Willy Schultz, Part 5

 

cover art by Rocke Mastroserio

The first four parts of "The Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz" were uniformily excellent, with each successive chapter arguably better than the last one. So, perhaps its inevitable that the next chapter, appearing in Fightin' Army #80 (1968) is a tiny bit of a letdown. At some point, there was bound to be a merely good--rather than superb--chapter in Capt. Schultz's story. Sam Glanzman's art work is great, but Willy Franz's script has a contrived element to it.

Willy was back in an American uniform at the end of the last issue, so this is still the case at the beginning of this issue. He comes across some dead Luftwaffe personnel next to bodies of the Arab renegades who had ambushed them. There's one survivor, a Luftwaffe nurse named Ilse.

Isle is temporarily blinded by a concussion during the ambush. When she hears Willy approaching, she tries to shoot him. But after disarming her, he speaks to her in German. Not surprisingly, she assumes he is a German soldier.

He takes her to a nearby cave to rest. A short time later, he exits the cave to check out a noise he heard. This leads him into a brief firefight with a German patrol supported by Arab scouts. One of the Germans, despite being wounded, gets away.

Willy knows that if the German survives to get back to his own lines, the enemy will be coming back in force. But in the meantime, he and Ilse spend the afternoon in the cave. This is the contrived part. That the two might like each other and be attracted to each other is perfectly fine. But within a few hours, the two are madly in love with each other. I know they needed to care for each other for the ending, in which Willy must leave her and know he'll never see her again, poignant. But gee whiz, you don't fall in love that quickly. No one does. Despite what Disney movies often try to tell us, love at virtual first sight is nonsense. 

To be fair, I will grant that the stress and danger of war can cause people to rush into relationships and fall in love (or think they've fallen in love) very quickly. But I just have trouble buying into it as being a real and healthy emotion. Perhaps if we just assume it's the war playing with Willy and Ilse's emotions, the story can work just as well. 

Anyway, Willy sees Germans approaching and hits the road, leaving behind his helment in his haste. Ilse, who's eyesight has gradually returned, is shocked to discover the helmet is American.

Willy is on the run again. The story is still good and the plot point I find contrived might not bother another reader. I half-expect to have someone comment that they fell in love in the space of an afternoon and have a joyously happy marriage. But for myself--heck, I "dated" my wife for a year before I even realized we were dating. Love takes time, Willy. Ilse will be confused, but she'll be fine.

In three weeks or so, we'll check in again to see how Willy is doing. Next week, we'll visit the Tomb of Dracula.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode 32: The Cave Girl Part 1

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode 32: The Cave Girl Part 1:   Jess, Scott and Tim discuss the novel  The Cave Girl . Click HERE for the audio version. Email us at: edgarsmailbag@gmail.com. This is al...

Cover Cavalcade

 

May is DRAMATIC WILD WEST ENTRANCES month!

A 1972 cover by Larry Lieber.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Broadway is My Beat: "The Laura Burton Murder Case" 11/3/50

A wealthy heiress is found strangled to death in a fleabag hotel. The obvious suspect is her husband, but the case proves to be less straightforward it originally seems.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

We Were There, Part 3

 

We Were There at the Boston Tea Party (1959), by Robert N. Webb, was the third in the overall We Were There series but the first to deal with the American Revolution. We've looked at the later volumes dealing with Ethan Allen and Yorktown respectively. Now we jump back to time just before the real fighting began.

As per the series' usual format, the main characters are a 15-year-old boy and his younger sister. In this case, it's Jeremy and Deliverance ("Del") Winthrop, children of a collage professor. The two young ones have gotten involved with Sam Adams, Paul Revere and other Sons of Liberty, delivering messages and doing other tasks.

But they want to do more. And here, I must pause in my plot summary to insert a bit of historical trivia. In 1865, a decendant of Sam Adams wrote that Adams' had a dog named Queue--a huge Newfoundland who was friendly with most people, but absolutely hated the Redcoats. It was said the he was covered with scars from his violent encounters with the British soldiers who were occupying Boston. 

There are no contemporaneous accounts of Queue, so there's a good chance he didn't exist. Or if he did, his private war against the Redcoats is merely a legend. But the We Were There novel treats Queue as real and, by golly, he's awesome. He easily rates a spot alongside other great dogs of fiction such as Buck, White Fang, Slasher and Nobs.

