Lone Star And The Badlands War (Lone Star #16)

Lone Star and the Badlands War, by Wesley Ellis

November, 1983  Jove Books

It’s been forever since I read a Western; I’ve never been a fan of the genre, though there was a brief time in middle school when I read a few volumes of Lone Star, The Gunsmith, and Longarm; yes, even then I gravitated toward the sleazier representatives of the genre. In fact I have a vivid memory of sitting outside during recess one day in middle school, my back against a brick wall, reading a volume of The Gunsmith that was about hunting Bigfoot while my classmates were playing basketball or whatever; this was sometime in the mid-late ‘80s, probably when I was 12 or 13, and I remember the class bully came by to make fun of me for reading while everyone else was playing sports. I should’ve just showed him the dirty parts in the book. And I also recall he wasn’t even really making fun of me, more like just shaking his head that someone would read instead of playing sports...that said, I also recall the school bully actually never messed with me and generally left me alone.* 

At that time Lone Star and other Western paperbacks were ubiquitous, or at least they were in West Virginia in the 1980s. My dad was a big Western reader, but I don’t think he read any of the “adult Westerns.” I am sure I found my Westerns at the local library – the Fort Ashby Public Library (still there, it appears, the same little building and everything!) – where they were on a spinner rack beside the men’s adventure novels. In fact I bet I grabbed up the Westerns precisely because they were beside the men’s adventure novels. 

Well anyway, I know I read a Lone Star or two at the time, probably because I figured they were like a Western take on The Destroyer, in that they paired a westerner and an Asian. Only in the case of Lone Star there’s no parody or satirical elements, and the westerner is a hot-blooded, hot-bodied redhead named Jessica Starbuck and the Asian is a slender half-Japanese samurai named Ki. And I also bet it was Ki that drew me to the series; this was the mid-to-late ‘80s, when ninja mania was at its peak, and I probably figured the karate-fighting dude on the Lone Star covers was like a ninja or something. In fact I recall thinking he looked like the GI Joe character Quick-Kick. 

The series ran for a long time. I was shocked to recently see how long Lone Star and Longarm actually ran. In the case of the latter it went on for decades and decades. Lone Star ended sooner, and James Reasoner wrote the last volume of the series; it was the only one he wrote. 

Speaking of James, I reached out to him to see if he knew who might’ve written this volume of the series, which was one of three I found recently at a used bookstore – and, contrary to the ubiquitousness of the 1980s, it would seem that Lone Star is not as easy to come across these days. I went to three different Half Price Books in the DFW area a few months ago, and only one of them had any Lone Star books; I bought all three books they had, and this is the earliest of them. 

Per James, The Badlands War might have been written by Jeff Wallmann, but there’s no verification available. Also per James, Wallmann wrote the majority of the Lone Star books, but there were some other series authors that I’m unfamiliar with, like Neal Barrett Jr. and Will C. Knott. 

Whoever served as “Wesley Ellis” for this one, his (or her!) writing is very polished, to the point it is a little sedate. This is very much a long-simmer yarn, and even the expected sex scenes are few and far between…but when they do get started, they go on for quite a while. In this regard the book reminded me of The Baroness; very “upscale” otherwise, but down and dirty and graphic in the sexual material. 

Personally, I love the idea that the Wild West was made up of randy women with the bodies of Victoria’s Secret models, and such is the case of Jessica “Jessie” Starbuck, she of the “flaming red tresses” and big breasts. She’s an interesting character for sure; scion of the Lone Star estate after the murder of her father (by recurring series villains “the cartel”), and thus fabulously wealthy, but also fabuously beautiful and a deadly shot with any weapon. She’s kind of modern in the regard that she’s a “woman with agency” per the latest trendy term, yet at the same time she is not an insufferable ball-buster like a similar female character of today would be; Jessie likes her men, and she likes to give ‘em a good time. 

Humorously, there’s a part early in The Badlands War where Jessie wonders to herself if she’ll ever get married. Given that the series went on for 150-some volumes and she had at least one man per volume, I think it’s safe to say Jessie might never have gotten married, but who knows. Even in this one she basically falls in love with a Clint Eastwood-esque “gunslinger” (who also falls in love with Jessie), but the guy is brushed off into the narratorial carpet at novel’s end. Jessie needs to ride on to the next volume – and her next male conquest. One wonders if she had female conquests as well, but I doubt Lone Star went that direction…even The Baroness didn’t. (Though Dark Angel did!!) 

Ki is also a character who seems to have stepped out of the 20th Century: a half-Japanese karate master who prefers bladed weaponry. If the series had been created a little later he doubtless would’ve been a ninja, and I’m betting there had to have been a volume of Lone Star that tapped into the ‘80s ninja craze. Ki gets along fine in this one; I expected there would be a lot of parts where slackjawed yokels would call him racial slurs, but there’s none of that in this volume…for most the part. 

It’s made clear that Jessie and Ki are not and have never been an item; theirs is a platonic relationship, actually more of a sibling one. We’re told in brief flashback that Jessie was young when Ki first started working for her father, so Ki is clearly older than her, but other than that we aren’t given much to go on. Then again, this is volume 16 of the series, so doubtless stuff like that has already been explained. 

There’s also the question of the year; given the appearance of a 20-something Theodore Roosevelt, The Badlands War must take place in the 1880s. And also Jessie and Ki do a helluva lot of traveling for the era; in this one they’ve come all the way up to the Dakota territory by train and by horseback, to check in on a ranch owned by the Starbuck enterprise that is in danger of being taken over by a sadistic Frenchman named Beaumont. 

Truth be told this is rather a slow-moving yarn, with little in the way of action. It operates on more of a long-simmer vibe, with Jessie slowly figuring out if Beaumont really is a bad guy who has his sights set on the Starbuck ranch here in the Dakotas while Ki meanwhile gets friendly with a Mexican bar whore named Olivia and has infrequent run-ins with Beaumont’s chief gunslinger, Korman. 

There’s also young Teddy Roosevelt, a minor presence in the novel; more focus is placed on Hawthorne, Roosevelt’s taciturn guide in the Dakotas, a Clint Eastwood-style cowboy who serves as Jessica’s only conquest in the novel. I’m wondering if Jessica only ever gets one bang per book, or if the ghostwriters and edtors ever got risque and let her have more than one guy. As for Ki, he too only scores with Olivia. 

