Friday's Favorite OTR

Life of Riley: "Riley Bribes Jr. to Win a Football Game" 9/28/46

When Riley mistakenly believes his son has taken a bribe to throw a high school football game, he comes up with the brilliant plan of offering him a bigger bribe to win. To the surprise of no one, this plan backfires spectacularly.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Who's Got the Plates?

Trapped, a film noir produced in 1949, does a really nifty job of keeping you guessing in several ways. Lloyd Bridges gets top billing, so its safe to assume he's the hero--or (since this is film noir) perhaps an anti-hero.

But he's actually the main villain, without any traits that bring him sympathy. Heck, there's never even any real reason to think he's very good at being a crook.




Someone is passing fake $20 bills and the Feds realize they were made with the same plates that Tris Stewart had once used. Stewart is now doing a 7-year stretch for that crime. He's offered a deal--time off if he tells them where the plates are. At first, he refuses. Then, while on a bus being transferred to another prison, he has a chance to make a break for it.

But this is the first of several twists. The escape is rigged, because he has agreed to help the Secret Service track down the plates. But then he beats the snot out of the agent assigned to him and makes a break for it, determined to get the plates for himself. After making us think that maybe we were going to get a story about a man who redeems himself, we are simply given a rotten thug.

That's fine, though, because Lloyd Bridges is a fine actor and brings a nice balance to the role. Stewart is more mean that smart, but he's just smart enough to stay ahead of the Feds for a short time.

For a very short time, actually. He looks up his old girlfriend, but the Feds already have her apartment bugged and have an agent frequenting the club she works at as a cigarette girl. That agent makes plays for her and flashes wads of cash, setting himself up as a potential source of money for Stewart.

Stewart, by the way, does not know where the counterfeit plates are at first, but after roughing up his former (and now perpetually drunk) partner, he gets a line on them. He contacts the guy who now has them and expresses an interest in buying his way back into the funny money business.

That's where the undercover agent comes in. The Feds don't want to arrest Stewart until he leads them to the plates, so the agent has to worm his way into the deal with promises of front money. But if he blows his cover, there's no doubt that Stewart will kill him.

The agent is played by John Hoyt. Trekkies will remember him as the Enterprise's doctor in the original pilot episode "The Cage," but he has a long and varied career as a character actor. I don't remember many times where he got to play a tough-guy hero, so its fun to see him in this movie.

Trapped is in the public domain, so its easily available to find online. Or you could just let me do it for you:

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

Roy Krenkel may be my favorite cover artist for ERB's books.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Hallmark Playhouse: "Parnassus on Wheels" 1/20/49

A charming adaptation of Christopher Morley's wonderful novel about travelling booksellers.

Click HERE to listen or download.

"Pain and the knife, they're inseparable!"

If you look at the above poster, then you think "Aha! Corridors of Blood (1958) is a horror movie and Karloff is playing yet another mad scientist and/or mad killer!"

But the poster is lying to you--or at least showing Karloff without sufficient context. He's not the bad guy. He's the tragic hero.

I had never seen this one. I ran across it while looking through a streaming service the library at which I work is trying out for a month. When I noticed that it stared Karloff and that Christopher Lee was in it--playing a henchman to the main villain named Resurrection Joe--then I realized I had to watch it. Resurrection Joe is one of the best henchmen names ever.





The movie is set in 1840s London, with Karloff playing a skilled surgeon. What makes him skilled is his speed. There is no such thing as anesthetic, so you have to operate quickly to minimize a possibly fatal level of pain and shock.

Dr. Bolton (Karloff) isn't just good with a knife. He's also compassionate, running a free clinic for the city's poor and experimenting with different drugs in an attempt to make an effective anesthetic. His peers at the hospital are skeptical of this last goal. "Pain and the knife," pontificates one of them, "they're inseparable."

Bolton refuses to accept this. But, while his intentions are good, but his methodology is a bit lacking. He experiments on himself and, before long, he's addicted to the drugs he's using.


