A Flight Of Falcons!

I've caught a few of the vintage RKO Falcon movies on Turner Classic Movies from time to time over the years, but recently they ran most of them back-to-back and I recorded them. Like many things, reading or watching, seeing a bunch in succession is revealing. The Falcon is a detective of sorts with a fuzzy literary genesis and a screen presence derived more from The Saint than anything else. What we have in the first movie titled The Gay Falcon is George Sanders as the debonair and smooth-talking man-about-town who appears suspicious to the police and who seems to be attempting to strike out in legitimate business to accommodate his fiance.

We quickly see he has little interest in his Wall Street career and quixotic interest in his fiance. The most striking trait of Gay Lawrence  is his compulsive need to hit on every pretty face he stumbles across. We're supposed to get the idea he's irresistible to women. There's a distinct screwball quality to the love relationships and comedy is no small feature of these frothy mysteries. The mysteries themselves often make little sense.  In the debut he's attempting to bust up a jewel robbery scheme. Despite being engaged to another woman, he spends most of the movie with Helen Reed (Wendy Barrie) and there's way more chemistry there.

So much so that in the second Falcon movie, A Date with The Falcon  Helen has moved in as the new fiance. This one is about synthetic diamonds and the genius who concocts them. The mystery again fails to work really and most of the movie is spent on romantic hijinks.

In The Falcon Takes Over things improve mightily on the mystery front. This movie adapts Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler and for the first time mystery takes the forefront in a Falcon movie. It's a marked improvement and it's interesting to see this film's variation on the familiar Chandler story adapted to film many times since. Ward Bond is particularly effective as the dim but amazing strong and dangerous Moose Malloy. In all three of the first Falcon movies Allen Jenkins plays Dr. Goldie Locke, the Falcon's assistant and for film purpose increasing humor relief. He's fun, but gets replaced.

In The Falcon's Brother we meet Tom Lawrence, who is as advertised the brother of Gay Lawrence. Gay thinks his brother is dead, then learns different and works to uncover a scheme to undermine the U.S. war effort.

Then Gay is incapacitated and Tom takes over the case and the ending results in Tom taking over the role of the Falcon full time. This switch is singular and makes this movie memorable. The fact that the lead role is handed off between real life brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway makes the switch even more fascinating.

After that Tom Conway settles in to solve mysteries with gusto and chase dames as they offer themselves up for that game. He fights to save the republic by putting down spies in The Falcon Fights Back.

And he chases down the answer to mysterious empty planes in The Falcon In Danger. The emphasis in the stories shifts more to murder and adventure and less to romp and romance, though none of it disappears. Sanders was more convincing as the lascivious lover and Conway is much more convincing as a quasi-noir detective.

One way they sharpen the storytelling is the change the settings. In The Falcon and the Co-Eds we find our hero at a swanky girl's finishing school on the east coast. Here he investigates murder with hints of the supernatural. It's surprisingly one of the better mysteries despite an atrocious title.

Then our hero heads west in The Falcon Goes West with a mystery in Texas which falls apart a bit but features a surprising amount of cowboy action on horseback. Then the story shifts south of the border in The Falcon In Mexico where our hero finds the deep secret of a long-dead artist who keeps painting from the grave. This one features some really dandy side characters though the show seems more interested in the scenery than the story.

After that it's off to tinsel town in The Falcon in Hollywood. This one shows Lawrence tumbling around a studio finding bodies and then losing them again. The mystery is okay and the side characters are pretty dandy. A female taxi cab driver in particular adds some spice to a tale which could easily fall apart if the pace slowed down at all.

And finally in The Falcon in San Francisco we have the toughest Falcon story yet. This one has some real noir characteristics with the Falcon finding himself in the clutches of some smugglers. There's a cute kid you want to see less of, and Goldy Locke (Edward Brophy) is back in fine fettle, but when the Falcon gets actually beat up by thugs it's surprisingly graphic for this series which often has its violence happen off screen. There are a couple more of these in the series - The Falcon's Alibi and The Falcon's Adventure - and I'll have to keep my eye out to catch these vintage entertainments.

