THE READING RHEUM: POSEIDONIS (1973)

 As it happens, the last Ballantine collection of Clark Ashton Smith works I'm reviewing for my blog was also the last one the company published. Of the four, ZOTHIQUE was the only sub-universe for which Smith wrote enough stories to fill a paperback book. Thus, POSEIDONIS, like XICARRPH and HYPERBOREA, includes only a comparative handful of stories/poems set in the titular world. The rest of the three books were perforce filled with a lot of one-off horror and SF stories, that, while interesting, aren't Smith's strength in comparison to the magical fantasy stories.                                                                   

Since I didn't get much more than moderate entertainment from the majority of this collection, I'll get those out of the way first, though I'll pass on commenting on either the verse or prose poems. THE DOUBLE SHADOW-- A narrator from Poseidonis describes the dire fate of his perceptor Avyctes (who's loosely tied to the character Malygris, whose stories are discussed below). A VOYAGE TO SFANOMOE-- Two Atlantean inventors flee their doomed home to take refuge on the planet Venus. And Venus welcomes them with an irresistible embrace. A VINTAGE FROM ATLANTIS-- A group of buccaneers happen across an ancient bottle of Atlantean wine, and quaffing it opens their way into the limbo of its vanished glories. "And only a teetotaler escaped to tell thee." AN OFFERING TO THE MOON-- Two archaeologists investigate the moon-worship of the vanished people of Mu, little realizing that they will be offering up their own lives in their pursuit of knowledge. THE UNCHARTED ISLAND-- A castaway finds himself on an isle not quite deserted, as he encounters an ancient people who seem to be re-enacting, like habit-afflicted ghosts, the actions that led to their collective doom. THE EPIPHANY OF DEATH-- A quasi-Egyptian scholar witnesses the fate of his colleague Tomeron in his family's tomb. Worms are involved. SYMPOSIUM OF THE GORGON-- A modern New Yorker somehow ends up in the palace of Medusa just as she's beheaded. I had hopes for this one since Smith followed the part of the Medusa-myth in which Pegasus is born from the gorgon's blood. Then Pegasus takes the narrator to the place he most desires to visit, and the tale turns into a shaggy-dog story about frustrated cannibals. THE INVISIBLE CITY-- What a surprise! Two explorers in Africa comes across an invisible domain, whose denizens don't want the explorers to leave. But in a departure from the norm, both of the guys escape with their lives and the aliens are either exiled or destroyed. THE ROOT OF AMPOI-- In the best of the "fair-to-poor" stories, a conniver seeks treasure in the Papuan Mountains and finds a tribe where the women have rebelled against their gender's natural shortcomings. All the females eat a special root that makes them grow eight feet tall, thus making matriarchal rule a slam-dunk. To the adventurer's surprise, the queen takes a shine to him (the reader never knows why) and marries him. This gives the man the chance to plunder the secrets of the "tall sex," but he does not profit thereby.                                                                                                         

  Only three stories in POSEIDONIS make my cut for high-mythicity stories, and two of them take place in the titular Atlantean city, examining the doomed career of the sorcerer Malygris. In my review of the XICCARPH collection, I wondered if the sorcerer Maal Dweb, who appeared in two stories, was Smith's only continuing character. But I forgot that he devoted the same number of stories to Malygris, and I found both tales more psychologically astute and ornately written than those about the Xiccarph magician. In THE LAST INCANTATION, Malygris, who's become the world's supreme sorcerer, becomes overtaken with ennui despite his vast knowledge of cabalistic matters. He remembers his former love Nylissa, whom he lost to disease, and whose loss precipitated his pursuit of rare magicks. He gets the idea of bringing her back from the dead, but with true ambivalence, once he's done so his memory has become too distorted to know whether he conjured up the real thing or just a pleasing illusion. In THE DEATH OF MALYGRIS, several of the magician's rivals haven't seen him about for years, and become obsessed with learning whether or not Malygris has been claimed by death at last. Since it's a Smith story, the experienced reader can be pretty sure that even though the wizard is dead, he's still not too dead to take his enemies with him. Not only was the sorcerer and his magicks a correlation for the author and his ability to conjure word pictures, he also more or less marked the end of Smith's only productive writing-period, for after MALYGRIS was written in 1933, editor Lin Carter asserts that the writer only produced a handful of stories in the last 26 years of his life on Earth.                                                                                                           

But of all the stories in POSEIDONIS, the best is one I don't even remember reading the first time, however many years that may have been. Like some of those covered above, THE VENUS OF AZOMBEII is a story of a white explorer finding a lost civilization in Africa-- and though Smith probably coined the place name "Azombeii" in response (conscious or not) to Haitian voodoo's origins in Darkest Africa, nothing remotely like a zombie appears in the tale. But unlike most lost cities full of white or Asian people, Azombeii is a lost city full of Black people. However, these Blacks become appealing to explorer Julius Marsden because their ancestors intermarried with some ancient Roman legion, who bequeathed to all of their descendants "classic" Roman features and a fertility goddess, Wanaos (Venus under a new name).                                   

  However, the true "Venus" of the story is the high priestess Mybaloe, who falls in love with Marsden at first sight. The two seem destined to be united in eternal bliss-- and actually, Smith does strongly suggest that the white American and the dark African with Roman features at least have some ecstatic encounter during a pagan orgy. But there's almost always a worm in every CAS apple, and this time it's an envious high priest, Mergawe, who poisons Marsden with a mystic potion that causes his flesh and bones to contract until he perishes, which is how the story ends, after Marsden has returned to the US and a boon friend reads the backstory of his demise in a memoir. But arguably the real star of the story is Mybaloe. I've not encountered that many distinctive female characters in Smith's stories-- usually just one-dimensional vampires and undead corpses. But Smith really tries to make Mybaloe an "ideal woman," possessed of humor and courage despite her isolated origins. In fact, this story saw print in 1931, long before the rise of jungle-girls in pulps and comic books-- and to demonstrate the resourcefulness of this "Venus," Smith even gives her a "Tarzan moment," where she saves Marsden from crocodiles by stabbing two of the reptiles to death. Obviously, whether from personal taste or in deference to his mostly Caucasian readers, Smith gives Mybaloe European features so that she's not exotic in a displeasing way. But in 1931, it was pretty daring to imagine a pulp story in which a white man and a colored woman were joined in an entirely serious romance, in contrast to the many times white explorers canoodled with high priestesses on the right side of the color line. Despite my earlier statement that Smith's magical fantasy stories played best to the author's greatest strengths, I now regard this 1930s exotic tragedy to rate as one of his top ten short stories.   

