Brick Bradford Revisited

The Brick of Human Kindness
In an earlier post I ruminated upon my ambivalent relationship with Brick Bradford, the "other" 1930s s-f adventure strip. In brief, it was a strip full of interesting ideas overwhelmed by meandering scripts and indifferent artwork.

While looking for bathtub reading recently I stumbled upon a small press reprint of "The Lord of Doom," a Bradford continuity from 1936. I realized I'd only read the story once before, and that was Club Anni Trenta's Italian translation. So I gave it another look.

Like many of William Ritt's yarns, "The Lord of Doom" is a huge story, running for nearly a year (13 Apr 1936 to 6 Feb 1937). The tale opens with Brick, June, and Dr. Salisbury crash-landing in the arctic wastes of northeastern Canada. They discover a hidden nation populated by descendants of Ghengis Khan's Mongol warriors. The place is technologically advanced and bristles with modern weaponry.



When they're brought before Temuchin, ruler of the hidden land, our friends are surprised to recognize Gola Mongola, a noted Hollywood actor. Mongola, it seems, was sent into the outside world as a youth to study foreign ways and plan for an ivasion. The Mongols are fed up with their hard life in the arctic wilderness. They want to seize territory in Canada and the United States so they can relocate to a friendlier climate. With the aid of brilliant scientist Kalla Kopak, Temuchin has amassed vast army and air forces. The Mongol invasion is about to begin.



The rest of the story describes the war between the raiders and the North American nations. The narrative alternates between a long view of warfronts and troop movements and a close-up view of Brick's adventures. Professor Salisbury helps the allies deploy an "electric wall" across central Canada. The wall is a series of stations transmitting a ray that causes moving metal parts to congeal into a single mass. There is a chilling scene in which Temuchin's planes first encounter the invisible wall. The entire fleet falls from the sky as engines and control surfaces freeze solid. Their modern weapons rendered useless, the warring armies revert to cavalry  and foot soldiers. The Mongols attempt to break through a section of the front not yet protected by the wall. Canadian, American and Mexican troops beat them back.


Ritt describes the war in elaborate detail. As the opposing forces mass for their first combat the story switches to "real time." Each daily strip presents the events of a day in Bradford's universe. The device becomes unwieldy when Brick's personal adventures move to center stage and Ritt wisely abandons it.


Our hero survives numerous clashes on both sides of the front. Several times he enlists the help of a plucky Canadian boy, a short wave radio enthusiast whose home always seems to be nearby when Brick's plane crashes.

This reliance on coincidence spoils a potentially exciting story. The North Americans' final victory arises from two credulity-straining events. To begin with the allies notice that Brick resembles one of Temuchin's lieutenants who died in battle. They disguise Brick as the officer and send him across the enemy lines to penetrate Temuchin's inner circle. Whereupon the warlord notices his lieutenant's resemblance to Brick...and sends him back to spy on the allies "disguised" as Brick Bradford! By the time Temuchin figures things out Brick has communicated all the invaders' plans to the good guys.


Equally unimpressive is the incident that finally ends the war. Ignoring his officers' advice Temuchin flies a solo sortie over allied lines. He is promptly shot down and taken prisoner. In captivity Temuchin realizes his cause is hopeless. He gives up and sends orders to Kalla Kopak to surrender.

It's a disappointing way to end the story, but Ritt saves it with a last-minute surprise. Following the surrender Bradford sympathizes with the Mongols' desire to escape the frozen tundra. He proposes that Temuchin's people be allowed to emigrate to the United States. Brick personally lobbies the League of Nations to permit the former enemy to resettle in the central states and to take a shot at becoming productive citizens of the World's Greatest Country.


It must be remembered that when "The Lord of Doom" was written America was living through one of its many periods of belligerent xenophobia. Popular literature teemed with sinister Orientals leading yellow hordes. For Brick to offer a vanquished enemy--a vanquished Asian enemy--such generosity is astounding.

Brick's faith proves well-founded. The new immigrants thrive. They even carve a commemorative bust of Brick into a mountain overlooking one of their new cities. Kalla Kopak becomes Brick's friend. In subsequent stories he is Brick's Dr. Zarkov, sharing the hero's exploits. Kopak's origin is quickly forgotten as is with the war itself. Forgotten it may be, but in my book Brick's handling of the invasion's aftermath wins him permanent standing as a first-class hero.


