Hunting Alien Dinosaurs!

 

cover art by Mort Meskin

My Greatest Adventure was an anthology books containing first-person accounts of people having... well, their greatest adventures. And, hey, they are told in the first-person. So they must be true.

Which is a good thing, because I wouldn't want to live in a universe that didn't include alien planets on which dinosaurs still exist.

This is what we learn in the 12th issue (November-December 1956), in a story with an uncredited writer and with art by Nick Cardy. The tale's narrator is a big-game hunter named Dakin. Just like 90% of big game hunters we find in comics, prose and film, he's complaining that he's hunted all the most dangerous animals on Earth and that there aren't any challenges left. His two friends--also hunters--agree, with one of them commenting that it's too bad their are no dinosaurs left on Earth. They'd be a challenging prey!

Immediately, a guy who introduces himself as Crispin enters the room and offers to take them to another planet on which dinosaurs do still exist. Though they don't really believe him, Dakin and his two companions follow Crispin onto a flying saucer. Soon, they do indeed find themselves on a dinosaur-infested alien planet.

The prey is dangerous, but Dakin is smart as well as a good shot. He has a talent for deducing what the weak point on any living beast might be. Soon, he and his friends have racked up quite a few trophies of both dinosaurs and a few other monsters.

When they have proven themselves capable, Crispin gives them their ultimate challenge. They have three hours to get back to the space ship. If they fail, they'll be stranded here. Crispin will be using his telepathic powers to set up challenges.

Dakin uses his brains to think and fight their way out of several traps, but no matter how far they travel, the space ship never gets any closer. Finally, Dakin realizes what's going on. The ship they are looking at doesn't cast a shadow, so it's an illusion. So, by moving away from it, the three humans get to the real ship in the nick of time.

They are flown back to Earth. At first it seems as if they don't have a trophy to commemorate their adventure. But Crispin, though he might be a bit of a jerk, is fair minded. The story ends with a rather impressive trophy being teleported onto Dakin's wall.

What I like about this story is how it emphasizes Dakin's ability to think through problems, even when danger is immediate. He does not just depend on his marksmenship or tracking skills, but instead depends on his intelligence. Smart heroes are always the best heroes.

Next week, we'll travel to the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II to check in with Gunner and Sarge.

Cover Cavalcade

 

JUNE IS AVIATION COVERS MONTH!

A Frederick Blakeslee cover from 1943.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Tales of the Texas Rangers: "Boomerang" 7/6/52

A death by drowning at first appears to be suicide. But evidence soon points to murder.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode #20: The Filmation Animated Series

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode #20: The Filmation Animated Series:   Jess, Scott and Tim provide commentary on two episodes of the Filmation Tarzan cartoon from the late 1970s: "Tarzan and the Golden Li...

No Quarter!

 

Read/Watch 'em In Order #127

We continue our journey through the may 1927 issue of Frontier Stories with another visit to the Wild West.

"No Quarter" was the first of 6 short stories and one novella by William Crump Rush that would be published in Frontier Stories during 1927 & 1928. That seems to be the entirety of his writing career, at least in the pulps. 

There's nothing special about "No Quarter." It's a fun story to read, but both plot and characters are pretty generic. Crump does do a nice job of introducing us to the main characters--ranch hand Zeno "Zee" Carter and his sidekick Gib Stewart--effectively telling us what we need to know about them in a few short, pithy paragraphs. 

We then learn that the ranch for which they work is threatened by rustlers and their boss's daughter might be in love with one of those outlaws. The rustlers start a prairie fire. Zee and Gib find themselves trapped in a ravine, fighting a Last Stand against the rustlers while defending the girl. There's a last-minute rescue and, of course, we find out the girl actually loves Zee.

It's all good and Crump's pithy style is effective. A discussion that Zee and Gib had about knights in the days of chivalry sort of ties in thematically with their own rescue of the girl. The gun fight at the ravine is short but exciting and well-described. 

But the plot might have been better served had the story been novella-length, with a bit more time to flesh out the characters, bringing them out of the stereotypes they inhabit. Also, we never actually meet the main bad guy (the one the girl was supposed to be in love with). All the villains, in fact, are just faceless Red Shirts. 

So after three fun stories in this issue of Frontier Stories, we hit a snag with a merely "okay" tale. The next story takes us far north to the gold fields. We'll see how that works out. 

Click HERE to read this issue online

Jimmy Olsen--Mind Reader!

 

cover art by Curt Swan

We began our story-by-story journey through Superman Family #182 (April 1977) with a Jimmy Olsen story. I was critical of that story because, though Jimmy was the nominal protagonist, is was purely Superman saving the day in the end.

Well, we finish up with this issue with a much better Jimmy Olsen story. Written by Cary Bates and drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger, it follows the long-established tradition of Jimmy Olsen being temporarily granted a superpower.