THE READING RHEUM: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (1929)

 TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR, ERB's fourteen-years-later sequel to the 1915 PELLUCIDAR, is one of the author's better spinoff stories, but it's best known for launching his "crossover project." In addition to spinning off the title character with only a token reference to former star David Innes, the authorial prologue-- in which ERB chats with radio-expert Jason Gridley about the supposed reality of ERB's fantastic stories-- sets up the action of the sequel TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. During the chat, ERB and Gridley supposedly get a very long radio-broadcast from Innes' buddy Abner Perry, telling them the entire story of prehistoric hero Tanar and ending on the revelation that Innes is still in the hands of enemies. At this point Gridley declares that he'll marshal forces to rescue Innes, said forces including the Lord of the Jungle, while Gridley gets a secondary hero-role as well as the standard romantic arc.                                                                 

  I'll touch on two quick points before getting to the main TANAR plot. The first is that, during the prologue, Gridley expresses the same opinion I did in my review of PELLUCIDAR: that Hooja the Sly was one of ERB's better villains, but that as far as ERB is concerned, the Sly One was sincerely killed off. The second concerns those now politically incorrect Black Monkey-Men from the first Pellucidar novel. The tribe does not come on stage in the course of TANAR, but the hero has a flashback in which he remembers being held captive by the tailed people, during which time they taught him the skill of bounding about the tops of trees. This past history comes in handy when ERB wants his caveman hero to swing through the forest with his lady love in his arms. If there wasn't such a time discrepancy between the first two books and the third one, I'd think that was the only reason ERB introduced the monkey-guys.                          

Anyway, fourteen years after the conclusion of PELLUCIDAR, David Innes' prehistoric empire is threatened by seafaring invaders called Korsars. Innes' forces repel the attackers, who unlike the primitives possess huge sailing ships and firearms. However, Tanar-- the son of one of ERB's many tedious noble savages-- is taken aboard one of the ships. Tanar encounters the ruler of the Korsars, an older man known as "The Cid," and the ruler's teenaged daughter Stellara. The Cid-- whose people will later be revealed as descendants of Barbary pirates who blundered into the earth's core--wants Tanar to reveal the process by which Innes' scientists compound gunpowder, since the Korsars' formula is faulty. Tanar is a warrior and knows nothing about chemistry, but he allows the Cid to think that he Tanar can be of assistance. As for Stellara, she and Tanar go the same way as every other ERB couple: falling in love at first sight and not being able to express themselves.                                     

  In fact, though Tanar's episodic adventures wandering about the earth's core are just par for the course, the romance between the hero and his lady is better than the average Burroughs romance. ERB captures much of the hormonal confusion of youth as Tanar and Stellara quarrel while displaying unconditional loyalty toward one another. In two of the roaming adventures, ERB creates a couple of primitive societies he may have meant to be mirror-images of one another. The first is Amiocarp, a tribe in which the members express love very openly, in marked contrast to Tanar and Stellara, who can't manage to know their own hearts. The second is Hime, a tribe in which all the members constantly show hatred and contempt for one another, which represents the fractiousness between hero and heroine-- though of course true love wins the day in the end.                         

This time the heroine has two unwanted suitors. The first one, Bohar, is encountered on the Korsar ship during Tanar's captivity, and halfway through the book Tanar kills this rival. Then, very late in the story, Tanar and Stellara get hauled to the Korsar base, and ERB belatedly reveals that the Cid intends to marry off his daughter to a brute named Bulf, whom Tanar also slays in due course. Strangely, the Cid doesn't ever have a reckoning for his crimes, and as far as I can tell, he doesn't appear in the later books. This might be understandable if the Cid was genuinely the father of Tanar's beloved. However, thanks to one of ERB's more intricate birth-mystery plots, Stellara reveals that she knows that she is not the child of the Cid, even though he thinks that she is. (Their few scenes together also display only contumely toward each other, so one assumes the Cid was not much of a daddy.)                                                                           

                                                                                                                                       Further, since childhood Stellara has known that she was the child of a primitive chieftain, and that her mother was stolen in a Korsar raid before being "married" to the Cid. There's some amusement-value in the author's decorousness about sex, since it goes without saying that for the Cid to believe Stellara his progeny, he has to have had sex with the deceased mother at some point. A contemporary author might have pictured Stellara as lusting for vengeance upon the false parent who raped her mother. But that wasn't in ERB's wheelhouse for whatever reasons. The author does devote some space to having Stellara find her way to her original tribe, where she meets her real father. But ERB seemed to be avoiding any discussion of the relationship between the heroine and the Cid-- who never even learns, so far as the reader knows, that he was tricked into raising another man's child. And even though the Cid doesn't suffer for his act of rape-- I don't even think he has any major scenes in TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE-- one might imagine that the slaying of Bulf, who explicitly would have taken Stellara by force given the chance, provides a substitute for the non-punishment of the novel's main villain. (ERB also never imagines what would have happened had The Cid forced himself on Stellara's mother more than once, but the erudite reader may argue that he did, but never learned that he was "firing blanks," as even people of ERB's time would have comprehended.) ADDENDUM: After TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE, Gridley gets another one of those loquacious radio broadcasts, this one relating the entire story of the 1931 FIGHTING MAN OF MARS.         

NEAR-MYTHS: "BLOODSTAINED FANGS" (ZOOT #12, 1948)

Ever since the jungle-genre in comic books was kicked off (in terms of original material) by 1938's SHEENA, there had been various "jungle queen" competitions. Usually the "bad jungle queens" were white like the good ones.

Black artist Matt Baker broke into the industry in the mid-1940s. Modern readers might find it problematic for a Black creator to work on a feature starring a White jungle queen, as Baker did with his longest running jungle-concept, "Rulah, Jungle Goddess." But arguably he put an unusual spin on the trope. Without explanation, the various Black African tribes encountered by the stately brunette Rulah (herself an American girl who took up the wild life on a lark) mostly had sexy White wives. I don't believe this anomaly is ever justified. My guess is that Baker was so good at drawing sexy girls, and thus captivating lots of young male readers, that his editors didn't care about the racial makeup of his African tribes, as long as he didn't actually depict romantic interactions between Blacks and Whites.

The story "Bloodstained Fangs," though, may show Baker pushing the envelope a bit. The "bad jungle queen" here, one "Mava," is indisputably Black, and sounds like she intends a general uprising that will liberate all of Africa from colonial influence, though of course she's not a liberator in any real sense. Moreover, she's clearly romancing the White European "bomb expert" Konrad in order to secure his cooperation.

Mava's also aware that jungle guardian Rulah is a danger to her plans (yeah, who cares about silly things like the standing armies of colonial Europeans). Mava sets traps involving electrified barb wire and hordes of rats, but Rulah finds her way to the evil rebel's lair nonetheless. Mava happens to be conducting her ablutions, and thinking about how she's going to take Konrad as her "mate," when Rulah bursts in and tries to drown the bad queen. Only the presence of Mava's guards foils the heroine's assault.

