Trust Doesn't Come Easy

cover art by Sam Savitt

A couple of weeks ago, we paid a visit to Lee Hunter, a former Union Calvary officer who is now an army scout, and Reb Stuart, a former Confederate now reluctantly working for the Yankees by caring for army horses. The first story in Four Color #779 (May 1957) was a strong one, introducing us to the main characters and showing us that the two can work together despite a strong dislike for each other.

The second story in that issue is "Ambushed," which also features very effective art work by Mike Roy* and another solid script by an uncredited writer.  In this story, Lee and Reb are still often trading insults with one another, but seem less openly disdainful of one another as they come to respect each other's abilities (and consistently save each other's lives).

This is, I think, a necessarily bit of character evolution. As would have been the case for most if not all original characters introduced in Four Color, the editors at Dell would have been hoping that sales and reader reaction would be strong enough to spin them off into their own series. Open hatred between the two protagonists would have gotten tiresome before long. But the two men rubbing each other the wrong way from time to time, but still able to work effectively together--well, that would be a lot of fun if their stories were well-written.

"Ambushed" begins with Reb having to make a getaway from some Cheyenne who have left the reservation. He joins Lee and the troops from Fort Defiance as they track down the wayward Indians. Lee forces the chief--named "Red Bird"--to surrender by cutting him off from the tribe's women and children.

It turns out, though, that Red Bird had good reason from leaving the reservation. White hunters are poaching the game and his tribe simply doesn't have enough food for the upcoming winter.

There is a plan to move the Cheyenne to a bigger reservation with ample game, but doing so would require Red Bird to show a lot of trust. His men have to agree to give up their arms during the journey and allow the army to protect them.

The bulk of the story follows the Cheyenne and their much-too-small escort on the journey to the new reservation. It is a remarkably effective piece of storytelling. The Indians nearly rebel when Red Bird asks them to disarm. The soldiers don't trust the Cheyenne and the Cheyenne don't trust the soldiers. And, to top it all off, a band of Pawnees are tailing the Cheyenne, planning to attack while their old enemies are disarmed and helpless.

All this allows the story to build up an extraoridinary level of tension. In the end, Lee overrules the sergeant who commands the escort and arms the Cheyenne, but even up to the last moment, it seems like any number of things can go horribly wrong.

In the end, though, Red Bird and Lee trust one another and strong leadership forces everyone else to go along with them. Lee improvises some tactics that allow the Cheyenne and the troopers to work together to fight off the Pawnees.

"Ambushed" is a fine example of the sort of expert and entertaining storytelling for which Dell Comics is so fondly remembered.

Lee and Reb would return in 1958 for one more issue of Four Color, which also has two stories in it. We'll look at the first of those stories in two weeks. Next week, though, we'll jump a few centuries forward in time to join Captain Kirk as he once again gets involved in some time travel shenanigans.


*{NOTE: The Grand Comics Database lists Ray Bailey as the artist, but a very knowledgeable member of a Facebook group about Dell & Gold Key comics makes a very compelling case that the artist is Mike Roy, with inks by Mike Peppe}

Cover Cavalcade

Another fantastic cover by Jerry Grandenetti. From 1954.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Cavalcade of America: "Venture in a Silk Hat" 1/14/46

The Civil War on Old-Time Radio (Part 6 of 17)

Union troops are hoping to drive the Confederates out of the border state of Tennessee. To this end, a secret agent comes up with a bold plan to steal a train and use it to burn railway bridges along the Southern supply line. On April 12, 1862, this plan was put into action.

Click HERE to listen or download.

This is the sixth of 17 episodes from various series that will take us through the Civil War and its immediate post-war legacy. I'll be posting another Civil War episode every three or four weeks.

Kidnapped Dads, Spies and Double-Crosses

As the September dusk in San Antonio turned into a dark and shielding night, the stranger witht he arrow wound decided that it was time to make his escape from the doctor's house.

