It began with a burning and it ended with a burning. At first it was just books, but by the end it included album covers, magazines and even television sets. It was creepy, because bok-burnings are always creepy, because they’re about trying to stop ideas existing and especially about keeping the young from finding out anything that doesn’t replicate their perents’ beliefs, that might change them out of being mindless, ignorant copies of their parents. How is it good parenting, true parenting, true love for a boy or a girl you have created to want them to be less than they can possibly be?
There were two censorship stories in this episide of Lou Grant but one was lightweuight and comic, aptly so because it involved Charlie Hume refusing to run a satirical cartoon strip that accused a California Senator of being in Arab politics, the fuss it caused, the Senator’s refusal, to take legal action and the cartoonist suing the Trib for breach of contract for failing to publish. That”s still censorship, but it’s the very thin end of the wedge.
The thick end is Altamira, where the book-burning(s) are takiing place. Rossi went out there to investigate, armed with an introduction to Mitchell Webster (Richard Dysart, later of LA Law), editor of the local newspaper and an old buddy of Lou. Webster had changed though. It was obvious from the outset, his overplayed avuncularity, his Altamira-is-a-nice-town-full-of-nice-people schtick.
But a very popular, very enthusiastic, very thought-provoking teacher Marilyn Keefer (Laurie Heineman) had been fired for refusing to drop books that are part of the National Curriculum, books with ‘radical’ ideas, asnd wound up working in a cowboy bar in a bare mid-riff fringed top and probably the shortest skirt in the entire run (so short we weren’t allowed more than tjhe briefest glimpse of the approximate position of its hem). She filled in Rossi on the Paul Revere Society, a self-appointed groupn of concerned citizens, out to drive ‘progressive’ ideas out alongside the ‘filth’.
There was also Irene Teal (Karen Ingenthron), the Librarian who brought her daughter here after her divorce, to live in a quiet, peaceful, nice town, who has to deal with famous and classic books being removed from the shelves, who has to accept borrowers editing The Catcher in the Rye by cutting out lines they don’t like with scissors, turning pages into doilies, who goes to dinner with Rossi in a place that makes lasagne with American cheese because she’s afraid for her job if she’s seen talking to him.
There’s the owner of the motel where Rossi’s staying, who takes out the televisipn to burn it, and bans it at home, because a popular character in a popular sitcom mentions being on the Pill.
Webster, an aptly chosen name is the spider in the centre, lying stories, slanted stories, praising the Paul Revere Society before they’d even formed, running their PO Box, creating, not reporting the news. And why? His son Jim, a Vietnam vet, died in 1969. not from the war, but from getting mixed up with drugs when he got back to LA (the episode was rigidly silent on the possibility that Jim Webster got hooked on drugs in Vietnam as a response to such a shitty war because if it hadn’t been you would never have seen this episode). Webster was out to stop the corruption spreading.
He was a fightened and confused man. They were all frightened and confused men and women, well-meaning and, in a way that would get the episode on the air, they were immocent. They wanted the best for their children and their neighbours.
And what made this episode horrible to bear was they we are their future. this episode was broadcast in January 1980. Before the year was out, Ronald Reagan would be elected President on a rising tide of fear, selfishness and conservatism (for what else is conservatism but the denand that you should do only what I allow?) This was a warning of what has become Trump and Johnson, with no end in sight, only we missed all the signs. We thought they had good intentions. We thought that they were just misguided.
But they burnt books out of fear of what was in them. The people who do that cannot ever be trusted to leave you alone. And too many still can’t see that.
The Guns of Avalon was the book that introduced me to the Chronicles of Amber, sometime in 1974, when I was eagerly exploring as much SF and Fantasy as I could carry home from the Library. In this case, it was Manchester Central Library, the one we all called Central Ref for short. I caught sight of Patrick Woodruffe’s splendid ‘Horned God’ cover, read the blurb, chanced the book and introduced myself to Roger Zelazny. It was the only book of the Chronicles that I read out of order, it was the most recent book to have been published, in 1972.
When I finally got to read it, on order from another branch, before buying my first copies for myself, I thought Nine Princes in Amber was not as good as this. Nearing fifty years on, I still think that. The Guns of Avalon has the advantage that all the complex exposition as to the characters and the setting has been laid out. It doesn’t need to do any more than provide brief recaps at various points and thus can concentrate on being a more direct action story. Furthermore, it doesn’t have to bounce around so many places and scenes, so Zelazny can take things more slowly, more smoothly, and vary the pace so that, overall, Avalon is a slower but more solid book, leading into a more cliffhanger ending.
Storywise, the book again offers the traditional three Act structure. Act One sees Corwin of Amber land after his sea-voyage and set-off to find a Shadow of his favourite Shadow, the land of Avalon, long since collapsed into Chaos. He is diverted to the land of Lorraine, ruled by Ganelon, once an adherent of Corwin’s in Avalon, long since exiled here for betraying him. L:orraine is affected by something called the Dark Circle, home to monsters and evil that is slowly expanding to encompass all the realm. The Dark Circle is the local form of Corwin’s curse: he stays to regain his former fitness and to defeat the Circle in this place.
