Month: August 2017

Fates Worse Than Death: Dick Tracy’s G-Men

Dick Tracy’s G-Men begins where most serials end: with the capture and execution of a supervillain. A newsreel begins the first chapter by introducing Nicolas Zarnoff (Irving Pichel), a “master spy” with a hand in disrupting and overthrowing governments all over the world. The newsreel shows footage of Dick Tracy and the men of the FBI’s Western Division capturing Zarnoff in a daring raid, and concludes with Zarnoff’s sentence of death in the gas chamber. After viewing the newsreel and approving it, Tracy is summoned to Zarnoff’s cell for a few last words, and we learn through dialogue just how wily and dangerous he is: he attempts to direct Tracy to a previously undisclosed hideout, but Tracy cuts him off. The G-men have already been there and defused the bomb Zarnoff had hidden in a safe to finish them off. This sets the tone for the serial: trap and counter-trap.

Tracy departs after Zarnoff vows his revenge. Then Zarnoff receives his last request: copies of all the major daily newspapers. Finding a hidden message from his associates in one of them, he tears up strips of the paper and moistens it in a cup. Drinking the water, he goes quietly to the gas chamber, only for his body to be stolen by his underlings and revived later. After investigating, Tracy learns that a drug known only to the Kali* priests of India was mixed into the ink at the newspaper printing press; by ingesting it, Zarnoff was able to stop his heart and breathing and insulate himself from the lethal gas for a time until he could be revived. Once free, he takes up his criminal enterprises where he left off, with an extra dose of vengeance for the only man to ever capture him: Dick Tracy!

* Pronounced “Kay-lie.” Pronunciation in these films is something I haven’t mentioned before, but there are a few that sound eccentric to modern ears, and not only foreign terms that are now more familiar. Columbia’s announcer habitually pronounces “ally” with the emphasis on the second syllable, as “al-LIE,” and in this serial a henchmen speaks of “DEE-tonating” a bomb. Whether these are relics of older accents or pronunciations from a time when such things were less standardized in broadcasting than they are now, or simply slips of the tongue that were left in due to the hurried “one take” method of filming serials, I’m not sure.

Where 1937’s Dick Tracy has much in common with other serials in its masked mastermind and brainwashed brother, and Dick Tracy Returns is tonally similar to Chester Gould’s comic strip, Dick Tracy’s G-Men seems to draw a great deal of inspiration from the pulp magazines that were contemporary to it. For one thing, there is a great deal of well-executed action, including excellent fight choreography and stuntwork. More importantly, the exoticism of a secret drug mixed into newsprint is just one of many examples of bizarre gimmicks that could be torn from a Ripley’s Believe it or Not! strip, or from the adventures of the Shadow or one of the many knock-offs of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu (or, looking ahead a few decades, the kind of thing Ian Fleming’s James Bond might run into). In another chapter, Zarnoff traps Tracy and his partner Steve Lockwood in a barred room, electrified by a sparking dynamo, and the settings in this serial are even more wide-ranging and colorful than usual, from a lighthouse to a deserted Old West ghost town. Like many serial villains, Zarnoff has hideouts and connections in all manner of places: an abandoned cannery, a fur store, a diving bell hidden beneath a dam, and several houses, cabins, and hotel rooms. Even the conclusion, with Tracy and Zarnoff stranded alone together in the desert, is different in character from the typical serial confrontation, like something out of a men’s adventure magazine and featuring a moralistic O. Henry twist (although it is similar to the ending of Dick Tracy Returns in that it gets the hero and villain alone together by means of an attempted airplane escape).

Allowing for the generally vague politics of serials, Dick Tracy’s G-Men is also more political than its predecessors: as mentioned, Zarnoff is a “master spy” credited with destabilizing democratic governments. A few years earlier, such a villain would have probably been described as a “revolutionary” (code for an anarchist or communist, matching Zarnoff’s beard and Russian name), but Zarnoff is more of a mercenary terrorist, selling his services to the “Three Powers,” a consortium of foreign governments (unnamed, but guess which “three powers” were causing anxiety in the U.S. in 1939?). Zarnoff’s plots include trying to kill the visiting President of a Latin American country, the sabotage of major installations like dams and canals, and the theft of secret plans for weapons and military operations. Whatever his motives, the fact that he is haughty, cynical and almost unnaturally cool-headed (one might say cold-blooded) makes it easy to root against him.

