Is it Pulp?

"What is pulp?" a question heard around the various pulp groups.

Some argue that like Champagne – unless your fiction appeared in the pulp magazines it’s just not pulp fiction.  Some will give you a time frame, others may narrow it down by country. (I should know I’ve seen several of these arguments, heck I’ve been in some of these arguments)

I tend to take the definition coined by the New Pulp movement as my touchstone:

“PULP IS -fast-paced, plot-orientated storytelling of a linear nature with clearly defined, larger than life protagonists and antagonists and creative descriptions and clever use of turns of phrase, words, and other aspects of writing that add to the intensity and pacing of the story.”

Pulp defies genre – The Cape can be both a superhero story and pulp, The Lone Ranger a western and pulp.  Pulp defies medium – pulp storytelling can come from pulp magazines, radio, comic strips, comic books, movies, TV, and video games

 Now I want to look at two recent TV series that both have similar premises but one is pulp and the other is not.

The premise: A high school teacher abducts one of his female students, holds her captive and tries to make her his family before she escapes.  In both shows we see the fallout of this act as the women recover from their abductions and return to society.

The first series is Found (2023-2025) and the second is Girl Taken (2026) based on the novel Baby Doll by Hollie Overton.

Both series handle their premises differently:

In Found, we follow abductee Gaby Mosely twenty years after her abduction and escape, who now runs a private investigation firm with a team of investigators who have all been victims of abductions or affected by an abduction.  The agency specialises in finding missing persons who might fall through the cracks of the police or other larger agencies.  Through flashbacks we see Gaby’s time as an abductee and then in second season her return to society.  Mark Evans, the kidnapper known as Sir is presented as a genius, who seems to be able to enter wherever he wants whenever he wants and evades capture for 20 years until Gaby finds him and locks him in her basement utilising him like Hannibal Lector assisting in the solving of her missing persons cases.

Gaby Mosely and her team are larger than life, challenging and supporting the system. Mark Evans/Sir is the bogeyman and we get the feeling that he could escape Gaby’s chains whenever he wants but his captivity gives him what he wants to be close to Gaby. Mosely and Associates are licenced private investigators but are often referred to as vigilantes.  In many ways they remind me of The Avenger and his team – Justice Inc. Like Justice Inc. all had been affected by crime and they bring special skills to the team. They solve the cases outside the norm for the police.  The kidnappers are rarely larger than life but Sir’s presence looms so large over the series especially after his escape at the end of season 1 that we don’t need other master villains.

 

In Girl Taken, we follow the escapee Lily through her abduction, sexual assaults, birth of a child and the immediate aftermath of her abduction and attempts to reintegrate into her old life.  The kidnapper Rick Hansen is presented as a smart man but is quickly captured after the escape.

Girl Taken on the other hand is grimly mundane, there are no special investigators, no master strokes of deduction. Lily is missing for five years, while her family and the police have no leads until she escapes. Rick Hansen is no bogeyman, he is just an ordinary kidnapper, holding his victim for his sexual gratification.

Girl Taken is a mundane crime story that could be ripped from the headlines.  Found takes that mundane premise and makes it larger than life adding the element of a super criminal and the almost extra-legal private investigation firm that elevates that show into pulp.  In fact, I recommend checking Found out.

Shi: Before the Way of the Warrior

 

Shi: Before the Way of the Warrior

Shi: Senryaku, Shi: Year of the Dragon.

We start with 2 miniseries that tell stories of Ana’s adventures before she became Shi.

Senryaku was a three part miniseries with 36 short stories from Ana’s youth and training illustrating the 36 stratagems of the art of war.  The stories bop around in time, so you get a story set when Ana is 6, to one at age 17, then 13, followed by a story with no date clues.  These are paired with gorgeous artworks of adult Shi in action by some of the best artists in the business.

I had the original 1990s three issue comic but I picked up the 2023 Omnibus which separates the text from the art and it looks amazing.  It’s a cool experiment and worth reading as an insight into Shi and to look at the beautiful artwork (the Omnibus is worth getting for the virgin art as well as some extra artwork)  When I bough the omnibus, the guy at the comic store warned me that it was not a comic story and asked several times if I was sure.  I explained that I had the original editions so I knew what I was getting.

 

Year of the Dragon is an actual three issue comic set in 1988.  It retells a couple of the stories from Senryaku but makes changes.  Ana is 18 years old and Tucci is wearing some of his influences on his sleeve with much of the artwork inspired by Patrick Nagel. The story features an 18 year old Ana going out into the world and hanging with the wrong people and not following either the Christian faith or the Way of the Warrior.  It’s a good prequel that shows Ana rejecting the call before embracing her destiny.

Dimension Hopping 

Next up we have what I like to call “the dimension hopping saga” of Cyblade/Shi & Shi/Cyblade, Funnytime Features, Lethargic Comics, Lethargic Lad, Gen 13, Shattered Image and Weirdsville.  (these all take place after Razor Annual #1/ Razor Shi Special)

It starts in Cyblade/Shi with Ana encountering Cyblade of Cyberforce in a cross company crossover with Witchblade making her first appearance.  It’s a slightly more fantastic story than the relatively grounded Way of the Warrior, with robot shock troopers and ends in a cliffhanger of an explosion.

In Shi/Cyblade, we discover that the explosion seems to have sent the two women into another dimension where they encounter a large number of independent comic book characters.  Toto we are not in Kansas anymore, and it’s a completely bonkers story -  to the point I wonder what the planning meetings between the two publishers was like.

Both Funnytime Features and Lethargic Lad had part one of their story run as a back up feature in Shi Way of the Warrior (6 & 7 respectively) and part 2 in their own title.  Both have Shi interacting with wacky characters in their own worlds.