He also gives Jeremy and Del a motivation for doing something more for liberty. Or at least do something nice for Sam Adams. The dog is currently held by the British, who have tired of his canine shananigans. 

With a sympathetic British sergeant looking the other way, Jeremy and Del manages to sneak up to Queue and cut him loose. But the dog won't leave without taking vengence, charging through the mess tent and scattering food over the dining soldiers.

It's a great scene, interjecting some humor into the story and using the incident to show that the problem wasn't with the individual British soldiers, who were often decent enough fellows, but with the stripping of the colonists' liberty.

The story progresses, with Jeremy and Del spying out the waterfront and discovering when ships carrying tea will be coming into port. Later, Jeremy actually sneaks aboard one of this ships to find out when the captains plan to offload their cargo. This involves the Winthrop siblings in the planning and eventual carrying out of the Boston Tea Party.

It's another strong entry in the series. Unlike the other two books we've reviewed, the author is dealing with a situation in which the siblings aren't necessarily in physical danger. But Jeremy and Del still find useful and legitimately exciting tasks to perform. And additional tension is added via their father, who they see visiting the Tory Governor Hutchinson. Is their dad pro-British? Will their work in the cause of liberty eventually put them at odds with their own parents?

I also like the historical accuracy. Heck, Queue MIGHT have existed. And the book is full of little touches showing the author knew his stuff. For instance, when the kids take a message to John Hancock, the wealthy merchant is having dinner with Paul Revere. Jeremy notices that Hancock is dressed in the richest finery (which he did in real life) while Revere is dressed very plainly (also, a real-life touch). Small touches like these add to the strength of the book.

We have one more We Were There book to cover. As a reminder, I'm doing blog entries on these books because I might eventually be doing a talk about them at a DAR meeting and so needed a handy place to preserve my notes. So we'll eventually cover the classic novels Johnny Tremaine and April Morning as well. 

Batman vs. Magic

 

cover art by Carmen Infantino

We're continuing to look at the reprints that appeared in Detective Comics #439 (1974). So far, we've gone back to the Golden Age for a Hawkman story and a tale of Dr. Fate. We've visited the Silver Age to time travel with the Atom. This week, we stay with the Silver Age to look at "Batman's Bewitched Nightmare," reprinted from Detective Comics #336 (Feb. 1965). 

This one was written by Gardner Fox, who would actually be the writer for 4 of the 6 reprints we'll eventually talk about. That's not surprising. The super-prolific Fox was a creative driving force behind much of what made both the Golden Age and the Silver Age of comics so much fun.

The art is by Sheldon Moldoff, ghosting for Bob Kane. 

A witch is helping crooks rob a bank, disguising their car as a pumpkin being pulled by mice (because apparently no one in Gotham City would notice this) and transforming the vehicle and the crooks back into their normal forms outside the bank, which she's already broken open for them.

It's interesting that Batman automatically assumes the magic must be fake (which, in fact, turns out to be the case) because magic isn't real. But Batman lives in a universe where magic DOES exist. Heck, it's only been a year since Zatanna was introduced into the DC Universe. And Batman has met Dr. Fate and Spectre. To be fair, of course, those latter two live in another universe where the physical laws might be a little different. But still, Batman has no reason to doubt the existance of magic. This isn't really a big deal in terms of this individual story, but it shows that the DC editors weren't that concerned about the overall continuity of their universe. To put it crudely, while Marvel was building a universe that intertwined upon itself, DC was concerned with telling individual stories---individual legends about legendary characters--without a worry about cleanly fitting it all together. Both attitudes produce entertaining stories, so both have their strengths.

Anyway, the crooks go down pretty easily when Batman and Robin arrive, joking about it as they are captured. Then, all of a sudden, Batman and Robin are unable to touch them. The witch has taken away their sense of touch.

The crooks take off in their car. With their sense of touch back, the Dynamic Duo pursue them in the Batmobile. 

But the witch then takes away their sense of sight--or at least limits it so they can't see the getaway car. Instea, the pursue the witch on her broomstick into a large cave.

Over the next few pages, the witch deprives the good guys of first their hearing and then their sense of smell, luring them into traps designed to take them out based on the sense they are currently missing. But Batman foils the first trap and Robin, through an on-the-fly Sherlockian deduction, saves them from the second trap. In fact, Robin really shines during the story's climax, figuring out that the broomstick works as a magic wand. Without it, she's powerless.

