Sos The Rope (Battle Circle #1)

Sos The Rope, by Piers Anthony

October, 1968  Pyramid Books

Sos The Rope started life as a three-part serialized novel in The Magazine Of Fantasy And Science Fiction (July-September, 1968), before being published as this slim paperback. Then in 1978 it was collected with its sequels, Var The Stick (1972) and Neq The Sword (1975), as a fat mass market paperback titled Battle Circle. It was the collected edition that I read, but I’ll review the titles separately because I’m just that kind of guy. 

I recall picking up Battle Circle sometime in 2017, and recently discovered it in a box in my garage, of all places. Indeed, I discovered it on the very same day I (re)discovered my copies of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant (those were in a different box in a different room, though; I guess I’m just a hoarder at heart). 

While he is incredibly prolific, the only Piers Anthony novels I have read are the Jason Striker series and the Total Recall novelization. Thus I cannot say I am an expert in the style of Piers Anthony, but Sos The Rope reads very much like those other books: a somewhat formal tone to the narrative, with a somewhat lurid feeling (this is a good thing, of course), but nothing too exploitative or explicit (this is a bad thing, of course). 

The biggest comparison to Jason Striker is the dumb-ass protagonist. As we’ll recall, Jason Striker was this tough judo master who happened to be a ‘Nam vet, but he blundered like a fool from one situation to the next. The same holds true of this novel’s protagonist, the titular Sos The Rope, who basically gets his ass handed to him again and again in the battle circles of this post-nuke America. And like Striker he makes one poor choice after another, usually a victim of his own nature. 

Anyway, we know from the outset that Sos The Rope is set in a post-nuke world; or, post “Blast,” as the characters refer to it. In the first pages we have references to plastic, a refrigerator, and even television, yet at the same time it is clear this is a primitive society, with men wandering around on foot and challenging one another in the formalized, ritualized practice of battle-circle dueling. 

It’s worth noting however that this is not a bloodthirsty post-nuke society by any means; the battle circle fights are rarely to the death and are more so ritualized ways of settling differences or matters of honor. Brawny men choose their names, specialize in one of the weapons allowed in the battle circle (swords, staffs, knives, etc), and roam the post-nuke country like nomads. What sets off the course of Sos The Rope, and the ensuing trilogy, is a meeting between two men who have the same name: Sol. 

I’ll admit, the first several pages were a bumpy read. There’s nothing like trying to make sense of a post-nuke pulp from decades ago in which two muscular men, both named Sol, challenge one another in a battle circle on the windswept plains while a nameless young woman (with a “voluptuous body”) watches on. I had a helluva time keeping track of which Sol was which, but basically one of them has long black hair and a beard, and the other one has long blonde hair and no beard. 

The bearded one is Sol The Sword, because that’s his weapon; the beardless one is Sol of All Weapons, and he carries around a wheelbarrow or something with all his fighting gear. The two men meet at a hostel – a place, we’re informed, that was set up by “the crazies” and is used as lodging for the nomadic warriors – and they have a friendly disagreement over who “owns” the name Sol. They decide to settle their differences in the battle circle by the hostel, all while some busty chick who works at the hostel watches on, ready to give herself to the winner. 

Anthony, given his martial arts background, is pretty good with hand-to-hand fight description, as proven with Jason Striker. But still, it’s hard to know which Sol is which, let alone which one to root for. Not that it matters, as neither is killed and indeed they become lifelong friends: but, for what it’s worth, “our” Sol, ie the supposed hero of this novel who will become “Sos,” gets his ass kicked and loses – which, of course, sets the tone for the rest of the book. 

The fight was for the name of Sol, and now that this Sol has lost, he needs a new name. Eventually he will become “Sos.” As for the busty girl, she gives herself to Sol, the winner, and so she becomes Sola – in other words, women don’t even have a name until a man has taken them, a sign of how male-dominated this post-Blast society is. If you listen closely, you can hear the piteous wailings of the ever-indignant wokesters over on Goodreads: “How dare Piers Anthony stoop to such misogyny! His female characters have no agency!” And etc. 

An interesting thing is that Anthony works his world-building into the narrative, never shoehorning us with info; eventually we learn that there is no rape in this post-Blast world, where the men actually respect the women. Indeed, there is a later part where Sos sleeps in a hostel that is occupied by a girl who has expressly come there to find a man, and since Sos is not interested in her (not suprising, given his overall lameness), she sleeps by him without concern of being raped. 

The nomadic warrirors wear metal bracelets, and the women they choose – whether for life or just for the night – wear the bracelet when chosen. Gradually I realized this was Anthony’s post-nuke spin on a wedding ring. But this is how Sola becomes Sola, wearing the bracelet of Sol – and she, Sol, and Sos will prove to be the three main characters of Sos The Rope. 

The trio venture into the Badlands, ie the still-radiated wastelands around the countryside, and encounter all kinds of brutal flora and fauna. The latter is evidenced by a rat swarm that might raise the hackles of more sensitive readers (as if sensitive readers would be reading a book titled Sos The Rope!). The bigger threat however is the love triangle that develops: Sola belongs to Sol, but Sos and Sola have a thing for each other. 