This brings me to the subject of the sexual material, always one of the key features of an Adult Western. I was surprised to discover that Lone Star was also like The Baroness in that the sex scenes go on for a few pages instead of just a few paragraphs. No detail is spared and the author clearly has his tongue in cheek with the many memorable anatomical metaphors. 

Action as mentioned is sparse; The Badlands War is more of a suspense story, with it slowly becoming apparent that Beaumont is indeed a villain and has been killing people to take over their ranches. He sends Korman out to murder several people during the course of the book, from a newsman to a family that works at the Starbuck ranch. But it isn’t until the end of the novel that he’s given his comeuppance. 

The climax sees Jessica, Ki, Hawthorne, and some locals staging an ambush on Beaumont’s chatteau; I was surprised (SPOILER ALERT) that Ki took out Korman while Jessica meanwhile ensured Beaumont was arrested…we’re told she’s good with a gun, but she only shoots down a random thug during the climax. 

Ki features in more of the action scenes, like for example an alleyway fight with Olivia’s brother where Ki shows off his “samurai” moves. Also Ki’s sex scenes are written from an “Oriental” perspective, with Ki all concerned with pleasuring his lady and going down on Olivia, essentially blowing the young woman’s mind, as she has never even heard of such things. 

All told I enjoyed Lone Star and the Badlands War, but I’d wager there are certainly better volumes in the series. As mentioned I did pick up a few more, so will be reading them anon.

*After a bit of research I’m fairly certain the Western paperback I was reading was The Gunsmith #21: Sasquatch Hunt, published by Ace Books in 1984 – meaning it was another I got from the library spinner rack.

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.

Black Samurai #7: Sword Of Allah

Black Samurai #7: Sword Of Allah, by Marc Olden

April, 1975  Signet Books

Marc Olden throttles it back for the penultimate volume of Black Samurai; I’m not saying Sword Of Allah is bad or anything, but it’s certainly a step down after the insanity that was the previous volume. I’d also say it’s my least favorite volume of the series yet, but again, that’s only when compared to the other volumes, all of which have been great. 

As I’ve mentioned in past reviews, a recurring schtick of Olden’s is to fill pages by jumping willy-nilly into the various perspectives of his characters – and he always features a lot of characters in his books. He does that probably more so in Sword Of Allah than any previous Black Samurai installment…with the ultimate effect that series protagonist Robert “Black Samurai” Sand is seriously lost in the narrative shuffle. He’s almost a supporting character in his own book. 

Sand features in a memorable opening which sees him becoming more personally involved in a mission since way back in the first volume. There’s no detail on how long ago The Warlock was, but we do learn straightaway that Sword Of Allah is essentially a sequel to earlier volume The Inquisition, the events of which we are told occurred a year ago. 

But when we meet him, Sand is once again in Paris – a recurring locale in this series if ever there was one – and he’s sitting on a plane about to take off with some woman he’s met in the past couple mounths, a woman he’s totally in love with and etc, etc. You don’t need a men’s adventure doctorate to know what’s going to happen to this woman. Meanwhile, due to the rampant POV-hopping with which Olden will fill up the pages, we already know a group of radical Muslim terrorists have hijacked the plane Robert Sand just happens to be sitting in. 

This is a tense scene as Sand quickly sees that the handful of terrorists who have overtaken the plane will no doubt kill everyone on board, and Sand must figure out how to get himself and his girlfriend, Ann, to safety. A curious thing is that Olden as ever wants us to understand that Robert Sand, despite being a badass samurai with years and years of training, is not a superman, so he doesn’t even try to take on the terrorists; instead, he searches for a way to get off the grounded plane without being detected. 

The terrorists are part of the Sword of Allah, a violent terrorist group, but again a reminder that such groups were less vile and deadly in the ‘70s, as these guys are more concerned with getting publicity for their cause – and with saving their own skins after they kill their victims. In other words, not the suicide vest radicals of today. But they are still vile, as Sand’s prediction is soon proven correct and the terrorists open fire on the occupants of the plane, blowing away men, women, and children. 

This is no doubt the darkest the series has ever gotten, with kids falling beneath the gunfire as Sand watches helplessly; and also, unsurprisingly, Ann gets blown away. This isn’t a spoiler; you know like within a sentence or two of the girl’s intro that she isn’t fated to be in the book for very long. Sand manages to engage a few of the terrorists in close-quarters combat; in a strangely unelaborated-upon tidbit, we learn that one of the terrorists is a Japanese martial arts expert Sand has fought in the past, who is now working with the Muslim terrorists. 

The Baron digs the knife in by letting Sand know that these very same terrorists were the ones the Baron tried to set Sand on, a few weeks ago, but Sand had been too busy boffing his British girlfriend Ann and so turned down the assignment. And now Ann’s dead, killed by the very terrorists Sand might have stopped if he’d heeded the Baron’s request. Thus Sand is driven by both personal loss and self-anger throughout Sword Of Allah. 

That is, when we see the guy. For the most part, the novel is made up of the random thoughts of the terrorists, their leader (“The Prophet”), and right-wing American terrorist Neal Heath, who last tangled with Sand in The Inquisition. Olden even works in the waning days of the Space Race into the plot, with an unexplored subplot about a joint US-USSR space venture – which a right-wing senator wants to stop at all costs, leading to the hard-to-buy teaming up of Heath’s group and the Prophet’s group. 

Olden tosses so much into the blender that he misses opportunities; for example there’s the Prophet’s sexy daughter, Laila, whose memorable intro has her about to bed some poor astronaut, only to kill him. The veteran pulp reader would expect that Robert Sand and Laila would hook up at some point, but this does not happen, and indeed it is not until the very final pages of the novel that the two even meet. 

So far as nookie goes, Sand goes unlucky in Sword Of Allah, too driven by the loss of Ann to notice any other women. That said, “driven” is a good way to describe Sand, as he is more vicious this time out than previous volumes, leading to a surprising finale where he employs an axe to execute some unarmed opponents. 

Olden specializes in long-running action scenes that really put his heroes through the wringer, and Sword Of Allah features a great such sequence that takes place on a small ship off the coast of France. Sand does a frogman and swims to it, planting explosives like a regular Tiger Shark, and then he goes onboard to “kill the Prophet,” who happens to be hiding on board. Instead Sand gets in a running gun battle with legions of terrorists, gradually pushed up against a wall with little opportunity to escape. 