Karloff's performance is nuanced and heartfelt--a man desperate to find a way to operate without causing pain and to simply help people in need. As he grows more and more addicted and this affects his ability as a surgeon, we feel nothing by sympathy for him. We've watched a good man--with at first the most noble intentions--gradually destroy himself.

Circumstances bring Dr. Bolton into the circle of Black Ben (Francis De Wolff). Ben owns a seedy tavern, but makes his real money luring indigent drunks inside and then having Resurrection Joe smother them with a pillow. The bodies are then sold to the hospital for medical training. 

The glitch in this business is that he needs a doctor to sign a death certificate for each body. When Bolton's deteriorating condition gets him removed from his post at the hospital and leaves him without access to the hospital pharmacy, he cuts a deal with Ben. He'll sign a stack of blank death certificates. In exchange, Ben will send Joe to help Bolton break into the pharmacy and get what he needs--primarily a bottle of opium.

Joe ends up killing the night watchmen. To his horror, Bolton finds himself trapped in the company of villains and quickly becoming useless to them.

Karloff's brilliant performance is the lynch pin for the whole movie, but the supporting cast is also excellent. The sets, costumes and dialogue effectively recreates the time period. I also like the Dickensian attitude towards class structure--the movie condemns an attitude we see among the the upper class when it is indifferent to the suffering of the poor. But there is no excuse given for those among the poor (Big Ben and Resurrection Joe) who have turned to crime. There is a moral balance here that I find admirable and ethically healthy.

So this isn't really a horror movie, though there are elements of that genre present. It's a combination of thriller and historical drama that is well-acted and tells a strong story. That darn poster is a big, fat liar. For that matter, so's the movie's trailer:

Those Poor Oxen!

Bill Elliot, like pretty much every successful B-movie cowboy hero, had his fair share of comic book appearances. In Bill's case, the numbering of these can get a bit confusing. He first appeared in Dell's Four Color #278 in 1950. When he got his own series later that same year, this began with issue #2--the Four Color appearance was counted as the first issue. This was common practice at Dell, though the publisher wasn't always consistent in this practice.

The 10th issue came out in 1952, then the series was cancelled. Bill had two more Four Color appearances after this (#472 & #520), then his own series restarted in 1954 with issue #13. So the two later Four Colors were counted as issues #11 & #12.  Gee whiz, if you collected those issues, what order would you put them in your long boxes?

Anyway, we'll be looking at a story from that initial Four Color. Bill is asked by an old friend for help. The friend runs a paper mill near San Francisco, but a nearby rancher wants control of all the water in the valley, so is working to sabotage the mill and put it out of business. There's no legal proof, though, that the rancher is behind the sabotage attempts.

For instance, a wagon load of machine parts is driven off a cliff when a thug tumbles a big rock down on it. The artist--identified only as Cary--gives us a pretty brutal image of the oxen falling to their deaths.  The driver and his assistant, though, leap clear.

Bill is nearby when this happens and manages to wing the thug--though he then loses him in the surrounding woods. These leads to the first of several times in the story in which Bill demonstrates himself to be a savvy detective as he realizes the snakeskin band on the hat the thug dropped is probably unique enough to help identify him.

Bill gets a real Sherlock Holmes moment a little later when he realizes a supposed expert on machinery is lying about his profession. The guy walks with a gait that shows he's used to wearing high heeled cowboy boots.

In fact, "The War on Spider Creek" is as much a detective story as it is a Western, with Bill following up clues in a logical manner, engineering a trap to catch one of the rancher's minions, and later lures the rancher and his gang into a larger trap. Adding detective story elements to B-Westerns was pretty common in both the movies and their comic book counterparts. When done well, this makes for a nice recipe for fun storytelling.

Though I do enjoy the story, I have a couple of nitpicks. It's made clear that there is enough water for both the rancher and the paper mill. So the rancher wants control of all the water for no reason other than to be evil. Establishing that the water can be shared, though, was necessary to set up the ending.

