The Corner Box S1Ep39 - Buck Rogers Created Ultron?!

[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where we talk about comics as an industry and an art form. You never know where the discussion will go or who will show up to join host David Hedgecock and John Barber. Between them, they've spent decades writing, drawing, lettering, coloring, editing, editor-in-chiefing, and publishing comics. If you want to know the behind-the-scenes secrets, the highs and lows, the ins and outs of the best artistic medium in the world, then listen in and join us in The Corner Box.

[00:31] John Barber: Hey, and welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm John Barber, and with me as always

[00:36] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock.

[00:37] John: any other frequent collaborators are still off elsewhere. So, it's just the two of us this week, with what started as a joke, in my opinion. Not that the topic’s not interesting, but who would ever want to hear me talk about it? And yet, here we are.

[00:52] David: I want to hear about it, and that's all that really matters, John.

[00:56] John: I guess so. I guess we are a large portion of our audience.

[00:59] David: We’re at least two thirds of our audience.

[01:05] John: Sorry, what the topic is not to hide it.

[01:07] David: Before we jump into it, John, I just want to tell our listeners, we do this on Zoom, and even though we wouldn't subject our audience to looking at our ugly mugs, and when I got on Zoom today, John, you had 3D glasses on.

[01:26] John: For work.

[01:30] David: You had 3D glasses on, legitimately for doing work. You were legitimately doing work while wearing 3D glasses. The 3D glasses were required for you to do your job today, and I just thought to myself, “Man, working in comics is a wild ride, man.”

[01:52] John: Well, that happens sometimes. By the time this is live, it'll be public knowledge that the company I'm working at is doing 3D versions of some classic Marvel Comics, and I was proofing one of them.

[02:08] David: Oh, really? Okay, man. Come on. Tell me, which ones.

[02:14] John: Yeah, we're starting off with New Mutants #98. You might enjoy it.

[02:20] David: Are you serious?

[02:21] John: I am, yes.

[02:23] David: You're starting with Rob Liefeld’s magnum opus, New Mutants #98? The first appearance of Deadpool.

[02:30] John: Yeah. I do feel like New Mutants 98 is when you hit X Force Rob Liefeld, not only because of the characters, but the style and everything. The last three issues of New Mutants are a different beast than the stuff leading up to it. 100%. Super excited about it.

[02:46] David: That's awesome. I have to have that. Are you going to do a shiny metal foil cover in 3D?

[02:52] John: No, but there is a 3D cover. I mean, it’s going to be in comic bookstores everywhere in June.

[03:00] David: I am first in line for this thing. That's how you're launching this program. That's a great start, as far as I'm concerned.

[03:06] John: We're going to follow it up with the second Deadpool of Deadpool #1 by Joe Kelly and Ed McGuinness. This really wasn't supposed to be an ad for this.

[03:15] David: I ambushed you with this part, but I want to hear about it.

[03:17] John: Jim Lee/Chris Claremont X-Men #1 and Jack Kirby's Black Panther #1.

[03:24] David: I just got a copy of Jack Kirby's Black Panther #1. I just got a, I don't know, probably a very fine copy. Shockingly affordable. I didn't think it was that cheap, but it's a very affordable book. Man, I love that cover. The cover is so good. That thing's going to really pop in 3D. The whole book’s great, but the cover, in particular, I was like, “man, Jack Kirby. That guy really was the king.”

[03:49] John: So, funny you mention that. I really liked the 70s Return to Marvel-era Jack Kirby stuff. I always have. I had 2001, Devil Dinosaur, Machine Man, Eternals, his run on Captain America, and Black Panther, and Captain America's Bicentennial Battles, which is one of my all-time favorite comics, […] edition of that, which I think is the only place you can see Barry Windsor Smith inking Jack Kirby, and there's some really good Jack Kirby Captain America in that, but I was at Marvel when the paperbacks of the Black Panther run started coming out, and I was excited. I was like, “I haven't read this. I love this era of Kirby, but I've never read these comics.” I was talking to Ralph Macchio, and he appreciated him now, but he remembered, at the time, he was super disappointed when Kirby came back because he and everybody else who had been following it loved what Don McGregor had been doing on Black Panther, with Billy Graham on the art, where it was more serious and, I mean, very wordy, but Don McGregor really got into the imperialistic politics of places, and what was going on in Africa, and what all that meant. Don McGregor's a white guy but he was very sympathetic to the character and to Africa, I guess, at the time. It definitely isn't now, I mean, but for the time, it was really remarkable, and then, Jack Kirby comes back in and he's fighting the toad men from Venus or whatever. I mean, it's great now, separated from any “this is what it's replacing.” I always thought that was interesting.

[05:24] David: Not exactly apples to apples, but since he got me thinking about Rob Liefeld, when Rob Liefeld comes back on Captain America after he basically replaces Mark Waid and Ron Garney, brilliant run that they had going, and then it gets interrupted by Leifeld’s launch of Captain America, and then when they actually bring Waid and Garney back on that run, I think after the fact, but it's just not the same. As much as a huge fan of Rob Leifeld as I am, I was a little disappointed that Captain America run from Waid and Garney got interrupted, because it was so good. It really felt like it had momentum around it.

[06:01] John: I totally agree, and I actually do like those. The sixth issue is weird, because it's a cable crossover, but the first five Captain America issues by Leifeld, I really enjoyed, but yeah. I don't know. It's rough, because you're coming off of a Waid/Garney, and I don’t think Waid and Garney recovered from that, in terms of the quality. I mean, I didn't really like it as much when they came back.

