Cover Cavalcade

SEPTEMBER IS YOUNG LEX LUTHOR MONTH!!!

A Curt Swan cover from 1960.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Phil Harris & Alice Faye: "An Elephant for Mr. Scott" 12/14/52

Phil is led to believe that his show's sponsor wants an elephant for Christmas. So Phil sets out to get him an elephant for Christmas. What could possibly go wrong?

Click HERE to listen or download. 

With this blog closing down soon, I'm afraid this is the last Friday's Favorite OTR post.

The End of an Era

 

Gee whiz, I've been doing this blog since 2007.

Over the last year, though, I've started a Substack blog on which I review every book I read and I've started a BookTube channel on YouTube. Both get a relatively low number of hits, but I'm enjoying doing this and my few YouTube viewers are kind enough to give me a bunch of likes for each video, letting me know that there's at least a few people enjoying them.

So, to make time for those ventures, I'm afraid I'm going to bring this blog to a close. There's one more Friday's Favorite OTR scheduled for Friday and I have Monday Cover Cavalcade posts ready for September ("Lex Luthor Month") and October ("Marvel Classic Comics Month"). But after that'll be all.

I am going to start including reviews of old and often obscure comic books on my Substack, so that will continue. It will just be a little less frequent. 

Anyway, I've never been sure how many readers I have here. There's 130 listed as Followers. Individual posts show anywhere from 50 to 100 views per post, but my daily stats often show thousands of hits per day. I'm pretty sure the daily stats include some sort of bot activity. It's nice to think that thousands flock to my blog each day, but that seems unlikely. 

For those of you who have been following this blog--thank you for doing so and I hope you've enjoyed what you've read. As I said, I'll at least occasionally including comic book reviews on my Books Worth Reading substack, so keep an eye out for that. 

I do hope many of you will follow along with my Books Worth Reading ventures, but whether you do or not, I'm sincerely grateful for the time you've spent reading this blog.

Books Worth Reading Links:

BookTube Channel

Substack 

Cover Cavalcade

  AUGUST IS "THE HEROES OF STREET AND SMITH" MONTH!!!

The Skipper, from 1937. Cover art by Laurence Donovan.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar: "Murder Merry-Go-Round" 3/11/49

Someone is sabotaging a small travelling circus. Johnny has to find out both why and who.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Childhood Impressions Revisited: The First Time I Read Where Eagles Dare

 

I first read the book Where Eagles Dare, by Alistair MacLean, when I was maybe 13 years old. I’d seen the movie on TV not long before and loved it. I did get a little lost in the wicked plot twists within the movie--I think both book and movie actually explain the plot twists well when they happen, but as a 13-year-old, I was mostly engrossed by the machine gun fire and explosions.

So when I saw the book on the paperback rack at an Eckerds Drug Store, I pulled out some paper route money and bought it. (As a side note: Remember when mass market paperbacks were cheap enough to be impulse buys? Ah, the good ol’ days!)

Anyway, in the book, there’s a point where the Allied commando team has to stash their equipment before mingling in town disguised as German soldiers. They break into the railway station and someone comes up with the idea of hiding their stuff in the Left Baggage Room. As a 13-year-old, I completely misinterpreted the term. What made the “Left” Baggage Room special as compared to the “Right” Baggage Room? It was a conundrum and there was no internet in those ancient days to look it up.

Over the years, I re-read the book frequently--it remains a favorite of mine. Everytime I got to that passage, I wondered anew about the “Left Baggage Room.” Even when I was more than old enough to figure out the context, I was apparently locked into my 13-year-old interpretation.

When the internet became a thing, I could have easily looked it up, but perhaps I enjoyed my minor bafflement. It had become a nostalgic part of re-reading a favorite novel.

Then, about 15 years ago, I was travelling to South Sudan and had an all-day layover at Heathrow Airport. I decided to visit the National Museum (my favorite place in London), but needed to store my backpack somewhere. That’s no problem, I was told. Leave it in the “Left Baggage Room.” You know, the place where you leave your bags until you need them again.

I was stunned for a moment. It was an epiphany, with my mind instantly shifting to Where Eagles Dare. IT ALL MADE SENSE AT LAST. No wonder it was the perfect place for the commandoes to store their equipment. At last, the mystery was solved.

