Cover Cavalcade

 

February is George Wilson Month. This one is from 1969.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Jack Benny: "Herbert Marshall Hosts" 2/2/41

Jack is out of town, so he asks Herbert Marshall to fill in as host for this week's episode. Marshall proves to be a great straight man in his confused conversations with Phil Harris. 

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Bretwalda, Part 3

 

cover art by George Rozen

Read/Watch 'em In Order #136

With "A Sword for Lief the Lucky," (Argosy, April 15, 1939) the saga of the mystic axe Bretwalda has reached the year 1000 A.D. It comes into the possession of Harold Wilton--whose family is still living in Norway--after Harold's father is killed by Eric the Red.

 And Harold discovers he has axe-related work to do as well. The current king of Norway is Olav Tryggvason, who has been working to Christianize his country. A number of still-pagon and powerful jarls, though, want to overthrow him. Harold heads to the royal hall in the port town of Nidaros to serve him.

But he's soon involved in a duel when he objects to a woman slave being hit. This is a set up and is actually part of a plot to kill a friend of Harold's. Before he knows it, he's falsely accused of murder and has to hide from the king he wanted to serve.

What makes the situation even more interesting is that he is saved from ambush by Leif Ericsson, whose dad had killed Harold's dad. Then there's that woman slave, who can help him, but only by almost certainly sacrificing her own life. Eventually, Harold figures out a way to save the king and Leif from assassination, but only by almost certainly giving up HIS own life. 

"A Sword for Leif the Lucky" is arguably the best of the first three Bretwalda stories. Not only is it a truly exciting action tale, but it also deals quite effectively with themes of duty and self-sacrifice. The author, Philip Ketchum, is particularly adept at presenting character interactions and dialogue in a very human, realistic way, allowing him to build relationships quickly but still believably. We completely identify with Harold and with the slave woman and we really feel the impact of their likely deaths. 

You can read it online HERE. 

Never Jump Through a Hole in Time!

 

cover art by John Romita

With Marvel Team-Up #9 (May 1973), writer Gerry Conway and artist Ross Andru began a three-part time travel story arc that took Spider Man into the future, back to the present and then back into the future. If Peter had signed up for Time Travel Frequent Flyer points, he would have cleaned up.

The story begins with Avengers Mansion briefly blinks out of existence and then turns out to be surrounded by a force field. Iron Man arrives to try to deal with this. Spidey, in the meantime, sees a news report about this on TV and swings over to help. 

Both heroes are in a sour mood,though, and spend several panels bickering with each other before a hole in the fabric of time and space opens next to them.

Caught up in a sort-of superhero oneupmanship, Peter and Tony both jump through this hole. It's a fun scene. The two had quickly gotten on each other's nerves and are reacting emotionally rather than logically, but this is the sort of fallability that always makes the inhabitants of the Marvel Universe so appealing. Even two of the smartest people in that universe can just plain mess up.

Still, things don't go too badly at first. They find themselves in another dimension, with highly advanced aircraft dogfighting around them. One of these crafts picks up the two heroes. Soon, they are introduced to Zarrko the Tomorrow Man.

Zarrko is a villain, but he hadn't appeared in a comic book for nearly ten years of real-life time and, at that time, he fought Thor. It's understandable that neither Spidey nor Shellhead knew he's a bad guy. Heck, a lot of readers in 1973 probably didn't recognize him.

Zarrko wants there help in dealing with a villain who is conquering 23rd Century Earth, which is where he hails from. Since this mystery villain has also captured the rest of the Avengers, the heroes agree to help Soon, they find themselves transported to that century., battling their way into a citadel, taking out mooks and sparring with a giant robot. They make it past these obstacles, but Iron Man's armor is severely damaged.

They make it to the citadel's control room, where they find the Avengers being held in stasis. They also abruptly discover that Zarrko's enemy is Kang the Conquerer. With Iron Man already nearly helpless, Kang easily zaps the good guys.