Robin takes the broomstick. He himself can't make it do magic, but that doesn't matter. The witch and the bank robbers are easily subdued.

But back at the Bat Cave, the two heroes get one last surprise. Communicating through the broomstick, a villain they've encountered before talks to them. This is the mysterious Outsider, who explains the broom is made from a rare piece of wood that allows someone with ESP (which the witch had) to seem to perform "magic." The Outsider set all this up to destroy Batman and Robin. It's not his first attempt and won't be his last. (Spoiler: The Outsider turns out to be an evil alternate personality of Alfred's. He's eventually cured of this.)

I like the story. The "eliminate one sense at a time" trick is fun and I especially enjoy Gardner Fox allowing Robin to take the lead and save the day at the end. The one-panel explanation of how the broom worked is convoluted even by Silver Age Comic Book Logic. But what the hey, it's the Silver Age. It exists according to its own logic and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Next week, we return again to the Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz.

Cover Cavalcade

 

May is DRAMATIC WILD WEST ENTRANCES month!

This 1955 cover is tentatively credited to Don Spaulding.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Inner Sanctum: "Make Ready My Grave" 4/23/46

Betty's new husband subconsciously ties nooses in random pieces of string; the family servant is super-creepy; and someone has dug a grave for her in the family cementary. It's possible that Betty has married... unwisely.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Duty and the Foreign Legion

cover art by Gerard C. Delano

 

It's been a few years since we've looked at one of J.D. Newsom's always-good Foreign Legion stories. (Click HERE and HERE for those reviews.)

As I read more of Newsom's action-packed tales, I'm impressed by their variety. The settings for these stories is always colonial North Africa and the main character is always a Legionnaire. But Newsom manages to generate unique plots and characterizations each time.

In "Duty," (published in the April 1, 1931 issue of Adventure) is told in the first person, as if we are being told the story in a bar over drinks. It's an effective storytelling technique--with my favorite example of this being L. Sprague de Camp's "A Gun for Dinosaur."

This time, the storyteller is a Legionnaire sergeant-major, who is explaining that, when he first joined after fleeing the United States, he was a disciplinary problem. In fact, he ended up getting sent to a camp called Ras-al-Gazer, where all the untrainable riff-raff end up... where the officer in charge and his non-coms treat you with unending brutality in the vain hope of instilling a sense of discipline. Looking back, our narrator realized the place served no useful purpose--"Discipline without justice is a joke," he states. But at the time, he was stuck there.

So was a soldier named Vaillard, a former professor of political science who had abandoned his wife, child and career and eventually found himself stationed at Ras-al-Gazer as another useless incorrigable. But Vaillard has plans. And when those plans involve murdering the commanding officer and stealing a pistol, the other prisoners are unwillingly drawn into a mutiny.

This leads to a stand-off. Vaillard and the mutineers are trapped in their barracks, but they have hostages. Vaillard is certain they'll be allowed to go free and march for the nearest border. But then a young officer comes into the barracks to confront the mutineers. This officer has a connection to Vaillard that changes the situation drastically.

The story is very tense, with the standoff between the mutineers and the soldiers being told very effectively. But its the characters of Vaillard and the young officer who really make the story work, with their specific relationship amping up the tension to 11. Essentially, the story becomes an examination of egotism vs. duty vs. family. And Newsom brings this tale to an effective end.

You can read the story online HERE. 

Thing vs Man-Thing

 

cover art by Gil Kane

Marvel Fanfare issues #11 and #12 were try-out issues to see if Ben Grimm could be the anchor of a team-up book. That try-out was successful, and Marvel Two-in-One (January 1974) hit the stands soon afterwards. Written by Steve Gerber and drawn by Gil Kane, it picks up soon after the point where Marvel Fanfare #12 left off. 

Ben had been stuck in the desert. He's made it to a bus depot and bought a ticket home. Why he doesn't call Reed at this point and arrange faster, more comfortable transportation is not discussed in the story. Gerber, I think, simply wanted to inject a little humor into the tale. This scene also shows us Ben's motivation for deciding to head to Florida instead of home to New York. He sees a news story about Man-Thing and objects to his name being taken. So its off to the Everglades to have a fight with the swamp monster.

