Crossover Cover: Year of Shadows

 

This collection of stories by Teel James Glenn features his character Anton "Dr. Shadows" Chadeaux, who is already in the CU through various connections. One of the stories included here is "The Eye of Darkness," which I covered in Crossovers Expanded Volume 1. Here's a rundown of the new stories with crossovers.

In "A Personal Demon," Dr. Shadows has Ham Brooks working on getting papers for him and his aides to go to Manchuria. He also has a throwing knife named Ike. Thomas “Trigger” O’Leary tells Chadeaux he owes the hero after he got him out of “that Skullmask murder thing last year.” Akemi Oyama calls Dr. Shadows’ friend and mentor Ki Nam Hoon “your Kato,” but he tells her Hoon is not a servant. The hero didn’t even know what prejudice was until he saw how the neighborhood teens treated his childhood friend Marguerite Sancre when she visited from her native Martinidad. When Chadeaux fakes his death, Moxie Donovan writes a color piece on the adventurer. Brooks is one of the bronze man’s five aides. Dr. Shadows’ knife Ike must be named after the avenging hero with malleable skin’s knife. The Skullmask and Martinidad are from Glenn’s book Weird Tales of the Skullmask. Kato is the Green Hornet’s chauffeur and partner. Moxie Donovan appears in a series of books by Glenn.  

In "Forbidden City Blues," Dr. Shadows says that when he started his career, he thought Clark Savage’s whole attitude toward publicity for himself was missing a chance to reach so many more people. Shadows’ lover Han Ku Lee (“Hank”) tells him, “You think Clark or Dr. Pali don’t fail?” Clark needs no introduction. Kendell Foster Crossen’s pulp hero the Green Lama often assumes the guise of Buddhist priest Dr. Charles Pali.

In "Grave Mistake," Dr. Shadows battles escaped convicts. Pat Chambers is the spokesman for the New York Police. The island of Martinidad is mentioned. Pat Chambers is from Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels. 

In "Isle Macabre," Dr. Shadows is recruited for a mission in Martinidad by Secret Service agent Rex Bennett. Chadeaux says he can get either Clark Savage or Richard Wentworth to provide him with a cover story. Bennett replies that Wentworth-Cranston Limited made land purchases in Martinidad two months ago. Rex Bennett is from the movie serials G-Men vs. the Black Dragon and Secret Service in Darkest Africa. Savage is the bronze-skinned pulp hero. Richard Wentworth is better known as the Spider. Wentworth-Cranston Limited was first mentioned in Weird Tales of the Skullmask. The co-owner of the company must be Wentworth’s half-brother, another well-known shadowy crimefighter, in one of his favorite disguises. 

These crossovers are four of over a thousand covered in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, coming this summer from Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!

Crossover of the Week

Autumn 1939

THE GREEN LAMA: CRIMSON CIRCLE 

The Green Lama battles a scientific enclave called the Collective that threatens not only him, but his aides as well, and has recruited several of his former allies and enemies. Lt. John Caraway wonders where Rick Masters is when you need him. The Lama broke the central tenet of his faith when he murdered Karl Heydrich in R’lyeh. The Collective can confirm his work against the Medusa Council in 1935. An unpublished article by Betty Dale of the Herald-Tribune correctly postulates that the Lama is really Jethro Dumont. The hero tells Gary Brown and his wife Evangl Stewart-Brown about his battle with Cthulhu. The Collective is based in Black Rock. Morgue attendant Dan Rohn refers to the Tipton murders. When Dumont left America years ago, there were more pressing matters to deal with, such as whether Wentworth and Van Sloan would ever get married. Not too long before the Green Lama debuted, a predecessor of his encountered a killer matching the description of Collective member Omega. In a flashback, Evangl reminds herself to ask her friend Diane Elliott of the Amalgamated Press about the Lama’s battle with the Medusa Council, and Evangl’s mother says vigilantism “seems to be going around with the bat fellow and that doctor gentleman.” The Lama’s lover Jean Farrell remembers running from a shoggoth in R’lyeh. At the Herald-Tribune offices back in the present, Betty Dale talks to her fellow journalist Luke Jaconetti. Commissioner Woods has an impassioned conversation with former Commissioner turned Governor Kirkpatrick. Detective Crevier says, “When it comes to vigilantes, copycats are a dime a dozen. You remember how many guys we had running around with a black fedora and trenchcoat back in the day?” Dr. Barry Dale, a researcher on atomic energy and Betty’s brother, meets with the President to brief him on the Collective, and tells him the Intelligence Service Command has denied any knowledge of them. Nyarlathotep appears before the Collective. 

