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[bowers]

 Greetings, all- Bowers here. Robb generously allowed me to pick this week's read. Since I am absolutely mad about comic strips, I chose the Buck Ryan strips as our subject. I was introduced to these strips by our own illustrious paw broon. He, Wiseman, crash and others have done an amazing job splicing these strips together from various sources into a noteworthy collection. Thanks, guys!

The strip, drawn by Jack Monk and written by Don Freeman, ran from1937 to 1962. I believe it was resurrected in 2015 but I don't know how long that lasted. How's that for a long run? Beginning as an amateur sleuth, Buck adapted to the times and fought Nazis, Commies, and other baddies as the decade dictated. The luscious and faithful Zola and femme fatale Twilight helped to spice up the stories.

Instead of choosing a specific story, I invite you all to comment on your favorite(s).

I'll jump right in with 1943's Buck Ryan 19- Hunts Axis Spies. This is the opening chapter of a three-story arc featuring Nazi spies, vampire bats, Imperial thugs, and more! A Nazi agent, yes with a monocle, sneaks into England with the intent of attacking and destroying Britain's livestock. A mysterious murder and a very novel use of small flying mammals. It's a short read and I don't want to give too many spoilers . Here's the link-
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=70848  All other strips can be easily accessed onsite. Enjoy! Cheers, Bowers

[John Kerry]

There are several Buck Ryan stories in Super Detective Library so I may go with a couple of those.

[bowers]

Great Idea, John. I'd forgotten about those! Cheers, Bowers

[gregjh]

A common complaint from me is that stories in comics are rushed for obvious reasons. This is not the case here. This is a story drawn neatly and with clear talent and a script that, although unapologetically cheesy, is also fun and slightly clever. The number of pages actually gives time not only for a setup, arc and conclusion but even what is essentially a preview with our spy making his way to British shores. It's not something I would have chosen to read but I'm glad that I did.

[Robb_K]

I read Buck Ryan 19 - Hunts Axis Spies.  I like it very much.  It is reasonably realistic, and has a clever and interesting plot.  I agree with Greg that it has excellent pacing, with the 34 12-panel pages providing ample room for a proper introduction, setting, character and plot development, climax, and very short epilogue - continuing the story into the next chapter(book).  It has decent suspense, as there is room to introduce more evidence as the story moves on.  And it  has ample action, as the story moves out of the introduction phase, into Buck's and Zola's detecting phase, and through the climax.  The artwork is well drawn, and I like the 1940s style very much.  I like the detailed backgrounds.  I'd like to see it coloured.  I agree that the script is a bit cheesy, but I like that late 1930s/early 1940s style.  This will get me to read other Buck Ryan stories.

Good choice!

[paw broon]

Just to make it clear, the 34 12 panel pages were not how it appeared originally.  Wiseman did all the research and provided all the tiers. The strip appeared as a single tier per day in the British newspaper. I felt it would be  better to arange them in a 3 tier per page order, mainly because I had rscently bought the Spanish hard back Rip Kirby books which had the 3 tier per page layout.
It took time and effort but I think it was worth it.
Buck Ryan stories are very entertaining and very well done. This one is no exception.

[Robb_K]

Just to make it clear, the 34 12 panel pages were not how it appeared originally.  Wiseman did all the research and provided all the tiers. The strip appeared as a single tier per day in the British newspaper. I felt it would be  better to arange them in a 3 tier per page order, mainly because I had rscently bought the Spanish hard back Rip Kirby books which had the 3 tier per page layout.
It took time and effort but I think it was worth it.
Buck Ryan stories are very entertaining and very well done. This one is no exception.

Yes, most veteran comics readers can tell that Buck Ryan was a one-tier, usually 4-panel daily strip.  I was just referring to the 34 pages X12 panels as a comparison to average comic book size, in order to compare opportunities to write and lay out a proper story, large/long enough to include complete story requirements vs. the normal late Golden Age bad habit of chopping 52, and (arrrrgh!) EVEN tiny 36 page books, into several short and tiny so-called stories.

[SuperScrounge]

Well, I picked Super Detective Library 166 ? The House of Fear (a reprinting of Chocolates Cigarettes.)

Not too bad, although there were a few moments where I wondered how much research the author had done on what he was writing about. In particular the truth serum scene with Zola seemed more fantasy than reality when it comes to truth serums.

Other than those quibbles, though, it was a nicely paced, interesting and well-drawn thriller.

Comparing the SDL version to the comic strip version there were some small touch-ups with the art and lettering. In the strip the chef is identified by Buck despite having never met him before, but in the reprint they added dialogue of the chef introducing himself to cover up that nit.

[Robb_K]

I've just read, Super Detective Library 166 - The House of Fear .  I like it even more than Buck Ryan Hunts Axis Spies.  The artwork is excellent.  The pacing was perfect.  The suspense was good.  It had action, but also proper room to develop mood, and reveal, slowly enough, information and to drink it in in a natural way, rather than having it all tossed to the reader at once, or having some never revealed, due to lack of enough space.  This story also had a few not-so-realistic situations, like hashish addicts being so addicted to one fix a day that they remain content as one would be in a crack house.

