Day 4 of the Marvel Appendix’s New Universe 40th anniversary celebration!

It's the 4th day of our New Universe 40th Anniversary celebration at the Marvel Appendix and today we're spotlighting Mark Hazzard, who headlined his own series! My old Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe collaborator Stuart Vandal wrote this one. We also have some more Justice and Psi-Force characters. See them all on the update page!

Day 3 of the New Universe 40th Anniversary on the Marvel Appendix!

Today is day 3 of the Marvel Appendix's celebration of the New Universe's 40th anniversary! Today we're spotlighting Fabian Nicieza and Ron Lim's The Medusa Web, an international group of mercenaries who started out as Psi-Force enemies, then later recruited them into their ranks! I also wrote up profiles on every individual member of the Medusa Web who didn't previously have a profile at the Appendix.

Check out all of the new profiles at the Appendix update page.

Lubango Vlog v.4.7: CEML Expansion

Here's a late addition to the Lubango Vlog - a brief tour of the construction site at CEML where four new buildings are being built!

Day 2 of the New Universe's 40th Anniversary at the Marvel Appendix!

Today we're continuing our celebration of the New Universe's 40th anniversary at the Marvel Appendix with a number of profiles on characters from Mark Gruenwald and Paul Ryan's D.P.7, with a spotlight on Stephanie Harrington, the energy-giving paranormal housewife who became a super-spy, natural leader and one of the cast's toughest combatants!

I wrote up profiles on D.P.7 characters Dave Landers, Randy O'Brien and Jeff Walters in the past; today I've added the rest of the book's original cast: Charlotte Beck, Lenore Fenzl and Scuzz!

Check out all of the new profiles on the Marvel Appendix update page!

Halloween Radio Recap #4: Quiet, Please

I've blogged many times about the supernatural anthology Quiet, Please, created by Wyllie Cooper (Lights Out); it was heard from June 8, 1947 to June 25, 1949 on Mutual and ABC; despite those being two of the worse networks in terms of preservation, most of Quiet, Please has managed to survive.

Ernest Chappell starred in each episode as "the man who spoke to you" and, indeed, each episode he would speak to you; episodes were nearly always narrated by Chappell's character to you, the audience. In time, music, sound effects and other actors would fade it, but it maintained the feel of a ghost story told by lamplight.

Most people come to Quiet, Please through the episode "The Thing on the Fourble Board" (August 9, 1948) - it was my introduction to the series. It's been called the greatest horror program in the history of radio by people like Stephen King and Harlan Ellison. Now, Quiet, Please didn't aim for horror of that sort every week, so if you want more episodes like this one... well, they do exist (try "My Son, John" or "Tanglefoot") but in general, Quiet, Please was a supernatural program; there wasn't always a menace to be faced; often the series aimed for melancholy, rather than scares.

Quiet, Please has some stories which are played for laughs; "Dark Grey Magic" concerns an inept spellcaster; "Kill Me Again" has a man entering into a deal with the Devil for another chance at life, but he doesn't get to enjoy it; "Presto Change-o, I'm Sure" features a spell to make people disappear and where exactly they disappear to; and "The Man Who Knew Everything" features a know-it-all and his complicated life.

Some stories are very gentle; look to the Christmas stories Cooper told like "Berlin, 1945" and "The Time of the Big Snow," which aren't the least bit scary or unsettling. His Easter story, "Shadow of the Wings," though, has a bit of menace inside it.

Cooper was often inspired by stories from the Bible, which is pretty unusual for a supernatural program; I wrote a blog post about these stories.

I already have a list of recommended episodes here on the blog. There are definitely episodes I love more than others but I treasure every episode of the series to some extent, even a far-out one like "The Hat, the Bed, and John J. Catherine" with its lengthy soliloquy. I came to Quiet, Please looking for some scares but I stuck around because of the quality of Cooper's writing and the spellbinding way Chappell's voice drew me into the stories.

You can hear the surviving episodes of Quiet, Please and recreations of missing shows at the fan page Quiet Please dot org. They also have scripts/transcriptions so you can follow along, just in case it's a little too quiet for you.

Next Thursday: Inner Sanctum Mysteries!

We're celebrating the New Universe's 40th Anniversary at the Marvel Appendix!

I ran a series of posts earlier this year that told the history of Marvel's New Universe imprint; now, I'm helping to lead a celebration of the New Universe at the Marvel Appendix. My fellow writers and I are writing profiles about characters, groups, events and objects associated with the New Universe!

Today's spotlight profile is The white Event, from which the New Universe's paranormals originated.

All of the new profiles can be found on the Appendix update page! I'll be adding more profiles every day up to October 28!

