Tag Archives: Tarzan

Celluloid Superheroes: the First Hundred Years

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The 2015 bombardment of superhero films is over. It was a relatively light year, just Avengers 2, Ant-Man, and the franchise-flopping Fantastic Four. But Warner Bros. and Marvel Entertainment have twenty superhero films in various states of production, all of them due in theaters by 2020.

Back in 1978 superheroes were so rare in Hollywood, the first Superman included the subtitle The Movie. So you may think of costumed do-gooders as relatively recent invaders of the silver screen, but they leaped to theaters long before landing in comics. 2016 promises Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Captain America 3, and X-Men: Apocalypse, but 1916 saw three rounds too.
 

laughingmask the-purple-mask judez

 
In Arthur Stringer’s The Iron Claw, Creighton Hale plays “an easy going idiot” working as a millionaire’s personal secretary by day, but at night he dons the guise of the mysterious Laughing Mask. By the end, he’s wooed his boss’s daughter and thwarted the nefarious Iron Claw.

Francis Ford joined Hale as the similarly clad Sphinx in The Purple Mask, only this time the masked hero has a masked anti-heroine to woo too, Grace Cunard’s lady thief and so-called Queen of the Apaches, the first celluloid superheroine. She leaves her purple mask as a calling card.

But the first most influential superhero film award goes to Louis Feuillade’ Judex—a partial reversal of The Iron Claw since Judex begins as a vengeance-seeking blackmailer disguised as a personal secretary before falling for his boss’s daughter. I like to show my class the original unmasking scene, Yvette Andréyor creeping into the hero’s batcave of a bedroom and discovering his make-up kit. Nowhere nearly as dramatic as the Phantom of the Opera unmasking, but shot a decade earlier.

My favorite superhero silent film, the 1927 classic The Russian Affair, won Best Picture in 2011.
 

the-russian-affair1

 
That’s because it exists only in the opening sequence of director Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. But the invented film shows how popular masked heroes were in the early 20th century. The Russian Affair—as well as glimpses of its equally pretend sequel, The German Affair—features the fictional silent star George Valentin in tuxedo, top hat, and domino mask—the quintessential costume of the pre-comic book superhero. Raffles, Tarzan, Robin Hood, Night Wind, Gray Seal, Lone Wolf, they all transformed themselves into silent superheroes, most unheard now. Except for Zorro, which The Artist inserts into Valentin’s fictional filmography, replacing the very real Douglas Fairbanks.
 

zorro1

 
Judex had barely exited American theaters before Fairbanks was skimming issues of All-Story for his own pulp hero to adapt. A year later, the Judex-inspired Zorro was an international icon. Hazanavicius even reshoots the best action sequence, dressing The Artist’s Jean Dujardin in Fairbanks’ Zorro wardrobe. The Mark of Zorro didn’t win Best Picture in 1920 only because the Academy Awards didn’t exist for another decade.

The 1928 Alias Jimmie Valentine was going to be a silent adaptation of O. Henry’s gentleman thief tale, but MGM called the stars back to record the studio’s first talkie instead. Fairbanks’s 1929 Three Musketeers sequel included his spoken prologue, but his talking Taming of the Shrew flopped later that year, as did his final Private Life of Don Juan. Hazanavicius’s gives his alter ego a tap-dancing afterlife, a superpower not in Fairbanks’ repertoire, so the real Fairbanks was replaced by a new breed of action heroes, some of them actual supermen.
 

tarzan        buster crabbe tarzan

 
Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller took his last gold medal in 1928, Buster Crabbe in 1932. Both went on to play Tarzan. I watched Weissmuller on my aunts’ TV, one of those crate-sized machines that flickered as the cathode ray tubes heated. I’m thankful my aunts didn’t keep the battle scenes I doodled on scrap paper, all those blowdart-blowing savages gunned down by white hunters. All Hollywood sandpits, I surmised, were seven feet deep, designed to swallow everything but a victim’s groping fingers.

MGM did the same to Fairbanks and every other ex-star unable to adapt.Not that the superhero sound era was an easy transition for Hollywood either. MGM only started their talking Tarzan franchise because they had the footage.
 

