The Phantom - The Charlton Years Volume Five!

The Phantom - The Complete Series: The Charlton Years Volume Five brings the reprint series from Hermes to a close as it documents the end of the venerable Phantom comic many years ago. The character had begun his new comic adventures at Gold Key in 1962and continued them at King Comics in 1966 before being picked up by Charlton for a hefty run. In 1976 it ended, but not with a whimper by any means. 

Don Newton was one of his generations finest comic artists, alongside others such as Joe Staton, John Byrne, Dave Cockrum, and Mike Vosburg. He lived in Arizona, far from the NYC-based comic book industry so he made his bones with outstanding fan artwork. On many occasions he drew the Phantom. Now he'd get his chance to draw him in a professional capacity. But first...

Charlton's conversion of their Phantom to something more akin to what classic fans of the character expect continues with issue sixty-three. "The Web of Fear" was written by Joe Gill and drawn by Frank Bolle. It has the Ghost Who Walks battling a villain dubbed "The Spider" who targets the Phantom and Diana Palmer as well as the treasure hidden in the Skull Cave. The Phantom invades the Spider's lair to rescue Diana and later lures the Spider and his thugs into his trap. 

Joe Gill wrote "Goldbeard the Pirate", but Don Sherwood drew it. Sherwood has a peculiar spare style and one of the biggest signatures I've ever seen in comics. George Wildman is revamping the Phantom as part of a larger move to revive Charlton's languishing superhero genre. To that end the company has been created Yang and E-Man. Charlton's ghost-host line-up is getting a kick as well. Charlton is on the cusp of another of its periodic flowerings. Back to the Phantom, we find the pirate Goldbeard using Diana to attract the Phantom who he wants to fee to the fishes. That of course doesn't work, but it comes close, and the rest of the comic is a back and forth between these two foes. 

With the sixty-seventh issue of The Phantom the game changes entirely as the late great Don Newton takes on the title that will make his reputation. "Triumph of Evil" written by Joe Gill offers Newton a chance to revise the Phantom's famous origin. Nazis come to the Deep Woods and are confronted by the Phantom's father. It proves to be his final mission. The secret of the Phantom is almost exposed, but our Phantom arrives in the nick of time to assume the legendary role. We get this story in a flashback as the Phantom tells it to Diana Palmer, explaining I suppose the need for an heir. This comic marked a new path for the Phantom, beginning with the attractive painted cover. 

Nick Cuti steps in to write "The Beasts of Madame Khan". We meet Hera Kahn as she attempts to bring her animal act to a circus. She is rebuffed but when the owner is killed by a strange fox-faced woman his brother agrees. The circus supplies cover for Khan to enter the jungle and look for the Mask of  Dusambassi, a legendary item once venerated by a tribe which dressed in animal skins and practiced lycanthropy. Khan appears to be able to transform herself and she has in her thrall three beast-men (a lion-man, a leopard-man, and a panther-man). The Phantom has to battle all of these foes to recover the mask and return some measure of peace to the jungle. 

Underneath a typically handsome Don Newton cover we get the story "The Shining City" which pits the Phantom against the cruel Athena, a woman of accomplished martial arts skills and unlimited money. She wishes to cross Benalla to reach an unknown destination which turns out to be a lost city known as "New Athens" and is filled with people who have lost contact with the outside world, until Athena found them and appears now as a prophesized ruler. She'd like the Phantom to rule by her side but he has other ideas.  The story was written by Joe Gill but drawn by Recreo Studio. "The Immortal Ghost of Bengali" is a one-page text item which has the Phantom confronting an old cult of Leopard Men. 

Bill Pearson joins Newton in a Phantom comic which pays homage to a duo of classic Humphrey Bogart movies. In "Mystery of the Mali Ibex", an ancient golden treasure is sought by a man named Rick who teams with a stunning blonde he calls Slim to travel up-river in a small boat with the one woman who might know its location. He is shot, the woman is killed and the blonde heads back to civilization, specifically Casablanca. There the man, named Rick confronts the blonde about the Ibex, but then a fat bar owner and his slinky henchman intervene. The Phantom, the father of our Phantom, gets involved. There are secrets and betrayals galore in this story which evokes both The African Queen and Casablanca. Newton's atmospheric artwork is ideal for this period tale. 