Sadly, it develops that Sol does not have a, uh, thing; left comatose from the bite of a mutant moth, Sol is dragged to safety from the rats and loses his clothes in the process, and Sos discovers that Sol is castrated; something Sola was already aware of. So basically she’s “married” to a guy who cannot give her the goods, yet still – for reasons of honor and such – Sos won’t give Sola what she clearly wants. 

I forgot to mention: Sos as a child was reared by “the crazies,” ie the tech-savvy overlords who run things behind the scenes. They are the ones who stock the high-tech hostels and whatnot, and have all the learnings of the pre-Blast world, and Sos has not only learned to read but knows a fair bit of history…though he is uncertain how true those ancient books really are. 

Piers Anthony does a good job of keeping the story moving while doling out small bits of background about the post-Blast world. Meanwhile the main narrative has Sos becoming Sol’s best buddy and sidekick; Sol dreams of starting an empire, but he knows he isn’t smart enough. Sos, meanwhile, is smart in all those ways, so Sos agrees to serve Sol for one year and help him gather men into an army. 

Meanwhile Sos and Sola become an item while Sol is off gathering men, but Anthony leaves it off-page. About the most us sleazehounds get are random mentions of Sola’s “voluptuous” build and pretty face…not much. But Sos manages to knock her up, though this tidbit is left off-page; curiously, Anthony leaves many important events off-page…most notably, a part where Sos challenges Sol in the battle circle for Sola and her newly-born daughter. 

Yes, Anthony cuts immediately to some time later, and we learn that Sos has once again had his ass handed to him. So much for the “rope” he’s learned to fight with; all this is after the empire has been started, and Sos has gone back to the crazies to learn what to fight with now that he’s lost the right to use a sword. A rope wouldn’t be my first choice, and anyway Sos still can’t beat Sol, so whatever. 

Here’s where Sos The Rope gets real interesting. It’s some time later and Sos has decided to end his life by climbing this big mountain that people go to when they’re ready to commit suicide. He climbs up and up, then “dies,” then wakes up in this high-tech “underworld” that is run by the crazies. He will eventually hook up with a lithe young (and small-statured) lady with major karate skills (again, the hanky-panky occurs off-page), but most importantly Sos here is augmented into a sort of cyborg warrior so as to be sent back out into the world to kill Sol and topple his empire. 

My assumption is Piers Anthony was influenced here by Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, and this sequence – where Sos dies and then goes to an underworld where he has plastic armor embedded beneath his skin, and his muscles augmented, and etc – reminded me very much of the Neoplatonist readings of The Iliad. 

Simply put, the Neoplatonic reading of the Iliad goes like this: when Achilles’ best friend/lover Patroclus is killed in battle by Hector while wearing the armor of Achilles, the idea is that Achilles himself has died. After Patroclus dies, Achilles stops eating the food of mortals and instead eats ambrosia, the food of the gods. He goes to his mother, who happens to be a minor-grade goddess, and she in turn goes to Hephastus, aka Vulcan, and asks this major god to forge divine armor for Achilles. Dressed in this divine armor, Achilles is unstoppable when he goes back to the war at Troy, eventually killing Hector. The Neoplatnic reading here is that Achilles the mortal has died, reborn in his divine armor – ie his divine soul. 

That’s all very basic, and I’m sure I missed quite a bit, but that’s the essential idea, and more importantly for the goal of this review – that is what Piers Anthony has happen to Sos the Rope. It was at this point, around a hundred pages in, with Sos transformed into a sort of walking tank, with armor plating beneath his skin, that I realized Sos The Rope was a post-nuke Iliad. 

At this point I was very much into the novel; it was just that sort of late ‘60s/early ‘70s sci-fi I love, with a metaphysical and slightly psychedelic edge, but again it was slightly undone by the blunderings of Sos – or, “The Nameless One” as he is now known, a giant who towers over the average men. Piers Anthony again gives us a doofus protagonist who can’t make up his own mind; Sos has carried a torch for Sola all this time, and indeed he decided to climb suicide mountain over his loss of her. But, despite only thinking of the little karate lady as a casual lay in the underworld, Sos realizes, after leaving her forever, that he was truly in love with her, not Sola! Actually, now that I think of it, Piers Anthony might understand male characters better than any other sci-fi writer. 

Seriously though, this kind of gets to be a little much, and takes away from Sos’s post-death meta-human makeover (we’re told his hair has even gone white, like he’s some sort of super-deformed anime hero). But even in his superhuman state Sos blunders, outing himself on his first night back in the real world and inadvertently letting one of Sol’s men know who he is – the idea is, see, that Sos takes the job from the crazies to kill Sol, but really he plans to sneak into the empire and tell Sol to end his empire, so that Sol doesn’t have to die. 

This entails a lot of fights with Sol’s underlings so Sos can prove himself – again, the fighting is for the most part bloodless (save for one fight where Sos accidentally kills someone), but it’s cool how Sos has essentially become the post-Blast Hulk. Even here Piers Anthony does a curious skipping of important parts and suddenly has Sol and Sos confronting each other, though Sol apparently doesn’t realize this huge cyborg creature is actually his old buddy, Sos (or maybe he does; Anthony leaves this vague). 

