I remember waiting for the panel to start and the panelists were talking and somehow Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton Family comes up. I forget exactly if he remembered Phil and not Wold Newton or vice versa but I piped up with the missing piece.
It's not an interesting story and I had completely forgotten about it until I read the text pages at the back of Adventureman. Fraction mentions that Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life was a major influence on this story.
Could I have helped inspire Adventureman? He mentions he got the idea in 2008 so no I didn't.
I haven't read a great deal of Fraction's work just the Punisher War Journal and Immortal Iron Fist but in Immortal Iron Fist we get the highly pulp inspired Iron Fist before Danny Rand - Orson Randall. Randall is an Iron Fist who uses dual chi pistols.
The short lived Iron Fist TV series had some awesome footage of Orson Randall and had Danny learn the gun trick in the last episode. (Iron Fist was the Netflix Marvel series that got better in the second season)
So when I read a preview which described Adventureman I was on board. The plot of a lost Pulp hero and a new sucessor to their title sounded interesting.
Fraction's stuff was okay and I like the Dodson's Red One, which has a Russian spy becoming an American superhero.
Great team, great concept - what more can you want?
Well a great execution obviously. So how did the execution go?
In effect Adventureman#1 is two comics, literally and figuratively. Literally as it's a double sized issue and figuratively because there are two stories happening here.
The first story and the first half is a classic "pulp" adventure for Adventureman and his team of assistants facing down an attack by Baron Bizarre and his Nazi Hell pirates. Adventureman tells his team that it's bad, so bad they all have to drink his super serum (shades of Simon Spectre). They fight the Baron and his evil team of associates. (which is a great idea)
There are grand fights and aerial adventures that would make Sky Captain happy (in fact I was waiting for him to turn up)
Adventureman is defeated and Baron Bizarre has a gun pointed at his head. Then we see the text of the last few paragraphs of the pulp novel which ends with:
"It was at long last, time for Adventureman to journey into the greatest unknown. He closed his eyes."
And we're told The End
Which leads us to the second story where Claire is reading the story to her son Tommy. I'll talk some more about that shortly but I have agree with Tommy here, What the Butts? What type of ending is that?
Now this is a story where we are told that Claire is part of Adventureman's legacy but EVIL wins in this story. Claire is supposed to be in the same world as Adventureman. But with Adventureman and his team deafeated and likely killed who stops the villians from destroying everything? or taking over the city.
It's a great cliffhanger but we're told that this is the end. There were no more adventures. Claire suggests that sometimes things just stop but that wasn't a stop that was meant to be a finale - if they went "come back next month to see if Adventureman excapes" and the publisher went bust I'd say that's ok but that isn't an ending.
I can't think of too many pulp and pulp-inspired series that end with the death (real or implied) in such a fashion. The Lone Wolf by Mike Barry (Barry N. Malzberg), Adrian Chase The Vigilante series both ended with their deaths (Chase is one of the few comic characters who have not come back from the dead)
Let's move onto Claire's story. Claire finishes reading the book, her son Tommy goes off that it's a bad ending.
We discover that Claire wears hearing aids and she settles in for a quiet night reading. She then mentions that she also turns them off at the noisy weekly extended Connell family dinner with her father, her son and six sisters. The sisters all appear to be multiple races which confused me (the back matter explains that Claire is one of seven adopted sisters - but that wasn't clear from the story)
The six sisters are all high achievers leading eventful single lives (at least there is no indication that they have partners or children) Claire just lives a quiet life running her mother's bookstore. There is a hint that she lead a more active life but that appeared to before she had Tommy and is implied before she lost her hearing.
At the store, she finds a mysterious customer when a mysterious woman leaves an Adventureman concordance. The woman runs out the back and hops into the coolest car I've seen in some time, followed by a man made out of bugs. The woman has Adventureman's logo on the palm of her glove.
Claire shows Tommy who says that their house and Hi-Brow make a triangle - uh that's only two points, then he draws an Adventureman logo on the book on three points.
Claire sends Tommy to bed and turns off the lights and heads to bed and swarm of insects cover her house and appear to turn on a spotlight or something.
The endings are a weakness. There's nothing in Claire's world that suggests that Adventureman really existed before especially with the apocalytic ending to Adventureman's story. The fact that the Connells are a mixed race family tells me that the Nazis didn't win and create a racial purity law. So what was Baron Bizzare after?
Yet despite these issues I loved this story and I'm keen to see where issue 2 and beyond lead to.