Issue seventy-one gives us "The Phantom Battles the Monster of Zanadar" written by a guy named John Clark. There are echoes of H. Ridger Haggard in this tale which has a cameo by a character named Quartermine. The Phantom undertakes a rescue mission up a remote mountain and finds a hidden tribe which worships a deadly giant spider. There are some great thrills in this one, and some nifty spins on the classic action. 

Don Newton's incredible run is interrupted by a story from Joe Gill and artist Don Sherwood. This one had been commissioned and was waiting for its opportunity by editor George Wildman. "Man in the Shadows" pits the Phantom against a wily foe named Dr. Nyte. Nyte kidnaps Diana in order to lure the Phantom into his trap where his henchmen all wear masks to make them look like their boss. The Phantom is forced to climb deadly cliffs to get to Nyte's remote lair which looks like a gothic mansion of sorts. Nyte has also trained a deadly wolf named "Satan" to imitate the loyal Devil. There is also a text story titled "The Witchman's Revenge" which has the Phantom battling a powerful slave in place of the titular Witchman. For some reason, or merely by accident, this story is presented out of order in the reprint collection, but it's all there. 

Don Newton returns in issue seventy-three on "The Torch" written by Bill Pearson (under a pseudonym). The creators are reaching into the Jame Bond universe for inspiration this time as the Phantom rises from the sea in that classic Sean Connery manner. (Minus the goofy bird thank goodness.) The Torch is an assassin and arsonist sent by Dr. Never (who we never see) to kill an old villainous chap named Raven who commands a gang of zombie-men controlled by headbands. We even get a little flavor of those classic Universal monster flicks as well. This one definitely was set up for a sequel but it was not to be. "The Invaders of Bengali!" is a one-page text yarn which has the Phantom do a crackerjack job of scaring away some poachers. 

Arguably the finest comic book run of Phantom stories comes to a conclusion with "The Phantom of 1776" which was both written and drawn by Don Newton. Dated January of 1977, this actually hit the racks in the fall of 1976 during the two-hundred-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. (The two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary is just around the corner if we can hold onto our democracy just a little bit longer.) When slavers enter the Deep Woods and steal away the chief's son and others, the Phantom takes on the mission to bring him back. That means sailing to America and battling pirates along the way. The Phantom is able to find the chief's son but none of the others who were taken. The Phantom has to take part in a battle between the British and the Colonialists before he can complete his mission. He uses his influence with Ben Franklin (who he saved in another adventure) to get back to Bengalla. But not before he witnesses the signing of the Declaration of Independence. As dandy as that is, the failure to rescue all the natives does leave a bad taste in the mouth after reading this classic adventure. 

And that's a wrap on Charlton's The Phantom. The little publisher produced some really outstanding issues in the run which began at Gold Key, continued briefly with King Comics and finally came to a finale with these issues by Don Newton. Newton's career was made by these comics, as he left Charlton a recognized pro and went over to DC to draw Aquaman, Batman and to my eye his other great mastepiece Shazam. If you just want the Newton adventures, Hermes has published them alone sporting that great cover image from the last issue. 

The Phantom would later show up in all sorts of places in comics. Reprints of the comic strips would show up now and again. DC took on the character and produced some handsome work by the likes of Joe Orlando and Luke McDonnell in the 80's. Marvel got their hands on the Ghost Who Walk for a few fantastic issues in the 90's. Moonstone revived the hero for the new century and was doing a bang-up job until Dynamite came along and lifted the license. Hermes itself has created some new material in recent years. I have more of the Hermes Avon novels to read and review and I might even get around to some of these other comics. The Phantom is well and truly immortal. 

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Fahrenheit 451 - The Authorized Adaptation!

Take my book from my cold dead hand! That's a paraphrase of an infamous Charlton Heston quote of course concerning guns. It's how I personally feel about the precious tomes which inhabit my house with me. I live alone but not really. My house is full of interesting folks like Asimov, Bester, Cooper, Dickens, Ellison, Fleming, Gaiman, Heinlein, Idle, Jakes, King, Lovecraft, Matheson, Norton, Orwell, Poe, Quinn, Robinson, Spinrad, Tolkien, Updike, Verne, Wells, Yarbro, and Zelazny to name a few. Their books and their stories abide with me. They are much more precious than any gun in a civilized society. But there's the rub. 

