• When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Parade of Pleasure

Started by Koko,

22 posts in this topic

Koko

Koko

Posted
Posted

Greetings,

I'm about to reprint Parade of Pleasure and need some help with the lllustrations, something seriously lacking in the original edition. As the book was never copyrighted, I'll be offering excerpts for you to enjoy, and the texy will help you identify the images needed. Enjoy.

Greg Theakston

Pure Imagination

P.S. The early part of the book has no citations

 

 

PART TWO

 

Comics: The Curse of the Kids

 

I

 

‘The marijuana of the nursery,’ exclaimed a leading New York editor in reference to comic-books on a recent Town Meeting of the Air radio programme, adding, ‘the curse of the kids!’ Statistics, however, show that the curse extends throughout the American household. It is estimated that ninety-eight per cent of all boys and girls in the USA read comic-books between the ages of eight and twelve (though I have certain modifications to make to this group at the end of this section), while eighty-seven per cent of all adolescent boys and eighty-one per cent of all adolescent girls read them also. Yet forty-one per cent of all male adults from the ages of eighteen to thirty are fans too. A recent survey in a town in the Mid-West reported that two-thirds of comic-book readers there were adult. Marya Mannes, a Vogue editress who lately contributed a brilliant article on the subject to the New Republic, claims that ‘in one out of every four American homes they are virtually the only reading matter’.

Although half the population of America is innocent of buying an ordinary book, comic-books outsold Life and the Reader’s Digest at American Army camp pxs, or canteens, during the last war by ten to one. Further figures show that the female is less addicted than the male, and that it is in the poorest homes of the United States where most comics are read. Mr Legman has drawn a depressing conclusion from such statistics as these. If comic-books provige ‘escape’, or relief, literature, he argues, our society clearly has no place in it for the child, or innocent. This is understandable enough. But the spectacle of grown-ups gobbling this pulp by the ton means that there is apparently no place for Mummy and Daddy either, since they have to seek such an elementary refuge from their society. QED–there is no place for anyone! Except, I would add, the comic-book publisher.

Now it is apparently considered ‘Communist’ to criticise comic-books in the USA today, especially now that so many of them, notably the new ‘war-comics’ what a danse macabre of the machine this is, to permit such nomenclature–have reds as their villains. It would be churlish to suggest, I suppose, that this kind of charge might have a small, very small tie-up with the publishers of comics. In any case, I have myself been put over this particular barrel by a London columnist,who fervently defended American comic-books, instancing the delightful Pogo series, as if Pogo were anything but an exception. I fear this journalist had not done his five years’ hard in an American provincial city to have taken Pogo as typical of run-of-the-mill comic-books.

The ‘Communist’ charge, the most easily accessible and at present most potent method of vilification available in the USA, is naturally not discouraged either by the large newspaper publishers, who set such store on the selling power of comic-strips in their columns. I shall not easily forget my own first effort in this field. After some reasonably diligent research, I put together an article on comics for possible publication in one of the larger American monthlies. An angel in Arkansas typed it for me and I bunged it in. Then things started happening. The replies received startled even my rather strong-skinned agents. I remained surprised myself only so long as I remained ignorant that the authors of such comments were editors of magazines, owned by individuals who in turn possessed papers that printed comics, or were themselves owners of comic-book publishing houses.

For I am afraid that this is the same old story we have seen in the movies. Of the stupendous monthly sale of 100 million comic-books in the USA today, Dell Publications put out thirty-five per cent. Although I have learnt that one can land in the warmest of bouillon for criticising this magnificent industry at all nowadays, I am afraid I am going to do so. The ‘Communist’ charge does not really deter me, since I foresee that in about a year’s time everyone in America will have been accused of being, or having been, a commie, whereupon it will cease to t have much effect. Explicit red suspects now include a former President of the United States, Little Red Riding Hood, and 7,000 Protestant clergy. A ‘Progressive’ glass works has had its windows broken and a loans agency, advertising ‘liberal’ terms in the, Mid-West, was desecrated by a gang of hooligans. An artist friend of mine in Greenwich Village, New York, threw what is known as a ‘rent’ party, ie guests come and pay for their own drinks, in an effort to collect money for the rent; some neighbourhood kids got the idea that it was a ‘red’ party, slung rocks through the windows, and started a small fire. (Anyone adversely criticising this book is of course automatically a Communist.) There are, at present writing, three governmental committees, headed by McCarthy, Jenner, and Velde, more or less permanently investigating Communism in the USA–each with its own publicity officer! I am determined not to be diverted from criticism of comic-books by London hacks and American glossy monthlies, just as firmly as I refuse to provide after-cigar reading for Messrs Malik and Gromyko (if they are still around when this book comes out).

Personalty, I shall be the first to criticise Russian comic-books directly I can lay my hands on any. From all second-hand reports they appear to be as beastly as some of their worst US counterparts, but, alas, at present writing I have not been allowed to see any Ruski funnies. I have, however, read those who have examined Slovenian children’s readers.One such apparently showed forty-two pages of political or military matter out of a total of sixty. The letter B was taught children by the word ‘Bomba’ and M by a jolly picture showing a gallows shaped like this letter. Diagrams of how to work hand-grenades, rather like those in current American war-comics, and so useful to a kid of four or five, abound behind the iron curtain, it seems.

In the USA, however, unlike the USSR, we are allowed, still, to make some sort of criticism of these booklets. I am permitted to write these words. This is rather important, I think. For in America the comicbook enterprise has proved one of the most successful ventures in the history of publishing. Not one such book was printed in 1933. Today estimates vary between 500 to 880 millions yearly. Readership, as I have instanced, is thought to approach 100-million, thus exceeding the now declined movie attendance figures, and Mr J. J. Proskauer, a printer of comics, has claimed that it would go even higher if newsprint were available. Even so, a present sale of 100 millions a month, with an average printing of 200,000 copies per booklet, makes this a multi-million-dollar industry with a vengeance. Yet does this industry have the responsibility toward the public that we should like to see? An executive of Fox Features Syndicate, another of the ‘majors’ of comic-book publishers, has openly stated, ‘There are more than people, you know’. The

