WITH ONE MIGHTY LEAP

 

My brother and I were not allowed to read comics

I'm not sure whether my mother thought they were bad for the eyesight, or bad for the morals, but it was a very strict regime.  So, though we were both voracious readers of "real books," whenever we visited friends, we dived into their comic collections with huge delight.

And a definite favorite was the English boys' comic book, The Eagle.  Though we didn't know it, the Eagle was a Christian response to the popular American comics, which the founder of the English  production, an English vicar, John Morris, thought were "deplorable, nastily over-violent, and obscene." So he had envisioned a comic book that was replete with action stories that were fun to read, but also conveyed respectable moral standards.  No foreigners would be depicted as villains or enemies, and in every group there would be at least one from an ethnic minority.

The Eagle, however, was not preachy at all.  In fact, it was exciting.  It introduced me to science fiction.  It's hero, Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, was inspirational.  He could be relied on, in any situation, to get out of trouble with amazing feats.  The feats felt authentic -- one of the writers was a very young Arthur C. Clarke. And the drawing was of very high quality.

Years later, when I had children of my own, to my amazement I met one of the men who had written for the Eagle -- not Arthur C. Clarke, but a fellow who could tell very amusing stories.  When he worked for the magazine, he said, he had been one of the two writers of the Dan Dare stories.  And he and the other writer had a private contest - each had a six (or so) week with the stint, and then handed Dan over to the other writer, having left their hero in a very tricky situation. 

Which the other writer had to solve.

Well, the other writer was in France, one time, and so, as my raconteur confessed, he thought he would create a situation that was utterly and absolutely impossible.  He dropped Dan into a 40-foot deep hole with sheer sides, with snakes and scorpions swarming at the bottom, and then headed off to France himself.

When he got back to London, he grabbed the comic with glee ... to find that WITH ONE MIGHTY LEAP out Dan had jumped, to carry on with his mighty deeds.

So Dan Dare was what we call today an action hero. 

I was reminded of this the other day when I picked up the second in the Orphan X series of books, The Nowhere Man, by  Gregg Hurwitz.  Orphan X, also known as Evan Smoak or the Nowhere Man, is definitely an action hero.  Taken out of an orphanage at the age of twelve, he was metamorphosed into a world-class assassin by dark forces in the US administration. Breaking away from this grisly business after a career of offing a large number of nasties, he now operates alone, and on the side of good.

Well, in The Nowhere Man, Hurwitz places his hero into all kinds of impossible situations. Somehow, X gets out of them, only to be recaptured and placed into yet another impossible situation.  In one, he is trapped in a kind of plastic cube, ready to be auctioned off to a large crowd of nasties who all hold a grudge because of what he has done in the past, and contemplate terrible things to do to him if they win the auction.

But, with the equivalent of ONE MIGHTY LEAP, he escapes yet again.

Marvelous stuff. Worthy of all the action heroes that went before him -- Superman, Batman, James Bond, the Saint, Robin Hood, and a personal favorite, Modesty Blaise.  They were not just in comics, but also on radio and in film, depicted by such flamboyant actors as Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Roger Moore, Sylvester Stallone, and that Arnie fellow whose name I have trouble spelling.

The world definitely needs action heroes, complete with their liberal standards. Right now, in fact, it seems imperative. An action hero or two could solve of lot of current problems. Watching one at work would be really nice.

Unfortunately, they do not exist.