Pulp Power

Preaching From
The Pulp Pit

Pulp Power
by Neil McGinness
Abrams Books
ISBN: 9781419756160

Before I embark on this short but, very sweet review of a wonderful book given to me by a very special friend this Christmas, I should probably warn the more educated and literate readers among you of the thing on the cover which caused paroxysms of rage to manifest upon my golden aged, chiselled features because, yeah, it’s a problem. A subtitle to this glorious tome reads... “The Shadow, Doc Savage, And The Art Of The Street & Smith Universe.” Yeah, that’s right, there’s a hideous comma before the word ‘and’. Further rage was felt when I discovered that this wrongness... I’ll say it once, you never put a comma before the word AND under any circumstances, unless you are a complete idiot... has now been perpetrated upon an unsuspecting public more than once, under the guise of a completely nonsensical creation called ‘the Oxford comma’. And this is why Oxford should always be destined to lose their boat race every year because, frankly, the King’s English shouldn’t be abused in this manner. 

Further insult to injury continues in the interior passages of this book where the writer (or perhaps it’s a wrong headed editor) has failed to realise that the full stop always comes after a passage in parenthesis and not, by any means, before. If you use it before, that means the sentence has been finished and there’s no need to put the following text in brackets. Got it? So... you know... stop teaching young children and troubled, impressionable adults to get it wrong please.

That aside, what a great book Pulp Power is! I’ve been reading 1930s and 40s pulp novels (in paperback reprint form, I’m not well paid enough to be able to buy first editions) since the release in cinemas of the Doc Savage movie in 1975 (reviewed here) and I’ve always admired the no nonsense and efficient manner these great, fast paced stories, which enthrall the reader at every twist and turn, are written. Not so much The Shadow, written by Maxwell Grant (mostly by Walter Gibson under that Street and Smith pen name) but most assuredly the sheer economical energy found in the Doc Savage tales written by Kenneth Robeson (the majority penned by Lester Dent under that house pseudonym). So a book celebrating the artwork on those 1930s/40s pulp covers was definitely something I was looking forward to cracking open in this nice, coffee-table sized wonder.

But, it turns out, this book is so much more and, while it is filled with many beautiful pages of the cover artwork, not to mention the less familiar interior, monochrome illustrations for the original pulp editions... there’s also a fair amount of text which deals with not only those two mighty heroes mentioned above but also with the origins of publishing house Street and Smith from its 19th Century birth, under founders Francis Street and Francis Smith, before passing to one of their heirs and then to its later acquisition by Conde-Naste. Following a suitably humble forward by the great Frank Miller, this companionable compendium is split into six chapters and breaks down thusly...

Section 1. The Shadow
Although named after one of their more famous heroes and certainly covering some interesting facts and figures that I was unaware of about the character, this chapter is where the bulk of the text is laid down and also deals with the company and the people who worked for it... as well, of course, as featuring lots of artwork from the interiors and exteriors of the 30s and 40s editions of The Shadow, not to mention some rare artefacts from the extensive collection of one of the many Shadow collectors in this world. It covers the birth of the character on the radio and highlights what that character was as opposed to what he became when, by demand a year later, the first Shadow pulps were launched... and a very brief glance at a couple of films and theatrical serials based on the character, although the two 1950s attempts at a TV show are not mentioned. What I did find interesting was that Walter Gibson was very quickly established as being so prolific with the character on his typewriter (and you would have to be, at a penny a word) that Smith-Corona produced a standee, endorsement of him as his pen name Maxwell Grant, as a reciprocal promotional gimmick. It also tells of the eventual cancellation of both The Shadow and Doc Savage magazines in favour of a new, glossy breed of magazine venture which became known as the slicks, in direct contrast to the pulps (also named after the quality of the paper used)... specifically a teenage girls magazine called Mademoiselle at the end of the 1940s (which was still running until sometime in the last decade).

Section 2 - Doc Savage, tells a little of the story of Lester Dent’s tales although, I have to say, that the text in this section is not as illuminating or as detailed as the first section. Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of the cover paintings and interior illustrations rendered beautifully on the page. These pages also include lots of big pull quotes from Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, presumably from around the time that he was in the running to play the character in a new film series (what the heck happened to that, please?).

Section 3 - The Super Crew looks at the other heroes created for both the Street and Smith pulps and some of their comic counterparts... dealing with The Whisperer, The Skipper (aka Captain Fury), The Avenger (along with his team, Justice Inc) and the first metatextual comic book character, Supersnipe. It also deals with the original and later, very different incarnations of a character who I saw highlighted on book shops shelves a lot during the 1970s and 1980s... namely, Nick Carter. I didn’t realise just how different the various revised versions of this character were or, just how prolific the writers were... surpassing even the extremely lengthy runs of The Shadow and Doc Savage novels (both numbering in their hundreds) by many hundreds more.

Section 4 - Paperback Revolution looks at the era of the characters I know best, especially in terms of James Bama’s dynamic 1960s and 70s Doc Savage paperback reprint covers (who I’ve mentioned many times before in articles for this web site, was modelled on Steve Holland, who played Flash Gordon in a dire TV incarnation of the character in the 1950s). There are some nice paperback covers of The Shadow included too, by comic book legend Jim Steranko.

