The Granddaddy of Masked Heroes: Jimmy Dale — The Gray Seal

By D. K. Latta

Superhero movies and TV shows are big box office these days, with their roots in comic books. While comic book superheroes were inspired by the pulp magazine mystery men that preceded them. The themes and tropes and archetypes relating to superheroes and masked mystery men are so much a part of 20th and 21st Century pop culture it’s almost hard to realize the clichés must have originated somewhere — and with someone.

And if you follow heroic blood lines through musty old tales you’ll eventually arrive at one Jimmie Dale — a.k.a. the Gray Seal — as the seminal inspiration.

You might never have heard the name — certainly I hadn’t until a few years ago. And I don’t want to poach much from the works of others, so I encourage you — once you’re done here — to prowl around the Internet and you’ll find others who’ve written about the character and his author. But I want to pique your interest — and to delve into some of the texts themselves (namely The Adventures of Jimmie Dale, The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale, and Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue — the three books I’ve read) to consider their influence on the masked mystery man field. And, equally, the ways in which the character stands as unique.

Created by Canadian writer, Frank L. Packard, back in 1914, the Jimmie Dale stories pre-date not only comic book superheroes, and pulp heroes like The Shadow and The Spider, but even (if only by a couple of years) Zorro — with only The Scarlet Pimpernel anticipating him. How much Packard and his creation directly influenced later creations, and how much it was just like minds arriving at similar ends we probably can’t say for sure — nor whether a later writer might have been inspired by a character unaware that character had been inspired by Jimmie Dale.

What we can say is that in his day Jimmie Dale spawned multiple stories, at least one silent film serial (which I suspect no longer exists), and as late as the 1950s apparently Walt Disney himself had been interested in producing a TV series based on the character.


So before we get too far: who was Jimmie Dale?

Jimmie Dale was a wealthy young man-about-town — part of, and perhaps inspiring, a long tradition of wealthy crime fighters that includes The Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, The Spider, Batman, and non-masked crime fighters like Peter Wimsey and Paul Temple. Although whether that reflects a certain snobbish elitism, or simply that it’s easier to fight crime if you don’t have to punch a 9-to-5 clock, it’s but one of the many ways the character helped establish an archetype — he even had a loyal butler, Jason, and chauffeur, Benson, although neither fully aware of what their master was getting up to.

And just what was he getting up to?

Thwarting the plans of evil doers under the guise of The Gray Seal — that’s what. Oh, and before you snicker too hard, no, Jimmie didn’t don flippers and trounce villains by bouncing a rubber ball off his nose (although that certainly would’ve been unique). In this case “seal” refers to a signature mark or stamp — The Gray Seal identified as such because he would leave a grey diamond-shape stamp to identify his involvement in a case. In that we can see echoes of The Scarlet Pimpernel (or the Brown Pumpernickel to any Canadian readers of a certain age!).

His gimmick was that he was an expert lock-pick and safe cracker (who carried his pick-locks, along with his box of seals, in a special girdle he wore under his clothes — shades of Batman’s utility belt). The Gray Seal’s only signature visual accoutrement was a black silk mask (with a lot of early pulp and radio “mystery men” the details of any costume were often vague, their signature look — Zorro’s all black ensemble, the Green Hornet & Kato’s green trenchcoat & black chauffeur’s uniform — only being entrenched once they started appearing in films and comics; indeed one infers often the creators weren’t picturing a distinctive ensemble since sometimes the characters can dodge pursuers simply by removing their masks).


But wait! We’re just getting started.

The Gray Seal was a notorious criminal, which might suggest he owed a nod to the class of gentleman thief anti-heroes such as A.J. Raffles. And though Raffles might well have been an inspiration, the catch here was that The Gray Seal’s criminality was entirely an act, better to allow him to operate on the fringes of society and butt heads with the underworld. The idea of a mysterious hero hunted by the police is, of course, a staple of the genre. And in deliberately cultivating a false image of a criminal, The Gray Seal can surely be seen as having anticipated The Green Hornet who likewise pretended to be a criminal to better catch criminals.

It helped to ratchet up the suspense as he was frequently caught between the rock of gangland (“Death to The Gray Seal!” went up the refrain) and the hard place of the law (who proclaimed “The Gray Seal, Dead or Alive — but The Gray Seal!”)

