Adventureman #2 by Matt Fraction and the Dodsons

 So we're back for issue 2 and when issue #1 ended insects were crawling all over our heroine's house and a beam of light or something shoots out of the house.

So what happened next?  Uh not sure.  What was the beam of light? No idea.

The issue opens in some sort of scary dimension where a voice with scary borders chastises Phaedra Phantom.  Phaedra was one of Adventureman's team and she is being held in this dimension by Adventureman's archnemesis Baron Bizarre and Baroness Bizarre.  It's implied that she escaped and visited Claire in the first issue but that's not clear.  Baron Bizarre is made of bugs. There's a hint that if people remember Baron Bizarre it gives him more power.

That interlude ends and Claire and her son Tommy are walking to school.  Tommy is reading the Adventureman guidebook from last issue.  Tommy advises that they gave the address of Adventure Worldwide - Adventureman's headquarters.  Like Doc Savage's 86th floor headquarters the building is never identified in the pulps, but they give the address in this guidebook.

(This came from Philip Jose Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life where Farmer made a confincing case that Doc's Headquarters was the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, a fact never revealed in the pulps) 

Tommy has to race to school and Claire has an appointment with two of her sisters.  One is baking souffles and the other arrives late, makes noise and ruins the souffles and bugs crawl out of them. Could they be connected to Baron Bizarre and the bugs from last issue?

During the exchange with her sisters, Claire is reading the guidebook and the test is in white writing accross the page.  In at least one point, one of the sister's talks to Claire and her speech bubble covers the text - I get that it shows that this is interrupting the reading but it hides the words.  The white words also appear over the top of the panels even over lighter parts of the picture where the words are lost and impossible to read.  This happens several times in this issue and it is so annoying.

After the souffle incident, Claire decides to visit Adventure Worldwide - so she jumps on her vespa and  zips through the city.  She snatches a coffee from a cop and we discover that Claire Connell used to be an NYPD cop.  We have no idea why she stopped - it may be when she lost her hearing or when she had her son or someother reason.   2 pages about how cool Claire looks on the Vespa but just the hint about her past.

She gets to building and there's a giant art deco skyscraper there, that she doesn't remember being there before.  She texts her son in class for the street view of the address.  Tommy gets into trouble and can't respond.

Claire then accosts a passerby and he tells her that the building there is a dump.  Clearly Matt Fraction has seen the 1994 Shadow movie starring Alec Baldwin where Shiwan Khan hides an entire hotel which serves as his headquarters in a similar fashion - and Alec Baldwin accosts a passerby in the same fashion.

Claire walks to the door but there is no handle but she remembers how one of Adventureman's assistants first finds the building - another place with white writing where it gets lost in the image.  This time the information is important to the story. 

It turns out that Phaedra Phantom phases you thorugh the door - the place is in ruins but the security system still works as Phaedra warns before she disappears.  Claire immediately sets off the security system and has a fight with two robots where Claire uses brains and brawn to defeat them.  Claire takes the elevator to the top of building (shades of Doc Savage's flearun elevator) and calls out that she has the book.

We then skip to the family Friday night dinner - Tom is there but his mother isn't.  His grandfather is about to ask about Claire when she charges in with her shirt and pants torn (in a likely homage to covers to the 1960s Doc Savage reprints that featured Doc in a torn shirt) 

And the issue ends.

Argh, there is so much to like in this book but it frustrates me in so many ways.  It seems like there is information that we should be getting but aren't and transitions that aren't quite working for me.  

And the timing of events is confusing.  Every Friday night the family gathers for dinner.  This happens in issue 1.  What appears to be the next day, (Saturday) she gets the guidebook from Phaedra and that night the bugs over the house and the light.

But that can't be right as what appears to be the next day (Sunday) Claire is dropping her son to school - she visits her sister, visits Adventure Inc and then turns up late for Friday night dinner.    

But that timeline can't be right clearly she got the book on Thursday of that week, then took Tommy to school on Friday morning and spent the day at Adventure Inc.  but it's not clear.  I'm not even sure that the events of issue two take place the day after the end of issue 1. 

Let's see if issue 3 solves some of these issues.

   

Adventureman #1 by Matt Fraction and the Dodsons

So I have a Matt Fraction story - he appeared at the 2013 Brisbane Writer's festival and I went along to his panel and got some Immortal Iron Fist and The Punisher signed by him.

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.

Simon Spector (2004) written Warren Ellis, art by Jack Burrows

Last year I wrote a review of Mark Millar's Prodigy, which I really enjoyed.

