THE READING RHEUM: HELL'S SALES MANAGER (1940)

 

I could never attempt a "1001 myths" project with prose pulp magazines and their kindred, even though in many ways those periodicals primed the pump for superhero comics. In the time it takes me to read one book-length pulp novel, I can read (say) ten horror stories in search of the mythopoeic. In prose pulps, I can find particular authors who were great at bringing the touch of the mythic to their stories, such as Rohmer, Burroughs and Howard. But it takes too damn long to search for myths in the hero pulps. Still, I did locate one by sheer chance-- even though both its title and its cover illustration have nothing to do with the story inside. 

Norvell Page wrote the vast majority of SPIDER adventures credited to house-name "Grant Stockbridge," and ever since I first encountered pulp heroes in comics and paperback reprints, I've always favored Page's frenetic SPIDER over the faux-cerebral SHADOW. The SPIDER stories are justly mocked for being wildly over the top in terms of all the chaos and destruction the villains would unleash upon New York City, and all the violence the city's arachnid defender would commit to bring down said villains. But MANAGER shows Norvell Page being a bit more-- dare I say it-- "cerebral" in terms of bringing his myth-materials into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

This time the Spider's other self, heroic Richard Wentworth (as well as his aides, principally his valiant girlfriend Nita Van Sloan) encounter menaces on two fronts. On the mundane front, Wentworth's police commissioner buddy Kirkpatrick has been assigned to help a deputy from the French Surete, Raoul Chartres, who's been instructed to bring down The Spider. Of course, this late in the game-- MANAGER was the seventy-seventh novel in the series-- Kirkpatrick had frequently suspected Wentworth's double identity but has arguably let his long friendship with Wentworth cloud his judgment, even though he firmly believes that the Spider should be jailed for his reckless vigilantism. Page may have brought Chartres in to freshen up the old formula with a new face. In addition, though the United States would not enter World War II for two more years, the spread of fascism on the European continent would have a French copper like Chartres sympathetic by reason of his allegiance to his embattled country-- even though the events of the war are only briefly touched upon in MANAGER.

In any case, Chartres is given a feisty, demanding character, and he has no doubt from his studies of the case that Wentworth is the Spider. There are a lot of good tense scenes between Chartres and Wentworth, and even between supposed allies Chartres and Kirkpatrick. But the primary menace is yet another dire super-villain determined to wreak chaos on New York for the sake of profit. I'm not entirely sure why Page named this fiend "The Brand." At first I thought it was because the red-clad evildoer initially bites the Spider's style by leaving sigils of his deeds on the bodies of his victims, the same way the Spider does to conquered criminals. But this brand-motif is quickly dropped. Once or twice the Spider thinks of his foe as a "firebrand" he means to extinguish, and I guess that's the most likely association, since the Brand's distinguishing gimmick is a special weapon, "the Bolt," that can spew forth lightning-like effects. But this power doesn't operate like conventional lightning, but has more the effect of a super-hurricane, inducing "implosions" that can devastate physical objects and kill people by exploding their heads. The descriptions of the weapon's devastation are much better than Page's logic as to how the Brand got hold of such a device. As pulp-scholar Will Murray has warned, no one should expect an ingenious surprise at the revelation of any SPIDER master villain's true ID. 

The super-science of the Bolt doesn't resemble anything in real science, but Page's imaginative extrapolation of the way implosions work in his world endow MANAGER with its most potent mythicity. It's also of interest that the Spider also tries to bite the Brand's style by joining his gang under his underworld alias of "Blinky McQuade, safecracker." This leads to a scene in which "McQuade," along with several thugs, must don imitation Brand robes to join his gang, and this leads to a tense scene when the Brand detects the Spider among his auditioning minions. Eventually, the Brand imprisons Wentworth and sends out thugs dressed as the Spider, so that the hero will die with the reputation of being a cop-killing crook like those on whom the hero preyed. So I assign some mythicity to the trope of hero and villain assuming one another's guises for this or that advantage.

Girlfriend Nita acquits herself well here, dressing up as the Spider when he's caught, and shooting it out with the phony Spiders, even though Page is careful to note that this level of violence does not come naturally to the heroine. I also give Page props for some very cinematic writing that goes a little beyond simple purple prose. Here's a scene told from Nita's POV, one that explains much of the perennial appeal of the superhero:

"Wentworth looked so small against the bulk of the building-- small, yet the dance of his shadow stretched out hugely across the barren field. It was enormous, dominant, a black silhouette of unconquerable power-- the will of The Spider!"

                    

THE READING RHEUM: THE MYSTERY OF THE SINGING MUMMIES (1936)

 

Though I'm a fan of (and maybe an apologist for) Sax Rohmer's works, I'd never visited either of the two "Yellow Peril pulps" produced by Popular Publications. In 1935 Popular launched THE MYSTERIOUS WU FANG, and the magazine lasted into 1936 for a total of seven issues. Popular pulled the FANG (sorry) and almost immediately issued another Yellow Peril series, DOCTOR YEN SIN. But the SIN came to an end that same year after just three issues. An essay on Pulp.Net alleges that Sax Rohmer's lawyers may have sent Popular a letter of restraint for both serials, claiming that the pulp publisher was stepping on the Fu Manchu brand.

It should be kept in mind that Rohmer's Devil Doctor was doing pretty well in the 1930s. Rohmer revived the Fu series in 1931 and prior to the publication of WU FANG, the British author had produced the seventh in the series, THE TRAIL OF FU MANCHU, which first saw serialization in 1934 within the "slick" upscale magazine COLLIER'S. I've no information about how well either FANG or SIN sold, but if FANG had been selling badly, why bring in a second Asian villain to take his place? One Wiki quote asserts that SIN might have been less "juvenile" than FANG, but without reading the source material I can only note in passing that FANG's heroic opponents included one teenaged boy, whereas there are no juvenile characters in the third and last SIN novel, MYSTERY OF THE SINGING MUMMIES.

Arguably the title is the best thing about the story. Like a lot of pulp titles, the creator seems to be jamming together disparate subjects to make the reader curious enough to wonder, "How the heck can mummies sing?" The explanation for the phenomenon that causes living human beings into mummified creatures, and the auditory sound associated with the phenomenon, is pretty inventive.

Not so much the title character. Author Donald Keyhoe (best known today for UFOlogy books) copies all the dominant surface characteristics of Fu Manchu. He's a polymath who can speak several languages, can master all of the sciences, and can hypnotize almost anyone. According to an article by a Wold Newton writer, the other two issues don't seem to have given Yen Sin any background at all, and he barely has any character beyond being an Asian mastermind. He commands a criminal organization called the "Invisible Empire" (though the cover uses the term "Invisible Peril").Which begs the question-- how "invisible" can your empire be when most of your henchmen are savage "Yellow" brutes, who might find it hard to blend into even a big metropolis in the US.

Possibly Yen Sin gets short shrift because Keyhoe put his greatest effort into the doctor's opponent Michael Traile, "the Man Who Never Sleeps." Due to a failed brain operation, Traile loses the capacity to sleep normally. Only a special yoga technique of relaxation allows Traile to keep from going mad, and not sleeping makes him something of a polymath who fills the late hours with esoteric studies. That said, he's just as flat a character as Yen Sin, and so are all of the supporting characters.       

