Shipwrecks and Rescues

Gaylord Du Bois wrote many Tarzan and Korak stories for Dell and Gold Key. He often lifted a plot element or character from ERB's original novels and re-used them in his own stories.

For instance, in the 1940 story "The Quest of Tarzan" (re-titled Tarzan and the Castaways when collected into a book in 1964), Tarzan is injured and temporarily loses the ability to speak. He's captured and caged aboard a ship by villains who intend to make money displaying him as a "wild man." The ship is eventually wrecked upon a reef during a storm, thrusting Tarzan and other survivors into another adventure.

So the "captured and unable to speak" bit was simply to get Tarzan into the larger story. In Korak Son of Tarzan #35 (May 1970), Du Bois and artist Dan Spiegle take this incident away from Tarzan and give it to Korak, once again using it to introduce the protagonist into a larger adventure.

When Korak finds his friend, the ape Akut, a prisoner, he attempts to free him. But he himself is shot by the captors. The bullet grazes his head and leaves him unable to use human speach, though he can still manage ape talk.

As it turns out, Korak's inability to speak is a legacy left over from the Tarzan story, but has no effect on the plot here. It only lasts a few pages until a storm drives the ship onto some rocks. A dunking in the ocean seems to have cured him.

Korak, Akut and a another captive of the slavers named Daniel Moray are the only survivors and manage to salvage a boat. Daniel, it turns out, had fallen into the hands of the slavers while trying to find his son Harry, who had been captured earlier by the same guys.

Well, nobody in the Greystoke family is going to turn down an opportunity to help with a quest like that. When they make it to the coast, they begin to follow a river that should lead them to the guy who bought Harry from the slavers. It's probably a bit of a coincidence that the slaver ship was wrecked near such a convenient spot, but such coincidences are as long a tradition in the Greystoke family as helping those in need.

After some minor adventures, they find the city in which Harry is imprisoned by the local sultan. That panel above, by the way, is a magnificent example of how much fun Spiegle's art could be.

This has been a solid story so far. If I wanted to nit-pick, I could complain that Du Bois waited a little too long before they found Harry. With the page count for the story nearly reached, his rescue from the city goes a little too quickly and smoothly to be as exciting as it could be. But it is still fun to read, with Akut knocking out a guard and Korak knocking out the sultan before they steal the sultan's private plane and make a getaway.

Despite the rushed ending, "The Slave of El-Ghazi" is a solid, straightforward adventure which borrows an element from Tarzan's adventures to use as a jumping-off point for a brand-new tale.

Next week, the Man of Steel teams up with the Boy Wonder.

Cover Cavalcade

A dramatic Joe Kubert cover from 1972

Friday's Favorite OTR

The Stan Freberg Show: "Abominable Snowman Revisited" 9/8/57

The "Washington Crossing the Delaware" skit in this episode is a perfect example of how to set up a really bad joke so effectively that it circles around being bad to become an hilarious joke.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Venus: The Jungle Planet--Part 1

Before the Solar System turned out to be boring in real life, Venus was often portrayed as a jungle planet, on the persumption that its perpetual cloud cover trapped in heat and kept the temperature at tropical levels. Often, dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures roamed the Venusian jungle.

"Swamp Girl of Venus" was set on such a planet. Publsihed in the September 1949 issue of Amazing Stories, it was written by Robert Moore Willams under the pen name H. H. Harmon.

It's a fun story, jumping into the action right from the start when human trader Hal McCabe rescues a Venusian native named Juth, who is being tortured for information about the location of Coth, a land inhabited by people who fly large, visious bird creatures. The torturers know that Coth is rumored to be rich in gold, so they want to know how to get there.

 McCabe puts a stop to the torture and also exacts a little bit of ironic justice on the bad guys. But McCabe and his new friend are soon in trouble. The inhabitants of Coth, riding down on their fifel (Venusian for "flying death") attack, knocking them out with gas bombs.

They wake up in a dungeon, stripped naked and knowing that their captors intend to hunt them for sport. But a story set on a Venusian jungle planet can rarely progress far without  a pretty human girl showing up. In this case, the girl is Le-ann. Her father was also an Earth trader, but his space ship had crashed in the nearby swamps when she was just 12 years old. Her dad was killed and she's been living with the people of Coth ever since. She's recently found her dad's ship, but doesn't understand that it will no longer fly.

So when she springs McCabe and Juth from the slammer, they end up in a wrecked ship that is leaking radiation, surrounded by dinosaurs and a variety of other dangerous fauna.

Walking across a Venusian swamp is a quick way to commit suicide, so the only option seems to be for them to steal some fifel and make an escape by air. Whether McCabe can Juth can both manage to fly the foul-tempered beasts or win the inevitable dogfight against a horde of Coth warriors is an open question. But when your only option is your only option, you gotta go for it.