Another thing Olden specializes in is pulling a deus ex machina to get his hero out of these scrapes; as in previous volumes, this tense battle on the boat ends with Sand’s apparent death, then the next chapter opens later and he’s all well and good – and we learn in quick summary how he got out of his predicament. It’s a copout, but Olden does it so well that you don’t even realize it until later. 

One thing he doesn’t pull off as well as giving Robert Sand his impetus for revenge. We only meet Ann in the opening scene, and Olden really lays it on with a trowel, how much Sand loves her, how great of a woman she is, and etc, to the point that she might as well have “DOA” stamped on her forehead. But this is all we see of her, and from there on Sand is burning and yearning for revenge, killing in cold blood at times, and it’s all cool and well done, but it does lack a little meaning because Ann is a new character who is not given opportunity to make an impression on the reader. 

The uncredited cover artist shows material that does happen in the narrative, with the caveat that Sand’s use of an axe in the finale is more “axe murderer” than “axe-wielding warrior;” it’s probably one of the most surprising finales in Olden’s work, as we see how cold and merciless the Black Samurai can really be. Otherwise, the scantily-clad babe on the cover must be Laila, but it’s not Sand she’s disrobing for – it’s the hapless NASA guy she wastes. Speaking of which, Olden continues to push buttons, as the only sex scene in Sword Of Allah features the Prophet and his daughter! But Olden does leave this scene of incest mostly off-page. 

Overall Sword Of Allah was entertaining, but as mentioned it was also my least favorite Black Samurai yet. It’s not bad or anything, just too mired in hopscotching perspectives from one-off characters, and the impression is given that Olden might’ve just been worn out by the previous volume and turned this one in quickly.

Black Samurai #6: The Warlock (Second Review)

Black Samurai #6: The Warlock, by Marc Olden

January, 1975  Signet Books

It’s hard to believe, but it’s going on 15 years since I reviewed this sixth installment of Black Samurai. This was the first volume of the series I read, and at the time I was unaware that it had been the source material for the film adaptation. I loved the book when I read it back in 2010, and reading it again now in 2025, I loved it again. 

For one, I’m a bit more familiar with the work of Marc Olden at this point, so I see how his style is so evident in The Warlock. Stuff that I might not have noticed in my first reading of his work, all those years ago. But it’s all here – the large cast of characters, the frequent cutting between perspectives, the occasional lapse into stream-of-consciousness as we dip into the thoughts of various characters. 

Yes, it’s all here, but this time Olden reins it in, to the point that very little of The Warlock comes off as padded. And it’s pretty impressive because Olden clearly indicates he has not become bored with the series; six volumes in, and he turns in the most entertaining installment yet, filled to the brim with crazy characters and situations. It’s almost like he took a brief survey of the mid-‘70s men’s adventure field, saw how lurid everything had become, and decided to turn the dial of his own series to 10. (Or 11, for you Spinal Tap fans.) 

But man, Marc Olden really threw in the kitchen sink with this one, and not to sound redundant, but it’s impressive. I mean it opens with Robert “Black Samurai” Sand being attacked by a pair of transvestite dwarves, for pete’s sake, with the dwarves wielding razor blades and slicing them at Sand. Not long after that our hero is attacked by “Lion Men,” brawny black dudes in leopard costumes, like they came out of a ‘30s Tarzan movie. (Tarzan And His Mate of course being the best of the lot – complete even with full female nudity in an underwater swimming scene…pretty impressive for a movie from 1934!) 

Again it surprises me that Al Adamson chose this volume to adapt for his movie version of Black Samurai. Reading the book again, after having finally seen the movie a few years ago (as mentioned in my review from back then, I was waiting forever for the uncut version to come out), I see how much content Adamson changed, likely for budgetary reasons…yet, at the same time, he added a bunch of stupid shit that wasn’t in the book that certainly increased his budget. Like a sportscar for Sand. Not to mention a friggin’ jetpack a la Thunderball. And even a moronic fight with a vulture. 

No, none of that stuff is in The Warlock. In fact, Adamson could’ve done a straight adaptation of the source material and he could’ve done it with the limited budget he was working with. He also toned down on the lurid element Olden brought his tale. Janicot, the titular “Warlock,” is a total freak in the novel, filming black magic snuff films for his jet-setting followers and making scads of money off the proceeds; as I mentioned in my review of the movie, the Janicot of the film comes off more like a poor man’s Uncle Arthur from Bewitched. 

Femme fatale Synne also suffers greatly in the movie. I’d forgotten how much Olden puts into her character in the novel: here she is a force of unbridled sex, a hotstuff black babe with silver hair and lipstick. In fact I wish she was in the novel more than she is. She’s Janicot’s second in command, and Olden has it that she’s so blown away by Robert Sand that she jeopardizes her standing with Janicot. That said, nothing much comes of this, and Sand bluntly turns down Synne’s offer for sex – indeed, Sand goes without for this particular volume. 

But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. Looking at my surprisingly-short original review of The Warlock, I see that I failed to note what the plot was about. Well, in this one Sand is tasked by his boss, former president William Baron Clarke, to take down Janicot, an Aleister Crowley type who runs a satanic cult. Janicot specializes in getting politicians in compromising positions in his sexual rituals, which are filmed for blackmail purposes, and an old colleague of Clarke’s has gotten in too deep. 

We meet Sand as he’s already in France, researching. As with most Black Samurai novels – and, come to think of it, a lot of Olden’s Narc books as well – the action takes place in Paris. I’m not sure if Olden lived there or was just fascinated with the place, but he constantly has stuff taking place in Paris. And that’s where Sand is as The Warlock opens, walking into an ambush courtesy a pair of leather-clad transvestite dwarves. 

Olden really brings home how sadistic these little bastards are; they are the bodyguards of Janicot, we’ll later learn – cross-dressing psyco dwarves who carry razor blades. The opening of the book features a great bit where Sand kicks one of the little bastards. Olden wisely keeps the dwarves a minor presence (lame pun alert); I don’t believe he even names any of them. Nor does he name any of the “Lion Men” who also serve Janicot – burly black men in leopard costumes who battle Sand in the opening sequence, but who then essentially disappear from the narrative. 

This is because Olden, as usual, has a ton of other characters he focuses on. As ever this means Robert Sand himself is lost in the shuffle, but the villains this time are so colorful the reader doesn’t much mind. I mean, there’s Bone, who serves as Janicot’s henchman, a gay albino sadist. There’s Rheinhart, a friggin’ werewolf, who was raised (as a cub?) by Janicot and is the most fierce fighter in the Warlock’s employ – and also we’re told of the creature’s various attacks on women, Olden building on the overall lurid tone of the narrative. 