The finale of Sos The Rope is quite curious, with the two characters arguing with Sol’s chieftans over whether or not Sol’s empire should be disbanded. SPOILER ALERT: The finale is rather downbeat, with Sol himself deciding to head on up suicide mountiain, his little girl demanding to go along with him – and Sos sadly watches his old buddy stalk off, kicking himself that Sol will no doubt make it up the mountain alive and end up banging the cute little karate girl that Sos has only now realized he’s in love with. In other words: wash, rinse, repeat – Sos now has the woman he wanted, Sola, but again he is jealous of Sol, who will no doubt soon be giving the little karate girl some good lovin. 

Well, all this no doubt is covered in the next volume, Var The Stick, which I’ll be reading soon. I have to say, I quite enjoyed Sos The Rope, especially the unexpected eleventh-hour jump into a sort of meta-human Iliad riff. I hope Piers Anthony continues with this vibe in the next books; one can only imagine the surreal, over-budgeted, psychedelic mess of a film Alejandro Jodorowsky might’ve made out of it.

The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2

The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2, by Stan Lee and Frank Springer

October, 1977  Signet Books

The second (and final) volume of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant is better than the first volume. This slim, 121 page paperback picks up directly after the preceding volume, which collected the strips from October 11, 1976 through January 15, 1977; The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 collects another three months: January 16, 1977 through April 17, 1977. 

Curiously, the last page states that a third volume would be released soon, but it was not to be – no doubt because The Virtue Of Vera Valiant had already been canceled by the time this paperback was published, the last strip having been published on August 28, 1977. My assumption is The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 went to press before the cancellation happened. 

But even then, another insallment could have been published; the April 18, 1977 through August 28, 1977 strips could have comprised a third and final paperback, thus completing the series for those few readers who were interested. But I guess that is the key point; it seems clear that The Virtue Of Vera Valiant was not a succes, neither in newspapers nor in paperback. And, as I mentioned in my review of the first volume, it has yet to garner any kind of interest, or even any cult fame – to this day the full strip has not been collected. 

The unfortunate thing is that The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 is much better than the first volume, and indicates that Stan Lee had figured out how to write the series. Whereas the first volume came off as tepid, given that Lee was spoofing soap opera melodrama and pathos without bothering to offer compelling storylines, in the strips collected here he has realized he needs to deliver a plot that pulls readers in, while still coming off as overly melodramatic. 

Again, though, Stan Lee has a tendency to jettison subplots without warning. The Virtue Of Vera Valiant ended with Vera Valiant being approached by elderly but dashing network CEO Martin C. Martin to be the star of a soap opera that would be real – in other words, reality TV before reality TV. The stories at the beginning of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 sort of follow on from this…but the “reality TV” thing is dropped posthaste, Lee focusing more on Martin C. Martin’s abrupt love for Vera. 

The reality TV stuff is ignored, save for a staff writer who sporadically appears, “taking notes” on the goings-on of the Valiant family (as a refresher, in addition to Vera there’s air-headed Aunt Gladys and portly loser Herbert). But even here the focus is more on romance; Aunt Gladys develops feelings for the writer, leading to the crazy-for-a-newspaper-in-1977 revelation that the writer is gay. I was a little surprised this made it into a mainstream newspaper; as it is, “gay” is never specifically stated, but twice we are informed the writer “doesn’t go for women.” 

But really the main focus of the first half of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 is Martin C. Martin pushing himself on Vera, who meanwhile pines for her boyfriend, Winthrop, who by the way has abruptly “disappeared.” It’s all very soapy and melodramatic, but done much better than such stuff was in the first book. Also, it gives artist Frank Springer a chance to do more than the threadbare, humdrum surroundings of the previous book; there’s a part where Vera and Martin C. Martin’s lothario son go to a disco, and there meet a femme fatale with the awesome name Ramona Rapture. 

This leads into a bizarre twist where a goon, who happens to be Ramona’s boyfriend, kidnaps Vera – but it turns out the goon works for Martin C. Martin, who moonlights as a crime kingpin! The whole “reality tv” angle is gone and forgotten and the second half of the book is all about crime boss Martin trying to blackmail Vera into being his woman. 

Herbert, the loser brother, has been talking about a new business deal he’s working on, and it turns out he’s been working with Martin C. Martin. But the crime boss opens an adult bookstore in Herbert’s name, and will only take Herbert’s name off of it if Vera agrees to be his woman – the adult bookstore, by the way, also being a bit more risque than what I would’ve expected from a 1977 newspaper strip, but the only thing we see of it is the marque out front with “Herbert’s Adult Books” in big letters. 

Stan Lee also opens up the storyline with the return of Winthrop, and also the brief “awakening” of his wife Melba, who has been in a coma for the past 14 years. Melba, whose face is never seen, starts talking in her sleep, providing oracles and whatnot, and her latest revelation is that Vera Valiant will soon die. When Vera claims that Melba never met her, thus throwing into question how accurate Melba’s predictions could be, Winthrop responds that Melba “didn’t know Jimmy Carter, either, but she predicted his election!” 

This brings a subtle but interesting supernatural bent to The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2, as Vera is freaked out in the final strips collected here that Melba’s prophecy will be fulfilled. Again it’s played for laughs, and Stan Lee has a hard time being both serious and funny – for example, Martin C. Martin’s goons take Herbert into a back room to torture him for not paying on his loan, but in the next strip we see that all they’re doing is forcing him to watch three soap operas on three televisions. 