It's a silly motivation and, even though I understand the purpose was humor, I also didn't care for Ben terrorizing an innocent guy, though once again I concede the humorous intent and that Ben does have a temper. But Ben will get a chance to show where his heart is before the tale ends. Overall, I like this story a lot.

The bad guy is the son of the original Molecule Man, who had ended up on another planet. Time flows faster on that planet, so M.M. dies of old age before he can figure out how to regain his powers and take revenge on the Fantastic Four. His son, though, pledges to carry on and do the job. Powered up and teleported to Earth, he is soon locked in combat with Ben.  Along the way, he discovers that if he loses his power wand, he'll rapidly age and die.

Man-Thing gets into the fight, so the new Molecule Man quickly decides to zap both his adversaries, turning both back into regular human beings.

M.M. finds a town and begins to raise havoc, including killing an innocent man. When Ben and Ted Sallis (the former Man-Thing) show up, Ben is enraged by the killing. M.M. decides he doesn't like Ben's inherent nobility and turns him back into the Thing. Soon afterwards, he turns Ted back into Man-Thing. After all, his power is great enough. Neither of these pathetic beings can be a threat to him.

It seems this is true, until Ben throws a glob of mud at the villain. He's aiming at his face, but instead knocks the wand out of his hand. This causes M.M. to grow old, die and turn to dust within seconds.

Man-Thing doesn't do a lot to add to the fight, but he serves a purpose in that Ben no longer wants to fight the monster. He realizes that there's someone out there even less fortunate than him. Yes, he got made, scared an innocent man and came looking for an unnecessary fight. But in the end, Ben is a good man and that's what will always shine through in any well-written story about him.

Next week, back to the DC Universe to visit Batman and Robin.

Cover Cavalcade

 

May is DRAMATIC WILD WEST ENTRANCES month!

This 1941 cover is uncredited.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 The Six-Shooter: "Crisis at Easter Creek" 4/15/54

Britt is working on a ranch near the small town of Easter Creek when he finds himself roped into raising money for a new church organ. Everone in town has already contributed. Well, everyone but the denizens of a nearby outlaw haven.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Manhunter (1974)

 

Quinn Martin, the producer responsible for a lot of quality television, had looked back to the 1930s for the classic series The Untouchables beginning in 1959. It wasn't until the 1970s that he returned to the Great Depression for another couple of tries.

Banyon (1971) starred Robert Forster as a P.I. It ran a mere 16 episodes before fading away. I've read the paperback novelization of the pilot and I'm pretty sure I'd love the show. But it never shows up in reruns anywhere or has gotten a DVD release. It's still on my "I hope I get a chance to watch it one day" list.

I did see at least a few episodes of Manhunter when it aired in 1974 and 1975. This one starred Ken Howard as a former marine who supplements the income on his family farm with bounty hunting. I was just a little 'un back then and only barely remembered the show. Being the bloody-minded kid that I was, I mostly remember cool weapons like tommy guns and Colt pistols. 

The pilot and a few other random episodes have shown up on YouTube. So I've now got to see Manhunter as an adult, having just watched the pilot. 

Of course, I still think the tommy guns and Colt .45s are cool. But, as was typical in most Quinn Martin productions, the plot was well-constructed and pilot is populated by talented character actors, including Gary Lockwood and Stephanie Powers as the primary bad guys. 

Ken Howard's haircut looks a little too 1970s, but that's a nitpick and a typical flaw in period television shows from that decade. 

Howard's character is named Dave Barrett. Just home from the Marines, he's working on his parents' farm. When he goes into town to see about a loan to fix the tractor, he witnesses a bank robbery. Actually, he does more than witness it. When an old friend AND his dog are killed in a hail of tommy gun fire, he snatches up a fallen pistol and nails one of the fleeing robbers.

He collects the reward and that does help out the farm's expenses, but his primary motivation is justice and protecting the innocent. He's good with weapons and he's an experienced hunter. The rest of the pilot follows him as he intelligently tracks the rest of the gang. He catches one of them, avoids an ambush meant to free his prisoner, and kills another. He figures out the gang's pattern for picking banks to rob and lays an ambush of his own. 