The rancher is caught, but no blood has been spilled Well, no human blood. Those poor oxen are still dead.

Bill gets his friend and the rancher to work out a deal to share the water rights, with the rancher agreeing to do so to avoid jail. The rancher also agrees to pay for the damage his men have caused. This allows Bill to comment on how nice it is to solve a problem without bloodshed.

This is all well and good as far as it goes. As an evangelical Christian, I'm all for portraying the idea of personal forgiveness as the proper route to take, while the rancher paying for damages is showing him taking responsibility for his actions.

But civilizations work by having a rule of law and it is never wrong to apply legal consequences to crimes even when personal forgiveness is forthcoming. The rancher had hired men to commit acts of violence and it was only dumb luck that no one got killed. (Despite my joke above, the death of the oxen does not, of course, have moral equivalency with the death of a person.) Of course, there as times when forgiveness and clemency should extend into overt law-breaking. I'm just not convinced that this was the wise thing to do in this case. If your thugs try to kill people while acting under your orders, then you need to do some jail time.

But I get that the story wanted to make a point about settling matters peaceable. And it really is a fun, well-constructed tale. So, like Bill and his friend, we'll be forgiving and let the matter stand as is.

This issue can be found online HERE.

Next week, we return to the 2nd World War for a story that uses our own Genre Savvy against us to give the story a fun plot twist.

Cover Cavalcade

Bugs with lasers vs. dinosaurs. Who would win?

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Adventures of Frank Race: "The Adventure of the Baradian Letters" 6/12/49

A woman Frank met during the war contacts him while he is in Paris, quickly embroiling him in a case similar to Holmes' "A Scandal in Bohemia," but also adds a murder into the mix.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Light Swords And Poison Sprays

Light swords? The good guys (and one traitor among the good guys) use light swords. George Lucas admits that ideas used in Star Wars came from many different sources, including pulp science fiction. Maybe lightsabers came from this story?  Enough has been written about the genesis of Star Wars that the answer to this question is out there somewhere, but it is now impossible to read about the light swords without thinking about Jedi Knights and lightsabers.

Anyway, the story we are talking about is "Kaldar: World of Antares," first published in the April 1933 issue of Magic Carpet Magazine. In it we discover that if you are an indigent with no family and an adventurous streak, then there are some very interesting job opportunities out there for you.

This is what Stuart Merrick discovers when he answers an advertisement asking for just those qualifications. He finds out that a group of scientists have discovered a way to transport a person to a planet in another solar system. The trouble is they don't know what he'll find when he gets there--or even if the planet is habitable. It's a dangerous job and the scientists are very upfront about this.

Merrick agrees, asking for sturdy clothes, a knapsack full of food and a pistol. I love this story and I'll be praising it here, but it annoys the heck out of me that no one--either Merrick or the supposedly genius scientists, say "Hey, maybe we should send along a camera and a few rolls of film as well."

Anyway, he'll be automatically teleported home after three days as long as he returns to the same spot on which he arrived.

The experiment is a success. Merrick arrives on the planet Antares in the middle of a vast city and causes quite a stir among the human beings who are living there. They soon have him hooked up to a language-learning machine. He's a little reluctant to go along with this at first, since it involves sticking electrodes directly into his skull. But a pretty girl named Narna convinces him to do this and he is instantly given the ability to speak to everyone.

I don't blame Merrick for this. Pretty girls can wrap me around their little fingers at a moment's notice as well.

Anyway, Merrick arrived just as the people of Kaldar (the city of humans) are deciding on their next leader. It turns out he popped up on a particular spot at just the right moment to convince nearly everyone he should take charge.

This job will entail a little more than speed learning language and (it turns out) getting married to the lovely Narna. Kaldar is surrounded by a variety of non-human races, the most dangerous of which is the spider-people calls the Cosp. The humans actually know very little about the rest of their planet, because they are hemmed in and often attacked by these enemies.