[06:24] David: When they came back, it wasn't the same.

[06:25] John I love both of those guys. I love Waid and I love Garney. Those guys, the creators, recovered from it, but I didn’t think the comic was as good.

[06:33] David: Yeah. 100% agree. There was just a magic ingredient in that first run that they just weren't able to replicate. Not that they didn't replicate it in other places at other times, but just when they came back, Captain America just wasn't the same, but both of those things taken out of context, for me, at least, Leifeld’s Captain America run was pretty fun. I enjoyed quite a bit of it, and of course, the Garney/Waid stuff was great a run, too. Yeah, I didn't know that that was a similar thing that happened with Kirby's Black Panther. So, for me that's 100% removed. I came into Kirby’s Black Panther completely fresh, not knowing anything, and I fully enjoy his Black Panther, is probably my favorite. Priest did a pretty cool run on Black Panther, as well, that I really liked, but I think if somebody put my feet to the fire, I would probably lean towards Kirby.

[07:28] John: Speaking of things that deal with race.

[07:35] David: Is that really the segment we're going with?

[07:37] John: The genesis of this podcast was I happened to buy and read the book, Armageddon 2419 A.D, by Philip Francis Nowlan, which is the first book that features a character named Anthony Rogers, who would later get the nickname Buck and become Buck Rogers. I don't know. I texted David like, “man, I've thought about this,” and you, I thought, were leading me on, but then, no, you were trying to buy the book, and all of a sudden, we're talking about it on the air.

[08:10] David: Yeah, man. I thought you were serious. I thought that was a great one.

[08:13] John: I mean, I'm interested in it.

[08:16] John:

Yeah, and also, I mean, what's more comic book origin-y than Buck Rogers? There's massive influence on the comic book space.

[08:28] John: I think so.

[08:29] David: I think so.

[08:30] John: Just to back up, and the fact that we're the same age, enough that I'm sure we both grew up with the same Buck Rogers when we were kids. I mean, I was familiar with Buck Rogers in the Gil Gerard/Erin Gray TV show from the, I guess, late 70s.

[08:45] David: Yeah, that's got to be it. It's got to be in that Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica. It's coming off of some of that heat.

[08:52] John: Oh, 100%.

[08:54] David: So, it’s got to be I be late 70s, early 80s.

[08:58] John: Yeah, well, I mean, I realized I must have always only been watching it on reruns. So, I don't know when it was actually on. Into the 80s, late-79 to mid-81.

[09:10] David: Is that two seasons or three seasons? Two seasons? Okay. Man, that was only two seasons?

[09:17] John: Well, yeah. It memorably, changes directions mid-course, if you remember. The first season is all on Planet Earth, and season two, they're on a spaceship with the Hawk guy.

[09:26] David: Yeah, that's right. That Hawk guy was badass man.

[09:31] John: Totally. I’m there. I have not revisited the show. I don't know. It was Glen A. Larson. He did Battlestar Galactica and was doing all the science fiction shows at that time, I think.

[09:41] David: Wait, the same guy that did Battlestar Galactica did the Buck Rogers TV show?

[09:45] John: Yeah, and he created Alias Smith and Jones, which is before my time. It's something that I heard of a bunch. Longtime fans will remember my joke about Quincy, M.E., which was also a show created by him. B.J. and the Bear, and then hang on your hat for these if you didn't know this, Fall Guy, Magnum, P.I., and Knight Rider.

[10:07] David: He made all of them? Co-creator or creator credit?

[10:12] John: He’s credited as creator on those.

[10:14] David: I hope that guy's a billionaire.

[10:16] John: Well, he's not alive. Knight Rider alone.

[10:18] John: Yeah, I think he did all right. I think he did all right for himself.

[10:24] David: That's wild to me. Man, this is going to be all Rob Leifeld. I think I heard this on Rob Leifeld’s podcast, because he's a massive fan of Battlestar Galactica, and I think the Battlestar Galactica, the first season or two of that was wildly popular, at least according to Rob, and the ratings were really high, but they canceled the show because they were like, “anything in that slot, Thursday night, eight o'clock slot, or whatever it was, is going to be really successful, and Battlestar Galactica costs a lot of money to make, so let's just stop doing that and make something else,” and of course, it failed, and they tried to come back with Battlestar Galactica, but it wasn't the same, but I wonder if that's what he did. They were like, “we're not doing Battlestar Galactica.” So, he's like, “Okay, well, what's the cheap version of Battlestar Galactica? Buck Rogers, with a little robot going [David’s Robot sounds].”

[11:15] John: Yeah, I mean, you might be right. Yeah, Battlestar Galactica lasted, incredibly, if you're me, anyway, one season, and then was canceled, and Buck Rogers started the following fall. Yeah.

[11:33] David: So, I guess, he just pivoted like, “well, how do we do this, but cheaper?”

[11:37] John: Yeah. I was not prepared to talk about the TV show at all, but I think the show used some Ralph McQuarrie designs. I think all the star fighters were designed by him. I think they were going for like, he designed a lot of the Star Wars. I think that's right, but I mean, there are definitely cool spaceships in the Buck Rogers show, but yeah, around that time, you had Star Wars blowing up. There's a lot of stuff trying to cash in on that, obviously. I mean, Star Wars originally started when George Lucas wanted to do a reboot of Flash Gordon and didn't get the rights to it and then created a totally different scenario. Another science fiction story that is influenced by a lot of the same stuff that Flash Gordon was, especially the John Carter novels. I think it's fair to say the original Flash Gordon stuff was fairly inspired by John Carter.

