THE LARGE AND THE SMALL PT. 2

 Neologism Neurosis time again-- 

In Part 1, I discussed the way "scale," with respect to the number of pivotal icons in a narrative, affected the tenor of different literary genres. I was talking specifically about the disparate ways readers and critics react to the polarized fantasy-subgenres of J.R.R. Tolkien's "epic fantasy" and Robert E. Howard's "sword-and-sorcery." Some poking around revealed that there are actually jargonistic ways of talking about scale in the sciences, where "macroscale" means "large scale" and "microscale" means "small scale." But coinages like "macroscale-icons" and the opposing neologism are both cumbersome.

I'll note in passing that Tolkienian "epic fantasy" has sometimes been marketed as "high fantasy," though I'll bet nothing has ever been marketed as "low fantasy" even though critics have bent their brains about what the "high/low" distinction ought to connote. I won't endorse the dichotomy here in any way. "Low" carries irrelevant negative connotations, just as I mentioned in Part 1 that antonyms for words like "epic" and "expansive" usually have negative connotations. But going back to the contrasted examples of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY, there's nothing intrinsically negative about the latter narrative following the destinies of one main character and a couple of pivotal support-characters, rather than charting a huge panoply of pivotal characters as does the former. The humbler "microscale" endeavors of Sir Gawain in GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT possess what I'll call an "intensive" quality, a quality not possible for any single story in the macroscale world of Malory's MORTE D'ARTHUR-- "intensive" being more or less opposed in my mind to "expansive."

I may as well mention that these distinctions about "large scale/expansive" vs. "small scale/intensive" certainly don't apply only to magical fantasy stories. The first literary opposition that occurred to me was that of the "expansive" MOBY DICK of Melville and the "intensive" LIGHT IN AUGUST of Faulkner, and I'm sure that there are thousands of other potential examples. 

So "expansive/intensive" is a possible jargonistic application, which I may or may not keep exploring. I will note that when I was looking at other words that carried the tonality of "epic," I was very attracted to both the words "panoramic" and "panoptic." Both certainly characterize Tolkien and his emulators, and "panoptic" is likeable because the essence of expansive narratives is that they give the reader the sense of participating in a huge number of viewpoints, i.e., lots of "eyes" with their own interpretations. By comparison, Howard and his emulators offer readers a more circumscribed number of eyes-- but here too, there's no good antonym for "panoptic." If I wanted to bring that word into my jargon-verse, I'd have to make up another neologism, such as "oligoptic," based on the Greek word-element "oligo" for "a few." So for the time being, if I use any terms at all, I'll describe "macroscale iconicity" as "expansive" and "microscale iconicity" as "intensive."

Of course the actual readership of fantasies will inevitably keep using the familiar terms of "epic fantasy" and "sword-and-sorcery." Yet even while I admit that fact, I'll still maintain that sword-and-sorcery holds "intensive narrative tendencies" with other subgenres that focus on small casts of characters, like PINOCCHIO, GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, and the majority of both rural "folktales" and citified "literary fairy tales."        

Yet if I wanted to change all the marketing terms to suit me, what would I choose? It would have to be something straightforward, and the first thing that comes to mind is the way 20th-century pop fiction was given shorthand terms based on elements widely common to the genres involved: "horse operas" for westerns, "space operas" for science fiction. So what would be the dominant elements that I would use, not only to distinguish expansive fantasy from the intensive type, but also to bring together all those subgenres I thought fell under the aegis of the intensive type?

Two words, sometimes used to mean the same thing, occur to me: "quest" and "journey." But in my view, a "quest" is intrinsically an organized endeavor, often by several people as in MORTE D'ARTHUR and LORD OF THE RINGS, to accomplish a specific end. In contrast, a "journey" need not have a specific end. It can have such, as when Gawain wanders about trying to figure out how to avoid falling victim to the Green Knight's ax. But the prose versions of both Conan and Pinocchio travel from adventure to adventure, often giving their readers a sort of guided tour of a particular world's weird wonders. A "journey" can also be performed by an ensemble-- the two heroes of Fritz Leiber's, the four kids of Lewis's first Narnia book-- but I'd generalize that if an author goes over six pivotal characters in his ensemble, he loses his ability to "intensely" focus on the fortunes of a handful of characters.    

So "quest operas" would be my preferred term for both LORD OF THE RINGS and THE ILIAD, though in the latter, the quest is for the Greeks to find a way to conquer Troy, which is possible through both the reclamation of Achilles (in Homer) and the invention of the Trojan Horse (in other works of the so-called "Epic Cycle").     

And "journey operas" take in CONAN THE CONQUEROR, THE ODYSSEY, PINOCCHIO and "Jack the Giant Killer."    

THE LARGE AND THE SMALL

 Responding to an online comment to my reprinting CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY on a forum:

_______________

 I'd agree that there's no way to know what subgenre has intrinsically greater variety-- one can always imagine infinite variations on any theme-- so I might modify my statement to say that there was the *perception* of epic fantasy having greater variety, just because of the difference in *scale* between the oeuvre of Tolkien and that of Howard.  