It's a pity the show didn't last long, but Quinn Martin never did replicate the success of The Untouchables. And, to be fair, though I enjoyed the pilot for Manhunter, it wasn't as good as The Untouchables. Ken Howard didn't bring the same intensity to his role as Robert Stack did as Eliot Ness. And, perhaps the earlier show being in black-and-white made it more evocative of the '30s.

But taken on its own, Manhunter is worth watching. 

Willy Schulz, Part 4

 

cover art by Rocke Mastroserio 

Fightin' Army #79 (May 1968) brings us the fourth chapter of the "Lonely War of Capt. Willy Schultz," written by Will Franz and drawn by Sam Glanzman.

 And, gee whiz, this saga continues to be astonishingly good. At the end of the last chapter, Willy (in a German uniform) had escaped from an American camp. Wandering in the Sahara Desert, he stumbles across a wrecked jeep with a dying American captain (and an already dead driver) sitting in it.

Willy identifies himself as an American. It doesn't register with the dying man that Willy is in a German uniform until after he tells of a unit of rookie soldiers nearby about to be attacked by Panzers. He dies thinking he's inadvertantly betrayed his men.

Willy swaps uniforms before burying the dead men. He doesn't take the captain's name, still identifying himself as Captain Schultz, but he finds and takes charge of the dead man's company.

There's a vet. sergeant named Striker to help him out, but the situation is grim. German tanks--including Tigers--are approaching. The Americans, aside from being green, are armed with light anti-tank guns and bazookas. They have nothing that can match the German armor.

But Willy is a good officer. He shows confidence and uses intelligent tactics. The lighter German tanks are destroyed. But then a Tiger tank destroys one of the anti-tank guns, runs over some of the infantry and seems in danger of breaking through.

Willy is able to use some oil cans to set the Tiger on fire. That's when things go sour for him. One of the Germans pops out of the hatch and Willy sees its a man he befriended when he was serving with the Germans. He shouts for the men in the tank to surrender, but Striker is simultaneously shouting for them to be shot if they try to leave the burning tank. Striker's not a bad guy--but he's reacting in anger towards the Germans who just killed some of his men.

In the end, the Germans die inside the burning tank. The Americans have won. The soldiers see Schultz as a hero who's leadership saved them. Well, all but Stiker, who hates Willy for trying to save the Germans. Willy wanders away, still alone. He saved the soldiers, but also taught them how to kill and watched a friend die.

The Willy Schultz saga has been superb from the get-go. This chapter, though, is the best so far. The action is well-presented, with the battle unfolding in a logical manner and Willy's tactics seeming reasonable. That Willy's German friend would be in the Tiger tank might have been predictable, but it still carries a remarkable emotional impact. Franz and Glanzman continue to stress that the average soldiers on both sides were just normal guys trying to survive, but not able to see the enemy in the same light. It effectively highlights the inherent tragedy of war.

Next week, we'll visit the Marvel Universe. It's been awhile since we've done so and I miss the place. So in two weeks, we'll review a Silver Age Batman tale, then return to Willy Schultz in three weeks. 

Cover Cavalcade

 

May is DRAMATIC WILD WEST ENTRANCES month!

Gil Kane drew and inked this 1975 cover.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Mysterious Traveler: "Death Writes a Letter" 5/18/48

A letter from a dead man might have given someone the information he needs to save two lives--including his own.  

Then again, he might not be able to save anyone.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

"The Avenger of an Outraged Law!"

 

[This is a re-run of a post that first appeared 8 years ago. I'm repeating it because I've decided to cover the first 5 Dan Fowler novels as a part of the ongoing "In Order" series. I'll soon be doing the same with a 2014 post covering the first Tom Corbett novel, as I'll cover all eight novels in that series as a part of the "In Order" series as well.]

Read/Watch 'em In Order #163

It was 1935 and the editor-in-chief of the Thrilling Publications was about to start a new pulp magazine. For a likely theme, one only had to look to the movies--where the James Cagney film G-Men was raking in big bucks--and to real life, where the FBI was locked in often mortal combat with gangsters such as Dillinger, Nelson and Machine-Gun Kelly.

 

(It is Kelly, by the way, who is said to have coined the term "G-Men" when he shouted "Don't shoot, G-Men" as he was arrested.)

 

So the new magazine would be called G-Men. The featured hero would be a dedicated agent named Dan Fowler, who would use both Tommy guns and brains to bring the worst public enemies to justice. Or to the morgue. Fowler was pretty okay with either result.