Zarrko shows up again, helpfully monologing his own plans to take out Kang and then carry out Kang's intention to use the 23rd Century as a base to conquer the 20th Century. A badly dazed Spider Man hears this and realizes that Zarrko is as much a threat as Kang. But there seems to be little he can do about it.

Marvel Team-Up #9 is a fun start to the trilogy. The interactions between Peter and Tony are fun, the story makes sense within the context of a Comic Book universe and the issue is packed with plenty of fun action, brought to vivid life by Andru's art.

We'll look at Part 2 of this story next week and see how it holds up as the action snaps back to the 20th Century.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode #25: The Beasts of Tarzan, Part 2

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode #25: The Beasts of Tarzan, Part 2:   Jess, Scott and Tim continue their discussion of The Beasts of Tarzan . In this episode, we cover chapters 6 through 12. Click HERE for ...

Cover Cavalcade

 

February is George Wilson Month. This one is from 1967.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 X Minus One: "The Snowball Effect" 8/14/56

A sociological experiment goes awry. The result might be a world dominated by a Ladies' Sewing Circle.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Recommended Podcasts

I know that millions of people across the globe live only for new content on my blog and thus will now be driven into hopeless despair, but I wanted to take time in one of my Thursday posts to recommend several excellent podcasts.

The Weird Warriors Podcast: "A podcast focusing on the Weird War Tales series published by DC Comics from 1971 to 1983! Side missions to other War and/or Horror comics may also be assigned!" Their analysis of each issue is intelligent and worth listening to.

The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society: The three hosts play and old-time radio episode, then provide smart and often very funny analysis of it. 

The Great Books: "National Review’s national correspondent and professor at Hillsdale College, John J. Miller, discusses classic works within the Western literary canon." Intelligent and insightful literary criticism.

The Prancing Pony Podcast: "The Prancing Pony Podcast is a weekly podcast about the Middle-earth legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, hosted by Alan Sisto and Shawn E. Marchese." They spend two or three episodes on each chapter of Tolkien's book, so they take the time to dive deep into everything from sentence structure to thematic meanings.

 

Number One

 

Often, the short stories run in DC's war comics were centered around a specific gimmick--such as two guys who enjoyed window shopping before the war now getting shot at from every window they encounter. This gimmick--often undeniable contrived--would then be brought to life by excellent art.

This is the case with "Number One," published in Our Fighting Forces #90 (1965) and later republished in Our Fighting Forces #134 (1971). The gimmick is that the main character (named Lacy) has always been Number One in everything. And, on D-Day, he's determined to be the first person to land on the beach.

As you can see in the above panels, he has a financial reason for this. His company has a pool going, so the first person ashore wins a big wad of cash. (Though if Ebay had existed in the 1940s, he could get rich with a lot less risk by selling that World Series ball.)

The writer is named Hank Chapman and his gimmick is indeed a bit silly. But the story is effectively told--it takes only one page to set up the premise--and Joe Kubert's art is typically magnificent. 

When D-Day arrives, Lacy continues to rack up Number Ones at a fast and furious pace. He's the first person to shoot down an enemy plane.

He's the first person to pick up survivors after his fellow soldiers are knocked out of their landing craft. He's the first person to destroy an enemy ship when he uses the craft's machine gun to take out a German E-Boat. 

When their landing craft is sunk by a German sub (another first, by the way), Lacy continues to swim ashore, using a grenade launcher to take out an enemy pillbox and open the way for the rest of the company to land safely. 

But he's been wounded and a Navy rescue craft picks him up before he can make it ashore. But, despite missing out on the chance to be first on the beach, he's still setting records. He's the first wounded soldier to return to England and the first D-Day soldier to get a medal, but he doesn't perk until he gets a photograph sent to him by the rest of his company, showing that they had been first ashore only because of Lacy's bravery.

That constant barrage of Number One achievements teeters on the edge of being too silly. But the premise of the story requires it and in the end, "Number One" is a fun tale. Kubert's art saves it from silliness, as his art (and the art of other DC artists) often did with the gimmicky stories. 