That's an excellent opening sentence, isn't it?--designed to immediately draw you into the story.

Will C. Brown's 1960 novel The Nameless Breed wins points from its setting alone. Placing the action in Texas in 1844 (when Texas was still an independent republic) immediately sets it apart from most Westerns. The new nation was struggling to remain independent, suffering incursions by Mexican soldiers, raids by Comanches, an economic depression, and pressures from other nations to either expand its territory and influence or simply allow itself to be annexed into the United States.

The protagonist is Brazos McCloud, who has spend the last year trying to figure out how to free his father from the Comanches. Finding him and rescuing him doesn't seem possible, but there might be a chance of ransoming him if Brazos and his two brothers can raise enough cash.

It's the fluid political situation that gives them an opportunity to get the money they need. A spy for England named Spide (appropriately nicknamed Spider both because of his appearance and his personality) wants to see some diplomatic papers that are being brought by courier from Washington. Brazos is normally a scrupulously honest man--we see several examples of this throughout the novel--but when the story opens, Brazos has already stolen these papers. The plan is to sell them to Spide, then head north to where the Comanches hang out, looking for a way to contact them and offer a ransom for his father. The McCloud family is vehementaly anti-annexation, so stealing from a Union agent as Step One is saving their dad is something they can live with.

But things continually go wrong. Brazos is recovering from a Comanche arrow wound when the novel begins (from a random attack that didn't involve his mission), he gets seperated from the papers, and it is soon apparent that Spide (who isn't necessarily working for the English) is planning on double-crossing him.

Brazos is a great protagonist. He has a strong sense of right and wrong that he will not compromise on even when the situation around him is terrible. The fact that he wants to honor his part of his deal with Spide after Spide has double-crossed him is evidence of that. He is courageous, loyal and able to keep his head under pressure. But he's not a one-dimensional hero--the author gives him a concrete and relatable personality. The supporting cast, both good guys and bad guys, are equally well-drawn. Brazos' older brother Wid, who rides north on the ransom mission with his brothers despite the pain and difficulty of doing so with a wooden leg, is a particularly strong character. The rest of the family doesn't want to go, but know they have to let him try for him to keep his manhood.

As Wid's sister-in-law says: "Don't you see--it's the last act of a man, the way for him to prove to himself that he is still a whole man. The oldest of you doing what the oldest son ought to do! Better he goes and suffers in the going, on the trail, than stays and suffers inside himself, a prisoner to his deformity! I cry to myself when I think of him going, but I would not want to see him shrivel here day after day while the rest of you were riding north [to rescue their father]."

The action sequences are exciting and suspenseful. Most notable here is when Brazos and one other character have to flee from a gang of killers by crawling under a huge patch of Yucca Daggers (plants with sharp, bayonet-like leaves). Stand up and they will skewer themselves even if they aren't immediately shot. Continue to crawl and they cut themselves on sharp rocks and have to dodge rattlesnakes.

The Nameless Breed won the Spur Award (given by the Western Writers of America) in 1960 and clearly deserves it. It works as both an excellent and exciting work of genre fiction and as a wonderful character study of a family in which each of them would risk anything for the others.

Tarzan Returns to Pal-ul-don: Part 2

When we left the Lord of the Jungle last week, we were about half-way through a magnificent story arc from the Sunday comic strip. Written and drawn by Russ Manning, this arc ran from February 1971 through April 1972. Jane had escorted two women photographers to the outskirts of Pal-ul-don, the dinosaur-infested Lost World that exists somewhere in Africa. As is typical in any story set in Edgar Rice Burroughs' never-a-dull-moment universe, the women end up deep inside Pal-ul-don.

Tarzan and Joiper (a tiny visitor from the valley of the Ant Men) enter Pal-ul-don to find and rescue the ladies. After a series of fast-paced adventures, Tarzan has rescued the lady photographers (Samie and Carli) but hasn't yet found Jane. What he has found is one of the Waz-don who inhabit Pal-ul-don getting pushed into a pack of hyeanodons by some of his fellow tribesmen.