But then, as happens more than once in the RULAH comics, the male villain takes a shine to the raven-tressed heroine. Konrad tries to cut Mava out of the deal, and while he's probably not planning to offer Rulah a choice in his plans for her, he never gets a chance to press his suit. Clever Mava has a knife concealed in her hair (so THAT'S where that idea came from) and she disarms Konrad. Then she consigns him to have his flesh eaten by killer ants.

Not feeling any more friendly toward Rulah, Mava sets her up to be starved slowly in the presence of ample food and drink.However, the "bloodstained fangs" of Mava's rats lead to her undoing. The rodents are attracted by the food, and Rulah rubs food on her bonds so that the rats set the heroine free. Though Mava is preparing to leave the area--another example of a villain just leaving a hero unattended so she can escape!-- she's evidently still in the vicinity of the ant-hill when Rulah comes for payback. Mava trips on the conveniently placed skull of Konrad and falls into the ant-hill, and the killer ants don't even need her to be dipped in honey to view Mava as their new favorite food.

Mava, appearing in 1948, is certainly not anywhere near the first Black villainess in jungle comics. However, she does have a lot more on the ball than the average lady witch-doctor, and so might be the first GOOD Female Fiend of Color in this particular genre.

SIDE-NOTE: Baker pursued roughly the same policy in another jungle comic of the period, JO JO CONGO KING. Although heroic Jo-Jo had a White girlfriend, the tribe they hung out with was a tribe of Black males with White females. Amusingly, when a story from JO JO #23 was reprinted in an issue of Skywald's JUNGLE ADVENTURES, the White tribes-women were colored Black, though they all still kept standard Caucasian features.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE DEVIL OF THE CONGO," (JUMBO COMICS #28, 1941)

{Note: the story-title "The Devil of the Congo" appears only on the cover of the magazine.)

I continue to visit Fiction House's SHEENA stories every once in a while because, as pedestrian as many of them are, every once in a while I've spotted strong myth-material, though no full-fledged mythcomics yet. 

I don't recall whether or not "Devil" is the first Sheena story to display a well-dressed, implicitly Westernized Black man in contrast to the tribesmen with whom Sheena interacts. But his position in the splash panel, looking upon the bound figures of Sheena and her mate Bob, clearly denotes him as the villain, and from the first page he's clearly going to be held responsible for the assault upon the peaceful Wasuri tribe. (Like most of the tribes in this and other jungle comics, the tribe will never appear again.)

After a short encounter with a couple of the missing Wasuri, Sheena and Bob are told that the other tribespeople have gone to Elephant River in response to a "white man's curse." Then two more warriors show up and capture the heroes, and the warriors' cowled commander says something about taking them to see a "Great Black Father." The warriors, who are also identified as Wasuri, take their prisoners to the hitherto deserted village, and it happens that the Great Black Father himself has just arrived there as well. I guess he came from that Elephant River place, which is maybe his HQ, but the point is never elucidated. 

Even kid-readers in 1941 probably would have recognized the play on words in the villain's name. The name "Great White Father" was used by American colonials as a high-flown title for whatever authority they reported to-- be it the English king or the American president-- when speaking to various Native American tribes, And the same kid-readers would probably know that the name carried paternalistic associations, even if they might not have really cared that much about conning some Indians. So even just a few pages into the story, it's obvious that this "Great Black Father" is supposed to seem like a numinous presence that can impress simple minded natives the way "Great White Father" was used to impress Indian tribesmen. Unlike the representative of White superiority, though, the villain of the story is a liminal presence. Though he uses the implements associated with White culture-- a gun, a cigar, a megaphone-- and is dressed in suit-clothes, he also wears a stereotypical African headdress. 

At any rate, Sheena and Bob somehow break free and escape the Wasuri village. Their main concern seems to be to find the missing Commissioner Fletcher, but Sheena's attacked by a leopard and must kill it. This delays the duo long enough for the Wasuri to overtake them and drag the heroes back to the village, where, mirable dictu, it turns out that the corrupted tribesmen are torturing Fletcher. Fortunately, the one thing Sheena manages to do during her brief freedom is to send her pet chimpanzee for help, and the chimp manages to stampede a herd of zebras into the village. So this time the heroes escape with Fletcher in tow, and he provides the big reveal: that the Great Black Father is the tool of fascists seeking to "exploit" the natives. (This trope is identical to the one in the 1946 WONDER WOMAN story "Invisible Terrors," though the Sheena tale was published a little before the summer of 1941, about six months before America declared war on the Axis Powers.)

Sheena leaves the injured commissioner with Bob and goes looking for help. She encounters a group of colonial soldiers, several Blacks led by one White guy, but they're actually the fascists who have empowered the Great Black Father. (One may presume the real authorities were Brits, since Kenya is mentioned as a neighboring country and Great Britain controlled Kenya from 1901 to 1960). Sheena gets away and encounters yet another expedition, but this one is headed by Fletcher's wife, and all the colonial soldiers with her are also Black Africans. Sheena has Mrs. Fletcher send the soldiers ahead to the Wasuri village, and the rather dim villain assumes they've come to join him, resulting in his capture. Then the real fascists are shot down and everyone in the Wasuri celebrates because they're impressed with the show of force. 

Though the tribe conveniently forgets the "white man's curse" narrative when it's convenient for the unknown writer of the tale, it's interesting that an escapist story like "Devil" even alluded to native discontent with colonial rule, which topic was almost entirely off limits during the heyday of the jungle-adventure genre.

"Devil" also provides a minor turning point in terms of the depiction of Sheena's skill set. A lot of early stories show the heroine fighting only with such weapons as spear, knife, and bow-and-arrow. "Spoilers of the Wild" may be the first story to show her using a judo throw, but the artwork for "Devil," attributed to one Robert Webb, shows her punching and kicking full-grown men around, which is generally the way Sheena is depicted for the remainder of her comics career.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #14

 While scanning through issues of JUMBO COMICS to chart the progress of the character Sheena, I came across a "weird western" feature named "Wilton of the West," which lasted from issues #1-24 of the title. While the majority of early forties western comics are depressingly isophenomenal, "Wilton"-- allegedly drawn for three issues by Jack Kirby and then by Lou Fine-- had his first brush with the uncanny when he encountered a red-garbed masked crusader, the Crimson Rider in JUMBO #9 (1939). The Rider turns out to be female, making her one of the first masked heroines in comic books, though she's not in every story and is always a support character.

Wilton has a few other encounters with bizarre phenomena, such as a mutilating serial killer (no mutilations actually seen, though) and a town full of Lilliputians, liberally borrowed from the Travels of You Know Who. But the only story worth exhuming I've titled "The Ghost of Moose Ridge." While even in 1939 phony ghosts in the Old West were commonplace, in issue #15 Wilton and the Crimson Rider encounter a weird spook with some "Headless Horseman" similarities. For some reason Crimson Rider becomes an expert in the occult for this one story.