Keyhoe certainly does not stint on the action; everywhere Traile goes he gets into some running gun-battle. But his crisp prose is somewhat mechanical. I wasn't expecting any of the moodiness of Sax Rohmer here, but I also didn't get the sort of fervid verbal poetry one finds in the purple pen of Norvell "The Spider" Page. In true Fu Manchu fashion Yen Sin gets away in the pages of his final adventure, though probably Keyhoe wrote the story long in advance of the decision to cancel the magazine.

The pulps also had a genius for capturing the uncensored attitudes of the writers and the readers at whom they aimed. But there are no insights here about why there's an eternal race war between Occidental and Oriental-- though Yen Sin's only moment of individuality Yen Sin is a claim that he hates the Japanese as much as the Caucasians. Japanese fifth-columnists play a minor role in MUMMIES, and there are nodding references to the activities of the Axis powers. For what it's worth MUMMIES' antipathy to Germany and Japan is one of the earliest expressions of anti-Axis feeling I've come across in American pop culture. I wasn't really expecting anything on a par with the best of Sax Rohmer, and in a way I'm kind of glad that he's not as easy to emulate as a lot of critics might suppose.                          

THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION

For once, I got permission from a forum-poster, one DoctorHermes428, to reprint here a post from CHFB that sparked my current essay. The conversation involved in part talking about the reasons why in the late 1960s Jack Kirby declined to accept any offer Stan Lee may have made re: taking over Lee's de facto Art Director duties for Marvel Comics, and why he Kirby decided instead to sever relations with Marvel in 1969 and go to work for DC Comics under head editor Carmine Infantino.

____________

I don't see how Jack Kirby would have enjoyed being Art Director, no matter if it paid better. He loved working on his own, sitting up all night over the drawing board. Being in an office with people coming in and out all day, the phone ringing, arguments over a cover layout... all this would have annoyed him beyond bearing (as I see it).
What happened at DC really broke Jack Kirby's heart. His grand plans for the Fourth World books where he had some of his favorite creators working for him, as well as his ideas for a line of black and white magazines, weren't supported by DC (mostly Carmine Infantino). 

I don't think Kirby was ever the same after this. He still turned out some fine comics but increasingly he was jus going through the motions. The spark had been damped. He wasn't out to change the world or create his life's work, he just settled down to make a living. I know most people will say, "It's just comic books, what's the big deal?" but to me it's one of the biggest missed opportunities in pop culture ever. -- DoctorHermes428.

Now in my essay STAN, JACK, AND JOE STUFF I mentioned in a general sense the way the Marvel Universe had in essence undermined Kirby's independent way of doing comics, though I didn't address any long-term creative consequences. I wrote:

From my outsider's standpoint, though, the synergy between Kirby and Lee was far different [from the Simon-Kirby collaboration], and I think Kirby got from Lee as good as he gave. But Kirby had spent a long, long time spinning his fantasies on the drawing-board, and he probably wasn't all that sensitive to the ways in which Lee MAY have turned him in new directions. Years later, when Kirby was seeking to reclaim his original art from the recalcitrant Marvel Comics, the artist said many dismissive things about Stan's talents, and some fans have taken those pronouncements as gospel. To me, the obvious fact that Kirby's later solo productions abjured the "soap opera" approach of Marvel proves to me that Kirby did not originate this approach to characterization, despite the fact that together Kirby and Lee could do soap-opera tropes better than anyone else in the business.

Kirby, unlike most professionals in his time, had an incredible capacity to remember and rework dozens of story-tropes from dozens of genres, so that much of his work, alone or in collaboration, seems like raw creativity unleashed. But he didn't always know the best way to channel his own creativity, precisely because he was so many-faceted. In addition, that creativity insured that he could never be entirely comfortable just cranking out stories for a client like DC Comics, and even if he didn't especially want to return to Marvel in the late 1950s, the ways in which his talent responded to Stan Lee's innovations re-defined the superhero genre at a time when the comic-book medium lay on the edge of extinction. Without the intense fandom that arose from Marvel Comics, it's possible that few readers would even care these days about sorting out who did what, and why.

 First, I should enlarge on what I said about "new directions." 

I've the impression that both Lee and Kirby read widely in many pulp genres as young men, and that, unlike many of their contemporaries, they were able, whether with one another or with other collaborators, to convey that enthusiasm to their young reading-audience. And of all the genres they both absorbed, the most important one to their 1960s collaborations was the genre of science fiction.

Now, the prose pulps of the 1940s would have offered a rather schizophrenic view of the genre, for one could encounter on the stands both pure "gosh-wow" space operas like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Captain Future alongside and deeper, more thoughtful philosophical meditations by authors like Asimov and Heinlein. So far as I can tell, though, almost no comics raconteurs of the 1940s tapped into the philosophical side of SF. All, including Lee and Kirby, were totally invested in "gosh-wow." And I will extend that argument (for reasons that will soon become clear) to the employment of SF in American cinema. In the decade of the 1940s, nearly no "philosophy-SF" was attempted, and the few attempts hardly came close to touching the hem of Fritz Lang's trouser-leg.

But comic book SF took on its own schizophrenic division in the very early 1950s. Going by my partial reading of the early issues of DC's flagship  SF-anthology comic, STRANGE ADVENTURES (1950), I would say that DC remained steadfastly committed to the "gosh-wow" method. In the same year that ADVENTURES debuted, William Gaines' EC Comics published its two SF-titles, WEIRD FANTASY and WEIRD SCIENCE. EC experts would know more than I of Gaines' reading-proclivities. But for whatever reasons-- which probably include the proclivities of contributors like Wally Wood-- EC's two magazines proved to be more in the spirit of "philosophy-SF" that had been best propagated in the forties by ASTOUNDING MAGAZINE and in the fifties by THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (said magazine having begun in 1949). To further support the sense of a changing ethos, American cinema suddenly began investing heavily in "thinking-man's SF," with DESTINATION MOON in 1950 and both THE THING and THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL in 1951. 

I can't say at present how much the changes to comics-SF and movie-SF affected either Lee or Kirby in the first half of the fifties. I don't think by that time either man was likely to be reading pulp magazines any more, whether the magazines were simple or sophisticated. But I have the distinct impression that both of them kept a weather-eye on the new breed of SF-movies, and that both men began emulating cinema's version of "philosophical SF" in their comic books, and MAYBE imitating EC's efforts in that department too. How much these emulations affected their work in the early 1950s is not important to my thesis. But it seems without question that when they started collaborating on SF-work in the late 1950s-- even on the works where Stan's brother Larry Leiber provided the dialogue-- they began giving the characters in their short-term anthology-tales more characterization than anything one could see in DC's gosh-wow stories of the decade.

The DC gosh-wow dynamic also informed the company's SF-heavy superheroes of the late fifties and early sixties: FLASH, GREEN LANTERN, JUSTICE LEAGUE. But when Lee enlisted Kirby to collaborate on their flagship superhero title in 1961, the first thing they did was to work in one of the tragic monsters they'd been using in their SF-anthology tales, but as an ongoing hero. 

