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.

Lord of the Jungle

Should come as no surprise that Dynamite has announced that they are also adding Tarzan to their list of characters with multiple covers by the usual suspects Alex Ross, Ryan Sook and others. The surprise is that it took them this long after their start of chronicling the adventures of John Carter and family of Mars. Like the first Mars book, the first eight of the Tarzan novels are reportedly public domain. The estate owns the trademark rights to the Tarzan name thus the name of the comic not reflecting the jungle lord's name anywhere.

The release is a little confusing as it seems to indicate that like most of Dynamite's books, it's going to be an origin tale, heavily relying on the story written for a medium other than comics. At least in this case it's Edgar Rice Burroughs' original "Tarzan of the Apes" tale and not a Kevin Smith movie treatment. However, since it is a modern comic book adaptation of a longer prose work, we can expect quite a bit of decompression with large chunks also left out.

Yet, the writer/adapter Arvid Nelson says:"Tarzan's DNA is in everything from super heroes to space epic. But I was surprised at how little I knew about him, because the many adaptations wander very far from the original character. His true story is so much deeper and more interesting -- that's we're trying to bring to life in Lord of the Jungle."

I don't really recall much in the terms of "super hero" or "space epic" in that first story. And, if the covers are any indication, I don't really picture Tarzan as wearing golden arm bands, bracers and necklaces. As the ultimate nature boy jungle man, I see him wearing little that's so purely ornamental, that he'd sooner wear leather made from a beast he killed and skinned.  Maybe as a necklace a leather strap with the tooth of a fierce beast he found hard to kill. Still, I'd rather just see them to move beyond the books and the origin story. I've got those to read and the comic isn't going to top them.  The real challenge is to take the character into the realm of comics, competing against the superheroes and find ways to make him work and stand out. He needs foes and stories that are equally larger than life with art that gets across the dynamism of the character. Frankly speaking, as far as the original stories go, while Tarzan is a great character and has that name recognition, Ki-Gor actually operated more in the super hero mold facing the likes of a race of intelligent gorillas bent on conquest. Reminds me, I do have a used paperback of "Tarzan Triumphant" which I've not read yet. So much to read, so little time.

My view of Tarzan though will always be the Neal Adams paperback covers. No one else seemed to capture power, energy and savagery all at once. I love John Buscema and Russ Heath but there Tarzans always seemed a little too clean, Hogarth's looked a little too much like a flayed model.
Even so, it will hard to be resist the price of the first issue. They promise a full first issue for $1, that's roughly a third of the price of most comics. On that alone, I may have to give up a diet coke that day and buy myself a comic.

Flash Gordon Makes Three!

Dynamite followed up the announcements of procuring The Shadow and The Spider with the announcement that Flash Gordon will soon be published by them as well. For those keeping track, the list of pulp or pulp-ish characters that Dynamite has the license to include the above plus Buck Rogers, The Phantom, Green Hornet, Lone Ranger, John Carter of Mars and Zorro. I had to check this morning to see if possibly there were any new announcements of Dick Tracy, Prince Valiant, Tarzan or Mandrake the Magician.

The press releases keep touting Dynamite's Project Superpowers as an example of the company's success, but when did the last issue of that come out? And, the few spin-offs it had have been cancelled. Likewise, the strong outing of Green Hornet titles has greatly diminished. Lone Ranger is ending. Buck Rogers has been gone for awhile. And, at least half of the titles feature strongly re-imagined versions of the characters. Green Hornet and the Bionic Man are based on film treatments. Their Zorro was largely an adaptation of Isabel Allende's novel. Couple that with their decompressed storytelling that takes several issues to deliver an origin and put the hero in costume. It's difficult to get too excited.

Of course Alex Ross is involved. He's obviously been a fan of Flash as he uses a Flash Gordon logo as part of his own logo (no trademark infringement there?). This announcement creates some bad blood between Dynamite and Arden who currently also publishes a Flash Gordon comic. Remember Dynamite pulling something similar with the Phantom? Appears that King Features is a little loose, they don't date exclusively. Of course, Arden didn't really impress me with their first issue as it set out to tell Flash's origin all over again, only with cartoony artwork and has a parachute pack just to seem to magically appear on his back when it's obvious he wasn't wearing one in preceding panels.

Hey, Dynamite. We know most of the origin and backstory already of Flash, Phantom, Bionic Man, etc. Don't just simply retread the same storyline or retcon the stories written by the creators only spread out over six issues. Give a little recap and jump in and give us the stories featuring the characters we love. Bring in new stuff, but not at the expense of the old. We want to believe that this comic featuring the hero is featuring the same hero that was in the pulps, serials, comic strips etc, not that it's just another version.

The art released has been interesting. The Doc Savage homage is definite with one. Once I saw that, I couldn't help but feel a John Carter vibe off another and a Star Wars vibe off a third. Of course, the pose in that one has been used in everything from Conan painting, movie posters for National Lampoon's Vacation, Army of Darkness, etc. Let you be the judge of that.

The Spider Too?