Still, though, I enjoyed The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 more than I thought I would, given that I didn’t enjoy the first one very much. Stan Lee has better found his footing and Frank Springer’s art is great as it was the first time, but it did seem as if some of the panels here were a little blurry. Not sure if it’s just my particular copy or if the reproduction process wasn’t done as well as it was for the first volume. 

Until the series is fully collected – that is, if it ever is – we’ll just have to wonder what else happened in the ensuing (and final) four months of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. As mentioned the last page of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2 mentions what will happen in the never-published third volume, noting a stranger who comes into the life of Aunt Gladys.  This no doubt refers to her runaway husband – the one who ran off with “a defrocked television repair person.” Recently I came across an eBay listing for a few Virtue Of Vera Valiant strips, and the seller happened to have the final strip listed. Here it is: 

This is the August 28, 1977 strip, aka the final strip of the series, so not only did Aunt Gladys get a Happily Ever After, but it looks like Vera and Winthrop did as well – Melba herself being on the phone was a perfect way to end the series, as she’s remained off-page the entire series…sort of like Niles’s wife on Frasier, now that I think of it. 

It’s debatable if Lee and Springer knew that the series was cancelled at the time. I’m betting they did, as the “cliffhanger” climax is in keeping with the series, and also brings the storyline full circle, as Melba, Winthrop’s wife with “sleeping sickness,” was one of the first subplots. Also the final “Next” caption, which is in keeping with the overdone, “melodramatic” tone of all the preceding such captions, plays in on the joke: “Did he say Melba?” 

Despite knowing that it no doubt played out on a goofy angle, I still find myself interested in the mention of the “psychic spell” that Vera falls under on the last page of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2. I wonder what that refers to. And also it sounds like poor Herbert is sent to jail, but I bet all of that was lame; as I mentioned in my review of the first book, Herbert seems to have come out of another strip entirely. Thankfully he’s hardly in the series. 

Anyway, I’m glad I picked up these two books back in 2009, and I’m still surprised that the entire run of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant has yet to be collected. If it ever is someday, I will be sure to read it. And also, it’s only now occurred to me that the series title is strangely similar to one of the more famous newspaper strips in history: Prince Valiant. I wonder if Stan Lee did this on purpose?

Here are more random photos of the inside of the book, but same as last time: the binding is so tight I could barely get a good photo of the interior!

The Virtue Of Vera Valiant

The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, by Stan Lee and Frank Springer

June, 1977  Signet Books

Last weekened I was in the room we use for storage and going through a bunch of boxes of junk. I came across a big printer box that had books in it, all of them still in the padded envelopes in which they’d been mailed to me (not sure why I never put them in a bookcase or whatever, but anyway). The majority of them were hardcover editions of the Greek/Roman poetry I was into many, many years ago (I guess my estrogen level must’ve been high at the time), but on the sides of the box were two smaller padded envelopes with mass market paperbacks in them. 

Of course, those were the packages I opened first – and they turned out to be this book, The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, and the sequel The Virtue Of Vera Valiant #2. According to the postage stamps, each book was mailed to me in June of 2009…pre-blog, baby! As I mentioned before, one of the reasons I started Glorious Trash was to force myself to actually read all the books I bought, so these two Vera Valiant paperbacks would’ve been read back then if I actually had a blog. 

I am not sure how I discovered these books, which were scarce and obscure then and apparently even more today; I am surprised to see that The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, a daily/weekly newspaper strip by Stan Lee and Frank Springer that ran from October 11, 1976 to August 28, 1977 has still not been collected, other than in these two old paperbacks.  And even then the full series was not collected, so even if you get these two paperbacks you aren't getting the entire strip run.  This perhaps shows how obscure the series really is, as even Lee’s other newspaper strip, The Amazing Spider-Man, has been collected. But then, it’s kind of unfair to compare Spider-Man to The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. 

I think I found out about these books shortly before I bought them from online sellers in June of 2009 thanks to the then-recent DVD release of soap opera satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. This was a soap that mocked soap convention, and since it was before my time (I was born in 1974, so would’ve been 2 years old when it was on TV) I’d never seen it. But I recall thinking the commercials for the DVD release were funny (to this day I still haven’t seen the show, though I still think it looks funny)…and somehow, somewhere, I learned that Stan “The Man” Lee had done a short-lived newspaper strip “inspired” by Mary Hartman. 

How inspired? Well, just check the back cover of this first Signet paperback collection, which even mocks the title of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, repeating “Vera Valiant” twice: 

So, Signet Books was aware that this strip was intended to be a soap opera spoof, same as Mary Hartman was. I wonder if actual newspaper readers knew this. I’m guessing not, hence the short life of The Virtue Of Vera Valiant. The book, by the way, is copyright The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, so I’m assuming they too were in on the joke. It’s also my understanding that some papers printed the series under the title “Vera Valiant, Vera Valiant,” to give further evidence of the strip’s inspiration. 

But the sad fact is that, judging from this 126-page paperback that collects the first three months of the series (October 11, 1976 to January 15, 1977), The Virtue Of Vera Valiant just isn’t very funny. This really surprised me; just the other month I mentioned how funny Stan Lee’s work was in the The Amazing Spider-Man strip. Here though his humor falls flat; the jokes do not seem very natural, given the artificial nature of the series itself (it’s intended to be a spoof of a stilted, melodramatic soap opera), and the jokes themselves are often of the groaner variety, or just lame in general. Also, there is a lot of repetition in setups and payoffs, but that seems to be standard in the disposable, ephemeral world of newspaper comic strips. 