"Swamp Girl of Venus" is a fun piece of Space Opera. Williams does a nice bit of world-building and the final airborne chase/fight scene is well-choreographed and exciting. McCabe is pretty much an straight-out-of-the-box tough-guy action hero ("No one had ever accused Hal McCabe of having lace on the edge of his underpants."), but he's a likeable hero and gets a nice human moment when he is almost crippled with embarassement when he meet Le-ann right after being stripped of all his clothes.

You can read it online HERE.

Next week, we'll look at another author's version of Venus as a jungle planet.

Rematch with Stilt-Man

Daredevil #27 (April 1967--writer: Stan Lee. artist: Gene Colan) picks up pretty much where the last issue left off and jumps right into the action, avoiding the pacing issues from which the previous issue suffered.

Daredevil is looking for Stilt-Man, pausing to help Spider Man take out some crooks and asking the Webslinger to also keep an eye out for the villain.

It's pretty obvious that Spider Man is in the story to help boost sales for DD's lower selling book. Spidey was the 14th best-seller for that year. DD was a lower--though still respectable--27th. But it's not unreasonable that the two heroes would occasionally run into each other and I do enjoy Spidey's attitude towards Daredevil. He's annoyed that people might think it takes two of them to subdue common thugs. So his appearance doesn't seem forced or contrived.

In the meantime, The Masked Marauder showing off his cool stuff to Stilt-Man. He has a helicoptor equipped with a force field that disintegrates anything touching it. The Marauder knows Daredevil is connected with Murdock and Nelson, so his plan is to kidnap the lawyers and force them to tell what they know.

The villains raid the law office, gassing Matt, Foggy and Karen unconscious and stuffing them in the force-field protected chopper. Threatened with death, Matt reveals that Daredevil is really his twin brother Mike. His supposed cowardice ticks off Karen, but it does send Stilt-Man off on a false trail.

But when Stilt-Man can't find Mike listed in the phone book, he's stumped on what to do next, eventually deciding to rob a jewelry store in hopes of luring Daredevil into the open. But in the Marvel Universe version of New York City, you really can't predict which hero will show up when you commit a crime. Stilt-Man finds himself fighting Spider-Man.

Gene Colan uses the same technique to choreograph this fight as he used in the Daredevil/Stilt-Man fight from the previous issue, shifting perspective from panel to panel to highlight the bad guy's changing height and the hero's agility.

Matt, in the meantime, has managed to knock the Marauder into the force field's Off Button before allowing himself to "fall" out of the chopper. In what might be the most remarkable achievement in his career, he changes into his Daredevil costume while hanging upside-down by his knees from the helicopter.

His ensuing fight with the Marauder is interesting to contrast with the Spidey/Stilt-Man battle. Where Colan used wide shots and shifting perspectives for the earlier fight, here he uses tight shots to highlight the confined space and lack of room to manuever. It's an excellent example of just how skilled an artist he was. Both fights have their own flavor and are exciting in their own ways.

Marauder had re-activated the force field and, to the suprise of pretty much no one, ends up falling out of the chopper and getting disintegrated by his own device. Stilt-Man, in the meantime, has escaped from Spider-Man, but accidentally electricutes himself unconscious by trying to zap Daredevil while standing in water.

This ending is too abrupt. I imagine Stan Lee recognized that a third issue with Stilt-Man probably wasn't a good idea. He's a fun villain, but needs to be presented in small doses or he'll just get too silly. But the story had reached the end of its page count, so poor Stilty had to come to an ignomious end to wrap things up quickly.

But this abruptness doesn't spoil the entertainment that preceded this. The fight scenes are fun and well-choreographed. And it's always worthwhile to see Stilt-Man as long as he doesn't overstay his welcome.

Next week, we'll visit with Tarzan's son Korak.

Cover Cavalcade

A really fun Gil Kane cover from 1961.

Radio by the Book now available for the Kindle

Radio by the Book: Adaptations of Literature and Fiction on the Airwaves is now available as an ebook. You can click HERE to get a copy.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Let George Do It: "42 on a Rope" 10/3/47

George bumps into a lady on the sidewalk, which unwittingly drops him into a case involving smuggled Nazi war loot and a failure to learn how a mouse gets out of a cement mixture.

Click HERE to listen or download.

Just Because a god Doesn't Exist, It Doesn't Mean he Doesn't Exist: The Pusadian Tales, Part 5

Read/Watch 'em In Order #107

"Ka the Appalling" was published in the August 1958 short story--the last one published until the 1970s. By now, Gezun of Lorsk has been established as the main protagonist of the series. Though whether he'll survive beyond this story is an open question right from the start. He killed a cat that was stealing his dinner and now an enraged mob is chasing him.

Gezun had arrived in the Typhon (a sort-of expy of Egypt in this particular world), where cats are sacred and killing one is not a good idea. Gezun is chased into a blind alley and starting to plan a desperate last stand when a guy named Ugaph leads him to safety through a secret passage.