Though Lee and Kirby were very different individuals and had very different attitudes toward their creative endeavors, I think the synergy between them came from a common understanding that you could tell far more engaging comics-stories if the characters were at least on the same level of a movie like 1953's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. From the years 1961-1964, that's as far as their aspirations went.

Then, during the years 1965 through 1967, Kirby goes through a period of incredible dynamism in terms of designing new characters. In FANTASTIC FOUR alone, he visualized the Inhumans, Galactus and the Silver Surfer, the Kree, and the Black Panther in that short period. It's possible, as Kirby apologists believe, that Lee simply let Kirby create everything during that period and just filled in the dialogue. But there's no literal proof that Kirby never picked up any ideas from his editor and collaborator. One can only say that Lee probably could not have designed a character to save his life. That said, before Kirby wasted time coming up with a design for comics' first Black superhero, I think it's axiomatic that Lee would have signed off on spotlighting such a character. Indulging some of Kirby's wilder flights of fancy didn't mean letting the artist do whatever he pleased. Lee was the editor, the guy who made decisions about what did or didn't benefit the image of the company he was building into a small empire. So if Lee had wanted to turn King T'Challa into just another White jungle-hero, that's what Kirby would have been obliged to draw.

As DoctorHermes says, in the late sixties Kirby saw that for the first time his works were getting a little serious attention from the non-comics world. He didn't think, probably correctly, that he was getting due credit for his contributions-- though to be fair, outsiders would not have cared about the specifics of who created what. As I said in my earlier essay, only hardcore fans kept track of such minutiae. For the last two years of his second Marvel tenure, Kirby reined in his creative impulses, probably to keep from giving away any more profitable ideas to the company. One anecdote suggests that Kirby might have shown Stan Lee a few rough ideas he'd later take to DC Comics. When some interviewer related this anecdote to Stan Lee, the Marvel editor typically said that he didn't remember one way or the other.

Ironically, one of the models for Kirby's "Fourth World" was not a major SF-author, but the foremost fantasy-author of the sixties decade, J.R.R. Tolkien. To be sure, the only thing Kirby really took from Tolkien was a general metaphysical attitude toward the struggle between the Good of New Genesis and the Evil of Apokolips, a theme not present in most SF prose works. But almost all of the imagery of the Fourth World stemmed from science fiction, not fantasy. 

What Kirby presented in the Fourth World was usually "gosh-wow" SF garnished with occasional philosophical content. Nevertheless, the scripts he wrote were fully as ambitious as those he co-created with Lee. I think it's likely that, aside from just wanting to be independent of his collaboration with Lee, Kirby hoped to establish his Fourth World as an artistic rival to the Marvel Universe he'd helped build.

I like many fans wish that Carmine Infantino had allowed the Fourth World story to come to a decent conclusion. But even given such circumstances, I don't think Kirby-at-DC had a chance in hell of challenging the popularity of Marvel. I hypothesize that in the early years, both Lee and Kirby probably enjoyed, as much as any professional adults could, the fannish pleasure of having two heroes from different features clash. At least I can't look at the 1964 "The Hulk vs the Thing" and see anything but two creators having fun, rather than just hacking out a job for pay. But when Kirby went to DC, the only way he could prosper at that company-- where various characters were parceled out into separate feifdoms-- was to keep his creations isolated from everything in mainstream DC, apart from some minor usages of Superman, Jimmy Olsen, and new incarnations of the Guardian and the Newsboy Legion. 

By 1970, though, the DC approach of keeping their features largely isolated from one another was beginning to lose favor with the hardcore fan audience. Those fans were a minor subgroup of the general audience, of course. But the casual comics-readers weren't ready to commit to Kirby's big project. Could the hardcore fans have made the Fourth World profitable enough to keep it going a little longer? No one can possibly know. All we know is that comics fandom of the early 1970s was divided on the merits of the New Kirby Universe. I've seen a fair number of fans reminisce that they just couldn't get into Kirby's rather eccentric scripts, and that may be because they'd become accustomed to the greater quality control seen at Marvel under Lee's editorship. I'm fairly sure that Don Thompson expressed contempt for the Kirbyverse in his fanzine NEWFANGLES, just a year or two before he and wife Maggie began writing for the tradezine THE BUYER'S GUIDE.

I concur that after the premature cancellation of the Fourth World books, Kirby never again sought to equal the incredible creativity of either that creative era or of the 1965-67 period. Some particular ideas are very good; some are pretty bad. As for mainstream comics after Marvel's classic period, I don't see a lot of writers and artists seeking inspiration from either prose or cinematic SF with the intensity that I discern in the works of Lee and Kirby. More often, I saw the tendency to rework tropes from the Lee-Kirby days, or from standout SF-comics of the sixties, like the Fox-Infantino ADAM STRANGE. (Chris Claremont riffing on the ALIEN movies is not my idea of a meaningful SF-influence.) Kirby's creative decline mirrored the demise of both gosh-wow SF and philosophical-SF in the comics medium so far as I can see, as Lee's linking of superheroes and soap-opera melodrama (which merits separate discussion) took precedence. 

And that's as good a place as any to end these somewhat doleful meditations.

THE READING RHEUM: THE MAN OF BRONZE (1933)

 

One of the most interesting thing about Doc Savage's first novel is how much of the mythology was in place from the first. 

Naturally, I knew that author Lester Dent-- billed throughout the hero's pulp-magazine run as "Kenneth Robeson"-- established right away the backstory of Doc Savage and his "Fabulous Five" aides in basic nutshell-fashion, which "shells" he and other raconteurs would continue to re-use for most if not all subsequent stories. But I'm rather surprised to note that Dent articulated the idea of Doc's "Fortress of Solitude" in the first novel. In contrast to the use that DC's Superman made of the idea-- where the fortress was just sort of a "Superman museum"-- Dent's hero states that this refuge was "the secret of [Doc's] universal knowledge," because the hero needed intense "periods of concentration." One assumes that this concentration was the source of his polymath facility with all of the sciences, though a cynic might say that it was also a way of distancing himself from common humanity. 

BRONZE is also all about establishing the righteous quest of the six heroes, even if it's framed in somewhat juvenile terms, as Doc tells his men, "We first got together back in the War [i.e., World War One, though none of them ever seem old enough.] We all liked the big scrap. It got into our blood. When we got back, the humdrum life of an ordinary man was not suited to our natures." This account slightly skirts a separate motive, in which it's asserted that Doc's father, a rich philanthropist, subjected his son to intensive training in physical and mental development for the express purpose of having Doc become a world-beating do-gooder. In any case, at the beginning of BRONZE, Doc and his men learn that the senior Savage has been killed, thus giving the sextet a concrete case to investigate.

Not coincidentally, the solution to the elder Savage's murder also leads the six champions to an almost endless fortune in gold that funds Doc's endless supply of crimefighting toys. The heroes journey to Central America and find that their enemies are linked to a Mayan civilization that, in true Rider Haggard fashion, has remained intact and isolated from the vagaries of colonist incursions. Yet though that bald summary suggests that Doc and friends may take the form of "ugly Americans" joining in the colonial project, Doc himself is very outspoken about disagreeing with said project. 

It's a lousy trick for a government to take some poor savage's land away from him and give it to a white man to exploit. Our own American Indians got that kind of deal, you know.