Shi appears in a brief cameo in Gen 13 #13C, helping Grunge fight off a team of bad girls. Another cameo in Shattered Image #4 telling members of Cyberforce that they could join her as an independent, and that she had met their teammate Cyblade.

Our final cameo, has Shi appear in the main character’s cupboard in Weirdsville #5.

Most of these are fun stories but don’t really add anything much to Shi mythos as a whole and can be skipped. 

Grifter/Shi & Horseman

And Shi is back in reality, teaming up with Grifter from WildC.A.T.S to stop an attack on America on the 50^th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. It’s a good action piece that pairs Ana with a man who worked with her father. 

Horseman follows directly on from the events of Grifter/Shi and has Ana meeting an immortal Korean horseman.  The Horseman would later appear in his own series. 

One thing I love is the fact that the independent smaller publishers all seem to be happy to allow the crossovers between their series as well as giving each other a forum to debut new characters.  The Horseman debuted in Shi, Shi debuted in Razor and Razor in Sade.

 Both set up Ana's career as Shi before Way of the Warrior #1.

Painkiller Jane (2005) TV movie

 

Starring Emanuelle Vaugier, Eric Dane, Richard Roundtree, Callum Keith Rennie and Tate Donovan. Directed by Sanford Bookstaver.

(How awesome is the poster above?  Nothing like that happens in the film)

I’ve been on a bit of an Event Comics/Painkiller Jane kick of late and I discovered there were 2 attempts to make a Painkiller Jane show.  This 2005 TV movie/pilot and a 2007 one season TV series.

I’ve said before that in a sense adaptations almost need to be reviewed at least twice, once in comparison to the source materials and once as itself.

In a lot of ways this puts me in mind of the 1944 Captain America serial – we have a guy called Captain America in a reasonable version of the suit and that’s about all that came across from the comics. This adaptation has a woman named Jane who heals quickly and that seems to be all that came over.

In the comics Jane Vasco was an undercover cop who had her cover blown and pumped full of untested synthetic drugs. She goes into a two year coma and wakes up with rapid healing powers.  Her former partner now gives her cases that sit outside the law.  In earlier Adventures she is covered in bandages, which is a cool look. 

Here our heroine is Jane Browning, an Army Captain in the Painkiller Unit. The unit is in Chechnya shutting down what they think is a drug lab.  The team start to bleed from their eyes (never a good thing) and men in biohazard suits shoot them.  Jane is the only survivor and she has a heightened metabolism and heals quickly.  She also has enhanced intelligence but doesn’t seem to come into play as much. 

Colonel Watts (Roundtree) tells Jane that they stumbled onto the lab of evil scientist and bioweapons manufacturer, Peter Erfan, a man so mysterious that they only have one photo of him at age 6 in an orphanage. 

Intel suggested that our scientist is trying to enhance human beings but until now it only burns subjects out eventually killing them. Until Jane that is.  The Secretary of Defence, Donnie Mitchell, wants her to be studied.

Jane is about be put into protective custody in Alaska, but determined to find Erfan and with a little encouragement from Dr Knight, she escapes custody.  Where she basically kidnaps Nick Pierce, a thief forcing him to outrun the military on his motorcycle.

Jane is shot so Nick takes her back to his house, where she recovers from her wound, her body forcibly ejecting the bullet.  Jane meets the rest of Nick’s crew - Blue, a medic and Squeak, young man who know every tunnel in the city.

There’s some skullduggery, Jane discovers that the man she thinks is Dr Knight is not Dr Knight and he tells her he is Captain Lucas Insley, military intelligence investigating Colonel Watts, believing that Watts has created Irfan as a cover for Watt’s own experiments.

Not knowing who to trust Jane brings in her sister (who does not appear in the comics) and calls on Nick and his crew.

We discover who the real Peter Erfan is, and he is able to recreate the virus that created Jane.  I won’t say who it is in case you want to watch the movie yourself on Youtube.

The story ends with Jane reported dead and given a new identity by Watts looking closer to her comic book counterpart.  We aren’t told the new identity but I like to think it is Jane Vasco.

Erfan believed to be dead, but a final coda shows him alive.

I presume had this gone to series, Watts would have given her missions to chase Erfans and battle his enhanced soldiers, likely working with Nick and his crew.

As an adaptation, this isn’t particularly faithful but does a reasonable job with the action on a TV movie budget.  It’s an ok set up, I suspect the series may have been closer to the comics or at least tried.  I liked Eric Dane’s Nick Pierce, I would have been on board for more of him, a roguish thief who helps Jane because it is the right thing.

Now this has me curious to see what was changed for the short lived series 2 years later.

I presume that this led to the 2006 Painkiller Jane comic miniseries from Dynamite comics.

 

Red Sonja (2025) Directed by MJ Bassett starring Matilda Lutz, Wallis Day and Robert Sheehan.

I saw this in the cinema – as luck would have it, I had the day off and I randomly looked up the third cinema near me and they were showing it. The other two weren’t. Pure luck.

 So off I go and I saw this movie in a theatre with six other people – all men. 

There’s thing that some movies need to reviewed multiple times.  Some demand it.  Any adaptation/remake/reimagining by its nature demands that it be compared to other iterations.  Does the movie work as its own thing? Where and how it sits in the participant’s filmography.

Red Sonja is a quasi-adaption of a 1934 Robert E. Howard story “Shadow of the Vulture” starring Red Sonya – not a spelling error – set in the 16th century. In turn that story was retold in the Hyborian age as a Conan comic tale by Roy Thomas and art by Barry Windsor-Smith in 1973. Sonja was successful and soon made the leap to her own series and novels.