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Trader Horn, the first big budget film shot on location, was a disaster. The production team returned from Africa with scene after scene of inaudible dialogue, a star infected with malaria, and the suitcases of crew members devoured by crocodiles and trampled by rhinos. They also had miles of jungle footage, way more than could ever fit into a single movie. Trader Horn came and went in 1931, but to capitalize on all that location shooting they’d already paid for, MGM rolled out Tarzan the Ape Man the following year. It was a cheap hit that spawned five low-budget sequels that returned Burroughs’ superman to the pop culture spotlight.

After Christopher Reeve retired his cape following 1987’s catastrophic Superman IV, Tim Burton rebounded with Batman, but otherwise the 90s are a 1930s reboot. Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy. Billy Zane in The Phantom. Alec Baldwin in The Shadow. It’s hard to remember a time when the Marvel pantheon wasn’t pounding box offices, but Hollywood once preferred retro-heroes. Disney’s The Rocketeer sported 30s curves, even though the character debuted in comics in 1982. That’s why Jim Carey threw on a yellow zoot suit along with the 1987 The Mask comic book. When Sam Raimi of later Spider-Man fame couldn’t get the rights to the Shadow, he cast Liam Neeson as a modern master-of-disguise instead. Darkman isn’t any good, but it does show how much comic book superheroes were a mutation of their pulp predecessors, an evolutionary process repeated in film.

It took a couple of decades, but the double flop of Seth Rogen’s 2011 The Green Hornet and Disney’s 2013 Lone Ranger and Tonto may have finally closed the theater doors on the 1930s. According to that math, are Warner Bros. and Marvel Entertainment being over optimistic with their 2020 projections? If the 30s are finally over, how long can DC’s early 40s and Marvel’s early 60s continue to last?

Tarzan of the Moral Imbeciles

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tarzan sunday comic strip

 
My father’s parents never learned much English. Their newspaper included only one comic strip, Tarzan, translated into Slovak. Mutineers didn’t maroon them on the jungle shores of rural Pennsylvania, but like Tarzan’s parents, they settled in a strange land oceans from their ancestral homeland. Tarzan swung into newspapers on January 7, 1929, same day as Buck Rogers, and so another Minute Zero in superhero history. The strip expanded to a Sunday full page in 1931, the year my father was born. Jerry Siegel was soon parodying it in his school newspaper with “Goober the Mighty,” the oldest and least promising of Superman’s siblings.

My grandparents were still new to the U.S. when All-Story Magazine published Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes in 1912. It was an instant, imitation-spawning hit. Charles Stilson’s 1915 Polaris of the Snows swapped Africa and apes for Antarctica and polar bears, but it’s the same formula (especially since there are no polar bears in Antarctica and no “anthropoid apes” anywhere). Stilson wrote two more Polaris novels (and his own ending to Tarzan of the Apes since Burroughs’ marriage plot cliff-hanger annoyed him so much), but as the King of the Jungle expanded his reign to stage and film and radio, imitators stopped disguising their loin-clothed knock-offs: Bomba the Jungle Boy (1926), Morgo the Mighty (1930), Jan of the Jungle (1931), Bantan (1936), Ka-Zar (1936), Ki-Gor (1939).
 

polaris of the snows

 
Of course Tarzan was a knock-off too. He’s a lost worlder, the genre H. Rider Haggard kicked off in 1885 with King Solomon’s Mines and into which Doc Savage and Superman boldly followed. Burroughs also swapped out Rudyard Kipling’s India and wolves; his jungle isn’t that different from Mowgli’s. W. H. Hudson preferred Venezuela for his 1904 jungle girl Rimi in Green Mansions. DC adopted Rimi decades later, when the softcore jungles were already well-endowed with leopard-furred felines. Eisner and Iger’s Sheena beat Superman to comic books by a year, with literally dozens swinging behind her. Stan Lee tried Lorna the Jungle Queen in the 50s and in the 70s Shanna the She-Devil. She later married Ka-Zar, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman’s first pulp jungle man who re-premiered in Marvel Comics No. 1 beside Namor and the Human Torch. Stan Lee transplanted him to Polaris’ Antarctic lost world, swapping out ancient Romans for ancient dinosaurs.
 

ka-zar and x-men

 
My father and his friends debated who would win in a fight: Tarzan or Buck? Tarzan or the Phantom? Tarzan or Batman? If you don’t think a loin cloth counts as a superhero costume, remember the original Jungle King is also secretly the English aristocrat Lord Greystoke. If that’s not enough of an alter ego, reread chapter 27, “The Height of Civilization,” in which the former savage transforms into Monsieur Tarzan, a French-speaking socialite who on a gentleman wager can strip off his tux, wander naked into the wilds, and return two pages later with a lion across his shoulders.

