My recent look at Max Allen Collins and his work on Mickey Spillane's Mike Danger for Tekno Comix and Big Entertainment made me want to go back and look at another character Collins created -- Ms. Tree.
My first -- and up until recently, only -- exposure to Ms. Tree was the first issue of DC Comics' Ms. Tree Quarterly, published in 1990. At the time, the highlight of this book for me was a prose Batman story written by Denny O'Neil with Mike Grell illustrations. I highly recommend this short story wherein Alfred, not Bruce Wayne, is the target of a group of kidnappers and Batman must determine why and where Alfred has been taken.
But back to Ms. Tree, the title character is a tough-as-nails female private eye named Michael Tree. An assassin has been hired to eliminate Ms. Tree in this tale and chooses to attack her in her home in the middle of the night. In what I would later learn is trademark Ms. Tree style, she instead gets the drop on the attacker and stops him in a decidedly permanent fashion. The rest of the story focuses on who hired the killer and why. The other players -- folks who work for Tree Investigations, a friendly detective on the police force and members of the Muerta crime family -- are all staples of Ms. Tree's world I was unfamiliar with, but they helped make this an OK story for me.
The art on this story, and I believe most of the Ms. Tree stories published, was by Terry Beatty. Beatty's style on Ms. Tree is deceptively simplistic. It's not really cartoony by any means, especially when it comes to action sequences, but he employs an economy of line work that keeps the panels clean and uncluttered -- simple.
This last fall, I decided to re-read both stories in Ms. Tree Quarterly No. 1 to determine if this book should go on the "sell" pile. Frequent readers will recall I'm trying to winnow down the huge collection I've amassed before it bursts out of the one room in our house it already fills beyond capacity. Much to my wife's certain chagrin, I not only decided that the Batman tale was worth saving this particular comic, but I decided I wanted to know more about the world of Ms. Tree. I learned that there were only 10 issues of Ms. Tree Quarterly published by DC (actually eight issues and two specials, but DC kept the numbering 1 through 10), so I found a good deal on the remaining issues of that series.
I've just recently finished reading those issues. The stories read like a comic-book Law & Order with their "ripped from the headlines" topics. Ms. Tree and her associates take on gay-bashing, satanists and the occult, MIA war veterans, the drug trade, date rape, single-parenting and a host of other topics. The stories are very well-written, often showing real-life consequences for some of Ms. Tree's more lethal solutions to dealing with criminals.
Along the way, I got better acquainted with the Muertas and the Trees. For instance, Michael Tree is not the name the title character was born with; it is her married name. She met and fell in love with a man named Michael Tree, also a private investigator, and the pair joked about sharing the same first name, and after they were married, the same full name. The pair did decide to get married, but shared a very brief union as the male Michael Tree was shot and killed on the couple's honeymoon, and the guilty party was traced back to the Muerta family. The male Michael Tree had been married before, and that marriage had produced a son, Michael Tree Jr. With the death of her new husband, Ms. Tree became the sole guardian of her teenage stepson, who would later fall in love with another member of the Muerta clan.
According to an article I found on Wikipedia about Ms. Tree, Collins envisioned her as being Velda, the secretary from Mickey Spillane's "Mike Hammer" series. Velda was Hammer's assistant/confidante/lover and one could almost imagine these stories being about Velda after she and Mike Hammer get married and Mike is murdered.
Ms. Tree's first adventure was serialized in Eclipse Comics' Eclipse Magazine Nos. 1-6 published in 1981-82. From there, Eclipse launched Ms. Tree's Thrilling Detective Stories, becoming just Ms. Tree with issue No. 4. The series continued for 50 issues plus specials, but was published by first Eclipse, then Aardvark-Vanaheim and finally Renegade Press. Then came the DC Comics' version, Ms. Tree Quarterly, in the early 1990s.
One other piece of trivia I learned from the Wikipedia article was that Ms. Tree's maiden name was never revealed in any of her comic appearances, but that it was often suggested in stories that she was the daughter of Joe Friday from the television series Dragnet. In 2007, Collins wrote the first Ms. Tree novel, "Deadly Beloved," in which the character is finally referred to as "Miss Friday" before her marriage.
One doesn't usually seek out this much information about a character he or she doesn't like, so it's probably pretty obvious that I've decided to keep an eye out for other Ms. Tree stories. I found the "Deadly Beloved" novel on Amazon.com and snagged copies of Eclipse Magazine at a recent Springfield, Mo., comic convention and online. From there, I'll be looking for more of this character from the 50-issue Eclipse-Renegade series.
Yes, kiddie-cops, Ms. Tree is good comics.
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