MYTHC0MICS: "CALL OF THE WILD" (CONAN THE KING #28, 1985)

 

I'm sure it's been at least twenty years since I read an issue of this Marvel magazine, which began in 1980 as KING CONAN and which lasted a healthy nine years, albeit under the altered title CONAN THE KING. It was a relatively high-ticket item, starting at $1.25 and ending at $1.50, and was the last Conan project from Roy Thomas before he left Marvel for DC. I imagine KING was launched for the usual economic reasons, but I'd like to think there was some thought of giving the barbarian a venue more expansive than the regular color comic.

There's a certain irony to Marvel devoting stories to the famed sword-slinger in his mature years, since Young Conan was always the most popular incarnation in prose and in comics. Robert E. Howard devoted one short story and one novel to Mature Conan, but clearly the WEIRD TALES readers liked the hero best when he was a young freebooter ranging from realm to realm. Nevertheless, KING presented Conan at an even later phase of life than Howard ever had. By the time of KING #28-- the last Conan tale for writer Alan Zelenetz-- the barbarian has sired a teenaged daughter and a somewhat younger son by his queen, Zenobia. The text of "Call of the Wild" implies that Conan is sixty years old, though artist Alan Silvestri draws both the barbarian and his red-haired guest-star as if they're merely in their forties.

Despite having ascended to the kingship of Aquilonia, Conan chafes at the confinements of civilized life. He dons a disguise and goes drinking at a lowly tavern. Monarch's business intrudes, so Conan orders everyone to clear the hall. One hooded figure seems minded to defy the King's order but then chooses to leave. 

Back at Conan's palace, his daughter Radegund anticipates her "confirmation" (whatever that means in Hyboria) but her father has conspicuously forgotten the Big Event. He's selfishly mourning the freedom of his younger years, and he departs the castle grounds for the forest. However, his cloaked "friend" from the tavern has apparently followed him-- a good trick, given that she couldn't have known when he'd leave and which way he'd go-- and reveals herself to the startled potentate.    

Unlike Conan, Mature Sonja has remained true to the wanderer's life, never marrying or settling down. She claims to have come to Aquilonia only to fulfill a commission, and to have run into Conan purely by accident-- though she could hardly be ignorant of the barbarian's royal attainments. It's worth remembering that in the first two-part tale of the Marvel Comics Sonja, she tricked Young Conan into doing heavy lifting for her. Mature Conan is delighted to see her and dearly wishes to talk over old times. She scorns his royal ascension, and her refusal to be Conan's nostalgia-buddy very nearly crushes him. But then Sonja switches gears and "allows" Conan to render her aid.

              

Zelenetz could have had Sonja lead Conan to any number of routine treasure-troves-- a lost tomb, a wizard's castle. Instead, Sonja's quest takes them to "a death barge-- sacred to the darkest gods of the nether realm." Aboard the ship, guarded by fanatics, lies the enshrined body of a necromancer, and Sonja's been hired to steal a gem from the dead wizard's eye. The two thieves have no real compunctions against robbing the dead, though in a symbolic sense the Death Barge might represent the world of Death itself, which will eventually consume all living warriors. In fact, Married, Not So Mature Conan can't quite resist getting grabby with Sonja's forty-something charms. Yet he doesn't resent getting her boot in his face, since his desire for the allure of pure adventure surpasses all else.

While Conan kills a bunch of guards (I'm sure they were all Bad People), Sonja steals the jewel-- but the dead wizard retaliates with a spell of deadly smoke. Conan hits on the idea of flooding the cabin, which interrupts the spell for some reason. Sonja keeps only her stolen eye-jewel while Conan randomly takes a "token" in the form of a necklace. Then they swim back to land, leaving the disposition of the Death Barge up to the reader's imagination.

Conan is all for deserting his throne and returning to his old wild ways, but Sonja tricks him one last time, albeit for his own good. Silvestri does a fine job showing Sonja's stoical acceptance that she's no longer a part of Conan's life, and off she rides, leaving him to his kingship-- and implicitly to his queen and children (though Sonja's only comment on the Cimmerian's marital life is a catty remark about Conan having a "harem.") Conan's poised to pursue her-- and maybe, his lost freedom-- when he hears temple bells and remembers that he's got a daughter waiting for him to perform his paternal duties.

