Black Samurai #7: Sword Of Allah

Black Samurai #7: Sword Of Allah, by Marc Olden

April, 1975  Signet Books

Marc Olden throttles it back for the penultimate volume of Black Samurai; I’m not saying Sword Of Allah is bad or anything, but it’s certainly a step down after the insanity that was the previous volume. I’d also say it’s my least favorite volume of the series yet, but again, that’s only when compared to the other volumes, all of which have been great. 

As I’ve mentioned in past reviews, a recurring schtick of Olden’s is to fill pages by jumping willy-nilly into the various perspectives of his characters – and he always features a lot of characters in his books. He does that probably more so in Sword Of Allah than any previous Black Samurai installment…with the ultimate effect that series protagonist Robert “Black Samurai” Sand is seriously lost in the narrative shuffle. He’s almost a supporting character in his own book. 

Sand features in a memorable opening which sees him becoming more personally involved in a mission since way back in the first volume. There’s no detail on how long ago The Warlock was, but we do learn straightaway that Sword Of Allah is essentially a sequel to earlier volume The Inquisition, the events of which we are told occurred a year ago. 

But when we meet him, Sand is once again in Paris – a recurring locale in this series if ever there was one – and he’s sitting on a plane about to take off with some woman he’s met in the past couple mounths, a woman he’s totally in love with and etc, etc. You don’t need a men’s adventure doctorate to know what’s going to happen to this woman. Meanwhile, due to the rampant POV-hopping with which Olden will fill up the pages, we already know a group of radical Muslim terrorists have hijacked the plane Robert Sand just happens to be sitting in. 

This is a tense scene as Sand quickly sees that the handful of terrorists who have overtaken the plane will no doubt kill everyone on board, and Sand must figure out how to get himself and his girlfriend, Ann, to safety. A curious thing is that Olden as ever wants us to understand that Robert Sand, despite being a badass samurai with years and years of training, is not a superman, so he doesn’t even try to take on the terrorists; instead, he searches for a way to get off the grounded plane without being detected. 

The terrorists are part of the Sword of Allah, a violent terrorist group, but again a reminder that such groups were less vile and deadly in the ‘70s, as these guys are more concerned with getting publicity for their cause – and with saving their own skins after they kill their victims. In other words, not the suicide vest radicals of today. But they are still vile, as Sand’s prediction is soon proven correct and the terrorists open fire on the occupants of the plane, blowing away men, women, and children. 

This is no doubt the darkest the series has ever gotten, with kids falling beneath the gunfire as Sand watches helplessly; and also, unsurprisingly, Ann gets blown away. This isn’t a spoiler; you know like within a sentence or two of the girl’s intro that she isn’t fated to be in the book for very long. Sand manages to engage a few of the terrorists in close-quarters combat; in a strangely unelaborated-upon tidbit, we learn that one of the terrorists is a Japanese martial arts expert Sand has fought in the past, who is now working with the Muslim terrorists. 

The Baron digs the knife in by letting Sand know that these very same terrorists were the ones the Baron tried to set Sand on, a few weeks ago, but Sand had been too busy boffing his British girlfriend Ann and so turned down the assignment. And now Ann’s dead, killed by the very terrorists Sand might have stopped if he’d heeded the Baron’s request. Thus Sand is driven by both personal loss and self-anger throughout Sword Of Allah. 

That is, when we see the guy. For the most part, the novel is made up of the random thoughts of the terrorists, their leader (“The Prophet”), and right-wing American terrorist Neal Heath, who last tangled with Sand in The Inquisition. Olden even works in the waning days of the Space Race into the plot, with an unexplored subplot about a joint US-USSR space venture – which a right-wing senator wants to stop at all costs, leading to the hard-to-buy teaming up of Heath’s group and the Prophet’s group. 

Olden tosses so much into the blender that he misses opportunities; for example there’s the Prophet’s sexy daughter, Laila, whose memorable intro has her about to bed some poor astronaut, only to kill him. The veteran pulp reader would expect that Robert Sand and Laila would hook up at some point, but this does not happen, and indeed it is not until the very final pages of the novel that the two even meet. 

So far as nookie goes, Sand goes unlucky in Sword Of Allah, too driven by the loss of Ann to notice any other women. That said, “driven” is a good way to describe Sand, as he is more vicious this time out than previous volumes, leading to a surprising finale where he employs an axe to execute some unarmed opponents. 

Olden specializes in long-running action scenes that really put his heroes through the wringer, and Sword Of Allah features a great such sequence that takes place on a small ship off the coast of France. Sand does a frogman and swims to it, planting explosives like a regular Tiger Shark, and then he goes onboard to “kill the Prophet,” who happens to be hiding on board. Instead Sand gets in a running gun battle with legions of terrorists, gradually pushed up against a wall with little opportunity to escape. 

Another thing Olden specializes in is pulling a deus ex machina to get his hero out of these scrapes; as in previous volumes, this tense battle on the boat ends with Sand’s apparent death, then the next chapter opens later and he’s all well and good – and we learn in quick summary how he got out of his predicament. It’s a copout, but Olden does it so well that you don’t even realize it until later. 

One thing he doesn’t pull off as well as giving Robert Sand his impetus for revenge. We only meet Ann in the opening scene, and Olden really lays it on with a trowel, how much Sand loves her, how great of a woman she is, and etc, to the point that she might as well have “DOA” stamped on her forehead. But this is all we see of her, and from there on Sand is burning and yearning for revenge, killing in cold blood at times, and it’s all cool and well done, but it does lack a little meaning because Ann is a new character who is not given opportunity to make an impression on the reader. 

The uncredited cover artist shows material that does happen in the narrative, with the caveat that Sand’s use of an axe in the finale is more “axe murderer” than “axe-wielding warrior;” it’s probably one of the most surprising finales in Olden’s work, as we see how cold and merciless the Black Samurai can really be. Otherwise, the scantily-clad babe on the cover must be Laila, but it’s not Sand she’s disrobing for – it’s the hapless NASA guy she wastes. Speaking of which, Olden continues to push buttons, as the only sex scene in Sword Of Allah features the Prophet and his daughter! But Olden does leave this scene of incest mostly off-page. 

Overall Sword Of Allah was entertaining, but as mentioned it was also my least favorite Black Samurai yet. It’s not bad or anything, just too mired in hopscotching perspectives from one-off characters, and the impression is given that Olden might’ve just been worn out by the previous volume and turned this one in quickly.

Black Angel: New Series From Tocsin Press

Great news, everyone – Tocsin Press has just published two volumes of a new series, Black Angel! Credited to Lawrence Conaway, the series is a blast of Blaxploitation-style men’s adventure from Men Of Violence Books.  A little more info on each volume...

It’s Coffy meets The Destroyer in the first volume, Black Angel!  Beautiful young Angie Black, a hooker in a high-class cathouse, is left for dead when the mob moves in on her madam’s operation.  Then an expert in killing teaches Angie all the tricks of his deadly trade.  Now, reborn as The Black Angel – a lethal beauty in a black leather catsuit – Angie is out for revenge!  

Here is the link to Black Angel on Amazon, where you can also read a preview of the first few pages (on desktop only).

In the second volume, The Doll Cage, Angie ventures to a South American island-nation to retrieve a naive city girl and bring her home.  With “women in cages,” a whip-cracking hotstuff nympho warden, a machete maiden, and even an old Nazi doctor, this one is like the novelization of a 1970s drive-in movie that never was.  