The Cosp use poison sprayers and a device that envelops an area in thick darkness. The good guys have light guns and, for hand-to-hand work, light swords that disintegrate whatever they touch. The Cosp have always had a tactical advantage, primarily from the darkness generator, and frequently raid the city for slaves.

When Kaldar is hit by a raid, Merrick comes up with a new tactic that helps even the odds. But a traitor among them kidnaps Narna and flies away with the Cosp. So Merrick has to lead a small rescue party into the Cosp city--a dwelling hollowed out of a metal mountain--to get Narna back.

It's a fun, exciting story, full of the imagination that Hamilton always brought to his tales. If I had a complaint (other than no one thought he should bring a camera--gee whiz), it's that the two guys who go along with Merrick on the rescue mission are underused. Jurul is a master swordsman and Holk is an incredibly strong warrior. Together, they make a fun team, but they don't get to do much.

But I have discovered that there are two more Kaldar stories out there. I'm reasonably familiar with Hamilton's work, but simply missed ever seeing these particular tales before. I'll have to find them and continuing reading about Merrick's adventures on Antares. I hope Jurul and Holk get more stuff to do, but I'm sure I'll enjoy the visit nonetheless.

Corporate Takeovers, Mutant Assassins and Raising the Dead Back to Life--Part 2

Cover art by Jim Aparo

When we left off last week, Batman, Robin, Catwoman (currently reformed at this point in Bronze Age continuity) and secret agent King Faraday are prisoners of the yet-to-be-identified Big Bad who had been trying to take over Wayne Enterprises and put Bruce Wayne on a slab in the morgue.

This is the point in the story where Batman #334 (April 1981) begins (though Robin and Catwoman make a brief escape before being recaptured). The unlucky quartet, though they had been working the case from separate directions, end up together on a remote volcanic island in the Indian Ocean. Batman is given the choice of joining the bad guy or joining the others as slaves in the mines. Naturally, he chooses the mines.

Which is just as well, because the four make a break for it together in record time., smashing their leg chains and fighting through the genetically engineered mutates who guard them.

In fact, this issue and the next are built around several escape attempts, which always yield the heroes more information before they are recaptured. It's a nifty way of constructing the story, giving us plenty of action (with Irv Novick continuing to provide us with great art), while gradually providing plot exposition in a way that keeps the readers hooked. Marv Wolfman is the writer and continues to demonstrate why he was considered one of the best in the business.




The escapees run across Talia, who apparently has the freedom of the villain's lair.  We learn that Bruce (despite Dick Grayson's concerns) did not blindly trust her, but suspected all along that she might still be working for her dad.

And her dad is indeed the main villain. This will catch very few readers be surprise today if they are reading the story for the first time. In 1981, Ra's al Ghul had been around for a decade and had appeared in a number of important stories, but I don't know if he yet stood out as the major member of Batman's Rogue's Gallery that he has since become. So his reveal might have had a bit more impact at that time.

Anyway, Talia really does have a thing for Bruce, but she is under Ra's al Ghul's control because she's actually 150 years old and kept young only through the rare drugs he provides her.

Batman #335 has Ra's making one last attempt to get Batman to switch sides. We also learn that Ra's had been engineering the corporate takeover most to get hold of this particular island without anyone noticing it was important. There is a Lazarus Pit located there--something Ra's both needs and prefers to keep a monopoly on.

Batman refuses to join him, so Ra's decides to convert the Caped Crusader into a mindless mutate. The other heroes pull off another escape and Talia switches sides again to also help Batman. In the confusion, one of Ra's al Ghul's henchmen shoots Talia.

This requires Ra's to multi-task. He has to angrily kill the henchman, use the Lazarus Pit to save Talia, then kill Batman. This leads to a wonderfully choreographed fight scene between Batman and Ra's that runs seven pages, with Ra's taking an unplanned dip in the Lazarus Pit himself and coming out super-strong, lava-hot and completely insane.

