Week 6.1 – Frog Boy

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Tony Frazier

Previously: Digger was blackmailed into robbing a bank. Now he and Twain, the criminal who set him up, have teamed up to go after the mastermind, the infamous Cobalt Czar. And now…

“In a West End town, a dead end world…”

Shut up!” Digger shouted. He reached over and turned off the satellite radio receiver. It had stayed planted on the 80’s station for the past six hours, and Digger had had enough. “Seriously, if I have to listen to one more Pet Shop Boys tune, I’m going to fire up the Drillers just to watch your chest pop.”

“Okay,” Twain said, leaning forward over the steering wheel. “Jeez, what’s your problem?”

“You’re my problem, all right?” Digger said. “You’re like the most annoying person I’ve ever met.”

“Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. Bastard.

“No, I take that back,” Digger said. “You’re number two. I was forgetting Frog Boy.”

“Frog Boy?” Twain asked, laughing. “Who was that, a superhero from your GoDS days?”

“No, he was a bad guy,” Digger said.

“Never heard of him,” Twain said.

“Nobody has,” Digger said. “I only ran into him once, and never heard of him again.”

“So what was his deal?” Twain asked.

“He wore a frog mask,” Digger said. “And he jumped. That’s pretty much it.”

Twain shook his head. “No, I meant, what made him so annoying?”

“Oh, that,” Digger said. “Long story.”

“Long drive.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Digger said. “Okay, fine. I was in San Francisco, must have been 12, 13 years ago. I’m tailing this guy through this flea market in Berkeley.”

“Tailing a guy?” Twain snorted. “You?”

“What so funny about that?” Digger asked.

Twain nodded at the Drillers grafted to Digger’s arms. “Well, you’re not exactly inconspicuous.”

“I wasn’t famous back then,” Digger said. “And I had the Drillers covered up with a poncho. In fact, that flea market in Berkeley was maybe the only place in the world I could wear that poncho and not stand out.”

“Fine,” Twain said. “So what happened? He made you and turned into a frog?”

“No,” Digger said. “He was part of a diamond smuggling ring. He was supposed to make an exchange there, I thought. So he stops in at this head shop booth, plays with this hookah for a while.”

“A hookah?”

“You know, a pipe, where they smoke through water or whatever”

Twain glanced sideways at Digger. “A bong, you mean.”

“No, a hookah,” Digger said. “It was made of brass. An antique.”

“So, a fancy bong.”

“Whatever, dude. The point is, he’s inspecting this thing really closely, taking it apart and stuff. And all of a sudden, he turns around and walks away,” Digger said. “Which was weird, because he had just been wndering around aimlessly for almost an hour. And suddenly, it’s like he just discovered a purpose. So I run up to the hookah…”

“Bong.”

“And I take it apart and look inside, but nothing’s there. So I’m thinking there must have been something inside that he took. And if I want to find out what, I’ve got grab him, like, right now, because he is almost to the exits. Which is when I got hit.”

What hit him? Find out in the next exciting episode!

To read from the beginning, click here…

Or to read the next episode, click here!

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Super Movies – V For Vendetta

Posted on November 6, 2011 by Tony Frazier

Yes, it’s another late post. Not because I was too busy, but because I had forgotten. Not forgotten to post, nor forgotten that this movie wasn’t very good. No, I had forgotten how angry the movie makes me, so I ended up only being able to work on this in small doses. Hope you appreciate the torture I put myself through for you.

As I mentioned yesterday, V For Vendetta was originally a comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, about a super-strong anarchist in a Guy Fawkes mask pursuing revenge on his former tormentors against the backdrop of a future Fascist England. It was by turns stylish and creepy, but you’d never want to mistake it for a coherent political statement.

Well, unless you were the Wachowski Brothers, apparently, who wrote the screenplay adapting this anti-Thatcher story into an anti-Bush one. The movie was directed by James McTeigue, the brothers’ assistant director on the Matrix films, and released in 2006, about halfway through Bush’s second term.

The story opens with Evey, played by Natalie Portman, preparing for some sort of date. But she decides for some stupid reason to go to this date after curfew, which puts her at odds with some Fingermen (who are like the secret police). They decide to rape her, just so her evening isn’t a complete bust.

Which is when a mysterious figure in a Guy Fawkes mask shows up and rescues her.

And you know, I can almost buy this premise at this point, the heroic freedom fighter against the forces of oppression. But I’ve already got a bad taste in my mouth, because during the “getting ready” montage just before this, we had the “Voice of England” evil TV propaganda guy decrying the evil United States of America (or “Ulcered Sphincter of Arserica,” as he says) for turning away from God and being tainted by Muslims and homosexuals.

And I realize early on that this movie is not going to be about a heroic freedom fighter battling forces of oppression, but about a cartoon liberal battling stereotypes and strawmen.

So anyway, the guy introduces himself as V very theatrically, which Evey loves because she’s always secretly wanted to be an actress. V takes her to a rooftop where he lets her watch as he blows up the Old Bailey, and she realizes that this guy is c-r-a-z-y.

The next day, the High Chancellor (played by John Hurt) is reaming out his department heads over the breach of security.


And this is a moment that the movie actually does well, because aside from the obvious 1984 allusions in the source material, there’s an extra layer of meta-irony at having John Hurt, who was a victim of Big Brother in the 1984 film version of 1984, now playing Big Brother himself.

So Inspector Finch, having no luck tracking down V, tracks down Evey instead. She works for the British Television Network, which is now exclusively a propaganda organ for the government. But moments before the cops arrive, V arrives to interrupt the regularly scheduled broadcast with one of his own, using a suicide-bomber vest with a deadman switch to compel cooperation. He broadcasts a message to the entire country, telling them that he will blow up Parliament in one year(on November 5th, natch) and inviting them all to join him.

The cops burst in to find everyone on the set wearing V masks, and the suicide vest wired to a timer in the control room. Inspector Finch, played by Stephen Rea from The Crying Game, watches as BTN head Dascomb (Ben Miles of Coupling) disarms the bomb.

Meanwhile, Evey has helped V make his escape. In return, he takes her to his secret lair, the Shadow Gallery, filled with dozens of forbidden works of art.


Because, you know, revolutionaries love art. V is also constantly reciting quotes from Shakespeare, which is how you know he’s a good assassin.

And he is an assassin. He uses Evey’s I.D. card to get in to assassinate Prothero, the Voice of England whom V knew from his time in some sort of concentration camp.

