In going through my comic book collection, I came across two issues of a pulp-inspired comic, The Gloom. Clearly a parody of pulp heroes, it appeared in 2005 from U.K. publisher APComics. Writer Tony Lee and artist Dan Boultwood clearly took inspiration from The Shadow and other pulp heroes.
I looked to see if there were any more issues published, as the 2nd issue ended on a cliffhanger, but it didn’t appear so. I did find a graphic novel that collected the five issues of the miniseries and got it. So was able to read the whole storyline.
We meet The Gloom right off the bat. Chasing bad guys, he is very much in the mold of The Shadow: wide brimmed hat, cloak and two .45 automatics blasting away. But, we soon see there are differences. His guns shoot hellfire, and only fire on bad people. Really rich industrialist Carson Kane, he is assisted by his burly manservant Tiny, and The Professor, who has had his brain put in the body of a monkey.
The bad guys for the storyline are Nazis (of course), lead by The Vermilion, who wears a red scarf over the lower part of his face. He is really Jack Kansas, All American Hero, who is secretly a fascist. Their plot is to drop an atomic bomb on a gathering of allied leaders, thus helping German win the war.
We will learn the origin of The Gloom, and that his origin ties into why the Professor’s brain is in a monkey and learn The Vermilion’s connection to The Gloom: They are both agents of the Angel of Vengeance!
The Gloom is soon joined by a group of other pulp-inspired characters, called The Eleventh Hour. We met Doc Adventure (Doc Savage), Turbine the Flying Man (Rocketeer, et al), Smash Jordan (figure it out), Tommy the Unknown Private (ditto), The Pearly Queen, Lady Britannia (another agent of the Angel of Vengeance, who has among other items a magic invisible plane), Bangers and Mash (Bangers is an explosives expert, Mash is a big guy with an even bigger hammer), and Ungawa the Duke of the Jungle (again, figure it out).
There is also a damsel in distress that The Gloom must rescue: debutante Mousey Blonde, who is really journalist Vixen La Fox.
While the storyline is serious, the humor comes in both the dialogue (in an exchange between Jack and Carson, Carson tells Jack, “Don’t you come back no more”) and in the artwork (The Gloom disguises himself as a Nazi by putting on a Nazi coat and helmet over his outfit and hat). Purists may not like it, but I did.
Overall, its a fun read. No idea if we’ll see a sequel. The title has had a checkered past. Planned for five issues, only two come out from APComics before it went under, taking the scans of the original art with them. They basically had to create new artwork for the first two issues and were able to publish the complete series online through MTV Comics, and finally the collected edition from Arcana in 2013. I think in some ways the original artwork is better and more colorful than the new work, which seems a bit dark.
But it is worth hunting down.
