Here is the second volume of Airship 27’s “Mystery Men (& Women)” — though there are no mystery women in this one.
We get four New Pulp hero stories:
• “Red Badge” by Mark Halegua and Andrew Salmon. He’s probably the most traditional of the characters in this collection. There is a slight mystery as to who the Red Badge is. Hope we see more of this masked vigilante.
• “Jack Minch, Crime Reporter,” by Greg Bastianelli, features a character in the reporter model. Minch deals with “mole people” living under New York. But there’s a lot more to the story than that, so I won’t give it away.
• “Dock Doyle,” by Adam Garcia, tells of a baseball player turned pulp hero. Actually, a pulp magazine in the mold of Doc Savage is created around Doyle, and he is also about to star in a cliffhanger movie serial. But he is soon embroiled in a real adventure, and we learn more about the real person that is Dock Doyle. There is supposed to be a whole collection of stories with this character coming soon. Sounds interesting, especially in how the story ends.
• “A Man Called Mongrel,” by Derrick Ferguson, is a black hero — a rarity among pulp heroes and something that several writers are trying to correct today. This story is set in modern times. I feel he was more in line with modern comic book characters. Derrick has written other black pulp characters as well (examples: Dillon, Fortune McCall). We should be seeing more stories with this character, as in many ways it’s a setup for further adventures. The second chapter of this story appears in the next volume of the series.
Vol. 2 is another great collection of stories. I look forward to further volumes of this series. The third volume is out, and I hope we see a fourth.
