Is it right for me to take up an entire Thursday post just to brag about something fairly minor? That would be wrong. That would be mind-numblingly egotistical.
Oh, what the heck.
The 2024 coffee table book Superman: The Definitive History quotes me on page 28:
Soldiers of Fortune (published by the American Comics Group) began its twelve-issue run with the March-April 1951 issue. For most of its run, it featured two modern-day adventurers (Ace Carter and Lance Larsen), as well as a pirate known as Captain Crossbones. By the time it ended its run, the comic had morphed into a war comic--probably in response to the beginning of the Korean War.
It's the first Captain Crossbones story that we'll be looking at today, because... well, because pirates are nearly as cool as dinosaurs and original Star Trek. Not quite--but close.
We don't know who wrote this story, though we do know the art was by Sheldon Moldoff. The tale recounts the origins of Captain Crossbones. He begins life as a young apprentice named Tom Rutherford, who runs away from his cruel master and stows away on a boat.
But his romantic notions of life on sea are soon squashed. Once he's found, the captain puts him to work scrubbing the decks. The other sailors haze him and when he fights back, one of them burns the image of the royal seal onto his arm. The sadistic sailor had no reason for using the royal seal other than it was handy and it was a way to cause Tom pain.
The captain punishes the sailor, but further feuding is put on hold when the ship is attacked by the notorious pirate Red Rover. Tom's ship is captured, but he's spared from walking the plank when the captain runs a bold bluff, telling Red Rover that Tom was a member of the royal family and had a mark on his arm to prove it. Tom, in other words, is worth a fortune in ransom.
The bluff works and Red Rover holds Tom prisoner rather than kill him.
The story is a little weak here. Tom spends several years on the pirate ship, learning the trade and growing an Errol Flynn mustache to remind us that swashbuckling is in his future.
Why Red Rover never sought to ransom him and how Tom was able to avoid committing atrocities along with the rest of the crew is never explained. He's just suddenly an adult with some wicked fencing skills.
JULY IS J. ALLEN St. JOHN VISITS BARSOOM MONTH!!!
The Black Museum: "Four Small Bottles" 4/1/52
Did a young wife poison her older husband? And if so, are the four small bottles used as evidence sufficient to convict her?
Click HERE to listen or download.
I've been a big fan of Talbot Mundy all my life, so when a friend of mine recommended his 1912 story "The Soul of a Regiment" AND mentioned that it had been voted by the readers of Adventure as the best story ever appearing in that superb magazine, I was embarrassed to discover this gap in my reading history. (It appeared, by the way, in the February 1912 issue.)
And Billy Grogram, who above all was a man of clean ideals,
began to feel content. He still described them in his letters home as
"blooming mummies made of Nile mud, roasted black for their sins, and good
for nothing but the ash-heap." He still damned them on parade, whipped
them when the Colonel wasn't looking, and worked at them until he was much too
tired to sleep; but he began to love them. And to a big, black, grinning man of
them, they loved him. To encourage that wondrous band of his, he set them to
playing their two tunes on guest nights outside the officers' mess; and the
officers endured it until the Colonel returned from furlough. He sent for
Grogram and offered to pay him back all he had spent on instruments, provided
the band should keep away in future.
Well, Gordon and his men are all killed at Khartoum. It's said the Billy Grogram went down fighting with his regiment. Then he's forgotten.
But there are rumors--rumors of a small band of fifers and a drummer. Rumors of a dancing madman whom the natives leave alone because the insane are protected by God.
And one day, perhaps those who have forgotten Billy Grogram and the First Egyptian Foot will be reminded that a regiment has a soul and the regiment's colors are the symbol of that undying soul.
Some modern critiques of the story point out imperialist and racists attitudes that run through the story. This is fair and proper. But, though the story is indeed a product of its time, its comments on courage, honor and discipline are still universal. Also, I'm not sure I completely buy into one particular criticism I ran across--the idea that the native troops only became effective when a white man was in command. But any group of men training to be soldiers--regardless of skin color--is going to start out as an undisciplined mob. And any such group of men is going to NEED an experienced soldier like Grogram (regardless of his skin color) to whip them into shape. That's not saying that the racial attitudes of 1912 don't seep into the story--I'm just not completely aboard with that one particular criticism.
"The Soul of a Regiment" really is a great story, dripping with bittersweet commentary on how quickly the world forgets those who died, but also dripping with reminders that courage and honor always lives on.
You can read it for yourself HERE.
Journey Into Mystery #73 (October 1961) was still ten issues away from giving us the Mighty Thor. Like many of Marvel's other anthology books before the resurgance of superheroes, it was a mixture of monster and science fiction tales--most of them a lot of fun.