Again, here is the link to The Doll Cage on Amazon, where you can read a preview of the first few pages (on desktop only).

And be sure to check out the other books from Tocsin Press (if you haven't already).  As ever, The Undertaker series comes highly recommended!

The Spook Who Sat By The Door

The Spook Who Sat By The Door, by Sam Greenlee

January, 1970  Bantam Books

(Original hardcover edition 1968)

Most likely known more for its film adaptation (below), The Spook Who Sat By The Door started life as this hardcover novel published by Sam Greenlee in 1968. According to the back cover of the 2020 edition published by Wayne State University Press, the novel has been “continuously available in print since 1968,” and what’s more it “has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture.” Of course, “anti-racist” means the exact same thing as “racist,” but we’ll leave that alone for now. 

Actually, we won’t. The back cover of the Wayne State University Press edition also goes on to state, “As a tale of reaction to the forces of suppression, this book is universal.” To which, like pretty much all other “progressive” double-speak, I say bullshit. Indeed, the “hero” of this tale is such a craven, hate-filled bastard that I almost wondered if Sam Greenlee intended him as a lampoon of the whole “black rage” movement. But that might be giving more credit than is due, as there’s nothing to indicate Greenlee had any tricks up his sleeve; the novel is tiresomely serious, and the attempts at instilling a second-hand rage in the reader fails, mostly because the main character is such an iredeemable prick. He isn’t so much “reacting to the forces of suppression” as he is instigating a race war, for reasons that are decidedly self-centered. In fact the dude basically plans to have others do the fighting for him, while he lives in his bachelor pad sipping whiskey and listening to jazz on the hi-fi. 

The novel is also written in such a way that the reader must do all the heavy lifting; Greenlee has a tendency to write much of the narrative in summary, ie such and such happened, then such and such happened – like, it’s all nearly in outline format, with no drama or suspense to bring the characters or situations to life. And a lot of important stuff happens off-page, or isn’t exploited well enough to reap the full dramatic potential – something the filmmakers astutely corrected, as the movie is a lot better than the book, and not just because the soundtrack’s by Herbie Hancock. 

On the plus side, I was happy to discover that Greenlee wrote The Spook Who Sat By The Door in the style of the popular fiction of the era; this is not a “literary” novel, or something akin to Ishmael Reed. And at times Greenlee does capture a masculine vibe in his terse prose; I also appreciated the frequent mentions of music, with characters even visiting record stores. Jazz musicians are mentioned often, and particular albums are mentioned, but Greenlee, writing in the late ‘60s, has his characters listening to the pre-electric stuff. I mean, as I’ve said before, I like my jazz funky, electric, and from the ‘70s. In fact, I’m listening to Eddie Harris’s Bad Luck Is All I Have as I write this review. 

The novel is set in the same period in which it was published, though the action takes place over a few years, leading to the “it could happen!” sluglines that adorned paperback copies in the early ‘70s. Despite what the Wayne State University edition’s back cover wants you to believe (not to mention what a particular political party wants you to believe), the era in which The Spook Who Sat By The Door occurs is very different from our modern era. But then, that same political party stays in power by cultivating and harnessing race rage – or, really, any kind of rage – so on that note you could say the book is still timely. I guess rage just never goes out of fashion with the left. 

Confirming this, politics is not really a driver for our “hero,” Dan Freeman. Rage is. This is fine; I mean rage is the driver for most men’s adventure protagonists of the era. But at least with those characters, you can empathize with them. Freeman is kept at such a distance from the reader – and other characters – that it’s not until late in the novel that you even learn what drives him. This undermines the power of The Spook Who Sat By The Door, along with the passive, summary-style narrative approach. 

If anything, Freeman – which is to say, possibly, Greenlee – shows most rage for liberal whites. A disdain for “caring” whites runs through the novel, meaning those white people who pretend to care for the plight of the blacks but have ulterior motives. In other words, virtue-signallers as they would now be called. There are a lot of humorous parts where these hypocrites are called out for their hypocrisy. 

But then, just as much anger is directed at blacks. There is a lot of antagonism between Dan Freeman and other blacks; in his intro in the novel, he’s bickering and sniping at fellow blacks who have been chosen for a new CIA program. They don’t like Freeman because he doesn’t seem to fit in, and Freeman doesn’t like them because they all have Ivy League educations and fraternity pins. In other words, in Freeman’s mind they are pretend caucasians. 

Curiously, the one group Freeman – and, possibly, Greenlee – does not have a problem with is actual racist white people! Indeed, it’s subtly conveyed that Freeman respects these people for showing their true feelings…with the hidden inference that Freeman likes it because he himself is a racist. 

Unless I missed something, Dan Freeman is not the titular “spook” who sat by the door. Rather, it’s a black man who has been hired by a congressman as a sounding board for the black voting public, but who mostly “sits by the door.” He opens the novel, implying that he will be an integral character in the novel, but he disappears after this opening – and, what’s more, the idea that forms the plot of the novel doesn’t even come from him! 

Rather, it’s the congressman’s wife who proposes, apropos of nothing, that the congressman push for an integrated CIA as a way of currying support from “the Negroes.” I mean, the “spook who sits by the door” isn’t even the one who comes up with the idea! Perhaps this is Greenlee’s point, that even the “token negro” who has literally been hired to give the black viewpoint is ignored by the liberal whites who have employed him – rather, they listen to their fellow liberal whites instead. As I say, the book is downright timely in some regards. 

Nevertheless, the plan is put in motion, and thus we are introduced without much fanfare to our ostensible hero, Dan Freeman. We don’t learn much about him, only that he’s from Chicago and has gotten through the intense trials to become one of the few black men up for CIA membership. We learn that he harbors a lot of rage, and also that he has ulterior motives of his own – the implication is clear that he plans to use this CIA training to cause some hell. But Greenlee keeps him at such a distance from us that we don’t get a clear idea of what it is he plans. 

In the meantime, he fights with his black comrades as well as the racists in charge of CIA training. As I stated at the outset, The Spook Who Sat By The Door takes place in a different world, where “integration” was detested by the racist whites who ran everything. At least, according to this novel. As mentioned, the book itself is very racist: all whites here are bigots who harbor prejudices against black people and whatnot. But then again such fiction is taken as truth today. Personally I’ve learned after fifty years of life that skin color means not a thing – an asshole is an asshole, regardless of race. 

Greenlee occasionally veers outside of his summary approach and gives us actual tense scenes, like when Freeman takes on his racist judo instructor. This is a cool part and has that masculine, men’s adventure-type vibe; the instructor is a white man, the referee is Korean, and Freeman mops the floor with the bigot. But after which he scolds himself for letting his “mask” slip; again, Greenlee has this tendency to keep Freeman’s true inclinations hidden from not only other characters but the reader himself (or “themselves,” if you go that way), and this sort of neuters the impact of the narrative. 

The CIA is run by “The General,” another bigot who intends to drum out all of the blacks through rigorous training. But as expected, Freeman manages to pass until the end – and, instead of becoming a field agent, he’s given a desk job in DC. So essentially he too becomes “a spook who sits beside the door.” Over the next few years, Freeman becomes a key player for the Agency, traveling around the world with various politicians and learning to grease the wheels in other countries. 

