Cover Cavalcade

The cover story in this issue has never been reprinted. I'm irresponsibly thinking of dropping 20 to 30 bucks on Ebay to get a copy so I can read it. These covers really were effective marketing tools.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Our Miss Brooks: "Free TV from Sherry's" 4/2/1950

Walter Denton plays a practical joke on Principle Conklin. The consequences of this snowballs into a situation in which several of the regular characters inadvertently steal television sets from the local department store.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Take a 500 Year Nap, Then Save the World

Last week, I wrote about what I felt to be the single best story from the Summer 1945 issue of Planet Stories (available to read online HERE). 

Declaring that one the best was a close call, though. The issue also contains a novella--"Spider Men of Gharr," by Wilbur S. Peacock--which is also a lot of fun.

The basic premise is similar to the classic 1929 tale  Armageddon 2419, in which Anthony Rogers (later known at Buck Rogers) is in suspended animation for 500 years, waking up to discover Earth has been conquered by aliens.

In "Spider Men," a guy named Kimbrell Trent is frozen when a pipe containing super-cold fluid burst. He was located inside a secret base--something recently built to defend against the invading Gharr. 

The Gharr are great villains--big four-armed bipedal cyclopian aliens who never make a sound, but  are implacable and apparently unstoppable. No weapons can hurt them and humanity is steadily being enslaved.

When Trent wakes up after his 500-year nap, he discovers the Gharr are still in charge, with many surviving humans kept in camps where they are forced to breed and produce slaves for work off-planet.

The first person Buck Rogers met after waking up was the beautiful Wilma Deering, who was a member of a band of freedom fighters. Trent doesn't buck tradition here--the first person he meets is the beautiful Lura, who is a member of a band of freedom fighters.

Actually, the comparisons I'm making are a bit unfair. "Spider Men" does initially parallel the first Buck Rogers story in several ways, but it has its own feel to it. I have no idea if Wilbur Peacock was familiar with the original story and consciously modeled aspects of his story after it. But if he did, we can forgive him. He manages to come up with something good. 

Trent has a rifle that fires explosive bullets and a pistol that is essentially a powerful flame-thrower. The Gharr threatening Lura is impervious to both these weapons, of course, but Trent uses a clever tactic that allows he and the girl to escape. 

He hooks up with her group, using his knowledge to repair some old equipment--another parallel to the earlier story in which Buck used his knowledge of World War 1 military tactics to beat the aliens

 Later, he accompanies Lura and a few others on a raid to free some human slaves. His weaponry comes in handy here--the Gharr might be immune to them, but the robot guards and the big six-legged carnivores they use has "guard dogs" can be destroyed.

Things go awry when Trent and Lura are captured. But this actually provides them with a chance to learn the real nature of the Gharr and just maybe give them a chance to destroy the invaders.

The Gharr really are a great creation. Their invulnerability; their bizarre appearance; their apparent inability to communicate directly with humans; and the creepy twist regarding their true nature--all of this adds up to move them to the top of the list of scary alien races. It is the Gharr as well as the differences in detail that help give this story a different ambiance than Armageddon 2419, with several intense action sequences spicing things up considerably. 

So though "Raiders of the Second Moon" is the best in this issue, "Spider Men of Gharr" is indeed a close second. Though I am a little confused about one aspect of the story. If the Gharrians never speak, how the heck did mankind find out they are called "Gharrians?"

Starve a Gorilla and Save the World

Orrgo is a pretty cool looking monster. Of course, pretty much every monster Jack Kirby ever drew is cool looking. That's part of what makes the monster stories Marvel produced in the 1950s and early 1960s so much fun. Kirby or Steve Ditko drew monsters that were simply fun.

Orrgo appeared in Strange Tales #90 (November 1961), with Kirby art enhancing a story written by Stan Lee (or possibly plotted by Lee with the script by Larry Lieber). As was typical of the monster stories, this one ends with a bizarre plot twist. This one happens to be a particularly clever one.

Orrgo is from a race with omnipotent mental powers--if they think it, it happens. So when they decide we puny humans have a nice planet, Orrgo volunteers to travel to Earth alone. His mental powers will be sufficient to conquer the planet.

