Out of the Vault - Vampirella #52

Once when I was a teenager, I walked in my room to find my mom standing in front of my open closet door, reading one of my comics. I was probably thirteen or fourteen by that time, starting to explore my sexual curiosity, as well as thinking about more mature subject matter. So I had decided to try an issue of Vampirella.

After all, who could resist that cover? I mean, look at it. The painting is credited to a guy named Enrich (listed here as Enrique Torres), and it's awesome.

But that was the last thing I was going to say to my mom. And all she had to say was, "Pretty vulgar, isn't it?"

And I had to admit, she was right. Actually, I had been really disappointed in the issue, but I had kept it because a) I keep everything, and 2) LOOK AT THAT COVER! That cover painting really does compensate for a host of ills.

I had, of course, been curious about Vampirella for years. I didn't read much Creepy or Eerie, but I had occasionally read both, as well as Famous Monsters of Filmland, and they all advertised in each other. So I had seen plenty of black-and-white thumbnails of various Vampirella covers, including the early Frazetta ones. I even had the Aurora Snap-Together model of Vampirella at one time. But I had never actually bought an issue.

Until #52. And boy, was I disappointed. Vampirella the character features in the first two stories, and they're both written by Bill DuBay, who is just as bad here as he was later in 1984.

The first story has Vampi and her mentor Pendragon visiting a Gothic mansion in the Rocky Mountains, which serves as a sort of Hogwarts/Xavier's School, only for carnies. Apparently, it is Pendragon's alma mater, and he speaks of it in loving terms in this bit of classic Bill DuBay dialogue.


But all is not well. There is a freak show on the grounds, and the freaks are really disgusting. It turns out that the school has been taken over by a mad scientist named Dr. Wrighter, and the freaks are all the results of his experiments. The big twist is that they have all volunteered to be made freaks in order to make big bucks in the carnival trade. I don't think you can find any more apt illustration of 70's economic malaise than this.

Upon meeting Vampirella, Dr. Wrighter immediately thinks of all the things he could do with her body, and unfortunately, they're none of the things the rest of us would do with her body. Instead, he plans to switch her head with that of his freakish hunchbacked assistant, then try to get the mismatched duo in the movies with the help of a Hollywood friend named Flashman. He drugs Vampi and has her on the operating table when the rest of the freaks discover that he's jumped her to the head of the job line and start beating on Wrighter like a bunch of SEIU thugs at a tea party rally. So Vampi kills them all. It's a mercy, really.

In the second story, Vampi and Pendragon have gone to Hollywood, where they appear on a morning TV show and we learn that Vampi's not just a vampire. She's also a stripper.


It just so happens that the show is seen by an assistant producer who has been tasked with finding a beautiful, innocently evil girl to costar with an actor named Flashman Howell (yes, the same Flashman that Wrighter was going to send Vampi to) and is pitched ideas for two movies. One is a heartwarming story about interstellar love that ends with the hero contracting space VD and being consumed by worms, and the second is a non-stop orgy of torture and rape (which the woman, being an empowered and liberated sort, of course enjoys). Vampi is so creeped out by the pitch that she immediately assumes these dweebs aren't actually moviemakers at all, but servants of the mad god Chaos. So she bites them.

Both stories are awful, filled with crappy dialogue and a non-stop parade of grotesquerie that made them really unsuitable as wank material. And yet, that seems to be the only purpose of the stories. The plots are slivers of nothing, merely excuses to allow Gonzalo Mayo to depict Vampi in a series of erotic poses (see above). If they had a Dictionary of Terms That Hadn't Been Coined Yet in 1976, you would find this issue under "Fan Service."

The remaining stories are unrelated one-shots, mainly aimed at showing women in bras or lingerie, being terrorized and tortured...


Oh, and one story that has neither women nor titillation in it at all, but it does have vampires. I did end up buying another issue a couple of years later, though I don't know why. It was even worse than this one. The lead story was another awful DuBay/Mayo production, and the back-up stories were just as substanceless. But this one didn't even have a hot Vampi cover. I honestly can't remember why I put out a dime for it.

Oh yeah, two other items of interest in issue #52. The very first thing in the issue after the table of contents is a full-page ad asking for information about counterfeit issues of Eerie #1.


And in the back, as in all Warren magazines, was the advertising section, where Warren sold tons of fannish crap. I've spoken before about the way fandom has subdivided and specialized since the 80's. For a fan in the 70's, this type of thing was typical.


Sunday newspaper comics from the 30's, 8mm reels from 60's and 70's films, Burroughs pulp paperbacks (with Frazetta covers!), and recordings of old radio shows from the 40's. Seriously, back in the day, you took what you could get, and you panned through a lot of stuff to get to what you wanted (of course, nowadays, I like all that stuff--I even own those two Flash Gordon books).

Stuff Blowing Up and Satellite Schadenfreude

Stuff is blowing up real good over at Hero Go Home.

And in other news, I've been seeing TV commercials for DISH Network with CEO and founder Charlie Ergen personally assuring people that DISH is committed to providing the best service possible. There's no sales pitch, nor announcement of a new promotion. Just a "Let me assure you that we want to not suck." A commercial like this would only be necessary if there were major problems in the organization. And here's the thing...

I haven't really discussed my time at DISH here. And I sometimes kick myself about not being tougher and sticking it out at DISH. Being broke and unemployed is no fucking fun at all. And I don't tend to harbor grudges or animosity against companies I formerly worked for. I hope the Daily Oklahoman is doing well. Fox23 and My41 are good TV stations, and I wish them well. I have good memories of my time in the Army, and have even considered reenlisting at various times since I got out. I still enjoyed eating at Bennigan's after I quit waiting tables there.

But DISH was a nightmare. Not just as a workplace, but as a company. It was the only company I have ever worked for which I refused to patronize as a customer while I was working there. And that only happened after I had experienced first-hand what the customer service experience was like, from the inside. There was absolutely no way I would voluntarily subject myself to the kind of treatment I was being asked to give to other people. Never.

So I hope they learn from whatever current difficulty they are undergoing and make things better. But I'll personally never find out, because I will never work for them again, nor will I ever use their service.