We don’t get any setup or intro, and the strips are arranged on each page without the series banner. The Sunday strips, as they are longer than the dailies, take up a few pages – and more often than not they cover the same material as the dailies, only offering a little “new” material. And the Sundays are here printed in black and white, even though they were in color in the original newspaper printings. 

As I say, there is a lot of repetition, given that the audience might not be with the series every day; there could be weekend readers who only saw the Sunday strips, or weekday readers who didn’t see the daily strips, so Lee has to ensure the story is understandable for both parties. 

This also means there isn’t much in the way of continuity; subplots come up and are dispensed with wily-nily, with no explanation. This was another surprise, as the Spider-Man strips did have continuity, so my assumption is Lee was either finding his footing with this series (and perhaps dealing with editorial mandates), or he was spoofing the often surreal nature of soap operas themselves. But still, this makes for an unsatisfying read at times. 

The setup is simple: titular Vera Valiant is a young, dark-baired beauty in Hackensack, New Jersey – a lot of the easy jokes come from the fact that the story occurs in Hackensack, by the way. She lives with her Aunt Gladys (parelells to Peter Parker and Aunt May) and her brother Herbert; Aunt Gladys, in the little we see of her, is a doting but air-headed older lady, and Herbert is a heavyset buffoon. A lot of the repetitive “groaner” comedy comes from Herbert; there’s a lot of jokes about him flunking out of various correspondence courses, his latest subject being podiatry. 

There’s even more repetitive jokery around Vera’s boyfriend, Winthrop, a meek C.P.A. That Winthrop is a C.P.A. is constantly mentioned, usually in a facetious light – Winthrop going on about how being a C.P.A. is a noble profession and whatnot. It’s funny the first time, sort of, but by the tenth time it gets old. Also, Winthrop happens to be married, but for the past 14 years – since his wedding night, in fact – Winthrop’s wife Melba has been a victim of “sleeping sickness.” Thus she is asleep in a hospital and has been so throughout the marriage; Lee plays up the melodrama of Vera wanting to be with Winthrop, but feeling he should be true to his wife, even if she’s asleep, and etc…all of it done in a satirical way, of course. 

Thus each strip ends with a big “shock” moment, usually with Vera putting her hand to her mouth in terror, but it’s always something goofy or dumb that causes this…like late in the book a limo keeps circling the house and “strangers” barge in, and Vera is terrified..but it turns out the strangers are from a TV show and want to make Vera a real-life soap opera star. It’s stuff like this throughout, but then again this particular subplot is a curious prediction of reality TV. 

The bit with the “sleeping sick” wife takes up the first storyline, then we have a random storyline where Aunt Gladys falls for a guy who claims to be from Beta-III and who wants to sell condos on other planets; he has a spaceship that apparently is a hunk of metal sitting on the Valiant lawn, but the black-and-white reproduction of the panels kind of prevents us from seeing what Frank Springer intended it to look like. There’s more lame, repetitive comedy with the joke that Gladys’s husband “ran off with a defrocked TV repair person.” 

As for the supposed alien, he too is presented as a meek looking CPA type; overall The Virtue Of Vera Valiant occurs in a rather bland world, with most panels taking place in the Valiant home. There is little of the escapism of a true soap, with rich characters in rich surroundings, and it’s altogether more of a threadbare, humdrum sort of affair. 

Then there’s the problem of Vera Valiant herself. She’s such a cipher she is hard to relate to, but then I’m not sure it was even Stan Lee’s intention that we would relate to her. She’s there to act as a spoof of the perennially-shocked and worried female protagonist common in soap operas, so her dialog is generally reduced to voicing concerns or gasping in surprise. Her brother Herbert meanwhile seems to have wandered in from an out-and-out comedy, and doesn’t fit with the vibe Lee is trying to create for the series. 

It’s interesting how Stan Lee seems to lose interest in his subplots so quickly, but again this could be his reacting to editorial demands. The subplot with the Beta III salesman is lame, and Lee himself seems to get sick of it; after spending so many strips on the storyline, he abandons it with Vera being sent to an insane asylum (a cop shows up and doesn’t believe her when she says that Aunt Gladys’s boyfriend is an alien), and the Beta III guy is never mentioned nor seen again. 

The next storyline is no less annoying, and just as long; Vera in an insane asylum, where the hunky psychiatrist seems to have a thing for her (he’s also treating Winthrop’s sleeping wife, by the way) and thus won’t let Vera check out. But Lee gradually loses interest in this plotline, too, with the abrupt reveal that Vera works in a library and is visited by a coworker, an outspoken feminist who rails that there are more men in the insane asylum than women. 

This takes us into the homestretch, where a dashing, older man who runs the network’s biggest soap operas (Martin C. Martin) shows up at Vera’s home, having seen her on TV (another gag has Vera being put on a late-night TV news program while in the insane asylum), and coming up with the idea of making a real-world soap about her life. 

