Cover Cavalcade

I'm not a huge fan of Lin Carter's fiction, but Frank Frazetta gave us a fantastic cover for this particular novel.

Beyond the Black River--a video review

Here's a new video for my YouTube channel--it's a look at "Beyond the Black River," one of Robert E. Howard's original Conan the Barbarian stories.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Police Woman 6/29/47 “Scheming Bridegroom”

This was a short-lived 15 minute show that ran for about a year in 1946 & 1947. In this episode, female police woman Mary Sullivan lays a trap for a man who lures women to their deaths with promises of marriage.

Click HERE to listen or download.

An absurd number of suspects

Read/Watch 'em In Order #33

After the Thin Man (1936) was made two years after the original, but picks up the action just three days after Nick has solved the Thin Man murders in New York.

He and Nora arrive home in San Francisco, where the movie immediately has some fun counterpointing the crooks, newsboys, boxers and assorted riff-raff that Nick knows with Nora's wealthy and somewhat snotty relatives. It's something that sets the tone of this movie and the rest of the series; though Dashiell Hammett provided the story outline for the sequel, any hint of a hard-boiled atmosphere has evaporated completely. The Thin Man movies are going to be silly fun build around a murder mystery and the chemistry of its two stars.

The Charles' are exhausted from their train trip and just wants to relax, but there's no rest of the weary. Aside from a home full of people determined to give them a surprise party, another case pops up.  It seems that Nora's Aunt Katherine, though she doesn't think much of Nick, needs a detective for a problem she prefers to keep in the family to avoid scandal. One of Nora's cousins has a wayward husband who hasn't been home for days. Nick is asked to find him.

That doesn't take long--the drunken jerk is hanging out at a nightclub, making time with the club's singer. But the singer is in a plot with the club's owner to swindle the husband out of money. The singer's brother has issues with the husband as well. Then there's his wife's previous fiance, who is still in love with her. And--don't you know it--nobody involved as an alibi when the husband is gunned down on a foggy Frisco street.

That makes for a large pool of suspects. Neither Nick nor the local homicide cop make any head-way in the case, though the likeliest suspect seems to be Nora's cousin. But soon, more bodies turn up--one strangled and another also shot. Nick keeps digging up possible clues (and, in fact, has a clue literally thrown to him through his kitchen window), but new facts just seem to keep adding to the general confusion.

In the end, Nick gets all the suspects together in one room, where he spots the clue that allows him to finger the killer.

And we all have fun watching Nick get there. The comedy is turned up to High, but it's sincerely funny stuff in the form of screwball comedy and sincerely witty word play. As I stated in our look at the first film, William Powell and Myrna Loy were perfect together--their comedic timing as Nick and Nora is flawless.

But though the movie is sillier than the original, it still works as a murder mystery. The case is interesting in its own right and director W.S. Van Dyke stages the action with his usual expertise. The fog-enshrouded streets of San Francisco are effectively used to generate a sense of danger at the right moments. A scene in which Nick trails a suspect down staircases to a basement--and then stumbles across a corpse (stiff with rigor mortis) locked in a large hamper--is genuinely tense.

That's Sam Levene on the right.

As was typical of films made during the Studio Era, the actors in the supporting roles are great. Most notable is Sam Levene, one of my favorite character actors of the 1930s and 1940s, playing police Lt. Abrams. A very young Jimmy Stewart is there as well, playing one of the many suspects in the sort of role you're really not used to seeing him play.

There's four more films to go and they will continue to get sillier. But every one of them will be worthwhile. I'm probably going to run out of ways of saying that Powell and Loy are always perfect together, so you'll all will just have to get used to it. I'm going to have to say it at least four more times.

There Should Always be Room for a Little Whimsey

Superman had a lot of silly, low-threat villains. While Braniac and Luthor were always trying to conquer/destroy worlds or kill the Man of Steel, guys like Toyman and the Prankster were played largely for laughs, pulling off less extreme crimes while playing practical jokes or employing high-tech toy soldiers as minions.

Mr. Mxyzptlk is another such villain, though his seemingly all-powerful magic could often be very dangerous. A version of Mxyzptlk first appeared in the Golden Age, with the Silver Age version introduced in Action Comics #208 (September 1955). He'd pop in from the Fifth Dimension and use his magic in annoying ways to make Superman's life miserable. Eventually, Superman would trick him into saying his name backwards, sending him back to the Fifth Dimension for 90 days and undoing all his magic tricks.


Then there's Bizarro. In Superboy #58 (Nov. 1958), a scientist   invents a duplicating ray that works imperfectly and creates a bizarre clone of Superboy. This first Bizarro is soon destroyed, but in Action Comics #254 (July 1959), Lex Luthor uses the ray to make (he hopes) an evil clone of Superman. But this Bizarro turns out to be more silly than evil.