In Act Two, Corwin completes his journey to Avalon, now accompanied by Ganelon as his aide. Guns don’t work in Amber because gunpowder is inert there, as are practically every other form of accelerant. But long ago, by accident, Corwin discovered that jeweller’s rouge from Avalon burns in Amber. He plans to lay in stocks. But Avalon has just defeated a Dark Circle kind of threat of its own, defeated – at the cost of a severed arrm – by its Protector. And that Protector is Benedict of Amber, Corwin’s oldest brother, the one for whom he has the most liking and respect, not to mention fear: Benedict is the Master of Arms for Amber, its greatest tactician, strategist, General and fighter. Corwin is welcome to rest in Avalon but not to further any attack on Amber, which is under constant attack from strange, foul creatures along a Black Road that cuts through Shadow, whose further end would seem most likely to be the Courts of Chaos. Corwin gets his rouge, takes a sidetrip to an equivalent of South Africa’s diamond fields to just pick them up out of the sand, and leaves. But before doing so, he meets Dara, a fresh, attractive 19 year old who he learns is Benedict’s great-granddaughter. He teaches her about Amber and Shadow. He also seduces her. When Benedict pursues him, Corwin assumes that it is this that has enraged his brother enough to want his head. Instead, Benedict accuses him of murder. Thanks to a trap involving the local manifestation of the Black Road, Corwin disables Benedict and escapes.
The final Act begins with an interlude on Shadow Earth. Corwin arranges for his special military equipment and even visits his former, still-intact home as ‘Carl Corey’, where he finds a message from Eric, asking his alliance against Amber’s enemies, or at least his forebearance from attacking until this threat is dispelled. Naturally, Corwin rejects the idea. He recruits a guerilla army from the hairy clawed Shadow he used before and leads a sneak attack over the mountain, Kolvir. This coincides with a massive attack along the Black Road, forcing Corwin to intervene on Amber’s side. But Eric is wounded, fatally, leaving Corwin in charge for practical purposes.
But his foray is interrupted by Dara, obsessive about reaching Amber and walking the Pattern, unrealistic about the reasons why she can’t. During the battle, she bursts through, aiming for the Palace. Benedict disowns her, filling Corwin with dread. He gets to the Pattern in time to watch Dara complete it, changing shapes a dozen times. From its centre, she tells him he is exactly too late. She disappears with the words, ‘Amber will be destroyed’.
US trade paperback
Up to and including this point, The Guns of Avalon is a direct sequel to Nine Princes in Amber, linearly and thematically. Until the very end, Corwin is still pursuing the throne of Amber. We meet two more brothers in Benedict and Gerard, we meet Dara, who purports to be a much younger generation of Amberite, we have our first, but by no means last ‘hellride’, that is, a passage during which Corwin travels in Shadow in an accelerated state, depicted in an abstract sequence of changing images.
But we don’t add much to the original set-up, until the irrationally obsessive but young and inexperienced Dara reaches the Pattern and transforms into an enemy intent on the destruction of Amber.
I’ve already stated my belief that when he started the First Chronicles, Zelazny had either no specific ending in mind, or that he had an ending that he later abandoned, realising that it was inadequate as underestimating the richness of possibility that Substance, Shadow and Chaos presented. And it’s my belief, based on the change that hits the series as of the next book, that this came now.
The two books still, to me, read and feel like the first two books of an enjoyable but underambitious trilogy. The Guns of Avalon has served the purpose of a middle book, extending the story to a turning point that sets up a grand finale: more of the same but sufficiently different to keep them reading.
There’s still the overuse of cheapjack Earth similes at nearly every turn, though nothing quite so egregious as in Nine Princes. There’s the Black Road, and its forerunner, the Dark Circle, openly established as the outcome of Corwin’s curse and no other, creating the ironic set-up that, now he has all but secured the Crown of Amber, he must defend it against his own work.
There is a relatively minor change of detail in the book. When his memories – true memories – are restored via the Pattern in Rebma, Corwin is adamant that there are/were a total of twenty-three siblings: fifteen brothers, six of them dead, eight sisters, two, possibly four of them dead. Here, the total is reduced to the thirteen live ones and a handful of deceased, who barely matter (these will be further reduced to brothers Osric and Finndo, senior to Benedict, who died ‘for the good of Amber’). Zelazny never tries to explain the discrepancy.
And there’s Ganelon. Ganelon was exiled from the real Avalon by hellride, centuries before. It’s one hell of a coincidence for Corwin to be diverted to Lorraine, where he is its protector, though the means by which Ganelon loses his hatred for Corwin is not merely plausible but well laid out. He’s a trusted aide, a sounding board, and asker of questions useful to the reader.
But he’s not what he seems, and when it becomes clear that a hidden hand is operating, it’s not hard to work out the truth. But that’s only in a later book. In The Guns of Avalon, Ganelon may not be only what he seems to be, and nothing more: he’s perfectly placed to be revealed as an imposter. But he’s not who Zelazny decides he will be, not yet, not whilst we’re in the first stage of the series.
It would be another three years, and two more intervening novels, before Sign of the Unicorn was published, time for ample thought. Ample thought indeed.
It’s off the top of my head, I know, but I’m struggling to think of another episode of Person of Interest, or any series for that matter, that so successfully navigates the transition from genuinely comic dislocation to the sudden and most serious of wide-ranging danger, to end with a step off a diving board into waters cold and bleak, whose depth is unguessable.
And in addition to that, portraying these various moods and modes with an equal level of attention and as an organic, integrated package.
‘Most Likely To…’ began in deliberately standard operating mode, Reese and Shaw staking out the Number of the Week, Leona Wainwright, Personnel Secretary, in Town to see a musical (Mamma Mia). Who, What, Why, When and Where, the usual quinella, except that Leona is attacked in a taxicab which is blown up in front of everybody’s eyes. This is not standard operating mode: Team Machine has lost a Number.
This leads directly to a split in forces. A new Number is already in, Federal Prosecutor Matthew Read (Nestor Carbonel) attending something in Westchester that, to the vast dismay of Reese and (especially) Shaw turns out to be a 20 year High School Reunion. Shaw is convinced they’re being punished, and for once you’ve got to take that seriously.
