The Spider #32: Slaves Of The Dragon

The Spider #32: Slaves Of The Dragon, by Grant Stockbridge

May, 1936  Popular Publications

One of the best volumes of The Spider I’ve yet read, Slaves Of The Dragon features the return of the “Yellow Peril” storylines as seen in previous Spider yarns as The Red Death Rain and Emperor Of The Yellow Death. This one is just as good as either of them, given that it deals with a rather risque topic for a 1936 pulp novel: sexual slavery, or rather “white slavery,” as it’s most often referred to, given that the titular Dragon is a Chinese sadist who is kidnapping thousands of white American women to be sold as sex slaves to the Mongols, the women fated to give birth to “half-breed slaves” until they are no longer fertile. 

Norvell “Grant Stockbridge” Page lays the “evil Chinese” stuff on thick, but I saw little to get my panties in a bunch over; I mean seriously, if you are woke or easily offended, you shouldn’t be reading 1930s pulp to begin with. But there are random asides on how loathsome and cunning the Chinese are; Richard Wentworth, The Spider, clearly fears them more than any other enemy, and there are many times where he gives in to a paranoia when he discovers, early in the book, that his opponents are Chinese. 

Page as ever keeps the plot moving, and one thing I’ve noticed with the Yellow Peril storylines is that he doesn’t waste our time with the usual “red herring” subplot that mars so many Spider yarns. This is clearly because the villain is Asian, and not someone who would be in Wentworth’s upper-crust circle, so there’s no opportunity for Page to do his usual “it was really so-and-so!” schtick…but at the same time, it’s an interesting reminder of when Chinese people were a rarity in New York City, sequestered solely to Chinatown. 

Random subject-change warning, but did you all know that Princess Ariel on Thundarr The Barbarian is Chinese?? I’ve been watching that show with my kid – I loved it when I was a kid, back when it first came on in the very early ‘80s – and there’s an episode where they go to Chinatown, and Ariel says something to the effect of “This is where my ancestors might once have lived.” Anyway, I was surprised…I mean the animators gave Ariel dark skin (and a very impressive rack that those perv animators prominently feature in every shot they can, god bless ‘em), so I assumed she was Arabic or something, but I was surprised to discover she was Chinese. 

Anyway, I think I was talking about Slaves Of The Dragon. Well, it’s a good one, and not marred by the usual red herring stuff, which I think I already mentioned. It hits the ground running, per the Page template, with Wentworth coming across a lingerie shop in the city that’s being hit by the cops. Only Wentworth soon figures these aren’t really cops, particularly the one holding the machine gun who is clearly under the influence of heroin. 

Page gets pretty risque here with “models” from the store being taken out by the pseudo-cops, many of them in various states of undress; the idea is they’re being arrested for indecency and the like, this being 1936 and there still being standards of decency and stuff like that. But when Wentworth sees the badge number on a cop heimmediately knows the guy is imposter – Wentworth knows the real cop who has that badge number, you see – it’s blazing guns to the rescue as Wentworth takes on the bad guys. 

We do get the expected random subplot with the appearance of Margaret Stone, a hotstuff young woman who sees Wentworth put the Spider seal on the forehead of a corpse, while in his everyday guise as Wentworth, something he’s never done before. And of course Margaret immediately suspects Wentworth is really the Spider, and there’s a dangling plot that she might out him to the police – which is a laugh, because the police already know – but then Page changes his mind and has Margaret infatuated with Wentworth, in a plot development that makes little sense. 

A cool thing about Slaves Of The Dragon is that the threat is a little more smallscale and personal than previous volumes, which adds more impact to the narrative. That said, the women-kidnapping scenes aren’t as prevalent as you might think, but I did think it was interesting that the novel was essentially a precursor of the later Super Cop Joe Blaze #2. 

Page as ever excels in scenes of personal and heroic sacrifice, and also as ever puts his hero through the wringer. One thing I learned about those wily Chinese from Slaves Of The Dragon is that practically every place they live in is filled with traps, though I learned this already many years ago in my in-laws’ house, where the bathroom door didn’t close unless you really pushed it in. Nothing like taking a leak and then turning around to discover that the door was wide open behind you the entire time. “What’s for dinner, everyone?” Those wily Chinese! 