     

But "all's well" for the King, whose dereliction of his responsibilities put into his hands just the right sort of booty to be a gift to the daughter he completely forgot. Zelenetz and Silvestri came up with a sort of "family melodrama" take on barbarian adventure, and my vague recollection of the whole series is that it often pursued storylines more in the vein of Hal Foster than of Robert E. Howard. To be sure, the KING series never lets an issue pass where Conan isn't mightily smiting enemies with his iron thews, so a lot of his complaints about civilized life ring false. Zelenetz's title is as ironic as his conclusion, for Conan's trajectory is less like that of Buck in London's CALL OF THE WILD-- the dog who embraces the wild life-- and more like that of White Fang, the star of London's other canine outing, the wolf-dog that finally gives up the wilderness in favor of domesticity. As a further irony, it's the she-devil with a sword-- the hero whose gender is best known for "nesting"-- who remains loyal to the allure of wanderlust.

THE READING RHEUM: THE STEALER OF SOULS (1967)

 

The earliest stories of Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone appeared during the years 1961-62 in a British magazine, SCIENCE FANTASY, and five of those stories were reprinted in an American paperback in 1967 under the title THE STEALER OF SOULS. 

By 1967 I had become a Fantasy-Zombie of the First Order, having splurged my disposable income into both superhero comics and science fiction paperbacks. I don't remember seeing any of the sword-and-sorcery books of the time, though I'm sure was aware of the comparable "science fantasy" books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. So I bought almost exclusively SF because that's what I found on the secondhand shelves, including an obscure Moorcock title, THE FIRECLOWN. (I may have bought that one because the figure on the cover reminded me of The Joker.)

But by the early seventies I became much more invested in the magical fantasy genre, partly because of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy books, designed to piggyback on the success of Tolkien, and partly because of Marvel's 1970 adaptation of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. And two years into that epochal period, Roy Thomas collaborated with Michael Moorcock on a two-part story in CONAN #14-15, in which Howard's burly barbarian crossed paths, and swords, with Moorcock's spindly albino. Not long after, I purchased a fair number of Moorcock's Elric books, as well as his related fantasies.

Though I greatly liked the Elric I'd first seen in CONAN, I'm not sure I was ever quite as enthralled by the original prose version. The original set of short stories and novellas concluded with the hero's death by his own cursed blade, and after that, for the remainder of Moorcock's life he kept returning to the character to write prequels and interstitial stories about the doomed swordsman. Obviously, countless fans became invested enough in Elric to sort out all the stories in their proper time-frames, but I can't say that I was ever moved to  do so. I think I enjoyed the stories I did read well enough, but few of them really stood out. Similarly, I find now that the five stories in STEALER are at best uneven, and even the best ones don't grab me the way Elric did guest-starring with Conan.

"The Dreaming City"-- a title Moorcock later used for a prequel book-- describes how Elric begins his spiral into darkness. He's the king of the empire of Melnibone, which is peopled by a race of humanoids who are somehow not related to actual humans, a younger race that shares the same planet with them. Melnibone once ruled the world with an effete sort of cruelty, but their empire has fallen into decline. Elric starts his first story as a dethroned monarch, cast out from the capital city Imryrr by the usurper Yyrkoon. Complicating Elric's situation is that he's in love with Cymoril, sister of said usurper, and that Yyrkoon has consigned Cymoril to a mystic sleep. Elric makes alliances with human generals to mount an attack on Imryrr, but before the attack begins, Elric infiltrates the city alone, as if a part of him wants to play Douglas Fairbanks and spirit the damsel away. Yet Yyrkoon's defenses are too good, and Elric must resort to betraying his own people to human beings. And it's all for nothing, because during the hero's duel with his enemy, his beloved is slain as well.

