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. 

Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers (Shaft #6)

Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, by Ernest Tidyman

September, 1974  Bantam Books

To this day I still have not read Ernest Tidyman’s novel Shaft, and I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve seen the more-famous film adaptation. Of course, I have Isaac Hayes’s soundtrack on vinyl, as to me Shaft has always been more of a music thing than a movie or novel thing. (Not sure if that sentence even made sense.) Many years ago there was a cool overview of the Shaft novels on Teleport City, and of them all it was this installment, the paperback original Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, that caught my attention. Only now, like 20 years after reading that Teleport City article, have I got around to reading the book. 

First of all, a big thanks to Steve Aldous’ World Of Shaft site, which provides a lot of great background info. Basically, Ernest Tidyman wrote a handful of Shaft novels in the early ‘70s, then farmed the series out to ghostwriters for a few paperback originals.  Carnival Of Killers, then, was actually written by pulp veteran Robert Turner, working off an unproduced non-Shaft script Tidyman had written years before about a private eye in Jamaica. But, according to Steve Aldous, Turner not only took a long time to turn in his manuscript, but Tidyman also deemed it subpar when Turner completed it, and Tidyman ended up rewriting the majority of it. 

Now, finally having made my way through this deceptively slim, 136-page book, I can only say that Robert Turner’s manuscript must have been really bad. Indeed, it gave me flashbacks to a novel Turner published the following year: Scorpio. Like that book, Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers was a chore to read, with Turner taking what should have been a sure shot of a concept and turning it into a middling, overly-digressive banality in which super-cool John Shaft is reduced to a bumbling fool, always ten steps behind his opponents. Indeed, Shaft – and the reader – spends the entire narrative just trying to figure out what’s going on. My assumption is Robert Turner was a Mystery writer at heart, as that is all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers really is: a tepid mystery, with hardly anything in the sex or violence categories. It’s so lame that Shaft even bungles the chance for a three-way with a pair of sexy white chicks, instead getting drunk and passing out. 

In this one, John Shaft is taken out of his element; when we meet him he’s lazing on the beach in Jamaica, taking a rare vacation. Not much effort is placed on establishing the character or referring to previous adventures, so I didn’t feel as if I was missing anything by reading this sixth volume before the others. Turner’s style is clearly apparent – but then, so is Tidyman’s. Above I mentioned I’ve never read Shaft, but I did start to read it once upon a time, and was surprised at the hardboiled narrative tone Tidyman employed. The fact that Shaft was black only came up in the occasional descriptions of him, but otherwise there was nothing that really differentiated Shaft from umpteen other tough guys of the time. But I guess the same could be said of the film, as Shaft the movie isn’t really “Blaxploitation” per se; it’s just like any other early ‘70s crime movie, only with a black protagonist. But the same could be said about every Blaxploitation movie; they aren’t so much “exploitation” as they are urban action movies with black characters. 

The same is doubly true of Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Shaft could be replaced with pretty much any other standard tough-guy P.I. in the book. Even the fact that he’s black doesn’t make much difference, which is odd, given that Jamaica is a country with a black population. Periodically Shaft will ruminate on the plight of the black man, but otherwise there is no focus on any sort of black unity or anything. In fact, Shaft constantly butts heads with the natives, and soon learns to hate Jamaica. 

Turner throws us into the action (or what passes for it) posthaste; Shaft’s beach picnic is ruined when a pretty young girl (“taffy-skinned, long-waisted, high-hipped, and very roundly bottomed with conical leaping breasts”) is accosted nearby by a pair of goons. Shaft only intervenes when the goons kick sand in his face, chasing after the girl, and knock over Shaft’s picnic setup. Our hero beats up the guys, but the girl runs away, and Shaft is taken to the local police precinct…where he learns that the two goons were undercover police officers. 