"Scale" is a tough thing to define, but it might be more accurate overall. I did an antonym-check on both the word "epic" and the emotional tonality it usually carries for me, that of being "expansive," and almost all the antonyms to both make the thing opposite look rather crappy, with the most value-free ones being things like "humble" or "restrictive." 

We know, though, people started calling Tolkien "epic" simply because the RINGS story involves a ton of characters and moving parts in comparison with less "expansive" fare like Conan. But one has to be cautious about implying that there's nothing "epic" about Conan. The REH story "People of the Black Circle" sets up the Cimmerian to defeat a circle of evil mystics out to conquer the world. I'm re-reading DC's 1970s barbarian-comic CLAW, and after three or four episodic stories someone unleashes a destructive demon on the world, and it's up to hero Claw and his sidekick to find the mystic items that can expel the critter. So really the only thing "small-scale" about a S&S story is usually that it involves fewer starring and supporting characters than the "large-scale" kind. At the same time, being "small-scale" allows a hero, or pair of heroes, to get involved in comparatively small-scale conflicts, like Good Ol' Conan Brown trying to plunder a great tower and releasing an enslaved entity in "Tower of the Elephant." Is an "epic fantasy" short story even possible?

In FLAME Murphy quotes from the prologue of an S&S collection, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editors made a very limited comparison to the two famous epics of Homer, saying simply, "If high fantasy is a child of THE ILIAD, then sword-and-sorcery is the product of THE ODYSSEY." This is a fine insight because even though we call both Homeric poems "epic," clearly ODYSSEY is just dealing with the struggles of one man and some supporting characters (the family back on Ithaca) facing an epic array of entities, while in ILIAD one might call Achilles the central character but the story devotes almost equal space to twenty or so "support characters," including Odysseus. Murphy then takes the editors' insight in some untenable directions, but nothing that demolishes the validity of the original idea.

Of course, even calling S&S "small-scale" doesn't define that much. As you point out, Jack Vance's Cugel books, which I haven't read for many years and which Murphy also cites, don't contain much swordplay, focusing on a "hero" who often outwits enemies rather than outfighting them. For that matter, there are a lot of fantasies that no one would term "S&S" that are also "small-scale," like literary fairy tales: PINOCCHIO, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Yet a few folktales involve pitched combat, like the folkloric "Jack the Giant Killer." A lot of knights-in-armor fantasies of the medieval era have the same plot structure as barbarian stories-- solitary hero rides around getting into trouble-- and don't involve major "epic" actions like finding the Holy Grail, and I wondered which if any of these Howard might have read, even in bowdlerized forms. 

On top of all that, having lots of characters doesn't mean a story is more complex. I read the first three SHANNARA books over 20 years ago, and I remember nearly nothing about them, while by comparison I recall a lot more incidents even from simple "Clonan" books by writers like Jakes and Fox, not because those books were great but because this or that incident held visceral appeal.

I may amuse myself trying to think of neologisms for "stories with many pivotal characters" and stories with few pivotal characters," but there's probably no new term that will ever change the status quo.

 

          

 

THE READING RHEUM: FLAME AND CRIMSON (2019)

Since this essay allowed me to deal with the questions of "escapism in entertainment" raised in Brian Murphy's FLAME AND CRIMSON, here I can concentrate on more of a straight review of the book. 

To my knowledge FLAME probably stands as the first substantive history of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre in prose, with only moderate attention to developments in other media. The author not only shows a strong familiarity with all of the major authors in the subgenre-- even the bad ones-- he took pains to read most or all of the AMRA fanzines (1959-1982) in order to get a sense of how the magazine endeavored to keep alive a very niche type of entertainment, particularly in the days before the Lancer paperbacks of the middle sixties revived the subgenre and made it widely popular for roughly the next fifteen years or so. As I said in the previous essay, I don't necessarily think the subgenre fell out of favor due to "the bad driving out the good." It may just be that the competing subgenre of epic fantasy offered a lot more variety to the fantasy-oriented reader than even the best exemplars of sword-and-sorcery.

In any case, Murphy's research includes many topics of interest, such as the role of Sprague de Camp in launching the sixties Lancer reprints, apart from the work de Camp and Lin Carter did in adding to the saga of REH's most popular barbarian. Murphy provides a lot of detail about the possible influences upon Howard's almost "sui generis" development of sword-and-sorcery-- influences such as Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, and A. Merritt. However, Murphy seems laser-focused upon positioning sword-and-sorcery within the tradition of what I call "magical fantasy stories," even though Murphy himself runs down a list of Howard's favorite authors and concludes that "Howard favored historical fiction authors and adventure stories largely absent fantastic elements." To support this claim, Murphy runs down a list of seventeen authors whom Howard is known to have read (and sometimes overtly imitated) and claims that only four of those on the list-- Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft were "fantasy authors." However, there were certainly well-known fantastic works in the oeuvres of such figures as Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Rider Haggard, while the majority of Sax Rohmer works-- works which Howard emulated in his "Skull-Face stories"-- have almost as much focus on "real-world fantasy" as the works of EA Poe.