[12:26] David: Those are the terms we're using. Inspired by.

[12:29] John: Pretty similar in a lot of ways, but there's a lot of that stuff floating back, and that started coming back. We had the Flash Gordon movie, of course, the Dino de Laurentiis one. I remember having Flash Gordon toys, and the cartoon show. The thing with Flash Gordon, for me, I'm aware of other versions of that in a way that I'm not with Buck Rogers.

[12:56] David: The only version of Buck Rogers that you're aware of is the TV show from the late 70s?

[13:01] John: Yeah.

[13:03] David: Because I think the majority of Buck Rogers stuff came before that TV show. I think Buck Rogers was big well before we were born. Sure.

[13:12] John:  Yeah, but I mean, Flash Gordon, too, but I know the old movie serial, where the spaceship’s flying down, it's got the sparkler in the back. I know Buster Crabbe played Flash Gordon in that movie serial. I was aware of the comic strip of Flash Gordon because the Flash Gordon comic strip is a masterpiece by Alex Raymond.

[13:32] David: A bit of a higher watermark.

[13:34] John: Yeah, and Buck Rogers, I realized that there's a giant hole in my understanding of the character. I think there's jetpacks, that kind of stuff. I couldn't tell you who did the comic strip. There must have been a movie serial, but I don't know what it looked like. I don't know what the adventures were like. I knew the Gil Gerard show. TSR, circa 1990, did a line of comics that had game components in the back. TSR is a company that, at that point, owned Dungeons and Dragons. They had Flint Dille writing that comic. I think I read an issue or two of that. I don't know.

[14:11] David: Man, I didn't know TSR even did comics. Now I'm going to. I know what I'm doing all weekend. Thanks, John. Like I don't have enough comic books that I'm trying to hunt down and read. Now I’ve got to hunt down Buck Rogers TSR Comics?

[14:23] John: Yeah, most people at the time didn't know about TSR comics. I think that was the problem.

[14:31] David: That just makes me want it more, John.

[14:33] John: No, it was pretty interesting because they were comic books, but then they had cardboard game pieces that you would cut out of the back. The idea was, there were comics modules that were halfway between a game module for an RPG and comic book.

[14:45] David: That sounds like a great idea.

[14:47] John: It wound up being a lot of games that weren't A+ games because they had been developed in four weeks, or whatever, but that's a lot of games to play.

[14:57] David: I think that's cool. Hopefully, our listening audience is as intrigued by TSR Buck Rogers comics as I am, because we're all going to go down the rabbit hole together, people. Let's go. I'm going to get my copies off of eBay before anybody listens to this. I got mine first. Ha.

[15:15] John: All this stuff feeds into being these things that are integral to what becomes comic books. Jack Kirby stuff, it starts off, he's doing Flash Gordon Buck Rogers rip-offs. Everybody's building off on this stuff, in the early days of comics, in the 30s/40s, and it's weird to wrap your head around the idea that when Star Wars came out, a movie serial from the 40s was as old as something from the 80s is now. You know what I mean?

[15:45] David: The 90s, John. The early 90s.

[15:48] John: Yeah, I was actually fudging that because most of the movie serials would have been in the 30s. You're right. Totally.

[15:55] David: That's wild.

[15:57] John: It's also wild, for me, just as an aside on that, realizing that the influence of Akira Kurosawa on Star Wars, was an influence of movies from few years ago, not some other era. They're black and white movies, but it was a little later than a lot of black and white movies, and it was the equivalent of being influenced by something from, I don't know, 2008, or something, now. I always thought was a classic thing. So, Buck Rogers starts as a short story called Armageddon 2419 A.D. There's a follow-up short story. The short story comes out in 1928. The follow-up short story comes out right after that, and they're put together into a novel in the 1960s. So, about 30-something years later. It was around 1960. So, about 30 years later, they put together a new novel by an editor. I have been unable to figure it out what gets changed in this. There's an introduction in the book that I have, and it explains that he didn't change the technology of it or anything. Some of the technology no longer made sense in 1960. All of that stuff. I would wager that what got cut out was 10 pages of recapping what would have been the previous 90 pages that you just read. So, I'm sure there's some recap stuff that got cut out, and you can see where the stories switch, and it's like, “and then the next spring, here's what we did.”

[17:16] David: Some clever writing there.

[17:21] John: You wouldn't have known if you didn't know where the source came from. It wasn’t totally weird, but I think those are the only stories that got written. So, Nowlan makes contact with the, I believe, grandfather of my now friend, Flint Dille, who buys the rights to this for the comic strip, renames the character Buck, and launches the Buck Rogers comic strip, which is what takes off. It diverges wildly from the book after the comic strips. It becomes, I think, more of what we're familiar with, in terms of Buck Rogers, including being nicknamed Buck. I mean, he was still named Anthony, but I don't know, that common nickname, but the Dille family owns Buck Rogers.

[18:03] David: Wow, I did not know that.

[18:04] John: Yeah, which is why Flint wrote it in the TSR days because Flint Dille’s involved.

[18:09] David: Flint’s like, “the only way that this is happening is if I write it.”

[18:14] John: Well, I don't know. There couldn't have been a more natural pick. A writer who writes comics and cartoons, and games.

[18:23] David: He's great. You're right. Perfect pick.

[18:25] John: And also owns the character.

[18:30] David: You've got family history on top of just the knowledge of knowing the character. Plenty of people can have that, but to have heritage.