Meanwhile, Finch and Fusco are off to Washington to investigate what information Leona Wainwright had that would make her a target for… yes, you guessed it, Vigilance.
So we have competing storylines, one deadly serious except for Fusco’s constant caustic commentary. He and Finch find the FBI ahead of them, removing every document from the office, and have to break into the FBI Evidence Locker to find it. Given that Miss Wainwright (she did not strike you, in her brief appearance, as one who would be married, with two children and a white picket fence, and certainly not an active sex-life) dealt with security clearances, her records would include the name of every security operative the US has.
Be warned, though. This is a red herring.
Whilst this is going on, ‘Frank Mercer’ and ‘Betty Wright’ find themselves plunged without warning into the company of total strangers who they are supposed to know from twenty years before, who know and remember them from that time, and about whom they haven’t a clue. Shy, braces-wearing, overweight, frizzy-haired ‘Betty’ attracts a lot of attention, as anyone would if they’d turned from that into Sarah Shahi. ‘Frank’ also atracts attention, from stoner Toke, an old buddy who’s thankfully out of it, but also from a succession of attractive women – brunette, blonde, redhead, so wonderfully colour-coded – each of whom walk up to him and slap him across the face.
But amidst this wonderfully silly stuff there’s a serious issue. Twenty years ago, a girl named Clair died of an overdose. She was Matthew Reed’s girlfriend, and everybody blamed him for it, and someone has a lot of stunts rigged to thrust her in front of everyone, to shame, embarrass, humiliate Matthew.
Except, as things modulate from light to darkness, he’s set it all up himself. He’d never been back for any previous Reunion. He’d spent twenty years blaming himself for driving Clair to suicide over his flirting with someone else, until he started looking at the case and thinking like a Prosecutor, not a boyfriend. And identified class nerd Dougie, Clair’s shoulder-to-cry-on, the one who would be a lover but had been irreversibly friend-zoned.
And Matthew’s set Dougie up to commit suicide out of remorse for what he did to Clair, drugging her up to make her more… relaxed. As in inert and unable to resist the rape that would have followed if Dougie hadn’t overdosed her.
Sands shift, the Number is a would-be perpetrator who couldn’t go through with it anyway. But without realising it, we are on a diving board as walking towards its end.
Because the High School erupts with overkill shooting in an attempt to kill Reese and Shaw. They’re not the only imposters there, as Vigilance have a man there, their whereabouts leaked by Root to draw Vigilance out into the open.
Unfortunately they’re in the open in Washington as well, and this time it’s Peter Collier himself, invading the evidence locker, confronting Finch, who’s just gotten Leona’s safe open stealing the folder. Collier’s going to take Finch as well, except that Root shows up, two guns blazing.
But Collier gets away with the folder.
And then we’re off the diving board and into the cold, dark water. Because Vigilance disseminates the folder world-wide. And the world learns that massive sums of money have secretly gone into something called Northern Lights, a massive surveillance system…
And Senator Ross H. Garrison (the ever-excellent John Doman), denying everything furiously, orders Control to shut the programme down. Shut the Machine down. And against her judgement… she does.
But the Machine shifts itself to commence Tertiary Operations.
What is it all about? Even without the benefit of hindsight and foreknowledge, it’s not difficult to see where this is leading. The Government has lost its greatest weapon in the fight against terrorism. It is blind and naked in the dark, privacy restored: Vigilance’s aim.
And there is a void. A space vacated by an Artificial Intelligence. Is there another AI, ready and waiting? Boys and girls, can you spell S-A-M-A-R-I-T-A-N?
Not that I’m trying to hint anything, but between now and Thursday, there’s a Lulu.com code that will get you 15% off the cost of The Infinite Jukebox book (and anything else under my name that you may care to sample).
The Code is ONEFIVE and you apply it at check-out.
I can’t really say that I was there. Most of what happened with Joy Division happened when I was living away from Manchester for the only time, in Nottingham, which was hardly a punk city. I got to see Joy Division live twice, both times as support, once in Nottingham, once in Manchester, in those two years I lived there. The only part of the story I was truly present for was Ian Curtis’s suicide, closer than I might wish, for one of the Partners in my new firm was the Coronor who conducted the inquest.
But I hate the very idea of reviewing this film as a film, because it is part of my life, and because I wasn’t really any further distant from it than any other Joy Division fan in anything but geography.
Yes, I see the disclaimer in the credits about how incidents have been dramatised, and the comments from the likes of Hooky that it isn’t the truth because the truth was more boring, but I’ve owned Deborah Curtis’s Touching from a Distance since it came out in paperback and I lived through the Seventies in Manchester when all this takes place and the re-creation is exact. We sounded like that, we looked like that, it was as shitty as that.
And I loved Joy Division’s music more than I ever loved anybody else’s, not even R.E.M. or Shawn Colvin who I had the pleasure of for decades, literal decades, not the twelve to fifteen months of Joy Division before that horrifying shock announced by John Peel at the start of a Monday night programme.
And I will never forget the feeling of unease at listening to the lyrics of ‘Love will tear us apart’ as a single, knowing of why Ian Curtis had killed himself, and wondering if I really should be listening to something so personal, which was already my favourite song ever, and still is.
I can’t begin to analyse this because I lived it and the film is too much like living it again. The cast are brilliant and even what is false feels real because I was there, at a distance but there.