And then to season the mix, Jimmie Dale employed other aliases to prowl around sleazy dives and opium dens — initially that of a low level crook and drug fiend nicknamed Larry the Bat and later as Smarlinghue, another junkie, but this time a struggling artist. The apartments used by Larry and Smarlinghue were named “The Sanctuary” — seeming to foreshadow the idea of such heroes having some covert base from which they operate.

The use of multiple identities foreshadows such a ruse employed by The Shadow as well as comic book characters like Moon Knight and Batman (who in addition to being Bruce Wayne has been known to disguise himself as low-level mobster “Matches” Malone). But even more intriguing is calling the character Larry “the Bat,” and describing him as a sinister figure who slouched through the shadows under the brim of a wide hat. It’s not hard to imagine that image of Larry the Bat might well have inspired The Shadow and The Spider. And the use of “the Bat” designation might have inspired later bat-named pulp characters (including The Bat and I believe two separate Black-Bats) and, in turn, Batman himself (it’s not really clear why Larry is even nicknamed “the Bat”).

Now if you’re familiar with the Jimmie Dale stories you’re probably squirming impatiently in your chair, wondering why I’m not writing about a key element of the stories. So wait no more as this all brings us to…The Tocsin!

Because one of the most interesting things about the stories is that though Jimmie Dale is our central protagonist, viewed another way he’s also a secondary character. For Jimmie Dale’s adventure — especially in the early stories — are often directed by a mysterious woman known as The Tocsin!

The origin of Jimmie’s life of adventure and heroism is that he is independently wealthy due to his family having made a fortune from designing safes — and is pretty much a deft hand at cracking any safe he puts his mind to. As a lark, he started sneaking around, breaking into safes just to test himself (with no larceny intended). But then he receives a mystery letter threatening him with exposure if he does not do as the letter writer bids — which involves preventing actual crimes. Despite this initial blackmail, Jimmie comes to enjoy these mysterious missives (which are addressed “Dear Philanthropic Crook”) and their life-or-death assignments — and he becomes infatuated with the unseen female letter writer.

The Tocsin’s letters provide a quick and convenient way to get Jimmie involved in his adventures (the letters serving an analogous function to Batman’s bat-signal). And they provide a narrative crutch for Packard, as often the cases are more a mystery to the reader than they are to Jimmie as he reads The Tocsin’s letters, but we readers are only permitted brief snippets from them, enough to foreshadow what’s to come without spoiling it all. (Later Packard relies less on these conveniences in crafting Jimmie’s adventures). They also weave an eerie mystery throughout the early tales as Jimmie — and the reader — is left to wonder who The Tocsin is and how can she possibly know all the things she knows? As well, it invests the stories with an emotional — and romantic — thread as Jimmie pines for this unseen holder of his heart and worries for her safety.


It’s an interesting gender dynamic, with a smart and canny female who plots and plans his adventures (though this reliance on The Tocsin becomes less relevant in later books). But even this can be seen as a possible pulp progenitor. For The Tocsin/Jimmie relationship has an echo of the later relationship between The Shadow and his agents. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Tocsin knows!” — to riff on The Shadow’s tag line — while Jimmie carries out her instructions. This comparison to The Shadow is especially vivid in the novella-length story, “The Woman in the Case,” where Jimmie meets up with another man acting for The Tocsin. Even though it’s just a one-time situation, it opens up the creative possibilities of a mysterious crime-fighter running a network of agents.

Although to be fair, The Scarlet Pimpernel also had a group of volunteers to do his bidding.

Now since I (and others before me) are making the case that The Gray Seal is the granddaddy of the mystery man hero, but The Scarlet Pimpernel pre-dates him by about a decade, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the two.

It’s certainly reasonable to infer The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (1905) had an influence on The Gray Seal. Both are named for their chosen symbol and scenes of Jimmie skulking through the Bowery evoke a similar “enemy territory” paranoia as the Pimpernel operating in Revolutionary-era France.

