SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 4

SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1969 - NOVEMBER 15TH, 1969
NOVEMBER 17TH, 1969 - FEBRUARY 7TH, 1970
FEBRUARY 9TH, 1970 - MAY 2ND, 1970
MAY 4TH, 1970 - JULY 25TH, 1970
JULY 27TH, 1970 - OCTOBER 17TH, 1970
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

Corrigan's next adventure begins as he and his wife, Wilda, vacation in the Riviera while he recuperates from a gunshot wound sustained in the prior arc. But the couple's romantic getaway is quickly interrupted when Kasim, the prince of a nation called Turistan, becomes smitten with Wilda and kidnaps her to become his bride (he needs to marry posthaste in order to ascend to the throne). Corrigan follows them back to Turistan in a chartered plane, but runs out of fuel and lands near the castle of Sarkhan, Kasim's sinister cousin. Phil is captured by Sarkhan, but a beautiful servant named Yasmina, secretly loyal to Kasim, helps him escape.

Meanwhile, Kasim has realized the error of his ways and wants to return Wilda to her husband -- but his palace is attacked by Sarkhan, plotting a coup with the aid of a mercenary troupe. Corrigan and Yasmina arrive, and Corrigan helps Kasim defeat his cousin, returning control of Turistan to its rightful prince, who finds in Yasmina the wife he had wanted.

It's a bit weird, but there's sort of a FLASH GORDON vibe in this one. Desert palaces were not an uncommon sight in Alex Raymond's run on that strip, and Wilda's predicament here echoes Dale Arden's periodic imprisonments by Ming the Merciless -- occasions during which he would typically dress her in skimpy attire and lust after her, trying to force her into marriage. But beyond that, there's nothing particularly special about this arc. We're getting back to the rut I noted a couple weeks ago, where there's no continuity to speak of and it never feels like anyone is in any real danger, which means the strip itself feels like it's going through the motions.

It occurs to me now that when I made those criticisms previously, there was one major adventure strip with which I failed to compare CORRIGAN -- the afore-mentioned FLASH GORDON. Possibly because one is a daily and the other is a Sunday, it just didn't occur to me. But FLASH was the sort of adventure strip I like: even though I never felt Flash, Dale, Zarkov, etc. were actually going to die at any point, Alex Raymond maintained my interest by keeping Flash going, nonstop. One adventure careened into the next, into the next, into the next, with little or no time to stop and rest. FLASH was the epitome of a cliffhanger serial, and that's an approach I feel would vastly benefit CORRIGAN, as well.

There is at least a bit of continuity between strips at this point, however. As noted above, this arc begins with Corrigan recovering from an injury sustained in the previous storyline. And at the end of the Turistan arc, Corrigan and Wilda return to the Riviera, where Phil finds his next assignment waiting, which entails a trip to Venice. So Corrigan and Wilda hop directly from the Riviera to Italy, where our intrepid agent has been tasked with protecting a mystery writer named Byron Jagger. Jagger is researching a story about a notorious gangster named Cain, who was believed killed in Venice years ago, but who Jagger has announced to the world is still alive -- and now, Jagger has had multiple attempts made on his life. It turns out Jagger has faked the whole thing for publicity, but has unwittingly lured Cain, who actually is alive, out of hiding. So in the end, Corrigan uncovers Jagger's scam, and also arrests Cain.

I like this one in large part for the Venice setting; Al Williamson does a wonderful job of transporting the reader there. That said, I am a little annoyed by a lack of continuity and/or research on Goodwin's part: in order to aid Corrigan in the case, Wilda offers to help Cain with his notes, because she has some "secretarial experience". Which is fine, except that according to Corrigan's Wikipedia page, the Wilda character was a mystery novelist when she first appeared in the thirties! She literally has the same profession as Cain. It seems like that could've been played up somehow, or at the very least, her assisting Cain could have been on those grounds, as a contemporary, rather than as a "mere" secretary.

Anyway -- the next storyline finds Corrigan back in the United States, where he heads southwest on the trail of some government secrets which have been stolen by a small-time con-man and part-time actor named Clete Bowman. Bowman has been hired to sneak the documents across the Mexian border to agents of a foreign power, and he's using a movie production as his cover. But Corrigan figures him out and fights Bowman in a mountain pass near the border in order to get the papers back. In an amusing touch, Corrigan actually doesn't beat the bad guy here: he's nearly killed by Bowman, in fact, but Bowman's hostage, an actress named Evelyn Dawn, beans him with a rock, knocking him out.

Subsequently, Corrigan is assigned to escort a witness back to the United States from the Caribbean, but the two are captured by Gorstrom, the mob's Caribbean operations head, who also happens to be a big game hunter with his own island and an enjoyment of hunting the most dangerous prey of all. So, you guessed it -- Corrigan and the witness, a woman named Karen Holt, are sent out into the jungle, where Corrigan's wits allow him to get the better of Gorstrom and his men, and he and Karen escape the island in Gorstrom's seaplane.

Corrigan returns to the U.S. again for his next mission, which finds him investigating the kidnapping of a business magnate's daughter. Eventually he discovers that she "kidnapped" herself in order to elope with her boyfriend, of whom her father disapproved, but got in over her head with the guy she cut in to help run the scam.

All three of these are decent outings, but none are anything special. Like I said above, Corrigan is in a rut. I can't honestly say that I dislike any of these arcs, because thanks to Goodwin's scripting, they're all fast-paced page-turners -- and of course, they're brilliantly drawn by Williamson all the way through. But I just keep coming back to that issue, which I mentioned last week -- and which I'd hoped, to no avail, we were moving beyond -- where they all feel inconsequential. And I'm not exactly certain why that is. I grew up watching episodic TV. It's not like I'm unused to the concept of stories being "done in one" and never mentioned again, aside from very minor continuity nods. Even many of the newspaper strips I've looked at around here function that way. Spider-Man, for example, rarely mentioned previous adventures unless he happened to be up against a returning villain.

But there was something in those Spider-Man strips that created, I dunno -- an "illusion of continuity". And again, I think part of it is that every storyline sort of bled into the next. With Corrigan, with very rare exceptions, when an arc reaches its conclusion, that's the end of it. Clean break. Saturday is the final strip in the sequence, and the third panel of that Saturday strip has a little teaser for the next case. Then, come Monday, Corrigan is sitting in his office doing paperwork or generally just waiting for his phone to ring, and suddenly he's off on his next assignment with no thought given to what came before.

Contrast this with Spider-Man -- typically his arcs would end on Friday or Sunday, and the next story would begin Monday -- but it wasn't like Peter got back to his apartment in the Sunday strip and then Monday's strip started clean, with him out at the start of a (no pun intended) brand new day. Usually he'd have some aspect of the last adventure on his mind when he got home. He'd try to sleep or call Mary Jane or whatever, then when that didn't work, he'd go out web-slinging to clear his mind and stumble into his next adventure. Or look at Flash Gordon, who I mentioned above -- every single storyline there bled into the next. There was never time for Flash to stop and "reset". Part of that is due to the globe-trotting nature of his stories -- he didn't have a "home base" to return to, so wherever he was when one arc ended, there he would be when the next started.

But with Corrigan, it really does feel like an "episode of the week" format. And I think what it comes down to is that that's just not something I've been trained to expect in newspaper strips. And knowing that Goodwin and Williamson did it differently in the STAR WARS strip a decade after this makes it even more frustrating that they aren't doing it here!

But I can still hope that they'll change their approach at some point. After all, we're only about three years into their thirteen-year run!