Recommended Podcasts

I know that millions of people across the globe live only for new content on my blog and thus will now be driven into hopeless despair, but I wanted to take time in one of my Thursday posts to recommend several excellent podcasts.

The Weird Warriors Podcast: "A podcast focusing on the Weird War Tales series published by DC Comics from 1971 to 1983! Side missions to other War and/or Horror comics may also be assigned!" Their analysis of each issue is intelligent and worth listening to.

The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society: The three hosts play and old-time radio episode, then provide smart and often very funny analysis of it. 

The Great Books: "National Review’s national correspondent and professor at Hillsdale College, John J. Miller, discusses classic works within the Western literary canon." Intelligent and insightful literary criticism.

The Prancing Pony Podcast: "The Prancing Pony Podcast is a weekly podcast about the Middle-earth legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, hosted by Alan Sisto and Shawn E. Marchese." They spend two or three episodes on each chapter of Tolkien's book, so they take the time to dive deep into everything from sentence structure to thematic meanings.

 

Cover Cavalcade

 

An awesome Nick Cardy cover from 1972.

Cover Cavalcade

 

A Joe Kubert cover from 1979.

Robot vs. Robot

G.I. Robot, who first appeared in Star Spangled War Stories #101 in 1961, is one of writer Bob Kanigher's most magnificent creations. A experimental combat machine, G.I Robot was supposedly emotionless and would perform the task of fighting the Axis with mechanical efficiency. But there were always subtle hints that maybe--just maybe--the Robot had feelings.

The early G.I. Robot stories were drawn by Ross Andru, who had the ability to put just a hint of emotion into the robot's unchanging visage. I have no idea how Andru did that, but by golly he did.

Today, we're looking at a later Robot story from Weird War Tales #122 (April 1983). Kanigher is still the writer, with George Tuska. And Tuska is almost (if not quite) as good at giving the Robot a subtle sense of emotion as was Andru.

By the way, this story involves the fourth version of the Robot. G.I. Robots take a lot of casualties, which kind of makes you wish that they don't have emotions.

This Robot is J.A.K.E. 2 (Jungle Autonomous Killer Experimental) and his human partner is Sgt. Coker . The two are with a marine unit on a Pacific island, tasked with the job of sinking a Japanese ship that is bringing tanks to the island.

Coker and J.A.K.E. fail to sink the ship, but J.A.K.E. pretty handily takes care of the tanks with a volley of mini-bazooka rockets fired from his fingertips.

This is, of course, awesome. But there is a detail of story construction that is open to criticism. The marines were in a panic about the Japanese tanks being delivered, implying they have no anti-armor weapons at all. Coker and J.A.K.E. nearly get killed in a desperate attempt to stop the tanks from getting to the island. But then J.A.K.E. destroys the tanks in a single casual gesture. So why were they considered such a threat in the first place?

But that's a small criticism. All these shenanigans are simply to set up the meat of the story, in which the Japanese send a Sumo Wrestler Robot to destroy J.A.K.E.

They've tried a Samurai Robot 9 issues earlier. A Japanese officer mentions they had also tried a Geisha Robot, which I don't think we actually ever see in a G.I. Robot story. I try to keep my blog family friendly, so I won't speculate on how exactly a Geisha Robot tried to do away with J.A.K.E.

Anyway, we get a fight scene between the two robots that Tuska does a wonderful job of illustrating. At first it looks as if J.A.K.E.is going to lose, but Coker gives him a "remember you're a Marine!" speech and J.A.K.E. pulls off a come-from-behind victory.

He then carries Coker through a mine field, but without warning the soldier beforehand that he has mine detectors in his feet and there was no danger.

So does J.A.K.E. respond to Coker's speech during the fight against the other robot? Does he show a sense of humor in carrying Coker through the mine field and giving the sergeant a scare? Does he have emotion? Does he dream?

Coker isn't sure. And neither are we.

That's it for now. Next week, we'll look at one of the many times Batman and Superman teamed up.

Fooling the Genre Savvy

cover art by Luis Dominguez

"The Platoon that Wouldn't Die" (Weird War Tales #19--November 1973) is a very clever story. Written by Arnold Drake and with art by Gerry Talaoc, it is about... well, a platoon that wouldn't die.

Unfortunately, the platoon in question is German, known as the Blue Bolt platoon. We meet them while they are in the middle of a commando raid. The purpose of the raid is to recover one particular
body among many from a graveyard--the body of their commanding officer, Major Bruekner.

In fact, this is the third time Bruekner's body has been recovered by the Blue Bolts. Apparently, the German keeps coming back to life. The Blue Bolts policy of never leaving a body behind seems to indicate that they all keep coming back to life.

The Allies need a man on the inside to find out what's going on. A con man named Harry "The Actor" Neilson is doing a twenty-year stretch in prison. He's offered a full pardon if he takes the place of a captured Blue Bolt, "escape" back to Axis lines and find out what the heck is going on.