But he’s not just an assassin. He’s also becoming a folk hero, as is shown during several interludes where we see people all over England watching their TV’s. And one of his earliest and biggest fans is this little girl with the coke-bottle glasses.


Remember her, because you’ll see her again later.

So V continues to kill high-ranking party members, including a bishop with a predilection for little girls. V uses Evey as bait for him, which allows Evey her opportunity to escape (which is odd since we’ve had a few scenes depicting her growing attraction to this odd masked man). When V attacks the bishop, Evey runs away and seeks aid from Dietrich, the TV comedian she had been heading to her earlier date with.

Dietrich is played by Stephen Fry, formerly of the comedy duo of Fry and Laurie. And he is played as an alternate version of V. Like V, he likes to make Eggy in a Basket (also known as toad in a hole), and like V, he has a secret forbidden art gallery. Only his secret gallery contains homoerotic art and a Koran, because once again, the movie insists on portraying Muslims and gays as some sort of fellow travelers, which is just… fucking… idiotic.

Oh and like V, Dietrich loves the theater, only his tastes run more toward Benny Hill than Shakespeare. Emboldened by V and Evey, Dietrich decides to do a Hill-style parody skit, complete with scantily-clad dancing girls and Yackety Sax, which depicts the High Chancellor getting killed by a firing squad of his own troops. V’s fans laugh and laugh, but the official reaction is less approving.

As Evey tries to escape, she is  caught and a bag is thrown over her head.

Meanwhile, Inspector Finch has learned where V came from, if not who he is. V was a prisoner in a concentration camp where they conducted experiments on political prisoners to try to find a cure to a particular bioweapon virus, a virus they ended up using on their own people to gain political power (shades of Loose Change). V was the only survivor and broke out in an explosion that left him horribly burned. And this scene pays particular homage to its comic-book roots with its visual style.

Evey, meanwhile,  comes to in a prison cell and undergoes weeks of torture, starting with having her head shaved.

She is starved and near-drowned and held in a cramped, dark cell without even a cot to sleep on. Her only solace is a note found in a crevice in the wall, an autobiography written by a woman imprisoned for the crime of being a lesbian, and if you feel your hair fluttering, it’s because my eyes are rolling so hard it’s making a breeze. But as Valerie declares to Evey that she loves her, it brings tears to Evey’s sunken eyes.

Armed with Valerie’s love and courage, Evey defies her captors, at which point, we get hit with the real mindfuck. Evey is told she is free, and her captor walks away. She steps out of her open cell door and discovers that she is actually in the Shadow Gallery with V.

He set this up, tortured and starved her for weeks while also providing her with Valerie’s story to teach her something about herself (although what that is is never named –is she a lesbian? Not that there’s anything wrong with that…).

And it’s at this point that I stop thinking this movie is a visually stylish, but drearily liberal bit of nonsense and start to get actively angry at this suckhole of a film. Because this is just a shitty, shitty thing to do to a person on every level, but the movie is not just going to have her reconcile with V, but actually thank him later. And the movie expects us to buy into that, because V is so artistic and tortured and most importantly, not conservative.

Thank God the movie’s almost over. So anyway, V is moving into his endgame as he goes after the two most difficult targets, the High Chancellor and Creedy, the head of the secret police. He promises to turn himself in to Creedy if the Chancellor is killed first. And Creedy, tired of the High Chancellor’s threats, agrees. Meanwhile, as November 5th draws near, V has Guy Fawkes masks delivered to every house in England, hoping to inspire the people to rise up against their oppressors.

And remember V’s biggest fan, the little girl with the glasses?


Yeah, she gets killed in one of the masks while spraypainting graffiti, which causes a riot. And such chaos and anger and instability was exactly what V was hoping for when he sent the masks. But hey, if you want to make an omelet…

So comes the Fifth of November, and Creedy kills the High Chancellor, and V kills Creedy along with a dozen or so cops, and is fatally wounded himself in the process, and oh God isn’t this movie done yet?

But no, because Evey has returned to thank V and he declares his love for her before dying, and meanwhile, the people of England, in the logic of the typical Hollywood liberal, are declaring their individuality by all dressing the same and marching in lockstep.


And Evey gives V a proper send-off by putting his corpse on a subway train with a ton of fertilizer explosive and blowing up Parliament. And look, it’s okay, because the little girl is still alive.

Yay! Only not, because everyone who died during the movie is there in the crowd and it’s some sort of statement about, oh, who the fuck cares?

Because let’s check the scoreboard, shall we? Civil disobedience? Good. Blowing up buildings to make a symbolic point, a’la Timothy McVeigh or the 9-11 crew? Cool. Suicide bombing? Hunky-dory. Killing cops, as long as they’re bad cops working for a corrupt system? Groovy. Muslims? Artistic and poetic. Gays? The most awesomest awesome ever, especially when they read the Koran, because Muslims+Gays=BFF’s y’all<3!

Christians? Killers and pedophiles. Conservatives? Fascists. Following the law? Cowardly. Kidnapping, false imprisonment, and torture? The worst evil imaginable, unless you’re doing it as therapy, in which case, romantic.

Man, you know what? Fuck Guy Fawkes Day.

 

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Out of the Vault – Anarchy in Gotham

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Tony Frazier

Remember, remember the Fifth of November and all that rot…

[imageeffect type=”lightbox” align=”alignright” width=”300″ height=”457″ alt=”Detective Comics #608″ url=”https://www.herogohome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Detective608Cover.jpg” ]It’s Guy Fawkes Day, which is a holiday with absolutely no meaning here in America, except that Alan Moore did this bitchin’ comic in the 80’s called V For Vendetta.

Illustrated by David Lloyd, the comic was an anti-Thatcher diatribe dressed up in a stylish story, which was later made into a so-so movie produced by the Wachowski Brothers. But the point is, the anti-hero star of the piece, V himself, disguises himself with a Guy Fawkes mask and actually enacts the plot which Fawkes failed to, blowing up the houses of Parliament.

I liked V For Vendetta (its masks being appropriated by the Occupy douchebags notwithstanding), but the issues are still buried in the Vault somewhere, so we’ll have to save it for another year when the Fifth falls on a Saturday. Instead, I bring you this second-order V imitator from the pages of Detective Comics issues 608-609, a two part story by writer Alan grant and artists Norm Breyfogle and Steve Mitchell titled “Anarky in Gotham City,” published in 1989.