I won't rate Murphy's opinions of other, non-Howard prose authors of S&S or on S&S cinema; such things boil down to individual opinion. The only estimation I found hard to swallow was his overly politicized reading of CL Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" stories, which were the only female-centric S&S stories produced during Howard's lifetime." When Murphy writes that "the dreamy, out of body sequences typical of the Jirel stories are battlegrounds of traditional gender roles," he not only sounds like he's parroting feminist academic scholarship, he also fails to make a good case for his interpretation.   

Lastly, Murphy tries a little too hard to create a radical opposition between S&S and the epic fantasy of Tolkien. He's somewhat on an interesting track when he quotes from the prologue to an anthology, SWORDS AND DARK MAGIC, in which the editor briefly ventures a comparison between the large scale of the epic fantasy subgenre and the similar scale of Homer's ILIAD, and also between the more limited scale of the S&S tale and the events of Homer's ODYSSEY. But Murphy tries to improve on what the anthology-editor wrote. For Murphy the iconic epic-fantasy hero traces from Hector, the noble antagonist, while the iconic S&S hero is embodied by-- Achilles, the ILIAD'S protagonist? I can only guess why Achilles appealed to Murphy more than Odysseus. But whatever the reason, his idea just obscured the more promising comparison: comparing the concerted, large-scale conflicts of the Trojan War to epic fantasy and comparing the generally peripatetic, small-scale adventures of the S&S heroes to the wanderings of Odysseus. But whatever my technical disagreements with Murphy, I never thought he was a phony, which was my reading of the authors of the proto-woke tome DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME.      

CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY

 I've been trying to find time to review Brian Murphy's 2019 book FLAME AND CRIMSON: A HISTORY OF SWORD-AND-SORCERY, which I basically liked. with reservations. But I happened to make a remark about the book on one online forum, and it occurred to me that I might justify it in advance of a formal review, since the crux of the book is the question as to how to define "sword-and-sorcery" as a genre, as well as its place in history.

FLAME, in addition to charting the predecessors of S&S and its provenance within pulp magazines, also advances a theory as to the subgenre's relative downturn after a surge in mass popularity in 1960s magazines and paperbacks. That theory is loosely a restatement of Gresham's Law-- "bad money drives out good"-- but substituting "bad product/good product." I'm not entirely opposed to that interpretation, though I think the matter might be more involved. The crux of the interpretation depends heavily on what one defines as "escapism" and what different people expect from it. The remark I made was as follows:

"At one point Murphy twitted Lin Carter for his view of S&S as escapist, yet Murphy said something similar at the end of CRIMSON."

To provide a little more context to the statement, Murphy extolls the essential creator of the subgenre, Robert E Howard, as a rare voice of genius within pulp fiction, and he has similar glowing praise for such innovators in the subgenre as Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber. But he considers that much of the less innovative works of the 1960s, by such authors as Lin Carter, John Jakes and Gardner F. Fox, to be generally responsible for the subgenre's downturn in the 1980s. Carter, for those not in the know, was a lifelong devotee of fantasy, though he wrote work in other genres. I have not read or reread any of Carter's books in many years, but I recall only liking a handful of works. I wouldn't credit Carter with much more innovation than Murphy does, and indeed, Carter's statements as Murphy reprints them indicate that Carter sincerely believed that S&S was meant to be "completely derivative" and thus not really defined by innovation. And one must admit that Murphy was hardly unique in denigrating the Conan-imitations of the 1960s, the various works by Carter, Jakes and Fox, as "escapist and wish-fulfillment" (p. 171).

Yet Murphy, as I said above, attempts to define "escapism" in such a way as to validate REH and other esteemed S&S writers-- who to this day are still not really embraced as "real literature"-- as being a cut above the rest. In the last chapter, Murphy says:

"Fantasy is the literature of escape, and sword-and-sorcery falls squarely into this tradition. It offers a glimpse at existence beyond our ordinary round, awakening world-weary hearts to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion." 

Murphy cites Tolkien and a couple of others as champions of this interpretation of fantasy and thus of all its subgenres. However, the author never quite defines what makes "good escape," as opposed to "bad escape." If a given story depicts any sort of fantastic entity or contrivance, doesn't it possess a power to take readers "beyond our ordinary round?" Or is there some special level of communication that a story in any genre should have, to open hearts "to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion?" In the "escapist and wish fulfillment" remark Murphy makes on page 171, he ventures a comparison between paperback sword-and-sorcery and the similar light women's entertainment known as "bodice-rippers." My impression is that the majority of these-- not counting offshoots like Gothics and supernatural romance-- are without fantastic entities or contrivances. But if those stories lack the power to bring forth "good escape," is it because they lack fantastic elements, or do the stories lack something else, something that can also be found in non-fantasy books by Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, as much as in the greatest fantasy-authors?

I have my own solutions to these conundrums, of course, and maybe Murphy does too. His purpose in writing FLAME was obviously not to propound a synoptic definition of "fantasy literature vs. realistic literature." Still, any time one uses the word "escapism," it opens some of these pitfalls, into which anybody, even with the best intentions, can fall.                                  