That’s it for The Virtue Of Vera Valiant, but more of the storyline was soon published in the second paperback, which I’ll be reviewing soon. A curious note, which I’ll belabor in the next review, is that the second volume states that a third volume would be forthcoming, but one never was – so The Virtue Of Vera Valiant not only failed to secure a long newspaper run, but also failed to garner paperback readers. 

Here are some random photos of the book, but the photos suck because the binding of my copy is so tight I could barely hold the book open with one hand while snapping pictures of the pages with the other. At any rate, Frank Springer’s artwork is great throughout, fully capturing the spoofy pathos of the series and giving each character their own look. However, unlike the Spider-Man strip, there is little in the way of risque material; Vera wears a full dress throughout the series and there’s nothing in the way of sex appeal. It’s just not that kind of story, I guess, but still the creep in me wishes there was at least a little of it…but then maybe I was just spoiled by the T&A John Romita brought to the Spider-Man strip. 

Mr. Right

Mr. Right, by Carolyn Banks

May, 1980  Warner Books

I recently discovered this one at a Half Price Books. Apparently making a bit of a splash upon its original 1979 hardcover publication – the back cover quotes a glowing review from Cosmo – Mr. Right was republished in 1999 under much “parafeminist” ballyhoo. Curiously this 1980 paperback doesn’t mention that at all, and indeed does a better job of describing the book. 

To be honest, I didn’t get any “feminist” angle from the novel. Sure, protagonist Lida is a sexually-liberated young woman who keeps a list of the 30-some men she’s been with, but at no point does she use this as a proclamation that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Indeed, in another of those unintentionall “tells” that I love so much, Lida thinks something is wrong with her and wonders if she’ll ever find true love. Lol, there goes the “feminism” thing; Lida needs a man, after all. 

Another humorous thing is how much the sex angle is exploited on the back cover. Folks, I have to report that again we have that curious ‘70s phenonmenon of a “sexy book” that hardly has any sex in it, and indeed the vast majority of the sex occurrs off-page. There is nothing in this book to the sleazy length of, say, The Baroness, or even of contemporary popular fiction like Harold Robbins. Rather, the sex scenes we do get to read about are over and done with in a few sentences, and seldom if ever dwell on any juicy details. 

I also found it interesting that there’s nothing different about Lida, at least when compared to the average female protagonist of the day – in Robbins, in Hirschfeld, in Susann. Those authors, and innumerable others, gave us female characters who were both strong and promiscuous, who were literate and witty. All told, the only thing different about Lida is her self-doubt (she’s certain something is “wrong” with her), and also she has small boobs – though, again demonstrating the lack of focus on anything risque, we aren’t even told this until rather late in the game. 

Well anyway, Mr. Right is really more of a mystery, anyway, one that just happens to feature a promiscuous single woman in her 30s who fears that the man she is falling in love with might be a murderer. This is Duvivier, a famous mystery author who writes under other pseudonyms and who might have murdered a woman back in the early ‘60s, though Lida only learns this through coincdental plotting – her friend, Diana, happens to sleep with a guy who knew of a murderous colleage, years before, and Diana fears this man might have gone on to become Duvivier. 

A big problem with Mr. Right is that Duvivier is not built up enough. Lida reads one novel by the guy, brought to her in the hospital by Diana (Lida’s there to have an abortion!), and Lida likes it so much that she writes Duvivier a fan latter. It would have helped tremendously if we had been told more about the man’s novels, or maybe even gotten to read snatches of them; author Carolyn Banks could have had a lot of fun spoofing the mystery thrillers of the day, but apparently this thought did not occur to her. 

So, as with so much of the novel, we are only told of how great Duvivier’s books are, particularly his murders. Lida also responds to the fact that Duvivier clearly enjoys writing his books – Lida is an English teacher at an all-black college in Washington, D.C., and thus responds to what she sees as Duvivier’s gifted mocking of literary conventions. 

We also have a lot of scenes from Duvivier’s point of view; the novel hopscotches a lot, and I’m happy to report that Banks either gives us white space to denote this or just starts a new chapter. In fact there are a lot of chapters in Mr. Right, some of them as short as those in the average Richard Brautigan novel. Anyway, Duvivier is droll, elitist, and condescending – and also enjoys masturbating when devising the murder scenes in his novels. 

The gist of the novel is that Lida belives she’s found “Mr. Right” in Duvivier, due to that one novel of his she’s read; again, it would have been so much better if we’d learned more about his books. It would have helped explain why Lida, a woman who is having sex with one guy on the very first page and will with another not many pages later – and who chastizes herself for being screwed up and whatnot – would fall in love with Duvivier in the first place. 

There’s some cool stuff that resonated with me where Lida tracks down Duvivier’s real name. Showing how this sort of thing was done before the internet, Lida calls the Library of Congress and has them root through varous files; it’s a nice bit of investigative work that impresses even Duvivier, when he learns of it late in the novel. This “uncovering an author’s real identity” was right up my alley, and I’m also happy to report that Mr. Right even refers to Jimi Hendrix, not just once but a few times. 

The pseudonym stuff might have seemed revelatory in the day, but is altogether quaint n our internet/AI world. But it was cool to see the work one had to do to find the real name of an author – and, as Duvivier is told by a librarian who takes his job very seriously, there’s nothing to be found if the author specifically tells the publisher not to share his real name, something Duvivier never thought to do. 