Ugaph isn't being magnanimous. He's a temple thief who uses a demon familiar to find out which particular temple treasures are available to steal. The demon requires a diet of bat blood, so Gezun and Ugaph's pretty daughter Ro are put to work collecting bats from old pyramids (a dangerous job because old booby-traps are still there) while he plans his temple-looting capers.

Gezun, though, doesn't care for being a bat-collector on a long-term basis. He comes up with a better plan. Why not start their own religion? Then they would have to steal temple treasures. People would be bringing them treasures directly as offerings to their god.

Ugaph likes this idea. But he doesn't like Gezun, who is too ambitious for his own good and keeps putting moves on Ro. So he makes plans on his own to offer Gezun to their god--Ka the Appalling--as soon as they have a temple built.

There are two things that might upset Ugaph's plans. First, no one is remembering to feed his familiar. Second, you can make up a god that doesn't really exist, but that doesn't mean the god you made up doesn't exist.

Though the previous story,"The Hungry Hercynian," is still my favorite of the series, this one is another strong entry. The dry humor and clever plot construction that is typical of a de Camp story are still here, making "Ka the Appalling" a delight to read.

There's one scene in particular that I think highlights de Camp's skill as a storyteller. At one point, a couple of thugs hired by Ugaph are planning to ambush Gezun and bring him to the temple as a sacrifice. Gezun ends up fighting them. He's armed with a sword, while the thugs have bludgeons. The fight scene is legitimately exciting and it is clear that lives are at risk during the tussle. But de Camp never forgets that neither Gezun nor the thugs are professional warriors. Nobody in the fight handles themselves with skill and the sense of danger is salted with just a little bit of slapstick, making it a uniquely entertaining action set piece.

You can read the story online HERE.

This was the last time we see Gezun until 1974, when a new Pusadian tale was published in Flashing Swords #2, a volume in the wonderful sword-and-sorcery book anthology edited by Lin Carter. I used to own that series, but it has somehow gone missing over the years. I'm going to try to get hold of the second volume so we can continue our visits with Gezun, so hopefully we're not done with him yet.

Metal Eating Monsters, Hijackers and Meteors!

cover art by George Wilson

 Space Family Robinson #15 (January 1966) was the first issue to carry the "Lost in Space" sub-title, tying it in with the then-current TV series while still retaining its own original cast of characters.

The series was usually written by Gaylord Du Bois, one of a number of excellent and extraordinarily prolific writers who worked for Gold Key. But this particular issue is tentativly credited to Del Connell, the original creator of the series. The art is by Dan Spiegle.

It begins with the older Robinsons--married couple Craig and June--using spectrographic scans in an attempt to find our sun and get back home. But the pets are getting bored and restless, so the parents allow their children, Tim and Tam, to take the pets down to a nearby planet for some exercise.

It does seem a bit irresponsible for parents to allow their kids to fly down unsupervised to an unexplored planet. To be fair, though, Tim and Tam are veteran explorers by this point. And no one could have predicted that they would run into a giant monster that is both made of metal and eats metal.

The beast chews on the spacemobile long enough to jam the main hatch open. Before Tim can make repairs, some local natives show up. As was usual with much non-prose science fiction of that decade, language issues are ignored for the sake of moving the story along. The natives simply speak English.

The kids soon learn that the planet's population is doomed. Food sources are dwindling and the Metal Eaters are magnifying the problem by... well, eating metal. This is putting a crimp in the plans of the natives to build a working spaceship.

The people here are mostly friendly, but one group decides to take matters into their own hands. They take Tam hostage, forcing Tim to call his dad for help. Their plan is to eventually hijack the Robinson's space station so they can escape the doomed planet.

Up in the space station, Craig and June had identified the sun, but lose track of it again when a meteor storm hits.

This incident highlights a weakness in the script. There are three plot threads in the story--the spectrographic search for the sun, the hijacking attempt, and the metal eating monsters. Those last two are tentatively linked, but not very strongly. None of the plot threads are ever solidly connected or interwoven, either in terms of plot or theme. Stuff is just happening haphazardly. It's as if Del Connell had several story ideas that did not by themselves fill an entire issue, so he simply mashed them together willy-nilly.

But even with this weakness in the story structure, the issue is a fun one. Dan Spiegle's fun and imaginative art saves the day. His design for both the metal monsters and the planet's natives are original and visually cool, giving the story an appear that lifts it above its weak script.

Anyway, Craig comes to the planet and soon uses a little judo to take care of the hijackers. End of that problem.

But the Metal Eaters have begun rampaging through the native city. I love the panel just below. This is exactly what I mean when I say the Spiegle's art saves a story. Who wouldn't shell out twelve cents for that panel alone?

Craig uses water vapor to take out the monsters, and gives both metal and plans for a space ship to the natives, giving them the means to eventually find a better home. The poor Robinsons have lost track of their home star again, so they're still lost in space. So their own adventure continues.

Next week, we'll re-visit with Daredevil for his rematch against Stilt-Man.