Von Foltz & Frazetta

Speaking of the ancient world, I would like to show two pictures, one of which looks a little like the other. The first is "Pericles' Funeral Oration" by German artist Philipp Von Foltz (1805-1877). The second is Frank Frazetta's wraparound cover illustration for Child of the Sun by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner (Fawcett, 1972). This could be an example of two artists arriving at the same solution to a similar compositional, dramatic, and narrative problem. On the other hand, there could be a little swiping involved. I'll let you decide for yourself. By the way, the Roman speaker in Frazetta's painting looks like a self-portrait.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Sunday Swipes No. 4

Not long ago, I found a series of European comic books called Chica. In an issue called Chica: A Horse Angel Special, from 2007, I saw a sequence that looked familiar:

I can't fairly call it a swipe, but the sequence shown above is very similar to the one shown below, by Frank Frazetta:

I have scanned this image from The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta, published by Bantam Books in 1975. That first Frazetta book is justly famous and well sought after. The uncredited artist on Chica may never have seen it, but it's pretty conceivable that he or she would have seen it and to have been inspired by it.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Last of Colloids & Tentacles

A colloid is a suspension of one or more substances in another. Two thirds of the ingredients of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich are colloids. A long time ago, I knew a guy who liked banana and mayonnaise sandwiches. (They smelled like house paint.) Only one third of his ingredients--mayonnaise--is colloidal. Protoplasm is a colloid, too, so when John Corliss Cranmer's giant amoeba gulped down first his daughter-in-law, then his son, people were the meal and the colloid was the eater of the meal. But then the people were made of cells brimming with protoplasm, too, and so it was a case of one big colloidal mass eating lots of little ones--if you're a reductionist, that is.

The word colloid is from the French, originally from the Greek. It means "a substance in a gelatinous or gluey state," originally, simply, "glue." Colloid as a word and a scientific concept is from the mid-nineteenth century, as so many things in our daily lives and so many of the ideas in our busy little brains are. There are other gluey concepts in science, collagen, for example, also the subatomic particles called gluons. There are also gluey crafts and gluey art forms. The collage is the most obvious example of these.

People have made collages for a long, long time, but the collage as a work of art dates from the modern period, maybe from the eighteenth century, certainly no later than the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso made collages and coined the term papier collé. Those two artists, along with Juan Gris, were originators first of analytical cubism, then of synthetic cubism. In analytical cubism, the artist looks at his or her subject from many different points if view. That's why, in a work by Picasso for example, you can see both eyes in a portrait seemingly done in profile. So, no, Picasso's people are not part flounder. In synthetic cubism--I think a more playful and not so mathematically exacting variation--a work of cubistic art is synthesized by gluing together scraps and cuttings of paper, thus the collage or papier collé. I guess making collages would have been hard to do before there was a mass and popular press as a source of material.

In moving towards synthesis, or what we might call literary collage, modern authors followed modern artists, I think. The art seems to have come first--synthetic cubism was in flower, if you can call it that, in 1912-1914. Then came the literary works, "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, for example, in 1922, Show Girl by J.P. McEvoy in 1928, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy in 1930-1936. I think we can include "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928) in that list, too. Several stories in the first issue of Weird Tales (Mar. 1923) include notes, clippings, diary entries, and so forth, as if the story were a scrapbook or a collage. That kind of thing would continue in future issues.

"The Call of Cthulhu" also has an analytical approach, as do other works of weird fiction that refer or allude to weird geometries, outré mathematics, and multiple dimensions. Maybe pulp fiction wasn't very far behind mainstream literature in the 1910s-1930s in its move towards modernism. But maybe the pulp fiction genres--especially science fiction--were a little bit ahead because they were in such close contact with the scientific developments of their time. Mainstream authors of the early twentieth century could disregard science. F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck didn't write science fiction. But then science and the future barged into the room and Walker Percy, Cormac McCarthy, and Margaret Atwood did and have. How times change.

There will be more on Ms. Atwood in a minute.

Dr. Frankenstein made a kind of collage using parts from different bodies, plus an Abby Normal brain. His goal was the synthesis of life from non-life. "I had worked hard for nearly two years," he wrote, "for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body." Lightning was the literal spark of life by which he would do it. And so his monster lived. A long line of proto-scientists, semi-scientists, pseudoscientists, and maybe the rarest kind, real scientists, has proposed that early in the earth's history lightning infused life in what they have called the primordial soup or primordial ooze, ooze being a species of colloid. Anthony M. Rud seems to have alluded to the primordial ooze--or jelly in H.G. Wells' formulation--in his story "Ooze" (Weird Tales, March 1923). Since the early nineteenth century, real-life scientists seem to have followed the example of Victor Frankenstein. We, the world over, recently had a deadly encounter with their Frankensteinian brand of science in the form of a lowly virus raised to the top of a Chinese/U.S. government-built Tower of Babel. They'll do it again. We can be sure of that. Next time it's likely to be worse, but that will be good for them because they can take more of what is ours in the process.

Life arising from non-life, called spontaneous generation, was debunked a long time ago. But I guess debunked things don't always stay that way. For example, there are yet again people who believe that a person can change his or her bodily form by some magical process of mind or by a series of practices they call "care," practices that the rest of us can only consider criminal, immoral, and unethical mutilations of the human body, a kind of witch-doctory or pseudo-medical falling-back on superstition, ultimately a literal diabolism. People who can supposedly transform themselves used to be called shape-shifters or skin-walkers, and they did what they did by supernatural processes. Now they go by a different name and we're supposed to believe that there is science behind it.