Dynamite released the news that they are also doing a comic featuring the pulp hero the Spider! What this means for Moonstone who publishes various illustrated Spider stories, one can only guess. Dynamite made news when they announced they were doing the Phantom which was still being published by Moonstone at the time. It took about a year, but eventually the Phantom did end up at Moonstone. However, DC doing comics with the Street & Smith characters didn't impact Moonstone's prose projects with the characters and Moonstone did a Green Hornet prose book at the same time Dynamite was doing the comic. As most of their work with the Spider could hardly be considered actual comics, it's possible that we'll see one publisher reprinting the original pulps, one doing new prose short-stories and another doing a comic.

Dynamite released a bit more news concerning the Spider comic which might give an inkling as to their approach with the Shadow. Starting with, the Spider is being redesigned by Alex Ross! It's not much of a redesign as it's basically tweaking his serial costume and it's not bad. And, it appears the Spider will be in the present day.

Neither of these is necessarily bad, but it does show yesterday's optimism to be a little misplaced.

I had hoped that maybe the company and creators might have learned something with Kirby Genesis where interviews are given to re-assure readers and fans that Kirby's designs would be left intact and effort would be made to keep to the spirit and characterization that he set forth with the characters. It seems strange to me that in today's market, that creators need to actually stress that when talking about a project, but it's the reality of the world we live in today. Where DC and other companies are trying so hard to get characters wrong and crowing about it as if that's a good thing, it's actually needs to be said that a book might be coming out with the characters looking and acting like they were envisioned by their creator.

Out of that content, these changes are not necessarily a bad thing though. In the comicbook mini-series Mystery Men written by David Liss, something that comes home is how much of today's world is like the world that the pulp heroes acted out of. I think much of what made the pulp crime-fighters like the Shadow and the Spider appealing, we have the same conditions today: racism and class inequality, the wealthy getting wealthier while the poor are getting poorer, wars and instability overseas, wealthy criminals getting off with slaps on the wrist. Handled correctly, I can easily see the likes of the Spider and the Shadow operating in the world of today. Doc Savage is the one that's harder to handle as so much of his world centered on super-science and unexplored places. Translated to today, a Doc Savage ongoing should be something akin to the television show Fringe coupled with Eureka and Warehouse 13 with clones, parallel worlds, insane experiments. But, the night avengers I can see as being just as relevant today as then (one of the things I liked about Nolan's Batman movies is that they would also be great Spider movies with hardly an adjustment, maybe even better).


The look as noted comes from the Spider's movie serials which is hardly how he looked in the pulps. The thing is, his look wasn't always consistent in the pulps either, sometimes he was just Wentworth for most of the story, with a few attempts at disguise as a crook or a simple mask. Sometimes he had a fright wig, fake fanged teeth and a hump! Sometimes he had the wig and teeth but no mention of a hump. The pulp covers were more consistent though a little more generic, but that's the way I often envisioned him, regardless of how he was described inside: black suit, cape, hat and mask and a gun in hand. However, this is a striking look that at least has precedent with the character and could serve the character well as a comicbook hero.

David Liss of Mystery Men (the Marvel comic, not the movie) has been slated as the writer. He is a good writer and captures the pulp era well in his few comic credits at Marvel. The Spider is even trickier to capture correctly by modern writers than the Shadow though. Both seem to have the problem that modern writers cannot get past the violence and the Spider is even moreso than the Shadow. But, Norvell Page wrote the character of Wentworth and the Spider as one of intense passion in everything he did. It was his passion of empathy for his fellow man, for the endangered innocents and the hatred of the crooks that cops could not touch through their cleverness, audacity or just ability at working the system that drove him to meet steel with steel at great personal risk. He operates in a world where the common gangsters are along the lines of Hitler and Stalin and can be opposed by one man if he's daring enough. There seems to be an inability of many to really grasp that, only seeing the extreme violence and portray the character as being one of questionable sanity. Once you start questioning his sanity, you really lose what the character is supposed to be about. The Spider takes great gambles with life on the line, but he's always a sane man in an insane situation. He's no more nuts than John McClane in the movie Die Hard.

I have to admit, I'm not enamored of the interior artwork presented. The computerized coloring is very evident and makes everything look a bit too pristine and artificial looking without communicating any sense of mood or atmosphere. I had forgotten to list that yesterday of among the things I tend to not like of Dynamite's books. The coloring often obliterates the line work. Which is fine if your colorist is actually a painter and painting the books, but the coloring is often obviously done on a computer by a colorist that doesn't seem to understand using coloring to communicate mood, story or even how to facilitate "reading" the illustrations and stories that are being printed over reading the comic via computer monitor. Colors are often too dark or too saturated, everything is lit as if it is being lit in a studio with harsh lights producing bright highlights and shadows on every object. Every surface has an obvious gradient to it. Backgrounds and moving objects all are blurred, every light produces lens flares. The end result is not making the art look more realistic than the old coloring methods but just unrealistic in different ways. If anything, the use of filters and gradients in efforts to make the artwork look more photo-realistic often has the opposite effect by highlighting the unrealistic nature of the artwork. It's like watching David Boreanaz acting opposite cartoon Stewie Griffin.