The story is effective melodrama, but reading it this time out, I found it a little too stage-managed. Not does Elric betray his people and lose his lover, he and the humans are later attacked by avengers from the sacked city-- and sure enough, Elric betrays his human allies for his own survival. And not only is he mystically bound to a sword that eats the souls of those it slays, he calls upon dark gods to empower him by promising them "blood and souls." I can understand why an author writing in the 1960s might want to get away from the simon-pure archetype of many fantasy-heroes, But Moorcock saddles his hero with so much adversity that all the hero's torments begin to feel contrived. Elric is a lot like Shelley's Victor Frankenstein. No matter what good he tries to do, it always turns out badly, and most of his life is spent wallowing in misery while being unable to save anyone.

The second story, "While the Gods Laugh," is the only other one I would rate with high mythicity. Elric, roving from place to place, is hired as a bodyguard by a beautiful woman, Sharilla, who wants to find a magical book owned by the dead gods of their world. Elric agrees to the mission, stating that he wants to know if there exists any divine forgiveness for a sinner such as he. On the way to collect the book, the two are joined by a sardonic fellow named Moonglum, who in many stories will become Elric's sidekick, providing a degree of humor impossible for the gloomy albino. I'll skip past the various perils the trio encounter, though it's worth mentioning that Elric and Sharilla sleep together on the way. The denouement is almost identical to that of "City," in that Elric feels utterly alienated at being unable to discover some "surcease of sorrow." The solipsistic hero will win no prizes for the way he ignores Sharilla's possible feelings for him, though she sees his lack of reciprocation and remains silent.

The other three stories are more like standard sword-and-sorcery perils, with various incidents of moping and grousing. In "Stealer of Souls," Elric accepts a commission from avaricious merchants seeking to destroy a noble enemy, but only because the latter is in league with a wizard with whom Elric shares an enmity. All of the characters are depressingly paper-thin here. In "Kings of Darkness," Elric and Moonglum accept the job of escorting beauteous Queen Zarozina to her kingdom, but the trio gets waylaid in another realm, whose rulers struggle with sibling rivalry and a "curse of the undead." In "The Flame Bringers," Elric's totally gotten over the loss of Cymoril and is shacked up with Zarozina, but her kingdom is threatened by a barbarian tribe with command over an enslaved wizard and his fire demons.

The lesser stories are about on the level of your average D&D scenario. Given Moorcock's reputation, I'm rather depressed to see so few characters with even enough depth for good melodrama. Though Robert E Howard wrote his share of bad stories, even the crummy tales show a passion for vivid if simple characterizations. Moorcock's attitude toward heroic fiction seems like that of Alan Moore. Both creators became emotionally invested in heroic characters in their younger years, but later became intellectually embarrassed by the bad repute of adventure-fiction. Thus both wrote many tales in which traditional heroic figures were downgraded in some way, whether for satire or in the name of a vague "anti-heroism." While admitting Moorcock's breakthrough achievement, I feel like he never tapped the full potential of his own concept, and thus I'm not sure I'll read any more soul-stealing stories in the near future. 

MYTHCOMICS: ["THE SONG OF RED SONJA"], CONAN THE BARBARIAN #23-24 (1973)

 Not only must I preface my remarks by saying that I'm using the title of one of two stories as an umbrella for both, but also that the two stories involved are part of a larger mosaic of CONAN stories by the celebrated team of Roy Thomas and Barry Smith. I don't know if anyone has coined a formal name for these interrelated stories, but since they're related to Conan's participation in a city under siege, one might call it "The Siege of Makkalet." It was an ambitious multi-part story, and yet another of Marvel Comics' experiments with longer continuities like the Lee-Kirby "Inhumans Saga" and Steranko's Yellow Claw continuity.

The most mythic stories within the greater mosaic are the two related to Thomas and Smith's introduction of the sword-maiden Red Sonja to Conan's Hyborian era. At some point in the Mythcomics Project, I stated that I wouldn't consider simple adaptations of stories from other media as "mythcomics." However, even though one of the two stories considered here derives from Robert E. Howard's prose tale  "The Shadow of the Vulture," Thomas and Smith ring in enough changes to the original tale that it's no longer a straight retelling. I've already included at least one derivative-yet-original mythcomic before this, when I analyzed George Perez's take on Hesiod's myth of Pandora.