Here begins the incessant stalling and repetition that will make up the brunt of the novel’s narrative. Shaft meets Chief of Detectives Alex Ashton, an eyepatch-sporting native who speaks in a clipped British accent and who will spend the rest of the novel baiting and bantering with Shaft. The story goes that the “taffy-skinned” girl, Marita Dawes, was serving as the private secretary of the Prime Minister, Sir Charles Lightwood, and the cops were trying to round her up on suspicions of her involvement with a planned assassination attempt on the PM. Ashwood tries to lean on Shaft – as he will continue to do through the novel – but Shaft don’t take no guff and has Ashton call up his cop pal in New York, recurring series character Captain Anderozzi, who puts in a word for Shaft. 

And really, that’s all Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers proves to be: a continuous cycle of characters playing head-games with Shaft, using him as help or as bait as they try to figure out who is planning to kill the Prime Minister. The idea is that Shaft, a private eye, will help Ashton figure out who wants to kill Lightwood, in exchange for Shaft himself not being sent to prison. The only problem is, Shaft suspects that Ashton himself might be behind the assassination plot, as do many other characters – including Marita Dawes, the girl from the beach. In one of those “pulp novel” moments, Shaft comes back to his hotel room that night to find the scantily-clad beauty smoking dope in his room, practically begging Shaft to join the cause. She claims to be a fervernt supporter of the P.M., and indeed thinks Ashton is the one who wants to kill him. But our surly hero kicks her out. 

This will be the start of a disturbing trend in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, as Robert Turner – and presumably Ernest Tidyman – seems intent on keeping John Shaft from getting laid. Our studly hero goes without for the entire novel. There’s sexy Marita, who makes herself available but is spurned. Later, there’s the PM’s hotstuff but ice-cold wife, a black beauty who scorns Shaft, and who in a better pulp novel would probably engage him in some hate-sex. Then, as mentioned, there are the two white gals from America, teachers here in Jamaica on vacation; Shaft, pretending to be a prince from Trinidad who does not speak English (in one of the novel’s more bizarre subplots), takes them up to his room and gets them drunk…then watches as they strip…then ponders over the etiquette of a three-way (ie, wondering which to take first)…and then Shaft ends up passing out, along with the girls, thus squandering our third and final opportunity for any seventies-mandatory sleaze. 

Action is slightly more pronounced, but not much. Shaft gets in a few scuffles here and there, generally taking his opponents down without much fuss. Robert Turner has a tendency to make his action scenes hard to follow, as seen in Scorpio, and that is apparent here; I still find it humorous that Turner, who edited The Spider toward the end of its run, had dissmissive things to say in Robert Sampson’s 1989 study The Spider about main Spider writer Norvell Page, sneering at the frequency of action in Page’s manuscripts. Maybe Turner was just jealous, aware on some subconscious level that Norvell Page was a better writer than he was.  (I provided Turner’s quote about Page in the comments section of my Scorpio review, for anyone who is interested.) 

There’s also a little in the way of gunplay. Toward the end of the book Shaft gets hold of a Colt Python Magnum, and in the climactic action shoots down a thug, “[giving] him a new navel about the size of an ostritch egg.” Otherwise this is not a gory novel by any means, nothing like contemporary Blaxploitation pulp paperback series The Iceman, and as mentioned it’s more of a standard mystery than a pulp-action thriller. Robert Turner even squanders what few pulpy conceits exist in the novel; one of the thugs in the book is a friggin’ hunchback who uses a blowgun that fires poison darts, but the character is treated so conservatively that there’s nothing novel nor memorable about him. 

In fact, Turner is guilty of that hoary copout: having his protagonist knocked out by the bad guys but conveniently not killed by them when he’s out cold. This happens a few times in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, one instance in particular involving Shaft getting hit by one of those poison darts. Later on there’s a part where he crashes his car while chasing some bad guys. In each instance Shaft comes to later on, swearing revenge, apparently not realizing that his enemies could very easily have just killed him while he was lying there unconscious. But then, maybe Turner just doesn’t want his readers to realize that. 