Section 5 - Comics Evolution looks at, not just the 1930s and 1940s incarnations of these characters in their comic book equivalents but also looks at their presence in comic books over the years, especially from stables like DC and Marvel. Indeed, there’s even an interview with the great comic artist Bill Sienkiewicz about his run on The Shadow. I did notice, however, that the truly excellent Doc Savage covers for the comic books put out by Millennium Press are strangely absent from the mix... hmm... perhaps there was some politicking going on.

Section 6 - A New Future is devoted to the continued life of some of these characters. I was surprised as a big follower of Doc Savage that, not only were writers such as Philip Jose Farmer and Will Murray, who have penned some great entries in the series in modern times, curiously absent here... but also that modern popular novelist James Patterson has already released a novel apiece for both The Shadow and Doc Savage. How that got by me without any kind of publicity is beyond my understanding and they’re definitely something I’m going to have to read but, I have to say, the blurb on Amazon for the Doc Savage story is pretty dire and off the point, it seems to me. I guess I’ll have to tread carefully when I’m reading this one. DC already tried modernising him in the comics in the 1980s and, frankly, it didn't work.

And that’s that. All the way through, the writer keeps reminding the audience of something they should probably already know... that characters like The Batman and Superman certainly owe more than just a passing debt to The Shadow and Doc Savage, repeatedly emphasising the easiest ‘borrowings’ to identify their common traits and stressing that these superhero characters would never have come into existence without the groundwork laid by these specific pulps. However, despite this and a few glaring omissions (why show things like the membership badge for the 1930s Shadow Fan Club without showing the similarly charming Doc Savage Club equivalent?), I’d have to say that Pulp Power is a wonderfully illuminating and terrific tome and highly recommended as both an object of beauty and as an education, especially to those readers unfamiliar with some of the stories. The fact that I learned a lot from it and am very familiar with the characters anyway, in various incarnations (most specifically Doc Savage) says a lot, I think. A really nice book and an absolute pleasure to spend some time between the pages with, I must say.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 16 - Voire Dire

 

 

If I Were A Richleau

Tales Of The Shadowmen
Volume 16 - Voire Dire
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 978-1612279107

For this very short look at the sixteenth volume in the Tales Of The Shadowmen collections, Voire Dire, I am once again about 16 months late in reviewing it. This is because of the December publication dates which leave me a year behind on these (I like to read them over the Christmas season). And, like all of them, this latest selection of short tales of famous fictional characters teaming up or crossing paths with one another is a bit of a hit and miss affair. For me, this year, it’s rather more of a miss but, well... we all have our favourites.

Of the fourteen stories that make up this year’s anthology, I will single out a few of which I was somewhat entertained by. The Peculiar Cats Of The Sea Of Dreams by Mathew Baugh is something which I would have found dull had it not been for my re-reading of the complete fiction of H. P. Lovecraft last year (reviewed here). I was quite up for it now, though, as a variety of characters are assisted by Randolph Carter in the dream kingdom in which he is known to be found... along with yet another incident with those powerful, battling cats which often come to the aid of their friend.

It’s often the case that I am most entertained by the stories about characters I know nothing of and I don’t know who the main protagonists from at least three sources in Nathan Cabaniss’ story Rage Of Terror are... so perhaps that’s why I enjoyed that one so much. I was, of course, familiar with the main antagonist of that story, as Fantômas makes his first (but by no means his last) appearance in this volume. It was also nice to spot a very young Kojak as a background character rookie cop (given his first lollipop in one of his two throw away appearances here) and also how the tale turned into an alternative origin story for Batman.

There’s a nice Rouletabbille tale by Martin Gately, which serves as a sequel/finale to some others which have appeared sporadically in the Tales Of The Shadowmen series and also a nice futuristic sequel story to one in another volume by Nigel Malcolm where, in a world modelled after Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner, The Nyctalope and Sexton Blake hack wall street and offer an exit from under their foes for the Frankenstein monster and its wife, the replicant Rachel from the aforementioned film. There’s even a nice moment in this tale where we find out the sad, future fate of the source of Doc Savage’s gold.

Captain Nemo appears in two tales... one by Travis Hiltz opposite characters such as Captain Haddock (from the TinTin graphic albums) and the Dread Pirate Roberts (from The Princess Bride?) and another, much more interesting one which kind of breaks the rules of appearing in a volume of these specific collections in that it only features one set of characters. I’m guessing that they needed a story to make up the space for this volume because its also a tale which has been published before in a different collection. This one, by Jean-Pierre Laigle purports to be (and of course it’s not) a formerly unpublished chapter from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and it involves the good captain telling one of his new guests of the time that the Nautilus was teleported by accident out of the ruins of Atlantis and into deep space... and how the Captain managed to get himself, his crew and his vessel back to the safety of the waters of Earth.

There’s an interesting story by Joseph Gibson where The Falcon from the 1940s, set in the 1960s and fully aware of his ‘fictional’ on screen exploits, teams up with his brother, among others, to take on Fantômas but, I was somewhat confused by the whole affair because, though it was somewhat entertaining, it’s also a fact that The Falcon’s older brother met his death in one of the earliest movies and his brother took over. What the George Sanders version is doing still alive to seek the assistance of the Tom Conway version (who was also Sanders brother in real life) is anybody’s guess.