Ralph Byrd returns in the lead role, even more jolly than usual, but the supporting cast has once again been shuffled: Junior and Mike McGurk are nowhere to be found in this serial. Steve Lockwood (Ted Pearson) and Gwen Andrews (Phyllis Isely, who would soon change her stage name to Jennifer Jones) remain in Tracy’s office, played by different actors, and additional support comes from interchangeable agents Scott (Robert Carson) and Foster (Julian Madison).

Zarnoff’s main henchman, Robal, is played by Walter Miller, and to me he looks an awful lot like Ralph Byrd. The fact that he generally wears dark suits and Dick Tracy wears light ones makes it easier to tell them apart, so I guess the cliché about white hats and black hats holds true. It’s a pity that nothing is ever made of their resemblance, like Robal trying to infiltrate the FBI or something like that; maybe Miller should have played Gordon Tracy in the 1937 serial. (And as for that name: “Robal” sounds like something from a Steve Ditko comic, but Chester Gould did have a penchant for using backwards spellings for character names–Professor Emirc, anyone? So was Robal a hidden commentary connecting Labor and un-American activity, or is it simply that Robal is Zarnoff’s “workhorse”? Who knows?)

An uncredited appearance is made by Sammy McKim, who played young Kit Carson in The Painted Stallion, as a boy who helps Tracy get out of an explosive-filled mineshaft in the ghost town chapter. As a child actor, McKim specialized in Western types, so it’s fitting that he makes an appearance for the Old West themed episode.

Interestingly, Harrison Greene, this time credited, returns for one scene as “the Baron,” a representative of the Three Powers interested in obtaining military secrets. Whether he is the same Baron seen in the previous two serials is anyone’s guess, but Greene is apparently the only actor besides Ralph Byrd to appear consistently in the Dick Tracy serials.

What I Watched: Dick Tracy’s G-Men (Republic, 1939)

Where I Watched It: Dick Tracy Complete Serial Collection, VCI Entertainment

No. of Chapters: 15

Best Chapter Title: Chapter titles include both “Sunken Peril” (Chapter Six) and “Caverns of Peril” (Chapter Eleven), but my favorite is Chapter Ten, “Crackling Fury” (an apt description of the sparking dynamo that Tracy and Steve are locked in with).

Best Cliffhanger: One thing that can be said of Republic’s cliffhangers is that they are almost always well-integrated into the plot. The chapter title frequently gives a hint as to the peril that the hero will face at the end, and enough foreshadowing is given–a bit of dialogue or a close-up on some innocuous prop that will become the instrument of doom–that the danger can be seen coming–or could have been seen if only the hero had been more careful. In Dick Tracy’s G-Men, the typical car, airplane, autogyro (!), and dirigible (!!) mishaps are alternated with some truly fiendish and inventive death traps. This is the real stuff, serial fans.

Yes, Dick Tracy’s G-Men uses stock footage of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster as part of a cliffhanger.

In Chapter Two (“Captured”), Dick Tracy is bound and gagged and placed behind a locked door with a pistol rigged to shoot at whomever tries to open it; Zarnoff figures that the stray shot will force the trigger-happy G-men to spray the door with machine gun fire, executing their helpless boss. (And it almost works, too!) In Chapter Eight (“Chamber of Doom”), Tracy is nearly asphyxiated in a furrier’s fumigation room (surely a source of ironic satisfaction for Zarnoff, who faced his own gas chamber in Chapter One!); in Chapter Thirteen (“The Fatal Ride”), Tracy, Lockwood, and FBI Director Anderson are nearly gassed again in the sealed back seat of a taxi cab driven by one of Zarnoff’s men. Only a convenient air tube gets them through that one.

