Pugilistic and Ballistic - Books That Blow Your Face Off #5

 
"You are a man of mercy, then?"
The Phantom mounted his horse and turned the mighty animal away from her, never showing his face.
"I don't deal in mercy," he said. "Only justice."
--From A Man Of His Word by Joe McKinney

This installment of Pugilistic and Ballistic takes us to a different kind of hero, a man of wisdom, wit and a kick ass purple suit.  That's right...THE PHANTOM!  I've been a fan of this character for a very very long time and still enjoy seeing him pop up in a syndicated strip as well as in comics from Moonstone Publications. Sure, that time has gone by now, but they could not go out on a better note than a ton of trades that I'm already chomping at the bit to get (including a complete edition of the excellent The Phantom : Ghost Who Walks series as well as a giant compendium of the fun GENERATIONS tales)...and this second collection of prose tales.

I love a good adventure story, and as with all of these Chronicles books (which also include The Avenger, The Spider and an upcoming and anticipated Green Hornet volume)-the stories range from solid to outstanding, taking characters in familiar directions while adding a bit of spin and pulp fiction flavor. The prose anthologies mesh the best of the old and new takes on some favorites of mine, so I'm a sucker for them.
So, that brings us to this particular volume.  I decided to order the hardcover edition of Phantom Chronicles 2 this time around, because I'm always kicking myself that I have to be frugal with these. Amazon had a sizable discount off the $37.99 price-so went ahead.

The book looks fantastic, sporting a cover by Mark Romanoski and really wonderful images by Stephen Bryant for each story, with an additional bookend set of images of The Green Hornet and The Phantom Ruben Procopio and Jeff Butler. Man, I want an original by Procopio someday...and the Butler piece shows why he is just right for the Moonstone line of books.  And it is purple with a slipcover. I don't own near enough purple books.

The stories are an interesting bunch and there are several highlights.  There isn't a bad apple in the bunch and it is obvious that great care was taken to keep The Phantom the character we know and love without taking away the authors individual stamp.  For reviews sake I'll just pick three that stood out in particular...

The Phantom of Cobtree Manor is Matthew Baugh's working The Phantom in to what feels like a 60s Gothic horror film that mixes exploding glass, the ghost of Captain Clegg and a woman that may or may not be mad.  If Mario Bava needed to do a Phantom film, I think it may have played out quite a lot like this.  What is nice is that both Walker and The Phantom share the stage, both of which bring humor and heroics to the table.  Great fun.

A Grim Certitude by Nathan Meyer feels really unique and the writing really sucked me in with a very unexpected style.  Sort of familiar...  The Phantom is on a rescue mission where time is of the essence and a nuns life hangs in the balance.  The majority of the story takes place in thirty seconds and Meyer handles it really well.  I loved this one.  This column has already covered a few Mack Bolan books and I was pleasantly surprised to see Meyer as one of the people that has written a bunch of Gold Eagle adventures. I'm predisposed to this style, and it was nice to find a Phantom tale written at Automag pace.

Encounters On A Jungle Night by Aaron M. Shaps was also a great surprise and is placed early in the book to good effect. Following a very classic styled tale by Tom Defalco, this is a Phantom tale told from the perspective of a Nazi soldier at a weird place called Outpost Zero.  Mad Science! Monsters! Dismemberment! The Phantom! More Dismemberment! Totally nuts and it doesn't feel like any other Phantom tale I can think of.  I can't pay higher praise to the author than the fact that it felt new and fresh without forgetting exactly who The Phantom is.

I can't help mentioning a few others...especially No Ghosts Need Apply and I Of The Storm which both knocked my socks off...but frankly, there was never a boring minute and I enjoyed it all.   If I have one pet peeve it shows up in the fun to read by typesetting challenged The Devil's Kettle by Will Murray.  Good story, but it looks as if an uncorrected version was run. Hyphenated words bump lines down, Paragraph breaks are skipped and there is a little gum up in the story that makes me think the wrong file got placed in the final product.