From the moment we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have believed ourselves to be as gods and to hold in our hands godlike power, godlike authority, and godlike wisdom. Our punishment was expulsion from the Garden and a realization of death. The difference is that we once knew shame and walked in shame, out of the gates and into exile. Now there isn't any shame, only pride, or Pride as it is now capitalized. Now we walk in history every day, as the worst among us might say. Anyway, I guess if we're gods, we can create and mold bodies and parts of bodies, just as Dr. Frankenstein did. In creating our modern-day monster, we will fashion his/her whole body--his veins, his feet, his hands, his organs--everything, including a Frankenstein's schwanzstucker made from the flesh of her forearm--according to our own whims. It won't be real, but we will be required to call it real and her a man. It will in fact be grotesque, a monstrous simulacrum, at once a symbol and a manifestation of our reaching into hell in our efforts to reach into heaven, where we believe we are or shall be enthroned. And, no, she's not gonna be very popular because of it.

Margaret Atwood, who has been called a TERF because she knows what everybody in the whole history of the world knew until ten minutes ago, famously said, "Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space." As we know, squids are cephalopods and the bearers of tentacles. So Ms. Atwood has offended not only people who don't know what a woman is, but she has probably also offended a lot of science fiction fans with her opinions on these things. If you're an offended Star Wars fan, though, you might want to just slink away, the reason being that in the Star Wars universe, there is a literal talking squid. His title is Admiral and his name is Ackbar, and though his tentacles are small (they're more like the barbels of a catfish), he is a member of a race called the Mon Calamari, meaning, in una bella lingua of a faraway planet spinning on its axis a long, long time in the future, squid. (The noun is Italian, the possessive pronoun French.)

There are other tentacled aliens in the Star Wars universe. Oola is one. Ahsoka is another. They have tentacles coming out of their heads. The Thermians in Galaxy Quest (1999) are, in their true form, tentacled. They are one form but take another. Call them trans, I guess. Cthulhu of course has tentacles. In Frank Frazetta's interior illustration for The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1922), there are tentacled heads, called Kaldanes in the story, that frighten and horrify Tara of Helium. In Gino d'Achille's  cover version, the Kaldanes are more spider-like. I believe the Kaldanes have both kinds of members, though, both tentacles and jointed legs. Maybe a Burroughs fan can let us know for sure. That reaching down through the neck to control a host body is also in The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein (1951), the Star Trek Episode "Operation -- Annihilate!" (1967), and, if I remember right, a skit on SCTV in which cabbage leaves attach themselves to the backs of people's heads. In the Star Trek episode at least, the controlling aliens are colloidal, made by the prop master from bags of fake vomit. By the way, the ninth book in Burroughs' Mars series is The Synthetic Men of Mars, originally published in 1939, and so we have another example of Frankensteinian synthesis in genre fiction.

Colloids are sometimes fun. Give a child a bottle of Elmer's Glue-All along with some construction paper and glitter and see how she entertains herself. But in science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction, colloids are more often gross, nasty, disgusting, and revolting--when they are not creeping, crawling, encroaching, and deadly in the way shoggoths or the Blob is. We have a different reaction to tentacled creatures, owing, I think, to our hundred-thousand-year experience with them. They are real, discrete, recognizable, nameable, alive. They look back at us with the biggest eyes in nature. And the smartest of them are very smart. More than any of that, though, they seem alien in their star-shaped or radially symmetrical bodies. It's no wonder tentacled creatures became the aliens of science fiction, or more accurately, why science fiction authors, beginning with H.G. Wells, would have fashioned the tentacled creatures of earth into aliens from outer space. Maybe we have atavistic memories of when octopuses first came to our planet, raining down on us in their iron spaceships.

We were made in the image of our Creator, and so we wish to create, thus our art and literature, among so many other great and wonderful things, including most of all love, which allows us an escape into eternity. Where we make our mistake is in believing we can create or re-create the things that he first created. And so Frankensteinian scientists, engineers, and technicians are busy. They believe they can create life (or that life was created) from non-life. They believe they can alter unalterable facts about human nature, human anatomy, and human biology. They believe they can make of us something beyond human, better than human, other than human, transhuman. They're working on synthesizing new forms from fragments of previously existing ones. The coronavirus and a million dead are one result of that. The supposedly counteractive "vaccine" and a million more dead are another. They also believe they can transfer the human mind into a machine, thus surviving their own deaths.* In fact, they appear to see little difference between the ghost and the machine. One can be the other. One is the other. And so we will soon have machines taking the place of human beings. Soon after that, our machines will probably enslave or kill us. If you have never read "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison (1967), you probably should, like right now. It may give you a glimpse into our caliginous--not collagenous but caliginous--future. Anyway, thanks, scientists, but ultimately, thanks, all of us, for we have all done this. Scientists--others, too--are only at the vanguard of our limitless depravity in our fallen state. We fall. The asymptotic curve of our pursuit of perfection--of a perfect and limitless depravity--moves forever upwards.

-----

*Having eaten the forbidden fruit, they believe that the knowledge they have thereby gained will reopen the gates and allow them back into the Garden.

"To Tara's horror, the headless body moved, took the hideous head in its hands and set it on its shoulders." Illustration by Frank Frazetta from The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

John Jakes (1932-2023)

Author, Advertising Copywriter
Born March 31, 1932, Chicago, Illinois
Died March 11, 2023, Sarasota, Florida

John Jakes has died. Known for his vastly popular historical novels, the late Mr. Jakes got his start as an author of science fiction and fantasy stories. His first published story was "The Dreaming Trees" in Fantastic Adventures, November 1950. According to Isaac Asimov, the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in 1950. If that's the measure, then John Jakes just barely slipped in before that age came to an end.