I was looking at the comments for that post and Alan Blank posted his review of the series on Goodreads which can be found here

In that review he mentions Simon Spector, a character I'd never heard of - a modern pulp character I'd never heard of.  Naturally, this was something that had to be rectified.

Simon Spector was part of Ellis' Apparat line for Avatar Comics.  The quick version is Ellis had a thought experiment - what if the pulp influence on comics was a little stronger and superheroes hadn't been as dominant.  What might comics of various pulp genres look like?  Science Fiction adventure, detective stories, aviator adventures and pulp vigilantes were the four genres picked and Angel Stomp Future, Frank Ironwine, Quit City and Simon Spector were the results.

Four one shots -  it sounded intriguing.  If I could find Simon Spector I wasn't off on a long term quest it was one and done. If I liked it then there were three more of similar style to track down.

And I found a reasonably priced copy and promptly bought it.

In the back of the book, Ellis talks of his inspiration for the line and this book in particular.  How he would read Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Spider and speculate about the pharmacutical assistance these heroes must have.

It's an interesting idea, not one I'd be keen to see used for a proper Doc Savage or Shadow adventure but intriguing.

In fact now that I think about it, Ellis is running not quite in the same groove as Philip Jose Farmer in A Feast Unknown but a parallel track.  Farmer isn't mentioned in his essay but ......

Simon Spector is a modern day riff on Doc Savage.  He operates out what appears to be the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building.

The story opens when a woman comes to Spector's office telling about her kidnapped husband who works for a weapons manufacturer. She mentions that one of the kidnappers was named Cristos. 

Cristos we discover is Spector's archenemy who was believed dead (first villian rule - if you don't see a body they are not dead) when the plane which he was locked in the cockpit crashed. 

Spector takes a pill that effectively speeds up his brain (Not unlike NZT in Limitless movie and TV series and the drug in Lucy)  There's a nice five page sequence after he takes the pill, where he asks for the lady's address and through deduction and knowledge of Cristos' MO is able to determine the villian's lair. 

Spector grabs his custom made weapons (because a number of pulp vigilantes had custom made weapons) made with his parent's wedding rings. 

He then makes his way to the hideout, where he battles Cristos. 

There's a surprise or two in the confrontation that I won't spoil.

I really loved this book - it was perfectly self contained giving us everything we need to know about Simon Spector yet also managing to tantalise us with hints of a larger story.  We don't know what happened to his parents, the nature of his earlier encounters with Cristos, what other villians has he faced, does he always need the tablets? Where did he meet his bodyguard and his doctor? Is Simon Spector his real name?

You could write a whole series of hundreds of adventures with this character and yet in this single adventure we know all that we need. 

This was a really good comic I enjoyed it immensely.  I'll have to see if I can find the other three Apparat books.

Prodigy (2019) written by Mark Millar art by Rafaael Albuquerque

Mark Millar is a prolific writer, he's written for Marvel and DC before he branched off to his own creator owned studio, Millarworld. 

He created Wanted, that was basis for the Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy movie (okay very thin basis), Kick-Ass and Hit Girl, and Kingsman (or as the comic was known The Secret Service).

I liked those properties both as movies and comics so I keep an eye on Millar stuff - I collected CLINT magazine which printed Kick- Ass 2 and Hit-Girl miniseries as well as The Secret Service and Supercrooks.

As a general rule, I prefer low to no powers in my comic stories (I'm a pulpy guy),  so some of his Millarworld stuff I can take or leave.  

Then I saw a review of issue 1 of Prodigy, the second series from Millarworld after it was bought by Netflix.  The reviewer said that this was Millar riffing on Buckaroo Banzai.  

Millar does Buckaroo Banzai - I'm down for that story.

I read each issue as it came out and finished this the first arc just last week..  I then went back and reread the whole series.  

This series was a blast and a half - Edison Crane the Prodigy of the title is worthy to stand alongside Buckaroo Banzai, Doc Savage, The Destroyer, The Pretender, Sherlock Holmes,  Dillon and the Nekton Family from The Deep.

If you know me at all that's pretty high praise.

Ethan is a genius with a total recall, he owns a business and serves an unofficial troubleshooter. Like Banzai , he's off in a million directions at once - playing 18 simultanious games of chess, writing compositions, planning stunts, written three plays, created a new telecommunication system and a new cling wrap that keeps things fresh for a century. All before breakfast.