In 1985, Brigitte Neilson starred in a movie featuring definitely not Conan played by Arnold Schwartezegger. 

Red Sonja appeared in one episode of the 1998 Conan TV series starring Rolf Moeller.

This latest version went through a rogue’s gallery of actresses and directors before we got this movie.

MJ Bassett had previously adapted Howard’s Solomon Kane in a 2009 movie of the same name. 

Now I haven’t read any of the Sonja comics or books or seen the earlier movie (working through the Rolf Moeller TV series right now) so I had to judge this movie as its own thing.

And I enjoyed it.  Lutz did a good job – her Sonja is very physical and has some good fight scenes, the make up, special effects and CGI were quite good.  There’s a baboon man who looks amazing and the CGI cyclops looks great. 

We got the chain mail bikini with a sly wink and a nod (interestingly in the original stories Sonja did not wear the bikini – according to legend Esteban Maroto sent Marvel an unsolicited sketch with the bikini and Roy Thomas loved it so they adopted it for the comics and hired Maroto to draw the comics.)

The story isn’t something ground-breaking and super-innovative.  Sonja’s village is attacked when she is a child, she grows up, ends up as a gladiator, leads a rebellion and fights the evil emperor.  We cover many of the beats that I know about Sonja so I wasn’t mad. 

I’m not going to lie and say it’s a perfect movie.  I have some issues, Sonja seems to pick up the fighting as a gladiator very quickly and gains the respect of her fellow prisoners almost instantly and similarly after the escape Sonja and her fellow gladiators form a guerilla Robin Hood group of freedom fighters and the climatic fight with the bad guys seems like it comes only a couple of days after their escape and a character who left earlier to return to his kingdom rides in with the cavalry.  Neither of these developments felt earnt by the heroine and that there needed to be a montage or something to better show me that there had been a passage of time – hell sod showing me TELL ME that time had past a line “the rebels have been hiding in the forest for 6 months” would have helped.

Look, it’s a nice B movie throw back to sword and sorcery movies or Xena Warrior Princess.  It didn’t reinvent the wheel and told me a story I quite enjoyed.

Shi Remixing the Warrior

 

Tomoe, Shiseiji, Reikishi, the Illustrated Warrior (and a movie that never was

One of the things I mentioned in my look at Way  of the Warrior (WOTW) was how Tucci and the Crusade team grew more confident in their story telling.  At the time issues 5 -8 of Way of the Warrior were being published, Crusade released the crossover /parallel story of Tomoe is told in issues 0 to 3 with Shi #6 and Tomoe #1 being the same story with the issue being published with the two covers Tomoe #1 and Shi #6 and the parallel stories converging again with Shi Vs Tomoe one shot that sits between issues 8 and 9 of Shi WOTW.

Tomoe then encounters Witchblade again between issues 9 and 10 of WOTW.

Do you need to read the Tomoe comics to understand what is happening in WOTW?  I’d say except for Shi Vs Tomoe you don’t need to read those comics to follow the story but they enrich your reading of those comics telling us what Tomoe is doing.

****

Shiseiji is where we see the Manga influence appear and we get a story told in Manga style (read back to front) with Manga influenced art that explores the unnamed illegitimate son of Ana’s nemesis Arashi hunting Shi and discovering that she is Ana. The battle between him and Shi does not end well for the bastard.  Even unluckier is the meeting with Tomoe.

The story opens with the events of issue 1 of WotW and finishes between issues 9 and 10. I liked the side story that tells us what happened in between issues.

(The Manga influence also appeared in Shi ½ from Wizard Entertainment -also known as Manga Shi ½ and the Manga Shi 2000 miniseries.  More on these later.)

****

Rekishi is a two issue retelling/summary of Way of the Warrior from the point of view of Detective Joe LaBianca which nicely summarises Way of the Warrior   . 

****

Shi: Illustrated Warrior was published in 2002, a prose retelling of Way of the Warrior by Caig Shaw Gardner.  I initially wondered if it was intended to be the novelisation of the Shi film that never happened. After some research it turns out that the novelisation was just the Way of Warrior comic and independent of the movie – but I presume that there may have been some plans for synergy with the novel and the movie coming out at the same or similar times.

The art is beautiful and Gardner stays fairly close to the events of both Way of the Warrior and Tomoe.  One change is that Gardner inconsistently swaps the races of Ana’s parents so her father is the Caucasian American and her mother is Japanese.  Her mother is still a devout Catholic but it makes for an odd read with the clash of cultures seemingly reduced by the change and undercut by the seeming forgetting of which parent is which race.

 

*****

Shi: The Motion Picture  – it’s unclear what happened to the movie – Franchise Pictures and Crusade Entertainment released a Cannes Film Festival Preview edition in 1999.

Tia Carrere was both producing (with her husband) and starring in the film.  I could speculate as Carrere and her husband divorced in 2000, Franchise had released Battlefield Earth which had lost a lot of money and lead to a lawsuit against the company at that time. (Franchise’s model is interesting – take passion projects stuck in studio limbo, negotiate reduced salaries for the stars to lower costs and get the film made. There were successes The Art of War starring Wesley Snipes, The Whole Nine Yards starring Bruce Willis)

The Cannes preview gives some script pages and some story boards – the movie seems to be adding new characters and costumes as well as keeping the overall battle between Shi and Arashi.

In interviews I’ve seen Billy Tucci say that Ming Na Wen was at least in talks for Tomoe and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa for Arashi.  More’s the pity that we never got this movie.