[18:42] John: Yeah, and I want to be clear, I have actually never talked to anybody in the Dille family, and I know them very well. I know several members of it. I've never talked to them about Buck Rogers. I don't know the current circumstances of it. I don't know what the deal is with it at all, presently. I don't want to hypothesize on that, but I literally have no idea. I don't see a bunch of Flash Gordon stuff existing right now, and I assume there's a reason for it, but I don't know.

[19:05] David: I think you mean Buck Rogers.

[19:06] John: What did I call it?

[19:07] David: You called it Flash Gordon, but it’s all the same. You didn't say Duck Dodgers.

[19:12] John: Live long and prosper. Back off, man. I'm a scientist. All that stuff. My introduction into the idea that there might be something more and weirder about this, about the character, I mean, than I was aware of, was a Howard Chaykin Buck Rogers series from eight or nine years ago, maybe. I think less than 10 years ago, from a small publisher. I don't even remember who the publisher is. I've reread it recently because I came across a paperback of it and was like, “I should buy that.” Seems to be an adaptation of the novel, is certainly going back to some of the themes in the novel, but then with unique Howard Chaykin left-leaning ideology applied to the realities of this narrative. That raised a lot of questions in my head. What in the world was this novel like? What in the world was going on in these stories? So, eventually, I decided to find out, and I bought the book, which is, I don't believe, in print currently, but maybe I'm wrong. I got a copy from the 70s off of eBay.

[20:16] David: What version did you get? Is it from the 70s?

[20:20] John: No, actually. This is a 1962 Ace book. Yeah, complete with ads for Kent cigarettes inserted in there.

[20:32] David: Man, it's full color.

[20:34] John: Oh, yeah. The ads are full color, and also Frank Frazetta posters. Knowing their audience.

[20:39] David: There's just an ad for “buy Frank Frazetta posters”?

[20:42] John: Oh, yeah. They used to do that in paperbacks.

[20:44] David: I don't remember that at all.

[20:45] John: This is old paperbacks from our point of view.

[20:48] David: 1962 is pretty old.

[20:51] John: I've never bought a new paperback that had an ad for cigarettes in it.

[20:54] David: At least two thirds of our audience was not born in 1962. That, I'm sure of.

[20:57] John: Yes. That’s us. I don't know how old Dave Baker is.

[21:05] David: I think Dave's 137 years old. That's going to be my guess. He doesn't look that old, but I don't know how one person can have as much esoteric knowledge about the wildest, weirdest shit and not be 137 years old.

[21:20] John: Yeah, because I feel like I can pull out some stuff, and then he's like, “Oh, yeah. Well, I was talking to Earl Mac Rauch.”

[21:28] David: So, 1962. So, you're like, “I’ve got to read this thing.”

[21:32] John: Yeah, and again, I'm familiar with the opening sequence of the Gil Gerard Buck Rogers show, where America's last deep space probe in, I think, 1999 goes off course and he gets frozen and comes back to Earth, which is not the original origin. The original origin is that Buck Rogers gets trapped in a radioactive mine, somewhere around the time it was written. 1920s. He was a World War One veteran. He gets trapped in a radioactive mine. Everybody with him apparently dies, and he's made unconscious until he wakes up in the year 2419.

[22:09] David: There’s a strange gas in the cave that somehow preserves him.

[22:14] John: Exactly. He comes to, he forages around in a forest for a while, and then runs into what he thinks is a young boy getting attacked by people, but it's actually Wilma Deering, who was in there from the beginning. She's a soldier in the American Resistance Fighters. Pretty quickly, you find out what's happened, which is, several 100 years ago, the Han empire from Mongolia conquered the world. It gets weirder. I don't even know how to go into this stuff. It doesn't go where do you think it's going to go. You know that it’s going to go racist, but not the way you think it's going to go, the way I thought it was going to go.

[22:55] David: It’s definitely racist. The brand-new branch of racism that you've discovered.

[23:04] John: It gets weird and unique. You don't know all the details for a while, but the Hans have conquered the world, and weird aside, is that where Han Solo comes from? Because this is something that George Lucas read.

[23:19] David: No. Oh, come on. There’s got to be another Han somewhere.

[23:26] John: It's not unique, but this is clearly something that he read. The people of America are hiding out and fighting back against the these several-100-years-now invaders.

[23:38] David: The Han air lords.

[23:40] John: Exactly. The Han Empire has two devices that America doesn't have. One is the repeller ray, and the other is the disintegrator ray. So, they can have these big airships that float around, using the repeller rays to float up in the air, and then they have the disintegrator rays that disintegrate things. So, it's classic ray gun stuff. Now, my understanding is that a lot of times, Buck Rogers gets credited as having invented jetpacks, and it was evidence that they show the cover from the magazine that first had it, but apparently that was an illustration for a different story within the same issue of that magazine. What they have are belts made out of a lighter-than-air metal that they've invented. So, the Americans have this lighter-than-air metal. The Han don't have that. The lighter-than-air metal is also resistant to disintegrator rays, so they can make airplanes out of this that are undisintegrate-able. Yeah, absolutely, and they can also hop around and glide because they could attach a rocket to that, and they would descend slowly. That comes up later, but the other thing that they have is rocket-propelled guns. Their guns fire missiles, basically.

