Friday's Favorite OTR

Tom Corbett, Space Cadet: “Stealing Crystals” 1/3/52

Tom and two of his fellow cadets are assigned to track down the members of an interplanetary smuggling ring. This leads to them ending up as prisoners on a ship heading up into orbit. But Tom soon comes up with an innovative albeit dangerous escape plan. Like most Tom Corbett stories, this is good, old-fashioned space opera.

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"If we succeed, and live, we can fight it out to see who keeps her."

There are certain cliches in adventure fiction that--as long as the surrounding story is well-written--I am a sucker for.

For instance, I love it when circumstances force guys who would normally kill each other on sight to team up with one another. It's a trope that Robert E. Howard seemed to enjoy. I just re-read the Conan novella People of the Black Circle (1934), in which this happens. I can think of three other Howard stories without even trying in which something similar occurs.

I'll probably do entries on the other three "enforced team-up" stories, since thinking about them makes me want to read them again. In fact, I briefly considered making this part of my "Read/Watch 'em in order" series, but each of these stories features a different character and aren't directly interconnected.

In Black Circle, Conan has become leader of a tribe of barbarian warriors who live near Vendhya, the Hyborian Age analog for India. He's hoping to weld other tribes together into an empire.

But there's other plots afoot as well--one of them involving spies from the nation of Turan teaming up with a sect of ancient and evil wizards to kill the king of Vendhya. (And not just kill him--but to steal his soul while doing so.)

Circumstances allow Conan to kidnap the Devi--the now-dead king's drop-dead gorgeous sister. Despite being pampered royalty, she soon proves herself to brave and intelligent, allowing her to rise above being a stereotypical damsel-in-distress.

Which is always a good sign in an original Conan story. The best of Howard's Conan tales often included a strong female character, while the weaker ones would sometimes involve whiny cry-baby girls who just scream a lot until they are rescued. I've nothing against damsels-in-distress. I just like it better when they seem to be worth the effort of rescuing.

Howard manages to weave several plot threads involving several different characters together to keep the story moving, inserting his typically awesome action sequences along the way. Eventually, the Devi is captured by the evil wizards and taken to their mountain fortress. To rescue her, Conan must team up with a Turanian spy named Kerim Shah, who has been searching for the Devi for reasons of his own. Though they would normally kill each other on sight, Conan, Kerim and the spy's small band of henchmen must team-up to rescue the girl. They figure they can kill each other afterwards to see who gets to keep her.

The motley crew must fight their way through both magical dangers and more prosaic threats to reach the fortress. Once there--well, they face even more horrific dangers. Howard's Conan stories often include elements of horror as well as adventure tropes.

But messing with Conan the Barbarian--even if you have nigh-godlike powers--is never a smart thing to do.

People of the Black Circle is one of the best Conan yarns. It's particularly notable in that at one point Howard has at least three sets of characters plus at least three large armed forces wandering around the Vendhyan border, but he keeps track of all of them quite nicely. The overall plot is not that complex, but there's enough going on so that it might have gotten muddled and confused in the hands of a lesser writer. But the various elements involved are sorted out and explained to us with Howard's typical skill. That guy really knew how to spin a yarn.

When Iceman Attacks

Spider Man #92 (January 1970)

I commented last time that reactionary politician Sam Bullit was too one-dimensional a character to be very interesting. And that’s true. But his story wraps up this issue before he has time to get tiresome and the plot allows us some nice character moments involving Spidey’s supporting cast.

The best moment involves J. Jonah Jameson, who initially supported Bullit’s law and order campaign. But once he’s presented evidence of Bullit’s thuggery and racism, he quickly switches sides. We’ve seen this before in Jonah—he can be a cheapskate and a bully, but he has sincere standards as a newsman and something as evil as racism turns his stomach. It’s an aspect of him that keeps him from being a one-dimensional punch-line and makes him a viable character in his own right.