Shi Way of the Warrior 1-12 (Crusade Comics)

 

So this is the tale that William Tucci wanted to tell.  The appearance in Razor Annual was just to get the character out there but Shi really came to life in this maxi-series.

It’s here that we meet Ana Ishikawa and her quest to find the man who killed her father and brother – Arashi. 

After the wrapping up of this story, the saga of Shi took a few different directions but this war against the Yakuza story forms the heart of Shi’s story. More than the physical battle, there is a moral battle, Ana is raised Catholic and trained as a Sohei with warring philosophies about violence, an internal battle, the battle between duty and honour. 

Part of the pleasure of this reread is to see the growth of Billy Tucci as both a writer and artist over the years.

The story opens with Shi killing the attackers of a policewoman and witnessing Arashi murder a homeless man. 

The police are shown to be competent, with Peter Denyse and his partner Joe Labianca investigating these Shi killings in New York.  Bodies are piling up and Tucci introduces Shi’s frenemy Tomoe Gozan, in flashback in issue #4 and in the present in #5.

Tomoe is from a rival ninja clan and is hired by Arashi to take out Shi and this takes up a portion of the plot as the pair battle not realising their secret identities.  Interestingly, Tucci then runs a four issue Tomoe miniseries that runs parallel to the story in Shi with Shi #6 also serving as Tomoe #1  and a Shi vs Tomoe special taking place between Shi Issues #8 and #9 and this is part of the growth of Tucci as a writer in that reading just Shi makes sense but adding in the Tomoe material enriches what happens in the story (having said that #9 does feel like a cheat as we are told of the battle between the two women, which we see in Shi vs Tomoe).

The contrast between the two women is highlighted in issues #9-#10 where Tomoe has adopted the role of Shi and how her methodology differs to her friend.

That battle between duty and honour, goes beyond Shi and her struggle between being a Sohei and a Christian, we see it with Tomoe and her reaction to fighting her friend, Peter Denyse’s conflict between the law and justice, even Arashi has his own inner battle.  This last one leads to an unexpected conclusion.

Shi: Way of the Warrior is more than comic about a hot chick killing people and that’s why it is rated so highly in many list of Bad Girl Comics.  Interestingly in an interview in Wizard #56, Tucci says that he doesn’t see her as part of the bad girl movement -  I see where he comes from.  But I think that Shi is part of that movement, Shi utilises the same inspirations as other bad girls but the difference comes from the fact that Tucci had a story to tell, not creating a comic to chase the trend, these characters like Shi, like Lady Death have survived and grown because they were their own thing they didn’t want to be the next Wonder Woman, the next Wolverine they wanted to be the first Shi and blaze a trail.  That legacy can be seen 30 years later with new Shi comics comic out today.  All because of this 12 issue maxi series.

Apparat comics by Warren Ellis.

 A while back I reviewed Simon Spectre by Warren Ellis which I quite enjoyed. In that review I said that I’d chase down the other three books in the series.

The basic premise is Warren Ellis had a though experiment what if the various genres of pulps directly transferred to comics without the influence of super-heroes. 

Simon Spectre was the hero pulp and I liked it.

Let’s look at the other three experiments and if they lived up to that first comic.

Firstly there is no links between the books these are four one shots with a self contained story.

Angel Stomp Future (art by Juan Jose Rip)

What if Pulp Sci Fi continued.. Ellis rightly points out that it did in magazines like Galaxy, Analog, Interzone, etc but he felt that the wild imagination had gone along with the wild covers that screamed PICK ME UP!  

To me, Angel Stomp Future didn’t work.  We follow Dr Angel Antimony in this weird dystopian future – Lord knows how far in the future where cyber implants and biohacking are passe – children do amputations and surgery in first grade. 

And there is this idea of memes not genes.  There’s a lot of talking about concepts but not much story.

We open with a pregnant Dr Antimony, pregnant with an angel baby complete with wings.  How she got pregnant no idea.  The pregnant woman steps in front of a train and a not pregnant Dr Antimony steps out of the train.. and it gets odder from there.

Ryp’s artwork is fantastic but the story doesn’t work for me.

Frank Ironwine (art by Carla Speed McNeil)

What if hard-boiled detective/Crime stories continued…Another one that didn’t go away – I can find crime fiction in almost every book store.  Hard Case crime has made a whole line of books reprinting classic crime fiction, lost works by masters of the genre and given new works a chance.  TV shows like the Law and Order Franchise, FBI franchise, NCIS, The Rookie and more all play in that crime/detective genre with various levels of hard boiled crime. -

Ellis seems to have an issue with CSI elevating the forensic detective to solving crime with interacting with people – dissecting farts he calls it .

Frank Ironwine is an old school cop, in many ways he reminds me of Det John Munch or Dannie Reagan.  Ironwine is the hard drinking detective who talks to people, knows the history of the city and the patterns of crime.  There is nothing new under the sun. 

Coming off a three day bender, Ironwine is woken from his slumber in a dumpster by his new partner De Groot to solve a murder.

Of the three books, I liked this one the best – not as much as Simon Spectre but a solid second place.

Quit City (art by Laurenn McCubbin)

What if the aviator hero continued…I agree with Ellis that airflight has become mundane and there are significantly less stories about aviator heroes but there are still some out there Top Gun (1984), the Iron Eagle series (4 movies 1986-1995), Airwolf (1984-1987), Blue Thunder (1983 movie, 1984 TV Series).  Science fiction still brings us the pilot as space adventurer – tell me that Han Solo isn’t an aviation hero.

The success of Top Gun Maverick (2022) and forthcoming sequels would suggest the genre isn’t dead.

