Cover Cavalcade

Fun, lively Dell cover from 1952.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Frontier Gentleman: "The Honky Tonkers" 2/16/58

A man accidentally shoots himself when he tries to draw on Kendall. Kendall is tasked with trying to remove the bullet and save the guys life--with two saloon girls for nurses and with the locals betting on whether he succeeds.

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PT Boats from My Childhood, Part 2

John Clagett knew his PT Boats. He commanded one of the small craft during the War and, when he became a novelist, based much of his fiction on his experiences.

Torpedo Run on Iron Bottomed Bay (1969), is the second of two young adult novels about PT boats I read as a kid. And, like The Hostile Beaches, it is a gripping and exciting story.

The main character is a seventeen-year-old sailor named Larry Cushing, whose experience working on small boats while growing up makes him a good fit for a PT. Larry is in some ways a generic character--pleasant, easy to get along with, and eager to learn. He demonstrates good marksmanship also, which gets him assigned to one of the twin .50 caliber machines guns.

What keeps Larry from being a cipher is Clagett's skill in making him likable and realistically describing emotions like fear and terror. Combat is scary and Larry definitely gets scared.

But he still does his job, demonstrating an intense loyalty to his friends and fellow crew. Larry is meant to be someone the book's target audiences can identify with and in this Clagett succeeds completely. I undoubtedly identified with him when I read the book as an 11-year-old and I still identified him reading the book as an adult.

Clagett does a great job with the action scenes as well. Especially notable is PT 107's first attempt to make a torpedo run against Japanese warships. The PT's engines suddenly conk out and the boat is floating helpless in the water while searchlights sweep around looking for them.

There's also a magnificent section describing the naval battle of Guadalcanal, as seen by the PT crews from an island hilltop---several successive nights of watching capital warships blasting each other apart.

There another plot-line running through the book. One of Larry's crew-mates is a Japanese-American named John Watanabe, with whom Larry develops a close friendship. When John is seen talking with several sick and ragged Japanese soldiers who are still lurking in the jungle surrounding the PT boat base, he's arrested as a traitor. Larry, though, is convinced that whatever John was up to, it was legitimate. Saving his friend from a court-martial means contacting the Japanese stragglers himself--something that could get Larry and another friend killed.

If I had to pick a favorite between Torpedo Run at Iron Bottomed Bay and The Hostile Beaches, I think I would lean towards the latter as being a little more intense and edge-of-your-seat. But it's a close call. Both are excellent war stories stuffed to the gills with authenticity.

But we're not done yet with the World War II fiction of my youth. Finding these two books launched a personal jihad of Googling until I was able to identify the two remaining books from my youth that I had always wanted to re-read. One is another story of naval combat in the Pacific. The other is an anthology of tales dealing mostly with infantry combat. Over the next month or two, we'll visit with each of these.

Shogun Warriors, Part 7

Wow. Shogun Warriors #16 (May 1980) is a surprisingly brutal issue and a game-changer for the title.

I will get one complaint out of the way right up front. We know before we even read the story that the Shogun Sanctuary is destroyed and the Followers of the Light all killed. We know this because THE DARN COVER TELLS US SO! I know that covers sometimes lie, but this one is telling the exact truth. Gee whiz.

The story starts in California, where the Shoguns are getting in some practice near Richard Carson's house. Carson's gal Deena is still feeling some jealousy towards Genji, but she recognizes this as irrational and is actually going to get a few Crowning Moments of Awesome in the upcoming story.

This is an effective bit of characterization. Deena is given enough flawed humanity to make her seem like a real person, but she's still likable and the character moments enhance rather than hinder the main plot.

That main plot involves the "men in black" guys who had been seen sneaking around Carson's home in previous issues. They return with a vengeance, hitting the heroes with a gas that weakens them and taking the pendants that allow them to communicate with the followers. The "men in black" guys" turn out to be robots and the three pilots (along with Deena, who wields a mean shotgun) manage to take a number of them out and get to their robots.

They quickly fly to the Sanctuary, but the bad guys have gotten their first and destroyed the place, killing the Followers. Abruptly, the Shogun pilots are on their own.

It is indeed abrupt. But it works in terms of effective storytelling. The appearance of the Men in Black in previous issues let us know something fishy was going on. This provided enough foreshadowing to give the plot twist dramatic viability without taking away the shock of what happened.

It's showing the stupid plot twist on the stupid cover that takes away the shock. Though I guess I might be a little unfair--experienced comic book readers would have known that covers often distort or mislead for dramatic impact, so perhaps this cover is a sort of double-bluff, causing readers to assume the event was really just an illusion or a holographic training program.

Anyway, a dragon-like alien shows up. This is the creature responsible for destroying the Sanctuary--it now tries to talk the Shoguns into simply abandoning their robots. It's logic is that humanity is advancing technologically too quickly. They might be heading into space too soon, bringing death and destruction with them. Their motivation is very similar to Klaatu's mission in the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, but their methods are more overtly aggressive. The alien has destroyed the Sanctuary, but also plans to kill Reed Richards, Tony Stark and pretty much every other really smart guy on the planet.

The Shoguns defeat the the alien, but now they are on their own, without a safe place to store the robots and without anyone who knows how to do maintenance on them.

From a really good issue, we now arrive at what is so far the only really weak link in the series. The pilots need a new place to store their robots. Savage can store his in an underwater cavern near his lab in Madagascar. Genji, who is relocated to San Francisco, and Carson make the bizarrely dumb decision to store Combatra in an abandoned tenement building--a completely unsecure location--and Genji doesn't even bother to turn off the "shimmer tube" that allows access to the robot's flight deck. Genji has been presented as an intelligent woman for 16 issues, now she metaphorically leaves the car keys in her unlocked Giant Robot of Death. It is a rare instance of poor storytelling from Doug Moench and Herb Trimpe.

