SIX WHITE HORSES: The Complete Adventures of the Gadget Man, Volume 3, by Lester Dent (V1 review here, V2 here) wraps up the series with inventor Clickel Rush getting into his usual jams — an inheritance from an uncle who doesn’t exist, becoming custodian of a foul-mouthed parrot, murder by feeding a man a poisoned pigeon — which lead to him doing Bufa’s dirty work and investigating. In the previous volume Bufa was completely manipulating Click; in this one Click’s spent a lot of his pay on unsuccessful startups to market his inventions so he’s got added incentive to crack the case. And may I say that getting a $10,000 bill for his work (they really hd those back in the 1930s) is way cooler than depositing the same amount in PayPal.
Regrettably this was the last of the series. Doc Savage expert Will Murray thinks Dent got PO’d when the publisher used Dent’s Doc Savage byline — Kenneth Robeson — on one of the stories. We’ll never know for sure.
THE MIGHTY CRUSADERS by Ian Flynn and Kelsey Shannon (who did the cover) is a sequel to Flynn’s The New Crusaders which I read a decade ago. The premise of the previous volume was that Archie Comics’ superheroes from the Golden and Silver Age have aged in real time and their kids are now stepping up as legacy heroes.
In this volume, the kids are still struggling to become an effective team. The new Shield keeps wanting to do it all herself; Golden Age hero Steel Sterling is becoming rigid metal; the Jaguar’s patron spirit keeps making her go crazy; and some of the team think they should be leader. When the villains show up, can the Crusaders rise to the task?
This is probably my favorite of the heroes’ many revivals since the Silver Age (if you’re curious, The MLJ Companion covers them from the 1940s through the end of the 20th century), though like the others it didn’t take — I think this volume was the last. Flynn does a good job cherry picking elements from previous versions, such as the female Jaguar from the 1990s DC !mpact line and a couple of villains from the 1980s Red Circle version.
Four years ago I picked up The Terrifics: Meet the Terrifics, in which Plastic Man, Mr. Terrific, Metamorpho and Phantom Girl join forces to become a DC version of the Fantastic Four. I don’t know when I’d have gotten back to the series but as I subscribe to the DC app for my Silver Age Reread at Atomic Junk Shop, I eventually worked through the rest of THE TERRIFICS, written by Jeff Lemire, then Gene Luen Yuang, with various artists (the cover is by Emanuela Lupacchino). In various stories the team gets trapped in a computer, battle Bizarro across time, meet their evil counterparts the Deplorables, meet Ms. Terrific (Mr. Terrific’s dead wife, but from a world where he died and she became the hero) and meet Simon Stagg’s evil son.
Do I miss getting these in hard copy? Not really. The series is fun, but not so much that I want to own it again. I was happy to learn the team is still active rather than forgotten once the series ended, as I’d anticipated. However it’s a little irksome that we now have this version of Metamorpho, one in Mark Waid’s World’s Finest and a third one in Al Ewing’s Metamorpho. I get that out-of-continuity books can be good but I’m not sure, which is in continuity, or if any of them are.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
