Drums Of Fu Manchu

I just finished this yesterday and it's fantastic. I've got this one on VHS only, so I've not gotten around to watching it for many many years, but a busted dvd player requires alternative planning. It's been so many years in fact that I've largely forgotten the details, so as the many ingenious threats by Fu Manchu unfolded I was continuously fascinated to see how it would turn out. And unlike some serials, the cliffhangers in this one are really excellent. Some serials depend on just plain luck all the time for the hero to survive, but in this story we were often treated to the element of unseen story to save the day, the heroes saved themselves and didn't depend so much on luck.

The story is pretty straightforward and familiar for Fu Manchu fans. Fu Manchu seeks the Scepter of Ghenghis Khan which will give him sway over a vast army in the Eastern world. He is opposed by Sir Nayland Smith and a young man named Allen Parker who saw his father killed by Fu Manchu's men. They spend the first half of the serial fighting over clues to the location of the scepter and then the last half fighting over possession of the scepter itself.

This is a great serial with dandy acting and wonderful action sequences. The plot is varied and there are ghostly houses, hills full of native warriors, secret passages in ancient caves, and the typical assortment of domestic threats. Fu Manchu is aided by his daughter and his slave warriors who have had brain surgery to guarantee their loyalty to Fu Manchu. These silent killers are a very potent image throughout the serial and give Fu Manchu a real sense of sprawling menace.

The acting is above average with Henry Brandon as Fu Manchu. Some regard his portrayal as the best on film of the classic Sax Rohmer villain and I can't disagree. Brandon is outstanding. But Robert Kellard is excellent also as Parker, the main action hero of the story. He's very robust and his action sequences are very smoothly done. William Royle is Nayland Smith and he's quite good, taking part in more fist fights than I'd have imagined.

William Whitney and John English are the superb directors of this serial as they are of so many excellent Republic serials. This one has not only the typical Republic rockem sockem action sequences, but some really effective atmospheric touches as well. Fu Manchu is almost always shown in deep shadow and it gives him a real sense of menace. This one is a real gem. I give it the highest recommendation.

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Connecting The Dot!

This is a fun bit of fluff from Harvey with Little Dot enjoying a very specific issue of Richie Rich.

And here's a bonus. Here Casper reads away on a particular issue of Spooky, one with a holiday theme while Wendy cleans.




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Millie The Reader!

This splash page cracks me up. Millie the Model is keeping up with the Fab 4 for sure. As it turns out that particular issue of Fantastic Four was the very first issue I ever saw. It was owned by my cousin but I did get to look at it. While I got a copy of that story soon enough in Marvel's Greatest Comics, it would be many more years before I actually got a copy of that comic itself.

As for Millie, she sure liked her comics. Here's another panel showing her enjoying a Jack Kirby classic!



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The Land That Trampus Found!

Above are images from The Land that Time Forgot, a mid-70's adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs classic. It's a story of modern men in the middle of a war who find themselves forced to become allies in a maddening environment rich with prehistoric threats of all sorts.

The movie starred Doug McClure, a charming TV actor who I loved on The Virginian. I liked him so much on this TV show, one my family always seemed to end up watching, that I find it almost impossible to accept in any other role. He does what he's supposed to in this movie, but I always see Trampus.

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The Black Edition - Neal Adams!

The covers above for the Tarzan of the Apes novels rendered by Neal Adams are without question the most personally potent images of the apeman I've come across. While I adore the work of Frazetta and Krenkel and Kubert and Yeates and others, it was these magnetic covers, dubbed by fans "The Black Edition", which literally forced me to give up food when I was a mere college freshman so that I could own the first six issues of this defintive paperback run.

Later of course I got the rest, and others by Boris Vallejo (more on those another time), and they are the Tarzan books I used to read the canon through the first time. I've read and taught Tarzan many times since with different editions of the books, but these are the ones I adore. While not really on model perhaps in all regards, Adams captured something of the essence of the Apeman, is exquisite blend of high romance and savagery. It's there in those pictures somehow.

I was able to get the the three Tarzan Portfolios that Adams developed out of the images. These are some of the very few portfolios I've bothered to collect up, and they are handsome indeed. But somehow the image blended with the logo makes it work even more effectively to kindle my imagination as good book art should do.

Here's an interview link where Adams talks about this project in addition to many other things.

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The Futurians!

Remember these guys?