This will get into something later on with this, as well, that they fire atomic missiles, but this is 1928, and this is way before anybody would have had any knowledge of what an atomic weapon really did. For all this book’s faults, and there are many, callousness about radioactive fallout is not something that they could have been aware of. Nobody knew that that was a thing. I mean, the existence of radioactivity was brand-new, and nobody knew that there were forms of it that could kill you. That's just using cutting-edge jargon, I guess, to be talking about this stuff. So, Buck Rogers immediately figures out how you can use technology that the Americans have to take down the Han ships, because the Americans have forgotten how to use the World War One tactics of barrage bombardments and stuff like that, but he knows all about that, having come from this time, so he quickly takes control of the gang, because that's what they are. That's what they call them in the book. They're just roving gangs. He becomes the boss of the gang. It's not really questioned. He's the hero of the book. So, he becomes the leader of it.

[26:03] David: Just he rolls into the gangs, like “I'm in charge now. Let's roll”?

[26:09] John: Now, he doesn't take control. They're just like, “obviously, he's the guy that should be doing it.” He figures out you can launch a missile into the repeller ray, and it blows up the airships. All right, you’re in charge now.

[26:18] David: Okay. Sometimes, you just know, John.

[26:22] John: Yes. I mean, a guy from the early 20th century. That's what they knew how to do things. Same thing as now. Found a guy frozen from 1928 now, he could have been in charge of your gang.

[26:34] David: I mean, I feel like that's what we do with our presidents already. 

[26:40] John: Political, but yes, that’s a good point.

[26:43] David: Just find the oldest person in the room and put them in charge.

[26:45] John: Wow. It would be something. “I was born in the 1800s and I look young.” Yeah, that's all it takes.

[26:53] David: Dave Baker should be president of the United States, if we're going to follow the logic.

[27:00] John: Maybe he is in the book. He couldn't be in two places at the same. Well, I guess you can. Wait a minute. Buck Rogers can be in two places at the same time. That's the whole point. So, the book veers wildly in whether women are competent or not. The soldiers are men and women. That's brought up a bunch of times. There's a number of times where Buck Rogers doesn't want to go off with Wilma Deering on a dangerous mission. So, she stows away with the help of everyone else, because everyone else is just, “of course. Why wouldn't she be there?”

[27:39] David: So, Buck Rogers is still a misogynist because he comes from 1919, but nobody else?

[27:46] John: No. He maybe lightly acknowledges the idea, but he seems to just get along with this idea that “women largely are equal,” but there's still these moments of, when they're off on a mission together, Buck’s the one in charge. Nobody questions that. Again, he's the hero of the book, and that seems to be the underlying intonation there, but there's this one sequence where Wilma and Buck have to jump from one thing into an airship, and Wilma makes the jump, and then Buck doesn’t, and he's stumbling, and it's all first-person narration, so he's saying he's not as elegant, or whatever. He's more awkward in his jump. So, I'm reading, I'm like, “that's interesting. They're giving a little bit of feet of clay to the hero,” but then when he lands on the other ship, it turns out that Wilma had run into a pole and knocked herself out. So, he had to clean up the situation because he landed conscious.

[28:45] David: Close but no cigar.

[28:47] John: Wilma kills a bunch of dudes and then faints out of having killed a bunch of guys, and that really got me thinking, was that a thing? Did women actually faint? Was there some time period where that was a thing that happened?

[29:02] David: Maybe because they had to wear corsets that were so tight that they couldn't get a good breath.

[29:07] John: That makes sense. That must be it. Yeah, okay.

[29:12] David: Physically, no, that's not a thing.

[29:16] John: This doesn't happen. Where did it become a thing that happened in fiction? You might be right about the corsets. That could have happened. That could actually do it.

[29:22] David: If you're in an intense situation, you can't take a full breath, that sounds like a problem.

[29:28] John: That might have answered my question right there. She was not in a corset in book. It might have been where that idea came from.

[29:34] David: It only has to happen once or twice, and then it's a meme.

[29:40] John: Okay, so that's the layout of the book. The two things that are fundamentally stunning about the book are that almost all of it is about tactics and technology. Almost all of it is just about how you would engage in warfare with these asymmetrical systems of attack. The second story, the Hans have completely counteracted everything that Buck Rogers figured out in the first one. So, they have to come up with new tactics. There's literally a chapter where Buck says, “I'm going to go over the technology of this airship. If you're not interested in that, skip this chapter.” What else is left? That's almost all the book is.

[30:22] David: Wait, does it really say that?

[30:23] John: Oh, yeah. 100%.

[30:24] David: If you're not interested, just move on.

[30:27] John: Yeah, this is going to be a very technical chapter.

[30:29] David: It's all just make-believe weaponry.

[30:33] John: It is, but that seemed to be the focus of the story, was plausible, make-believe weaponry.

[30:39] David: Okay. Is it entertaining?

[30:41] John: No. It's weird. This is, I would say, definitely not as entertaining as the John Carter books, that have plenty of problems on a moral level for where we are today, or where we were then, in certain instances. Other instances, it’s just interesting to see how people thought, how white folks writing about this stuff thought about things in those times, but there's no explanation for any technology. There's no explanation for anything that happens technologically in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter stuff. I remember reading a Hugo Gernsback novel, Ralph 124C 41+. That was one of the early science fiction novels, and Brendan Cahill and I would joke about this all the time because I remember telling him about it at the time that I read it. There's this part where these two people are flying in an air car, and one of them says, “I forget. Tell me about our economic system,” and the other person explains the economic system. It seems to combine that Hugo Gernsback-ian, “here's some realistic, for the time, thoughts on what you could do, in terms of warfare, with the layers of technology,” where it's almost like a Tom Clancy novel, or something at that level, it's explaining that stuff, combined with the space opera style of a John Carter, although it's all ground-bound to Earth. They never leave Earth's atmosphere, but they're just high adventure post-Tarzan heroic guy getting into dangerous scraps and getting out of them.