THE READING RHEUM: STAR OF DOOM (1983)

In the early 1980s Ace Books brought out new editions of REH's Conan books, while also publishing two serials of new novels based on REH characters. Andrew J Offut wrote six paperbacks about the adventures of the Gaelic warrior Cormac MacArt, while the team of David C Smith and Richard L Tierney wrote six for Red Sonja. Technically, the Sonja here is not the version Howard created, but the one Marvel reworked into a denizen of Conan's Hyborian world, complete with brief references to the comics-character's origin. I would imagine Ace made some sort of arrangement with Marvel, though that would depend upon the nature of Marvel's contract with the Howard estate.

I recall having read two other books in the SONJA series, and found neither memorable in terms of being very good or very bad. I'd never read STAR OF DOOM, the last in the series. But it may be that Smith and Tierney were on their last legs when they reached their DOOM, for it's an appalling waste of time, even for quickie junk fiction.

It's hard to believe anyone would craft a sword-and-sorcery story with so little action. DOOM is a talkfest that spends most of its time with Sonja discussing strategies with her small cast of characters. The menace is a pale retread of the old "meteor that crashes to Earth holds alien visitor" trope but altered to accord with the magical matrix of Sonja's world. An unnamed entity within a fallen "star" is captured by a mad magician, who finds that he can leech magical power from the visitor, enough to possibly conquer the world. However, it takes the magician over ten years to gain mastery of the ET's power, during which time his sanctum is under siege by enemy soldiers. Sonja and her male comrade-in-arms Daron come up with a possible way to enlist a powerful sorcerer to root out the world-conqueror before he takes whatever fiendish plan he has in mind.

Not surprisingly, since Daron was the creation of the authors, he gets the lion's share of the drama, while Sonja is bland and unmemorable. In their world, Daron is the first man Sonja ever loves, but he's never especially appealing, so DOOM is far from a grand romance, in addition to being light on blood-curdling action. Smith and Tierney suggest that the magical figure that Sonja saw before she became a warrior-woman may have been a manifestation of her own ego, but their execution of this idea-- slightly suggested in the Marvel origin-- is mediocre. The only real point of interest in DOOM is this odd line spoken by Sonja about the futility of making war for a "noble cause."

Self-survival or greed; that's all most noble causes turn out to be.

This relates to my interpretation of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but since I've already done a similar meditation on that subject here, there's no need to repeat my observations here.

QUICK KULL CONTEMPLATION

I posted the following on RIP JAGGER'S DOJO but decided to duplicate the post here in case I thought of any follow-ups later.

________

I've sometimes wondered if original Kull stories might be more successful if the hero found himself in what we now think of as GAME OF THRONES territory.

For instance, not in all the KULL comics I've ever read have a found an answer to the question, "Why does Kull even want to BE a king?" He complains about "poison in my wine cup, and daggers at my back" (a great line BTW), but he doesn't seem to derive any compensatory joys from rulership. Hell, does he ever even line up candidates to be his queen? Conan more or less stumbles across a commoner for his queen in HOUR OF THE DRAGON, but in "real life," a king is constantly being nagged to make a political marriage for the nation's benefit. Howard had his own reasons for wanting to keep Kull free of what some might call "the Jane Porter Syndrome," some of which had to do with the audience for whom he wrote. But WEIRD TALES is gone, and whereas Conan will always be celebrated as the lusty freebooter, Original Kull stories might take a more settled approach-- without, of course, neglecting sex, blood, and thunder.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE SHADOW OF THE VULTURE" (1934)

After re-viewing the 1985 RED SONJA film, I became more curious about the possible evolution of the Marvel Comics character from Howard's one-shot character "Red Sonya of Rogatino." She, along with her male compatriot Gottfried Von Kalmbach, appeared only in the above-titled short story in the pulp magazine MAGIC CARPET, which was published by Popular Fiction Publishers. The same publisher brought out WEIRD TALES, the magazine that published the majority of Howard's Conan stories.

Here's my initial writeup from FEMMES FORMIDABLES regarding the story's significance in terms of Red Sonja's evolution:

I mentioned in my first 1934 post that Robert E. Howard had authored at least three significant femmes formidables in the same year, but one of them, "Red Sonya of Rogatino," gained more fame in a derived form, that of Marvel Comics' "Red Sonja."  Since Red Sonja only borrowed a few motifs from Howard's character, as well as appearing in a thoroughly different milieu, it seems sensible to give the earlier Sonya separate consideration.  The French reprint book above, which retitles the Howard story "Shadow of the Vulture" into "Sonya la Rouge," looks as if it's illustrating the Marvel version more than Howard's.

One surprising facet of "Shadow" is that Red Sonya is at best a secondary element of the tale.  The bulk of the story is Howard's rewriting of the history of the 1529 Siege of Vienna, the last attempt made by the Ottoman Empire-- then under the command of Suleiman the Magnificent-- to extend its power into Europe.  Robert E. Howard, being an ardent Celticist, had his own fictional version of "how the Irish saved Europe," often sending Celtic, English, or roughly related racial types into the mysterious East.  This time Howard sends a German hero, Gottfried von Kalmbach, to personally twist the tail of the ruler Suleiman.  Suleiman responds by sending a hitman, the "Vulture" of the title, to bring him Gottfried's head.