John Jakes could have been in Weird Tales, but he wasn't. By the time "The Unique Magazine" folded, he had had nearly three dozen of his stories published, in Fantastic Adventures, Amazing Stories, Super Science Stories, Planet Stories, Imagination, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Space Science Fiction, Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader, Rocket Stories, and Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy. He also wrote Westerns and crime and detective stories. Weird Tales was on its way down in the 1950s, while magazine science fiction was taking off. You could hardly have blamed John Jakes for choosing one over the other. (Or maybe he submitted stories to Weird Tales but was turned down.) He certainly wasn't above writing stories of fantasy. A later phase of his career proved as much.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Jakes began writing stories of a yellow-haired warrior loose in a world of monsters and magic. In his "Prefatory Note" to Brak the Barbarian (1968), he acknowledged writing his Brak stories in the shadow of Robert E. Howard. He did so not out of cupidity, as a letter writer to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination had suggested. "My motive for giving birth to Brak and his parallel universe on an old black Underwood was much simpler," the author explained. "There just are not enough stories of this kind to go around any more; not enough, anyway, to please me." And so he wrote.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination published the first Brak story, "Devils in the Walls," in May 1963. Eight more followed, plus several novels and collections of stories, some of which are variants of the original eight stories. I haven't done a close enough study of the Brak stories to say just how many of them there are, but it looks like there are twelve. Also, we shouldn't forget a Brak comic book story, "Spell of the Dragon," with a script by Dan Adkins and John Jakes and artwork by Adkins, Val Mayerik, and Al Milgrom, published in Marvel Comics' Chamber of Chills #2  in January 1973. That makes thirteen.

I have compiled the following lists from information in The FictionMags Index, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, and Wikipedia, and by consulting my own collection of Brak books:

Brak Stories by John Jakes:

• "Devils in the Walls" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (May 1963)
•  "Witch of the Four Winds" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (serial, Nov.-Dec. 1963)
•  "When the Idols Walked" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (serial, Aug.-Sept. 1964)
•  "The Girl in the Gem" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Jan. 1965)
•  "The Pillars of Chambalor" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Mar. 1965)
•  "The Silk of Shaitan" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Apr. 1965)
•  "The Mirror of Wizardry" in Worlds of Fantasy, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1968)
•  "Ghoul’s Garden" in Flashing Swords! #2, edited by Lin Carter (1973)
•  "Storm in a Bottle" in Flashing Swords! #4, edited by Lin Carter (1977)

Brak Books by John Jakes:

• Brak the Barbarian (1968), collecting "The Unspeakable Shrine," "Flame Face," "The Courts of the Conjurer" (variant of "The Silk of Shaitan"), "Ghosts of Stone" (variant of "The Pillars of Chambalor"), and "The Barge of Souls"  
• Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress (1969), originally "Witch of the Four Winds"
• Brak the Barbarian Versus the Mark of the Demons (1970)
• When the Idols Walked (1978), originally "When the Idols Walked"
• The Fortunes of Brak (1980), collecting "Devils in the Walls," "Ghoul's Garden," "The Girl in the Gem," "Brak in Chains" (variant of "Storm in a Bottle"), and "The Mirror of Wizardry"

I have stopped before the current age of non-books called "books" began.

John Jakes was born in Chicago; graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, in 1953; earned his masters degree at Ohio State University; and worked as an advertising copywriter in Dayton, Ohio, before setting off in 1971 to become a full-time author. (His prefaces were dispatched from Kettering, Ohio.) He sold millions of books from the 1970s to the 1990s, and several of his historical novels were adapted to TV miniseries. He lived on Bird Key in Sarasota, Florida, and died in Sarasota on March 11, 2023. Today would have been his ninety-first birthday. We send condolences to his family, wish John Jakes a happy birthday, and say thank you to him for the reading pleasure he has given the world.

* * *

I wrote about John Jakes in my essay "They Should Have Been in Weird Tales," published in The Weird Tales Story, Expanded and Enhanced, edited by Robert Weinberg and Bob McLain (2021).

Fantastic Stories of Imagination, May 1963. Cover story: "Devils in the Walls" by John Jakes. Cover art by Vernon Kramer.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination, January 1965. Cover story: "The Girl in the Gem" by John Jakes. Cover art by Ed Emshwiller. Notice the tentacles in the lower right.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination, March 1965. Cover story: "The Pillars of Chambalor" by John Jakes. Cover art by Gray Morrow.

Brak the Barbarian (1968), with cover art by Frank Frazetta.

Brak the Barbarian Versus the Sorceress (1969), with arresting cover art by Frazetta.

Brak the Barbarian Versus the Mark of the Demons (1970), with cover art by Michael Leonard.

Brak vs. the Sorceress (1977), with cover art by Charles Moll.

Brak vs. the Mark of the Demons (1977), again with cover art by Mr. Moll.

The Fantastic Swordsmen (1967) with a cover story "The Girl in the Gem" by John Jakes and cover art by his friend, Jack Gaughan. Again there are tentacles.

Flashing Swords #2 (1973), with cover art by Frazetta illustrating "Ghoul's Garden" by John Jakes.

Thanks to my correspondent for letting me know about the passing of John Jakes.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Readings Over Christmas No. 1-Mention My Name in Atlantis by John Jakes

I read a lot last year. Book No. 51 was Mention My Name in Atlantis by John Jakes (Daw Books, 1972). Mr. Jakes' book is a kind of mock epic. The lead character and narrator is a Falstaffian figure called Hoptor the Vintner. His sometimes sidekick is Conax the Chimerical, king of a land of barbarians. Mention My Name in Atlantis is also a satire and a parody, including of the typical heroic fantasy hero and pulp writing in general. Here is an illustrative passage:

     "Pox on your map-makers!" screamed Conax. "Can I help it if those feeble-eyed fops are ignorant? I'd invite them to visit, but the thin-blooded villains would surely freeze their privates the minute they crossed the borders of my noble northern nation!"