Meanwhile, there's no sense of movement in the panels presented. The characters all look like they are posing for photo stills from a movie set traced over in photoshop judging by the cold unvarying line widths. A comic doesn't have actual movement, a single panel often needs to communicate three bits of time simultaneously: suggest the movement a second before, the present, as well as the result of a second after. There's zero movement, mood or passion in the pages presented. It looks "realistic" but in a very staid, antiseptic way. The exact opposite of the effect you want to go for with characters like these. Again, look to Marvel's Mystery Men to see it being done right.

The Shadow at Dynamite

Dynamite (the publisher of Zorro, Lone Ranger, Green Hornet, Black Terror) has announced that it has acquired the rights to Street & Smith's pulp hero the Shadow. Dynamite as a company has a history of announcing things before they are finalized (The Fighting American, the Phantom), so here's hoping this one doesn't come back and bite them in the next few days.

No announcement of a set creative team but here's hoping it doesn't include Alex Ross (Other than covers of course) or Kevin Smith. The good news is the announcement talks about the history of the character but nothing about re-designs or working to make the character more palatable to today's audiences that generally pop up in their announcements and talks about classic characters. Maybe they learned something from DC's crash and burn with the pulp and Red Circle heroes. It's telling that when they talked about the Kirby heroes of Kirby's Genesis they talked about how they were keeping faithful to the designs and looks of the characters. So there's hope that they have learned something.

The biggest fear should probably be decompressed storytelling, first issues that don't have the hero in action at all. This has been part of Dynamite's general storytelling, long drawn out origin stories, writing for the trade market and not the monthly comicbook market. There should be action and mystery in the first issue.

Dynamite does have a good pool of writers and artists to draw from, but are any up to writing the character. Wagner from Green Hornet: Year One seems to have a grasp of the time period, and Francovilla has a good feel of mood and style that the title should call for. Maybe they could lure Gerard Jones and Eduardo Barreto back to comics and a character they did so well years ago.

Some wonderful preview images though.

Doc Savage Returns!

Just got word that come July, Altus Press will release New Doc Savage novels written by pulp historian and writer Will Murray! The first book will be titled "Desert Demons" and include Doc's full crew as well as Pat Savage.

With DC's First Wave comics coming to an end and their mishandling of the various pulp characters, it's good news to hear that new books will be coming out. Murray has written several Doc novels under the old Kenneth Robeson byline. Making use of un-used Lester Dent outlines and plots, he penned novels that were longer than the old pulp novels but easily fitting in stylistically with the various ghosts Dent employed to toil under the Kenneth Robeson bylines. He achieved something almost impossible with the novels. He managed to tell stories that fit in stylistically and spiritually with the original stories and keep the characters in character and on model without actually coming off as parody or pastiche of another man's characters and style.

Murray's White Eyes stands out as a master crook organizes an underworld army and storms Doc's 86th Floor headquarters hoping to take out the hero and his crew. His Forgotten Realm is a wonderful lost race novel that has Doc investigating a mysterious man called X-Man. The story is a bit reminiscent of Kuttner's much shorter Thunder Jim Wade adventure "Waters of Death".


DeVito will be the cover artist making use of photos of the late Steve Holland, model for Bama's and Larkin's Doc Savage covers for Bantam. Holland was also used as model for the Spider, Avenger, and many other paperback covers. He also starred as Flash Gordon in a short-lived tv series in the 1950s.

Several of the older Murray Doc novels are being released as audio books for those that like to listen vs reading.

Also on the docket, least last I heard, is a reprint of Marvel's excellent b/w Doc Savage comic series. Now, if someone could do a comic series in the spirit of that magazine, that managed to meet the demands of comics and visual storytelling with the spirit and characterization of the original characters and making each immediately recognizable from the pulp descriptions (in fact, that series is how I usually picture the characters when reading the comics).

The Spider copyrights?

So, I was bumming around the internet and found a reference that claimed that the first year of the Spider pulps were not renewed, but were starting with issue 13 by Argosy. This sounded a little fishy, so I checked some of my pulp reprints which happened to have a few from the first year. Now, those reprints do list a renewal of them being done in 1961.  Curious, I then checked one of my go-to resources for copyright research online. There, checking the renewal pages from the years 1960 and 1961 as well as their list of periodicals' first renewal dates, and they all bore out that the Spider was NOT renewed until the 1934 v4n1 issue (whereas the first Spider pulps were published in 1933). I wonder if the "v4n1" threw the reprinters into thinking those were the first issues? Or, is there a gap in the research? Someone's obviously making a mistake. Pity I don't have another trip to DC and the Library of Congress planned anytime soon.

Does have me interested in trying to read the Spiders reprinted so far in actual chronological order. I'm not even sure if I have read the first one or not.

However, my next review will either be the G-8 novel "The Beast Staffel" or the first two Avenger novels, all of which I've read in the last couple of weeks. Currently reading Secret Agent X adventure "The Curse of the Mandarin Fan" which has been highly enjoyable so far.