It’s October! If I were forced to choose, probably my favourite month. Let’s see what I did with it:

• THE THIRD FLASH FOSTER STORY: The third and final comic about the High-Gear Hot-Shots unequivocally gives us the most action of the three. It’s a shame these kids never got to come back because presumably the ’50s Captain America killed them all for being Commies or something.
• THIS PAINTING COSTS $5000 AND NINETEEN CENTS: This month I made a painting. The painting costs $5000 and nineteen cents. Is it worth that much? That’s in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think it is, but that’s because it hasn’t sold yet. But that’s what it costs, it says so. Really makes you think about the value of art, doesn’t it?
• BACK TO GURX: I asked on Patreon which of several PDR ideas I should commit to and the choice was that I go back to planet Gurx. This post here is just a look at the evolution of the Strondovarians, but I am going to do at least a few months of posts about the planet and its lifeforms. I’ve also begun making a dedicated page on the site on the topic that will hopefully be easier than going through all the individual posts I’ve done so far.
• SUPERMAN VS HALLOWEEN 2026: Over at the Avocado I wrote about Superman again, but instead of focusing on his work against bigotry, I looked at a time he fought some ghosts. I’m gonna try to do this yearly after this.
• BEEKEEPER REVIEW: ALESSIO: Not all Beekeeper Reviews are of interesting characters, unfortunately. I’m in this for completeness, after all. My 97th such review comes from a movie I realized part of the way through I had actually seen before and completely forgotten, and I think that’s a fair response to it.
• MUSING ABOUT CHAMPY THE USELESS VAMPIRE: In the hopes of starting the month with some Halloween flavour, I decided to play an adventure game about a vampire. It turns out to be a very short game, clearly a labour of love by amateur developers, but it had its charms and it had at least one mechanic I would steal if I am ever lucky enough to make my own game.
• OBSCURE MARVEL CHARACTER PIXEL ART: Trying to stay on the theme of the spooky-style season, I decided to draw a character from a Marvel horror book. Specifically, I’ve drawn Professor Louise Hastings. She was a character in Darkhold: Pages From The Book Of Sins, which came out in the early ’90s as part of the Midnight Sons line. The Midnight Sons/Suns brand was largely about (and have become even moreso about) supernatural-flavoured superheroes, but the fact that this was a team of relatively-regular people facing off against unfathomable evil forces, it appealed to me a lot. Spoilers: Louise didn’t make it through alive, but that the fact that such a cool character could be killed off made the book feel like everyone was at risk. My stipulation to have the art done within a 24-hour window really feels crueller when drawing someone who is not wearing a superhero outfit, though.

• PODCAST QUESTIONS: One neat thing this month is that I had a question answered on the podcast Least Haunted (the specific episode can be found here). It’s an excellent podcast that discusses folklore and paranormal legends but doesn’t fall into the trap that I’ve seen other podcasts do and believe in them. It’s a smart show by smart people. This reminds me that a few months back I had a question answered on another show, Final Girl After Dark, which is a horror movie podcast (episode here, since neither show’s website seems to want me to link directly to the episodes in question). And thus ends the section where I act like listening to podcasts counts as something I accomplished this month.
• EXPENSIVE CAR REPAIRS: Well, I mentioned my victory against my student loans last month, so naturally I need to mention that I had to put about $1500 onto my credit card this month to repair the car (mostly the suspension, some other minor things that are actually what I brought it in for). I won’t lie, when something like that happens, it hurts. My entire life is based around my debt and has been for about a decade, so every big setback like this feels like I’m being dragged back a year or so. Still, the car is fixed and that’s something, right?
• CONTINUED COMIC SECTION BEAUTIFICATION: I am still trying to make the site in general more presentable, with a focus on the Comics section first. Among the things I did there this month was a cover for what are potentially the oldest comics I have on the site, the Space Army, as seen below:

Look, I’ve probably enjoyed things I’ve watched, read, listened to, and eaten. All that stuff. But I also watched the movie Shadow In The Cloud, so all that other stuff has been pushed out of my brain. Look, it’s not a great movie. I like the synth in the soundtrack (you wouldn’t expect it from a movie set in WW2), but overall I was bored with most of it. I say MOST of it because there was one very important exception.

There’s a scene where the gremlin on the plane has stolen the main woman’s baby (the baby is in the box) and stuck it down under the wing of the bomber. Naturally, she has to crawl on the bottom of the bomber while the plane is being attacked to save the baby. But then she has to climb back into the plane. That’s when this happens:

What else could compare to that?

Why are swordfish good orators?
They always have a point.

This one has David Vincent on a mission with Bob, who is a guy he met with the Believers group last episode. I was impressed to see that Bob made it into a second episode. He dies in this one.

Anyway, on their mission Vincent and Bob capture an Invader and intend to take him to Washington for questioning or whatever. The thing is, we’re told, this Invader holds a special rank in Invader society, so they will stop at nothing to get him back. As they run with their captive, the heroes find their way to a cabin where an elderly poet and his granddaughter live. Bob, as I said, dies, so we’ve got Vincent and the old man and the young girl and the Invader Leader Guy prisoner and they’re surrounded by Invaders coming to get their guy back. It’s a siege situation. And to make things even more tense, if the Invader Leader Guy doesn’t get to one of their regeneration chambers within a couple hours, he’s going to die.

We get all these people arguing their various points of view. In particular, the Leader offers Cyrus Stone, the old poet, the chance to rule over humanity in the Invader-controlled world. Stone is a cynical man who is tired of the world as it is, saying of the Invaders, “compared to what we have here, they might not be so bad.” One misstep that the Leader makes is that he praises Stone’s poetry and is asked “Are there poets on your planet?” he says there are, so Vincent says “I’d like to hear one of your poems” and the Leader has nothing. It’s all good stuff until David Vincent gets killed. That’s right, our hero, who we’re followed for all these episodes is having a fight with some Invaders and gets thrown into some sort of generator and is electrocuted. He is dead.

Stone asks alien leader a question. He’s heard them talk about the wonders that their technology can do, including their regeneration chambers, so can bring David Vincent back to life? The leader admits they can, if it is done quickly enough, like within the next couple minutes. Stone says that if they bring back David Vincent, then the Leader is free to go. The Leader agrees, but can’t understand the motivation of the human, giving up a chance to rule for one life. Stone says “We value life, that’s why we endure.” By the time David Vincent is awake again, though weak and confused, the aliens, including their Leader, are gone.

I always like when we learn a bit more about the Invaders. Their lack of poetry doesn’t surprise me at all given their lack of emotion (and I have my doubts they even use a spoken language in their natural forms), but this guy being a “Leader” is something new. He doesn’t phrase it like he is the boss of this operation or whatever, he says “Where I come from, I am a Leader. There is no equivalent here.” He makes it sound as if the word “Leader” is a compromise of language and that he is actually something more important. We probably won’t learn more about this, but I’ll keep it in mind.

Other things I bothered to note: Edgar Scoville, the rich man who runs the Believers group, seems to be very rich. When Vincent was on his own, he worked with the military, sure, but Scoville requests soldiers and gets them. That’s impressive.

Also, they’ve turned up a couple times, but the Invaders have these handheld communicator devices that are just little circles things that light up while you’re talking into them. They’re not particularly special, especially considering the devices we have now, but every time I see them I imagine a world where the people who would go on to create our cell phones and stuff were more inspired by this than the communicators on Star Trek.

It’s the third and final issue of this era of Young Men comics. We’ve seen the High-Gear Hot-Shots go from a group of kids who dreamed of the day they owned a car to a real hot-rod racing crew. Where do they go from there? Perhaps, dare I say, they become heroes?

I’m impressed with the splash this time! It lives up to the promise of action more than the others did. In the previous issue, the splash gave us a preview of a race scene that would happen later in the story. The splash from two issues ago showed something that could happen but did not. This splash? It IS happening. In the present tense! The story and the action have already begun!