When the good guys meet the Mayans, the natives are mostly well-bred and intelligent, including a sexy princess named Monja, who immediately falls for the unapproachable Doc Savage. The only exceptions are a corrupt warrior class who are behind various assassination attempts on Doc and friends, all with the long-range goal of taking control of the Mayan redoubt away from the rightful rulers. The villains are easily the weakest aspect of the novel, though it's an interesting sociological motif that Dent made ambitious professional warriors his bad guys, in marked contrast to the knightly purity of Doc's group. In the end, once the villains are defeated, the Mayan rulers become the de facto sponsors of Doc's war against evil. This sponsorship is certainly is a fate better than their getting annihilated just to make the hero look like a tough guy, which was a common fate for lost civilizations in thirties pop fiction, as seen in 1935's THE PHANTOM EMPIRE.

A minor surprise: I remember groaning when I watched a scene in the 1975 DOC SAVAGE film wherein Doc pays a sort of left-handed compliment to the beautiful female lead by telling her, "Mona-- you're a brick!" It was a corny line, but its derived from a scene in the book, where Doc says much the same thing to Monja. But it does have a little more psychological heft in prose. Doc is also a chaste knight who won't engage with the female sex to avoid threatening his mission, and since he's slightly aware of Monja's affections, he seeks to distance himself from the sexy young woman by treating her like one of the boys.

THE READING RHEUM: XICCARPH (1972)

I started seriously reading prose science fiction in the late 1960s, and aside from horror tales, that was close to being the only form of metaphenomenal fiction around for most of the decade. There were a few exceptions to this tendency-- J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis-- but I didn't happen to read them during that decade.

As I remember, though, I got my first substantial taste for reading prose fantasy in the early 1970s, and Tolkien's best-selling LORD OF THE RINGS was the cause, because it stimulated Ballantine Books to issue a substantial series of fantasy reprints from 1969 to 1974. To be sure, Lancer Paperbacks had already started the ball rolling by issuing new editions of the works of Robert E. Howard, but somehow I didn't encounter these in the early 1970s either. 

It didn't take me long to find out that devotees of early fantasy spoke in reverent tomes of the 1930s pulp magazine WEIRD TALES, and that of all horror-and-fantasy authors who appeared in its pages, Robert E, Howard, H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith were deemed the top of the heap. Lovecraft's horror-and-fantasy works had seen paperback reprint in the 1960s, but Smith-- who for most of his life was more of a verse poet than a prose-story writer-- had wait for the Ballantine imprint. Editor Lin Carter did a sterling job of selecting some of the choice stories, and though Smith never became as popular as the other two with later generations, these volumes still give one the easiest access to this writer's ouevre.

As I do these days with everything I read or re-read, I wanted to evaluate Smith's work through the lens of myth-criticism. The Carter selections are organized into four reprints, each of which is given the title of one of Smith's fantasy-lands. Not all stories in every volume take place in the titular locale, for Smith tended to toss off new landscapes at the drop of a hat rather than devoting himself to any particular one, as Howard did with Hyboria. My chosen volume, XICCARPH, boasts six subdivisions, all devoted to different locales.

Many of the tales in XICCARPH were just decent reads, but not worth discussing in detail (SPOILER warnings for those I do so discuss). Here are the exceptions:

The entries for "Xiccarph" focus upon what may be Smith's only continuing character, for just two stories. In "The Maze of Maal Dweb," a young man, native to the fantasy-planet Xiccarph, finds out that his beloved has been abducted by the evil wizard Maal Dweb, who rules the world with his magical skills. The youth successfully penetrates the wizard's sanctum, full of bizarre garden-growths and weird automatons, but Maal Dweb has the hero outpaced from the first, so it's an unhappy ending for him. The sorcerer's triumph is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he only steals young women for aesthetic purposes, turning them into beautiful stone statues for his contemplation. Smith must have liked the character, for he then wrote "The Flower-Women," in which Maal Dweb journeys to another world and decides to play hero, liberating a race of delicate flower-women from a cabal of wizards descended from lizards-- lizard-wizards, if one chooses. Smith's depiction of his worlds are highly colorful but not particularly mythic.

Three stories are set on a loose SF-locale, "Aihai," but all of these I found unexceptional. The only point of interest is that one story, "Vulthoom," is named after a Lovecraftian-styled alien god, and that comics-writer Gardner Fox recycled the name, slightly altered to "Volthoom," for a Silver Age JUSTICE LEAGUE continuity.

"The Doom of Antarion," though, presents a more mythically-dense concept. Modern-day Earthman Francis Melchior (note the Biblically inspired name) runs an antiques shop and spends all his free time star-gazing. He holds an enduring fascination with two seemingly contradictory spectacles: those that are "steeped in the mortuary shadows of dead ages," and those that suggest "the transcendent glories of other aeons." Smith incisively notes that these desires are both rooted in Melchior's distaste for "all that is present or near at hand," which might be seen as a comment on the tastes of horror-and-fantasy readers in general. While pursuing his astronomical observances, the protagonist, not unlike that other Melchior, fixates on one heavenly body in particular, "one minute star" that fills the antiquary with "intimations of loveliness and wonder." In due course, Melchior finds his earthbound spirit drawn to the planet Phandion that orbits the distant star, and that spirit merges with the living body of a poet named Antarion. But even though Phandion satisfies all of Melchior/Antarion's desire for exotic beauties-- including Antarion's beloved Thameera-- the world is doomed to perish when its sun dies. Thus "transcendent glories" fall victim to "mortuary shadows," and the antiquary Melchior then returns to his own body, haunted by the memories of the transcendence he so desired. I might observe that Edgar Allan Poe showed a similar passion for both "glories" and "shadows," and that here Smith produced a very Poe-esque take on the psychology of both passions.

Of the other four stories in the collection, only one other, "The Monster of the Prophecy," stands out, and it's interesting in that it reverses the verdict of "Antarion."  On contemporary Earth a poet named Theophilus feels estranged from his fellows by his poetic sensibilities (which may make this character a stand-in for Smith himself). Theophilus considers suicide, but a scientist invites the poet to join him in an experiment. Though the scientist looks like an Earthman, in reality he's a non-humanoid alien-- possessed of five arms, three legs, and three eyes-- from a world called Sabattor. The alien wishes to return home with a specimen of an Earthman, and asks Theophilus to accompany him voluntarily. The poet has no attachments to his Earth-life and he accepts. Though for some time the human finds it fascinating to learn the ways of an alien world, the attractions of being a scientific curiosity pale, and his existence brings him trouble from Sabattor's small-minded priesthood. Oddly, though, Smith gives Theophilus a somewhat happy, if macabre ending, as he ends up living out the rest of his life as the love-mate to one of the non-human alien females, who, like the protagonist, is a poet without an audience on her native world.  The happy ending is not without a certain irony, but here the irony is directed not at the main character but at the world in which he was born.

A LOVECRAFTIAN SEGUE

The following quote was taken from a letter written by H.P. Lovecraft to the pulp magazine ALL-STORY. This excerpt appeared in an essay in the collection LOVECRAFT AND INFLUENCE, analyzing the influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs on the Providence author. In his essay "A Reprehensible Habit," Gavin Callaghan did not elaborate on the context of the letter, except insofar as it illustrated his thesis, and the ellipses in the excerpt are presumably Callaghan's.