In this case, while filling in as host of a talk show, a guest who can read minds transfer that power into Jimmy. Later, the original mind-reader is kidnapped. 

It turns out the guy had sensed he was in danger, but couldn't get the cops to believe in his ESP. (Though, if any police department in the world should be open to the existence of superpowers, it SHOULD be the Metropolis PD.)  So he transfered his powers to Jimmy, so that Jimmy could then jump in to help.

There's no physical evidence at the scene of the kidnapping. In fact, even Superman turns up nothing when he does a superspeed/super-senses search of the apartment. But Jimmy soon realizes he can track residual brain waves. Going off on his own (which was actually kind of dump), he soon finds Heller (the mind reader) and his kidnappers in a junkyard. He overhears enough to realize the crooks have kidnapped Heller to force him to find out bank safe combinations. 

Unfortunately, Jimmy doesn't realize that a third kidnapper is lurking about. Soon, he's also a prisoner.

And here's where the story shows itself to be much better than the early Jimmy Olsen tale in this issue. Jimmy is a prisoner, but he's still clever and proactive. Realizing that he can transfer the mind-reading ability into someone else (just as Heller did), he moves it into one of the crooks. Then he begins thinking that Superman will be here within seconds.

It's a bluff, but it works. The crooks begin to run off in a panic. Jimmy and Heller quickly subdue two of them.

The third crook looks like he's getting away. But Superman (who has followed his own clues to the junkyard) does indeed arrive to catch him.

The bad guys are captured and Heller gets his mind-reading power back. How he does this isn't explained. Can he just reclaim it or did the crook who had the power at this point have to agree to give it back? 

But that's a nitpick. Yes, Superman does swoop in to catch the last crook and show his own cleverness, but Jimmy gets to be a smart and proactive protagonist. This is a Jimmy Olsen story as they should be.

Next week: What's better than hunting dinosaurs? How about hunting alien dinosaurs on another planet?

Cover Cavalcade

 

JUNE IS AVIATION COVERS MONTH!

A Russ Heath cover from 1963.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Suspense: "Joker Wild"    12/8/52

A famous comedian wants to be taken seriously. So he commits a murder. But it might take more than one murder to get people to stop laughing at him.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

They Are Not DOLLS! They are ACTION FIGURES! part 2

 

I had only watched 1939's Tower of London once, some years ago. At some point, I got it into my head that it was made right after Son of Frankenstein--quickly produced using two of the same actors from that film, the same director, and some of the same sets. I was assuming that Son wrapped ahead of schedule and Tower of London was thrown together to take advantage of this. 

I was wrong, though. Both pictures were made at Universal in the same year and did share actors and director, but Tower of London was a lavish A-picture made all on its own. (Perhaps I was mixing it up with The Raven and The Terror, in which Karloff appeared a couple of decades later. That really was a case of making the second movie quickly after the first wrapped.)

Tower of London is the story of Richard III, borrowing elements from Shakespeare's play, but using an original script and original story elements. Basil Rathbone is the totally evil Richard. Boris Karloff is his chief executioner, the club-footed Mord, who almost literally worships Richard and will do anything (and kill anyone) to get Richard to the throne.

When the movie opens, Richard is sixth in line to the throne, so his odds of getting there if he just waits it out aren't good. So Richard changes the odds. He schemes. He gets into the good graces of the current king and manipulates him. He arranges marriages to solidfy political connections. He has Mord stir up riots among the common folk at key moments. And he has people killed.

This includes his own brother, the wimpy Duke of Clarence (Vincent Price in an early role). In Shakespeare's play, Clarence is stabbed then drowned in a wine vat by henchmen. In this version, Richard and Mord to the deal himself. In the movie, Richard challenges Clarence to a drinking contest, then after Clarence passes out, Richard and Mord dump him in the wine vat.

It's an effective and creepy scene, with our sympathy for the Duke of Clarence heightened by Price's performance, who brought such an aura of helplessness and incompetance to the role that we just can't help but feel sorry for him.

Later, Mord and a few henchmen have to do away with the two young princes in the tower. The movie drips with an atmospheric dread from start to finish, but this scene might be the best. Here is the only time we see Mord show a spark of humanity--when he hesitates before measuring the sleeping princes to make sure their secret graves are the correct size. When he returns with a few henchmen a few minutes later to kill the two boys, the younger prince shouts "Kill me, but spare my brother!" while the henchmen look sickened by what they are about to do. They still do it, so we can't really give them any credit. But it does give a feeling of real humanness to the scene and helps give even the nameless henchmen some characterization. 

Anyway, how does the movie keep the royal line straight for us--allowing us to follow the events of the movie? Richard himself lends a helping hand in this. He uses his secret Royal Family Action Figures™ to help us follow along. 

