Additional Easter Eggs in Rob Hanes Adventures #25

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Though I included the usual comprehensive liner notes for Rob Hanes Adventures #25 within the issue, this post  supplements those liner notes, providing additional background and Easter eggs for the issue…

(And for anyone needing to purchase this latest issue as well as any back issues, visit the WCG Comics webstore!)

In the published liner notes, I cite the classic strips that are referenced in the issue and have been lifelong inspirations for my series. Many characters from those strips appear in the issue’s story, “Old Adventurers Never Die…,” albeit, of course, under somewhat different names and guises. Anyone familiar with these strips will immediately recognize their counterparts in the issue, but what follows is a comprehensive scorecard.

Before continuing, as reference, below is a detail of the issue's cast as they appear on the cover pictured at right.

From left to right on the plane: Sky Bannon, Medill Anderson, Sgt. Hanes. 

Left to right standing: Crash O'Brien, Rob, Malta, the Iron Tigress

Kneeling in front left to right: Percy Leigh and Cap'n Breeze.

Who’s Who

Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates' Pat Ryan, Terry Lee, Burma, and the Dragon Lady are the antecedents for Crash O’Brien, Percy Leigh, Malta, and the Iron Tigress.

Caniff created Terry in 1934 and worked on the strip through 1945 before moving to Steve Canyon.

Pictured in the promotional image at right are Terry, the Dragon Lady, Pat, and Burma.

The other character in the image is Connie, a companion and valet to Pat and Terry, who I decided not to include in my story, partly due to the character being an insensitive and racist portrayal of an Asian character that wouldn't have been appropriate for me to include or draw. But Connie is briefly referenced through a line of Percy when he says, "Not so hotsy dandy!"

Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon—Sky Bannon.

Caniff left Terry and launched Steve Canyon in 1946 when his syndicate would not grant him any ownership rights. He had ownership of Canyon and leased it back to his syndicate for distribution. The strip ran until Caniff's death in 1988.

Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs & Captain Easy—Captain Breeze.

Crane is one of the great unsung adventure cartoonists who transitioned from and was a bridge between a "bigfoot" style of cartooning to one that showcased his incredible storytelling and draftsmanship. Originally created as a daily gag strip in 1924 that featured a diminutive Harold Lloyd like lead character, it became more of an adventure strip with the introduction of the two-fisted Captain Easy in 1929, who soon dominated the strip. 

In 1943, Crane left the strip, which remained in syndication until 1988. He left the strip to launch his creator-owned Buz Sawyer—another outstanding strip that he worked on until his death in 1977, and which continued until 1989.

Noel Sickles’ Scorchy Smith—Archie Cristman. 

As I mention in the liner notes, Cristman was named for cartoonist Bert Christman who briefly followed Sickles as the artist on the strip. He left comics to become a naval pilot and later joined the Flying Tigers and was killed in action. 

The character of Hamerstein in the story was inspired by a sidekick in Scorchy named Himmelstoss, a German ace from World War I who befriends and shared adventures with Scorchy for a while in the 1930s. 

 

Right: Cartoonist Bert Christman

Alex Toth’s Bravo for Adventure—the titular character of this series, Jesse Bravo, appears in Rob Hanes Adventures #25 as Jules Tango. 

Bravo for Adventure was actually created by Toth in the 1980s, but was set in the 1930s as an obvious homage to the soldier of fortune strips of that era. So I couldn’t resist including the title character in my issue. 

Bravo also bore a likeness to actor Errol Flynn, which is a recurring motif in Toth’s work, being one of the cartoonist's favorite actors.

Hergé’s Tintin—Tintin can be seen from the back in the very first panel on page one, looking at the James Bond Aston Martin vehicle on display at the convention. 

In addition, Tintin’s sidekick, Captain Haddock, is the skipper of the Chinese junk in the opening of the story. He can be seen in the background in panel 1 of page 4, and has a couple of lines in the last two panels of that page.

Though the followers of Tintin is relatively small in the U.S., around the world he is arguably as well known and popular as Mickey Mouse. 

Hergé (pen name for cartoonist Georges Remi) produced 24 full-length albums (graphic novels) of the strip from 1929 to 1977—the artist died in 1983 (a final album was published incomplete).

Additional Inspirations

Looping back to Toth’s Bravo for Adventure: the incident used to transport Rob back to the 1930s was inspired by an untitled Bravo story where, like Rob, Jessie receives a glancing blow to the head from an airplane propeller that sends them to la-la land! 

In Toth’s story, Jesse slips into a surreal but fanciful stream of consciousness tale that similarly references classic adventure comics. (In his story, Terry and the Pirates is name-checked as "Perry and the Tyrants," and Captain Easy makes a fun one-panel cameo—my Captain Breeze character design aligns closely with Toth’s take on the character in that story.)

In addition, the scene where Rob wakes up in the hospital room at the end of the story echoes a similar moment at the end of the Bravo story.

Other characters and storylines also specifically recall sequences and characters in Terry and the Pirates. The two main villains, the Cossack and Anthony Macomber, harken back respectively to a hill bandit known as General Klang (pictured  at left) and Anthony Sandhurst.

Like the Cossack in my story, Klang in Terry was a warlord who acted as a mercenary proxy for the Japanese occupiers. In one of his storylines, he similarly tries to pull off a mass execution (in fact, in Terry, it involves a lot more people!)

As for Anthony Sandhurst, he always has been one of my favorite antagonists in Terry and the Pirates (and perhaps in all of comics), partly because he was not the usual kind of bigger-than-life colorful pulp villains like the Dragon Lady or Klang—he was a believable yet detestable individual with no redeeming qualities yet was a fully realized character who was very human in his selfishness and belief the world owed him a favor. (His looks were also based on actor Charles Laughton.)

For many years, he was a recurring thorn in the side of Terry and, particularly, Pat Ryan. When he showed up in Terry in 1936, he had recently married one of Ryan’s loves from early in the strip’s run, a spoiled rich girl named Normandie Drake who Pat tamed. But the lovers were kept apart due to her rich family’s social ambitions and snobbery. This created a love triangle that kept the lovers apart and readers in suspense for many years—indeed, the entire war. In 1942, just after the start of World War II, Caniff revealed that Sandhurst was a Japanese collaborator. Near the end of Caniff's run on the strip and in the closing days of the war, a grown up Terry encounters Sandhurst among a renegade Japanese unit that refuses to surrender. While Sandhurst would meet his comeuppance, his final fate actually occurred after Caniff left the strip in 1946, under the watch of his successor on the title, George Wunder.

Sandhurst’s character and the love triangle involving Pat Ryan and Normandie inspired me to create a parallel in Rob Hanes Adventures—their counterparts in my strip being Anthony Cromwell and Caroline Wilde. 

Like Sandhurst and Normandie, Cromwell and Caroline marry, which effectively keeps Rob’s feelings for her unrequited (like Normandie, Caroline similarly takes her marriage vows seriously and believes she can make her flawed husband a better person).

In fact, this love triangle is one of two overt connections between Rob Hanes Adventures and the Terry universe—Cromwell is intended to be Sandhurst’s great grandson, a rotten apple to the core who has not fallen very far from the tree. 

The other connection relates to Normandie Drake, the niece of a rich entrepreneur, Chauncey Drake. In my series, the multinational company Drakorp (owner of Justice International) is the modern day iteration of the Drake family’s Draco Mining concern in Terry.

One final easter egg—there is a panel (reproduced below) where Rob, the Iron Tigress and others regroup and gird themselves for a counterattack. That image was partly inspired by a concept painting for a proposed film adaptation of Terry and the Pirates by noted movie poster artist Drew Struzan (also reproduced below) that appeared in Jim Steranko’s Prevue magazine. The film, of course, never came to fruition but the Struzan piece below hangs on a wall in my studio—signed by the artist!