The novel is mostly comprised of Shaft chasing one red herring after another, and getting nothing but conflicting signals from the locals he meets with. This is one of those novels where the hero is constantly befuddled and uncertain, making for a very trying read…again, so similar to the following year’s Scorpio. One can tell where Tidyman might have tightened things up at times; there are parts where Shaft will abruptly seem more like the John Shaft one expects. I also suspect Tidyman was behind the occasional veiled references in the book; we’re told, apropos of nothing, that Shaft doesn’t like moustaches, implying of course that he himself doesn’t have one – which, of course, is pretty surprising, given that Richard Roundtree sported one in his iconic portrayal of Shaft. There’s also a part where Shaft, watching those goons struggle with Marita Dawes on the beach, decides that it’s all “a lot better than that shit on television,” and I wonder if this was a veiled dig at the much-disliked Shaft TV series. 

Curiously, there is a focused attempt at knocking John Shaft down a few pegs throughout the novel, with the author(s) making him altogether disagreeable and surly…and stupid. There’s also a strange quirk in the final pages to imply Shaft is fat; for muddled reasons, the climax takes place during a costume ball, and Shaft appropriates the guise of a toreador. But the costume doesn’t fit him and everyone keeps telling him he’s “too fat” to pose as a toreador. Shaft consoles himself that there isn’t “an extra ounce of fat” on him, but otherwise he picks over his food in the climax…and yes, that’s how lame Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers is: the “thrilling” climax features Shaft picking at his meal during the costume ball and still trying to figure everything out. 

Even the very end of the novel continues with the novel’s confusing vibe: Shaft happily gets on a plane back to New York, and drifts off to sleep…only to be woken by a woman screaming that she has a bomb. It’s none other than Marita Dawes, that “taffy-skinned” beauty who started the whole caper, and I guess we are to take it that she’s one of those hippie terrorists who were so fashionable at the time. But Turner (and Tidyman, I guess) is determined to maintain the goofy vibe of the book, thus Shaft closes his eyes and forces himself to feign sleep! Whether he’s dreaming all this or not is unstated, but given the madcap tone of the book, one must imagine he is not. 

As it turned out, this was it for the adventures of John Shaft – in the United States, at least. Presumably Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers sold so poorly that Ernest Tidyman was unable to secure a publisher for the following – and final – installment of the series, The Last Shaft. That one was only published in the UK, in hardcover and paperback, and is now exceedingly scarce; a scan of it was, however, up on archive.org, but who knows when it will be back online now that the Internet Archive has been hacked. 

About the only thing that would make The Last Shaft worth reading is that it wasn’t written by Robert Turner; it was written by Philip Rock, who also wrote the incredible Hickey & Boggs novelization. It also sounds like the closest the Shaft series ever got to men’s adventure, with a well-armed Shaft taking on various criminals in New York. And it apparently lives up to its title, with Ernest Tidyman having grown so sick of his famous character that he wanted to do away with him. Judging from the harsh, rude, surly, and just plain grumpy character featured in Shaft’s Carnival Of Killers, I can’t say the literary world suffered much of a loss.

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.

The Peking Dossier (Nick Carter: Killmaster #84)

The Peking Dossier, by Nick Carter

No month stated, 1973  Award Books

The first of two Nick Carter: Killmaster by an author named Linda Stewart, The Peking Dossier is from the unfortunate era in which series packager Lyle Kenyon Engel had let go of the reins and Award Books was fully in control, turning the series over to an army of ghostwriters with none of the unity or continuity that Engel had maintained for the series. Even worse, the series is now in first-person, with “Nick himself” relaying his adventures to us. 

This is problematic enough for me; I mean Nick Carter is this super-agent who is always “on the job,” so how the hell does he have time to write books? And indeed, The Peking Dossier is a slow-as-molasses read, another of those deceptively-slim ‘70s paperbacks. This sucker has some seriously small print and, despite “only” being 188 pages, it took me forever to finish the book. This is because Linda Stewart has a tendency to draw things out a little too much at times…and also, she makes the even worse mistake of putting her tongue a little too far into her cheek. 