Three previous stories established Conan's enlistment with the forces of Makkalet as a mercenary, defending the city against the invader Turan. Thus Conan becomes a loose parallel to Howard's Germanic hero Von Kalmbach, while Turan stands in for the real-world Ottoman Empire. The ruler of Turan has a slightly different reason for his enmity toward the Cimmerian, but his arc is the same as that of Suleiman I, sending the (fictional) assassin Mikhal Oglu, "The Vulture," to collect Conan's head. Original to the above exchange between Mikhal and his liege is Mikhal's remark that "no night is dark enough to hide [Conan] from me."

Conan is forced to flee the Vulture's forces to beseiged Makkalet, and it's there that the barbarian meets fellow mercenary Red Sonja, who is pretty close visually to Howard's description but lacks any backstory, least of all that of her having become a warrior because her sister became the harem-favorite of an Eastern ruler. The burly Cimmerian doesn't immediately show gratitude for his rescue by Sonja's forces, passing a sexist remark about "a wench who should be tending a hearth somewhere." Sonja doesn't hear the jibe, but he does belatedly attempt to render thanks, only to have the martial maiden reject his overtures. In the short story Howard writes a line meant to establish that his "Sonya" was purely a warrior who had no dalliances with other soldiers. Thomas rewrites this line, making Sonja more ambivalent: "She's all men's delight, and no man's love"-- which fits with some of Red Sonja's greater use of feminine wiles, if not actual selling of her services.

In the short story, Sonya shows some belated appreciation for Von Kalmbach's prowess, and that's the reason she's watching him when the hero's abducted by some of the Vulture's pawns. Thomas doesn't explain exactly how Sonja came to be watching Conan when he gets kidnapped, but her rescue makes it possible, as in the Howard story, to lure the Vulture into a trap where Conan uses his Cimmerian super-sight to gain a fighting-advantage. 

The second story, the one literally entitled "The Song of Red Sonja," is entirely original, and puts a new complexion on the heroine's attitude toward the barbarian. But first, Sonja is seen doing something that the all-business Red Sonya would never have done: dancing on a table for the applause of her fellow soldiers, including Conan. 

Sonja's dance foments a brawl at the tavern, but she remains in Conan's company as they depart to avoid being arrested by the city's guards. Surprisingly, given what we later learn about Sonja's motives, it's Conan who suggests that they should take a dip in some local pool. Sonja doffs her mail-shirt, and Conan takes that as a go-ahead signal. Then Sonja suddenly remembers that she has a task to perform that very night, and she uses her sexiness to lure the barbarian into helping her. 

To his credit, Conan soon figures out that the she-devil wants him for his Cimmerian climbing-skills, so that both of them can rob a local treasure-tower in Makkalet. He goes along with her plan, though, hoping to lure her into a sense of indebtedness, and therefore, into sex. However, Sonja has a secret mission. She hasn't come to Makkalet simply as a random mercenary, but has been charged with recovering a magical item from the treasure-house by another ruler, the humorously named "King Ghannif." (In Yiddish, a "goniff" is a dishonest or disreputable person.") 

The magic item, as it happens, conjures a magic serpent, allowing Conan and Sonja something to fight for the next five pages. Thomas throws in a reference to Howard's concept of a race of serpent-men, but the serpent has no independent mythic value, and once the heroes force the creature to retreat back into the bauble, the beast and its talisman are never referenced again in the Marvel CONAN series.

Once Sonja has what she wants, she decides to "burn her bridges," so to speak, with the somewhat gullible barbarian. It's at this point that Thomas has the sword-maiden utter her famous line--

"No man's lips shall ever touch mine, Cimmerian, save those of him who has defeated me on the field of battle!"

