Unlikely Stories-The Legion of Super Heroes, "Heroes for Hire" 1969

 

Unlikely Stories--The latest in a very occasional series. (The first was published in a fanzine in the 1990s, the most recent here on this blog about eight years back!) The concept is to take any Silver Age comic book story at random and look at it through a more demanding eye than a child reader would have done at the time of publication.

 

Long before Marvel had a title with that name, we have today, “Heroes for Hire,” a late Silver Age Legion of Super Heroes story from the February, 1969 issue of ADVENTURE COMICS. 

 

Our story opens in deep space where a Science Police rocket ship—labeled U.P. for United Planets—is relentlessly pursuing a “fleeing criminal” across the galaxy. No indication of his crime that would justify such a chase, mind you, but the alleged bad guy eventually touches down on the planet Modo. This is something one of the Science Patrol officers is reluctant to do, asking his balding, overweight superior, “Haven’t you heard of…Modulus?”

 

 

“Bah…Space bilge!” is his reply and the ship touches down on Modo…only now it’s shaped entirely differently and says “Science Police” on the side where it said U. P. before. The guy being pursued has crashed his wounded ship but runs off away from it with no injuries whatsoever nor any problems with Modo’s atmosphere. 

 Six Science Police officers, also without any problems in the alien atmosphere, give chase, only to have the planet itself form a giant dirt hand to grab them as the perp makes a cackling getaway. Cut to…

 

Several Legionnaires are using their flight rings to fly toward the United Planets “Mind Drug Research Center,” summoned there because of a robbery in-progress stealing the center’s “forbidden mind drugs” to sell on the 30^thcentury black market. 

 

On seeing the heroes arrive, one of the thieves yells out, “Use Preparation L!” which would, presumably, be more effective under the circumstances than Preparation H. 

 

In this case, though, it’s more like “L” as in “LSD” as we’re subjected to not one but two pages of Brainiac 5 freaking out on a very psychedelic bad trip, at least as psychedelic as veteran comics artists Win Mortimer and Jack Abel could draw it. One can only imagine those pages in the hands of a more experimental artist like Ditko or Steranko! 

 

The late-arriving Superboy sucks up the gas, which serves to bring Brainy down quickly without having any effect on Superboy himself. The other Legionnaires find one of the crooks and take him in for “Interrogation,” which turns out to be a major privacy-violating super-hypnotic thought reading machine. Under its influence, they are told that Modulus IS the planet Modo. A living planet! You know, like Marvel created a couple years earlier in Thor with Ego. It’s said that even Superboy can’t go there as there is a known supply of Kryptonite on Modo. 

 

So, instead, the Legion sits tight and allows a crime wave to overtake Earth. Not sure why, as it seems they could easily capture the bad guys before they got anywhere NEAR Modo, which, as we’ve been told, is in “deep space.”

 

Meanwhile, Superboy—who’s spending an inordinate amount of downtime in the 30^thcentury but that’s another story, I guess—refuses to rescue a millionaire’s high tech plane full of passengers until a fee is negotiated. The millionaire pays, but vows to trash Superboy’s good name to the public. Meanwhile, Karate Kid has had a similar experience, saving rare books (good to know the 30^thcentury still HAS books!) for a fee of five million dollars. 

 

The Legion members—the same few. No indication where the others are—appear the next day on the show, MEET THE PRESS—still going after ten centuries! Gotta be some kind of record there! Superboy, using language that came AFTER his time period, and no doubt died off centuries before the one he’s in, tells the world, “We’re just trying to earn a little bread the only way we know how.” The public turns against the Legion and as they walk away, Superboy is so distracted he even steps in his word balloon! 

 

Brainiac 5, Karate Kid, Princess Projectra, Duo Damsel, and Superboy decide to leave Earth for a friendlier planet but, instead, operate out of a Legion Cruiser in deep space with an apparently limitless fuel and oxygen supply. 

 

We see a news broadcast about the epidemic crime wave and how the Galactic Guard—analogous to the National Guard?—has blockaded Modo to no effect.