     "He has florid rhetoric," observed General Pytho. "Rather like the purple phrasing of the tellers of adventure tales, who swap their narratives for a tenth of a zeb a word in the scroll mart." (p. 52)

The story is set in Atlantis and explains what happened to that now sunken continent. In addition to Atlantis, there are other Fortean subjects, namely ancient astronauts, alien abductions, and flying saucers, which are initially interpreted as omens of disaster. (Disaster comes.) All are made continuous with heroic fantasy, a development that seems sure to have irritated purists of both Forteana and Howardiana (if there is such a word). That seems fine to me.

The cover of Mention My Name in Atlantis is by H.J. Bruck (1921-1995), a German-born artist. Bruck included at least two Frazetta swipes in his composition:

Here are the originals:

Look closely. You'll find them. Look closer still and you may find more.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

The Art of "The Moon Men" & "The Red Hawk"

"The Moon Men" was originally published as a four-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly, from February 21 to March 14, 1925. It's really the center of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Moon trilogy, not because it's the second of three stories but because it was written first. "The Moon Maid" is a prequel to it and "The Red Hawk" is there to bring Burroughs' saga to a happy ending.

"The Moon Men" was originally entitled "Under the Red Flag." It told the story of America under the rule of Bolsheviks, not under the Kalkars, the Moon Men of the published version. Either way, the story is dystopian, perhaps an overlooked work in the history of Dystopia. I wish that the original manuscript or typescript could be found and published. It's nice to think that it still exists.

"The Moon Men" is dystopian and therefore political, but that doesn't mean it's all talk. In fact there's a lot of action. (I read it and took notes on possible illustrations.) But for some reason, cover illustrators over the years have come up short when it comes to "The Moon Men." Ace Books published a paperback edition called The Moon Men, but the illustration on the cover is from "The Red Hawk." (See below.) The original cover illustration from Argosy All-Story Weekly is static and doesn't indicate much at all about the story:

Stockton Mulford (1886-1960) was the artist. In his treatment, "The Moon Men" could be a simple historical drama or costume drama. It's interesting, though, that the villain here is depicted as bestial or subhuman. Note the small cranium and the low forehead. Remember that "The Moon Men" was published during the Progressive Era, one feature of which was the Eugenics Movement. Then do an online search for images using the word "eugenics." What you will find is lots of photographs of supposed scientists measuring people's heads. So many people hold science and scientists in such esteem when so often science has been used to justify atrocities. Scientists have been eager participants in such things.

"The Moon Men" was reprinted in the hardcover book The Moon Maid in 1926. From November 1928 to February 1929, Modern Mechanics and Inventions reprinted the contents of The Moon Maid as a four-part serial called "Conquest of the Moon." The first installment made the cover:

But that's not a scene from "The Moon Maid." It's actually from the opening sequence of "The Moon Men." The cover artist is unknown. As far as I can tell, this was the last cover illustration for "The Moon Men" before the era of bad art, which started sometime after the 1980s. I don't want to show any of that kind of thing, so it's on to "The Red Hawk."

"The Red Hawk" was originally published in Argosy All-Story Weekly as a three-part serial, from September 5 to September 19, 1925:

Again, the image is static and not very informative. Ironically, the artist was a sympathizer with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Modest Stein (1871-1958). Maybe he took on the assignment thinking the title character was a Marxist. At least he got to use his favorite color.

"The Red Hawk" was combined with "The Moon Men" in paperback and entitled The Moon Men. Here is the Ace edition from 1963:

The cover artist was Ed Emshwiller, also known as Emsh (1925-1990). His illustration is from the climactic battle in "The Red Hawk." Later artists followed his lead: although the book was called The Moon Men, the cover illustrations are from "The Red Hawk."

Once again, Burroughs got the Frazetta treatment--and what an extraordinary image this is. I wrote the other day that Frank Frazetta (1928-2010) seems to have read "The Moon Maid" before making his cover illustration. But maybe not. Frazetta was notorious for procrastination and for working late into the night and into the morning on the day of his deadline. Maybe his cover for The Moon Maid is actually just a reworking of the elements of Roy Krenkel's cover from 1962. Call it a Frazetta-fied version of somebody else's picture. That is almost certainly the case here. One way of knowing is that the last Moon Man with whom the Red Hawk does battle is not described in the book in the way that Emsh and Frazetta depicted him on their covers. It seems like Frazetta just took the elements of Emsh's picture--a man dressed in Indian garb, a blue-skinned giant, and a woman shrinking from battle--and made them his own. I can't complain. How could you? But we should know the facts, I guess, one of which is that the woman, Bethelda, actually helps the Red Hawk in his battle with the Moon Man by holding a lamp behind her lover's head in an attempt to blind the onrushing Kalkar. She isn't helpless.

British and Dutch publishers of the 1970s followed suit:

Here's the cover for the Tandem edition of The Moon Men from 1975. This one, too, illustrates "The Red Hawk." The cover artist is again unknown. He or she looks to have been influenced not only by Frank Frazetta but also by Richard Corben (1940-2020). I'd call this another nice cover from Tandem.

Ridderhof of Holland published De Maanmannen en de Rode Havik in 1973, again with cover art by Jad (1934-2014), who still seems to have been stuck on cavemen and cavewomen. Note that the main title combines those of the two stories found inside. This conceptual illustration is ambiguous. It could actually be from either story, I think. Don't ask me what the Moon Man is doing with his sword.

Finally, Del Rey/Ballantine issued a paperback edition in 1992, again with cover art by Laurence Schwinger (b. 1941), and again the cover illustration is for "The Red Hawk" and not "The Moon Men." I wonder when "The Moon Men" might get its due.