He appears on Earth in the middle of a circus and his confidence in his powers are immediately justified. He scans the audience to learn the language, announces he is taking over, then proceeds to defeat the army, encase Washington DC in a block of ice, levitate New York City and then hypnotize every single human being in the world. Actually, I wonder why he bothered with the other stuff and didn't instantly jump to the hypnotize everyone part. But I guess even Unconquerable Aliens need to have their fun.

Apparently, all that fun is also very tiring, because Orrgo then takes a nap. Remember that he's still hanging out at the circus. Remember also that hypnotized animal trainers are notoriously forgetful about feeding their animals. A cranky gorilla--not under control of Orrgo because the alien was tuned into human brain waves--starts looking for someone to blame after he misses dinner.

So the gorilla saves humanity because he wasn't feed properly. Take that, PETA!

It's a fun twist to a fun story. In less than a year, the Marvel Universe would have superheroes around to protect us from threats like this. But we really don't need superheroes, do we? We just need a cranky primate who knows how to throw a punch.

Next week, we join Popeye the Sailor in wondering how you fight a ghost when you can't actually punch them. It's a problem that even a cranky gorilla might not be able to solve.

Cover Cavalcade

I think ammunition expenditure by government agents in the pulps accounts for at least 75% of the national deficit.

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Lone Ranger: "Mountain Trap" 1/1/43

Outlaws are trading guns to both the Crows and the Blackfeet, which would incite a war between the two tribes. The Ranger & Tonto race to put a stop to this.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Sword Fights, Invisibility Cloaks and Nazi War Criminals

When I stumbled across the Summer 1945 issue of Planet Stories online, I downloaded it primarily because "Spider Men of Gharr" is pretty much a title that by itself forces one to read the actual story.

But today I want to talk about one of the short stories from this issue--"Raiders of the Second Moon," which is a tale I think is particularly fun. But SPOILER ALERT--after writing several drafts of a review, I discovered this is one of those stories that you simply can't talk about effectively without giving away important plot points.

So I would recommend you read the story HERE (it begins on page 43), then return to this blog to see if you agree with what I have to say. It's only 10 pages long, so it is a quick read.

But the writer (Basil Wells, writing under the name Gene Ellerman) packs a lot of stuff into those 10

pages. It turns out there's a second moon hidden behind Luna--a planetoid called Sekk with a breathable atmosphere and a human civilization. Our hero, though, is from Earth. He's got amnesia, so goes by the name of Noork, called this because he muttered "good 'ol New York" when he first crashed on Sekk. So he doesn't remember that he's an American pilot who had been pursuing a Nazi war criminal. The Nazi had escaped in a home-made space ship. Noork grabbed another prototype ship and pursued. Both ended up on Sekk.

That's actually a pretty impressive resume for a hero, isn't it? A World War II pilot is so determined to catch the Nazi that he tries his hand at flying a space ship he had just then stumbled across. That he crash-landed on Sekk might lose him a few points, but its still pretty cool.

All this background information, by the way, is fed to us gradually throughout the story. In fact, I was at first assuming I was reading part of a series of stories about Noork, since we initially get the impression we are jumping in on a story already in progress. But that's just a side effect of clever plot construction and in the end everything ties together nicely.

Because he has no memory of the Nazi, Noork is caught up in rescuing the beautiful Tholon Sarna, who has been captured by the evil priests of the Temple of the Skull. The priests employ apparently invisible minions known as the Misty Ones.





Noork manages to mark a few Misty Ones by tossing fruit at them, which allows him to then peg one with an arrow. Once again, we can't help but be impressed with him. He just discovered how to battle evil by staging a food fight.

He learns that the Misty Ones use invisibility cloaks. Taking one from the guy he killed, Noork then proceeds to sneak into the Temple of the Skull to rescue Sarna, which turns out to involve several deadly sword fights. But even when he's escaped the Temple with the girl, he still has that pesky Nazi criminal to deal with. And the Nazi has a gun...

"Raiders of the Second Moon" is fast-paced, internally consistent. and---as I said above--really, really fun. It does not break any new ground in the Space Opera genre, but it uses the established mores of that genre to spin an entertaining yarn.

It's not, by the way, the first time a Space Opera tale gives us a second moon. There's another one out there inhabited by vampire frog people. In comparison with that, Noork probably had it pretty easy.