Novel by Adam Lance Garcia, Moonstone Books, 2015. The Green Lama is Kendell Foster Crossen’s pulp hero. Rick Masters had his own backup feature in Spark Publications’ Green Lama comic. R’lyeh, Cthulhu, the shoggoth, and Nyarlathotep are from H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The Lama’s battle against the Medusa Council was seen in the anthology Day of the Destroyers, edited by Gary Phillips. The Intelligence Service Command is from the same book. Reporter Betty Dale is Secret Agent X’s girlfriend. Black Rock first appeared in Garcia’s story “The Black Rock Conspiracy,” included in the anthology The New Adventures of Foster Fade, the Crime Spectacularist. Fade appeared in stories by Lester Dent in All Detective Magazine. In “The Black Rock Conspiracy,” Fade battled an unnamed Omega. The Tipton Murders are a reference to Garcia’s other story from that anthology, “Dead Men’s Guns.” Wentworth and Van Sloan are Richard Wentworth, aka the Spider, and his beloved Nita Van Sloan. Governor (formerly Commissioner) Stanley Kirkpatrick is also from the Spider novels. Diane Elliott is Operator #5’s girlfriend. “The bat fellow” is the Black Bat, while “that doctor gentleman” is the pulp hero commonly known as “Doc.” Luke Jaconetti first appeared in “The Black Rock Conspiracy” before appearing in Garcia’s The Green Lama: Scions, as well as Day of the Destroyers. Detective Crevier is referring to the shadowy hero, the Spider, and possibly others. Barry Dale is the alter ego of another Spark Publications hero, Atoman, created by Crossen and Jerry Robinson. His appearance here foreshadows his future superhuman identity. 

This crossover writeup is one of hundreds included in my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, which will be published by Meteor House! All three volumes are AUTHORIZED companions to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!

Crossover Cover: Sherlock Holmes & the Green Lama: The Heir Apparent

 

Are you a fan of Kendell Crossen's pulp hero the Green Lama?

Then you'll love this novel in which the future Lama, Jethro Dumont, teams up with Sherlock Holmes!

For more details, consult my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, to be published by Meteor House! Much like the first two volumes, this one is an AUTHORIZED companion to Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2!

Crossover Cover: The Black Bat Returns

Are you a fan of the pulp hero the Black Bat?

Then you'll love this anthology of new stories featuring the character published by Moonstone Books, which includes tales in which the Bat encounters the Domino Lady, the Green Lama, Doctor Satan, the Golden Amazon, and the Purple Scar!

For more details, see my book Crossovers Expanded: A Secret Chronology of the World Volume 3, to be published by Meteor House! Much like the first two volumes published in 2016, this book is an AUTHORIZED companion to Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Volumes 1 and 2 by my dear friend Win Scott Eckert!
 