The fight ends with Ra's supposedly dead and the heroes getting away in the nick of time just before the island blows up. Talia leaves Bruce to experience growing old naturally on her own and Bruce and Dick make friends again. Thus ends a strong four-issue story arc with great action and a very well-constructed story.

Next week, we'll return to the Old West to share a comic book adventure with yet another B-movie cowboy.

Cover Cavalcade

Wonderful use of perspective by Al Milgrom in this cover from 1977.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Molle Mystery Theater: "The Creeper" 3/29/46

A serial killer who targets red-headed women is terrorizing a neighborhood. One poor woman sporting red hair suspects nearly everyone she meets of being the killer. Is she right about one of them?

Click HERE to listen or download.

A Good Lesson to Learn

Last year, I found and re-read a book I remembered enjoying enormously as a kid. The Hostile Beaches turned out to be quite good. It was the second of six books about the war time adventures of two young sailors.

This made me want to read the rest of the series, but they've been out of print for years and used copies for most of this series run about $30.00 each. So--though I would like to one day own the entire series--I finally acquired the first book, The Cold Seas Beyond (1963), via interlibrary loan. I ended up with a copy owned by the University of Missouri--Kansas City.

This one is set in the Aleutian Islands, not long after several of the western-most islands are occupied by the Japanese. Bob Dunbar, our point-of-view character, is just out of high school and working on a civilian salvage ship named the Otter. They are now helping the military, delivering supplies and doing salvage work when necessary.

It's another great book and I'm looking forward to reading the others. This may drive our interlibrary loan library nuts trying to track down copies for me. But that's her job, by golly, and sometimes you just have to consider people expendable.

Anyway, I'm not going to give a detailed summary of the book because I want to talk about one particular scene that really impressed me, especially since this was a Juvenile novel (what we would today call a Young Adult novel). I'm afraid it involves a spoiler, but I really want to talk about this.

The Otter is sent out to salvage a PT boat that ran aground on a remote island. The crew of the PT boat has already been evacuated, but the Navy in the Aleutians are already short on resources, so they want the boat back if possible.

The Otter has quite an adventure on this job. The weather is horrible, making just approaching the rocky shore where the PT is stranded dangerous. When the crew decides that the boat can be salvaged, this requires back-breaking work in still horrible and freezing weather to patch up a hole and pump out sea water. Rigging the towline and getting the boat off the shore is also difficult, as is towing it through the very heavy seas.

Before they can get back to safe harbor, the towing line parts. There is heavy fog and the two crewmen who were aboard the PT boat find themselves alone, adrift and with no idea where they are. Then, when the fog clears, they are spotted by American planes. They don't have a working lamp with which to send a recognition signal, so the planes attack them. The PT boat is sunk and the crewmen are found and rescued by the Otter just in time to keep them from freezing to death in the bitterly cold sea.

So all that hard labor, danger and tension had been for nothing. It's only one incident in the ship's career and they have their share of victories--including a remarkable one at the novel's climax. But I couldn't be more impressed that this sequence is included in a book targeted at younger readers.  There is no guarantees in war--or in life in general. Sometimes, you'll do your best and, through no fault of your own or no fault of anyone (heck, the American planes acting properly in sinking a boat that didn't send the recognition signal), you will fail. When this happens, it is your responsibility to bounce back and try again.

Such a great lesson and exactly the sort of thing that should be in a Young Adult novel.

Corporate Takeovers, Mutant Assassins and Raising the Dead Back to Life--Part 1

Cover art by Jim Aparo

Usually, Batman's foremost concerns are stopping costumed madmen from committing mass murder, saving the world at large from various threats, or beating up the occasional mugger. But there are times when, as Bruce Wayne, he does have to pay attention to his business ventures. In Batman #332 (February 1981), this is particularly important, because someone is trying to run Wayne Enterprises out of business and take over its assets.