famous Al Capp, author of the amusing Li’l Abner strip, when questioned about his large fan-mail, confessed, ‘Whoever would have thought that so many people who like my strip are actually able to write?’ (In a subtle customer like Capp one is never quite sure that the joke’s not on oneself. Capp’s strip in early 1953 showed itself well aware of all the tendencies criticised here. Li’l Abner was turned into a girl in order to be able to earn money wrestling with the Slobbovian girl wrestling champ, who worked out on weight-lifting exercises and told Abner, Slobbovian law forbids boys to rassle with gorls. This protects boys–’) Another leading comic-book publisher has declared, ‘We aren't in this business for our health.’ But since seventy-five per cent of American parents have declared themselves against comic-books, many of us apparently feel that they aren’t in business for our children’s health either, and between March and November 1948 our children, assisted by adults evidently, lapped up just a quarter of a billion comic-books of the type known by the macabre pseudonym of ‘crime-comics’. In its issue of February 1950 Parents’ Magazine published a temperate rating of comic-books by a group in Cincinnati, Ohio, who studied 555 comicbooks of different types. Their findings were conservative; for instance, I noticed that the–to me–abominable CRIME does not pay comic was only rated ‘0’ (‘Objectionable’) by this group. From this you can imagine what those comics were like which were deemed ‘d’ (‘Very’). Of all these comic-books considered, the Cincinnati group found only 57.47 per cent fit for children, just over half, that is, of an output of printed matter specifically legitimatised as ‘kid's stuff’ by the industry. 12.43 per cent were judged ‘Very objectionable’. I will return, at the end of this sectiop, to the efforts being made by sincere, concerned groups of this kind, as well as by alert individuals, to curb this menace. Now of course, comic-books vary, as my London critic so wisely observes. There are good ones and bad ones, and some real stinkers. Those categories aimed at the most juvenile audience, and depicting humanised animals, such as rabbits and bears and the like, are comparatively harmless, though one would like to register a protest at their drawing and typography, which is not only lacking in that spontaneity, freshness, and charm one likes to see in young children's literature, but is actually physically damaging to the eyesight. However, this kind has a negligible circulation. Again there are, also fairly small in circulation, the young girl’s or adolescent’s comic-book. These feature the activities of some teen-ager and attempt to present her ‘problems’, such as dating, and dating, and more dating, and still more dating. Seriously, however, it does seem that teachers really imagine that this kind of comic-book helps to solve the young thing’s ‘conflicts’. In a study called Comics In The Classroom, such a teacher, no doubt with the best intentions, Miss Katherine Hutchinson, puts forward an actual summary of the classroom use of comic-books, and revealing it is indeed to those of us who were brought up in the “bad old days” of law and order, when a saucy pupil got his or her bottom smacked for speaking out of turn. However that may be, Miss Hutchinson writes as follows:

 

‘The activities and experiences of these comic folk call forth the best in the child’s sentiments and contributes to moral and social growth...The eternal conflicts and problems–child-adult as in the Katzenjammers and Little Iodine, between the sexes as in Jiggs and Maggie, home life as in Blondie, adolescence as in Tiller the Toiler–give insights that may be capitalised by teachers in promoting social growth.’

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
VintageComics

VintageComics

Posted
Posted
Thank you for reprinting something most of us would never have a chance of owning.

 

Saw a flawless copy that a board member picked up in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. It was stunning.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
TheWatcher

TheWatcher

Posted
Posted
Thank you for reprinting something most of us would never have a chance of owning.

 

Saw a flawless copy that a board member picked up in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. It was stunning.

 

The copy Alan picked is absolutely gorgeous. Finest I've seen (cue BZ to show off his NM/M copy)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Koko

Koko

Posted
  • Author
Posted

More.

I cannot agree with this teacher. The Tillie the Toiler kind of girl adolescent’s comic is usually larded with highly juicy jokes, to draw in as much of a male audience as possible; for instance, a short man will be travelling with Tillie in a subway and, standing in front of her, his pop-eyes on a level with her strutting bosom, exclaim, ‘I just love the view in the subway’, or some such semi-smut. Canteen KATE is another of these, featuring here the adolescent girl’s ‘problems’ as she joins the Army, a topical subject needless to say, Kate is a sexy redhead provided with what Mr Legman calls ‘binocular’ bosoms, and her ‘conflicts’ are invariably those rather physical ones she undergoes with the US Army, whom she proves able to seduce from General Officer Commanding down to local MP on the beat. And some of these stories concerning Kate, such as one in Canteen KATE no. 3 where her G I date dresses up as a geisha girl to avoid arrest for not having a pass while on service in Japan, are questionable in the extreme.

In all these adolescent-girl comic-books, in fact, woman occupies a dominating position in the pre-marital mix-up. ‘Sis’ comes out on top. And, after reading of this kind of courtship, how thankful I felt that I had not myself gone through that stern school, than which a mincing machine would seem to be more tender. ‘What do I do now, Teacher?’ a balloon-breasted lass asks her judo instructor on the cover of Leave It To BINKY no. 29, as she heaves her boy-friend over her shoulder in an excruciating flying mare. Indeed, marriage itself is presented not as an harmonious resolution of these adolescent ‘tensions’ teachers talk about so glibly, but rather as a contest, a frightful field of battle for which a man needs all the protection he can possibly get. This is partly, of course a general American tendency. Philip Wylie, in Opus 2I, had a nice word to say about the nature of the American ‘guide to marriage’ book, with its elaborate charts and diagrams and general air of preparation for a duel to the death. One has only to look at college catalogue descriptions of the many ‘marriage courses’ (usually scheduled under such lofty departments of knowledge as ‘Social Science’ or ‘Social Hygiene’ or some such balderdash) in order to corroborate Mr Wylie. (I noted that Columbia advertise their course, ‘Social Science 396x–Field Work in Marriage,’ in the following intriguing terms, ‘An opportunity for observation and participation in actual field situations for qualifie students.’) Well, the adolescent-girl’s comic-book is cast in this mould. Suzie is another example of this genre, a typically dumb but effective blonde of generous build, whose style of humour is about as sidesplitting as the following extract hints:

 

Electrician mending radio: ‘I found the trouble, Suzie! There’s a short circuit in your TV set!’

Suzie: ‘Goody! Now all you have to do is make it longer!’

 

Suzie ‘s life consists of a perpetual battle to keep off her less attractive boy-friends for her more muscular beaux. She is always, despite her ‘dumbness’, about three steps ahead of any of them in the paraphernalia of adolescent courtship. As a character remarks of Suzie, ‘Understanding a woman’s about as easy as picking bird seed out of molasses with boxing gloves on!’ Such, in a word, is the propaganda put over by this kind of comic-book: Men, give up! Give up trying to compete with women–they’re incomprehensible. Just sit back and slaver while their sexual attributes reduce you to a helpless jelly of quivering reflexes. Relax, men, take it easy. When you’re a little older, it’ll be a real privilege for you to watch those same women go out and buy so many nice things with the money you ‘ve enjoyed earning for them.