I went to the cinema this afternoon to see Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of one Harley Quinn) expecting to come back and write one of my ‘Uncollected Thoughts’ about it. But I won’t. Don’t go to this film expecting a stiory because it deliberately rejects the idea of story, preferring to racket around in explosions and slow-motion violence that is colourful and cartoony Two of its pricipal five characters bear little or no resemblance to their comic book originals and the film drops a considerable number of F-Bombs and MotherF-Bombs (there’s one of the latter on the soundtrack). Sure, it’s vigorous, and you can liberally scatter the Z-word all over it (zany, you numbskulls) and a lot of people will enjoy its complete rejection of conventional story-telling. I’m not telling you too not go to see it, just to not blame me if you do.
You should stare at the poster for 150 minutes instead
Getting my hands on a DVD-Rom of More Fun Comics, a National Allied Publications/Detective Comics inc./National Periodical Publications Golden Age title published from 1934 to 1947, completes my collection of what I think of as the Big Four, that is, the four comics who contributed characters to All-Star Comics and the Justice Society of America.
That’s my angle of interest, but it must be acknowledged that More Fun has a historical significance of its own. As New Fun it was the first ever comic book to feature all-new material, and in issue 6 it offered the first published work by Cleveland teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, two instalments of Henri Duval, Swordsman of France, before creating Doctor Occult in issue 8. By then, the title had become More Fun, as of issue 7 and, finally, More Fun Comics with issue 9.
My DVD-Rom is more in the mould of Flash and All-American than Adventure, but like the two All-American publications books, the title did not survive the Fories, being cancelled with issue 127, by when the reason for my interest had long since gone by the board. It starts with issue 8, so let’s look at that to begin with.
Cover-dated February 1936 and published by More Fun Inc., headquartered in Missouri, issue 8 is a revelation. It’s the last of the original, larger-scale format, 44 pages with card covers. Comic books began as reprints of newspaper strips and despite the all-original boast, the comic is still trying to stick with that formula. With the exception of a prose serial, everything appears for one page only, laid out like a Sunday strip: four tiers, mostly square panels containing illustrations more suited to books that comics, no animation or attempt at movement, a mixture of B&W, limited colour and full-colour, funny strips and adventure ones, multiple genres. When I said this was all-original, that only meant that none of this stuff had been printed before: there isn’t an original idea in the entire issue, and nothing is remotely readable.
The next issue shrank to comic book size and expanded to 64 pages, with some series jumping to two pages, and some new features appearing. If you’re expecting to hear about these, you’ll have to find another blogger: I’m an analyst not an annalist.
It’s more-or-less a given that Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson used original art because he couldn’t afford the Syndicate fees for strips, and the young writers and artists he used were much cheaper. I’ve heard them described as rough, naïve, inexperienced and, reading between the lines, too untalented to make it on newspaper strips. Now I know they weren’t exaggerating.
None of this is of more than historical interest to me, except for an almost unbelievable letter of praise from a girl reader living in Newton Heath, Manchester, and there’s a lot of it to get through before we reach the meat of the run for me.
The change I had my eyes open for finally showed up in issue 31, May 1938. Gone was Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson. Vincent Sullivan was now Editor, not assistant Editor. More Fun was now owned by Detective Comics Inc. And inside the front cover there was a full-page ad for a new title: Action Comics no. 1.
There was no immediate change. New features replaced old but More Fun stayed the same. Dr Occult was dropped but Seigel and Schuster’s Radio Car, a Police series, continued its irregular course. Old features drifted on, unchanging. But with every month that passed, DC, as I suppose we should now call them, were becoming more aware of what a hit they’d bought from Siegel and Schuster, and Bob Kane, enlivened by ideas from Bill Finger, was shaping his own costumed character. Unseen and unheard, there was a tide rising and it was going to overflow soon.
For now, e.g., issue 41, the mix was still the same, various miscellaneous adventure series, a couple of gag strips. More pages were in full colour, through these continued to be distributed haphazardly throughout the comic, favouring the front of the book. The biggest difference was that every strip got at least two pages and several as any as four, making for only a dozen different series.
Issue 43, cover-dated May 1939, was released alongside Detective 27, with plugs for the new action-adventure strip starting that month, the Batman. And Charlie Gaines had established All-American Publications and All-American Comics. And by issue 49, there wasn’t a single gag strip in the book.
But patience eventually pays off. The long life of the original More Fun Comics, little changed from the title put together by Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, ended in issue 51, cover-dated January 1940. in honour of that, let me list its contents. These were; Wing Brady, a Foreign Legion adventurer; Biff Bronson, an adventurer; King Carter, a globe-trotting cowboy adventurer: The Buccaneer, a sea-going adventurer; Kit Strong, a private detective adventurer, Lieut. Bob Neal of the Sub. 662, a Naval adventurer; The Flying Fox, an aviator adventurer; Detective Sergeant Carey, a Police detective adventurer; Sergeant O’Malley of the Red Coat Patrol, a Canadian Mountie adventurer; Bulldog Martin, an adventurer, and a single comic page starring Butch the Pup.
But the Buccaneer was ending. Its creator, Bernard Bailey would be drawing a new strip the following month, written by Jerry Siegel.
The white bits are not a costume
He’s there on the cover, with his green cape and hood, gloves and trunks, arms folded as he looks sternly down over a gang of crooks, The Spectre coming to turn More Fun around. Inside, he’s the lead feature, the first of a two-part telling of his origin as Jim Corrigan, hard-boiled Police Detective. The story’s familiar, as it should be given how often it’s been reprinted, but by the end of the episode, the ghost of Jim Corrigan is still wearing a tuxedo.
