being Darkseid's identity is still unknown to the Legion and probably also to many of the original readers of the book.

While all this is going on, the captured Servant comes out of her coma and nearly takes down Saturn Girl and Cosmic Boy. Lightning Lad, who has been ill himself, pulls himself together enough to put the Servant down again.

It's a great issue. It's fast-paced, full of great action, doles out just enough information about the villains to leave us wanting more, and moves the overall story arc along enough to be satisfying. 

As with the last issue, I'm giving short shrift to many of the continuing story arcs--there's an election for the new Legion leader (Dream Girl wins) and Chameleon Boy is on trial for something incredibly dumb he did a few issues earlier. I want to concentrate my review on the main story, but I should say again that these ongoing arcs gave depth to the characters and made them relatable. 

That's it for now. We'll be back in two weeks with the next part of the Great Darkness Saga. Next week, we'll jump back a little over a thousand years to discuss a war-time team up between Sgt. Fury and Captain America.

Cover Cavalcade

 

From 1930. The artist is R.C. Wardel

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Richard Diamond: "Photographer's Card" 3/26/50

Diamond gets possession of a small photographic negative that people are willing to kill for.

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A Bank Robbing Double Feature, part 1

 

Machine Gun Kelly and The Bonnie Parker Story were released as a double-feature in 1958. Both were released by American International Pictures and produced on very low budgets (which was A.I.P.'s specialty.) Both, despite the low budget, are excellent movies.

Machine Gun Kelly was produced and directed by Roger Corman, who is often remembered for churning out scores of movies on very low budgets, thus turning a profit on each one regardless of its quality. But he was a good director when he put his mind to it. He knew how to tell a story well and his direction often has a visual flair to it that keeps things interesting.

Kelly is one of his good films. It benefits from having Charles Bronson play the title role. This was Bronson's first leading role and he does a great job endowing that role with just the right mixture of brutality, bravado and barely-hidden cowardice.

Kelly runs a small gang that specializes in bank robberies. His girl--Flo Becker--is a part of that gang (with Susan Cabot giving another strong performance). It's soon obvious that she is the manipulative half of the two, though Kelly maintains an veneer of supposed manhood around her with occasional abusive behavior and displays of jealousy. 

All in all, it's not a healthy relationship. But then, Kelly has trouble with healthy relationships. His leadership methodology to run the gang boils down to being a bully. It's not a happy gang.

In fact, that gang splits apart and turns against one another when a bank job goes wrong. Even before that, one of them tries to snitch more than his cut from the bank job that opens the movie. That guy ends up being pushed onto a cage containing an angry mountain lion and losing an arm. Kelly later has to ambush a rival gang led by one of his former partners. 

It's Kelly's brutality that eventually brings him down. He and Flo turn to kidnapping, teaming up with a crook named "Apple" and snatching the young daughter of a rich man. But Kelly eventually kills Apple and the one-armed snitch from earlier in the movie snitches once again. Things begin to fall apart, with Kelly now in a panic as the Feds close in, while Flo tries to badger him into manning up and going down in a blaze of gunfire.

There are hints throughout the movie that Kelly is a coward, egged on to acts of immoral courage only because of Flo. Anything he sees that reminds him of death sends him into a cold sweat. In fact, the second bank robbery goes wrong because he sees a coffin being delivered and freezes up for a minute, keeping him from getting to the bank in time to cover his partners.

The movie has a number of strong elements aside from the solid story and the lead actors. The supporting cast are all great, each giving their characters distinctive personalities. Especially notable are Frank DeKova as a crooked gas station owner who claims to have once been a great hunter and Morey Amsterdam as the eventually one-armed snitch with a snake-oil personality. In fact, it's fun to see Amsterdam (best remembered as Buddy on The Dick Van Dyke Show) play a low-life crook. 

I couldn't decide on which scene to highlight for this review, so I'm just going with both my top choices. The first is the dialogue-free opening scene, showing up a bank robbery set to jazz music. The other gives us a chance to see Charles Bronson roughing up Morey Amersterdam--which is something you just don't see every day.

Next week, we'll look at The Bonnie Parker Story--the other half of this drive-in double feature from 1958.

A Hand from the Wall!

 

Three weeks ago, we looked at the cover story from Gold Key's Scooby Doo... Where are You? #6 (June 1971), which was based on one of the original Saturday Morning episodes. 