This female chauvinism is everywhere in comic-book literature and, as in the more violent type, love in the adolescent’s genre is lust. Woman is won by the strong right arm, topped off by the iron right fist, and once won, woman reigns supreme. Take a typical story in Suzie no 88 to summarise the content of this type. This is about yet another teen-age heroine who makes equal mincemeat of the boys emotions, one ‘Katy Keene’. Throughout this story the buxom Katy is shown in the most suggestive of scarlet two-piece bathing costumes (and one reads with alarm that some of these pictures were contributed by girl readers, fans of Katie, under fourteen –a fifty-year-old Rotarian couldn’t have improved some of them). Katy is sunbathing, and while she goes off to buy an ice-cream cone a nuniber of suitors stroll up and sit on her rug–to compete for her attentions when she returns. Katy, however, gets into conversation with a brawny youth called ‘KO’, who must be Irish as he says ‘Begorra’ and has a nasty-looking rash on his face which the draughtsman probably intended to be freckles. KO is a boxer and on his way back to the rug with Katy he demonstrates his strength to her by busting a pole–in two. On this, all the other men, watching from Katy’s rug, run for it. It is really a crib from a Charles Atlas ad, you see. Katy and KO now have the rug to themselves. He remarks, ‘Maybe you kinda like ‘em hangin’ around, eh?’ (he’s very county Irish, he drops his ‘g’s), to which Katy demurely replies, ‘Oh, KO, stop teasing!’ But it is Katy who has the corner on teasing. KO is called away by his trainer and she is left at the end, as we found her at the beginning, surrounded by admirers imploring her for dates or to go riding in. their new convertibles–‘Boys! Please! One at a time!’ Get-away-closet is this kid’s ethic all right. But let us not waste any more time on these types, comparatively harmless within the limitations of their ideal outlined above. Let us look instead at the really popular comic-books. Of these, crime-comics are tops. In 1948, out of 800 million books published in the USA, 700 million were comic-books, and of these nearly half were crime-comics. I should mention that these figures do not take into account comic-strips, of which about 6,000 million are turned out monthly. In 1949, owing to organised protests, and in no small measure to the active campaigning and writing of critics like Legman and Wertham, the industry divided this output into roughly two groups, crime and love. A detailed bibliography of this breakdown is provided in Neurotica no. 6, yet what is interesting is to see that few if any ‘war-comics’ appear at this time. Today, these are one of the most popular of all kinds and also one of the most violent, excused by the fact that war is violent. In other words, directly violence can be ‘legitimately’ stepped up, it is. Here are a few titles of war-comics beside me, as I write: Men’s Adventures, GI Joe, Atomic WAR!, War WAR Comics, The American AIR FORCES, Two-Fisted Tales, The Adventures of REX, Buddies US Army, Joe Yank, Battle Stories, Battlefront, War Birds, YOUNG MEN on the Battlefield, MAN Comics, T-Man, GI in Battle, Battle Brady, Fighting MAN, BATTLE!, Battle Action, GI Combat, Combat Casey, Combat Kelly, JET Fighters, US Tank Commandos, Horrors of War, Fighting MARINES, Battle Cry, Our ARMY at WAR, WAR Stories, The Fighting MAN, RANGERS, WAR Report, WARFRONT, Star-Spangled WAR STORIES, Atomic Attack, Battle Report, US Marines, Fighting AIR FORCE–growing tedious? This has been called the most thorough psychological preparation for war an generation ever had–Soldier Comics, War Action, BATTLEFIELD, This Is WAR, Frontline COMBAT, Operation PERIL, All American MEN of WAR, WAR HEROES, and so on. In fact, so explicit is the mystique here that I even treasure in my comic library a booklet of these ‘steel-tough battle tales’ entitled WORLD WAR III. I will return, briefly, to this type below. Meanwhile let us glance at the crime-comic series which, though they may be restricted in actual number of titles issued, remains a kiddies ‘favourite and, as in the movies, the actual manifestations of violence within each story are growing more intense.

I should enter a caveat at this point. My own reading of such comicbooks was done during the latter half of 1952 and the beginning of 1953 when, as the saying goes, the heat was on. Federal investigations were being conducted into the industry at this time and the publishers were noticeably toning down the more unpleasant elements. So the survey that follows took place under conservative conditions. Bear in this in mind, let us turn to the notorious crime-comic.

 

2

 

The crime type of comic-book is said to show that crime does not pay, and Charles Biro, editor of Lev Gleason Comics, says that his magazines, which include the best-selling CRIME does not pay comic, have had thousands of letters from teachers, clergymen, and prison warders, all saying how fine they are for lessening crime. And you are also likely to be confronted ‘now with three or four ‘psychiatrists’ on the mastheads of these booklets, presumably supplied with tenuous retaining salaries. It should be made clear that there is absolutely no humour in the crime, comic, just as there is nothing strictly funny in the war ‘funnies’. Yet you are apt to be rather surprised all the same when you see a soldier plunging his bayonet hilt -deep into the squashy chest of another under the word ‘comic’. Famous Funnies no. 204 has a picture of reds being burnt alive by napalm bombs. For real laughs you have apparently to go to Comic Comics (such a title actually exists). For in the crime-comic, as in the tough movie, no one wins thanks to a particularly highly-developed sense of humour, or even because of kindness or generosity. Might alone is right. Here are a few current examples.

All-True CRIME no. 49 contains thirteen killings by criminals (excluding the ‘group slaughter’ of an exploded aircraft) as against four by the police, two of which are indirect–nordoes this allow for the numerous cracks to the skull that would certainly Put most normal human beings to sleep for good. CRIME and Punishment no. 58, another Lev Gleason comic that has added the disarming subtitle ‘Dedicated to the Eradication of Crime’, begins with a ten-page story in which eight men on the side of justice are killed as against one killer (who, in any case, dies accidentally by his own hand, as do so many of these criminals, walking into a tar pit). Four pictures in succession, covering almost an entire page, show coppers getting beaten up. CRIME Smashers no. 13, another of the so-called ‘true crime’ comics, carrying a cover of a girl being brutally gagged by a man, her skirt around her thighs, opens with two well-chested women shot in the first three pictures. This first story, called ‘Gail Ford–Girl Friday’, describes the exploits of a girl detective in tracking down a killer the police are powerless to locate, and in the course of this search she beats up a gang of ruffians with her purse. In the second story a ballet dancer strangles her partner with the girl’s own pigtails, a scene to make Mr Edgar Mittelholzer envious. Out of a total of thirty-eight pictures eight were of this exciting event. The dancer’s understudy is suspected, but knocks out the detective with the heel of her shoe when he tries to take her into custody (‘A heel for a heel’). After this convincing argument the ‘tec’ gets the right girl. ‘You–You‘ve got me!’ she says, confronted by his gun, and he gloats back, ‘Now you’ll dance in the gas chamber!’ (A pictorial piece, called ‘Prayer Works Wonders’, appropriately faces these last pictures.) The third story in this book features ‘Sally the Sleuth’, a delectable dish, blonde and good, who is after a girl criminal, brunette and bad, with whom she has a fight on the floor, skirts flying, all part of the day ‘s work for these little ladies.

The central story in Down with CRIME no. 6 concerns a double-crossing crook called Johnny (‘Elbows’) Scarlet, another portrayal from real life, it seems, who treats the men he murders ‘like a butcher handles meat’,as a pal puts it of him. There are seven killings in this story and twenty-one explosions recorded by diligent comment in the copy. CRIME exposed no. 13 (how hypocritical can these titles get, by the way?), with a cover of another bosomy beauty in the grip of a killer, has twenty-six ‘acts of violence’ (actual shots gone home, or blows delivered) in twenty-one pages of pictures: ‘UNGHH!’ or ‘AGHRRR!’or ‘UGHHH!’ or again ‘EEEAGHH!’ describe the victim’ various reactions, while the attitude of the police is typified by the following invitations put into the mouths by officers of the law, ‘Come here, Punk’ and ‘Cut out the tough act, or I’ll clout YOU one.’