I keep getting distracted. Yes, there’s a great part where Wentworth goes into the bowls of the Dragon’s crypt, led by the “childlike” and small female servant expected in the Yellow Peril trope, here named Ya Hsai. But she leads Wentworth to this crazy trap where starving rats are in the floor below and somehow Ram Singh is here and he’s been shot in the chest by Wentworth (unintentionally, of course), and there’s a desperate scene where they gun down rats and chop them with knives and Ram Singh begs to give up his life for Master Wentworth. 

We also get a lot of Spider appearances here, with Wentworth disguising his face with makeup and a floppy hat, including a humorous part where he walks around Broadway in full Spider get-up. But as ever the entire thing is a ruse because everyone knows Richard Wentworth is the Spider; there’s a part early on where they even attack him in his home. A scene, now that I think of it, that Page doesn’t follow up on; Wentworth’s fiancé, Nita Van Sloan, comes over with a young boy whose mother was kidnapped, and Nita mentions that she might adopt the child…and the child is never seen nor mentioned again. 

As for Nita, she really shines here, as she has been in the more recent volumes. There’s a great part toward the end where Page for once actually breaks away from Wentworth’s perspective and features Nita alone, outside Washington, D.C. (believe it or not, in the swamp! Talk about timely – they need to drain that thing!), and she’s been captured with the other women, and she gets hold of a whip from one of the female guards and starts up a slave revolt. 

The only failing with the book is the Dragon himself, who is just an old Chinese man; Page doesn’t do much to make the villain memorable. There’s no costume, no grand speech, nothing. He’s just a wily old Chinese guy who has an army at his disposal and has been hired to kidnap white women to be given to Mongols for slave-breeding purposes. In other words, pretty forgettable as a Spider villain. 

Action is frequent and as ever sees Wentworth using dual .45s; there’s a modern Paul Verhoeven vibe where both he and Nita start using corpses as “human shields” during the bloody firefights. Unfortunately Page delivers an overlong aerial combat sequence later in the book, and I’ve never been a fan of those in the series. 

There are a lot of “big moments,” though, particularly a part where the Dragon announces that the Spider is dead, and right after he says that the Spider himself shows up, guns blazing. Page also tries to do something different with the character of Ya Hsai, building up a rapport between her and Wentworth. But the stuff with Margaret, who develops an almost fatal attraction for Wentworth, is much less believable. 

Page has so much fun with Slaves Of The Dragon that he ends the novel mid-battle; Chinese military planes are attacking the Dragon’s ruined base in the Virginia swamps, and Wentworth, Nita, and a G-man are shooting at them, and Wentworth tells Nita to call the FBI, and the novel ends! Speaking of which, there’s a lot of talk about “Hoover’s FBI,” all of it praiseworthy, and so far as I can recall this is the first time the FBI has been mentioned in The Spider. 

Overall Slaves Of The Dragon was certainly entertaining, and moved at a faster clip than many other Spider stories, mostly because it followed a single plot from beginning to end and didn’t jump wily-nily to various action setpieces.

Serpent's Eye (The Year Of The Ninja Master #3)

Serpent's Eye, by Wade Barker

September, 1986  Warner Books

Man, this Year Of The Ninja Master series is perhaps the strangest in all men’s adventuredom, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Ric Meyers takes the simple, pulp concept of original series Ninja Master and turns it into a metaphysical head-scratcher that makes the bloated ninja epics of Eric Van Lustbader seem like fast-moving action extravaganzas. 

What I find humorous is that Meyers came onto Ninja Master because the original series author (Stephen Smoke?) turned in a second volume deemed subpar by Warner Books…well, why wasn’t another “Wade Barker” brought in to replace Meyers? Surely no Warner editor could’ve read this third volume of Year Of The Ninja Master (not to mention the first two!) and deemed it worthy of publication. My only theory is that the demand for anything ninja was so great in the 1980s that publishers were desperate for product. Even crazier is that there was another volume of this series, and four more volumes of another series, War Of The Ninja Master, all written by Meyers! 

Told in three “books,” Serpent’s Eye is notable because it’s the first book in this series to solely focus on Daremo, formerly known as Brett Wallace, the hero of the original Ninja Master series…and before that, we’re told, his name was Brian Anderson, which always makes me laugh because that’s the name of a guy I know from work, and he sure as hell is no ninja. The previous two books featured Jeff Archer, Brett Wallace’s former sidekick; Archer, who was taken through hell by his sadistic creator in the previous two books, does not appear in Serpent’s Eye. 