Upon reflection, however, my favorite cliffhanger is the one closing Chapter Four (“The Enemy Strikes”). This chapter takes place in and around a barge filled with explosives. Zarnoff knows that Tracy has tracked him to a dockside salvage outfitter, so he lays a trap, putting a time bomb in the hold of the barge. While Tracy and the G-men shoot it out with the bad guys on the multi-level barge, the timer ticks away; the cliffhanger, however, is not the explosion of the bomb. Dick Tracy discovers the time bomb and throws it overboard, where it explodes harmlessly. Rather, it is set in motion when Robal throws a barrel at Tracy. Tracy dodges the barrel, but instead of continuing to focus on their fight, the camera follows the barrel as it rolls from one ledge to another, Donkey Kong-style, until it lands in the water. There it bobs between the barge and another barge next to it, until the current brings them together: at first, the barrel bulges as it is squeezed, but it eventually splinters beneath the pressure. The danger is clear. Sure enough, Tracy is knocked out and falls into the water, between the two barges, where it is only a matter of time before he suffers the same fate as the poor barrel. Here comes the tugboat to push the barges together. . . .

Sample Dialogue: “I have cheated the law, outwitted the deadly science of the lethal chamber, but at a price no mortal man was ever expected to pay. That ancient drug was brewed by the alchemists of Satan. Tracy forced me to it. Tracy must die.” –Zarnoff in Chapter One, “The Master Spy” (Zarnoff was supposedly modeled after Boris Karloff, but only Chapter One, with its echoes of Frankenstein, really leans into the horror elements; at first after his resurrection, Zarnoff is shaken, and his appearance frightens his henchmen, but in later chapters he appears to have recovered his equilibrium.)

What Others Have Said: “These serials were a definite departure from the comic strip, omitting key characters such as Tess, Pat Patton and Chief Brandon, and emphasized Tracy as the ultimate dedicated lawman, asking no quarter and giving none in his battle against crime. Even as kids we knew that liberties had been taken in transferring Dick Tracy to the screen, but as action fans we didn’t care.” –William C. Cline, “Remakes and Side Effects” in Serials-ly Speaking: Essays on Cliffhangers

What’s Next: My schedule permitting, I should have just enough time to watch and write up the fourth and final Dick Tracy serial, Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc. before the end of summer!

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Kamandi Challenge no. 8

Cover by Jim Lee, Scott Williams, and Alex Sinclair

“Not Quite the Odyssey”
Writer: Keith Giffen
Artist: Steve Rude
Color: John Kalisz
Lettering: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

After parting with the Britannek Bulldogs last issue, Kamandi was hang-gliding over the ocean toward his next goal, following the track of his missing parents, when he was bitten by a Polar Parasite that had hitched a ride in his satchel. As Kamandi Challenge no. 8 continues the story, Kamandi is able to bring the glider in for a crash-landing in the surf, and succeeds in crushing the parasite against a rock before it can take control of his mind. While attempting to recover supplies from the wrecked glider, he is surprised by a band of humanoid goats and sheep in ancient Greek dress. Calling him “Odysseus,” they take him to be the returned hero of the Odyssey: he is human, like the illustrations in the “ancient texts” the goats have based their life on, and he can speak. He must be the one!

Nothing is ever quite that simple in Kamandi’s world, however, and the goats’ claim on Kamandi is challenged by a band of wolf people, the eternal enemies of the goats. To the wolves, Kamandi is “Ulysses,” the Roman name for Odysseus, and such hermeneutic differences are the stuff of which holy wars are made. Or perhaps it is simply the external manifestation of the two species’ age-old antagonism. The wolves attack, and the goats fight back, with Kamandi stuck in the middle and with no control over his own fate.

Once safe in the goats’ village, Kamandi learns a little about the feud, and that both sides expect him to be their champion, but he is also given to reflect on the bizarre experiences he has come through. As hinted at in previous chapters, Kamandi has been experiencing dreams of another life, a life which in the hints we are provided can be recognized as the original Kamandi series by Jack Kirby. This isn’t the first time Kamandi has been taken for a god, and his priority is escaping and getting on with his search. At the same time, both sides prepare for a final confrontation, their training marked by grisly reminders of the conflict: the wolves practice shooting arrows into sheep carcasses, and the goats play games with severed wolf heads.