There’s also Chavez, returning from the fourth volume; in belabored backstory that doesn’t make much sense, Chavez has hired Janicot to capture and kill the Black Samurai. We briefly met Chavez at the end of The Deadly Pearl, where he swore revenge for his brother’s death; the dude certainly has a roundabout way of getting revenge, as he’s hired Janicot to track down Robert Sand, capture him, drug him, and kill him on-camera in a black magic ritual or something…which is the sort of thing Janicot does. 

Reading the book again, I was impressed once more with how lurid Marc Olden got, particularly with Janicot…I’d forgotten the hinted-at backstory that Janicot was a Nazi in the war, one who renamed himself and gradually drew an international following as a mystic guru. Olden delivers a few jet-setter party sequences Janicot throws in Paris that could come out of a contemporary trash paperback. There are also a few scenes where Janicot kills off people who have run afoul of him or his cult, and Olden really brings to life the plight of the unfortunates; some of the material here could come out of the sweats of the era, focused on torture and suffering. 

What’s interesting is that Olden has enough for a novel with this setup, but he also throws in Toki, Sand’s Japanese beloved, not seen since (I think?) the first volume. Janicot has also been hired to blackmail a Vietnamese politician who has campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, and this dude just happens to be married to Toki. Janicot is supposed to get the guy and film him in some depraved satanic orgy to use as leverage on him. And meanwhile, Janicot has learned that this guy’s wife is also the love of the Black Samurai’s life (how Janicot’s learned this is left vague), so the Warlock figures he can get double bang for his buck – kidnap Toki and use her as Black Samurai bait. 

And yet even this isn’t enough for Olden; Sand is already on the trail of Janicot at novel’s start, unaware of the Warlock’s plans for Toki. This is because Janicot has pulled the same blackmailing trick on a French politician the Baron is friends with, and so the Baron has asked Sand to go over to Paris and get the goods on the Warlock. So in other words “it’s personal this time” for this particular installment; there’s no big global threat the Black Samurai is looking to stop. 

Curious, then, that director Al Adamson gussied up the plot with so much fluff. For those who have seen the film but never read the book: Sand doesn’t drive a sportscar. He does not, at any point, put on a rocket pack straight out of Thunderball. He doesn’t fight a vulture(!). And he doesn’t wear a tracksuit at any point of the novel. Indeed, watching the movie again after re-reading The Warlock, it blew my mind that Adamson was too foolish to just do a straight adaptation, as the ensuing film would have been more senastionalistic…and likely cheaper, too. 

One thing the movie did get right with its “fluff” is more in the way of sex and nudity. There’s little of either in the novel. Robert Sand does not have sex in this one, though the, uh, carrot is dangled – courtesy Synne, certainly the most interesting female character yet in the Black Samurai series, if not the entire men’s adventure genre. She’s a black beauty who serves as Janicot’s vassal (or something), a former hooker from the American South who was discovered by Janicot and turned into essentially the embodiment of sex; the Warlock uses her to screw VIPs, and though there is not a single sex scene in the novel, we’re informed that Synne can keep a man happy. Oh, and she has long, straight hair that’s been dyed silver, and also she wears silver lipstick and silver nail polish. This is something Al Adamson also chose to ignore in his film adaptation…but then, actress Marilyn Joi doesn’t look much like how Synne is described, anyway. 

Even Robert Sand is taken back by her staggering and exotic beauty; we are told that his stern, “samurai!” façade is tested by Synne. But it’s all simmer and no boil. Synne catches sight of Sand, and – in the frequent cutovers to Synne’s perspective that occur through the novel – we learn she’s developed a thing for the Black Samurai. He’s a real man, she can tell, and not like the sadistic brutes she has to screw to keep Janicot happy. Men like Chavez…who, by the way, engages Synne twice in the novel, off-page, as does another guy Janicot is keeping happy, a stuffy British doctor. 

As I mentioned in my original review, the Sand-Synne stuff is ultimately anticlimactic. They have a “meet cute” early in the book, when Sand, dressed like a movie cowboy with a Lone Ranger mask, crashes a Paris party of Janicot’s. He runs into the silver-haired Synne, and there’s a clear mutual attraction. But when they have their actual face-to-face, later in the novel, not much comes of it. Synne offers herself to Sand, but as usual he’s all business – plus at this point he’s learned that Toki is in danger – and Sand turns Synne down. Something that makes the silver-lipped beauty freak out in rage, as no one spurns her. But man, that’s it – there’s never another meeting between the two. 

Olden does deliver on the action front, though. And not since that first volume has Sand been so put to the test; he must rely on his samurai resolve quite often in the narrative, being outnumbered and outgunned at frequent points. There’s a fight with the werewolf late in the tale that’s pretty cool – again, shocking that Al Adamson, who made schlocky, low-budget horror movies, didn’t include the werewolf in his film adaptation – and, though brief, the fight is brutal, with the additional element that Sand is injured at the time, with a broken wrist. 

There isn’t a big fight with Chavez; indeed, Olden follows his usual template in that the novel is so busy that he must hurriedly bring everything to a close in the final pages. Chavez is for the most part a secondary character; in his frequent cutovers we see him mulling over how whacko Janicot is (which of course makes the reader wonder why Chavez hired Janicot in the first place), and also chomping at the bit for “the black man to die.” 

The action takes place for the most part in Paris, including an extended action sequence where Sand tries to kill Janicot at a small airport – leading to a tense capoff where Sand commandeers the plane on the tarmac. This leads to a strange bit where the Baron, all the way back in Texas, somehow knows that it wasn’t really Janicot at the airport, and it was all a fake-out to get Sand. Another strange miss is all the stuff with Toki; this is another bit Al Adamson made more of a deal of. But in the novel itself, Sand and Toki don’t even really have a moment together; Sand saves her, but she’s out cold at the time. 

Since I’m on a spoiler kick, skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know what happens. But the resolution with Synne is also lame. She’s killed off-page…by Chavez! Olden delivers one of his customary rushed finales with Janicot’s people all holed up in a remote house once the action has moved Stateside, and Sand leads a team of the Baron’s men into the compound to kill everyone. When Sand storms into the house, he catches Chavez as Chavez is coming out of a room. Sand kills him without much fuss – there’s no big dramatic payoff – and then Sand discovers Synne’s corpse in the bedroom. Material from her perspective has already hinted that Chavez is rough and sadistic in the sack, so this turns out to have been foreshadowing on Olden’s part; Chavez apparently killed Synne during some rough sex. Still, it’s a bit of a letdown. I wanted more from this unusual character. 

