For this Saturday’s light-hearted and escapist superhero post, here’s a look at the gamma-powered Doc Samson, a potentially great character that Marvel Comics never quite managed correctly.
Almost as strong as the Hulk, possessed of an MD and a PhD, this guy should have been placed in the Defenders the minute they stopped having the Hulk as a regular team member. Say, around Defenders #103 (January 1982).
INCREDIBLE HULK Vol 1 #141 (July 1971)
Title: His Name is … Samson
Comment: General Thunderbolt Ross is desperate to cure his daughter Betty from her current state of being trapped in an immobile glass form. (Betty wound up like that after a blood transfusion from the supervillain the Sandman 3 issues earlier.)
General Ross has called in the brilliant Doctor Leonard Samson (formerly Leonard Skivorski, Jr), as yet non-superpowered. Dr. Samson devises technology which can convert a certain type of gamma radiation into a cure for Betty, but the Hulk must be captured to obtain that radiation.
Samson is a psychiatrist on top of being a physicist, and he uses a psychiatric approach to revert the cornered Hulk back into Bruce Banner temporarily. Leonard explains his plans to cure Betty of her glass state AND cure Bruce of being the Hulk, and Banner agrees to cooperate.
In a laboratory, Dr. Samson triggers the restrained Bruce Banner’s transformation into the Hulk, and uses his Cathexis Ray Generator to drain all of that gamma energy from him, curing Bruce of being the Hulk permanently. Next, Samson uses a tiny fraction of the stored gamma energy to turn Betty Ross back into her normal human state.
After a few days of caring for both Bruce and Betty as his patients, Leonard uses the leftover gamma radiation in the Cathexis Ray Generator to turn himself into the super-powered Doc Samson. By controlling the radiation, Leonard kept his human form and intelligence, unlike Bruce when he became the Hulk. As a side-effect his hair grows long and green. Continue reading
The Frontierado Holiday is about the myth of the Old West, not the grinding reality. The Danites – the gunslinging Knights of the Mormon faith – are an underutilized and underappreciated element of Old West fiction. 
In Deseret itself there were conflicts with Mexican raiders after the end of America’s war with Mexico (1846-1848). Danites would also be called upon to battle various Native American tribes in Deseret, in the role of oppressors rather than oppressed much of the time. 
63. Some of the Fool Killer’s targets in the April of 1913 edition of James Larkin Pearson’s Fool-Killer: 
Those were the days when not even the elected officials owned by wealthy families like the Morgans accumulated anywhere near as much money as those who owned them. Think of today’s abusive and repulsive families like the Bidens, Cheneys, Pelosis, Bushes, Clintons, Romneys and so many others from both political parties who have COMBINED obscene wealth with political influence to be sold. They plunder the public treasury while making shady money on the side and breaking laws that the rest of us are expected to abide by. 
*** Forever chaotic Mexico. The Revolution of 1910 led to the final downfall of decades-long dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1911. Diaz’s reform replacement, Francisco Madero, was overthrown and arrested by Victoriano Huerta, who had just had Madero killed in 1913. The Fool-Killer bitingly observed “They sure don’t waste any time in Mexico deliberating over what to do with their ex-presidents.” 
BOSTON – Warren Fremont Upson, better known by his one-word nickname, was one of the Pony Express Riders aka Expressmen to ride with the service for its entire existence from April 3rd, 1860 to October 26th, 1861. His real name was so seldom used in the old west that in some sources on Pony Express history he was listed only as “Boston.” 
Our hero spent most of his time riding and exploring in the Sierra Nevadas, hunting and cooking his own food and acquiring a familiarity with the mountain range’s often-treacherous curves and turns and sudden drops. That familiarity would pay dividends later in life when Boston was assigned to the most geographically dangerous route of the Pony Express. 
Well, after last week’s 
CONAN THE BARBARIAN Vol 1 #58 (January 1976) 
This blog post will review the first meeting of Conan and Belit, then Marvel’s depiction of their first shared adventure (featuring an imaginative “fan theory” regarding why Conan was also called Amra) and finally, the sorrowful finale of the longest romance of our Cimmerian’s life. 
MURDERCYCLE (1999) – Okay, I want a Ghost Rider vs Murdercycle film! ESPECIALLY with Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider. Anyway, despite the title, this movie is a nice throwback to the days before so many low-budget filmmakers were trying to be intentionally over-the-top and campy with their productions and titles in hopes of garnering sales from a reputation for being so-bad-it’s-good. 
Let’s take this from the top – an object from space lands near a Top Secret government facility concealed within a seeming shack in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a meteor but an alien weapon and when a man on a dirt bike draws near the fallen object he falls victim to its jack-in-the-box/ face-hugger tech. 
DUTCH HENRY – Henry Borne, spelled Bourne in some sources and Born in others, was born on July 2nd, 1849 in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. His parents were fresh from Germany and the old “Deutsch-Dutch” confusion on the part of non-German speakers led to Borne’s eventual nickname Dutch Henry. 
Come 1874 and Dutch Henry was living on the Texas Panhandle. He was on hand at the storied Adobe Walls store called Myers & Leonard’s when the Second Battle of Adobe Walls began on the morning of June 27th. A combined force of several hundred Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa warriors attacked, led by Comanche Chief Quanah Parker (at right). 
THE SICKLE OF FIRE (1896) – Written by Charles Kelsey Gaines, an American author who set this particular short story in British Columbia. The main characters are our narrator and a scientist named O.D. McKazy.
FARMER PEEL – Gunslinger Langford Peel got the nickname “Farmer” Peel through the same sense of irony that earns some tall people the nickname Shorty and some fat people the nickname Slim. Peel was always well-dressed and smooth-tongued and the furthest thing away from the image of a Farmer that you could get among the high-stakes gambler/ gunslingers of his era. 
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