In America we are not afraid of the military of the military-grade hardware you might be hiding on your person or in your vehicle, but we are fucking terrified that you might have a book which has an unsettling idea or two in it. Electronic media has made book-burning purely a symbolic act of stupidity and fear, but the very effort to suppress ideas and the books that contain them is still raging along as hot as it ever was. Ray Bradbury spoke to this madness in his famous novel Fahrenheit 451 which was first published in the 1950's. I've read this book numerous times and taught it in class several times as well. It's a bracing vision of a future. It was adapted to film in the late 1960's. Now, like so many classic yarns, this story has been given the graphic novel treatment. That's what I'm responding to today. 

I'm not familiar with the work of Tim Hamilton, but based on the stellar storytelling in this tome, I'm a fan. There are lots of cheesy ways this singular book could've been adapted. Hamilton chose a restrained approach which uses a muted color palette and, in a way makes the words in the presentation as important as the pictures. That's not unimportant for a book about the value of words. 

We follow the fireman Montag, a man charged in this society with the destruction of illicit reading materials. What materials are considered verboten you might ask? All of them pretty much it seems. But mostly classic and popular literature, the kinds of fiction and nonfiction which lifts the individual out of their mundane existence and points the way to potentially more durable truths. The great irony in this society which seems to be always at war, is that fireman destroy and not save. That key irony empowers the novel and this graphic novel with a core irony. Montag is a man conflicted and also a perfect example of why a society wishing to maintain control of its populace burns books and instead encourages banal socialization by way of mammoth television screens. That this world is doomed is evident from the very beginning of the book. 

Now given the central message of Bradbury's book, one might think a comic book version of his story might smack too close to the kind of reductionism he preaches against, but this book features an introduction by Bradbury himself, so he apparently was fine with it. A book that inspires self- reflection and a further search for truths is to be celebrated regardless of his format. And that's how I feel as well. This is a dang good adaptation of a story demands to be read in the modern day. 

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The Man In The High Castle!

I've been meaning to read The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick for many years and have finally gotten around to doing it. It was at once what I expected and very surprising as well. Residing now comfortably in the 21st Century it's probably difficult if not downright impossible for most folks, save those of us of a certain age, to comprehend the impact of World War II. Now it's just another of those dusty historical events, shoved together with "The Great War" and "The War Between the States". It's been long enough that some of the old poison which invested the enemies of WWII with such awful power has returned to the public discourse. The hatred of the "other" rules the passions of too many people in our society and that hatred will ultimately destroy our society as it did the society of Germany overcome by the Nazi dogma. 

On the off chance you don't know about The Man in the High Castle, the story takes place in an alternate United States which is no longer united. When FDR was assassinated the whole of history was altered and the result was that the Nazis won the war and eventually conquered the Eastern half of the continent. The Japanese took control of the West Coast while in the Rocky Mountains a fragile territory exists not under the control of either foreign power. We follow several characters who are trying to live and prosper in this strange old world of 1962. The story tracks an antiques dealer, a jewelry maker, his estranged wife who teaches judo, a trucker with a dark mission, a venerable Japanese representative, and a mysterious Swede who has a secret that will shake the planet. The titular "Man" from the title is a mysterious figure who wrote a book titled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which is a bit of a sensation where it can be sold. It is banned in Germany-controlled regions. It speaks of a world in which the Allies won the war, and the Axis was defeated.

Published in 1962 (the same year it is set) the novel won the Hugo for best novel in 1963. It is of course one of the great classics of science fiction. I've bought it a few times over the decades, but only now have I successfully read this rather short novel. The fault is entirely mine. Dick said he was inspired to some degree by Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore which speculate about a United States in which the Confederacy prevailed. I cannot recommend this novel enough. It shows what life is like under a government which as policy enslaves part of the population and routinely murders others. The utter nihilism of the Nazi philosophy is laid bare, and we get a peek into the foul world such hatred brings to one and all. 

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The Iron Dream!