 

Actually, that makes Fowler seem a little bloodthirsty, doesn't it? And there are moments when he's in the middle of a fire fight with villains in which he does revel in the idea that the men he's mowing down are getting their just desserts. But he does take them alive when he can and he does follow the rule of law.

 

Fowler had a good 20-year run in the pulps, becoming one of the mainstay heroes of the industry. Reading the first story--titled "Snatch" and published in the October 1935 issue of G-Men--it's easy to see why. It's a slam-bang and entertaining action tale.

 

It was written by George Fielding Eliot, though the pen name for all the Fowler stories would be C.K.M. Scanlon. Eliot was a pulp veteran who knew how to keep a story moving fast without sacrificing good plot construction.

 

The plot of "Snatch" is inspired by the real-life Purple Gang. Here, it's the Grey Gang, led by the brutal Ray Norshire, who are on a crime spree in the Mid-West. They've robbed a bunch of banks, killing a number of people along the way, and have now moved on to kidnapping.

 

Dan Fowler is assigned to head up the effort to stop the Grey Gang. He grew up in the area and his dad is the sheriff of one of the small towns within the sphere of the gang's operations, so he seems the best man for the job.

 

And he is. He manages to trap and catch several gang members, save a kidnapped baby and then catch most of the rest of the gang, though the wily Norshire keeps getting away. Dan is building up a suspicion that there's a mastermind working behind the scenes. Unfortunately, this mastermind might be one of several local law enforcement figures, which would explain why Norshire managed to be in just the right position at the right time to kill a weak-willed gang member who was about to talk.

 

Fowler suspects Norshire will try to bust one or more of his gang out of jail. So he comes up with a plan that the Feds will use again 14 years later in the Cagney film White Heat. He goes undercover as a prisoner to follow along during the escape.

 

This doesn't work out well, as the bad guys tumble to him not long after the jail break. He manages to get away, only to be arrested by local cops who don't believe he 's a Federal agent. This gives Norshire and his gang time to get away.

 

So it's time for yet another plan--one that will both trap the Grey Gang and get the secret mastermind to give himself away.

 

It's a fun story. There's a number of good action scenes, the best one involving Fowler trying to get away from the Grey Gang after they realize he's a Fed. The story itself is very well-told--Fowler follows up clues logically and pursues intelligent hunches based on the evidence. He definitely exists in a pulp universe rather than the real world, but good storytelling makes him believable all the same.

 

Kind of like Cagney in the movie G-Men. Gee whiz, now I gotta watch that again.

Fake Leopard Woman!

 

cover art by Bernard Bailey

Every other week, we've been looking at stories reprinted in 1974's 100-page Detective Comics #439. So far, we've visited with the Golden-Age Hawkman and the Silver-Age Atom. This week, we're jumping back to the Golden Age to review an early Dr. Fate story that first appeared in More Fun Comics #66 (April 1941). It was written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Howard Sherman.

Fate's lady friend Inza meets an honest-to-goodness leopard woman at a party, learning that the poor girl has leopard-spotted arms, has recently been dumped by her boyfriend because of this and is contemplating suicide.

Inza is staying overnight at the house where the party is held. That night, she's attacked--apparently by the leopard woman. Dr. Fate senses she's in danger and flies to her. He investigates, confirming the spots on her arms and having an unpleasant encounter with the owner of the house. He soon discovers that the house owner is drugging the poor girl, which is what gives her the spots. They guy wants to drive her to suicide so he can inherit her money. Fate banishes the guy "from the world of men," stops the fake-leopard lady from killing herself and, for the first time, takes off his helmet so that Inza can see his face.

Gardner Fox is normally a cracker-jack writer, so perhaps that's one reason I'm disappointed in this story. It is atmospheric and Sherman's art looks good, but the 6-page length leads to a weak plot. Fate walks through the adventure without effort, "deducing" the bad guy's identity and motive simply by reading his mind. Neither the villain's identity nor his motive are properly set up--it's all just dropped abruptly into the next-to-last page of the tale. A disappointment in all but the atmospheric art.

Next week, we return to the Lonely War of Willy Schultz.

Cover Cavalcade

 

May is DRAMATIC WILD WEST ENTRANCES month!

This 1978 cover is by Rich Buckler