A story in CRIME does not pay no. 111, however, better illustrates the standard of brutality purveyed in this type of comic-book. Here a farm-hand, ‘Country’ Adams, dreams of becoming a big-time city crook–just as any boy might. ‘Country’, on the other hand, is able tom realise his dreams. He beats up a gang single-handed, gouging out the eyes of one man, staving in the ribs of another, using ‘Police Tactics’ on a third, and shooting up what’s left over. As ‘Country’ says, ‘Butchering pigs or people is all the same to me’, and he gets taken as a hatchet-man by a top Chicago crookster. ‘Country’ fairly swims in the gravy for a while, but ten killings and two explosions later he is himself shot by a copper. ‘BAROOM!’–‘SCREEEE!!’–‘OOOFF!’–and, once more, ‘EEEAAA!’ goes the text in this book.

MURDER Incorporated no. 3, with a well-trussed heroine showing her best Saks underwear on the cover, has three similar stories. The first is a happy little get-together over narcotics (‘the illegal dope-peddler claims 75,000 young lives a year as his prey’), and includes the grisly exhumation of a woman. The second tale is about a gangster who assaults his best friend, blows up a jewellery store, double-crosses his gang, kills another man and six children, before finally ending up in the ‘drink’. After these, the third yarn is a bit of an anticlimax, a mild matter of counterfeiting (in which, incidentally, no one ever detects the phony notes). As the ‘true’ story here appears to have been reasonably bloodless, six socks and a killing are thrown in for good measure into the eight pages of the ‘comic’ story. And I’m sorry to report that I never found that girl in the frothy slip on the cover in any of these stories. CRIME exposed no. 10, in a similar police-record story called ‘The Search’, opens with a picture of a policeman being shot in the guts and closes with one of the criminal accidentally boiled alive in a water-tank. The cover shows a successful jail-break.

One need hardly continue. My point should have been made by now. But the readership of this kind of comic-book is clearly becoming, like the tough-movie public, somewhat inured to the lashings of bloodshed dished out, for a more horrific kind of crime-comic has been putting in its appearance. This is what I call the crime-terror kind of crime-comic, and it shades off at its far end into the purely absurd fantastic-science type of comic-book, of which there are an increasing number. Indeed, I found a story in Weird Science no. 17 in which there appears a publisher who, when asked how business is going, replies, ‘Terrible! If it were’t for the science-fiction craze, I’d be out of business!’ These crime-terror booklets, seemingly on the increase, show a monstrous reiteration of the morbid, of tombs, electric chairs, mortuaries, surgeries, and so forth. Take The BEYOND no. 18; its first story tells of a girl who tries to murder her husband, only to find him turn into a phoenix which finally burns her in its embrace, a pleasant opportunity for the imaginative draughtsman. The second is a welter of murders committed by a ‘ghost’. The third concerns a man who finds a severed hand in a Ming dynasty box. This hand steals his girl-friend in a fine scene and eventually strangles the man himself while he is in a strait-jacket in a lunatic asylum–the insane asylums depicted in so many of these comic-books being rather more ritzy affairs than either Snake Pit or If A Man Be Mad has led one to believe of such institutions. The fourth story starts off with a man dying in the electric chair, but he proves unkillable and returns to life to run a gang of crooks in a city where the police are powerless to stop him with mere bullets. In the end his body decays, rather contradictorily, and ‘Jules Scholler dragged his rotting body to the city dump. There, amidst the burning garbage, he committed his tortured soul to the flames.’ Weird Science no. 17, mentioned above, has one of the most inordinately loathsome covers I have encountered on any comic-book. Owing to the ineptitude of the drawing, it is difficult to distinguish exactly what it is meant to be, but in general it seems to depict an oozing, pus-ridden monster, a mixture of octopus, ape, and giant ray, squeezing to death a beautiful, agonized girl. The contents, in this case, match the cover, two pictures showing blondes, dresses trousses to the lap, being trampled to death, one by an unspeakably ugly monster and the other by a mob of American citizens making for Miami Beach on a public holiday!

We may pause a moment over this latter. For this story is as simple slice of anti-intellectualism as you could wish for. We see the usual stereotype of the professor that is supposed to be a satisfactory substitute for us spellbound masses, bespectacled, absent-minded, clearly the kind of man who would get a flunking grade in Bloomingdale’s, lecturing his class on ‘the law of averages’. He waxes loquacious over the possible collapse of this law, and we see in pictorial form what might happen if everyone in America decided to take a vacation to Miami Beach or Ebbets Field at the same moment. Chaos would come again, according to the prof. Finally, we see him affirming that the law has broken down today and that ‘our society is going to suffer terribly!’ Then comes the pay-off. We see his class. There is only one student present out of 378. In other words, profs are cranks and their jeremiads are to be ignored. There is a final twist at the very end, when the single ‘student’ attending the lecture gets up as the prof flings out another warning and reveals himself to be the janitor of the building, who replies, in crackerbarrel calm, ‘Wal, I wouldn ‘t worry ‘bout it none, Perfessor! Y ‘see.. ah ‘m the janitor here...an‘ t‘day is Sunday.’

The crime-terror type of comic-book–‘99-44/100 per cent of PURE HOROR!’ as it proudly advertises itself–has the most bloodcurdling repertoire of all and one that gives a specious justification to the wildest fantasies of the adult draughtsman. Necrophilia is one of the favourite topics here. Horror and Suspense Fight Against CRIME no. 6 ends with an appalling story called ‘Crime Graveyard’. In this a glorious redhead, beside whom Jane Russell would appear a pygmy, stages the fake death of her husband, whom she has previously urged to the killing of her own uncle, in order that they may both collect on the insurance. Unfortunately she is accidentally shot while digging her husband out of his grave (these bullets will fly around the place) and the last pictures show him buried alive there, waiting in vain for his release–‘There was air enough in the coffin to keep him alive in his comatose condition for twenty-four hours!’ Tales From The CRYPT specialises in necrophilic stories and frequently carries a cover of some victim buried alive. No. 34 in this series has four stories; the first is a straight Frankenstein crib complete with attempted rape of a pretty girl who, to elude the monster, throws herself out of the window in a lather of lacy underthings and a scarlet ‘YAAAAAAA!’ The second (‘Oil’s well that ends well!’) concludes with the now customary rescue - this time the coffin, being half full of oil, explodes. The third is a self-described ‘nauseating nursery novelette ‘ about the execution of a money-mad king; and the fourth, the worst of the lot, is a tale of an old woman whp appears to be a sort of Jekyll and Hyde. When the body of this lady’s alter ego is ‘killed’ and taken to the mortuary, the old girl threatens that if the blood is removed from the corpse, ‘Anytime anyone comes near me I’ll spit ECTOPLASM squirt right up their left nostril.’ The ‘corpse is let free and the last picture gives us the old woman showing her long blue autopsy scar to an imaginary visitor (‘Not bad sewin’ for a MAN!’ she simpers). To conclude this survey of almost unadulterated ghastliness, I refer to The Vault of HORROR no. 23, in which a woman is pursued by a Thing (‘It stank from oozing grave mud! Clods of rancid crawling rotted flesh fell from its eyeless face...‘), a man is decapitated (‘THOK!’), another boiled alive in a showerbath, and a tyrannous employer, who slaps his nine women employees, is burnt alive in his own sweatshop, the girls first flinging him under a sewing-machine and stitching up his lips in a perfectly sickening series of pictures accompanied by the text, “Heh! Heh! Heh! Well a stitch in time saves nine...’

