Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League Read online

  BUCKAROO BANZAI

  AGAINST THE WORLD

  CRIME LEAGUE

  ET AL.

  A COMPENDIUM OF EVILS

  BUCKAROO BANZAI

  AGAINST THE WORLD

  CRIME LEAGUE

  ET AL.

  A COMPENDIUM OF EVILS

  THE RENO KID

  with E. M. RAUCH

  PROFESSOR OF ORATORY AND BELLES-LETTRES

  THE BANZAI INSTITUTE

  BANZAI INSTITUTE PRESS, LTD.

  FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN 2016

  SECOND IMPRESSION 2017

  THIRD IMPRESSION 2021

  DARK HORSE BOOKS

  Milwaukie, OR

  BUCKAROO BANZAI AGAINST THE WORLD CRIME LEAGUE ET AL.: A COMPENDIUM OF EVILS

  © 2021 Earl M. Rauch. Dark Horse Books® and the Dark Horse logo are registered trademarks of Dark Horse Comics LLC. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of the copyright holders. Names, characters, places, and incidents featured in this publication either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is coincidental.

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No portion of it may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

  Inquiries to be addressed to the publisher.

  Cover illustration by Julian Totino Tedesco

  Cover design by Patrick Satterfield

  Published by

  Dark Horse Books

  A division of Dark Horse Comics LLC

  10956 SE Main Street

  Milwaukie, OR 97222

  DarkHorse.com

  First edition: October 2021

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-50672-214-6

  Hardcover ISBN 978-1-50672-213-9

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Printed in China

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Rauch, Earl Mac, 1949- author.

  Title: Buckaroo Banzai against the World Crime League, et al : a compendium

  of evils / by the Reno Kid with E.M. Rauch.

  Description: First edition. | Milwaukie, OR : Dark Horse Books, 2021. |

  Summary: “Still mourning the loss of his beloved Penny Priddy and his

  surrogate father Professor Hikita, Buckaroo Banzai must also contend

  with the constant threat of attack from his immortal nemesis Hanoi Xan,

  ruthless head of the World Crime League. To make matters worse, Planet

  10 warrior queen John Emdall has sent her Lectroid legions against Earth

  with a brutal ultimatum. Or is her true target Buckaroo Banzai? As the

  apocalyptic threats continue to mount, only Buckaroo and his Hong Kong

  Cavaliers stand in the way of global destruction”-- Provided by

  publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020057639 | ISBN 9781506722139 (hardcover) | ISBN

  9781506722146 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3568.A79 B83 2021 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057639

  “All the beans and bullets you can eat.”

  TO MY DEVOTED FELLOW HONG KONG CAVALIERS

  LIVING OR DEAD

  THIS EDITION IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

  “What is precious, is never to forget . . .”

  —Stephen Spender

  AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  I am frequently challenged by critics, with tones of ironic superiority: “Why add to the legend of Buckaroo Banzai—scientist, medical doctor, adventurer, trick shot artist, and professional entertainer, inter alia—an exceptional man and soft-spoken do-gooder, yes, and not one to toot his own horn, but also no superhero with superpowers?”

  My goodness, no, he is no Superman of the comics, but many account him to be the superman of Nietzsche, that perfect balance of East and West, Apollonian rationality and Dionysian appetite: not a superman to rule over others but to govern himself. “But,” continue the critics, “is he not also something of a theatrical cowboy given to fist fighting and street grappling and conspiracy theories, no? Not to mention such charming anachronisms as rhymed doggerel! How many men has the trigger-happy fellow killed? Does he not carry six-guns even when performing in public in front of audiences of all ages? And a celebrated medical doctor, no less! True, his face appears on cereal boxes, and his scientific discoveries and musical talents are undisputed; but what of his social influence on children? Certain of his recordings and stage gyrations are indelicate, to say the least . . .” So forth and so on go the familiar objections.

  In the face of such self-righteous sanctimony, I offer the simplest of responses: this cowboy saved the world, not once but repeatedly. Regardless of your personal or political feelings about pistol-toting vigilantes and frontier notions of justice and fairness, scarcely a day passes without some media pasha or academic pundit inquiring if I was really there, at that phenomenal battle over the sleepy plains and thickets of New Jersey. Did I truly see with my own eyes the clash, barely above treetop level, that decided the fate of our Earth? Did I rejoice to see our own Buckaroo Banzai land by parachute while the alien John Whorfin’s Lectroid ship crashed in a blazing ball? The answer is a self-evident yes, although with the passage of time I occasionally find myself asking the same question. Was I really there? Fortunately, if I forget all that I remember, or when I pass from the scene, my recollections of that fateful day will outlive me—see The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension—because I once took the time to put pen to paper. In the intervening years, swelling ranks of partisan readers have lately petitioned me for information about supervening events in the case, particularly in light of that which is whispered as truth but based upon rumor.

  While Hanoi Xan’s earlier attempt to ally himself with the unfortunate Dr. Lizardo was thankfully only a near thing, the voice of reason itself demands that the uncanny must not remain behind the black veil of legend and mystery. Like any thing in front of us, we wish to get a better sense of it through critical analysis and, if we are speaking of a historical figure, through as much biographical information as possible, so that the outline of the individual may be drawn with both a softer lead and a finer point and by this process come alive in our eyes.