It's the sort of thing Engel never would have allowed: Nick will often refer to himself as a “hero” when telling us his story in The Peking Dossier, usually in a “taking the piss” sort of vibe. Like a part where he scales a wall, and Stewart has an exhausted Nick tell us, “Sorry, I know heroes aren’t supposed to get tired.” There’s other stuff, like later on where Nick knows someone’s broken into his hotel room, and Nick informs us he has his own special way of monitoring this – and it isn’t the “hair on the doorway” trick Ian Fleming wrote about in James Bond. Nick further complains that Fleming gave too much away, and Nick himself isn’t going to give away his secrets “for ninety-five cents.” Ie, the cost of a Nick Carter: Killmaster paperback in 1973. 

This breaking of the fourth wall (or whatever the literary term for it is) might be fine in something like The Destroyer, but Killmaster is supposed to be more of a “straight, no chaser” affair…or at least it was when Lyle Kenyon Engel ran it. As Engel himself noted, he did not like the first-person narrative for the series, but it was insisted on by Award Books. One can see Engel’s point, as ultimately first-person narrative will lead to this…a writer thinking himself (or herself) too clever for the material, and poking fun at it in the narrative. Also the entire “Nick Carter is also the author” conceit is ridiculous, as one must imagine super-hero Nick Carter traveling the globe as he stops villains and beds exotic babes…and yet somehow finding the time to write a 188 page book of teeny-tiny print. A book that is then published under his own name! 

Another issue is the first-person narrative makes Nick seem altogether too gabby, as Manning Lee Stokes frequently demonstrated in his own first-person offerings for the series, a la The Red Rays. Since Nick narrates the entire story for us, he comes off like a neurotic fusspot, and it’s hard to square with the image of a virile man of action. But then, it all depends on the narrative voice, and again given the army of solo ghostwriters working on the series at this point, “Nick” comes off as a different narrator every time. In the hands of Linda Stewart he suddenly sounds more like a private eye in a bad ‘50s film noir, as Nick’s “voice” is decidely hardboiled in The Peking Dossier. 

That said, Linda Stewart wins the Leigh Brackett award for “female author who can write almost exactly like a male author.” Folks, if I hadn’t known going in that a woman wrote this one, I never would’ve guessed it. Speaking of Stokes, Stewart makes her version of Nick just as aggressively macho, and there’s none of the pussyfooting around certain subjects that one gets from other female authors invading the world of men’s adventure, like for example Blood or The Peacemaker. Unlike the few other female authors in the men’s adventure genre I’ve read, Linda Stewart knows to keep things moving, with a focus on action – of the violent and sexual variety. Even more so than the previous female author on the series, Valerie Moolman. 

That said (again), Nick does fall in love in The Peking Dossier, and indeed only has sex with one girl in the book (the one he falls in love with, naturally), so there is that giveaway that our author is a woman. Otherwise, Stewart knows enough to not emasculate her Nick Carter too much; we still get the topical description of women and there’s a fair bit of action…though, again, the sex is for the most part off-page or relayed in metaphors, and the violence is not gory it all. This is one of those books where Nick tells us he “shot” someone and leaves it at that. Or even, “In ten seconds they were all dead.” 

Again like Stokes, Linda Stewart has a little fun with some in-jokery; just as Stokes would often refer to himself, his pseudonyms, or etc in his own work for the series, so too does Linda Stewart. Indeed, she does Stokes one better, introducing herself into the book. The Peking Dossier ultimately concerns Nick Carter facing off against a master assassin with a clone army who is looking to kill every US senator and ultimately the President, and early in the book Nick is told to meet with the AXE agent who will be working the assignment with him…a lovely redhead with an incredible body who gives her name as Linda Stewart. 

Nick will soon learn it’s a lie: the redhead’s name is really Tara Bennett, and she’s a scientist for AXE. But it’s interesting that Linda Stewart slipped her real name into the book…doubtless unaware that fifty years later some random reviewer would be writing about it on his blog. It’s also interesting that she made herself Nick’s dream girl, in a way; later Nick will tell us that Linda/Tara not only has the best body he’s ever seen, but she’s the best lay he’s ever had – and, as Nick himself reminds us, he’s been with more than a few women. But Stewart doesn’t dwell much on the juicy goods. In fact, the most we get is stuff like, “Tara was something else.” The reluctance to dwell on all the juicy material also comes off as humorous, given how gabby our narrator is about vitually every other subject. 