If. in fact, man is unable to create living things out of inorganic matter. to hypnotize the beasts of the forest to do his will, to swing from tree to tree with the apes of the African jungle...or to explore... the deserts of Mars, permit us, at least, in fantasy, to witness these miracles, and to satisfy that craving for the unknown, the weird, and the impossible which exists in every human brain.

Though Burroughs' name is not mentioned, the references to Tarzan are unmistakable, and it's likely that the part about creating creatures from inorganic matter alludes to ERB's 1927 Mars-novel THE MASTER MIND OF MARS. What's more significant to me and my NUM formula, though, is that HPL speaks of the uncanny feats of Tarzan as being as much a "miracle" as the marvelous super-science of Mars. I find this intriguing because HPL himself wrote very little in the way of "uncanny" horror fiction, one exception being "The Picture in the House," a story of rural cannibalism. Almost everything he himself penned fit into his definition of "supernatural horror"-- though by this he didn't mean traditional ghosts and goblins, but usually his own unique take on super-science. My memory is that in his long essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature," HPL barely alludes to anything in the realm of the uncanny-- which would not be unusual, since by definition the uncanny does not include the genuinely supernatural-- not to mention anything "miraculous."

I've long maintained that the factor uniting the uncanny and the marvelous is the quality of "strangeness." I deduced this general law from the many examples of compendia of fantastic film that always include fearsome psychos alongside forbidden planets, fake ghosts alongside real ones, and so on-- a recent example reviewed here. But of course, long before there were any such compendia, pulp magazines like WEIRD TALES offered both uncanny and marvelous terrors to their readers. HPL's letter records the personal testimony of a fan who liked both types of weird fiction-- even if he himself concentrated on just one of the two in his own creative endeavor. 

On a side-note within this segue from the current "strangeness/unfamiliarity" essays, I would say that HPL didn't take many tropes from ERB, given the latter's emphasis on physical adventure and romance-- with one exception, for some of ERB's works are as fascinated with the concept of societal devolution as those of the Providence horror-meister.

NULL-MYTHS: BLOOD AND JUDGMENT (1986)

I should preface my remarks on Howard Chaykin’s four-issue SHADOW series by stating that I was never (unlike the celebrated Harlan Ellison) a strong fan of the character prior to Chaykin’s take on him. Growing up in the sixties, I heard fragmentary references to the hero and his mythology, most of which probably stemmed from the popular radio show rather than from the pulp magazine series wherein the crusader originated. There were no paperback reprints of The Shadow until 1975, and the only comic book that took a shot at reviving the Master of Darkness was an insipid superhero title from Mighty (Archie) Comics in the mid-sixties. The short-lived DC Comics adaptation in the early seventies was my first real exposure to any accurate version of the character, and though I found the series enjoyable, it was not one of the high points of the period. Sadly, most revivals of the Shadow in comics since then have failed to last into the high numbers of the pulp magazine’s decades-long run, and the hero was scarcely served any better in the media of TV and movies. These days, I’m reasonably well acquainted with the mythology of the character, especially through copious reprints of the original pulp tales. But even now, I’m not a big Shadow fan.

I didn’t like the four-issue BLOOD AND JUDGMENT any better in 1986 than I do now, but I must admit, it stands as one of the few times a comic-book adaptation of the Shadow made good money for its publishers. To be sure, a lot of extrinsic factors played a part. In comic books the relative freedom of titles aimed at the “mature readers” in comic-book specialty stores made it possible to stretch the boundaries of what one could do in “masked avenger” narratives, resulting in what I’ve chosen to call “adult pulp” in contrast to the juvenile variety seen in most though not all actual pulp magazines. A lot of eighties comics were just the same puerile stories with greater sex and ultraviolence—THE OMEGA MEN comes to mind—but there were valid makers of adult pulp as well, talents who shone in the eighties as they never could have in the seventies. Miller and Moore were the top of the heap, but Chaykin, something less than a “fan-favorite” in the seventies, became a Big Name Creator with First Comics’s 1983 publication of AMERICAN FLAGG. Whatever FLAGG was, it wasn’t just warmed-over clichés with more violence ladled on top, and at least three (if not more) critics for the hero-hating COMICS JOURNAL reviewed the title in its heyday. (I was not one of them; despite initially liking the series, I just didn’t have much to say about the feature back then.)

By the middle eighties DC had fully embraced the aesthetic of adult pulp, with the four-issue SHADOW series appearing in May 1986, roughly three months after the debut of Frank Miller’s wildly successful THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Miller explicitly stated that at the time he thought of RETURNS as a “brass band funeral” for the superhero genre, even if Miller’s reborn bat ended up becoming more of a meal ticket in the long run. But what did The Shadow mean to Howard Chaykin?

As seen in the first link above, Harlan Ellison manifestly despised Chaykin’s take on the character. I expressed some doubts as to how “mythic” the original pulp character was, but on the whole, if a creator wanted to reduce a famous hero to a travesty of his (or her) original self, I thought said creator ought to have a really good reason, beyond putting money in his bank account.

Having reread BLOOD AND JUDGMENT, I don’t think Howard Chaykin gave a ripe fart about the Shadow or his mythology. He does take various elements of the pulp stories—principally, the ideas that the Shadow acquired his mental skills in some far-Eastern domain, and that Lamont Cranston, the hero’s supposed alter ego, was merely one of his many disguises. Since BLOOD AND JUDGMENT takes place contemporaneously, Chaykin gives the Shadow a straightforward hero-origin. After crash-landing in a Tibetan super-science enclave named “Shambala,” pilot Kent Allard is enlisted to become a “paladin” for the Shambalans, who for vague reasons want to have their own urban avenger fighting crime in big cities. Chaykin puts no more into this origin than he must to make the story work; he’s manifestly uninterested in the Shadow’s career and barely gives a reason for his retirement to Shambala for some 35 years. Super-science does allow this version of the Master of Darkness to remain young while all of his former aides have become doddering old men and women. Apparently Shambala gave Allard a nose-job as well, since by 1986 he’s become the spitting image of Reuben Flagg.

What interests Chaykin is presenting a raucous, ribald vision of the modern world. It’s never a vision of great depth, but it certainly has a personal vibe to it. There’s copious violence—a mystery villain, Preston Mayrock, starts killing the Shadow’s former aides in order to lure the hero out of hiding—but the real emphasis is kinky sexuality. This makes an odd fit with The Shadow, who was one of the least sexual of the pulp-magazine heroes. Chaykin’s ageless Shadow has already fathered two offspring—both fully-grown Asian men. In addition, he is served by an agent named Lorelei with a super-sexy voice (her word balloons are all hearts) and after he seduces a woman who hates him, she ends up calling him “master.” Preston Mayrock is even more of a fount of perversion, being a wheelchair-bound old man who’s married a ripe twenty-something chippie. He allows his wife to screw his clone-replica “son” because Preston plans to have his brain transplanted into Preston Junior’s body.