By comparison, for those first 24 issues Sheena's issues are fairly pedestrian, except for #20. Sheena, as a tiny number of fans know, was not the raised-by-animals type of jungle hero. Instead, she was a white child adopted by a tribe of Afro-Mongols, from whom she learns skills with knife and spear. The story, given the mostly irrelevant cover-title of "Spoilers of the Wild," has Sheena and Bob explore a hidden valley. They're taken prisoner by a bunch of gorillas under the control of a human female, Keela, who's as strong as a gorilla and was apparently raised among them. Keela tries to edge Sheena out with Bob, and Sheena uses superior skill to vanquish "Keela of the Apes." Since at least one gorilla is unusually hostile to Bob and Sheena, I find myself wondering if he was a rejected suitor, though the story does not say so. (Also, what's with a tribe of apes having a place where they "make wishes?")

Neither of these stories is articulated well enough even to count as a "near myth," but they do present some odd "raw material."

NEAR MYTHS: ["THE BEAST WOMEN OF ZARGA"] SHEENA #12 (1951)

Given how deeply Edgar Rice Burroughs tapped the depths of myth in the jungle-adventures of Tarzan, I might have hoped that I'd come across even a fair smattering of near myths in Golden Age jungle comics. However, I'd have to say that most of the ones I've encountered were far too formulaic to allow for that much symbolic discourse.

Still, I found one mythcomic for Fantomah, and one near myth for Sheena, so I decided to blow an afternoon scanning through online reprints of the latter Queen of the Jungle to see if I could find anything worth writing about. The result is this story, which appeared in 1951, close to the end for both the Sheena comics of the Golden Age and their publisher Fiction House.

We begin with jungle-queen Sheena and her mate Bob agreeing to help an eminent scientist investigate the superstition of strange "beast-women" who rule over "devil beasts." Oddly, though, the jungle duo don't just meet the doctor the ordinary way. Lightning knocks them off a cliff and into a raging river, and it's just by dumb luck that eminent Doctor Crane happens to be there in his boat to pick them up.

By this time it was practically de rigeur that the "devil beasts" would be a bunch of prehistoric survivals, though at least the artist didn't just cadge the images out of some high school science text. First the expedition encounters a tentacled "serpoquid" (Sharktopus, take note). Then along come the hairy-armed (but still comely) Black Amazons known as "the Beast Women of Zarga."Sheena gets separated from her comrades, and almost killed by giant spiders known as "spidrons." The Beast-Women take Bob and the other men to their giant idol Zarga, who by his silence agrees that the intruders must die. On a peculiar note, Doctor Crane thinks that the women-- whose men are never seen-- are "offshoots of some ancient race, preserved by the glowing rocks." What glowing rocks, you ask? The ones the artist forgot to draw, apparently.

The Beast-Women are just about to have their reptilian mounts trample the captives to death when Sheena intrudes, insisting that in a duel of true queens, "queens cannot die." This provokes the Beast-Queen into a one-on-one duel, which she of course loses, causing the other hairy ladies to retreat further into the cave. Then everyone-- just goes home. That's it? They disturb an ancient people for their curiosity, and then, curiosity satisfied, they just leave? I mean, the Beast Women weren't nice people, but they weren't really bothering anyone. But of the hundreds of jungle stories in which I've seem depictions of Amazon tribes, I have to admit that I've never seen anyone depict a tribe of hairy ladies. For a myth-maniac like myself, this detail suggests that these ladies are more beast than human and thus able to command all the monsters of prehistory-- and that alone makes this weird tidbit worth writing about.

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1929)

 

SPOILERS (for a novel printed back in 1929, HAH)

Within two years in the early nineteen-teens, Edgar Rice Burroughs had authored what most of his fans regard as his three seminal serial concepts: TARZAN and JOHN CARTER OF MARS in 1912, and the PELLUCIDAR series, beginning with AT THE EARTH'S CORE, in 1914. Roughly fifteen years later, ERB then made an ambitious attempt to correlate all three concepts within a series of novels written from 1929 to 1930. Slightly later, he also provided a link to his "Venus" books, which are usually regarded as a concept distinctly inferior to the other three. This didn't happen until 1932, so it was probably just an afterthought for ERB.

AT THE EARTH'S CORE, like other books in the ERB canon, opens with the conceit that its narrative-- the story of how David Innes and his colleague Abner Perry found a huge primitive environment at the center of the earth-- is actually a true story related by Innes to Burroughs himself. However, for the crossover project ERB decided to create a fictional character, Jason Gridley, to serve as a linking element between his disparate fictional worlds. In two crossover novels, radio-technician Gridley is just an onlooker. First, in TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR (the third in that series, and the first to center on a hero other than David Innes), Gridley uses his advanced radio to receive a transmission from Abner Perry, which tells the story of the titular Tanar and his adventure. Later, Gridley also receives a similar transmission from Mars, which allows him to relate the story of 1930's A FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, the seventh of the "Mars" series, but there too Gridley merely relays information. 

The TANAR narrative ends with the revelation that Innes has been imprisoned by evildoers, so Gridley makes the promise to come to Innes' rescue. The story of the rescue-mission makes up the narrative of TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. Gridley seeks out Tarzan in his African jungle and convinces the ape-man to help save Innes, even though neither Gridley nor Tarzan has ever encountered the Pellucidaran adventurer. Tarzan uses his personal wealth and contacts with some characters from an earlier TARZAN novel to bring about the construction of a unique dirigible, with which the heroes plan to journey to the earth's core via a polar entranceway. Most of the technicians manning the dirigible are Germans, which may be ERB channeling memories of the German use of zeppelins in World War One. Tarzan also brings along a small group of his Waziri warriors and an American Negro cook (more on whom later).

Anyone hoping for a major encounter between two of ERB's creations, Tarzan and David Innes, is doomed to disappointment. Innes is not rescued until CORE's final pages, and the character rates only a couple of paragraphs-- which is more than we see for other Pellucidaran support-characters (including the aforementioned "Tanar"), who get the equivalent of footnotes. The only substantive crossover is the one between the hero Tarzan and the setting of Pellucidar. Since the latter is not the star of the Pellucidaran novels, CORE is in essence what I've called in this essay a "high-charisma crossover," since only one of the crossover-presences possesses centric stature. 

Gridley, though he debuts in a Pellucidar novel, is only weakly correlated with the Pellucidar mythos, and even less so with the Mars series. He's allowed to shine as a secondary, support-cast hero in CORE for reasons of romance. ERB always worked a romantic subplot into his adventure-stories, and since Tarzan like David Innes had already become "an old married man," Gridley was elected to play the role of the Earnest Young Man who completes a romance-arc with a comely savage girl of Pellucidar, the amply-named Jana, Red Flower of Zoram.

The structure of CORE amounts to a series of search-and-rescue missions. Both Tarzan and Gridley get separated from the crew of the dirigible, so that both are able to pursue distinct story-arcs. Tarzan gets stuck with the non-erotic duty of befriending some of Pellucidar's noble warriors-- a gorilla-man and the brother of Jana-- while Gridley saves the lissome Jana from both human and animal marauders. Love is swiftly kindled between Gridley and the primitive naif, but like one of ERB's earlier heroes, Billings of the 1918 PEOPLE THAT TIME FORGOT, the civilized Gridley becomes a trifle snobbish in the presence of the uneducated girl. Jana, possessing the full array of feminine intuitions, senses his diffidence and "catches him by running away." This strategy leads to more arduous treks and more battles with the denizens, animal and human, of Pellucidar. Thus both Gridley and Tarzan burn up most of the book's continuity until all the good-guy protagonists are united so as to bring about the anti-climactic rescue of David Innes and the plighting of troths between Gridley and Jana.

Gridley is little more than a stereotypical earnest adventurer, the image of the reader's identificatory figure. Jana is slightly more complex. Her fulsome nickname establishes both that she's beautiful and she knows it, but unlike many of ERB's savage heroines Jana can at least attempt to defend herself, using a spear to slay a primitive hyenadon, much like the character of Meriem in THE SON OF TARZAN. She's extremely proud and doesn't allow Gridley the luxury of pretending that they're "just friends," and her determination to make him confess his feelings in spite of his upbringing drives the romantic subplot. As for other characters, Tarzan is just Tarzan, though as in earlier novels he tends to shift into an animal-like affinity with the natural world whenever that suits ERB's purposes. The rest of the support-characters, good and bad, are all stock figures, though the Negro cook Robert Jones requires a little extra comment. It may be that the commercial reprint of CORE I read expunged some "pickaninny" humor, for Jones doesn't really do much in the story, though he does speak in the mushmouthed Southern dialect usually reserved for Negro characters. His backstory is curious. Though he was captured in Germany while serving as a cook for the American forces during World War One, Jones got along well enough with his captors that he never went back to America and simply continued working for German employers until being hired for the dirigible-adventure. The temptation is to believe that Jones is one of ERB's "cheerful Negroes," though at least he's never as pusillanimous as the maid Esmerelda from TARZAN OF THE APES. 

Yet just as Esmerelda was unfavorably contrasted with the noble Black Africans of the first Tarzan novel, it may be that Jones is meant to be an unfavorable contrast with the fighting Waziris on the expedition, who are clearly shown to be capable of learning the operation of the dirigible from the German crew. This interpretation would cohere with ERB's overall program of critiquing civilized life in contrast to the lives of noble savages, a prevailing theme in the majority of the author's works. CORE is full of such trenchant observations, most often lobbed against pampered Europeans, and even against the American Gridley and his circle of friends. Because Pellucidar is a place where the perception of time is somewhat erratic, ERB also scores some points against the workaday world experienced by his readers, the world of punching time-clocks and societal demands. 

Of course, it must be said that ERB's critique of modernity is a shallow one, rooted in the escapism of noble savages who are just wholly good or wholly bad. ERB actually seems less interested in the Pellucidaran people than in the multifarious prehistoric animals. ERB gives a lot of attention to describing all the exotic biological features of the fauna: cave-bears, pterodactyls, even a quasi-stegosaur capable of limited glider-flight. There are also a few animal-human hybrids, such as the aforementioned gorilla-men, the Sagoths, and reptile-men, the Horibs, the latter proving to be among ERB's best villains. ERB fills these descriptions with considerable verve and thus gives Tarzan one of his best settings for adventure.

On a minor note, the novel ends with one member of the dirigible-crew still missing, but this contrivance takes place simply to set up that character's own debut as a starring hero in the 1937 Pellucidar book BACK TO THE STONE AGE, also a very minor crossover since David Innes makes a token appearance therein. Gridley did not appear in this story, but he has another introductory role in the 1932 PIRATES OF VENUS, the first in the "Carson Napier of Venus" series. 

ERB didn't seem to pursue crossovers much after this period from 1929 to 1932. But TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE is certainly the best of his crossover works, as well as one of the best of the Tarzan novels.

NEAR MYTHS: THE THREE CAMILLAS

In literature the name "Camilla" first appears in Virgil's Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 BC. There's no evidence that any character with that name appeared in earlier Roman myth, though because she was an athletic huntress-type, she might have originally been either a servant of the Hunt-Goddess Diana/Artemis, or even a mortal version of Diana herself.

In JUNGLE COMICS #1 (1940), an artist billed CAW (identified on GCD as Chuck Winter, best known for co-creating DC's "Liberty Belle") did a thinly disguised ripoff of Rider Haggard's novel SHE. An explorer named Jon finds the requisite lost city of white people in the African jungle, all descended from Vikings. This "Lost Empire" is ruled by a queen named Camilla, who stays immortal with the help of a sulphur spring. She tries to make Jon her consort, but he resists, and ends up destroying her Viking city. With the destruction of her spring, Queen Camilla ages and dies.

In the very next issue, Winter virtually reprised the same story. An explorer with a different name encountered a queen with the same name, but one who ruled over a people descended from the Mongols of Genghis Khan. (Note that despite her supposed Mongol descent Camilla II looks like any old blonde flapper of the time.) The most interesting near-mythic aspect of this story is that despite originally possessing no science themselves, the Mongols somehow acquire super-science over the centuries thanks to the "raw materials" in the area, including some mineral that gives off "flexodium, a radium ray unknown to the outer world." Camilla II's city is also destroyed by her unwilling consort but she refuses to be rescued, walking back into her burning city, never to be seen again. The story is mostly interesting as a predecessor to the 2018 BLACK PANTHER film. In that narrative, African natives acquire super-science purely by their access to a magical mineral, not because they have any contact with advanced technology outside their world (in contradistinction to the way Wakanda was portrayed in its first FANTASTIC FOUR storyline).

Apparently, having tried on two versions of the same Haggardian idea, Winter decided he liked the first one better, so Camilla I, despite having already died, gets better, as does her previously destroyed Lost Empire-city. She has another encounter with the white explorer in JUNGLE COMICS #3, and this time he escapes without blowing everything up. Then in issue #4, it appears that Winter decided to give his evil queen a moral makeover. Camilla I gets tossed out of her own lost city, wanders around a while, and runs into Jon and his girlfriend Ruth. She suddenly reveals magic powers, turning Jon into a block of ice. Yet once Jon goes back to normal, he and Ruth help Camilla I regain her throne, and she swears to be a good queen from then on. By issue #6 Winter was gone, replaced by Bob Powell, and Camilla suddenly develops swordfighting skills.

Camilla I's first brush with mythic complexity occurs when she decides in JUNGLE COMICS #7 to challenge the powers of "Hades itself." (By now, the idea of Camilla I's having been a Viking has been utterly forgotten.) She takes with her a hunchback named Caredodo, introduced in the previous issue, and the two of them face down Mephistopheles, who looks like every standard devil ever created, and Satan, who for a change has a more Dante-esque look, being a two-headed green monster. Camilla I conquers Satan with the use of a Christian cross, and a visiting angel descends to grant the courageous woman a wish. (Maybe he thought he was a genie?) She wishes for Caredodo to be transformed into a handsome cavalier, whom she named "Sir Champion," which makes one wonder if her wish was more for her own amatory benefit. 