The Pimpernel largely established the trope of the foppish dandy who is really a heroic man-of-action (inspiring Zorro and evolving into such iterations as the “mild mannered reporter” and the “bored playboy”) something not especially employed in the characterization of Jimmie. But equally the Pimpernel was more historical revolutionary than urban crime-fighter — more Robin Hood than Batman. And he was more an abstract idea than a physical presence; Sir Percy Blakeney didn’t have a specific mask or costume that identified him as the “damned, elusive” Pimpernel. Whereas Jimmie did have a mask giving The Gray Seal a physical presence.

Another aspect that occurs to me is that in both The Scarlet Pimpernel and in Zorro there could be a certain aloofness to how the central character was portrayed, presenting scenes from other characters’ perspective and not always showing us the inner thoughts of the titular hero — in the first Zorro novel, The Curse of Capistrano (The All-Story Weekly, August 9 – September 6, 1919), the story cuts coyly between Zorro and Don Diego without ever explicitly identifying them as the same man! Whereas in the Jimmie Dale stories Jimmie is front and centre, his emotions, his motives, his joys and sorrows, are very much the focus — so it could be argued that the Jimmie Dale stories were the first stories about a masked hero in which the reader is meant to identify with the man, rather than the mask. (The emphasis on Jimmie’s emotions and angst probably finds one of its closest pulp-era descendants in The Spider stories).

Though the fact that his books were marketed as the adventures of Jimmie Dale rather than as the exploits of The Gray Seal further indicates just how early in the evolution of this particular sub-genre they were — before publishers were ready to embrace the nom du crime-fighting as the thing that would send copies flying off the shelves.

So just to re-cap: we have a wealthy dilettante-by-day, masked crime-fighter by night, with a sinister, broad-hatted alias nicknamed The Bat, who acts as an agent for a mysterious, seeming all-knowing figure, is summoned into action by a signal (a letter), carries a signature tool belt, operates out of a “Sanctuary,” leaves a “calling card,” and cultivates a reputation as a criminal while actually fighting crime — all beginning in 1914!

So was almost the entire genre of mystery men and, later, superheroes, erected upon the foundation stones laid down by Frank L. Packard and Jimmie and The Tocsin? Or were there enough other earlier inspirations — from Sherlock Holmes to Raffles to The Scarlet Pimpernel to Tarzan — that someone else would’ve eventually put the pieces together if not Packard?

But though I’ve focused on the ways the Jimmie Date stories established so many conventions of the genre, and may have inspired specific characters, perhaps equally interesting is some of the differences.

One aspect is Jimmie’s morality — and his reluctance to kill. Jimmie does carry a gun, but rarely uses it, and only then generally just to frighten, not to actually hit anyone (an explicit moral choice — especially in scenes where shooting his way out of a situation would be the easiest solution). In the third book, Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue, he does contemplate a kill-or-be-killed showdown with his nemesis — but it never comes to that. Early superheroes and pulp heroes varied in their predilection for lethal force, so I’m not sure Jimmie’s morality can simply be dismissed as a natural product of its time.

It isn’t that Jimmie is entirely soft-hearted — some villains who he defeats face the death penalty and he can be contemptuous of the bad guys. Yet equally there are scenes of him standing sadly over a dead crook lamenting the loss of a life, or valiantly trying to staunch the bleeding of a mortally wounded killer, or risking his own safety to protect a criminal for whom he feels responsible. Themes that seem to get more pronounced as the stories progress, as if possibly reflecting Packard’s own evolving thoughts on them. (And in a refreshing contrast to so many modern “heroes,” Jimmie doesn’t go in for torture, generally eliciting information he needs via other methods).

This maybe relates to a core tone of the stories and of Jimmie and The Tocsin’s motives. Namely that whereas most detectives/masked heroes are fundamentally avengers, swooping in after the fact to punish the evil-doers, by virtue of The Tocsin’s uncanny prescience Jimmie was often trying to interrupt a crime, even prevent it from occurring in the first place. As such he was more a defender than an avenger, trying to stop bad things from happening (albeit not always succeeding), and making sure the innocent aren’t wrongly implicated (a number of stories involve someone in danger of being framed for a crime they didn’t do). Jimmie and The Tocsin were very much protectors of the little guy, as it were.

It’s also worth noting that Jimmie falls into the category of the reluctant hero in the sense that his driving motive is to protect The Tocsin rather than simply a glib love of action. His intention being that once her safety is guaranteed he can give up being The Gray Seal. Yet rather than this diminishing his nobility, it accentuates it — because he is still fundamentally altruistic, more than once sacrificing his chance at personal happiness (and at being united with The Tocsin) in order to help others in more immediate danger.