There was one seemingly glaring error, when Buck was located in one room, and his thought balloon was coming from behind a door to the adjacent room, where Vendetti was located, and the latter's thought balloon also originated.

But the story and artwork was such high quality that such a small oversight can be forgiven.  I'll be reading more Buck Ryan stories.

[lyons]

A very underrated strip.  Solid and fast-moving in script and art - it was a pleasure to have made the acquaintance of Buck Ryan.  Thanks Bowers.

[The Australian Panther]

The Buck Ryan series and also the Super Detective Library are, for me, a couple of the crown jewels of CB+.
Some real gems there. A credit to Paw and Wiseman and those involved. Whenever Paw posted a new one, that was my breakfast reading.
We should perhaps choose a couple of the other titles for the reading group at a future date. 
Spotlight on Leslie Shane perhaps.     

John Kerry said,

There are several Buck Ryan stories in Super Detective Library so I may go with a couple of those.

I had a look there and chose SD #156 Appointment with Danger.
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=79255
went through the SD books at random and this one came up first.
Actually this makes the third time I have read it, curiously.
Ingredients - A cartoon character, a film studio, a knife-throwing dwarf, murder, pretty girls and Zola being subtly catty through jealousy. What's not to like?
Jack Monk obviously liked drawing pretty girls and Don Freeman liked writing dialogue for them.
There is a lot of technical detail here for Monk to draw, as there usually is, this time around Animation and Film studios in particular.
Often when a newspaper strip is reformated into a comic book, there are some pretty rough edges.
But whoever edited these did an excellent job. The pacing doesn't falter.
I have posted elsewhere my assertion that Monk and Freeman had to have been heavily influenced by Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, which is all to the good as far as I am concerned.   
   


Ingredients

[Robb_K]

The Buck Ryan series and also the Super Detective Library are, for me, a couple of the crown jewels of CB+.
Some real gems there. A credit to Paw and Wiseman and those involved. Whenever Paw posted a new one, that was my breakfast reading.
We should perhaps choose a couple of the other titles for the reading group at a future date. 
Spotlight on Leslie Shane perhaps.     

John Kerry said,

There are several Buck Ryan stories in Super Detective Library so I may go with a couple of those.

I had a look there and chose SD #156 Appointment with Danger.
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=79255
went through the SD books at random and this one came up first.
Actually this makes the third time I have read it, curiously.
Ingredients - A cartoon character, a film studio, a knife-throwing dwarf, murder, pretty girls and Zola being subtly catty through jealousy. What's not to like?
Jack Monk obviously liked drawing pretty girls and Don Freeman liked writing dialogue for them.
There is a lot of technical detail here for Monk to draw, as there usually is, this time around Animation and Film studios in particular.
Often when a newspaper strip is reformated into a comic book, there are some pretty rough edges.
But whoever edited these did an excellent job. The pacing doesn't falter.
I have posted elsewhere my assertion that Monk and Freeman had to have been heavily influenced by Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, which is all to the good as far as I am concerned.  Ingredients

I agree that this story is extremely well-drawn, filled with action, and VERY fast-moving.  Reading it is like watching a fast-moving film.  In a way, that's the way to read it the first time.  Then, upon the second reading, you can peruse it slowly, enjoying and focusing on the super detailed artwork.  An excellent read!  I'm looking forward to reading the whole lot!

[crashryan]

Of all the treasures on CB+, Buck Ryan has been one of my happiest discoveries. I've read them all at least once (I think). Like any long-running strip it has its ups and downs but on the whole it's great entertainment, top-notch in both story and art. For the Reading Group I thought of a number at random and read that episode. It proved to be #38, Fake Stamps and Crocodiles, from 1949. It's a fine example of what I love about Buck Ryan.

An interesting contrast between American and British newspaper strips is that American strips are usually remembered for their artists (Alex Raymond, Milt Caniff, Stan Drake) while British strips are often remembered for their writers (Peter O'Donnell, Les Lilley, Don Freeman). I think it's because British strips were generally attached to a single daily newspaper. Not having to satisfy a huge syndicated audience (or kids reading the Sunday funnies) freed British writers to create somewhat more mature and complex storylines than their American counterparts. This isn't to say all British strips had great writing, as a look at any Axa continuity will demonstrate. But given a good scriptwriter British strips had more room to flex their muscles.

I've always enjoyed mysteries set in specialized milieus like broadcasting, cooking, and Persian rug collecting. Don Freeman obviously also liked such stories and enjoyed researching their details. Delving into the mechanics of stamp forgery gives this episode an air of believability even though the plot twists are sometimes far-fetched. I had to wonder, though, why anyone would bother to forge "thousands of dollars" worth of 20-cent banknotes. 20 cents must have bought a lot of in 1949 Indonesia to make counterfeiting such small notes worthwhile.