Shout-Out-Cast

Although I have written on many occasions about the old-time radio show that airs Sunday nights on KFAQ, I must confess that I have stopped listening to it in the past month or so. There were several reasons. They had cut the show from three hours to two. They had started inserting frequent commercials into the live webcast of the show that were not present on air, meaning that the show you were listening to would cut off suddenly in the middle for three minutes or more, then be rejoined in progress later on (meaning you just missed whatever happened during those three minutes).

And the mix of shows was becoming less interesting. There were more newscasts and nostalgic sports shows, fewer dramas and comedies. And of course, host Joe Riddle is a huge fan of Lum and Abner, going so far as to sometimes air two episodes a night. And since I've never much liked the boys from Pine Ridge, Arkansas, that would add up to a fourth of the show that I couldn't stand.

Luckily, the awesome Eilis O'Neal (who also happens to be one of our Atlantis Irregulars) brought me a flyer from local bookstore Gardner's Used Books, who have started up an on-line old-time radio station at gbsradionetwork.com. They actually have several stations, broken out by genre. I've been listening to the horror station, of course, because it's October.

In general, I like the mix of shows. They play the usual suspects: Lights Out, The Hermit's Cave, Quiet Please. However, one odd feature is that they don't seem to play any Inner Sanctum, the American show which was introduced by the famous "creaking door." However, they play the hell out of a British take-off titled The Creaking Door. One caveat: the audio quality is really variable (a frequent danger with old radio transcription disks). Some programs can barely be understood.

But I like the idea a lot, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they develop the concept further.

In other news, I still haven't gotten things rolling on my big Halloween Secret Project, but I've been rolling ideas around and work should start in earnest next week.

Big Game Wednesday - Stalking the Night Craptastic

So in keeping with the Halloween theme, I held over the discussion of this game from last week. In the early 80's, a company called Tri-Tac Games published three RPG's designed by a guy named Richard Tucholka: Fringeworthy, FTL:2448, and Stalking the Night Fantastic. The first two were science-fiction oriented, and the third was a horror game... sort of. I'll get to the "sort of" in a bit.

Now, if you're an old-school gamer, Tucholka's name might set off some alarm bells. That's because he was also one of the designers of another game I've talked about before. Yeah, that's right, this one. And like The Morrow Project, Tri-Tac's RPG rules system featured very detailed combat rules that would conceivably allow you to adapt any firearm from history easily into the system. Like The Morrow Project, that meant combat would be realistically deadly. But unlike The Morrow Project, the scenario set out for Stalking the Night Fantastic wasn't meant to induce the sort of paranoia that would cause the party to kill each other off within the first game session.

At this point, allow me to make a slight digression from the topic at hand. One thing that has held pretty consistent throughout my life is that, given a binary choice of competing products--VHS vs. Betamax, Macintosh vs. Amiga, Chevy Aveo vs. Mini Cooper, Champions vs. Villains & Vigilantes--I almost invariably choose the wrong one. I had a Beta VCR. My first computer was an Atari 400. I was loyal to the Amiga when IBM ruled and Mac was ascending.

And standing in the store, deciding whether to pick Stalking the Night Fantastic or the only other available horror game, a minor work titled Call of Cthulhu, well, you know which one I picked. The reason?

Sanity. I wanted a game where characters could fight back against and conquer evil. A game where the characters could improve into better and better monster-killing machines, not a game where the characters were doomed to a slow degeneration into madness. I chose... poorly.

Because although Stalking the Night Fantastic was a horror game--pitting the players as agents of a shadowy organization known as Bureau 13 against a wide variety of monsters--it also tried to be funny. The third edition of the game even featured cover art by Phil Foglio, known for his lighthearted style.

The humorous touch was reflected in the history and timeline of Bureau 13, as well as in the cast of sample characters. Not only were the NPC's in charge of the agency rather silly, but also the sample monsters and other enemies, like some kind of undead TV preacher and a redneck werewolf or something (the rulebook has long since been lost, so I remember it only vaguely--the cover image up top was taken from rpggeek.com, so while it features the same cover art as my lost copy, mine was not spiral bound, I don't think).

The combat rules, on the other hand, were deadly serious and very detailed. Looking at the book in the store, I was excited by the level of detail you could achieve in determining wound locations and severity. I thought it would really bring things to life in a vivid way to be able to say, for instance, "the bullet hits you in the left forearm, shattering the bone," or "the bullet hits your thigh, but misses the major blood vessels and passes through." I thought that could be cooler than the AD&D standard of "Hit, 6 points."

So how did Stalking... achieve such a level of realism? Let's look at the character sheet. Here's the first of two pages:


That big block of stuff toward the top is 16, count 'em 16 stats, plus hit points listed in 25% increments. And here was where we encountered the first element which made the game (at least in its first edition) virtually unplayable.

Although I no longer have the rulebook, I did have a cheat sheet I made up as a quick reference for combat (check it out--it's typed with badly-yellowed photocopied tables cut out and taped onto the sheet--kicking it old-school, man). I was confused recently when checking this sheet, however, because I remembered hand-to-hand combat as using a completely different dice mechanic than ranged combat (which was corroborated here). Apparently, this sheet I made is a simplified house-rule version I adapted to try to get some playability out of a game that had otherwise turned out to be a waste of time and money.


Because combat in the game was a mess. If you look at the character sheet above again, you'll notice that Accuracy, Dexterity, Agility, Dodge, and Throw are all separate stats. And although it's pretty stupid to bring a knife to a gunfight, the situation could turn up at some point. But the systems for hand-to-hand and ranged combat were so incompatible (with hand-to-hand rolled on percentile dice and projectiles rolled on a d20) that the first time I tried to run a sample combat, I seriously could not figure out how to make the two work together. Epic Fail, as the kids say today.

So I apparently adapted the percentile tables to a d20 equation for all types of combat. But then came the real killer, illustrated on page 2 of the character sheet:


Damage.

See those silhouettes? They're covered with a grid. Basically, once you had rolled to hit, you would then roll to see which part of the body was hit (lettered A through G on the grids). Each lettered body part was divided into a 6x6 grid, so you would roll two six-sided dice to determine in exactly which spot you were hit. Then (as an optional rule, IIRC) you could consult several pages of damage tables to see exactly what the result of the damage was.