There’s one thing about the story that doesn’t sit all that well with me. Corrigan has blown out a party in honour of his heiress fiancee Clarice Winston to knock off some of ‘Gat’ Benson’s mob. Clarice is understandably angry with him for that. Corrigan’s hardly apologetic: indeed, he roundly tells her there’s only going to be one boss in this marriage, and that’s him. Clarice calls him a tyrant and a bully, but she still loves him.
Ok, it’s 1939, when marital relationships were looked on in a totally different light, and it’s hardly out of step, but it still jars modern sensibilities, or at least my modern sensibilities. But knowing more now of Jerry Siegel’s marriage and his personal history than I once did, I can’t help but sense a personal issue being worked on here. Jerry the mother’s boy, the nerd-before-there-were-nerds, who married against his Mother’s wishes, wouldn’t be the first writer to make his personal problems ‘work’ in his fiction.
The rest of the issue is unchanged, though I couldn’t help noticing that Bulldog Martin suddenly got a bottle of invisibility pills at the same time.
The other half of the story completes the tale with Corrigan’s revenge on Benson and his mob: dealing death with a glance, withering one into a skeleton, driving the rest out of their senses, you can already see where Michael Fleisher got his ideas from. Corrigan also revives Clarice from near death, breaks off their engagement rather woodenly, moves out of the apartment he shares with his best friend, all the time acting so strangely, and then sews himself a costume to wear as The Spectre. All these limitless super-powers and he gets out a sewing machine. It’s not the most favourable of signs.
Somewhat surprisingly, Corrigan gets the chance to relinquish his powers and receive eternal rest in his third episode, summoned to the edge of Heaven and getting an either-or offer from the Voice. Since he’s summoned in the split instant that a crooked Swami has fired a bullet at Clarice, who is proving impressively hard to shake off, Corrigan has no choice but to go for Option B: to be earth-bound, fighting crime until all traces of it are exterminated.
Only four episodes in and I have to say there’s a strange intensity about these early Spectre stories that just doesn’t come over in the solo chapters in All-Star Comics, which is self-evidently because those are written by Gardner Fox. Siegel brings a twisted perspective to Corrigan/The Spectre’s determined rejection of all human connection and an angry nihilism to the superficially charming Zor’s role as The Spectre’s evil equivalent.
I’m also intrigued that, whilst Corrigan and The Spectre are one being, the latter is already and constantly ’emerging’ from the former’s body, foreshadowing a significant development later in the series.
Half-helm only
The Spectre had obviously made a hit because in issue 55 he was joined by his partner in the supernatural, Doctor Fate. It’s a most odd first story as there is no origin, and whilst I knew this is held back some time, reprints had always centred upon Fate’s first meeting with debutante Inza Cramer. Here though, we start with Fate’s evil enemy, Wotan, targetting Inza to draw Fate’s attention, with the good Doctor – not described as possessing magic but rather the great secret of transforming Matter into Energy and Energy into Matter (what a gloriously meaningless attribute that is!) – not appearing until halfway.
So that was now two costumed heroes, both magical. Dr Fate took the cover for the first time in issue 56, continuing his battle with Wotan but overcoming him permanently (?), whilst the Spectre merely fought a gang of crooks. Elsewhere, More Fun was settling into a consistent run of adventure series, most of them veterans of the comic, though there was a new character, aviator Captain Desmo, who kept his face permanently concealed by flying helmet and goggles just as much as if he were a superhero.
And a new series, about Africa-based adventurer Congo Bill, facing up to a Phantom-esque villain called the Skull, started in issue 56. It’s a pretty basic adventure strip but it would last a surprisingly long time, hopping from title to until 1959, when, as we’ve already seen, it arrived in Adventure Comics, where Congo Bill was transformed into Congorilla.
The Doctor Fate strip also runs with a frenetic intensity. Gardner Fox just freewheels through each adventure, hurtling from one action to another, with very little evidence of a composed plot and a high-risk magical apocalypse threatened on every page. It’s gloriously goofy and gloriously weird. Both these strips burn in a way none of the other Justice Society members ever do. Though the basis of Fate’s power is still unsettled, now being an atomic force within him.
But the Gothic/Lovecraftian atmosphere of Fate’s series was fairly quickly decided to be a bit too intense for the readers, and this had to be dialled down. The first step, in issue 66, was to have the Doctor remove his helm and reveal a blond-haired handsome face: a human being, in fact, in response to Inza’s wish for someone she might love instead of a mysterious sorceror. Kent Nelson’s somewhat grisly origin, involving involuntary patricide, followed in the next issue.
At the same time, Congo Bill bowed out his short run in the comic.
Since their respective debuts, The Spectre had been the lead feature in More Fun and Doctor Fate closing things out. Now, in issue 68, the roles were reversed.
Despite Fate and the Spectre, More Fun had never wholly accepted superheroing.
The first time he was popular
Now the time was coming when this would change rapidly. Johnny Quick, a rip-off of The Flash in issue 71, Aquaman, a rip-off of the Sub-Mariner and The Green Arrow, a rip-off of Batman both in issue 73, all created by Mort Weisinger. In between times, Dr Fate got the toning down I knew was coming, getting rid of the supernatural and the eerie in favour of a half-faced helm that exposed his nose and mouth, and aiding his sudden vulnerability to attacks on his lungs. Only Radio Squad and Clip Carson survived the transition.
And Fate was not the only supernatural character to get toned down as issue 74 introduced The Spectre to Percival Popp, the Super-Cop. I have long read about, but never read, this comic relief character who was to dog Corrigan and his ghost for the rest of the series. Popp turned out to not be a cop but rather a private detective, determined to work side-by-side with Jim Corrigan. He was a short, skinny guy with a big nose, glasses and a shock of dark red hair. He could have been worse but he was bad enough: a comic relief character in January 1942?