Rather it’s Daremo alone, and he is a far cry from Brett Wallace: confused, adrift, following instincts that he himself does not understand. Meyers gives us a protagonist who is more so a puppet, being pulled around on the strings of fate. There is a dreamlike, metaphysical texture to the novel that is more stupid than profound, because it is so at odds with what this genre requires. Often Daremo will “find himself” somewhere, like say Hong Kong, and have no idea how he got here – granted, Meyers explains this at the end of the novel, but at that point the damage is done. Even Pinnochio had more free will. 

What makes it crazier is that I had flashbacks to Traveler in that I now have no idea when exactly this series takes place. Okay, so the opening features Daremo drifting around in his “fate leads me” state, finding himself on the east coast, and sort of invisibly shadowing a ‘Nam vet named Scott Harmon who has the most bizarre character intro I’ve ever read: beating up some neighborhood prick who was putting razors in candy bars on Halloween night. WTF? Well, Daremo slips into the guy’s home and tells him all about himself and “recruits” him. 

Then Daremo puts together and entire team, and they all fly over to the Middle East(!?), and then they rob a bank in Iran, and then they fly out on the C-130 one of the guys in the team owns…and I mean they’re also armed with machine guns and rocket launchers here…and then we’re told that all this happens in 1979, right before Iran fell to the mullahs. (Talk about a timely read, folks!) 

Okay…so the series is set in the late 1970s?? Did anyone else know this?? 

But then Book Two opens and Daremo is suddenly in Hong Kong, again on the trail of the mystical Chinese ninjas who have been fighting him since Dragon Rising. I almost got the impression the Iran stuff was a dream, but I’m not sure. In fact, Serpent’s Eye opens with a vague bit of Daremo, gutshot and dying, sitting on top of the world and reflecting on his end, which lends the impression that everything that follows in the narrative is a death delirium. 

This section in Hong Kong is so tonally at odds with the rest of the series that I laughed. Meyers, perhaps flashing back himself – namely, to his days writing The Destroyer – retcons Daremo into a Remo Williams stand-in, and has his superhman martial arts warriror blitzing through the Hong Kong underworld as he chases down a high-level gangster who is sending assassins after Daremo. 

The action scenes are written in such a lazy, first-draft way that I came to the conclusion that the entire novel was a first draft. But otherwise this sequence is so similar to The Destroyer: lots of witty dialog, Daremo so superhumanly skilled that his safety is never in doubt. In pure Remo form, Daremo even manages to hook up with a beautiful American babe who happens to be here, serving as a hooker for the gangster Daremo’s searching for, and just like Remo, Daremo is superhumanly skilled in the lovemaking department, but has no actual “drive” to do the deed…and when he finally does do it (or does her, I guess I should say), it’s of course left entirely off page. 

The girl’s name is Michelle Bowers, and despite himself Meyers makes her a memorable character: a failed actress who has ended up a hooker in Hong Kong. A recurring joke has her wanting to tell Daremo why she became a hooker, and Daremo not being interested in knowing. Anyone who has read a Meyers novel will know that at some point Michelle will be captured, tied up, and degraded, and of course this happens in Serpent’s Eye, but with a different outcome than expected. 

Book three is almost tiresome in its lameness. More of a puppet than ever, Daremo needs to get into mainland China for reasons he cannot comprehend, and ends up hanging out with a traveling theater group that’s a Peking Opera type of affair. Eventually this builds to a low-rent psychedelic affair where Daremo climbs this high mountain, beset by gods the entire time – and I forgot to mention, but Daremo often meets and converses with gods in the course of the book. 

SPOILER WARNING: Skip this paragraph, but I’m noting it here for my own sanity whenever I get up the courage to read the next book and need to remember what happened in this one. Anyway, it is revealed in some of the laziest bullshit-first draft writing ever that “Daremo” has actually been Scott Harmon all this time, ie the ‘Nam vet introduced in book one of Serpent’s Eye, and I guess he’s been Daremo in the previous two books? The real Daremo all along has been “The Figure In Black,” ie what we thought was the villain, but has really been Daremo guiding his puppet Scott Harmon along the path…which explains why Harmon was so confused as to his own objectives and whatnot. Not only does Harmon die at the end of the book, but so does the superhumanly-powerful Chinese ninja that has been a plague since the start of this series. “He died” is literally and lamely how Meyers describes this major series event, showing absolutely no ability nor desire to draw out the dramatic import – and folks I kid you not, the novel ends with Daremo laughing happily on this big mountain in China. 