Attempting to slip away in a small boat, Kamandi instead finds himself trapped between the fleets of the two warring factions; he briefly senses something else moving under the surface of the water, but is distracted from it by the outbreak of war. Too slow to escape being caught between the opposing fleets, Kamandi concentrates on simply surviving while staying out of the paws of wolf and sheep alike. Briefly submerged, he sees an ominous dark shape with glowing eyes. Later, adrift on a shield, he passes between the feet of an enormous statue that stands astride the harbor like the Colossus of Rhodes; on the pylon supporting one foot is carved the name “Odysseus,” on the other “Ulysses.” As we have seen through the snapshots of life in both communities, the religious mania of the high priests has no room for ambiguity: they would sooner die than compromise, and the last we see of the wolves and sheep are the flames consuming their ships and their villages. Only too late does Kamandi, alone at last, remember the creature he saw under the water, when he experiences another swell and a menacing sea serpent surfaces right in front of him!

Some chapters of Kamandi Challenge have sought to tweak or update the original series by questioning its assumptions or broadening its representation, but “Not Quite the Odyssey” is a comic book fable in the classic mode. With its literary references and overt indictment of religious mania, this story (written by Keith Giffen, who provided art for the series prologue in issue no. 1) would have fit very smoothly into Jack Kirby’s Kamandi. The artwork by Steve Rude (himself an iconic disciple of the Kirby manner) nicely combines Kirby’s energetic style (Rude’s Kamandi looks very much like Kirby’s, but with slightly more rendering and shading, and the heavily-inked backgrounds frequently look like they were pulled straight from a Bronze Age book) with varied panel layouts that keep scenes from being monotonous. Further, the touches from ancient Greek design in the goats’ city and the wolves’ Roman Legion dress gives them a specificity and deepens the thematic connection to the Iliad, with Kamandi escaping the final sea battle like the wanderer his captors take him to be.

On the other hand, the commitment to parable and the relative lack of distinct characters sometimes leaves this chapter feeling as two-dimensional as the Greek pottery art it references. After the quirky, loquacious characters presented by (especially) Jimmy Palmiotti, Bill Willingham, and Marguerite Bennett, the return to functional (at best) dialogue is a bit of a come-down. Most of it is purely expository, and both the goats and the wolves speak with the monotonous single-mindedness of the zealot: “He has returned! As foretold in the sacred book!” (A humorous exception is Kamandi’s face-to-face encounter with the “Penelope” who was waiting for his return, an appropriate punchline to the mistaken-identity plot and an effective bit of “what now?” escalation.)

To make up for it, Kamandi spends more time than usual talking to himself or adding wry asides to the conversation: this Kamandi is experienced enough to know how crazy this all is, and he even chastises himself for the choice words (rendered in grawlixes) he uses in response. Fables are about types rather than individuals, or perhaps that is the point of this particular fable: the loss of identity when one gives in to cultism. Kamandi, in this reading, is the lone individual, the Last Boy on Earth, just trying to keep his head down and survive as elemental social groupings collide. No wonder he doesn’t have much meaningful interaction with either side: they’ve largely given up listening and speak only to each other, choosing to live in their own echo chamber (heeeeey, maybe this isn’t only about ancient myth.)

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Fates Worse Than Death: Atom Man vs. Superman

As Atom Man vs. Superman begins, a crime wave has overtaken Metropolis, the kind of multi-pronged gang assault on property and lives that frequently opens the first chapter of serials, even though the Depression-era violence that inspired it was long-gone by 1950. Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent* suspects that a single criminal mastermind is behind it, secretly organizing and coordinating the atrocities. But who? A bulbous, oversized helmet is superimposed over the montage of stock footage and spinning newspaper headlines, the “Atom Man” of the title, but Clark believes that to be merely a cover for Superman’s arch-enemy, Lex Luthor. In this very first chapter (“Superman Flies Again”), Superman uses his X-ray vision to locate Luthor’s hideout and capture him. Yet over the next year, the crimes continue! Was Clark Kent wrong about Luthor (who claims to have gone straight and is applying for parole)? Is the Atom Man an entirely different villain?