Another interesting thing, given that The Peking Dossier was written by a woman, is Nick’s insistence on asserting his dominance over Tara. Moments after meeting her, and learning that she’s an AXE scientist who will be working with him, Nick ensures that Tara is under no question of who is in charge. Again, Stewart’s Nick Carter has the same aggressive macho tendencies as Manning Lee Stokes’s, but then it could because Stewart’s goal is to show how Nick goes from being a macho boss to a guy who falls in love with Tara. 

And for an author who is brand new to the series, Linda Stewart really goes to bat to have Nick Carter explain himself and his philosophy to us. We are also told without condition that he’s not wealthy: “If you were out of work for six months last year, you probably earned more than I did.” Frequently Nick will confide such thoughts in us readers, and I have to admit I kind of appreciated Stewart’s self-confidence in such things…I mean here she was, the first female author on the series since Valerie Moolman, ten years before, and she dove right into it without any hesitancies. One could easily believe “Nick himself” really is telling the tale of The Peking Dossier, Linda Stewart’s narratorial voice is so confident. 

The only problem is, the novel is incredibly sluggish. It just seemed to take forever for me to finish it, and my assumption is Stewart’s word count came in higher than expected and Award just shrank the print instead of cutting the fat. The helluva it is, the main idea is kind of cool: there’s this group of assassins from Red China that calls itself “KAN,” and Nick tells us that no one’s ever figured out what the name means, so AXE just refers to it as “Kill Americans Now,” which is what the assassin group specializes in. As if a cabal of “A1” assassins wasn’t enough, Stewart also throws in a cloning subplot; one of the chief KAN agents has apparently cloned himself, and is sending out his duplicates to kill United States senators. 

This is how Tara Bennett comes into the picture; Hawk sends her to meet up with Nick, and it turns out she is a scientist who has guessed clones are behind the plot…given that the killers have all been Chinese men who look identical, even to the same mole in the center of their forehead. Stewart’s footing is a little off with her presentation of Hawk; she has the AXE boss withholding info from Nick, for reasons that make little sense other than plot convenience. For example, why exactly Tara goes through with the “Linda Stewart” charade is not properly explained, nor is how she is under orders – from Hawk – to not tell Nick certain things about the assignment. Regardless, Tara as mentioned will be Nick’s sole bedmate and ally throughout The Peking Dossier, first going with him to Nassau to get a lead on the KAN plot, and then later to England, and then finally to Hanoi. 

One thing Linda Stewart shares with other female authors in the men’s adventure genre is her reliance on knocking Nick out for the convenience of the plot; Nick Carter is knocked out or drugged into unconsciousness at least five times over the course of The Peking Dossier. It gets to be comical after a while, and it’s clear it’s because Stewart has painted her hero into a corner and has to resort to the easy way out and knocking Nick senseless. The funny thing is, Nick’s opponents just conveniently don’t kill him when he’s out cold! But anyway, poor Nick certainly picks up at least a few concussions in this one. 

At any rate, Stewart does pack in a bit of action throughout, but as mentioned it is spectacularly bloodless. Nick uses his three mainstay weapons – the Luger, the stiletto, the gas bomb – and even here Stewart, again brand-new to the series, has Nick explain to us the usefulness of Pierre, the gas bomb. You know, the one he hides by his balls. Stewart, with her tongue again in her cheek, has Nick tell us how men never search there, adding to the benefit of the bomb, yet at the same time he humorously tells us how hiding something behind your balls can be a little embarrassing if the wrong person sees it. Otherwise Nick doles out quick, clean kills in The Peking Dossier, but he does gas-bomb a group of KAN killers at one point. 

The plotting is pretty busy, and overly so, to the extent that fun stuff is unexplored. Like there’s a part where Nick is cornered by some KAN killers, and they end up fighting with each other over who gets to kill the infamous Killmaster, as apparently there’s a points reward system in the KAN organization. Nick wonders how many points he’d be worth, but Stewart doesn’t do much with the setup. Same goes with the clone stuff, which isn’t really dwelt on until the final pages. Essentially, a top KAN killer hopes to create a clone army to topple the west, and he also plans to clone Nick and Tara! Nick because he could have an army of Killmasters (we are told clones inherit the exact abilities of the source), and Tara because he would have a super-smart genetic scientist at his disposal. 