Burroughs calls him a literal “superman,” the first time the eugenic term immigrated into pulps, evidence of its own genre expansion. Corn flake tycoon John Kellog founded the Race Betterment Foundation in 1906, and Indiana, with a boost from future president Woodrow Wislon, passed the nation’s first sterilization law a year later. In 1911, the American Breeder’s Association added immigration restrictions, racial segregation, anti-interracial marriage laws, and gas chamber “euthanasia” in the fight to stop unfit breeding, while the First International Eugenics Congress met at the University of London the following year to discuss the same agenda.

Burroughs did not attend, but he was a fan. One biographer describes him as “obsessed with his own genealogy” and “extremely proud of his nearly pure Anglo-Saxon lineage,” believing in the “extermination of all ‘moral imbeciles’ and their relatives.” The October issue of All-Story hit stands a few weeks after the Eugenics Congress convened. I doubt Winston Churchill ever touched an American pulp mag, but he and his fellow attendees agreed with Burroughs’ bewildering ideas about genetics. I always photocopy chapter 20, “Heredity,” for my class. Despite being reared by apes, the young Lord Greystoke knows how to bow in a courtly manner, “the hall-mark of his aristocratic birth, the natural outcropping of many generations of fine breeding, an hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth and savage training and environment could not eradicate.”

DNA wouldn’t be discovered for decades, so Eugenicists thought they could weed out everything from crime to promiscuity by stopping unfit parents from giving birth to unfit babies. One of those babies was my dad. His honky parents hailed from the degenerate regions of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, what anti-immigration advocates called “beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence,” men with “none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time.” That’s why Congress capped the immigration quota for Eastern Europeans at 2% of their 1890 U.S. population.  But my grandparents had already weaseled in.

Adolf Hitler was a private in the Austrian-Hungarian Army at the same time and in the same city as my grandfather, but rather than accept a second conscription, Stefan Gavaler bound over the Tatra Mountains to land in Carrolltown, PA. He died in the kind of mining accident Superman tries to prevent in Action Comics No. 3 (“Months ago, we know mine is unsafe—but when we tell boss’s foremen they say, ‘No like job, Stanislaw? Quit!’”). One of Stefan’s sons went on to marry the daughter of a corporate vice-president of good German stock and produce just the sort of Aryan-diluting mongrel Burroughs most feared: me.

Tarzan, however, marries well. After learning he’s not a half-ape but an undissipated carrier of high English blood, he foregoes both his kingdoms to pursue the eugenically fit daughter of an American professor to the woods of Wisconsin.  It takes a second book for Jane to marry him, and a third to produce a son. Burroughs wrote a sequel almost every year until 1939. Tarzan (the name means “white skin” in anthropoid ape language) could wrestle a gorilla into submission, but Adolf Hitler was too much for him. After Nazi Germany, Eugenics retreated into a lost world in the cultural jungle. Burroughs only published one more Tarzan novel before his death in 1950.

I think Disney was the first to send Tarzan to Czechoslovakia. A Slovak-dubbed version of the song “Son of Man” is on youtube. I can’t understand a word of it, but I’m happy it exists.
 

tarzan48

Prehistory of the Superhero (Part 6): The Fabulous Junkshop

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In our last chapter, we focused on the Western, particularly as presented in the cheap, pamphlet-formatted magazines known as dime novels.  Of course, westerns weren’t the dime novel’s sole adventure genre: tales of pirates, spies, and detectives abounded; the most durable dime novel hero of all was probably Nick Carter, Detective– his adventures ran, in various media, from 1886 to the 1990’s.
 

 
Before leaving the Dime western, however, I wish to dwell on one of its heroes who was a precursor of the modern, cross-media, branded intellectual property character: Buffalo Bill.

William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1846–1917)  was an authentic frontiersman, whose adventures were written up by Ned Buntline (1813–1886), the writer often called “the man who invented the West” , in  the 1869 serial Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men for the New York Weekly. The tale was enough of a success to inspire a hit theatrical adaptation in 1872.

