THE SPIDER: DRAGON LORD OF THE UNDERLORD The Isolation Row reviews VII

When I was in college I discovered The Shadow. The first of the reprints of his pulp exploits was The Living Shadow, which I probably read in the summer of 1970. It had a striking cover by an artist identified as Kossim, who I later learned was Sanford Kossim, and as my reading at the time was largely comic books and sf, it was a perfect fit for the time I was deciding whether or not I should return for my third year of college -- the student strike and my own lack of academic engagement had me pondering my future.

The Shadow did not draw me back to university, but among other things it probably influenced my decision to concentrate on the subjects I felt I needed to study, one of which was American studies. In that class, for the exceptional professor Richard Slotkin, I wrote my final paper on The Shadow, some 55 pages, which among other things drew a comparison with Herman Meville's Confidence Man, illustrated by the cover of the Signet paperback, with a cover by Kossim.

Captivated by The Shadow as I was, I looked for other pulp heroes, and the most obvious place to start was with The Spider, the most successful, and obvious, of The Shadow copies. I didn't go very far with The Spider, although author Norvell Page (writing under the house name Grant Stockbridge) had a talent for keeping things moving. But the lockdown being what it was, I decided to give The Spider a second chance.

Fifty years later, it was even harder to be impressed. I chose Dragon Lord Of The Underworld because I do have a fondness for the pulp versions of Chinatown, and Chinese super-villains, but Ssu Hsi Tze (Four Vermin, apparently a nom de guerre) was a disappointment. Page specialised in villains with outre weapons of mass destruction: in this case, literally, vermin, which of course in  The Spider's, mind, refers to the rule of vermin, not just accomplished by vermin, including the dread Kara Khoum spiders from the Gobi desert. And, as he fears, "what the Chinese could accomplish here in America was fearful to contemplate. He would have the instant, unquestioning obedience of every Chinese, to the death." This is 1935, after all. Look at the cover: white woman in the clutches of the long-nailed Chinese villain and his henchmen. The Yellow Peril threat engulfing society's most cherished symbol!

The casual racism is typical, but Richard Wentworth, The Spider, is an enigma. He is part Superman and part louche, which fits the Shadow model, but he lacks the dark centre and fearsme intensity of Lamont Cranston. His Margo Lane is his faithful girlfriend Nita Van Sloan, and one of the most fascinating differences to The Shadow is the way Page does not hold back from suggesting the sexual relationship between the two, even if it's never actually shown. Though she does always call him 'Dick'. Oddly, Nita is described early on as one of the three 'servants' who knows his true identity, another being his servant Ram Singh, a Kato-type bodyguard and chaffeur. The others are not characters, simply off-stage presences who can explain The Spider's uncanny knowledge of events, but the odd thing is that, at least in this novel, the villain knows his identity, knows where he lives, knows where he can attack Nita, and this appears to be more general knowledge than the narrative would dictate.

In Spider novels the death toll mounts exponentially, this is another characteristic of many of the pulp hero novels, most notably Operator No5, who fights the 'Purple Invasion' in a series of novels whose body count far surpasses World War II, and stands as the apex of Yellow Peril fiction. But the resolution of The Spider's battle always boils down to the mano a mano battle, with imperiled frails, bizarre tortures and underground catacombs laden with traps in which to fall.

Of course Nita in peril is a given, but its the handling of two other female characters that is most interesting. One is Flo Delight, a 'dancer' who wants revenge on The Spider because she thinks he killer her gangster boyfriend Craven (though it was Ssu who killed him as part of his bid to take over crime in New York). The names are not subtle, in case you hadn't noticed. Flo pursues The Spider and finally is left in the hands of Nita, a study in white and somewhat stained gray. When finally Ssu brings her face to face with her nemesis, he makes the fatal villain mistake of not honoring his promise to let her kill him with her own hands. Tsk tsk.  The other, more intriguing woman, is San-Guh Liang-Guh, Ssu's handmaiden. Oriental villains always seem to have beautiful women (Fu Manchu's daughter Fah Lo Suee being the prototype) with whom to tempt their white enemies, though in San-Liang's case the first thing Wentworth notices is that she is not a pure-blooded Manchu. Not that his fealty to Nita is ever in doubt.

This all may seem silly beyond words, but Page's real talent lies in the final showdown, which turns into a literal battle of wills between Ssu and The Spider, who is billed, on the pulp covers, as The Master Of Men, something to compete with The Shadow's ability to 'cloud men's minds'. With San-Liang holding a still vengeful Flo at knife point and the governor of New York a mindless prison about to unleash mass destruction on the city, there is no way The Spider could ever escape, much less save New York and America! Is there?

WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL? THE SHADOW, THE FIRE OF CREATION, THE CONFIDENCE MAN & DONALD TRUMP

I was interested to read an interview in the New Yorker the other day with Philip Roth. Judith Thurman asked him about The Plot Against America in the context of Donald Trump's presidency, but he told the interviewer this:

"Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville’s last—that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam."

The Confidence Man is one of the four greatest American novels, alongside Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby (you can argue the order however you want), in part because it reveals that essential part of the American character, the one Whitman said contains multitudes. Roth was deadly accurate in identifying our Grabber in Chief with Melville's character, but the brief mention reminded me of another identification I made many years ago, with a later fictional character.