Tarzan rescues this guy, but he's forced to separate from the girls, who promptly get to themselves get kidnapped by the Waz-don. Trying to keep more than one of his friends un-kidnapped at any one time is sometimes a Sisyphean task for poor Lord Greystoke.

Anyway, the Waz-don he rescued is the high priest at the Waz-don cliff city. The priest had somehow ticked off the chief and been given a death sentence. Tarzan ends up in the city and it soon involved in political shenanigans, which in turn leads him to fight (and win, of course) a duel that makes him chief.

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Pretty much the moment Tarzan takes over, the Ho-don (the light-furred natives who are perpetually fighting the Waz-don) attack. So Tarzan is soon in the midst of a battle involving soldiers mounted atop several different species of prehistoric beasts.

Manning's art work has never been better--the above panels represent the sort of image I can stare at pretty much forever in rapturous awe--and his story has not just been exciting, but also quite sophisticated as we are quickly introduced to new characters and complicated political situations. The exposition never slows up the story and we never lose track of what is going on. 

During the battle, Tarzan spots Jane apparently leading the Ho-don's in battle. But Jane does not acknowledge him when he calls out to her. She does, though, order the Ho-don forces to retreat.

At this point, the action moves away from the Ape Man to let us know what has been going on with Jane all these months. In fact, Manning is going to emulate one of the Burroughs' most common storytelling techniques. He breaks away from Tarzan at the cliffhanger moment. He'll catch us up on Jane's story, then break away from her at a cliffhanger moment. Then he'll flash back to Tarzan, showing us what he has been up to since we last so him. Then he'll intersect these two stories at a key moment.

Jane, by the way, is also up to her neck in complex political intrigue. I'm not going to try to summarize the details. The important point is that she's being blackmailed into pretending to be a sun goddess by an evil high priestess.

When she attempts to get the upper hand over the priestess, she ends up getting tossed into an arena to be eaten by saber-tooth tigers. She looks a tad worried in the above panel, doesn't she? But for Jane, a situation like this is usually called "Tuesday."

That's the point we break away from her story and return to Tarzan, recounted his adventure in sneaking into the Ho-don city and ending up in just the right place to launch a last minute rescue of his wife. For Tarzan, this sort of thing is also called "Tuesday."

I'm pretty sure that if you look up the word "awesome" in the dictionary, it shows you the above panel as the definition.

Jane, despite having a broken arm, gets her licks in on the priestess, then she and Tarzan escape from the city, finding a place to rest and heal from their respective wounds.

But what about the two girls? What about Joiper the Ant Man? (And if I was going to criticize this story arc at all, it's that Joiper didn't get much to do during this last half.)

Well, it turns out that Tarzan and Jane are destined for most adventures in Pal-ul-don before they get home. But Manning made his readers wait for that. The next five months of strips would focus on Tarzan's son Korak. The strip would return to Tarzan and Jane in September of 1972 and give us another full years' worth of adventure in Pal-ul-don. I won't promise when, but we'll take a look at those strips eventually.

Next week, though, we'll return to the Wild West for the second of the four adventures featuring the Yankee Lee Hunter and the ex-Confederate Reb Stuart.

Cover Cavalcade

A terrific Carl Barks cover from 1958.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Our Miss Brooks: "Babysitting for Three" 11/14/48

Miss Brooks gets roped into babysitting three children, which leads to her students believing she is secretly married to Mr. Boynton and raising a family of her own.

Few actresses other than Eve Arden can deliver a line like "Go to your room or I'll kill you" to a child in a deadpan voice and make it funny rather than mean-spirited.

Click HERE to listen or download.

For more adventures in babysitting on old-time radio, read my article on the subject HERE.

Brackett and Bradbury Team Up!