As mentioned in my original review, Janicot is still around at novel’s end; there’s a horror-esque finale where his ghostly voice calls to Sand in the dark of the night, and we’re to understand the Black Samurai is properly bugged out. But I do not believe Janicot returns; the series only lasted for two more volumes, and looking at the back covers I see no mention of the Warlock’s return. But then, villains not getting their comeuppance was a staple in Olden’s Narc series. 

Overall though, I enjoyed The Warlock just as much on this second reading, and I was very impressed with the level of insanity Marc Olden injected into it – comparatively speaking, it’s a lot crazier than the previous five volumes of Black Samurai, and displays a more pulpy side of Olden than those familiar with his work might expect.

Black Dynamite (The Comic Book Series)

Black Dynamite, by Brian Ash, Jun Lofamia, Ron Wimberly, and Marcello Ferreira

February, 2015  IDW Publishing

Somehow I was completely unaware that there was a Black Dynamite comic book tie-in published several years ago, shortly after the release of the movie. I knew there’d been an animated series on Adult Swim, but I never watched it, and likely never will, as judging from the clips I’ve seen it’s nothing at all like the movie. And really, as the years have gone by, Black Dynamite has become one of my all-time favorite movies, if not my favorite ever. It’s a perfect spoof of a poorly-produced, low-budget “Blaxploitation” film of the early ‘70s, while being a very funny movie in its own right. Somehow the producers were able to walk that line, and they did so perfectly, from the “goofs” expected of the former (boom mics showing up in shots, actors blowing lines), to the straight comedy of the latter (the part where Black Dynamite and his pals have a brainstorming session in the diner in particular). 

Sure, Black Dynamite isn’t perfect; I’ve never been fond of the finale, which I think goes too far outside the self-imposed constraints of the film. Black Dynamite fighting Richard Nixon in the White House might sound funny, but it’s not something you’d see in a legitimate Blaxploitation film. Indeed, I’m always ticked that the main plot – a black politician working with a greasy mobster to sell drugs in “the community” – is hastily dispatched in the final quarter, as if the producers decided they needed a bigger finale. The deleted scenes on the Blu Ray even indicate that this storyline was indeed the finale, up to and including a bevy of Dolemite-esque hookers-slash-kung-fu fighters taking on the mob; this scene lasts a mere few seconds in the final film, the producers rushing through it to get to “Kung-Fu Island” and Richard Nixon. 

Then again, the imperfection kind of adds to Black Dynamite’s charm. The biggest mystery is why it wasn’t a hit, and why it isn’t better-known today. Director Scott Sanders wonders the same thing in the Introduction he provides for this trade paperback, which collects five comic books that were published by two different imprints from 2011 to 2014. This intro, which is the highlight of the book, is very insightful, as Sanders explains the origins of Black Dynamite (essentially, it was an idea of star Michael Jai White’s), as well as the writing of the script (White with the concept, collaborating with Sanders and fellow star Byron “Bullhorn” Minns, who per the intro is the one who ensured they got all the Blaxploitation tributes/parodies correct). 

Sanders tells us how an early cut of the film got a lot of industry attention, and how the final film was expected to do so well. And then, “crickets” upon the premiere…and Black Dynamite only even played in a few theaters. Sanders is clearly at a loss to understand what happened, and conveys this in his intro. He does try to find a silver lining; he tells us of a special showing in a Hollywood theater, sometime after the film’s general release, where he and Michael Jai White were the featured guests, and the two were surprised to see that most of the audience came dressed up as characters from the film. I wonder if this special showing Scott Sanders is referring to is the one at the Red Vic, for which an artist named Dave Hunter created a blacklight poster – a poster which I have and showed here on the blog fourteen years ago. (And for the past fourteen years, that blacklight poster, framed and ready to be hung, has been in the exact same spot on my study room floor, leaning against the wall and waiting to be hung up!) 

Scott Sanders also finds silver lining in how Black Dynamite has become both a cartoon and a comic book character, even speculating that he maybe should’ve been a comic character all along. Unfortunately, it appears that even Black Dynamite the comic bombed, as the “series” only lasted 4 issues, with a one-shot coming out before it, and this trade paperback is out of print and overpriced on the used books marketplace. Again it is curious that Black Dynamite didn’t resonate more. I concur with Sanders that it seemed like a pre-packaged success, even down to Adrian Younge’s pitch-perfect soundtrack. One can easily get wrapped up in the world of Black Dynamite, and the producers even gave us fun stuff that should have further guaranteed social media interest, like those PSA spots. These comics should have just added to that. Maybe it’s just a case that Black Dynamite came out at the wrong time. 

I’ll say right now though that the comic does not, and could not, compare to the film. Black Dynamite works mainly due to Michael Jai White’s performance, and the conceit that White is “really” a former pro footballer named Farrante Jones who has become an actor. (Furthering this conceit is the idea, which I read somewhere, that “Farrante’s” football career was cut short due to a neck injury, hence why Black Dynamite has such stiff upper-body movement – again, it is things like this, things you wouldn’t even notice until your fourth or fifth viewing, that make the movie so special.) The writer of the comics, Brian Ash (who apparently also wrote and produced the animated series), clearly has his work cut out for him, trying to mimic this “serious but not serious” vibe. His failure is that he even tries. That said, I did appreciate how Ash tried to stay true to the “Farrante Jones” conceit, with fake ads throughout the book of Michael Jai White as Farrante Jones, sporting some product. 

To me, the biggest failing of Black Dynamite the comic is that Brian Ash doesn’t play it straight. He should’ve just written a straight Blaxploitation caper featuring a studly and virile black protagonist, and left the funny stuff to the dialog or to the characters. Instead, Ash occasionally goes for humorous plots, or will have characters making fun of plot developments, which is never a good idea. Again, it works fine in the movie – one can clearly see Michael Jai White as “Farrante Jones playing Black Dynamite” struggling with the dumb-ass script and terrible lines he’s been given, not to mention the bad actors he has to work with – but in a comic it doesn’t work very well at all. 