However, Camilla and Champion only enjoyed about twenty more adventures-- none of which were particularly romantic-- before her status as Queen of the Lost Empire dwindled away. In JUNGLE COMICS #27, Camilla makes a brief reference to her former status as the queen of a city of lost Vikings before she dons a zebra-skin and becomes just another Sheena-like jungle crusader. I haven't read all of these, but I doubt there's anything close to symbolic complexity therein.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE TIGER WOMEN OF WILDMOON MOUNTAIN" (JUNGLE COMICS #13, 1941)

 I stated in my review of THE CITY OF SHIFTING SAND that I wasn't especially enamored of the sort of Golden Age comics-story where "anything can happen." This may explain why I've been less fascinated with the cult of Fletcher Hanks. To the best of my knowledge, this Golden Age artist was almost completely forgotten by organized comics-fandom. In the past ten or so years, some of Hanks's work saw print in Art Spiegelman's RAW magazine, and since then there have been three collections of the work he did for assorted Golden Age publishers. 

Without attempting to analyze in depth Hanks's appeal for later afficianados of comics, I think it boils down to what I called "freewheeling silliness." Hanks's heroes, such as the superhero Stardust and the jungle-magician Fantomah, encounter grotesque beings that pop out of nowhere and start killing innocents. After a lot of killing, Hanks's heroes decide to exercise their powers-- which often seem limited only by whatever the artist happened to think up-- and the heroes destroy the villains, usually in equally grotesque, sometimes monotonous ways. 

One can find other Golden Age stories that offer as little rationalization for their heroes and their boogiemen, but Hanks does have a singular artistic approach to his material, in that even characters who are supposedly good looking come off as subtly distorted. Hanks's flights of fancy are not mythic in themselves, but I did find one story that suggests the complexities of myth, even without rationalizations.

So on the first page, Fantomah-- a protector of some African jungle, whose origin and powers are never explained-- learns that the local tribes are being invaded by strange women riding on the backs of tigers. Fantomah instantly knows that they are "vahines" (a Polynesian word meaning "woman" or "wife"), and that they come from a place known as Wildmoon Mountain.

The image of wild huntresses may owe less to anything from Polynesian sources than from the Greek stories of the hunting-goddess Artemis and her forest-dwelling acolytes. At the very least, even in 1941 most pop-fiction raconteurs knew something of the Greek Amazons, as seen by the creation of Wonder Woman and her "isle of women" in the same year. But the vahines have a destructive purpose like nothing I've seen in other Amazon-tales. The tiger-women decide that they want to kill all of the other women in the world, so that "men will be at our feet." It's not just the ruthlessness that impresses me, but the sheer chutzpah of thinking that a handful of women could monopolize all the men in the world in order to rule them. (Are the vahines perhaps thinking of having lots and lots of daughters over time?)

Fantomah starts summoning jungle-animals to fight the vahines, and while she's doing that, the evil females wipe out all the women in a village. 

To their credit, the vahines apparently anticipate Fantomah's tactics, for they bring along a "glow-worm oil" that makes them shine like phantoms. Whether the animals believe that the invaders are actual ghosts, or because they think they're on fire, they won't attack the vahines with that glow. Fantomah signals her displeasure by transforming into her skull-headed "wrathful goddess" aspect.

Fantomah exerts her "powerful will"-- which for some reason she couldn't manage before another tribe's women gets wiped out-- and she nullifies the ghost-glow. Then Fantomah's minions destroy the tigers and send the vahines leaping for the trees.

At last the heroine's pet vultures use their talons to grab the vahines by their long hair, after which the birds transport their prisoners back to their point of origin, Wildmoon Mountain. Up to this point the name sounded like nothing but an idle poeticism, possibly with a slight connection between moon-worship and the worship of Artemis/Diana. But Fantomah's powers bring a shining, "super-sized moonstone" from inside the mountain, and according to one of the vahines, this is an object of their veneration, without which the women cannot survive.

Fantomah then decides to let the tiger women get hoist on their own petard. By the jungle-heroine's will, the giant moonstone suddenly has something like a magnetic attraction, and when the vultures drop the vahines, they all get attached to their god-stone, and then get pulled into the orb's interior, as if it was a giant womb. Then Fantomah cancels earthly gravity under the giant globe, and it rockets away from the earth and into space. Perhaps appropriately, the moonstone collides with Mars, the nearest planet named for a male god. The vahines are utterly destroyed and Fantomah takes pleasure in the return of jungle peace.

As contrived as Hanks's story is, the base idea of a band of women trying to get rid of all worldly competition has few if any precedents. It reminds less of any literary ancestors than of the observations of ethologists speaking of the sometimes vicious ways that female creatures, particularly apes, retaliate when they have competition for the males of the tribe. Yet no men actually appear in the story, not even to come to the defense of their women. This doesn't exactly satisfy the provisions of the "Bechdel Test," insofar as the vahines talk about men with the plan of dominating them. But it might be the first comic-book story in which the entire conflict revolves entirely around a battle of powerful women.

THE READING RHEUM: THE SON OF TARZAN (1915)

 

The first two Tarzan books display a high mythicity, and, going on memory, the third, BEASTS OF TARZAN, at least displays some interesting motifs. However, the fourth book—THE SON OF TARZAN, the only entry in the Tarzan series not to star Tarzan himself—lacks the imaginative free play seen in the earlier books. SON’s plot consists of dozens of melodramatic incidents piled chock-a-block on top of one another. This is not a bad thing in itself, since Edgar Rice Burroughs remains one of the best blood-and-thunder writers in pop culture history.

Jack Clayton, son of Tarzan and Jane, makes a couple of brief appearances in earlier novels as an infant, but SON begins with the character as a pre-teen in the England of 1915. Despite knowing nothing of his aristocratic father’s history as an “ape man,” Jack displays an unstinting fascination with all things jungle-related. This fascination leads him into contact with one of Tarzan’s enemies from previous books, one Paulvitch, and an attempt to return a captive ape to Africa. The latter task causes young Jack to become stranded in Africa, where in jig time he’s transformed into a junior version of his father through contact with Tarzan’s old ape tribe. They dub the boy Korak, and he drifts away from his memories of civilized life and his parents with extraordinary ease. Like Tarzan, Korak immediately starts making enemies in Africa, due to his possession of an un-beastlike strain of compassion.

Whereas the second Tarzan book benefitted from a resourceful main villain, SON splits its focus with three more limited dastards. A cannibal king, Kuvudoo, has the least to do, followed by a nasty Swedish ivory-poacher, Malbihn and an Arab chieftain, known only as the Sheik. All three are brought into conflict by Korak by their attempts to prey upon the novel’s female lead Meriem, who plays “Jane” to Korak’s Tarzan.

