SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 11

NOVEMBER 6TH, 1976 - JANUARY 22ND, 1977
OCTOBER 30TH, 1978 - FEBRUARY 3RD, 1979
FEBRUARY 5TH, 1979 - JUNE 16TH, 1979
JUNE 18TH, 1979 - NOVEMBER 3RD, 1979
NOVEMBER 5TH, 1979 - JANUARY 2ND, 1980
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

Corrigan's next mission (drawn by a fill-in artist) finds him dispatched to the Middle Eastern nation of Sumeran in an elaborate plot to "steal" a gem, one half of a pair, in a ploy to draw out the thieves who stole the other gem in order to get it back. He's partnered with Yahzid, bodyguard to Sumeran's prince, for the duration of the mission. They meet Madame Kohbra, the leader of a band of insurgents, and follow her into Sumeran's desert, where the ultimate showdown takes place between Corrigan and Yaz against Kohbra and her army. Corrigan of course wins, and Kohbra is branded a traitor by her own followers thanks to his duplicity.

Corrigan has wandered a few Middle Eastern deserts in the time I've been reading this strip, but this one may be my favorite such story. In a weird way, it feels like something Carl Barks might have come up with for the Disney Ducks, and that's something I can never complain about.

SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 10

NOVEMBER 6TH, 1976 - JANUARY 22ND, 1977
JANUARY 24TH, 1977 - JUNE 11TH, 1977
JUNE 13TH, 1977 - OCTOBER 1ST, 1977
OCTOBER 3RD, 1977 - FEBRUARY 4TH, 1978
FEBRUARY 6TH, 1978 - JULY 8TH, 1978
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

Phil Corrigan closes out 1976 and enters '77 with a case that finds him summoned to Brayne Computer Industries, ostensibly to investigate a security breach. However when he arrives, Corrigan finds that the company's CEO, Amberson Brayne, fabricated the issue in order to set up a meeting with Corrigan. Brayne wants a new head of security, and he believes Corrigan fits the bill -- but Corrigan refuses the offer and leaves. Brayne, used to getting his way, bristles at this and brings in his second place candidates for the security job: industrial spy Satin Sherwood and mercenary Rip Tower. Whichever "destroys" Corrigan will get the security job.

Satin plans to ruin Corrigan's reputation and sets about framing him for stealing secrets from Brayne's factory -- but Rip simply wants to kill the guy, and Satin as well, to get the job. In the end, Corrigan and Satin team up to defeat Rip and bring down Brayne, with Satin suggesting that she may return to the straight-and-narrow thanks to the experience.

The story is typical Corrigan fare; well-written and beautifully drawn, but never feeling like there's any real danger for anybody involved. However, we do get an interesting explanation of exactly what Corrigan does for the FBI, here. He's described by Brayne's assistant, Huggins, as a "special troubleshooter" who goes on missions all over the place and typically works alone. This seems to be a case of Archie Goodwin explaining (very, very late in the game) why Corrigan feels more like James Bond or the Man from U.N.C.L.E. than your typical domestic FBI agent. And though it is a bit late to make the distinction, it's nonetheless appreciated.

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.

SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 8

MAY 13TH, 1974 - NOVEMBER 2RD, 1974
NOVEMBER 4TH, 1974 - FEBRUARY 15TH, 1975
FEBRUARY 17TH, 1975 - MAY 24TH, 1975
MAY 26TH, 1975 - AUGUST 30TH, 1975
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

Corrigan's next adventure begins as he flies home from Dragon Island. When he lands in the U.S., a fellow passenger is attacked by a female vigilante, and Corrigan finds that the man was transporting heroin into the country. This leads our hero into in investigation of both the drug-running ring and the mysterious woman, who calls herself Lady Vengeance. But Corrigan is stalked by a mob assassin called the Dispatcher as he conducts his investigation.

This all sounds pretty intriguing, right? And on paper, I think it should be. But there's something off about the presentation. We learn halfway through the arc that Lady Vengeance is actually Michele Fortune, daughter of an assassinated mob boss who has teamed up with some of his old associates to tackle the syndicate with the aid of her father's incriminating diary. But Corrigan quickly (and far too easily) gets her to realize that she's basically a mosquito to the mob right now, and that if the FBI had the diary, they could do a lot more damage. So Michele happily agrees to turn the book over to Corrigan, and Lady Vengeance is never seen again after this point.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the Dispatcher is the one who killed Michele's father, so we probably have a big showdown between the two at the arc's climax, right? I mean, Goodwin and Williamson have shown capable women taking out bad guys before in this strip, so it wouldn't be unexpected. But that's not what happens here... instead, the Dispatcher and his henchman, Ajax, catch up with Corrigan and Michele, and the Dispatcher is killed by ricochets from Ajax's gun when they attempt a pincer maneuver, after which Corrigan easily dispatches Ajax and brings the arc to a perfunctory end.