It’s all very racy, but not much better developed than one of the “saucy stories” from the pulp-magazine era. The prose stories of the original Shadow were naïve and juvenile, but they weren’t incapable of depicting shades of feeling and characterization. The only time Chaykin’s era doesn’t seem like a self-satisfied parody of a hero is a single scene in which the villain sics guard-dogs on the Shadow, and the hero spares the “innocent ones” by mastering them with mesmerism. Without characters to engage the reader, most of Chaykin’s visuals prove busy and ultimately off-putting.

For me the only positive aspect of this mini-series is that because it sold well, DC kept this SHADOW series going for nineteen more issues, usually scripted by Andy Helfer and penciled by such luminaries as Bill Sienkiecwicz and Kyle Baker. Most of these stories are not much deeper than Chaykin’s, but Helfer embraced a more genial, Miller-like comedic approach in adapting the adventures of this classic crimefighter, so they’re more fun to re-read than Chaykin’s smarmy sensationalism. His outlook worked better with a series of his own creation, though, on a side-note, I reread a handful of the AMERICAN FLAGG installments and found them also lacking in mythicity.   

THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY PT. 2

Once more I return to the quote that started these meditations on legitimizing pop fiction:

In part it seems like Batman comic book fans have been wary of the show precisely because it situates superhero comics not in the relatively sober tradition of gritty pulp noir, but in the (often comic) tradition of serial melodrama. Yet, as this episode is well aware, that melodramatic tradition is in some ways actually more high-brow, or more accepted as high-brow, than those supposedly more validating pulp sources. 


In Part 1 I've demonstrated that the tradition of serial melodrama was not particularly comic, and that if any counter-tradition did exist, it was in the form of spoofs and satires of the original form. In my one comment on Berlatsky's original thread, I asked him if he meant to imply that the serial melodramas of the silent era-- PERILS OF PAULINE and the like-- were meant to be comic, and he admitted that he did not mean that. To the best of my knowledge, the counter-tradition of spoofs and satires did not arise in the form of actual serials, but in short features like the 1917 short film TEDDY AT THE THROTTLE, a Mack Sennett comedy starring Gloria Swanson as a girl who gets tied to a train-track and is rescued by her faithful dog.

Why does it matter, whether or not the serials were dominantly comic? It's a point of simple logic. It's logical that serials should be "serious"--  not in the sense of being highbrow art but in the sense that their producers want audiences to be invested in the fates of the characters-- because the entire strategy of dividing a purportedly whole story into parts is to make audiences experience suspense about whether characters will survive myriad life-threatening perils.



Having established that what Berlatsky's talking about is actually a counter-tradition-- one that is no more or less valid that the original melodramatic design-- what does he mean when he says that "Batman comic book fans" have rejected the supposedly comic pattern of serial melodrama for "the relatively sober tradition of gritty pulp noir?" I pointed out in Part 1 that most pulp fiction was just as melodramatic in nature as anything in cinema, silent or otherwise. But I will admit that there's one factor that separates popular films from popular pulp fiction: the latter does not have a counter-tradition of irony and comedy, at least not one comparale to the cinema's, that arises in response to the "serious" mythoi of adventure and drama.


I'm not saying no funny stories ever appeared in any pulps; science fiction magazines certainly made space for humor. Yet I don't believe humor had a strong presence in the two pulp-genres that most influenced the Golden Age Batman: that of the detective/mystery genre (subsumed by the mythos of "drama") and that of the urban crimefighter (subsumed by the mythos of "adventure.")  The only way any of this could be termed "noir" would be in terms of dark and forbidding settings, so it's probably best to set that misplaced term aside here.

"Gritty" is an interesting word for Berlatsky to have used. It's possible to regard some pulp-works, like the Dashiell Hammett works of BLACK MASK, as "gritty," but a lot of detective-fiction of the period avoids any sort of grit and grime. Street & Smith's SHADOW magazines, which provided a fairly strong influence on Kane and Finger's Batman, tended to avoid both sexuality and extreme violence, usually focusing on fairly pedestrian ratiocinative mysteries in the tradition of S.S. Van Dine.  Since not all pulps-- or even all pulps that influenced Batman-- were gritty, I must assume that Berlatsky is opposing a tendency of Batman fans to devalue the "often comic" tone of the BATMAN show in favor of whatever tropes in the pulps can be considered both "sober" and "gritty"-- tropes which Berlatsky deems only "supposedly more validating" than the counter-tradition of the "humor-medlodrama."

I don't agree with Noah that modern fans are very much opposed to the 1966 teleseries these days. For many modern fans, it was the first televised version of the character they saw, and many if not all of them see it as a step toward whatever legitimacy one might see in having the character adapted for expensive Hollywood movies, starting with the 1989 BATMAN. I also don't know how many fans really worry about validating the BATMAN comic in terms of its pulp influences. It may be enjoyable to think about the Caped Crusader as part of a pulp-tradition that includes Dashiell Hammett and the Shadow, but I've met very few Bat-fans who worry about having Batman vetted by highbrow critics.  Indeed, if Batman has gained legitimacy from making the transition to expensive Hollywood films, it would seem that it did so not by emulating the campy approach of the teleseries, but by emphasizing the "gritty" aspects of Batman's childhood trauma, be it in the carnivalesque style of Tim Burton or with the quasi-Marxist focus of Christopher Nolan.  So in terms of Hollywood success, "the serious" served Batman better than "the comic"-- even if the partly-comic 1966 series deserves some credit for making the Gotham Guardian and his villains into household words.

Part 3 will concentrate on the First Big Battle for Bat-Legitimacy, which dates back to a time before the Bat-teleseries was even a gleam in William Dozier's eye.

THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY

Once again, a commentary on the 1966 BATMAN  show by Noah Berlatsky provides me with more grist for my mills, which, as the saying goes, grind exceeding slow. I'm not debating his take on the particular Bat-episode he cites, but I will respond to this passage in terms of the fannish history involved.

In part it seems like Batman comic book fans have been wary of the show precisely because it situates superhero comics not in the relatively sober tradition of gritty pulp noir, but in the (often comic) tradition of serial melodrama. Yet, as this episode is well aware, that melodramatic tradition is in some ways actually more high-brow, or more accepted as high-brow, than those supposedly more validating pulp sources. 

First, I have to take issue with the implied distinction between "gritty pulp noir" and "serial melodrama." Melodrama itself is a capacious category that takes in any work, in any medium, that makes an appeal to sensation rather than Aristotelian *dianoia.* Merriam-Webster's primary definition is relevant even though I don't agree with its comment re: "characterization":

a work (as a movie or play) characterized by extravagant theatricality and by the predominance of plot and physical action over characterization

One may think of "pulp noir" as connoting the arty detective stories of BLACK MASK, or the highly regarded films noirs of the 1940s and beyond. However, to the extent that they depend on extravagance and the emphasis on plot over character and/or theme, all of them are melodrama.  As far as the Golden Age Batman is concerned, though, his main influence from the pulp magazines stems from the even more outrageously melodramatic pulp-hero tradition.  It's common knowledge in fan-circles today that the very first Batman story in DETECTIVE #27 was a swipe from a SHADOW story.

I'm not sure that I would call even the more respectable forms of pulp melodrama entirely "sober," whether one is talking about the Continental Op or DOUBLE INDEMNITY, but the term can be fairly used in a comparative sense. The most famous pulp melodramas are "serious" rather than "comical;" ergo, they are more "sober" than a work than seeks to spoof those tropes, as the teleseries BATMAN does.