Along the way he has some “side pieces,” like a black hooker in DC he retains over the years, and also an old flame who apparently is Freeman’s main girlfriend, though she’s thrust on readers so casually that at first I confused her for the hooker. The idea is that even from these women Freeman hides his true self, though via the hooker we learn of his revolutionary tendencies, in that he refers to her as a “Dahomey Queen,” a reference to Africa. 

But again, the reader must do a lot of the work to make the narrative come to life. In this way Greenlee is similar to author Cecelia Holland, who also refrains from providing the motivations for her characters; I’ve tried two times over the past six years to read her doorstep of a sci-fi novel, Floating Worlds, and have given up halfway through each time due to my frustration over not being told why characters were doing what they were doing. 

Anyway, the General gives a patronizing speech to Freeman over dinner one night, telling him how “you people…will take generations” to fully integrate, and etc, and Freeman keeps his “mask” on, only losing control when he excuses himself to the restroom, where he cries in rage – curiously, a scene that was left out of the movie. Again following his own unstated goal, Freeman abruptly quits the CIA and goes back home to Chicago, returning to his former job as a social worker; he sets up a nice bachelor pad and again integrates with the upper-crust (read: liberal) white society. And meanwhile he hobknobs with the Cobras, a Black Power guerrilla outfit (read: The Black Panthers). Freeman only now demonstrates his true goal: to instill his CIA training on these black freedom fighters, to start a war on whitey. 

Now, the cynic in me wants to accuse Dan Freeman of cultural appropriation. I mean, think of it – he’s been taught by white people, and now he wants to use their own stuff against them. It’s not like Dan Freeman is an originator. This is why I think Sam Greenlee might have had some tricks up his sleeve, as he constantly refers to jazz musicians – real ones, like Miles Davis and Sonny Stitt – and the implication is that these black Americans are originators, men who have broken away from their shackles (rather real or conceived) and have gone on to create instead of to destroy. 

But as we all know – and have learned – the left only knows how to destroy, not create. And this is what Freeman teaches the Cobras to do. All the hand-fighting, shooting, bomb-making, and etc tricks he learned in the Agency. As “Turk,” Freeman again wears a mask, not allowing himself to get too close to the Cobras, as he knows they’ll need to be expendable. Again, our hero is a prick. For Freeman plans to begin racial skirmishes across the country, his Cobras using all kinds of whitey’s tricks against them…while Freeman himself maintains his pose as the high-society “integrated negro” who lives in a cushy apartment, sipping whiskey and listening to jazz. 

Again, so much is told instead of shown. The Cobras hit a bank – we’re told about it. They dose a guy with LSD, we’re told about it. Indeed, for years I’ve had this jazz-funk DJ mix, which I blogged about on here many years ago: Pulp Fusion: Cheeba Cheeba Mix. Well there’s a sample in that mix, some guy saying, “I just met the most wonderful bunch of n—” (you of course know the word I mean), and I had no idea that line of dialog came from the movie version of The Spook Who Sat By The Door. And it’s in the novel, too – but unlike the film, it’s delievered in hindsight, capping off yet another summary-style excursion of “this happened, then hat happened,” so that, like virtually everything else in the novel, the line lacks any punch. 

Things come to a head in Chicago, where the riots begin, soon erupting across the country. And meanwhile Dan Freeman sits in his bachelor pad, posing as a member of integrated society. His “mask” is still firmly in place, as he lies to everyone – to the Cobras who serve him and look up to him, to the old girflriend who comes visiting. None of them know who the true Freeman is, and as mentioned even we readers never do, as his motivation is never satisfactorily delivered. Thus the novel’s intended downbeat ending – or happy ending, depending on your point of view – also lacks much punch.

In 1973 a film adaptation was released; I’ve come across speculation online that the CIA “yanked” the movie from theaters because it gave away too many secrets, and etc. Again: bullshit. This is a low-budget film, of a piece with the other independent Blaxploitation productions of the era, and I highly doubt the CIA was bothered by it at all. Episodes of Mission: Impossible gave away more “secrets.” 

The only things that elevate this film adaptation are Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack and the fact that protagonist Dan Freeman – as well as the other characters – is given a chance to breathe; we actually see things as they happen, and aren’t told everything in summary. If the Cobras – here named “The Black Cobras” in the movie – rob a bank, we see the bank robbery as it goes down, instead of reading a paragraph summary of the events. 

Also, Dan Freeman (portrayed by Lawrence Cook, who is very good in the role) is given the motivation he was denied in the novel. Indeed, the idea that he goes into Agency training precisely to start a race war is not evident in the film version; the idea is just as easily conveyed that his frustrations with lack of integration are what push him over the edge. As mentioned above, the part where the General gives his patronizing speech remains in the film version, but Freeman’s emotional breakdown after it has been removed from the adaptation, which I found curious. 

Sam Greenlee himself was a co-writer of the script, as well as a producer of the film, so one wonders if it was his attempt to rectify the passive tones of his original novel. Characters are still sort of thrust on us, like Freeman’s old girlfriend from Chicago who still throws him a casual lay every once in a while, but at least these characters are introduced more properly than in the book. Also the movie sports better characterizations for the Cobras, leading to memorable scenes – like the “yellow” Cobra (ie a light-skinned black) who chaffes that everyone thinks he’s white, leading to an emotional “I was born black, I’m gonna die black” speech – one that was sampled in yet another funk DJ mix I like a lot, Blaxploitation Mixtape by DJ EB. 

But as mentioned, the movie is clearly low-budget. The novel opens with a big cabinet meeting, but in the movie it’s three people in a small office. And hell, the titular “spook” who sits by the door has been turned into a woman in the movie, but even here it’s the politician’s wife who comes up with the “integrated CIA” idea. A lot of Freeman’s simmering schemes are left out of the movie, but the fight with the judo teacher remains. Overall, though, the feeling is that the producers were trying to make a legit movie, as The Spook Who Sat By The Door lacks much of what one thinks of when one thinks of a “Blaxploitation” movie. Indeed there isn’t even any nudity or much violence. 

One thing the film does have that is similar to other Blaxploitation flicks is a great soundtrack. Recorded right in the midst of his “Headhunters” phase, Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack features early versions of material that would come out on his Thrust LP. We’re talking jazz-funk with serious cosmic aspirations, courtesy far-out synth work with ring modulators and echoplex and a host of other sonic trickery. It’s a shame the soundtrack was never properly released, as what exists in the film sounds incredible, and for me the music was the highlight of the film. 

It’s taken me some weeks to write this review, mostly due to work and life commitments. In this time the race conflict has come even here to Frisco, Texas – on April 2nd of this year a seventeen-year-old boy was stabbed to death at a track meet by another boy of the same age. This garnered national coverage, but curiously race was never mentioned by the mainstream news outlets; the victim was white, the perpetrator was black.  Curious indeed that this racial element was not mentioned, given the corporate media’s obsession with “racial motivations” when it’s white-on-black crime.  (It was up to the “right-wing news outlets” to even mention the racial angle…which of course was yet more indication of their right-wingery, you shouldn’t be surprised to know.) 

Granted, race could very well have had nothing to do with the murder here in Frisco – it’s a horrific event regardless of motivation – but I bring it up because it illustrates, again, how different our world is from the 1968 of Sam Greenlee’s novel. How would the national media have responded if a black boy stabbed a white boy to death then? Indeed, per the incessantly-aggrieved pearl clutchers of social media, it’s racist to even consider that there was a racial motivation to the murder here in Frisco. Of course, these are the same people who took to the streets in “fiery, but mostly peaceful” protests in the summer of 2020.  Of course, race was never proven to be a motivation for the incident that sparked that particular outrage, either, but whatever.