Ellis was not doing anything to really bring the genre back with this one. The heroine Emma Pierson returns home after quitting Aeropiratika, a Blackhawk style group that were told has cool aviator adventures but we don’t see that.  Emma is introduced landing her plane in her home town and not returning to it instead talking to old friends and confronting the ghost of an old boyfriend.  A deconstruction of the aviator hero – “counterintuitive” Ellis calls it in the postscript essay.  Ellis tells us that the hero abandons the mission and verse into the postmodern action story. Except Quit City doesn’t have any action.

I can think of two series that give us the aviator hero forced to retire from flying and does something else.

JAG (1995-2005) was described as Top Gun meets A Few Good Men as the lead hero Harmon Rabb Jnr (played the David James Elliot) is a former Naval Aviator forced out of combat flying because he suffers from night blindness.  Harm then became a JAG lawyer but is still able to fly as part of his investigations.

In the Scarecrow series by Matthew Reilly (1998 to 2012 and a cameo or two in other Reilly works), Shane Schofield is a former Marine aviator shot down, captured and tortured.  His eyes were injured during the torture and he is no longer able to fly, instead he retrains to lead a Marine Recon Team.  Like Harm he still has the ability to fly as part of his adventures.

Both these were exciting stories – I don’t know what Quit City is.

I didn't enjoy McCubbins' work in the Sable & Fortune miniseries more because the stark contrast it was to original artist's work.  Here I liked it better but wished it was in a story I liked better.

Final Thoughts

Hands down Simon Spectre is the best of the four stories with Frank Ironwine my second favourite.  It’s not necessarily that the stories are bad but I think that Ellis and I are coming from this thought experiment from different angles and frames of reference.  In 2025, I have the benefit of over 20 years of stories that appeared after these comics were published in 2004 to round out my perspective including the new pulp movement. 

Ellis’ distain for CSI science makes more sense as there were three CSI series on the air in 2004- the recent revival series CSI: Vegas was cancelled after three seasons in 2024.    Forensics do play a role in modern detective fiction but they are not the be all and end all. There is limited forensics in the Benoit Blanc movies or Rian Johnson’s other project Poker Face.

I think Ellis takes his personal piloting experience too seriously (he got to hold the controls for a few minutes and he is the last great figure in aviation history).  I gave two examples of how one might play with the pulp aviator and there are more set the series in a remote community, Alaska, outback Australia, the middle of the Gobi desert. 

The aviator becomes a heroic figure as they are the lifeline to these communities – the Australian comic strip Airhawk and the Flying Doctors (1959- 1986 and a 1981 TV movie) operated on such a premise.

It may simply be that I cannot see what Ellis was trying to do or that Ellis missed the mark.  There were no further adventures in these worlds. 

Ellis would print the one shots Crecy (historical fiction), Aetheric Mechanics (steampunk/Sherlock Holmes), Frankenstein’s Womb (Mary Shelley meeting a monster at Castle Frankenstein) and the sixteen issue series Doktor Sleepless (a mad scientist tale) under the Apparat imprint.

Razor Shi

 

For the longest time I thought that there were two Razor Shi crossovers – Shi’s first appearance in Razor Annual #1 (1993) and a sequel that appeared in Razor and Shi Special (1994) and I was kinda right and kinda wrong.

Razor Annual #1 has the story Death Watch over 18 pages (pages 2-19) and the story is to be continued.

 The Razor and Shi Special reprints those original 18 pages and an additional 6 pages making a complete 24 page story. 

So, kinda right and kinda wrong – there’s no text explaining this anywhere in the Razor and Shi Special.  I had the Special for ages and spent forever tracking down a reasonably priced copy of Razor Annual #1 only to find that I already had the story. A little annoying.

But let’s look at the story itself.  It opens with a young runaway on the streets of Queen City at 4am.  The runaway is flirting with a couple of gang members, who decide that they’d rather beat up the young girl.

Razor attacks the pair to protect the girl and in the ensuing scuffle Razor is shot and more gang members appear.

The Balls gang members chase Razor and she escapes into an abandoned building, which she discovers is the headquarters of the gang.

Razor prepares herself for the final stand when an Asian woman with her face painted white appears with a katana and throwing darts and defends Razor.

There is a scuffle and Razor pulls out some flash-bangs and the pair start their assault.  Razo refers to Shi as “China Doll.” Shi decapitates a guy.

This is where the story ends in the annual, a cool action shot with our two heroines in action.

The story continues with the pair killing the rest of the gang members.  Shi offers to tend to Razor’s wounds but Razor tells her she can look after herself.

The pair talk and Shi introduces herself as Shi, which means … DEATH! With a skull reflected in her eye. (great panel)

Razor says “Hey China Doll, thanks for saving my life.”  Shi replies that Razor is welcome and Shi is Japanese. 

The story ends with Razor realising that she is not alone and Shi is a friend.

It’s a simple story that shows us what Razor and Shi are about.

From what I could gather this annual was published in December 1993 between issues 4 and 5 of the regular Razor series.  Razor appeared in issue 0 in July 1991 and the first issue appeared in October 1992 and subsequent issues appearing quarterly.

As a Shi fan, her actions here feel a little out of character.  Also in her first two panels (pages 12 and 13 of the story), Shi has a grey circle around her right eye (it’s a black and white comic), which disappears for the rest of the story.

The soon to be published Shi: Gatecrasher revives Billy Tucci’s original concept for Shi was a character named Ran (Japanese for Rebellion) who had a red circle over her right eye exactly like the one seen in those first panels. 

It’s crazy how late in the process that Shi’s appearance and attitude wasn’t fully locked down.  We don’t even find out her name until Shi #1 (later retitled Shi: Way of the Warrior) in March 1994.  The Razor and Shi Special was published in July 1994.