Sonya becomes embroiled in this conflict only because she comes to have some regard for Gottfried as a fellow warrior, and possibly (though it is not stressed) as a man.  Sonya saves Gottfried twice from his enemies, and displays fearless prowess on the battlefield, but her own character-arc is dubious.  She claims to be the sister of Roxelana, a historical Polish woman who became the real Suleiman's primary wife.  Howard devotes nearly no space to describing how this state of affairs came to be, though there's a mention that Roxelana was abducted in a Muslim slave-raid. To modern ears, this sounds pretty exculpatory for most sins that Roxelana would have committed in order to survive.  Yet Sonya refers to her sister as a "slut," apparently for not having chosen death over bedding a Muslim potentate.  It's possible Howard had some notion of pursuing this plot-thread in a separate story, but "Shadow of the Vulture" remains the only story about the woman from Rogatino.

Naturally, given Howard's great talent, there are other mythic aspects of "Vulture" aside from its introduction of the Polish femme formidable. MAGIC CARPET was probably interested in the story only because it offered readers some violent, exotic adventure, but as I noted above, Howard was a history-buff who believed in what a later author called "the clash of civilizations." He quite clearly took pleasure in the failure of the Ottoman Empire to secure a foothold in 1529 Austria, which would have put Islamic rule within the perceived boundaries of Europe proper, and Howard explicitly took it as the good favor of fate that the Muslims had been thwarted by "the yellow haired Aryan barbarian." (I'm not sure what Howard made of Islam's domination of the Iberian Peninsula for several centuries.) I should not need to point out that Howard 's mention of "Aryan" is not covalent with formal Nazism. Within the context of the story, which is not a racist story as such, the term only means that the author advocated the fading of the East's power as the West came to prominence.

The Ottoman failure to take Austria loosely parallels the failure of Suleiman I to take the head of German mercenary Von Kalmbach, even though Suleiman sends one of his foremost warriors, Mikhal "The Vulture" Oglu, to accomplish the deed. In a broad sense, Suleiman does Von Kalmbach a favor by persecuting him, for the German, though prodigious in battle, is something of a rebel without a cause, sneering at both the Ottomans and his own "Frankish" allies. Von Kalmbach seems content to spend his whole life fighting and then drinking like a sot.

While fleeing from Oglu's forces, Von Kalmbach takes refuge in an Austrian siege-city. One of the city's foremost defenders is Red Sonya, and though the German is fascinated with the red-haired fury, she seems initially scornful towards him. However, it eventually comes out that she does hold high regard for Von Kalmbach's battle prowess, and she ends up saving the mercenary's hide twice. Howard shows no literal romance between the two of them, but it's likely he meant to suggest that they were both alpha-types who sublimated their sexual feelings through constant quarreling. That said, the story ends without depicting even a symbolic union, such as a partnership, between the mercenary and the Polish warrior-woman.

In the first CONAN story that births Red Sonja, the heroine voiced her determination never to yield her favors to anyone save "him who has defeated me on the field of battle." There's nothing remotely like this declaration in "Vulture." The only remotely similar statement comes from a bit-player who tells Von Kalmbach that Sonya "marches and fights like a man," but is "no man's light o'love." Howard probably only included this observation to make sure readers understood that Sonya was not a camp-follower. If anything, Sonya is an antitype to her sister Roxalana, who, though never "on stage," allowed Suleiman I to take her maidenhead. (Possible pun-alert here: the Ottoman ruler can take a woman's "head," but not the head of a superior warrior.) I won't say categorically that Howard never wrote any character who might have challenged one or more males after the fashion of Marvel's Sonja. But Red Sonya of Rogatino is wholly defined by her mission to take the role of a male warrior in order to defy the Turkish ruler who despoiled her sister, so there's a loose opposition between the worlds of war and of sexual conquest. In later years Red Sonja would sometimes become a symbol of feminist liberation, yet the lady from Rogatino says nothing against the dominion of the male of the species. For such protests, one would have to seek out a character Howard created around the same time, Dark Agnes de Chastillon, whose first of two adventures deals with her escaping an arranged marriage and imprisonment in a brothel. 

Next up: Red Sonja Risin'.

OUTSTANDING EPIC FANTASY COMICS

 I've been thinking about the appeal of epic fantasy-- which usually includes the subgenre of sword and sorcery, and includes at least mystical marvels even if some version of science fiction may also be present-- and then wondering about the best examples of this super-genre in comic books and comic strips (not that there are a lot in the latter medium). 

My main criterion is an epic sweep showing either a made-up world or some version of Earth's archaic past, but magic does need to be present to make it fantasy, so "sword and planet" stories like the John Carter series are out, unless magic is evoked alongside science. Mike Grell's WARLORD, which is an "inner Earth" SF-world in which magicians and demons run around, would qualify if I thought any of its arcs were outstanding in some way. For my purposes I'm also thinking only of long comics runs or arcs; no one-off short stories set in fantasy-worlds. I tend to rule out serials in which characters are too jokey or too homey, which would probably let out CEREBUS in addition to its being a domain where magic is only occasionally important to the story. Ditto ASTERIX. If someone had done original-to-comics versions of Peter Pan or the Oz books I might tend to exclude those too. I'd like to have included ELFQUEST but I'm pretty sure all of its miracles fall under the rubric of science fiction, even with all the archaisms.