Two more I’ll mention... both somewhat problematic for different reasons.

One of these is the very short story The Replacement by Xavier Mauméjean. In it, Bruce Wayne goes to a meeting with Doc Savage and The Shadow to seek their blessing at the start of his crime fighting career. On the way out from his meeting in the Empire State Building, he bumps into Britt Reid (The Green Hornet) and Kato, who then go up to the 86th Floor for, presumably, a similar meeting and, I have to say, I really didn’t understand the implications of some of the comments made at this meeting.

The last one I’ll specifically mention is The Stone of Solomon by David L. Vineyard. This is an exciting tale of John Silence teaming up with Dennis Wheatley’s Duc de Richleau character but, alas, the regular introduction to the story tips its hat that the version of Richleau present for the majority of the story is not who he seems. Since the reveal at the end of the short is very protracted and teased out, one wonders why the writer should have bothered when we know which character the story is supposed to be about in the tale and that, since he’s not mentoned once in the narrative until the end of the story, it’s obviously him masquerading as Richleau in this one.

And that’s about it for Tales Of The Shadowmen 16 - Voire Dire. More characters abound and cross paths... some of whom I know very little such as Darkman and Gordon Gekko (I’ve not seen their respective movies) and others I am more familiar with such as Arsene Lupin or Anne Rice’s vampire character Lestat. There’s also a very entertaining and thorough version of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Jane Greystoke (formerly Jane Porter before she married Tarzan) and even a couple of relatives of famous characters, such as the sons of Professor Challenger and Robur The Conquerer.

Actually, I guess I was about 50/50 with this volume which, I guess is not a bad batting average considering the number of writers and the considerable number of character appearances and references which are scattered among the tales. Once again, I’ll look forward to receiving what would have been the December 2020 edition this coming Christmas release and hopefully, fingers crossed, get around to sharing my thoughts with you on that one in about a year from now.

Tales Of The Shadowmen

The Shadows Know...

Tales Of The Shadowmen
Edited by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier

Okay, so it’s time I try to finally make right something which has been on my mind since not too long after I started this blog review site. Long term, regular readers will probably know of my two Christmas book rituals, which have been celebrated in reviews on this blog every year apart from the last two, when the two authors concerned didn’t write any new books in their respective series. I’m talking about my annual Christmas week tradition of reading first, the newest release from Patricia Cornwell of her latest Scarpetta story, followed by the latest Temperance Brennan mystery, as written by Kathy Reichs. However, there’s actually a third Christmas book reading ritual I have every year and, each year I put off reviewing it because I’m always exactly one book behind in the order of the releases and I always figure I’ll start off with an overview review of the current volumes to date. The reason being that the newest volume in this specific series, which is an annual short story collection called Tales Of The Shadowmen plus whatever the latest volume’s subtitle is, are released in December each year. Shipping being what it is, I always ask for the previous year’s volume the following Christmas. This is still the case and I need to break that cycle soon, I guess.

And this is my way of doing it... by getting the overview out of the way so I can start reviewing the individual volumes as I receive them each year without having to reintroduce the concept of this series in such a detailed way each time.

So, yeah, here we go.

 I discovered these books around about 11 or 12 years ago, I think it was. I’d heard the names of Jean-Marc Lofficier and his wife Randy before because they used to be associated with some Doctor Who guides I used to read back in the 1980s. I think they have handled a lot of different franchised and individual science-fiction and fantasy projects over the years and Black Coat Press, a French imprint with an English translated equivalent, is one of those projects.

So what, or who, are The Shadowmen... well the term originally derives as a collective name for various French characters from past literature who are revived by a number of various writers for these collections... except it’s more than that. So initially, we’re talking about famous characters, some of whom are more familiar to French readers than British ones I suspect... and we’re talking about The Black Coats, Fantomas, Judex, Arsene Lupin, Irma Vep, Josephine Balsamo, The Musketeers, various Jules Verne characters, The Nyctalope, Rouletabille and so on and so forth. However, these characters are, in the parlance of the youngsters of today, mashed up by the various contributing writers of these collections... not just with each other but with many other fictional characters from around the world. So you will have two or more characters from various completely different literature sources, often a lot of heroes or villains and their supporting characters, mixed together in brand new stories.

So yeah, add in to the mix characters like Batman, Sherlock Holmes, Madame Atomos, Harry Dickson, Sâr Dubnotal, Sexton Blake, Bulldog Drummond, Fu Manchu, The Green Hornet, The Shadow (an inspiration for young Bruce Wayne in one tale), Hercule Poirot, King Kong, Solomon Kane, John Carter, the Frankenstein Monster, Nosferatu, various Bond villains, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Babar the Elephant... the list goes on and on. They’re up to volume 15 now already (I just finished reading volume 14) and  there are many different heroes crossing over with each other. Heck, there's even a very short story where Barbarella abducts Captain Kirk in order to have sex with him, if memory serves.

And there’s quite a few writers involved in these... sometimes very famous ones such as Michael Moorcock or Kim Newman. Heck, Kim Newman’s Angels Of Music, which are a kind of 19th Century group of female characters operating as the ‘Charlies Angels’ of their time and run by Eric, The Phantom of The Opera as their Charlie figure, was originally instigated in the pages of a couple of stories from these collections (I believe Mr. Newman’s novel from a year or so ago, detailing their adventures, is an expansion and continuation of these original tales).