This is an interesting introduction to Shi that certainly makes me want to know more about both Razor and Shi.  Interestingly Razor and Shi never cross paths again but both would go onto have many crossovers. 

It’s a solid start for Billy Tucci in both art and writing it’s a simple story but it’s well told.  With the exception of Ran becoming Shi – all characters stay on model and are easy to identify.  It’s not perfect but it’s clear that Tucci has talent and one of the joys of this reread is to see his growth as both a writer and artist and his ability to work with other creatives. 

The Great Comic Reread: Shi

Recently I finished collecting all the Shi Comics (well almost, I still have one Lethargic Lad crossover and the Shi CGI preview to find but neither are important to the story of Shi) and then of course Billy Tucci then announces more comics specifically Shi: Gatecasher and a crossover/team-up with La Muerta (another character I collect who also has a number of similarities to Shi)  - so I figure it’s time to read the complete Shi in preparation for these new releases.

Shi is the story of Ana Ishikawa, a young woman whose father and brother were murdered by the Yakuza when she was a girl.  She was trained as a Sohei warrior monk by her paternal grandfather – an unpopular move among his brethren not only because of her gender but the fact that she is half American and a Christian.   Now Shi is trying to take revenge against the man who killed her family and is now a high ranking member of the Yakuza in America.

It's a simple plot (some would say the oldest - revenge) and the interplay between the deadliness of her martial arts and her Christian beliefs make for some interesting tension. Which forms the first series Shi (later subtitled Way of the Warrior)

And then it gets more complicated and the range of stories quickly widens with demons, super-soldiers, werewolves, and kitsune all coming into play.  Shi also became a legacy character appearing in the 12th Century, the 17th Century, World War Two and a dystopian manga future.

Shi also was one of the poster girls for the Bad Girl Art movement in the 90s (a label Tucci doesn’t like) with characters like Razor, Lady Death and Witchblade, featuring strong female comic book characters with cheesecake art, anti-heroines often battling supernatural threats. 

Shi appeared 130 odd issues across 50 miniseries and one shots published by several publishers – London Night, Crusade, Image, Dark Horse, Avatar. 

It’s fascinating Shi made her debut in a Razor annual and that Tucci seems to operate on the idea that a rising tide lifts all ships and Shi appears in multiple crossovers with other independent characters like Grifter, Cyblade (a crossover that introduced the Witchblade), the Horseman, Lethargic Lad, Eenie Weenie Comics, War of Independents, Ash, Jetta, Fallen Angel, Vampirella as well as Marvel characters like Daredevil and Wolverine.

I really enjoyed the adventures of Shi and it was interesting that Tucci and his fellow writers have built a comprehensive and mostly cohesive history for the character.  I am looking forward to the new adventures to see where they will go.

Let’s explore the world of Shi over the next few posts.

Super-Heroes: the Fact Behind the Legends by Gyles Brandreth, illustrated by David Symonds: Knight Books 198

I remember getting this book out of the library in the late 80s. I remember three things: 1) The title “Superheroes” coming out of the cover with no pictures.

2) there was an illustration of James Bond casually filing his nails with a Bond behind him as he is surrounded by henchmen with guns; and

3) There was an entry for Paddington Bear.

Now I know we all have our definition of what is and what is not a superhero and where I might disagree with you, I can typically follow your chain of logic.

BUT PADDINGTON BEAR???????

Surely my memory is faulty, I’d mixed up Superheroes with David Pringle’s Imaginary People or some other reference work that I had read at the same time.  I mean it was like 40 years ago.  I must have been mistaken. But I was so certain of those three things it would pop into my head every now and then.  Recently, the thought popped up again and I decided to track down the book and put the whole thing to bed.

Easy peasy you say a book called Superheroes with no author. Let’s pop “Superheroes” into the title search on Abebooks or some other online book search tool.  Over 12,000 hits.  Let’s scroll through the results

“Superheroes don’t clean their rooms”

“Your Guide to Superheroes”
“Marvel Superheroes”

“Big brothers are Superheroes”

And many many many more that just aren’t the book.

However, I did know that the book was likely published in the late 70s or early 80s and I had a feeling it was British. 

So I start limiting the search by time which would knock out many of the results and I find Gyles Brandreth’s book.

The cover had the title coming out of the page that I remembered but had a subtitle and a guy in a plain white superhero suit (I wonder if Mark Millar saw this book and that was the inspiration for Nemesis)

But that cover might just be another printing or I just misremembered but I found a copy at a reasonable price and ordered it.

The book arrived and I flick through and there is the James Bond illustration almost as I remembered but the Bond girl was not there.

I am not doing well on my memory for this book, maybe I was wrong about Paddington Bear.  I flick a little further in the very thin book and DAMMIT the bear is there.

I read the introduction and Brandreth gives no rules or rationale for what he sees as a superhero. He merely states that these are characters are his favourite characters.

Looking over the 35 entries there are several that I certainly would not have considered superheroes, Robinson Crusoe, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Dan Dare, Peter Pan and Tin Tin just to start.

If the book had been titled Adventure Heroes or Action Stars or something similar these would have made more sense.

The entries themselves are fine a nice two or three page profiles but there are some errors, Alan Scott’s successor as Green Lantern is referred to as Hal Gordon instead of Jordan (but that could be a confusion with Flash Gordon or a simple typo).  Look I get it I’ve written my own similar non fiction works and errors happen.