If you're a fan of the X-Men and the Legion of Super-Heroes, you know that Dave Cockrum was the man largely responsible for the revived interest in both teams during the Bronze Age. He first redesigned the Legion for DC in the pages of Superboy, and then found himself at Marvel where he got to do pretty much the same thing with the X-Men. When Cockrum took over both teams, they were largely defunct, when he left them they were much much more successful. Cockrum left the X-Men and was replaced by John Byrne and the rest (as they often say of course) is history. But back to the Futurians. After Byrne left the X-Men, Cockrum was asked back. Here's what happened later in his own words:

"The only reason I left the book the second time was because I had previously put in a proposal for The Futurians. It sat on Jim Shooter's desk for about a year, and he finally said, "Yeah, you can do this if you want." I was in some doubt whether I should quit the X-Men and do that but I really wanted to do it. Chris and Louise Simonson, the editor, talked me into giving up the X-Men because they thought I was more enthused about The Futurians. That was probably the biggest mistake of my life! That was about the time they started paying the royalties and reprint money. It takes nine months after an issue goes on sale before you get a royalty check so I hadn't received one yet by the time I quit the X-Men. When the first one came it was $2000 right out of the air! I thought, "Geez!" And it got better, and from what I heard, people like Jim Lee were making $40,000 a month on royalties. (That's why they could afford to go off and start Image.) If I had known about that kind of money coming in (even the $2000 a month)you couldn't have pried me off that book with a crowbar. The Futurians was never that successful." (CBA Interview)




The Futurians showed up later at Lodestone, the ill-fated company that also revived the THUNDER Agents, and then there's a much later one-shot which was the up-to-then unpublished fourth issue of the series from Aardwolf which was produced at the time to some extent help out Cockrum with medical bills I believe.


Cockrum's designs largely informed the Bronze Age. They were at once sleek, elegant, and sexy. He was very good with younger heroes, as he did a handsome idealized youthful figure. Personally, I've always preferred Cockrum's X-Men to Byrne's but that's a close call. Certainly both men are much better than the talent that has handled the team since their heyday.

He was a great talent.

Apparently The Futurians have been revived for a modern comic. Here's a link. It doesn't have that magic though that Cockrum brought to the feature alas.

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The Animated Spider-Man Season Three!

This is easily the weakest of the Seasons by far. As I said there's very little new here, but a whole lot of vintage stuff often squeezed into tighter timeframes and with little sense a lot of the time. Motivation for crime seems to be an afterthough as villains show up do really offbeat things, but then get captured and we get no background on them at all to explain why they adopted the method they did. That's the interesting part dang it.

This Season even reuses one earlier cartoon twice. The episode with the villain the Master Technician is reworked and he's made into a "new" villain from Atlantis (they added pointed ears and a fin on his head) who does pretty much the same thing save that instead of NYC getting lifted into the sky it gets dropped into the ocean. Later the "Master Technician" shows up again but renamed the "Radiation Specialist" he repeats his crime from before lifting the NYC skyline again. So essentially we get the same cartoon three times in three seasons with slight variations.

Here are a half dozen things I learned watching this season (I cut it in half since the season was so short):

1. Snowmen are inherently angry so you better not accidently bring them life. They want to kick your ass!

2. Comets have antennae.

3. Despite all aerodynamic principles, biplanes can still outfly jets and even shoot them down with rays and stuff.

4. Peter Parker will give anyone a lift, even villains.

5. Captain Stacey looks completely different, even in the same episode from scene to scene. Sheesh!

6. Mysterio is a hipster who wears glasses and though he lost his pointed ears from the First Season, his skin has gone green for the Third.

This set of cartoons also looked muddier on my dvd set. I assume that had to do with the original source materials as the rest of the disk is fine in that regard. It's only Season Three that has the slight glowing effect in the backgrounds.

I did like the episode culled from the Rocket Robin series, "Revolt From the Fifth Dimension". It was strange and had some great images, though as a Spidey tale it was pretty limited. The Mysterio story was dandy and I think is based on a classic Spidey comic though again Mysterio looks different. Mary Jane shows up but she's Captain Stacey's niece time. There is also a keen interest in the Universal Frankenstein movies, but I'll have more to say on that in a seperate post.

One other thing I did notice was there was a lot of mindgaming in these episodes. Whether it was the Swami (a somewhat pointed racial stereotype for the time) or Mysterio or Infinata of Dementia-5 or the Kingpin with his brainwashing, the human mind was getting twisted a bunch in these episodes. Surely this had nothing to do with the times...heh heh heh.

All in all I didn't find this Season as much fun, though it had high points. After watching them all now, I have to give the nod to Season Two and despite its endless web-swinging, I still think it's the most compelling in terms of story and art.

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