In “Part One: Letters to the Editor,” Batman is after some big drug deal going down at a rock concert at a local club. Having arrived a little early,  he takes the opportunity to beat up some juvenile offenders, just in case you don’t know that the Batman is supposed to he tough. The sequence showcases Norm Breyfogle’s strengths–strong layout and kinetic action–as well as his weaknesses–loose, cartoony style and iffy anatomy.

[imageeffect type=”lightbox” align=”aligncenter” width=”600″ height=”891″ alt=”Batman, scourge of evil!” url=”https://www.herogohome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Detective608BatvsDrugs.jpg” ]

Meanwhile, another figure is wandering the night, musing to himself Rorschach-style about the evils imperiling society and how the will of the people should be the supreme authority. When punk singer Johnny Vomit flees the scene after Batman crashes his drug deal and takes on some adult goons, he runs into the mysterious Anarky.

[imageeffect type=”lightbox” align=”aligncenter” width=”600″ height=”683″ alt=”Zap!” url=”https://www.herogohome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Detective608Anarky.jpg” ]

Anarky is clearly influenced by V–the cloak, hat and mask, plus the symbol he spraypaints at his crime scenes (Anarky uses the original anarchy symbol, while V does an inverted version minus the crossbar to transform the ‘A’ into a ‘V’). The police find Vomit unconscious with a Letter to the Editor from the local paper taped to the wall. The letter, written by Dave Stang, complains about the noise levels at the club and warns that if the city doesn’t take action, some upstanding citizen will.

The Batman goes off to investigate Stang to see if he might be Vomit’s attacker. But Stang turns out to be a little old lady who lives in the neighborhood and just can’t stand the noise. She wrote under a tough-sounding male pseudonym to be taken seriously by those punk kids. Meanwhile, Anarky is breaking into a chemical company to confront the owner about the pollution from his plant.

[imageeffect type=”lightbox” align=”aligncenter” width=”600″ height=”530″ alt=”Bet that burns.” url=”https://www.herogohome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Detective608SludgeDunk.jpg” ]

And yes, by coincidence, the same issue of the paper that featured the letter from Mister Stang also featured a letter complaining about pollution from the plant. Anarky is simply hearing the Voice of the People and acting on it, you see.

[imageeffect type=”lightbox” align=”alignleft” width=”300″ height=”460″ alt=”Detective Comics #609″ url=”https://www.herogohome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Detectvie609Cover.jpg” ]And now we finally meet the Man Who Might Be Anarky, Mike Machin, a normal suburban guy with a pretty wife and a hard-working teenage son with a paper route. As he’s having breakfast with his family, Bruce Wayne is also having breakfast and figuring out the Letters to the Editor connection, vowing to be ready and waiting for Anarky’s next appearance.

Which comes in Detective Comics #609, in “Part Two: Facts About Bats,” Batman has three letters to choose from in picking Anarky’s next appearance. One is a complaint about a slum being torn down to build a new bank, leaving dozens of vagrants homeless (or more homeless, since they were living in cardboard boxes). And though there is a demonstration at the groundbreaking, it comes from the offended homeless themselves, not a master villain.

So as the sun goes down, Batman has two choices: a reception for a foreign dictator being held at the Halton Hotel, or a banking summit. In fact, Anarky appears at… the former slum, rousing the homeless mob into doing a little vandalism. And there’s something weird about Anarky’s neck.

[imageeffect type=”lightbox” align=”aligncenter” width=”600″ height=”745″ alt=”Looks like a member of that tribe with the stretched-out necks” url=”https://www.herogohome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Detective609OddNeck.jpg” ]

So Batman appears and tackles Anarky, revealing….

[imageeffect type=”lightbox” align=”aligncenter” width=”600″ height=”695″ alt=”He’s a robot! Or something!” url=”https://www.herogohome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Detective609Faceless.jpg” ]

Whoah. A man without a face. The homeless folks rally to Anarky’s defense, giving him time to slip away, but Batman breaks free and pursues. And finally, Anarky’s true identity is revealed.

[imageeffect type=”lightbox” align=”aligncenter” width=”600″ height=”874″ alt=”Lonnie! (nice read, Velma…)” url=”https://www.herogohome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Detective609TheBigReveal.jpg” ]

Not that much of a shock, actually, but quite nice in story terms. It explains why Anarky was so naive as to select his victims from cranks in the lettercols, and also explains the anatomical oddities that Breyfogle depicted so nicely in his artwork.

So that’s our salute to Guy Fawkes, via V For Vendetta, as imitated in Detective Comics. But we’re not done yet!

Be here tomorrow for Super Movies as we revisit the film adaptation of V For Vendetta!

[imageeffect type=”lightbox” align=”aligncenter” width=”600″ height=”388″ alt=”Heh…” url=”https://www.herogohome.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Detective609Anarcape.jpg” ]

Posted in Out of the Vault | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Week 5.4&5 – Twain’s Story

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Tony Frazier

Previously: Digger and Twain went to the Traveler’s Tavern to borrow gas money from Jill, where they encountered detectives Merrick and Grayson. And now…

Jill’s mouth opened, but she couldn’t make any sound come out. And at the same time, she couldn’t stop blinking, as if something deep in her brain had short-circuited, making her lose control of her body. Finally, she managed to say, “Why would you need money? You just robbed a bank.”

“I had to give that to the kidnappers,” Digger said. “I’m broke, and we need to get to New York.”

Jill was pretty sure that she would be able to stop the blinking in just a few seconds, if only Digger would say something that made sense. “Kidnappers? What’s going on?”

Digger turned to Twain. “You’d better go get the van started,” he said over the sound of approaching sirens. He turned back to Jill. “I don’t have time to explain. It’s just, you’re the only person I know who would trust me even if you had reason not to. So please, whatever you can.”

Jill shook her head again as she reached under her counter for her change bag. At least the blinking was coming under control. “I don’t know why I put up with you,” she said. She pulled out two bundles of fives and a bundle of tens. “Here’s a few hundred. I don’t know if it’ll get you all the way, but it’s the best I can do. Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? How do you know you can trust that guy?”

“I’m pretty sure I can’t trust him, but he’s my only link to the truth.” Digger let his fingers touch hers just a hair longer than was absolutely necessary as she handed him the money. “Thanks, Jill. I’ll…”

“Don’t say you’ll pay me back,” Jill said. “We both know you don’t have a job. And I’m out a mirror and a bottle of Scotch.”

“Call Davey Lopez,” Digger said as he headed for the door. “Tell him how much you need and that I’ll owe him a favor. Talk to you soon.”