This issue, for instance, includes "Menance from Mars!," with a script tentatively credited to Stan Lee (plot) and Larry Lieber (script) and the imaginative art by Don Heck.
Martians are coming to Earth! But they aren't invaders this time around. Instead, they are coming to learn about humanity. We are, after all, getting close to having interplanetary flight. They need to find out if we are naughty or nice. If we are a threat to them, then by golly, we need to be destroyed in preventative self-defence.
They find a mild-mannered human wandering iun the woods and question him, monitoring him with a machine that can detect truth from lies.
Does the human hate them because they're different? No. Would he steal or cheat if he could become rich by doing so? Of course not! Has he ever gone hunting or fishing? He could never hurt another living creature!
Well, obviously, this guy demonstrates that humanity is harmless. They let the guy go and head back to Mars, deciding NOT to destroy Earth.
The man, in the meantime, is found by the orderlies from the local mental hospital. They humor him when he tells a story about meeting Martians and make sure he gets back to the hospital intact.
Yes, the Earth is saved by a crazy man--whose main delusion seems to involve always being very nice to everyone else.
Don Heck's design for the Martians is very effective--alien and menacing enough to come across as a threat if they decide we need to be destroyed. And the twist at the end if funny and effectively ironic.
It is, therefore, possible to enjoy this story on a superficial level. But does this story also comment rather harshly on humanity? Only a guy who lives in Crazy Town is delusional enough to believe (and thus convince the Martians) that mankind is safe and harmless. Taken at that level, it's a pretty harsh commentary on us, isn't it?
The story reminds me a little of 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien tells us that super-robots will destroy Earth if we bring our warlike tendencies to the stars. I can't help but wonder if the memory of that movie was the jumping-off point for Stan Lee in coming up with this one.
I'm also reminded of the Twilight Zone episode "Hocus Pocus and Frisbee," in which aliens accept the tall tales of an inveterate liar as truth. That episode, though, aired in 1962, so it's wasn't an influence on this story (and there's not enough of a time gap between the comic and the episode's air-date to make it likely the comic was an influence on the TV show).
But, regardless of possible influences, "Menance from Mars!" is still a good story in its own right--fun, layered and maybe a little bit dark.
JULY IS J. ALLEN St. JOHN VISITS BARSOOM MONTH!!!
The Lone Ranger: "Boots and a Bloodhound" 9/10/54
Two actors with a traveling troupe plan a bank robber. With the help of a mixed-up at the cobbler shop and an ill-tempered dog, the Ranger and Tonto might be able to put a stop to their crime.
Click HERE to listen or download.
"The Lord of Samarcand," (also published as "The Lame Man") by Robert E. Howard, was published in the Spring 1932 issue of Oriental Stories. It is, I think, one of the grimmest tales that Howard ever told. And, by golly, it works. It's a vivid example of how Howard could use descriptive prose together with strong characterizations to keep his reader engrossed from start to finish.
It's set in the late 14th and early 15th Century. A Scotsman named Donald MacDeesa is the protagonist and his life has indeed been grim. He fought in Scotland until he was forced to flee for his life. He eventually ends up in the Middle East, where the army he's a part of is wiped out by the Turks.
Anxious for revenge, he enters the service of Timour, also known as Tamarlane. This is a real-life emperor--a Turco-Mongol who founded the Timurid Dynasty that ruled much of what today is Afganistan, Iran and Central Asia.
Donald helps Timour defeat the Turks, satisfying the Scotsman's lust for revenge in that quarter. Then, with nowhere else to go, he serves Timour as the head of a sort-of Special Forces unit. Timour, a somewhat narcissitic ruler who desire only to expand his empire, recognizes Donald's usefullness, but feels no friendship or appreciation towards him:
Timour hurled Donald against his foes as a man hurls a javelin, little caring whether the weapon be broken or not. The Gael's horsemen would come back bloodstained, dusty and weary, their armor hacked to shreds, their swords notched and blunted, but always with the heads of Timour's foes swinging at their high saddle-peaks.
As the years go by, Donald's lonliness and friendlessness causes him to grow attracted to a Persian slave-girl. But the girl has a tendency to get involved in courtroom conspiracies. And if she gets on Timour's bad side, she might not live long. And if she doesn't live long, Timour might find out there can be consequences for treating people like disposable insects. It's not good to be on Timour's bad side, but it's definitely not good to be on Donald MacDeesa's bad side.
History has a different version of Timour's death in 1405 than we get here, but the story actually accounts for that. Much like "The Lion of Tiberias," which I reviewed a few weeks ago, Howard improves upon real-life in regards to the death of a tyrant.