So far I've come up with:

PRINCE VALIANT-- I've only read a smattering of these reprints, but I would say Hal Foster may be the only guy in newspaper comics to master the form, though I've read that the only usages of magic occur early in the strip's history

THE WIZARD KING-- technically only the first part of Wally Wood's opus is really good; he was pretty ill when he rushed out a quickie second part

CONAN-- maybe the first fifty Marvel issues. Barry Smith was the best exemplar of Conan art though John Buscema did a lot of impressive work up to that point.

KULL-- more scattershot in its first Marvel incarnation, but the second one, titled KULL THE DESTROYER at times, included some imaginative Doug Moench scenarios

CLAW THE UNCONQUERED-- a Conan ripoff, but with more emphasis on magical fantasy, with some cool Keith GIffen artwork

BEOWULF-- DC only did six issues of this character, who was a little jokey at times but still had some epic sequences

RED SONJA-- most if not all of Frank Thorne's work with the character

GHITA OF ALIZARR-- Thorne again, and the first of two albums is very good while the second is still pretty good

INU-YASHA-- medieval Japanese fantasy with an epic sweep

VIKING PRINCE-- gorgeous Kubert art in the feature's more fantastic incarnation

THE READING RHEUM: JIREL OF JOIRY (1934-39/1969)

This 1969 paperback was one of my "gateway drugs" to the super-genre of fantasy, and as I remember I purchased this along with my first collection of CONAN stories. In those pre-Internet days I had no idea that the titular character was the first noteworthy sword-and-sorcery heroine in prose fiction, and I'm not sure that I knew (though I believe I soon learned) that JIrel's creator C.L. Moore was one of the pioneering female fantasy/SF writers from the days of the American pulps.

The five stories in this volume were the only ones Moore wrote with this character, except for an anomalous "crossover" story between Jirel and Moore's space-opera hero Northwest Smith, reviewed here. All of the stories appeared in WEIRD TALES, and may have been a response to the popular success of Robert E. Howard's Conan series. However, whereas the Howard stories are rigorously plotted historical epics with a smattering of magical elements, Moore's five Jirel stories are all wild phantasmagorias of violence and bizarre supernatural imagery. There's never more than hints about the background of the fiery, sword-swinging heroine, who has somehow risen to the rulership of a medieval French province, Joiry, but who spends most of her time fighting mystical threats. I'll discuss some of these in detail, so-- SPOILERS.

The first story in the series, "Black God's Kiss," was published in 1934, and it's easily the best of the five. "Kiss" starts off with a bang, showing Jirel in the throes of defeat, taken prisoner by the warlord Guillaime, who has also conquered Joiry. Guillaime kisses Jirel, suggesting that he'd like to make her his leman, and when she responds by sinking her teeth in his throat, he belts her and sends her to the dungeon. Jirel breaks free and decides that the only way to strike back against the warrior is to venture down a forbidden stairwell that leads to Hell itself. Once there, Jirel braves a variety of bizarre Lovecraftian menaces, none of which resemble the standard horrors of the medieval Hell. Finally she finds a weapon, acquired by kissing the stone lips of a black statue, and when she communicates the kiss to Guillaime, he perishes immediately. In a turnabout sure to be unpopular with feminists, Jirel then belatedly realizes that since being forcefully kissed by the warlord, her hate for him was really an all-consuming love.

"Kiss" evidently pleased the readers of WEIRD TALES, for Moore followed up with "Black God's Shadow." Following the events of the first story, Jirel has managed to re-take Joiry, but she's haunted by the spirit of Guillaime, tormented in the afterlife, Jirel assuages her guilt by once more descending into Hell to liberate the warlord's spirit. Though Moore tries to combine some new horrors with those familiar from the last trip, the story lacks the narrative drive of its predecessor.

The title of the third tale, "Jirel Meets Magic," seems odd given her previous journeys to Hell, but it is her only meeting that the swordswoman has with a sorcerer (discounting "Starstone.") Jirel pursues the rebel magician Giraud into a weird dimension, where she finds that Giraud has a protector, an enchantress whose name, Jarisme, is modestly close to that of Jirel's. The two women hate each other at first sight, but Jarisme doesn't kill Jirel right off due to a vague prophecy of doom. Jirel pursues Giraud and Jarisme to the latter's castle, where the warrior woman witnesses a convocation of bizarre alien beings, all apparently sorcerers allied to Jarisme. Despite the superior powers of her adversaries, Jirel triumphs as expected.

In "The Dark Land," Jirel spends nearly no time in the real world, when Pav, overlord of a weird alien dimension, spirits her into his realm. Pav has observed Jirel's adventures in dimension-hopping and wants her to be his new queen. Pav's human form is essentially an illusion, as he is coterminous with his whole dimension, so he has no human weaknesses. Only by seeking out Pav's previous queen can Jirel manage to escape her absorption into this alien domain.

The last story, "Hellsgarde," includes no voyages to otherworlds, though most of the action takes place in the haunted castle of the title.  Jirel is taken prisoner by a weird, vampire-like family, whose purpose is to lure out the spirit of their ancestor, who assaults the noblewoman with kisses. (These days, the lustful ghost probably would not be quite so restrained.) Jirel isn't able to save herself this time, and she perseveres only because the vamps's real purpose is to feed not off her, but off her spectral attacker.

One interesting aspect of these five tales is that even though Moore produces some tantalizing "cosmic horror" images worthy of Lovecraft, those images possess a greater vibe of sexual perversity than one finds in the Providence writer. Moore mostly wrote short stories, aside from two solo novels and some book-collaborations with her husband Henry Kuttner, so she probably never would have contemplated a longer work with her intriguing creation, nor would she have believed such a work would have been saleable. Today a Jirel of Joiry novel could find an audience. Yet the unique blend of perversity and cosmic imagery could probably never be duplicated in these more politically correct times, so it's best to leave the first lady of sword and sorcery to her own era.

  

THE READING RHEUM: THE SKULL-FACE STORIES (1929-1934), BLACK CANAAN (1936)

 

It’s interesting to reflect on what factors might have led Robert E. Howard, fairly early in his writing-career, to pastiche the Fu Manchu stories of Sax Rohmer. WEIRD TALES printed the first story in Howard’s series, “Skull-Face” in 1929, but Rohmer had not written a new Fu Manchu story since 1917. Despite the early popularity of the Fu books in the nineteen-teens, Rohmer reputedly wanted to end the series, but later decided to return to his most famous character. Possibly some silent-film adaptations of the Fu stories, appearing in 1923 and 1924, helped revive general interest in the character, and it’s been theorized that the announcement of a pending sound-film adaptation in 1930 may have persuaded the writer to pen DAUGHTER OFFU MANCHU, which appeared in that same year. Robert Ervin Howard may have heard about these revival rumblings in advance of DAUGHTER’s publication, and if so maybe he sought to steal some of the older author’s thunder.

Of course, it’s also possible that Howard had simply enjoyed the earlier Fu-novels, particularly because they addressed contemporary concerns about the relationship of white people toward people of color. Rohmer was not given to theorizing about any proposed hierarchy of various races, but even by 1929, a few years before Howard birthed Conan, such theories were clearly a big part of Howard’s intellectual makeup. In fact, the British Rohmer is more concerned with the theme of Europe vs. Asia than he is with inherited racial nature. Indeed, Fu Manchu stands as a refutation of the notion of racial limitations, since he is a master of all sciences from both the modern and ancient worlds.

The four tales I term “the Skull-Face stories” are something of an anomaly, because Richard A. Lupoff, the editor of the 1978 Berkley paperback collection SKULL-FACE, didn’t just include the two extant stories featuring the titular villain—one of which was an unfinished Howard effort, which Lupoff finished. The editor also included two stories, one unpublished in Howard’s lifetimes, both of which featured a villain named Erlik Khan. This later creation did resemble Skull-Face in terms of modus operandi: that of enslaving his henchmen with opiates so that someday the dark races might rise up to conquer the light-skinned ones. I’m glad that Lupoff bracketed the four stories together, for the sake of Howardian scholarship. Nevertheless, the two villains are not identical, any more than are their respective heroic enemies, even though these heroes both share the first name “Steve.”

The three later stories — “Lord of the Dead,” “Taveral Manor,” and “Names in the Black Book”—are passable timekillers, but I have little to say about them. “Skull-Face,” however, is a more delirious exercise, for all that its villain is not the main character, as is the case with the Fu Manchu stories. The central figure of “Skull-Face” is Steve Costigan, a veteran of World War One. For years he’s suffered from what our age calls PTSD, and he’s ended up finding surcease from sorrow in a Limehouse hashish-den. At the story’s opening, Costigan has run out of money and is on the verge of becoming an utter wastrel.

However, the operator of the hashish-den—initially called the Master, and appearing to be a living skeleton—decides to make Costigan his henchman, asking him, “You who are a swine, would you like to be a man again?” Howard never fully justifies the reason why this villain—whose other enforcers are non-whites, ranging from Chinese to Arab to Black African—chooses to employ this one white man as a pawn, even giving Costigan a serum that gives him temporary super-strength. However, at one point, Costigan saves the Master’s life and Costigan considers them even. The evildoer still seeks to make Costigan his slave. Luckily the hero, being a typical Howardian he-man, breaks free, thanks in part to help from Skull-Face’s only other white servant, a beautiful maiden named Zuleika, and from a redoubtable English cop modeled on Rohmer’s Nayland Smith.

Howard’s story, originally serialized in three parts, rambles quite a bit, just as the early Fu stories did. During the episodic chapters, Skull-Face takes on at least two other names, “Kathulos of Egypt” and “the Scorpion.” (The former name is probably an in-joke on H.P. Lovecraft’s demon-god Cthulhu, while the latter might be a reference to the villain in Rohmer’s 1919 novel THE GOLDEN SCORPION.) Unlike Rohmer, Howard has no interest in “the romance of the Orient.” And whereas Fu Manchu is served by henchmen with no thoughts or personality, all of Skull-Face’s minions are major assholes, so that the reader can look forward to the many scenes in which the mighty white hero beats them all to butter.

