SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 1

JANUARY 20TH, 1967 - APRIL 8TH, 1967
APRIL 10TH, 1967 - JULY 1ST, 1967
JULY 3RD, 1967 - SEPTEMBER 9TH, 1967
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

No, your eyes don't deceive you! Though we're continuing the adventures of the man we've known over the past three weeks as X-9, the title of the strip has changed. Per the introduction to IDW's first volume of SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN strips, around the time Al Williamson and Archie Goodwin came aboard as the strip's creative team, King Features Syndicate changed the strip's name as well, in the interest of drumming up some new readers for a feature whose circulation had never been exceptionally high. I don't know if the name change had any impact on that circulation, but I can say with certainty that the Williamson/Goodwin team makes this strip instantly more enjoyable and simply more readable than it was thirty years earlier under Alex Raymond, Dashiell Hammett, and Leslie Charteris.

Certainly this is due in part to the passage of time and changing tastes and attitudes among the readership. The strips of the sixties are more in line with the sort of stuff I compared the vintage X-9 material to last week -- the faster-paced stuff like SPIDER-MAN and DICK TRACY. Where the 1930s X-9s typically featured four panels and copious words, these strips are generally three panels as a rule with much fewer word balloons and captions. On one hand, that makes them less dense than the older stuff, but at the same time, it also makes them way easier to read.

Plus, these strips are scripted by Archie Goodwin, a comic book writer by trade, so he knows how to tailor his words to a sequential art medium, unlike novelists Hammett and Charteris. That helps immensely to make this stuff more palatable and much more fun to read. In fact, let me put it this way: over the past three weeks, it took me multiple sittings to get through every X-9 storyline, even the shorter ones. But for today's post, I read four arcs in one sitting of about an hour -- and I don't feel as if anything was rushed past in the process.

Now, before I go any further, let's have a brief rundown of those three arcs. We open with our hero, Phil Corrigan (apparently his real name, unlike the alias "Dexter" from the early strips), assigned to protect Marina Vladcheck, a beautiful Soviet scientist defected to the United States, from a kidnap plot. The owner of a traveling carnival, Magnus, is after the girl for reasons that remain unrevealed even by the arc's conclusion. Corrigan teams up with an agent named Daley to keep an eye on the girl -- but when she ditches her work and her guardians for a night out at an American discotheque, Corrigan and Daley find themselves in a race against Magnus's men to locate her. The hunt culminates in a fist-fight between Corrigan and Magnus atop a ferris wheel, and Marina is rescued in the end. (Also, Magnus surprisingly survives to be arrested, which is not something I was used to from the thirties strips -- there, X-9 nearly always killed the bad guy by a story arc's conclusion.)

The artwork is phenomenal here, which I'll discuss more below, but the story leaves a bit to be desired. It's still a better read that any of the Raymond-era storylines, but it's clear that Goodwin and Williamson were still figuring things out at this point (and perhaps slowly moving away from whatever shadows were cast by the previous creative team), so any deficiencies can probably be chalked up to that, because things do get a lot better very quickly. That said, this one almost feels too short -- there's no reason given, as noted above, for carnival owner Magnus's attempts to kidnap a Soviet scientist. Unless Goodwin and Williamson plan to revisit the character in a future arc -- which is possible given his survival -- that seems a weird oversight.

The second arc finds Corrigan dispatched to South America, impersonating a recently captured criminal, to infiltrate a "hideout" where crooks on the lam can pay for protection from a beautiful woman named Adrienne Widdoe and her partner, a corrupt cop called Captain Drumm. Corrigan learns that the criminals are actually unwittingly paying for the privilege of working as slave labor in a mine. He puts an end to the scheme and the villains, as well as all the imprisoned criminals, are arrested.

This one is a bit better than the last, but still feels a little short and pat in its resolution. Corrigan arms the criminal miners and a shootout ensues between them and Widdoe's guards, while Corrigan goes after Widdow and Drumm himself. Then, after he captures them, we're told, very abruptly in the final strip, that the escaped miners were captured by the local authorities as they attempted to escape upriver in a boat. This feels like something that could've been drawn out longer, but it's almost like Goodwin and Williamson got bored with their story and decided to wrap it up in a hurry.

In the third arc, Corrigan is sent to the Riviera, where expatriated mob boss Joe Falcon has had a change of heart on his deathbed and wants to turn over all his information on the American crime syndicates to the FBI. (It's been established at this point in the strip that Corrigan works specifically for that organization, something that was never explained in the Raymond-era material.) But by the time Corrigan arrives, the mobster is dead. Corrigan realizes that he hid his files in a safe deposit box and mailed the key to his beautiful (seeing a trend?) daughter, Cheryl, at school in Switzerland -- and she missed the delivery when she returned to the Riviera to be with her father when he passed away.

Corrigan and Cheryl take the train to Switzerland, but are pursued by two mob hitmen out to make sure Falcon's papers aren't recovered. Eventually, Corrigan and Cheryl ditch one man on the train, and beat the other to the key. A car chase ensues, and in the end Corrigan gets away with his prize. (And again, nobody is killed -- Corrigan only knocks out one hitman, and the other survives a car crash. This truly is a kinder, gentler X-9.)

This arc, the first to feel like a full story with a well-conceived conclusion, has a particularly "Bondian" feel to it, with the exotic European locales looking like something out of a Sean Connery movie -- which of course make sense, since Connery's Bond was at the peak of his popularity at this point (this was the year YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, Connery's fifth outing in the role, hit theaters). Obviously the Bond influence would be impossible to avoid in spy fiction produced in this timeframe, and it will be interesting to see if Goodwin and Williamson keep it up going forward.

Besides the quick, exciting pacing of these strips in contrast to the often plodding nature of the 1930s material, the X-9 of 1967 also outshines his original incarnation in another realm: the artwork. Alex Raymond was a tremendous artist, but the source material used by IDW's Library of American Comics for that volume did his work no favors. I think I commented on the simplistic nature of Raymond's work a couple weeks ago, but subsequently I found scans of some of his original art from those strips online, and it was just as beautiful as his FLASH GORDON work. I think that with X-9, it was simply a case of IDW/LoAC not having access to very good originals (they generally use syndicate proofs for these volumes).

On the other hand, the source material in these CORRIGAN books was apparently pulled from Al Williamson's personal files by arrangement with his estate, and the finished product looks absolutely gorgeous -- totally crisp and clear -- next to the Raymond stuff, which was extremely muddy. It also helps that the Williamson strips are printed at a much larger size than the Raymond ones, presumably due to the strips not being as wide as were Raymond's. Williamson was an amazing artist, and work like this, where he pencils and inks himself, represents the very best of his work.

I've seen images of Corrigan from later in the seventies, and it's evident that Williamson evolved him with the times, giving him shaggier hair and a generally hipper appearance. But it's remarkable early on that Williamson's Corrigan is basically the spitting image of Raymond's "Dexter"/X-9. Especially in profile this is clearly the exact same character as in the earliest strips, allowing for the stylistic differences between Williamson and his predecessor. I don't know what X-9 looked like over the three decades separating Raymond and Williamson, but it's pretty clear that Williamson had studied Raymond's work very closely when he began drawing the strip.

Next week, Corrigan's adventures in the sixties continue, and we meet his wife (!) in the longest Williamson/Goodwin storyline to date.