Cody was much taken by the play, and agreed to star in person in another Buntline-inked production, The Scouts of the Plains; or, Red Deviltry as it is, co-starring Texas Jack and Wild Bill Hickock. After a very profitable ten-year tour, Cody struck out on his own in 1883 by organising his own extravaganza, part drama, part circus, part rodeo, all Western, all sensational: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

The show was a colossal hit such as the world had never seen. It toured not only the U.S.A., but also Europe, selling over two million tickets in its first London run. Buffalo Bill was, probably, the first true international celebrity entertainer.
 

 
He was also what we’d call a brand. Enormous sums were made from merchandising Bill and his associates’ images; toys, films, crockery bore his stamp; he is thus the forerunner to such other “hero-brands” as Tarzan, Batman, or the Star Wars crew.
 

A Buffalo Bill toy set from 1903. Bill certainly understood merchandising…

 
Of course, Buffalo Bill fiction continued to pour onto the newsstands — it’s estimated that, without even counting unauthorized pirate books, some 557 novels chronicled his supposed adventures. Of these, 121 were written by Prentiss Ingraham (1843–1904) — who also happened to be the press agent for the Wild West Show.
 

 
Long before the phrase was coined, Ingraham perfectly understood the concept of “media synergy.” Thus, just before the show was due to open at the Chicago World’s fair in 1892, he wrote and had released nine new Buffalo Bill novels. Six of these actually dealt with the show itself — publicity and product placement.

Ingraham also understood the value of “spin-off” product: he promoted the fictional adventures of Wild West co-stars Buck Taylor, Nate Salsbury, and Annie Oakley.

He would have been perfectly at home in today’s superhero business ecology.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show reminds us that, though this series of articles has concentrated on the printed word, there were of course many other vectors of popular culture, such as songs, circuses, and the theater. In nineteenth century America, the latter was decidedly democratic in spirit; and the masses clutched to them as their own the plays of William Shakespeare. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted:

There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.

Such was the popular mania for the Bard that in 1849, a riot in New York over competing productions of Macbeth left 25 dead.

I don’t think it too far-fetched to speculate that early American Shakespeare productions, as mediated by melodrama, are another distant root of the superhero. Consider the many conventions the superhero tale shares with Elizabethan theater: lively heroes and villains, secret identities, disguises that are always effective, fight scenes complete with colorful speeches, and men in tights!

( I was  struck by this theory while watching the first X-Men film, with its glorious use of two of Britain’s greatest Shakespearian actors– Patrick Stewart as Professor X, and Ian McKellan as the arch-villain Magneto.)

The dime novel went into decline at the turn of the last century, for various reasons.

Despite its name, the dime novel generally cost a nickel (5 cents) rather than a dime (10 cents).  Even in 1900 dollars, that didn’t leave much of a profit margin. Furthermore, by that date the dime novels were almost entirely pitched at children and adolescents, a demographic that had little in the way of spending power: thus, this was a medium unattractive to advertisers. (The same problem would bedevil comic books, especially after the mid-1950s, when the Comics Code strictly regulated advertising.)

There were also fresh rivals for the young person’s pennies; most notably the new mass medium of film. Your leisure nickel could now buy you all the excitement of the movies; why spend it on musty, hacked-out pamphlets?

Meanwhile, a writer turned book packager, Edward Stratmeyer (1862-1930), launched series after series of inexpensive books targeting young people: theRover Boys, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys. These were ghost-written by multiple authors and published under house names, such as Victor Appleton. Their success was phenomenal — in a 1922 study, it was estimated that the Stratmeyer Syndicate published the majority of children’s books sold.
 

The books continue to sell well to this day.

(These wholesome adventures attracted what would strike us as bizarrely extreme hostility from educators. The New York Public Library’s chief children’s librarian, Anne Caroll Moore, in 1906 boasted of purging them from the system she oversaw.)

Stratmeyer’s innovations– concentrating on series, farming out manuscripts to freelance writers — would become standard procedure for comic books.

The Coming of the Pulps

The successor to the dime novel was the pulp magazine.

Publisher Frank Munsey (1896 — 1925) saw the writing on the wall. He decided to convert his dime novel line to a new format, thicker and more expensive, aimed at an adult audience that still craved escapist adventure. Because they were printed on the cheapest, roughest paper available– so-called ‘pulp,’ these magazines came to be called pulps.

