After a bit of a delay, here is my posting on the fifth volume of Airship 27‘s Mystery Men (& Women).
As I’ve mentioned before, the series is kind of like DC’s old Showcase title or Street & Smith’s Crime Busters in providing a variety of New Pulp characters. With this one we get three New Pulp stories. Most of these characters have appeared elsewhere rather than this being their first appearance.
First up, we get a new female hero, The Shrike from Gene Moyers. She is similar to The Shadow in that she recruits a cadre of agents to fight evil. Like The Shadow, she is mysterious, and we the reader don’t get her full story. Here she is going after a smuggling ring that has also kidnapped a girl to blackmail her father. The Shrike has also recruited a new agent, female reporter Delores Dickson. I look forward to more stories with this character as the author has plans for more, which will slowly give us more information on the character. The cover is supposed to be The Shrike, but she actually dresses more like a ninja and uses a bow, as well as a pistol.
Thomas Deja, who has created the Shadow Legion series with two volumes so far from Airship 27, gives us the second of a planned series of four stories that showcase a different character. This time we get The Nightbreaker, who is more the dark avenger type. Interestingly, The Nightbeaker was just a character in a radio show, and Isaiah Cooper just a actor playing him. But something happened to him that caused him to become “out of shift with reality,” and so he became The Nightbreaker for real, using a special “multigun.” Here he goes up against someone who can control water and is after revenge.
Hopefully we’ll get the next story in this quartet in the next volume.
Finally, we get a new Doc Atlas story. Doc Atlas is a Doc Savage pastiche that I have posted on before. Created by Michael Black and Ray Lovato, Atlas is set in post-WWII. Assisted by two characters who provide the Ham and Monk dynamic, Doc Atlas is starting to setup shop in the Empire State Building just after the war, and meets Penny Cartier for the first time. She will become Doc’s girlfriend. Here, they deal with a mysterious villain threatening New York with a Tesla deathray, and the trio needs to get to the bottom of things, while also having to contend with some G-men interference.
It was announced that Doc Atlas would be coming to Airship 27 some time back, but this is the first story we’ve gotten. I do hope we will get more as we are told that Black and Lovato have brainstormed a whole timeline and story ideas for the characters.
Once again, it’s another good collection of stories. Sadly, this one came out a couple of years back and we haven’t gotten another new volume yet. So no new Doc Atlas stories, nor the rest of Deja’s quartet of stories. Hope we’ll see this change soon.
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