This gave me an interesting insight as a reader however...in the last 5 years I've read to my children every night, and that has actually slowed my reading pace down a lot, but I enjoy it more and have found telling stories to others has matured my reading.  But, typos and line glitches are now catastrophic!  I don't know if this has happened to any of you, but it was the first time this has happened for me.

The extras included in the hardcover are a brief history of The Phantom that is a nice overview and is a bit bittersweet as it ends with Moonstone's accomplishments with the character and does not look forward from there.  Also, a strong story by Saurav Mohapatra and CJ Henderson entitled The Plague ends on a nice note and feels very much in the spirit of a Lee Falk story, just told with a slightly different point of view.   The Phantom has a rich history of publication, and I believe that Mohapatra is the first Indian author to make an imprint with the good ring of protection!  Awesome.

I'm not going to skip over one of the most intriguing parts of the book, and one that should easily earn your dollars for the softcover at the least...Harlan Ellison contributes an essay / story fragment called The Soul of Solomon which is a must read for both fans and creators that enjoy and handle iconic characters. The essay details the process, and unraveling, of a tale that would join The Phantom and The Green Hornet that involves suicide and all kinds of weird and cool plot twisting.  But Ellison comes to a seemingly simple yet incredibly well defined reason to not finish his story.  Icons stand. Bending them because you can, and not because you should, is the key to making a story work.  Someone needs to license this and create a textbook with this as Chapter 1.  Marvel should hang it on the door to the office (never mind that Dynamite Entertainments editorial staff should have Ellison come in and read it to Alex Ross)...if you ever wanted to tale that cool story you thought up, read this first.  It won me over, because as I started it I kept thinking that Ellison was being smarmy and self absorbed, and then I wacked myself in the head when I got it.

The Phantom Chronicles 2 keeps The Man Who Could Not Die relevant and respectful, and I could not have enjoyed it more.  Maybe, someday...a volume 3 can emerge from the Eastern Dark!

Pugilistic And Ballistic : Books That Blow Your Face Off #4

Today we have a selection of Motorbikes and Hutsploitation as we first go right up to the May 2010 Mack Bolan offering and then enlist in Cody's Army and unleash a flag waving good time!

"The bullets entered his face, leaving marks that looked like an angry case of chicken pox, and exited through holes that weren't much larger than the entrance holes.  But they did their intended job, scrambling the man's reptilian brain stem on their way through."

After realizing that I had not read a Mack Bolan book that was written more than 20 years ago I trundled down to the only place I know that carries the Gold Eagle line at a discount (The New England Mobile Book Fair) and grabbed up The Executioner #378-Death Run and gave it a read.  Not bad really, though I noticed that the story plays a lot like the show 24. Mack Bolan. Jack Bauer. Jack. Mack. Bolan. Bauer. Hmm....

Terrorists decide to blow up Los Angeles and we call CTU (no no, sorry) Stony Man in to action!  The unique and fun setting this time is a set up mixing Malaysians, Al Qaeda and a Phillipino Gang setting a MotoGP team to smuggle in Plutonium to blow up the city in order to get at some diplomats...and the rest of the city as collateral damage!  We spend as much time with the various factions as we do Mack Bolan in this novel. But nobody slays 'em like Bolan, even in the year 2010.  Mack has a cellphone, a GPS and tons of high performance bikes to zip around on during lengthy high speed ballistics n' rubber burning chase sequences.  

The villains are eeevil, this time we have a sadistic torturer reducing humans to lumps of flesh AND a meth dealer with a dog name McVeigh! Mack strikes down the bad guys in gory fashion, yet still manages to keep the human element that I enjoy as he takes at least one Spaghetti Western styled beatdown and mess up a few bits of his operation.  All in all, Death Run was a fun way to watch a stripped down season of your favorite action TV show in two sittings, yet still manages to retain the fun and flavor of Mack Bolan. 

In 2010 Bolan is a little more refined and tech support oriented, but fun nonetheless.  Sometimes the fun in an adventure novel is to get immersed in a different world, and I never expected to have an equal amount of motorcycle and car porn in my gun porn!!  But...it works, mostly because author Darwin Holmstrom brings his expertise in motorcycles to the table and makes it easy for a novice to understand and still meet the physics bending reality of high speed chases without going in to all out science fiction.  I'm sure that he was working on Let's Ride at the same time he was researching all of this material.