It was partly coincidental, because I happened to pull out my copy of The Confidence Man to see if I could find a quote to use in what turned into a 55pp American Studies paper on The Shadow, and I realised that the cover of that Signet edition was drawn by the same artist who'd drawn the covers of the Bantam re-issues of the early Shadow pulp novels. Sandy Kossin had sensed the same inner violence, energy, and darkness in the two characters (Kossin did a lot of lighter material, there's a nice article about him by Drew Friedman; Kossin drew the cover for his father, Bruce Jay Friedman's novel Steambath).

The Shadow is the great creation of the pulp magazines in the 1930s, who spawned the famed radio show with Orson Welles intoning 'who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men...the Shadow knows!', and ran from 1931 to 1949, some 325 novels, 283 of which were written by Walter Gibson (as Maxwell Grant) who for about 15 years turned out two a month. As I said, I wrote this paper, putting the Shadow in the context of the times, of psychology, of literature, and indeed of popular culture. When the Alex Baldwin movie came out I wrote a big piece about the character for The Independent, half of which appeared as a sidebar and the other half as part of the critic's review. But I still follow the character, occasionally read another reprint of a pulp novel, and was very pleasantly surprised by the latest comic book adapatation, a novel called The Fire Of Creation, written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Aaron Campbell.

It's a period piece, as it should be, set in 1938, with war clouds hovering, and actual war with the Japanese in China. It opens with a mass murder on the New York docks, and proceeds to China where, in Indiana Jones fashion, The Shadow joins the fight on the right side. Which is also interesting, because the story begins with another massacre too, of Chinese during the Japanese invasion, and the Shadow himself reminds us that he also knows what he calls 'the greater game'. Ironically, that is also how the story ends, with the greater game engulfing a key villain.

Ennis' Shadow is fairly true to the basic pulp character, although he's adapted some of the characteristics which were added on radio. But he's very true to the mood, not only of the character himself, or as his alter-ego Lamont Cranston, but the mood of the times. There's a dark apocalyptic tone to the whole story, and apocalypse is exactly the sort of setting in which The Shadow should thrive. Campbell's art emphasizes this; at times it's moody, at times explosive, and once or twice stunning in its emotional impact. He uses layout and shadows perfectly, and there are an extraordinary set of covers, especially by Alex Ross and a host of other artists, which draw on the original Shadow pulps, by the likes of George Rozen. They are included in a bonus section which also contains the first 22 pages of Ennis script: it's always eye-opening to see how visual good comics writing can be. Of course there are elements of melodrama to the story, but this is the comics, and it's based on a pulp, and it is true to that spirit, and fascinating fun.

The Shadow: The Fire Of Creation
by Garth Ennis and Aaron Campbell
Dynamite, 2012, $19.99, ISBN 1606903616

GREAT GATSBY AGAIN!

F. Scott Fitzgerald's most famous quote is probably the one where he says there are 'no second acts' in American lives. Yet his greatest book, and to my mind the greatest American novel of the 20th century, The Great Gatsby, is all about someone trying to create a second act for himself. Of course he fails. And it is in that failure that the brilliance of Gatsby lies.

There was a lengthy, and very good, examination of Fitzgerald's novel by Jay McInerney in yesterday's Observer (you can link to that here)--an interesting choice of author because there are a few similarities between McInerney and Fitzgerald; both have been seen as chroniclers of their generations, when both quite obviously have talents and aspirations beyond that. Both are seen as followers of, if not hangers on, to high society. McInerney's piece comes in the wake of Baz Luhrmann's film and his reaction to it is pretty much as flat as mine (you can link to that piece, which I wrote last month, here).

McInerny is very good on the importance of Nick Carroway, and his position as narrator. One might see FSF himself as being more like Carroway than he cares too; certainly Gatsby is what he sees himself as trying to be, and Zelda was his Daisy. But it's not constructive to interpret great fiction through its relation to an author's own life, and I apologise for being tempted that way. The brilliance of Gatsby lies in the attempt to build a new life, to the openness of America to such possibility, and to Fitzgerald's sharp eye for (and Carroway's ultimate dissolution with) the entrenched upper class of American life. In the Twenties, as in the Roaring Reagans, they flaunted wealth, and aspirations were high. McInerney doesn't mention Tom Buchanan being a former star athlete at Yale, just the sort of thing FSF himself had aspirations to (there, I've done it again) but he is the sort of person to whom things come easily. And Gatsby isn't.

Gatsby is a cipher, a character who might have walked off the pages of Melville's Confidence Man. McInerney's absolutely right that people can and do read Gatsby as a sort of manual in getting ahead, a celebration of the basic American right to get rich, and enjoy the love story even though it's ending isn't happy. But beneath that lies a basic sense of the intangibility of that dream, that the pursuit of happiness --not money--as enshrined in the ideal of America, has hidden and not so hidden boundaries and limitations. Fitzgerald understood this as well as anyone--hell, Gatsby's partnered with Meyer Wolfsheim and he fixed the World Series. It doesn't get much more ironic about the American Dream than that.

No one has ever put his finger on the promise and the frustrations of that Dream as well as Fitzgerald did. No one has ever placed it on its pedestal and knocked it down with quite such panache.