Perhaps more egregious is Dr John H. Watson is referred to as Dr Henry Watson.   I mean the H might stand for Henry but there is no Henry Watson in the Cannon of Conan Doyle Stories.  Speaking of Cannon, he says that Irene Adler is the love of Holmes’ life – that’s not in the Doyle stories that’s from several of the continuation authors.  Ideally you should only reference the Conan Doyle stories or make it clear that you are referencing a continuation work (such as Baring Gould’s Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street for example).

For adventure heroes, this is not a bad quick reference work for a young reader of 10 or so. 

The Saga of F5 by Tony Daniel

 I forget how I discovered F5 and its spinoffs.  My guess is either an ad or in the 50c bin.  Two four issue miniseries and a special so 9 issues in total easy enough to buy and read in an afternoon.

The special F5 origins came out in April of 2000 and is the quick introduction to the members of F5 – a paramilitary unit multiple members – we see team commander Hollister waiting to be picked up by his boss Paps Thanos and he then spends a page giving us a rundown on each of the members of F5:

·       Sasha Ho: ex-violin prodigy who at 18 joined the Marines and later became a elite bounty hunter.

·       Case Seymore: Runaway and street smart

·       Paco Lopez: gang banger turned vigilante turned Navy SEAL.  He actually has the coolest look with two big knives and a balaclava. 

·       Australian born Zippy Jaeger treasure hunter who left Australia with a bounty on his head and joined the Navy SEALS.

·       Penny Hurst: socialite and spy and team leader

It is revealed that Thanos has his own F5 team

·       Martin Brice super agent and team leader

·       Manu: former Air Force and mechanical genius

·       Molly O’Brian: former aviator rescued from the brig by Thanos

·       Naomi Co Chin: Native American thrill seeker and deep sea treasure hunter hunting for the people who wiped out her village

·       Abraham Silke: product of a government experiment that allows him to change his appearance at will.

It’s a good set up lets us know about the factions but doesn’t really tell us what F5 is and what it does.  But that’s for the main book to do which also came out in April 2000.

Issue #1 opens with Penny Hurst being interrogated for being a traitor and we flash back to a mission in Bolungarvika, Iceland and we get page showing us what appears to be  a screen showing the mission objectives -infiltrate a contamination bunker, get samples of anthrax and plutonium for study, then dilute and release the chemicals, then rendezvous with the sub and blow the place up. 

Now I have no idea who is running this place is it an official Icelandic military base? A terrorist HQ? A private research lab?  It doesn’t matter F5 is on the case that’s all that matters.

Then we flash back to the mission, no idea how long ago this was, a week? Did they just get back?  A month?  Who knows?  But the mission is happening at noon (12pm)

Penny is following a grey haired man who is bleeding.  He calls her sweetie and that she’d been lying to him for six months.  So the implication is that Penny at least has been undercover for six months.  Penny kills the guy and takes the cylinders he was carrying.

Sasha is in the compression chamber and she kills the three guards by dropping down from the ventilation shafts and shoots them.  She checks in with Paco and Wally.

Paco is on the run, under fire, carrying Wally on his shoulder who has been shot.  Hang on, who is Wally??? He’s not mentioned in the Origins one shot.  But he’s been shot and is slowing down Paco. Sasha is having trouble with the water valve.

There’s some radio chatter between Penny, Zippy, Sasha and Paco but it feels like Zippy is calling Penny, Sasha.

I’m going to stop here – Daniel writes Zippy’s dialogue in ‘Strine or the Aussie accent

“Reddie wheneva yew ahr, Sasha”  I need more Zippy.

Paco now in a rush buries Wally in the snow to get to Sasha, lucky he does as a bad guy has snuck up on Sasha and got a garotte on her throat.  Paco throws a knife which goes into our villain’s back.  Paco retrieves the knife and opens the valve and Zippy opens the flood gates.

Paco has to go back to get Wally as the team is to meet the sub.  Penny is under fire at the meeting point but Zippy judo chops the shooter. 

Paco and Sasha go to get Wally but can’t find him so Sasha knocks some sense into him as out silver haired guy that Penny is not as dead as we thought and sets off the self destruct code.

The sub appears and only Penny and Zippy are there to meet Hollister, and two blondes – one calls Hollister Dad, and the other looks like Casey.  But Sasha and Paco found a hang glider and escaped the explosion.

That mission was completely FUBAR,  Wally died and there was some sloppiness, so Penny tells her mysterious interrogator.  That mission caused changes to the F5 agency .

We now flashback to F5 headquarters, their cover is that they are F5 Storm Trackers, operating out of an office in Seattle.

Hollister’s daughter’s name in Gwenn we discover as Camilla (who seems to be a boss of F5) brings in Paps Thanos famous spy hunter, who has been unemployed since the end of the Cold War to work with F5.

There was a radioactive meteorite that landed in the ocean near Greenland.  It killed a lot of fish and someone stole the rock and it was able to be tracked due to the trail of death with the meteorite ending up in Germany.

German tech CEO Marius Van Kessler has the meteor and clearly he cannot want the meteor for any good purpose.  This mission is so important that Pap has brought in his own team.

There’s a test mission to see which team is the lead team, oh dear the radioactive meteor good thing that wasn’t super urgent or anything.  The mission is to infiltrate a navy ship deactivate the radar and steal a silver briefcase.  Oh noes Hollister goes missing.  Blah blah the OG F5 infiltrate and do their thing.  Gwenn offers some computer assistance (and we discover that she is 12 – I don’t care if her old man is the control - a 12 year old on covert missions is just insane.) 

But it was all a trap and Thanos is there to get the drop on Penny but Sasha Ho knocks him out for 25 minutes and that’s the end of issue 1.