Now the possible disappointing thing about these, if you’re new to them, is that these characters don’t all link up in a single continuity like Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold-Newton family tree. So story consequences in one won’t often, unless it’s a continuation of a previous story, spill over into other stories involving some of the same characters. For the most part these are stand alone stories with the odd serialised story (some book length serials are published in sections in consecutive volumes) and mostly should be enjoyed for the flights of fancy they are. Many times a family tree connection is established by a writer but it won’t always hold true for another story. So, for instance, in volume 14 there is a Honey West adventure where she takes on the main arch nemesis from The Wild, Wild West. This makes sense within that tale (where she also meets Gene Roddenberry and Julius Schwartz) because in that particular continuity the writer establishes that both James West from The Wild, Wild West and, also, Herbert West (Lovecraft’s re-animator!) are descendants of hers. That lineage probably won’t be present in any future Honey West tales in the series however, unless it’s one written by the same writer. So, if you can forget the possibility of a bigger, over reaching continuity within the collections, you can get a lot of enjoyment out of them.

Of course, by their very nature, depending on whether the reader finds each writer’s style entertaining or not, all the volumes are a bit hit and miss in their overall make up but, for me at least, they have become more hit than miss as the series of volumes has grown over time.

Actually, a big part of the enjoyment of these things is that the various references and character identities are not always given away up front, from either the writers themselves or from the Lofficier’s, who usually write a brief intro to each story. So it does also become a game of reference spotting a lot of the time and sometimes the amount of references can be quite dense... I remember a story from one of the early volumes mixing up various Spaghetti Western characters with Shaw Brother’s style kung fu action references and it’s sometimes a bit difficult to spot all the different props and people in these tales. Luckily for anybody reading along and playing that kind of game with the text, there is usually a ‘cast list’ for each story given at the end of the book, listing the main characters, supporting characters and references plus the original creator they are credited too. Very useful if you miss out on any. So, for example, I may have realised that the Roger Delgado incarnation of The Master from Doctor Who was taking on Professor Quatermass in one story but, there was probably a lot more going on than at first met the eye and the post story ‘dramatis personae’ can sometimes help clear up the odd references that litter these tales.

So there you have it, you’ve probably got more of a flavour of this ongoing series of books now and, frankly, if you are a fan of period set fantasy, science fiction, horror or crime fiction (or preferably all of those genres) then you’ll probably find at least a few tales in each volume that you’ll have a good time with. I’ve never seen these books sold in even specialist shops like, for instance, Forbidden Planet but you can usually get them from places like Amazon and, of course, the Black Coat Press themselves at http://www.blackcoatpress.com, which is a website which really is worth checking out. If you click on their catalogue link you’ll find a list of intriguing titles (not just Tales Of The Shadow men) where you can get English translations of hitherto rare or out of print science fiction, horror, crime and fantasy which you just can’t get form anywhere else, plus a load of new stuff too. Their new releases are always a bit of an eye opener (and often of stuff I’ve never heard of) so just reading about their release schedule and existing back catalogue can be an education in itself, sometimes.

So there you have it... Tales Of The Shadowmen and Black Coat Press... something you may want to get into if interpenetrating, famous and not so famous characters are your thing. Definitely worth a recommendation and definitely worth a look. And now this ghost of a review is finally committed to reality (at least in the digital realm), I can maybe review Volume 15 with a clear conscience when I get around to reading it. Maybe even before Christmas this time.

Doc Savage - Empire of Doom

Bronze Shadows

Doc Savage - Empire of Doom
by Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson
Altus Press ISBN: 978-1618272850

Empire Of Doom is the 20th of the new Doc Savage novels written by Will Murray, under the original name that Lester Dent used when he wrote the bulk of the series in the 1930s and 40s - Kenneth Robeson. This one is also the second literary work (unless you count other media such as various comic books over the years) to feature both Dent’s Man Of Bronze and another famous pulp character, Walter Gibson’s The Shadow (who was written by him and various others under the name of Maxwell Grant).

Now, for the most part I love Murray’s forays into the mind of Dent in these novels and, as it happens, this one is no exception... however, I read the last one where he tried to team up these two characters (who are as tonally different as night and day) in his tale Doc Savage - The Sinister Shadow (which I reviewed here) and I was somewhat disappointed. I think that disappointment stemmed from the writer being closer to Gibson’s prose in that one than he was to Dent’s and, frankly, I never found Gibson’s The Shadow novels to be anything near as readable as Dent’s Doc Savage tales. So it was well done to Murray for effectively evoking the style of The Shadow in that but, yeah, it didn’t find it nearly as entertaining as the majority of his other Doc Savage works.

That being said, I have to say that Empire Of Doom reads like a full on ‘Kenneth Robeson does Doc Savage’ tale and... yeah, it’s excellent. The Shadow fits right in here and I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. The book starts off strongly with the theft of a Navy Destroyer during the Second World War by The Shadow’s arch enemy, Shiwan Khan (who was the villain of choice opposite Alec Baldwin’s version of The Shadow in the 1994 movie). He immediately uses it to launch two missiles into the skyscraper where he knows The Shadow’s Inner Sanctum to be. Midst all the confusion, as the local fire service try to combat the resultant blaze, some of Khan’s minions infiltrate The Shadow’s lair disguised as firefighters and make off with all of the terrible, fantastical weapons the dark avenger has confiscated from criminals over the years.