Crossover Cover: The Green Lama Unbound

I covered the original version of this novel some time ago. Since then, a revised and expanded version has been published by Moonstone Books. The Green Lama battles Cthulhu. Cthulhu; Nyarlathotep; R’lyeh; the Great Old Ones; the Outer Gods; the Necronomicon; the Deep Ones; Abdul Alhazred; Glyyu-Uho; Vhoorl; flying polyps; the Great Race of Yith; shoggoths; Arkham, Massachusetts; Innsmouth; the Miskatonic River; Miskatonic University; Professor Randolph Carter; and Zkauba are from the works of H. P. Lovecraft. This novel also makes use of characters and places from Cthulhu Mythos tales by August Derleth (the Elder Gods); Brian Lumley (Chthonians and Shudde M’ell); Ramsey Campbell (Baalbo, Yifne, and Tond); Walter C. DeBill, Jr. (Ogntlach); Lin Carter (Xoth); and A. A. Attanasio (Yaksh). Rick Masters and Twin Eagle had their own feature in Spark Publications’ Green Lama comic book series. “That guy who lives in the Empire State Building” is a well-known bronze-skinned pulp hero. Arnold Toht is from the first Indiana Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, while Colonel Ernst Vogel is from the third film in the series, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Neville Sinclair is from the film version of Dave Stevens’ comic The Rocketeer. Since the comic book has already been incorporated into the Crossover Universe, the Sinclair mentioned here must be the CU counterpart of the Sinclair from the film, which follows a different continuity than the comic. The phrase “klaatu barada nikto” appears in both the science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films. Foster Fade, “the crime spectacularist,” appeared in three stories by Lester Dent in All Detective Magazine in 1934. Richard Knight appeared in the pulp magazine Flying Aces in stories by Donald E. Keyhoe. The Black Bat was created by Norman Daniels and appeared in Black Book Detective. The Lama’s old detective friend in London is Sherlock Holmes. Elisha Pond is a false identity used by Secret Agent X, who appeared in a titular magazine. The original version of the novel has a few references that were deleted from the revised version, such as a rampaging ape (King Kong), Captain Hazzard (a one-shot pulp hero created by Paul Chadwick), Dan Fowler (an FBI agent appearing in the pulp G-Men Detective), Lance Star (a Canadian pulp hero recently revived by Bobby Nash and other writers), and Jim Anthony (who appeared in the magazine Super Detective).

Crossover Covers: Masks 2

A sequel to Chris Roberson, Alex Ross, and Dennis Calero's series Masks, which takes place in an alternate universe, as I discussed in a previous post. Heroes from three different time periods team up to fight a villain called the Red Death, including two Green Hornets, two Katos, the Black Bat, two Miss Furys, the Shadow, the Black Terror, two Black Sparrows, the Spider, the Green Lama, Lady Satan, and Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt. The contemporary Hornet and Kato are the ones from Dynamite's ongoing Green Hornet comic, which is incompatible with NOW Comics' take on the character, further cementing this series as an AU.

This series, along with many other works of fiction, will be included in my forthcoming two-volume tome Crossovers Expanded Vols. 1 and 2, an authorized companion to Crossovers: A Secret Chronology of the World Vols. 1 and 2 by Win Scott Eckert. The books will debut at FarmerCon/PulpFest on July 21-24, where Win (who also will be providing the foreword for Vol. 1) and I will be signing copies at the booth of Meteor House, the books' publisher, which Win runs along with Michael Croteau and Paul Spiteri. Keith Howell, who provided the covers for both volumes, and William Patrick Maynard, who is contributing the foreword for Vol. 2, will also be on hand to sign copies.

Crossover of the Week

Winter 1940; Summer 2011

A PLAGUE ON THE LAND

Moran’s Pub, owned by Seamus Moran, is frequented by vigilantes. Seamus pours the owner of a fire opal another large Bushmill’s, and thinks of his cousin Paddy and his bar uptown. Seamus thinks most of the vigilantes are killers, with two exceptions: “the green one was a man of peace, the pink one killed when she had to but mostly avoided it.” Seamus, a leprechaun, asks the Nightmare to deal with trouble in his homeland, Eire, the spiritual plane of Ireland. In the 21st century, Detective Sergeant Bianca Jones of the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide division talks to Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, at Paddy’s. Bianca thinks the Nightmare is “a character, like the Spider or the Pink Reaper,” but Nemesis says he was real, and persuades Bianca to go back into the past to help the hero in Eire.