Meriem presents a more interesting character than Korak, if only because she’s the subject of an involved Dickensian foundling-plot. The Sheik, desiring revenge on Meriem’s French father, kidnaps the child, takes her to his own tribe of Arabian bandits, and raises her as his own offspring. The Sheik subjects Meriem to a series of parental cruelties that make the abuses of Tarzan’s ape-father look like benign neglect. Korak rescues her and schools her in jungle-survival, though this doesn’t keep her from being the constant prey of the book’s villains. Nevertheless, Meriem is a more dynamic character than Jane, and though she’s not a formidable fighter, she defends herself ably on a couple of occasions, hearkening back to the female lead of Burroughs’ “Mucker” series. Meriem also learns how to swing her way through the African jungle, and arguably this makes her one of the first “jungle girls” in pop fiction.

Jane was menaced by the threat of rape once in the first book and by romance with someone other than Tarzan in the second book. Meriem is threatened with rape by the Swedish raider, with cannibalistic consumption by Kuvudoo’s tribe, and with illicit romance with a young English nobleman. Further, although the Sheik fades in importance after Korak first rescues Meriem, the Arab leader comes up with the most horrific doom for the young girl: attempting to marry Meriem to his half-brother, who is both a half-caste (described as looking “black”) and an apparent victim of syphilis, since part of his face has been eaten away by “disease.” Though the Sheik does not state his game plan outright, his overall plan seems to be not just to despoil Meriem by having her “uncle” rape her, but to have her impregnated with a non-white child as well.

Though SON OF TARZAN boasts no positive characters of color, it must be admitted that the blonde Swede Mailbihn is just as rapacious as any denizen of Africa. Further, though the young English nobleman, Morison Baynes, doesn’t want to rape Meriem, he does plot to take her back to England as his mistress, which rates as a lesser form of degradation. Baynes starts out as an egotistical bounder and a coward, a loose satire on the entitlement of the sons of civilization. However, Baynes’ feelings toward Meriem become protective and he ends up sacrificing himself for her, which is the much same fate Burroughs meted out to William Clayton, Jane’s most prominent suitor in the first two books.

The jungle romance of Korak and Meriem never becomes as ardent as the early lovemaking of Tarzan and Jane. This is certainly because the two of them begin their relationship as pre-teen youths and implicitly only develop romantic feelings in a gradual and decorous fashion. One assumes that Jack Clayton learned something about the birds and bees before his jungle sojourn, but Meriem doesn’t get any such schooling at the hands of her nasty adoptive father, and initially can only think of Korak as a “big brother.” The author inevitably is obliged to show the two young people fall in love, but Burroughs never seems very comfortable with these scenes, and remains vague about the characters’ respective ages during their largely chaste interactions.

Burroughs doesn’t really elaborate a distinct myth-persona for Korak, and toward the book’s end Korak himself states, “There is only one Tarzan; there can never be another.” I take this as the author’s tacit admission that Tarzan is his superior creation, and in future books Korak only appears a few times in supporting roles. The character only became a regular headliner in the 1960s, when Gold Key Comics published KORAK, SON OF TARZAN, a well-done juvenile series loosely based in Burroughs’s concepts, accrue any great personality, appearing to be nothing more than “Tarzan Lite,” an athletic ape-boy who’s never quite as lusty or as savage as his old man.

THE READING RHEUM: TARZAN OF THE APES (1912), THE RETURN OF TARZAN (1913)

In this essay I’m going to concentrate on three significant tropes in the first two Tarzan books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (henceforth ERB). Thus, instead of recapitulating plot-points as I’ve done in most prose fiction reviews, I’ll assume that the reader is basically familiar with the plots, the better to concentrate on trope analysis.

Though ERB’s Tarzan books eventually fell into largely routine formula, the first two stand at the apogee of 20^th-century literary mythmaking. Tarzan may have taken some inspiration from Rudyard Kipling’s books about the animal-reared Mowgli (though ERB never admitted such an influence), and for the most part Kipling is still esteemed above ERB by most literary critics. But the first two Tarzan books exceed the admittedly fine Kipling works in terms of the complexity of ERB’s mythic rendering of the savage foundling idea. This complexity expresses itself through the author’s often unpredictable use of three major tropes, which I will call (1) the colonialism conundrum, (2) the cannibalism conflict, and (3) the consanguinity conjecture.

The prevailing notion that ERB was an ardent defender of colonialist policies may be one reason for critical disdain of his work (though it didn’t seem to do Kipling any great harm). In truth, TARZAN OF THE APES is often critical of European encroachment on Africa. Prior to the hero’s birth, Viscount John Clayton and his wife Alice have been sent to Africa so that Clayton’s new position will make it possible to bring a halt to “unfair treatment of British black subjects” in the Congo. Later in the novel, long after Tarzan has grown to manhood amid his adoptive ape-clan, a tribe of Black Africans moves into the apes’ territory while fleeing the depredations of Europeans seeking “rubber and ivory.” To be sure, ERB certainly shows aversion to some aspects of Black African culture and physical appearance, which he knew only through secondary sources. Yet unlike many of his contemporaries, ERB does not demonize whole races. If Tarzan takes charge of an entire tribe of Black Africans, as he does in RETURN OF TARZAN, it’s because Tarzan has by that time been exposed to Europe’s recorded knowledge regarding battle tactics. Thus he can successfully command the Waziri tribe to repel the assault of Arab raiders because Tarzan has access to the same sort of tactical knowledge that gave the Arabs an advantage in tribal Africa.

Cannibalism is one of the practices that ERB attributes to certain tribes of Black Africans. I’m certain any number of parvenu intellectuals could mount defenses of the practice, citing Western misinterpretations of what the ritual did or did not mean in real-world Africa. ERB, however, treats cannibalism not specifically as a perversion of Black Africans, but as one that descends from humankind’s animal forbears. Not until Tarzan has grown to maturity among the apes is he allowed to participate in the ritual of the Dum-Dum. During this tribal gathering, the apes make noise upon a naturally occurring (and highly improbable) jungle-growth that serves as a giant drum. As the anthropoids drive themselves into a frenzy dancing to the drum-rhythm, they nerve themselves up for the ultimate transgressive act of their kind: devouring the flesh of a slain ape from a rival tribe. ERB does not make learned comparisons to the long history of cannibalistic practices, particularly those known from archaic Greece, but there can be little doubt that the author suggests that the Dum-Dum is the ancestor to such rituals, even as apes are ancestors to men.

Tarzan himself comes very close to sullying his palate with this meal. But when he tries to get a taste of the forbidden fruit, he’s attacked by his foster-father Tublat, mate to Tarzan’s mother Kala and the ape-man’s long-standing enemy. Tarzan slays Tublat and spends weeks recuperating from injuries, but the question of further participation in the cannibal-ritual does not come up again. Further, once Tarzan finds the cabin of his late parents, he has begun to think of himself as something other than an ape.

