MYTHCOMICS: "NAWANDO'S LAST VISION" (RED ARROW #1, 1951)

 

I came across this mythcomic thanks to my having continued to survey Native American comics-characters on my OUROBOROS DREAMS blog. Three issues of a western comic, RED ARROW, were released in 1951 by one of America's smallest comics-publishers, P.L. Publishing. I have not yet read any of the company's other magazines but everything in the RED ARROW series is absolutely ordinary. GCD attributes the art to one Richard Case, of whom I know nothing, except that he was working before another Richard Case, one made famous for working with Grant Morrison, was even born. Since there's no writer credited, I will proceed as I often have before, using the artist's name as if I knew he were the sole author. Whether it was Case or not, someone involved with this forgotten tale brought to it a mythic density that demonstrates the desire to research what was then known of Native American medicine-men rituals.

   Although the story's action is set in 1876, it might have just as easily set in the pre-colonial days of the continent, for there are no indications of the influence of European colonists upon the shaman Nawando or any of the Native Americans. The opening caption claims that only Nawando can speak to animals, yet many pre-colonial tales show animals freely conversing with all human beings, to say nothing of intermarrying with them. Here, Nawando feels a great vision approaching, so he isolates himself from his tribespeople. The mountain he seeks is guarded by a serpent who claims that the domain belongs to the dead, but one of Nawando's allies casts the serpent aside. 

Nawando's vision allows him (and the readers) to peer in on the life of a discontented young fellow named White Bull, who lives in a pueblo "far across the desert." The distance may not have been all that great, given that the Southwestern lands of the Navajo, the Pueblos, and their neighbors the Apaches bordered one another. But the main focus of the vision is not to show where White Bull is, but what he does, and what he does is to predict that he will never settle down and become a commonplace householder. Two pretty maidens think White Bull is too conceited, removing himself from the tribe to sit out in the wilderness at night, so they set a trap, a hole for the young brave to fall into so that he'll be duly humiliated.

Though some readers might expect this contrivance to end with some romantic hookup, this idea is ended when Case has the two mischievous maidens captured by marauding Apaches, "never to return to their people." White Bull for his part takes his ordeal in stride, simply meditating in the pit despite hunger and circling vultures. He seems to understand now that he's on the cusp of becoming a medicine man himself, though he doesn't know he's now being watched by a full-fledged spirit-guide. Nawando's vision ends and he prepares to go to the aid of "a son in deadly danger."

Nawando and his animal friends cross the desert, but again they meet malign creatures who apparently just don't like foreign shamans trespassing on their territory. But all of the inimical forces are circumvented thanks to the medicine-man's allies.

  Then a storm comes up, as if signaling the opposition of the heavens as well. However, Nawando decides to simply face the tempest, assuming an attitude of acceptance much like that of White Bull, saying "I go to meet the Great Spirit." But by chance or design the tornado-like turbulence drops Nawando and his allies right near the pit of White Bull, so that they are able to rescue him. And in the arguably rushed conclusion, White Bull receives his new status as the future "seer of visions" (though without stating which tribe he'll be seeing visions for, and without going through years of metaphysical training). Nawando announces that he's happy to let his figurative son succeed him, for he's ready to retire to his cave in the mountains. He doesn't say he anticipates death, though the serpent does claim that the mountains-- at least the only ones we've seen-- are the domain of death.

And so Richard Case rendered to his few readers a quixotic take on how visionary seers propagate their line by reaching out to similarly gifted individuals who also stand outside the normal travails of birth, marriage and death. It's also worth mentioning that although White Bull doesn't intentionally become isolated inside the pit made by the malfeasant maidens, some shamans in various cultures have been known to seek enlightenment within such declivities-- whether it's to get away from people, to get closer to the earth, and any number of similar reasons. Also, in terms of imagery a pit would be gendered as feminine, and from page 3 on it's evident that the aspiring shaman plans to reject that path for the sake of the illumination of "higher" visions.   

      
   
        

THE APPROPRIATION HUSTLE PT. 3

I have not used the above essay-title since I completed a couple of posts on the subject of appropriation in 2017, but since my views on the subject have not changed, the title seems fully applicable here, to extend my remarks on the topic as they appear in Brian Attebery's 2013 book STORIES ABOUT STORIES.

In the last section of my Attebery review, I quoted the author's opinion of a particular White Australian author's "appropriation" of Aboriginal stories for her fantasy-novel.

As with similar endeavors in Canada, the United States, and other colonial locales, a goal of the [colonial] project... was to get rid of indigenous peoples through a combination of assimilation and genocide while APPROPRIATING [my emphasis] their songs, stories and rituals.

