The Spider vs. Trump: 1938

 

The Spider: The City That Paid to Die! (The Black Police Trilogy Part One) (1938): written by Norvell Page writing as Grant Stockbridge, in The Spider Vs. The Empire State: The Black Police Trilogy (2009):: Pulp-action-hero The Spider's crime-fighting disguise was so bizarre that it was only depicted on two of the covers of his 1930's and 1940's magazine. Basically, he dressed up to look like a hideous vampire. Most of the time, the cover artists depicted him as a generic masked crime-fighter, similar to The Phantom and a legion of others.

The Spider's adventures were no worse than the second-most apocalyptic pulp-hero sagas in history (Operator 5 may have been moreso, but it was set in a vague near-future America under siege by a host of foreign powers both real and imagined, which is to say both the Japanese military and The Purple Emperor laid waste to North America). The death toll was often in the millions, with New York often being depopulated in every issue by building-destroying death rays, plague-carrying vampire bats, and endless armies of criminals, madmen, and enemy fifth-columnists.

The City That Paid to Die! is the first part of what's now known as the Black Police Trilogy. In this first novel, fascist criminal forces basically trick New York's population into voting for their political proxies. That done, the forces of evil -- led by a mysterious Master -- enact legislation that allows them to terrorize and enslave the population of New York State. Even the federal government is helpless, we're told, because everything is legal and above-board!

Enter Richard Wentworth, The Spider, unmasked and forced to fight with his secret identity in shreds, his property and weapons seized, his friends and allies in perpetual mortal danger. But his ties to the benevolent inhabitants of Chinatown allow him to escape New York City just ahead of the forces of The Black Police (their uniform colours, not a racial bit, by the way).

In the wilderness of upstate New York, the Spider must build an army from those he's rescued from the murderous clutches of the New New York Order. But the Black Police number 100,000 or more dangerous criminals made legal by the machinations of their Master. Can the Spider prevail? Can he even survive? Two more novels tell the story. Recommended.

The Spider: The Spider At Bay (The Black Police Trilogy Part Two) (1938) by Norvell Page writing as Grant Stockbridge, in The Spider Vs. The Empire State: The Black Police Trilogy (2009): Richard Wentworth's battle against American fascism continues in the second part of what became known as The Black Police Trilogy.

While Wentworth normally fought weird crime as the pulo hero The Spider, here he repeatedly 'pretends' to be The Spider in order to rally the Resistance around him. That almost seems meta!

Things are really bad for freedom and justice in what's basically The Empire Strikes Back of the Black Police Trilogy. New York State is even more under the thumb of an evil mastermind known only as The Master. 

The Master's puppet government, democratically elected with a spineless figurehead as governor, is free to murder and pillage the resources of the state because, um, State's Rights are really solid and binding in the world of The Spider. Even an unnamed FDR can't help! The Master's minions can even call in the National Guard to fight the Resistance!

As the second book in a trilogy, The Spider At Bay mainly exists to make things worse for The Spider and his ragtag group of helpers. This is very much New Deal pulp heroics, with our heroes battling a government that hates the poor and the working class and thrives on villainy. You know, like Trump! By the end, things look bad. Very bad. Is this the end of The Spider, err, Richard Wentworth? Recommended.

The Spider: Scourge Of the Black Legions (The Black Police Trilogy Part Three) (1938) by Norvell Page writing as Grant Stockbridge, in The Spider Vs. The Empire State: The Black Police Trilogy (2009): With the duly elected forces of villainy in New York State holding all the cards, Richard Wentworth/ The Spider must mount one last mission to save the state from The Master!

The Spider takes more physical punishment than any other pulp hero of the 1930's and 1940's. The Shadow, the Avenger, and Doc Savage were generally very little bloodied in the course of their adventures. That was the job of their subordinates -- to get knocked out and beaten up. 

The Spider is basically a cross between Ash from Evil Dead 2 and Leonardo DiCaprio's titular character in The Revenant. He gets shot, shot again, beaten, stabbed... really, he's Wolverine without the mutant healing factor. It's sort of exhilarating to read the adventures of a pulp hero whose main quality is perseverance. Well, and a love of heating up the spider insignia on his ring with a cigarette lighter so he can brand captured criminals on the forehead with the Sign of the Spider!

So many questions...

• Will The Spider stop The Master? 
• Will the federal government get off its ass and do something? 
• Will we learn the true identity of The Master and perhaps feel a bit underwhelmed at the revelation? 
• Will a Bad Twin become a Good Twin because of the love of a good woman? 
• Will completely insane death traps like a giant wood-chipper made to chip up humans be put into play? 
• Will The Spider save the dam in Pennsylvania from being blown up by the Master as a way to divert federal attention away from New York State? 
• Will anyone realize that The Spider and Richard Wentworth really are the same person? 

So many questions... answered in The Scourge of the Black Legions! Highly recommended.

The Shadow in Autumn

The Shadow: Midnight in Moscow (2014-2015/Collected 2015): written and illustrated by Howard Chaykin; lettered by Ken Bruzenak: Nearly 30 years after writer-artist Howard Chaykin's violent, addictive, and stylish comic-book take on pulp hero The Shadow, The Shadow: Blood & Judgment, comes this slightly less over-heated but equally stylish and enjoyable graphic novel about the Weird Avenger of Crime.