Of course, the next time I read the book, I was a little disappointed not to suffer the usual bout of minor bafflement when Major Smith suggests hiding their stuff in the Left Baggage Room.

Oh, well. Some of us are impossible to please, I suppose.

Sappy the Sportsman

 

cover art by John Walworth

As far as I can determine, the only appearance of Sappy the Sportsman is in Barnyard Comics #1 (June 1944). And perhaps that's all he should have. In that one story, Al Pross' lively art and the unknown writer's decision to give Sappy and his manager Pug Brooklyn accents lend the story charm and humor. But Sappy is pretty much a one-joke character.

He's a skinny, clumsy dog who craves being a successful athlete. His overly optimistic manager Pug keeps getting him try-outs, but Sappy isn't any good at anything. In baseball, he throws a wild pitch so softly, the catcher doesn't know he's thrown it. Then he gets beaned when the ball is thrown back to him.

He knocks himself out when he tries boxing. 

He gets tangled in the net when playing tennis.

And he gets tangled with the TABLE when trying ping pong.

Well, that's enough for Sappy. He finds one thing he's good at, which is knitting. It's safe. Or at least it should be--in the last panel of the story, he pokes himself in the finger with a needle.

It's a story that brings you a smile, but doesn't necessarily have you laughing out loud. As I said before, it's Pross' art that makes it work. And the decision to have Sappy and Pug speak Brooklynese just seems... right. It gives the story a Damon Runyon-meets-Tex Avery vibe that the art alone couldn't carry. 

And even if the story isn't a classic by any definition, characters like Sappy are a part of comic book heritage and should be remembered.

You can see if it brings you a smile by reading it HERE.

Next week... well, next week will be an important announcement about the fate of this blog that will shake the very foundations of Western Civilization. 

Cover Cavalcade

  AUGUST IS "THE HEROES OF STREET AND SMITH" MONTH!!!

From 1936: The Whisperer as portrayed by John Howitt.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Box 13: "Archimedes and the Romans" 7/31/49

A young boy writes Box 13 about a mysterious happening. Dan decides to check it out, though it's just a letter from a kid. Nothing will come of it.  Right?

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Bombs over Burma

 

Anna May Wong is a great actress and it's too bad that the racism of the day usually prevented her from getting more than supporting roles in A-movies (there are a few exceptions), she did get the lead role in occasional B-movies. PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), one of the Poverty Row studios, put her at the head of the cast of a 1942 war movie titled Bombs Over Burma. The rationale at PRC might have been purely business oriented--she was a name that would help sell the film on the Chinese market. That is speculation rather than objective fact, but in any case, a starring role is nonetheless a starring role.

She plays a Chinese school teacher named Lin Ying who also works as an espionage agent, helping in her own way to fight against the invading Japanese. Her mission in this film--find out what enemy agent is feeding the Japanese information about important supply convoys travelling along the Burma Road.

This mission put her on a bus driven by an American expatriate named Slim. Her fellow passengers are an eclectic group of Americans and Europeans. When a damaged bridge forces them to stop for the night at a Buddhist monastery, the situation grows dangerous.

Lin Ying discovers the monk who runs the monastery has a secret room with a short-wave radio, but there is an initial uncertainty about whose side he's on. Then there's a murder. False accusations abound and it looks like Lin Ying might get framed for being the enemy agent.

It turns out she's one step ahead of the bad guy the whole time, running a con on him to force him to give himself away and leading to his rather brutal demise.

Like all wartime films dealing with the war, it is propaganda. But that's not a bad thing. When Slim admits he stays in China because he was bullied growing up and now hates seeing China bullied--he calls the coolies working through the night to repair the bridge his blood brothers--it generates more honest emotion than we usually see in Poverty Row films. (For a modern viewer who knows that post-war China would be ruled by one of history's greatest mass murderers, there's unintended poignancy that the filmmakers could not have planned for in 1942.)

It's not a perfect film--even with a short 65-minute run time, there are a few times when scenes are dragged out too long. But the mystery behind the identity of the enemy agent is a reasonably good one and Anna May Wong gives an excellent and grounded performance. She was an actress who always deserved a chance to shine.

Here's the move on YouTube: