Wings of War and G-8 and His Battle Aces - World War 1 Pulp Fiction

Recently I watched the Blu-ray of the movie, Biggles: Adventures in Time.  The movie does not resemble anything that Biggles of the books, written by W.E. Johns, experienced, at least in those I have read. Based on comments some people have made, the movie was nothing like any of the books.

While the movie certainly takes liberties with the character of Biggles, and adds a science fiction element to it, I do find it a fun, enjoyable movie to watch. It reminded me of some of the old pulp stories.

I am certainly no expert on the original pulp magazines.  I began reading some of them when Bantam was doing the Doc Savage reprints.  I frequented a lot of used book stores in those days (notice I say used, not rare) and was able to pick up a lot of Doc Savage books very cheaply.  More recently several companies have put out reprints of pulps in various forms. Some are facsimile editions, that look just like the originals, including advertisements, and others are reprints of the stories, maybe some of the articles, but including new material from experts on something about the character or subject matter.

One of these reprints was G-8 and His Battle Aces.  Adventure House offered reprints of issues as a subscription.  I don't remember exactly how many issues I received in this manner, but it was something that I still remember doing at the time.  After all, I wasn't making a lot of money at the time, and to me the subscription was quite expensive.

Having started reading pulps with Doc Savage, G-8 and his Battle Aces was a wild and crazy ride.  Basically anything bizarre that could be thought of, was being used by the German forces during The Great War, and G-8 had to stop it.  Everything from panther men, giant vampire bats, giant jellyfish like creatures, zombies, vikings, and a host of other terrors were trotted out for the readers of G-8.

G-8 was a master spy working for American Intelligence.  As I said previously, I am not an expert on the pulps, but it is interesting how many American Intelligence operatives had their stories told in pulp magazines.  It almost makes me wonder is any non-spies fought in the air of the World War. 

So far I have found G-8, Philip Strange, The Lone Eagle, The Three Mosquitoes, and Captain Babyface.  I think there may be more but am forgetting them at the moment.  Many of these are available as reprints.  Some, like G-8, as individual stories, like the original pulps, in either paperback or ebook format.  Others, like The Three Mosquitoes, and Philip Strange are available in multi-story books published by companies like Age of Aces (http://www.ageofaces.net/).  The one thing that I like with the single story paperback reprints, is the original artwork reproduced in the stories.  These illustrations really are something that I appreciate seeing.  The Age of Aces books feature some of the art but not all of it.  The ebooks don't feature any of the interior art.

G-8 was written by Robert J. Hogan, which was the authors actual name.  Normally a house author name would be used so that various writers could churn out the stories.

G-8, along with his men, Bull Martin and Nippy Weston, are generally fighting some sort of fantastic creature or scheme, dreamed up by one of the Kaiser's "mad scientists".  G-8 story titles read like a Who's Who of terror; The Bat Staffel, Squadron of Corpses, Sky Coffins for Satan, Hordes of the Wingless Death, and Bombs from the Murder Wolves are all titles of some of the character's tales.

 The stories feature a lot of action and adventure for the master spy.  G-8 is never identified by any other name.  He may assume other names to help him in his missions, but it is stated that his name has been concealed so that he can better accomplish stopping the enemy.

G-8 is aided by two aides, Bull and Nippy, who remind me of Doc Savage's aides Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks and a servant named Battle who is an expert at makeup.

Recently I read one G-8 ebook and listened to an Audible presentation of another.  Both were quite good and brought back a lot of memories of the stories that I had read in the past.  I had forgotten a lot about the character, since it had been quite a few years since I had read any of the stories, and found them exiting, even if a bit "over the top" for realism.

The one that I read was The Death Monsters.  I don't want to go into too many specifics, in case someone wants to read it, but it involves the return of one of G-8's enemies and large flying jellyfish like creatures that are unstoppable.  I will give one spoiler though, guess who wins?  The next issue was not "Jellyfish and His Battle Aces".

The story offers the usual thrills and chills and plot line out of a SYFY Network movie.  If it wasn't for the World War 1 setting, SYFY may have very well done a few of these stories as movies.  Death Monsters, Fire Serpent, Hell Hounds, Bloody Wings of the Vampire all could be interchangeable  between pulp story or movie.

The G-8 story that I listened to, was Fangs of the Serpent.  This story was a bit different than some of the other stories that I have read.  Rather than a giant "evil monster" it involved hypnotism and more of a traditional spy type story.  Still a lot of action and adventure, but less horror and more spy.

This audiobook was very well done.  Nick Santa Maria did an excellent job of presenting the story.  His use of various voices for the different characters almost seemed more like a cast recording and less like an audiobook than other readers.

The audio also includes a couple of additional non-G8 stories.  I am guessing that these would have been the filler stories in the pulp magazine.  Of course, not having the original, I really am not sure of this.

The other character, that I recently discovered existed, is The Lone Eagle.  I was a bit surprised when I found out about his pulp adventures, and that Amazon actually had an ebook version available.

I don't exactly remember where I read that The Lone Eagle even existed.  I remember seeing that he was a more realistic version of G-8.  There were not the fantastic enemies of G-8's stories but more down to earth, spy stories. This was something that the publisher wanted to give the more mature readers. 

Wings of War, contains two of the adventures of Air Intelligence agent John Masters.  The stories were credited, as most pulps did, to a house name; here Lt. Scott Morgan.

These stories are what they were written to be, realistic espionage stories, written about a First World War agent.  There is excitement, aerial fights, and you never know who the enemy really will be.

Of the two, The Lone Eagle story is more similar to Biggles of the books and G-8, in plotting at least, is more similar to Biggles in the movie.

Both have merit though.  Depending on what a reader may feel like at the time, it is certainly possible to enjoy both types of stories.  At times you may feel that something more realistic and at other times you may like something more fantastic.  After all, you wouldn't have fiction and non-fiction books, if people didn't want different things at different times.  Now granted, some people may only read one type of book, but that is usually the exception.

The challenge now, is that I might even try to come up with a way of using some of the ideas from these stories (not sure about fantastic or not) for Pulp Alley games.  I have a lot of ideas for Pulp Alley games, but I just don't know if I will ever have time to do them all. 

Next up, I am going to start reading one of The Three Mosquitoes reprints from Age of Aces.  I want to see how these stories compare to G-8 and The Lone Eagle.  I also picked up a Captain Strange book, which I know is fantastic fiction.

It should be fun, and if nothing else, it will be high flying adventure.