End spoilers. Serpent’s Eye was super stupid, and overlong at 244 pages, but if the entire series was more like the sub-Destroyer section in book two, Year Of The Ninja Master would at least be worth reading. But man I think I’d be more willing to read The Miko before I take the plunge and read the next – and thankfully last – volume in this series.

Springblade #8: Betrayal

Springblade #8: Betrayal, by Greg Walker

August, 1991  Jove Books

I keep forgetting about the Springblade series…and then when I read one of the books, I remember why I keep forgetting it. Seriously though, this is military fiction more so than men’s adventure, and the escapism one expects from the latter genre is not to be found. It’s all military jargon, acronyms, and characters who talk about their time in the service. 

This one’s even more military-themed than the others, as the entire novel takes place during the Vietnam War. A more accurate title for this volume would’ve been Flashback, as that’s all we get for the majority of the 188 pages…series protagonist Bo Thornton flashing back to 1965 and all the shit he got into when he was in the SOG outfit in ‘Nam. 

What’s unfortunate is that the opening of Betrayal promises something else. Two DC politicians plot against the Springblade team and want to get them killed off; one of them holds a personal grudge, because back in #2: Machete his “balls were smashed in” by team member Jason Silver when Springblade was faking a hostage attempt for reasons I cannot recall. 

Well, these two guys have a plan up their sleeves to get Springblade, and it would appear that this is only so far as the copyeditor read the book…because that’s the story that’s sort of promised on the back cover, only it’s not the story we readers actually get. Instead, as mentioned, the entire damn thing is a flashback to Vietnam. 

Presumably occurring in the previous volume, Bo Thornton has finally married Lisa, aka the Smurfette of Springblade, the one who used to sit at home in the earliest books but has now been retconned into “the computer girl” on actual missions. Now she’s become Mrs. Thornton, and Betrayal opens the morning after their wedding, with the entire team hanging out at the Thorntons’ beachside home, which is where the wedding took place. 

Nothing says “men’s adventure novel” like telling us your main protagonist just got married, but Springblade is only packaged as men’s adventure. More than ever the focus this time is on the military life. While everyone else is asleep, Bo and Lisa sit on the beach and Bo lights a cigar and proceeds to tell Lisa, his new wife, all about his days in ‘Nam, down to the last Cong-blasting detail, and Lisa sits there avidly listening! But I guess Bo is smart to do stuff like this in the early days of a marriage…I could just imagine Springblade #25, in which Lisa tells Bo she’s sick to goddamn death of hearing about Vietnam, and when the hell is he going to fix that garage door?? 

We head back to 1965 and stay there for the duration. Betrayal tells the story of how young Bo Thornton become involved with SOG, the Studies and Observations Group, going deep in-country in ‘Nam and getting in various commando fights with the VC and NVA. His teammates are not ones who would eventually feature in the Springblade team, and there are also a few Montagnards who fight alongside him. Rather than telling a cohesive tale, the novel is more about the various things Bo had to do in SOG, like collecting dog tags at crash sites, and etc. There is also an extended bit in which they rescue some POWs, and curiously this is where the titular “betrayal” occurs, as there’s a turncoat soldier at the VC compound where the POWs are being held, so Bo and pals get double bang for their buck: freeing prisoners of war and killing off a traitor. 

The only enjoyment I got from Betrayal was that, apropos of nothing, it brought to the surface a memory I’d long forgotten, so I guess in a way I should be grateful. Back in college I was friends with this demented guy named Tim, a big football player type who I always thought looked slightly like Henry Rollins – this was back when the video for the Rollins song “Liar” would play on MTV, and we’d joke that it looked almost exactly like Tim at times. 

Well anyway, Tim was slightly “batshit crazy,” as one might say, and he’d go through various phases – like he’d go all-in, whole hog crazy over some new pursuit or activity, usually as a way to impress some girl (there were precious few girls at our college – as one very astute young woman once asked me, years later as she looked through my college yearbook and noted the lack of girls in the photos: “What did you guys do, jerk off all the time?”). 

For example, just a few of Tim’s phases were: “solving” the JFK assassination (which entailed Tim wearing a suit and tie every day, carrying around a briefcase that had nothing in it, and watching the Zapruder film over and over in slow-motion on the Oliver Stone JFK VHS); being a cowboy (which entailed wearing a cowboy hat, chaps, and learning to ride horses – we had an equestrian program in our college, and yes, one of the girls he was interested in for this particular phase was in that program); and also there was a brief phase where he wanted to play hockey, which entailed him wearing his hockey gear all the time, even at lunch and dinner. 