While Doc Savage tries to track down the stolen destroyer, one of his five companions, Long Tom, is taken over by Khan’s mind control and kidnapped, The Shadow also tries to track Khan’s progress and, inevitably, the two heroes join forces in an uneasy alliance against the army of darkness that this evil nemesis is recruiting.

And that’s about all I’m going to say regarding the specific content of the novel but, if the plot hook sounds a little familiar to longtime Doc Savage readers, it’s pretty much lifted from the 1938 Doc Savage novel, Fortress Of Solitude. That’s the one where Doc’s one and only arch enemy Johnny Sunlight, who would return for his second and final appearance in The Devil’s Ghenghis, manages to infiltrate Doc’s secret lair and abscond with all the weapons which are ‘too dangerous to remain in the hands of mankind’. So some readers should feel right at home with the opening of Empire Of Doom.

It’s a romp and a half and, though not all of Doc’s ‘Amazing Five’ are present (Johnny is off somewhere on an archaeological dig), it manages to pack in the rest of them quite credibly and it even has a very brief cameo, of sorts, by Doc’s famous cousin Pat Savage, although I would have liked to have seen more of her in here. It also has the ‘other’ Lamont Cranston and this book is helpful to those of us who are not big readers of The Shadow and who are somewhat hazy as to the nature of his secret identity. Is The Shadow Lamont Cranston or Kent Allard or both... or neither? Hard to say because the point seems to be that The Shadow can impersonate them whenever he wants to and, of course, he and ‘the real Lamont Cranston’ use this trick to confound and confuse Doc and his companions as the book goes on.

Other than that, the novel is pretty much business as usual... Murray knows how to spin a good, globe hopping yarn and this one is another real humdinger containing mind control, buckets of severed fingers, brain washed warriors with almost impervious armour and electrocution fingers, wingless planes, a black ray that brings a darkness over everything it touches and which kills electrical power and... oh yeah... there’s even a giant, mechanical robot that can crush you if you let it get near you. The book is full of the usual thrilling escapes, treachery and scenes of combat that are a hallmark of the Doc Savage adventures.

Also, a nice touch in this one, is that Murray finds a way to turn the weird trilling sound that Doc unconsciously makes in times of intense, penny dropping thought into a useful plot point towards the end of the novel. I won’t say too much about that but it comes in very useful when it seems that all the chips are down for our two heroes and death is creeping nearer.

Another thing which was interesting to me and which I didn’t realise before was that The Shadow has a couple of islands where he tries to rehabilitate certain criminals that he captures and it’s obviously a ‘common ground’ between him and Clark Savage Jr, who also has his own methods for the ‘cure’ and rehabilitation of the villains he captures. Now I believe Doc’s ‘Crime College’ was infiltrated on at least one occasion in the past (I think it might well have been the Doc novel The Annhilist from 1934) but this time it’s the turn of The Shadow to have his ‘rehabilitation scheme’ invaded and his subjects converted into loyal followers of his arch nemesis. It’s all good stuff and I appreciated the way Doc and The Shadow interacted with each other here, with Doc never really trusting the invisible avenger or Cranston completely through the tale. It’s even uncertain as to what Doc is going to do with The Shadow at the end of the book, once the super villain’s account has been settled. Although, of course, there’s the obvious ‘incident’ which takes place at the end of the novel which makes any speculation with regards to the fate of Cranston's sometime alias redundant.

Anyway, that’s me caught up for a bit in terms of Murray’s new and, hopefully, continuing adventures of the Man of Bronze. I’m hoping he’ll be releasing at least another one of these sometime this year but I’ve got no idea if or when that will be happening. I would also like to see him write the second of his solo Pat Savage adventures too, after his first one, Six Scarlet Scorpions, was so well handled (reviewed by me here). In the meantime I will have to content myself in saying that, if you’re a Doc Savage fan, then Empire Of Doom is another of Murray’s better entries into the series and you should definitely take a crack at this one. It’s a pretty exciting tale that Murray/Robeson spins here.

Justice Inc

Avenger's Ensemble

Justice Inc
Dynamite comics Trade Paperback reprint
ISBN: 1606906623

So here we have another modern comic strip "mash up" of 1930s pulp characters, this time teaming up Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Avenger. Now I read a DC series called First Wave a few years ago which teamed up these characters but, as I recall, I found it so awful a rendition of the original source material, being nothing near these fictional people in either spirit or tone, that I just flat out refused to bother to review it. This one is a little better but... it's still not great and, especially in terms of Clark Savage Jr, still not what I would call a credible portrayal of the character.

The Avenger was a relatively short lived character created by the Smith and Street magazine as another one to try and rival their two aforementioned heroes in popularity but, despite having a radio series too, the magazine folded after a few years. The published pseudonym for the writer of the series was Kenneth Robeson and the publishers promoted it as being written by the creator of the Doc Savage tales but, honestly, I don’t think Lester Dent, the main Doc storywriter and creative force behind the property, ever wrote any of The Avenger stories. The initial novel, Justice Inc, told of how the hero Richard Benson loses his wife and daughter in a villainous plot involving a plane crash. He survives death but the shock of his ordeal causes his skin to go grey and harden like clay. This means he can resculpt his features to resemble anyone and this master of disguise, along with his aides, sets up Justice Inc to avenge the victims of crime. That's pretty much all I can remember of that initial pulp story, to be honest, as it's been over twenty years since I read it.