What’s notable here is the degree to which the characters and their relationship are already established at the outset: not only is it taken for granted that audiences will know Lex Luthor, but he is caught and imprisoned within the first episode in the manner of a modern action film’s “cold open.” (Of course, Luthor is up to something, but that’s beside the point.) The assumption that audiences wouldn’t need to have things explained to them was a safe one for the filmmakers, of course: Superman was widely read in comic book form and heard on his own radio show (from which the plot of this serial was adapted); as I mentioned in my review of the previous Superman serial, that familiarity kept the producers from making too many changes to the source material in adapting it, and the faithfulness to the original says as much about the popularity of Superman as it does about the fickleness of filmmakers. It’s worth noting, in fact, that serial adaptations from comic strips were generally more faithful than those from comic books, a reflection of the newspaper strips’ higher status in those days. (It’s possible that the subtle touches in Atom Man vs. Superman also reflect an awareness of the audience’s greater sophistication by 1950, as well.)

In any case, Atom Man vs. Superman is one of the few serials I’ve seen that takes its audience’s awareness of the characters and setup for granted, going so far as to subvert their expectations for suspense or comic relief. For example, more than once when Clark Kent ducks into a doorway to transform into his alter ego, fellow reporter Lois Lane follows him under the impression that Clark is trying to scoop her or keep himself out of danger. If he can’t turn into Superman, how will he save the day? Or will Lois learn his secret identity? Something always comes along to protect Clark’s secret and allow him to make the switch, but Lois’s growing suspicions are a major subplot: not only does she ask out loud, “Is Clark Superman?”, she has Daily Planet editor Perry White so convinced that he almost publishes a front page story saying so. Ultimately, the status quo is preserved, but rarely short of Superman II have I seen a Superman film in which the truth floats so close to the surface.

It makes a difference, as well, that Atom Man vs. Superman is the sequel to an earlier serial that does begin with the hero’s origin, and this particular story was adapted from a storyline from the radio show The Adventures of Superman. (And how odd is it that the title follows the familiar “______ vs. ______” format, but unusually puts the antagonist’s name first?) All of the major players from the first serial return (including leading man Kirk Alyn, credited as only “Superman,” maintaining the fiction that the man himself showed up to film his own adventures), with the addition of Lyle Talbot as Lex Luthor. Talbot’s Luthor is just like we remember him: brilliant, egotistical, and bald; he is both the “mad scientist” of his earliest comic book incarnations and the smooth-talking public figure of later stories. Luthor has always been a complex and captivating foil for Superman, but his human strengths and failings are especially clear in comparison to the masked villains typical of the serials. (The serial hardly makes a secret of the fact that Atom Man is a convenient front for Luthor: while he “goes straight,” he receives threats from the Atom Man on behalf of the criminal underworld Luthor has supposedly turned his back on. But everyone knows that Atom Man’s plans and Luthor’s are one and the same.)

The main plot involves criminals, including one already in custody of the police, who mysteriously disappear whenever they flash a particular silver coin, making for some miraculous escapes and frustrating Superman’s attempts to connect their crimes to the Atom Man. As it turns out, these “activated coins” are signal beacons for a “space transporter,” a teleportation beam developed by Lex Luthor (and the solution to his continued leadership even while in solitary confinement: he just uses his own coin and has his henchmen beam him to his hideout for an hour or two, and then he goes back before the prison guards are any wiser). The coins and the transporter are significant devices throughout the serial, with Luthor using them to slip from one hiding place to another; help his underlings stay out of the grasp of Superman or the police; bait traps for Superman and the Daily Planet reporters; and even kidnap Lois Lane (Noel Neill) by sending her one of these medallions. The coins also further the plot when one of the coins is recovered and Luthor schemes to get it back before it can be analyzed.

But the technology underlying the space transporter is also capable of sending its target’s atoms into space, “where they will circle endlessly” without solidity, a fate Luthor refers to as “the Empty Doom.” At one point he uses it briefly on one of his underlings as punishment for failure, demonstrating its effectiveness but also revealing that the effects can be undone. Luthor’s ultimate plan is to consign Superman to the Empty Doom, ridding himself of his archenemy forever; he succeeds, but only for a chapter. While in this state, Superman is insubstantial and invisible (except to the audience, through the miracle of double exposure), as if on the astral plane, or like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. The scenes in which Superman, in double exposure against a background of planets and stars, struggles with a henchman sent to check on him (and here the Empty Doom functions more like the comics’ Phantom Zone), are great fun, and in some ways closer to the loopier sci-fi elements of the comics than we usually get when the character is adapted to film. Through great effort, he is able to communicate with Lois through her electric typewriter, and eventually his instructions to her help him break free.