Next week, we jump over to the Marvel Universe for the first of a three-part look at an early Marvel Team-Up story arc. 

Cover Cavalcade

 

February is George Wilson Month. This one is from 1967.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Nero Wolfe: "Phantom Fingertips" 1/26/51

There is no question that a murder was committed by one of three suspects. There is no question of this. But the fingerprints on the murder weapon don't match with any of them.

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Tugboat Annie One More Time.

 

Tugboat Annie Sails Again (1940) is the movie responsible for me going down a Tugboat Annie rabbit hole recently. I recorded the movie off of TCM, but it was a sequel and--according to the strict rules of the International Society for Watching Movies in Proper Order--I needed to watch the first movie first. I didn't want a reprimand on my permanent record.

Anyway, I ended up reading one of the original short stories and wrote about it HERE. I then found out that 1933's Tugboat Annie was available inexpensively via Amazon Prime, so I bought it and watched it. Last Thursday's post contains my review.

NOW I could finally watch Tugboat Annie Sails Again. 

But it's not really a sequel. It's what we would call today a reboot. In the original prose stories, Annie became a tugboat captain after her husband died, taking over her post. She manages the tugboats owned by a company while actually serving as captain aboard one of them.

In the 1933 movie, Annie owns her own tugboat and her husband is alive. Annie is the captain because she's capable and her husband is a drunken layabout. She also has a son.

The 1940 movie jumps back to the continuity of the original short stories. Now played by Marjorie Rambeau, Annie is once again a widow with no kids and she once again works for a corporation. Alan Hale, Sr. plays Horatio Bullwinkle, a rival tugboat captain. And though Annie doesn't have a son, she does have a substitute--a ward named Eddie Kent (played by Ronald Reagan). 

The script is credited as an original story, based on the Tugboat Annie characters, but the film uses  several elements from the first Annie short story, including the danger of her losing her job, a businessman who doesn't trust a woman captain and her knowledge of obscure maritime law saving the day in the end.

Annie, at first, gets the company in trouble. She's trying to negotiate a contract with a businessman named Armstrong, but his slightly spoiled daughter (Jane Wyman) gets on Eddie's nerves. When Armstrong arrives, Eddie is giving his daughter a spanking. Shenanigans ensues and Armstrong ends up covered in garbage. That pretty much guarentees that Annie will not get the contract.

But she redeems herself--and makes her company a nice piece of change--when she employs her considerable skill as a sailor to rescue a cargo ship that's trapped on a sand spit. This gives her a chance to get that contract with Armstrong.

That involves towing a drydock from Washingon state to Alaska, but a liner that ignores the maritime rules of the road rams the drydock, forcing Annie to leave it beached on a nearby island. Her rival Bullwinkle later claims it as salvage. 

Now it looks like Annie is going to be out of a job. But she is both smart and tenacious and still might be able to pull out a win.

Rambeau gives a more overtly emotional performance as Annie than did Marie Dressler, but she's great in the role in her own way. We never doubt for a moment that she is smart, a skilled sailer and earns the loyalty of her crew. In fact, a scene in which her crew offers to quit if she's put on the beach hits just the right emotional notes to seem real rather than corny or contrived.

It can be argued that the eventual romance between Eddie and Miss Armstrong is too predictable and contrived, but Reagan and Wyman work well with each other and make their scenes together work. 

I wish that there had been more scenes of the tugboats at sea doing their work, but that's a nitpick. Tugboat Annie Sails Again is a fun movie and a worthy entry in its version of the Tugboat Annie multiverse.

From Rann to Earth and Back Again

 

The thing about Adam Strange was that he wanted to live on the planet Rann with his wife, but would be forced to regularly return to Earth. While on Earth, he would get zapped by a teleportation beam called the Zeta Ray. That would bring him to Rann. But when the Zeta radiation wore off, he would be zapped back to Earth. 

I always wondered why he didn't just get to Rann by another method--he lives in a Comic Book Universe where this is a real possibility--and then be able to just stay there permanently.