 

We next see Superboy refusing to save a little girl trapped on a high building ledge on the radioactive planet of Gnogg which looks a lot like future earth only, presumably, the humans are all radioactive. After a long and agonizing negotiation, the child’s father pays the Boy of Steel 500 Ergloks—pure radium—and he finally uses his super-breath to catch her just before she hits the ground!

 

Projectra earns living crystal money using her illusions to create advertising on an alien world, while Karate Kid enters an amateur boxing match for pay. Superboy brings in some money that’s just balls of pure energy. A mysterious radio call comes in from Duo Damsel but, after this, the members return to Earth somehow and go on a mad spending spree, leaving their home-away-from-home ship lying in deep space, where some criminals decide to take advantage of their absence and attack it for the riches everyone knows the Legion has amassed! “We caught ‘em by surprise. The ship’s losing oxygen,” says one after they zap the red rocket with a ray. The reader, however sees a gigantic hole straight through the center of the spacecraft so presumably it’s losing more than just oxygen!

 

Just then, though, Brainiac 5 and a Legion member we’d not yet seen in this issue, Chemical King, escape in an escape pod. From a safe distance, the latter uses his power long range to start a chemical chain reaction that causes a Rube Goldberg-like progression in which the living crystal money is freed to eat the energy ball money and the radium money, etc, etc, ultimately creating paralysis rays that paralyze everyone and everything on Modo when the bad guys tow the ship there to clean out its loot. Brainiac 5’s plan worked like a charm! Or should we say young writer Jim Shooter’s? We discover that Duo Damsel was the one who went and found Chemical King, on whom the plan was completely dependent! Mighty far along before they noticed he wasn’t on board with it—literally AND figuratively! Brainy notes that even Modulus was paralyzed and will be “helpless, once off Modo.” Wait a sec. I thought we established Modulus WAS Modo! Seeing as how Modulus turned out to be almost completely incidental to the issue’s plot, I guess it doesn’t much matter. What matters is that the Legion will now pay back everyone with interest and their reputations will immediately be restored. Surely there won’t be any intergalactic lawsuits or anything. So, as we leave our tiny band of heroes (and again, there were like 25 members at this point. Were the others even consulted on this plan?) in a second big red Legion cruiser, this one with LEGION written in gigantic letters on its side, my question is…whatever happened to Superboy? He disappears from the story completely after sort of rescuing that poor little girl who will likely be traumatized for the rest of her life because of his callousness! 

 

Sadly, it was stories like this that got the Legion strip canceled for a time just three issues later. 

Back Issue and Friday On My Mind

 

For those of you who follow my writing elsewhere, I wrote the FRIDAY FOSTER article in this issue of BACK ISSUE coming from TwoMorrows this summer. It's my ONLY piece in BACK ISSUE in 2022 although I continue my regular column, ONCE UPON A LONG AGO, in every issue of TwoMorrows' COMIC BOOK CREATOR.

If you aren't familiar with the FRIDAY FOSTER newspaper comic strip, you've got time to catch up before my article as the complete collection of gorgeous FRIDAY FOSTER color Sunday pages recently came out and it's a gem! Here's my review from last month on FORCES OF GEEK!

https://forcesofgeek.com/2021/12/friday-foster-the-sunday-strip-review.html

You can pre-order BACK ISSUE here and issues of COMIC BOOK CREATOR on the same site: 

https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_54&products_id=1668

Superman's Pop Meets Fellow Hero Dads

This World War II vintage photo shows the presumably one-and-only meeting of Major Laurie York Erskine, creator of Renfrew of the Mounties, Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan of the Apes, and Jerry Siegel, creator of Clark Kent of Metropolis.

 

Mental Health America Fundraiser for My Friend

https://www.facebook.com/donate/887722658607889/1538195003224148/

Did you ever know anyone with mental health issues? I'm betting you did because many conditions that used to go undiagnosed are now out in the open...at least on some levels. It's not that more people have issues but more people than ever KNOW they have issues. Maybe YOU do?

I've known a number of folks who have been dealing with severe depression, being bi-polar, etc. Some have been employees, some relatives, but all friends whom I hated to see suffer when society preferred to act like everything wasn't as bad as they knew inside it was. 