The other part that is stunning, though, is the incredible brutality on the side of the Americans, and there's a weird narrative hole in this, that the Han don't actually do anything bad in the book. They've conquered the place, but they conquered it 300 years ago. So, you're talking about the great, great, great, great-grandchildren of the people that did the conquering. It's not okay to maintain a conquered people. I don't mean to say that that's all right in real life. If you're thinking about conquering people, 300 years aren't going to make it okay. All they're really doing is fighting insurgents in this story. You can actually see that carried over into Star Wars, in that the only thing you ever really see the Empire do that's bad is blow up Alderaan, which is real bad, and you're like, “these guys are total dicks.” That's not okay.

[33:21] David: But if you've never seen anybody blowing up a planet, then what are they really doing?

[33:27] John: Yeah, all they do in Empire Strikes Back is trying to stop the rebellion. Lando doesn't want them on Cloud City for the reasons that I guess they'd properly tax everything. You know what I mean?

[33:42] David: He's angry because they're shutting down his illegal gambling and mining operations.

[33:48] John: Yeah. Battlestar Galactica is not as good as Star Wars, but the Cylons are trying to eradicate humans. Oh, okay, bad. Don't want to do that. You don't really see the Han do anything super bad. There are asides in the first story, where the Americans have downed Han passenger aircraft, and then massacred everyone. They don't take prisoners.

[34:12] David: Civilians? Oh, okay. Sounds good.

[34:17] John: By the second one, I guess this actually is at the end of the first one, they destroy a Han city with atomic weapons. Again, just a powerful cannon in this milieu.

[34:28] David: Not the atomic weapons we know today.

[34:33] John: Although, they blew up a city. The second book, Buck Rogers, Tony Rogers gets captured. He spends the whole time in a city, but they think there's a threat that things are going to go really bad, but then it's mostly just him, he's like, “I had incredible freedom when in the city. I could walk around. I was always surveilled,” but he's not kept in a cell. He's not locked up. He can go anywhere, and then the Americans, meanwhile, start launching chemical attacks on these places. They start gas attacks, and then they start launching diseases into the cities.

[35:10] David: What?

[35:13] John: He talks about how brutal the Hans are for quarantining the areas that get hit with diseases and just letting the people die, not questioning that, well, actually throwing diseases into place is actually a bit brutal as well.

[35:24] David: Seems like that's the worse of the two.

[35:28] John: So, the last section of the second story is that they've got these lighter-than-air balls that float. Ultron is the name of that.

[35:44] David: Seriously?

[35:45] John: Yeah.

[35:45] David: Oh, that's got to be where that name came from.

[35:47] John: Certainly. They are very light. They're not zero weight, and there's a part where Buck Rogers is thinking about, “if I just let it sit there, would it eventually hit the ground? Well, no time to worry about that. I've got folks to kill.” They use these for the gas and the disease attacks. I don’t remember the circumstances, but somehow one of these makes its way into this city. Rogers in his room, hears the noise or something, the door opens, and this ball is remote controlled by somebody in the base. It's got a rocket engine on it. So, it's gradually descending if left to its own devices, but it's got a rocket that can bring it back up, and shoot it forward, and shoot it in all directions. So, it's basically a drone, which is actually interesting, because there was certainly a time where that technology, as described in this book, was absurd, and you would never have it. Why would you ever do that? And now we're back to this point where it's like, “oh, no, that is a thing. It's absolutely a thing that the military is using. You're watching it through view screens and shooting weapons at people. Yeah, of course. That's the future of warfare. Absolutely.” The way the drone tends to work is they just lob it into people. So, it just smashes people. This metal ball just smashes people. So, he opens the door, the hallway’s filled with smashed people, the ball comes in, starts talking to him in a metallic voice that he realizes is Wilma. So, she's back home, and they're married at this point. They immediately get married. They sleep together and get married, instantly. So, she's there and she kills everybody in the room.

[37:18] David: I was just going to say, she's brutally murdered a bunch of people by smashing a metal ball into their heads and bodies, and now she's like, “Hey, honey.”

[37:29] John: Yeah, I really love this part where it's like, “somebody's going to come in and see that you're here. Put some blankets over the ball and put them on the couch, and then pretend like you're unconscious.” So, he does that, and it works, and people come in, and they're like, “what happened?” He’s like “this thing came in, knocked me out. It looks like it killed everybody,” and the blanket-covered ball then smashes into everybody that's in the room with him and murders them all as well. This is a prison break. I don't mean, yes, killing the captors. Alright, it's just very brutal. Also questionable, who's the bad guy here? Buck gets out. He gets back to the base. The Han at this point have made all these underground tunnels that connect all their cities. So, they load up a bunch of these balls with atomic bombs, go into the underground tunnels, smash everybody in the way, and then go into the cities and blow up all of the Han cities in America with atomic weapons.

[38:35] David: All the cities everywhere?

[38:36] John: Yes. End of book 2, the Americans won.

[38:40] David: That's how it ends?

[38:42] John: Well, no. The other part of the brutality of this is that Buck Rogers teaches everybody.

[38:48] David: I don’t remember any of this on the TV show.

