Adventureman #3 by Matthew Fraction and the Dodsons

 

So when we left Claire she had just stumbled into the family dinner.  OK there was a gap of some hours between when we saw last saw her until the dinner. It's a mystery what happened to her and one that should be solved in this installment. Let's see what Matt Fraction wrote.

The family is concerned and they race her to the Emergency Room.  Claire feels great and she can hear again (or at least partially).

When one of the cops she saw last issue is brought in injured.  He was injured in a bug attack and is losing blood.  He's AB- and Claire declares that she's multiversal blood type n and after an Adventureman flashback she gives him a transfusion of blood.

Record scratch - WHAT THE BUTTS?????

multiversal type n???  Fine, he's AB- but O- is the universal donor and can be given to anyone.  I get that they may have limited blood stocks but to make up a blood type from the whole cloth - which you don't really explain I was yanked out of the story sooooo fast.

Now I'll accept a lot in my pulp and pulp-adjacent fiction, I mean I'm the guy who wrote about a ray that causes the blood to rust (or at least appear to rust)  check out my novel Australis Incognito for more details.

But the type n blood was a step too far for me.

It may seem that I'm hard on this book and I am - I have high expectations of this story.

Back to the story, we get the information that Claire's dad may have been the Chief of Police as Claire's old partner calls him Chief.  

Then we're told that Claire appears to have grown fifteen inches (37.5 cm) but I'm not quite seeing that growth reflected in art.  (BTW the Dodson's art is gorgeous)

The MRI scan shows Claire's brain is active, really active.

And we're half way through the book and the mystery is set up and Claire can't remember what happened to her.

She goes home with her father where they along wih her son watch an Adventureman serial.  "Fair Phantom of the Lost Fortress" is the title (the other appears to be Adventures of A Dark Tomorrow)

As Claire watches she declares that she remembers.

But we leave Claire to see what is happpening with Baron and Baroness Bizarre torturing Philanda Phade - the ghost assistant of the original Adventureman.  There's several pages of Baron Bizarre talking where they are trying to release Abbathexiddion the Beast-GOd of the Ultravoid.  It ends with the Beast-God sending the Baroness to take the head of Adventureman.

The we get several pages of anecdotes and sketches about the creation of Claire's family and specifically her sisters.

I get the feeling that this comic would do better with less behind the scenes and more background, make it more like Watchmen where the back matter tells us about the classic pulp era Adventureman - excerpts from "the Great Pulp Heroes", fanzine articles about the Adventureman serials, interviews with the original pulp author, explanations about the magic pill Adventureman takes (because for all the mystery it seems obvious that Claire has taken that drug)

Pulp should be fast paced we are now three issues into the series and very little has happened.  I'm sticking with the book because it seems that we are building to something in the next issue but we need more answers and explanations of this world.   

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.

Pulp Heroes: Sanctuary Falls (2017) by Wayne Reinagel

I don't know what to make of this novel.  It's a huge sprawling epic of a novel which completes the story started in The Khan Dynasty and More Than Mortal and I ultimately did enjoy the story but as I said in my review of those two novels Reinagel really needs a strong editor to look over his work.  While the repetition of sections wasn't in this novel, there were massive infodumps that almost made my eyes bleed. Reinagel has done his research and it shows in the story but I don't need the entire history of the atomic program in America and The Soviet Union to explain how an atomic bomb was stolen or the entire political career of James Forrestal.  Every time I saw one of these infodumps it took me out of the story.

Two of the chapters - 15 and 16 felt completely unnecessary to me.  Chapter 15 started with Lester Dent walking down the street and looking up at a lit window, where Stan Lee is closing up Timely Comics after Martin Goodman discovered Lee's inventory stories (which did happen) and reflecting on the Golden Age of Comics.  The next chapter has Lester Dent and Walter Gibson discovering that their magazines Doc Titan and The Darkness (Reinagel's stand ins for Doc Savage and The Shadow) had been cancelled and Dent reflects on the history of the Pulps.  While both chapters serve to highlight that this is the end of an era both chapters took us away from the main story.