Perhaps by virtue of following in the early footsteps of Sherlock Holmes and Raffles, Jimmie’s stories are a bit low-key compared to later pulp adventurers. They are full of adventure and breathless escapes, no mistake, but rooted in robberies and blackmail rather than the over-the-top citywide crimewaves, mad scientists, and zombie armies that would often bedevil later pulp heroes. (Notable exceptions are when Jimmie takes on the sinister Crime Club towards the end of the first volume, and the elusive, master-of-disguise, the Phantom, in a later volume).


And that perhaps brings us to a significant characteristic that distinguishes the Jimmie Dale stories from many later pulp heroes. The emphasis on the Bowery — the territory below the “dead line” (a term I’ve heard different origins for and which Packard uses to mean the demarcation between the decent part of town and the crime infested ghetto, the “Bad Lands” as he labels it). The whole reason Larry the Bat and Smarlinghue are such important parts of Jimmie’s crime-fighting arsenal is because he spends a lot of time in that part of town. Whereas a lot of later masked crime-fighters tended to make their preferred stomping grounds the concrete canyons and penthouse suites of up-town.

There’s a kind of proto-noir vibe, investing the stories with a Dickensian ambience, or maybe Damon Runyon-esque, conjuring overcrowded tenements, narrow streets where half-naked children play, and dingy pawn shops. A world where everyone has a colourful nickname (the Wowzer, Gentleman Laroque, Silver Mags, Blind Peter), and where even the crooks live in sad, dilapidated rooms surrounded by broken furniture (and possibly broken dreams). It’s a no man’s land of criminals and grifters but with its own codes, its own hierarchy, and its own relationships.

On one hand it can seem a bit reactionary with Packard envisioning slums where pretty much everyone is a crook or involved in criminal shenanigans. Yet on the other hand, there is an element of compassion to how he views that world. We learn The Tocsin gives money to needy families whose bread-winner is away in prison, and in some tales Jimmie’s actions exonerate inhabitants of the Bad Lands from being wrongly accused. While Larry the Bat and Smarlinghue function as they do because they are on cordial terms with many below the dead line. Later pulp and superhero tales tend to draw upon the underworld simply for villains and menace, while Packard — at least to an extent — acknowledges it is inhabited by human beings, too.

Perhaps the oddest mystery about the Jimmie Dale stories is that they have fallen into such obscurity…because they’re actually pretty good.

In some ways the Jimmie Dale stories are more literary versions of pulp stories. Later pulp hero adventure writers often affected a deliberately stripped down, just-the-essentials style, whereas Packard’s prose can seem more descriptive, more full of palpable atmosphere, and imbued with deeper emotional gravitas. The writing style is definitely a product of its era — lots of long paragraphs, and convoluted sentences with multiple clauses in a way that wouldn’t be passed by an editor now. Yet unlike some older writers, it’s still eminently readable today — vivid with much energy and verve in the prose. The chapters clip along with alacrity making for snappy reads.

Granted sometimes the century old underworld slang can be a bit head scratching (whether authentic to its day — I think Packard actually did ride-alongs in police cars for research — or made up). But equally part of the appeal is this distinctly historical flavour (such as references to sputtering gaslight) which lends it a slightly different ambience from the more familiar pulp adventurers circa the mid-20th Century. Some uses of language are even surprising: including a couple of dialogue passages where a character ironically finishes a seeming affirmative statement with a sarcastic “Not!” — which I assumed only became en vogue circa the late 20th Century!

Reading old stories you can run up against dated or problematic racial and ethnic attitudes. And there’s some of that in these stories — Chinese opium dens, or occasional villains with Jewish-sounding surnames, or an effeminate, seeming gay, crook (it’s not that depicting such characters is inherently offensive, it’s when such characters only ever appear as villains that you can wonder if there’s an agenda). Still it’s mostly undercurrents at worst (and innocent of intent at best) and minor compared to many contemporaneous writers. And although significant female characters aren’t abundant in the tales, the cunning and resilience of The Tocsin (and Jimmie’s acceptance of same) makes her a surprisingly modern heroine.