For instance, let's say you rolled a damage result of D,2,3 (with an extra roll to determine it was the right side). You would make a dot on the character sheet to indicate the hit, then go to the damage tables for D,2,3 which would look something like this:

S,M,B3,M,S

Where the S meant skin, the M meant muscle, the B meant Bone (with the numeral indicating how strong the bone was; the thigh and pelvis were thicker than the fingers and skull, for instance). So say your bullet did 8 points of damage; counting through from front to back of the damage table (and counting the bone as three), we get seven. So your bullet would pass completely through the upper arm of your target, shattering the bone in the process. But if you had armor over that location which stopped four points of damage, the bullet would only have four points left to apply to the arm, meaning it would pass through the biceps and lodge in the bone.

On paper, it all looked cool. But when I tried running my first adventure, in which a group of agents attempted to foil a coven of witches during a demon-summoning ritual, the damage resolution rules brought the game to a maddening crawl. One of the NPC's had a Thompson submachine gun, which meant burst fire and multiple bullet hits. I think it took somewhere in the neighborhood of a half-hour to resolve the damage from that one attack, after which the PC was rather thoroughly dead, the rest of the players were bored, and no one wanted to play this stupid game for another minute, me included.

That was probably one of the last games I game-mastered in California. Luckily, Gary decided he was willing to give Champions another try, but that's a story for after Halloween.

Movie Tuesday - Parting Thoughts on Superman, 1948

In one sense, yeah, it's way too easy to pick on movie serials like Superman. They were made quickly and cheaply, designed to be seen in 15-minute increments a week apart. So the occasional changes between the ending of one chapter and another, which seem so glaring when you're watching several episodes in a row on DVD, would have been missed by most of the movie-going public. The cheap special effects and repetitive nature of the plot are similarly easy to fault, but also completely understandable.

For what it is, there's a lot that's good in Superman. The plot, while repetitive, actually presents a broad range of perilous situations for its cliffhangers. Unlike Batman and Robin, which would be made by pretty much the same team--same producer, one of the same directors, mostly the same writing team, and even some shared cast--the car going off a cliff gag is only used once. Some of the super strength gags work well, and the animation, while clearly unrealistic, does lend a dynamic excitement to some scenes.

One big problem I have with the serial is with Superman himself. Kirk Alyn makes for a pretty good Clark Kent, but he just doesn't sell the superness of Superman. He too often comes across as good-natured, but stupid, especially in the final few chapters. And his dance training is all too evident, so that this Superman is suspiciously graceful. The stock shot of Superman ducking behind the filing cabinet to change clothes, for example, includes this weird throwaway moment where he arches his back and points his toe, a dainty little fillip that is weirdly distracting.

It's just not super.

The rest of the cast isn't bad, though. Noel Neill brings a lot of charm to the part of Lois Lane, even though she seems strangely unfazed by the dangers she is exposed to in nearly every episode. And Tommy Bond makes for a pretty good Jimmy Olsen, a scrappy kid who takes on thugs even though he has no super powers. Likewise, Pierre Watkin does an excellent Perry White and Carol Forman makes a pretty good villainess (though we never get any real idea of her true identity, history, or ultimate goals).

The most interesting thing, perhaps, is that, unlike the Batman serials, we of a certain generation instantly recognize the members of Superman's extended cast and understand what role each one is supposed to fill. There's none of the weirdness of "Where's Commissioner Gordon? Where's the Batmobile? Why does Batman keep talking about getting orders from the government?"

And to hammer this point home like a record that's been broken as badly as the one Superman repairs in the final chapter of the serial, it's due to the radio series. The characters in Superman are modeled very strongly on the characters from the long-running radio serial. The cast will remain unchanged in the next movie serial, and though the roles will be recast in the TV series a few years in the future, their portrayals will still hew very closely to the radio show.

The point is, the character that lives in the popular imagination as "Superman" is not the character from the comic books, by and large. It's the character from the radio show adapted from the comic that was mostly responsible for everything that came after.

Granted, this was more true in my youth than now. Nerd culture has begun to penetrate into wider consciousness, so that elements of the comic-book Superman, like red kryptonite and the Bottle City of Kandor--are now more widely familiar. Still, even the comic book Superman was greatly influenced by the popularity of the radio show.

However, one big element was missing from the first serial. The Spider Lady, while a decent serial master villain, was not a member of Superman's Rogue's Gallery. That shortcoming would be remedied in the follow-up serial, Atom Man vs. Superman. See you in four weeks (Nov. 1, a very special day) for that one.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, and just because I think it's funny, there's also this...

UPDATE 2: Marc Carlson in the comments mentions that he's not sure one can hide behind a cabinet "manfully." And I acknowledge that this may be true. But that doesn't mean you have to do this:


And that's what it calls to mind when he grabs the cabinet and leans back. Seriously.

Movie Monday - Superman, 1948, Chapters 13-15

Continuing our recap of the first Superman serial from 1948:

Well, here we are, the exciting conclusion of Superman's first live-action serial. If you'll remember, at the end of Chapter 12, Clark and Lois were handcuffed together and caught in a mine explosion.

As Chapter 13, "Hurled to Destruction," opens, the explosion in the next room causes rocks to fall on Lois and Clark. Lois is knocked out. Clark pulls off the handcuffs, changes to Superman, bursts through the wall and carries Lois out, then changes back to Clark and handcuffs himself to Lois again. Seems like he could have avoided all the clothes changing, considering she was unconscious, but that's Superman. He always plays it safe, just in case.

When Lois comes to, she immediately notices that Clark is handcuffed to the wrong arm, and Clark smiles. Because he probably did it on purpose. Because even in 1948, Superman was a dick.

The Fabulously Gay Duo take the Mono-Chromite ore back to the Spider Lady's hideout. Spider Lady is not looking so good. The stress is taking its toll.


You can almost hear Hackett whispering to Driller, "Don't you think she looks tired?"

Spider Lady orders Graham to build her a Reducer Ray with the Mono-Chromite. Graham refuses, saying he invented the Reducer Ray to benefit mankind. Seriously, how? I mean, I totally get how the Spider Lady intends to use it as a weapon, but how does someone like Graham invent the Ultimate Disintegrator and then claim, "Oh noes, I only invented it for peaceful purposes!" Luckily Hackett knows a "scientific way" to make him cooperate. And like Hackett's jailbreak, no time or thought is wasted on exactly how it works. Graham just suddenly decides to cooperate in the next scene.