Nothing in "Song" sets up this unusual declaration, and the five Sonja stories that followed show no sign of following up on the statement. Not until Sonja got her own origin in the 1975 story in KULL AND THE BARBARIANS #3 did Thomas return to the subject, so it's difficult to say what he, or possibly Barry Smith, might have been thinking of when the line was coined. Thomas had dumped Original Sonya's motive of fighting the Ottomans because of her personal sense of affront (though strangely, not on behalf of her abducted sister). My best guess is that, although Thomas could not have known that comics fans would want to see more of the red-haired vixen, the writer knew that if he brought her back, he would eventually have to come up with a new backstory to explain why Red Sonja had rejected the traditional role of women in a barbaric world. Thomas could easily have borrowed the "no sex without physical conquest" from the Classic Greek tale of Atalanta, who would not marry any man except one who could best her in a foot-race. (The swain who does outrace her, BTW, does so by means of a trick.) The subsequent origin-story, however, would take the concept in an entirely new direction.

WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 2

One of the most famous tropes of the superhero idiom is that of "strength concealed by weakness," or, alternately, "strength evolving from weakness." -- DJINN WITH SUMMONER, PT. 1.

The two  DJINN essays focused largely on characters who make use of "genie-like" entities to do their fighting for them. In some cases, like that of Ahmad from the 1924 THIEF OF BAGDAD and the eponymous star of Disney's ALADDIN, the main character demonstrates high dynamicity, at least for an ordinary human with no special powers. This dynamicity does not depend primarily on having a great weapon, like the aforementioned Richard Mayhew, but on a mastery of otherwise ordinary weapons.

There are a handful of exceptions. One is Michael Moorcock's sword-and-sorcery hero Elric. Born an albino, Elric is only able to fight normal human opponents thanks to sorcery. As  the panels from CONAN #13 show, Elric can only match Conan's formidable strength by the use of his sword Stormbringer, which gives him  both physical power and fighting-skill.

Despite his dependence on his sword, Elric is still a megadynamic hero in a way that, say, Hubert Hawkins of THE COURT JESTER is not. Elric may not be able to fight without his sword,  but he must exert his own will to battle his enemies. Hubert's talents are thrust upon him by an outside manipulator, and so he remains at base a weakling even with a weapon. Stormbringer qualifies as a method of *interiorization,* which I defined as a situation in which "the hero's true, powerful self is concealed within him, and must be summoned from within." Magic potions are far more often used than magical weapons, ranging from the lotion that makes the classical Jason temporarily invulnerable to Popeye's spinach and Hourman's Miraclo pills.

Charms are even dicier than weapons. I've stated on other occasions that I consider Bram Stoker's DRACULA to be a combative novel, which implies that the starring vampire is opposed by other megadynamic forces, the vampire-hunters organized by Van Helsing-- or more specifically, the more physically prepossessing members of the coterie, mainly Jonathan Harker and Quincy Morris. Van Helsing, though not an active figure in the battles with Dracula, is the only member of the group who understands the undead's true nature, and so he's able to marshal such weapons as crosses and holy water against the Count. However, the power of these charms-- implicitly stemming from the power of Stoker's Catholic deity-- are not powers inherent in Van Helsing or any of his aides. The charms cannot be used without human hands guiding them, but the charms' power is not tied to the *will* of Dracula's antagonists. The megadynamicity of Stoker's vampire-hunters inheres not in their weapons, but in the personal fighting-skills of Harker and Morris in particular.

Thus, when the Van Helsing of the 1931 DRACULA wields a cross against his opponent, Dracula must yield, but he yields to the power of God, not to the power of Van Helsing.

Nevertheless, a vampire-hunter's *amplitude* may get boosted quite a bit by his daring or unconventional use of charms or similar devices, just as I demonstrated in WEAKLINGS Pt. 1 with respect to the Jack Burton character. In the 1958 HORROR OF DRACULA, As played by Peter Cushing, Van Helsing becomes a younger, more active man, who first stuns the Count by running along a table in spectacular swashbuckler-style in order to escape the vampire and expose him to the sun.

Moments later, Cushing uses a mundane object to make a cross. I'm fairly certain that Stoker never shows anyone stymie Dracula with a near approximation of a cross; I've always believed that the original Count was affected only by genuine religious icons. So Van Helsing is perhaps inventing an "allergy theory;" that vampries aren't affected by Christian supernatural forces but by their (the vampires') own allergic reaction to anything that even looks like a cross. Thus, even though Van Helsing neither receives power from a cross, nor channels any of his own through it, he does gain megadynamic status from his inventive handling of an otherwise mundane weapon.

Throughout the various works of supernatural horror, there are many other situations where a potential victim repels a monster with the help of supernatural forces that they summon through some charm or other medium, and once again, one can only determine megadynamicity on a case by case basis. For instance, at the conclusion of the 1932 MUMMY, the evil sorcerer Imhotep is foiled when a bolt of fire from the statue of Isis burns up the Scroll of Thoth and returns the mummy to the dust of his origins.

Isis, or whatever force is left of the once-popular deity,only intervenes in answer to the call of her former priestess Anck-es-en-Amon, currently occupying the body of a modern woman, whom Imhotep plans to kill. But there's no implication that either the priestess or her modern descendant have any power of their own; they only call up greater power that is not intimately associated with them, summoners who have no real contact with their djinns.

However, on occasion charms may be used as channels for inner power, rather than for external force. The obscure 1981 film JAWS OF SATAN looks, from this VHS art, much like the first image of Van Helsing seen above: a priest wielding the power of God through the instrument of the cross.

However, the script is more ambivalent about where the main character, Father Tom Farrow, gets his ability to fight demons. In this review I wrote:

Farrow certainly doesn't believe he's worthy of a visit from the Dark Lord himself, but in time, he finds out that he shares a special heritage. Back in the days when St. Patrick allegedly cast all serpents out of Ireland, one of Patrick's followers-- not the saint himself-- attracted the ire of the local druids. They cursed him and all his progeny to be slain by snakes, which were to be commanded by Satan himself in the form of a cobra-- or something like that.  

Though it's a ridiculous premise, I have to give the filmmakers props for the audacity of invoking ancient Irish curses to explain a bunch of hostile snakes. In the end, Farrow gets his Catholic moxie together, confronts the King Cobra with his cross, and exorcises it in a flash of flame. It's a poverty-row version of the EXORCIST exorcism, but I found that it does imply a greater conflict of supernatural forces, so that this cheapjack horror-film does become a combative drama. It helps that Farrow also isn't just any old priest, but someone with a special destiny and ancestors to avenge.

That "special destiny" is suggested in the climactic scene, where in my view Farrow seems to be pulling power out of himself, rather than down from heaven, in order to set his Satanic opponent on fire. So, like the Peter Cushing Van Helsing, Father Tom joins the company of the megadynamic elite for the way he combines his own strength with the charms of his faith.

MORE QUICK HU POSTS

Damnit, it's like eating heroin-laced potato chips. I go in to make one lousy post and I'm sucked in again.

Noah Berlatsky contends that the film FOXY BROWN marginalizes womankind's historical experience with rape and racism because the narrative doesn't dwell overlong on the psychological consequences of her rape and forced drug-addiction. I posted:

There's a reading that I'm sure that neither you nor [Stephanie] Dunn are likely to favor: to wit, Foxy shrugs off the ordeals of rape and heroin addiction not as a means of some "disavowal of history" but because she's a super-tough heroine who can do such things. Male film-heroes rarely have to suffer rape, of course, but I'll bet there have been heroes who had to overcome forced drug addiction just through manfully gritting their teeth. And of course male heroes survive all sorts of elaborate tortures, a representative example being Conan being hung on a cross and left to die in the desert.

So if Conan recovers from his ordeal and apparently never has so much as a bad dream from the experience, is that too a disavowal of some aspect of "history?"

Noah also chose to judge the entire "spaghetti western" subgenre on the basis of two examples, so I wrote:

Is [your] point that--

(1) it's wrong to judge people as "types" based on superficial impressions ("such-and-such a woman is a bitch, therefore all women are bitches")

(2) but it's OK to judge a body of works based on looking at one or two works from that body?