I certainly cannot claim that there’s no racist content here, not when Howard claims that Skull-Face’s avowed people, the Egyptians, are a people “more despised than the Jews.” Howard apparently based this absurd assertion on the same sort of racial theories that informed the Conan stories, which often posited the idea that certain races, be they Egyptian or Chinese, were not fully human like Caucasians. Howard goes a step further here, in that he eventually reveals that Kathulos is actually a revenant from ancient Atlantis, revived into a mummy-like state by arcane magic/science. For all of Skull-Face’s resources, though, he’s largely a cardboard fiend, with none of the perspicacity of Rohmer’s devil-doctor.

I don’t imagine that a story like “Skull-Face” promoted racism in anyone who wasn’t already racist. It does reject people of color from the table of privilege, and flatters the status quo, but both the good guys and bad guys are so broadly drawn that few would deem them any more than overheated entertainments. Further, though I’ve established in other essays that the mythopoeic impulse can appear in any authors despite their holding offensive beliefs, “Skull-Face” doesn’t really offer any memorable mythic images. Even Howard’s playing to White Americans’ fears of a Black Uprising—a thing readers would never find in Rohmer—lacks any sort of imaginative conviction. (That said, Howard does have Skull-Face mention that he has no intention of liberating Blacks, since he believes they should be his slaves as they were for the Atlanteans.)

Coming from deeper recesses of the mythopoeic mind is Howard’s 1936 short story “Black Canaan.” Here too we encounter the notion that a non-white people, specifically American Blacks descended from Deep South slaves, are not fully human. However, here Howard grounds his fantasy in the notion that because Black Africans predate Caucasians as a culture, the former’s ancestors conferred on all their descendants an inhumanity stemming from their interactions with monstrous demon-gods.

“Canaan,” which takes its title from a real-life Arkansas city, takes place in the 1870s and is told from the viewpoint of heroic white local Kirby Bruckner. The earlier Union victory over the Confederacy has made no difference in the wilds of this domain. Here, white people call the shots while blacks brood in “the jungle-deeps of the swamplands,” which are patently a displacement for the real jungles of Black Africa. Neither Kirby nor any other white character acknowledges any inequity in the hegemony: Howard wants to portray the enmity of whites and blacks for one another to be an inevitable clash of civilizations, not anything founded in social injustice.

Oddly, the individual who warns Kirby that the blacks may be rising against their masters is an old black woman, who enjoys an “Ides of March” moment at the story’s beginning and then disappears. Kirby, being a doughty hero, braves Goshen, the swampy recesses near Canaan, to investigate the rumor. He learns that there is a “conjure-man” named Saul Stark who is stoking the Black folk to rise up against the whites (Howard purportedly based the character on a real-life personality from the period, albeit not one involved in fomenting race wars.) But Kirby meets an even more insidious threat in a young “quadroon” woman who beguiles him in the forests, summons Black henchmen to attack him, and ultimately masters him with what may be either hypnotism or real magic. The mysterious woman, given no name and addressed just once as “the Bride of Damballah,” is a source of endless allure for Kirby. This white hero is clearly capable of lusting for forbidden fruit, a vice one would never find in a genuine frontier-hero of the the 1800s hero, such as Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bummpo.

Saul Stark and the Bride are two of Howard’s best villains. They make no complaints about white people’s injustice; they’re both willing to bring about chaos for the sake of sheer power. And in “Canaan” Howard also makes a much more substantive reference to Lovecraft than anything one sees in “Skull-Face,” for by some magic Stark can transform his hapless worshipers into fish-like monsters a la the piscine predators of HPL’s Innsmouth.

Howard’s use of Biblical lore also enhances the mythicity of the story. The Biblical Saul, of course, embodies the trope of the illegitimate king, and Stark seeks to carve out his own kingdom in an illegitimate manner, though the latter-day Saul does have the blessings of the only “gods” that have objective reality in the story. It’s of even more interest that while Canaan is the name of the town inhabited by the whites, Goshen was the name of the land where Pharaoh sent the Jewish slaves prior to the Exodus. It’s patently absurd to imagine that Howard was not aware of the extent to which American Blacks identified with the Jews of the Exodus through the common theme of slavery, and that if Goshen was the place to which Stark’s minions were confined, even as the Jews were confined, Canaan was the land of plenty that both Jews and Blacks aspired to conquer. It goes without saying that Howard’s tale upholds the status quo both in the historical era and in Howard’s own environment. Nevertheless, Kirby’s partial attraction to the deep truth of humanity’s savage origins ensures that the whites’ triumph is at best a temporary one.

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--

AN ANTI-CANONICAL CANNONADE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seabury Quinn-- THE DEVIL'S BRIDE

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

Donald Wandrei-- "The Red Brain"

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

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

Russell Fearn's "The Golden Amazon Returns"

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