Admittedly, Berlatsky isn't talking about all melodramas, but the sort of "serial melodramas" that BATMAN frequently imitates, particularly in the Riddler episode cited. But if one is speaking of the sort of serials that commenced in the silent years of American filmmaking-- that is, films that purport to tell a story broken up into short chapters-- then it's questionable as to whether the majority of these were comic in nature.

I'll cover the matter of silent serials in a separate post, but for the time being, I'll put forth the generalization that most of them were not comic in tone. Comic send-ups of adventure-stories have a long history, though, and silent film had its share, notably Buster Keaton's SHERLOCK JR. I suggest that when modern fans think of silent melodrama films at all, they're seeing them through the lens of their spoofs. This is understandable but inaccurate; a little like assuming that medieval epics were all funny because Cervantes is better-remembered than the epics he was satirizing in DON QUIXOTE.

If Berlatsky is correct that at some point "highbrow" critics venerated any sort of melodramas, it would only be through this arguably distorting lens, as ironic or comic takes on material that was originally meant to be taken seriously, at least in terms of rousing strong emotional involvement.By this logic, William Dozier's BATMAN might find himself in the same category as Douglas Sirk's witty inversions of women's melodramas.

But what should this mean, if anything, to those readers who wanted emotional involvement from their BATMAN stories?

For the answer, Stay Tuned Till Tomorrow, Same Bat-essay, Same Comics-Blog.

AN ANTI-CANONICAL CANNONADE

Though I've said earlier that most readers of popular fiction are attracted to that form precisely because it doesn't require them to evaluate it, it's inevitable that a few readers will form their own "canons" for these sort of anti-canonical works.  It's inevitable because no matter how simple or how debased a given popular genre may seem to elitists, some creators will invest considerable passion and imagination into those works.

I once said I'd try to formulate a list of "adult pulp" comic books, but never got around to it.  But of late I've been cogitating on pulp magazines (and some of their contemporaneous fellow travelers).  Since these were the predecessors of comic books, here's my list of some above-average popfic tales from the pages that gave birth to many of America's most lurid and extravagant dreams.

_________________


Edgar Rice Burroughs-- TARZAN OF THE APES and THE RETURN OF TARZAN (Tarzan series), GODS OF MARS and MASTER MIND OF MARS (Mars series)

H.P. Lovecraft-- THE CALL OF CTHULHU and THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS

Robert E. Howard-- "Tower of the Elephant" and HOUR OF THE DRAGON (Conan), THE MOON OF SKULLS (Solomon Kane)

A. Merritt-- THE MOON POOL and THE SHIP OF ISHTAR

Clark Ashton Smith-- the "Zothique" cycle and THE HASHISH-EATER

Lester Dent-- THE LAND OF TERROR and THE MUNITIONS MASTER (Doc Savage)

Seabury Quinn-- THE DEVIL'S BRIDE

Sax Rohmer-- THE INSIDIOUS DOCTOR FU MANCHU and BROOD OF THE WITCH-QUEEN

Donald Wandrei-- "The Red Brain"

Norvell Page-- THE RED DEATH RAIN (The Spider)

C.L. Moore-- "Black God's Kiss" and "Jirel Meets Magic" (Jirel of Joiry)

Russell Fearn's "The Golden Amazon Returns"

Robert J. Hogan-- THE BAT STAFFEL (G-8)

AUDIENCE IDENTIFICATION

I've stated in earlier essays that I consider the bulk of mainstream American comics to have been directed primarily toward juveniles-- which for convenience's sake I'll define as anyone too young to vote-- even though obviously some comics, like the pulp magazines that preceded them, were intended to skew more toward older juveniles.

But there isn't a unanimity of opinion on the mattter. This site printed the following opinion:

"Obviously, many of the below comics [from the Wertham survey] are not intended for children. While all of them were probably read by children, they were not necessarily the intended audience for them as far as the cartoonists were concerned. Harvey Kurtzman’s Frontline Combat, for example, was written with a military audience in mind, and Kurtzman frequently received fan letters from men in the military."

When this excerpt was posted here on THE BEAT, I responded:

"I don’t see how these Golden Age comics could not have been “intended” for children– if not by the cartoonists, then by the publishers.

I’m sure a lot of adults sneak-read the comics, especially those that had quasi-adult themes. But I’ve never seen any history of the period that didn’t affirm that the bulk audience for comic books was made up of juveniles, and that the publishers all knew that comics could only succeed by selling to that audience, though some books favored the older set of juveniles."

Poster Eric H. responded, in part:

'Mr. Phillips, A lot of the crime and horror comics continued the traditions of the pulps and “spicy” magazines both of which had a significant adult audience.

Here’s a quotation from “The Monster Show: a Cultural History of Horror” by David J. Skal:
“The circulation figures for comic books during the early fifties are impressive even today: in 1950 50 million comic books were being printed and distributed every month. They were being read mostly by adults (54 percent, according to one Dayton, Ohio study), and by 40 percent of everybody in America above the age of 8.”

When you consider that the population of the U.S. was about 152 million people in 1950, 50 million comics is a huge number. Most people probably wouldn’t have thought anything of reading a comic. But then SOTI and the hearings made them out to be dirty, seamy things, so most adults no longer wanted to be associated with that material. And to top it off, the code ensured that most of what was published from then on was only going to appeal to an audience of children."'

There's something to be said for this view, in view of the aforementioned study and at least one other I've seen cited elsewhere. And I've already stated myself that comic books helped force the pulp magazines out of business by usurping much of their place on newsstands, though I would modify Eric H.'s statement to give cheap paperbacks their share of the credit for killing off the pulps.

However, as stated Eric H.'s judgment requires a great deal of supposition. One can fairly say that a lot of servicemen read comics on the front, though in the early 40s most of these would have been juvenile-oriented works like SUPERMAN and CAPTAIN MARVEL. It's quite likely that some publishers in the late Golden Age tried to capitalize on this exposure by concentrating on genres that might have more adult appeal for those audiences than superheroes, such as crime and horror. And some adults may have read them just as the previous generation read the pulps.

However, one should keep in mind that the pulps were a disreputable source of reading-material, and that to whatever extent comics might have taken their place, they would have inherited that same bad odor, irrespective of the effects of the anti-comics hysteria that arose in the postwar years. In contrast, the medium of the cheap paperback, that other famed Pulp-Killer, only had a bad reputation as long as it concentrated on lurid subject matter, which the paperback-medium shed as it began publishing more societally-acceptable fare. So I would maintain my view that even if some adults partook of comic books from time to time, the majority of those that wanted pulpish thrills probably turned to the paperback more quickly than the comic book. So while I don't dismiss out of hand all contemporaneous studies of comics-reading adults, they still don't weigh that heavily against the then-dominant opinion that comics were for kids.

Why did so many concerned mothers and lawmakers of the period accede so easily to the notion that comics should be for kids? Kiddie comics, far more than superheroes (no longer very popular by the late 40s), were the culprit here. Bad as the pulps' reputations might have been, no one ever considered them the domain of small children, as there were no kiddie pulps along the line of a LI'L DOC SAVAGE. The anti-comics polemics of both Wertham and Legman make clear that they think mass-market comics should have been kept clean for kids (though neither of them was entirely consistent as to how "clean" the kiddie-comics were). Kiddie-comics were the origin of the Pedagogical Paradigm that still pervades comics-criticism, even now that there are hardly any kiddie-comics, or kiddie-readers, to be found.