This week, we'll look at the back-up story from this issue. As with "The Ghost of Redbeard," the writer is unidentified and the artist is Warren Tufts. 

"The Hand From the Wall" is only five pages long, so it jumps into the story quickly. When the Mystery Machine runs out of gas, Shaggy and Scooby are delegated to make the hike to get more.

This is quite a hike, though. The two sit on a random door step to rest, but (of course) strange things begin to happen.

A treadmill door step takes them inside, where a series of weird things scare the heck out of them. (Though, granted, it's not THAT hard to scare Shaggy and Scooby). Finally, arms coming out of the walls grab hold of Shaggy.

The rest of the gang shows up and soon discover that the "villain" is retired operator of a Spook House, who now scares random people to stave off boredom. He makes up for scaring Shaggy by giving them passes to the local Fun Park.

The story is very quick and simple, but it works because Warren Tufts' art is energetic and captures both the look and feel of the cartoon. It's a filler story, but it good filler. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Mini-Podcast #61: The Lost World, Chapter 13-16

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Mini-Podcast #61: The Lost World, Chapter 13-16:   We finish up our analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel. Click HERE for the audio version Please visit our store at:  https://ww...

Cover Cavalcade

 

A Virgil Finlay cover from 1941.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Molle Mystery Theater: "The Further Adventures of Kenny Angles" 4/18/47

                        aka "Kenny Angles and the Queen of Diamonds"

Kenny Angles was a reoccuring character on Molle Mystery Theater--a non-too-bright Broadway tout who always ends up in trouble through pure bad luck. This time, he's suspected of being part of a jewel-theft gang. Kenny's long-suffering lawyer sends him to the library, figuring that there was no way he could get into more trouble there. This plan fails miserably.

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OOPS! No Wednesday or Thursday posts this week!

 

I usually write and schedule my posts several weeks in advance. I realized at the last moment that I accidentally left off this week off that schedule! No Wednesday or Thursday reviews this week!

For those of you whose lives revolve around reading my blog--knuckle down and bear with it. We'll be back next week.

Cover Cavalcade

 

An awesome Nick Cardy cover from 1972.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Gunsmoke: "The Jayhawkers" 4/4/53

A cowboy--part of the crew of a cattle drive coming up from Texas--rides into Dodge and buys 2000 rounds of ammunition. Dillon wants to know what (or whom) the Texans plan to shoot. 

Click HERE to listen or download. 

That's a Lot of Money!

 

Read/Watch 'em In Order #133

With the last piece of fiction in the May 1927 issue of Frontier Stories, we finally get to the cover story.

"Cross and Double Cross," by Martin Stevers, is set along the Missouri River in 1840. Captain Andy Corbin of the steamboat Eagle is setting out for St. Louis, heading for the Dakotas.

He has to face the usual obstacles inherent in the journey: snags and sandbars on the river and the tendency for pro-slavery passengers to get into brawls with free soil passengers. 

But it's a last minute request from a bank to transport a half-million dollars in cash that really makes the trip dangerous. You can't keep that amount of money a secret and a particular gang of outlaws--the Turnbills--is bound to make a try for it.

Andy suspects--with good reason--that a rival has arranged for the money to be aboard and is probably even helping the Turnbills by putting some of his own guys in among the passengers. But Andy knows his rival would depend just on the outlaws. Andy is confident of his ability to win a fight. So the rival must have an alternate plan--something sneaky set to happen along with the outlaw attack.

Andy is a great protagonist, smart and tough. When, late in the book, he finds himself facing off with a bunch of bad guys without help for several minutes, we have come to believe that he can hold his own. 

The plot flows along swiftly, with Andy convinced he's figured out the plot, then having to deal with a setback that seems to indicate he was wrong, then realizing he was right all along and act just in time to come out on top.

Most of the tales of this issue of Frontier Stories have been pretty good. "Cross and Double Cross" is a worthy finale. Great action, clever story construction and a protagonist who can both out-think and out-fight his opponents make is a fun read. 

Also, it's set on a riverboat. Riverboats are inherently cool. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Mini-Podcast #60: The Lost World, Chapters 9 - 12

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Mini-Podcast #60: The Lost World, Chapters 9 - 12:   We discuss the next four chapters of The Lost World. The story goes into hyperdrive with death, betrayal, dinosaurs, and discoveries.  Cli...