I won't repeat my refutation of this dubious logic, though I'll add the point that Attebery managed to conflate all those colonial persons urging for "assimilation" of marginal peoples with those who were supposed "appropriating" the sacred narratives of those people. In point of fact, the powers urging assimilation would have been totally focused on erasing all cultural differences. But when a researcher with an interest in Native American culture like Henry Schoolcraft devotes six volumes to preserving Native American culture-- research that, in turn, provided much of the content of Longfellow's HIAWATHA-- one could hardly call that erasure. It's also possible to fairly critique the characterizations Schoolcraft or Longfellow made of Native American culture without assuming some dire plot to heap opprobrium on Indians, and without assuming that the respective authors made tons of money by adapting their stories. (Longfellow did; Schoolcrafr probably did not.)

On a separate matter: Attebery was very vocal against the idea that only authors aligned with "living traditions" like that of Aboriginal worship could be deemed worthy to weave fantastic fiction out of those sacred narratives. He said nothing about other Aboriginals would approve of what the hypothetical Aboriginal author did with their sacred narratives, though Attebery dismissed the complaints of Christians who didn't always like what authors like C.S. Lewis wrought in his fictions about the "living tradition" of Christianity. Somehow I doubt Attebery would be quite so sanguine if traditional Aboriginals were upset with their religion's depiction, even by one of their own-- or even one who was ethnically related to that subgroup, but not "living the life." 

A specific example of some real-world condemnation can be found in the public criticism of fantasy-author Rebecca Roanhorse. Of her six published books, I've read both entries in the "Sixth World" series, which take place in a future where an apocalypse has more or less returned certain parts of the U.S. to their pre-Columbian status. So, given that it's a author with partial Native American ethnicity writing about Native American culture, it all must be good, right?

Not quite. According to Roanhorse, she's half-Black and half-Pueblo Indian, but her "Sixth World" fantasy is based upon Navajo religion. After Roanhorse became well-known, certain Navajo pundits claimed that a non-Navajo, even one who had lived for some years on the Arizona reservation known as "Navajo Nation," had no right to utilize Navajo narratives for fiction irrespective of formal literary quality. From Wikipedia:

Dr. Matthew Martinez, former Lieutenant Governor of Ohkay Owingeh,^[8][9] welcomed Roanhorse on her first and only visit to the community, in 2018, and spent time with her. He said, "I recognize that adoption is an emotional experience for families and communities and especially those who have been adopted out with no real connection to home....At Ohkay Owingeh, our current enrollment process privileges family lineage and not blood quantum." Agoyo explained that "anyone who descends from an Ohkay family - as Roanhorse has publicly claimed - can become a citizen. But Martinez said the author has chosen a different path."^[1] Martinez continued, "by not engaging in any form of cultural and community acknowledgement, Roanhorse has failed to establish any legitimate claim to call herself Ohkay Owingeh." He eventually concluded, "It is unethical for Roanhorse to be claiming Ohkay Owingeh and using this identity to publish Native stories."^[1]

 

 

Serendipitously, a similar example of small-minded exclusionary attitudes was brought to my attention by this CRIVENS post. It seems that a 2024 facsimile of the renowned GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1 came out with an advisory warning reading, in part, that the story contained "negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures." But GSXM is not some 1940s cartoon making jokes about African cannibals or the like. The advisory also claims that its purpose is "spark conversation to create a more inclusive future." But how can there be a conversation, when the authors of the advisory don't even say what was wrong with "Second Genesis?" Did the story fail to depict non-White characters like Sunfire and Thunderbird as even-tempered? Or did some Marvel drone get the whim-whams from the scene in which a group of tribal Africans are shown worshiping mutant heroine Storm as a goddess, because neither they nor she know better?

Those are both possibilities. However, I'm of the opinion that the real issue was probably that all of the creative people involved were dominantly Caucasian in ethnicity. Yet the idea of having a concept like X-MEN being written so as to satisfy all ethnicities is absurd. Navajo pundits may be content to have no fiction-author base a story upon their sacred tales unless it's someone who truly came, ethnically and culturally, from the Navajo community. But how could any single writer or artist satisfy the demands of writing for all the ethnicities in this or any X-MEN story? Storm is ethnically though not culturally Black American, so I guess Rebecca Roanhorse could write her. But she couldn't write Thunderbird (even had he survived), because he's Apache. Nor could she write any hero from any other culture. And the same would apply to any other author. (And yes, I know that there are no "sacred narratives" in X-MEN, but obviously the whole "appropriation argument" extends far beyond the specific "religious fantasy" context it assumed in Attebery's screed.)

While I will admit that some pro-appropriation individuals may be motivated to preserve the integrity of their cultures, I stand by my imputation that an awful lot of talk about "appropriation" is what I called it in the title, a hustle designed to make sure some people get jobs and others don't. What did Ryan Coogler, a Black American from Oakland, know about real African cultures before he helmed a motion picture based on a made-up African nation? Wasn't he as dependent as a White writer-director would be, upon what expert researchers advised him? Even though he's credited with scripting, I feel sure that he depended on outside research as much as Longfellow depended on Schoolcraft. 

I have seen some online essays claiming that some of the worst political correctness is losing its hold on American culture. That doesn't mean an absolute return to the days when almost all comics-creators shared the ethnicity of European Jews and/or Gentiles. But it could mean a return to the idea that the quality of the work is more important than the identity of the work's creator.