The space transporter isn’t the only high-tech invention Luthor brings to bear in his war against Superman, but it does get the most screen time. Luthor also has an “atomic projectile” (a high-powered mortar shell that Superman simply catches and returns against its operator, exactly the same as when the Spider Lady tried the same thing in the last Superman serial); a remote control flying saucer; a robot (spoiler!); an earthquake machine; an atom bomb (there’s a lot of nuclear anxiety in this serial, from the title on down); and even a spaceship! At one point, Luthor synthesizes his own Kryptonite, a step up from the “synthetic radium” that so many serials feature; however, to make it work correctly, Luthor’s Kryptonite requires just one ingredient he must steal: radium! Oh, well. There is a clever sequence in which Luthor manipulates Superman into using his X-ray vision on a box of nails: Luthor has prepared an alloy that turns into plutonium when bombarded with X-rays, tricking Superman into generating the fuel that will be used against him.

And of course there’s television; at first, Luthor earns his parole by offering a new invention to the government, a “combination of radar and television.” Regular readers of this series will be aware of my interest in how television was presented in the serials, as an almost-magical scrying device that allowed remote viewing even of places inaccessible to cameras. By 1950, television was less a futuristic pipe-dream than a definite reality with a growing audience, and viewers and filmmakers alike were now aware of the medium’s limitations, so super-science was invoked to make it exciting (and useful to the plot) again. The only difference between the fantastical view of television common in the 1930s and its use in Atom Man is the gloss that presents Luthor’s device as a new spin on the now-familiar medium. At the same time, television is an everyday occurrence, with Luthor setting up a mundane television studio as a cover for his more esoteric spying. (Hilariously, the cover blurb on the DVD claims that Luthor “says he’s just a simple repairman for those new devices called televisions!”, a synopsis that is garbled at best.) At one point, Lois Lane goes to work for Luthor as an on-camera personality, mostly for tepid “man-on-the-street” interviews. Although regular broadcast television is shown in a decidedly unthrilling light, it wouldn’t be long before the new medium killed theatrical serials for good, or rather absorbed them, as low-budget storytelling-by-installment became the default mode of TV entertainment, even including the Man of Steel himself.

What I Watched: Atom Man vs. Superman (Columbia, 1950)

Where I Watched It: Superman: The Theatrical Serials Collection DVD set

No. of Chapters: 15

Best Chapter Title: “Superman Saves the Universe” (Chapter Fifteen) Well, what else would we expect Superman to do?

Best Cliffhanger: Although there are more than a few classic perils here, Atom Man vs. Superman finds the filmmakers chafing at the formal restriction of the end-of-chapter cliffhanger. Some of the chapters end with one or more characters in a state of uncertainty rather than immediate peril: at the end of Chapter Seven (“At the Mercy of Atom Man!”), Superman, weakened by Luthor’s synthetic Kryptonite, is loaded unconscious onto an ambulance which the audience knows is being driven by Luthor’s henchmen. Not only does Superman not get out of trouble immediately in the next chapter by escaping or undoing the peril as in so many serials, he is forced to step into Luthor’s matter transporter and face the “empty doom,” from which he doesn’t escape until the next chapter after that!

In other cases, the cliffhangers are perfunctory: rather than being set up with the heavy-handed foreshadowing so common to the Republic formula, dangers are thrown up at the last minute, as when Jimmy Olsen (Tommy Bond), chasing an escaping henchman, gets his foot stuck in a railroad bed and can’t escape an oncoming train. The train has nothing to do with the events that have come before, but it’s the end of the chapter, so something has to happen. Both examples are probably extensions of the playful formula-tweaking mentioned above: by 1950, even kid audiences were ready for twists on familiar material. Fortunately, the awareness that cliffhangers alone weren’t enough to satisfy audiences pushed the filmmakers to create interest in other ways, through character and novel special effects. (As in the previous serial, animation is used to depict Superman’s flight as well as other effects too expensive to create otherwise.)