Blind Men's Bluff

When Batman is having a tough time taking out some blind guys, then you know he's having a bad day.

Well, actually, the blind guys aren't blind. They're pretending to be blind as part of their cover to commit a major heist. Now, the blind guy who was pretending to be Batman was really blind. He's dead, though. There's another guy pretending to be blind who really is Batman. He's not really blind, nor is he dead, despite Commissioner Gordon's continued insistence that Batman is indeed dead.

All this starts in Batman #204 (August 1968) when a criminal mastermind known as the Schemer decides to rob an armored car that will be transporting a fortune in gold.  He knows that Batman is his greatest threat to success. So he leaves a corpse in a alley--someone dressed as a blind beggar, but who had apparently scratched a "They found out I'm Batman" on the alley wall before dying.




The story, written by Frank Robbins and with evocative art by Irv Novick, does hit a bit of a bump here. Gordon, quite frankly, comes out looking like an idiot throughout the story, convinced on questionable evidence that the dead man is indeed Batman. In fact, even when the real Batman does a Sherlock Scan of the corpse and points out several significant clues indicating the guy really was a blind beggar, Gordon throws a fit and tries to have Real Batman arrested. But if you can get past that part, then you still have a cleverly-plotted, exciting and occasionally creepy (in a good way) story.

A veritable army of blind beggars, none of whom are really blind and several of whom have rocket launchers hidden in their canes, are hanging around Gotham City and are on the lookout for an armored car that will be picking up a shipment of gold from a secret location. With the Batman and the cops all distracted, the Schemer figures out he'll have a clear field to commit his robbery.

But Batman manages to stay a jump ahead of the cops, at one point even knocking out one of the fake beggars and changing clothes with him, fooling Gordon long enough to get away from the cops and get a line on the real bad guys.

That brings us to Batman #205 (September 1968), with the Schemer finally tracking the armored car to the bank where the gold is stored. Here we finally learn the details of his plan--and from the point-of-view of comic book logic, it really is a doozy. He'll be setting off a bright flare to temporarily blind the bank guards. The
sunglasses his men are wearing are all designed to filter out the light of the flare, allowing them to get the gold. I mentioned above that Novick's are is evocative. The panel in which a small army of "blind" men approaches the nervous guards is proof of this. Gee whiz, that's a creepy image.






























But Batman, himself now in blind beggar garb, manages to foil the plot at the last moment. By the time the dust settles, the gold has been safely delivered to a transport plane, but Robin has been captured by the Schemer. The Schemer has a back-up plan--the submarine he uses as a secret hideout is equipped with a missile launcher with which he can shoot down the plane carrying the gold. Robin can be used as a hostage to keep Batman from interfering.

Batman (with the help of Alfred piloting the Bat Copter) does indeed interfere, rescuing Robin and stopping the Schemer in the nick of time.

Despite Gordon's two-issue descent into idiocy (and arguably despite the less-than-original name "Schemer" with a stereotypical owl-theme to his appearance), this really is an incredibly fun story. The pacing is non-stop, with the plot running at full speed from start to finish. The twists and turns the story takes are fun and believable within a comic book universe. Batman gets to be legitimately clever on several occasions, as well as being a kick-butt martial artist. And, despite getting captured, Robin plays a key part in the tale and does contribute his share to catching the villain.

Although I can't help but think: If the Schemer hadn't apparently spent a fortune equipping a submarine with an advanced weapons system, he probably wouldn't have to rob gold shipments to get by. Gee whiz, maybe he wasn't that smart after all.

Next week, a gorilla gets really hungry and... saves the world?

Cover Cavalcade

Yet another very effective Carmine Infantino cover.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Dragnet: "Big Actor" 8/10/15

Someone steals narcotics from a Catholic hospital. A scene involving the interrogation of an addict who has no idea what city he lives in is particularly good. So is the part in which Friday & Romero question a subject on a movie set--a brief scene of a cop movie is being shot and the cops have to pause every few seconds while another take is filmed.

Click HERE to listen or download.

The link for today's episode should take you directly to Archive.org, where downloading it should be much easier than the file-sharing service I've been using. Someone please let me know via a comment if it works okay.