Now that I’ve finally read The Spook Who Sat By The Door, I think it would only make sense to read Civil War II, written by Don Pendleton and published shortly after Greenlee’s novel came out; it appears to pick up where The Spook Who Sat By The Door left off.

UPDATE: I wrote this review over the weekend, and in that time the situation here in Frisco has quickly progressed.  Race has now been brought into it...but not by the side you might assume.  (Actually, if you have been paying any attention whatsoever to our collapsing modern world, you know exactly which side brought race into it).  That the murdered white kid has been demonized as a deserving victim says all that needs to be said about how far astray our society has gone.  But at least there are people out there like this young lady who see and speak the truth.  

Shaft Has A Ball (Shaft #4)

Shaft Has A Ball, by Ernest Tidyman

April, 1973  Bantam Books

The first Shaft novel to be published as a paperback original, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner, who the following year turned in the execrable Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Fortunately Shaft Has A Ball is better than that one, though as John Lennon would say, “it couldn’t get much worse.” For the most part Shaft Has A Ball comes off like one of the hardboiled yarns Turner wrote for Manhunt and other crime mags several years before, as collected in the anthologies Shroud 9 and The Hardboiled Lineup. In other words, it’s not much of a Blaxploitation affair, though that seems to also be true of Ernest Tidyman’s original Shaft novel (which I intend to read one of these days!). 

Again a big thanks to Steve Aldous for the background detail that Ernest Tidyman did the final edit of Shaft Has A Ball. Tidyman did a good job in his editing and rewriting, as the style here is the same as in the final book in the series, The Last Shaft, which was written by Philip Rock. In other words, one could read the Shaft series and not even suspect it was the work of two ghostwriters and one editor. The only caveat is Philip Rock was a superior writer, and Robert Turner again takes a fun concept and proceeds to do little with it. And, as with every other Turner book I’ve read, it was a chore to finish the book; despite being only 150 pages, Shaft Has A Ball maintains a sluggish pace throughout. 

I first read about this novel twenty years ago on Teleport City, meaning to someday check out the book. I recall even back then the Shaft books were obscure and hard to find. I’m reading this series way out of order, but it’s no big deal; there’s not much in the way of continuity, other than the small group of people John Shaft regularly works with: Captain Anderozzi of the NYPD, a cleaning lady who stays off-page the entire book, and Rollie Nickerson, a minor actor who is part-time bartender at the No-Name Bar that Shaft frequents. There’s also returning character Ben Buford, a Malcolm X type who apparently grew up with Shaft and has a brotherly sort of antagonism with him. 

According to Steve Aldous, Shaft Has A Ball was written by Robert Turner at the same time Philip Rock was writing Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which was the last Shaft novel to be published in hardcover in the United States (and, like all other books in the series, credited solely to Ernest Tidyman). This means there is some incongruity in how a certain character is presented in each book: Senator Albert Stovall, a black politician who in Shaft Has A Ball doesn’t have much to do in the narrative other than bet on a horse race, give Shaft an expensive watch, and get the shit beaten out of him (off-page) by a “sadie-massie” gay male prostitute. Meanwhile I was most staggered by the off-hand mention that Stovall, a black politician known for his firebrand personality, was a Republican. 

And yes, the sadie-massie (ie sadomasochism) mention brings us to the titular “ball;” it’s an event being held in the Hotel Armand in New York City for GAY, aka Gay American Youth, but really it’s a drag queen ball. Presumably the attractive black women on the cover are these drag queens, or maybe the artist (Lou Feck, per Steve Aldous) had no idea what the novel was about and just assumed there would be a bunch of hot black women in it. (Spoiler alert: There aren’t.) But then, even the drag queens are seldom in the text. Above I mentioned how Robert Turner does little with the plot. This is no truer than the ball itself; indeed, the entire “heist going down at a drag queen ball” element is almost an afterthought, and the heist could just as easily have occurred anywhere else. What I mean to say is, just as in Scorpio and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, Robert Turner doesn’t seem to know what kind of a book he’s supposed to be writing. 

Also according to Steve Aldous, the plot for Shaft Has A Ball came from Ernest Tidyman himself, and clearly his idea was of a heist happening in the middle of a drag queen event. One can already see the hijinks this would entail, with various characters dressed up like women and whatnot; but, brace yourself for this shocker, Robert Turner does zilch with the setup. If you expected Shaft himself would put on a dress in this one, be prepared to be crestfallen. Shaft isn’t even in the hotel when the drag queen ball takes place! I mean that’s how lame Turner’s plotting is. Rather, it’s a pair of crooks who dress up like broads and proceed to knock over the Hotel Armand (while knocking over some of their colleagues to increase their cut of the heist), and the whole thing is over and done with in a handful of pages. 

But really, it’s like a Manhunt story taken to novel length; Shaft the cynical, burnt-out private eye who wonders if he’s had enough of the city and just wants to give it all up, but is pulled into action again. Speaking of which, Shaft is pretty much a bad-ass in this one, killing people with his bare hands and blowing people away with a submachine gun in the finale. He also sees some bedroom action, courtesy a smokin’ hot black-Hispanic chick named Winifred Guitterez who works for a “black-themed magazine” and asks to do a profile on Shaft. Instead she wants to get, uh, shafted, and the two go from dinner to Shaft’s apartment…only, Shaft finds the naked corpse of a white girl in his place, a junkie who just got out on bail and has implicated Ben Buford in an upcoming heist. 

Shaft sends Winfired off…not that she holds any grudges, as she returns later in the narrative for the sole purpose of providing a somewhat-explicit sex scene, after which she completely disappears from the novel! The literary equivalent of the perfect woman, I guess. Curiously Turner does build her up a bit; Shaft researches her after she approaches him for an interview, learning that she was into boxing for a while, which is odd for a woman now and even more so was in 1973. But ultimately Winifred has no imact on the narrative, and is another indication of Robert Turner’s lackadaisacal plotting; she appears in the opening to interview Shaft, goes to dinner with them, gets sent home, and then calls him later so they can “finish business” – and next time we see her, she’s in bed with him. And then that’s it. I just felt she could’ve had more impact on the story. 

The same goes for the entire subplot around Ben Buford. For reasons never satisfactorily explained, a group of professional criminals plan to heist the Hotel Armand and pin the blame on Buford. Why this is necessary is not much dwelt upon, but part of the caper involves a crook who looks enough like Buford that he will pose as the revolutionary rabble-rouser during the heist so as to make people think Buford is behind it. The only puzzling thing is, the Buford lookalike pulls off the heist in drag, which undermines the entire plan! It’s stuff like this that just makes me think that Robert Turner never really understood what he was supposed to write in these ghostwriter projects. 

So in a nutshell, Shaft Has A Ball mostly features Shaft being told his old “pal” Ben Buford is planning a heist, and Shaft insisting that Buford wouldn’t have time for such nonsense. Then some people leave a dead junkie girl in his apartment and Shaft hunts them down, brutally killing one of them in the filthy bathroom of a bar and crippling the other. And curiously this subplot sort of goes away for a while, and Shaft moves on to providing bodyguard services for Senator Stovall. But this doesn’t entail much: Shaft takes a nap on a couch in the senator’s hotel room while Stovall disguises himself, to go bet on a horse race. After this Shaft goes home to bang Winnifred, and is called late that night when Stovall is taken into the hospital, having gotten banged up by a rough-trade male prostitute named Cowboy.  This is a character who also receives some brutal payback from Shaft. 