[38:50] John: No. Things have changed by then, I guess. Rogers is explaining World War One fighting techniques. So, the idea is that you've got your rifle, you fire your rifle into the guys, and then when you get close enough to them, because this is how combat happens, is you do get close enough to them, then you take your bayonet, and you go into the groin and work your way up, and you cut everybody in half that way. So, there's a bunch of times where he is chopping folks through their balls, in half. So, there's a scene at the end of the sequence, where they're blowing all the stuff up. There is some hand-to-hand fighting, and Wilma is shrieking and howling with joy as she eviscerates people, and they blow up everybody with the atomic bombs. The Final Chapter is an epilogue, and I don't know, again, I assume this is just the epilogue to the original story. I really don't know the timing on it. All this has been written as though Buck Rogers, excuse me, as though Anthony Rogers were narrating this sometime in the future. So, at the end, it becomes implicit that it’s decades later, Wilma has passed on, seemingly of natural causes, he's near the end of his life now. It doesn't say when it is, but 70 years have passed or something. So, after that final battle, they went around the world and freed the rest of the world, helped all the countries of the world, and then it makes a real clear point to talk about how Wilma and himself were friends of all races everywhere, and it didn't matter, whether whatever two European groups were considered different races in 1928 that they bring up, but then he talks about “even in Africa, though they were considered inferior in my time, are some of the most splendid people around now.” Stuff like that, and the non-Han Chinese people, “terrific, wonderful. They’re our friends. We love them. The only group that we purely hate is the Hans, and we hate them, and they deserve to die.”

In fact, “I hadn't brought this up,” says Buck. “There's a theory that an alien spacecraft crashed in the middle of China, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and those people bred with the people of Tibet and became this horrible race of the Han empire, who are just not even human,” and even in the first story, when they're describing them, they in no way describe anything about these characters as being the 1920s cliché versions of Asian people. There's none of that. There's explicitly none of that.  Buck Rogers is like “these people don't look like what I think of when I think of Chinese people.”

[41:50] David: He actually says that?

[42:51] John: Yeah. Words to that effect. No part of the culture seems to have derived anything from any cliché about Asian cultures. We like to go into the culture of it, and it's weird, but it's got nothing to do with, as far as I know, anything anybody ever thought about Asian cultures.

[42:08] David: Just make-believe.

[41:10] John: This weird society where women have to try, they need to be married to men. It's awful, but the point of it is that it's awful because they're the bad guys. I mean, if you go back and read The Shadow or Doc Savage from that time, there's all this Orientalist stuff going on in there, and it is not like that. It isn't this weird mysterious orient or something. It is a unique construction. So, in this epilogue, you get into this part where it's theorizing that maybe they weren't even human, which in some way is better, and then in another way, is way worse.

[42:50] David: It's very complicated. Yeah, I agree. That's definitely worse. It's a tough one.

[43:00] John: Yeah, and that's where the stuff gets weird in this book. As far as I know, all of that gets dropped after comic strip #3 or something. He wakes up, finds Wilma, and then they go off on high adventure stuff, and it is not about the tactics of future warfare, and Buck Rogers does, in the end of the book, or Anthony Rogers does, in the end of the book, think back like, “well, some of this stuff seems like a brutal past in today's world of peace and prosperity, and brotherhood, but it was a brutal time, and when I think of Wilma, eviscerating people and screaming with joy, those are the times we lived in, and now I'm ready to go and hopefully meet her in the afterlife,” and ends like that.

[43:49] David: Man, that's a book right there.

[43:52] John: It's a lot to unpack, and I don't know what to think of it. I mean, I don't know. It's not like this is anything on the forefront of anybody's mind here. This isn't some conundrum about something vital, like Star Wars, where we're like, “what about the parts of Star Wars that are analogues for imperialism?” I don't mean the Imperial Army, but I mean, analogues for exoticism of other Earth cultures and stuff. Some of that's actually troubling. Nobody's going to go anywhere near this stuff in 2024, I hope. I mean, we've moved on. I don't really even be shitting on the book because parts of it are weirdly progressive, but there's a lot to take in. A lot of tactics to take in, too. Tactics and racism.

[44:43] David: You got your fill.

[44:44] John: Both. That's plenty.

[44:46] David: God, sounds like I might skip this one, John.

[44:53] John: The reason to read this book is, I want to find out where Buck Rogers came from, and it does it. It nails it. You find out. I guess, it might be a tautology, but it accomplishes what I hoped for, plus the ad for Kent cigarettes.

[45:17] David: Well, I can tell you what I've learned from this podcast, and from this entire conversation, and I think it's actually very worthy, and that is that Ultron, the name of my favorite robot in Marvel Comics, came from the original Buck Rogers/Anthony Rogers book.

[45:41] John: Jacosta must have come from somewhere else. Just trying to think of another Marvel robot.

[45:50] David: I mean, I feel like that's worth the price of admission alone. If everybody listening to podcasts, if you can take nothing else away from this, take away the fact that Ultron comes from this book.