No, Noah, nobody expects you to reserve comments until you've read every work in a given genre or subgenre. But if we're dealing with a body that has, say, a couple hundred films overall, a few more than three would be good before making any pronouncements.

We shall see what comes of this latest plunge into the depths...

------

ADDENDUM:

As I half expected, NB didn't really engage with my idea that Foxy Brown was being a typical tough-ass hero by shrugging off her traumas. He even managed to make it seem like even an archetypal hardass like Conan was also participating in psychological erasure (or some damn thing) by not wallowing in his trauma.

Amusingly, though, while on one hand he thinks that fictional characters ought to be judged by the same terms than real people, he doesn't think he has to show to fictional genre-works the same deference that people ought to show to other people.

Yes, because stereotyping people is morally wrong, but talking about works of art is talking about works of art.

Somehow I suspect that NB's inconsistencies are not evidence that he "contains multitudes" a la Whitman...

BRONZE AGE THOUGHTS

I recently came across this Roy Thomas observation from DRACULA LIVES #1 (1973):

"It's our firm conviction that at least a sizable portion of the future of comics lies in a larger, more expensive, even more mature product than today's color-comics market is structured to allow. In a day when Playboy and other magazines sell for a buck (and more, on such gala holidays as Christmas, New Year, and Hugh Hefner's birthday)--in a day when a forty- or fifty cent cover price is possible only to a magazine of tremendous initial circulation--in short, in a time of creeping inflation, rampant overcrowding of the newsstands--we felt that, even though Marvel's popularity is at an all-time high, we'd be fools and klutzes not to experiment with other prices, other sizes, other formats."

It's my theory that what Thomas was saying in '73 was by then common wisdom for Marvel since about 1970-71. I've always considered the Bronze Age-- which I place in 1970-- to be a new era because that's when the Big Two took their first faltering steps toward "adult entertainment," as represented by Marvel's CONAN and DC's GREEN LANTERN. I must admit that there's a big marketing difference in the two, since the former was aiming for success based on the popularity of the paperback Howard reprints while the latter was a gamble aimed at keeping a failing book alive.  Still, both are predicated on appealing to non-juvenile interests.

That Thomas was thinking in this wise long before 1973 is evinced in the 1971 premiere of SAVAGE TALES, for which Roy is billed as "associate editor." The idea of appealing to an older market would be a logical step since it's commonly asserted that sales in the late 1960s went way down, as the superhero bubble, prompted in part by the BATMAN teleseries, went kerblooey.

Marvel-- which also attempted to corner the underground market with the 1974-76 COMIX BOOK-- seems to have been more heavily invested in developing this market than DC, or even Warren. I've read very little of Silver Age Warren, so I don't know if its horror and war stories were on a par with the more mature stories of EC Comics, nor do I know whether or not the Warren audience skewed older than that of Marvel and DC. Warren did begin VAMPIRELLA in 1969, so that would seem to be a more overt courting of an adult audience by Warren, using sex-and-violence in much the same way Marvel used Conan. 

On a side-note, I'd opine that the Marvel guys never seemed to get a handle on adult horror: most of the b&w horror stuff had the same tone as the color comics.  

In 1973 it probably made all the sense in the world to assume that magazines would be a secure foundation on which a comics-company could build. For one thing, the company could expect to raise prices when other magazines did, and not lose out, as DC allegedly did when they tried to maintain 25-cent comics against Marvel's 20-centers.  But then, who could have predicted that the digital revolution would come close to making all magazine entertainment irrelevant?

THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE PT. 3

"Rough sex or rape?" is the title of a New York Times essay on the spousal rape scene of GONE WITH THE WIND. This crucial ambiguity in the intersection of sex and violence makes it difficult to pick a "male-oriented" example of rape in popular fiction.

For instance, in the first Tarzan novel back in 1912, the hero rescues Jane from a possible "fate worse than death" at the hands of a crazed ape.  Tarzan, who has already become smitten with Jane from afar, then "assaults" her with kisses. Jane is briefly swept away and responds. Then her common sense re-asserts itself and she repulses him. Yet rape as such is never a real possibility in this sequence, for the gentlemanly ape-man is simply puzzled at Jane's behavior and takes no further action, except to escort her back to her camp. The hero does not get any nooky until the two of them are formally married in a later book.