While the lead villains have moved to the terrorist cells of Al Qeada, Bolan remains Bolan and bodies and machines go BOOM while we are treated to a loving run down of all of the weapons the soldier uses in his never ending war.  The only knock I can really give against this, and it has little to do with the content of the book, is that I prefer the more dated adventures for the ambiance of the dated dialogue and attitudes.  Perhaps this is what brings me to the novels of the 70s and 80s so much, not only are they insane fantasy action stories, but they take me to a favorite time in exploitation film.  This is slick and technologically advanced fiction.  A great read, but I think I'm still more intrigued by Mack vs. The Mafia!

"It is a climate made for violence.

If that came their way, the men of Cody's Army were prepared."

Rah Rah Sis BOOOOOOOOOM Bah(m)!  Cody's Army is here!  Well, you can't even imagine how excited one of the authors of the book on Italian Action Films was when he saw that cover and that title.  Fred Williamson once wailed "I ain't going to no GottDamm Phillipines!" as The Black Cobra, but I've seen so many waterfalls and huts explode I just love that area of the world for some action.  And while it has many faults, Cody's Army delivers on action in big doses.  

Cody and his crack outfit are sent in to rescue an American family from the evil Col. Locsin and his "Flip" cronies, and the first 70 pages of the story are basically one huge infiltrate, rescue, destroy mission that sets up a subplot of a rebellious teenage daughter that goes native for a brief time so that Cody's Army has someone to protect for the remaining 130 pages.  Turns out, she also rats out her dad, who is working as an engineer, as an ex-CIA operative.   So, everyone wants him...but it all unravels as we meet up with at least 4 different groups attempting to pull of Operation Thunderstrike.  You have mean Malaysians, angry Philippino toughs, government officials and more.  But have no fear.  Cody is backed up by the President of the United States to just smash everyone in to tiny little bad guy bitlets.  And they do. 

While the plot is generic and the pace slows down to a crawl after the opening salvo, I found myself enjoying this book more for the authors attention to describing what is going on with the Philippines after the Marcos regime was forced from power than I was the 2 Star Generals damning Cody for being recklessness while asking God to love him for his heroism.  Action wise...it is fine, I liked the final assault sequence and helicopter battles quite a bit, but nothing goes as over the top as something like Killsquad, which left me feeling a little dry. 

I mentioned enjoying the period atmosphere in the Bolan review above, and it is true...Cody's Army would have made an excellent Cannon film, it has enough action as to not break the bank for a film company and the pace is almost exactly the same.  But this is a book and there is no budget to worry about.  I honestly never really looked at why all those 80s Philippino action films had so many insurgents, counter insurgents and corrupt government officials.  After a little checking, it seems that the author of this one had his facts straight. I may not have loved the book, but it did give me a nice way to appreciate all the action films I love.  Not that Strike Commando really needed a lot of clarifying-yet to use that old dubbing chestnut..But Still....

Non-Essential reading, but I will always love the title of this one...PHILIPPINE HARDPUNCH rocks!

Pugilistic and Ballistic - Books That Blow Your Face Off #2

Time for more masculine adventuring in the neo-pulp world with today's installment of Pugilistic and Ballistic--THE SLAVER EDITION!  Two titanic tales of flesh peddling, sex smuggling and vengeful vanquishing.  First up...Mack Bolan goes berserk in THE EXECUTIONER #60--SOLD FOR SLAUGHTER!

Bolan huddled underneath the rain of flesh and shrapnel, battered by the heavy-metal thunder of the blast.