 
Postscript: Sorry I was able only to reproduce part of most of these dailies. My regular scanner was unavailable and this damned "all-in-one" monstrosity wouldn't fit an entire page without wrecking the book. All reproductions are from a two-volume "Limited Edition  for Collectors" with no publisher information.

Space Conquerors!

A Fine Day in Space

When I was a kid I was a Boy Scout. I had a subscription to Boy's Life, a large-format monthly filled with short stories, fact articles, lots of ads for guns and...a comics section!

Naturally this was my favorite part of the magazine. The section ran full- and half-page color comics, their subject matter divided amongst fact, humor and adventure. I later learned these strips were produced by Johnstone and Cushing, the legendary comic art studio. At the time I was reading Boy's Life the section's roster included "The Tracy Twins," "True Stories of Scouts in Action," "Tono of the Longhouse People," biblical and historical one-shots, and my favorite, an s-f series called "Space Conquerors."
From my garage/midden I've recovered the handful of tearsheets I clipped from the magazine in the early 1960s. For years they'd been my only mementos of the series. Three cheers for the Internet! While googling in preparation for this post I discovered a complete index of the series with links to every episode in Google Books' run of Boy's Life!
I learned that the feature began in 1952 and went through several reboots as well as periods during which it simply presented astronomical facts. The story I'm posting turns out to have been the first episode of one of those reboots. It introduces three nameless astronauts exploring space in the first faster-than-light spaceship. Early episodes were rather tame, but later the series became a wild and woolly space opera. Not that the stories were very good: half a page per month made for sketchy plots and no characterization. It didn't help that the writer (presumably Al Stenzel) occasionally changed plans in mid-story.
This 1962-1963 episode was drawn by Lou Fine in his most generic style. Art on the strip was generally good. Fine had replaced George Evans, who had replaced the second of two guys I don't recognize. Fine drew several stories, then Alden McWilliams took over for a long run. After a surprise appearance by Gray Morrow, Fine returned. This time his art was more elaborate, though in some strips he seems to have been inked by another hand. Fine died in 1971, so the art variations may have been related to illness.According to Planettom, the series ended in 1972. However I swear that years later...maybe the mid-1980s?...I came across a copy of Boy's Life, now thinner and in a smaller format, and found an episode of "Space Conquerors" drawn by Ernesto Colon. Did I dream this? Does anyone know about post-1970s Boy's Life comics? Several later "Space Conquerors" originals are out there. Here's a nice 1964 page from Stephen Donnelly's collection. From near the end of the strip's run comes this one from 1971 which belongs to Alan Crouse. Both are by Fine.

Guilty Pleasures--1

Why the Hell Do You Like That?!
Like every comic strip fan, I have a special regard for some features that, when anyone else sees them, prompts the exclamation, "Why the hell do you like that?" Sometimes, after a long thoughtful pause, I admit (only to myself!) that I haven't the foggiest idea why I like it. For me the prize guilty pleasure, eclipsing even Gim Toro, is Brick Bradford.
I'm going to make some powerful enemies here, among them the estimable M. Hugo Sleestak and half of Italy's Golden Age fans. Brick Bradford is recognized as a seminal strip in American comics history! How can I call it a "guilty pleasure?" Alas, no matter how much I like William Ritt and Clarence Gray's brainchild, I am forced to admit that it was a clunky mess marred by boring scripts and variable, often poor, artwork.

In truth Brick Bradford's appeal is what the strip should have been, not what it really was. Looking at William Ritt's tenure as writer (1933-1948), one finds a bounty of great ideas. Many were original at the time, or at least not yet done to death: a giant robot terrorizing a city, a lost civilization in the Arctic ice, a journey into subatomic worlds. Ritt, a voracious researcher who liked to pack his stories with arcane knowledge, also cooked up some truly offbeat story hooks I still find irresistible. Among these is "The Lord of Doom," in which a Hollywood leading man reveals himself as the descendant of Temujin the Conqueror and invades Canada and the United States from his hidden Arctic fortress; and "Queen of the Night," in which Brick's lunar expedition discovers a colony of earth people who fled the first World War by building a spaceship and relocating on the Moon!
Ritt's trouble was that he took these great ideas and wrote interminable stories that droned on and on. His characters were of cardboard extra-sturdy even for 1930s comic strips. Their dialogue was of finest lead.Adventure strips of the 1930s could indulge in much longer storylines than today's holdouts. But Ritt's continuities weren't long, they were nearly eternal. All the stories from 1933 to 1940 lasted more than six months. Then Ritt really went to town. 1940's "The Throne of Titania" ran 765 days...well over two years! The next two stories, "Beyond the Crystal Door" and "Queen of the Night" ran over a year apiece (462 and 468 days respectively). Two short (168 day) stories followed as Ritt lost interest in the strip. After that he departed. Clarence Gray wrote short continuities for several years until health problems forced him to relinquish the dailies to Paul Norris. Gray continued to write and draw the Sunday Brick until his death in 1957.