Having said that, there is at least one truly great cliffhanger in this serial: in Chapter Fourteen, “Rocket of Vengeance,” Lex Luthor sends a missile loaded with an atomic bomb to destroy Metropolis, his final act of defiance before taking off into space, leaving the Earth behind forever. Superman intercepts the missile, climbing on top and riding it, Dr. Strangelove-style, as it heads straight for the Daily Planet building and the office of Perry White (Pierre Watkin). The sequence, which cuts between close-ups of Superman riding the missile, shots of the city from the missile’s point of view, and White, Lois, and Jimmy watching its approach, is among the most exciting in this serial.

Sample Dialogue:

Lois: Let’s head back to the office.
Jimmy: What for, to be hit by that rocket?
Lois: We’ll write the story, even if it’s our last one.
Jimmy: I’d rather read about it.
–Chapter Fourteen, “Rocket of Vengeance”

What Others Have Said: “Atom Man vs. Superman was far more gimmicky and gadget-prone than the first serial, Superman, but was flawed by the same [producer Sam] Katzman cheapness in production values, despite the cast and crew.” –Jim Harmon and Donald F. Glut, The Great Movie Serials

Well, I liked it.

What’s Next: Summer isn’t over yet! Join me next time as I explore Dick Tracy’s G-Men!

* (who is secretly Superman)

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Kamandi Challenge no. 7

Cover by Bill Sienkiewicz

“Salvage”
Writer: Marguerite Bennett
Pencils: Dan Jurgens
Inks: Klaus Janson
Colorist: Hi-Fi
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

Note: This issue came out last week, but I was travelling, and it’s taken me a few days to get caught up. My apologies for the delay.

Kamandi, thrown from the towering heights of Mishkingrad by its former “Alpha” Grosnovo, and about to fall into the bear city’s atomic furnace, remembers that he is still holding the “cortex crown” that controls the city. Putting it on, Kamandi commands the metal around him (all parts of the great living city) to form a protective shell around him (similar to the vegetable shell Vila wove around him in no. 5) and take him to Renzi. There, he is astonished to see Renzi already surrounded by a band of female dog warriors, scavengers who periodically raid the bear city for technology and scrap metal. The dogs decide to take Kamandi along with them and throw him into a bag for transport. (They rescue Renzi as well, leaving the city of bears to collapse without Renzi’s atomic heart to power it.)

Later, Kamandi emerges from the bag to find himself on a huge dirigible, the floating headquarters of the “Bulldog Britanneks,” as the dogs call themselves. Beatrice, the leader of the Britanneks, recalls knowing Kamandi’s mother, a veteran of the “Android Wars” who designed their ship, and points Kamandi toward the last place she had seen her.

In the mean time, the dirigible floats over the forbidden wastelands of the North Pole, home to the “ice wizards.” The ice wizards (the only one we see is a polar bear) control hordes of “polar parasites,” metallic centipedes that latch onto unwilling hosts and control their minds, steering them to recruit more hosts. The ice wizards have been exiled to the wasteland and sense an opportunity to escape; for their part, the parasites are in constant search for new hosts and new territory. Directed by the ice wizard, a flying iceberg pierces the dirigible, bringing it down. One of the dog women, Sadie, rescues Kamandi from falling to his death; earlier she had flirted with him, but in this moment we sense that perhaps the attraction goes both ways.

On the ground, several of the Britanneks are overtaken by parasites, and with their minds controlled by them they begin attacking their fellows or attempting to lure them to be attacked by parasites. With their ship crashed and at the mercy of the parasites, the group retreats, but not before Kamandi finds the cortex crown among the wreckage. Since the dirigible was built from scrap looted from the bear city over the years, he reasons that the metal may still respond to the crown’s power, just as it had saved him earlier. A plan is hatched: the Britanneks lure the polar parasites and their hosts into the open, and then Kamandi, wearing the crown and driving a power-lifter-like exoskeleton made from the scrap, surprises the parasites, crushing them under the vehicle’s enormous “feet” and freeing the mind-controlled Britanneks as well. With the ice wizard captured (and disposed of off-panel?), the operation is a success.

