Book that I've edited.

Last May, the pastor at my church preached a series of excellent sermons about the Holy Spirit. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to act as editor and convert those sermons into a book.  It's now available as an ebook for the Kindle and can be found HERE.

Cover Cavalcade

From 1922, by artist Laurence Herndon

Friday's Favorite OTR

You Are There: "The Bombardment of Fort Sumter" 5/22/49

The Civil War on Old-Time Radio (Part 2 of 17)

The newly-formed Confederate government demands that Fort Sumter surrender. If it doesn't, it's very likely the country will be plunged into civil war.

Click HERE to listen or download.

This is the second of 17 episodes from various series that will take us through the Civil War and its immediate post-war legacy. I'll be posting another Civil War episode every three or four weeks.

The Crawling Creature

With so many pulp magazines now available online, I've taken to occasionally pulling one up at random, then choosing a random story from within that particular issue.

In this case, I found the July 1932 issue of Thrilling Adventures and picked a story titled "The Crawling Creature," by Donald Bayne Hobart.

Hobart was a professional pulp writer--one of those who could regularly turn out an entertaining story in any one of several genres, including Westerns and mysteries.

In "The Crawling Creature," Hobart very effectively combines a jungle adventure with a mystery. Dix Ayers and Dan Buckly are travelling through the African jungle. Each of them carries a money belt containing a lot of cash--money they plan to use to buy interest in a diamond mine in South Africa.

But Ayers wakes up one morning to discover Dan has been murdered: "...his head smashed like an egg shell and those two ghastly red X's drawn across his cheeks with his own blood." Dan's money belt is gone.

The natives talk about a murderous entity known as the Crawling Creature. Ayers guesses that this is what killed his partner, but he also realizes that the Creature (despite the superstitious awe it generates) is human--the X's on Dan's cheek and the missing money pretty much prove that.

Ayers buries Dan and begins to hunt for the killer. He soon uncounters "Lucky" McNally, a man big enough to have smashed Dan's skull, but who soon saves Ayers' life from a booby trap. So McNally seems to be an ally and not an enemy.

Or is he? Ayers begins to suspect that all is not as it seems.

Hobert's prose is clear and fast-paced. He simply knew how to tell a good story. And here he gives us a tense hunt for a killer in a thick jungle combined with the uncertainty about who the killer actually is. It's a fairly short story, but it manages to build up a remarkable level of suspense before coming to a satisfying denoument.

You can read it for yourself HERE.

I knew Hobert's name but I don't think I've happened to have read any of his stuff before. That's one of the benefits of the Random Pulp Story Selection Method (patent pending). It will inevitably bring you to one of the many minor treasures buried with in the covers of the pulps.

God Gambits and Man-Eating Plants (The Hutec Trilogy, Part 3)

Cover art by George Wilson

As Turok Son of Stone #86 (September 1973) begins, Hutec is still risking his life to preserve his scrolls.

Unlike the last issue, though, Turok and Andar are no longer annoyed by this. It's unclear whether they have really grasped the concept of a written language, but they now realize that the scrolls do somehow contain useful knowledge.

The previous issue ended with a landmark identified by the scroll having been moved out of position, so the scrolls can no longer lead them out of the valley. But they still contain the history of Hutec's people, so it's understandable that he wants to keep them safe. In fact, the morning after the above tussle with a carnosaur, he hides them in a small cave, where they will be safe until he returns for them.

This actually comes across as a little abrupt in terms of storytelling. The story in the previous issue was driven by the existence of the scrolls. And this issue starts with a fight to the death against dinosaurs to keep the scrolls safe. But it seems that the unknown writer had suddenly realized the scrolls served no immediate purpose to the ongoing plot and simply decided to get rid of them.

Hutec decides to go his own way. His logic is actually pretty sound. If the group splits up, they can cover twice as much ground in their search for a way out of the valley. They have a way of signalling each other and agree to rendezvous every couple of months.

But Turok and Andar run into trouble not long after Hutec leaves. They are captured by a tribe that is convinced they must know a way out of the valley to a paradise where there are no dinosaurs.

Turok vainly tries to explain that they don't know the way out, but the tribe assumes he's lying. Turok is tied up and tossed outside the stockade, left to be eaten by the first dinosaur that passes by unless Andar tells them about the secret exit from the valley.

There's a dinosaur mistake here. The artist is Angelo R. Todaro, with the great Alberto Giolitti doing the inks. I'm assuming that Todaro was a member of Giolitti's studio in Italy. So perhaps there was a miscommunication between the Gold Key staff in the States and the artist in Europe. The end result is that Turok is attacked by an ankylosaurus, which is a plant eater. But Andar identifies it as a flesh eater and the narration refers to it as a gorgosaurus (a relative of T-Rex). Somewhere along the way, somebody goofed. (George Wilson painted an ankylosaur on the cover. I'm assuming he did the covers after the story was produced, so he was passing on someone else's mistake.)

Moving on with the story: I have read discussions of Turok in which Andar is referred to as The Load--a character who exists to simply get into trouble and often seems a liability to the hero. And it is true that Turok is the mentor/father figure to Andar--older and wiser and ready to get Andar out of trouble when necessary. There's also a few stories in which Andar does act like an idiot.

But it's unfair to characterize Andar as The Load. I've reviewed a few stories in the past in which he has to step up to the plate and come up with clever plans on his own. He does this now, signaling Hutec and getting his bow and arrows back long enough to kill the ankylosaur/gorgosaur. 