The finale plays out in a temple in which the KAN villain manufactures heroin (another subplot), using a group of naïve monks to do the work. We have some B-movie sci-fi stuff, like Nick and Tara seeing little jars with growing embryos in them, knowing that they are looking at clones of themselves. But a lot of it is ruined by Nick constantly getting knocked out, or dosed by drugs into oblivion. Oh, and also falling in love with Tara. After a lot of off-page lovin,’ Tara admits to Nick that she’s fallen in love with him…and Nick, after telling us that under normal circumstances he’d come up with something to tell a girl who’d fallen in love with him – basically, to get lost – tells us that instead he tells Tara he feels the same. Now, one would expect this will mean that only one thing could possibly happen to Tara, but Linda Stewart goes in an unexpected direction. 

SPOILER ALERT: Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know. But for posterity, here’s what happens with Tara. Stewart as metioned puts a lot of subplots and extranneous background detail into the book, with Nick often referring to people he knew in the past (who of course have never before been mentioned in the series). Well anyway, one such reference, which Tara randomly throws out, is to an elite AXE agent who was killed in action or lost or something (I forget). Well, despite telling Nick she’s in love with him and even that she wants to have his child…in a hasty final chapter Nick informs us that Tara, who does survive the events of the novel, is already married – indeed, to that very elite AXE agent! Turns out he's been crippled or somesuch, and Hawk at AXE is paying for his care, and Tara used the opportunity to go out in the field and briefly fall in love with Nick and let herself imagine what it would be like to be with him. But she’s staying with her crippled husband. Or something. Nick for his part doesn’t seem much fazed, telling us a married life isn’t one he thinks he’d even want. 

Overall The Peking Dossier is entertaining, though a bit ponderous at times and certainly bloated. That said, Linda Stewart proves herself a better series writer than many who worked on Nick Carter: Killmaster, and perhaps one of these days I’ll seek out her other installment, 1975’s The Jerusalem File.

Orgasm

Orgasm, by Brian Richard Boylan

July, 1973  Dell Books

Now here’s a book on a topic I think we all might find some interest in. Subtitled “The Ultimate Experience,” Orgasm is part of the glut of sex paperbacks turned out in the early ‘70s; author Brian Boylan gives no bio for himself, but in the book he does reveal that in 1972 he published another sex-themed Dell PBO, Infidelity, which was taken from his interviews with a few hundred married couples who had cheated in some capacity. 

In his intro to this book, Boylan states that he personally has noticed that the orgasm itself is rarely focused on in these sex books; it is the end goal people work toward, and writers and researchers leave it at that. Or, “The last taboo,” as Boylan puts it. But what does an orgasm feel like? And how would women or men describe it? This apparently is the germ idea for Orgasm, but Boylan loses the plot, and for the most part the book comes off like any other early ‘70s sex book. 

This is humorous, given that Boylan spends the intro chapter of Orgasm ranting about the glut of sex books in the marketplace and how they are all essentially retreads of one another. That said, this is a good idea of how the market was responding to the sex glut of the early ‘70s; even the researchers were getting burned out. That is, if Boylan was indeed a researcher. His occasional self-references give the impression that he was, but there was no biographical detail about him I could find in the book. He’s certainly done his homework on the sex research front, though, but humorously he never refers to himself, maintaining an objective view and just telling us what the people he spoke to said. 

So then, Orgasm is not like How To Be A Tiger In Bed, but more like The Groupsex Scene, in that the majority of it is comprised of ribald dialog from early ‘70s men and women on how they like to get down. Boylan notes in his intro that he did not take notes nor record anything when talking to his subjects – saying that this often kept them from being totally open with him – and he admits that the dialog is filtered through his own writing style, which explains why all the characters “sound” the same. In other words, Boylan didn’t invade the privacy of his subjects like Robin Moore did in The Making Of The Happy Hooker. 