The story ends with ten epilogues wrapping up some of the side plots. With some of these epilogues, it felt like Reinagel didn't trust his readers to recognise the characters he was referencing, I understand this as a fan of obscure characters I have been guilty of making references to characters that very few people know and there can be a tendency to want to explain everything and over explain it.

The story was really good I liked the idea of Doc Titan, The Darkness, The Scorpion and The Guardian all coming to a problem from different angles and teaming up to work on the problem but it felt like the first half of the novel was bogged down with side plots. Like I said in my review of The Hunter Island Adventure, Reinagel is much better when he is more focused.  One thing he did do in this story was not to utilise the full supporting casts of all the main characters, making use of Doc Titans aides meaning that there were less characters to follow in the bulk of the action and the final showdowns had two teams of four characters rather than a cast of thousands.  

Pro Se Presents October 2011: The Hunter Island Adventure by Wayne Reinagel

Originally published

Sunday, August 26, 2012 9:42:59 PM

After reading Pulp Heroes: More Than Mortal and Pulp Heroes: The Khan Dynasty I saw that Reinagel had written this shorter piece focusing on the female pulp sidekicks, Pam Titan (an analogue of Pat Savage from the Doc Savage Series), Cassie Greyson (an analogue of Nellie Gray from The Avenger), Megan Meriwether (Margo Lane from The Shadow) and Whitney Van Pelt (Nita Van Sloan from The Spider). Set between The Khan Dynasty and More Than Mortal , the four heroines are on a cruise taking the place of Simon Blake The Guardian who was suddenly called away on a case.
The four women are kidnapped and taken to Hunter Island where Simon Blake was to be put one the trial and hunted for the rape and murder of Judge Armstrong’s wife and daughter. Reinagel quickly lets us know that Hunter Island was formerly known as Ship-trap Island (from Richard Cornell’s The Most Dangerous Game) making this a follow on from that novel. One of the hunters is Lord James Roxton, the son of Lord John Roxton from The Lost World and the other Professor Challenger stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The women arrive at a time when there is some dissent between some of the hunters and the leaders Armstrong and Roxton. The mutiny sees the women on the run and hunted by the mutineers.
None of the women are fainting damsels in distress and react just as capably their male counterparts (in some cases they are more effective than their male counterparts simply because the hunters underestimate the women).
I really enjoyed this novel, The Hunter Island Adventure is not as epic in scope as More Than Mortal and The Khan Dynasty but that is not a bad thing as I felt that this brought a better focus on the plot with a smaller cast of characters.
(One of the problems I had with More Than Mortal when Doc Titan and The Guardian’s teams joined forces I had trouble recollecting who was who from what team although that might be more on my dodgy memory.)
The four women are written as four different characters with different skills and knowledge who seem to be genuine friends who interact often with a light hearted banter and girly gossip. Not surprisingly this relationship is consistent with what we see in the two other adventures.
The Hunter Island Adventure is a good rollicking adventure and well worth reading. 

New Pulp TV Series

So after the top 50 New Pulp Movies list a couple posts back, I decided to do a New Pulp TV series list.  I've put them in alphabetical order (more so I don't double up) and not to play favourites.