I'll have more on Burroughs before long, but this entry brings the current series on his Moon trilogy to a close. As always, thanks for reading.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Art of "The Moon Maid"

"The Moon Maid," the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Moon trilogy, was in Argosy All-Story Weekly as a five-part serial, from May 5 through June 2, 1923. As such, it would have been on the newsstand at about the same time as the first four issues of Weird Tales, March through June 1923. Burroughs' new novel was the cover story for the issue of May 5, 1923. The cover artist was P.J. Monahan (1882-1931):

The Moon Maid of the late-century fan's imagination is astride a centaur-like creature. (See the images below.) What the fan forgets is that the Moon Maid, called Nah-ee-lah, has come from a lunar city on mechanical wings. She is free and takes flight. She takes joy and pleasure in flight.

In 1926, A.C. McClurg & Co. published "The Moon Maid" along with the other two books of the trilogy in an omnibus hardbound edition. J. Allen St. John (1872-1957) was the cover artist:

This appears to be a cleaned-up and possibly slightly altered version of the original. If you look closely, you can see that Nah-ee-lah is a captive of the centaur-creature, one of the Va-gas. She is bound to him by a leather strap and is actually pulling away from him. He is not her servant or protector. Remember that part.

Roy G. Krenkel (1918-1983) executed the cover illustration for the Ace paperback edition of 1963. His drawing follows pretty closely St. John's painting from nearly forty years before, but that's mostly because he was instructed to make it so:

As you can see, the strap is gone--or maybe the blue cord now binds her. Although the Moon Maid is still leaning away from the centaur, she looks like he is serving her rather than holding her captive. She also wears a knife on her hip. That's a nice cover, I think. Krenkel liked it, too.

Krenkel was friends with and often worked with Frank Frazetta (1928-2010). Frazetta followed Krenkel and other artists in creating covers for Ace Books and other paperback publishers. Here is his version of The Moon Maid:

What a difference Frazetta made! Under the Frazetta treatment, Burroughs' worlds of the imagination became more powerful, more violent, more mysterious, more erotic. More than half a century younger than Burroughs, Frank Frazetta was influenced by the art and culture of twentieth-century America from which everything Victorian had been completely wrung out. With Burroughs, nineteenth-century sentimentality, moreover that century's all-too-common stilted prose, prevailed. Truth be told, J. Allen St. John, being a near contemporary of the author, was a better fit than later artists. Frazetta was probably too virile and masculine for Burroughs. You could make a case that the stories he told of John Carter, Tarzan, the Moon Maid, and other Burroughs characters were better than Burroughs' own versions. You might say that Frazetta's fantasy was superior, if only for that instant--that height of action and mystery--captured in his arresting images.

Frazetta may actually have read "The Moon Maid," for he brought back the wingèd figures and the sharp peaks from the story and from the Argosy cover of 1923. There are Moon craters, too, but these are in the wrong place: Burroughs' Moon is actually a hollow world, pierced like a whiffle ball with crater-holes, and its people live inside. They are unaware of the outside. (The setting reminds me of the Star Trek episode "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky.") Before I ever read "The Moon Maid," long ago when I was a kid and looking at Frank Frazetta's artwork, I thought that the centaur is protecting the Moon Maid. That impression is apparently a holdover from Krenkel's cover and a demonstration of the evolution of an image of culture. This version of Frazetta's Moon Maid is soft, lush, and romantic, like something from a dream.

Frazetta was famous (or infamous) for altering his original paintings. His Moon Maid got the same treatment:

Here the centaur is fiercer still, and there is still the impression that he is the servant and protector of the Moon Maid. Frank Frazetta's famous fanny fetish is on full display here. Nah-ee-lah is fleshy and voluptuous. But then the centaur is also at an extreme--of power, muscularity, and menace. I always wondered about the seeming flight of her mount in this version. The book explains it, that on the Moon, everybody can leap farther, like John Carter on Mars or the first iteration of Superman on Earth. (Hold onto that comparison. It will come again soon.)

I always like to show British and foreign-language versions of American works. Here are two of The Moon Maid:

This is a British edition, published by Tandem in 1975. Unfortunately, the cover artist is unknown. I like the woman's pale-gray hair and insouciant pose. The background is also interesting.

Here is the cover of a Dutch edition, published in 1973 by Ridderhof. I don't think this is really a scene from "The Moon Maid," although there is a catlike creature and a snakelike creature in the story. The cover artist was Jad (1934-2014).

Finally, the Del Rey/Ballantine edition from 1992:

Here in a cover design by Laurence Schwinger (b. 1941) the Moon Maid returns to her origins on the wings of a bird. (There is a wing in his name and several in his picture.) This is perhaps the most romantic of the illustrations shown here. It may also get to something, a change in emphasis from the Moon Maid as a captive--an object of rescue and one to be looked at by men--to a free woman, a figure larger than and superior to all male figures in this picture. In the previous versions, "The Moon Maid" is pretty clearly a fantasy for men, but here the story might be meant to appeal more to women. Women who read it may be disappointed, but then again, maybe not.

Next: The Art of "The Moon Men" & "The Red Hawk"

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Nine

Mars, Red to Blue

For simplicity's sake, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) and his works are thrown into a big bucket called "science fiction." We like to categorize and we want our categorizing to be easy. But Burroughs began writing before there was a well-formed thing called science fiction--"Under the Moons of Mars" was in The All-Story on this day 109 years ago--and by our standards and our current categories, stories of John Carter on Barsoom are more properly called science fantasy*, planetary romance, or swords and planets. I would say that, like Star Wars, Burroughs' Mars books are not science fiction.

And now I take it all back. (But maybe not really.)

