Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction. An Encyclopedia from Able Team to Z-Comm

by Bradley Mengel

  Conclusion

  As can be seen, the female characters in action fiction have evolved from a largely supporting role to taking center stage. These characters have been frequently sexualized, with skimpy costumes and a focus on their physical beauty. This came to a peak with characters like Su-Lin Kelly, the Baroness and the Sexecutioner, who were nymphomaniacs bedding nearly every male and many females who came across their paths. This trend was reversed somewhat with the debut of the female private eye and attempts to create female versions of male characters, focusing on their skills and abilities. This trend continued with the adventuring archaeologists, all of whom were successful in their field and capable of handling any situation. However, their physical beauty is still a factor. With the streetwise vigilantes of the new millennium, the focus became less on the physical beauty and more on the psychological state of the vigilante.

  6. The Future of the Serial Vigilante

  The serial vigilante did not emerge from a vacuum and forms part of a continuum of justice figures from many different strands of literature and folklore. We can see elements of the serial vigilante in the tales of Robin Hood, William Tell, Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Spring-heeled Jack, the Just Men, the Shadow, the Saint, the Lone Ranger, the Scarlet Pimpernel and numerous other characters. These characters have appeared in legend, folklore, penny dreadfuls, dime novels, thrillers, pulps and comics. These terms have defined and placed these characters in socio-political contexts often defined by major world events.

  Alice Turner (1977), in her essay "The Paperback Hero," argues that several societal conditions in 1969 led to the rise of the serial vigilante — the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the Chicago trials, My Lai massacre, Altamont following Woodstock, the president's "secret plan" for peace in Vietnam, anger, frustration and a deep division. Turner then suggests that we may never see the like again but she does point out that there have always been macho heroes dispensing frontier justice.

  This last thought has been echoed by other scholars such as Cawelti (1975), Kittredge and Krauser (1978), and Ruehlmann. Since the highpoint of the 1980s, there has been a marked decline in the serial vigilantes. The Executioner, the Destroyer and the Punisher are the only characters from the founding decades of the 1960s and 1970s still being published. None of the characters who debuted during the 1980s are still in production.

  What can we predict about the next wave of justice figures? By examining the trends seen in serial vigilante fiction — such as the recent reprints and revivals, trends seen during the '90s and beyond, the effect of the September 11 terrorist attacks, the rise of the female serial vigilante and the supernatural serial vigilante — it will be possible to predict something of the nature of this next wave of justice figures.

  Reprints and Revivals

  One of the factors that led to the advent of the serial vigilantes were the reprints and revivals of the pulp heroes during the 1960s, as evidenced by the reprints of Doc Savage, the new adventures of the Shadow and television shows based on the Saint and the Green Hornet. Today, the pulps seem to undergoing another revival with the new adventures of Captain Hazzard as well as new reprints of Doc Savage, the Shadow and the Phantom Detective. Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril takes pulp creators William Gibson (the Shadow) and Lester Dent (Doc Savage) and sets them on an adventure worthy of their creations. Has there been a similar revival for the serial vigilantes? Ignoring British editions of series like the Executioner, the Destroyer, and The Death Merchant, which were licensed to British publishers within a few years of original publication, there are very few reprints. Leisure books reprinted Chet Cunningham's first eight Penetrator novels in 1991, which, by coincidence, was the same year as the unauthorized film The Firing Line starring Reb Brown as Mark Hardin. In 2000, Eagle One Media offered the Penetrator series as ebooks. Pinnacle Books reissued William Johnstone's Rig Warrior series in 2001.

  The collection The Best of the Destroyer was printed in 2007 by Tor Books to help promote their original Destroyer novels and reprinted three early Destroyer novels. The Tor Destroyers novels, billed as the New Destroyer, can be considered a revival of the Destroyer series which had been seen as mishandled under the former publisher Gold Eagle and ignored many of the later books in that publisher's run.

  There have been several other revivals of serial vigilante franchises. Knight Rider went through several failed revivals with the torch-passing Knight Rider 2000, the irrelevant Knight Rider 2010 and the short-lived series Team Knight Rider and a new television movie in 2008 with Michael Knight's son, a former Army Ranger, taking a new car and continuing the fight for justice.

  The Punisher, after the cancellation of his three series in 1995, went through several unsuccessful revivals including making the Punisher the head of a Mafia family (Marvel Edge imprint) and an angelic demon hunter (Purgatory mini-series) until Garth Ennis took over the character with the Welcome Back Frank mini-series in 2000 for the Marvel Knights imprint. Ennis returned the character to his street-level roots and added a dark humor to the character which revived the character's popularity and spawned a two new series and several specials and served as a partial basis for the 2004 movie. The 2004 movie updated the character's origin from serving the Vietnam War to serving in the first Gulf War in Kuwait and further expanded the character's popularity.