But back to the plot: Last issue ended with Spidey “kidnapping” Gwen, intending to act like enough of a jerk so that she never suspects he’s really Peter Parker. It’s a plan that sounds a little dumb when spelled out, but gosh darn it if it’s not a bad plan. Especially since it’s something he had to improvise after Gwen sees him web-slinging into Peter’s apartment.

But he never really gets a chance to carry out the plan, since Iceman happens to be nearby and immediately jumps in to “rescue” Gwen.

There’s really no reason for Iceman to be in this story other than to plug the X-Men’s own book. But that’s okay. It’s something I touched on before—team-ups like this can be fun and as long as stories are self-contained in one specific book, it’s a perfectly legitimate path for comic book writers to take. Heck, we’re only about a year away from the first issue of Marvel Team-up, whose entire reason for existence is simply to allow Spider Man to join forces with other denizens of the Marvel Universe. And that book will be a lot of fun.

Crossovers are only annoying when they FORCE you to buy another book to get the whole story. That’s become more common in both DC and Marvel comics over the last decade or two and I continue to disapprove of it.

DO YOU HEAR THAT, MARVEL AND DC? I DISAPPROVE!

There. That’ll get ‘em to stop, I’m sure.

Anyway, Gil Kane (this is his last issue before Romita returns) makes the Spidey/Iceman fight look cool. And their tussle takes a potentially tragic turn when Bullit’s thugs kidnap Robbie Robertson. Iceman’s attacks on Spidey interfere with the webslinger’s rescue attempt.

But in the end, the two heroes team up. Robbie is rescued, while Bullit is discredited and arrested.

In February 1971, Spider Man will be mistaken for a criminal by yet another costumed hero, while Gwen decides to leave New York. 

Cover Cavalcade

I'll bet they didn't cover this sort of situation at the FBI Academy! This is a pretty busy cover, but it works--giving a sense of a desperate last stand.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Sherlock Holmes: “The Island of Death” 4/28/47

Five circus freaks are invited out to a remote island off the coast of Scotland by a scientist of questionable repute. Holmes and Watson tag along to watch out for them. Soon, there’s one murder and one attempted murder. Holmes has to sort through his odd set of suspects to find the killer in this bizarre and entertainingly melodramatic episode.

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Reputation is Everything

Read/Watch ‘em in order #27

This time out, we don’t have a protagonist who is too drunk or too bitter or too cynical to amount to anything until an adventure involving Mr. Moto pulls him out of it. In ThinkFast, Mr. Moto (1937), we have a hero who is simply young and inexperienced—but determined to make good.

Wilson Hitchings is a member of a family that owns a very old and conservative bank operating out of Shanghai. So when a distant (and very pretty) relative uses the family name to run a casino in Hawaii, something has to be done to protect the bank’s reputation. Wilson, who is just learning the ropes, is sent to the Islands to deal with it.

At first, he thinks he just has to convince a bitter relative to sell out to a family she hates. But things soon get more complex. It’s not just that the roulette wheel is crooked—it’s that the casino is being used to launder money being sent to rebels in Japanese-controlled Manchuria.

Mr. Moto soon appears on the scene. The Japanese agent’s initial theory is that the Hitchings Bank is knowingly involved in the money shipments. In fact, he even holds Wilson responsible for an attempt on his life.

But Wilson doesn’t back down in his own investigation. To his own surprise, he discovers that he can handle himself well in dangerous situations. Before long, he and Moto are working together.

Well, working together to an extent. Moto wants to close down the money pipeline to Manchuria no matter what. Wilson’s first concern is the reputation of the bank and his family. The two men sort-of want the same thing—but may need to get there from different directions.

These leads Wilson to make what seems to be a very bad and very dangerous decision when he attempts to deal directly with the leader of the money-laundering operation. In fact, poor Wilson might be inadvertently responsible for getting Mr. Moto killed…

You can’t help but like Wilson. He’s intensely loyal to his family, but he doesn’t shy away from difficult moral decisions when faced with them. The book is extremely well-plotted, having only occasional moments of action, but holding your interest and building up suspense quite nicely as Wilson gradually figures out what the heck is going on.