In passing on from this crime-comic group, let us not forget what kind of a picture of the fair sex Junior is picking up here. Most of these books are adorned with the picture of some tough, well-chested woman, a cross between a bouncer in a honky-tonk and a Notre Dame full-back in physical appearance below the Aryan tresses, often engaged in beating up the coppers. ‘Try this in ya belly, ya louse,’ is standard address from buxom blonde to crime-comic cop. The Horror and Suspense comic, mentioned above, carries a lurid cover on which a girl is saying to her boy-friend who is indulging in the gentle pastime of drowning a cringing policeman, ‘Let me plug him, Fred. It’s quicker than drowning. CRIME does not pay no. 105 has another of these Amazonian heroines on its cover, underwear by Ohrbach and Klein–outsize. A scene from a story called ‘Thrill-Crazed KILLER’ in Thrilling CRIME Cases no. 47 shows an enormous blonde standing over a man she has just floored; he remarks, with reason, ‘Whew! I feel like I been run over by a truck.’, to which she replies, ‘You haven't been yet. But if you want to keep yourself from being put through a meat-grinder...you better pony up all the dough.’ The last picture in this plaintive little parable shows our heroine suggestively manacled, sweetly smiling, as she is led off to prison, the payoff in one picture after sixteen of successful violence. In CRIME never wins no. 3 the heroine of the first story, whose dress looks as if it has been put on her by a spray-gun, slaps two women, knocks out two men, one with a bottle, and kills one police officer in six pages; the heroine of the last, a laughing blonde, kills four men, knocks out a fifth, and brutally slaps a girl bank-clerk in as many snappy pages. As she robs one man she declares explicitly that she is not going to leave ‘till I show Mister Tough Guy what it means to be tough’. In short, the same slapping routine we have noticed in the movies goes on here. In the last-mentioned comic-book I counted 137 separate pictures of successful crime, as against nine of retribution and justice. Several of these stories, of course, have no police in them at all, being simply accounts of internecine gang warfare. Supposedly Junior is being taught by these books that crime doesn’t pay but, as more than one critic has remarked, he is certainly being taught that CRIME does not pay pays, for this title is one of the most successful crime-comics on the market today.* In Rangers Comics no. 63–a series distinct from the war-comics of that name and marked ‘D’ by the Cincinnati group–I actually found a story entitled, ‘Crime almost Pays’! In brief, the heroine of the crime-comic is Mirams’s movie heroine, combined with the grab-your-man sexual attitude about which Monsieur R. F. Maxwell has written in that light-hearted French Kinsey report, us Hommes n ‘y Connaissent Rien. Or,

Sin querer a una mujer

es imposible vivir!

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Koko

Koko

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Dr Powdermaket tells us that in Hollywood more men have to resist the advances of girls than vice versa. In Wings Comics no. I15 I actually found this situation taken so far that in the last picture of one story a girl, who has been proved right, turns to her boy-friend and says, ‘Speaking of rewards, Mister–Bend Over!’ But let us leave this group and turn to the next in popularity, the Superman type.

 

3

 

But just a minute. Who goes here? ‘they fought like sharks in the water till I torpedoed the socialist with my head in a flying dive and winded him completely. I was so angry with the socialist for biting like a dog that I took him for a long “water-baby” ride under the water where he was completely out of his element...I shortened my arm to an almost impossible angle, and hooked my bare toes over the front of the tintenne and went down almost on my knee so as to spring horizontally at...this his tooth-happy verminous socialist. But who is this? Is it Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, Catman, Combat Kelly, or even merely Superboy? No, sir. It’s Roy Campbell!’

 

4

 

Superman made his debut in the June 1938 issue of Action Comics, a booklet still going strong, and his was the most popular formula till the crime-comic came along. By now, of course, he has a team of potent impersonators, from Kid Eternity, Mister Universe, down to such engaging mites as Doll Man–and he has a sub-sister in Wonder Woman. Now this type of comic-book has already received its share of attention in the press and on the radio. The whole concept of ‘super’ and its function in the political philosophies of our age have received copious criticism. A quarter of a century ago, P. Wyndham Lewis could write: ‘The prefix “super”–as in Superman, or Super-Dreadnought gives the key to the state of mind involved. It is almost indistinguishable from Advertisement, in many ways, as a department of Romance.‘Fatally and intimately connected with this is the gospel of action. This doctrine has, in the form of the romantic energies of war, already made a living melodrama of the Western World’ Mr Legman claims that the Superman comic gives a child ‘a total conviction of the morality of force such as no Nazi could aspire to’. And he finds hints here also of the shadow of the joy-boy. Mr McLuhan believes that Superman’s social attitudes ‘reflect the strong-arm totalitarian methods of the immature and barbaric mind’. It is, of course, quite true that this sort of shallow, vociferous optimism in the individual is too often a sign of lack of confidence and belief in one’s cause. Yet I do not personally believe that the hollow, self-gratulatory note of the Superman comic means that the USA has a bad conscience; rather I think it may suggest that the publishers of the stuff cannot help but be a little queasy in their consciences at the dilapidation of taste they are so systematically perpetrating. War-mongering? I wouldn’t know. But I have found in the Superman ethic undeniable signs of that philosophy I best describe to myself as Jim Crow While U Wait. It has, however, been left for a Jesuit priest, Walter J. Ong, writing in The Arizona Quarterly, to administer the most severe rebuke of all, I think, to this kind of comic-book. In this article, entitled ‘The Comics and the Super State: Glimpses down the Back Alleys of the Mind’ (significantly omitted from Miss Hutchinson’s bibliography, by the way), Father Ong sees the ideology of the super state and the total mystique of fascism in both Superman and Wonder Woman comic-books. ‘We do not have to look far in the present comic field,’ he writes in 1945, since when things have got worse, ‘to discover a strong cross-current of those forces which the German, and other, super states have found useful.’ To summarise Father Ong’s arguments, he finds that this type of comic-book, with its concentration on a single leader-hero (Superman or Ubermensch), purveys ‘herdism’, conformity to a mechanistic norm, clouded in a haze of metapolitical dreams and provided with a strong-arm philosophy as a receipt for government. He observes Plastic Man delivering a left to the jaw under the balloon, ‘I was just rea1ising how much better it is to reason with these poor, wayward fellows.’ An ‘orgy of muscularity’, plus a ‘glorification of youth’, is a viertes Reich of the Superman comic for this reverend father, ruled, as he finds it to be, by brute force and a semi-insufficiently_thoughtful_person, pagan, and sexually inverted Duce or Fuhrer. He is unsparing of Wonder Woman, too, writing of her activities as follows:

 

It is indicative that the new piece is called Wonder Woman, not, as one might expect, Superwoman (although the Superman–Wonder Woman publishers have run a few strips by this name to secure the copyright for themselves, just in case). For the heroine of the strip is really a female superman, preaching the cult of force spiked, by means of her pretentiously scanty “working” attire, with a little commercial sex. (Force-and-sex is apparently-an approved formula of the super state, which baits its hooks with promises of considerable freedom in the use of both.) ‘Indeed, although he says she is designed to counteract the “blood-curdling masculinity” of the other comics and to introduce “love” into the comic field, Wonder Woman is dubbed by her enthusiastic creator an Amazon, while the ambit of her activities excludes the life which most normal women might desire. The name she wears in ordinary civil life–she only takes to the woods as Wonder Woman when occasion demands, as it indeed seems to most of the time–displays a curt and colourful masculinity: “Diana Prince”. She is no Cinderella and the clang of the huntress’s name against the mannish cognomen is the kind of note she likes to hear struck. When not in her outre “working” clothes, she habitually wears a suitcoat and tie among the jewelled guests at luncheon parties and at formal evening affairs...The same Hellenistic apotheosis of youth is carried on with great enthusiasm by Wonder Woman, too. This streamlined American Amazon gives evidence of the cult, for instance, in a morbid retrogressive fancy, reminiscent again of proto-Nazi melody out of Nietzche or Stefan George. This fancy settles upon a return to the child’s world as the most desirable goal in life. Here is the defeatism of the individual overwhelmed by the threat of herd existence at its worst. In Wonder Woman’s dreams, which are staple items in her adventures, the frustrated adult returns to the world of impulse in order to discover a life pattern free of the intellectual activity proscribed by existence in the herd. In this world where adult problems are evaporated as the twitching of the mind subsides, Wonder Woman in one occasion finds herself arraigned before a judge who is an infant still unable to talk. “Da–de, da–dah,” (I quote) is his studied verdict. Here is the new recipe for the good life...she qualifies as the heroine of a really redoubtable womanhood by turning over ten times in a somersault without touching the ground.’*

 

Almost all Americans I have read object to the fact that the America which Superman, Captain Marvel, and the rest inhabit is entirely corrupt. Batman, for instance, lives in a town called Gotham City which is riddled with corruption month after month. Every agent of organised law and order in this America seems to be either inept or crooked (as in Mickey Spillane fiction). Superman is thus sarcastically told in one Action Comic, ‘To listen to you, anyone would think this town was full of crooks!’

It is important not to prevaricate at the start and to admit at once that, without quibble, in varying degrees of intensity, these heroes all have one thing in common–they hate brains. Buy a Captain Marvel Jnr (easily available in Europe now) and see how the scientists this boy prodigy with the bulging biceps is constantly busy rescuing are nearly always hopeless fools, either idiotically forgetful or just plain lunatics responsible for catastrophic inventions–a conception of the American scientist I should hardly have thought wise to encourage these days. Captain Marvel Jnr no. 104 features a typical story of a stupid scientist who invents a robot that runs amok and threatens to smash the world. The last page but one consists solely of the illustrated ‘words’, ‘WHIRR...KLANK... KLINK...KRUMP...THUMPETY...WHACK... KRANK ... THUD!’. As a character in Whiz Comics no. 142 I puts it as he knocks three others flying (‘SMACK...UGGH...pow!’), ‘Your friends, Mike, have a limited vocabulary.’

Limitations of vocabulary do not, however, prevent young Marvel from saving the scientist by means of his superior brain. He wrecks the robot and comments sarcastically in the last picture of all, ‘Thinking up another idea, Professor?’ In CRIME must lose no 11, as a matter of fact, there is a crime-character ironically nicknamed ‘Brains’; he crushes his chief rival under a lead chandelier with a splash (he himself, however, is mown down with a tommy-gun by his victim’s busty blonde sister in the next picture). In brief, then, the Superman ethos is to drive a man’s teeth through the back ot his skull, at the same time saying, with a leer,‘Got to reason with these guys.’ At times, of course, even Superman’s urbanity can slip and I once found him so far forgetting himself as to say to an enemy, ‘I’m going to break you up like kindlin’–bone by bone!’

Meanwhile, the ‘mad’ scientist as villain has spread through the whole range of comic-books and become a boringly stock character. Black Cat MYSTERY no 33 features a crazy scientist who employs overgrown scorpions to kill his foes, one of whom is an elderly woman who dies covered with these monsters in a particularly loathsome picture. Old age never comes off very happily in any of these booklets. The scientist himself is finally shown being eaten alive by the brutes he has grown. Superman is, to my mind, however, less Obnoxious than his subsequent impersonators; he is supposed to have come to earth in the late thirties as an infant from the planet ‘Krypton’. His other personality is a reporter called Clark Kent, whose ‘rival’ (get-away-closer) on the same paper is a woman journalist, Lois Lane. The courting of these two, with the man continually stalling as to who he really is, provides a sort of Li‘l Abner background of courtship for the exploits of Superman, who has to duck out of his disguise as Kent in order to perform his feats. To give some idea of Superman’s abilities, one need only glance at a typical story in Action Comics no 176; here Superman-Kent (his name always printed in a reverently heavy type) flies, dislodges huge rocks with his ‘X-ray’ vision, whisks men through the air, converts the carbon in a pencil into a diamond by the pressure of his hands, flies to South America and back in a few seconds, burrows through a mountain to rescue a man trapped in a mine, lifts a children’s carnival into the stratosphere, carves a vault out of a hillside with his fists, brings a carload of fleeing crooks back by rubbing a bar ‘at SUPER-SPEED’ and thus converting it into a magnet, hauls more men off through the air, and so on. All this takes Superman eleven pages. Defying the laws of physics it is only natural that this mystical figure should be above mere justice. Superman, it should be said, can live as well under water as above it. In all elements he seldom travels less than several hundred mph. He possesses the power of a cannon with his breath and has the source of daylight (wherewith to light cities by night) in his hands. The helpless police have constantly to call on him for assistance. The last story in the Action Comics number above, by the way, is called ‘Vigilante’ and features a hero of this name and type in the usual Western extravaganza. With lariat and pistol ‘Vig’ accounts for literally scores of villains in the bloodbath of each issue, and in these stories the police seldom put in an appearance at all. Recently, however, ‘Sup’ has been toning down his activities somewhat and Vig has followed suit; in Action Comics no 168 the former dealt solely with animals, while the latter did his shooting on a target-range. Batman is another of these Fuhrer incarnations, hooded, begauntleted with a strong right in place of the normal processes of the law. However, I did notice that in his swank Gotham City apartment he is undemocratic enough to employ a butler. He has a young and adoring help, called Robin, and his enemy is again often the intellectual. In Batman no 74 he has three villains to cope with, all of them brainy, and the first, called ‘The Joker’, ends up in a padded cell, the proper place, presumably, in this universe for those who think. As Batman dives on his second victim in the final act of ‘justice’, he tells him that none may escape Batman’s law–and delivers a haymaker with his left.