I guarantee you Ritt's stories didn't need all that room. Even "shorter" stories like "Adrift in an Atom" were laden with digressions and dead ends. Worse, Ritt often pointlessly spread minor scenes over several days. The following example comes from "The Metal Monster:"







I can't find my reprint to scan, but there's another sequence earlier in "The Metal Monster" in which the bad guy shoots at Brick through his laboratory window. The shooter retreats along a balcony, Brick follows him, then the villain doubles back and winds up behind Brick. This goes on for almost a week. Maybe hot artwork would have made the tedium worthwhile, but that brings us to Brick Bradford's other problem: artist Clarence Gray.

Above: From the strip's first year (1933).

At his best Gray was a competent cartoonist. His work in the first year of the strip was solid if unexciting. From the beginning his figures were stiff, a tendency that worsened as the strip progressed. But Gray had a knack for 30s-style s-f machinery and a flair for exotic landscapes and architecture. However during most of Brick Bradford's heyday Gray wasn't at his best . Some dailies showed real effort:But far too many were hasty and poorly-composed. Dailies like this looked as if they were knocked out before breakfast.In fact, that may have been the case! In a King Features publicity piece Gray bragged of once having drawn "six strips in five hours." Bradford dailies from the thirties suggest he did it more than once.Gray put much more effort into the Sunday pages. Though his compositions were frequently awkward and his figures never lost their stiffness, Gray filled his Sunday panels with action, crowds, and detailed vistas.


The "Middle of the Earth" Sunday is from 1935, not long after the "Brocco the Buccaneer" daily.

After Ritt left and Paul Norris took over the dailies, Gray concentrated his efforts on his beloved Sunday page. His stiff figures developed thick, rather ugly outlines, but everything else demonstrated the extra care. Take a look at the last two panels of the 1950s Sunday below. Gray's stories were as quirky as Ritt's. I remember one set in an alternate future where Native Americans were America's dominant culture. New York's skyscrapers were shaped like wigwams! But Gray didn't have the space to develop his ideas, and all too soon cancer ended his career at age 56. Paul Norris took over the Sundays as well...and for me that was the end of Brick Bradford. The character Norris wrote and drew for the next thirty years wasn't the same naive wide-eyed adventurer. Brick, like Flash Gordon, joined the Space Age, though at least he kept the Time Top around.

Naive, wide-eyed adventure. That's why Brick Bradford appeals to me, despite the meandering stories and bad art. It's the romance of lost worlds, nut-and-bolt spaceships, hulking humanoid robots, and hidden civilizations that inspired comics creators and fiction writers alike during the 1920s and 1930s. Ritt and Gray just didn't have the "stuff" to make Brick a truly great strip. But their naive, wide-eyed enthusiasm was transmitted through their efforts into the hearts of readers like me.

To read a Brick adventure, you must check out brickbradford.blogspot.com, hosted by my newly-minted enemy Hugo Sleestak. It is from him I lifted the first two dailies. Most of the remaining artwork in this article came from the fantastic galleries at comicartfans.com, particularly the collections of Francisco Lopez, Maurizio Scudiero, and Massimo E. I'll bet there are more Clarence Gray originals in Italy than anywhere else...they love their "Guido (Giorgio) Ventura"!