  But Xan is different, to put it mildly, and few subjects arouse such heated controversy as the scabrous contagion known for making the life of Buckaroo Banzai a living hell and killing anyone who crosses his shadow—the same man who among the masses is thought to be imaginary, a fictional being, and yet in parallel is known by another name as a trusted intimate of Queen Victoria and a banker to, among others, many of the principal royal houses of Europe, including the Hohenzollern and the last three czars . . . the same man who is mentioned also in French colonial reports from the 1940s as being in possession of no fewer than twenty princely domains in Xinjiang Province alone, as well as having a long string of criminal enterprises and a regular corps of bullies gathered from the pests of society in his employ. How to reconcile such competing claims? I regret this question cannot be answered authoritatively. The simple fact is that no satisfactory explanation exists for the phenomenon that is Hanoi Xan Anthropos.

  In part this is due to his network of dezinformatsiya and
the finest public relations money can buy, but bribery alone cannot account for why the true nature of the creature is shielded from discovery by the public and therefore the calumny he rightly deserves. Indeed, it flashes on the brain that perhaps there are things about the monster that our human minds cannot apprehend, an understanding not entrusted to us, that when we endeavor to speak of him, we lack even a fundamental idea of what we are talking about or even a way to render him visible. What else can be said of a “man” who claims to have been born a snake, hatched from the egg of a black swan, and whom no less a figure than Macaulay has called “a malefactor with no equal in the long record of human iniquity, a creature scarce seen in the light . . . the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man who engaged every lust, whose hands are alternately polluted with gold and with blood.”

  Such words, while not inaccurate, evoke the archetype more than the man: a mysterious figure of epic scale and larger than life. As against such hyperbole, perhaps it is more helpful to characterize Xan rather in terms of what he is not, as the wise Maimonides taught with respect to the Creator: not anthropomorphic, not mortal, not corporeal, not bound by physical laws. Of course I am not saying that Xan is not material, only that even in the flesh he inspires disbelief.

  Consider the fantastical travelogue The Khan of Kathmandu, a manuscript recently discovered in the British Museum, believed by experts of the Banzai Institute to be in Xan’s own hand and dating from the fifteenth century. Ascribed to Sir Edmund Shaa—goldsmith and engraver to the Royal Mint, moneylender to the king, and member of the Privy Council—the fanciful tale recounts the author’s travels in the Himalayan kingdoms and his impressions of a mysterious Mongol prince with supernatural powers whom he encounters along the way. At times the author’s language reminds us of a conflicted lover—“my legs did still lothe to lodge within his bed”—furthering our suspicion Xan even may have written the account himself. Indeed the khan offers magical cures for various maladies: “Float bloode on water, mix with pith wick and natural oils which exude, smoothe over maculae and by reason of euphony, repeat, ‘You handsome man rascal, you.’ ” If this concoction somehow fails to produce the desired results, he advises the author to “wash both Old Larry’s winged and subordinate phalluses to and fro, in this way to unbosom one’s vexations. Forthwith the mutation is wrought and the innermost penetralia of causes may be pressed.”

  Make sure it’s done right, in other words! Erotic, yes, but exactly what happens between the two travelers is left unclear. In the volume’s final illustration, they simply go their separate ways, with the moon and the Himalayas rising behind the khan. Other woodcuts depict the same brooding fellow in traditional Nepali dress, holding a musket and standing over a downed mountain cat, while in another he gazes at the night sky through a telescope, surrounded by a harem of beauties. He is never named, identified only as “the Khan” or “the Wretched Khan.”

  Was Shaa the man we know as Hanoi Xan? Writing in effect about his alter ego and a part of the world he himself had never visited but knew quite well as Xan? Again, our own forensic handwriting experts think so, but Sir Edmund would have been only one of Xan’s many identities down through the centuries. Where, then, to begin? Whence comes Hanoi Xan? What does he look like? How old is he?

  I can answer only that he is ancient. From oral legends and pseudepigrapha, he is rumored variously to have arisen from Persia, the Euphrates Valley, or the lost Pacific continent of Mu around the time of the great comet swarm of 11,000 BCE—his face the model for the Easter Island statues, et cetera—but the first notice we have of the entity who has come to be known as Hanoi Xan in the historical age comes from a three-thousand-year-old clay tablet fragment, written in Babylonian, upon which is described a demon feathered snake of “circular form,” “birthed by a wicked swan” and possessing “a face which is no face” along with a list of other attributes, being both “large-boned and invisible . . . twixt man and monkey . . . of sable beauty . . . [who] affrights and affronts the great people of Nineveh . . .”

  In Mesoamerica, too, we find legends of the feathered serpent—called Quetzalcoatl, Kukulkan, and other names—though I cannot attest to a direct connection to our villain.