1.      Adventure Inc

2.      Agent Carter

3.      Agent X

4.      Airwolf

5.      Arrow

6.      Bugs

7.      Burn Notice

8.      Daredevil

9.      Darkwing Duck

10.   Human Target

11.   Intelligence

12.   Jack of All Trades

13.   Jonny Quest

14.   Kim Possible

15.   Knight Rider/Team Knight Rider/Knight Rider 2008

16.   Legend

17.   Leverage

18.   MacGyver/MacGyver 2016

19.   Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

20.   Now and Again

21.   Nowhere Man

22.   Person of Interest

23.   Queen of Swords

24.   Relic Hunter

25.   Sable

26.   Sam Fox Extreme Adventures

27.   Soldier of Fortune Inc/ Special Ops Force

28.   Stingray

29.   Street Hawk

30.   Tales of the Golden Monkey

31.   Terra Nova

32.   The A-Team

33.   The Adventures of Briscoe County Jnr

34.   The Cape

35.   The Deep

36.   The Equalizer

37.   The  Finder

38.   The Green Hornet

39.   The Librarians

40.   The Mummy: The Animated Series

41.   The Persuaders

42.   The Player

43.   The Pretender

44.   The Punisher

45.   The Sentinel

46.   Transporter: The Series

47.   Vengeance Unlimited

48.   Veritas: The Quest

49.   Veronica Mars

50.   Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

50 New Pulp Movies

Recently Derrick Ferguson announced that he was doing a list of 50 New Pulp movies.  The end result can be found here

When he announced it, it for shits and giggles I thought I'd try and see how well I'd go at predicting what would be on his list.

So here is my list the ones in red weren't on Derrick's list.

50 New Pulp Movies

1. Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins

2. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

3. Sahara

4. Indiana Jones Quartet

5. The Rocketeer

6. Sky Captain

7. Hudson Hawk

8. Our Man Flint/In like Flint

9. High Road to China

10. Darkman

11. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zizzou

12. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

13. The Fifth Element

14. The Phantom

15. Romancing the Stone

16. Jake Speed

17. Dark Avenger

18. Dark Knight trilogy

19. King Kong 2005

20. Kong Skull Island

21. The Mummy Trilogy

22. The Goonies

23. Cutthroat Island

24. Sunset

25. Shoot em up

26. Captain America: The First Avenger

27. Atlantis the Lost Empire

28. The Punisher 2004

29. Big Trouble in Little China

30. National Treasure

31. Cast a Deadly Spell

32. The Black Mask

33. Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen

34. Brotherhood of the Wolf

35. The Black Samurai

36. The Black Scorpion

37. Billy Jack

38. Congo

39. Machete

40. The Man with the Iron Fists

41. Second Hand Lions

42. The Specialist

43. The Transporter

44. Cleopatra Jones

45. Coffy

46. Foxy Brown

47. Black Belt Jones

48. The Equaliser

49. The A Team

50. The President's Man

So with only 14 out of 50, I'm a poor prophet of Derrick's choices but it just shows the wide range of New Pulp movies out there (that is movies from after the 1950s in the pulp style)

Crossovers Expanded Volumes 1 & 2 (2016) by Sean Levin published Meteor House

A few years back Win Scott Eckert published Crossovers: A Secret History of the Universe which made connections to many different characters through the links of crossovers. 

I reviewed these back on the old blog (which will have to be reposted here soon)  and found them to be excellent works that were well researched.  However, by its very nature such a work is incomplete - new crossover stories are written all the time and older ones await rediscovery.  Win handed the title of Crossover Chronicler to Sean Levin who after several years of work has published these two new volumes.

Levin has taken Win's format and built two new volumes that have the same breadth and scope of history as Win's works.  Indeed if all four volumes were to reedited into one giant sized telephone sized work I may have some trouble identifying which entries were by which author but this is a good thing it makes Crossovers Expanded feel like an organic outgrowth of the original volumes.

 Looking through both volumes I was frequently surprised by crossovers I was unaware of and pleased to see some familiar authors and names appear in this book.  Full disclosure, several of my stories are referenced in this work and Sean has done a great job at spotting the connections I have sprinkled through my stories. 

I bow to Sean's knowledge of pulp and adventure fiction.  I must also compliment the artwork that littered the work that provided a visual link to the works.  Keith Howell has done a great job on the covers illustrating several heroic archetypes.

As a fan of pulp and adventure fiction these are invaluable reference works.