This first story hit the newsstands in 1939 and it's in this year that the bulk of this new comic book is set. Starting off with their new, present day incarnation of The Man Of Bronze, a time travel element is introduced into the story to allow Doc to travel back to 1939 to meet himself before returning to the present, leaving us readers back in 1939 to continue the story. A story which, as it happens, is almost a retelling of the original Justice Inc version of The Avenger, but interpenetrated with Doc Savage and The Shadow, intersecting the timeline and with Doc's miraculous science being responsible for the clay faced resurrection of Richard Benson as The Avenger. After both Doc and The Shadow train Benson in how to take care of himself, the three go on to work together to try to foil the dastardly plans of The Shadow's villain The Voodoo Master, Doc Savage's two-time nemesis Johnny Sunlight and a mysterious third villain who is another variant on the Lamont Cranston personae... who is neither The Shadow nor, in this version and more in keeping with the later novels, a dupe identity for The Shadow.

And there you have it.

Except the writing isn't brilliant to be honest. I can't speak for The Avenger because I've only ever read the first novel but Doc is engaging in far too much chit chat here and even displaying a
sense of humour and self awareness that just wasn't part and parcel of Doc's almost emotionless, inpenetrable character. Similarly, The Shadow seems way too verbally aggressive and disrespectful of people for me to take him seriously as a credible version of the character. So this didn't sit well with me.

A good point about the comic is the artwork, which gives it a nice, painted, 1930s style pulp sensibility throughout... but the plot is fairly choppy (if this was a movie I'd say it was badly edited) and is a distraction to comprehension at certain points, I found. Furthermore, the geeky fanboy nods to the actual identities of the writers of the original books, like having characters with names like Ernst, Grant and Robeson, felt clumsily done and less enjoyable than a more sly, subtle set of references.

Another element which didn't sit well with me was the lack of the original companions of the characters. Sure, Monk Mayfair and Margo Lane are in there briefly but they don't seem too much like their original, pulp counterparts and, especially in the case of the Doc Savage novels, they were very much ensemble pieces with all of the subsidiary characters carrying a lot of weight and bearing on the feel of the stories. Here, they're pretty much ignored, it has to be said.

Adding insult to injury, they've included Doc's cousin Pat Savage, The Woman Of Bronze, in the story but she's hardly in it. The pretext that Margo Lane uses to recruit her into the escapades sets up a plot development which seems to me, unless I somehow missed it, to be completely superfluous to the main storyline and a complete loose end, not picked up later on in the narrative. Which is a) not so great writing and b) completely pointless and a waste of a great character who has always had a lot of potential. Even Lester Dent himself uses the character a little too sparingly and she only appeared in a small fraction of the more than 180 original Doc Savage novels, as if Dent himself failed to exploit the richness of the character. Modern Doc scribe Will Murray, who writes the latest incarnations of the novels, has probably done more to make use of Pat's personality for dramatic purposes... perhaps even more so than Dent did. Here, though, writer Michael Uslan kinda drops the ball with the character as far as I can see. Of course, on the plus side, with Pat hardly being in this volume, at least she isn't as badly presented as Doc is here. So that's something.

So could I recommend this volume to fans of the characters and of comics in general? Well certainly I would tell Doc fans to steer clear. It's not great, to be sure, although it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than DC’s First Wave interpretation of the character, it has to be said. If you’re a fan of comics in general... well the story is fairly simplistic, as you would expect it to be when dealing with 1930s pulp characters, but if you’re into rip roaring adventures with plenty of action then you might find this one an okay addition to your library. For anyone else, however, I'd say go back to 1970s Marvel for a better comics fix of Doc Savage and 1970s DC for a better comic book version of The Shadow. Much better versions, to be sure, and ultimately more satisfying... especially the black and white Marvel magazine style comic of Doc Savage... that run was an absolute masterpiece of a series.

Doc Savage - The Sinister Shadow

Lurks In The Hearts Of Bronze

Doc Savage - The Sinister Shadow
by Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)
ISBN: 978-1618271983

Warning: Very marginal spoilers here.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? 
The Shadow Knows!

Okay, so I’ve been a big admirer of both the original Doc Savage novels (since I started reading them in 1975, when the movie came out) and also Will Murray’s continuation novels, including his new batch under the collective term “The Wild Adventures Of Doc Savage”. All of the Wild Adventures are being reviewed here in the order of their release and, if you look them up in the Index By Title at the top right of this page (the book section is at the start of the index), you’ll see there are only a few of Murray’s magnificent tomes that I found wanting. Unfortunately, this is one of them but I don’t think that’s necessarily Murray’s fault in this case... it’s more my reaction to the literary style of Maxwell Grant. I’ll explain that a little more in a minute.