Curiously, Ash also has a strange tendency to take Black Dynamite out of his element. Surprisingly, only one of the five comics here features Black Dynamite in his typical urban environment. The first three issues of the series, in fact, don’t even seem to take place in the ‘70s, and have him traveling around the world and fighting the Illuminati; the third issue in particular is head-scratcher, featuring Black Dynamite up against genetically-bred giant insects and lots of gore. Humorously, it’s as if Ash realizes he’s lost the plot, as despite ending on a cliffhanger, the events of issue three are ignored in issue four (which was the final issue). And of all the stories here, #4 has the most in common with the movie. Indeed, the fourth issue even sort of rips off the movie; whereas Black Dynamite concerned an evil white plot to contaminate malt liquor, Black Dynamite #4 concerns an evil white plot to booby-trap tennis shoes. 

But of all the comics in the collection, it is the first one, the one-shot Black Dynamite: Slave Island, that is the best; it was originally published in 2011 by Ape Entertainment. And no wonder this story is the best in the collection, as per the credits the plot is courtesy none other than Michael Jai White and Scott Sanders! So then, Slave Island may give an indication of what Black Dynamite II might have been like. If so, then perhaps Brian Ash isn’t the one to blame for consistently taking Black Dynamite out of his element in the ensuing comics, for White and Sanders set the trend here. Slave Island is essentially a take on the “slavesploitation” films of the ‘70s (Arthur “Roots” Haley himself even has a cameo in the comic), with Black Dynamite pointedly referred to as a “Mandingo” at one point. 

The concept is interesting, but perhaps a little too one-note for a film, so maybe it isn’t fair to judge Slave Island as a movie that never was. It concerns Black Dynamite becoming aware of an island off the coast where black people are still held as slaves. He gears up and heads there, only to end up being washed up on the coast sans all of his equipment. From here it’s Black Dynamite in a loin cloth – again, the funky ‘70s trappings are for the most part gone in the comics – as he attempts to lead a rebellion among the cowed slaves. And it turns out “Slave Island” is actually a tourist spot, with wealthy white vacationers paying to come here and see how “things are supposed to be.” 

None of the slave characters get much of a chance to breathe, what with Slave Island only being around 48 pages. The slave who gets the most attention is a sexy, scantily-clad Pam Grier-type who harbors rebellious tendencies, but she isn’t in the story nearly as much as she should be. Black Dynamite, who is quickly caught and thrown in with the slaves, will spend the rest of the story taunting the white owners of Slave Island that a revolution is brewing – that is, when he isn’t being bid off to a wealthy white matron who engages the “Mandingo” in several nights of off-page lovin.’ Oh and I should mention here, despite looking exactly like a 1970s comic, Slave Island features rampant cursing and even a little nudity, just like the movie Black Dynamite. It also features the wonderfully economical plotting of a ‘70s comic; unlike modern-day comics, where an entire issue or more can be devoted to plot setup, Slave Island tells the beginning, middle, and end at a rapid clip. 

There’s a lot of stuff here that one could imagine making its way into the movie sequel that never was, like Black Dynamite punching a shark after being capsized in the ocean. Also his leading the slaves in revolt is pretty cool, but again a little rushed, as is typical for a comic. But Slave Island is mostly interesting in how creators White and Sanders apparently wanted to broaden the character of Black Dynamite, taking him out of the inner-city; unfortunately, Sanders doesn’t give much background info on Slave Island in his intro. It’s interesting to wonder if he and White did indeed conceive of it as a potential storyline for Black Dynamite II. 

Another big thing going for Slave Island is the artwork, courtesy Jun Lofamia. Per a brief, uncredited postscript at the end of the trade paperack, it’s noted that the goal for Slave Island was for it to look exactly like a comic from the ‘70s, and it was a struggle to find a modern artist who did not have a modern comics style. But, as it turned out, Lofamia was a comic artist in the ‘70s, thus his style here is identical to something you might’ve seen in a Marvel comic of the ‘70s. It’s great, and one can tell that the book was a labor of love on this front, down to the muted color palette and the faux-yellowing of the pages. Slave Island is also good because Brian Ash refrains from too much spoofery, other than occasional “humorous” stuff, which usually involves dialog; one of his recurring shticks is having characters misunderstand each other. 

Unfortunately, Black Dynamite the series is a whole ‘nother thing. Published by IDW, the series only ran from 2013 to 2014. Given that Brian Ash was involved with the animated series, I have to wonder if his Black Dynamite comic series is a take on that; even the artwork of the first three issues is similar to the cartoon, courtesy Ron Wimberly in issue #1 and Marcello Ferreira in issues #2 and 3. Their artwork has that same “street” look as the cartoon, and I don’t like it at all. Apparently the concern over finding an artist who was not influenced by modern comic art was not a concern for the series, as it had been for the Slave Island one-shot. And not only is the artwork “modern” in these first three issues, so too is the storyline, which bears no similarity to Black Dynamite the movie. 

Actually, what the storyline of Black Dynamite #1-3 most reminded me of was the COMCON mini-series Gerald Montgomery wrote in 2000 for The Executioner. As with that Mack Bolan storyline, here Black Dynamite discovers a secret organization of evil white people that is heavily equipped and intent on taking over the world. The brevity of Slave Island is gone, with Black Dynamite #1 essentially nothing more than setup for the ensuing two issues – and it’s clear that more than two issues were intended for this storyline, as the “Illuminati” plot abruptly (and thankfully) comes to a halt after issue #3. 

Things get off to a bad start with an opening in which Black Dynamite is kicked out of “the community,” the very same community he saved from drugs in the movie. One thing going in this first issue’s favor is that the time is clearly stated (1976), and also the events of both the movie and Slave Island are mentioned. But otherwise there is no feeling of continuity. Black Dynamite is asked to leave by the locals because his ass-kicking has caused unintentional consequences for the people of the community, and they just want him gone. So, like Cain in Kung-Fu, Black Dynamite sets off to walk the Earth. 

One suspects he walks a helluva long time, because almost all the 1970s trappings of Black Dynamite are gone from here on out. The funky fly threads are gone, and Black Dynamite’s afro is even shorter. The villains all seem to have stepped out of the ‘90s; their leader is a bald white guy in a black three-piece suit, as if Lex Luthor has come over from DC Comics. (Actually the villain, dubbed “The Man,” looks a lot like famed comics writer Grant Morrison.) If Slave Island was a broadening of the Black Dynamite canvas, then the storyline in Black Dynamite #1-3 is a shattering of it. Tellingly, neither Michael Jai White nor Scott Sanders are credited for the plot of this storyline; it’s all the work of Brian Ash. 