[46:03] John: I've always liked going back and seeing where stuff came from. Even when I was in high school, I was a Nine Inch Nails fan, and then I would find out the stuff that they listened to, Trent Reznor listen to, and check those bands out. I would always do that. I'm always fascinated by the birth of the heroic fiction that we live in, or that we ply our trade in a lot of the times. I mean, I remember years ago, reading this Alistair MacLean novel. He's the guy that wrote Guns of Navarone, if you're familiar with the book. It was World War Two-era and after, but writing World War Two fiction, and it was all stuff where the British are the “you never tell a lie, totally honorable people” fighting these despicable German and Japanese soldiers who will lie and betray you at any time, but this is on the level of He Man and Skeletor, where “I gave my word to Skeletor. I have to keep it.” Skeletor is just “I’m going to let you go He Man. I’m not going to let you go,” but I remember reading it. There's this one sequence where the English are in this boat, and they're about to get overtaken by another boat of, I don't remember if it’s German or Japanese soldiers. Their plan is, “let's pretend that we're dead, and then when the bad guys get up close, we'll shoot them.” There's no way you could write that now. You have to take it three steps further than that, where “if we pretend that we're dead, they're going to know it's a trap. So, we have to go, and we have to set a plan for what they'll do based on knowing that it's a trap.” You know what I mean? The tactics have evolved. “Were you followed?” “No, there was this guy that kept being there, but he was reading a newspaper. So, obviously, he wasn't following me.” I'm fascinated by that stuff and seeing where that comes from. So, that's what led me to read this. Didn't disappoint in that level, I guess.

[48:06] David: There's something there. It's not worth bringing up on this podcast, but there is something there about returning to simpler times. The X Men stuff just got announced. The new X Men stuff got announced, and it’s like, how do you put the genie back in the bottle? Legitimately, how do you? Because the only thing that got me thinking that is, I haven't read any of the news or anything. All I saw was the images for the three new comics, and I was like, “Oh, that's cool. Ryan Stegman is trying to do Art Adams.” That is a sum total of all that I've looked at. The other thing that came from that was, man, there's enough regular characters to fill three books. They've got three team books, and I recognize every single one of those characters and all three of those covers, except for maybe one character, and man, they've got so many characters that they have to service, and everybody's got their favorite. Nightcrawler is my man. That's the book I want, but somebody else's book is Cyclops. In the late 70s, early 80s, it was one team. It was a rebooted team, but they were able to bring in the other characters, one at a time, and it wasn't that big a deal, and it didn't crowd the book out, and it didn't force anybody to have to have three books running just to cover all the storylines and hit all the characters. How do you put that back in a bottle, man? How do you get that back to a manageable number? I don't think you do. Maybe you do. I don't know.

Anyway, I was just thinking about that. So, there's something there. There's something to unpack there, in terms of going back to those original source materials, like you're saying you like to do, and see how they did it, and how does that inform an origin story? Anyway, how do you put the genie back about how you do an origin story?

[49:56] John: Yeah, I think there's a lot of characters that when you go back to that, you do mind something primal that was the original spark that made the thing work, and I think there's other characters that doesn't work on. You know what I mean? Where things shift, you go back, and the original stories just can't carry the conceptual weight of what's been put on them after that. We were talking last time about the Batman comic that Perkins and Dan Jurgens are doing. You can go back to that first Batman story, and it's a stripped-down superhero story. It's a gangster story, or the mad scientist, or whatever, but that idea that it's Bruce Wayne putting on a costume and it's Zorro with Dick Tracy villains. That still holds water. That still works. I think there's something interesting to go back to the early Superman stuff. I mean, I always like saying the first thing Superman ever does is he stops the state from murdering an innocent person or executing an innocent person, and there's an interesting way to go back to Superman with that idea that it's not just a power fantasy, but it's an empowerment fantasy, and stuff there, and there's other ones where I think it totally doesn't work. I don't think you can go back to the first Thor comic, because I just think Thor didn't work for a couple of years, until the character evolved into not just being Don Blake finding a staff, but being a God cast-out to have to learn humility. That came later. That's the core part about Thor. I don't know if going back to the roots of this teaches anything. It's interesting to see how this is being developed or whatever. Yeah, sorry.

[51:34] David: Yeah. Some stuff, for whatever reason, gets developed, and some stuff just doesn't. In Buck Rogers case, I think, just based on what we've been talking about, there's not much that gets kept.

[51:50] John: There’s no Killer Kane, there's no Princess Ardala, there's no spaceships. All that gets added later, and that seems to be core to what the character is.

[51:59] David: I mean, the only thing that we keep really, off the top my head, is just the man out of time, which I don't know, it can't possibly be the first time that was done.

[52:11] John: That, and Wilma Deering was there from the beginning, and that's about it. A few years ago, I was reading some of E. E. Smith’s Lensman books, if you've ever seen those, but straight-up, there’s the Death Star. One of the books, they fight the Death Star. The Lensman is basically the Green Lantern Corps. It's interesting to see where that stuff comes from, because a lot of the people in the early days of comics came directly from that world, came from the Fandom of it. Siegel and Schuster did, or just straight-up came from writing the pulp science fiction stuff before American science fiction turned to be really idea-based, science-based things, when it was very much guys with ray guns and jetpacks, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Doc Smith, and Mr. Anthony Rogers.

[53:00] David: Well, I think you just wrapped it up, man.

[53:02] John: I think so.

[53:04] David: Nice job. I’m fully entertained, as usual. So, at least two thirds of our audience was very entertained by this one, John.

[53:10] John: My self-loathing does not allow me to. So, it must be the other listener who was entertained. Thank you, other listener. I appreciate it.

[53:20] David: Little Davey Baker laughing his ass off right now. He's fully into it.

[53:25] John: He has never listened to the show when he's not on it.

[53:27] David: No, It's true.

[53:32] John: I’m just saying that, in case he does listen to this.

[53:36] David: There we go. Origins of Buck Rogers.

[53:38] John: Thanks a lot, and we will be back next week. So, we hope to see you here at The Corner Box.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, tell your friends about us, leave a review and comments. Check out www.cornerbox.club for updates, and come back and join us next week for another episode of The Corner Box with John and David.