The Shield gets more powerful with each story. Somehow, one senses that even though he can be temporarily stopped with something like gas, he seems destined to recover in time to rescue himself. So far, he’s rescued himself even when others attempt to rescue him. I’m hoping that a supporting cast will grow around this character as I read these stories. I don’t enjoy them as much as The Comet and Fu Chang, but I had to stick with it through the continued episode in this issue and another.
The Comet in “The Village of the Doomed” has a bit of an inconsistency. I loved the idea that he couldn’t just blast off the rock pinning down the miner after a landslide because the rock was full of silica. That was terrific in light of the “glass” weakness the hero must face. Yet, later on, he blasts through the mining shaft to save the miners. That was disappointing, but the brutal demise of the bad guy more than made up for that consistency problem in terms of my enjoyment of the story. It was just another part of the mine. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Press Guardian in “The Graft Ring Killers” didn’t seem as much like a pseudo-Green Hornet in this story. There was plenty of action (loved the burning barricade) and I enjoyed some of the superhero tropes of having to protect the beautiful woman he had already saved, as well as the secret identity bits. Poor Perry’s father doesn’t think much of him and he is only sent on this mission because they think he looks naïve enough that someone might accidentally spill information in front of him. While Meskin’s inks don’t have quite the boldness of Irv Novick’s, the detail during the fire scene was some of the best I’ve seen of his work.
The untitled Fu Chang story was somewhat more interesting than the previous ones. Fu Chang shows some cleverness of his own and Tay Ming gets to take some initiative in this story. The dialogue with its formality really conveys that immigrant precision with which English is spoken as a second language. I also liked the touch of turning the tong into a force for good.
Sergeant Boyle in “Rescue of Battalion A:” One must suspend one’s disbelief at a lot of points in this story, but one man armies have been a staple of comic books through the years (even up to OMAC—grin) so I just buckled in and enjoyed the ride. I didn’t worry about the bombing statistics from WWII which indicated that there were clearly no can’t miss bombs. I didn’t worry about the easily detachable machine gun from the airplane, I didn’t worry about the impossible tying of a knot with trailing barbed wire from a plane. But I remembered the classic scene from “A Fistful of Dollars” where the man with no name contradicts the bad guy’s theory that “When a man with a pistol meets a man with a rifle, the rifle always wins.” [Not an exact quotation, but you get it.] In this Boyle story, there is a point where our hero is attacked by a sniper. The sniper misses and Boyle fires back with a pistol. But there’s a twist in this scene and Clint Eastwood it isn’t (but it’s worth it).
Even though it was published a decade before my birth, I would have loved the Lee Sampson stories. He falls into improbable plots, wins battles well above his pay grade, and finds himself still a midshipman after the proverbial (and sometimes literal) smoke clears. In “Mosconian Menace 2,” a crossover title story line involving, The Shield earlier in this issue and The Wizard from Top Notch #5. Those pesky Mosconians plan to kidnap the entire command staff of the naval college and keep them captive in one house until they can bomb it. It may be a weird premise, but the climax involving the airplane is worth putting up with the hi-jinx. [Because of this story, I looked up Top Notch #5 and it’s a wilder story than this one. The Wizard part of the story reminds me of some of the Superman books in the ‘50s. Pure fantasy, but great visuals and great fun!
The Rocket and the Queen of Diamonds: The story continues as John Carter…er The Rocket and Dejah…I mean the Queen of Diamonds have flown the rocket out of the safe lands of the kingdom. In this story, they meet a Hawkman warrior (Hmm! Ecclesiastes was right; there is nothing new under the sun as we get a peek of a later DC superhero in an earlier guise. Along the way, we run into a flesh-eating monster called an alligoscerous, intended to be a monstrous alligator (put the words together with the adjective second) and happily named with a spelling that is both a semi-anagram and close to the term “allegorical” which it isn’t, but could be with a little effort (Rahab, Leviathan, Tiamat, danger?). This one has…surprise…both lizard men and ape men in it. I would have thought ERB would have been litigating against this feature (although ERB might have been friends with Manley Wade Wellman at some point, though I don’t see any crossovers in their online biographies).
Kayo Ward: I like this improbable feature. Kayo Ward fights outside the ring in this story even though professional boxers would likely (and I’m just judging this from the time I shook hands with Muhammed Ali) get tagged for a serious assault charge if they hit anyone outside the gym or the ring. The story begins with Kayo taking a bullet in his shoulder and still winning the fight. Later, after his manager, Lew Black, heads to New York to try to get a title bout, he ends up fighting and performing acrobatic leaps onto moving cars without so much as a wince. But hey, it’s a typical gangsters meet boxing story and it ends with an upbeat “cliffhanger.”
Inspector Bentley of Scotland Yard in “The Hunchback Horror:” Readers get to play along with the inspector in these stories. I’m not sure there are enough overt clues in the script for readers to identify the villains, but there must be something because I’ve been right in the majority. In this one, Sam Cooper’s artwork (both pencils and ink) fit the story perfectly with its creepy, ancestral home, formal British evening wear, and nice character work. I see that our database believes Manley Wade Wellman scripted this and, with the folklorist’s penchant for occult tales and atmosphere, I am prone to accept it.
Pep Comics is an intriguing anthology series with an interesting mix of heroes. Now that I’ve gone to Top Notch #5 to get the rest of the Mosconian story, I’ll have to check out all of the Top Notch features and see how it compares. I was intending to read these Pep Comics straight through, but now I’m curious about its sister publications. But I’ll be back. These issues are more fun than I imagined.
Link to the book:
Pep Comics 04