Getting to the grim end of this tale is a wild ride. Here's a brief passage describing one of Donald's many battles. The word "vivid" doesn't really do it justice.
AND AT ORDUSHAR the siege dragged on. In the freezing winds that swept down the pass, driving snow in blinding, biting blasts, the stocky Kalmucks and the lean Vigurs strove and suffered and died in bitter anguish.
They set scaling-ladders against the walls and struggled upward, and the defenders, suffering no less, speared them, hurled down boulders that crushed the mailed figures like beetles, and thrust the ladders from the walls so that they crashed down, bearing death to men below. Ordushar was actually but a stronghold of the Jat Mongols, set sheer in the pass and flanked by towering cliffs.
Donald's wolves hacked at the frozen ground with frost-bitten raw hands which scarce could hold the picks, striving to sink a mine under the walls. They pecked at the towers while molten lead and weighted javelins fell in a rain upon them; driving their spear-points between the stones, tearing out pieces of masonry with their naked hands. With stupendous toil they had constructed makeshift siege-engines from felled trees and the leather of their harness and woven hair from the manes and tails of their warhorses.
The rams battered vainly at the massive stones, the ballistas groaned as they launched tree-trunks and boulders against the towers or over the walls. Along the parapets the attackers fought with the defenders, until their bleeding hands froze to spear-shaft and sword-hilt, and the skin came away in great raw strips. And always, with superhuman fury rising above their agony, the defenders hurled back the attack.
A storming-tower was built and rolled up to the walls, and from the battlements the men of Ordushar poured a drenching torrent of naphtha that sent it up in flame and burnt the men in it, shriveling them in their armor like beetles in a fire. Snow and sleet fell in blinding flurries, freezing to sheets of ice. Dead men froze stiffly where they fell, and wounded men died in their sleeping-furs. There was no rest, no surcease from agony. Days and nights merged into a hell of pain. Donald's men, with tears of suffering frozen on their faces, beat frenziedly against the frosty stone walls, fought with raw hands gripping broken weapons, and died cursing the gods that created them.
The misery inside the city was no less, for there was no more food. At night Donald's warriors heard the wailing of the starving people in the streets. At last in desperation the men of Ordushar cut the throats of their women and children and sallied forth, and the haggard Tatars fell on them weeping with the madness of rage and woe, and in a welter of battle that crimsoned the frozen snow, drove them back through the city gates. And the struggle went hideously on.
You can read the entire story yourself HERE.
Star Spangled War Stories #86 (October 1959) reminds us that sometimes earning medals runs in the family.
This is something that happens in real-life. Arthur MacArthur Jr was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Battle of Missionary Ridge in 1863. His son Douglas was awarded that medal for his leadership in the Phillippines in 1942. Teddy Roosevelt was eventually given a Medal of Honor for his actions at San Juan Hill in 1898 (awarded posthumously about a century later), while his son Teddy Jr. was awarded the medal for his extraordinary leadership on Utah Beach on D-Day.
So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Mademoiselle Marie's family has a history of winning medals. In their case, they seem to win these medals for the EXACT same acts of bravery.
In "Target for Tonight," (written by Bob Kanigher and drawn by Mort Drucker), starts with Marie hiding in a farm house, with a German tank just outside. Above her, a B-17 frantically calls by radio for her to identify the location of the rocket silos they are supposed to bomb.
Those silos are pretty much right next to the farmhouse, but if Marie radios back, she'll give herself away to the tank. Also, it would mean the American bomber would drop its load right on top of her.
(Why the tank can't hear the bomber's pilot voice coming from Marie's radio is not addressed, but its a minor hiccop in an otherwise good story.)
She thinks back to stories her grandfather and her father had told her about their wartime experiences. During the Franco-Prussian War, her grandpa had called in an artillery strike on his own position to take out a big enemy gun. Then during the First World War, her dad had done pretty much the same thing. Both had survived to be decorated.
Well, if her grandpa could do it and her pa could do it, then by golly SHE could do it! The trouble is the tank finally opens fire on the farmhouse and her radio is smashed.
So she improvises--using the tried-and-true DC war comics tactic of firing through the tank's view slit until she detonates the ammo inside. The burning tank then marks the target for the B-17, which then bombs the silos.
Marie survives and receives her own medal. It's just a rose, but it is a sincere effort by the other members of her Resistance group to honor her bravery and she knows this.
The story does have a few holes in its overall logic and Kanigher's love of melodrama is laid on a little too thickly, but Drucker's art carries it along nicely (I especially like his effective panel compositions) and the main point--that acts of heroism in the past can inspire others later on--is still valid and effective.
Next week, a lunatic saves humanity.
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