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.

SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 6

APRIL 10TH, 1972 - JUNE 17TH, 1972
JUNE 19TH, 1972 - SEPTEMBER 9TH, 1972
SEPTEMBER 11TH, 1972 - NOVEMBER 25TH, 1972
NOVEMBER 27TH, 1972 - FEBRUARY 3RD, 1973
FEBRUARY 5TH, 1973 - MAY 19TH, 1973
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

Corrigan's next story arc perfectly represents simultaneously the most frustrating thing about the Archie Goodwin/Al Williamson run, and some of the best of their work. The frustration kicks things off. As is the case more often than not, we're jumping into a new storyline cold turkey, with no mention of what went on before. When last we saw Corrigan, remember, he had returned to the United States with Lushan, and had thwarted Doctor Seven's plan to find a financial backer for his terrorist organization, Triad. Any rationally functioning brain would expect to see Corrigan dwelling on such a high-profile adventure as the next arc begins. But no, Corrigan has totally moved on. He's now at Cape Meridian to investigate threats against the first U.S. space station -- which is fine on its own, but he should at least be thinking a bit about Seven as the adventure opens.

I know I'm beating a long-dead horse at this point, but it's just such a letdown to read a serialized comic strip that isn't really serialized, especially when I know, from their work on STAR WARS in the eighties, that Goodwin and Williamson are more than capable of producing just such a beast. Why they treat Corrigan in such a painfully episodic fashion is beyond me.

But on the plus side, as I mentioned above, the rest of the arc is actually quite good. The space station is bombed and three astronauts are trapped in a capsule orbiting Earth, with twenty days of oxygen and no way to make it home. What follows is a tense sequence as scientists on Earth rush to complete a rescue craft while Corrigan works to uncover the bomber, who he knows is operating from within NASA, before he can strike again. And the conclusion is somewhat surprising and exceptionally suspenseful.

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.

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.

SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 3

JULY 29TH, 1968 - OCTOBER 12TH, 1968
OCTOBER 14TH, 1968 - JANUARY 4TH, 1969
JANUARY 6TH, 1969 - MARCH 15TH, 1969
MARCH 17TH, 1969 - JUNE 14TH, 1969
JUNE 16TH, 1969 - AUGUST 30TH, 1969
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

Last week I spoke a bit about the stakes in these Corrigan stories feeling extremely minimal. You go into every single arc knowing that not only will Corrigan win, nobody will die and the bad guys will all be captured, and he'll move along to his next mission the very next day. I suggested just a little bit of lethality to perhaps up the ante for our hero. I noted that otherwise, things might get tedious as we move along.

It occurred to me after I wrote those words, however, that there are other ways to break up the tedium, and Archie Goodwin's plotting may be part of my problem here. He writes every arc as straight and episodic as possible. There are no twists or turns. Corrigan shows up, finds out what the problem is, then solves it; the end, on to the next unrelated story. No wrenches are ever thrown into his plans. He never gets blindsided. And, while I have gone on record before as saying that I enjoy watching hyper-competent characters do their thing and succeed at everything, that's not exactly what this is. Hyper-competence is great, but it works best when the characters are using it to overcome serious obstacles. Corrigan tends to sleepwalk his way through every situation, because there are no obstacles that challenge him, and no villains he can't outwit in a very straightforward fashion.

I guess what I'm getting it is that I don't necessarily need to see anybody die to make these stories more compelling. I just need some better plots from Archie Goodwin! Sub-plots, twists, continuing continuity, and so forth. This was something Goodwin and Williamson did pretty well in the STAR WARS newspaper strip of the early eighties. They actually had ongoing plotlines outside of the current story arcs, and they had arcs that built upon one another (and sometimes led directly from one to the next) toward a narrative finish line. That is what I hope to see them bring to Corrigan! Otherwise, it just feels like going through the motions in every storyline.

SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN PART 2

SEPTEMBER 11TH, 1967 - DECEMBER 2ND, 1967
DECEMBER 4TH, 1967 - FEBRUARY 17TH, 1968
FEBRUARY 19TH, 1968 - MAY 4TH, 1968
MAY 6TH, 1968 - JULY 27TH, 1968
By Al Williamson & Archie Goodwin

So it turns out Phil Corrigan is married! Who knew? Certainly not me, so I Googled it after meeting his wife in the first of this week's story arcs. It turns out that during the 1940s, SECRET AGENT X-9 morphed a bit to feature some soap opera elements, and one of those was a romantic rivalry for X-9's affections between his assistant, Linda, and a mystery novelist named Wilda. In the end Wilda won Corrigan's heart and the two were married in 1947 -- meaning that by this point, they've been living in wedded bliss for twenty years of real time!