Banks drops more ‘70s topical details here, like mentions of the pseudonymous bestsellers The Sensuous Woman and The Sensuous Man; she also references The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, another real book, but the librarian states that it was by “Mr. X;” in reality it was by Dr. A. This same librarian claims to know who “Mr. X” really is, and tells Duvivier that he’d never believe it; one wonders if Carolyn Banks herself knew that Dr. A was really Isaac Asimov. 

All these things are up my alley, but unfotunately a big problem with the novel is Lida. In another “tell,” instead of coming off as the strong and independent woman the author and publisher(s) intend, she instead comes off like a self-involved whore. Perhaps this is another “tell,” or self-own. Lida sleeps with a married man and even visits him for more sex while he’s in the hospital, all while wondering why she can’t meet a real man – we even learn she had sex with one of the students in her class, a black kid named “George Washington,” just so she could write that particular name down on her list of conquests. Or, as the kid told her – all of this relayed to us via dialog, as a lot of the story is – Lida would be able to put up a sign over her bed that stated, “George Washington slept here.” 

There is a lot of pre-PC humor here that had me laughing at times, but I’m sure it would be forbidden today, as a lot of it has to do with Lida’s comments about her black students, the majority of whom are not intelligent. When Lida and Duvivier meet, there’s also a lot of witty repartee between the two; Banks capably demonstrates how the two were made for each other. There’s also a very funny part where Diana tries to come to Lida’s rescue during a play and starts yelling that she can’t see when the house lights go down, much to the annoyance of the audience. 

But a lot of Mr. Right is made up of incidental scenes that have little bearing on the plot. Also, Banks has a tendency to write in short, punchy sentences, not much setting up scenes or giving us an idea why they are important to the story. In a lot of ways – from plotting to writing – the novel reminded me of another contemporary “spoof” of popular fiction, The Serial. 

Also, a lot of the book occurs in the early 1960s, right after the JFK assassination. This part is very much out of a mystery novel, concerning a nebbish and possibly homosexual young man who might or might not have murdered a woman, and who might or might not have become Duvivier. Banks hopscotches from the ‘60s to Lida in the ‘70s and also Diana (who has her own share of the narrative), so there really is a lot of jumping around in the novel. 

What puzzles me is why contemporary reviewers would think this novel was so different. I mean, this was an era in which a mainstream bestseller featured characters giving each other golden showers, so how in the hell could anything in Mr. Right have been considered risque or boundary-pushing? It’s altogether tame in comparison. And Lida, despite her sparkling wit, isn’t too different from sundry other female protagonists of the time. Only in her previously-mentioned self-doubt is she different, and that begins to wear thin quickly. 

Overall I’m glad I came across Mr. Right in the bookstore, as I doubt I would’ve have learned of it otherwise. Carolyn Banks proves she can deliver witty dialog and memorable situations, but all told I didn’t feel that the actual novel lived up to the sordid spectacle promised by the back cover. But then, do they ever?

Yankee King Of The Islands

Yankee King Of The Islands, edited by Noah Sarlat

No month stated, 1963  Lancer Books

Another vintage Men’s Adventure Magazine anthology I picked up many years ago, Yankee King Of The Islands is credited to editor Noah Sarlat, whose name appeared on many such books at the time. Sarlatt was an editor at the Atlas Magazine line, and thus the stories collected here are taken from those magazines – with the caveat that we are not given the names of the magazines themselves, just the date of their original copyright. Another thing to note is that the cover – which I believe originally appeared on an issue of For Men Only – is misleading. The majority of the tales collected here occur in the 1800s; only two of them take place in WWII, and one other takes place in the 1950s. 

Another thing to note is that, unlike anthologies like Our Secret War Against Red China or Women With Guns, the stories here are more pseudo-factual, like actual news articles, than the narrative-driven fiction that was typical of the men’s mags. 

This unfortunately means that the stories are not as fun as the average men’s adventure yarn; at least they weren’t as fun for me. I like the escapist stories, and the ones here are too mired in history. There’s also much less of the female exploitation one generally encounters in the average men’s mag story; zero in the way of the sleaze that would eventually take over the mags, too. About the most we get is that a busty island native gal will “please” one of our heroes, and that’s it. 

The title story is up first: “David Whippey: Yankee King Of The Islands,” by Robert J. Levin and copyright 1958. This is one of the stories where we only learn rather late that the action is occuring in the early 1800s. It’s about a young American who ventures to the South Seas to get away from “the white man” and learn about the native culture first-hand. 

The story is also Avatar a few decades early. Whippey even undergoes a “test of the heart” where he has to endure various stages of a trial – walking over coals, chasing after the unmarried women as a sort of tribal mating right, and finally engaging a rival tribe in warfare. Here though we learn that this collection will lack the escapist vibe of the typical men’s adventure magazine story, as it’s all relayed in a dry tone – there’s zero in the way of the customary female exploitation, and Whippey’s native bride receives a scant few lines of text, none of it exploitative. 

Rather, the focus is on telling who Whippey was and how he became one with the natives on this South Seas island; it’s essentially a history story, with little in the way of the action and escapism the reader might expect. 