And then he was gone, leaving behind the smells of gunpowder and Scotch, plus two groaning detectives on the floor. The sirens were growing louder. Pretty soon, she’d have to answer all kinds of questions. She considered telling them that Digger had robbed her at gunpoint, but no. She wasn’t a good enough liar, and she had better ways to make him suffer.

Like cutting him off until he paid his bar tab.

***

“Okay, finish your story,” Digger said to Twain once he was back in the van. “Why does the Cobalt Czar even care about me?”

Twain pulled out quickly, driving away without even a glance back to see if any police were following him. He drove completely without concern, as if he were sure the police would never stop them. “Not a lot to tell, really. When I came to, I was in a dark cell with a dirt floor. They fed me this nasty gruel with greasy rice and stringy meat that might have been dog, might have been rat for all I know. And every couple of hours, they would pull me out and ask me questions.

“I told them I was an archaeologist searching for the City of the Moon. They didn’t believe me, so they beat me up. Broke both my arms a couple of times.”

“How long ago was this?” Digger asked. Twain didn’t look as if he had a mark on him.

“Few days ago,” Twain said. “They had a healer who would fix me up when they broke me too much.”

“That’s not too bad, I guess,” Digger said.

“You ever had an arm force-healed in just a couple of minutes?” Twain asked. “Hurts worse than breaking it. And it always left me dehydrated and weak after. I’m pretty sure I would have died in a few more days if I hadn’t gotten away.”

“How did you?”

“They asked me about you, and I said that I knew you,” Twain said. “Next thing I knew, they ran me through a shower, gave me fresh clothes, fed me real food and left me in another interrogation room. And then he came in.”

“The Cobalt Czar?”

“Yeah. He asked me if I knew you and I said yes,” Twain said. “Then he says, ‘Digger. Everyone’s hero. Saved the planet while the world watched. Everybody knows him. Everybody loves him.’ Then he slammed his hands down on the table and said, ‘I hate him.’”

“What did I ever do to him?” Digger asked.

“You made him look bad,” Twain said. “His people stay in line because they know he can’t be beaten. But man, when you appeared everywhere and stopped Hell on Earth, you changed things. I mean, nobody’s rebelled or anything, but everyone has that look.”

“What look?”

“Hope,” Twain said. “So I told him he was preaching to the choir, and then he started asking me about how I knew you, and if you had any weaknesses he could exploit. And when I told how I’d run rings around you before, he got really friendly and offered me a deal. I help him disgrace you and he brings me back to America and lets me go. He was even going to throw in a cash reward if I did a good job. And I’ve got to admit, I did a pretty good job.”

“If you and he are such buddies, why’d he strap a bomb around your chest?” Digger asked.

“Incentive,” Twain said. “He apparently studied business management here several years ago, before he turned blue, so he’s got all kinds of half-assed ideas about how to motivate people. He was supposed to take the bomb off once I delivered you. But instead, he just let me go and said he’d release it remotely after a week.”

“You believe him?” Digger asked.

“Not now,” Twain said. “Which is why I’m helping you.”

“And what exactly do you think I can do to him?” Digger asked. “I’m not really in his league.

“You’ll see.”

What is Twain’s plan? What will happen next? Find out next week as we continue Run, Digger, Run!

To read from the beginning, click here

Or to read the next episode, click here!

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Week 5.3 – Twain’s Story

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Tony Frazier

Previously: Digger learned that the infamous Cobalt Czar was behind the plot against him as Twain described what happened in Mongolia. He had infiltrated the mysterious City of the Moon, only to be struck from behind.  And now…

“Was it the Czar?” Digger asked.

“No,” Twain said. “The Czar’s a brute, but he’s not a monster. At least, not on the outside. And last time I checked, you couldn’t see through him.”

“Through?”

“Yeah. Like a ghost or something. And I couldn’t swear to it,  but I think I saw someone behind him,” Twain said. “ Or, um, through him. It was dark. And then the thing screamed at me and hit me again and I was out.”

“How did he hit you?” Digger asked.

“Uh, with his hand, duh,” Twain said.

“Oh, come on. We live in a world where guys can shoot you with fire or laser beams or explosions.” Digger waved his Driller for emphasis. “When they’re not booby-trapped. Guys who can call down lightning or zap you with their minds. I almost got killed by a guy throwing toothpicks once. So don’t act like that was a dumb question.”

“Well, if he’d hit me some other way, I would have mentioned it,” Twain said.

“So what happened next?” Digger asked.

“First things first,” Twain said. “You going to get us some gas money or what?”

“Yeah,” Digger said after a moment. “Let’s go to the Traveler’s.”

***

“Hey, Digger,” Jill the bartender said, looking at him suspiciously as he walked in with Twain. “I didn’t think you two knew each other. You buddies now?”

Digger turned to Twain. “What’s she talking about?”

Twain didn’t answer, but his smile was sly.

“He was in here last night,” Jill said, “sitting right next to you. You didn’t say a word to each other the entire time. Now I hear you’ve robbed a bank? What’s going on?”

“Yeah, we’d like to hear this, too,” said a voice from behind them.

Digger turned to see two men with pistols drawn and trained on him. “Don’t move,” said the same man who had just spoken. He flashed a badge with one hand. “Detective Merrick, BPD. You’re under arrest for the robbery of MCP National Bank, downtown.”

“You know, if you fire those things in here, somebody could get hurt,” Digger said.

Merrick slipped the badge into his jacket pocket, then took up a two-handed firing stance. “That’s what they’re made to do,” he said. “So come along quietly and you won’t be.”

“I wasn’t talking about me,” Digger said. “Jill, you should get down behind the bar.”

“Digger, don’t do anything stupid,” Jill said.

“How long have you known me?”

“Oh God,” she said and squatted down.

“I’m warn…” she heard the detective say, cut off by a smack as a shot rang out. A bottle of Dalmore on the bar shattered. She closed her eyes as the drops spattered in her hair. She heard the crash of furniture, and then Digger’s voice said, “Jill, you okay?”

She stood up. The place was a mess, the two detectives unconscious on the floor. “Are you crazy?”

Digger laid two pistols on the bar. “No, I need to borrow some money.”

What will happen next? Be here tomorrow for a special double-length episode to finish the week!

To read from the beginning, click here

Or to read the next episode, click here!

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Week 5.2 – Twain’s Story

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Tony Frazier

Previously: Twain was about to reveal the name of Digger’s mysterious tormentor. And now…

“You’re asking, but it sounds like you already know,” Twain said.

