How long is Don Quixote; I really should just read that now.

We'll see if this post ends up on Halloween, or something else: I ended up taking some time off, but I have to have my pipes reamed or something...that's not a metaphor, my kitchen sink's been clogged up for days, and drain cleaner has done nothing but fill my house with the refreshing odor of drain cleaner. I feel like I watched a ton of horror movies, but not sure any really knocked my socks off. (So Sweet...So Perverse, When Evil Lurks, and the Night Strangler were probably the last few; although I watched the Puppetman after those, and it wasn't bad!) Is this an appropriately Halloween book? Sure, why not? From 1975, Weird War Tales #37, "The Three Wars of Don Q.!" Written by Arnold Drake, art by Leopoldo Duranona.

Pre-WWII, recently fired war correspondent Nick Taylor discovers German soldiers secretly fighting in the Spanish civil war, which would be the kind of scoop that could get him his job back, if he can avoid getting murdered. Hiding out in a castle's crypt, he meets a strange little man that claims to be Sancho Panza, and he believes Nick to be Don Quixote! (We've mentioned it before here, but I still don't think I've read the actual original.) Sancho has a moment where it seems like he's going to murder the false Don, but shakes it off, since they have to ride against the Moors in the morning. After getting armored up, Nick tries to protest that he wasn't Don Quixote, but Sancho ignores that, and gives him "the talisman of the horned cat!" that Quixote had got when he saved a witch's life. Neat, but can that help him...?

Sancho sees a Moorish "falcon of war" coming for them: it's really a German fighter plane, although Nick even seems to see it as a falcon, when he takes a run to throw a spear at it. And takes it down, which even Nick considers unlikely. He then sees a 'dragon,' that then returns to the form of a German tank, which Nick also takes out; but he and Sancho are then captured. That's no big deal, though, since the talisman can get them out, like it always does--and it does, seemingly teleporting them to freedom, or the local equivalent, in the 15th century...After fighting some Moors, Nick and Sancho are again captured, but the talisman saves them from execution; this time taking them to the future, 3254!

Humanity was long gone by that point; and Nick gets dragged into a war between two groups of apes and such, with a scheme to use an old King Kong display to plead for peace. He realizes the apes weren't trying to bring about peace for its own sake, but so they could rule; and Nick destroys their time scanner and sends himself and Sancho back to 1938. Well, himself, anyway: Sancho and the talisman have seemingly aged to nothingness when he wakes up. He rushes to a phone, to call in his story; only to be told he was too late: it was now 1939, and he had lost an entire year! Nick's old boss as much as calls him a drunk; but that was a pretty loopy story and I can't blame him. 

The blurb on the cover proclaims this issue "Special! An Unusual Full-Length War Novel!" which I don't think the book did often. Which might be just as well, this reads like a fever dream.