The rest of the title was not at all impressive. Johnny Quick was crude. Aquaman and Green Arrow were as bland as their spells in the Fifties in Adventure, just cruder in style to begin with. And Doctor Fate had exchanged gothic/sinister tones for obsessive, pun-based wisecracking of a kind that makes Spider-Man look sophisticated.
The first history of The Spectre I ever read, as long ago as 1966, made mention of the time when the Avenging Ghost was permitted to resurrect Jim Corrigan’s body to life. I’d always been under the impression that this had preceded the arrival of Percival Popp, but in fact it followed it, by one issue.
Issue 75 saw Clarice Winston trying to re-enter Corrigan’s life. His cruel rejection of her in his origin is always held up as a key factor in that story but it leaves the impression that that was that for the lovelorn heiress. But Clarice remained as much in love with him as ever, and hopeful of getting married, and Jim still found her hard to resist. Now Popp, in his second apearance, took a hand in trying to put the two back together.
No comment
But Clarice was becoming the victim of an artist who was draining her life, and who was having a sculpture thrown into the river, exactly where Benson’s men had thrown Corrigan’s cement barrel. To prevent his body being found, and blowing his identity, The Spectre sought and received permission to restore Corrigan to life.
And the first thing Corrigan did was seek out Clarice.
It was a touching reward for her faith and patience. Now his excuse for not marrying her was, you’ll pardon the phrase, dead in the water. Did he get engaged to her? No, you’d think he was engaged to Percival Popp, in both his existences, since the little man became co-star of the series two issues later.
The success of the Green Arrow took me completely by surprise. By issue 76, he’d claimed the lead story and, an issue later, took over the cover. Clip Carson was dropped as from the same issue.
It might be germane to ask, if Green Arrow had become the most popular character in More Fun, as he self-evidently had, why was he not drafted into the Justice Society of America? There are two answers to that: America had entered the War, paper was rationed, no new titles were to be launched for the duration, and had they topped any reader’s polls, neither The Spectre nor Doctor Fate had anywhere to go to make room.
More pertinently, Green Arrow – and Speedy – already had a team to call home, Detective Comics’ Seven Soldiers of Justice, aka the Law’s Legionnaires, denizens of the recently created Leading Comics. More Fun was now firmly a superhero comic. Clip Carson had gone, leaving only the long-running Radio Squad to disrupt the line-up. The Green Arrow’s stories were no better or worse than the ones in Adventure in the Fifties, the main distinction being that the Emerald Archer only fires real arrows, with points not gimmicks. Aquaman deals with mainly realistic sea adventures, without the constant ‘finny friends’ business, but he’s the entirely human son of a famous submarine scientist who’s taught him scientific ways of living under the water. Johnny Quick, now enjoying some solid art from ‘Mort Morton’, is the best of the bunch.
As for the old stagers, the de-powered Doctor Fate is not a patch on the full-helmed version. There are no magical or super-scientific foes, just ordinary crooks. The series is energetic enough and Inza is doing a sterling job of showing that you really don’t need to hide your identity from your girlfriend, but it’s still pallid stuff compared to the beginning. And The Spectre has now resigned himself to a full-time role alongside the ridiculous Popp. At least we no longer have to suffer the incessant and tiresome demands of the Cliffland Chief of Police that Jim Corrigan capture The Spectre because The Spectre is behind everything. Obviously. Not that much of a relief, sadly.
The War came to More Fun in issue 84, on the cover at least and, in passing, in Green Arrow’s strip. The next issue was billed as a big change in Doctor Fate’s life as the Doctor became a Doctor, retraining as a physician. This made me think: once again, the histories I’ve read of characters have not been as accurate as they might. Kent Nelson has always been portrayed as an archaeologist, like his father Sven, who changed profession to Doctor to be more useful during the War years. When he was revived in 1965, he was back in the digging business. Incidentally, having jettisoned the lower half of his helm, Fate dispensed with his golden cape as well.
In fact, throughout Fate’s series to date, once Kent Nelson was revealed, there was not one word about his profession. And how could he go on digs when he spent all his time in that walled tower in Salem?
Incidentally, the story revealing Nelson’s new profession saw Fate meet a plastic surgeon blackmailed into creating new faces for crooks over a brother in a prison camp in Germany, exactly the same set up as the Green Arrow story in the same issue.
Though he didn’t displace the Green Arrow from the leading position, Johnny Quick did get onto the cover for issues 86 and 87. As for issue 88, The Spectre story had him, and Jim Corrigan, as just a ghost again. There had only been one additional story after issue 75 to specifically reference Corrigan as human again (and dating Clarice), but this was a definitive continuity-reversal.
There was one final story to reference Corrigan and The Spectre as separate, and this was the one in which they separated. Corrigan the human could finally pass the physical, and went into officer-training, to fight the Japanese, leaving the Spectre behind to keep helping out Percival Popp. But separation from his host had the unexpected effect of leaving the ghost invisible. In possession of all his other powers alright, just not visible. So the once-mighty Spectre, who could kill at a glance, was now the stooge. Thankfully, not for much longer.
The same issue did include a development I was glad to see, the re-entry of Inza Kramer, fiancee to that dashing young Interne, Doctor Nelson. Aww, so sweet. Clarice Winston must have been green. But that would prove to be Inza’s final appearance in the series.