  Other recent movies have followed the trend of updating the character's back stories so that Bob Lee Swagger's Vietnam sniper experience in the novel Point of Contact was updated to black ops sniping in Africa for the movie version Shooter. A similar transformation took place with The Specialist movie and the novel series that inspired it, with Vietnam veteran Jack Sullivan becoming explosives expert Ray Quick, who served in Nicaragua. Similarly, the entire plot of the movie Death Sentence was updated and the characters changed to move away from the Death Wish film series. The novel Death Sentence was a sequel to the novel Death Wish, which formed the basis of the film series. How a proposed remake of Death Wish will update and alter the movie is to be seen. With Hollywood's tendency to turn old television series into movies, it is expected that many serial vigilante television series will make the jump to the big screen. It remains to be seen what, if any, changes these movies make to the original series.

  Female Serial Vigilantes

  During the 1970s, we saw many female serial vigilantes in series such as The Baroness (Baroness Penelope St. John Orsini), Black Swan (Shauna Bishop) and the Girl Factory (Su-Lin Kelly). The movie industry was not far behind with the adventures of blaxploitation heroines such as Coffy, Foxy Brown, TNT Jackson and Cleopatra Jones. In more recent times we have seen the rise of female serial vigilantes such as Tomb Raider (Lara Croft), Black Scorpion (Darcy Walker), Relic Hunter (Sydney Fox) and Rogue Angel (Annja Creed). The 2007 film The Brave One offers us a female version of the serial vigilante, starring Jodie Foster as Erica Bain, a DJ who lost her fiance in an attack.

  In recent world conflicts such as both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, women have been in combat situations; as a result there are more women with combat training and experience in society. As current fiction shows, more characters with modern combat experience may see more female characters taking on a serial vigilante role.

  The 1990s

  After the high point of the 1980s, many of the characters that debuted during that period stopped publication, but new serial vigilante series continued to be created and published.

  Kasner's Black Ops and Johnstone's Codename series debuted in novels during this time. Both series offered teams funded by elite groups to tackle worldwide terrorism and other unpunishable crimes.

  But the 1990s saw many more serial vigilante television series such as Hack, Pretender, and Soldier of Fortune/Special Ops Force (SOF). Black Scorpion, Relic Hunter and Vengeance Unlimited also debuted. This was also the decade that saw three attempted revivals of the Knight Rider franchise the television movies Knight Rider 2000 and Knight Rider 2010 and television series Team Knight Rider.


  Perhaps the most influential of the serial vigilantes from that decade didn't originate in any of those formats but debuted in a video game. Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, started as a video game but quickly spread into other media with a comic book series, two movies and several original and adapted novels. The character paved the way for other female adventuring archeologists, such as Sydney Fox Relic Hunter, Annja Creed, Rogue Angel, and Abbey Chase of Danger Girl.

  September 11, 2001

  It may have been expected the terrorist attacks of September 2001 might have launched a new wave of serial vigilantes avenging the deaths of their families at the hands of terrorist attacks. But this didn't happen.

  One factor in the rise of the serial vigilante during the 1960s was the belief that the system wasn't working. The events of September 2001 made the police and firefighters of New York City heroes whose efforts showed that the system did work. To go outside of that would be seen as an insult to the men and women who gave their lives in this crisis. Mack Maloney's Superhawks were created in response to the September 11 attacks and featured a team of ex-military personnel, all of whom had lost loved ones in those attacks, tracking down and killing the people responsible for September 11 and preventing further attacks.

  Often heroes have military background. Many western heroes served in the Civil War; the pulp heroes had a similar background with World War I. Most spies of the Cold War started in either World War II or the Korean War. Many serial vigilantes started out in the Vietnam War.

  We see this trend continue with the military crime series JAG and NCIS. Detectives such as Elliot Stabler and Robert Goren from the Law and Order franchises Special Victims Unit and Criminal Intent, Colby Granger from Numbers, Det. Bobby "Fearless" Smith from Boomtown all have prior military service. Perhaps our new wave of serial vigilantes will find their training grounds in the war on terror, and the frustration of hunting terrorists who remain elusive despite the large-scale manhunts.

  We only need to look at how earlier heroes were updated to suggest the origins of new serial vigilantes. When the Pulp hero The Spider was updated and slightly revised to become the serial vigilante known as Spider, his military service changed from World War I to the Korean War. In a similar fashion the origins of the various incarnations of the Punisher have similarly updated the various conflicts. In the original conception, Frank Castle was a Vietnam veteran. The 2004 movie updated this and had Frank Castle serving in Kuwait during the first Gulf War and then later joining the FBI. The Kuwait back story was removed from the original release of the Punisher movie but was retained in the novelization and restored in the extended cut of that film.

  The latest batch of serial vigilantes had similar new origins. Home Team's members served in both Bosnia and the first Gulf War. Two of Kasner's Black Ops team members also served in the first Gulf War. William Johnstone's one-man Black Ops team, Art Jenson (a direct descendant of Johnstone's western hero, Smoke Jensen), had served in Iraq. While Invasion USA's Tom Brennan is a Vietnam veteran, many of those who have assisted him had fought in Desert Storm and the Afghanistan conflicts.