The Britanneks, reunited, rebuild the remains of their dirigible into a hot-air balloon, while Kamandi, with a new lead on his missing parents, takes off separately in a hang-glider (after receiving a “first kiss” from Sadie). Gliding alone above the wasteland, Kamandi doesn’t notice one last polar parasite crawl out of his satchel, and the chapter ends with the creature biting him on the neck. Is this the end of Kamandi, or is he doomed to spend his remaining days as the host of the polar parasite?

As in other Kamandi stories, “Salvage” gets a lot of mileage out of comparing and contrasting human and animal behaviors and personality type. There are plenty of canine puns and references on hand (Kamandi “deworms” the parasite-infected Britanneks; the flying headquarters is referred to as a “doghouse” and later a “kennel,” and so on; it must have taken a lot of self-control to avoid the phrase “puppy love”). Most notably, while only Commander Beatrice is an actual bulldog, the group suggests the kind of plucky, diverse, but oh-so British commando troop one sees in movies about World War II, and Beatrice represents the typical funny animal English bulldog as a Winston Churchill stand-in: gruff, cigar-smoking, and (in this case) maternal. (“A Canterbury Tail/Calamity from the Clyde,” a two-part “Tale of the Great Disaster” printed in Weird War Tales nos. 51 and 52, makes a similar association between nationality, animal type, and character, but as we have seen that is almost de rigueur in funny animal stories, even ones like this that are darker than your average Carl Barks strip.) Naturally, the canine commandos are introduced playing poker when Kamandi is welcomed onto the dirigible.

Also striking in this story is that all the Britanneks are female, a conceit lampshaded by the engineer Mae who says of Kamandi when they meet, “You smell like you’ve met two, hm, three supporting female characters, tops–both of whom died, I’m guessing.” That sounds about right. I mostly know Marguerite Bennett, who wrote this chapter, from her work on DC Comics Bombshells, a series focused on the publisher’s female characters fighting an alternate World War II in a world without male superheroes. Although this chapter’s art (by Dan Jurgens and Klaus Janson, both of whom have been working in comics since I was reading them as a kid in the ’80s) is more old-school and less attuned to the feminine nuances of Bennett’s script than that of Bennett’s Bombshells collaborator Marguerite Sauvage, “Salvage” shows some of the same inventive remixing of wartime iconography and bantering sisterhood as her flagship series. Also, in addition to improving Kamandi’s representation stats the Britanneks have a more functional family dynamic than any group Kamandi has encountered since his abrupt expulsion from the Truman Show-esque small town in which he grew up, back in issue no. 1. Kamandi has made friends and allies, but the tough warrior women of the Britanneks are a family: they not only fight together, they care about each other, and their scenes are reminiscent of the Vuvalini in Mad Max: Fury Road.

Finally, Kamandi has traditionally been a series in which romance took a back seat to action and adventure; not exactly “no girls allowed,” but like many comics, the emphasis is on Kamandi’s status as “The Last Boy on Earth” (emphasis added). Mae commenting on the meager (and deceased) female supporting cast could easily be referring not only to this series but to Jack Kirby’s original book as well. The love of Kamandi’s life, Flower, a girl his age who could speak (in contrast to the mostly mute humans of Earth A.D.), was no sooner introduced than she was killed tragically; later Kirby, sensing a missed opportunity, introduced Flower’s twin, Spirit, but if Kamandi noticed Spirit’s hula-girl near-nakedness, he was too polite to say anything. That was for the pubescent audience. In this case, the flirtatious Sadie and her interest in Kamandi would be unexceptional were it not for the prospect of cross-species love in their relationship. Ultimately, their mutual attraction is turned into a cute joke, with Sadie slurping Kamandi’s face like any family pet. Whether a furry fantasy* or a riff on dogs’ age-old affection for man, the message is clear: even in the wastes of this post-apocalyptic world, it is love, and the possibility of finding it, that makes survival into living.

from Kamandi no. 12

*Not to downplay the degree to which Kamandi can already be seen as a furry fantasy, but as I suggested, its generally chaste approach takes the focus off questions of romance or sexuality.

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