I'd have to do an entire multi-part series to cover the evolution of Bizarro's story arc, but in a nutshell that duplicating ray turns out to be the most abused item of super-science in the history of the DC Universe. Soon, there's a Bizarro world (a square version of Earth) populated by many, many Bizarro Supermen married to many, many Bizarro Lois Lanes and having Bizarro babies. There are also Bizarro versions of Jimmy Olson, Perry White, many of the Justice League Members, Krypto, Lex Luthor and I'm not sure who else.

Anyway, Bizarro's do everything backwards. They have Ugly Contests instead of Beauty Contests. They eat cold dogs instead of hot dogs. Bizarro dogs are chased by Bizarro mailmen and it takes an hour for a Bizarro Lois to make instant coffee. The original Bizarro (who wore a sign reading Bizarro #1) would also occasionally return to Earth and get into mischief.

Bizarro World got it's own back up feature in Adventure Comics for a time, written purely for laughs by Jerry Siegel. It was in Adventure Comics #286 (July 1961), that Bizarro meets Mr. Mxyzptkl. Or at least he meets a Bizarro version of the imp called Bizarro-Lktpzyxm. But that's close enough for me. I refuse to do another post that requires me to make sure I'm spelling Mxyzptkl correctly, so I'm just going to cover both characters together.


Bizarro #1 is broke, so he decides to go into business as a private detective. And there is indeed a crime spree on Bizarro World. Someone turned the mayor's broken-down mansion into a beautiful building and filled it with priceless art. From a Bizarro perspective, this is a horrible crime, since all that beauty is just plain ugly.

Bizarro checks out several suspects, including the mayor whom Bizarro figures is guilty because he had no motive. But the culprit turns out to be Bizarro-Kltpzyzm, who's idea of mischief is fixing broken stuff the other Bizarros don't consider broken.

Bizarro #1 tries several plans to de-power the imp or trick him into saying his name backwards, but these all fail. It turns out, though, that he simply had to ask Kltpzyzm to surrender, because this is a plan that would NOT work for the original Mr. Mxyzptkl.

And that's pretty much that. The humor in the Bizarro stories is never laugh-out-loud funny and occasionally the jokes fail completely. But there's a sense of whimsy and a sort-of cuteness to the stories that still make them fun to read.

The existence of characters such as Bizarro and Mr. Mxyzptkl in the Silver Age DC Universe was, in the end, one of its strengths. It was, after all, a multi-faceted universe with countless diverse elements. It's nice to know that Mort Weisinger and his writers remembered that there was room for some occasional whimsey along

with the constant barrage of Earth-threatening evil plots.

That finishes our look at Superman's Rogue's Gallery. Our next visit to Weisinger's Superman universe, I think, will finish off the Legion of Super Pets with a look at Streaky and Comet.

The Six Shooter: A Review and Episode Guide

I've written a review and episode guide for The Six Shooter, a Western that ran on NBC radio for 39 episodes in 1953-54. The series starred James Stewar as Britt Ponset, a "Texas plainsman who wandered through the western territories, leaving behind a trail of still-remembered legends."

Stewart played Britt in a laid-back, folksy manner that made him old-time radio's most purely likable hero. The premise of the show allowed anything from straightforward action to character drama to comedy. One week might find Britt stalking a killer through a dark canyon. The next week might find him judging a preserves-tasting contest. This show is one of the treasures of Old-Time Radio.

The link above is for the Kindle. It should be available for the Nook very soon--Barnes and Noble seems to have a much longer processing time for newly-published ebooks before they show up on their website.

Cover Cavalcade

Here's a wonderfully exciting Neil Adams cover.

The History of B-Movies

I've made another video for my work at the Ringling College of Art Library. This one is about B-movies from Hollywood's Golden Age--the lower budget but often excellent films made to be the second half of a double feature.




Also available on this YouTube channel are videos I've made on the history of Dell and Gold Key comics, J. Allen St. John and Roy Crane.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Casey, Crime Photographer “King of the Apes” 5/1/47

An animal trainer performing with a circus is killed by one of his trained orangutans during his act. But it’s possible the ape had been trained to commit the murder.

To catch the killer, it’s not just a matter of figuring out who did it—or rather who got the orangutan to do it. It’s also a matter of luring him or her into a trap in order to prove it. And that might just get someone else strangled by a trained ape.

Click HERE to listen or download.

A spacesuit named Oscar

Robert Heinlein is quite properly considered one of the masters of science fiction. He wrote ground-breaking and important novels throughout his career, but my personal favorites are among the "juvenile" novels he wrote in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s.

Today, we'd probably call these young adult novels, but they in no way wrote down to their audience. They are great stories in terms of plot construction, full of intelligent ideas and philosophies. They are simply great science fiction adventure stories.

