Riffraff and Rhyming

 

As we continue our journey through Dell's Animal Comics #4 (Aug-Sept 1943), we come to a story whose writer and artist are uncredited, but who introduced us to a precocious little puppy named Riffraff

He's found in a flour barrel by Tom Drake, who (along with his parents) inexplicable speak in rhymes. 

I'm tempted to call the rhyming dialogue a weakness of the story. The rhymes are workmanlike in their construction, but I think we were all spoiled by Dr. Suess while growing up. Knowing how clever and funny rhymes can be when written by a master, the tale of Riffraff can't help but suffer in comparison.

Still, we must remember that this comic was written for children. I can see a parent having a lot of fun reading this story aloud to his or her child, even if it does fall short of Suessian cleverness.

Back to the story: Riffraff appears to be a white dog at first, but after he's washed, we find out he's black. And getting stuck in a flour barrel is a precursor to just how much trouble the little puppy can get himself into.

Soon, Riffraff has gotten beaten up by a cat and chomped on by a turtle. Overall, he has a rough day.

And then things get DANGEROUS. That evening, Riffraff sees a fire starting in the attic of the Drake home. He tries to warn the family, but they just think he's being rambunctious. So the clever puppy ramps up the rambunctiousness until the family is mad enough to chase him back up the stairs to the attic.

They see the first and put it out in time to save the home. 

So Riffraff (despite getting a paw stuck in a mouse trap moments later) is a hero and knows he's found a home.

I like the art a lot, especially that fantastic panel in which the cat is beating up poor Riffraff. The unidentified artist gives the puppy a lot of personality, though he arguably fails to do the same with the human characters--they are pretty generic looking.

As for the script--well, as I already mentioned, I'm not sure the rhyming scheme adds anything to the story. But it is a fun story and Riffraff is a fun character. You can read the story online HERE. 

Next week is the week of my first wedding aniversary, so we'll take a break from the Wednesday and Thursday posts as I pay contractually obligated attentions to my wife. We'll be back in two weeks with another visit to Project Pegasus. 

Cover Cavalcade

 

This 1934 cover by Hubert Rogers is a nice complement to last Monday's Man vs. Snake cover.

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Friday's Favorite OTR

Crime Club: "Death Blew Out a Match" 12/2/46

On a small island off the coast of Massachusetts, a woman is murdered and another woman eventually goes missing.

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Moral Dilemmas and Cold Equations

 

I don't remember how we got into this discussion, but recently, while driving to church, Angela began to tell me about an ethics course she'd taken in college, in which the teacher would give them moral dilemmas. Things like "You are part of a wagon train hiding in a cave from Indians. A baby starts crying. Do you kill the baby to keep it from giving you away or do you allow the Indians to find you and kill everyone?"

Angela's criticism of this is that it was difficult to come up with a definitive "either-or" solution. She felt there was always an Option C or even an Option D after you gave the problem some thought. Human ingenuity was nearly always a wild card tossed into the problem.

Well, as a Totally Geeky Nerd (or would that be Totally Nerdy Geek?), I immediately thought of Tom Godwin's classic short story "the Cold Equations," published in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. By golly, THERE'S a definitive "either-or" moral dilemma.

A pilot is rushing badly needed medicine to a frontier planet. He needs to get that medicine there or a lot of people will die. But then he discovers an 18-year-old girl has stowed away on the ship, because she wanted to visit her brother, who works on that planet. Her extra weight means that the ship no longer has enough fuel to land safely. So the pilot either has to toss her out the airlock or both he and the sick men on the planet all die with her anyways. 

It's a story that is justifiably considered a classic. Ironically, Godwin submitted it three times to Astounding's editor John Campbell, each time coming up with a clever way to save the girl. But Campbell kept sending it back until Godwin acknowledged in the story that the laws of physics were immutable. There could be no way to save the girl. Simple mathmatics dictated she must die. Human ingenuity didn't mean a darn thing.

She had unknowingly subjected herself to the penalty of a law that recognized neither innocence nor youth nor beauty, that was incapable of sympathy or leniency.

Angela and I talked about the story for awhile and she agreed that, dramatically, the tragic ending was the proper one for this story. We both, though, were able to get picky about one aspect of the story's general premise. The emergency ship carrying supplies was launched from a large cruiser, which was carrying civilian passengers. The girl had been one of those passengers and she had apparently sneaked aboard the smaller vessel by simply ignoring a KEEP OUT sign. We both felt that any spaceship carrying civilians would by necessity have much better safety precautions on the assumption that sooner or later a civilian would try to do something incredible stupid.

The story has also been criticized by others for being an example of faulty engineering via giving the emergency ship absolutely no margin for error as well.

These are legitimate criticisms, yet the human emotions in the story are so strong and generate so much empathy that "The Cold Equations" still works beautifully.

In a 1991 issue of Analog Science Fiction, Don Sakers published his answer to the original story, in which human ingenuity does provide a gruesome but successful solution, saving the (in this case) young boy and still delivering the medicine. It's a great story (voted the readers' favorite for that year) and still makes it clear that there are consequences for the decisions we make, though one can fairly argue that Sakers gave his pilot a specific piece of equipment and a bit of technology that didn't exist in Godwin's universe. But I do like what Sakers wrote in an Author's Note when the story was anthologized, making it clear that his story was not a condemnation of or lack of appreciation for the original tale:

The important point is not any given solution to this particular scenario... it's something larger, just as Godwin's point was something larger. Just as SF once need to hear that there are times when the girl has to go out the airlock, in 1991 SF needed to hear that the girl doesn't always have to go out the airlock. That there are two ways of looking at the world, and both of them are valid and necessary.