Tom Corbett in Color

Ray Bailey, Space Cadet
Today I offer four of the handful of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Sundays I found in a thrift shop. They come from the San Francisco Chronicle. Three seem to be from the same story. All show off Ray Bailey's great artwork.First comes the 20 April 1952 episode, featuring Ray's take on the Dragon Lady. "Sultra" even sports Madame DL's cape, not to mention the official Sophisticated Bad Babe Cigarette Holder. Note that while everyone else comes from Caniff Land, the fellow in green leaning on Venger's seat definitely hails from Mongo. Was Bailey just having some fun?In the next strip, from 28 June 1953, The Polaris crew have entered a space race. Almost everyone smokes in Tom Corbett except the cadets themselves, and as we see here the top brass is partial to stogies. This seems more like Civil War generals than futuristic Academy faculty members. Come to think of it, the officers even look like Civil War generals, sporting moustaches and full beards which weren't common in 1953's U.S. military.We learn in the 12 July 1953 Sunday that Roger believes the ship has visited an alternate earth. Tom and Astro figure he's space crazy. They may be right, considering that Roger is glassy-eyed and he wanders off in search of the "one person" who will believe him.My final offering is from 26 July 1953. From the reference to "Manning and his charts" I think this is from the same storyline, and that Lorelei in panel 3 is the "only one" Roger was looking for. Sydney Greenstreet makes a guest appearance in the first panel, smoking one of Commander Arkwright's cigars and enjoying a great rendering job. Meanwhile, in panel 4 we see some of those great Ray Bailey mountains. Then there's Lorelei herself, a classic Caniff Girl if ever there was one.
If from the above you gather I'm a Bailey fan, give yourself a 25th-century cigar. I plan to run some more Corbett Sundays next time (I have maybe eight more), and when I can scan it, I'll post my beloved Undersea Agent original which proves that Bailey still had that spark in the late 60s.

Kurt Caesar--Part 2 of 2

Rendering unto Caesar those things that weren't Caeser's

As much as I like Kurt Caesar's work, I always feel a little guilty about it because of his rampant swiping. I'm of two minds about swiping. In the fannish days of my youth I adopted a self-righteous zero tolerance policy. I was one of several apa hacks (the 1970s equivalent of bloggers) who delighted in excoriating Dan Adkins for stealing almost every panel. Adkins would swipe from s-f magazine artists when drawing comics, and from comics artists when illustrating science fiction mags; it seemed like a calculated effort to reduce the chances of readers recognizing his source material. I changed my tune about swiping once I found myself on the other side of the page. I saw how, in the face of looming deadlines or insufficient skill, swiping could save one's neck Still it's hard to view Caesar's best-known work, the Urania covers, without noting that this planet came from Bonestell, this robot from Mel Hunter, this spaceship from Alex Schomburg.

In his comics work Caesar was hardly alone in being awash in influences. In the late 1930s Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff were the twin gods of the comic strip. Almost every “realistic” cartoonist of the time was influenced by one or the other. Not only in America: American strips were enormously popular in Europe. There, Raymond was undisputed king. Kurt Caesar was one of a shipload of European strip cartoonists who based their work on Flash Gordon's master. Not only cartoonists admired Raymond ; he was equally popular with the public. A Serbian comics website describes how one publisher tried to boost sales by packaging Caesar's “Il Pirata del Cielo” as “the latest creation of the great A. Raymond,” going so far as to paste Raymond's signature onto the artwork!

Another source of Caesar's work was photos, especially movie stills. Working from stills is a time honored tradition. These photos are readily available, often dramatically lit and posed, and treat the same themes as comics. The practice seemed quite popular in pre-war Italy. To give one example, the South Pacific adventures of Franco Caprioli were littered with American movie stars. It's kind of fun to watch a character morph into Wallace Beery and back depending upon whether Caprioli had a movie still that matched his layout.

It's worth noting that comics didn't flow one way across the Atlantic. Some Italian strips appeared translated in American comics. Among them was the ubiquitous “Il Pirata del Cielo,” which appeared as “Sky Pirates” in Sky Blazers #1 (1940).

In Roy Thomas' Alter Ego magazine Alberto Beccatini has documented how after the war several Italian cartoonists worked for Archer St. John's comics. Other Italian work appeared in Fiction House titles, though I'm unsure whether it was new work or translated reprints. I suspect it was both. Kurt Caesar drew a Wings feature under his “Jack Away” byline, and the panels show extensive cut edges, meaning they might have been existing art reformatted to fit the American page. However the cuts may simply have been evidence of pasted over dialogue. I no longer own the comics so I can't go back to figure it out.