Commercial films-- which were, it should be said, aimed equally at both male and female adult audiences-- are replete with such forceful displays of passion, in which the male protagonist forces his attentions-- usually not to the extent Rhett Butler does-- upon a female. It's generally understood that the female protagonist is a stand-in for the female audience that is presumed to want to see sex happen between the lead characters: ergo, the protagonist's reluctance is meant to be broken down in the face of passion; i.e., it is a "no" that really does not mean "no." I do not think that female audiences would have partaken of such scenes in novels and films unless they could relate to them as fantasies. This gives the audiences credit for realizing that such scenarios did not represent real experience, and that they did not represent rape as such.

Were all members of the male audiences aware of "forced attentions" as being in the domain of fantasy, and hence, not justifications of real rape? Here too I think that we must assume that the majority of males knew that they were watching a staged fantasy, though I would admit that there is more potential for misunderstanding from the male point of view.  Still, the male protagonists of novels and films usually were not represented as literally overpowering the female as Rhett Butler did. The more standard scenario was that the reluctant female would finally respond and the curtains would close upon what was then consensual, if only implied, sex.

Four years before the publication of GONE WITH THE WIND, Robert E. Howard submitted-- but did not manage to sell-- a Conan story entitled "The Frost Giant's Daughter," seen above illustrated by the comics-artist Barry Windsor Smith.  Usually Howard's most celebrated character does not have to rape anyone; women regularly throw themselves at the bemuscled barbarian.  But in this story rape is justified in a scenario almost involved as that of Mitchell's novel, though one playing to male fantasies.

As "Daughter" begins, Conan stands on an icy field littered with the dead bodies left from a brutal conflict between two enemy forces. He and a warrior from the other side, name of "Heimdul," square off, and with one blow Conan slays what would seem to be his last opponent.

Into this scene of carnage a naked woman who calls herself "Atali" manifests. She refuses to justify herself to the weary barbarian, but exhorts him first to lie down and die with his allies. Then Atali teases the warrior with her beauty, so that he becomes intent on conquering her. She leads him into an ambush, and as two larger-than-average warriors attack Conan, she shouts that they will enjoy eating his heart "on our father's board." But Conan slays Atali's brothers, and then chases her down. Atali is saved from being raped by the power of her godly father Ymir, who stuns Conan with a celestial light-show and carries his daughter away in what Conan imagines to be a "gigantic war-chariot."  When Conan's allies find him in the snow, he has only a piece of Atali's garment to validate his story.

This is one of the few times a commercial fiction-hero-- one with whom a dominantly male readership would have identified-- is shown to be not just capable of rape, but somewhat justified in committing it. Admittedly, Conan doesn't know that Atali is leading him into ambush when he first chases her; in fact, he's fairly businesslike with this naked vision, trying to figure out if she's allied to his side and if she'll lead him to safety. Only when she flaunts her charms and mocks his lack of manhood does he chase her down, "his eyes burning like those of a wolf." However, long before Conan knows what's going on, the intended readers are likely to suspect the motives of this ethereal cock-tease, and so the idea of the hero raping her as punishment for her deception probably would not have occasioned much audience-grief for Atali, had the story seen print in the 1930s.

Even though the rape isn't completed, due to the interference of Big Daddy Ymir (Howard's Freudian superego?), this is still a psychologically significant "fake-rape" story.  Whereas the spousal rape in GONE WITH THE WIND is justified by feminine priorities-- Scarlett doesn't appreciate her husband, etc.-- this one is justified by male priorities: someone tries to kill you, so you can retaliate against them however you like.  "Daughter" is also a strong mythopoeic tale, in which Conan, even after winning out against mortal enemies, is tantalized by a woman who uses sex as a lure to promulgate death.  One can argue that this sort of fantasy is retrograde to any civilized way of life, and of course it is.  That's precisely the reason it retains its unique power and resonance.

More in Part 4--