That's because I never happened to have read Mystery in Space #75 (May 1962), in which writer Gardner Fox and artist Carmine Infantino explain just why this is. 

In the previous issue, Adam had returned to Rann via a teleport machine he'd captured from invading aliens. Now he can stay as long as he want.

But space pirate Kanjar Ro has escaped from the planet on which the Justice League had imprisoned him. (Which was apparently done without any judicial process, but there you go.) He wants revenge on the JLA. His plan is to find a planet with three suns that has a lighter gravity than his home planet. Then he can figure out a method to gain Superman-like powers. Remember that the Man of Steel gets his powers from our yellow sun plus Earth's lower gravity when compared to Krypton. By replicating this on a planet with three suns, Kanjar will have three times Superman's power. Comic Book Science at its best!

The action now jumps back to Rann, where Adam and his wife Alanna enounter a barbarian tribe that now has a bell-like weapon that allows them to gain physical control over others. Adam and Alanna have a narrow escape, then wear earplugs to allow them to infiltrate the barbarian camp by mingling with prisoners. Here they discover that Kanjar Ro has set up camp. He has a Gamma Gong that he intends to use to control the entire planet AND he's having those he has enslaved build the devise necessary to bombard him with solar radiation from the three suns, giving him Superman Powers x 3.

Gardner Fox was a great writer and I largely enjoy this story, but he tended to occasionally over-write and over-explain. This happens here, slowing the story and obscuring Infantino's magnificent art with too many word balloons and boxes of expository narration. 

In fact, I'm not going to try to explain the rest of the story in detail, because that would bog down this blog post even more than it probably already is. Suffice to say that stopping Kanjar Ro involves stealing the bad guy's Cosmic Ship, sailing to Earth as a clue for the JLA, taking a Zeta Beam back to Rann and eventually confronting Kanjar with the Justice League as allies. It's actually a cool plot, following sound Comic Book Logic from start to finish. Adam come up with legitimate clever ideas for countering the villain throughout the tale. It just needs an excessive amount of exposition to get there. 

By now, though, Kanjar has completed his solar radiation bath and is easily kicking JLA butt. But Adam deduces that metal from Kanjar's home planet would work on him the way Kryptonite works on Superman. This allows him to save the day.

But Adam got zapped by Kanjar Ro before the battle ended. This leaves him with a perculiar condition--if he stays on Rann for more than short visits, he'll get sick. So the short Zeta Beam visits are now his only option.

Despite my criticisms of the story, it really is a fun Silver-Age romp. And I'm happy to learn that what I always thought was a plot hole was actually explained. You see? The Silver Age all made sense! It did! It really did!

Next week, we'll jump back in time to land on the beaches of Normandy with a particular Allied soldier on D-Day. Or try to land, anyways.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode #24: The Beasts of Tarzan, Part 1

Edgar Rice Burroughs Podcast: Episode #24: The Beasts of Tarzan, Part 1:   Tim, Scott and Jess discuss the first five chapters of 1914's The Beasts of Tarzan.  Click HERE for the audio version. email us at: e...

Cover Cavalcade

 

February is George Wilson Month. This cover is from 1965.

Friday's Favorite OTR

 Mysterious Traveler: "The Accusing Corpse" 4/16/44

Roger's plan to profit from blackmail and murder is perfect down to the last detail. Or is it?

Click HERE to listen or download. 

Tugboat Annie again

 

A few weeks ago, we looked at one of the Tugboat Annie stories written by Norman Reilly Raine starting in 1931. I had looked it up because I had recently recorded a movie off of TCM titled Tugboat Annie Sails Again.

But, of course, I found it impossible to watch that movie before I watched the first Tugboat Annie movie made in 1933. Fortunately, this is available very inexpensivily via Amazon Prime. (Sadly, this also means I have no way of making my own clip--I can do this with DVDs, but not via a streaming movie.)

In the stories, Annie was a widow with a mention that her now-late husband had had a drinking problem. In the movie, Annie (perfectly played by Marie Dressler) has a still-living husband, played by Wallace Beery, who definitely has a drinking problem.