Plastic Man, being made of a . rubbery plastic, can be stretched limitlessly in any direction. His head cannot be pulled off his shoulders and he can administer a sock on the jaw from the distance of fifty yards or so. In Plastic Man no 40 ‘Plas’, as he is known to his intimates, starts off in an FBI office –‘YAWWWN! I’ve never seen crime so dull! Chief! I wish something would happen!’ It does. Using his arms as lassoos, as ropes for binding recalcitrant prisoners, and for slugging round street corners, Plas swiftly fixes things up and catches the crooks, including a hula-hula dancer who turns men into monsters by hypodermic injections and cool Cola drinks. Wiggly Wanda, as this girl is called, apparently has some rather unlikely connection with the scientists at Los Alamos. The last story in this issue ends in the usual all-in with a dozen criminals and Plas’s remark, as he KO’s them one by one, ‘I’ll put you out of your misery!’ Mister Universe, on the other hand, likes to come to closer quarters with his victims than our pal Plas. He is an expert wrestler and in a ten-page story I counted thirty-four out of sixty-seven pictures of this hero actually screwing one of his opponents into knots. But both Plas and Mister Universe are mild in comparison with Blackhawk and the Marvel family, who represent some of the more extreme examples of this kind of comic-book, politically in particular. Both these last have made recent trips to Korea and the enemies of both are now, quite monotonously, Russian soldiers. Blackhawk heads a small gang of thugs, including, for comic (?) relief, one Chop-Chop, a confessedly pro-Chiang Chinese. Blackhawk knows his present-day political scene as only a few gifted characters, like Senator McCarthy and Mickey Spillane, seem to. There are only two sides in this world, Russian Communism and American Republicanism, and you must choose one or the other. A typical issue, then, no 61, finds the gang up against ‘a horror so simple, so fiendishly ingenious that it walks beside you and me on the street, and who cannot recognise it’. What else could this be but American Communism? The first picture sets the tone; it shows the: boys busting in the platform of commie speakers (‘It’s yust like shaking apples out of a tree!’) and Blackhawk himself smacking open the jaw of one of the offenders concerned (‘Too bad they’re all rotten, Olaf!’). The cover of this comic, incidentally, is easily recognisable. Blackhawk no 62 shows the leaders splitting open the jaw of a Russian soldier, and so on. We open in no 61 with a meeting of the United World Council, a parody of the United Nations Assembly, and the comment, ‘What need have we for world police with the Blackhawks on the job?’ In pursuit of the commies, Blackhawk flies to Paris, where the gang find reds everywhere and crack another meeting to smithereens–‘We came here to work on troublemakers like you,’ a statement to which Chop-Chop adds the penetrating piece of Realpolitik, ‘All Blackhawks got plenty hammer for commie jaws!’ Holding a KO’ed commie in his fist, Blackhawk, dressed in the familiar tunic and squashed hat, and replete with insignia, agrees with Chop-Chop’s substitute for Confucian wisdom–‘Communism always wilts before determined resistance.’ The final ‘sock -out’ is a real pleasure for this hero. As one of his henchmen remarks, ‘I am unhappy when it is all talk and no fight!’ ‘You’ll need new teeth before you make any more speeches,’ adds Blackhawk to a red agitator to whom he is putting paid in no uncertain fashion. To the police, arriving as usual late on the scene, he says, ‘Guard these rats well, boys! Maybe they’ll tell you about the organisation that planned to take over.’ With a leer the leading copper comes back, ‘We’ll urge them a little, Blackhawk!’ And as the hero busts the last of the lot in the mouth, one of his happy gang remarks, ‘Lovely punching, Blackhawk! I only wish he did have pals so we could slug somebody, too!’ As he leads his beaten man away, Blackhawk says,‘Cheer up, chump! You’ll get the same trial as any other plain man...and the same gas chamber afterward!’ It should be pointed out, moreover, that Blackhawk is a ‘real’Superman type of comic-book. Blackhawk does not defy the laws ofgravity, he is supposed to be a perfectly possible human being like you and me. The Marvel family, however, who interfere in the Korean war fairly consistently now consist of Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Jnr (the little lad who, as we have seen, has his own comic-book to himself), and Miss Marvel whose swirling skirt seldom comes much lower than her lap. Take the first story in The Marvel Family no 78, a patriotic legend entitled ‘The Marvel Family Battles the Red Star of Death’ (we have already had the Captain himself battling the ‘Red Crusher’ in Captain Marvel no 142. This latter personifies the red soldier in Korea in these stories, an unshaven, toothy Russian who evidently goes into action in Korea with a whip rather than a rifle and who makes remarks like, ‘Die, Yankee dogs! Let your blood and bone splatter all over the landscape!’ One page in this comic-book features the word ‘WHAM!’ four times, each letter measuring three-quarters of an inch in thickness. This is essentially a simple tale.Captain Marvel stops an American general from calling ‘a full-scale retreat’ after the man has read one enemy pamphlet, and goes on to halt a bombing raid in mid-air. He deals as easily with Ruski soldiers as he does with those undefined foes who swear ‘By Buddha!’ The ‘red vulture’ himself is personally KO’ed by the Captain, Miss M administering a ladylike kick to the jaw (‘CHUMPFFF!’), followed by a snorting right hook (‘WHAM!’ again, I fear). In The Marvel Family no. 81, where the Marvels go after the ‘mightiest mongol’, young Marvel shows that he is not behind the rest of his family in brutality; he mops the floor, literally, at the end of a stick, with a coloured, mongolian enemy. The last scenes in most of these stories end like the one in no 78, which shows the originally terrified US general congratulating the energetic team: ‘You have served the forces of freedom all over the world...I’m going to cite you all for medals.’, ‘No more Red Star!’ sighs one youth, almost wistfully, it would seem, in the very last picture of all, as he gazes into the night sky. Happily, I know from my own experience that the American Army is capable of dealing with the enemy in a rather more competent manner than these comics suggest. In passing, this is one of my chief complaints, too, about the new war-comics that have spawned in the last year or so, namely that an unreal and histrionic picture of modern warfare, fundamentally detrimental to the US Army, is presented. In these it is only natural that the Communist should be the enemy and it would be churlish to cavil on this point, though I would wish, for the sake of the future, that the red soldier be shown herein as a little less inept thanne probably is. In my experience the Army is a corporate affair, achieving its major successes through obedience to discipline. The war-comic, however, shows the individual running the war, generals accepting palsy-walsy advice from enlisted men, and it concentrates on the more awful moments of combat in well nigh hilarious terms. So Battle Brady, an heroic G I, the central figure in Battle Action, continually wins the Korean war alone. More, he virtually created the war–‘The fighting in Korea was just a police action...but when Battle Brady and Sgt Socko Swenski got there it became a Real War! ‘BRAC! CAK! CAK! VOOM! WA-BRUM-BA!’ are the opening ‘words’ of Battle Action no 5 with Pvt ‘Battle’ Brady “rarin’’’ to go. Battle, in fact, dotes on action, in a way I have seldom, in real life, been privileged to observe in a human being, who usually rather enjoys hanging on to existence. ‘Hooray for the Brooklyn Dodgers!’ he yells as he plunges his bayonet hilt-deep in yet another red. Here the terror of war is forgotten. It is all a gorgeous carnage, topped off with a joke or two in dreadful taste. Anything, even a hint, of the torment involved in calling up the necessary courage each time a man steels himself for such endeavours is totally ignored. Page after page is a child’s or insufficiently_thoughtful_person’s dream:

‘BRAM...BAM...PAM...KLAK...RAK...PAK...BAM...KLAK ...PAM...POW...SWISH...KA-LINK...BLAM...KA-BRUM!’ and ‘BRAK-A-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK...TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK-TAK...THUD!’ are the entire copy of two individual pages of Battle Action no. 5. Star-Spangled WAR STORIES no. 133, All-American MEN OF WAR, and Our ARM Y at WAR all have several pages of this stuff. The Church, meanwhile, in these war-comics also ‘talks turkey’ (as a nun puts it, speaking of His Holiness the Pope, in a recent propaganda film); War Report for March 1953 kicks off with the story of a padre who learns that might is right and who at the end brings a sword, not peace, with a vengeance. Chaplain James Tucker at first hates carnage but in the last pictures he hurls a grenade, shouting ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ and cracks a commie on the skull with his rifle-butt ‘YAGHH!’) remarking, ‘And the Lord has a long arm, my erring brother!’ Indeed, I refuse to be restrained about these war-comics, which give such a fantastically unreal picture of war that I once wondered whether they–weren’t sponsored by draft boards. No one, except the enemy, gets hurt. A favouvite, recurrent, screamingly funny joke is for two commie soldiers to make simultaneous bayonet lunges at the grinning G I hero (‘I’m surrounded,’ he winks at us), who then ducks, with the result that the commies kill each other. Even on the most bathetic of crass Hollywood screens this sort of thing would seem rather stiff, but, believe it or not, I found this identical situation recently in two contemporaneous war-comics, Combat Casey no 8 and Combat Kelly no 11. In the latter book a man stops a jeep, filled with enemy soldiery, on his stomach muscles and then tosses the vehicle over a cliff. There is a nice legend here, too, about a sort of Koje prison compound, where a riot is staged by Yalu River Rosie, a commie vamp whose chest, however, fulfills all requirements for an American audience. This story has pictures, carefully drawn, of a man’s teeth leaving his mouth after a blow. Typical remarks by Combat Casey are, ‘Lemme show you how to bend over backwards’ (to a red he has kicked in the jaw) and ‘Here’s a kick in the belly for your thoughts, Comrade.’ As he blasts off his tommy-gun, yet another war-comic hero, Major Bill Mace, makes the following comments: ‘Dirty gook buzzards! I’ll show you crummy bums how a man fights a war! I hope you gooks are in good with Buddha, because you’re gonna be seeing him in a minute.’ While the Russian is taken for granted as on Korean soil in these stories, the British never put in an appearance there. And the ‘red’ forces are shown using every conceivable diablerie of modem warfare imaginable, including poison gas. Every prisoner they capture they automatically torture. Often this torture scene will appear on the cover, for the sake of sales, as on T-Man no 11. ‘I knew I didn’t stand a chance...The dirty red butchers had the upper hand now...’ Short-skirted women, like the recurrent Yalu River Rosie, constantly appear, usually as commie agents. Battle Brady no 11, decorated with a cover of a GI bayoneting two reds at a time (Heads up, commies! It’ll only hurt a minute!’), has a concluding yarn in which six girls, all reds, appear, all showing their knees, and most of them most of their thighs. This story involves the search for an enemy ‘intelligence’ agent called Manchuria Mary. She is caught, but only after she has KOed two GIs and been seen bathing nude in a pool.

The point about these war-comics is that they assume a full-scale war is on with Russia. Anyone emerging from a protracted jail sentence, in which he was not allowed to see a newspaper or hear a radio, say, into the America of today, and picking up Combat Casey would at once be led to conclude this. ‘Among a ruthless enemy horde in Korea, one name stands out in loathsome brutalit –THE RED CRUSHER!’–this is the Russian soldier, shown directly fighting (though obliterated in billions each issue by) the GI in Korea. Total war is assumed. Geneva Conventions go by the board. No prisoners are taken by either side, unless to be tortured (only by Russians, in this case). Poison gas, flamethrowers, and atomic bombs are frequently employed by both sides. One war-comic I have before me is called Atomic War and shows a jet-plane delivering a bomb, marked ‘New Year Greetings 1961’, while from the cockpit emerges the balloon, ‘When this NEW guided missile hits the Kremlin, those Russkies will really have a hot time!’ In Captain Marvel no 142 the Captain uses a flame-thrower against troops as a matter of course. All this sort of thing is something less than reassuring for those of us, like myself, who are called upon from time to time to engage in un-‘comic’ warfare. It must be said that there are those who find nothing harmful in the Superman type of comic-book. ‘Mr Harper’, in Harper‘s Magazine for July 1947, disagreed with criticism of this kind of comic, and Coulton Waugh, in his book The Comics, regards Superman as a modern Paul Bunyan. Ray Falk, writing with delight about the spread of comics to Japan in The New York Times magazine for May 3rd 1953, praises the American nature of this fight-mindedness:

 

‘Japanese publishers turned to cowboy comics when General MacArthur prohibited the picturisation of feudalistic samurai stories. Publishers soon became aware that Japanese children understood cowboy comics and that they found in them gratification for an apparently universal human desire to enjoy a good fight. For locally created Western comics, Japanese writers and artists get their plots and scenery from Hollywood films. With department-store sales of toy pistols booming, the day is not far off when the cry of “Te O agero”–stick ‘em up–will be sweeping the playgrounds of Japan.’

 

All the same, few go so far as the testimonial, quoted by the publishers, that ‘Superman represents to be, physically, morally, and spiritually.’ Superman now figures on both film (Columbia, starring Kirk Alyn) and television, while Sir, for January 1953, a pin-up magazine, carried an article called ‘America May Become a Race of Supermen’. The heading under this title ran, ‘We’re getting taller and healthier by the year and scientists predict we’ll be supermen in two centuries’I paused at that, for I thought I’d read it before somewhere, and so I had: ‘We all feel that in the distant future man may be faced with problems which can be solved only by a superior race of human beings, a race destined to become master of all the other peoples.’* In the text of the Sir article, geneticists are invoked to back the theory that Americans are growing taller and stronger than other races–‘We are actually the tallest national group in the world.’ Here we read also that ‘Our girls are steadily increasing in height, too.’ So, keeping in mind that there is, you know, a set of comics of this type called Master Comics, let us glance for a moment at Superman’s sister, and observe similar tendencies at ‘play’ among the ladies in this star-cast genre.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Go to topic listing