By our current categories, Burroughs' Mars books may not be science fiction, but before the Great War and even early in the interwar period, there may not have been any more popular, influential, or pertinent example of the genre, at least on this side of the pond. (On that topic, there are still things to come.) They were the state of science fiction at the time, and they were so powerful in the imagination that they endured for decades, in their pure, original, science-fantasy form, perhaps more deeply and intensely in science fiction, space opera, and space fantasy. (There are swords and sabers--airships, too--on both Barsoom and Tatooine. See the images below.) Even into the Space Age, some people imagined Mars to be the way Burroughs had imagined it. Even some scientists still thought of Mars as a dry but habitable planet (and Venus as wet but also habitable). Canals still webbed the Red Planet's surface. Ruined or dying cities might still be found at their nodes. Decadent or moribund peoples might still haunt those cities and their engulfing, pitiless deserts. Maybe there were or once had been other people in our solar system. Maybe someday we would come upon their artifacts and ruins, like a forlorn and windswept City on the Edge of Forever.

That popular image of Mars persisted even after the mid-sixties Mariner 4 mission showed the planet to be not just mostly dead but all dead--persisted, that is, in the popular imagination if nowhere else. Even in the 1970s, there were artists' images of Mars showing a patchwork of green and red, the green parts tied to each other by ligamentous canals, the two colors waxing and waning, warring with each other within the wider cycle of the Martian year. We so wanted there to be life on Mars. We wanted the green to exist and for it to be plant-life, even if it was just simple moss or lichens. You might look at the Viking missions of a decade after Mariner as acts of quiet desperation, as a kind of grasping at the straws of the idea that the Red Planet was once alive and vibrant and that life might still be found there. The views from a space-borne Mariner weren't enough. We needed a close-up view of things. We needed to touch the surface: the arm of the Viking lander would extend like the forefinger of God, but instead of bestowing life upon Mars, it would detect it. Carl Sagan (1934-1996), an ardent childhood reader of Burroughs, was instrumental in the Viking missions. Although a scientist, Dr. Sagan seems to me to have been more than anything a hopeless romantic. I think he went to his grave believing in life on other planets.

But there would be no Barsoom.

There wasn't even a bacterium.

In January 1980, a little over three years after the Viking landers set down, NBC-TV broadcast The Martian Chronicles, based on stories by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) and with a screenplay by his friend, Richard Matheson (1926-2013). Both men had been young contributors to Weird Tales. Bradbury loved Burroughs' Mars books so much that as a child he wrote a sequel to The Warlord of Mars (1919). Even in 1980, we were holding on to romantic notions of Mars. But instead of being red, Mars in our imagination had turned blue, not only for the terrible sadness and melancholy of The Martian Chronicles, but also for the cyanotic lack of oxygen in its rarefied air. Red planet, blue mood.

By 1990, when Total Recall was released, Mars had become a kind of cyber-corporate-dystopia. In seven decades, the -topia of Red Planet had seemingly gone from Burroughs' U- to a Philip K. Dick-inspired Dys-. But in the climactic scenes of the movie, the hero Quaid reactivates the ancient Martian atmosphere factory, the vivifying plant in the original Mars books, and the blue of sadness and cyanosis gives way to a cyan sky: Mars is suddenly terraformed and Burroughs' vision is redeemed: Dystopia is banished and Utopia returned to Mars.

To be continued . . .

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*I still want to hold on to there being a close connection between science fantasy and Lost Worlds: I think of Burroughs' Mars novels as science fantasy/Lost Worlds set not on a closed Earth but in an open--and limitless--universe. With that being the case, it's a short step from science fantasy to science fiction, and the doors of the universe are thrown open to every kind of storytelling.

The Gods of Mars & The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Nelson Doubleday edition of 1971. Frank Frazetta's cover illustration is a tour de force of action and painterly technique. I suspect he finished it in a day or less. The Thark's red cloak is reminiscent of the one worn by the ape-creature on Frazetta's cover for the Lancer edition of Conan.

A rear view of this wraparound cover will show a rear view of Dejah Thoris, too. Frazetta had his proclivities. But his choice in depicting the female figure in such a way wasn't just about showing a good shot of her fanny. Or at least I don't think it was. By turning her away from us and posing her the way that he did, I think he heightened the mystery and peril of the situation in which the lovers find themselves. She is firm in the grip of the ape-creatures and is rapidly being carried away by them. John Carter had better do something, and fast, before she disappears from this tableau. (Winslow Homer did the same kind of turning away in his picture-making. I think his purpose was to depersonalize, and thus universalize, his figures.) By the way, if you look quickly enough, you will see the same kind of rear view and split, gray-toned, feminine anatomy in the climactic scenes of Total Recall.

Frank Schoonover (1877-1972) was one of the original John Carter artists. Here is his cover for The Gods of Mars, from 1919. His protagonist is a little goofy-looking. My reason for showing this image is to point out the similarity between Burroughs' desert airships and those run by Jabba the Hutt's gang in Return of the Jedi (1983): George Lucas--just like seemingly everybody else in twentieth-century American fantasy and science fiction--was almost certainly influenced, directly or indirectly, by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Eight

Arcadian Utopias

Dejah Thoris upbraids and implores the Tharks of Barsoom:

"Why, oh, why will you not learn to live in amity with your fellows. Must you ever go on down the ages to your final extinction but little above the plane of the dumb brutes that serve you! A people without written language, without art, without homes, without love; the victims of eons of the horrible community idea. Owning everything in common, even to your women and children, has resulted in your owning nothing in common. You hate each other as you hate all else except yourselves. Come back to the ways of our common ancestors, come back to the light of kindliness and fellowship. The way is open to you, you will find the hands of the red men stretched out to aid you. Together we may do still more to regenerate our dying planet. The granddaughter of the greatest and mightiest of the red jeddaks has asked you. Will you come?" (A Princess of Mars, Nelson-Doubleday, 1970, pp. 52-53)

This passage is as clear and succinct as any in illustrating Edgar Rice Burroughs' conservatism. It seems to me, though, that his views were not reactionary so much as a uniquely Burkean/American version of conservatism. This version might not be easily portable except perhaps into the Lost Worlds of the imagination. Maybe fictional conservative utopias are possible after all.

