When I was working on my first movie book, Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan (covering made for TV science fiction, fantasy and horror films), I discovered that giving a full accounting of every relevant movie would take more than my word count. As a compromise I shoved most of the marginal stuff into an appendix: fake ghosts (The Strange and Deadly Occurrence), stories with marginal specfic elements (Blade Squad, a straight-up cop story except the cops fight crime on jet-powered in-line skates), and films on the boundary between science fiction and reality. In the latter category I put “asteroid/meteor/big gol-dang rock hits the Earth” such as the films Fire in the Sky and Without Warning.
Oops. After reading my book, a friend pointed out to me that 1994’s Without Warning is a first contact movie. It opens in what’s apparently a romantic suspense movie staring Loni Anderson, then reporters break in with accounts of an asteroid smashing into Grover’s Mill, Wyoming (Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, was where the aliens landed in Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds broadcast). Then more asteroids hit. Then it turns out these aren’t asteroids but spaceships — do they come in peace? As invaders? What isn’t the government telling us? Despite some plot holes, it’s a good film — I caught it for my later book, The Aliens Are Here and reviewed it on my own blog.
That’s the thing about research: you often don’t know what you don’t know. I’d seen the movie’s description in TV Guide, decided I didn’t need to watch it, ’nuff said. Only it wasn’t enough. I had no way to know that, but it still annoys me I got it wrong.
Which brings me to my ongoing reread of the Silver Age. While it’s not a research project in the same sense, I have been trying to read every 
superhero book published, within the limits of what’s available, and some of the non-superhero stuff such as Sgt. Fury and The Witching Hour. Recently I learned I’d missed one story completely, as in not noticing it existed.
In Sub-Mariner #29 (Roy Thomas, Sal Buscema), “Fear is the Hunter,” the Olympian Huntsman is tracking down Hercules to drag him back to Olympus — Zeus, pulling his best Odin-impersonation, is PO’d his boy ran off to go hang with his mortal friends. As the Huntsman’s powers include fear, Hercules keeps running in terror and the villain can’t get close. Ah, but if he enslaves Namor, the Atlantean can catch up with Hercules and take him down. Of course, it doesn’t work out quite that way.
It’s a fun story — I read a friend’s copy in junior high school, several years after it came out. I loved the non-canonical version of various Greek monsters such as Scylla and Charybdis. Rereading now, I noticed a footnote I’d forgotten, telling readers to check out Part One of the story in … Ka-Zar?
I wouldn’t have cared about that when I first read it because I’d have had no way to find a two or three-year-old issue of Ka-Zar. Back in those days, missing a part of the story was par for the course. Now, though, with the DC and Marvel apps and my own collection, it’s not so hard to find one I missed. Only how did I miss it? Since I started this reread, I’ve been using the newsstand feature of Mike’s Amazing World to check what’ out each month. I couldn’t think of any Ka-Zar series before Astonishing Tales debuted and having read that, I knew it didn’t have a Hercules story in it.
Well, okay, Marvel did launch a tKa-Zar serie in the summer of 1970 … but it was a reprint book. Looking at Marie Severin’s cover told me that.
I’d glanced at the contents of the book on Mike’s site, confirming it was Ka-Zar’s first two Marvel appearances; presumably someone thought this would generate sales due to people reading Astonishing Tales and wondering about the backstory of the Lord of the Savage Land. After reading the Sub-Mariner footnote (the title of that is probably borrowed from Ernest K. Gann’s autobiography, Fate is the Hunter, by the way) I went back and looked again … yep, there was a Hercules story listed.
Why stick it there? No idea.
Why not mention it on the cover? Ditto.
Whatever the reason, it happened with the next two issues (covers by Severin) as well.
They contain Parts One and Two of an Angel solo story by Jerry Siegel — yes, the Superman guy — and George Tuska. The Dazzler murders Angel’s father — oh, wait, I should specify it’s not the Dazzler (drawn here by Bob Larkin) —
— but “a” Dazzler, a villain about the level of the C-Listers Siegel created for MLJ when it was trying to copycat Marvel’s style of superheroics. This Dazzler doesn’t even use light, just generic rayguns.
In Part Two, Angel swears revenge, gets captured, discovers Dazzler’s holding Warren’s girlfriend Candy as a hostage and agrees to do his bidding. The resolution came in Marvel Tales #30, which still doesn’t mention the Angel on the Severin cover.
That one isn’t on the app, but if you’re fascinated by the diabolical Dazzler, the Marvel Appendix website covers their final battle. I wasn’t fascinated, but I read it nevertheless. Doing so did not noticeably change my life in any way,
If you’re wondering about the title of my post, it comes from an old theatrical joke. An aging stage actor lies on his deathbed, gasping out his last breaths, when he raises himself and calls his heir to him. “Maestro,” the heir says, “do you have some wisdom to impart?”
Maestro nods, then speaks in a horse whisper. “Dying … dying is easy.
“Comedy is hard.”
Yeah, I was also deep into middle age when I learned that Marvel used to slip in new back-up type stories featuring random, B-list characters in its reprint books. Another interesting instance of this was the Hawkeye & Two-Gun Kid story that appeared in Marvel Tales #100 – it was posted (and the post still exists) 15 (!) years ago on the Diversions of the Groovy Kind blog. That is, in fact, how I learned that this was even a thing (and the first comment under the post is by yours truly).
I missed that one. Bookmarking to read later.