The Shadow started life as a radio show character to promote Street And Smith’s pulp magazines in 1930. He became more and more his own thing and it wasn’t long before people were asking the news stand sellers for magazines of pulps specifically based on the character. Eager to feed that market, the publishers commissioned Walter Gibson to start writing his literary adventures in The Shadow magazine and I understand he wrote the bulk of them, under the Street And Smith pen name of Maxwell Grant. Orson Welles played him on the radio, the magazine sales were astonishing and several films and serials, not to mention comics, were sold of the adventures of... The Shadow. In the UK he’s not so well known as a character but in the US he was a really big phenomenon in the 1930s. Characters like Batman may never have been invented if it wasn’t for The Shadow. I have a wonderful Batman comic somewhere from the seventies used as a reintroduction to the character, to usher in DCs revival of The Shadow in his own comic, which pretty much underscores that fact.

While not directly influenced stylistically by The Shadow, when a young Lester Dent was asked by Street And Smith to have a go at writing for the character, it was more as an audition for another character the publishers were thinking of bringing to life and, in terms of the newer character, Dent was given the job... three years after The Shadow had debuted on the radio and about two years after the character’s pulps commenced publication. That character was, of course, Doc Savage and Dent wrote the majority of the Doc Savage novels under the Street And Smith house name of Kenneth Robeson (although I don’t think he wrote any of The Avenger novels also written under that same publisher pen name... I may be wrong). Doc Savage was extremely popular, too, but he was always somewhat eclipsed by the popularity of The Shadow, I feel. There were no serials or even a movie about Doc until 1975 (although writer/director Shane Black is apparently trying hard to get a new version to the screen at some point, it would appear).

This novel is, as far as I know, the first full length novel to ‘team up’ the two characters... although the idea of Doc Savage and The Shadow getting together is not a new thing, of course. Various comic book companies over the years have tried it and... well the results are never that good and I’d have to say the same here, to a certain extent, although Murray certainly does a good job with The Shadow. Which is possibly why I didn’t like this one so much.

One of the major problems with crossing over these two characters is that they are so different in tone. The Shadow is the ‘ninja of noir’, lurking in the shadows, secreting himself and his investigations and ultimately dealing out leaden death to his enemies. Doc Savage on the other hand, while still possessing some hefty secrets, goes about his work openly as a global adventurer and he would never, knowingly, take away anyone’s life. Even the special guns he invented for his five aides are loaded with drums of ‘mercy bullets’, which explode on impact and just knock the person on the receiving end unconscious. So we have a very clear light versus dark tone on any stories that try to match up the heroes and... well that difference rarely comes across without one or the other of the characters being somewhat compromised, it seems to me and, in the case of Doc Savage’s side of the story, that’s exactly what happens in this novel, to some extent.

While I quite like the idea of The Shadow and loved some of his comics, film serials and radio shows, I’ve never really gotten on with his literary incarnation. And that’s not just because I can never pin a handle on who his real alter ego is... such as Kent Allard, Lamont Cranston or possibly, in this one, George Clarendon... in fact I believe the real identity of The Shadow became more obscured and involved over the decades. The real reason I’ve never gotten along with the character in the pulps is because he just seems so much less engaging and because he always seems so less well written than my constant literary companion, Doc Savage. The books just seem a bit ‘deadly dull’ in the way the action is expressed and... well, all I can say about that is that Murray must be doing a fine job here because... he’s really caught that deadly dull style and used it throughout the novel.

The majority of the action in The Sinister Shadow involves both The Shadow and his network of operatives. Doc Savage and co seem to have much less to do in this one and, consequently, the writing style for much of the novel, including many of the scenes involving Doc and his crew, seems to be very much in the style of the fictional Maxwell Grant than of the fictional Kenneth Robeson.

I don’t know enough about The Shadow to be able to really judge just how great a job Murray has done on him here but it did feel like it was very much in keeping with the few volumes I’ve read. There is a certain, overwrought sense of poetry to the prose as the writer finds ways to express The Shadow as he slips from sight and becomes ‘a living shadow’, so to speak. I do, however, think of myself a fair judge of Doc Savage and there are a few things I think were somewhat overlooked in this tome, regarding Doc and his crew, due to the bulk of the story feeling tailored to get as much time spent with The Shadow and his operators as possible.

For instance, early in the book, Doc and Monk accept a ‘lift’ from the police, rather than ride to the scene of the crime in something faster and more independent. I’m sure Doc wouldn’t have taken that offer in a normal situation without a hidden agenda because it leaves him somewhere where he’s possibly going to get involved with trouble, without any means of giving chase. So it seemed somehow wrong.

Secondly, the two heroes penetrate each other’s secrets, to a certain extent. The Shadow learns the location and existence of both the Hidalgo Trading Company vehicle hanger that Doc has set up and, even more damagingly, his Crime College, where he secretly cures criminals of their bad deeds, removes their memories, and teaches them an honest trade. For his part, Doc discovers and invades The Shadow’s Inner Sanctum but, frankly, there’s no way Doc would have let The Shadow escape him or fall into an unlikely alliance with him for the last act of the book. Doc would have never let him go, I’m sure. He would have chased him down to the ends of the earth to rehabilitate him, rather than tolerate a vigilante dealing out death in his city. So none of that really felt ‘true’ to me.