Short story by John L. French in Apocalypse 13, Diane Raetz, ed., Padwolf Publishing, 2012. The vigilante with the fire opal is the shadowy hero of the pulps. Paddy Moran and Nemesis are from Patrick Thomas’ Murphy’s Lore series. “The green one” is the Green Lama, while “the pink one” is the Pink Reaper, another character from the Murphy’s Lore series. The Nightmare is a pulp-era vigilante created by French. The Nightmare became romantically involved with Nemesis in Thomas and French’s book From the Shadows. Bianca Jones appears in her own series of stories by French. Bianca is wrong about the Nightmare and the Pink Reaper being fictional, and she is also wrong about the Spider’s nonexistence.

Crossover of the Week

June 1945

CHANCE OF A GHOST

George Chance’s (aka the Green Ghost) friend Ned Standish, of the Kingsport Standishes, a summa cum laude graduate of Miskatonic University, has been accused of murder. Although Chance calls Standish “Commissioner,” he is actually an Assistant Police Commissioner for one of New York City’s boroughs, as are Weston, Kirkpatrick, Woods, Foster, Quistrom, Gordon, Warner, Hombert, and others. Chance refers to other vigilantes active at the time he began his career, such as the Black Bat, Captain Midnight, the Phantom Detective, the Domino Lady, and Ki-Gor. Chance’s wartime missions began with liberating Professor Horatio Smith, who was something of a modern-day Scarlet Pimpernel, from a supposedly unescapable German prison camp. Subsequent missions for the OSS included a strange encounter with a hideously wriggling whitish worm at an abandoned chateau in Northern France and one with a revolting frog-mouthed, tentacle-lipped creature that accosted him in the sewers of Paris. Standish went over the file on flapper girl Toby Basinger’s case with D.A. Skinner. A lookalike for Standish murdered Basinger, who killed an ex-girlfriend of Chance’s, nightclub singer Angel de la Ruse. Chance’s aide Joe Harper smokes Red Apple Cigarettes.

Short story by George Chance, edited by Win Scott Eckert in Legends of New Pulp Fiction, Ron Fortier, ed., Airship 27 Productions, 2015. The Green Ghost (aka the Ghost) appeared in the pulp magazine The Ghost, Super-Detective (later retitled The Ghost Detective, and then The Green Ghost Detective). Kingsport, Massachusetts and Miskatonic University are from H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos tales. Commissioner Weston appears in the tales of a vigilante who can cloud men’s minds. Commissioner Stanley Kirkpatrick is from the Spider stories. Commissioner Woods is from the Green Lama’s pulp exploits. Commissioner Charlie Foster is from the Secret Agent X tales. Commissioner Arthur J. Quistrom is from Leslie Charteris’ novel The Saint in New York. Commissioner Gordon operated as a whispering vigilante in pulp novels by Laurence Donovan. Commissioner Jerome Warner is from the Black Bat stories. Commissioner Hombert and D.A. Skinner are from Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. Captain Midnight is from the radio series of the same name. The Phantom Detective appeared in pulp stories by Robert Wallace. The Domino Lady is a pulp heroine created by Lars Anderson. Ki-Gor is a jungle hero who appeared in pulp tales by John Peter Drummond. Professor Horatio Smith is from the movie Pimpernel Smith. The Scarlet Pimpernel is from Baroness Orczy’s novels, of course. The seemingly unescapable prison camp is Loki from Farmer’s authorized Doc Savage novel Escape from Loki, which is also the source of the whitish worm, which Doc encountered in Baron de Musard’s chateau during World War I. The frog-mouthed, tentacle-lipped creature is Dewer, who encountered occult detective Jules de Grandin in Seabury Quinn’s story “The Bride of Dewer.” Toby Basinger and Angel de la Ruse are from Howard Hopkins’ Green Ghost story “Ghost of a Chance,” although Basinger’s name is Eckert’s invention. Red Apple Cigarettes appear in a number of films, including Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, as well as a number of other works by Eckert.