  Additionally, we have seen the rise of the revenge film, Man on Fire, Kill Bill Vol. 1 &2 coming out at the same time as the 2004 Punisher movie. Interestingly, these can be seen as a harkening back to the earlier period. The Kill Bill movies are Tarantino's homage to the spaghetti westerns and martial arts movies of the 1970s. The Punisher is a version of a '70s comic book character and a remake of a 1989 film. Man on Fire is based on A.J. Quinell's 1980 novel of the same name and is also a remake of the 1987 movie, which was also based on the book.

  This trend has been continued with revenge/vigilante films such as The Marine, The Brave One, Shooter, Death Sentence and a new Punisher film, Punisher War Zone. While The Marine and The Brave One are original movies, the other films were adapted from older literary sources. The Punisher has been covered above; Death Sentence is adapted from Brian Garfield's 1975 sequel to Death Wish of the same name; Shooter is based on Stephen Hunter's 1993 novel Point of Contact.

  Private Security Firms

  In both Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been an increased reliance on private military contractors, such as Blackwater Worldwide, to provide security and military forces. These private military forces may form the basis of new series where members of these forces fight terrorism and crime. Private military forces have appeared in fiction but primarily in the role of villains, such as in the 2008 pilot movie for Knight Rider where operatives from Darkwater Security are trying to steal the new Knight Industries 3000, or in CSI Miami episode, "Guerillas in the Mist," where Paragon Security has been hired by the government to kill gunrunners with a weapon called "the Vaporizer"; the CSI team must track and bring these killers to justice.

  Supernatural Serial Vigilantes

  Often, the fight against the evil that humanity does has not been enough; several serial vigilantes have taken the fight from the natural realm to the supernatural. During the 1970s and 1980s, there were several series devoted to supernatural serial vigilantes. In these cases, supernatural horrors replaced the mundane Mafia and terrorists. In some cases, our hero may have mild supernatural abilities; in others, he may be able to harness the supernatural for his ends, but often these are battles of the natural against the supernatural. These can be seen in series such as Lory's Dracula, The Satan Sleuth, Chill, Sabat and Night Hunter.

  In 1998, the Punisher went through a supernatural phase in a four-issue Marvel Knights mini-series titled Purgatory. In the story Frank Castle has committed suicide and is sent back with blessed guns to hunt demons. This supernatural version included a revision of the Punisher's origin where a skull-faced demon gets all the souls of the people the Punisher has killed. This supernatural aspect has largely been ignored in the current incarnations of the character, although Garth Ennis did allude to it in his Punisher Born mini-series. This appeared at the same time as the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed and Angel. While the supernatural version of the Punisher was not successful, it was not until 2005 that we saw new supernatural serial vigilantes. Supernatural gave us the adventures of Sam and Dean Winchester, brothers traveling America and fighting supernatural forces that they were trained by their ex-Marine father to fight. The Rogue Angel series combined the female adventuring archaeologist with fighting the supernatural.

  Conclusion

  Injustice will always exist in society, and art will always seek to explore the issues of society. In recent years there has been an increased interest in serial vigilante characters, with a number of revenge/vigilante films. Just as the success of various revivals of pulp heroes showed there was a market for the serial vigilante, the success of these revivals of serial vigilantes shows that there is a market for a new breed of justice figures. This new breed will likely be bred in combat for the war on terror as the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan has several similarities to Vietnam and its role in the war on communism.

  This new breed may include a higher proportion of women, as women have taken on larger roles in both the military and the police in the last forty years, including service in combat zones, although just how big this proportion will be is dependent on how successful the first few of these female new breed are.

  If the trend seen in the '90s continues, the new breed's adventures will most likely be recorded in either film series or television series; there will be a few new paperback series as well as comic book series. It may be that the more successful film or television series will be adapted in the other mediums. We can see this happening now as the Rogue Angel novel series has been adapted into the comic format.

  The origins of the new breed will be similar to their serial vigilante predecessors. Some will lose loved ones in a terrorist attack; others will find that their loved ones will die at the hands of street gangs. Others will find themselves attacked personally either in the form of a physical attack or having their reputation attacked through trumped-up charges. All will begin a personal w
ar.

  The foes fought by the new breed will range from street-level criminals such as muggers and drug dealers through to terrorists. While the Mafia has become a spent force, organized crime in the form of prostitution rings and drug cartels is still a major force in criminal circles. Some of the new breed will venture into fighting the supernatural.

  The new breed will be as different from the serial vigilantes as the serial vigilantes were from the pulp heroes that preceded them. They will share elements of the justice figure. Some series, like the President's Man and Invasion USA, will be regarded as transition series where the Vietnam era serial vigilante hands over the fight to the war on terror's new breed.

  Bibliography

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  Contemporary Authors On-Line (2007)- Retrieved September 20, 2007, from http://infotrac.gale-group.com

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