SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 5

OCTOBER 19TH, 1971 - JANUARY 30TH, 1971
FEBRUARY 1ST, 1971 - MAY 1ST, 1971
MAY 3RD, 1971 - JULY 31ST, 1971
AUGUST 2ND, 1971 - OCTOBER 16TH, 1971
OCTOBER 18TH, 1971 - JANUARY 8TH, 1972
JANUARY 10TH, 1972 - APRIL 8TH, 1972
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

It may suffer the same issues of light continuity and no real stakes that I've spent the past few weeks complaining about, but Corrigan's next adventure does at least venture into some unique territory for the character! In this one, the U.S. State Department gets wind of a plane found in South America, belonging to a believed-dead scientist who the government would like to have back -- or at least, whose research they would like! Corrigan is placed on temporary assignment with the State Department to investigate -- but the Soviet Union has also learned about the plane, and dispatches an operative to team up with Corrigan in his search.

The Soviet operative turns out to be the beautiful Colonel Tanya Greb, and she joins Corrigan, his pilot Parez, and Professor Stone (an archaeologist from a previous Goodwin/Williamson arc) to investigate. Stone is along due to the fact that some dinosaur bones were improbably found in the plane, and carbon dating says that they're only a couple hundred years old. So as you might imagine, before long, the group finds their way into a land lost to time -- a prehistoric jungle in the rainforest, where dinosaurs still live!

The ensuing adventure sees our heroes locate the missing scientist, Professor Branveldt, work to repair their crashed helicopter while evading T-Rexes in the jungle, and eventually escape via raft as the entire lost world collapses around them. This arc is about as far from the standard law-enforcement procedural that we usually get from Corrigan, and veers far into high adventure territory -- and I love it for that. I don't think all of the strip's woes are suddenly solved here, but at least we have a nice diversion into some uncharted territory to liven things up for a bit.

The next couple arcs also manage to keep things interesting. I'm not sure what happened here, because Goodwin is still going with the "adventure of the week" format, but somehow the stories feel way more exciting and interesting than previous installments. Perhaps it just took a few years for Goodwin and Williamson to find their groove, because suddenly, here in the seventies, everything doesn't feel as "plain vanilla" as it did in the late sixties!

First, Corrigan returns to his hotel room in South America, where he is visited by an old friend from the CIA named Herb Thomas, who thrusts our hero back into "Bond" territory. It seems someone is stealing U.S. satellites by triggering their recall systems, sending them plunging to Earth. The signal has been traced to the small country of Kalipur, bordering India and China. And while the CIA can't investigate for fear of triggering an incident, the FBI has been recently invited to Kalipur by its ruler, Prince Jamal, in order to train the nation's newly established police force. So Corrigan heads for Kalipur undercover as an advisor, to poke around.

He soon finds that the prince is a follower of "universal meditation", a sort of church whose leader, Doctor Seven, maintains a high-tech stronghold in Kalipur's mountains. Corrigan pretty quickly pegs Seven as the satellite-snatcher, and infiltrates his lair. Corrigan does some snooping, survives an assassination attempt and a seduction attempt by Seven's sexy "dragon lady" assistant, Lushan, and exposes the doctor's scheme after a brief period of captivity. Seven and Lushan escape, however, setting up their inevitable return. (Seriously, unlike some of Corrigan's previous foes, it's very, very clear that Goodwin and Williamson plan to revisit these two -- and I'm glad they are, because I'm a total sucker for "yellow peril" villains, racist caricatures though they may be.)

It's a little thing, but part of what I'm enjoying about these current storylines is the simple fact that they bleed into one another, similarly to what I mentioned in regards to Spider-Man last week. First we have Corrigan returning from the "lost world" to his hotel to be greeted by an old friend as described above, and now we see him share a plane home with an irritable movie producer named R. Barcroft Baxter, who turns out to be the villain of the next arc. Upon landing in the U.S., Corrigan is greeted at the airport (on the tarmac!) by Wilda, while Baxter meets up with a mobster recognized by Corrigan.

This prompts our hero to take a trip out west, where he learns that Baxter is jockeying for a studio head position (in order to funnel mob money into a legitimate enterprise), but his major competition is Kay Stirling, the daughter of the studio's founder. Kay wins the approval of the board of directors over Baxter, so Baxter enlists the mob to stage a series of accidents on the set of Legend, the final film approved by Kay's father. So Corrigan gets a job as a stuntman and eventually exposes Baxter.

Unlike the previous two arcs, this one isn't necessarily the most original concept -- in fact, we just had a storyline involving a movie production not long ago. But for some reason this story is a lot of fun. I think in part it's due to Baxter. Unlike a lot of Corrigan's often flavorless bad guys, Baxter is smarmy, slimy, and fun to hate. You want to see this guy get what's coming to him because he's such a sleazebag. And with that, I think I've hit on a problem I hadn't previously recognized in Corrigan's adventures: most of the villains really are boring, one-note characters. Their main trait is always "evil", and they typically have no personality. There are exceptions, of course, such as Ma Murkel, but I just find her annoying. Doctor Seven and R. Barcroft Baxter, on the other hand, are well-crafted in their own ways: Seven as a "Fu Manchu" archetype, and Baxter as an arrogant creep.

Unfortunately, following from these two more engaging stories, we have a pair of less satisfying outings. In the first, Corrigan is assigned to investigate a possible assassination attempt on a visiting head of state. He discovers that the scheme is being perpetrated by dissidents using an American protestor as their triggerman, and puts an end to the affair before the assassination happens. Then, Corrigan is sent to Africa to extricate a U.S. criminal, but finds himself up against the crook and his two mercenaries as they search for a lost treasure.

Neither of these stories is awful -- and the second actually features some legitimately tense moments of treasure-hunting in the wilds of Africa -- but they're just the sort of usual "paint-by-numbers" Corrigan adventures that I've muttered about in the past. Fortunately, the next arc brings Doctor Seven back (just about a year after his last appearance), and by the mere virtue of a recurring villain, the story feels a bit more momentous than our past few.

In this one, Doctor Seven's beautiful aide, Lushan, shows up at the American embassy in London asking for Corrigan's help. Corrigan diverts on his way home from Africa to meet Lushan, who tells him that Seven is putting together a global terrorist organization called Triad. His first partner is a European terrorist named Corbeau. The second is an American, who Seven is in the United States to woo. Corrigan and Lushan evade Corbeau's men in England and retreat to the U.S., where they find that Seven's second partner is oil billionaire Breck Buxton. As Seven gives a presentation to Buxton, Corrigan crashes the party. In the end, Seven escapes but Buxton is captured.

Again, we're back to that full-on Bond fell, with a little globe-trotting (England to the U.S.), a ski chase, a villain with a doomsday weapon, and so forth. I'll admit that Lushan's turn here is a bit hard to swallow -- she had no issues working for Seven previously (and was actually quite ruthless about it), but apparently the fact that he's now planning to potentially kill people rather than just steal satellites is enough to get her over to the side of the angels. However I can forgive the slight inconsistency with her character since this is a genuinely exciting and interesting arc. Hopefully Goodwin and Williamson can keep it up when we rejoin Corrigan next week.