His Munsey’s (from 1889), Argosy (from 1888) and All-Story (from 1905) magazines were immediate hits. They were anthologies featuring adventure tales set the world over– in the far west, Africa, the Seven Seas, and even on other planets.

Among the most popular — and lasting — writers Munsey’s pulps discovered was Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 — 1950), whose extra-planetary adventure romance Under the Moons of Mars was serialised by All-Story in 1912.
 

It was the first of the popular John Carter of Mars tales, featuring an American soldier mystically transported to the Red Planet, where he battles an array of fierce aliens. The lower gravity of Mars gives his Earth muscles super-strength — a detail later adopted by the creators of Superman for their hero.
 

 
Burroughs later that same year of 1912 introduced arguably the most famous adventure hero in pop history, Tarzan of the Apes, again in All-Story (see image at top of this column.)

All-Story caught lightning in a bottle once more in 1919, when it published ‘The Curse of Capistrano’ by Johnston McCulley (1883-1958), the first adventure of Zorro.
 

 
Zorro is worth dwelling on for several reasons.

In Spanish colonial California, young aristocrat Don Diego de la Vega appears to be a silly young fop; secretly, however, he roams the countryside as the dashing masked swordsman known as Zorro (‘the Fox’), fighting injustice and oppression with flashing blades and sharp wits.

This iteration of the secret hero (probably based on the Scarlet Pimpernel), i.e. a seemingly harmless playboy type hiding a brilliant fighter for justice, was to be repeated many times in super-hero lit; in the pulps (the Shadow, the Phantom Detective, McCulley’s own the Crimson Clown) and in the comics (Batman, the Clock, Mr Scarlet.)
 

 
And in 1920, McCulley’s novel was filmed starring the two biggest movie stars in America, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, as The Mark of Zorro.
 

 
This was another sign that the superhero spanned various media long before he appeared in comic books — magazines, books, films, radio, comic strips.

In the three decades from 1920, the pulps proliferated– and specialised. Magazines were devoted to every pop genre and sub-genre under the sun: the reader browsed a fabulous junkshop of thrills and chills.

Crime: Black Mask, Dime Detective. 
Horror: Weird Tales, Horror Stories. 
Science fiction: Marvel Tales, Amazing Stories, Astounding, Planet Stories. 
Aviation: Flying Aces, G-8 and his Battle Aces. 
Westerns: All-Western Magazine, Blue Ribbon Western. 
Romance: Ardent Love, Love Story Magazine.

There were even strange genre hybrids. Crime + soft porn = Spicy Detective Stories. Western + romance = Ranch Romance.

And there were the ‘character pulps’.

These were magazines dedicated to a single character, and many of these were superheroes.

Harvesters of the Bitter Fruit

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!

The Shadow was introduced in 1929 in a one-off story. Street & Smith, its publisher, revived the character in 1930 for its radio show, Detective Story Hour, and followed this the next year with a dedicated magazine. The latter would continue until 1949, featuring 325 tales ascribed to house pseudonym “Maxwell Grant” — most of the novels were in fact written by Walter Gibson (1897-1985).

Playboy Lamont Cranston is the mysterious scourge of the underworld, theShadow. With blazing pistols and mysterious powers (the ability to ‘cloud men’s minds’), he ruthlessly opposes gangsters and such adversaries as Shiwan Khan and the Prince of Evil– teaching them the truth of his motto:

The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay… the Shadow knows!
 

Poster for the Shadow serial. Serial films often featured superheroes, both from the pulps and the comics.

It is especially as a radio show that the Shadow achieved success (Orson Welles was one of the main interpreters of the title role.)  Radio even spawned its own original superhero: The Green Hornet.

A more savage rival to the shadow was the Spider (fl.1933-1944).
 

 
The Spider — principally written by Norvell Page (1904–1961) under the pen name ‘Grant Stockbridge’ — was another idle playboy-turned-vigilante, but whose bloodlust seemed unslakeable. As historian Jim Steranko put it, “His idea of mercy was a bullet between the eyes instead of in the stomach”. His descendants in the superhero line are the ‘grim and gritty’ killers that flourished in the 198?s and ’90s, such as the Punisher, Grifter, or Vigilante. Like them, he was hated and hunted by police and criminals alike.