Halloween Radio Recap #3: Lights Out

"It... is... later... than... you... think...
Lights Out brings you stories of the supernatural and the supernormal, dramatizing the fantasies and the mysteries of the unknown; we tell you this frankly, so if you wish to avoid the excitement and tension of these imaginative plays, we urge you calmly, but sincerely, to turn off your radio... now."

Lights Out wasn't the first radio horror program - it had been preceded by the likes of The Witch's Tale - but it offered a new level of sophistication with an emphasis on sound effects and an isolating, first-person perspective to heighten the sense of danger around the show's cast. It originated on January 1, 1934 under the eye of Wyllis Cooper, who remained with the series up until 1936 when he moved on to Hollywood (a career move he later bitterly regretted).

Arch Oboler took over the series for the rest of its initial run in 1936-1939 and quickly made it his own; Oboler ran a 1942-1943 revival on CBS by sponsor Ironized Yeast and most of the surviving episodes of the show are from that era (many scripts from that era had been first performed during Oboler's 1936-1939 run). The show had brief summer revivals on NBC and ABC from 1945-1947, mostly featuring recreations from Cooper's 1934-1936 tenure. Much later, Oboler recirculated his shows with new introductions in the 1970s as The Devil and Mr. O; Oboler also produced a 1962 record called Drop Dead which featured recreations of old Lights Out scripts.

Scholarship on Lights Out is much better now than it was when I first got into old-time radio; many people simply called Lights Out as a show "created by Arch Oboler," ignoring Cooper entirely. There was also a lot of confusion around the series Arch Oboler's Plays, where fans circulated episodes from that series as episodes of Lights Out. Further, because scripts were recycled and recirculated so many times, figuring out when a recording originated has been an error-filled process - but, as I say, current scholarship has been fixing many decades-old errors.

We still have comparatively little of the show's history; those few examples of Wyllis Cooper's scripts (and the high quality of Cooper's work on his later show Quiet, Please) suggest there are many lost treasures in the show's earliest years. But Arch Oboler's particular talents were well-employed on Lights Out; he loved stream-of-consciousness storytelling, which was extremely effective on a horror series. Many of his dramas featured characters succumbing to delusions, repeating words ("got to get away... got to get away...") and a particular penchance for anti-fascism sentiment. While it means you pick up on Oboler's idiosyncracies quickly, when the man delivered a frightening scenario, the show delivered on chills.

Part of what set Lights Out apart from what came before - and much of what would come - was the lack of a horror host. There was no "Old Nancy" like on The Witch's Tale. The nearest the series came to such a host was Arch Oboler himself during the 1942-1943 series, in which he'd make banter with the announcer before, mid-drama and after. Of course, sometimes Oboler's remarks were there to reinforce the story's themes; I guess it's possible Oboler occasionally went over his audience's heads. Both Cooper and Oboler also enjoyed getting a bit meta, as Cooper's "Coffin in Studio B" and Oboler's "Murder in the Script Department" and "The Author and the Thing" are all examples of stories set during the production of Lights Out in which horror is visited upon the show's creative staff.

Beyond the lack of a horror host, the menace on Lights Out tended to be more subtle than on other horror shows. Often the creatures on the show didn't speak at all (such as on "Visitor from Hades"); in other instances, the point-of-view character is trapped somewhere and is driven insane while trying to escape ("Murder in the Script Department"). There were plenty of monsters on Lights Out - even the Devil himself a couple of times - but the terror tended to be psychological. In that way, Lights Out helped set the stage for television's The Twilight Zone.

I've recommended many episodes of Lights Out over the years and I can easily say, "just liten to them all." That is, if you like horror on radio, listen to them all! I most enjoyed Oboler's stories "It Happened," "Poltergeist," "Mungahra," "Come to the Bank," "Knock at the Door," "Meteor Man," "The Fast One," "Spider," "Bathysphere," "Murder Castle," "State Executioner" and "The Author and the Thing." From what we have of the Cooper era, the Boris Karloff episode "Death Robbery" is dynamite.

I've also blogged about an unusual episode of Lights Out that was re-dramatized on the Shadow in this blog post, and I blogged about the rare comic book adaptations of Lights Out in this blog post. I also had some thoughts about his story "Across the Gap" as an anti-fascism allegory in this blog post.

Lights Out had a TV show from 1949-1952 and a surprisingly large number of them are available - they're easily found on YouTube. Although the TV series had some adaptations from Cooper's radio work, there was just one adaptation of Oboler's work - Oboler hated television.

You can hear the Old Time Radio Researchers Group's collection of 65 Lights Out episodes at this link.

Next Thursday: Quiet, Please!