Digger remembered the video feed from the warehouse. Reflected light illuminating a suit sleeve and a hand wearing a blue surgical glove. “It wasn’t a glove,” Digger said to himself.

“What wasn’t a what?” Twain asked.

“I saw him on the video, standing in the background,” Digger said. “His skin was blue. Blue skin plus Mongolia can only mean one thing. You’re telling me the Cobalt Czar is behind all this?”

“See, you’re not as dumb as everyone says you are.”

Digger shook his head. It couldn’t be possible. The Cobalt Czar was an infamous figure on the world stage: probably the most powerful super there ever was next to Bugs. He had managed to establish an independent fiefdom, Keuke Bator, on the Mongolian/Siberian border, and his incredible power had enabled him to hold it against the twin empires of Russia and China. The tiny country held few people and fewer resources, being established on some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world.

It was rumored that what money the country made came through weapons trafficking and extortion, though no one knew for sure. Keuke Bator made North Korea look like a free and open society in comparison. But one thing was disputed by no one: the Cobalt Czar ruled absolutely. And the nations of the world trembled when he turned his gaze beyond his own borders for fear it would fall on them.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Digger said. “I’ve never met him. I’ve never even gone near his little kingdom. Why would he do this?”

“Hell on Earth,” Twain said.

“What?”

“Look, when I couldn’t get anyone to take my bribes, I decided to just disguise myself and sneak in to the City of the Moon. Find out what the big deal was,” Twain said.

“That’s crazy,” Digger said.

“Not crazy. Risky,” Twain corrected. “”At least, that’s what I thought at the time. Getting onto the base wasn’t actually all that hard. The Czar’s men are loyal, but not that well trained.  And as I looked around, I found that the heaviest security was around the mouth of a cave leading under a ridge of land stretching across the center of the base. It looked like this City of the Moon was underground, in some sort of cave complex.”

“So was it an actual ancient city down there, or just some sort of rock formations that looked like a city?” Digger asked.

“I don’t know,” Twain said. “I never found out.  I waited till almost midnight to make my move past the guards, but before I got past the last set, I heard something behind me, and then I was hit by something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know that either,” Twain said. “It was cold, I can tell you that. I looked back to see what had hit me, and all I saw was this slouching shape. Huge, bestial. I still have nightmares about it.”

What could the shape have been? Join us tomorrow for the next exciting episode!

To read from the beginning, click here…

Or to continue to the next episode, click here!

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Week 5.1 – Twain’s Story

Posted on November 1, 2011 by Tony Frazier

Previously: Digger was abducted and forced to rob a bank by Twain, working for a mysterious someone. Twain has offered to help Digger bring that someone to justice. And now…

“Okay, no more stalling,” Digger said as they pulled away from the gas station. “Let’s get this thing done already.”

“How much money can you get your hands on?” Twain asked.

“What? Why?”

“We need gas money,” Twain said.

“Gas money? Where are we going?” Digger asked.

“New York.”

“New York?” Digger scrubbed at his face as if he could wash away the disbelief. “They took the hostage to New York?”

“No, the plan is in New York,” Twain said. “I have no idea where the hostage is by now. He may be on a plane to China for all I know.”

“Okay, back up,” Digger said. “Just what is going on?”

“Well, do you remember a while back when you helped me steal that mask?”

“Dude, when I said ‘back up,’ I didn’t mean that far.”

“This is relevant,” Twain said. “Look, the clues to what that mask did were there all the time.But as far as I can tell, nobody ever put them all together and made the mask work until I did it.”

“So?”

“So, that’s something I’m really good at,” Twain said. “I find an interesting legend, and then I dig and I put pieces together, and somewhere in there, I end up finding the truth that others have missed. Like finding that submarine with the Nazi gold.”

“Which you still owe me a share of,” Digger said.

“You don’t want that,” Twain said. “That money’s tainted. You’d never forgive yourself. The point is, I got on the trail of this other thing. I wasn’t sure what it would amount to, but I could feel in my gut that it was big. So I ended up going to Mongolia…”

“Wait a second,” Digger said, “you mean, when you said the hostage could be on a plane to China, you were being literal?”

“Of course,” Twain said. “Hyperbole’s not my style.”

“So what was the legend?”

“It was a bunch of things,” Twain said. “Hard to boil down without putting you to sleep. There was stuff about the Khans, and stuff about a magic cup that was like the Holy Grail or something, and stuff about the City of the Moon.”

“City of the Moon?” Digger said, shaking his head.

“You have to be able to look past the details and see the pattern,” Twain said. “I get there, and I’m talking to guides and studying maps and checking libraries, and one thing leads to another, I figure out where this City of the Moon is. I mean, it’s real. It might not be an actual city, but it’s a real place. So I go there.”

“And what do you find?” Digger asked. “Aliens?”

“Of course not,” Twain said. “No such thing. No, I found a military base, heavily guarded, with a village not far away. So I do my thing, try to bribe some information out of somebody, only these guys won’t be bribed. They’re too scared.”

“Of who?” Digger asked, though he feared he knew.

Who is everyone so scared of? Join us tomorrow to find out!

To read from the beginning, click here…

Or to read the next episode, click here!

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Halloween Double-Feature Podcast 2011

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Tony Frazier

Those who know me know that I’m not just about the superheroes. I also have a great love of old-time radio, so it is a thrill to be able to put together this tribute to the great radio horrors of the past.

Halloween Double-Feature Podcast 2011

Click the link to play in your browser or right-click to save to your computer. The program is about 45 minutes long and consists of two stories, “The April Fool” and “In the Dark: Deadly Fortune.” The first is more in the tradition of Quiet Please, while the second is more of a Light’s Out. The file size is around 43 MB.

I owe a big Thank You to the friends who helped me out by lending their time and voices to the project, even though they don’t necessarily share my love of the medium.

Barbara Farran and Randy Farran
Paul Batteiger of Adventurotica (warning-link is NSFW)
Eilis O’Neal, author of The False Princess

Also big props to Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech, Licensed under Creative Commons “Attribution 3.0″ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/” There’s a vast array of fine free-to-use music on his site. If you can throw some love his way, please do.

If you’re interested in technical details, the program was assembled in Audacity, a wonderful freeware sound editor. These things are a lot of work, so I probably won’t be doing these more than once a year, but if you enjoy it, please tell your friends. If there is enough interest, I may do more.

