Balladeer’s Blog continues reviewing the 1927 book Trader Horn, the quasi-autobiographical account of the British Trade Agent Alfred Aloysius Horn’s adventures in Africa during the late 1800s. The partially factual book spawned multiple movies. For Part One click HERE.
PART THREE – Trader Horn’s skills at bartering and deal-making with the indigenous people grew as he acquired more and more experience. His account always expressed his awe at the high populations of animal life throughout the region in the 1870s-1880s.
Gorillas were plentiful enough to live in what Horn and his fellow Trade Agents called colonies. It was from observing gorillas that humans had learned to break open the huge water vines to drink the water inside. Alfred was always grateful for the way this practice allowed one to make one’s water supply last longer on extended journeys through the jungle. The water from the vines was clean enough to avoid dysentery, too. Continue reading
YOUNG MEN Vol 1 #24 (December 1953) 
Synopsis: Steve Rogers aka Captain America is now teaching at a prep school called the Lee School in a New York suburb. James Buchanan Barnes aka Bucky is one of his students. In old school comic book disregard for the passage of time, Bucky is still that young despite having been a teen in 1941. 
PART TWO – Aboard the S.S. Angola, the teenaged Alfred Horn approached Africa on his first assignment as a Trade Agent for the firm of Hatson & Cookson, whose business operated from Bonny Brass to Old Calabar and up the Niger River as well as coastal ports along Cameroon. 
BLACK LIGHTNING Vol 1 #1 (April 1977) 
Jefferson Pierce was a gifted athlete from high school on up and even won medals in the Olympics. Disdaining celebrity, he became a teacher and ultimately moved back to the slums where he grew up and taught at Garfield High. 
TRADER HORN (1927) – This book was the quasi-autobiographical account of Alfred Aloysius Horn (1854-1931), a British trader in Africa during the 1800s. Ethelreda Lewis added pertinent commentary to each chapter. 
This weekend’s light-hearted and escapist superhero post from Balladeer’s Blog is a Double Feature. The main event is a look at the early adventures of Marvel’s neglected hero El Aguila (the Eagle). 
EL AGUILA 
Through trial and error, Alejandro found that long, slender metal objects were the best conductors for his bioelectricity and gave him the most accuracy with his energy blasts. He began using a sword through which to shoot his rays but to conceal his mutant nature publicly pretended his swords contained micro-generators that accounted for the rays he projected. 
THE VIOLET FLAME (1899) – Here is another of the science fiction works written by THE Frederick Thomas Jane, of Jane’s Guides fame. Previously, Balladeer’s Blog reviewed Jane’s works 
CAPITAO SETE (Captain Seven) 
Recently, a Balladeer’s Blog reader asked if I would compile a list of my “Best of” stories of the 1930s and 1940s pulp hero G-8 and his Battle Aces. That idea makes perfect sense considering I reviewed all 110 book-length stories of this World War One flying ace who should be as big culturally as Doc Savage, Zorro, and so many other pulp icons. 
THE BAT STAFFEL (October 1933) – The very first G-8 pulp novel is at the top of my list. Not only does it nicely capture the tone and nature of the series, but it introduces the villainous mad scientist Doktor Krueger. That Teutonic terror would become the archenemy of G-8, Bull Martin and Nippy Weston as the series of novels rolled along. 
ACTION COMICS Vol 1 #1 (June 1938) 
Superman takes down a wife-beater, saves Lois Lane from horny gangsters and clears a woman falsely convicted of murder by tying up the real killer – and even smashing his way into the governor’s mansion to make him call off her imminent execution. 
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