A humorous thing about Shaft Has A Ball is that Shaft’s sentiments on the gay community are very out of touch with today…but Turner indicates they were for 1973, too. There’s a curious bit where Shaft, in the Hotel Armand where he is to bodyguard the senator, rides up the elevator with the head of security, who informs Shaft that a drag queen ball is going on. Shaft makes some off-color jokes, and the security guard gets upset…which just seemed a very modern reaction to me. Shaft by the way will continue to make off-color jokes about gays and drag queens as the story progresses, which again makes it damn puzzling that Shaft himself has no interraction with the drag-ball heist itself. Personally I pictured burly, mustached John Shaft toting a gleaming .44 Magnum while in a dress and lipstick…wait, didn’t Hightower do that in one of the Police Academy movies? I haven’t seen one of those since the ‘80s (I saw the fourth one in the theater!!), so I can’t remember. 

Meanwhile we know, from various cutovers to the villains, that a group of criminals are plotting to knock over the Armand and pin the blame on Buford. There’s a lot of stuff from the perspective from the heisters as they plan things, but in true heist style it all unravels. Instead two low-level criminals in the gang do the heavy lifting, and it is they who go about in drag during the heist, even though one of them is supposed to fool everyone into thinking he’s Ben Buford, which makes one wonder why he’s in drag in the first place. Then these two guys start knocking off their fellow criminals. Meanwhile Shaft is off sleeping somewhere. No kidding. He’s informed by Captain Anderozzi about the heist, the morning after, and Shaft sets out to clear his good budy Buford of any blame. 

Apropos of nothing, Shaft deduces that someone at the heist was impersonating Ben Buford…and then Shaft goes to the apartment of his part-time actor friend, Rollie Nickerson, and asks him for a book of local actors(!). Shaft then looks through the book and picks out the black actor in it who looks like Ben Buford…and sure enough, that is indeed the guy who pulled off the heist! I mean it’s ludicrous. But Turner is close to meeting his word count, thus the finale jettisons the gritty vibe of the rest of the book and has Shaft figuring out where this guy likely has holed up. Shaft spots some mobsters also scoping out the place, and ends up using one of them as bait. But at least we get an action-styled finale, with Shaft picking up a machine gun and blasting away at the house; all told, Shaft kills a couple people in this one, though not on the level of series finale The Last Shaft. 

While the concept isn’t sufficiently taken advantage of, Shaft Has A Ball is at least better than Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, but one can see why reception of the Shaft paperback series was lukewarm. John Shaft here is just your standard pulp private eye, with the same grizzled, cynical worldview as a million other pulp private eyes, and this blasé vibe extends to the narrative. But then, this could just be due to Robert Turner. Next I’ll be checking out Goodbye, Mr. Shaft, which as mentioned also features Senator Stovall, but it was written by Philip Rock, whose work I prefer to Turner’s.

The Last Shaft (Shaft #7)

The Last Shaft, by Ernest Tidyman

January, 1977  Corgi Books

(Original UK hardcover edition 1975)

Well, the Internet Archive fixed itself and this final volume of the Shaft series, only ever published in the UK, is now back online. A big thanks to the person who scanned and uploaded their precious hardcover copy, as The Last Shaft is incredibly scarce and overpriced, either the orginal 1975 UK hardcover or the 1977 Corgi paperback. It’s surprising the novel still hasn’t been published in the United States. 

And also a big thanks to Steve Aldous, who notes that Shaft creator Ernest Tidyman intended this as the final novel in the series from the outset, and tried to get it published in the US. I’d love to know why he was unable to; it sounds as if Tidyman was courting upscale (read: hardcover) imprints, which is odd, given that the previous two Shaft novels – Shaft Has A Ball and Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers – were paperback originals. Had Carnival Of Killers and Shaft Has A Ball sold so poorly that Bantam passed on The Last Shaft? Or was it that Bantam (or other US imprints) passed on The Last Shaft due to Tidyman’s insistence on making the title of the book literal? I guess we’ll never know. 

The helluva it is, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers is the book that should’ve been passed on in the US, with The Last Shaft coming out instead. Carnival Of Killers, written by Robert Turner, was incredibly tepid, whereas The Last Shaft, written by Philip Rock (who turned in the awesome Hickey & Boggs tie-in), is for the most part fantastic – a pulpy slice of ‘70s crime, served up just the way I like it. And Philip Rock is a much more talented author than Robert Turner; there is no part where Rock seems to be winging it, banging out the words to meet his quota. The Last Shaft moves at a steady clip throughout, maintaining tension, characterization, and good dialog. In fact it comes off at times like Hickey & Boggs, which itself was a fantastic piece of ‘70s crime-pulp. 

There’s no pickup or mention of the previous book, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Shaft is even more bitter and worn-down when we meet him this time, looking out the window of his Manhattan apartment in the very early morning hours and wondering if he wants another belt of vodka. We are told Shaft is sick of New York, and wonders if it is time for him to go. Philip Rock maintains the world-weary characterization of John Shaft that Ernst Tidyman gave the character, as Robert Turner also did, but Rock manages to make Shaft likable, whereas Turner didn’t. Also we are often told Shaft’s a big bruiser, and, given the amount of action in The Last Shaft, I more so saw Jim “Slaughter” Brown as Shaft than I did Richard Roundtree. 

But then, The Last Shaft could just as easily have been the novelization of the third Slaughter movie we never got. It has more in common with the Blaxploitation action movies of the early-mid ‘70s than it does the hardboiled P.I. yarn Ernst Tidyman gave us in the original Shaft novel (which I really need to go back and read to completion someday). In this one we have Shaft beating people up, gunning them down, blasting away with a machine gun, and even blowing a place up and napalming stuff. We’re often reminded how he’s “Big, Black, and Bold,” per Billy Preston’s awesome “Slaughter” (which curiously was never released in its complete form until 2009’s Inglourious Basterds soundtrack.) 

Overvall, The Last Shaft sees John Shaft essentially becoming another Executioner or Revenger, or any other of the proliferation of mob-busters who showed up on the paperback racks in the mid-‘70s. Which again makes it curious that this novel did not come out as a paperback here in the US. Regardless, Shaft here turns into a one-man commando squad who takes on the underworld, even outfitted with a trick vehicle that’s stuffed to the gills with all manner of firearms and explosives. He even manages to get laid while kicking some Mafia ass, which is also par for the course for these ‘70s mob-busters. 

The plot is basically a Maguffin that allows Shaft to become a vigilante. He gets a visitor despite the early morning hour, none other than Captain Vic Anderozzi, a recurring series character. Anderozzi has come here with a guy named Morris Mickelberg, who per Anderozzi is the guy responsible for all the payoffs and whatnot going on in the city. Anderozzi has also brought along a massive box that contains all the dirty secrets – names, payoff dates, receipts, etc. It’s kind of a goofy setup, but Anderozzi’s reasoning is that Shaft is the only guy he can trust – the captain’s goal is to take Mickelberg and the box to the District Attorney first thing in the morning, and he just needs someplace safe to stay in the interim. 