NEAR-MYTHS: " PARTS OF THE HOLE," (DAREDEVIL V. 2, #9-15, 2011)

I only reread the introductory sequence for the Marvel character Echo because of the MCU teleseries, to re-familiarize myself with the template.

Back in the day I bought some odd issues of the original sequence, but wasn't exactly inspired to follow the whole story. Some of Joe Quesada's art was nice, but the concept-- principally executed by Quesada and KABUKI writer-artist David Mack, with some fill-in assists from two other raconteurs-- seemed too much like a superficial effort to introduce an "Elektra Lite." Echo, a deaf woman of Cheyenne ancestry, possesses what I guess is a mutant ability to instantly emulate any fighting-skill she sees, combining aspects of Marvel's villain Taskmaster and the autistic heroine "Zen" from the 2008 CHOCOLATE.

Mack and Quesada fill their seven-issue tale with lots of bizarre, Sienkiewicz-style imagery (probably inspired by the example of ELEKTRA ASSASSIN) and lots of decompression-style, pseudo-literary voyages into the heads of Matt "Daredevil" Murdock, Echo, and Kingpin, the nasty villain who sets a potential heroine against a real hero. It doesn't help Echo's reputation that Kingpin gulls the young woman-- to whom Kingpin's been something of a surrogate father-- by giving her doctored evidence that the Man of Fear killed her birth-parent. What, Echo just accepts one piece of evidence as to the hero's turpitude, and seems blithely unaware of Daredevil's numerous years of crimefighting? And, from what Mack and Quesada tell readers, she doesn't even need Kingpin to give her a compelling reason as to why a costumed hero would slay Echo's father-- though Kingpin himself was in partnership with said individual. For me, I downgrade this arc not just because Mack and Quesada indulge in this hoary "frame the hero" trope, but because they're so bad at it.

Echo's tragic past and her various musings are just as tedious and derivative as her motivation for fighting the hero, and her Native American heritage is tossed off in some jejune gibberish about learning "the devil's medicine." Given that Echo is a sexy femme fatale, she soon becomes another love-interest for the main character. However, unlike Elektra, Echo doesn't know Daredevil's civilian ID (though Kingpin does, and curiously neglects to tender that intelligence). So she ends up dating lawyer Matt, and they have some long "date-cute" interactions, though these too seem very dependent on a lot of "blind dating the deaf" tropes. Then, at first opportunity she dons a sexy outfit and gets into fights with the sightless crusader.

The fights are decent, though nothing that would ever make Frank Miller look over his shoulder. But in keeping with the fashionable decompression approach, any tension generated by the action is dispersed by loads and loads of banal wool-gathering in the heads of Murdock and Kingpin about their early years-- all of which had been done better by previous raconteurs on the title. "Hole" takes place shortly after Murdock's first great love Karen Page has died-- not sure if it was for the first time or not-- but the only good thing that comes of this touch is a weird but rather funny joke about how masturbation leads to blindness. And speaking of blindness, Echo does get the chance to take an ironic revenge upon her "bad father," so at least Mack and Quesada provided that much resolution before the character became absorbed into the Marvel continuum.

I also re-visited this introductory arc due to my interest in Native American figures in pop culture. I suspect, given the way the MCU distorts most of its adaptation-material, that reading the arc won't really yield much insight into the streaming show. But such are the sacrifices I make.

THE READING RHEUM: THE RED HAWK (1925)

Curiously, the cover to the 1963 Ace paperback, in which the company reprinted the short ERB novels MOON MEN and RED HAWK, looks like it belongs with a standard Burroughsian SF-romance along the lines of the Mars books. But the scene, showing a normal sized man dueling a nine-foot armored giant, derives from the end of the concluding novel RED HAWK, the one with the least amount of standard science-fiction content. (In the book the giant doesn't have blue skin or pointed ears, but-- creative license.)

Like MOON MEN, RED HAWK takes place entirely on ERB's future-Earth. In MOON MEN the key conflict only appears to concern the tyrannized Earth-humans attempting (and failing) to throw off the chains of the virtually indistinguishable humanoids from the Moon, the Kalkars. But arguably the real focus is the resistance to ethnic assimilation. The good guys, all of whom are Americans, have managed to keep themselves genetically separate from the invading Kalkars. Yet the Americans are far less persecuted by the literal aliens than by their offspring, who are hybrids of Kalkars and Earth people. The American leader is the descendant of the heroic Julian from the first book, while his worst enemy is a descendant of the villainous Orthis-- and both characters perpetuate their legacy through women from the Moon, Julian through a Va-na woman and Orthis through a female Kalkar.