Bolan finds himself on a rescue mission in a slave pit where a one time ally, Smiley Dublin the sexy Sensitive Ops Agent, has found herself imprisoned.  Luckily, Mack uses one of his mob Ace pseudonyms to pull off a rescue and demolish operation on her behalf. But it just leads to another case in the files of The Executioner as the seeds of the slavers evil are in need of being burnt out of existence, and Bolan will do just that. Following the stench of sold human skin all the way to Algiers (a place that seems to have bad connotations for Bolan as we are given an Executioner history lesson)-and straight in to the heart of human hate.  Toss in the fact that Smiley can't stay out of trouble and ends up right back in the hands of the grubby flesh merchants and beneath the torture instruments of the sadistic Countess-it is double time for the grisly gun muzzles of Mack the Mangler.  Parabellum punishment ahead!

I love Mack Bolan books. Good ones, bad ones, barely plotted ones, over plotted ones....they are always a fast and furious read.  This one is from 1983, which would put me right at 15 years old and about the right age for when I was most in to the Gold Eagle line.  While the sleaze is really off page for the most part, it is the unrelenting glee which Mack Bolan turns the bad guys in to human mulch that puts him in a class by himself when everything is working right.  Mike Newton knows how to keep plot straight forward, gun porn practically bludgeoning and manages to find intriguing ways for Bolan to bring the pain on a page to page basis.  

And he writes the phrase Parabellum Manglers a whole lot.  I'd love to use that as a band name.  

Sold For Slaughter may be run of the grist mill in everything but the action scenes-but if you are there for anything but enjoying the Jason X of ballistic mayhem do his thing then you will probably never encounter this book.  Start it at breakfast, enjoy your day, finish at bedtime...I had a blast.  I'm still enjoying reading the cover blurb, is it me or would a letter "a" make this much smoother?  Also note, the cover image is actually a FANTASY of the female agent. Woah!

I think there are more badguys mulched in the first 100 pages of this book than the entire run of Black Samurai. 

Brett picked up a fork from the table in front of the man who'd lit the match and thrust it in to the man's heart. The stunned, overweight Mexican gasped and fell forward into a plate of half eaten refried beans and chicken bones.

Ah the Ninja Master series (see review of #1 here)..."Wade Barker" is always welcome in my paperback perusal.  This entry see Brett Wallace now as a full blown Ninja for hire if justice is on your side character...and a missing TWA hostess becomes the target of his investigation.  She gets in to more than a little trouble on a Mexican layover, and instead of a little boozing and shopping, she ends up in a flesh market, stripped, shaved and available for test drives by anyone interested in purchasing her from the malefic General Estrada.  Lucky for this stewardess, she is Japanese and her boyfriend has access to the United Ninja Help Line!   Brett has his regular farewell sex scene and pulls his pal Jeff Archer along for a mayhem filled ride of sleaze and smashing just over the border.  

Reviewing number 1 I was surprised how low on the nastyometer it was, but not so here.  THIS is what I remember the series being like.  Besides the upped and more hardcore sex, the violence is all of the flesh shredding and pummeling variety-and the General gets up to things like sponsoring vicious cat fights and lesbian sex shows.  The hapless stewardess, Meiko, does get to bust some battle moves, but also finds that her first lesbian experience, performed under duress, gives her "explosive" orgasms-surely something her boyfriend at home will benefit from.  Also look for a near Cannibal Holocaust styled torture sequence near the books end that will leave a dent on readers.  That makes the books kick off castration look gentle.  Overall, a very nasty dip in to the deep end of American Ninja Exploitation Novels of the 80s.  

Since my last post I was informed by Ballistic Book Bearer John Grace that Ric Meyers is not "the" Wade Barker but "a" Wade Barker.  It makes sense as later books would be much more ninjariffic and martial arts oriented. These early volumes are only as exotic as shuriken belt buckles and the occasional lapse into Kung-Fu styled flashbacks, but I don't care. I dig 'em.  

Now, who exactly is this Wade Barker...I must know!  