Leigh Brackett--one of the finest writers of Space Opera who ever put pen to paper--was a little more than halfway through writing a story titled "Lorelei of the Red Mist" when an opportunity to write the screenplay for the classic Bogie film The Big Sleep dropped in her lap. So she handed the manuscript to Ray Bradbury and let him take the story wherever he wished.

The result is one of the finest Space Opera yarns that ever appeared in Planet Stories. And that's saying a lot.

By the way, in her introduction to the 1974 Anthology The Best of Planet Stories, Brackett mentions how many readers try to deduce which elements of the story were hers and which were Bradbury's. It's really very simple. Everything before the sentence "He saw the flock, herded by more of the golden hounds" is Brackett. Everything else from that time on is Bradbury's.

The story starts out with a criminal named Hugh Starke, having just stolen a fortune from the Terro-Venus Mines, Inc., flying his ship over the Mountains of White Cloud on Venus, trying to dodge the company detectives. This doesn't work out very well for him. His ship crashes and he is fatally injured.

But that's not the end of him. Starke's mind is transfered into another body by a beautiful Venusian sea-woman named Rann. This body used to belong to a warrior named Conan, but Conan's mind was broken by torture and now Starke has sort of moved in and taken over.

Brackett mentions in the Best of Planet Stories introduction that she named the protagonist's new body Conan as a tribute to Robert E. Howard, as she admired his work. But she later considered this to be a mistake, as her Conan and Howard's Conan are such different characters.



Anyway, Hugh-Starke-as-Conan finds himself in a violent and complex political situation. A kingdom of land-people--who are native Venusians but essentially identical to humans--are being attacked by a faction of Venusian sea-people who left the sea a long time ago. Rann is the leader of these aggressors and she plans to use mind control tricks to force Starke to kill the leaders of the land-people.

But there is another faction of sea-people who never left the sea and want to wipe out both land-based factions.

Hugh has not lived a very notable life before being thrust into a new body, but now he finds himself forced into an heroic role. As much because he's stubborn as because he's never been a murderer, he manages to (mostly) resist Rann's mental commands. At first, his intent is to figure out a way to recover the money he had stolen and get back to human civilization, figuring that his new body means he's unlikely to ever get tracked down by the cops. But a rapidly growing conscience and a growing love for a warrior woman named Beudag will bring him to the decision to stay and help the land-people.

To do this, though, he must convince that second faction of sea-people to alter their plans. That faction has been collecting the corpses of those killed in the ongoing war between the surface dwellers. They have a science that will allow them to re-animate the corpses for a short-time, using them to launch a genocidal attack.

The prose styles of the two authors mesh together smoothly and Bradbury takes the story in a great direction, bringing it to a violent but satisfying conclusion. The plot is full of tension and the setting (especially a sequence set beneath an ocean formed by a strange, breathable radiation rather than water) is often pretty spooky, with the super science in the story effectively working like magic. In fact, the story often feels more like a sword-and-sorcery tale than a Space Opera. That's not a criticism, though, "Lorelei of the Red Mist" works fine just the way it is.

The story has been anthologized a number of times and is also available to read online HERE.

Tarzan Returns to Pal-ul-don: Part 1

J. Allen St. John

The land of Pal-ul-Don first appeared in Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1921 novel Tarzan the Terrible. Located in an almost inaccesible area of Africa, it ranks up there with ERB's best Lost Worlds--not just because it has dinosaurs in it, but also because of the sophisticated world-building Burroughs did in creating the world, which allowed him to craft one of his most engrossing and action-packed stories.

As I've mentioned before, the writers of the Dell and Gold Key comics featuring Tarzan and Korak took the Greystokes back to Pal-ul-don on a number of occasions. The commercial value of this is obvious--an excuse for including dinosaurs on a comic book cover and in the story itself always helps a book stand out on the spinner rack. But it was also a good idea in terms of storytelling. Pal-ul-don is a rich world in which a lot of adventures can take place.