Three hundred years later, the scope of the conflict has taken several odd turns. If any conflict still takes place in big cities, the reader never hears of it, and the narrative concern with religious suppression utterly vanishes. Instead, the heirs of Julian and Orthis now both lead nomadic tribes in the American Southwest, and the tribes have taken the names of their progenitors: "Julians" and "Or-Tis." There's no more distinction between pure Kalkars and half-breeds, and for all one can tell, all Kalkars on Earth may be mixed-race. In contrast to the first two books, these Kalkars have gone out of their way to practice eugenics so as to distance themselves from common humanity, in that the males are on average seven feet tall. (Apparently the females stay average-sized, since there's a scene in which the hero mistakes a non-Kalkar woman for a Kalkar.) 

Said hero is the twentieth scion of the original Julian, but his main name is Red Hawk, and all the people in his tribe have names like those of Native Americans, as well as wearing Native American attire and living in teepees. (They also practice scalp-taking, though ERB does not show this.) But both the Julians and the Or-Tis (which is both a singular and plural noun) are pretty evidently White people who have, for reasons never explored, taken to living like Native Americans. (That the two tribes are not Indians is made clear by ERB's introduction of real, dark-complected people called "In-Juns," more on whom later.) The social organization of the Kalkars is not very well explained. They're not parasites like the old Kalkars, but just unrelenting brutes who treat their women like slaves. Though the line of Orthis was originally allied to the Kalkars, now the Or-Tis tribe has separated from their former patrons, though the Or-Tis and the Julians harbor more hate toward one another than they do for their giant-sized enemies.

What makes all this "Fake Indian" business fascinating is that ERB ends up pursuing the exact opposite theme from that of MOON MEN, in that Julian-Hawk becomes the fulcrum of a movement TOWARD assimilation between the Or-Tis and the Julians. Hawk is actually a fairly chauvinistic hero at the start. Then he's captured by the Or-Tis, whose leader offers the possibility of a peace between them. When Hawk refuses, he's imprisoned with a renegade Or-Tis man. This prisoner claims that the current leader is an impostor, and that there's a real direct scion of the original Orthis out there somewhere, who wants a real peace with the Julians. In actuality, the unnamed man really is this true valid leader, though he barely figures in the main plot, except in that he's the brother of the obligatory Burroughsian heroine.

After escaping the Or-Tis tribe, Hawk falls in with a curious tribe of pygmy-sized people who live in very small teepees and who call themselves "Nipons," after their ancestor, the normal-sized "Mik-do." These Japanese pygmies, whose small stature goes unexplained, are also enemies of the brutal Kalkars, and the Nipons' greatest enemy is a nine-foot giant named Raban. Hawk, being chauvinistic again, thinks Raban is just a superstitious fantasy. But upon leaving the Nipons, Hawk encounters a Kalkar man with a female prisoner, and he nobly kills the Kalkar raider even though he assumes his prisoner is Kalkar too. 

The woman Bethelda is a little more contentious than a lot of ERB heroines. Though grateful for her rescue, she withholds her true secret: that though she's not a Kalkar, she is an Or-Tis. Bethelda eventually reveals all and criticizes the warrior for holding her people responsible for the sins of an ancestor long dead. By this time, they've fallen hard for each other, so this leads to the usual ERB trope of the female being captured and the male rescuing her. And her captor is none other than the mythical Raban, who is also the nine-foot-tall armored guy on the cover. After Raban's inevitable conquest the human tribes are united, in part through the wedding of Hawk and Bethelda, and the Kalkars are at last driven to the sea.

If this wasn't already such a long post I'd linger over a lot of Burroughs' character beats here. ERB was a formula writer but he worked in a good range of dramatic and comic scenes here, far more than he has in MOON MAID and MOON MEN combined. Once he even came back to previous themes, for after dropping the matter of cannibalism that occupied a few MOON MAID chapters, the topic arises again in Raban, who purports to eat his victims. And since ERB never gives a reason for his Japanese pygmies, maybe he was just playing with Nordic myth-images, giving readers a world with both "giants" and "dwarfs."

But since I have to wrap up with something, I'll discourse on the Fake Indian thing. On one level, it's tied into Caucasian fantasies about being a nature-dwelling savage outside the bounds of civilization, like the 1984 film RED DAWN. But there's a little more to it.

Burroughs actually had been a ranch-cowboy for a time in his youth, and served with the Seventh Cavalry for a year before his health got him discharged. During his army hitch he claimed he rode with troopers seeking out the Apache Kid, as seen in this post on the FRONTIER PARTISANS blog. So though he didn't interact with the Apaches on a personal basis that we know of, he had some acquaintance with real Native Americans. It's often been noted that the Mars books place John Carter in the middle of conflicts between tribes of "good alien Indians" and "bad alien Indians," and though ERB didn't write a lot of westerns, I think it's evident that he worked a lot of Western archetypes into his books. Thus, even though the real "In-Juns" in RED HAWK have no agency in the novel, one of ERB's most unique lines in all of his stories is spoken to Red Hawk by an old Indian woman, who didn't get the standard message on the Vanishing American:

Like the coyote, the deer and the mountains, we have been here always. We belong to the land, we are the land-- when the last of our rulers has passed away, we shall still be here, as we were in the beginning, unchanged. They come and mix their blood with ours, but in a few generations the last traces of it have disappeared, swallowed up by the slow, unchanging flow of ours. You will come and go, leaving no trace, but after you are forgotten we will still be here.

 

THE READING RHEUM: THE SONG OF HIAWATHA (1855)

 Given my keen interest in charting the course of adventure-fiction within the greater context of prose and poetic literature, I took considerable time getting around to Longfellow's famous narrative poem.

The bulk of Longfellow's work is not well regarded with younger audiences today, although older connoisseurs of poetry are likely to remember the engrossing rhythms of "The Children's Hour," "Paul Revere's Ride," and the epic of a figure who began as a historically verifiable 16th-century chief but was transformed by the poet into a catch-all demigod amalgamating assorted Native American stories. By the time Longfellow wrote the SONG, the entire tradition of the epic poem, which could trace its heritage back to many of the earliest civilizations, was clearly on the decline, and I would say that the SONG was probably the last specifically "heroic" epic of any consequence (including such latter-day efforts as Yeats' "Wanderings of Oisin.") After the SONG, almos all adventure-related narratives, whether as high-toned as IVANHOE or as trashy as THE BLACK MONK, became dominated by the medium of prose.

Archaic heroic epics served many purposes: to celebrate a nation's founding (the Aeneid), to dramatize a great martial conflict (the Iliad), or to bring a warrior back to his homeland (the Odyssey). The SONG is probably closest in spirit to the Iliad, which alludes to, but does not chronicle, the fall of Troy. The SONG describes the way of life of the Iroquois tribes that lived in the Northeastern United States, at a time before that way of life ended due to the incursions of European colonists. But even though by 1855 not all Native American tribes had been fully subdued by the U.S. government, the decline of the Iroquois stands for the eventual decline of all Native Americans within the U.S. borders (and to some extent to all such colonial endeavors). which I would imagine Longfellow foresaw. 

Experts on myth and folklore have declare that Longfellow's mixing and matching of Native American stories is far from faithful, even to the few written records of the oral tales in the poet's own time. Nevertheless, I don't judge literary myths primarily by accuracy to source, and so I found the SONG replete with many fascinating myth-tropes. Some of them are etiological in nature, like describing the invention of pictographic writing or the formulation of rituals to banish the spirits of the deceased. And many tales reflect the Indians' focus on all non-human creatures as "people" in their own right, capable of helping or harming the principal hero in his adventures. But for me I was frankly surprised at how many combative stories Longfellow works into his epic. 

Longfellow's Hiawatha is a demigod. A divine being, the West Wind, sires the future hero on a mortal woman (albeit with her own deific background), and then deserts her, patently competing with the Greek gods for the place of "worst deadbeat dad." As an adult Hiawatha takes his magical weapons and engages his heavenly father in combat to avenge his mother, who dies lovelorn-- but the West Wind can't be killed, so that Hiawatha must return to Earth and become a culture hero to the Iroquois. Aside from the etiological myths mentioned above, most of Hiawatha's activities are martial in nature, as he subdues the great sturgeon that swallows him whole, and conquers the immortal magician Meggisogwon, who has one vulnerable point (helpfully revealed to the hero by a clever woodpecker). Hiawatha also has a couple of larger-than-life friends-- Chiababos the minstrel and Kwasind the Strong Man-- but they end up meeting untimely ends, arguably signaling the decline of the fantasy-world in which Hiawatha dwells, even before the European colonists arrive to plunge the timeless wilderness into "real time." Most of the major characters are male, and so there's not much focus upon the lives of Native American females. The only time a female character is especially significant involves a magical ritual of corn-protection performed by the hero's famous wife Minnehaha, who performs the ritual by walking around a cornfield nude. Yet Minnehaha also dies during famine, underscoring that even in the fantasy-land Death still held its dominion.

Since the founding of the United States changed so much about the world, both in its "New" and "Old" incarnations, it's somewhat appropriate that an epic about the decline of the "noble savages" occupying that land should also stand as the last of the great heroic epics.

THE READING RHEUM: A PRINCESS OF MARS (1912)

 

In one crucial respect, the French writers of the degeneracy school differed from their American counterparts. Where Mather and his cohorts saw the Indian as insatiably lustful, a being of overbearing sexual power, these European writers saw him as sexually weak, cold-blooded, insensitive to pleasure or pain, passionless—perhaps even defective in his manhood.”—Richard Slotkin, REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE, p.203.