It's a dangerous job that becomes more dangerous when Harry--now Corporal Schlosser--"rejoins" the Blue Bolts and immediately gets assigned to help assassinate an American Intelligence officer--the same guy who just recruited Harry out of prison.

There's a neat twist here that has us thinking for a good portion of the story that Harry shot his own boss to maintain his cover, though it turns out in the end that he was able to fake this. But that's not the really big twist.

Major Bruekner gets killed again while the Blue Bolts are making their escape, though it takes dozens of bullets to put him down and Harry notices that the body weighs a lot when he helps carry it away from the battle.

Back in German territory, the body is sent to a building labeled "Institute for Para-Psychology Studies." Harry sneaks inside and discovers voodoo ceremonies going on that are bringing the Blue Bolts back as zombies. That's the answer!

Or at least we spend a few pages thinking its the answer. This is what I like about this story. This is, after all, an issue of Weird War Tales. It's full of zombies, vampires, ghosts and dark magic. When we find out the Nazis are zombies, we have absolutely no reason to doubt it.

Except it turns out that this particular story is science fiction, not a tale of the supernatural. The zombie thing is a cover--even the Blue Bolts who haven't been killed yet are now under the impression that they are effectively immortal--which is a major boost to their moral.  In reality, though, when one of them is killed, he's replaced by a robot.

Harry manages to shoot the head scientist, then spends some time vainly pumping bullets into robots before realizing he can just destroy the main control panel.

So the story effectively plays with our genre expectations. The clue about the corpses being particularly heavy is a nice one, but not to obvious to give away the plot twist. When we find out about the "zombies," we have no real reason to doubt it. In the universe of Weird War Tales, such things exist. So, when this story turns out to be one of the occasional forays into science fiction, it is equally believable but still an effective surprise.

The story is otherwise well-constructed and there's lots of good action. The protagonist is a con man rather than a regular spy mostly for the irony of him nearly falling for a con himself. But it also makes him enough of an outsider to be able to declare everyone--Axis and Allies--nuts after he's criticized for risking the mission by not killing his boss during the commando raid.

As far as I know, this is Harry's only appearance. It's not impossible that the editors at DC might be hoping he'd catch on and become a regular or reoccurring character in their war comics and he probably would have continued to be an interesting protagonist. But Harry's war ended after he shut down the robot factory. Still, he got to shut down a Nazi robot factor and keep the Germans from flooding the battlefield with unkillable soldiers. That's not bad for a single mission.

Next week, we'll return to the Hyborian Age and watch Conan team up with a certain red-haired lady warrior.

Cover Cavalcade

This is one of many evocative covers drawn by Luis Dominguez for Weird War Tales.

It's not bad to be haunted if the ghost is on YOUR side.

Its not surprising that a book like Weird War Tales would eventually appear on the market. War stories and horror tales really aren't that far apart. In both genres, the main characters have to suffer violent death or some other hideous fate--or at least be threatened with it--in order to move the plot along. So perhaps the two genres go together naturally. They certainly did in the best Weird War stories.

DC's Weird War series from the 1970s was an anthology book. Like most such books, it was somewhat uneven--it certainly had its share of weak stories. It took soldiers--usually just average ground-pounders--and threw them into situations featuring supernatural or science fiction elements. Most of the stories were set in World War II, though an occasional foray farther into the past or into the future was not unusual. Usually, there were two or three short stories per issue, though occasionally one story would be book-length. The series also had some of the consistently best cover illustrations of the decade.

The 14th issue (June 1973) was one of the book-length ones. Featuring clean, solid art by Tony DeZuniga, it starts off at Pearl Harbor, just before the Japanese attack. An American Army Sergeant named McBride discovers his Japanese wife (named Tsuko) has been kidnapped by her father. The father always disapproved of the marriage to an American. Rushing to the father's export-business warehouse, McBride finds the place deserted. The dad confronts him with a pistol and the news that Tsuko has been taken to his yacht to go back to Japan.

McBride jumps the father and two shots ring out. The next thing the soldier knows, he's standing over his own body (Tsuko's dad is dead as well.) Death comes for him, but outside the attack on Pearl Harbor has begun. Yelling that he still has a job to do, McBride runs away from Death.

Soon, poor Tsuko is killed as well, giving her life to save an American pilot from Japanese guns. Are the two young lovers separated forever? Well, one of the many soldiers saved by mysterious appearances of either McBride or his wife during the course of the war is convinced that they are eventually reunited.

It's a good, well-plotted ghost story with several sincerely eerie moments, given added verisimilitude by little details that help set each successive chapter at definite point in real-life World War II history. DeZuniga, who would soon be bringing weirdness to the Old West via the original Jonah Hex stories, also takes care to portray uniforms, equipment and weapons accurately. (Though he does show a Japanese sailor with an American hand grenade on his belt. Oh, well.)

Cover Cavalcade

Cover Cavalcade

Weird War Tales usually concentrated on World War II, but this George Evans cover about the First World War is wonderfully designed and perfectly evocative of the feel of this unusual series.