I second the Australian Panther's suggestion that Dick Tracy influenced Buck Ryan, especially in the matter of oddball villains with unusual quirks. Jack Monk's realistic art smooths out some of the weirdness, making it easier to swallow things like knife-throwing midgets than if they'd been drawn in Chester Gould's grotesque style. Monk draws sexy women, handles action well, and puts admirable effort into getting the locations and props right.

As characters Buck Ryan and Zola have a shade more depth than Dick Tracy and just about anyone else in his strip. Zola is especially appealing, with her smart-aleck attitude and readiness to mix it up with the bad boys. All the same she's still 100% a straight arrow. Twilight's ambiguous morality made her a much more interesting foil for Buck. It's no wonder she eventually replaced the long-suffering Miss Z. At least Zola got to exit alongside a new guy who would pay her more attention.

I wholeheartedly encourage new readers to give Buck Ryan a try. Personally I think the postwar episodes are the best. The wartime espionage tales are certainly fun but Jack Monk writes best when prowling the underworld with the spivs. It's hard to believe that when Buck started in 1937 he wore a Dick Tracy hat and coat and ran around with a teenage sidekick named Tinker--no, Nipper--no, it was Slipper. That was it, Slipper. A far cry from sharing a flat with a gorgeous (sometimes) ex-con.

[Captain Audio]

One of the simpler plots, but very weird in a way was the drug smuggler who had a large depression in the top of his head which he stuffed with contraband covering it with a wig or hat. Before I read that one I'd just finished reading a recent news story on a man in Florida who had such a deprssion due to a devastating head injury in which a large part of his brain was destroyed. Such a deformity seemed fantastic in the Ryan story but was obviously based on fact. Perhaps the writer had encountered a man with such an injury in the past.
The odd part is not that such injuries happened but rather than some of the aflicted may survive and seem otherwise normal.

[The Australian Panther]

The odd part is not that such injuries happened but rather than some of the aflicted may survive and seem otherwise normal.

What is even odder is that there are apparently people one record who have had this kind of injury - and have clearly lost brain matter but who do not seem to have lost any noticeable cognitive ability.   

[Robb_K]

The odd part is not that such injuries happened but rather than some of the aflicted may survive and seem otherwise normal.

What is even odder is that there are apparently people one record who have had this kind of injury - and have clearly lost brain matter but who do not seem to have lost any noticeable cognitive ability.  

When people have a given area of their brains damaged, resulting in severely reduced, or total loss of individual functions, those functions are often handled by other, undamaged portions of the brain, from that point on, or starting relatively soon after.  For example, when a stroke damages the area where the native language usage and understanding function lies, the secondary (additional/non-native) language function area (located in a different area of the brain - far enough away to often remain undamaged in such cases), will often take over.  I knew a man who was a Canadian native English speaker, who had learned French in 3 years of high School, but wasn't anywhere near fluent, and had only spent 6 months in France in a high school exchange programme 45 years before his stroke, and hadn't spoken any French to speak of, since then.  And yet after his stroke, when he couldn't understand a WORD of his native English, the only way to communicate with him was to speak French to him.  He seemed, although not totally fluent, reasonably good and functional in that language at first, much better at it from the start, than he EVER had been.  Also, he became more and more fluent, and sounded more and more like a native French speaker, VERY quickly after the stroke, until he was totally fluent in French within a few months, with a native-sounding accent he never had had before.  I also heard about a young person who had a head injury as a teen, who had grown up in a home with grandparents who had been immigrants.  He lost the use of his native language, and after the injury, immediately started to speak in their other (alien language-from a very different language group), which he had NEVER spoken, but clearly had heard and learned to understand without even realising that fact.

I've also read that mathematical reasoning, and balance, and many other functions can be picked up by other areas in the brain, if the primary area of their function control centre becomes incapacitated.

[Captain Audio]

The old saw about people using only ten percent of their brain actually comes from the fact that aprox 90% of the mass of the human brain is merely supportive tissue that has no neurological functions. The portion of the brain that does the thinking for you is mainly situated in the outer layers.

Its correct that if a portion of the active part of the brain is destroyed that other less active portions can take over its functions given time.
In cases where a brain has been bisected each now isolated hemisphere can adapt as a fully functioning brain giving the person in effect two completely functional brains, often with two complete personalities.

[Robb_K]

The old saw about people using only ten percent of their brain actually comes from the fact that aprox 90% of the mass of the human brain is merely supportive tissue that has no neurological functions. The portion of the brain that does the thinking for you is mainly situated in the outer layers.

Its correct that if a portion of the active part of the brain is destroyed that other less active portions can take over its functions given time.
In cases where a brain has been bisected each now isolated hemisphere can adapt as a fully functioning brain giving the person in effect two completely functional brains, often with two complete personalities.

THAT partly explains why the damaged victim can't remember ANY of his/her native language (stored in the damaged area), and how one of his/her auxiliary languages can become his/her new "native language", and be learnt so quickly.  The identical half, on the other side of the brain, of the most highly developed auxiliary language, takes over as a new "native language", because that area of the brain wasn't damaged.