Occasionally Boylan does move away from the dry, factual tone, especially when complaining about all the misleading sex books of the day, or imagining how the average guy would describe an orgasm. There’s also a lot of complaining about sleaze novels, which Boylan asserts is the level to which most “sex books” stoop to. And yet, Orgasm also stoops to those levels, if only due to the sometimes-crazy comments Boylan’s subjects tell him. Oh, and given the lack of the male imagination in describing a climax, the majority of the commentary in Orgasm is from women. 

As with most of these books, Orgasm provides a glimpse into the era in which it was written: an era in which women were coming out of the shackles of the early twentieth century and were on The Pill, freely gabbing about their extramarital affairs and their love of the male genitalia (see below). Speaking of which, I am currently working on my time machine. 

In closing, I think this is one of those books where a bunch of random excerpts will do a better job of describing the book than I ever could:

The Penetrator #44: Deep Cover Blast-Off

The Penetrator #44: Deep Cover Blast-Off, by Lionel Derrick

December, 1981  Pinnacle Books

Man, how have I gone over a year without reading a volume of The Penetrator? For a while there I was reading a few books a year. Well anyway, at this point we are in the homestretch, with less than ten installments to go in the series. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been reading The Penetrator for 14 years now; it’s like it has become a part of my life at this point. 

Fortunately, the series refresh seen in the previous volume continues with this one; Chet Cunningham seems to come out of the doldrums that he was in for the past, oh, I don’t know, 15 or so volumes. Maybe series editor Andy Ettinger told Cunningham and series co-author Mark Roberts to get their shit together. To be sure, Deep Cover Blast-Off is not a return to the violent form of early Cunningham entries like #4: Hijacking Manhattan and #12: Bloody Boston, but at least Mark “The Penetrator” Hardin kills a bunch of bad guys this time, instead of just knocking them out like some TV detective. He also lives up to his name, uh, “penetrating” not just one but two sexy babes in the short course of the novel, though for the most part Cunningham leaves the sexual material off-page. I’ve often thought of doing the opposite of Bowdlerizing, ie adding explicit sex and violence to books. 

Curiously, Cunningham in this one seems to recreate Joanna Tabler, Mark’s casual girlfriend of earlier volumes (and a character Cunningham introduced to the series). Joanna was a tough but beautiful federal agent…and in Deep Cover Blast-Off, Cunningham introduces another tough but beautiful federal agent who becomes involved with Mark Hardin. This one’s named Malona and she’s an Intelligence officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which we’re informed is Canada’s version of the FBI. Also curiously, Cunningham never once refers to Joanna Tabler in the course of this book – other than vague mentions of “women” who have suffered for becoming involved with Mark – but it’s funny because Malona is pretty much the same character, only she’s Canadian and she’s a brunette. 

But then, Mark suffers another female loss early in the book. Up in Windsor, Ontario to investigate the murder of an old ‘Nam pal who went on to work for the CIA, Mark becomes involved with a hotstuff waitress named Beda. She’s soon caught and suffers the ultimate price for being with Mark, but Mark spends about a hot second mourning her…and then Malona is literally introduced a few pages later. Cunningham clearly has his tongue in cheek, with the bonus that Mark takes the first girl’s death in stride and is promptly checking out Malona. But as I’ve already mentioned Cunningham for the most part ends the scene when the hanky-panky gets started, and in fact doesn’t even dwell much upon the ample charms of either Beda or Malona. 

A funny thing about Deep Cover Blast-Off is that Mark Hardin heads to Canada to research the death of an old ‘Nam pal…but spends more of his time investigating the death of some other guy. It turns out that three CIA agents have been killed while investigating affairs in Canada, Mark’s ‘Nam buddy being the most recent. Humorously, the Agency isn’t much concerned over the deaths, chalking them off as random murders or somesuch, so it’s up to The Penetrator to do his own investigation. 