Pugilistic And Ballistic : Books That Blow Your Face Off #1

For me the term MEN'S ADVENTURE is not really a pulp era term...I grew up as a comic book kid, but my local shop was stacked to the gills with action paperbacks that ranged from Black Samurai dudes chopping and Bolan and his Able Team smashing to Ninjas hacking and trashing with a blissful quickness that still thrills me.  I can't believe it has been almost 4 years since I covered any of these great 70s and 80s Neo-Pulps on this blog!  Has it been that long since I enjoyed a PENETRATOR novel??  Well, not any more...  I found my way back to these a while back with a little inspiration from unpacking some books from my last move combined with my frequent trips to Bookgasm and the Bullets, Broads, Blackmail & Bombs column by Bruce Grossman (who happens to live nearby and can build a mean kids rocket as well as drop Able Team bombs!  So...lets get to it!

In this post on the HYBRID MAN strip I mentioned how much that story stuck in my mind.  While I was happy to read about almost any character that had a name that threatened violence upon the reader as a young man-and still do-one of the fondest memories of becoming a sleaze and trash novel fan I can name is the "Wade Barker" penned NINJA MASTER series.  These books are pretty much like taking the movie American Ninja and letting Andrea Bianchi pen scripts around the concept. And yes, as a younger man I must admit to hoping to pick up Wade Barker's sword after he finished the Ninja Master books for my own adventure with Brett Wallace and his rather peculiar brand of justice.
Time to revisit the Ninja Master with episode 1...VENGEANCE IS HIS!

"Brett stepped in front of them and, screaming as he did so, punched the pencil once through Teddy's heart and, pulling the bloody instrument quickly out of one wound plunged it in to Bobby's heart.  Both men fell in their tracks and blood began pumping out of their chests like pulsating geysers."

When we first meet Brett Wallace he is actually a happy fella named Brett Ashford-he makes his rich parents proud by returning from Japan with a beautiful wife and a pregnancy to announce to all his socialite friends. He has studied martial arts and had a chance meeting with a ninja, but turned away from that path in order to enjoy a quiet life of family and love...
And then some thugs break in at random and rape and murder his pregnant wife and dismember his family.
Oh, it is on...NINJA STYLE bitches!! NINJA STYLE!!
After the justice system fails him, Brett must take his own vengeance, killing the gang that was just out for some fun and got carried away while robbing his family. With his bare hands.  This confuses his sense of martial morality, but there is a solution--one that will benefit us all!
Brett is left with no choice but to return to Japan, become a ninja over a 9 year period (which the book just skips sadly) and heads to San Francisco to set up shop as a NINJA VIGILANTE OF DESTINY!
Not only that, but he manages to score a beautiful woman thanks to some ninja connections, open a restaurant and save a small neighborhood from certain destruction at the hands of a villainous gang.  By the time it is over...as in right at the final sentence, the team is formed as Brett, the sexy Rhea the restuarantuer / no strings attached sex scene and the awesomely named Jeff Archer are a team out to right some wrongs.

Now, I remembered these novels as the pinnacle of Ninja Trash Cinematic Pulp-and I was surprised at how tame this book is, but it sure doesn't take long to get rolling, because I belted down the first quarter of #3 this afternoon and it did not disappoint. This book really doesn't either-it is fun to watch things fall in line to create the Ninja Master.  Really, this is Death Wish 3 with shurikens more than anything-and while it may sound like I wanted more than what I got, read the first part of the sentence again.  DEATH WISH 3 WITH SHURIKENS!  I may have been left wanting more, but there is much more, and much trashier fun, ahead!
Some time ago I sent my Trashy Paperback guru, Curt of THE GROOVY AGE OF HORROR a copy of THE SKIN SWINDLE and it managed to even surprise him, so getting back in to these is going to be fun for me. 
There is a series of these books I've never even read, which is really exciting...I need to locate them all (and fill in my gap of #2-Mountain of Fear and #7 The Skin Swindle) and get cracking some thug skulls.  Looking at the first volume I'd have to say that Meyers didn't really write these well, but he has a great sense of pacing and junky details that I can't help but devour. One day I really must pick up the sword of Wade Barker and put together a Trashy Ninjitsu Opera  in honor of these books.

Wade Barker forever...I'm going in and I'm not coming out until every stereotypical bad guy gets a shuriken shoved up his ass...BRETT WALLACE STYLE!!