* * * 

In this blog, I have made distinctions and emphasized dichotomies:

• Progressive vs. conservative
• High culture vs. low or folk culture
• Science fiction vs. fantasy and weird fiction
• Utopia vs. Dystopia
• The intellectual-elite vs. the popular

These distinctions don't always hold up very well. They are, after all, attempts to impose an architecture upon things that are wholly natural and organic. Science fiction author Jack Williamson (1908-2006) made distinctions, too. He considered the dystopian tradition older than the utopian. He found the origins of Dystopia in the ancient, G_d- or gods-centered, Egyptian/Hebraic past. Utopia, on the other hand, is from Greek humanism, still ancient, but more derived, and in our age more prevalent.

There are more distinctions to make. Here is an important one I think, from Utopian Fantasy: A Study of English Utopian Fiction Since the End of the Nineteenth Century by Richard Gerber (McGraw-Hill, 1973):

In a sense every utopia is scientific. [. . .] All the same, though most utopias show signs of scientific detachment, it is well to distinguish between scientific and arcadian utopias. For in the arcadian utopia the scientific method, the thought applied to the building of utopia, is used to abolish every kind of scientifically rigid construction within utopia. Anarchy and a sublimated state of nature are proclaimed. [. . .] Both myths are significant, but the scientific clockwork utopia possesses a higher degree of reality, embodying modern man’s real hopes and fears. The arcadian Utopia nowadays has hardly any other function than reactionary wish-fulfillment [. . .]. (pp. 46-48)

It's clear that Mr. Gerber is coming at things from the left, but his point is a good one: that in the genre of Utopia, there is a distinction to be made between the scientific (and progressive) type versus the arcadian (and conservative, or as he calls it "reactionary") type. If there is such a distinction, then a seeming contradiction--Edgar Rice Burroughs as a conservative utopian--becomes instead a possibility. You might boil it down this way:

Scientific Utopia vs. Arcadian Utopia (or the Utopia of Escape)

↓

Science Fiction, Dystopia, and Apocalypse vs. Science Fantasy and Lost Worlds

↓

H.G. Wells vs. H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Edgar Rice Burroughs

So where does that leave weird fiction, the catchall category that filled the pages of Weird Tales? Well, I think a little falls on one side and a little on the other. I'm kind of surprised at how this is turning out . . .

* * *

Here is another paper hidden behind a paywall, "The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth-Century America" by Marianne Sommer (2009). Only the abstract appears on the Internet at no cost:

The essay focuses on the writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950)--the creator of Tarzan--and his contemporary and president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935). These historical figures are of interest as multimedia-versed shapers of collective fantasies of human evolution. [. . .] Osborn and Burroughs engaged in "interesting experiment[s] in the mental laboratory which we call imagination" when they made different races, sexes, and national types compete in prehistoric struggles for existence. The laboratory setups were to reveal natural hierarchies, but they were also intended to transform the reader/viewer. The verbal and visual reconstructions of lost worlds served Burroughs's and Osborn's conservatism: the true American/Anglo-Saxon type had to be preserved, if not recovered.

Again, the drift of the paper seems towards emphasizing Burroughs' conservatism except that now there appear to be elements of social Darwinism and racial theory thrown into the mix. But this leads to another important point, and it's in regards to the utopian/science-fictional/science-fantasy hero versus his dystopian/weird-fictional counterpart . . .

To be continued . . .

Thuvia, Maid of Mars & The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Nelson-Doubleday, 1972), with cover art by Frank Frazetta. What you can't see is a banth on the back cover, a multi-legged lion-creature that threatens John Carter but doesn't seem to bother very much his pink princess. I guess we have all seen this proud and haughty look on the face of a real-life woman.

A Barsoomian city looms large in the background. One distinction I haven't made yet is that Dystopia and the scientific Utopia would seem strictly urban phenomena: the perfectly orderly society--good or bad--requires mass living, urban density, urbanized order. Has anyone ever written a rural Dystopia? Is such a thing even possible? If Richard Gerber is right, then an arcadian Utopia is a possibility, and I guess the Mars novels might fall into that category. But do Tharks inhabit Dystopia? I sense that they don't. Their society is simply primitive, too primitive to reach the level of development needed for a perfectly orderly, perfectly controlled, and perfectly awful dystopian society.

A long time ago, I had a book called The Intellectual Versus the City by Morton Gabriel White and Lucia White. I never read this book, but the title is intriguing. You would think that the intellectual would favor the city. Intellectuals certainly do today. At some point, though, there must have been a flip, but I don't know when or why that would have been. Anyway, characters in dystopian stories often seek to escape from the city and into nature. It happens in THX 1138 (1971) and Logan's Run (1976). In We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924) and The World Outside by Robert Silverberg (1971), a green and natural world surrounds the dystopian city. These seem to me examples of the divide between the scientific Utopia (aka Dystopia) and the arcadian Utopia, which might as well be called by a different name.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Utopia & Dystopia in Weird Tales-Part Seven

The Red Utopia in the Sky

Gentleman John Carter journeyed to Mars, there to fight and befriend Tharks, all before Tarzan swung on his vine. Like James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) a century before him, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) got his start by believing that he could pen something better than what he was reading in the popular press. He set out in 1911 to write his story. The first place his imagination went was not to the jungles of Africa but to the red planet Mars. John Carter was projected bodily from a mystical Arizona cave. Burroughs made the journey in his mind.

We might think of Utopia as a socialist or progressive genre, perhaps as a sub within the larger genre of science fiction. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000 to 1887 (1888) would seem an exemplar of the socialist Utopia. In their book The Politics of Utopia: A Study in Theory and Practice (1982) Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor used the passive voice to pose a sideways question:

It may well be asked why so many 'modern' utopias are socialist--indeed, the two categories almost became coextensive during the nineteenth century.

