The Phantom - The Goggle-Eyed Pirates!

The tenth entry in Avon's "The Story of the Phantom" novel series is The Goggle-Eyed Pirates by Ron Goulart as Frank S. Shawn from the original 1960's comic strip story by Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy. The story was also adapted to comic book form by Bill Lignante in the fourth issue of Gold Key's The Phantom series. George Wilson supplies a fetching cover for this one, with the Phantom clutching a machine gun. 

The story is straight forward enough affair. Diana Palmer is aboard a luxury ship which is attacked by strangely garbed pirates wearing goggles and robes with other devices to make them seem taller. These items are tossed into the sea after the robberies and the pirates resume their roles as actual passengers of the ship. This is suspected almost immediately and even before the ship actually docks the Phantom gets aboard to check on Diana and begin his investigation. 

The pirates prove to be a devious lot and the Phantom is challenged in bringing them to justice. This is a solid adventure all the way through, albeit a brief one. Goulart is always able to keep a brisk pace in his stories and this yarn switches back and forth between three protagonists -- two Insurance Agents, Diana Palmer and the Phantom. The insurance agents named Bockman and Lumbard are well crafted enough for the purposes of the story. My only quibble with the tale is a moment when Lumbard performs a stunt which seemed a tad too dangerous to survive. 

There are no heavy themes in The Goggle-Eyed Pirates, unless it is a cautionary tale for rich folks to leave their valuables at home or in the bank when they are on a cruise. We meet a few folks who are part of the scheme unknowingly or only in tangential ways and that showcases how quickly anyone can be snared into a bit of larceny. 

Something that always comes across to me vividly in Goulart's stories is how potent a puncher the Phantom is. He drops villains with a hefty one-two or sometimes even just a powerful single blow. The reader can feel those punches. I'm always fascinated about the Phantom seems to bring out the best in the talents who work on his stories. 

Next time the Phantom takes on The Swamp Rats. 

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The Phantom - The Mystery Of The Sea Horse!

The Mystery of the Sea Horse by Lee Falk, who is really Frank S. Shawn, who is really the late great Ron Goulart. This is snappy and fast-paced little Phantom novel which is adapted from the twelfth Phanton daily story by Lee Falk and Ray Moore, gets to the action tout sweet. Diana Palmer gets involved with a handsome gent going by the name of "Chris Danton" who turns out to be a drug smuggler, and the Phantom just so happens to be in California and is able to race to her rescue. But that's just the beginning. 

The Sea Horse in the title is a number of things. The main villain of the piece has a passion for seahorses, so much so that he has named his remote estate and his yacht after the tiny creature. Whether Goulart is going for a pun since this guy is a smuggler of narcotics, in particular heroin or to put it oddly a chap who moves "horse" across the "sea", I can't say.  

As the story unfolds, we learn that our villain might well be a Nazi, with name change and new line of work. He's being hunted by diligent if brutal assassins. Add to that the Phantom who is on his trail relentlessly for having made the critical error of attempting to harm Diana. The duo of "Walker" and Palmer head down to Mexico in pursuit of the villain. Eventually we get aboard "The Sea Horse" where the story reaches its climax. 

This is a humdinger of a little adventure. There's little in the way of what I'd call specific Phantom action and the Deep Woods only comes into play in that our villain knows of it and of the Phantom before the action even starts. 

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The Ghost Of Avon!

I need not have worried how I was going to fill the hours after Doc Savage (Sanctum Books) and Fu-Manchu (Titan Books) end their epic novel reprint runs early this year. News has just broken that Hermes Press, the outfit which has been reprinting the Lee Falk Phantom comic strips and comic books for many years will now offer up the vintage Avon Books Phantom novels which graced the shelves during the 1970's. I only picked up a couple at the time and while I enjoyed them, was not sufficiently plugged into "The Ghost Who Walks" to seek them all out. I've wanted them  of course in the years since, but I find them rarely and usually in such condition that reading them would demolish them. Now I needn't worry as within the next three years (according to the announcement) about once every two months a new old novel adapting the Phantom stories will arrive for my reading pleasure.

If you want to listen to the announcement yourself check out this link or listen below. Dan Herman, the publisher of Hermes is doing the talking and after hyping up the latest Phantom comic strip volume announces the novel program. It's at about the three minutes and thirty seconds mark if you don't want to sit through the whole thing.


Now I want to be upbeat about this Phantom news, but to be frank Hermes has a history of not being able to deliver on time. It's decent and often quite good when it arrives, but deadlines have always been a problem. So the promise to do this in under three years seems a bit optimistic to me given their track record, but I will choose to accept it until I have concrete reasons to doubt it. Hopefully this will kick off sooner than later as I would love to have a few volumes to enjoy this summer.

For your viewing pleasure I've included in this post the delightful George Wilson covers which graced the Avon books. Great pieces as always and I'm very much looking forward to seeing them enlarged for the new editions.

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Power Of Warlock - Masks!

In the third issue of The Power of Warlock (yeah I know it's technically just "Warlock" but I prefer the fuller title) by Mike Friedrich, Gil Kane and Tom SuttonAdam Warlock and his disciples (four teenagers) are riding a high-speed  boat across the water off the coast of Malibu.

They encounter a submarine manned by the handsome Apollo and his minions who it seems work for the malevolent Man-Beast. A battle commences and Adam is able fend off the threat but Apollo is revealed to be the much more hideous genetically evolved warthog named "Triax the Terrible" and he holds the lives of the twins Eddie and Ellie Roberts in his deadly hands.

In the battle with Triax  (called inaccurately "Trax" on the cover) presented again by the team of Friedrich, Kane and Sutton, Colonel Roberts, the father of the twins held in the claws of Triax calls in an airstrike which has little result save to make the monster throw Eddie Roberts to his death. This death is quite the blow to everyone involved, including Warlock who will have to allow time to pass to heal his hurt.

Seeing that his lack of faith in Warlock has caused this result, the Colonel calls upon Adam to save his daughter. Warlock does and defeats and kills the deadly enemy but too late to save his fallen disciple. As the Roberts family grieves we meet Victor Von Doom who is quite  different on this Counter-Earth.

Master pulp writer Ron Goulart steps in to script the next story in the fifth issue titled "The Day of the Death Birds!" and it is also sadly the final story by the art team of Gil Kane and Tom Sutton. In this tale Victor Von Doom is a scientist working in good faith with the United States government on weapons development, but the test of a new weapon dubbed the "Death Birds" worries him since it will take place too near a dam which itself is near a cache of abandoned military weapons. He calls the President, a man named Rex Carpenter who has recently been elected to that post and whom we met last issue, ignores his warnings and proceeds with the tests. The dam breaks and a disaster looms.

But Adam Warlock, recovering from the death of Eddie Roberts has been healing inside his cocoon and emerges in time to help save the locals from the flood. But the President surprisingly names Warlock a threat to the nation on television making him an enemy of the state.

The failure of the responsible adults on Counter-Earth to offer up proper protection against the threats which Warlock battles is clearly a theme of these early stories. Warlock offers up a clarity of mission which lesser men fail to grasp or confront and in his willingness to give his all functions as a proper hero for a society which finds itself by threats it doesn't really recognize, because as we see in these stories masks hide all sorts of things. 

More to come tomorrow as a new art team takes the helm.

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Vampire Tales #1 - First Blood!

Vampire Tales Volume 1 Number 1 is dated August 1973. This title along with Dracula Lives, Tales of the Zombie, and Monsters Unleashed formed a wave of magazines Marvel produced in the early 70's to tap the somewhat more adult market for comics outside the confines of the four-color world still ruled by the Comics Code. It was a chance to extend some horror characters and create others which challenged the status quo of what a Marvel character had long been. The first issue featured a very atmospheric cover by Esteban Maroto.

First among equals in Vampire Tales is Morbius the Living Vampire created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man a few years before. In the debut story by Steve Gerber and Pablo Marcos Morbius is operating in Los Angeles and falls in with a group of hippie satanists who take him to see an alluring psychic who causes him all manner of trouble when her spells unleash a demon. To read this one go to this very groovy link.

In an article titled "Blood Is Thicker..." the editors set up the premise of the magazine and state its mission to follow the exploits of life suckers of all sorts.

Next up is a reprint story from 1954's Menace #9 with art by Bill Everett titled "To Kill a Werewolf" and it's pretty much what you'd expect. Marvel made use of vintage 50's material quite a bit early on in these hefty magazines to fill out the page counts.

"The Vampire - His Kith and Kin" by Chris Claremont is a five-part look at the history and lore of vampires from a 1928 book by Montague Summers. This initial installment discusses general tropes of the monstrous undead bloodsuckers.

"The Vampyre" by writers Roy Thomas and Ron Goulart and artist Winslow Mortimer adapts what is arguably the first vampire story by John Polidori, a tale concocted at the same party which gave the world Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. It's a journeyman effort which records the events of the yarn without much damage and sadly with little excitement.

Next up is another 1954 tale from Journey Into Mystery #15 titled "Satan Can Wait" with Paul Reinman artwork. All the 50's material in this issue is very handsome to look at, though the stories themselves are pretty tame.

"The Worst (No Kidding) Vampire Films Ever Made" mocks some of Hollywood's lesser cinematic efforts. I'm not sure I agree with all the movies included on the list as the vampire western Curse of the Undead is included and I rather like that genre-blending effort. Others mentioned are Billy the Kid Meets Dracula, Blood of Dracula, and Atomic Vampire, all deserving I suppose, but to my mind many still fun in their own hapless ways.

The magazine closes with a story by Gardner Fox titled "Revenge of the Unliving" featuring very handsome and moody art by Bernet. The story of an ancient vampire who rises once more to find her treacherous lover has some classic twists and turns.

The debut issue of Vampire Tales feels a little bit like what it is, a somewhat rushed effort to get something under two covers and onto the stands for the little bloodsucking audience to gobble up. The lead Morbius story feels like it was done very swiftly and lacks much of the atmosphere that Marcos often brought to his best work. Likewise the Polidori adaptation seems rather staid and lackluster, not the least of which is owing to Mortimer's tried and true but very humdrum artwork. Gardner Fox was fresh to the Marvel Bullpen at the time and he cranked out a lot of these horror yarns, this one of the better ones for sure.

There is a breeziness to the text articles which frankly reminds me of the relaxed and conversational tone often used in blogs like this one. Clearly the writers felt they were talking shop to a close-knit group who would get many of the offbeat references.

The series will really connect, fulfill more of its undead promise in the second issue. More on that next time.

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The Power Of Warlock!

Warlock created by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane out of the fabric woven by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby with the character "Him" is a significant Bronze Age Marvel figure. Not so much for his level of moderate success which was sporadic, but in that he shows off what Marvel did best during that period, which was to develop and enliven the rich creations of the Silver Age. Both Thomas and Steve Englehart were expert at taking older concepts and shining them up for a new audience. Warlock is perhaps the best example of that.

Warlock which debuted in 1972 in the aptly-named Marvel Premiere #1 quickly was launched into his own series only to lapse a year later, a failed effort with great art along the way by Gil Kane and Bob Brown. It also featured scripts by the likes of Mike Friedrich and Ron Goulart. The Warlock saga came to a conclusion of sorts in the pages of The Incredible Hulk written by Thomas with art by Herb Trimpe during 1974. Warlock, a rather on-the-nose Christ analog, made for some vibrant storytelling.

Then came Jim Starlin in 1975 who took the fabric woven by Thomas and Kane and fleshed it out, giving us one of Marvel's iconic figures at last in full figure. The title Strange Tales had been revived and Warlock came back there only to very quickly pick up his own series where he left off and again things were splendid for a year or so.

Then another cancellation in 1976, and the saga found its final episodes scattered among an issue of Marvel Team-up drawn by John Byrne and then finished truly in the two grand epic annuals in the summer of 1977, a sprawling saga beginning in The Avengers and ending in Marvel Two-in-One.

To follow the journey of Warlock demands a keen attention to Marvel Bronze Age history and access to a rich back issue bin, at least until now. Several of these issues have been reprinted in one place or another, other Essentials volumes in fact. The Jim Starlin stuff has been available off and on since it first hit the stands in various reprint packages, but never has it all been available together in such a handsome volume. This is the thing the phone book reprint volumes excel at, getting sagas like this in a handy format.

This one is highly recommended, if only for the gorgeous inking by Tom Sutton on Gil Kane's pencils on those early issues. Truly a team which should've done more work together, they were outstanding.

Below are the issues you will get in this handsome book in their proper order.




























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