Wandering the world, Black Dynamite is confronted by a squad of black-armored goons who take him off to a secret, high-tech facility. That’s the entirety of issue #1; so much for the economical storytelling of Slave Island. In issue #2, Black Dynamite meets “The Man,” the aforementioned Lex Luthor/Grant Morrison lookalike, who gabs that this high-tech army is part of “The Illuminati” that secretly runs the world, and what’s more they want Black Dynamite to join. But Black Dynamite picks up a bazooka that is conveniently lying there and blows the place up. After this he hooks up with a multi-ethnic resistance group – none of whom are named, but one of them is a sexy Asian gal – and he becomes a fighter against the Illuminati. 

With the Illuminati stuff and the ragtag band of guerrilla fighters, the parallells to Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles are very evident. In fact, what with the Morrison lookalike as the villain, I wondered if Black Dynamite #1-3 was intended as a spoof. But it doesn’t work, and what’s more it’s all rushed (the Asian gal isn’t even given a name, I believe), and The Man is not an interesting villain. And the plots are wholly unlike what one might expect from a Black Dynamite storyline.  And Ferreira’s art more so conveys the ‘90s. Again, like The Invisibles. 

The third issue is where it gets real puzzling, with Black Dynamite going to the Himalays and encountering a temple of monks who have these genetic insectoid monsters at their disposal; for some reason, Ash and Ferreira decide to add a bunch of gore to the world of Black Dynamite (and yes, I realize the film had a few gore affects as well), with the insectoids tearing people up and exploding. The finale is especially gory, with The Man having his head surgically implanted onto the neck of a black man (and then ordering the black man’s head gorily sawn off); certainly a tribute to the Blaxploitation movie The Thing With Two Heads. 

Fortunately (and humorously), Black Dynamite #4 ignores all that bullshit and gets back to what readers want: a story that feels like Black Dynamite. Also fortunately, Slave Island artist Jun Lofamia is back, again turning in artwork that seems to have come right out of a 1970s comic, once more even replicating the muted colors and the yellowed pages. Whereas issues #1-3 took place (presumably) in 1976, the fourth issue is stated as being in 1972. No mention is made of the previous three issues, as if Brian Ash himself wants to forget about them. 

Shockingly, this is the only story in the collection that has an inner-city setting. Black Dynamite is in the audience as a famous, Dr. J-type basketball player does some stunts on the court – and then the b-baller somehow explodes. While the news lies about what happened, Dynamite – after “balling” the guy’s sexy widow (lame pun alert) – investigates and learns that it’s all an Anaconda Malt Liquor-style plot. Evil Whitey is tricking out a new shipment of sneakers in the latest plot to take down the black man, and Black Dynamite kicks some ass. This one is a self-contained storyline, not as good as Slave Island, but certainly better than the Illuminati storyline. The only problem is that Brian Ash treats too much of issue #4 as a comedy. 

And thus Black Dynamite the comic comes to an ignoble end. This trade paperback collection is only notable for the insightful intro by Scott Sanders, and the tantalizing possibility that Slave Island might have been the plot for Black Dynamite II. And now that I’ve written so much, here are some random pics of the pages – take note particularly of Jun Lofamia’s pitch-perfect 1970s comic artwork recreation. 

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast

The Destroyer #38: Bay City Blast, by Warren Murphy

October, 1979  Pinnacle Books

I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Destroyer, but I’ve been aware of this particular installment for years, as it features Remo and Chiun taking on spoofy parodies of the protagonists of other Pinnacle series: namely, The Executioner, The Butcher, and Death Merchant. But as ever Warren Murphy (writing solo this time, without early series co-writer Richard Sapir) is more focused on the “spoofy” nature, with hardly any focus on action. Despite the trappings, The Destroyer is a comedy series, and one must admit that Bay City Blast is occasionally very funny, even if it isn’t the “Pinnacle All-Stars” novel one might have preferred. (It still surprises me that Pinnacle editor Andy Ettinger never conceived of a one-shot that would’ve united all of the series protagonists in a big story, like a prefigure of Gold Eagle’s later Stony Man books.) 

First of all, I want to note that the long-limbed black beauty in a bikini with the submachine gun on Hector Garrido’s cover art does not exist in the actual novel. This of course is a bummer. But then, girls don’t much exist in The Destroyer. They are for the most part cipher-like, and never exploited as they would be in the typical men’s adventure novel, due to the sad fact that hero Remo Williams has zero in the way of a sex drive. As I’ve complained before, Remo’s more robot than man; Bay City Blast even features a “pretty” secretary (“pretty” being the extent of what Warren Murphy gives you in the exploitative goods) who constantly throws herself at Remo, and he remains disinterested – and also Remo goes without a woman for the entire book. Some men’s adventure progatonist! 

My assumption is the gal with the gun on the cover might be Garrido’s interpretation of Ruby Gonzales, who appears briefly in Bay City Blast and reports to Smitty, the boss of CURE. But she is fully clothed throughout and for the most part breaks into a building to check its security level; I get the impression Ruby has been in other volumes, but I’m by no means an expert on The Destroyer. So I could be wrong, but it just seemed to me that Ruby was an already-established character, and all told she’s only in the book for a few pages. 

I always rant and rave about The Destroyer and what I wish it was, but truth be told Warren Murphy is a good writer, and clearly has a good sense of humor – one that he’s able to convey via the narrative. We already know Bay City Blast will be funny from the start, when a mobbed-up “businessman” named Rocco Nobile moves into slummy Bay City, New Jersey, and promptly takes it over by blackmailing various dirty politicians. The humor comes in the recurring image of Rocco’s bodyguard constantly putting his hand in his pocket, and the dialog throughout is, as ever, pretty humorous. 

The biggest humor comes via The Eraser and The Rubout Squad, a subplot that comes out of nowhere but ultimately overtakes the narrative: this is the name of Murphy’s pseudo-Pinnacle squad. First there’s Sam Gregory, a gun manufacturer with dreams of taking on the Mafia and wiping it out with his own squad. To this end he recruits three men: Mark Tolan, a psychopath who was court martialed in ‘Nam for gunning down a village of women and children (the Mack Bolan parody); Al Baker, a guy with delusions of being a torpedo who has decided to go against the Syndicate, but in reality is just some loser who’s seen The Godfather too many times (the Butcher parody); and finally Nicholas Lizzard, a six-foot-five failed actor who is now a full-time drunk and whose biggest talent is dressing up in drag so that he can make himself look like “a six-foot-four woman” (the Richard Camellion parody, and the one Murphy seems to have the most fun with). 