Crossover Cover: Horror in Clay

The Green Lama battles a murderous golem created by a Rabbi who initially unleashed the creature on the German consulate in New York. The Rabbi has learned of the Holocaust the Nazis will soon enact against his people from hieroglyphics in an ancient temple in Jerusalem. The temple had images on the walls of the Ark of the Covenant, the Staff of Ra, and crystal skulls. Also in the temple was a statue of a horrible ancient god named Cthulhu. The Green Lama appeared in stories by “Richard Foster” (Kendell Foster Crossen) in the pulp magazine Double Detective. The Ark of the Covenant, Staff of Ra, and crystal skull references are meant to evoke the Indiana Jones films; indeed, an earlier version of this novella that appeared in the anthology The Green Lama Volume One contains a reference to “Professor Jones, Jr. at Marshall College.” Cthulhu needs no explanation at this point. The Lama went on to battle Cthulhu in Garcia's The Green Lama: Unbound.

Crossover of the Week

Summer 1935-1936

DAY OF THE DESTROYERS

            Jimmie Flint, Secret Agent X-11 of the Intelligence Service Command, battles Colonel Lucian Starliss and his Medusa Council, who seek to oust President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and take over the United States. Along the way, he receives aid from the Phantom Detective (Richard Curtis Van Loan), the Black Bat (Tony Quinn), the Green Lama (Jethro Dumont), and the Gray Face (Owen Tull.) Herald-Tribune reporter Luke Jaconetti moonlights for the Amalgamated Press, which employs Jimmie’s girlfriend Kara Eastland. Luke receives a phone call from Betty Dale. After the Council is defeated, Kara says that Dumont is organizing other wealthy men such as himself, including Van Loan and “that odd chap, Wentworth” for a Patriots for Progress group.

            An anthology of linked stories by Gary Phillips, Tommy Hancock, Aaron Shaps, Jeri Westerson, Ron Fortier, Eric Fein, Joe Gentile, Paul Bishop, and Adam Lance Garcia, edited by Gary Phillips, Moonstone Books, 2015. Luke Jaconetti first appeared in Garcia’s story “The Black Rock Conspiracy,” featuring Lester Dent’s pulp hero Foster Fade; he also appeared in Garcia’s novel The Green Lama: Scions. Reporter Betty Dale is the girlfriend of Secret Agent X, who has no known connection to Secret Agent X-11. “That odd chap, Wentworth” is Richard Wentworth, aka the Spider. This crossover brings Secret Agent X-11 (a character created for this anthology) and the Gray Face (another original character, created by Phillips), into the CU.

Crossover Cover: Codename: Action

A government agent teams with Operator 5, the Green Hornet and Kato, the Green Lama, the Spider, Daredevil (the Golden Age comic character published by Lev Gleason, not the Marvel superhero who debuted in 1964), Black Venus, and the American Crusader to battle a plot by the terrorist group Hexagon. At the end of the series, the agent dons the name and costume of Captain Action. This series does not fit with the continuity of the Captain Action comics published by Moonstone, which are already connected to the CU via crossovers with the Phantom, the Green Hornet, and Honey West and Derek Flint. Additionally, the Spider’s look, as with his other incarnations in Dynamite’s titles, is based on the serial The Spider’s Web, rather than the fangs, hunchback, and fright wig described in the pulps.