He has a secret alcove where he keeps models of each person ahead of him in the Royal Line, naming them for us in a scene set early in the movie. As each of them is eliminated, he removes the figure of that person and moves the others up the line towards the small throne he has set up next to them.

It sounds silly, but Rathbone sells it, making it a natural part of Richard's murderous egotism.

I've included that scene below. It's there twice. Once with a YouTube link, which is my preferred way of sharing videos. But this is a Universal movie and they are big bullies in this area, often having YouTube delete clips from their movies regardless of Fair Use rules. So I've imbeded it a second time into the blog itself in case it does vanish from YouTube. 

Richard, of course, comes to a tragic end. In this particular version of his story, one of the protagonists manages to steal the royal treasury, giving Henry Tudor (the future Henry VII) the resources to race an army. Richard and Mord die in the battle that ensues. No matter what version of his story we visit, it never ends well for him.

Here is the Action Figure scene. And, by golly, they ARE action figures. Not dolls!

Toys That Kill People

 Gold Key's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. #3 (Novemberr 1965) was written by Dave Wood, with art by George Tuska for the first 26 pages and (for reasons I imagine are lost to the ages) Dan Heck stepping in to draw the last 6 pages.

I tried three times to write up a summary of this story. Each time, the convolutions and lightening fast pace foiled my attempts to concisely summarize it at all. This isn't a criticism of the story--the twists and turns of the plot are part of what makes it a delight to read.

The bare bones summary is that THRUSH is trying to find the secret lab where a scientist is cranking out secret weapons for U.N.C.L.E in the forms of toys and novelty items.

Starting with this premise, this comic book succeeds in exactly the same way the early seasons of the TV series succeeded. The story can be enjoyed as an espionage thriller, but can also be appreciated as a parody of that genre.

Specifically, it was making fun of the many, increasingly wild gadgets that were becoming a staple of the James Bond films. This began with From Russia, With Love (1963) but really went into high gear with Bond's Aston Martin in Goldfinger (1964). 

In the U.N.C.L.E. story, we get a direct reference to the Aston Martin when Napoleon and Illya are trying to escape a carful of THRUSH assassins and actually use the oil slick trick. But in this case, THRUSH has one-upped them with a pursuing car that squirts sand over the oil as it moves forward.

In addition to this, we get:

A small army of wind-up toys that crawl up THRUSH agents and then pop open to emit sleep gas.

A hairdo that squirts ammonia gas into your eyes.

The creepiest looking robot boy in the history of robot boys.

Contact lenses that allow you to hypnotise whomever you are looking at.

A fake mustache that emits a sleep gas when you sneeze through it.

And a fake suicide pill that puts you into a death-like coma and transmits a signal so that your partner can find you and give you an antidote. 

It's all great fun. Though another issue remains my absolute favorite from the series, this one perhaps comes closest to representing that combination of real adventure and parody that the TV series initially did so well.

Next week, we'll finish our journey through an issue of Superman Family with another Jimmy Olsen adventure.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Mini Podcast #48--A Princess of Mars Chapter 15

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Mini Podcast #48--A Princess of Mars Chapter 15:   A look at Chapter 15 of A Princess of Mars, in which we learn some interesting things about the Green Martian woman Sola. Click HERE for ...

Cover Cavalcade

 

JUNE IS AVIATION COVERS MONTH!

From 1942. Great cover, but sadly the artist is uncredited.

Paperbacks at War

 

 

Paperbacks at War, including several reviews written by ME, is now available. You can purchase a copy HERE. 

Friday's Favorite OTR

 This is Your FBI: "Skyway Man" 3/7/52

Safecrackers are robbing the proceeds of carnivals and county fairs. For their latest job, they intend to make a getaway by airplane--and frame the pilot for the crime.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

They Are Not DOLLS! They Are ACTION FIGURES! part 1 (and Big Little Books part 1)

One thing my parents were great at was buying us wonderful toys. Sometimes, though, I had to endure the agony of one of my brothers owning a particularly cool toy instead of me. Why did my older brother own the Major Matt Mason action figure (and the super-cool Space Crawler) and not me? It's not fair! It's not!

Well, at least I owned the Major Matt Mason "Big Little Book." That was pretty cool. (And I had the satisfaction of seeing Ed take his battery-operated Space Crawler to the beach, where sand got into the works and it stopped working. But it would be petty to mention that years later, so... um... forget I mentioned it, okay?)

That Big Little Book, titled Moon Mission (1968), tells us more about the moon than those darn Apollo astronauts ever did. Did you know there are giant rabbits and giant worms on the moon? I'll bet you didn't. By golly, it's enough to make you believe in conspiracy theories!