Author Frank L. Packard was Canadian, which is a bit of trivia I find especially intriguing as a Canadian myself and being interested in pop cultural history. And unlike some other seminal Canadian contributors to early western pop culture (Hollywood pioneers like Mack Sennett and Mary Pickford, comic strip/comic book luminaries like Hal Foster and Joe Shuster) Packard didn’t emigrate but remained a Canadian (at least he’s buried in Canada). Nor were the adventures of Jimmie his only literary success. He wrote many other novels and stories — including stories inspired by his time working for the Canadian Pacific Railroad. But the Jimmie Dale stories were set explicitly in New York, USA, presumably because that was where the market was (I don’t know if there were any Canadian magazines at the time that would’ve published such crime-adventure tales).

Although one wonders if you can infer a Canadian influence (beyond the occasional, minor reference to Canada in the stories). Putting too much stock in national or cultural stereotypes is, I think, problematic and prone to fallacy. Still, it’s part of the “game” of literary analysis. So is it possible Jimmie’s reluctance to kill and generally amiable demeanour was a reflection of some innate Canadian “niceness” on Packard’s part (in contrast with the guns-blazing American mystery men who followed him)? Could the fact The Tocsin’s nickname derives from a French inscription Jimmie finds on her ring (Sonnez le Tocsin! or “Sound the alarm!”) and her real name is Marie LaSalle be because to the Montréal-born Packard it was just instinctive to throw in French references? Even his decision to name his hero The Gray Seal can be viewed as suggestive. A grey seal is an animal, so why didn’t Packard select a less confusing moniker? Why not The Purple Seal? Or The Gray Stamp? Since it’s reasonable to infer Packard was influenced in the naming department by The Scarlet Pimpernel — a British hero named for flora — is it possible the Canadian Packard, writing his hero for the American market, decided to throw in a coy Canadian double meaning for the name? (Yes, I realize grey seals aren’t unique to Canada, but wild life often assumes national associations — the “Canadian” beaver, the “American” bald eagle; if Marvel Comics were to announce a seal-motif superhero, wouldn’t most readers anticipate it being a member of their Canadian team, Alpha Flight, rather than The Avengers?)

A quirky bit of trivia I came upon was that Packard himself rewrote the stories for the British market by re-locating them to London complete with rewriting some of the slang. So if some Canadian movie producer or comic book publisher wanted to revive the property, you could, without too much justification, culturally reclaim the character by setting the stories in Montréal or Toronto — or an anonymous Anytown, North America city — since even Packard clearly regard the setting as mutable, and might well have chosen a Canadian setting to begin with if the market had seemed receptive to it in his day. Obviously, that’s neither here nor there, just a whimsical thought that occurred to me.

The first collected volume, The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917, collecting material copyrighted 1914-1915), is itself broken into two sections: “The Man in the Case” and “The Woman in the Case.”

The first section is essentially a collection of short stories, each involving Jimmie receiving a note from The Tocsin and setting off on his mission. The stories are mostly slight and at times repetitive, but fun — as I say, Packard writes with verve. Sometimes the greater suspense arises from complications stemming from maintaining his secret identities — the dilemmas and obstacles he must overcome before he can even act upon The Tocsin’s assignment. These dilemmas add more variety — and suspense and tension — to the tales. In one story The Tocsin’s note is stolen from his pocket and he must recover it before the pickpocket connects Jimmie to The Gray Seal. In another he is stuck in the guise of Larry the Bat for days, but without the money or resources to maintain the identity for too long. And so on. It’s as if once Packard has settled on his formula he starts pushing and stretching it, seeing the secret identity dilemmas as being as interesting as the case-du-jour. While throughout these tales we also develop Jimmie’s fascination with The Tocsin, as he comes closer and closer to actually making personal contact with her. In a way these early tales are akin to a modern TV series — individual adventures, but that build and develop from each other, teasing along threads, and introducing recurring tropes like the posh St. James Club where Jimmie often hangs out, his friend Carruthers, a reporter, the earlier mentioned butler, Jason — not that the characters are exactly complex personalities. And if the repetition means the stories aren’t ideal for bingeing (to continue my TV analogy) they are fun little adventures to delve into from time to time.