One of my friends is a young woman who nowadays has her own situations under control...but still there. Her birthday is coming up on January first of 2022, and she has started a Facebook fundraiser to benefit Mental Health America.  

Please give some thought to helping my friend reach her birthday goal with a small contribution. It's SO close!  

I thank you and Amy does as well. Here's the link:

https://www.facebook.com/donate/887722658607889/1538195003224148/

 

Christmas in the Funnies in the Forties

 

Bond Not Bond Blogathon: The Man from Hong Kong-George Lazenby

 

Just because Sean Connery swore off Bond films after YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE in 1967 certainly didn’t mean that Cubby Broccoli and company were going to retire 007 and his license to kill (at the box office!). Almost immediately, testing began to find a new, unknown (or more or less unknown) actor to play England’s favorite secret agent in another Fleming “adaptation,” ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE. In 1968, LIFE magazine did a big feature about the finalists, debuting Australian model George Lazenby as the final choice based largely—as producer Cubby Broccoli would later say—on how macho he came across. 

 

What happened next has been well-documented in numerous places. Lazenby’s Bond movie and his performance in it received decidedly mixed reviews and he was reportedly convinced by his agent that spy movies would no longer be hot in the 1970s so he quit. Either that or he was dropped from his contract.

Although George claimed at first to have many offers from major studios, his next film was a low budget international production called UNIVERSAL SOLDIER in 1971. He turned up fairly often in gossip columns with stories about his being unreliable, unemployable, and even uninsurable due to some debilitating condition he had contracted. One gossip columnist said Lazenby, “was last seen practicing yoga atop some hill in India.” At the same time, he started taking martial arts lessons and ended up in magazines like the newly released in 1973 FIGHTING STARS, meant to cash in on the martial arts movie craze hitting America. 

 

That craze had George reportedly in contact with Bruce Lee, whose star was leading the way in the genre. Lee is said to have wanted Lazenby for his all-star GAME OF DEATH, the film he began and was hoping to finish before Hollywood came calling with ENTER THE DRAGON.

 

With Lee’s untimely death in July of 1973, his last unfortunately named movie was tabled, to be rewritten as an exploitative cash-in half a decade later using some of Lee’s original footage and a host of better remembered stars than Lazenby in a newly contrived plot.

 

At the time of Bruce’s death, however, his producer Raymond Chow was left with the completely unexpected sudden loss of his major cash-generating star and scrambled to find a replacement as well as try different types of movies using martial arts. 

 

Which brings us to THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, a 1975 Raymond Chow co-production set mainly in Australia, of all places, and starring longtime martial arts star Jimmy Wang Yu. Known for his roles as the one-armed boxer and one-armed swordsman, Jimmy was actually in possession of all his limbs. Despite his boyish good looks and his movie martial arts skills, he had no real personality to speak of and tended to come across as a matter-of-fact, by the book kind of guy. This served him well in this picture as he was playing an out-of-his-element Hong Kong policeman dispatched to Australia on what should have been a simple mission to return an arrestee (the great Sammo Hung, who also choreographed the picture). 

 

It’s the Australian setting that allows for the significant presence of ex-Bond George Lazenby—a consolation prize, perhaps, from Raymond Chow.

 

The picture starts in the best Bond tradition with a pre-credit sequence, although it doesn’t feature either of our stars at all. Instead, Sammo Hung is on an Australian tour bus, meeting someone for an exchange of money and drugs during a remote stop. But the two men doing the exchange are spotted and bolt, only for Sammo to be captured by the authorities after a lively chase. The other man is killed.

This segues directly into the film’s excellent title sequence, to my mind one of THE best title sequences of any film of the 1970s. The producers apparently planned it that way, too, as more money was reportedly dropped on getting a hit song out of the sequence than was spent for much of the rest of the picture.

