SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 3

JULY 29TH, 1968 - OCTOBER 12TH, 1968
OCTOBER 14TH, 1968 - JANUARY 4TH, 1969
JANUARY 6TH, 1969 - MARCH 15TH, 1969
MARCH 17TH, 1969 - JUNE 14TH, 1969
JUNE 16TH, 1969 - AUGUST 30TH, 1969
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

Last week I spoke a bit about the stakes in these Corrigan stories feeling extremely minimal. You go into every single arc knowing that not only will Corrigan win, nobody will die and the bad guys will all be captured, and he'll move along to his next mission the very next day. I suggested just a little bit of lethality to perhaps up the ante for our hero. I noted that otherwise, things might get tedious as we move along.

It occurred to me after I wrote those words, however, that there are other ways to break up the tedium, and Archie Goodwin's plotting may be part of my problem here. He writes every arc as straight and episodic as possible. There are no twists or turns. Corrigan shows up, finds out what the problem is, then solves it; the end, on to the next unrelated story. No wrenches are ever thrown into his plans. He never gets blindsided. And, while I have gone on record before as saying that I enjoy watching hyper-competent characters do their thing and succeed at everything, that's not exactly what this is. Hyper-competence is great, but it works best when the characters are using it to overcome serious obstacles. Corrigan tends to sleepwalk his way through every situation, because there are no obstacles that challenge him, and no villains he can't outwit in a very straightforward fashion.

I guess what I'm getting it is that I don't necessarily need to see anybody die to make these stories more compelling. I just need some better plots from Archie Goodwin! Sub-plots, twists, continuing continuity, and so forth. This was something Goodwin and Williamson did pretty well in the STAR WARS newspaper strip of the early eighties. They actually had ongoing plotlines outside of the current story arcs, and they had arcs that built upon one another (and sometimes led directly from one to the next) toward a narrative finish line. That is what I hope to see them bring to Corrigan! Otherwise, it just feels like going through the motions in every storyline.