The Iron Dream purports to be nothing less than a novel by the science fiction writer Adolph Hitler. Norman Spinrad's conceit in this brazen 1972 work is that in an alternative world Adolph Hitler did not rise to power to lead the Third Riech to evil ruin, but rather that he migrated to the United States and took up the career of a science fiction writer, finding some small success in the myriad sci-fi pulps of the day. The Iron Dream contains the final 1959 novel of Hitler known as Lord of the Swastika which proves to be his magnum opus, and it's a doozy. Within the meta-frame of the story the novel was reputedly a Hugo award winner and triggered a following of devoted acolytes. In our actual, real world The Iron Dream did actually win the Nebula. 

Norman Spinrad's novel was first published in 1972 and I first encountered it when I went to college in 1975 and chanced upon SF Rediscovery edition in the college bookstore. The cover art is fascinating, a clear image of Hitler astride a stylized motorcycle with the omnipresent swastika in the background. Even as callow college Freshman I got the joke, that this was a takedown of the attitudes and beliefs of Hitler and the cretins who believed as he did in the morbid notion of racial purity. 

The story is that of Feric Jaeger, a young pure-blooded Aryan who leaves the limits of his sordid little hamlet in a post-apocalyptic world and seeks to enter the center of "true humans". He is dismayed by the lack of rigor in thought and practice to maintain the purity of the race. Radiation from what is referred to as the "Great Fire of the Ancients" has mutated mankind. And he takes it upon himself with no hint of self-doubt to bring a violent revival to the land. To that end he takes command of the local political group and later still a gang of motorcycle toughs. These he blends into his "storm troop". The sign of his leadership is not just his might and powerful personality but a mythic powerful truncheon which responds to his unblemished genetic heritage, marking him in Arthurian fashion as the chosen leader. (It's just about as phallic as it gets as the story unfolds.)

As we follow Feric, he gains more and more power preaching his message of racial purity. Long passages describe the leather garb and resplendent decor of this racially ideal culture. Rarely if ever does Feric make a misstep as we see the repulsive characters around him somehow fail to see the true power of a true man fueled by his undaunted philosophy. It's "might makes right", but the "right" here is a reverse-engineered psychotic vision of a singular race stable and dominant in the world. Feric leads his assembled nation against the hated enemies in the East, sweeping the enemy away in a mighty swathe of pure will and military glory. Eventually we are treated to the sight of camps built and run for the express purpose of gleaning the preferred genetic models and disposing of the remainder either by exile or euthanasia. It's an orgy of battle, blood, metal, explosions and gory destruction of all that is less than the ideal of humanity which somehow dances in the heads of the psychopaths we are to see as the heroes of our tale. 

Spinrad even goes so far as to create a bogus critical essay by a fabricated professor who puts this blasphemous saga into a bogus literary context. Spinrad even goes so far as to create a bogus critical essay by a fabricated professor who puts this blasphemous saga into a bogus literary context. "Afterword to the Second Edition" is a little essay written by "Homer Whipple" which lays bare the neurotic and psychotic content of the novel suggesting even that the man Adolph Hitler who wrote Lord of the Swastika was at the end of his days and his sanity thanks to syphilis. He points out that there is not a single female character in the book and the homoeroticism is redolent page after page, though likely unknown to the author. With this essay Spinrad through the voice of Whipple gives us the point. In regard to the hero, it says "Of course, such a man could gain power only in the extravagant fancies of pathological science fiction novel. For Feric Jaggar is especially a monster: a narcissistic psychopath with paranoid obsessions. His total self-assurance and certainty is based on a total lack of introspective self-knowledge. In a sense, such a human being would be all surface and no interior." Sound like anyone we know. 

One way to view The Iron Dream is that it gives insight into the stunted mind of those who dream of something as inane as racial dominance. The fear and loathing of the other is first and foremost a theme in this book and I cannot read it today without hearing despicable echoes from the political discussion of my own land in my own time. Another way to see the book is an enormous prank played on racists and bigots of all kinds. But the biggest joke there is they are incapable of getting it. Most ironically of all is that Nazis hold this satire in high regard, proving how dim they are and how thoroughly they missed the entire point. Or course the dullards did. 

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Slaughterhouse-Five Or The Children's Crusade!

Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut was all the rage when I was first dabbling in science fiction matters as a teenager. It was an era in which not that much science fiction material broke through to the mainstream and it seemed every little bit was glammed onto by fans and critics, sometimes out of proportion to its relative value. Vonnegut likely would've denied that his 1969 novel was a work of science fiction, despite his use of various motifs like time travel and alien abduction. He'd likely say he'd written a satire with its aim to decry the hideous nature of war and its malignant effect on the people who not only suffer it but prosecute. The United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War, a war no one quite understood then nor seem to have much of a grasp on even today. 

Our protagonist is the nearly always befuddled and bewildered Billy Pilgrim, a man who has come "unstuck" in time and so ambles back and forth across the decades inhabiting his own life at various points with little control. He's in the midst of World War II, near the end and has become a prisoner of war who ultimately ends up in the German city of Dresden before it is firebombed into to ruins. He and a few others survive the deadly attack tucked away in the titular and very real "Slaughterhouse-5".  

(Slaughterhouse-5)

We also meet Billy as a successful optometrist in later years, a married man though he seems not to understand his rotund wife, a father though his children seem eager to get the older Billy into a safe place when he goes mad, saying things like he's been kidnapped by aliens. We meet a Vonnegut regular, Eliot Rosewater who loves the science fiction work of Kilgore Trout who he later meets. There is also Howard W. Campbell Jr., a Nazi ally and propogandist who shows up in another Vonnegut book. We slide up and down the totality of Billy's life and spend no small amount of time on the planet Tralfamadore where Billy was taken by aliens to be put on display for the entertainment and efficacy of the alien population. There he had sex with kidnapped porn star Montana Wildhack, who had his child. It's a heady brew as the changes come paragraph to paragraph at times.  The novel is a blend of real-life experiences from Vonnegut and furious imagination, all brewed together to expound on the futility of war and perhaps human ambition in total. 

They adapted the highly successful novel to film in 1972. The film directed by George Roy Hill is remarkably faithful to the novel, more so than I expected honestly. We follow Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) as he tumbles through time in his passive and haphazard way. The novel is small but still things are compressed. Very quickly he and his fellow soldiers are rounded up and shunted to a POW camp and later still to Dresden. At the same time, we follow him in his later life as he marries, has two children and pursues a successful career as an optician. I was very curious to see how much of the sci-fi angle the movie would pursue, and it did enough, though that clearly was an element they wished to compress and deemphasize. 

To that end Billy's encounters with writer Kilgrore Trout are absent. Lazzaro (Rob Leibman) is interesting in that his loathing for all people is so intense and fuels his tortured life. Billy's wife Valencia (Sharon Gans) is outstanding in a role that demands quite a bit from her. The wild car ride which ultimately spells her doom in the most outlandish way possible is actively hilarious. Poor Edgar Derby (Eugene Roche) is a sincerely good man who only wants to help and is rewarded with savage violence. I was very much pleased to see so much of Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine) as she was a gorgeous woman. All in all, a decent movie version that hews reasonably true to the source. 

Now as for recommendations, I'm a bit mixed on that. Slaughterhouse-Five is a difficult book to get into because of its hectic structure, and the payoff is somewhat meager. The film delivers much the same message with less effort, though to be fair without having read the novel, I might have been quite confused at times. The capricious nature of war, the way people die is not as if written in a novel, but a terribly random affair. It's difficult to swallow in a land in which white hats prevail and justice supposed wins the day. Sometimes the bad thrive and the good die. So it goes. 

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The Handmaid's Tale - The Graphic Novel!

When I first read The Handmaid's Tale long ago, soon after it was published in the 1980's I was startled by its vision of a possible future for the United States. I've even taught the book a time or two over the decades. But I was convinced it was sufficiently distant and the chances of it really happening so remote that I took as a mere allegory for the real struggles, women had at the time in achieving a level status in society. Boy was I wrong. 

Having quashed a woman's constitutional right to control her own body and determine for herself what will happen to her in the only life she has, the "Conservatives" (they are actually "Reactionaries", but no one calls them that.) who are ascendant in some states (mine included) swiftly took that right away as soon as the States became responsible to protect it. Since then, they have gone further in some states, and now the struggle is to protect a woman's access to any kind of birth control and consequently much needed medical assistance. There is even talk of outlawing recreational sex, though no one takes that seriously. (I've learned to take everything they say seriously.) 