Anyway -- we meet Wilda here when Corrigan is assigned to investigate what made a government scientist go rogue and blow up his own missile defense system. As part of the investigation, Corrigan realizes that the doctor spent some time at a luxury resort, so he brings Wilda along for cover to spend some time there. And it turns out to be a good thing he went to the resort first (of all possible places), because that's exactly where our poor scientist was corrupted! It turns out the place is run by "Ma" Murkel and her three sons, a group of bumbling bad guys being paid by a foreign power to turn high profile U.S. scientists into traitors.

Corrigan eventually gets to the bottom of the scheme and, after rescuing Wilda -- held as a hostage by Murkel and her sons -- he arrests the goofball family and heads home with his wife.

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.

SECRET AGENT X-9 PART 3

APRIL 21ST, 1935 - July 27TH, 1935
JULY 29th, 1935 - SEPTEMBER 21ST, 1935
SEPTEMBER 23RD, 1935 - NOVEMBER 16TH, 1935
By Alex Raymond w/Leslie Charteris

X-9 parts ways with his sidekick, Sidney George Harper Carp, as this arc begins. Carp is headed "down south" to look into some investments, while X-9 returns to Washington for a new assignment. And thanks to the departure of Dashiell Hammett, it feels like a new beginning for the strip. Immediately, Alex Raymond rectifies some of Hammett's prior mistakes. For one thing, we finally actually see X-9's boss, "the Chief", showing at long last that our hero really does report to someone in the government. The Chief takes statements from some Texas Rangers who are on the trail of a group of bank robbers called the Iron Claw Gang, and a young man they kidnapped, Philip Shaw -- the son of a banker who was killed in a robbery.

In Texas, X-9 learns that the robbers are after some untapped oil mines which Shaw and his father owned. But Shaw doesn't know where they are -- however, he tells the robbers that there's a map hidden in the bank. Carp returns around this point; through sheer coincidence he happens to be in the vicinity of the robbery. X-9 also has an assistant for this case, a beautiful Federal agent named Ruth Meredith. It's kind of funny; every storyline so far has featured an attractive girl -- but unlike, say, the Spider-Man strip, where Peter Parker would be floored by every chick he met and frequently wind up making out with them, X-9 remains entirely chaste at all times. It's like the strip wanted to introduce a new love interest in each arc, but couldn't actually do anything with them due to the moral standards of the time. It's weird.

That said, young Phillip Shaw does fall for Ruth when she and Carp show up to save him from the gang, and the two become a duo for the remainder of the storyline, jumping in and out of trouble at every turn as they try to reunite with X-9. (Which, by the way, is kind of refreshing to see in something from this era. Ruth comes across as a pretty confident and capable operative, not needing to be rescued by anyone -- and in fact doing some rescuing herself -- as she tries to protect Phillip.)

SECRET AGENT X-9 PART 2

DECEMBER 17TH, 1934 - MARCH 9TH, 1935
MARCH 11th, 1935 - APRIL 20th, 1935
By Dashiell Hammett & Alex Raymond

Secret Agent X-9's next storyline is easily the most 1930s-ish piece of fiction you'll ever find, if for no other reason that than it features a spunky newsboy named -- wait for it -- "Harmonica Slick" abetting our hero. The arc focuses on a girl named Jill, the center of a bitter custody battle between her working-class mother and her wealthy aunt. The aunt had previously disowned her son for marrying a simple factory worker, but now that he's dead, she wants the fruit of his loins to raise in a life of privilege. But naturally, Jill's mom would like to keep her daughter.

Enter X-9 (still going by the name of Dexter, though he made clear in the very first story arc that it was merely one of may aliases he's used). For reasons never explained, he arrives to sit in the gallery at the hearing -- and it's fortunate that he does, for Jill is soon kidnapped by mobsters working for the notorious "Rocks Greer". Greer wants to hold the girl for ransom, and X-9 sets off on the crook's trail with Harmonica Slick by his side. Eventually, after several harrowing chases and narrow escapes, X-9 catches up with the criminals and rescues Jill -- but Greer escapes.

I can't say there's much to write home about here. The story is fine, and I'm sure it was probably of more interest to the people of 1934, since from what I've gathered over the years, they ate this sort of thing up (orphans and kids playing the harmonica, I mean). But, as with the prior two storylines, it's pretty unspectacular. Indeed, thus far the only saving grace to the strip has been Alex Raymond's artwork. I mentioned last time that I'd discuss it this week, so let's do so now.