Thus, when the tribesman Kulonga slays Tarzan’s adoptive mother, thinking nothing of eating an ape’s flesh, Tarzan slays Kulonga in vengeance, but cannot bring himself to devour Kulonga’s flesh.

I don’t deny that ERB invokes the idea of some mysterious “hereditary” aspect that causes Tarzan to refrain. Yet, to be sure, in RETURN it is specified that Black Africans who don’t eat flesh despise those that do. Since it would seem unlikely to state that the non-cannibalistic blacks are guided by “heredity,” I would argue that on the contrary ERB has suggested a natural progression in culture to which black people have as much claim as white people: a “thou shalt not” injunction against the eating of one’s own kind. It is also an injunction that the wicked can choose to rebel against. In the last half of RETURN, Jane is set adrift on the sea in a lifeboat after her ship is wrecked. With her are other escapees: some other sailors, her fiancée William Clayton (Tarzan’s cousin), and Nikolas Rokoff, a loathsome fellow who’s continually made attempts on Tarzan’s life throughout the novel. The other sailors die and are thrown overboard, because William will not allow Rokoff to eat their dead bodies. Later, however, William himself stands in danger of being killed and consumed by the wicked Russian. Clearly, Rokoff’s being white does not immunize him from attempting omophagia, even if only for pure survival. That particular peril is ended when the lifeboat reaches land.

The implied distant relationship between apes and men brings up the issue of possible consanguinity between the two species. Though ERB’s readers may have told any number of jokes, racist and otherwise, about the interbreeding of apes and men, few of them would have literally believed that any fruit could come of such a union. ERB skillfully suggests this possibility in a purely metaphorical sense, thus allowing his readers to take pleasure in the fantasy without violating the dictums of science. For instance, the one thing that almost everyone knows about Tarzan is that he became a physical marvel due to being raised by apes. Indeed, most imitations reproduce this same trope. What practically none of them seek to duplicate is the incident of Lady Alice’s symbolic rape. Though Alice is already expecting at the time, ERB has an unnamed ape attack her. She manages to shoot the ape, killing it, but its body falls atop her. Thereafter, Alice loses her mind and endures only long enough to give birth to her son before dying. Clayton is then slain by Kerchak, leader of the ape-tribe, paving the way for Tarzan to be adopted by Kala. I suggest that, though ERB could have terminated Lady Alice via any number of exotic diseases, he knew that on a subconscious level his readers would read the ape’s attack as a “rape,” so that in a symbolic sense, Tarzan is half-ape because, as the superstition goes, “his mother was scared by an ape.”

Jane, of course, is also famously menaced by an ape, and this one, Tarzan’s foster-brother Terkoz, is explicitly looking for a new mate after being routed from his tribe. ERB was probably aware that in reality apes didn’t generally seek to cohabit with humans, but he loads the dice by portraying Terkoz as being in a crazed state. One must admire the cleverness of ERB, to have Jane menaced physically by Tarzan’s foster brother, after having revealed that her principal suitor is William Clayton, Tarzan’s male cousin and thus a brother-analogue.

ERB’s strangest experiment with consanguinity appears in the last quarter of RETURN OF TARZAN. In the latter half of TARZAN OF THE APES, the author foregrounds the existence of Opar-- the first of many, many African lost races ERB will produce-- by having Jane’s scholar-father reference the strange civilization. Yet ERB takes his sweet time about bringing the Oparians on stage, given that they don’t appear until after Tarzan has completed a long series of unrelated adventures—being challenged to a duel in France, fighting bad Arabs and helping out good ones, getting tossed off a boat by his nemesis Rokoff. Presumably ERB wanted to show his hero undergoing a wanderjahre after nobly foregoing a romantic union with Jane, for those wanderings had to come to an end once he returned to the jungle and inevitably married his one true love. Further, once the hero was ensconced in Africa with his wife and his faithful Waziri, he could—and did—encounter the Oparians numerous times.

Just as Rokoff’s white skin did not shield him from backsliding into the iniquity of cannibalism, the white skins of the Oparians does not prevent them from being corrupted by consanguinity. Tarzan makes his first acquaintance with the men of Opar—all ugly, apelike brutes—when they capture him for sacrifice to their sun-god. However, the ape-man soon learns that all of the Oparian women are comely beauties, most especially High Priestess La. She intends to sacrifice the intruder to her god, only to fall in love with him after he rescues her from a crazed male. After that, La gives Tarzan a mini-history of her people’s colonization of the jungles of Africa. She claims that they had many colonies, but that they lost all heart when they learned that their mother country had “sunk into the sea.” This leads to all colonies save Opar being overwhelmed by the “black hordes.” But though Opar remained strong against black tribesmen, the denizens chose to commingle with the semi-intelligent apes like those that raised Tarzan. Indeed, the only reason Tarzan can communicate with La is because they both know ape-lingo.

La’s history of her people’s degradation is a masterpiece of equivocation. On one hand, ERB has La argue that the reason the men are all ugly is because the ones who stayed in Opar were “the lowest types of men,” while the women are good-looking because they descended from the noble lines of the priestess-clan. On the other, as if to tacitly admit that this eugenics fantasy is nonsense, ERB throws in the detail that some Oparians apparently couple with apes willingly: “in time we will no longer banish those of our people who mate with apes, and so in time we shall descend to the very beasts from which ages ago our progenitors may have sprung.” Of course, even if La admitted that a lot of current citizens were still mating with anthropoids, this wouldn’t explain the radical physical differences between males and females, any more than does the eugenics scheme. In essence, Opar escapes these categories because ERB as an author is fascinated with the opposition of Masculine Ugliness and Feminine Beauty. To be sure, this serves one immediate purpose, to make La fall hopelessly in love with Tarzan as the incarnation of Masculine Beauty. But one can’t help but feel like there’s more to Opar than setting up that particular plot-point.

By way of wrapping up, I’ll note that the one thing I don’t think Opar signifies is “apes=black people.” Had ERB wanted to suggest that the Oparians had degraded themselves by intermarrying with a tribe of Black Africans, he certainly could have done so without bringing apes into the picture. Rather, the males of Opar take on the brutishness of simians not because they are literally born of human-ape unisons, but because their mothers are all “scared by apes.” While this sort of thing has no deleterious effect upon Tarzan’s good looks, the male Oparians are perhaps further compromised by their living in a dying society, while the ape-man lives out in the wilds, coping with danger and death every day. In a strange sense, Tarzan becomes more conscious of his humanity by observing the things his ape-brethren cannot do, while the Oparians have surrendered any illusions about the difference between the two species. As for the Oparian women, perhaps in ERB’s world infants with two X-chromosomes just aren’t as vulnerable to having their humanity scared out of them.