Shaft’s reaction makes him seem a wholly unattractive character, which gave me bad flashbacks to Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. Shaft essentially tells Anderozzi he’s crazy and immediately grabs a shotgun and takes off – Shaft realizes “half the city” will be out to kill the captain, kill Mickelberg, and get that box. So Shaft leaves his “good friend” in the lurch, but to Shaft’s credit he has a change of heart while escaping; Shaft sees two men on the roof of his apartment building, one of them wielding a machine gun, and he swoops in to the rescue. As mentioned, Shaft does a fair bit of killing in The Last Shaft, blasting these two would-be hitmen apart with his shotgun. Philip Rock doesn’t dwell much on the gore, but he capably handles the action, a gift he demonstrated as well in Hickey & Boggs. 

Ernst Tidyman foreshadows his intention of making the title of The Last Shaft literal with the offing of a major character here in the opening, an occurrence which sends Shaft on his rampage – and furthers the “one-man commando Mafia buster” connotations of the novel. (I say Tidyman and not Rock, as per Steven Aldous the novel is based on a storyline Tidyman gave to Rock, with Tidyman also editing Rock’s final draft.) This death serves to be Shaft’s impetus for the rest of the novel: to get revenge on the killers and see that they all burn, handing off Mickelberg’s papers to the proper authorities. But Shaft is from this point a hunted man, with assorted crooks, mobsters, and corrupt cops out to get him. 

If there’s any failing to The Last Shaft, it’s that Rock (and Tidyman, I guess) introduces a deus ex machina conceit, a character who is randomly introduced into the narrative and will prove, again and again, to have just what Shaft needs for any given situation. This character is named Willie, a seemingly-inconsequential character who is introduced when Shaft checks himself into a hotel in the city. Willie, we’re told, has a “peculiar face,” one that is “striated,” and his hair is goofy, too. Another character mentions that Willie’s wife works at a salon and she “experiments” on Willie for practice. It’s an altogether curious intro for a character who will ultimately play a huge role in The Last Shaft, indeed serving as Shaft’s sidekick. Again, one can see this as a novelization of a movie that never was. 

Willie, as it turns out, is aware of who Shaft is (our hero giving a fake name when checking in and also covering himself with a hooded parka), and offers his help. This begins a gag that runs through the novel; Willie has decided he wants to be a private eye, and has been taking correspondence courses on it. But as the novel progresses, it turns out to be more – much more – than this. Willie not only knows all the tricks of the trade, but also has a delivery truck that is outfitted with virtually every firearm (up to and including machine guns), a mobile phone, and even C4 plastic explosive. (Not to mention napalm!) Rock clearly knows all this is a bit too much, and to his credit he has Shaft initially shocked by this, until finally accepting all of Willie’s vast bag of tricks with nonchalance. 

But seriously, if Shaft needs to shoot at someone, Willie has a machine gun for him. If Shaft needs to get some people out of a building they’re holed up in, Willie has napalm for Shaft to douse the parking garage with, flame-roasting the people within. (A sequence that has an eerie bit of prescience to it; Shaft and a random New Yorker stand on the street and watch the building burn, wondering how long the people trapped above have to survive, much as real-life New Yorkers would 26 years later as they helplessly watched the Twin Towers burn on 9/11.)  If Shaft needs to do some detective work and get a phone number, Willie knows just the things to say to the operator on his mobile phone. And yet at the same time we are to understand that Willie is naïve, an amateur who looks up to Shaft; there’s a big of a Hickey & Boggs vibe here, with the bickering and bantering black-white duo, but Willie is not Shaft’s equal on the action front, and acts more as the straight man. 

Willie also acts as a chaffeur, driving Shaft around town in his delivery truck, which is disguised as a bakery truck. And if that disguise is uncovered, not to worry; Willie has also taken a course on how to quickly paint the truck so that it looks like something else, like for example a yogurt delivery truck. Meanwhile Shaft sits in the back of the truck, formulating his plan of action; the second half of the novel is comprised of a series of assaults Shaft stages on the New York underworld, again operating in the same capacity as a Mack Bolan or a Ben Martin – like Bolan, he even takes to calling his targets moments before hitting them. 

Shaft also finds the time to pick up Sandra Shane, Morris Mickelberg’s hotstuff ex-wife, a former topless dancer Mickelberg picked up years ago. Now she’s determined to get the money her ex never gave her, becoming sexually excited over Shaft’s promises to get it for her. Rock doesn’t do as much to bring her to life, but at least Sandra Shane provides the series with some genre-mandatory spice, something that was completely absent in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers. That said, the Shaft-Sandra conjugation is not much dwelt upon, though we learn that Shaft, uh, gets hs rocks off a few times. Our author has more fun with another secondary character, Rudolph Gromyck, a dirty New York cop who tries to outwit the Mafia and his fellow cops and find Shaft – so he can get Mickelberg’s papers and become rich off them. 

There are a lot of one-off mobsters yammering at each other on the phone before getting blown away by Shaft; our hero kills a fair number of people in the novel, again like Bolan or any other ‘70s men’s adventure protagonist. Rock also provides a little comedy with Willie fretting over Shaft using all those weapons in his truck – goofy, particularly when you consider that Willie himself is the one who stocked his truck with all of the weapons. But given that the novel moves so quickly, the reader doesn’t have much time to ponder over all of the plotholes. 

Unfortunately, the reader does have time to ponder over the ending of the novel, which is guaranteed to upset everyone. SPOILER ALERT, but The Last Shaft, as mentioned, lives up to its title. In a humorously tacked-on ending, we read as Shaft finally returns to his apartment building after successfully wiping out all the criminals who have been hounding him the entire novel. And on the way into the building the poor guy is mugged by a random thug and shot dead. This brief sequence, likely written by Ernest Tidyman himself, does not flat-out state “Shaft died,” but otherwise it’s clear as day – the mugger shoots, and we’re told the metal of the gun “became a blossom of flame…but only for the shortest moment known to man, that moment before dying.” Granted, the character dying could be the mugger; Shaft has already proven himself to be quite a resourceful individual, and might have pulled out a holdout gun and shot the mugger before the mugger could shoot him. I mean, Tidyman (or Rock) doesn’t specify who is dying in that last sentence, so it might not even be Shaft. And yet, I don’t think so; Tidyman’s intended irony here is that Shaft has spent the entirety of The Last Shaft cleaning up the city – of the bigwig mobsters and other high-level crooks – and then he is shot down by a random mugger. 

As mentioned above, perhaps it’s this lame ending that kept The Last Shaft from being published in the US. If so, it’s strange…I mean the publisher could’ve easily removed it before publication. As I say, this brief finale is tacked on, and comes off as the literary equivalent of the similarly tacked-on surprise ending of contemporary action flick Sudden Death: a downbeat, nihilistic cap-off that seems thrust on the reader more so for shock value than for any dramatic intent. 

Overall, I did enjoy The Last Shaft, and it’s too bad Tidyman didn’t get it published in the US…and change the finale along the way, opening the series up to be the continuing adventures of Shaft and Willie. But likely Tidyman considered himself above such pulpy things, and preferred offing the character that had made him famous. 

I’m reading the Shaft books way out of order; next I will likely read Shaft Has A Ball, but one of these days I will read Tidyman’s original Shaft novel.