A minor detail that intrigued me by this point was a succession of adverts for Prize Comics, and then Prize and Headline Comics. No such titles were ever published by Detective or All-American, and these turned out to be titles published by Crestwood Publications, who had the bright and possibly unique idea of advertising in their bigger rivals line!
With paper rationing starting to bite, in the form of an order to reduce usage by 10%, More Fun, which had been monthly since it established itself, was demoted to bi-monthly status for the duration. All this was to was was to delay the changes lying directly ahead.
In the meantime, a slip on the cover of issue 93 plugged The Green Arrow and Speedy, whilst the Aquaman story was, for once, worth reading. The Monarch of the Sea guards a delayed freighter bringing supplies to Murmansk. The twist is that it has an all-female crew and, whilst Aquaman and the Germans patronisingly underestimate the ladies, they perform with calm confidence and aptitude, needing no condescension. Oh, and the Captain turns into a red-headed babe in a backless evening dress when they arrive!
Even less comment
Little things: Johnny Quick’s stories had adopted a comfortable formula by which the Mile-a-Moment hero has to help someone by doing a job that would take a dozen men a month to complete, but do it in less than twenty-four hours. At the back end of his run and using only the most minimal talents, Doctor Fate was only now being referred to regularly as ‘the Man of Magic’. And issue 94 saw the debut of Dover and Clover, twin private detectives who made Percy Popp look competent.
Nevertheless, they quickly proved to be so popular that they shared the cover of issue 98 with Green Arrow and Speedy, who were quoted as claiming this was “Our Mag”. Not for much longer it wouldn’t be but this issue saw the final appearance of Doctor Fate, in a sadly stupid and unbelievable little escapade that was below even the standards his series had sunk to. Cover date July-August 1944: in All-Star Comics 21, cover-dated Summer 1944, the Doc and Sandman were active in their last Justice Society adventure.
Fate was not replaced, unless you count a one-page comic historical feature a replacement. Two issues later, More Fun reached its historical 100th issue, without fanfare, celebration or effort of note, though Johnny Quick got the cover and the lead slot and Green Arrow was bounced back to fourth slot. More Fun used to be The Spectre’s comic. It was so for the last time in issue 101 (January-February 1945). And the Ghostly Guardian, or else the Dark Knight as he was so frequently called over four decades before Frank Miller’s first Batman story, made his last appearance in All-Star in issue 23, Winter 1944. Like Doctor Fate, the disappearances were virtually simultaneous, and the last story undistinguished. Both had been undistinguished for a long time.
The Spectre’s replacement was introduced in a five-page prelude in issue 101. Superman had long been human until he reached manhood. Now he had a career to be revealed as Superboy, though not the Superboy Jerry Siegel had envisaged, nor a Superboy Siegel had any part in, More Fun‘s line-up would now consist of Superboy, Aquaman, Green Arrow and Johnny Quick, plus the stupid Dover and Clover. Sound familiar? It ought to, for reasons we’ll shortly learn.
Anyway, Superboy’s full-scale debut didn’t merit him the cover, which went to the twin detectives, nor even the lead slot, which was Green Arrow again. It was a younger Superboy than we would get used to, somewhere around age eight, and a Clark Kent who didn’t wear glasses and acted like a normal kid. There was some way to go yet.
And there was no rush to exploit the new character, though he was mentioned on issue 103’s cover, as Green Arrow and Speedy once again call out Dover and Clover for trying to take over ‘their book’, only for the clueless crime-crackers to turn up again to point out Superboy’s in it. And they showed him on the cover of the next issue, with the crime-fighting archers.
Superboy might have started without Jerry Siegel, but his name was on it, alongside Joe Schuster, next time around. There were none of the familiar characters, no Ma and Pa Kent, no pretty redhead next door. They wouldn’t come until later, and in a different title.
Because, after issue 107, cover-date January-February 1946, More Fun underwent a wholesale change of direction, to emulate its name by becoming a comic comic. The regulars, Superboy, Johnny Quick, Green Arrow and Aquaman, were shipped out en masse, to, as we have already seen, Adventure Comics, where they would stay for over a decade.
Alfred Bester created this?
With issue 108, Dover and Clover took over the cover, and the lead slot, greeting Genius Jones, who had travelled in the opposite direction and dropped into place behind them. The rest of the comic was new, or rather old – old hat, that is. A parade of silly characters and silly situations, without any of the ingenuity or humour of the newspaper strips of the era, or any of the rich cartooning abilities of their artists. But the next month, for the comic had been returned to monthly status now the war was over, just in time for its great change, Genius Jones – a creation of Alfred Bester, my life – had both cover and lead slot and the detectives were back at the back.
In fact, they were settling in to alternate cover billing.
Now it’s fair to say that, with the exception of Sheldon Mayer’s Scribbly and the Red Tornado, I get nothing from the Golden Age humour strips. Even Johnny Thunder was nigh on intolerable at times, when Peachy Pet took the lead. So from More Fun‘s change of direction to the end of the run, there is little to interest me. Nevertheless, I read each issue (semi-) diligently to check for anything requiring comment.
For the record, the line-up after the alternating leads consisted of Curly’s Cafe, Windy, The Gas House Gang, Rusty, Cabby Casey and Cunnel Custard, but if you want any more details than that, buy your own DVD!
That was until issue 121, which introduced Jimminy and his Magic Book, a fairytale adventure that got not merely cover status but two well-drawn stories inside. Genius Jones and Dover & Clover continued, as did Rusty, Windy and the Gas House Gang but everybody else was dropped.