It's nifty to see the same actors show up in different movies in different roles. It points to the nature of movie making at this time, an efficient industrial style and it allows one to see actors across a range of different character types. It was also most curious to watch these flicks at the same time as sexual harassment scandals tear across the media. The Falcon's behavior around women is terrible, he seems to treat them like samples on a snack tray. His eyes wander up and down without shame and his hands find their way onto shoulders and around hips with abandon. Sometimes he's rebuffed but most often his stolen kisses are treated with an embarrassed glee. We're supposed to be having fun with him as he tumbles from girl to girl with little regard to feelings, but frankly he's a cad pure and simple and an exceedingly selfish one at that.

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Dojo Classics - The Lonesome Rider!

I know the greatness of Kubert, and it's amazing to me that this wonderful talent just seems to improve year after year after year. His Fax From Sarajevo and Yossel are properly seen as masterworks in the form by one of the great talents the field has produced. No doubt.

But as wonderful as his Tarzan and Tor and Rock are, arguably my favorite Kubert work is Tex The Lonesome Rider. I picked this up a few years ago and I was immediately swept away by the scope and emotional power of this deceptively simple western tale written by Claudio Nizzi. It's got the tropes you expect, a stranger of strong moral convictions finds evil in the vast landscape of the west and seeks to right wrongs or at a minimum avenge them.

The narrative is driven by the images, much like Sergio Leone's movies. We know Tex Willer by his posture and his behavior, not so much by what he says. Actions speak louder than words in the situation and they do likewise in the presentation of this story. There is mighty evil in this story and likewise mighty good. The very stuff of magnificent narratives.

If you haven't read Tex The Lonesome Rider you are in for a treat. I give it my highest recommendation.

UPDATE: The Lonesome Rider has been re-issued by Dark Horse as a hardback comic volume. Here's a link with details. It's been many years since I first read this yarn but the impression it made still remains.

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Doug Wildey's Quest!

I imbibed the wonder of Hanna-Barbera's Jonny Quest when I was a wee tot. It was infused into my DNA through repeated viewings as it wondered around television during the 60's. Later it would resurface here and there and I made homemade tapes to enjoy the splendor. Finally a DVD came out and I snatched it up, one of the very first DVDs I ever bought as I made the painful migration from years of VHS. All this is to say that I'm a Jonny Quest fan through and through, so when I chance upon an article purporting to be the late great Doug Wildey talking about his masterpiece, I pay attention. So should you. Go here to find out more.

And here are some of Wildey's very best Quest comic book images.

And this poster is one I picked up decades ago. It rests on a wall across the room from where I'm typing this very message.

Doug Wildey's personal quest ended some years ago. Jonny's will never end as long as it lingers in the imaginations of those of us who imbibed from our flickering  screens so many years ago.

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Doug Wildey's Rio!

I don't know when I learned just who Doug Wildey was, but when I recognized his name from the old Jonny Quest cartoon, I knew he was among my artistic heroes. Wildey was not an artist who dominated the shelves, in fact he hardly did any comic book work. So when he produced a new series for the independent Eclipse Monthly it was a big deal all around.

Rio was just one series among many in the debut issue of Eclipse Monthly and not even the headliner. Captain Quick and the Foozle by Marshall Rogers was the breakout from this series, if any was. Steve Ditko's Static migrated in from Charlton appearances to find a home. Trina Robbins adapted a bizarre Sax Rohmer novel titled Dope, and The Masked Man was an attempt to update the concept of The Spirit. Alongside them was a realistically drawn western about a lean tall stranger known only as Rio, a many who once was an outlaw but now wore a badge and was on a mission for President Grant.

The adventures of Rio appeared in intermittent issues of Eclipse Monthly, getting a featured cover appearance in the fifth issue.