This is the beginning of an engrossing four-part story written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Irv Novick (with Don Newton drawing a connected back-up story in this first issue). As the story opens, Bruce is having personal problems as well as business problems. He's gotten involved with Talia, the daughter of immortal criminal Ra's al Ghul. Bruce has apparently accepted her story that she's in love with him and will go straight, but Dick Grayson isn't convinced of this at all. This, by the way, is just a short time before Dick graduates from Robin to Nightwing. Dick storms out of the Bat Cave, vowing never to return.

Of course, we eventually learn that Batman isn't that dumb or that trusting--he does care for Talia, but keeps her in mind as a suspect even while he's working with her.

Then Bruce finds out about the business-related shenanigans. An obese rival named Gregorian Falstaff (I love that name) is behind all this, but he's using blackmail and kidnapping to get inside information on Wayne Enterprises, which makes it a matter for Batman.

Soon, there's a fight between the Dark Knight and a genetically altered strong man, in which Batman gets tossed through a wall with embarrassing ease. But I guess the law of Conservation of Ninjutsu is in effect here--where Batman is curb stomped by one mutant, he's able to fight his way through a roomful of them a little later one.

This all comes to an end when Falstaff tries to use a hostage as a shield only to have Talia kick him into the path of his own energy weapon. The guy ends up as a pile of ash on the floor. This doesn't end the case, though. By now, Batman has figured out that there was a power behind Falstaff--a greater enemy who still poses a threat.

So, in Batman #333 (March 1981), it's off to investigate a Swiss bank in hopes of back-tracking the money trail. But the bad guys are on to Batman and he soon finds himself pursued (in an excellent action scene) by assassins on skis shooting laser rifles at him. Soon after, he and Talia are attacked while he's dressed as Bruce Wayne, which means the bad guy knows his secret identity.

Bruce and Talia end up in Hong Kong, still attempting to figure out who the villain behind all this is. But the issue ends with Bruce getting captured.

While all this is going on, Robin has enlisted Catwoman as an ally to begin his own investigation into all this. At this point in Bronze Age continuity, Catwoman has reformed and had also found out Bruce Wayne was Batman. If I remember correctly, she was brainwashed back into being a villain just before the 1986 reboot. In more recent years, the idea of her reforming has been re-visited in stories I'm not familiar enough to pass judgement on. But in the early 1980s, it was handled well, making her an interesting part of the Bat Family and hinting at an eventually marriage to Bruce that would have mirrored her Earth 2 counterpart. 

Anyway, I really like the way this separate plot thread was handled. For what I would bet were reasons that included pacing and the chronology of the events, the adventures of Robin and Catwoman are regulated to 8-page backup stories in each of these two issues. The two follow their own leads, also end up in Hong Kong, team up with government agent King Faraday, then themselves get captured. 

Keeping the two story lines separate allows us to fully appreciate the contributions each of the protagonists is making to the overall plot and Marv Wolfman dovetails them together nicely. 

Next week, we'll look at the final two issues in this story arc, when the action moves to a remote island in the Indian Ocean and we finally find out who the Big Bad is this time.

Cover Cavalcade

Flash #120 from 1961 and the story's sequel from Flash #269, published 18 years later in 1979. It's interesting to note that neither golden giants or dinosaurs intelligent enough to use weapons & tools wouldn't even break the Top Ten on Flash's "weirdest stuff I've encountered" list.

I'm giving a lecture.

I've been asked again by my local library to be a speaker.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Adventures of Ellery Queen: "A Message in Red" 11/7/45

A stenographer, a publisher's reader and a lady's maid are all killed by the same gun--but in different locations at different times. They didn't know each other or share any friends, so what's the connection between them?

Victor Jory, who had played another famous detective in the 1940 serial The Shadow, is the celebrity guest who gets to play armchair detective and outguess Ellery.

Click HERE to listen or download.