  THE MONGOLIAN CONNECTION

  To speak briefly, there always seems to be a new Xan—one may as well use a name generator—which is not to say that he has changed for the better. In Mongol oral tradition, he is described not as Hulagu Khan or a khan of any kind, but variously as a shaman, a spider, a snake, a dream spirit, or the deceitful Talker (the Mongol devil) himself. A later narrative paints him as a “great dark bird of plunder” (black swan?) who leaves behind a bloody trail of outlawry, including grand pyramids of human heads. Captured and brought in chains to the court of the great Kublai Khan, he and his vaunted powers are put to the test. When the secrets of his magical tricks are exposed by the khan’s own conjurer—a purported metaphysician and direct antecedent of Buckaroo Banzai who “brought fire against fire,” as the story goes—Xan requests a noble death but instead is dipped in blazing naphtha until he reveals, amid the most terrible damnations, the location of his ill-gotten treasures. When his belly is sliced open, legend has it that enough precious jewels come pouring out to fill an entire tayal, or grain bag. What is more, in Xan’s single teardrop the khan’s conjurer lays eyes on the future: accursed Mongol invasion fleets storm tossed like kindling by a divine typhoon and sunk in the Sea of Japan.

  What to say of such a lurid tale on the order of a movie plot, and the no-less-sensational accounts of Xan’s revenge on the Banzai bloodline down through the generations? The simplest solution, it might seem, would be to put the question directly to Hanoi Xan and Buckaroo. The former is not available to this author, however, and Buckaroo acknowledges his ancient Mongolian roots but laughs at every mention of a thousand-year-old curse from the Old Country. For all of that, however, he has never explicitly denied the feud, perhaps because its existence is obvious. Make of it what you will, dear reader, as we have other fish to fry.

  EUROPEAN VIEWS

  Turning to the West and closer to home, we have the famed Elizabethan spiritist and psychic investigator Dr. John Dee and his account of the angelic apparition Uriel, also known as Phanuel or Shanuel, who in the doctor’s scrying glass appears as wrinkled yet “smooth as glass, white as walrus ivory, sinister and shining . . . the prowdest vaine viper full of inchaunting tongues and musiques . . . a lewd and vile bastard, a gnawing vermin, damnable friend of violence and chief procurer for Old Larry himself . . . yet having a good contour of the nose . . . an atheist, alchymist, skryer and prackticer of pracktical kaballah . . . [who] doth loathe his awefull aged side . . . [and] disgorges his stomacke because his closen eies could not his sight abide . . . [and hence] bathes in the first menstrual bloode of young maidens and the bloode of women great with chyld.”

  I will save for later Xan’s reported fondness for bathing in the menstrual blood of virgins and proceed to the famous case of the broad-hatted man in Vermeer’s View of Delft whom the painter later erased from the work for reasons that are unclear. Eyewitness accounts at the time identify the figure as Xan’s alter ego, the Dutch trader van Pfeffersack, the putative richest man in Europe who made millions in piracy and the slave trade, along with a financial killing in the famous tulip panic of 1636–37. Most scholars, Berenson among them, have noted the uncanny resemblance between van Pfeffersack and Vermeer himself—the reclusive so-called Sphinx of Delft of whom little is known—and speculate the erased image may have been in fact a self-portrait. Others, as I have mentioned, go even further, alleging that Vermeer, Pfeffersack, and Xan are the same man. At all events, without an actual image of the broad-hatted figure, the debate is moot; and I can contribute nothing further upon the subject.

  The same period gives us Bunyan’s thinly disguised account of Xan/Pfeffersack which, while not naming names, tellingly alludes to the birth legend of “Mr. Badman”: “I will t
ell you, that from a child he was very bad; his very beginning was ominous, a malignity conceived by serpent and enchanted black swan, and presaged that no good end was, in likelihood, to follow thereupon. There were several sins that he was given to, when but a little one, that manifested him to be notoriously infected with original corruption; for I dare say he learned none of them of his father and mother who found him foreign to them; nor was he admitted to go much abroad among other children that were vile, to learn to sin of them: nay, contrariwise, if at any time he did get abroad amongst others, he would be as the inventor of bad words, and an example in bad actions . . . the ringleader, and master-sinner from a child.”

  A century later we have P. Brydone’s A Tour through Sicily and Malta (1773), in which the author mentions a fellow tourist who introduces himself as Henry Shannon, an Englishman. One need not imagine Brydone’s surprise—for he has written of it in a separate letter—upon recognizing Shannon as the Frenchman Charles-Henri Sanson, the latest in a long line of Sansons to hold the office of royal executioner to the court of Versailles. Perhaps because he is describing two men as the same man, Brydone describes him as “prodigious of length” but also “short round,” “gaunt” but “bulbous” and “frog-like.”

  Carlyle, because he was Carlyle, gushes with zeal over the same bloodthirsty individual: “To fix gaze long onto him is to fling away one’s soul. He is a lamplighter, an illuminator, the type of the man to come.”

  “The type of the man to come,” just possibly because he never seems to go away. To wit, the son of Charles-Henri, Henri Sanson, would follow in his father’s bloody footsteps and chop the head off Marie Antoinette, among others. Like the latter-day Xan, he preferred to call himself a disciplinaire rather than an executioner and—if we give credence to the infamous Marquis de Sade—was a “blood drunk” and an avid practitioner of “domestic discipline” as well.