Barry Reese has created several pulp-inspired characters over the years, all set within his own universe, including Sovereign City, and now published by Pro Se Press.
One series has been about Assistance Unlimited, a group of characters under the leadership of Lazarus Gray and set in Sovereign City in the 1930s and ’40s. In many ways, the group is loosely modeled on The Avenger‘s Justice, Inc. Reese has a timeline for his universe that goes into the present day. So an open question is whether this group is still around, perhaps with new members?
The idea of successive generations hasn’t been used much with pulp heroes (or New Pulp). We too often want more stories with our favorite hero, not their kids or successors. No Shadow Jr. or Doc Savage III for most fans. But Reese has already done this by having the second generation of some of his characters step up; and a few other authors have done similiarly.
With Broken Empire: Adventure Unlimited: The Silver Age, we see this with Assistance Unlimited, as Broken Empire is set in the 1960s! While Lazarus Gray is still around, as is Samantha Grace, a younger generation takes the lead in the group, along with other characters. We don’t know what happened to Morgan Watts or Eun Jiwon. Yet.
Now we have Ellen Grace, Sato Shinji, Bart Hall, Charity Grace, and new character Benjamin Falk. We don’t know much about Sato. Bart Hall is the original Daredevil from the comics by Lev Gleason (he wore a half-red/half-blue outfit and used a boomerang). Bob Benton, the original Black Terror, is also around, but has passed along the mantle of Black Terror to his former sidekick, Tim. Charity is a former Gravedigger (see her trilogy), but she doesn’t play a big role here.
Ellen seems the main star here, and is Samanath’s daughter. She is kind of an Emma Peel type, with a harder edge. Falk is introduced in this volume, a former Secret Service agent who quit after the JFK assassination and is a target of SIGIL, the bad guys who are a merger of the Nazis and the Illuminati. You’ll learn why. He works with Ellen for most of this story. We also meet Ezekial Gray, though he’s not a formal member of AU, and gets involved in the second half.
Further, the group no longer operates from their old headquarters in Sovereign City. Now they operate from a nuclear aircraft carrier! I wonder how they pulled that off financially.
This volume has basically two parts. In the first, they deal with a neo-Nazi-type who has created clones of himself. He tries to threaten the world with an ancient solar weapon and create a Fourth Reich, but is betrayed by one of his clones and a mysterious Mr. X. In the second, they deal with the threat of SIGIL, now under control of a would-be sun god! Who has gone mad thanks to a mystical device. Can they take him down before he burns the world?
Overall this is a great addition to the series. Another novel in the Reese universe is out, The Second Book of Babylon, that I hope to get. Reese is working on the eighth Lazarus Gray volume, and his timeline includes the ninth and 10th volumes, as well as a few other future works. Hope we’ll see these soon. And it would be interesting in seeing more of this iteration of AU.
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