SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 9

SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1975 - DECEMBER 27TH, 1975
DECEMBER 29TH, 1975 - MARCH 27TH, 1976
MARCH 29TH, 1976 - JULY 24TH, 1976
JULY 26TH, 1976 - NOVEMBER 6TH, 1976
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

Notwithstanding Doctor Seven's giant robot, Corrigan's adventures have been as down-to-Earth as always since he returned from the lost world of dinosaurs in 1970. But here, in late '75, Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson have decided to throw Corrigan into an adventure that's as far from grounded as (in)humanly possible! In this one, Corrigan is assigned to recover a manuscript stolen from a literary museum. The author's great-granddaughter, Trisha St. Cloud, tags along with him as he conducts his investigation. At first, all seems straightforward; Corrigan deduces that one Professor McQueen masterminded the heist. But when Corrigan and Trisha catch up with McQueen aboard his chartered freighter down near the Arctic Sea, things get... weird.

It turns out that the manuscript details the true-life adventures of Trisha's great-grandfather, though no one has ever believed it. In the book, he and his fellow passengers are kidnapped from their boat and taken to a tropical island in the arctic inhabited by cavemen and aliens. Trisha's great-grandfather escaped and wrote his book, and McQueen found the diary of a sailor who got away with him, corroborating the story. Thus, McQueen now believes the aliens are real and wants their technology.

So naturally, the freighter is wrecked and Corrigan, Trisha, McQueen, and McQueen's henchman make it to the island. The last of the aliens shows himself, and reveals he's been contemplating destroying his ship since he will likely never escape Earth. When McQueen demands, at gunpoint, the ship's secrets, the alien tricks him into destroying it and the island instead. Corrigan and Trisha escape, but everyone else is killed.

I don't know that I can say I love this one, but it's a nice change of pace from the usual Corrigan fare. And Williamson, who cut his teeth drawing sci-fi comics for EC in the 1950s, does a great job on the eerie, TWILIGHT ZONE style alien. If for no other reason, Williamson's artwork is enough to check this arc out (though that's honestly the case for every arc; Williamson is always the main draw where Corrigan is concerned, even on the better arcs).

Things get decidedly more grounded in the next arc, and it's a good one. Following his alien island adventure, Corrigan is dispatched to Gulf City in the United States, to investigate the murder of a fellow FBI agent. Corrigan teams up with the deceased agent's partner, Ralph Storm, as well as Police Commissioner Hightower, to investigate the city's seedy underworld. Williamson and Goodwin serve this up as a legitimate mystery, with a few suspects, a web of clues, and no premature unmasking of the culprit, as they've done in the past. It's probably the best mystery story they've pulled off, though there's nothing truly remarkable about the plot to mention here; it's just a solid, well-crafted storyline.

Corrigan and Wilda go on vacation in our next arc, but as you might imagine, things don't go as planned. At their rental cabin on scenic Thunder Lake, the couple learns that the woods are haunted by a monster -- which recently killed the cabin owner's brother. (The owner, by the way, is named Luthor Kyle, suggesting that Goodwin was thinking about DC villains' last names when he scripted this arc.) Despite the apparent danger, Corrigan and Wilda choose to stay in the cabin anyway -- but their first night there, the monster shows up and kidnaps Wilda.

This leads to Corrigan searching the woods for the beast, and eventually finding (surprise!) that the "monster" is actually Kyle's brother, Damon, having recently suffered a break with sanity. But he regains his senses when Corrigan rescues Wilda, and the trio heads back toward civilization. But when it turns out that more cabins were invaded during the time Damon was holding Wilda prisoner, Corrigan realizes there's more afoot and begins an investigation. Eventually, Corrigan realizes that there's a second monster, and this one is systematically looting houses in the area. Of course it turns out to be the work of a human being, and Corrigan thwarts him -- but the real shock comes when Corrigan's perp is killed by an actual monster, glimpsed in one single chilling panel before it vanishes into the snow.

This is a good one, basically featuring Corrigan dropped into an episode of SCOOBY-DOO. Plus, since we've seen our hero encounter dinosaurs and aliens so far, you find yourself legitimately wondering for a while whether the monster is real. The twist in the end, revealing that while the "monster" we've been after isn't real but that a real one does exist, is pretty cool.

And then we move into Corrigan's next adventure, which begins with a random and unexpected bombshell: our hero is suddenly divorced. He implies that Wilda got tired of him constantly flying off all over the world on various cases and filed for divorce, but it comes literally out of nowhere. They were just a happy couple, on vacation together, in the previous arc! And even weirder, this storyline opens with Corrigan recalled from vacation to deal with his new case. So either that was the quickest divorce in the history of mankind, or this is actually a different vacation and some time has passed between arcs. (Which isn't impossible, since the final strip in most arcs ends with a "meanwhile" teaser to set up the next storyline -- but the Thunder Lake story didn't conclude that way, instead having a clean ending.)

This next arc features some sub-part fill-in artwork, as Williamson must have taken a little time off. I don't know who drew the story, but while his work isn't horrible -- he nails Corrigan's appearance for the most part -- it feels very stiff and not as fluid as Williamson's atuff. As a result, the story, which is decent, suffers a bit.

In this one, Corrigan is dispatched on the trail of a long-missing Nazi spy when some of said spy's gold is found in the American southwest. Corrigan goes undercover at a flying circus previously co-owned by the man who taught him how to fly, Skipper Holmes, until Holmes was killed when he found the gold. Corrigan makes an instant enemy of the circus's star pilot, Bo Krassler, and suspects Krassler of being the spy. But there are a few twists before we learn the truth, and eventually Corrigan thwarts the bad guys.

I'm beginning to think that Archie Goodwin was a fan of biplanes for some reason, by the way. In 1974, he wrote "Death Flies the Haunted Sky" in DETECTIVE COMICS #442, which revolved around a biplane killing people. Here, two years later, he has Corrigan involved in a couple of biplane dogfights at the flying circus. Not sure what the fascination was, but it's kind of interesting...