But my favorite of all Tim’s phases was the “mission” phase, where Tim would don black clothes, blacken his face, and go run around at night, like he was a commando in Vietnam. As I recall, the “mission” phase came soon after the “JFK” phase, so I guess it was a logical progression. Our college was in West Virginia, but it was early on the “multicultural” front, so there were literally students from all over the world, in particular from Japan. Well anyway, one night Tim insisted that I go out on a mission with him, and this is the memory Betrayal brought back for me. 

As it turns out, I also remembered that I’d taken a photo on this particular night! It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time it wasn’t very common to constantly take photos…I mean you needed a camera and you needed film. But for whatever reason, the night Tim insisted I go on a mission – which of course entailed dressing up all in black – I took a photo. And here it is, straight from the Glorious Trash Archives: that’s Tim with the blackened face, kneeling, and that’s me standing beside him: 

To the best of my knowledge, this photo was taken in late winter or early spring of 1995. Thirty-one years ago, as hard as it is to believe. I was a junior in college, and I would’ve been twenty years old at the time. That was my dorm room, and note the blacklight Grateful Dead poster, with the fun fact that I am not and have never been a Grateful Dead fan!! Also note the Japanese girl calendar on the wall…now that I think of it, I might still have both of those somewhere, the poster and the calendar. 

But as you can see, Tim went all-in when he was on a phase: note the blackened face and the thousand-yard stare. So this night we went out and our college was right in the woods, right in the mountains of West Virginia, and it was slightly cold and very foggy – very cinematic. Tim’s “missions” would have him sneaking around the dark woods and pretending to be a comando; I went along that night as an observer, because I realized even then it wasn’t too common to be around someone so batshit crazy, so why not enjoy the experience? 

Anyway, here is what Betrayal made me remember, and it’s a wonder I almost forgot it, because previously I’d always thought it was one of the more funny experiences in my life. There was a steep hill with a wooden bridge that connected two of the dorms, and as we were running around in the cold, misty night, Tim caught sight of two Japanese students coming toward us on the bridge – I remember we could just see their silhouettes in the moonlight, as it was pitch black out there, and the two Japanese couldn’t see us. 

Tim turned to me and whispered a certain slur you’ll often hear in Vietnam War movies, referring to the race of the poor unsuspecting Japanese students who were approaching us, and then he pushed me down so that we were crouching in the shrubs beneath the bridge as they walked over us. Folks it was just like a movie, I kid you not, because the two Japanese students even stopped on the middle of the bridge and each of them lit a cigarette, all while talking to each other in Japanese, totally oblivious of the fact that they were being watched by two American guys in black and facepaint – like something out of every single Vietnam War movie ever made! All the two of them needed was an AK-47 slung across their backs. 

Now I do recall at this point I was trying not to lose it, hiding below them in the dark, but one of the rules of a mission was to stay silent. But to make it even funnier, Tim leaned to me and whispered, “Give me the knife.” The two Japanese students obliviously went on their way, and then I recall Tim said something like, “That was close,” and then we were off on the mission…and I can’t recall much else, only that I got bored and decided to go back to my room and get drunk, which is pretty much how every night ended. And still does today, in fact! (Just kidding…sort of.) 

As I was writing this post, I realized the impact Tim had on my life: it was because of him that I moved to Dallas, back in 1996. He moved out here after college to get in the Dallas Police Department, but for reasons I cannot recall he did not get in (they probably found out about his JFK file), and he eventually left Texas.  But when he first moved here he convinced me to come down to Texas, and I stayed here after he moved on. I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I had not come down here and eventually met my wife and had a son...and honestly I can’t imagine a world without at least one of those two people, so batshit crazy or not, I owe Tim a debt of gratitude.

Anyway, if not for Betrayal I might have forever lost this memory of that crazy Vietnam mission in West Virginia, which once upon a time was one that would make me chuckle. I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the incident, but man for a long time I’d laugh, because I kid you not it was exactly like stepping into a Vietnam War movie. But otherwise this novel has nothing to do with the Springblade series; it starts off being about one thing, and then veers off into an interminable flashback…something I’ve attempted to replicate in my own review, as you might have noticed.