Another in the Shadow/Spider mold, but more genteel, was Richard Curtis Van Loan, a.k.a the Phantom Detective (fl.1933–1953).
 

 
This dapper sleuth, though no slouch when violence threatened, was more of a true cerebral detective than his pulp colleagues, and he worked closely with the police: a new twist for the superhero, who had traditionally been an outsider. As the illustration above shows, the Phantom is content with a wee domino mask for a disguise, which fools everyone; a convention still current in superhero comics.

The Avenger, The Whisperer,  Captain Zero, The Black Hood, The Cobra, Moon Man…the list of pulp superheroes stretches on. We might linger on one, the Black Bat– the illustration below shows why:
 

 
It would appear that this was the inspiration (to use a polite word) for the comic-book superhero Batman…but the latter first appeared in May 1939, while the Black Bat premiered in July of that year. A case of coincidence that provoked a testy exchange of lawyers’ letters and a live-and-let-live arrangement. (Note, however, that Batman later adopted the Black Bat‘s fin-lined gauntlets in his costume.)

But next to the Shadow, the king of pulp superheroes was Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze.
 

 
However, we’ll leave discussion of Doc for the next installment of this series; note however, the word coined by Street and Smith (publisher of The Shadowand  Doc Savage) to describe this sort of character:

super-hero, the first time this appellation appears.

Blinded with Science

Some of the best (and occasionally worst) of the pulps were the science-fiction magazines. (Indeed, one of the last survivors of the pulp age — much transformed in format — is the SF digest Analog, the renamed Astounding Science Fiction.)

And the type of science-fiction that permeates superhero comics isn’t the cerebral, literate fare of Olaf Stapledon or of J.G.Ballard– no, it’s the extravagant ‘space opera’ of E.E.’Doc’ Smith (1890–1965) and his fellow writers at Amazing Stories.
 

 
Smith’s Lensman series (1937) begins with two galaxies colliding, and builds from there. Exploding planets! Space Pirates! Intergalactic empires at war! And policing it all is the corps of the Lensmen, supermen armed with the Lens, an invincible energy weapon.

(The Lensmen would inspire the space-faring superhero group the Green Lantern Corps in DC’s Green Lantern comics, and the Lanterns’ power rings obviously derive from the Lens.)

Another space opera with superheroic overtones was penned by Jack Williamson (1908–2006), The Legion of Space (1934)– a possible inspiration for DC comics’ Legion of Superheroes.
 

Space Legionaires facing a bit of a sticky wicket

 
This is plausible, because the main early writer of the Legion of Superheroes wasEdmond Hamilton, also the author of the Williamson-influenced Captain Future pulp series; Captain Future was created by Mort Weisinger, the editor of the Superboy comic in which the Legion of Superheroes first appeared.
 

 ;
As this shows, the links between comics and the pulps were close; next installment will illustrate just how close.

Next: Reign of the Superman

 

A Nostalgia for Racism?

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A few months ago, I chanced upon a piece of art which was up for sale at one of Russ Cochran’s on-line comic art auctions. It was a Hal Foster drawn Tarzan Sunday which is usually an event in original art collecting because of the rarity of such samples.

As you can see, it is a fairly reasonable example of Foster’s art on Tarzan. It was, however, a no-go area for me whatever my feelings for Foster’s artistry. The reasons are simple: this piece of art would not have given me any pleasure and I would have been embarrassed to put it on display in my apartment. I simply don’t have the blindness or nostalgia for racism which allows for an enjoyment of this kind of art. There’s the Aryan beauty standing before the squat depravity that is the Cannibal Chief and later the rather simian qualities of the cannibal tribe as they howl for blood. I have as little passion for the subject matter as I would a depiction of bestiality. There are many pit holes in collecting original art but this particular aspect is less often highlighted. After all, wouldn’t most comic art collectors salivate over the original art to this Frazetta-drawn cover…

…with its razor-toothed natives within an inch of pawing at the white female’s succulent breasts? Any objections would be easily dismissed with the notion that these were more gentle and less enlightened times where such stereotypes were the norm. And clearly they were. The fact that the art displays beautiful draftsmanship and is historically important ensures that such aspects are easily brushed under the carpet. A collector friend of mine who finds such images unpleasant was less happy with this easy acceptance which obviates concerns for subject matter. He placed a comment on this Frazetta cover (when it was displayed on Comic Art Fans) comparing it to Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s depiction of Storm Saxon in V for Vendetta.