And Mr. Moto is arguably at his best in this novel. His manipulation of events in the last chapter puts him right up there with the Shadow, Batman or Sherlock Holmes in his ability to outthink his opponents.

A City in a Bottle

You’d think that having a city and its 1,000,000 inhabitants shrunk down by an evil alien and taken away into space would be a bad thing. But since this is what happened to Krypton’s largest city and since that’s what allowed the city and its 1,000,000 inhabitants to survive Krypton’s destruction, I guess you’d have to call it fortuitous.

It was the evil alien Brainiac that stole a miniaturized Kandor—as revealed in the July 1958 story “The Super-Duel in Space.” (Action Comics #242) 

I’ll talk about Brainiac in detail in a future post, since I want to concentrate on Kandor this time around. Suffice to say that Brainiac here is shrinking and stealing cities as part of a plan to repopulate his home world—where everyone else was wiped out by a plague. This and a few other details don’t completely match up with his eventually retcon as a humanoid computer rather than a living being. We’ll discuss balancing internal continuity with good storytelling in that future post.

For now, it’s Kandor that concerns us. Here’s a large and viable population of Kryptonians and—though they’ll be stuck at microscopic size until a 1979 story sees them finally restored to normal size—it means that Krypton’s people and culture have survived. But more importantly for Mort Weisinger and the writers who worked for him, it became a plot device from which they could spin scores of entertaining stories.

“The Super-Duel in Space” was written by Otto Binder (with art by Al Plastino) and you can see Binder’s talent for fun plot construction and fast pacing all through the story. He crams in an awful lot of stuff—the introduction of Brainiac; his fight with Superman centering around his impenetrable force field; his shrinking and capture of Earth cities; Superman’s successive escape from the bottle containing Metropolis and then the bottle containing Kandor; the restoration of Earth’s cities; the people of Kandor sacrificing their chance at restoration to make sure Superman is returned to his proper size. So Kandor now resides in a bottle in the Fortress of Solitude.

It’s a fine story—following the odd logic of Silver Age DC comics as the plot unfolds. The fight between Supes and Brainiac is a little disappointing—with the hero simply tossing stuff at Brainiac’s force field while the villain laughs contemptuously. And Brainiac’s ship simply flies off at the end with the sleeping alien blissfully unaware all his captive cities have been freed—which is a bit anti-climatic.

But Brainiac’s visual design is striking enough to guarantee his return and his introduction as an important member of Superman’s Rogue’s Gallery.

And Kandor—well, Kandor is an interesting place. Eventually, we’ll meet Superman’s exact double, along with doubles of Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, Lana Lang and Perry Mason. There will be a Superman Emergency Squad—Kandorians who dress as Superman and fly out of the bottle (thus gaining superpowers) to help him out despite their small size. A Kandorian parole board will help Superman decide when to let criminals out of the Phantom Zone. Superman’s efforts to discover a way to restore Kandor is itself grist for several good tales.

In fact, of all the elements to Superman’s mythology being added during Mort Weisinger’s tenure as editor, Kandor is probably outdone only by the Legion of Superheroes as a source of rich storytelling. (And, okay, I’ll admit that it was sometimes contrived storytelling—how many exact doubles of Superman’s close friends would you expect to find in a single city? Heck, they even called themselves the Look Alike Squad.)

So I think we’ll spend one more post examining Kandor, taking a look at the first time Superman and Jimmy Olsen assume the identities of Nightwing and Flamebird to fight Kandorian criminals. 

What to get your kids for Christmas

Cover Cavalcade

I have no idea what that thing is--but I know I want one.

Read/Watch 'em in Order: The Book

Pretty much because I just wanted to see what it looked like, I have converted the first two dozen posts from my "Read/Watch 'em in Order" series into an ebook, available as a downloadable PDF via the link below:

READ/WATCH 'EM IN ORDER

It doesn't look half-bad.