But there's a problem: he needs a special Relativity Tube that will take months to fabricate. No problem, says the Spider Lady. They'll just steal one from the Ray machine located at the University. She has a brilliant plan that involves sending three of her men posing as journalists to take pictures of the university grounds for a story on the Relativity Ray.

Meanwhile, Perry White has just gotten a brainstorm. He wants Clark and Jimmy to go to the University to take pictures of the grounds for a story on the Relativity Ray. Could Perry White and the Spider Lady be twins with a psychic connection? Clark sends Jimmy on ahead while he "researches something in the files." If that's what you want to call it, Clark, feel free.

The Spider Lady's men overpower some University guards and take their uniforms. FGD-Alpha, though, stays in the same suit because it's so Fabulous. He goes to steal the tube. And it's sort of hilarious, because the machine itself is a bouquet of tubes.


So Alpha fetches the tube and brings it back to the thugs outside, where Jimmy Olsen tries to stop them. Alpha hands the tube to the others and tells them to wait in the car. Then Alpha pulls a gun on Jimmy. But Jimmy Jackie-Chans the gun out of his hand using the car door, and there's a big fight. The other thugs decide to abandon Alpha to his fate and drive away.

Alpha manages to get the gun again and forces Jimmy to drive him out of there. They pass Clark's car going the other way. Clark changes to Superman and captures Alpha. Jimmy asks Superman to take Alpha to the Daily Planet, where he can be questioned for an exclusive story before being handed over to the police. Superman immediately agrees, with this weird, unchanging, moronic grin on his face that makes you wonder if Kirk Alyn was dosed up on cough syrup that day or something.

Superman leaves Alpha alone and unguarded with Perry White. So of course, as soon as Superman's gone, Alpha decides that, instead of answering questions,he'd rather throw Perry out the window. Did Superman not see that coming? Is he an idiot or just a dick (I mean, I know he's a dick in general, but in this specific instance?)

In Chapter 14, "Superman at Bay!," Alpha tries to escape, but Clark comes back from the storage room where he changes clothes in time to tackle Alpha and beat him up. Then he rushes into the office and saves Perry, who's hanging from the window ledge. Clark Kent, Man of Action! Alpha is sent to prison.

Spider Lady is conflicted. On the one hand, she has the tube which will allow her to complete the Reducer Ray. On the other hand, she's got an underling in jail who knows the location of her secret cave (the others Superman captured were all low-level thugs hired just for the single job, not inner-circle members like Alpha). So she comes up with a brilliant plan.

Rather than simply break Alpha out of jail, she has Hackett get himself captured so he can reassure Alpha that help is coming soon. She somehow talks Hackett into going along. Though it wasn't obvious in the scene, I get the feeling that boobs were somehow involved. Men will do all kinds of moronic things due to boobs.

Hackett gets arrested just outside the Daily Planet building and is put in a cell with Alpha (at Lois's urging--they're being recorded to see if they'll give anything away). He gives Alpha a cryptic message to meet at the Dog's Eye if they get separated. Later, he throws a cigarette butt out the window.

Lois and Jimmy, watching outside, see a shifty-looking man pick up the cigarette butt and start to leave. Jimmy grabs him, and they discover the butt contains a coded message. Rather than turn it over to the police, Jimmy decides to complete the courier's mission to see if it can lead him to the Spider Lady's hideout. Jimmy's always making up these plans that seem to leave out a vital part, like how will he communicate where the hideout is once he's found it? It's like he went to the same school as the Underpants Gnomes or something.

He goes to address the shifty Italian guy gave him, which is an appliance store run by--hey, look who it is! It's the Wizard himself!


This being a year before Batman and Robin, it's obvious he's doing his master-villain internship with the Spider Lady. (And when he glances out the window, do we see where his secret identity of Carter, the valet, got his alias from?)


When the Wizard goes out to the street to give Driller the message, Jimmy hides in a closet. Driller comes into the shop and radios the location of Hackett's cell to the Spider Lady. She decides to have both Hackett and Alpha killed. As Driller and the Wizard are leaving, they hear a sneeze in the closet. Jimmy is caught! They tie him up and leave the gas on, with the door rigged to cause a spark as soon as it's opened.

Lois is worried about Jimmy, so she calls Clark from the jail to check on him while she tries to pry some information out of Hackett and Alpha. Superman flies to the address Lois gave him and lands behind another car with invisibility-inducing glass.


But if you thought that the trap on the door was going to be the big cliffhanger moment, are you in for a surprise. Superman somehow spots the trap on the door and comes in through a window without setting off the explosion. Jimmy tells him that the Spider Lady is going to turn the Reducer Ray on the jail, and Superman takes off to try to stop it. Too Late! Zap-Boom!

Which leads us at long last to the final chapter, Chapter 15, "The Payoff."

Superman swoops into the jail through a hole blown in the wall and grabs Lois. Hackett and Anton beg to be let out of their cell, but Superman ignores their pleas and flies away with Lois in his arms. Dick. The cell is destroyed moments later.

Superman drops Lois off at the Daily Planet building. She seems inappropriately cheerful for someone who was just almost blown up, but whatever.


The Spider Lady next sends an ultimatum to the police and the Daily Planet. To demonstrate her power, she is going to destroy the Planet building at 3 p.m. If she has any demands (say, the fabulous riches she keeps claiming her schemes will yield), Perry turns the radio off before hearing them. The only possible clue to catching the Spider Lady is the recording of Hackett and Anton in the jail cell, but Perry says the recording was destroyed in the blast.

Lois starts writing an article titled WHAT DO WE THINK OF WHILE WAITING FOR OUR DESTRUCTION? I think my first thought would be something along the lines of, "I need to get the hell out of this building," but whatever.

Clark, meanwhile, changes to Superman and retrieves the broken record pieces from the wreckage of the jail. He reassembles the record and makes a new pressing in Perry's office. Perry tells Lois to take dictation as the record plays; you see, women are good for something.

Clark picks up on the Dog's Eye clue immediately and tries to figure out what it means. Meanwhile, Jimmy notices a wire story about car ignition systems burning out in a mountainous area nearby. Lois suggests taking the Planet's plane to explore the area, thinking the Reducer Ray might be the source of the problem. While on the plane, Lois throws Jimmy such a look of affection that I wonder if, rather than the typical romantic triangle of Clark-Lois-Superman, the real triangle here isn't Superman-Lois-Jimmy?