After the War, Caesar's covers for Il Vittorioso resembled those of the American “popular science” magazines. He romanticized racing cars, speedboats, new aircraft, and future predictions. The cover at left was from a 1961 issue (sorry about the extreme cropping; I scanned it in two pieces from a bound volume). In his comics work Caesar had simplified and modernized his style somewhat. But he hadn't thrown out his reference library--note the guest appearance by The Mangler in this fictitious strip about the X-15 rocket plane!

(Sky Pirates page from a reproduction of the story at goldenage comicbook stories. blogspot. com. Urania cover from mondourania.com. Other pix from my collection.)

Kurt Caesar, illustrator--part 1 of 2

Italian comic artist Kurt Caesar (1906-1974) is best known today for having illustrated the adventures of “Romano il Legionario,” a daring pilot who fought the good fight for Mussolini in the years before World War II. Almost as well known is his series of cover paintings for the science fiction magazine Urania in the 1950s. During his busy career Caesar specialized in hardware stories, with an emphasis on aircraft. Caesar's love for planes showed especially strongly in his strips from the 1930s, when dashing aviators, explorers, and air pirates filled the pages of kids' weekly newspapers like Topolino and Il Vittorioso.

Caesar was born Kurt Kaiser (or Kaisar?) in Montigny-les-Metz, France. Though his German father would rather he'd have been a surgeon, Kurt preferred the arts and wound up at the Prussian School of Fine Arts in Berlin. An able sportsman, Caesar became a professional boxer and even captured a German title. Following his graduation he became a journalist, working for a variety of German magazines. While at Die Kultur he married the magazine's owner, Elfriede Ensle. Soon he took a job as a roving journalist for a Zurich-based periodical. He traveled throughout Europe and Asia, learning to speak several languages. Finally, in the mid-1930s, the Kaisers settled in Italy, where Kurt began his successful career as a comic artist.

Kaiser changed his name to Caesar, and confused later generations of fans by using several variations on this name during his career. At various times he was Kurt Caesar, Curt Caesar, Cesare Avai, Caesar Away, Jack Away, and Corrado Caesar. His first strip, written by legendary Italian comics scenarist Federico Pedrocchi, was “I Due Tamburini” for Mondadori's paper I Tre Porcellini. Shortly thereafter he illustrated the serial “Il Pirata del Cielo,” one of Italy's first strips featuring a “bad guy” protagonist, renegade American aviator Will Sparrow. I've reproduced a page below.* The love Caesar lavished on the strip--especially the airplanes--is obvious.

Caesar's biggest success, as already noted, was “Romano il Legionario (1938).” Flying for the Fascist air force, Romano first fought nobly in the Spanish Civil War, then branched out to battle on air, land, and sea. Some of Caesar's finest work appeared in this strip, as shown in the reproduction below, shot from the original art. Caesar left the series in 1943. During the war he served as a journalist in Spain and northern Africa. He wound up in Africa as an interpreter for General Rommel. There he was captured by the English and spent the remainder of the war as a POW. He resettled in Rome after the war and began producing strips and illustrations for Il Vittorioso.

[Sidebar: Oddly, the Lambiek entry on Kurt Caesar states that he was actually working for the Resistance during the War, and that “his activities were recompensated” afterward. While I have no grounds to challenge this statement, it seems incredible that the author of such unabashed propoganda as “Romano” would be working for the enemy. What's more, the statement doesn't appear in any other Caesar biography I found online. Stranger things have happened, though. Can anyone supply details?]

In 1952 Caesar accepted the assignment of painting covers for Mondadori's Urania, the first Italian science-fiction magazine (sample below.) Over the next six years he produced some 160 covers, which were quite popular with readers and today capture much of the spacefaring spirit of those years--even though large pieces of many covers were lifted from other artists. Unfortunately the death of his wife following a long illness broke Caesar financially. He was replaced at Urania and moved with his son to a village north of Rome. There he continued to paint covers for other s-f magazines. He also drew features for England's Fleetway magazines, including Jet Logan. Beginning in 1968 Caesar illustrated many of German publisher Moewig-Verlag's comics adaptations of the Perry Rhodan science fiction novels.

Kurt Caesar died of a heart attack in 1974 at the age of 68.

*(Most of the biographical material here was found in lambiek.net's “Comiclopedia” and the Italian and German language versions of Wikipedia. The page from “Il Pirata del Cielo” was scanned from an Albo d'Oro reprint, and the Urania cover came from the fantastic gallery of Urania covers at mondourania.com. The “Romano” original was found at dandare.info)