Numerous critics have remarked that in A PRINCESS OF MARS, Edgar Rice Burroughs created his “myth of Mars” out of myths of the American West. Prior to publication of PRINCESS (serialized under a different title), Burroughs had already penned three or four traditional westerns. John Carter, the protagonist of the first Martian novel, claims that he remembers no personal history, but nevertheless his main identity is that of a native of Civil-War Virginia and a former Confederate officer. Having become impoverished because his side lost—which is Burroughs’ only direct comment upon Carter’s Southern heritage—Carter goes West. He teams up with another former Rebel officer and seeks riches. However, savage Indians attack the two white adventurers. Carter’s partner is killed and Carter is cornered inside a cave by the hostiles. Believing himself doomed, he suffers a strange paralysis, after which a part of him separates from his mortal body, and he looks down upon what he deems his own “lifeless clay.” His “alternate self” then gazes up at the heavens and beholds the planet Mars, with which he identifies as a “fighting man.” In no time, Carter’s other identity manifests on Mars, where he seems to have as physical an existence as he did on Earth. He learns that Martian gravity gives him fantastic strength, and this leads in turn to Carter becoming the supreme warrior on the planet, as well as winning the hand of a red-skinned princess, Dejah Thoris.

In keeping with the theme of the Roman god of war, all denizens of Mars are warlike, but their warring nature springs from their world’s geological catastrophes, resulting in the planet’s slow loss of its atmosphere. Earlier Martian generations possessed a higher level of technology, which makes it possible for the natives to use super-science on occasion. Nevertheless, every race on Mars—red, white, black, or green—fights with pre-industrial weapons: swords, spears, bows and arrows. The people of Dejah Thoris, who are red-hued like the Indians of Earth, are somewhat more sophisticated than their fellow Martians, but in PRINCESS Burroughs is far less interested in them than in the bizarre green men, the Tharks and the Warhoons. These science-fictional ogres, Burroughs’ most memorable monsters, do not share the humanoid characteristics of most Martians, in that they have four arms and tusks in place of teeth. In addition, they incarnate the deepest idea of the ruthless savage, appearing to have no concept of pity or kindness. Carter will eventually learn that “nurture” rather than “nature” makes the Tharks pitiless, thanks to their habit of being raised by an impersonal village rather than by natural parents. That said, a couple of Thark characters prove themselves capable of being ennobled by Carter’s example. John Carter himself clearly loves the savage life—never once is he disheartened by killing an opponent, since all of his killings are justified—but he is a savage who has not forgotten the benefits of civilized life.

But the closest similitude between Carter and the Tharks is their reserve toward sexuality (hence the opening quote). In Burroughs’s cosmos, the unrelenting chaos of Martian life has made it difficult for the Martians to have more than perfunctory interest in spawning. There are occasional “degenerates”—though “throwbacks” might be a better term—among the Tharks, as with one of the book’s main villains, Thark chieftain Tal Hajus. Of this nasty villain, who later comes close to committing inter-species rape on Dejah Thoris, Burroughs writes:

[Tal Hajus] was, in contrast to most of his fellows, a slave to that brute passion which the waning demands for procreation upon this dying planet had almost stilled in the Martian breast.

Burroughs writes this in Chapter 12, and not until Chapter 27 does Tal Hajus attempt to assault the comely princess. Thus, long before the threat manifests, Burroughs has Carter meditating (on the same page of Chapter 12) that it may be necessary for Dejah Thoris to take her own life as did “those brave frontier women of my own land rather than fall into the hands of the Indian braves.” In Tal Hajus, then, Burroughs allows for the reader to imagine the savage as “insatiably lustful.”

But even though John Carter wanders through a world where he and everyone else walk around near-naked, he himself seems as “underfunded” as the majority of Tharks—and for the same reason, that of being almost wholly oriented on the arts of Mars, with little experience in the ways of Venus. In Chapter 14, Carter gives readers their only view of his own sexual experiences as he thinks about his burgeoning affection for the princess.

So this was love! I had escaped it for all the years I had roamed the five continents and their encircling seas; in spite of beautiful women and urging opportunity; in spite of a half-desire for love and a constant search for my ideal, it had remained for me to fall furiously and hopelessly in love with a creature from another world, of a species similar possibly, yet not identical with mine.

In other words, in Burroughs’ cosmos, inter-species sex is okay when sanctioned by the goddess of love. Yet in contrast to the author’s same-year TARZAN OF THE APES, there’s not a lot of lust in the pages of PRINCESS, except from villains like Tal Hajus and the spite-filled Thark villainess Sarkoja. But then, the loyalty of Carter and most other Martians to the martial spirit mirrors the author’s dedication to spectacular violence. Even though Burroughs does not dwell on the resultant gore from blades piercing flesh, he provides so many guttings and slicings that it’s impossible for readers not to imagine the sights the author denies them. It would be interesting to compare the sheer quantity of violent acts in any Mars book to those in the contemporaneous novels of the period. I tend to think that Burroughs had no literary peers in the realm of spectacular violence until Robert E. Howard came along—but even I am not dedicated enough to the spirit of Mars to undertake such a comparative study.