I mean, Lois and Jimmy have been pretty inseparable since their first appearance on screen, and though Lois smiled at Superman, she never giggled with him like she did with Jimmy on the phone. Then again, maybe it's just me trying to make this story interesting.

As they circle the area in the plane, guess what? Their ignition system burns out. Duh. See, this is why you take the car to the place where engines go to die. Because cars don't plummet out of the sky when the engine stops working.

So the plane crashes, and the Spider Lady's thugs (their car is working just fine, BTW) catch Jimmy and Lois. They are taken to the Spider Lady's secret headquarters to await death after the destruction of the Daily Planet.

Meanwhile, Clark, who solved the much more obscure "?+" clue a few episodes ago, has spent a few hours now doodling the words "Dog's Eye" all over a sheet of paper. He finally looks at a map of Metropolis and instantly realizes what Dog's Eye means.


He flies to the Silver Queen mine, where FGD-Beta is pining for his lost Alpha. Superman strong-arms Beta into telling him where the Spider Lady's hideout is, but instead of a map, Beta pulls out a chunk of Kryptonite!

Helpless, Superman is brought into the Spider Lady's hideout as she gives the order to destroy the Daily Planet. But without Hackett to maintain his mental conditioning, Graham refuses to carry out the order. He fights with Driller in front of the machine.

Meanwhile, as the doddering old scientist struggles with the younger, vicious thug, Superman leaps to his feet. Spider Lady is shocked that the Kryptonite is not stopping him. Superman says that he expected Kryptonite, so he has lined his uniform with lead. "Spider Lady, you're finished," he gloats.

This conversation has given Driller enough time to beat Dr. Graham into submission. Spider Lady orders Driller to turn the ray on Superman. Superman lets him, clearly enjoying the gentle massaging action of atomic destruction...


While Graham regains his wits and beats Driller down. Then with a maniacal grin, Graham turns the beam on Spider Lady, destroying her!


So Driller jumps back in to beat up on Graham some more, at which point Jimmy tags in to punch Driller a couple of times. Superman is still just standing around, watching everybody else fight. He tells Lois to have the men hold Driller for the police while he goes to "round up everybody else." Then he flies straight to the Daily Planet building, where he changes to Clark Kent and takes a nap in Perry's office, because crimefighting (or watching other people fight crime) is tiring work. Perry, Lois and Jimmy find him there later. We share one last, "Ha ha, Clark isn't Superman" joke from Lois and then we fade out. Finally.

Closing thoughts on the serial tomorrow, and then the Superman films go on a brief Horror Hiatus!

Wheelz, I Haz Some

Dad brought me his spare car, an almost 30 year old El Camino with a sluggish transmission and mushy brakes. But it's a car that runs, and it's paid for, so things are actually looking up. I used the car to visit Sargon's house to watch "Iron Man 2" on Blu-Ray, a pretty fun movie (this the day after watching "Iron Man 2" on a DVD from the same special edition that he had lent me). However, I have to make a strange admission.

I often have one of two reactions to seeing a movie for the second time: either I start seeing mistakes and problems I missed while caught up in the story the first time, or else, I start seeing all kinds of things I missed on first viewing, which increases my understanding and/or respect for the movie on continued viewing.

With "Iron Man 2," though, on second and third viewing, I still admired the same things I had admired the first time, and disliked the same things I had disliked the first time. I still don't love the movie, but I still like it, and some parts I like very much.

Out of the Vault - Scary Tales #3

As I've mentioned before, horror comics back in the days when the Comics Code held sway contained little in the way of actual horror, and therefore had to find alternate stories to tell, usually in the form of poetic justice fables featuring monsters preying on bad guys (but with no gore). Charlton's Scary Tales #3, published in 1975, is yet another example, and like the previous Charlton horror comic I've featured, is more interesting for who worked on it than for its stories.

The first story is titled "Distress," written by Paul Kupperberg and drawn by a young Mike Zeck. Kupperberg has written about a zillion comics since then, including the mostly forgotten Arion, Lord of Atlantis (a book I remember liking back in the day; it remains in the Vault, but I hope to cover it at a future date), and was also senior editor at Weekly World News for a while, according to Wikipedia. Zeck, of course, was the penciller of Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars, as well as a long run on Master of Kung Fu.

The story is rather silly. A medieval warrior wanders into a strange town where the people shy away from him in fear. He is approached by an old man in a tavern, who tells him the wizard in the castle on the cliff keeps the villagers terrified and has even kidnapped the old man's daughter. When the warrior turns down the offer of "mere gold" to rescue the girl, the old man basically pimps his daughter out. Next thing you know, the warrior is climbing the cliff with his fucking lance strapped to his back.

And a good thing, too, because after he loses his sword fighting off bat-winged demons during the climb, he needs the lance to run through a creepy dwarf.


It's obvious that this was published in the days when the Comics Code's power was waning, given the sexual suggestion and the clear intimation that the lance has run the poor little dude completely through. Of course, once the warrior finally reaches the chamber where the girl is being held prisoner, he is frozen in place by the evil wizard (who just happens to be the old man from the tavern), and oh yeah, the daughter is a vampire. TWIST!

The next story is titled "Satan Weeps," written and drawn by an uncredited Steve Ditko. and it's introduced by the busty Vampirella wanna-be from the front cover, only she's also holding a whip. Why? Cause it's sexy, I guess. It has nothing to do with the story or her character.

The protagonist of the story is Arnold Printz, a guy who thinks the small town where he lives is boring, so he decides to liven things up by worshiping Satan. Since the jocks put him down, he decides to take revenge by casting a voodoo-style spell to cause abdominal pain to the star of the football team, then invites the guy over to his house to make the pain stop.

His plan somehow involves having the jock sell his soul to Satan, only the jock tells him to stuff it, and in the ensuing struggle, Arnold's statue of Satan is broken. And then...


Seriously, what the fuck? I have no idea what that ending is supposed to mean, and every explanation I come up with is stupid. There aren't even any decent Ditko hands. Then again, 26 years later, we got Devil May Cry, so it wasn't a total loss.