Lastly, Doc’s aide Ham is kidnapped early on in the book (along with Lamont Cranston) and is absent for quite a lot of it. Monk, however, doesn’t seem that unduly upset about this turn of developments through most of the adventure. Which seems kinda odd. The Monk Mayfair I know would have been going frantic throughout the whole of the story, I’m sure. Here it seems like it’s just business as usual for the apish chemist... so, again, it just didn’t ring true to the characters for me.

Other than this, though, the book is entertaining enough and full of action. It just seemed a little less interesting to me. Well done to Murray, though, for finally fooling me for a minute or two when Doc disguises himself as... ahem... a prominent character in the story. I usually spot these things a mile off and this is such an obvious thing to have happen here that I was amazed that I didn’t see that one coming. So that was good although, by the time in the novel this actually happens, I was kinda counting the pages until the end.

All in all, then, a remarkable facsimile in style and content to the original pulps of The Shadow and I think fans of the character will love this one. As a Doc Savage fan, however, I was less enamoured of Doc Savage - The Sinister Shadow, than I thought I would be... which is a shame but 'them’s the breaks', I guess. Still... looking forward to the wonderful Will Murray’s next Doc Savage adventure... which I already have sitting in the ‘to read’ pile.

In The Nick Of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials

Image Chapter

In The Nick Of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials
by William C. Cline 
McFarland Classics 
ISBN: 978-0786404711

I was really looking forward to reading this book when I initially bought it. I’d already read one pretty good book on serials, The Great Movie Serials: Their Sound And Fury (reviewed here), and, although I enjoyed it greatly, I felt it was lacking in some areas for a number of reasons, not least of which because the serials which are available to us now on home video systems were not readily available to the writers of that book in 1973. It was still a great read, however, and I was looking forward to reading what I thought would be a, relatively, modern take on the genre, looking at the components and key themes of these chapter plays in a more critical and enlightening manner.

However, what I didn’t realise is that this is actually a reprint of a book which was originally published in 1984, so although the writer would have possibly had a little more access to his subject matter, the book doesn’t really break down the form of the serial in a way which might have been more useful. To be fair, it does analyse aspects of the chapter plays to a certain degree, but I did find this one a hard and, in some ways, monotonous read for large sections of the book.

Now I fully comprehend that the author did, in fact, see pretty much all the serials he talks about and was in a unique position to do so for some of his time as a cinema programmer. This is not in question. However, I did find it hard to read that, according to the writer, serials were primarily aimed at the juvenile end of the market and that the reason they are neglected by many is because they are not sophisticated enoutgh to hold an adult audience. While I can tentatively object to the first accusation on the grounds that I’m pretty sure expensive serials like the Flash Gordon series were as much for adults as they were the children, I can certainly raise the issue that an adult appreciation of all art forms, whatever their primary market, is not without reward or interest and certainly I am able to enjoy the format, formulaic as it is, from a modern context as much as I can from pitching my viewing to a historical perspective... albeit with a different level of appreciation juxtaposed with the initial thrill of the action.

Nevertheless, the author may have got off to a bad start with me but at least he is passionate enough about the serials that he’s written at length about them. Like the earlier book I read on serials, In The Nick Of Time: Motion Picture Sound Serials eschews any real glances at the early silent film serials, instead choosing to pitch its tent firmly within the era of the talkies... although the way the subject is organised, it could have easily been used to cover both forms, I suspect.

My main problem with the book is, although it is split into dedicated chapters on specific tropes of the serials such as heroes, sidekicks, leading ladies, villains etc, it mostly reads like a series of lists strung together to pass for sentences. Extremelely detailed lists, granted, but also not very interesting in that they seem to be saying such stuff as “actor x played this kind of character in serial A, serial B and Serical C, totalling y number of serials for this company and z number of serials for that company”... before just moving onto the next person in another paragraph and repeating this kind of exercise throughout. It doesn’t breakdown the serial formula to specific story arc styles so much, or refer to the psychological reasoning that brought certain kinds of serials to our screens and, much as some of this book was quite informative, it’s really not the critical study of the form I have been searching for so far (although, if anybody knows of one, please either tweet me or pop it in the comments section at the bottom of the page).

To be fair to it, some of the sections are quite valuable taking this kind of approach, such as the one on score composers, but when I did find something as interesting as this, I found it not going into enough detail on the subject... possibly for a lack of research resources in this kind of area (the composers were rarely credited and most of the serials recycled music from here, there and everywhere, including cannibalising their own past successes... although the part about why the Spy Smasher music was like it was is something I found very interesting).

And there, I think, lies the nub of why I just didn’t get as much joy from this tome as I thought I would. For the casual reader who is interested in these things, there’s probably way more irrelevant detail than required but, for the reader who wants to explore these in more depth and gain more of an understanding of just what made these chapter plays tick in the way they did, there’s maybe not enough focus in those areas... it has to be said.

However, you have to respect the author of this work because he certainly knows his stuff and, for the time in which this was written, this was probably an essential addition for any cinephile’s shelf. By no means a hard recommend from me but, since there’s not exactly a glut of books on this unique form of cinematic entertainment, it’s possibly one you might want to welcome into your hands at some point, if you have no others on the subject. An honourable attempt with, I hasten to add, a very valuable and lengthy reference appendix detailing every sound serial shot and released in any given year from 1930 to 1956... so if you need an essential checklist of sound era serials, this book has it.