It's this casting that makes the movie work. Annie commands the tugboat Narcissus. The plot involves the husband (Terry) making a mess of things in one way or another--either because he's pawned important equipment for drinking money or because he's too drunk to do his job correctly. Annie, though, loves him and sticks by him, even after he smashes their tugboat into another ship. The Narcissus has to be sold at auction to pay for damages. Annie stays on as captain, but the tug is now being employed towing garbage scows. She hates it, but sticks with it.

By now, Terry's drinking has alienated their son Alec (who commands a liner), but Annie can't bring herself to kick Terry out or to retire and let Alec take care of them. Alex, by the way, is played by Robert Young.

In the end, though, the Narcissus has a chance to save Alec's damaged liner and, to do so, Terry is going to have to man up, do something right and perhaps even give his own life.

It's all very melodramatic, but Dressler and Beery are indeed perfect in their roles. Both bring elements of comedy to the story, toning down the melodrama. And Dressler's ability to often subtly show emotional pain while still retaining her gruff exterior is magnificent. Those two are able to make us care about the characters and care about what happens to them.

Also--well, we get to see tugs, schooners and other early 20th Century vessels sailing around in glorious black-and-white. That alone is worth the price of admission.

And now I can move on to Tugboat Annie Sails Again. Marie Dressler had died by the time the sequel was made, so I'll be able to see if another actress can do as much justice to the role. 

As I said, I could not make my own clip this time. Here's a random clip I found on YouTube. It's not the scene I would have chosen, but it does give you a good snapshot of the main characters.

Aliens vs. Dinosaurs

 

cover art by George Wilson

Usually, the only science fiction element present in a Turok story are the dinosaurs existing in modern times. But occasionally, the stories would deal with dinosaur mutations or other mildly SF elements.

Turok, Son of Stone #58 (July 1967), though, goes full Sci Fi when aliens, riding an honest-to-goodness flying saucer, arrive in Lost Valley. 

With a script by Paul S. Newman and art by Giovanni Ticci, "The Things from the Sky" is a fun, clever and satisfying story.

It all begins with panicking dinosaurs. And panicking cavemen. In fact, it seems that everyone and everything around Turok and Andar has decided to panic.

The reason for the panic is a visit from aliens, who are buzzing the valley and checking out life on Earth.

The alien ship lands and Turok--being Turok--handles the situation with calmness and aplomb. The aliens are able to adapt to the local language just by hearing it, so they are soon communicating. It's interesting that the aliens essentially just say they come in peace without trying to explain their origin in detail. Did they realize Turok and Andar would not have the knowledge necessary to really grasp the concept of other planets?

I also love the design of the aliens. The multi-tentacled body encased in a space suit that keeps us from getting a really good look at them--that's a truly alien look that seperates them from earth people in appearance and thus makes them more interesting.

Well, the aliens may come in peace, but the local fauna isn't peaceful at all. Turok has to save an alien from a plesiosaur. After that, the aliens keep their ray guns handy, but still look to Turok for ideas about scaring off dinosaurs and still panicking cavemen.

But dispite everything, the saucer is damaged, forcing the aliens to perform make-shift repairs that largely consist of banging the hatch back into shape with a hammer. (The damage prevents them from getting into the ship to get better tools.)

When it looks like the ship is repaired, one of the aliens takes Andar up on a test-flight. This is the part that rises the story from good to awesome. The ship flies out of the village and Andar is able to see his home village once again. It's an event that makes the ensuing ending absolutely heart-breaking.

Because, naturally, something goes awry. The ship returns to pick up Turok and the rest of the alien crew. But when they take off again, they fly through a flock of pterodactyls. The ship's intake valves are clogged and the saucer crashes. Turok and Andar are thrown free, but the saucer and its crew are destroyed. No one is going home today.

The story is strong because of great art, imaginative design of the aliens and opportunities to show how Turok always thinks his way out of difficulties. But that heart-breaking glimpse of home--that's what makes it really stand out.

Next week, back over to the DC Universe for a visit with Adam Strange.