Ditko follows this up with a two-pager titled "The Vengeance of the Canoes," which distills all the tropes of the standard Comics Code horror tale down to the bare essence. Poor natives row out to a luxury cruise liner to sell hand-made native goods. A tourist offers fifty cents for a carving of a war canoe, which the native has priced at two dollars. The native, desperate and hungry, accepts, and the tourist laughs at him for being a poor salesman. Then as the liner is leaving, it swamps the canoes, causing the angry native to call down the "curse of the canoes." The tourist then decides to toss the carving overboard, since it won't fit the decor in their New York penthouse. The canoe grows to giant size, and the huge warriors sink the cruise liner full of greedy tourists. Moral: don't be greedy or else cheap, crappy knickknacks will kill you.

Next comes the bane of young comics readers, a text feature. And it's a really weird one. It's a ghost story titled "House for Sale," in which a real estate agent is tasked with selling a haunted house. He decides to fix it up before selling it, though, which the ghost apparently likes, and the agent likes the house so much, he wishes he had the money to buy it himself. Next thing you know, the agent inherits a lot of money (a little more than he needs to buy the house), and falls in love with the beautiful lawyer who comes to inform him of the inheritance. And they all live happily ever after. That's right. It's a ghost love story.

The final story is "The Card of Death," starring Countess Von Bludd, the Vampirella wanna-be. She is bored, stuck in her drafty old castle, so she takes off to Monaco or someplace, where she can find rich, evil men to eat. Her first meal is Golden Gus Fogarty, whose evil, we're told "emanated from his pores," though we never find out exactly why she judges him evil.


Anyway, she kills Fogarty, then kills an evil old sheik, then saves a whistleblowing Mob accountant from a hit-man before heading back to her castle again to rest up from her vacation. There's really nothing exciting here, just a series of panels showing the Countess in a series of mod, low-cut outfits, neither very scary nor very racy. And despite the title, there is not a single card in the story (okay, one panel does show the Countess at a gambling table apparently holding a card, but it's a throwaway panel and the card is not significant). It mainly takes place in a casino, though, so I guess that's close enough.

Now you understand why the 80's were such a giddy time in comics. Because we'd been mostly stuck with crap like this for over 20 years.

The Halloween Extravaganza Begins! Also, Book Fear!

Welcome to October! There's a new banner up top and a ton of obscure Halloween content sloshing your way in the next month. There's also a new chapter up on Hero Go Home today, and it's finally leading into the real action of the book. I'm realizing two things about this: number one, this is becoming not just a serialized novel, but more like a multimedia experience. Every week brings an Extra, and every Extra adds a new aspect to Digger's world.

And they're not just illustrations: there has also been a screenplay excerpt, for example. And in coming weeks, there might be even more variety--ideas I'm tossing around are audio clips, Champions character sheets, flash fiction or bonus short stories, even another comic strip or two. I'm even playing with the header to reflect the turn the story is currently taking, and I'm debating whether to make that a permanent feature, with the header changing with every new chapter (probably not, but you never know).

But number two: I really suck at promotion. Hero Go Home has about as close to zero readers as you can imagine. I get maybe 10 hits a week, if I'm lucky. Which tells me that the story is boring. And as much extra value as I try to add, if the central story is boring, I lose.

There has not been a fast-moving plot so far, I admit; I've been taking that Lords of the Rings-like approach of introducing the world and the main characters gradually, gently, letting the reader get to know them as they're getting to know each other. Things start to kick into a higher gear with today's chapter, and I hope that as that happens, readership picks up.

And on a separate note, there's the idea of marketing. Here's the deal: the business of publishing has for years followed a pretty standard template, exemplified by the advice you hear from professional authors at conventions and conferences all the time. The conventional wisdom is this: "Money flows to the writer."

That is to say, if your work is any good at all, you will find a publisher willing to pay you a fair advance and royalties for the rights to publish your work. This relationship benefits everybody: publishers get quality new material to publish, authors get (hopefully) a decent sum of money for their work, and readers know that what they're buying met some minimum standard of quality and professionalism in order to have been printed at all.

But there are disadvantages to the system, as well. High expenses and declining readerships mean fewer books published, therefore fewer opportunities for new writers. The hit mentality means some books will receive little to no support after publication, and few chances for authors who aren't immediate bestsellers to continue their careers. And every time a coveted slot is given to an author based on celebrity rather than on quality of work (Washingtonienne, for example), it makes the argument that books are published on merit that much harder to swallow.

Which is a long-winded way of getting around to saying this: I've been struggling with whether to continue serializing the story, or pull it and try to sell it conventionally. Because on the one hand, the donation box may never make me a dime, and I would love the respectability and cachet of a traditional publisher. And there are people, like a certain outspoken publisher who recently posted on Facebook about this, who believe that a book that has not gone through the filter of a publishing house must be shit.

But on the other hand, I've also read some posts by another fairly successful up-and-coming author on Facebook who is relating some really scary news about how the publishing world is being upended by the new realities of the Internet (in the same way that the definition of news and the business of journalism is being permanently changed). The fact is, the standard model of the publishing world is becoming more and more rare, and may soon vanish altogether. My free webnovel with its myriad multimedia extensions may be the model of the future, if only I could get the confidence to push it out there into the wider world.

And then, of course, there's the part of me that whispers evil in my ear at this time of night, the part that say it's not worth trying to market the novel because nobody will buy it anyway. After all, if it was really any good, I would be getting readers from links and word-of-mouth. The lack of traffic is simply an indication that I'm not giving people something they want or value. Trying really hard not to listen to that voice.

Big Game Wednesday - A Distinct Lack of Staying Power

Going back over the games I ran in college, I realize I ran a lot more stuff than I thought at first. It's just that much of what I ran ended up being one-shot games. I've already mentioned the Morrow Project disaster.

One Halloween, I decided to have the guys over to my apartment where I ran a one-shot Villains and Vigilantes game inspired by a convention game I've talked about before. I had the players basically generate themselves as V&V characters, then the game began on one of our typical Saturdays on campus. As they were coming back from a meal break at Burger King, they heard sirens. Gunmen ran past them, making for a getaway car. In the process of the getaway, the players' friend Fraze was shot and lay bleeding the streets, mumbling the crooks' license plate number and clutching a mask he pulled off one of them.