His later works just don't appeal to me. I admit that this is in part because the views he often presents about subjects such as religion or sexual morality are significantly different from what I believe, but my main problem is that he seemed to often sacrifice good plotting in order to hammer us over the head with those ideas. Gee whiz, if he had just told stories as well as he did in his juveniles, I would have been happy to enjoy his later novels while still disagreeing with him.

(Though, at the risk of seeming inconsistent, I love Starship Troopers despite the fact that a good 40% of the novel consists of pausing the story to pontificate about what makes a healthy society. Then again, I agree in general terms--if not always in specifics--with much of what he has to say in that novel. Also, the armored soldiers vs. alien bugs battles are awesome.)


Of his juveniles, the last one he wrote is my absolute favorite. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was first serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1958, then published as a book that same year.

It's got a wonderful premise. The setting is the future--we've begun to go out into space and have a permanent city on the Moon. But Earth is otherwise just like 1950s Earth, with the main character (high school student Kip Russell) working as a soda jerk at the local drugstore.

But Kip has plans. Encouraged by his father to self-educate himself beyond what he learns in school, Kip already has an expert's knowledge of engineering, mathematics and astronomy. He wants to go to the Moon more than anything else in the world.

He enters a contest to write a slogan for a soap company, with the first prize being a trip to the Moon. But he wins second prize--a used spacesuit.

Kip tinkers with the suit (he names it Oscar), gets it working and is taking it on a sort of test-run across his back yard when he's kidnapped by aliens and taken to the Moon.

This is the start of an absolutely wonderful adventure story. Kip isn't the only prisoner of the aliens (called Wormfaces by Kip). There's also Peewee, a pre-teen girl who still carries around a doll with her everywhere, but who also happens to be a genius. Then there's Mother Thing, an alien who is the enemy of the Wormfaces and who exudes a sense of protection and love to the humans.

The Wormfaces are planning on soon taking over Earth. Kip, Peewee and Mother Thing are tasked with the job of escaping and hopefully foiling their plans.

During this, Heinlein avoids the trap of turning his young protagonists into action heroes, something that would be realistically beyond their capabilities. Instead, they have to use their brains to problem-solve their way out of dangerous situations. Heinlein uses this basic premise to generate an enormous amount of tension. When Kip and Peewee are trying to escape by travelling 40 miles across the surface of the Moon to the human settlement, there are several problems to overcome. How do they take Mother Thing with them when none of the available space suits fit her? How does Kip share oxygen with Peewee when the valves on her suit aren't compatible with the air tanks he has available? Heinlein takes these problems and adds them to the physically strenuous task of hiking 40 miles over rough terrain and creates a mini-epic within the novel. The entire sequence is un-put-downable.

He does it again later on when the protagonists end up on Pluto. Kip must walk one hundred yards outside a building to plant a radio beacon--but his suit isn't properly insulated against the extreme cold. Once again, there is an epic mini-adventure within the main story.

On top of all this, Kip and Peewee find out that the Wormfaces might just be the least of their problems, when they encounter a sort-of federation of alien races that are debating whether its safe to leave us potentially dangerous humans alive.

The characterizations are among Heinlein's finest. Kip is completely believable as an intelligent teenager, able to keep his cool in dangerous situations largely because he had great parents who taught him self-discipline and how to think for himself. Peewee is precocious and downright adorable--Heinlein finds the perfect balance between portraying her as a genius at science and math while still reminding us that she's just a little girl. Her relationship with Kip, which quickly evolves into a big brother/little sister dynamic, is heartfelt and honest.

Portraying a child genius in a realistic way is never easy. Star Trek: The Next Generation tried it with Wesley Crusher, but (despite Wil Weaton's skill as an actor) was largely a failure in that Wesley is in the end simply annoying. But Heinlein succeeds (as did Orson Scott Card in Ender's Game). Peewee seems very real and, though she can get on Kip's nerves from time to time, we quickly come to love her as much as does Kip.

Another strength of the novel is that Heinlein never loses track of just how wondrous outer space is. Even in the midst of dangerous adventures, Heinlein smoothly integrates descriptions of the mountains of the Moon or the landscape of Pluto or the Milky Way as seen from a planet in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. He reminds us of the enormous scale of space--of the mind-boggling distances between planets and stars and galaxies.

Some SF universes, such as Star Trek and Star Wars, make interstellar travel pretty routine. And this is fine--that's a part of the stories being told in those worlds. But it's nice to be reminded that traveling in space isn't something that will ever be completely routine. And this isn't just because Space is a harsh environment that is always trying to kill us. It's also because Space is...well, Space--full of planets and nebula and neutron stars and countless other majestic sights. Even when Heinlein is tossing his characters into what seems to be certain death, he never lets us forget that.