Both stories are copyright 2011 by Tony Frazier. Recording can be distributed under Creative Commons “Attribution 3.0″ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/”

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Super Movies – Blade II

Posted on October 30, 2011 by Tony Frazier


Sorry for the late drop on this. A lot of things have piled up here lately, and last night, I suffered a bout of stupid that delayed things even more. But here we are.

To cap off our five-week festival of Superheroes Who Are Monsters movies, let’s look back at Blade II. Both Wesley Snipes and screenwriter David S. Goyer returned for the second go-round, but director Stephen Norrington did not (he instead directed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which apparently drove him to quit directing altogether). Taking the director spot this time was Guillermo Del Toro.

Oh and there was one more returning cast member. After a brief prologue, the credits inform us that Whistler, Blade’s mechanic/right hand man (played by Kris Kristofferson) who died in the first film, didn’t really die. He was turned into a vampire and spirited away. Blade has spent the last two years searching for him.

Cue the opening action sequence!

Blade is in the Czech Republic, doing what he does best. He kills a few vamps, and like the first film, they disintegrate into flaming ash when they die, a really cool effect that ups the ante from the standard Buffy vamp dust. He gets one to take him to Whistler’s location, and kills a bunch more. He even stabs one in the balls. Man, he really does not like vamps.

The action choreography is different this time from the first film. Wesley Snipes himself was credited with the martial arts choreography in the first film, but for the sequel, they brought in a specialist from Hong Kong. More about him later. Suffice to say that the choreography goes to more extremes now–more cool stuff, but also a lot of superfluous hand-waving and silly posing.

So Blade kills off all of the vamps except the one he made the deal with to bring him here.  Instead of killing him, he gives him the Ghost Rider Point.

Things look bad for that guy in the future. Just saying.

So Blade goes into the room where the vamps have Whistler imprisoned. And let me just take a moment to comment on the set-up here. Apparently, the reason Blade was unable to find Whistler for two years was that the vamps kept moving him around. So was Whistler working with them, telling them Blade’s secrets, or maybe making them the same kind of awesome weapons he was making for Blade?

Nope, they were just torturing him, then healing him, then torturing him again (and also making him wear shiny bronze-colored leather pants, the fiends). Thing is, in the 6 minutes Blade has been onscreen so far, he has killed 14 vamps. How many of their kind has Blade killed in his two-year, single-minded search for his former partner? Wouldn’t somebody have realized at some point that they were just making him madder? Vamps are stupid, is what I’m saying. Remember this for later.

Oh yeah, Blade finds Whistler in a Star Wars healing pod.

Blade cures Whistler using the retrovirus Dr. Karen developed in the first film. This doesn’t sit well with his new partner, a pot-smoking tool named Scud. Scud doesn’t trust ex-vampire Whistler, and Whistler thinks the young punk is doing everything wrong.

Suddenly, Blade’s headquarters is invaded by a couple of vampire ninja in cool hoods that protect them from light. And if the bad-ass suits look like something out of del Toro’s later Hellboy, well, that’s because Hellboy creator Mike Mignola served as conceptual artist on this film.

After a quick fight to prove to everyone how bad-ass they all are, the vamps offer Blade a truce. They need Blade’s help, because there is something else out there hunting vampires. Something worse than Blade.

So Blade agrees to go to the meeting with the vampire overlord. But he opens his coat to show the female vamp, Nyssa, his little surprise.

Get your minds out of the gutter. It’s explosives, as insurance against treachery. Nyssa takes Blade to vampire corporate headquarters to meet her father, vampire overlord Eli Damaskinos. He’s slimy.

Damaskinos and his lawyer tell Blade about their enemy–Nomak, a vampire carrying a mutated version of the vampire virus they have dubbed the Reaper strain. Nomak and his infected minions hunt vampires, and when they run out of vampires to eat, humans are next on the menu. The proposal: Blade joins with a special vampire commando unit called the Blood Pack (originally set up to hunt Blade himself) to hunt down Nomak.

Blade agrees and meets the Blood Pack, a motley group of pseudo-badasses with cartoonish names and costumes, but really, they might as well be called “Five Redshirts and Ron Perlman.”

Some directors have their go-to guys, the ones they always seem to love working with. Perlman is del Toro’s, having also featured in Cronos, Hellboy, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Blade out-badasses the redshirts and leads them to a vampire nightclub where they have their first encounter with the Reapers. And this extended sequence is where you can really start to tell just how much more complex and expensive this movie is than the first one. The club is huge and elaborate, and the fights happen in parallel across several different locations, all incredibly full of detail.

So it’s a real treat for the viewer, but not so much for the Blood Pack, because their enemies are not vulnerable to either silver or garlic (which is what their gun ammunition is made from) or the anticoagulant Blade used to kill Frost in the first film. And they can do this.

Nasty. It doesn’t seem to bother this guy, though.

That’s Snowman, played by Donnie Yen. And I only single out this one member of the Blood Pack because he’s also the guy they brought in from Hong Kong to do the fight choreography. He doesn’t speak a single word in the entire film. Why speak softly and carry a big stick when you can not speak at all and carry a badass sword?

The fight doesn’t go well for the Blood Pack. They manage to drive the Reapers away, but lose one of their own in the process. But they learn that the Reapers are still vulnerable to UV light. It seems to be their only weakness.

And Blade and Nyssa finally meet Nomak face-to-face.  He looks… vaguely familiar.

Scud is upset that Whistler disappeared during the fight. Whistler, however, has a good reason. He has found a live Reaper, trapped and unable to escape. They learn two other weaknesses in this way. Without blood, the Reapers die quickly because of their heightened metabolism. And during an autopsy, Nyssa discovers that the heart is shielded from frontal attack by bone, but vulnerable from the side.

Blade decides that their best bet is to hunt the Reapers during the daytime. The vampires aren’t happy with this plan, or with the weapon of choice: grenades that create a burst of artificial sunlight, which will kill the vamps as well as the Reapers.  Blade dismisses their concerns none too gently, which upsets Nyssa, who is developing a fondness for Blade.

While Blade is taking his serum, the one that lets him control his thirst for human blood, Nyssa confronts him with the fact that he, too, shares their vampiric nature. Why deny what he really is to work for the other side? Damn, Wesley Snipes, she just called you an Oreo.

The Blood Pack enters the sewers to hunt down the Reapers. They have a bunch of UV grenades and a big UV bomb that Whistler and Scud have somehow managed to design, test, perfect and manufacture in quantity in about three hours. But in true redshirt fashion, they split into teams: the good, the bad, and the useless.