Following the clues led them to a costume shop, which was a front for a secret organization known as the First Kingdom. The bad guys were seeking some source of cosmic power known as the Bloodgems, located in multiple parallel dimensions. At some point, the players encountered a guy who ran an occult bookshop, the dude who was battling the First Kingdom to protect the Bloodgems. He recruited the players to help him find the gems first, and off they went through a dimensional portal.

They awoke in a forest. The forest was very big. Or it would be more accurate to say that they were now very small. Bunnies, in fact. The bunnies had to find the old Owl, who owned the Bloodgem, while avoiding traps, a hunter, and one of their First Kingdom foes, a demonic bear. Retrieving the gem gave them the ability to open a new portal, which took them to their next world.

The players arrived in a space cantina, just ahead of an alien First Kingdom warrior named Sunbow. They learned of the recent theft of a huge, blood-red diamond called the Royal Star, and had to retrieve it with the help of the Starjammers from X-Men. Upon retrieving the diamond, their next portal opened.

They appeared in a medieval fantasy village, where a crowd of people watched a small group of heavily-armed heroes journey toward a castle. The players fell in with the heroes. One of the folks seemed to have a device that functioned remarkably like a movie camera. He told the players that he was Danny, the Documentary Filmmaker, and introduced the rest of the party: Phil the Fighter, Marian the Mage, Karl the Cleric, Thaddeus the Thief. The players noticed one other member of the group, a guy clothed all in black, dripping poison onto the blade of a scimitar.

"Who's that?" they asked.

"Oh, that's Al," said Danny.

"Al the Assassin?"

"No, he's a druid, actually," Danny answered. "He doesn't really fit in."

The heroes entered the castle and were promptly thrashed, after which the players entered to battle the final enemy, a demonic wizard. Once they retrieved the last of the gems, the portal opened to their final destination.

The game was meant to conclude the following week, but I never finished writing it up. I got too ambitious, planning to run a superpowered At the Mountains of Madness, but I let my ambition overwhelm me yet again. It was okay. Whatever I did would pale after Al the Druid.

At one point, Dragon Magazine published some variant rules for Top Secret called (IIRC) Crimefighters. It was meant to be a pulp-era game, taking place in the 30's. I thought it looked awesome and ran an adventure with it. The big bad was a knife-wielding murderer who was a straight-up rip-off of Michael Myers from the "Halloween" films. But the players never really got to that final confrontation, for in the process of trying to interview a mob boss, they got in a gunfight. One of the players then decided he would throw some dynamite that he had written on his character sheet. He storked his roll to estimate how much fuse he would need, with the result that the dynamite went off in his hand. Thus setting off the other sticks of dynamite he was carrying and blowing up the entire penthouse floor. Result: TPK, except for the one person who decided to stay with the car.

Sometime later, I think I ran the adventure again, with the group actually finishing it this time. That led into another adventure with the same characters, investigating a funeral home in New Orleans that was turning corpses into zombies, an adventure which led the party to the Caribbean and a search for Atlantis. The players wanted to continue the campaign, but I was hard up for adventure ideas, especially since they wanted to go to China, and one of the players was originally from Hong Kong. I was so intimidated by the idea of getting China completely wrong that I quit running instead.

But I still liked the idea of a pulp-style game, so I kept my eyes open for pulp-style systems. One which excited me when I first looked at it was Stalking the Night Fantastic, so I bought it and ran it.

Once.

It was a disaster.

Next week.

Movie Monday - Superman, 1948, Chapters 9-12

Continuing our recap of the first Superman serial from 1948:

In the last chapter, Superman was racing to save a train from being derailed. As Chapter 9, "Irresistible Force!", opens, Superman stops the train seconds before it passes over the bomb that would have made it derail (of course, Hancock more accurately showed what would happen to a train forced to stop that suddenly).


Then Superman returns to the armored car, where the Fabulously Gay Duo have been deterred from freeing their fellow thugs by the arrival of the police. Clark Kent climbs back up to the road just as the driver notices that he's missing.

Back at the Daily Planet, Lois is jealous of Clark's scoop, so Perry assigns her to meet the Reducer Ray's inventor, Dr. Graham, at the train station for an interview. Meanwhile, the Spider Lady, furious at the failure to steal the Ray, comes up with a new plan. She will kidnap Dr. Graham and force him to build her a ray.

How will she do that? Well, turns out the Spider Lady has a deadly secret.


She's not a blonde! She'll pose as Lois (dressed basically the same but in a sillier hat) and get Dr. Graham to come with her, while Hackett disguises himself as Graham to fool Lois and get into the lab where the ray machine is being kept.

The plan goes off perfectly. A well-timed fender bender delays Lois while the Spider Lady meets Graham, then Lois continues to the station (where we learn from the license plates in the parking lot that Metropolis is in California), where she waits in front of a rear-projection screen to meet Hackett-disguised-as-Graham.


The shadows on the rear-projection screen are really obvious in this sequence. Then Jimmy Olsen hides behind a car to shoot a photo of Dr. Graham, apparently because he's camera-shy or something.

When they arrive at the lab, Hackett gets in using Graham's credentials. He tries saying goodbye to Lois, but she invites herself in, claiming she hasn't finished getting her story yet. So Hackett allows her to accompany him to the lab, where he pulls out a camera to take photos of the Reducer Ray machine.

Lois gets suspicious at all the photos and notes Hackett is taking, so she excuses herself and leaves. She pauses on the stairwell and hears the other thug ask Hackett if Lois "suspects anything?" Lois then grabs a phone on the wall and starts to dial the police, apparently not realizing that if you can hear them, they can hear you.

Meanwhile, Perry hands Clark the photo that Jimmy took of Hackett-Graham. Clark uses his X-Ray Vision to see through Hackett's disguise (?) and rushes off to save Lois as cartoon Superman. After having tied Lois to a chair, Hackett sets the Reducer Ray to overload, then leaves Lois to die. Bwa-ha-ha! Hackett bids goodbye to "Mrs. Lane" then leaves as the needle approaches the Extreme Danger Point!

In Chapter 10, "Between Two Fires," Superman arrives and flies behind a glass car window that renders him invisible.