And doing likewise in the tenth. The three stories told were installments in a larger yarn, though each episode had a relatively satisfactory beginning, middle and end. The artwork was detailed and evoked a west which was both mythic and mundane. Rio was enough of a real man to make him identifiable and enough of a classic western hero to make him admirable.

After that initial outing he disappeared until those three stories were put together for an ove-rsized album from Comico Publishing. To read these earliest Rio stories check out this link.

Then some years later, Rio would ride again in an adventure published by Marvel Comics. Doug Wildey seemed not at all in a hurry to generate these stories, all told with heart and all using to some degree actual historical western figures. Rio was a man everyone seemed to have known, or to have at least heard of. But somehow you got the sense the official history of the west had just forgotten about him. These stories were there to set the record straight.

When Rio appeared again, for the final time it was a Dark Horse Comics. Rio always rode on and each time ended up at a different publisher.  Soon enough Wildey passed away and left unpublished in the United States, two Rio adventures. One had been published in Europe, but the other was not quite finished. Both those "new" Rio adventures were combined with the earlier material produced over nearly two decades and published by yet another comic book house, this time IDW.

They approached the tome as if it were an art book and it's lovely. The techniques that Wildey used to produce his memorable art is evident and as the introduction makes clear, Wildey was an artist completely interested in the result and not the purity of technique as he mixed those at will. Doug Wildey was a master artist and this volume entitled Doug Wildey's Rio makes that clear.

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Herb Goes West!

Herb Trimpe was always one of my favorite Bullpen artists and despite his untimely passing some years ago, he still is. Famous for his definitive run on The Incredible Hulk soon after old Jadejaws got his title (for the second time), Trimpe went on to become a Marvel stalwart. He drew series as diverse as Ant-Man, G.I. Joe, Iron Man, Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD, Godzilla, Shogun Warriors and many more.

But one of the things I most remember Trimpe for was his delightful spate of covers for Marvel's western comic reprints of the early Bronze Age. Trimpe had a knack for portraying sprawling scenes of action with a strange ability to keep all the disparate figures in focus. Here's a heaping helping of some Trimpe classic covers. Enjoy!

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Western Marvel Firsts - Two-Gun Kid!

Marvel was thrumming with energy when they pushed out a revised Two-Gun Kid onto the comic book marketplace. This Kid was a western variation on the superhero tropes which was working so well for the company at that moment -- the revised Rawhide Kid had been a big hit, so the duo of Lee and Kirby tried it again. Greenhorn lawyer Matt Hawk took over the comic with its sixtieth issue.

Before Hawk, there had been Clay Harder introduced way back in 1948. But his kind of western heroics felt somewhat tired compared to the more Kirby-infused energy of this new hero. Coming to the west to bring law and order to the chaos of the wild west, Matt quickly learns he is up against a more vicious foe than he'd anticipated. He runs across old gunslinger Ben Dancer who trains the eager Hawk in the ways of the west and Matt takes on the masked identity of the Two-Gun Kid while keeping his own self hidden behind the milquetoast veneer of the timid lawyer from the east. It was a pretty nifty premise, time-tested and it held its own for several years.

Here are some choice covers featuring the new and improved Two-Gun Kid.

I came to fully appreciate the Two-Gun Kid when Steve Englehart brought him and many other Marvel western stars into a time-twisting Avengers epic. Two-Gun liked the 20th Century and came forward with Hawkeye as his amigo and the two traveled around together for a time. They even had a one-shot adventure together in the one hundredth issue of Marvel Tales. (Check out this Groovy Link for that story and hang around for a Thanksgiving feast while you're at it.)  Eventually he returned to his time, but certainly this proved he was in many ways Marvel's most modern western star.

Only the debut issue of Matt's adventures have been collected as part of Marvel Firsts - The 1960s. I'd buy more if they put them out in a handy format.

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