Black Dynamite (The Comic Book Series)

Black Dynamite, by Brian Ash, Jun Lofamia, Ron Wimberly, and Marcello Ferreira

February, 2015  IDW Publishing

Somehow I was completely unaware that there was a Black Dynamite comic book tie-in published several years ago, shortly after the release of the movie. I knew there’d been an animated series on Adult Swim, but I never watched it, and likely never will, as judging from the clips I’ve seen it’s nothing at all like the movie. And really, as the years have gone by, Black Dynamite has become one of my all-time favorite movies, if not my favorite ever. It’s a perfect spoof of a poorly-produced, low-budget “Blaxploitation” film of the early ‘70s, while being a very funny movie in its own right. Somehow the producers were able to walk that line, and they did so perfectly, from the “goofs” expected of the former (boom mics showing up in shots, actors blowing lines), to the straight comedy of the latter (the part where Black Dynamite and his pals have a brainstorming session in the diner in particular). 

Sure, Black Dynamite isn’t perfect; I’ve never been fond of the finale, which I think goes too far outside the self-imposed constraints of the film. Black Dynamite fighting Richard Nixon in the White House might sound funny, but it’s not something you’d see in a legitimate Blaxploitation film. Indeed, I’m always ticked that the main plot – a black politician working with a greasy mobster to sell drugs in “the community” – is hastily dispatched in the final quarter, as if the producers decided they needed a bigger finale. The deleted scenes on the Blu Ray even indicate that this storyline was indeed the finale, up to and including a bevy of Dolemite-esque hookers-slash-kung-fu fighters taking on the mob; this scene lasts a mere few seconds in the final film, the producers rushing through it to get to “Kung-Fu Island” and Richard Nixon. 

Then again, the imperfection kind of adds to Black Dynamite’s charm. The biggest mystery is why it wasn’t a hit, and why it isn’t better-known today. Director Scott Sanders wonders the same thing in the Introduction he provides for this trade paperback, which collects five comic books that were published by two different imprints from 2011 to 2014. This intro, which is the highlight of the book, is very insightful, as Sanders explains the origins of Black Dynamite (essentially, it was an idea of star Michael Jai White’s), as well as the writing of the script (White with the concept, collaborating with Sanders and fellow star Byron “Bullhorn” Minns, who per the intro is the one who ensured they got all the Blaxploitation tributes/parodies correct). 

Sanders tells us how an early cut of the film got a lot of industry attention, and how the final film was expected to do so well. And then, “crickets” upon the premiere…and Black Dynamite only even played in a few theaters. Sanders is clearly at a loss to understand what happened, and conveys this in his intro. He does try to find a silver lining; he tells us of a special showing in a Hollywood theater, sometime after the film’s general release, where he and Michael Jai White were the featured guests, and the two were surprised to see that most of the audience came dressed up as characters from the film. I wonder if this special showing Scott Sanders is referring to is the one at the Red Vic, for which an artist named Dave Hunter created a blacklight poster – a poster which I have and showed here on the blog fourteen years ago. (And for the past fourteen years, that blacklight poster, framed and ready to be hung, has been in the exact same spot on my study room floor, leaning against the wall and waiting to be hung up!) 

Scott Sanders also finds silver lining in how Black Dynamite has become both a cartoon and a comic book character, even speculating that he maybe should’ve been a comic character all along. Unfortunately, it appears that even Black Dynamite the comic bombed, as the “series” only lasted 4 issues, with a one-shot coming out before it, and this trade paperback is out of print and overpriced on the used books marketplace. Again it is curious that Black Dynamite didn’t resonate more. I concur with Sanders that it seemed like a pre-packaged success, even down to Adrian Younge’s pitch-perfect soundtrack. One can easily get wrapped up in the world of Black Dynamite, and the producers even gave us fun stuff that should have further guaranteed social media interest, like those PSA spots. These comics should have just added to that. Maybe it’s just a case that Black Dynamite came out at the wrong time. 

I’ll say right now though that the comic does not, and could not, compare to the film. Black Dynamite works mainly due to Michael Jai White’s performance, and the conceit that White is “really” a former pro footballer named Farrante Jones who has become an actor. (Furthering this conceit is the idea, which I read somewhere, that “Farrante’s” football career was cut short due to a neck injury, hence why Black Dynamite has such stiff upper-body movement – again, it is things like this, things you wouldn’t even notice until your fourth or fifth viewing, that make the movie so special.) The writer of the comics, Brian Ash (who apparently also wrote and produced the animated series), clearly has his work cut out for him, trying to mimic this “serious but not serious” vibe. His failure is that he even tries. That said, I did appreciate how Ash tried to stay true to the “Farrante Jones” conceit, with fake ads throughout the book of Michael Jai White as Farrante Jones, sporting some product. 

To me, the biggest failing of Black Dynamite the comic is that Brian Ash doesn’t play it straight. He should’ve just written a straight Blaxploitation caper featuring a studly and virile black protagonist, and left the funny stuff to the dialog or to the characters. Instead, Ash occasionally goes for humorous plots, or will have characters making fun of plot developments, which is never a good idea. Again, it works fine in the movie – one can clearly see Michael Jai White as “Farrante Jones playing Black Dynamite” struggling with the dumb-ass script and terrible lines he’s been given, not to mention the bad actors he has to work with – but in a comic it doesn’t work very well at all. 

Curiously, Ash also has a strange tendency to take Black Dynamite out of his element. Surprisingly, only one of the five comics here features Black Dynamite in his typical urban environment. The first three issues of the series, in fact, don’t even seem to take place in the ‘70s, and have him traveling around the world and fighting the Illuminati; the third issue in particular is head-scratcher, featuring Black Dynamite up against genetically-bred giant insects and lots of gore. Humorously, it’s as if Ash realizes he’s lost the plot, as despite ending on a cliffhanger, the events of issue three are ignored in issue four (which was the final issue). And of all the stories here, #4 has the most in common with the movie. Indeed, the fourth issue even sort of rips off the movie; whereas Black Dynamite concerned an evil white plot to contaminate malt liquor, Black Dynamite #4 concerns an evil white plot to booby-trap tennis shoes. 

But of all the comics in the collection, it is the first one, the one-shot Black Dynamite: Slave Island, that is the best; it was originally published in 2011 by Ape Entertainment. And no wonder this story is the best in the collection, as per the credits the plot is courtesy none other than Michael Jai White and Scott Sanders! So then, Slave Island may give an indication of what Black Dynamite II might have been like. If so, then perhaps Brian Ash isn’t the one to blame for consistently taking Black Dynamite out of his element in the ensuing comics, for White and Sanders set the trend here. Slave Island is essentially a take on the “slavesploitation” films of the ‘70s (Arthur “Roots” Haley himself even has a cameo in the comic), with Black Dynamite pointedly referred to as a “Mandingo” at one point. 

The concept is interesting, but perhaps a little too one-note for a film, so maybe it isn’t fair to judge Slave Island as a movie that never was. It concerns Black Dynamite becoming aware of an island off the coast where black people are still held as slaves. He gears up and heads there, only to end up being washed up on the coast sans all of his equipment. From here it’s Black Dynamite in a loin cloth – again, the funky ‘70s trappings are for the most part gone in the comics – as he attempts to lead a rebellion among the cowed slaves. And it turns out “Slave Island” is actually a tourist spot, with wealthy white vacationers paying to come here and see how “things are supposed to be.” 