He's bored and decides to investigate unusual events in Australia. While there he;s approached by a CIA agent who explains that these events are part of a larger conspiracy.  Crane goes full Sherlock Holmes on her.  making deductions left,  right and centre.

Before you know it Crane and CIA agent Rachel Straks are globehopping looking for an ancient text that might be the key to it all.  

The fitth issues ends with a twist that plays out nicely in the final installment.  I did not see it coming but I feel that Millar didn't play fair with the reader, Crane saw the twist coming because he had knowledge that we, the reader, weren't privvy to.  

But damn if I didn't care because it was worth it see Crane bring down the bad guys.  because he is a dozen steps ahead of our villains - it was almost a reverse Watchmen.  Crane discovers the plot and goes yeah I figured it out thrity five minutes ago and made adjustments to foil your plot.  Oh and here's your handcuffs back.

I can't say more without spoiling it.

Give Prodigy a try if you like Doc Savage or Buckaroo Banzai and I look forward to the inevitable Netflix adaptation.

Australis Incognito: Behind the curtain.

So as promised here's a peak behind the curtain for the story behind the story of Australis Incognito.

Now I'd love to say the whole thing came to me in a one big hit but that's not true.  Some of the ideas had been floating around in my head for some time.  The Rusting Death had been a title that been waiting since the mid 90s when I mistyped the Doc Savage novel The Rustling Death for my book list.

But the story really started on Watchmen's 25th anniversary in around 2011.  Like many fans I wondered how things would have went after the events of Moore and Gibbons' story.  It's a world now without a superman just people in costumes.  Was there a third wave/generation of heroes, did the peace last?  What might a third wave look like?

I let myself imagine.  Silk Spectre II and Nite-Owl II would have kids The Nite Spectre, Silk and Nite-Owl III.  There would be a Rorschach II, the daughter of the original's landlady who believes that Walter Kovacs is her father.  There would be original characters like the Cutlass.

I never wrote anything down and at some point reality set in assuming that DC was going to do anything they wouldn't be hiring me anytime soon (and shorly after we got the Before Watchmen collection of miniseries)

As any Watchmen fan worth their salt knows the story was written with the Charlton characters.  DC looked at the story and realised that it would render their newly acquired characters unusable.  Moore then created new characters who if you squint looked a little like the Charlton Characters,

So I squinted - The third generation Watchmen siblings became The Dingo, Risque and Risk.  Rorschach II became The Question Mark II.  I left the Cutlass alone.  I dropped several characters and created new ones.

One of my new characters was the Aggressor, a veteran of Afghanistan or Iraq and fighting a bloody crusade against organised crime.  Then I found the Cutter series by James Hopwood - and also published by Pro Se Press.  Hopwood did what I was planning and in all honesty did it better.  So I changed tack The Agressor was active in the 1980s and was involved in The Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption in the Queensland Government and police force, which worked much better for me.  So James if you read this - Thank you.

Around the same time, I was looking at myself as an Australian new Pulp writer and what I wanted to write.   I discovered a history of Australians creating pulp and pulp adjacent characters and I met several other creators who were crafting new stories in the same vein.

I wanted to write a big Australian pulp story. I had the basis for my story.  I pitched the idea to Pro Se as Oz Pulp.

The good news they liked the idea, the bad - they were not so keen on Oz Pulp.  I wasn't keen on their suggested replacement Aus Pulp.

I sat brainstorming when  I remembered that on old maps Australia was called Terra Australis Incognita - and Australis Incognito was born.  (Several Australian horror anthologies have used Terror Australis)

Australis Incognito became more than the title of the story but the collective name of my heroes and would go back to the settlement of New South Wales in 1788 allowing me to weave a backstory that allowed me to reference several characters I had read about.  It also gave me a reason that these characters all knew each other.

I had the idea for a villian so big that these characters couldn't battle them alone.  I distinctly recall the idea that one of the heroes was suggesting the unknown villian was a Moriarty-type.  The mysterious villian lurking over the skyline of Brisbane on the cover.

Around this time I had been invited to contribute to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Was Not (IFWG, 2019) an anthology that paired Sherlock Holmes with a different doctor instead of Watson.  I selected Dr Nikola, the villian of five novels by Australian writer Guy Boothby that were just as popular as the Sherlock Holmes stories back in the 1890s.  Nikola became a large piece of the this new story and his actions in the past served as a catalyst for this modern day adventure.

I had a great time building a world where modern pulp heroes could operate and link in with other Australian pulp and pulp-adjacant characters.