Superman shuts off the machine (with a brief cut where Kirk Alyn was apparently burned by the arcing electricity of the prop). Then he switches to Clark and drives an unconscious Lois back to the Daily Planet.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Olsen is following up the story when he runs into Hackett (now out of disguise) at a filling station. He poses as an attendant and fills their tank (and also flattens their tire for no apparent reason), then follows them to the laboratory where Graham is being held. However, Hackett and friend knew they were being followed and take Jimmy prisoner.

Graham tells Jimmy that, under the guise of building a new Reducer Ray machine, he has built an ultra-short-wave transmitter. He uses it to send out a distress signal in Morse Code. Clark and Lois are assigned to the story of what is causing a disruption in the local phone lines, and Clark recognizes the coded message. He and Lois use the phone company's spare equipment (which looks like it might be an electrocardiogram machine, from the name Medi-Sine) to trace the signal.


Meanwhile, the bad guys figure out what Graham's up to and leave the lab, but leave the radio equipment turned on. One of the thugs, played by Rusty Wescoatt, who would later show up as one of the Wizard's thugs in Batman and Robin, sets a trap for whoever might follow the radio signal to its origin. The bad guys leave with Graham and Jimmy, but Jimmy makes a daring leap out of the car. Lois arrives soon after and is trapped by flames!

As Chapter 11, "Superman's Dilemma," opens, Clark loses contact with Lois on the radio and decides she needs help. He changes to Superman and rescues Lois. Meanwhile, the Spider Lady threatens Graham that he'd better build her a Ray Machine or else! And after a little torture, Graham agrees to do just that. But he'll need a very special ingredient--a chemical called Mono-Chromite. The Spider Lady sends a couple of her thugs to get it from a chemical engineer named Frederic Larkin.

Larkin checks his index card file for Mono-Chromite, and learns that it is a special substance invented by Dr. Graham. "Restricted Substance. If Asked For Without Credentials, Notify Proper Authorities," says the card. So Larkin says it will take him two hours to make the stuff. The thugs leave, and Larkin immediately grabs the phone to notify the Proper Authorities. Who does he call? The FBI? The OSS? The Department of National Security?

No, silly. He calls Perry White, of course, who sends Clark over to get the story. Unfortunately, Lois overhears and decides to play hardball on getting the story this time. First, she delays Clark by hiding his hat. Then she has her car reported stolen. Then she takes the Planet coupe and tosses Clark the keys to her car. End result? Clark is arrested for grand theft auto while Lois and Jimmy advise Larkin on which Proper Authorities he's supposed to call.

Their answer? Put Jimmy in a crate marked Mono-Chromite so he can figure out where the Spider Lady's hideout is. And it would have worked, too, if it hadn't been for those twisty mountain roads causing the crate to fall over. Meanwhile, Clark changes to Superman and busts out of jail.

The truck pulls to a stop (clearly revealing the painted-over Columbia logo on the door of the truck)...



and a thug gets out to check the crate. He sees Jimmy's fingers pulling the door closed and reports to his buddy that there's someone in the crate. So the two thugs go back and open fire on the box, blowing holes in it. Buh-Bye, Jimmy.

At least until Chapter 12, "Blast in the Depths," where we see Superman arriving just after the truck stops. When the thug comes back to check on the crate, he sees Superman's fingers pulling it shut (this despite the fact we were clearly shown Jimmy inside the crate when the thug went back to talk to the driver last week). But in this parallel universe, the thug doesn't go talk to the driver. Instead he pulls out his pistol and shoots the crate by himself, alerting the driver to come join him.

Superman pops out of the crate and captures the crooks, then heads back to jail in time for Clark Kent to be released.

Spider Lady is pissed and demands that her underlings come up with another plan. Hackett suggests locating a mine where they can get Mono-Chromite ore and refine it themselves (this despite last week's mention of Mono-Chromite as a chemical that any competent chemical engineer could fabricate in a couple of hours--now it's a special mineral requiring special ore). Spider Lady sends the Fabulously Gay Duo to visit a mining engineer named Collier (and yes, the Duo are still dressed alike).


FGD-Alpha (fitting, since his name is Anton) goes in to question Collier while FGD-Beta (fitting, since his name is Brock) stands guard outside. Collier refuses to play ball, there is a struggle and Collier is shot. The FGD beat it, planning to return later.

Perry sends Lois over to Collier's office to get the story on the shooting. She prowls around the empty office and discovers a map to the Mono-Chromite mine at Question Crossing. TheFGD arrive and discover her hiding on the window ledge. They take her prisoner and haul her with them out to the mine, but not before she scratches "?+ " on the window as a clue (and then breaks the window during a struggle-Lois is not real bright). Clark and Jimmy arrive later and discover the clue. Clark figures it out quickly by consulting a mining engineer's handbook containing a list of mine locations.

So Clark and Jimmy head to the mine, where Clark is captured by thugs and handcuffed to a bound and gagged Lois (talk about overkill). When Clark removes Lois's gag, she immediately asks, "How did you find me?" Um, by following the clue you left and accidentally managed not to destroy when you broke the window? It was only a couple of scenes ago, don't you remember?

Outside the chamber, the thugs light some explosives and leave the mine, knocking out Jimmy for good measure. Equal shares of doom for everyone!

Conclusion next week!

Halloween Is Coming

So we're coming up on Halloween pretty soon. And unlike last year, I want to concentrate on Halloween-themed posts in the run-up to the holiday. I know some people don't like the overcommercialization of holidays, drawing them out for maximum profit, but if you can't do it for Monsterday, then what's the point? So expect October's editions of Out of the Vault to carry monster and/or horror themes. Expect the Superman recaps on Movie Monday to suspend once we finish with the current serial next Monday and switch to some horror-related movies as well. And as for Big Game Wednesday?

I'm not sure. Would you rather hear about horror-themed games, or would you like a return to Big Video Wednesday with some episodes of Night Gallery or something, or would you even perhaps like a brief return to Big Audio Wednesday?

And in between, expect some filler material that should satisfy your Halloweeny cravings, leading up to a big event for the holiday itself. I don't want to say too much about it, except that if anybody has experience with or would like to try their hand at voice acting...

Well, let's just say that ideas are being weighed, but there will definitely be something.

Oh, and though it won't be as all-encompassing, Halloween will definitely be felt over at Hero Go Home as well. Just saying.

If you've got suggestions or requests, let me know.