Curiously, despite this being the 44th volume of the series, we get the usual brief rundown and recap of who Mark Hardin is and some of his past exploits. We even get that recurring note of how his voice lacks a regional accent; this time Cunningham humorously refers to Mark’s accent as “CBS neutral.” Man, if only CBS was neutral! But another curious thing is the stuff Cunningham forgets. For example, there’s a part where Mark uses this new concoction of Professor Haskins to knock someone out without harming them or killing them…which is weird, given that this is what Mark previously used his dart gun “Ava” for. But Ava seems to have been written out of the series, and I’m not sure the last time the Penetrator used it. 

Cunningham delivers some fun stuff this time around, as if he’s finally invested in the series again. Most notably is a bit early on where a lead takes Mark to a gay bar (“There wasn’t a woman in the place”), one that’s filled with “swivel-hipped males.” Raise your hand if you remember when Mark, in an earlier Chet Cunningham offering, once posed as “the Pierre?” But Cunningham doesn’t do much with this scene, other than Mark acting incredily aggressive toward the patrons (“Which of you queers here pulled the trigger?”), and for the most part it’s all just setup for an action scene, as Mark finds out the owner of the place is somehow involved with the murders. That said, the chapter is titled, “Mark Three, Gays Zero.” 

Another returning gimmick from earlier novels is that Mark gets hurt in the ensuing action; he’s shot, but manages to get away, and later hooks up with the busty waittress he literally said only a few words to, earlier in the day. This would be Beda, who gamely takes Mark in and nurses him to health, with the expected shenanigans resulting: “[Mark]…kissed her pulsating breasts.” Man, she must be in the X-Men or something! “I shall unleash my pulsating breasts!” But as mentioned (frequently, now), Cunningham leaves the actual sordid details off-page. Mark’s a slow learner, though, as sure enough Beda is captured by the bad guys the very next morning, suffering fatally for it, but Cunningham spends more time detailing how Mark escapes the police once he has dealt with Beda’s captors. 

And like a few pages later Mark is already salivating over hotstuff Malona Mitchell, RCMP Intelligence. Cunningham has the two get down to it posthaste, with a lot of saucy banter between then but again fading to black during the actual sleaze. Malona becomes Mark’s companion for the rest of the novel, under the impression that he works for the CIA. The RCMP also suspects something is up with these agent murders…and meanwhile we readers know it’s the Russians, in particular a deep-cover agent named Ustinova, who was implanted in Canada back in the 1960s to research germ warfare and was gradually forgotten by his superiors in Russia. Now Ustinova has gone insane and plans to carry out an attack on DC; to this end he sends out his sadistic thug, Turgun, to dispatch anyone who gets in his way. 

Action is more frequent than previous volumes, and again Mark Hardin once again kills most of his opponents, rather than just knocking them out. He’s also picked up a gift for very lame one-liners, like when he tells a guy, “Don’t be a nerd.” This might be the earliest usage of that word I’ve encountered in a book…and no, the guy Mark calls a nerd isn’t a dweeb in Coke-bottle glasses, it’s a dude with a gun, so either “nerd” meant something else in 1981 or Chet Cunningham just didn’t know what it meant. 

Despite being a sadistic thug, not to mention the guy who killed Mark’s pal, Turgun is the victim of Mark’s “kill-free” takedown: a concoction of tear gas and ether made by the Professor. Curiously though, not much is done with this concoction despite much build up. And besides, Mark does eventually deal with Turgun…in a sequence that seems to come out of the Penetrator of old. Vowing to get brutal justice for his slain pal, Mark uses a tractor’s manure spreader to mete out Turgun’s comeuppance, though Cunningham doesn’t get as gory as he could in the sequence. 

The finale of Deep Cover Blast-Off further demonstrates the détente of the early ‘80s, as Mark takes down Ustinova’s missile-firing silo with…a group of KGB agents. There is a friendly rapport between the group and the reader can tell much has changed in the world since the series started in the early ‘70s. And the novel ends on this sequence, with a quick capoff noting that Malona has gone on a fishing trip with Mark…which, curiously, was the same thing the never-mentioned Joanna Tabler used to do. So, one wonders if Malona will return in future Penetrator installments.