And then comes “The Woman in the Case” — which could be likened to an epic, multi-episode season finale. If the chapters in “The Man in the Case” showed Packard could write page turning little episodes, “The Woman in the Case” shows he could also write a long form adventure/suspense tale every bit as good as any of his compeers. The secret of The Tocsin is finally revealed — and, surprisingly, it does plausibly answer how she could know so much of what she knew (at least as plausibly as you need in a pulp adventure tale). It’s also a more flamboyant tale as Jimmie learns of the Crime Club, a syndicate that’s like a forerunner of James Bond’s Spectre — with a secret hideout, state-of-the-art criminal accessories, and such Machiavellian cunning Jimmie is told some of their schemes might take years to come to fruition! It’s a turning of the stories on their head: in the first batch of tales, Jimmie usually knew more than those he was up against — but now it’s Jimmie who’s in the dark, against an enemy so powerful, with so many agents, it’s not clear how he will survive — let alone triumph. It’s a moody, suspenseful adventure and puts you on the edge of your seat a few times.


It provides an effective climax to the volume (including a spectacular escape from a burning building!) and also seems to wrap up the series with Jimmie finally united with Marie a.k.a. The Tocsin and retiring his various alter egos.

But clearly Packard realized he was onto a good thing, so shortly after came more adventures — the second collection being The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1919, collecting material first published 1916-1917). Somewhat contrivedly it just starts out with The Tocsin once more going into hiding, communicating only with notes again, and Jimmie once more adopting the persona of The Gray Seal (now substituting Smarlinghue for Larry the Bat). Once again the first part of the book features largely stand alone adventures, but teased throughout is the mystery of The Tocsin’s whereabouts and whether he will see her again. But it’s as if Packard is now more comfortable with his formula — and with his skills as a plotter of mystery-suspense stories. So the stand alone tales are often longer (sometimes spread over a couple of chapters) allowing for more developed and complexly plotted cases, with twists and turns that Jimmie has to overcome. And again the last part of the book is devoted to reuniting Jimmie with his lady love (although not quite as flamboyant as “The Woman in the Case” story).

More volumes ensued including Jimmie Dale and the Phantom Clue (1922) which follows immediately on the heels of The Further Adventures… with The Tocsin once more going into hiding (clearly Packard figuring if the formula ain’t broke, why fix it?). But though still episodic like a collection of short stories, it has a more sustained plot-line linking them together as a novel. Possibly anticipating the doppelgänger/player-on-the-other-side trope popular among superheroes, Jimmie, the man of many identities, is pitted against a mysterious criminal mastermind, the Phantom, who is himself a master-of-disguise, and uncovering the Phantom’s secret hideout (his own “Sanctuary” if you will) is central to Jimmie’s objectives!

Next came Jimmie Dale and the Blue Envelope Murder (1930) and Jimmie Dale and the Missing Hour (1935). And with the character presumably now in the public domain, there’s even been a 2017 pastiche, Jimmie Dale, Alias the Gray Seal, by Michael Howard!

Reading some of these old stories it’s a wonder they aren’t better known than they are (though many of the books do remain in print, as are other Packard collections). From a cultural/historical perspective it’s fascinating to come upon a creation that was clearly establishing tropes that others would pick up on. But equally, the stories and ideas hold up as entertaining and fresh just read for themselves (unlike can sometimes happen when reading seminal stories that now just seem trite thanks to over-familiarity).

Death to The Gray Seal? I say: nay! — Life! Life to him! (And to The Tocsin, too!)

 

D. K. Latta has been writing fiction and non-fiction off and on for decades, his writings appearing in magazines, webzines, Huffington Post Canada, and his own websites. His fiction is mostly in science fiction and fantasy (and with a predilection for pulp genres and superheroes) and his non-fiction has mostly (though not exclusively) been focused on Canadian film & television (where, as a Canadian, he is intrigued by issues surrounding cultural identity and representation) with a side helping of opining on comic books and science fiction.

Some of his published fiction can be found on-line at:

Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, New Myths, Escape Pod, Perihelion, Crimson Streets, and others. And in the anthologies Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories, Tesseracts Nineteen: Superhero Universe, Lords of Swords, and others.

Some non-fiction, non-Canadian writings include book, graphic novel, and audio drama reviews and essays still on-line at Strange Horizons, Black Gate, Dark Worlds Quarterly and elsewhere.