As many readers will know, there is a whole area of collecting known as Jungle Girl art of which one of the prime examples must be this particular piece by Dave Stevens:

It’s all in good fun, both mocking homage and parody. It would seem churlish by some to find these items in any way offensive. There are of course people who collect “coon” art for historical purposes (which is absolutely valid) and others because it gives them pleasure. I don’t find the latter aspect particularly respectable.

Another story in the same vein which I chanced upon recently is “Yellow Heat” by Bruce Jones and Russ Heath from Vampirella #58 (Mar. 1977) the scans of which can be found here). The entire story was sold at a Heritage auction for $4370 in 2002

The story is one of Jones’ best remembered from Vampirella in part because of Heath’s lovely hyper-realistic art but mostly because of its twist ending. [I would suggest that those unfamiliar with “Yellow Heat” read the story before continuing with this article.] You’ll find two appreciations of “Yellow Heat” here and here. The Comics Journal message board regular Mike Hunter describes the effect as such:

“Bruce Jones and Russ Heath wreaking havoc with our “we humans are all alike, after all” expectations in “Yellow Heat”.”

Jones uses a number of tricks of sleight of hand to achieve the shock ending in this story. Part of the justification for the ending would appear to lie in the first page where a sort of incipient famine and breakdown in society is described. Jones’ script in the first panel would however suggest that the famine has not arrived and that these are much more bountiful times. The Masai warriors don’t look malnourished in the least which lessens the impact of this early description and any expectations of its relevance. There is also the description of the captive lady as a “beauty” and Heath’s great depiction of the same which effectively throws off the reader.

The confluence of a familiar coming of age story mixed with an unexpected twisting of facts and sensibilities is also a factor. These issues would be further heightened for readers familiarizing themselves with this story for the first time in the 21st century. With a greater appreciation for distant cultures, many readers would be cognizant of the fact that the Masai do not practice cannibalism and would not expect such a denouement. Others would realize that such accusations of cannibalism were often used by white colonialist as an excuse for their excesses thus eliminating such a possibility from their minds. Nor would the modern day reader (or one during the 70s I suspect) expect any writer to produce such blatantly racist caricatures of Africans in the final two panels. Readers perusing a Warren magazine in the 70s would probably be familiar with the elevated ideals of the EC line where stories like “Judgment Day” saw publication. Few readers would expect a backward looking ethos and this makes the ending that much more surprising. Perhaps it might be a useful exercise for readers to imagine a gentle story about Jews taking care of orphaned children during the Black Death before eating them in the story’s final panel. Children aren’t as delectable as beautiful African women but you get what I mean.

While I haven’t read any interviews with Campbell or Heath concerning the genesis of “Yellow Heat”, my suspicion is that there must be some explanation for the strange sensibility on display here. The story was, after all, created during the 70s and not the early 20th century when popular art was considerably less informed. It is entirely possible that “Yellow Heat” was created out of naiveté and plain wrong-headedness but it is also possible that it was born of a flippant underground sensibility – a remark on the excesses of the past (though it has to be said, nothing in the story even suggest this). In many ways, it is much more educational to read these stories “blind” than to rely on any form of stated authorial intent.

There are better examples of these kinds of cultural jibes from more recent times like Robert Crumb’s “When the Niggers Take Over America!” which is so hysterical in its excesses, all but the most simple-minded would mistake it for anything but satire.

There’s also the notable example of Chaland’s An African Adventure where every form of jungle imbued racism is brought forth.

There are the malevolent natives…

….and there’s this scene where a tribesman is slapped:

It should be clear to most readers that the only person taking a slap here is Hergé and Tintin in the Congo.

On the other hand, it would appear to many readers that Jones, Heath and Foster were drawing from the same well with respect to their imagery – the corpulent chief and malicious cannibals in both Tarzan and “Yellow Heat” being the prime examples. On a purely textural basis, Jones and Heath’s story is truly ambiguous in its racial sensitivity. Is “Yellow Heat” actually quite factual (this seems impossible), the product of a more enlightened age where having fun with racial stereotypes is perfectly acceptable (perhaps a satire; I’m sure certain African Americans would find it harmless enough) or is it symptomatic of something much less wholesome?