It is in that new present-day context that I read The Hand Maid's Tale - The Graphic Novel. I have not watched any of the television series, so all I know about Margaret Atwood's cautionary story is what she herself has put into words. I has been long enough since I read the novel that his adaptation still has moments of freshness, as details I'd forgotten fall into place. The story is adapted by Renee Nault, and it's important that it's a woman who adapts this story. Not that a man couldn't have done it well, but no man could share the feelings which run to the core of this nightmarish tale of a not-that-distant dystopian future. 

For those who might not know, let me describe what the story is. It's the personal document of one woman who we know as "Offred", but that is meaningly since women of Gilead are forbidden to have names. Her name means "Of Fred" and indicates that she has no identity apart from the man who once a month ritualistically tries to impregnate her. Due to war and toxins birth rates in the world have declined and many cannot have children. For wives of important and rich men this means that they are supplied surrogates who live in the home of the wealthy and wear only red and speak rarely if ever, and serve effectively as an alternative womb. These tragic women are stripped of identity and freedom to choose. They are sex slaves in an aberrational Christian cult which runs "Gilead" or what is today Maine and surrounding states. We only glimpses of the larger world because glimpses are all that Offred has. She once had a husband and a child, but those things were taken from her by the repressive state regime which uses the Bible to justify its perversions. 

As the novel and this graphic adaptation make clear, this is not a story which will have a happy ending or really an ending at all. We are privy to the thoughts, memories, hopes and fears of one woman for a period of time and then no more, save for a coda ending which suggests that Gilead must have passed into the history books as all societies must. The artwork by Nault in this story is tenderly rendered and is designed to propel the story and not to exist on its own. 

If you want an insight into what some of the more loathsome Christian cultists desire for society today as I write this, take a look at The Handmaid's Tale and you might get a terrifying glimpse. 

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Little Wizard Stories Of OZ!

Frank Baum enjoyed the success of the OZ series, but he was always bristling to bring new and different stories to his vast audience and so attempted to end the OZ series with 1910's The Emerald City of OZ. But those other efforts largely were unsuccessful and facing economic hardship he returned to OZ with The Patchwork Girl of OZ in 1913. In the interim he produced six little books for very young readers to attract those readers to the OZ series. The collection titled Little Wizard Stories of OZ brings together those six little books originally published independently. They are graced with a great deal of artwork by John R. Neill and tell brief vignettes featuring many of the OZ favorites. 

The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger serve as official guard for Ozma the Queen of OZ, but that proves to be a boring gig at times, so they decide to spend some time getting back to their roots and eat a baby and tear up a citizen. They of course change their minds when the moments come. 

Dorothy and Toto like to spend time wandering in the country when they get bored with the doings in OZ. The Little Wizard suggests that's too dangerous, but they ignore him. The have reason to remember his cautionary advice when they run into the size-changing Crinklink who takes them both prisoner. 

Tiktok the Mechanical Man pays a visit to the Nome King in order to get a few new springs to make him more efficient. The Nome King in rage smashes Titkok and orders him cast into a dark pit. But thankfully Kaliko, one of the Nome King's servants attempts to put Tiktok together again to avoid Ozma's retribution. 

Ozma and the Little Wizard run afoul of three imps named Udent, Olite and Ertinent. When the Wizard changes the three imps into bushes the trouble only gets worse. The same is the case when he changes those shrubs into pigs. 

Jack Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse go to save two kids who have been captured by the King of the Squirrels for taking some of the store nuts the squirrels will need in winter. When Jack's head is smashed, the adventure is really only beginning when the Little Wizard lends a hand. 

The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman decide to go on a sailing jaunt, but things get prickly quickly when they capsize. Crows gather as the Scarecrow tries to rescue the Woodman who is trapped on the bottom on the bottom of the riverbed. It's not long before the Woodman begins to rust, and the Scarecrow starts to lose parts of his face due to the water. Once again, the Little Wizard rides to help. 

Baum returned to OZ full time with 1913's The Patchwork Girl of OZ. More on that next time when we pick up the series this summer. 

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