commies on 101!!!

Coming this Friday night on Turner Classic Movies...

Take a walk on the wild side as we present The Shack Out On 101 (1955), a nutty B-movie that uncovers Communist infiltration that extends to short-order cook Lee Marvin!

They will pry my greasy spoon from my cold dead fingers!

"Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War"

"Leg stealin' fascist jerks!"

Most of my recent fiction-reading has been rather blah so it was with some trepidation that I began Scott Wegener & Brian Clevinger's Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War. I had been extremely disappointed by The Five Fists of Science, a story about Nikola Tesla & Mark Twain fighting JP Morgan, Edison, Marconi and other worshippers of lovecraftian horror in the year 1900. So, when I heard about Atomic Robo, a creation of Tesla, that went on to fight Nazi monstrosities and legged tanks, I thought this might turn out to be a neat concept undermined by a flawed execution. I need not have worried. I enjoyed it immensely. How could it be otherwise, with lines like the above, and this?

"So you're building a big dumb bomb to show everyone who the greatest scientist blah, blah, blah."
"No, that would be the pathetic work of an egomaniac. My bomb will kill everyone in the world. I was robbed of my place in History, so Humanity will be robbed of its Future."
"I am really going to enjoy stopping you."

This, by the way, is the 2nd volume of Robo's adventures. Alas, Book One, Atomic Robo and the Fightin' Scientists of Tesladyne is out of print. Hopefully they'll soon reprint it, because $99 for the only available copies seems a bit pricey. I must say though that I am sorely tempted to bite the bullet, based on this exchange from it.

"It shot us out of the sky with a deathray!"
"It probably focuses sunlight through a series of mirrors and lenses."
"No way it can be that powerful."
"It's sound in theory. Solar deathray design was my doctorate thesis."