Posted by Kent Brockman on September 28, 1997 at 02:13:42:
For You-Seven: I'm about as much on crack as I ever have a chance of winning the lottery. (Brief pause). Oh wait....I DID!! Ha-hah sucker! I can buy and sell your whole family!!! Anyway, good luck on your trip to England.
And Now with the subject at hand:
I was wondering what other Indy-like material out there anyone likes? I mean, I know those Richard Chamberlain ALLAN QUARTERMAIN movies are awful - but you gotta kind of like em becuase they TRYING to be like Indiana Jones - right?
Recently one of my big interests is THE SAINT - the movie with Val Kilmer is okay - more James Bond wannabe than it should have been - but the romantic angle keeps it on a properly adventurous course. The old TV show with Roger Moore was way better - you gotta respect a hero who can do everything both 007 AND Indiana Jones can do. By that I mean do the cool suave superspy stuff and the rugged, thrashed, adventure hero stuff. Even better than the show though, are the books by Leslie Charteris. They are way old and many were printed in the thirties and forties - THE golden era of human civilization (I like Indy as much for the 30's throwback to anything else). I recently found some SAINT books with fantastic era-covers in which he's got a trench and fedora on in every one - also there is girls in the usual garments! Really excitiing stuff.
What else? Of course - ROCKETEER, THE SHADOW, and THE PHANTOM were all kind of Indy-like. Phantom would be the best of that lot and was even written by the Jeffrey Boam guy (one of the few good things he's written, besides his scant work on the late, beloved BRISCO COUNTY JR).
Of course - this brings me to the pulps. I don't have any - and trust me I'd buy as much up as I can - but they are so darn expensive! I was wondering - a lot of you seem to be into the RPG and do you remember JUSTICE INC? A great pulp game with lotsa ideas and loads of thirties-gaming source material! I loved it and all Indy Jones fans should look into it. It was published by Hero Games, who are still around but they never published any supplements for it. It came out in 1984 and I'm sure TOD had influenced the idea to do it. I picked it up just CUZZ it looked so Jones-ish on the cover, claimed to be THE RPG for the 20's and 30's, and also claimed to be multi-genre. I hadn't known what I was getting into and my eyes were opened to a whole new world of literature (except that it was old literature! ha!). Anyway - if you are a serious Indy fan, you SHOULD get this game!
2 recent pubs I liked were by veteran pin-up artist and photgrapher and (et al.) Jim Silke. The RASCALS IN PARADISE collected edition, published by none other than Dark Horse Comics themselves, is a damn swell book with loads of TOD influence (or course, it was more influenced by pulps - but then that's where most of TOD's influence came from). The story is wonderful: Rugged jungle heroes on a fouled up replica of Earth must trek into the planet's darkest heart to rescue a brunette bombshell who is being planned for use in sacrifice. They are aided by a blond bombshell with a rocket pack and the villain is a villainess who is the obligatory red-head bombshell! Pretty good, eh? It combines the best of King Kong, Rocketeer, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (ahh, finally I'm excited enough to spout the full name) and Sam Peckinpah flicks!! What more could you want? RASCALS IN PARADISE is pretty easy to find in the graphic novel section of most major bookstore outlets. You MUST get it - it's one of the funnest reads I've ever had! Silke alos put out an issue of BETTIE PAGE COMICS for Dark Horse. It's really good, and is largely the same style - just with Bettie Page in it this time! It's pretty good too and is still fresh - so you can probably get that at your Lo-Cal comic store.
Yahoo that was a mouthful! What have you got for me folks?
Kent