SECRET AGENT X-9 PART 1

JANUARY 22ND, 1934 - SEPTEMBER 11TH, 1934
SEPTEMBER 12TH, 1934 - DECEMBER 15TH, 1934
By Dashiell Hammett & Alex Raymond

Secret Agent X-9 begins his newspaper run in grand fashion, with a storyline that runs over nine months and sees him tangling with a local mob as he works to solve the murder of a wealthy magnate.

Strangely, I'm not sure yet exactly what X-9 is supposed to be. I mean, obviously he's a secret agent. He spends this storyline going by the name of "Dexter", but he mentions more than once that it's an alias and says at one point that he's used so many names, he doesn't remember what his real one is. He reports to a mysterious "Chief" and a quick flash of his ID is all it takes for the cops to immediately snap to attention and begin taking orders from him.

It all adds up so far, right? He's clearly some kind of super G-Man with top security clearance. But if that's the case, then why does the soon-to-be-murdered Mister Tarleton Powers ring him up at home and ask him for protection like he's a common private detective? Is that part of his cover? It's never explained. But in any case, it's a good thing this random old guy does call our protagonist, because he's quickly swept up in the murder investigation, which leads him to uncover a plot by local gangsters, led by "The Top", to hijack a shipment of gold bullion coming into the United States.

SECRET AGENT X-9

Reading all those Spider-Man newspaper strips has me in the mood to keep going along those lines, so I've grabbed a small stack of books that has been sitting in my bookcase, unread, for a few years now: the adventures of SECRET AGENT X-9 (a.k.a. SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN).

I'll forgive you if you've never heard of this strip. I hadn't heard of it either, until I began researching Alex Raymond when I reviewed his ten-year run on FLASH GORDON back in 2017. It seems that around the same time he was drawing Flash's Sunday adventures on the planet Mongo, Raymond also illustrated another strip for the King Features Syndicate. This one, a detective serial, ran as a daily strip, and Raymond drew it from its inception in January of 1934 up through October of 1936. (The decade on Flash also started in January of '34.)

Surprisingly, the first X-9 storyline is written by none other than Dashiell Hammett, of THE MALTESE FALCON fame, among much more. According to the foreword in IDW's collection of the vintage X-9 strips, Hammett had repeated disagreements with King Features about the strip, while Raymond often found himself unhappy with Hammett's scripts. So when Hammett finally departed the series, Raymond himself took over as writer for the remainder of his run.

SECRET AGENT X-9 didn't end with Raymond's departure, however. The strip continued until it was cancelled in 1996! I have no idea why I had never heard of it until just a few years ago, but there you have it. It doesn't appear much of the strip is reprinted outside of Raymond's work, though, aside from one very big exception: IDW has also collected thirteen more years of the strip, 1967 through 1980 -- a run written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Al Williamson.

As a huge fan of the Goodwin/Williamson STAR WARS newspaper strip*, which I read in its rejiggered comic book format and reviewed here way back in 2014, this little tidbit was a revelation to me, and I eagerly grabbed all five of IDW's volumes collecting that run, right around the same time I picked up the Raymond book. Like I said up top, I've had these volumes sitting on my shelf for for about three years now, and I've finally decided to read them.

And to think I never would've known about any of this if it weren't for Flash Gordon! (Indeed, I kind of love weird interconnected coincidences like this. FLASH GORDON was part of George Lucas's inspiration for STAR WARS. The STAR WARS newspaper strip introduced me to the Archie Goodwin/Al Williamson team. I read FLASH GORDON because I knew it inspired STAR WARS. And because of FLASH GORDON, I discovered that Goodwin and Williamson had collaborated on another strip. It's not exactly what you'd call full circle -- more like "full zig-zag" -- but I like it.)

So, for the next several weeks starting Monday, we'll delve into the world of SECRET AGENT X-9 circa 1934-1936, followed by the renamed SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN adventures from 1967 - 1980. (And fret not if this sort of thing isn't your cup of tea -- I'm fully aware that it's sort of a niche thing and most readers come here for super hero stuff. Well, good news -- in just about three or four more weeks, I'll be ready to announce the triumphant return of regular, ongoing Friday posts, which will cover some Marvel material -- though not necessarily in the way you might expect!)

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* For the chronologically inclined, Goodwin and Williamson started their team-up on the STAR WARS strip in 1980 -- so they jumped straight from CORRIGAN to STAR WARS without missing a beat, and their newspaper strip partnership therefore lasted for a whopping seventeen years, up to the STAR WARS strip's cancellation in 1984.