Something that many pulp fans want to see is a team-up with various pulp heroes. While commonplace with comicbook heroes, such team-ups never happened with the pulp heroes, even among characters published by the same publisher.
So I guess most were exited when Dynamite published Masks. But I found it a bit disappointing.
The first Masks mini-series was written by Chris Roberson and teamed up The Shadow, The Black Bat, The Spider, Zorro, Miss Fury, The Black Terror, The Green Lama, and The Green Hornet and Kato. But there were various changes.
The story is set in the 1930s, but Zorro didn’t live during that time. So they have a descendant of Zorro take up the mantle. This I found troubling because Zorro was a master swordsman and fighter, due to the training he had in Spain before returning to California. Training that his descendant would not have had. They also worked the origin of The Black Bat into the story, which really doesn’t work for me. Keep in mind that after loosing his eyesight to acid, it was several months before his eye surgery and recovery, and they tried to compress this into a few days. And they put The Spider in the same outfit they had him in the Dynamite comic, which was based on the movie serial, and I never liked it.
Also The Black Terror, Miss Fury, and The Green Hornet are not pulp characters. The Black Terror is a comicbook character. Miss Fury comes from the comic strips and comicbooks, and the Green Hornet is mainly a radio character, though he later had comicbooks and movie serials. But Dynamite was already doing stuff with them, so tossed them in. Of the three, The Green Hornet is the most pulp-like.
In the story, the heroes go up against the Black Police, a group The Spider took on by himself in a trilogy of stories. And then they had the first comicbook hero, The Clock, be the secret mastermind behind the group. That was kind of a disappointment in turning a hero evil.
The second Masks, written by Cullen Bunn, brings back the gang, but also adds in others: Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt, Lady Satan, Black Sparrow, and Mulan Kato. The story is also set across time, as Peter Cannon is a modern-day character. For those not familiar with these other characters, Peter Cannon was created for Charlton Comics and was in the style of Amazing Man and to a degree The Green Lama, as he was trained in a lamasery and uses his skills and knowledge to fight evil. The Black Sparrow was created in Dynamite’s The Shadow comic as a foil for him, and later appeared in Dynamite’s Noir series. Lady Satan is a comicbook character who fought against the Nazis in occupied France, and somehow later became a sorceress.
The big baddie is The Red Death, a character inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe story, who is attacking in the 1930s, ’70s, and modern times. The Shadow, Black Terror, Green Hornet and Kato, The Spider, Black Sparrow, Miss Fury, Lady Satan, and Green Lama are dealing with things in the 1930s. In the 1970s, we have The Spider, Black Sparrow, and Miss Fury. However, the 1970s Black Sparrow is the granddaughter of the original, and Miss Fury is a new person inspired by the original. And in modern days, we have Peter Cannon, Lady Satan, The Black Bat (apparently the newer version Dynamite created), and the current Green Hornet with Mulan Kato. And thanks to time travel, we get all the heroes together at once, and even alternate versions of several as well.
It all gets a bit confusing, making it more in spirit a comicbook-style big crossover, than what I would imagine would have happened in a pulp-magazine crossover.
Both series ran eight issues, and each one have been collected in trade paperback. Easy to obtain if you really want these.