Crossover of the Week

September 16-23, 1989

CRIME OF THE ARTS

            The Voice teams up with a woman named Dana to take down the militia to which the man who disfigured her belonged. The hero uses his father’s gas gun, and quotes the First Master Detective, “Watson, you see, but you do not observe.” The Voice uses a meditative technique one of his honorary uncles taught him rather than go to sleep. The Voice compares a female scientist working with Dana’s victimizer to the original Victor Frankenstein. The woman’s father worked at a secret facility that reprogrammed people located near a town in upstate New York. The Voice calls his friend Curt Van Loan of Havens International Media. The Voice uses his Uncle Kent’s mental trick to fall asleep nearly instantly, and teaches Dana his Uncle Jethro’s technique for reducing pain without drugs. The Voice remembers seeing a picture of the militia’s leader in the New York Clarion. The Voice thinks that Matt Helm would have taken a practice shot at a tree, but he can’t alert whoever is approaching. Dana compares the militia’s headquarters to Fu Manchu’s lair, but the Voice replies “If old Fu owned this place, we’d probably be dead by now.”

            Story by Erwin K. Roberts in Casebook of the Voice, Modern Knights Press, 2014. The Voice’s father is the pulp hero Secret Agent X, who was created by Paul Chadwick under the pen name “Brant House.” The First Master Detective is Sherlock Holmes. The Voice’s honorary uncle who taught him the meditative technique is Michael Traile, “the Man who Could Not Sleep,” the archenemy of Donald E. Keyhoe’s pulp villain Dr. Yen Sin. The reference to “the original Victor Frankenstein” is consistent with numerous books, comics, and movies in which relatives and descendants of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein engage in experiments of their own. The secret facility near upstate New York is Doc Savage’s Crime College. Curt Van Loan is the son of Richard Curtis Van Loan, aka the Phantom Detective, who appeared in a titular pulp magazine by several authors using the pseudonym “Robert Wallace.” Van Loan’s girlfriend in the original pulp stories, Muriel Havens, is Curt’s mother; her father, Frank Havens, was the publisher of the New York Clarion newspaper. Uncle Kent is Kent Allard, alias the Shadow, while Uncle Jethro is Kendell Crossen’s pulp hero The Green Lama, whose real name was Jethro Dumont. The references to Matt Helm and Fu Manchu could be interpreted as allusions to fictional characters, but given the Voice’s familiarity with a number of other heroes and villains, I am treating them as valid crossovers.

Crossover Cover: Of Monsters and Men

This prose anthology from Moonstone Books features pulp heroes battling monsters. Five stories have crossovers in them. In "Bump in the Night" by Tommy Hancock, Frederick C. Davis' hero the Moon Man battles the Invisible Man, who specifically identifies himself as the same individual of whom H.G. Wells wrote. However, it seems unlikely that John Hawley Griffin would have survived his brutal assault at the hands of Edward Hyde in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume II. Most likely, this Invisible Man is an unidentified individual who has replicated Griffin’s formula for his own misdeeds. Adam Lance Garcia's "The Daemon's Kiss" mentions that the Green Lama and Jean Farrell have been a couple ever since their encounter with Cthulhu. The Lama and Jean battled Cthulhu in Garcia's novel The Green Lama Unbound. In Eric Fein's "The Phantom's Ghost," the Green Ghost (George Chance), visiting France, battles a successor to Erik, the Phantom of the Opera, who has apparently stolen the original Erik’s remains. The remains in this story cannot be those of the real Erik from Gaston Leroux’s novel, as he survived at least until the year 2003, when he appeared in Simon R. Green’s Nightside novel Hex and the City. In Sean Taylor's "Golden Amazon Versus Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame," John Russell Fearn's character the Golden Amazon, visiting Notre Dame Cathedral, tussles with a cult that has brainwashed Quasimodo into doing its bidding. Apparently Victor Hugo was lying when he referred to Quasimodo’s death in his novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Quasimodo actually acquired extended longevity somehow. Wold Newton scholar Matthew Baugh's story "Sycorax" features Captain Future battling the witch Sycorax (from William Shakespeare's The Tempest) on Titan. There are also references to Segir and Black Pharol from C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith stories, Tsathoggua from Cthulhu Mythos fiction by Clark Ashton Smith, and Jekkara (or Jakkara) from Leigh Brackett's Mars stories. The Captain Future stories take place in an alternate universe where all the planets in the Solar System are inhabited by various sentient species in the 21^st century.