Staffel of Beasts

G-8 and his Battle Aces: v6n4, September 1935.
 Author: Robert Hogan

After looking at some of Robert Hogan's other pulp works (Secret 6, Wu Fang), it's a joy to return to his longest lasting and best series: G-8. G-8 was an otherwise anonymous flying spy during the days of World War One and his Battle Aces were Bull Martin and Nippy Weston. Rounding out the group was the make-up whiz and cook extraordinaire but otherwise slow on the uptake servant Battle.

I don't know which came first, Hogan's ingenious plots or the covers, but one of the joys of the books that reprint the original covers is seeing the outlandish cover with it's purplish prose title and wondering just how Hogan is going to work it into the story. For unlike many pulps, the covers were illustrative and not merely symbolic if they applied at all. I wish I had a better scan of this one to share, but my scanner is out of whack. It features a tiger with a snarling but human looking face jumping from an enemy's plane onto presumably one piloted by G-8.

The storyline is long into getting to that point though. It mainly features G-8 going behind enemy lines investigating a mysterious hospital and why the Germans are requiring all cripples to report there for duty. Like many stories, the common people and the effects of war that makes enemies of brothers and the dehumanizing aspects of it are never too far from the surface. Hogan treats the average German and the various cripples with sympathy without losing the action and sense of high adventure. In the end, the story does deliver on the cover, but the title is misleading. While a tiger does make its appearance, one does not a staffel make.

Hogan got a lot of mileage out of G-8. While the lead is never given another name, he is humanized. He is capable but not superhuman so. Unlike other heroes, he needs help for his really convincing disguises. Each story often features at least one scene of the main characters sharing a meal or about to and joking and teasing each other. Against the horrors of War, we see them as normal people as well. While he is ostensibly an aviation hero in WWI, G-8 spends much of his adventures on the ground. Along with dogfights in the skies, there are often harrowing crossings back and forth through No Man's Land on the ground in various disguises, him infiltrating camps, secret labs, etc.  More often than not, the plots themselves are pure pulp science fiction featuring lost races, super weapons and devices, seeming supernatural plots. This one is more prosaic than most but still one that almost could only happen within the pulp pages. Under Hogan's pen, one wouldn't have been surprised to see a whole staffel of beasts with human faces though.

All in all, a fun read from beginning to end.

Who really wrote "The Octopus"

Went to the comic store yesterday, they were having a big sale on trades and miscellaneous items. I was actually looking to pick up a Spectrum3, a fantasy art magazine. Instead, found a spiral bound book titled Keys to Other Doors by John DeWalt, with a nice picture of the Spider taken from the interior art of one of his pulps. And, half off too.

The book is a handy collection of lists concerning pulp characters, mostly from the lines of Thrilling (known in comic circles as Standard, Better, Nedor, etc) and Popular (the Spider, G-8, Captain Satan), both original publications and reprints, as of the publishing of the book in 1995. Included is also publication histories of some of the work of Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the character Zorro. Over all, a very handy volume for easy reference.

Also nice, it lists the authors of the pulps as best can be determined. Many of the hero/character pulps were published under names such as Kenneth Robeson, Maxwell Grant, Brant House, Grant Stockbridge, etc. Robert Hogan may be about the only one to write a major character series, G-8 and his Battle Aces, under his own name.

When I reviewed the pulp The Octopus, I credited it to Norvell Page. The old reprint I have by Robert Weinberg lists him as the writer behind the house name of Randolph Craig. The most recent reprint of the story is in a nice volume of a couple of Spider tales credited to Norvell Page. Thus, I was surprised to see the list here to place the writers as being a duo named Edith and Eljer Jacobson. A quick web search revealed a famous psychoanalyst named Edith Jacobson but nothing of anyone named "Eljer" nor any collections of stories or books by them. I posted the question at the yahoo group Cover_Ups which focuses on the pulps and was pleased to get information directly from a couple of pulp scholars in short order.

Apparently, in researching the authorship of the pulp, the payment checks from the company were found concerning the story and it was signed by both the couple Edith and Eljer and Norvell Page. Edith and Eljer were a husband and wife team normally writing weird menace stories for the pulps. The school of thought seems to be that the Jacobsons wrote the original story and then it was re-tooled/re-written by Page to make the hero fit more of the Spider mold. This would explain why the story in places seems typical of Norvell Page's work and at times even more grotesque, and horrific, the prose more purple without quite the polish of his Spider work.

I'll have to be sure to keep a lookout for their name on other stories for comparison's sake in style. It's a shame that the most recent reprint doesn't credit their involvement implying Norvell Page was the sole author.