The Hot-Shots are winning a race. With their newly-streamlined car, the High-Gear Special (which I still think of as a Ship of Theseus for the Model TNT), the Hot-Shots have become an unmitigated success. They’re winning a lot and they draw a crowd to the tracks as well. That’s relevant because a man they know, Mr. Pettigrew, is opening a new racetrack over in Pineville. The thing is, he borrowed a bunch of money from the bank to finance this and now the bankers think he is too old to successfully operate it. They want to take over. If the opening race isn’t a success he will be ruined! Luckily for him, the High-Gear Hot-Shots agree to use their growing fame to help him out.

So that’s some nice understandable stakes quickly established. Exactly the kind of thing I have been asking for! If these stories want to live up to their promise of action, it’s helpful to set up a problem early and have all the racing be work toward solving it. That’s not too much to ask, is it? It’s not like I’m demanding these kids have their lives endangered by criminals or anything.

Oh, but then some criminals show up and full-on blackjack Drag. In much the way that the second story was about Rod, the Rich Kid of the group, this one is about Drag, the Big Kid of the group. He’s there in the car with Flash in the race at the beginning, and when they have the race at the new Pineville track, Drag helps out by working the ticket counter. That, of course, means he is the only obstacle between these criminals and their target.

You can’t keep a good Drag down, though. He quickly runs out onto the track to flag down Flash so that they (the whole gang get in the car for some reason) can chase after the crooks and get Pettigrew’s money back. There’s an exciting chase scene ending when Flash can get the Special in front of the crooks’ car to cut them off. Seeing all this, the bankers realize the loyalty these kids have to Pettigrew, so they agree to let him keep the track. Hooray!

The realization that he’s in danger only catches up with Drag when the race is over. With this being Drag’s story, I wish that he and Flash had been alone in the car together during the chase, Rod and Hub don’t need to be there, but I do come out of this one liking Drag. Obviously his roll is to be the “fat one” of the group, but he’s never mocked for it (the only time I even remember it coming up is a in the first story where he is shown with a bunch of empty cups that used to have milkshakes or floats or whatever ’50s kids ate). In this, the story where he gets focus, he’s shown to be a little dumb, but nice and loyal and apparently tough (he shakes off that blackjacking before the crooks are very far away at all). That said, being fat is only his second-most important physical feature. His first is going like this:

In all three issues, Drag has just been constantly gobsmacked. But he keeps going, like a High-Gear hero.

Then there’s the action. Of the three stories about this gang, this has the best action. There’s a story I’ve read about in a couple of Gene Colan interviews (one example is here for the curious) about a time when Stan Lee wanted Colan to draw a car chase. Colan did so, drawing a cool car chase that lasted multiple pages. Lee wasn’t happy! He said that Colan was wasting space, that the chase could have been done in a page. Fans wrote in saying they loved it, though. Giving an action scene time to be fun is important in comics.

The chase here runs for about three pages (more if we start it when Drag gets clocked upside the head). In a seven page story, that’s almost half of it! If some ’50s kid saw the cover to this comic and thought “I want to read an action-filled hot rod story” then this is a comic that would have given them one.

I can genuinely say that Flash Foster and his High-Gear Hot-Rods was finally getting somewhere as of this issue. If these characters had gone on, maybe they could have produced some great comics. We never got an issue about Hub. We never got to see them against a rival crew. Flash never got more personality. Sandra from the first issue never came back (this story doesn’t actually have a single female character). Given time, I think this could have grown into something.

Instead, in Young Men #24 the superheroes return. This doesn’t mark that genre’s permanent takeover of the medium quite yet. Captain America, Namor, and the Human Torch only return briefly, but it’s enough to derail our Hot-Shots. What a shame. They won me over and they got knocked down. Ain’t it always the way…

So that’s it for the Flash Foster stories, but I will be coming back to these issues of Young Men in the future. There’s three more features in this book that show what the non-superhero era of comics was like, and I look forward to all of them.