The useless team kill themselves without encountering a single Reaper except the team member who has been keeping his infection a secret. The bad get far enough away that Blade can’t interfere, then attack Whistler. The good, including Blade and Nyssa, actually find a bunch of Reapers and kill them.

But a lot more appear, so they retreat to regroup around the big bomb carried by Reinhardt (Ron Perlman). There are only three left: Reinhardt, Nyssa, and Blade. Whistler has managed to set off the pheromones and has traded being beaten up by a vamp to being trapped by Reapers. Blade sends Nyssa and Reinhardt for cover and sets off the UV bomb.

He finds Nyssa badly burned; she wasn’t able to find complete cover. She is dying. And since Blade has developed feelings for her, he cuts his own wrist and lets her feed so she can heal. Which is when he gets zapped from behind by a bunch of vampire stormtroopers.

See, the vampires had a secret agenda. The Reaper strain wasn’t a natural mutation of vampirism; it was designed by Damaskinos’s vampire scientists to try to overcome the vampires’ natural weaknesses. Nomak, the carrier and Damaskino’s son (via test tube), was supposed to be the vanguard of a new vampire master race.

But he got out of control and had to be put down. So they brought in Blade, with the help of a spy infiltrated into his organization. And of course, it’s not Whistler who just spent two years with them. It’s Scud, Damaskinos’s familiar.

So get this: the vampires want a way to get at Blade, who has no mechanic/weaponsmaster to work with. We’ve seen Blade make his own silver bullets, but it’s a stretch to think he can do all the things Whistler could. So the vampires give Blade a new Whistler, who makes Blade new weapons with which to kill them and even helps Whistler perfect the UV grenade that he had been unsuccessful at making before. And at the price of making Blade an even more effective killer of their own kind, they got what, exactly? See, vampires=stupid. Oh and also, Scud=blowed up.

But Blade is still a prisoner and Nomak is still vulnerable to sunlight, which means the vampires still have work to do. They decide to start by draining all of Blade’s blood and bone marrow to find the element in his genetic code that allows him to walk in daylight. Then they’ll use it to perfect their uber-vampire.

But of course, they don’t count on Nomak, who has followed the vamps to Vampire World Central and begun tearing his way through the stormtrooper guards. In the confusion, Whistler manages to break free of Reinhardt and helps Blade into a bloodbath to heal. And remember last week when I said Blade never gets a drop of blood on him? This time, he emerges from being completely drenched in blood, and within seconds, there’s no trace of it.

Blade kills Reinhardt and about 30 stormtroopers, then searches for Nomak, who is hunting Damaskinos and Nyssa. Nyssa is upset at the ways her father used her and her team to get to Blade.  So she turns on him, trapping them both with Nomak. Nomak kills Damaskinos and infects Nyssa before Blade shows up.

Time for the big final fight. Blade and Nomak go at it with everything they’ve got, including martial arts, pro wrestling finishing moves, and lots of work by their virtual stunt doubles from the Uncanny Valley.

Blade manages to finish off Nomak by stabbing him through the heart sideways, and then he rushes to Nyssa’s side. What’s wrong with her can’t be fixed by simply letting her feed this time, so he carries her outside at her request, to see the sun. And we get the most romantic immolation by sunlight ever.

Poor Blade. Still alone, except for Whistler. Would that change in the third movie? Find out in two weeks when we finish off the Blade trilogy with Blade: Trinity.

Why two weeks, you ask? Because next week, we’ll have a special presentation for the weekend of the Fifth of November.

And be sure to come back tomorrow for our very special Halloween surprise!

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Out of the Vault – The Brave and the Bold Monster Spectacular

Posted on October 29, 2011 by Tony Frazier

Finishing off our five-week Halloween Monsters Who Are Heroes in epic fashion, we have The Batman, a hero who pretended to be a monster to frighten his enemies, teaming up with four honest-to-goodness monsters: a golem, a demon, a werecreature, and a ghost. It all happened in the pages of The Brave and the Bold, Batman’s monthly team-up comic, in the 70’s. And unusually for a round-up of DC issues, all four stories, from 1972 to 1977, feature the same creative team: writer Bob Haney and artist Jim Aparo.

First up: issue # 101, cover-dated April-May 1972, featuring Metamorpho, the Element Man. It may be stretching things to call Metamorpho a golem, but he did have a body apparently composed of different kinds of minerals. His special power was to change the chemical composition of his body at will.

As “Cold Blood, Hot Gun” opens, a rich corporate fatcat falls to his death from his skyscraper office. Batman deduces that the suicide is more homo- than sui-, and further realizes that the hitman is none other than his recurring foe, the one-armed Bounty Hunter (even though the modus operandi is nothing like the Bounty Hunter’s usual pattern). Checking the dead man’s typewriter ribbon, which bears the impressions of the letters typed on it, Batman decides that the Bounty Hunter typed up a neat list of his future victims after throwing his first one out the window.

Don’t try to make sense of it. Number one, we only have 25 pages to get through the plot, including a major guest star, so things have to pretty much fall right into our laps, and number two, it’s a Bob Haney story. Anything can happen.

Anyway, the important thing here is that one of the names on the list is Sapphire Stagg, daughter of rich industrialist Simon Stagg and beloved of Rex Mason, alias Metamorpho. Metamorpho has been in a chemical stasis bath for a couple of years as an attempted cure for his condition, but Stagg takes him out early to guard his daughter from the threat. Meanwhile, other names on the list are dropping one by one, and for Batman, it’s personal, because the last name on the list is Bruce Wayne.

Turns out all of the people on the list were bidding on a mansion being offered for sale by two brothers. And it’s a good thing Metamorpho came out of his bath early, because…

We finally discover that the Bounty Hunter was hired by one of the brothers who didn’t want the estate sold. But the Bounty Hunter kills him for a really stupid reason, then ends up in a final fight with Batman.

But the Bounty Hunter manages to use Sapphire as a human shield and get away, leaving Batman to vow to get him someday. I figure he probably did. And as we’ve seen before, the World’s Greatest Detective(TM) is really not, or else every other detective in DC-world really sucks.

Brave & Bold #109Our next monster team-up features the star of last week’s Vault, the Demon Etrigan.  Keep in mind, this story–“Gotham Bay, Be My Grave,” cover-dated Oct. Nov. 1973–was actually published during Jack Kirby’s original run on the character, so Etrigan does no rhyming here. He is played less as a monster and more as a straight super-hero.