The authors went on to suggest some answers. The point is that in the nineteenth century, utopianism and socialism were seemingly joined, perhaps with other elements into a nascent science fiction. (Perhaps into a progressive Scientism, too.) We might still think of them that way. The Lost Worlds fantasy, about which I have been writing, might be the conservative's answer to the progressive/socialist Utopia, an exploration into new lands but without all of the abstruse and ultimately murderous theorizing. Instead of going into the glorious future, the Lost Worlds hero ventures into the nostalgic past.

In "Utopias Beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia" (1991), Peter Fitting, in an epigraph, quotes from Ms. Goodwin and Mr. Taylor's work--

Since the revival of utopianism and utopian scholarship in the 1970s, there has been a growing realization that there are also utopias which eschew and even reject socialist ideals.

--before setting off on his own discussion. Mr. Fitting posits the existence of what he calls "right-wing utopias" (I believe him) and promises to look at some of them. Unfortunately, all but the first page of his paper is hidden behind a paywall. Darned capitalists!

Ditto for Michael Orth's paper "Utopia in the Pulps: The Apocalyptic Pastoralism of Edgar Rice Burroughs" (from Extrapolation, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1986). We might not think of Burroughs as having been a utopian thinker or writer, but the late Mr. Orth made a good start to his case in his opening sentence:

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote more than seventy books, and at least fifty of them contain elements of utopian thinking--that is, they offer more or less detailed presentations of imaginary cities, peoples, or nations which the author clearly wishes his readers either to admire or detest; and they express a conservative vision of history and possibility.

(Mr. Orth's citation here is to a previous work by Mr. Orth.) And he went on from there, writing: "The conservative vision has always been strong in utopias"--and placing Thomas More's original Utopia, as well as Looking Backward, in the category of conservative utopias. Interesting. Unfortunately again, you can't read very much more before reaching the end of the free part. Double-darn them!

I might agree with Mr. Orth. I have already written that the utopian/progressive/socialist program is essentially conservative in orientation, though of a fiercely reactionary type: it dreams and strives and yearns for a return to the Middle Ages, in which the Progressive/Socialist imagines the monarchy, aristocracy, and clerisy to be few and powerful; the masses of serfs to be static and powerless; and the middle classes, whom he or she derisively calls the bourgeoisie--"bougies" to two-bit Marxists like the Great Bronx Dingbat--to be non-existent.

There are a couple of distinctions to be made here, though. First, if it's a detestable place, then I would call it Dystopia rather than Utopia. Second, conservatives--being essentially non-intellectual or even anti-intellectual--are more likely to write non-intellectual stories of adventure rather than dry, intellectual utopias or even drier and overly intellectualized scholarly works. If it's an adventure story, it was probably written by a conservative, and if it's a Utopia, it was probably written by somebody else. But if Mr. Orth is correct and many utopian stories are essentially conservative, then maybe that distinction falls apart.

One more distinction: the people tend to read popular fictions and forms. If you want them to read it, you've got to make it interesting. There has to be love and car chases. Utopias and scholarly works are more for the intellectual élite. People like that don't mind being bored by prose as long as their little ideas are turning in their heads. Or, as another of Peter Fitting's epigraphs reads:

. . . the freedom of writing implies the freedom of the citizen. One does not write for slaves. The art of prose is bound up with the only regime in which prose has meaning, democracy.

That quote is from Jean-Paul Sartre--and he was a Marxist and an intellectual. (So maybe we don't trust it after all.)

So is Utopia essentially a conservative genre? And did Edgar Rice Burroughs write of conservative or "right-wing" utopias? Maybe so. I'd like to read the papers by Mr. Fitting and Mr. Orth in order to learn more. But here we are. Anyway, maybe my line of inquiry has been wrong. But these things might actually fit together pretty well: That the original Utopia and stories like it led to the Lost Worlds fantasy. That the Lost Worlds fantasy, once it could no longer be set on a fully mapped and explored Earth-of-the-present, had to take place somewhere else--or sometime else. And that some of the resulting genres would find a warm and natural home in the pages of Weird Tales.

To be continued . . .

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Note: My title, "The Red Utopia in the Sky," is a paraphrase of an expression in Stephen Baxter's sequel to The War of the Worlds, called The Massacre of Mankind (2017). His original phrase is "their arid utopia in the sky" (p. 148), "their" meaning the Martians'. Thanks to Mr. Baxter.

A Princess of Mars was originally entitled "Under the Moons of Mars." If you were reading The All-Story one hundred and nine years ago this month, you would have found yourself halfway through it. You would also have encountered Dejah Thoris' takedown of her Thark captors' primitive socialistic society:

"Why, oh, why will you not learn to live in amity with your fellows. Must you ever go on down the ages to your final extinction but little above the plane of the dumb brutes that serve you! A people without written language, without art, without homes, without love; the victims of eons of the horrible community idea. Owning everything in common, even to your women and children, has resulted in your owning nothing in common. You hate each other as you hate all else except yourselves. Come back to the ways of our common ancestors, come back to the light of kindliness and fellowship. The way is open to you, you will find the hands of the red men stretched out to aid you. Together we may do still more to regenerate our dying planet. The granddaughter of the greatest and mightiest of the red jeddaks has asked you. Will you come?" (pp. 52-53)

The illustration is of course by Frank Frazetta, who was a great fan of Burroughs in his youth. In contrast, Conan and Robert E. Howard were mostly or wholly unknown to him before he landed assignments for which he is so well remembered, his covers for the Conan series published by Lancer Books in the 1960s and '70s.

Original text and caption copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley