This is the End: The Destroyer

Strictly speaking this is not the end for the world of The Destroyer.  The books are still being published as is the Legacy spinoff series.  But this is the end of playing catchup with the series which started in the early 1970s.  I started collecting in the late eighties and now have finally caught up (if I had more time I'd reread the whole series in order) thanks in large part to fact the entire series is now available as ebooks.  151 books, a spinoff series of six books so far, a movie (and a new one in the works), a TV pilot as well as Marvel comics. (There are new comics that I need to get)

It feels weird being caught up, the hunt for Destroyers has been part of my life for 30 years now.  The Destroyer I can't remember how I discovered him it might have been a copy of Inside Sinanju at the cheap books in the corner store visiting my grandmother.  It might have been a library book.  It may have been the back cover blurb for the Doc Savage video (which was definitely my introduction to Buckaroo Banzai).

When I found The Destroyer, I was in love. The characters are great.  Chuin should be the most offensive character in the world but he's not. Some would say that he's racist but it makes sense because he IS far superior to everyone else. He’s a frail looking little old man but heaven help you if you upset him or interrupt his soap operas.

Then there is Harold Smith the incorruptible WWII veteran cheapskate with a computer system that can infiltrate any electronic information.  Smith was asked to head the agency CURE by Kennedy and has been in the job since the 1960s. 

Remo is the meat in the sandwich of these two extremes. The Newark beat cop conscripted into an eternal battle with outré threats to America. He's the guy who cleans up Chuin's bodies when the old man kills someone who has annoyed him.

A lot of the Destroyer has made its way into other things Person of Interest, Knight Rider, The Karate Kid.

The Destroyer lead me to explore other series and was why I wrote Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction.  Being able to write a Destroyer short story for the More Blood anthology was one of the greatest moments of my life. 

Welcome to my new blog

Hello and welcome to the latest version of my blog.  It was formerly hosted over at Opera Blogs but with the decision to close those down I decided to move the blog over to Blogger.

As you can see I've changed the name of the blog from The Serial Vigilante Blog to Brad's pulpy blog.  Recently, I've felt that the scope of the Serial Vigilante Blog was somewhat too limited focusing as it was on the characters who appeared in the paperback racks of the 70s and 80s.  I'd been reading and thinking about those characters for nearly a decade and was starting to feel a little burnt out.  I found that my interests and tastes had expanded somewhat beyond that framework.

Serial Vigilantes will always be part of this blog but I want to expand beyond that especially with my involvement in the New Pulp Movement.  I was always able to justify that there was some tangential connection when I posted about New Pulp, Classic Pulp,or even Pulp Precursors (the amount of justification I felt the need to make for Don Pendleton's introduction to a Sherlock Holmes story).  With the change to Brad's Pulpy Blog if I want to post about something pulpy I can.  Something I may not have posted about on the old blog such as Katy Perry's jungle girl as seen in the videoclip for Roar is fair game here.

Hopefully for you the reader this means a more interesting blogging experience with a greater variety of material and more frequent blogging from me.

What becomes of the material on the old opera blogs?  Well I've tried to import them across but for whatever reason it hasn't worked so I'll be grabbing some of the posts off there and reposting here. Some will be posted as is (the two interviews being the first to come to mind)  others may be rewritten and new photos added but I'll make it obvious what is being reposted and what is new.