MYTHCOMICS: ["SCALP ITCH"}, JOE COLLEGE #2 (1950)

In a previous essay I won't trouble to track down, I wondered whether or not American "teen humor" comics had any potential to produce the symbolic discourse necessary for a mythcomic. Just the fact that both Gershon Legman and Frederick Wertham took a few shots at the genre might indicate that there was some potential for gold, where these two ignoramuses saw only dross. Legman was a little more explicit than Wertham about the psychosexual undercurrents of the genre, though like Wertham he was content to cite one supposedly disruptive example of said genre to prove his contentions. I quoted him in greater detail in this 2008 essay:

...there are published not only a handful of female crime-and western-comics, but whole series of so-called 'teen-age' comic-books specifically for girls, in which adolescent sexuality is achieved in sadistic disguise... through a continuous humiliation of scarecrow fathers and transvestist boyfriends by ravishingly pretty girls, beating up the men with flower-pots and clocks and brooms..."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH (1949), p. 47.

This quasi-Freudian reading manages the feat of making teen humor comics sound a lot more psychologically interesting than they really are. I've seen Legman's one example, a 1947 Timely issue of JEANIE, and it's no than so-so slapstick, though it does have a scene where a pretty girl's father gets conked by his daughter when she mistakes him for a burglar. "So-so slapstick" pretty well describes the majority of all teen humor comics from Golden, Silver, and Bronze Ages-- and I speak as one who, whether motivated by intellectual genre-curiosity or by nostalgia for simpler times, has sampled most of the titles out there. Such forgotten ARCHIE-imitators as ALGIE, GINGER, MAZIE, DEXTER, and Thoth knows how many others sometimes had nice art, but offered little more.

Then I came across my copy of JOE COLLEGE #2. There were only two issues of this Hillman title over the years 1949 and 1950, and none of the stories in #1-- which I read on COMIC BOOK PLUS-- were anything special. Nor were any of the stories in #2, except for the cover-featured "Joe College" story. The artist on both of Joe's stories was Bob Powell, and though Joe's first story is ordinary, Powell did dip into some psychological waters for the second and last tale. The cover shown above, though it depicts an imaginary situation (a savage Indian seeks to lift Joe's scalp under the pose of being a barber), captures the essence of the tale's screwball premise.

By 1949 "Joe College" was a term for a fun-loving college student, and that's all there is to the series' youthful protagonist as he attends his alma mater, Hardknox University. But in the story I've retroactively entitled "Scalp Itch," all of the mythicity inheres in the young WASP's encounter with certain not-yet-vanished Americans.

Following a page on which Joe accidentally antagonists a cranky red man named "Horse Feathers" (a decorous euphemism for "horseshit"), one of Joe's professors explains the complicated reasons why there's a whole quasi-reservation of Indians on the campus grounds, Long ago an Indian tribe donated the land to the college's founder, and in a very improbable exchange, they and all their descendants got to live in some mansion near Hardknox. One assumes that the campus provides them some upkeep as well, though the professor asserts that all their money comes from standing around the campus begging for coins. (This is how Joe antagonizes Horse Feathers; mistaking him for a statue of an Indian and passing remarks about the redman's ugly mug.) On top of these considerations, the tribe gets two more privileges. First, one of their women-folk is apparently allowed to "roam der campus until she finds a mate," and though it's an ordinary mortal woman named Princess Dreamboat, Joe has somehow heard about this part of the custom and claims "I thought she was just a myth." However, Joe hasn't heard the second stipulation: that once every ten years, the men of the tribe "are allowed to take vun scalp from vun student"-- and though in practice this means nothing more than shaving the victim's head, it's definitely a demonstration of resentment at white people, since the Indians "always pick der longest and blondest hair."

Naturally, the two customs converge upon blonde, hapless Joe. First, he rescues the wandering maiden "Princess Dreamboat" from a waterfall, and she promptly falls in love with him. (Joe somehow neglects to mention that he has a steady girlfriend.)

At the same time, it happens to be the night when the tribal members can enact their hair-cutting hazing ritual, and Horse Feathers almost gets his wish, until Dreamboat intrudes in fine Pocohontas style.

I'll omit one of the climactic turnarounds, in which Horse Feathers's evil intent rebounds on him, but I will reprint the other climax, in which Joe's girlfriend catches the Indian maiden spooning with Joe, and proceeds to give her a trim job.

The fact that the Indian girl wants the white guy's loving feelings, while the men of her tribe want to cut something off of him, shouldn't require a lot of comment, beyond the commonplace notion that "hair= virility" in myth and folklore. I particularly like Dreamboat's line, "I've just been scalped by a savage white woman." The little tear in Horse Feathers' eye is a coincidental bonus, which takes on extra humor given its resemblance to this famous "crying Indian" commercial image.

I have no idea if JOE COLLEGE was Bob Powell's first "teen humor" comic book, though I know that he worked in the genre again in later years. The artist's wild sense of humor looks forward to the inspired lunacy of the MAD comic book that began two years after JOE COLLEGE's demise. though, oddly enough, Powell didn't do much if any work for EC Comics.

The entire story can be read here.