Doc Savage: The Doom Dynasty (1992) Story Terry Collins Art Mike Wieringo Covers Brian Stelfreese

  

The next appearance of Doctor Nikola was this two part miniseries pitting Doc Savage against Dr Nikola. 

Set in 1939, Doc is contacted by an old friend of his father's, Hikara.  He wants to warn Doc about something but before he can tell Doc anything he is bitten by a monkey and infected with a deadly plague.  His dying words lead Doc to another friend Dr Plympton, who runs a clinic in Africa.

Doc arrives too late.  The clinic has been ransacked and  Plympton is dying of the same plague but he tells Doc the location of Clark Savage Snr's Journal from 1897.  The journal records Doc's grandfather Richard Henry Savage meeting with Dr Nikola in that year. Richard Henry provides to Nikola (which would be just after Lust For Hate) with funding for a scientific project.

Doc's reading is interrupted by the arrival of his aides: Renny, Monk and Ham who captured by Nikola and his men.  Part 1 ends with the three men in danger.

Part 2 has Doc trying to rescue his men but getting captured.  Nikola tells Doc that he knew Richard Henry Savage and that the elder Savage had discovered that Nikola had been using his money to create a deadly plague.  With assistance from Nikola's female assistant Li, Richard Savage escapes and burns down the laboratory and steals the only copy of the formula.  Nikola is treated with a regenerative serum based on Siliphilium (That's the spelling from the comic - in the Doc Savage novel Fear Cay it was Silphilium) 

Now after forty years, Nikola has recreated his plague formula and is trying to remove Doc who would be the only one able to  stop him.  I won't reveal the ending but  it's no surprise that Nikola is thwarted.  Although I was surprised to discover that Nikola took Li as a lover and his current assistant Kao is his daughter.

I was a little disappointed that the back matter didn't include an article on Dr Nikola.  There is an article by Will Murray about the real Richard Henry Savage in part 1 and letter column in part 2.  (There was a letter giving more information in the next Doc Savage Miniseries - Devil's Thoughts)

I enjoyed this story when I first read it and I enjoyed the recent reread after reading the original Nikola stories.  I was nice to see Nikola against foes who might be considered his equals. 

It appears Doom Dynasty takes its cues from A Lust for Hate and is a portrayal I'm not adverse to but it makes Nikola far less likable than his appearances in the other four Nikola books.

JAKE SPEED (1986) starring Wayne Crawford and John Hurt

Originally posted Friday, August 25, 2006 2:52:20 PM

 

I remember being grade 5 or 6 and writing a story where The Hardy Boys had me join them on a case, part of the appeal of the escapist fiction is that we can join in these adventures.

JAKE SPEED offers this opportunity. The movie starts with kidnapping of two American girls in Paris. Next we see the family upset by the loss of their daughter Maureen. Grandpa comes with the advice that the family should bypass the State Department and try to contact the handful of men who can really help. Mack Bolan The Executioner, Remo Williams The Destroyer and Jake Speed. Grandpa recommends Jake Speed.*

C'mon Grandpa we all know these books aren't real, no way Jake Speed can help because he's not real.

Maureen's sister Maggie goes home and gets a note from Jake Speed. Maggie takes her friend with her to the meeting (the friend gets some of the best lines in the film referring to Jake Speed as Speedy Jake and Remo as Romero and The Urinator of Reamer)

We get to see several Jake Speed novels which were published by Gold Eagle (Now those novels would have to be some of the rarest pieces of Aggressor material)

Next thing Maggie knows she being whisked off to Africa for an adventure ("But I don't want an adventure I want my sister back" she screams at Jake at one point.)

The film lags slightly once we hit Africa and discover that Jake's trusty HARV (heavily armoured raiding vehicle) hasn't arrived yet and the adventurers are stuck driving normal jeeps. Des informs Jake that Doc Savage used to drive these. Jake grumbles that Savage isn't even in the game anymore.

We see an abortive attempt to find Maureen but all this makes Jake seem incompetent, with our adventurers fleeing in defeat.

Then we wait, wait for HARV to arrive, wait while Maureen runs off and is told that Jake and Des are conmen.

Finally HARV turns up and the adventure starts again and we discover that Jake's archenemy Sid is behind all this. We see Jake fall into a lion pit, take on an army, engage in a high speed car chase.

I generally enjoyed this movie except for the dragging middle part.





*Imagine if he had of recommended Remo, I can see the family beating down the door of Folcroft Sanatorium and Smith having a fit.