There wasn’t much left. Howard Post’s art on Jimminy (whose other name was Crockett) may well have been the best ever to appear in More Fun, with a foreshadowing of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, but More Fun was heading for cancellation. Superman crossed the cover of issue 125, Cabbie Casey replaced Rusty in issue 126, and with issue 127, cover dated November-December 1947, with no less than five Jimminy stories and one final Dover & Clover, it was gone.
So ended DC’s oldest title and Genius Jones andDJimminy went with it. Depending on dates, Dover and Clover may have had as much as ten more appearances in them across other titles, but they ended up in deserved limbo too. And, in the absence of a DVD of either or both of Leading Comics and Star-Spangled Comics, that completes my adventures in the Golden Age.
Over the last five years I’ve been adding posts about a variety of songs that, in many differing ways, I find significnt, whether that be musically, soocially or personally. The series hasrun under the title of The Infinite Jukebox.
Just last week, I posted the 100th such essay and, having reached that milestone, i decided to compile all the blogs into a book, which I have now published through lulu.com.
It’s nothing you haven’t read before, but if you were interested, and didn’t fancy picking through five years worth of posts to find these gems, you can now have these all in one place, by clicking on this link and paying a mere £6.99 and postage.
There’s even a picture of the cover to incite you.
The series will go on here and when I’ve racked up another 100 entries, I shall alert you to the chance of acquiring Volume 2. But that won’t be for awhile yet so you needn’t worry about me embarrassing you like this again any time soon.
In imdb‘s episode ratings, this latest Lou Grant gets a below-par 7.8. I can understand that on an objective basis, especially given one substantial plothole in one half of the story, but my own history left me unable to be objective about the subject of the other.
Whilst the amount of time devoted to each, vastly different strand would justify me designating them as A and B stories, both did deal with very different questions of heritage and both turned on matters of significance. The ‘A story’, if I have to designate it thus, began with a determined but nervous woman walking onto a golf course, confronting one of four Doctors finishing a round, identifying herself as a baby he once delivered – and slapping him across the face before collapsing, sobbing that he had given her cancer.
In contrast, the ‘B story’ started in comic manner, with an elderly, well-dressed, rich and foreign-looking couple invading the Trib to try to withdraw someone else’s already-published wedding announcement, as preparation to prevent the wedding. Billie gets the girl, Rossi gets the other girl.
Billie’s girl is Jessica Downey (Sands Hall). Twenty-odd years ago, the Doctor prescribed her mother a new drug named DES which was supposed to prevent miscarriages. In fact, it had no such effect. But in about one in one thousand four hundred cases, it led to canccer in the baby, about twenty years later. Not merely cancer, but it also deformed the uterus, meaning that a woman so affected could conceive but not carry a baby to term. Before the episode was over, Jessica had had all her ovaries removed and at least part of her vaginal wall, losing her desire to become a mother, and bitter about how long her loving boyfriend would stay with her when she couldn’t give him babies, nor ‘normal’ sex.
In a way, this clinical and detailed exposition was shocking, especially for a forty year old episode (original broadcast 28 January 1980), not just for its explicitness about the sexual aspects – the word orgasm was used, out loud – but also for the use of the C-word. . There was still a massive inhibition on saying the word Cancer so far back, a horror-movie fear that to say it was to bring it down on you.
That it was about cancer left me unable to look at it without my own background blurring any attempt at judgement, and the episode opted to bring the subject into the family with Billie herself. She’s the right age: did her mother take DES when she had her?
The short answer, after a whirlwind of emotions including some very understandable re-writing of the past to pretend it was exactly the same as the present, was yes. no suggestion of actual cancer, just a twice-yearly check-up that will doubtless never be referred to again: a Sword of Damocles hanging high indeed, but still hanging.
Rossi’s story involved Sarah Hartounian (Carol Bagdasarian), who was marrying Jamahl Azar (Gregory Rozakis). The couple trying to prevent the wedding or at least word of it getting out were her Uncle and Aunt Leon and Levinia (Buck Kartalian and Magda Harout). The reason? Sarah was Armenian and Jamahl Turkish.
Sarah and Jamahl were nothing more than two people in love, but to Leon and Levinia they were symbols, and a disgrace. For centuries, the Turks have tried to wipe out the Armenians, including two genocidal massacres, in 1915 and 1916, the outline of which was told in blunt and horrific detail, to which was added the approbation of Hitler (true historical fact) in comparison to the Jews.
To the older Hartounians, Sarah was not and could not be Sarah alone. She was and must be a symbol of her people, and be a representative of her ethnicity, which made her both more and less than she was. Lou tried to point out that only by such things as the pair marrying can ancient hatreds, however well justified, begin to be repaired, but Leon’s personal experiences, alongside his late brother, Sarah’s father, were so intense that he would never break out of that. And so intense that who had the right to try to bend him?
Leon and Lavinia believed Sarah was only marrying Jamahl to hurt them, when the truth was that they were marrying for the only good reason for marrying: love and compatibility. But, in the episode’s biggest plot hole, Leon intended to alter his brother’s will to disinherit Sarah. The show never explained how he could do that: his own will, yes, as was first mooted but his brother’s already operational one?
Either way, this inheritance ended up in court where the judge, after hearing compelling arguments both ways, voided the change of will. The elder Hartounians marched out, refusing to speak to their niece, which made you wonder just exactly who had won.
And Billie reconciled with her mother, who herself was torn up over the fear she had hurt her child but who had not been able to express it before.
Lots of cliches in there, put in service of an episode with solid roots that would probably have been better served as a one-off, not a weekly series produced under headlong time constraints. But I felt it in that part of me that only knows cancer for what it did to my family, which cannot think but only feel.
Martin Crookall - Author For Sale 