Polite Dissent

In 1962 Gold Key published Ben Casey Film Stories #1. It wasn’t really a comic book. Instead, it was a series of black and white still frames from the television show with captions beneath to explain what was happening. This is not the best way to tell a story. The pictures are often blurry and usually vague about the action. The captions — which have to explain what is going on in the picture — are written for a third-grader, and a very dumb third-grader at that. Overall, it’s a very unsatisfying read as the words and pictures are competing with each other instead of complementing each other.

The comic contains two stories, cribbed straight from the television show. Both scripts made for an exciting television drama, but are not terribly exciting when simplified into half of a comic book.

“Operation Tycoon” , the first story is about ruthless industrialist Walter Tyson. He informs his board of directors that he’s going on a hunting trip, and then secretly checks into the hospital for an operation. He brings his secretary with him and they set up an office in his hospital room. This infuriates Dr. Casey who prefers his patients actually acting sick. Meanwhile, Tyson’s estranged wife discovers he’s in the hospital for an operation and tells the board of directors. They replace him as CEO. Being replaced is what convinces Tyson to finally go through with the operation, which is successful. A few days later, he leaves the hospital a happier, if unemployed, man.

In the second story, “Thirty Days to Live,” Casey has been reprimanded by the hospital board for performing a risky operation on a young boy. Casey knows the child will eventually need three surgeries, but he has angered the board and may get kicked out of the hospital. Jut when he thinks his day can’t get any worse, he accidentally sticks himself with a needle contaminated with the blood of a patient who has rabies. As Casey spends the next month wondering whether or not he will come down with rabies (until this year, an incurable disease), he has to convince the hospital board to let him operate twice more and save his patient’s life. I suspect this made for a riveting hour of television, but it made a very disjointed sixteen page story.

The medicine, what they show of it, is fine; it’s the storytelling itself that is sub-par. Given this it’s no surprise that the comic only lasted for one issue (but what is surprising is how many people are willing to pay $50 for a black and white comic that aspires to fumetti).