None of the slave characters get much of a chance to breathe, what with Slave Island only being around 48 pages. The slave who gets the most attention is a sexy, scantily-clad Pam Grier-type who harbors rebellious tendencies, but she isn’t in the story nearly as much as she should be. Black Dynamite, who is quickly caught and thrown in with the slaves, will spend the rest of the story taunting the white owners of Slave Island that a revolution is brewing – that is, when he isn’t being bid off to a wealthy white matron who engages the “Mandingo” in several nights of off-page lovin.’ Oh and I should mention here, despite looking exactly like a 1970s comic, Slave Island features rampant cursing and even a little nudity, just like the movie Black Dynamite. It also features the wonderfully economical plotting of a ‘70s comic; unlike modern-day comics, where an entire issue or more can be devoted to plot setup, Slave Island tells the beginning, middle, and end at a rapid clip. 

There’s a lot of stuff here that one could imagine making its way into the movie sequel that never was, like Black Dynamite punching a shark after being capsized in the ocean. Also his leading the slaves in revolt is pretty cool, but again a little rushed, as is typical for a comic. But Slave Island is mostly interesting in how creators White and Sanders apparently wanted to broaden the character of Black Dynamite, taking him out of the inner-city; unfortunately, Sanders doesn’t give much background info on Slave Island in his intro. It’s interesting to wonder if he and White did indeed conceive of it as a potential storyline for Black Dynamite II. 

Another big thing going for Slave Island is the artwork, courtesy Jun Lofamia. Per a brief, uncredited postscript at the end of the trade paperack, it’s noted that the goal for Slave Island was for it to look exactly like a comic from the ‘70s, and it was a struggle to find a modern artist who did not have a modern comics style. But, as it turned out, Lofamia was a comic artist in the ‘70s, thus his style here is identical to something you might’ve seen in a Marvel comic of the ‘70s. It’s great, and one can tell that the book was a labor of love on this front, down to the muted color palette and the faux-yellowing of the pages. Slave Island is also good because Brian Ash refrains from too much spoofery, other than occasional “humorous” stuff, which usually involves dialog; one of his recurring shticks is having characters misunderstand each other. 

Unfortunately, Black Dynamite the series is a whole ‘nother thing. Published by IDW, the series only ran from 2013 to 2014. Given that Brian Ash was involved with the animated series, I have to wonder if his Black Dynamite comic series is a take on that; even the artwork of the first three issues is similar to the cartoon, courtesy Ron Wimberly in issue #1 and Marcello Ferreira in issues #2 and 3. Their artwork has that same “street” look as the cartoon, and I don’t like it at all. Apparently the concern over finding an artist who was not influenced by modern comic art was not a concern for the series, as it had been for the Slave Island one-shot. And not only is the artwork “modern” in these first three issues, so too is the storyline, which bears no similarity to Black Dynamite the movie. 

Actually, what the storyline of Black Dynamite #1-3 most reminded me of was the COMCON mini-series Gerald Montgomery wrote in 2000 for The Executioner. As with that Mack Bolan storyline, here Black Dynamite discovers a secret organization of evil white people that is heavily equipped and intent on taking over the world. The brevity of Slave Island is gone, with Black Dynamite #1 essentially nothing more than setup for the ensuing two issues – and it’s clear that more than two issues were intended for this storyline, as the “Illuminati” plot abruptly (and thankfully) comes to a halt after issue #3. 

Things get off to a bad start with an opening in which Black Dynamite is kicked out of “the community,” the very same community he saved from drugs in the movie. One thing going in this first issue’s favor is that the time is clearly stated (1976), and also the events of both the movie and Slave Island are mentioned. But otherwise there is no feeling of continuity. Black Dynamite is asked to leave by the locals because his ass-kicking has caused unintentional consequences for the people of the community, and they just want him gone. So, like Cain in Kung-Fu, Black Dynamite sets off to walk the Earth. 

One suspects he walks a helluva long time, because almost all the 1970s trappings of Black Dynamite are gone from here on out. The funky fly threads are gone, and Black Dynamite’s afro is even shorter. The villains all seem to have stepped out of the ‘90s; their leader is a bald white guy in a black three-piece suit, as if Lex Luthor has come over from DC Comics. (Actually the villain, dubbed “The Man,” looks a lot like famed comics writer Grant Morrison.) If Slave Island was a broadening of the Black Dynamite canvas, then the storyline in Black Dynamite #1-3 is a shattering of it. Tellingly, neither Michael Jai White nor Scott Sanders are credited for the plot of this storyline; it’s all the work of Brian Ash. 

Wandering the world, Black Dynamite is confronted by a squad of black-armored goons who take him off to a secret, high-tech facility. That’s the entirety of issue #1; so much for the economical storytelling of Slave Island. In issue #2, Black Dynamite meets “The Man,” the aforementioned Lex Luthor/Grant Morrison lookalike, who gabs that this high-tech army is part of “The Illuminati” that secretly runs the world, and what’s more they want Black Dynamite to join. But Black Dynamite picks up a bazooka that is conveniently lying there and blows the place up. After this he hooks up with a multi-ethnic resistance group – none of whom are named, but one of them is a sexy Asian gal – and he becomes a fighter against the Illuminati. 

With the Illuminati stuff and the ragtag band of guerrilla fighters, the parallells to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles are very evident. In fact, what with the Morrison lookalike as the villain, I wondered if Black Dynamite #1-3 was intended as a spoof. But it doesn’t work, and what’s more it’s all rushed (the Asian gal isn’t even given a name, I believe), and The Man is not an interesting villain. And the plots are wholly unlike what one might expect from a Black Dynamite storyline.  And Ferreira’s art more so conveys the ‘90s. Again, like The Invisibles. 

The third issue is where it gets real puzzling, with Black Dynamite going to the Himalays and encountering a temple of monks who have these genetic insectoid monsters at their disposal; for some reason, Ash and Ferreira decide to add a bunch of gore to the world of Black Dynamite (and yes, I realize the film had a few gore affects as well), with the insectoids tearing people up and exploding. The finale is especially gory, with The Man having his head surgically implanted onto the neck of a black man (and then ordering the black man’s head gorily sawn off); certainly a tribute to the Blaxploitation movie The Thing With Two Heads. 

Fortunately (and humorously), Black Dynamite #4 ignores all that bullshit and gets back to what readers want: a story that feels like Black Dynamite. Also fortunately, Slave Island artist Jun Lofamia is back, again turning in artwork that seems to have come right out of a 1970s comic, once more even replicating the muted colors and the yellowed pages. Whereas issues #1-3 took place (presumably) in 1976, the fourth issue is stated as being in 1972. No mention is made of the previous three issues, as if Brian Ash himself wants to forget about them. 

Shockingly, this is the only story in the collection that has an inner-city setting. Black Dynamite is in the audience as a famous, Dr. J-type basketball player does some stunts on the court – and then the b-baller somehow explodes. While the news lies about what happened, Dynamite – after “balling” the guy’s sexy widow (lame pun alert) – investigates and learns that it’s all an Anaconda Malt Liquor-style plot. Evil Whitey is tricking out a new shipment of sneakers in the latest plot to take down the black man, and Black Dynamite kicks some ass. This one is a self-contained storyline, not as good as Slave Island, but certainly better than the Illuminati storyline. The only problem is that Brian Ash treats too much of issue #4 as a comedy. 

And thus Black Dynamite the comic comes to an ignoble end. This trade paperback collection is only notable for the insightful intro by Scott Sanders, and the tantalizing possibility that Slave Island might have been the plot for Black Dynamite II. And now that I’ve written so much, here are some random pics of the pages – take note particularly of Jun Lofamia’s pitch-perfect 1970s comic artwork recreation.