Meanwhile Sam Gregory dubs himself “The Eraser,” and it is he who has the trademark bit of dropping broken pencils at scenes, a la Bolan’s marksman medals or The Penetrator’s arrow heads. My assumption is Gregory is intended as Murphy’s spoof of The Penetrator Mark Hardin, but other than the name and the broken pencils bit…the character seems to more be a parody of Don Pendleton. This is mostly because he is the one who plans the hits and also comes up with alliterative titles for them: first is “Bay City Blast,” and later the Eraser plans on others with similar, Pendleton-esque titles, like “Salinas Slaughter.” 

Murphy also has a lot of fun spoofing Mack Bolan via his psycho duplicate Mark Tolan; in Tolan’s scenes, Murphy recreates Don Pendleton’s style, down to the recurring “Yeahs” that punctuate the narrative. He even gets double bang for his spoofing buck with Tolan often vowing to “Live Huge,” parodying Bolan’s “Live Large.” I seem to recall Warren Murphy saying years ago in a Paperback Fanatic interview that he felt Pendleton’s ego was getting a little too large at the time, hence he had some fun mocking him in Bay City Blast. One can well imagine Don Pendleton being unsettled at how psychopathic his character is made to seem: Tolan, who names himself “The Exeterminator,” is a nutjob who is ready to explode at any moment, and indeed gleefully guns down children in Bay City Blast. 

But as mentioned it’s Nicholas Lizzard, the Richard Camellion spoof, who draws the most laughs. Curiously, Lizzard is presented as a roaring drunk who lives off vodka, making one wonder if Murphy was making any insinuations about Camellion’s creator, Joseph Rosenberger. Speaking of whom, Murphy does not mimic Rosenberger’s style in the Lizzard sections (but then, not many could), but he certainly makes Lizzard just as psycho as Tolan. The recurring humor here is very un-PC in today’s era, as Lizzard often dresses like a woman, but isn’t fooling anyone. This though is the extent of Lizzard’s schtick, other than the heavy drinking, so he isn’t a “cosmic lord of death” or whatever Richard Camellion was. 

As for The Baker, he’s nothing at all like the character he’s spoofing. Whereas Bucher the Butcher is a terse, cipher-like death machine, Al Baker is at heart a good-natured sort who is only in it for the money, and in fact harbors a lot of concern about the increasingly-violent nature of the Rubout Squad. Not that this subplot goes anywhere. Baker still takes part in the Squads raids on Bay City’s “underworld,” ie gunning down innocent men, women, and children. The latter I think is where Murphy goes a little too far in his black humor; the Rubout Squad shooting down prepubescent Chinese children in a “heroin factor” (really a fortune cookie bakery) doesn’t really elicit many chuckles. 

Remo and Chiun are often lost in the shuffle, but on the positive side Remo is treated with less scorn in this one. His opening sequence is pretty cool, and another indication of the comedy nature of the series, as he takes out a house filled with recently-freed criminals, killers and rapists who’d been put away but released by shady lawyers; humorously, all of them have hyphenated, Joe-Bob type names. But unlike The Executioner or any other Pinnacle series, it’s all played for laughs, with Remo easily and casually killing each of them off one by one, and becoming more concerned with where to put their cars after killing them. 

And that again brings me to my central issue with The Destroyer. Everything is so easy for Remo and Chiun that there’s no tension or drama or anything. Killing is simple for Remo. Along with the lack of sex drive, this makes Remo Williams an altogether poor men’s adventure protagonist, because you can’t really feel anything for him. Perhaps this is why Murphy and Sapir grafted on the “treat Remo like a fool” subtext, to try to make Remo more relatable. And also again the action scenes are not presented the way I prefer; as ever they are relayed via the impressions of the person about to be killed by Remo, with the reader never getting a good idea of what Remo is actually doing. 

So it’s the comedy that carries the story, with every sequence always devolving into satire or parody. Like when Remo and Chiun go fishing for vacation, and a great white shark chases them – Remo even referring to Jaws while it happens – and Chiun merely “calls” the shark with his fingers in the water and then kills it with a single blow. The climactic faceoff with the Rubout Squad is also fairly anticlimactic, with Murphy again returning to his standard trick of killing villains off-page, which is a big letdown. And even here Remo dispatches his enemies with such ease that the reader who actually wanted to see a pseudo “Pinnacle All-Stars” square-off will be mightily underwhelmed. Only Tolan really goes face-to-face with Remo, Murphy apparently wise enough to know his readers would expect a little more from him for his Bolan parody, at least. But even here it’s more for laughs, with Remo almost like a god up against Tolan. 

As for the plot, it moves quickly, and Murphy spends more time with the Rubout Squad bickering and bantering with each other before gunning down innocents in their war to “cleanse” Bay City. Meanwhile Remo and Chiun are called into act as bodyguards for Mayor Rocco Nobile, the mobbed-up bigwig who showed up in the opening pages; this subplot I thought was pretty cool, ie Nobile’s real intent in Bay City, but again Murphy sort of loses site of it as the book progresses. Even here it’s comedy, with Remo and Chiun just happening to get a hotel room right next door to the Rubout Squad, but neither party realizing it. There’s also comedy in the Eraser’s growing anger that the newspapers, for some mysterious reason, never report on the Rubout Squad’s hits. 

The ”climax” is on us before we realize it, and while it might not be the action spectacular you’d get in a more “straight” men’s adventure novel, it does feature the Eraser in a tank going down Main Street in Bay City. But the confrontation with the Rubout Squad is quick, anticlimactic, and mostly off-page, so I wouldn’t use Bay City Blast as an indication of how Remo Williams would fare against the Death Merchant, the Butcher, or the Executioner. But then, Warren Murphy presents Remo as so omnipotent that he’d probably handle the real deals just as easily as he does the spoofs. 

Murphy does score huge points for somehow seeing through the mists of time and describing what passes for a “journalist” in our miserable modern era. Murphy’s intent apparently is to spoof the hiring standards of The New York Post (this is during the section in which the Rubout Squad is incensed that their hits aren’t making it into the news), but little does Murphy realize that he’s describing what will be the required background for a “journalist” in a few decades: 

Overall though, Bay City Blast is fast-moving and fun, but again The Destroyer just isn’t my kind of men’s adventure series.