You can find "The Cold Equations" online HERE. 

Race with Doom

 

The Roy Rogers Show ran on NBC from 1951 through 1957, so the Roy Rogers comics from that time was keyed off of that.  When Roy was appearing in B-movies, the plots would sometimes be set in the Old West and sometimes in then-contemporary times. The B-movie version of the modern American West still involved horses and six shooters, but were mixed together with cars, planes and telephones.

Roy's TV show was placed in that modern west, so the comics of the time also often featured cars and planes and the occasional submachine gun. But sometimes, a particular comic book story could have easily been set in the Old West without changing a thing about it.

"Race with Doom," for instance, appeared in Roy Rogers Comics #90 (1955) and had an Old West vibe to it. Written by the mind-numbingly prolific Gaylord Du Bois, it's a simple but fun tale greatly enhanced by John Buscema's great artwork.

Roy spots a young lady being pursued by men on horseback. Roy uses a rope strung across the path they are riding along to get the drop on the men, allowing the girl to get away. But Roy doesn't yet know what's going on, so he's got no cause to arrest the men.

He catches up with the girl, learning that her name is Nan and she's the niece of a bank manager. When a teller ran off with some funds, there were rumors the bank was going to go under. Nan is bringing 80 grand in cash to the bank to prevent a run. The guys chasing her want the money.

And, boy, do they ever want the money. When Roy and Nan take a break in a canyon, they stampede a herd of cattle into that canyon. There seems to be no way out.

But Roy can rivel Batman in his ability to think his way out of impossible situations. Since the only way out is off a cliff, he does indeed take Nan off that cliff, making a dangerous climb down to a ledge.

The poor cattle are doomed, but Roy and Nan are safe. The bad guys make the mistake of thinking they are dead before checking for their bodies, which allows Roy to get the drop on them.

The story is indeed simple, but well-told in a very straightforward manner. As I mentioned, Buscema's art (especially the grim sequence in which the cattle are going off the cliff) really elevates it, but Du Bois' script is still strong on its own. Roy's success as a Cowboy Hero was due to his likeable and easy-going personality, something Dell Comics managed to emulate quite nicely as it skillfully dropped him into entertaining adventures.

That's it for now. Next week, we'll return again to Animal Comics.

Cover Cavalcade

 

A cover from 1939 (drawn by John Richard Flanagan) shows us you should always bring a gun to a snake fight.

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Broadway is My Beat: "The Ernie Lane Case" 4/18/53

A woman learns her fiance is wanted for killing his wife, but she's reluctant to tell the cops where to find him.

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Mark of the Whistler

 

Read/Watch 'em In Order #117

The Mark of the Whistler was released in 1944, the same year as the first film of the series, and gave us another good, solid Film Noir.

This time, the script was an adaptation of a short story titled "Dormant Account," by Cornell Woolrich, which had been published a few years earlier in the May 1942 issue of Black Mask. In that tale, a homeless man named George Palmer poses as someone else to claim a long dormant bank account and scores big when he gets away with it. But it turns out that some not very nice people have it in for the guy Palmer is pretending to be.

The movie is a pretty faithful adaptation of this story, with Richard Dix giving an excellent performance as the story's sort-of protagonist. In the film, he's named Lee Nugent, which is coincidentally the same name as the person who can claim the dormant bank account. That's what gives the normally honest man the idea of running the scam.

He researches the other Lee Nugent, discovering that the other Lee lost his family in a fire when he was twelve, then disappeared when he ran away from the family he was placed with a few years later. Memorizing these facts and rigging up a few other ways to "prove" who he is, our Lee is soon ready to try to fool the bank. 

The movie adds a few things to the original story, probably to fill out the plot to squeak the 61-minute film into full-length territory. But in each case, this adds to quality of the story. We get indications that our Lee is essentially a decent person, able to make friends, despite his having given into to temptation regarding the bank account. Both the script and Dix's performance combine to give us this impression, most especially in Lee's interaction with a young boy while researching the other Lee, which makes a difference later on when a particular friend takes risks for him. When that happens, it's believable.

There's also a new character added--a perpetually distrustful clothing store owner (wonderfully brought to life by Porter Hall) who helps Lee run the scam on the bank. Once again, he may have been added to flesh out the film's runtime, but he's a great character that fits perfectly into a Film Noir universe.

As in the original story, the newly enriched Lee soon discovers that the man he is impersonating has enemies. When he realizes someone is after him, he decides that moving to a new city would be a wise option. But it might be too late to get away...

I think both the original story and the film suffer from a very, very unlikely plot twist at the end. But The Mark of the Whistler is, on the whole, a good movie and another strong entry in a strong series. 

I own six of the eight Whistler movies on DVD, taped off of TCM a few years ago. The Mark of the Whistler is one of the two I don't own, but I was able to watch it on YouTube. I'm embedding that video below, but please note that I don't know the copyright status of the films, so don't know if it will still be accessible in the future. If it is still under copyright, it might eventually get pulled. So if my future biographers, researching a comprehensive multi-volume biography on how I saved Western culture through my blog, discover that the movie isn't here any more, please note that it's not my fault.

The original short story can be found HERE, reprinted in a 1953 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.