The suits are all crisply pressed, the men and women gorgeous when they aren't grotesques, and the writing as sharp as ever. Chaykin hasn't changed much since the 1980's, and that's great in his case: why improve on a certain type of almost decadently sharp artwork and witty, often trenchant writing? All that and he can still stage an action scene or weave socio-political commentary into a retro-pulp adventure.

It's late 1949 and the Shadow contemplates retirement. Though as gal-pal Margo Lane notes on more than one occasion, he doesn't seem to be aging the way everyone else is. This could very well be a prequel to The Shadow: Blood & Judgment, which saw the Shadow come out of his retirement in the 1980's from a hidden Tibetan utopia when someone starts killing off his former lieutenants in his war on crime of the 1930's and 1940's. 

Has Chaykin mellowed? This time around, the hyper-violence is muted and most of the interpersonal relationships handled without the satiric, sometimes comically dismissive tone of The Shadow: Blood & Judgment. Whatever the reason, this Shadow won't offend some Shadow purists the way Chaykin's earlier story did. There's action and romance here, but there's also an elegaic quality to the proceedings. The aftermath of World War Two has left a world that doesn't want pulp heroes any more, in our reality or in the Shadow's where those heroes were a reality and not simply a publishing phenomenon.

But anyway, there's a wittily different femme fatale. There's a roll call of Shadow villains, lieutenants, and associates. There's an uncomfortable Shadow as Kent Allard as Lamont Cranston dancing with Margo on New Year's Eve (in the pulps, the Shadow was an American aviator named Kent Allard who occasionally also operated as millionaire Lamont Cranston -- but Cranston was also an actual, separate person in the pulps, though not always so on the radio show where the Shadow first appeared, seminal multi-platform superhero that he was). There's funky super-science and one wild space-shot. Atomic war may be a growing possibility, but not while the Shadow is still on duty. 

It's all great fun, with a real sense of melancholy and that permanent sense of Chaykinesque style. Highly recommended.

Grand Pulp Railroad

The Great Pulp Heroes by Don Hutchison (1996): Canada's own long-time genre historian, editor, and writer Don Hutchison gives us a book on the two decades or so in which single-character pulp-hero magazines flourished in America. It's a fun, breezy, and informative read. For some reason, ChaptersIndigo once had about a million copies of these things in stock at $2 a pop. So, they're out there.

American pulp(-wood, for their cheap, acid-heavy paper) magazines followed a peculiarly evolutionary path. They started off in the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century as generalists. Magazines that included Argosy and All-Story published stories from every genre (including the first serialized Tarzan and Mars novels from Edgar Rice Burroughs).

Then the magazines specialized in terms of genre (fantasy, science fiction, mystery, Western, et al.) and then sub-genre (flying adventure stories, 'spicy' detective stories). Finally came the magazines devoted to individual heroes. The Shadow, simultaneously a radio hero, was the first hero to get his own magazine. The sales success of the Weird Avenger of Crime swiftly led to imitators (Phantom Detective, The Spider) and slightly different types of heroes from the same company, Street & Smith (Doc Savage, The Skipper, The Avenger).

This was a world in which sound movies had just appeared, and in which radio and the pulp magazines dominated the day-to-day entertainment business. There was no television, much less the Internet or computer gaming. Even electricity had not yet been supplied to all Americans. Or indoor plumbing. And the problems of the Great Depression seemed to fuel a desire in a lot of readers to see heroes who took up arms against gangsters, murderers, evil rich people, and crazy dictators.

Of course, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a recurring character in The Spider and the Operator 5 series), most heroes were rich people who fought for the common good. That trope, which predated the hero pulps, still persists in such comic-book superheroes as Batman and Green Arrow today, in whatever media in which they appear.

The pulp adventure heroes had a time of about 22 years from the first appearance of The Shadow in magazine form to the last issue of the last surviving hero-magazines in 1953. Subsequent decades would see reprints and revivals, though only The Shadow and Doc Savage have proved to have any staying power in the popular imagination.

While it lasted, though, the adventures -- especially in the 1930's -- ran wild and wooly. The Spider and Operator 5 probably had the most apocalyptically destructive adventures, with whole cities and indeed countries (including all of Canada in the case of Operator 5) being wiped out in every issue. Doc Savage and The Shadow did a better job of keeping most of New York standing, which may be why they were the gold standard for heroism.

The pulps in their entirety even managed to arouse censorship flaps from time to time. New York's Mayor LaGuardia threatened all the pulp publishers based in New York (which is to say, all of them) with expulsion if they didn't clean up their act. Pulp magazines were blamed for youth crime. Of course they were.

Hutchison's book performs its most valuable service in giving plot synopses of many of the most outlandish adventures of these heroes. The Spider, Operator 5, and G-8 stories often seem like fever dreams of ultraviolence and desperate heroism. Even the failed magazines deliver some truly bizarre moments, none moreso than the single issue of a magazine devoted to a super-villain rather than a superhero, The Octopus. That guy was bananas.

So if you can track this down, go forth and do so. Only some glaring typos and a lack of colour illustrations disappoint, though the B&W cover reproductions are still swell. Highly recommended.