Inevitably, other writers started adding to Pal-ul-don to open up yet more storytelling possibilities. The comic books added several purely human cultures to the mix. But I believe that it was Russ Manning's Sunday strip that added several very important additions and ideas to that world.

One of my favorite story arcs from the Sunday strip ran from February 1971 to April 1972. It is a breathlessly fast-moving adventure--especially when read as reprints without a chance to catch your breath between entries. 

Manning adds several more items to the increasingly complex Pal-ul-don mix. In a story arc from the daily strips in 1969, he had introduced Wieroos--the brutal race of wingmen who normally lived in another of ERB's lost worlds--to Pal-ul-don. 

Actually, I should add a caveat to that. As far as I know, the first appearance of Wieroos in Pal-ul-don is in those 1969 strips. There may have been an earlier comic book or comic strip appearance that I'm not aware of. I checked with Jess Terrell, one of my co-hosts for the ERB podcast, but he wasn't sure either. 

Manning also introduces the idea that Pal-ul-don exists in a different time than the rest of the world--the paths that lead there literally take you back in time. For purely personal ideas, I don't care for this. As far as I'm concerned, Pal-ul-don, Caspak, Pellucidar, Skull Island, the Valley of Gwangi, Challenger's plateau, Dinosaur Island and the Savage Land all exist in the here-and-now and I'll be able to take a dinosaur-themed vacation one day. A world were this isn't true is simpy an intolerable idea. But we can look at the comic strips and comic books--excellent as they are--as an alternate continuity and, personal feelings aside, placing Pal-ul-don in a different space-time location is a perfectly viable idea.

Let's dive into the story arc we are concerned today, Tarzan is recovering from wounds at a remote oasis. Jane, back home at the Greystoke African estate, is asked by two women photographers--Samie and Carli--to be a guide and take them to Pal-ul-don. Jane agrees, but only if they stop at the outskirts, take a few pictures of some Eohippus, then go home. That way, the journey should be safe enough. Nothing should go wrong.

It is beyond me how anyone living in the Edgar Rice Burroughs universe would think this plan would work. Of course, things go wrong. Samie disappears and Carli thinks she sees Jane get scarfed down by a T-Rex before she flees back into the desert.

Tarzan, meanwhile, has healed up and gotten home. An Ant Man warrior named Joiper lets Tarzan know where Jane has gotten off to.

I have always enjoyed the way Manning weaves places and characters from various Tarzan novels into his stories. Joiper, who will accompany Tarzan to Pal-ul-don, is a great character. Though he has his own distinct personality, he reminds me quite a bit of Reepicheep from the Narnia novels--small but brave, noble and skilled with a sword. He's a tad more head-strong than Reep was, but there are a lot of parallels.

What follows is a wonderful, non-stop action set-piece that runs for several months, with Tarzan, Joiper and Carli dodging dinosaurs; Tarzan using his tracking skills to determine Jane is alive; Carli getting captured by Wieroo and discovering that Sammie is already a prisoner in their city; then Tarzan and Joiper pulling off a daring rescue. Manning's kinetic and breathtaking art highlights the fast-paced writing, making this one of the most purely entertaining Tarzan stories I've ever read.

To quote one member of the "For the Love of All Things Edgar Rice Burroughs" Facebook group:

When you consider Manning's beautiful art and his writing skills, he has probably done more than anyone else in portraying the real Burroughs feeling.

They get out of the Weiroo city and back to the surface of Pal-ul-don, with Tarzan determined to stick around until he finds Jane. The August 22, 1971 strip ends with them all encountering a group of natives shoving someone off a cliff into a pack of carnivores.

The story shifts gears somewhat at this point, with Tarzan getting involved in a civil war. So we'll pause here and finish up the story next week.

Cover Cavalcade

From 1945: A wonderful cover painted by William Timmins.