I want to like F5 but it feels like there is too much information I don’t need and not enough of what I do want.  It feels like the characters all know what’s going on and there is no need to explain it to each other.  The story needs an entry point character, the new team member that requires an explanation of what is going on. 

That could have been Penny’s interrogator.  It may have been better to have just the main F5 team, with Penny as leader have their missions as the focus of the first issue and introduce the second team in the second issue.

I’ve been a bit harsh on F5, but that’s because I want to like this. The mission to stop Van Kessler and the Saturn germ he distilled from the meteor is a good mission. The revelation of who the traitors/double agents are is ok. I think that the art is really good.

I am actually curious to see where the F5 team goes from here – do the surviving members continue operations?  There were no further F5 adventures.

Tony Daniel formed a company F5 Entertainment with the intent of taking this and The Tenth to Hollywood.

Actually it’s not entirely true that there are no more F5 stories because one of the revelations of F5 is that Abraham Silke is actually Sandra Silke which leads into her origin miniseries called Silke.

I actually liked Silke better storywise because it is developing just one character, Silke, and how she became the product of a government experiment that allows her to change her appearance at will.  Also we are following Silke and learning information with her, so we have a better entry point into this world.  Silke came out starting in January 2001 maybe if had come first then we get Silke joining F5 and Abraham/Sandra Silke learning about the team and trying to track down the traitor, the F5 series would work better for me.

Daniel seems to be working in DC and Marvel these days and is unlikely to return to the world of F5. 

 I really wanted F5 to sit up there with Danger Girl as a fun spy comic but it was ultimately let down by a story that wouldn't let me in.  

 

The Shadow by James Patterson and Brian Stitts (2021)

 

Choices were made. Now I am a fan of the Shadow so I have to admit I was a little perplexed by some of the choices made here.

I get Conde Naste's choice to reboot The Shadow (and Doc Savage). I get why they chose James Patterson (and friends) as the writer(s).

Patterson as a brand is much like the old school pulp writers churning out stories.

Now I get those choices. Others not so much.  Now some choices were external to the book.

Sanctum had a long running reprint program of the Shadow and was approaching the end of those reprints, when Conde Naste told them the licence was expiring, Sanctum upped production and asked for a little extra time to get the last couple of issues out.  Conde Naste said no and the reprints remain incomplete.

Now this seems like a move to upset the fans, it does nothing to make the faithful look favourably on this new book.

But hey this was all external to the book itself and wasn’t the authors fault and I shouldn’t judge the final product because of corporate Argy bargy.

So I found a cheap copy at a book sale and grabbed it. I went in with an open mind.

(When telling this to my wife she says “Yeah I can see the fraction of a millimetre you have your mind open.”)

So I read the book and choices were made in the making of the book.

Now the book opens with Lamont Cranston meeting Margo Lane for dinner – both have news. Lamont is going to propose and Margo is pregnant. Then Shiwan Khan poisons them. Lamont races and has both of them put into suspended animation.

Ok we want to get The Shadow out of the 1930s/40s and that’s a way to do it.  Hey it worked for Sherlock Holmes three times. (The Return of Sherlock Holmes(1987), Sherlock Holmes Returns (1992) and Sherlock Holmes in the 22^nd Century (1999-2001)).

I get that but we don’t see the Shadow in action in the 1930s. If I was not aware of who/what the Shadow was I’d be in the dark, we’re told a few times that he was a detective but we aren’t shown that.  Why take the Shadow off the board in 1937?

That’s when the radio program started. The pulp series had been running since 1931 and the Shadow was been the narrator of The Detective Story hour in 1930. But his arguably most famous incarnation that formed the basis of this version of the Shadow is sort of wiped off the board.

(There is a scene later where Lamont says that he never dressed like the pulp version and he thought it odd that the radio show revealed his real name.)

The story then jumps ahead 150 years to 2037. We are introduced to Maddy Gomes who is about to turn 18 and receive her inheritance. Now Maddy is named in this will not her grandmother or her parents.  Maddy can do the Jedi mind trick and control people.

Her parts are told in first person and Lamont and Margot’s in third person which can be a little distracting.

Oh yeah The Shadow’s history is changed no longer is he a World War One ace, he and Shiwan Khan are ten thousand year old monks trained in mystic arts.  This kinda ruins the whole Shiwan Khan is the descendant of Genghis Khan (1162-1227) that is the character’s thing.

Also Lamont suddenly gets new abilities like throwing fireballs and shapeshifting into a cat and wall.  Shiwan can also shapeshift, he becomes a runaway bus at one point.

The plot has Maddy waking up Lamont exploring the world where World Leader Gizmonde rules with an iron fist and the poor are getting poorer.  And there is an EEEEVIL!!!! Plan to poison large groups of people with food.

Maddy wakes up Margo and the three of them try to stop Gizmonde who we discover is Shiwan Khan.

Maddy gets trained by Lamont and can turn herself invisible.

Margo doesn’t mention that she was pregnant until the end of the adventure assuming that she had lost the baby, which is possible but you’ve been in status for 150 years unaging pretty sure the baby would be too.

Or we discover that she had the baby, How? Who knows?

That female baby grew up and had a baby and so on and so forth until Maddy.  Yep she’s their multiple great granddaughter.

I didn’t get any of the choices made to change things – it felt like Patterson and Stitts had novel about Maddy fighting the man in a dystopia and shoehorned the Shadow update very badly.  There were times I wanted to fling the book across the room, the choices made were so confusing and mind boggling – it was like it wanted to have its cake and eat it too.

I tried, I really wanted some enjoyable new Shadow adventures but this ain’t it.  There’s second book “Circle of Death” but I don’t think I’ll be reading that one anytime soon.

And really neither cover sets the world on fire.