But the 10-year-old me didn’t care, because this was Aparo at the height of his powers (and doing his own inking, to boot). Team-up books are hard, because you have to be able to draw every character in the entire line and make them all fit in with the main character’s aesthetic while being true to the guest star’s character as well. Some artists aren’t really able to pull it off, but Aparo was in the top tier. He could do anybody and make them look good next to Batman. Aparo, George Perez, John Byrne: was anybody else as good as these three?

The story: A strange creature emerges from the ocean as a construction crew is building a new bridge. The monster kills the captain of a tugboat in the harbor, but disappears before Batman can confront him. Later he kills the harbormaster, and even later, he attacks Jason Blood’s friend Harry Matthews (who would later die during the Matt Wagner miniseries as seen last week). So Jason chants the mystic poem…

Wait, “Leave, leave the form of man?” Every other time I’ve seen it, it was “Gone, gone the form of man” or minor variation. But Bob Haney writes his own rules, man. He colors outside the lines.

There’s actually not much here, story-wise. Jason Blood’s psychic sidekick, Randu, gives us the monster’s origin in a psychic vision. The monster is the ghost of a sailor killed in the eruption of Krakatoa after an attempted mutiny (hence his rocky, hardened lava skin). He hates all sailors. He tried to kill advertising exec Harry because he was wearing a captain’s hat, having come from his yacht.

So Batman tries to lure the monster out by disguising himself as a sailor (wearing a rubber mask over his Bat-cowl–man, he must have been sweating), but gets his ass kicked. Jason Blood, meanwhile, has figured out the monster’s weakness and changed to Etrigan once more, except…

Yeah, Bob Haney story. The power of ESP waves. But I love that last panel of Blood in mid-transformation. Batman wakes up to find out that Etrigan has killed the monster already by hanging him with the noose he was supposed to be hanged with before the eruption. Batman manages not to mutter something about being a guest star in his own book and heads off to the next issue on our list.

Issue 119–“Bring Back Killer Krag,” cover-dated June 1975–features Man-Bat, a character I’ve always loved visually, but who has never seemed to really live up to his potential.

The story opens with the murder of a rich man named Moran by a hit man who never misses. Is this the elusive Bounty Hunter again? Nope, it’s new top gun-for-hire Max Krag, who manages to kill Moran right under Batman’s nose and get away clean. Krag flees to the island nation of Santa Cruz, which does not have an extradition treaty with the U.S. Unfortunately for him, Batman doesn’t work for the government. I mean, it was easy to forget given how openly he worked hand-in-hand with Commissioner Gordon during this time, but the Batman was still a vigilante working outside the law.

Too bad that Moran’s widow decides to take matters into her own hands, offering a huge reward for Krag, which means there will be others getting in Batman’s way. Including Kirk Langstrom, the Man-Bat.

Batman travels to Santa Cruz and parachutes in covertly, just like a super-spy. But he lands in the wrong place.

Yeah, since bats can’t swim, the fishermen assumed he was a giant frog. A giant blue and grey frog with pointy ears or something. Luckily, Man-Bat saves him, though it’s never explained how Man-Bat can carry Batman with his hands like that and still flap his arms to fly. Then again, it’s not the goofiest thing Aparo pulls in this issue. Keep reading.

After a couple of misadventures apart, Batman and Man-Bat decide to work together to kidnap Krag. Unfortunately, they are captured and thrown into iron cages instead. And strangely, though Domingo Valdez, the “Black Napoleon” who rules Santa Cruz, is smart enough to capture his foes with no difficulty, he not smart enough to take away their stuff.

Dude. See, Man-Bat just happened to have a spare vial of his bat serum in his pocket. But just as silly, if not more, is the fact that Batman still has his utility belt, so he probably could have escaped in about 50 different ways if he hadn’t just wanted to feel the forbidden thrill of turning into a man-beast for a page or two. And I love the way Batman’s cape merges into his arm wings and his cowl just magically manages to accommodate Batman’s new giant bat-ears. Man, Haney’s crazy was obviously rubbing off on Aparo by this time.

Let’s move on to the last issue in our Halloween Spooktacular (you thought you’d make it through the entire month without me using that word? Hah!).  Issue #133, cover-dated April 1977, features Deadman in a story titled “Another Kind of Justice.”

I always thought Deadman was a cool character, even though I never knew much about him. The first Deadman story I ever read was in a barber shop in the shopping center where my dad’s store was. I don’t remember anything about the story except that the art was awesome (by the superb Neal Adams, I later learned). I later got in trouble with my teacher at school by inserting Deadman into a drawing illustrating that children’s story about the family of ducks stopping traffic.

So I’d had a fondness for the character for years. Deadman was former circus acrobat Boston Brand (former as in dead) given the power to search for his killer  in the afterlife by possessing the bodies of living people. So it was like Ghost without the pot throwing, crossed with The Fugitive . His killer was even missing an arm, or at least a hand, having replaced it with a hook. Hmmm, a one-armed killer… might it have been the Bounty Hunter?

Who knows? In this story, Batman intercepts a shipment of heroin (though in an attempt to make him sound like Kojak or something, Haney has Batman refer to it as “skag”). Batman figures out that an infamous smuggler seems to be at the bottom of it (a smuggler who rose to power by killing his mentor years before), so he comes up with a plan.

Step one: get in touch with Deadman. How do you contact a ghost? Get Jason Blood or Randu or even Zatanna to perform a seance? How about placing a classified ad?

Yeah, at this point, Haney’s crazy has lost the power to surprise. And at this point, the details don’t matter. Suffice it to say that Deadman uses his powers to put the bad guy in a spot of trouble.

What’s remarkable about this particular issue to me is that this was apparently Batman’s plan all along–not to get the guy to confess and get arrested, but to get him killed by his fellow mobsters. The guy manages to get away, but crashes his boat on Dead Man’s Reef and drowns, taunted by the spirit of his ex-boss. Batman and Commissioner Gordon share a laugh about it at the end.

I’m not sure why this never bothered me before. Perhaps just the generally bad level of writing in all the pop culture I was devouring at the time, or just a different societal mindset toward justice at the time. But I can’t imagine Batman, with his principled code against killing, doing anything like arranging the murder of one mobster at the hands of others nowadays.

And that brings us to the end of five weeks of Halloween Vaults. Be here tomorrow for our final Super Scary Movie, Blade II, and Monday for an extra-special surprise. And for next Saturday’s Vault, a total change of pace. Maybe something with a gorilla…

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