SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 7

MAY 21ST, 1973 - AUGUST 18TH, 1973
AUGUST 20TH, 1973 - NOVEMBER 10TH, 1973
NOVEMBER 19TH, 1973 - FEBRUARY 7TH, 1974
FEBRUARY 9TH, 1974 - MAY 11TH, 1974
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

At long, long last, as we begin this week, Corrigan delves into some of that inter-arc continuity that that strip has been missing. When last we left our intrepid FBI agent, he was in South America following his latest encounter with Doctor Seven. The next storyline opens with Corrigan still there, preparing to head home, when he's drugged at the airport by a pair of kidnappers who fly him to the Caribbean island of eccentric millionaire Sebastian Quint. Quint had abducted ten men of action for a "survival of the fittest" type of competition, to determine which of them will serve as host for his brain when he dies. But after the group is whittled down to the final four candidates, who Quint forces into a gladiatorial match, Corrigan rallies them to fight back together, and they escape.

From Quint's estate, Corrigan heads to civilization on a neighboring island, where he catches his flight home. But aboard the plane is a small-time crook, Slade, who our hero sent up the river some time back and who was in the Caribbean to lure an old associate, Granite, back to the U.S. for a big score. Panicking, Slade tries to bump Corrigan off upon their arrival in the U.S., but fails and is himself killed instead. This leads to Corrigan investigating Slade and learning that he was planning his robbery in the Southestern United States. Corrigan heads down there and matches wits with Granite and with Slade's widow, Amber. In the end, as expected, the G-Man is victorious.

Neither of these storylines sets my world on fire exactly, but they're both decent enough page-turners. However their very existence is enhanced greatly by the inter-arc momentum mentioned above. I know maybe this is weird, but that sort of thing really can elevate an otherwise pedestrian plot for me. Give me three adventures where the main character wraps everything up in a bow at the end, with a clean break between stories, and if the plots themselves aren't riveting, I'll call them mediocre and complain. But give me those exact same plots with threads running between and connecting them -- serializing them -- and I will sing their praises to the rooftops even if they actually are mediocre.

And that's more or less what we have here. We're talking about nearly a year of strips, with the Doctor Seven arc starting February 5th and the Slade/Granite/Amber arc ending November 10th. I liked the Seven arc by virtue of it being a Seven arc, but the two that followed it were really no great shakes. Yet I find this to be the best continuous year of Corrigan stories I've read to date, because they feature the character leaping from adventure to adventure with no time to go home and take a break in between. So maybe I'm just weird; I dunno. I can't explain it any better than I just did, but serialization appeals to me simply because it is serialization.

Now, the break before our next arc does allow Corrigan some downtime at home with Wilda, but the arc itself is another installment in the Doctor Seven/Triad saga, so I'm okay with that. (Indeed, I don't mind between-arc downtime sometimes, but I vastly prefer when the arcs run one into the next into the next, and the downtime scenes are weaved into the arcs themselves.) In this one, Seven's partner, Corbeau, is attacked and his yacht destroyed. He washes ashore in the U.S. and asks for Corrigan's help. It seems that since Seven was apparently killed in South America, a civil war has begun between Corbeau and third member of Triad, Lucian Omar. Omar wants to sell Seven's diabolical technology to the U.S. crime syndicate, while Corbeau opposes this plan and would sooner see Triad dismantled.

So Corrigan teams up Corbeau and they travel to Rangoon, where Corbeau is killed and Corrigan has a rematch with the hitman Joe Ice. Then, on the neighboring island of Sumarkan, Corrigan sneaks into a party at Omar's villa (shades of the last time they crossed paths) and thwarts the weapon deal. The syndicate men make a run for it, and Omar is killed when he attempts to stop Corrigan. In the end, Doctor Seven appears, having cheated death yet again, and allows Corrigan to leave the island, promising they will meet again after he has rebuilt his empire.

This arc is really good, and has almost a "season finale" (or maybe season premiere) feel to it, if that makes sense. Major shakeups happen here, and it all feels far more momentous than any of Corrigan's "case of the week" adventures, or even his more important prior outings against Seven and Triad.

And the action doesn't slow down when the arc ends, either. Needing a way home, Corrigan books passage on a freighter bound for "Dragon Island", from which he plans to hitch a ride on a mail plane to Samoa and then the U.S. But naturally, Dragon Island proves to be its own adventure, as Corrigan stumbles onto a piracy ring, which he thwarts with the aid of Kamu, a native of the island with whom he shared a cabin aboard the freighter. Corrigan and Kamu defeat the pirates, led by the beautiful Serena Frost and her partner, Captain Kraken.

This arc isn't nearly as earth-shattering as the last one, and it even features some cribbing from other stories -- including something Goodwin and Williamson already did! You may recall an arc early in their run, where Corrigan found himself thrown into forced labor in a mine down in South America. The mine was overseen by a beautiful woman and her partner. It's almost the exact same setup here, though instead of an illegal mine, it's a pirate ring. And on top of all that, in order to keep the Dragon Island natives off their case, Frost and Kraken have borrowed a page from Ian Fleming's DOCTOR NO, outfitting a tank with a flamethrower to look like a dragon and scare -- or kill -- anyone who gets to close to their operation!

Still, borrowed plot elements aside, as I discussed above, I like this one quite a bit simply because it follows hot on the heels of the last adventure. Rather than a clean break between the end of the Triad story and the start of his next adventure, we have Corrigan still down in the tropics looking for a way home, which leads him organically into this next plot. It seems that at last, here in 1973/74, Williamson and Goodwin are on a nice streak of winners, following from some very, very uneven work over the first six years of their collaboration. My only hope is that this recent inter-arc continuity will become the rule, rather than the exception for Corrigan's exploits going forward -- because as of this moment, my somewhat waning interest level is totally reinvigorated.