I loved this story as a kid. Revisiting it as an adult, I still enjoyed it. The story, written by George S. Elrick, is silly but fun. And I think that I can appreciale the Dan Spiegle art even more now. The Big Little Books were formated with a page of text always facing a page of art. So the book has dozens of great Spiegle illustations. 

The tale picks up with Major Matt Mason leading the second expedition to the Moon, where his men are busy constructing a permanent base. But there's a problem. The first expedition had left a man behind to study the long-term effects of living on the moon. This man--Major Otto "Squeak" Harvey--had done well at first, but soon his audio-visual reports showed him getting more and more agitated as he complained about an incessant "cooing" sound coming from outside his habitat. Then all communication is cut off.

Mason and Harvey's sister, a doctor named Jo Ann, travel by jet pack to Squeak's habitat, only to find him missing and the habitat itself wrecked. Then they find a hole in the ground leading into a maze of tunnels. Tunnels dug by.... giant moon worms!

Another astronaut ends up in the tunnel (which, for obscure reasons, maintains Earth-normal atmophere and temperature. He runs across Squeak, who is irrational and speaks only in cooing sounds. 

Oh, I mentioned giant rabbits as well, didn't I? These are genetically altered rabbits brought to the moon to eventually be (as the prose cold-bloodedly tells us) "ground up into protein powder." Though the big bunnies normally live in pressurized enclosers, they to have oxygen and temperature-control pills inserted into their skin, so can live on the moon's surface for a time. These leads to a sub plot in which another astronaut pursues an escaped rabbit with a tranquilizer gun. 

Anyway, it turns out that alien parasites are inhabiting the worms and one of them has also gotten into Squeak. The parasite briefly jumps into Jo Ann, but the astronauts get it to eventually move into one of the rabbits. It's not unfriendly, so as long as it has a body to inhabit, it's happy. I don't know what happens when the time to grind up the rabbit arrives.

It's probably Spiegle's wonderful art more than the silly story that sells it to me as an adult. That and an element of nostalgia. After all, Ed might have owned the Major Matt Mason action figure and the Space Crawler and the Jet Pack (which travelled along a string you stretched across the room) and the Moon Base, but I owned the Big Little Book. NO ONE CAN TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME!

My younger brother Jeff, by the way, claims the Big Little Book was his. We can discount this, of course. Can you believe someone being jealous of stuff we owned as kids? It's sad. And, after all, THE BOOK WAS MINE! (And so was the big fire truck with working hose, by the way. But that's another story.)

My only real complaint about the book is the trademark notice on the title page. "Major Matt Mason is the registered trademark of Mattel, Inc. for its DOLL." Gee whiz. He wasn't a doll. He was an action figure. Why can't anyone get that right?

Krypto is Awesome!

 

cover art by Curt Swan

Krypto is by far my favorite Superpet. Beppo can be a little annoying. Comet is just plain weird. Streaky is... well, a cat. But Krypto is simply awesome.

And in "A Bad Day for Junkyard Blue (written by Bob Toomey and drawn by John Calnan)," we see several reasons why Krypto is awesome. First, it starts out with a reminder that being a dog--without any real responsibilities--is a lot of fun. Krypto is galavanting through the skys, flying rings around airplanes and joining a flight of birds for a few moments. He's not doing any harm. He's just having a good time.

Then the scene shifts to two guys who I think should have gotten their own comic book series. Burt and Harry are two incompetent and none-too-bright bank robbers who make a mess of their latest attempt to rob a bank. Toomey's script and Calnan's lively art combine to give us some sincerely funny slapstick involving these two. If Bud & Lou--or perhaps Stan & Ollie--had turned to villainy, this is how they might have turned out.

Anyway, as they make their getaway in a wreck of a car that soon breaks down, Krypto spots them and joins in the chase. He does so more because he just enjoys the chase than because he wants to see justice done, but we'll soon see that Krypto does feel moral responsibility. 

When the getaway car breaks down, Burt and Harry scale a fence and end up in a junkyard. Here, they are cornered by Blue, the junkyard dog. Krypto lands next to Blue, figuring he can help.

But his sudden appearance startles Blue, who panics and hides in a wrecked car, which is then lifted up by one of those junkyard giant magnets to be dropped into a crusher. Krypto quickly saves him while the cops are arresting Burt and Harry.

Blue, in an effort to regain his pride, snarls at Krypo. In a sweet moment, the Dog of Steel realizes what's happening and makes Blue happy by running off in apparent fear. I love it.

Darn it, why doesn't my dog have superpowers? This is about as active as he ever gets:

I really which, though, that Burt and Harry had returned for more goofy attempts to be successful criminals. Heck, a great running gag would have had them appearing in successive issues of Superman Family and Batman Family, running across a different regular character in each one and failing miserably at crime each time.

In two weeks, we'll return to Superman Family for another Jimmy Olsen story. Next week, we'll drop in on the Man from U.N.C.L.E.