MYTHCOMICS: COYOTE #1-16 (1983-86)

In AN ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY I gave pride of place to the first two issues of Steve Englehart’s Epic-published COYOTE series. At the time I wrote that, I hadn’t given the rest of the Coyote-tales a close reading: either the seven installments that appeared in ECLIPSE MONTHLY magazine or the remaining fifteen in the Epic series. I only remembered that after the first two solo-feature issues, in which Englehart’s script was beautifully realized by artist Steve Leialoha, both story and artwork fell off drastically in quality. Yet, given that I’ve said it’s possible to have a significant symbolic discourse even when other qualities are lacking, I decided to re-examine the full Coyote series.

I found no reason to change my opinion of the ECLIPSE MONTHLY stories, which I touched on briefly in a review for COMICS JOURNAL #85 (1983). This sequence introduced Coyote, a hero named for the Native American trickster-god. He possessed shape-shifting and dimension-crossing powers, the heritage of a meandering and confusing backstory. With almost no motivation, the hero began clashing with his principal adversaries: a secret organization called the Shadow Cabinet. These assorted spy-jinks led me to label the Eclipse series as “American Werewolf gets a shave and plays James Bond.”  I also noted that collaborator Marshall Rogers was guilty of “cardboard figures and meticulously cluttered panels.” At best the Eclipse stories rate as near myths.

The sixteen Epic issues, however, do manage to realize a “density of discourse” that raises them to the level of “good myths.” Englehart had established in the earlier stories that Coyote got his supernatural powers as the result of being raised in a society of eldritch beings: a were-coyote foster-father and a vampire foster-mother. But in the Epic series, Englehart deepened the protagonist’s connection to Native American lore and culture. Though Coyote’s “origin-story” is laid out without a lot of attention to motives or consistency, it does establish that Coyote, a mortal man, was actually chosen by the Native American coyote-god to help drive out the Europeans who conquered the lands of the red men. This revised origin didn’t come to much in terms of plot, but it allowed Englehart to intermingle two forms of narrative: the modern-day, superspy-like adventures of his hero, and vignettes about the original coyote-god’s adventures in the world that existed before the Caucasian invasion. I don’t know to what extent Englehart’s vignettes derived from real Native American folklore, although some of the details are certainly provided by the writer himself. The significance of the vignettes is that Englehart emulates much of the earthy humor that characterizes authentic Amerindian folktales. One outstanding vignette, possibly the height of the Englehart-Leialoha collaboration, deals with Coyote’s creation of the Milky Way by his impulsiveness.

And what of the main story concerning the hero? Well, in 1983 I wrote that he was one of several contemporary heroes who were more concerned with “maintaining personal freedom” rather than expousing total altruism (I was big on the theme of altruism vs. selfhood back in the 1980s.) Coyote, having much of the nature of his trickster-god, is full of youthful self-confidence, contempt for those of lesser attainments, and just plain horniness. Indeed, whereas James Bond of the Movies often got to bone at least two women per film—albeit separately—Coyote is a true “harem fantasy,” in which he hooks up with two sisters (one white, one phenotypically black) and later with a third hottie, a female Russian assassin. Issue #16 concludes not only with Coyote’s victory over the Shadow Cabinet, but also his success with getting at least two of the hotties to remain in his personal seraglio. I’m not sure if any modern American comics-creator would even be able to pitch, much less have published, such a politically incorrect male fantasy.

Further, Englehart does manage to tie together Coyote’s current enemies with the mythic past of the folklore-Coyote, for the Shadow Cabinet is largely run by magical beings called:”Crows.” Native American folklore has its share of crow-gods, but it’s not clear if these are gods, though in one of the past vignettes the Crows are seen as the persistent adversaries of the coyote-god. At the very least, the presence of the Crows keeps the Shadow Cabinet from being just another globe-spanning secret organization.

Ironically, in 1983, I wrote just the opposite, stating that I thought the Cabinet was meant to be more than “SPECTRE or Hydra;” that it was a metaphor for Englehart’s view of the “grasping-and-taking aspect of American business.” I no longer think Englehart applied this metaphor to the Cabinet itself: now I think it really was just another SPECTRE, albeit with overcomplicated origins (including aliens!) Yet throughout the sixteen Epic issues, Englehart adroitly contrasts the anal-retentive tendencies of Anglo culture with the more freewheeling spontaneity of Amerindian ways. He also works in interesting commentaries on the three “Religions of the Book”—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all of whom appear as minor players in the pagan conflict of Coyote and the Crows.

On a side-note, Marvel’s publication of the Coyote series also gave Englehart a venue inn which to publish his four-part collaboration with Steve Ditko, “The Djinn.” Only one installment of the series had seen previous publication, but Marvel published the whole series, much to the delectation of Ditko enthusiasts, since the series featured some of the artist’s best eighties work. Englehart also worked the continuity of the “Djinn” story into Coyote’s mythos reasonably well, but over time the writer created too many wild subplots, so that the series came off as belonging to the “everything plus the kitchen sink” school.

Issue sixteen concludes with the words, “James Bond is problematical, but—Coyote will return!” it takes a special kind of nerve to claim that your comic-book character has a better chance to return than that internationally famous superspy 007. But in this Englehart proved a better writer than a prophet, for Coyote hasn’t turned any new tricks in the comics since 1986.