When Hutec show up, he uses a blowgun dart  to paralyze one of the tribesmen. (The drugged darts were introduced two issues earlier, so this is a perfectly fair plot development.) Andar picks up on this immediately and plays the God Gambit, threatening to call on his god Hutec to turn them all into stone. This works--Turok and Andar are both set free.

Of course, Andar then promptly gets swallowed by a giant man-eating plant, necessitating his being rescued by Turok and Hutec. So he does have his "Load" moments.

The book ends with Hutec once again going off on his own. As far as I know, he would have one more appearance in Turok nine issues later, then go off on his own again. It's really too bad the Gold Key Turok book wasn't given a final resolution when it ended in 1982. It would have been nice to learn what happened to Hutec as well as Turok and Andar.

Next week, some second-tier villains get an upgrade and become a real threat to the Avengers.

Cover Cavalcade

An excellent 1959 cover by Jerry Grandenetti. As an extra bonus, here's a bit of documentary footage that shows just how tough a B-17 was in real life:

Friday's Favorite OTR

Molle Mystery Theater: "Angel Face" 12/20/46

A man is willing to steal $20,000 to he can take care of the woman he loves. But she's not who she seems to be. Then again, he's not who he seems to be either.

Click HERE to listen or download.

The Twilight Zone Goes West--Part 2

The second of The Twilight Zone's Western-themed episodes was "Execution," which aired on April 1, 1960. This one is a time travel story, so the Wild West is the setting only for a few minutes at the beginning and the end. So I suppose it's a judgement call as to whether it truly qualifies as a Wild West-themed story. But it's my blog, so my decisions, by golly, are final. 

Joe Caswell (played by Albert Salmi) is a murderer about to be at the receiving end of a well-deserved hanging. But the moment the rope snaps tight around his neck, he's teleported nearly a century into the future via a time machine.

It's at this point that the episode becomes fun on a meta level. The inventor of the time machine is a scientist played by Russell Johnson, who is a little more than four years away from playing the Professor on Gilligan's Island. Johnson was an excellent character actor, so it's always fun to see him play a character role in his pre-Gilligan days. But seeing him play a scientist is even more fun. I half-expected the time machine to be made out of coconuts.

The story, written by Rod Serling and based on a short story written by George Clayton Johnson, is not a classic, but it's still a good one. Johnson's character gradually realized he's brought a brutal thug into modern day. Caswell soon murders him, goes out onto the streets of New York and suffers a nearly crippling culture shock from the lights, cars and other bizarre things he's not equipped to understand.

Salmi's performance as Caswell is great--he actually manages to generate a small level of sympathy for the time-lost outlaw. But the ending, involving Caswell's encounter with a modern day killer and an inadvertent activation of the time machine, tries a little too hard to be ironic and--I think--comes across as contrived.

But Salmi and Johnson bring enough life to their characters to still make it an enjoyable half-hour.

By the way, this was the first of two appearances that Russell Johnson made on The Twilight Zone. He'd return the next season in yet another time travel story, in which he fails to save Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated. It's no wonder the one thing the Professor never tried on that island was building a time machine out of coconuts and going back to keep the S.S. Minnow from sailing off on that three-hour tour. He already knew that mucking about in time never ends well.

Space Canine Patrol Agents

Cover art by Curt Swan

 One of the strengths of the Silver Age of Comics was its willingness to get a little silly from time to time.

Well, actually, "Decoy of the Doom Statues," from Superboy #136 (March 1967), was more than a little silly. It was a lot silly. But the writer, Otto Binder, was really, really good at being silly. When he wrote a script, being silly was a strength and never a weakness. His Golden and Silver Age tales often drip with fun and charm generated by the silliness.

This story (with art by George Papp) is a perfect example of this.

This is the second of three stories featuring the Space Canine Patrol Agents, intelligent alien dogs with superpowers who fight evil. And, as you can see from the above panels, tend to be a bit harsh when rejected Patrol applicants who don't quite make the cut.

Krypto had become a member and is visiting their headquarters when Prophetic Pup, a potential applicant, is told that if his next three predictions come true, then he can join. Two relatively innocuous predictions do come true. The third is that Superboy will be placed in danger by a hound, but then rescued by another hound.

In the meantime, a planet of intelligent dogs is endangered by a swarm of giant fleas. The SCPA responds. This turns out to be a plan by the evil cats of Black Cat World.

This, of course, is one of the reasons I secretly believe that comic books are true histories rather than fantasies. In this story, the dogs are heroic and the cats are evil. JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE! AHA!

Anyway, shenanigans ensue. The fleas are stopped and most of the cat gang is captured, though Krypto is briefly endangered by kryptonite and has to be rescued by Superboy.  But one cat escapes and, with the help of evil Kryptonian cats who are trapped in the Phantom Zone, lures Superboy and Krypto into a kryptonite trap.

So it turns out that Krypto is the hound that inadvertently lures Superboy into danger.

The villains dump the dying heroes outside Smallville because of... reasons. The cats are just plain mean. Other dogs from the Space Patrol are visiting, but they too busy goofing around to leave much chance of finding Clark and Krypto.

But remember that Prophesy Pup said a hound would rescue Superboy. In this case, it's an autograph hound, who was on his way to visit a nearby movie set.

A Comic Book Universe needs an occasional dose of silliness and whimsy. Otto Binder is the perfect writer for providing us with those qualities. I love knowing that the Space Canine Patrol is actually a thing. The universe would be a poorer place indeed without it.

Next week, we'll finish up the Hutec trilogy in Turok, Son of Stone.

Cover Cavalcade

From 1978: A phenomenal Gil Kane cover from Marvel's excellent John Carter of Mars series.