Next up is “32 Wives For The Captain,” credited to Robert J. Fuller and copyright 1958. This one at least takes place in contemporary times, but the story is so strangely written…essentially it’s the summary of a trial a woman named Charlotte Lemieux endured in France in 1951. So the tale is focused on what was said in the courtroom, again as if the story is a recounting of true events – something you’d read in a standard magazine, not something with a Nazi strapping a busty blonde to a torture device on the cover. 

Again, the narrative thrust is nonexistent as we are told, not shown, of the horrors poor Charlotte endured – she and her husband discovered a lost island in the South Seas, and were prompty taken captive by the inhabitants…her husband locked in a cage and forced to have sex (off-page) with all the women on the island. The women however were French, and long story short, Charlotte deduces that they were the in-bred descendants of a crashed ship of French whores that was lost at sea in the late 1800s – indeed, the titular captain refers to the man who sired all the ensuing generations, taken captive by the 1800s whores and impregnating 30-some of them. 

The wonderfully-titled “The Adventures of a Yankee Beach-Comber on Many-Bride Island” is next, credited to Leon Lazarus and copyrigth 1960. We’re back in historical times, the 1850s to be exact, and Captain Josiah Flagg is shocked one day when a nude young island woman washes up onto his ship. This one is more of a survival at sea tale, as the horny men onboard want the girl, but Flagg insists on keeping her in a room and nursing her to health; there’s even a part where they endure a long storm at sea. 

Then eventually they crash and Flagg is washed up on a deserted island where he lives for two years, eating seal meat and such, untill one day some natives from another island come by and take him away. Eventually Flagg hooks up with the chief’s daughter or somesuch, but again the girl is barely a presence in the story, and at the end she helps Flagg fake his death so he can be put on a boat and set out to sea and return to his own people. 

By far my favorite story in the collection is the next one: “The Amazing G.I. Who Took Three Head-Hunting Brides,” by Bill Wharton and copyright 1961 (it’s also the latest story in the collection). It concerns Geoffrey Hunter, a British soldier in the Sarawak Islands who leads a guerrilla band of native headhunters in attacks on “the Japs.” The titular brides, native beauties with “small, firm breasts” once again are incidental to the story; much more focus is placed on Hunter training the headhunters how to fight the Japanese. 

Curiously the story too approaches the vibe of a “real” piece of journalism, with a long climax in which we’re told of Hunter’s escapades post-war…how he decided to stay on the island, living with the headhunters, how he sent a detachment of them to handle the troubles in Malaysia some years later, and then ultimately how he died there in the early ‘50s. 

Perhaps one of the more unlikable protagonists in men’s adventure mag history follows, in “Pacific Girl Trader,” credited to George V. Jones and coyright 1960. Another “real history” piece (though I had to look the guy up to learn he did in fact exist), this one focuses on Nels Sorensen, a guy from Denmark who became a US citizen and is now the “lone white man with a native crew” in the South Seas. With the detail on how Sorensen was a deep sea diver with the US navy, I thought this was another contemporary yarn, but once again we have a late-in-the-story revelation that it’s actually in the 1880s. 

Sorensen makes his sleazy living in the South Seas, sailing to and fro and selling stuff to the natives…that is, when he isn’t kidnapping them and selling them into slavery. I knew I was in for an unusual sort of yarn when the story opened with Sorensen gamely watching a friendly tribe kill off some captured enemy and then eat them, and Sorensen helps himself to a chunk of thigh. From there he figures he could buy the captured women for a pittance, and he takes them onto his ship…where they “please” him, the book as ever not getting full-on sleaze, and then he sells them off. 

The crux of the story is more focused on Sorensen’s scheme to trick people into signing on for an expedition into the South Seas and then leading them into captivity while there, but the plan backfires and he’s sent to prison. But he escapes, and the rest of the story is about him trying to concoct various schemes to get back to the South Seas, including even setting himself up as a notable in early 1900s America. But all told the story is again delivered in that dry, journalistic tone, robbing it of the escapism of the average men’s adventure story. 

“Marooned In Paradise” is another one by Robert J. Fuller and copyright 1958. It’s another dry, pseudo-factual yarn, this one with the novel conceit that it features a Japanese protagonist: Akio, a Japanese navy man who is marooned in ’42 and washed up on a deserted island of Arabic people, and fell in love with a girl there, but managed to get off the island and now is consumed with finding it. 

The last tale is another historical yarn: “Jacky-Jacky: King Of Convict Women Island,” by Robert Irwin and copyright 1958. It’s the 1800s and the titular Jacky-Jacky is a notorious convict on the penal colony of Australia. This one has an opening that’s actually like the average men’s adventure mag story, with Jacky-Jacky making the moves on a busty waitress before discovering it’s an ambush. But from there we are back into the pseudo-reportage that sinks all the other stories here. 

Unusually, this one also has a bit of a social justice undertone, as Jacky-Jacky – another real person – rose to fame posthumously for his statements on the horrible life of the penal colony. Also, the “women island” of the title is such a non-event in the story that it made me chuckle: there’s a part late in the story where Jacky-Jacky is on an island prison where women are also kept, and we’re told that some of the other men make use of them, but Jacky-Jacky himself is too busy plotting escape. Mel Gibson could’ve done this one instead of Braveheart; at least his Australian accent would’ve made sense. 

And that’s it for Yankee King Of The Islands. Not the best introduction to men’s adventure magazine stories, but interesting in how it shows what paperback publishers of the day thought readers would be interested in.