Teel James Glenn: On choosing the Gunmaster

Dumas Poe, Hillman's original Gunmaster.

When Nick Ahlhelm approached me with the concept of Pulpsploitation—bringing old public domain characters forward into the 1980s to marry them with the hard corp action/men’s paperback type story—I thought he was a little nuts (Okay, maybe a lot nuts)—but in an inspired way!

It immediately started me thinking what old pulp era characters I loved the most. Well, the ones outside of the big three: Doc Savage, Shadow and the Spider.

Well, after some soul searching it came down to three others. I loved the eastern mysticism of the Green Lama, the generational aspect and sense of purpose of Lee Falk’s Phantom and the world spanning action of Agent X.

Then I had the hard task of looking at what public domain characters were out there that might lend themselves to a 1980s update and still satisfy my desire to take aspects from those legendary heroes.

I wanted something that I could write with the same kind of martial arts action I had liked in seventies books like the Jason Stryker series and the Destroyer books.

Then I found The Gunmaster comic book character.

The unrelated Charlton
comic character.

Now, as a child I had read a Charlton western character with the same name but they had no connection. This original Gunmaster was perhaps one of the strangest and most fascinatingly motivated characters in all of literature!

Specifically The Gunmaster of the 1940s was named Dumas Poe (already a legendary sounding name) that appeared in a limited series of ten tales in Clue Comics and Real Clue Crime Stories. He first appeared in 1945 and, tantalizingly enough, three of his stories were drawn by the legendary team of Simon and Kirby. No, that team did not create him, at least as far as anyone knows (they were not the first team on it). I have not been able to find out exactly who came up with such a wild concept, but whomever it was, my hat is of to them.

The Gunmaster was a none-costumed adventurer. He was a descendant of Kattak Po, a Tibetan monk who supposedly invented firearms. Feeling remorseful over all the death guns caused, Kattak made it his life’s mission to stop their spread and prevent gun-inflicted deaths. His descendants followed in his footsteps. They became known as Gunmasters because of their knowledge of firearms and their ability to use them with nearly superhuman accuracy.

As the latest Gunmaster, Dumas Poe relied on the skills honed by his predecessors to stop crimes and fight for justice on behalf of the victims of gun violence. He was assisted by the Circle of Elders, the spirits of previous Gunmasters who appeared in his room whenever he asked for their aid.

Wild, huh?

When I discovered this rare series I was fascinated by the entire, almost mad, concept. I saw so many possibilities for the semi-mystical hero. It had just the right mix of the Far East that echoed the Shadows and The Green Lama and the generational aspects of Lee Falk’s Phantom and even my own Skullmask.

Now that I had found ‘the one’ for me to attack I dove into it with gusto.

I decided then to infuse my own ‘mad’ sense of adventure and pulp excitement to the mad idea of using guns to stop guns. In this gun mad world it seems like trying to stop the ocean and is that not the definition of a hero; to try and stop the tempest single handedly?

The first of the New Gunmaster tales is “Praey for the Raven”, a tale set in the 1980s with Dumas Poe passing the torch to his son in a tale that starts in Hong Kong, skips to Tibet and then ends up on the Gold Coast of Long Island, New York.

I hope to write more hard hitting adventures of The Gunmaster and hope you will all enjoy them and ask for more!

Teel James Glenn 9/14/14