The Great Darkness Saga, Part 1

 

cover art by Keith Giffen

Though a few hints setting up "The Great Darkness Saga" had appeared in a few issues prior to this, it's in Legion of Super-Heroes #290 (August 1982) that the story really took off.

Writer Paul Levitz and artists Keith Giffen (breakdowns) & Larry Mahlstedt (finished art) jump right into the action. Something had attacked the Museum of Mystic Arts in Metropolis, but had not found what it was looking for. When a team of legionaires investigate, the something (a "Servant of Darkness" whose origin and purpose are as yet unknow) returns. There's a fight, but the creature proves able to take on even the uber-powerful heroes such as Superboy and Wildfire.

The powers the Servant uses--super-strength and a freezing breath--will eventually turn out to be a hint to its origin. But for the moment, the important thing is that it curb stomps the Legionaires and makes a getaway through a space warp with a powerful magic artifact.

In fact, we learn that a number of magic artifacts have been stolen. The most powerful item NOT yet stolen would be King Arthur's sword Excaliber, which is stored in the Tower of London.

Yet another Servant of Darkness does indeed go after the sword. The Legion puts up a better fight this time, with brand-new member Invisible Kid making his own contribution. But, in the end, the bad guy still gets away with the sword.

We the readers get to find out a little more than the Legionaires know at the moment, as the scene flashes to an apparently dead world, where we see the two Servants we've met plus three others gathered around their as-yet-unidentified boss. 

One of the fun elements of this issue is the effective way it drops in hints to whom the big boss might be and to the nature of his Servants. The main villain will, of course, turn out to be Darkseid. (Hey, it's been forty years! Spoiler bans have elapsed!) A reader nowadays who is familar with the DC Universe would probably guess this pretty quickly. This is especially true when (a few pages from now) we see one of the Servants using a flying devise just like Darkseid's son Orion and is even referred to as "My son" by the villain. Also, we do see Darkseid in silhouette a couple of times clearly enough to give it away.

A year or so before this story arc was published, Darkseid had been the bad guy in one of the JLA/JSA annual crossovers. He popped up in a few other places, but he had not yet racked up a lot of Frequent Villain Miles outside of Kirby's New Gods books. To quote a fellow member of the "DC Comics: When They Were Fun" Facebook group: Like his contemporary, Thanos, Darkseid was considered a pretty major threat, but did not have the comparative prominence that say, Dr. Doom or Luthor enjoyed. They were known, but not quite to the heights of apex level villainy that they later acheived. 

Another member of that group said: I guessed that it was Darkseid but it was not someone that many readers guessed. DC kept many villains compartmentalized then and the Legion really didn't utilize any 20th century villains/ characters outside Superboy and Supergirl. This was before company crossovers. Also this was before advance solicitations and the internet. So all in all, it was well done.

Perhaps this was the perfect time to make him a suprise villain, dropping a few hints first with confidence that it might not be too obvious.

More magic items are being stolen on the planet Talok VII, so the team heads there. 

A female Servant shows up to steal a magic orb. When she gets into trouble, the Orion-like Servant warps in to help out.

The female is captured, but the other Servant escapes with the orb. The prisoner is brought back to Legion HQ, where she gives the computer fits when it tries to analyze her. Meanwhile, the main villain absorbs the magic from the various stolen artifacts and prepares to move on with the next phase of his plan.

Because I want to concentrate on the main plot, I'm giving short shrift to the various subplots involving different characters that carry over from previous issues. I will say, though, that these subplots were largely a strength of Levitz's run as writer--relationships form, characters grow, etc. Occasionally, these character arcs dripped just a little too much into soap opera territory, but 95.3% of the time they helped make the heroes likeable and relatable.

The storytelling is exciting and the art work is strong. I've already mentioned the hints dropped throughout the story about Darkseid and his Servants, which I consider another plus. 

I always enjoy the casual way everyone accepts the existance of magic alongside all the super-science of the 30th Century. Of course, magic and science have always co-existed in the DC (and, for that matter, Marvel) universe. I always appreciate it when the characters who live in that universe simply accept this and move on with the story.

We'll discuss the second part of this story in two weeks. Next week, we'll look at another Scooby-Doo tale. 

Cover Cavalcade

 

Here's a Bill Everett cover from 1956.