So it isn't supportable that comics simply stepped into the vacancy left by the pulp magazines. As to whether they were ever dominantly intended for juveniles or not, the determining factor would have to be whether or not the advertising for even the theoretically-adult comics of the period was directed at adults or juveniles. I don't have any information about the specific advertising in EC's magazines, but I did ask one fan with some knowledge of the originals, who asserted that EC used to issue phrases like, "Kids; send in your dimes" for items like glossy reproductions of the Crypt-Keeper and the Old Witch.

I'm sure William Gaines would have liked to have converted adults to his "picto-fictional" tales. Adults were where the money was. But dominant evidence suggests that he was still playing to kids, albeit the older ones. With the possible exception of the Kurtzman war books, I would put most of the ECs, as well as comparable older-juvenile works of the time, in the category of "juvenile pulp."

PULP FACTION

"There must be ephemera. Let us see to it that they are good."-- Gilbert Seldes, THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS.

"...the pulps began to feature more action stories, some of them wildly implausible-- a selling point for the pulp audience. The slicks, on the other hand, were reality bound. Their stories didn't stray far from home and hearth, while pulp stories frequently ventured from the Wild West to darkest Africa, or voyaged to the moon or Mars."-- Frank M. Robinson, "The Story Behind the Original All-Story," online publication ZOETROPE ALL-STORY.

When I first began using the terms "adult pulp" and "juvenile pulp" as a way of placing a new context on Dirk Deppey's view of superhero comics as inherently juvenile, I assumed that any readers would pretty much get what I meant by "pulp." But as a means of illustrating some of my general points about popular literature and the history of comic books, I'll belabor the definition a bit.

The only literary definition of "pulp" given by American Heritage (the one quoted at the beginning of Tarantino's PULP FICTION) refers to a publication, such as a book or magazine, containing lurid subject matter. But clearly the word "pulp" has taken on wider colloquial meaning, since the term is being used to Tarantino to refer to the subject matter of a theatrical film, which is not a "publication" as such. Thus there should be no difficulty in applying the term "pulp" to a medium such as comic books, which are not actual pulp magazines no matter how much influence comics took from the pulps.

Similarly, one may extend the synechdoche backwards as well as forwards. Lee Server's history of pulp magazines, DANGER IS MY BUSINESS, makes abundantly clear that though pulp magazines themselves didn't come into existence in the United States until the 1880s, what one might call the "pulp tradition" of sensationalistic fiction goes back to what he calls "story weeklies," which were printed on newspaper, and to the better-known "dime novels" that gave us fictional heroes like Nick Carter and fictionalized heroes like Ned Buntline's Buffalo Bill. Server demonstrates that tradition by noting that 'One weekly boasted of its contents as containing "sensational fiction with no philosophy."'

(Side-note: there are parallel "pulp traditions" in Europe and other nations as well, such as the so-called "shilling shocker" of the Victorians, but for my purposes here I can only deal with the history of U.S. popular culture as if it was a thing unto itself, even though it wasn't.)

Of course the notion that any coherent narrative can be utterly without "philosophy" is a misapprehension, as I discussed here. But it's a pleasant enough misapprehension for one to entertain, and to be entertained by, as when one is told that one can only enjoy a given film by "leaving your brain at the door." To indulge in works of thematic escapism is to free up the mind to what Gilbert Seldes calls the "high levity" of the "minor arts," which he opposes to the "high seriousness" of the major arts-- a point I'll be touching on again in my next DIVIDING LINE essay, concerning the differentiation of adult and juvenile fictions.

Of course, even if the "pulp tradition" had literally started with the first pulp magazines, it's clear that the comic books of the Golden Age primarily patterned their presentation after the pulps (an imitation so sincere that it helped "flatter" the pulps right out of existence), despite the fact that the medium of comic books descended more directly from comic strips. Frank Robinson's quote illustrates a difference in tone and subject matter that separated the disreputable pulps from the high-quality "slick" magazines, to say nothing of real books, and a similar "high class/low class" relationship evolved between comic strips (mentioned approvingly by Seldes in his 1924 book) and comic books. Of course comic strips weren't strangers to sensationalism by any means. However, just as Robinson notes the preference of the "slicks" for "home and hearth," comic strips too showed a marked tendency to emphasize domestic constancy over wild extravagance. In SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT Frederic Wertham largely gives comic strips a free pass from the seduction-accusation, for he assumes that newspaper editors were more conscientious than comic-book editors about keeping their illustrated fictions safe for all ages. And even if "home and hearth" were challenged for a while by the growth of the adventure-strips in the late 20s and early30s, modern newspaper comics have almost entirely returned to domestic themes, though it's anyone's guess as to whether Gilbert Seldes would find "high levity" in any of them.

In their respective comic-book commentaries both Jules Feiffer and Jim Steranko found the Golden Age comic books of the pre-Superman years to be poor imitations of the newspaper comics, Steranko diagnosing said imitations as being afflicted with "conceptual anemia." For Steranko "comic heroes were outweighed, outnumbered and outclassed by the newspaper characters that spawned them," but comic books would soon take new vitality by going back to the "source" that gave comic strips such characters as Tarzan and Buck Rogers-- that source being "the pulps," albeit more those that emphasized featured heroes than those that were primarily anthologies of unconnected stories.

It should be added that in doing so, however, comic books went pulps one better. The majority of the pulp-heroes were ordinary humans who supplemented their physical skills with bizarre weapons and minor mental powers, but post-Superman comic books are famed for giving their readers ordinary humans with the powers of gods. Admittedly, there are probably a lot more "Batman-type" heroes in comic books of the Golden Age than "Superman-types," as it would seem to be much easier to think up new variations on the former than on the latter-- particularly variations that wouldn't get one sued by DC Comics. But even if the super-types didn't outnumber the bat-types, the former would come to dominate the medium, both within the particular genre of the costumed hero and in terms of the genre's dominance of the marketplace. What was a minor iteration in the pulps, sometimes giving rise to rare first-rate stars like John Carter but more often to obscurities like Aarn Munro and the Golden Amazon, became the defining idiom of the comic book medium.

As others before me have speculated, such a departure into outright fantasy may have only been possible because early comic books concentrated on juvenile audiences, rather than allowing adult sensibilities to hold any sway, as they did in comic strips and pulps. In theory both strips and pulps were written to "all ages" and could be read by either adults or juveniles, but clearly each of them had particular items that skewed more juvenile than adult, and vice versa. Comic books, even if they occasionally allowed for moments of "juvenile decadence" of which Grandma and Fredric Wertham wouldn't approve, remained skewed toward juveniles for some forty years before the fan-base became entrenched enough to demand works with some "adult" connotations, whether those of high art or "adult pulp."

Having come to that crossroads, I close by asserting once more that the next DIVIDING LINE will deal with more of the theory behind the adult/juvenile divide, though I'll probably postpone the promised comparison of Owen Wister and George Lucas as I don't have time to read THE VIRGINIAN just now.