 

That song was “Sky High,” by the UK-based band, Jigsaw, as catchy an earworm as there ever was and a perfect theme song here. I’ll go so far as to call it the best Bond theme that never was. Over training footage of the Hong Kong police force, with Jimmy Wang Yu as Hong Kong’s Inspector Fang, we watch as a mysterious hang glider circles the cityscape in spectacular fashion only to land right in the middle of the police academy training exercise field. 

 

Turns out to be an Australian woman journalist (although actually performed by a male stuntman) and Fang is both stern and smitten with her to the point that they’re in bed together before Fang heads off on his routine extradition jaunt to the land of Oz. Routine but for the fact that his charge is killed before he can return him to Hong Kong.

 

Said to have been conceived as Wang Yu’s first English language film, he was nonetheless dubbed, poorly at times, as the violent police Inspector. Lazenby, as Sydney, Australia’s drug overlord and crime kingpin, steals the spotlight. One critic even wrote, “A crash course in martial arts and Sammo Hung’s excellent choreography transformed Lazenby into a credible performer. In THE MAN FROM HONG KONG, he moved rather better than nominal leading man Wang Yu does.

 

George, as “businessman” Jack Wilton, makes his first appearance more than a half an hour into the picture, sporting a stylish mustache and arriving at his private dojo with a decidedly less than impressive young woman who could never have made it as a Bond Girl. Elsewhere, Inspector Fang has just taken out one of his best men and Wilton surveys his students in action in order to find a suitable replacement. When he isn’t impressed, the cocky Wilton himself takes on three at once. 

 

Wilton is described as a “Mr. Big,” into drugs, prostitution, gun-running, and carrying a lot of political muscle, also. The Aussie cops Fang is working with have never been able to get anything on him but Fang determines to stop him personally once and for all after Wilton has him nearly killed. Fang and his escorts go to see the big man but fail to do so. Seems he’s off in his sumptuous penthouse apartment with its sunken living room arranging a “slight accident” for the annoying Inspector Fang.

 

Fang contacts the only Australian he knows, the sky-riding lady journalist from the credits, and gets her to take him along as her plus one to a fancy outdoor Wilton party where the two finally do meet. Lazenby here shows not only more charm than Wang Yu but, really, more than he did as Bond, too. The pair play a little cat and mouse before Wilton goads his enemy into a kung-fu battle dance where each man holds his own, augmented by sound effects, of course. Sneak that he is, Wilton steps off to the side, leaving the fight to his stuntmen bodyguards. In the end, it’s Caroline, the journalist, who stops the fight just as Wilton had taken aim at Fang with a crossbow. 

 

Another young woman is introduced to the plot and given a romantic subplot with Fang, complete with sappy love song and softcore sex scene, only to be killed off by a bomb attached to the vehicle she’s in with her new paramour. In movie time, they hadn’t even known each other 15 minutes, but now it was personal. 

 

Fang goes after Wilton’s men while Wilton makes more attempts on Fang’s life as well. Finally, taking a cue from Caroline’s earlier hang-gliding—as well as the picture’s original title, THE DRAGON FLIES—the Inspector borrows the hang glider for a sail over beautiful Sydney directly onto Wilton’s roof. An epic, climactic kung-fu battle occurs after Fang kicks in through Wilton’s high-rise window, leading to not only evidence of Wilton’s evildoing but also to his explosive demise.

 

 

Cue “Sky High” for the closing credits.

 

THE MAN FROM HONG KONG wasn’t a huge budgeted movie and it was the very first directorial effort for Brian Trenchard-Smith. None of that showed onscreen, however, as this is an exciting mix of cop drama and kung-fu flick, loaded with dangerous stunts (both Lazenby and Jimmy Wang Yu were injured during production) and action sequences. It’s a little lopsided that the villain is more personable than the hero but that actually looked good for George Lazenby’s comeback prospects. 

 

Unfortunately, that was not to be, as George settled back into under the radar international tax dodge flicks and, later, the occasional 007 cameo homage or documentary. In time, his acting got better, and he worked fairly steadily in TV and sometimes low-budget films, but he never did recapture the momentum he had been handed on a silver platter with Bond, or that he almost seemed to grab again in 1975 with THE MAN FROM HONG KONG.