So when a family of migrant workers decides to sleep in the tenement, the kid in the family stumbles into the shimmer tube, ends up on the flight deck and accidentally causes Combatra to take off. Carson has to follow in Raydeen and spend most of the issue trying to force Combatra down without hurting the kid.

It is a weak and uninteresting issue. It also brings up an interesting point about the future of the Shoguns. The kid keeps accidentally firing off Combatra's weapons, many of which are missiles and rockets. With the Sanctuary destroyed, how are the Shoguns' getting ammo reloads? I would give them a pass on their fuel--we can assume that the advanced tech of the robots includes power plants that last a long time or perhaps can refuel by solar energy. But they are going to need a steady supply of missiles. Remember that I'm reviewing these as I read them for the first time, so I'm curious to see if this is becomes a plot point. To be fair, there is only a few issues left, so the story might come to an end before ammunition shortages become an issue.

Next week, we'll see the first of two "Comic Books Take on Real Life" with a look at a comic book biography of Crazy Horse published in 1950.

Cover Cavalcade

Automobile Polo was actually a real-life sport--for a very brief period of time.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Bold Venture: "Deadly Merchandise" 3/26/51

A cargo that Slate Shannon did NOT transport from Key West to Havana leads to a pair of murders and an inadvertent involvement with would-be revolutionaries.

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Every Good Lawyer has Skeleton Keys and a Solid Right Hook

Read/Watch 'em In Order #72

Poor Ken Corning. The lawyer can't spend more that a few minutes working quietly behind his desk before someone tries to frame him.

Actually, in "Making the Breaks," (Black Mask, June 1933), it's his secretary Helen Vail who gets framed. Or rather, she's framed so that Corning can in turn be framed so that Corning's client can in his turn be framed.

The client is accused of killing a man during an armed robbery. Both the dead man's friend (present during the robbery) and two other witnesses make positive identifications. But someone is willing to hedge their bets even further when two hundred-dollar bills--part of the loot taken from the victim--turn up in Helen's purse after someone tries to snatch it.

Corning is convinced his client is being framed, which means one or more of the witnesses are lying and are probably plants arranged by the notoriously corrupt NYPD. He sets Helen Vail out to make friends with the girlfriends of the witnesses and eventually does a little breaking-and-entering, steals a diary, sets a fake fire and essentially kidnaps someone. But that's how you get things done in the Hard-Boiled Universe, by golly. Corning identifies the real killer and clears his client without ever setting foot in a courtroom--AND all because he carries a set of skeleton keys and can knock a man out with one punch. Who needs law school?

That faking a fire bit, by the way, is emulating a similar trick once used by Sherlock Holmes. Everybody learns from Holmes.

This is the fourth of the six Ken Corning stories and, if anything, they are getting better as the series progressed. The pace grows faster and the stories more exciting, while the plots remain strong and logically constructed. Erle Stanley Gardner was an excellent storyteller and (as I've said before) it's a shame that Perry Mason has overshadowed so many of his other characters. Mason deserves his fame, but the other guys are pretty cool as well.

Giant Inter-Dimensional Alien Hand!

I don't want to tell Batman his job. I really don't. He's been doing it for nearly 8 decades now and we should all presume he knows what he's doing.

But in Batman #130 (March 1960), he and Robin are told by Commissioner Gordon that a giant hand holding two aliens has been seen near a zinc factory. All three men immediately assume it's a prank. Because when you live on an Earth that is filled with super-powered beings, supernatural creatures and is regularly invaded by aliens, a giant hand is just too silly.

Also, Batman is apparently having a slow day, since he volunteers to personally give the supposed prankster a stern lecture. But when they arrive at the factory, they are shocked--shocked, I say--to discover the giant hand is real.

I am making fun of the story, but I also had great fun reading it. It is a prime example of Silver Age silliness, but it also has a well-constructed story that follows Comic Book Logic and Dick Sprang's art fits it all perfectly. Batman is hardly the Dark Knight (I do prefer his more serious Bronze Age stories), but if you imagine Adam West's voice while you read this one, it all works perfectly.

That darn hand seems to be unstoppable. The two aliens, able to understand English via a translator device, control it as it shrugs off bullets and artillery to steal zinc, copper, platinum and tin. Batman tries to wrangle it with a cable tangled from Bat Plane, but that doesn't work out well. The aliens, by now, have given away their plan--they need certain materials to build a larger dimensional transmitter, allowing them to launch a full-scale invasion of Earth.

Bill Finger's script treats all this completely seriously, which is what makes it work. Yes, it is silly and its pretty much impossible not to make fun of it to a degree. But the story never makes fun of itself. And when Batman uses the fact that the aliens can't speak Eskimo to deduce that the giant hand is a fake, it all makes perfect sense.

Lex Luthor turns out to be the mastermind behind it all. By faking a potential inter-dimensional invasion and stealing a lot of low-value ore along with valuable platinum, Lex hoped to make off with a fortune without anyone ever noticing.

This, by the way, is Luthor's first appearance in a story that does not feature Superman.

Batman tracks the fake aliens to Luthor's hideout and uses the hand to catch the mad scientist. This also allows the Caped Crusader to end the story with a really, really bad joke. But to be fair to Batman, I think most of us would have been tempted to make the same joke had we just used a fake giant alien hand to catch a super-criminal.


The video below will show you the entire story, Next week, we return to giant robots & giant monsters.

Cover Cavalcade

One of my favorite Rafael DeSoto cover paintings.

Friday's Favorite OTR

Dimension X: "Dwellers in Silence" 7/19/51

A faithful and touching adaptation of a story from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles.

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