Parade of Pleasure

[Koko]

5

 

As with the males, the prototype is far more mystical in nature than the belligerent lesser fry, and consequently less unpleasant. Wonder Woman possesses, in Mr Legman’s neat words, ‘the drum-majorette patriotism of star-spangled panties and spread-eagled breasts.* In Wonder Woman no. 50 our heroine is summoned by Aphrodite to be reminded of the magical properties of her lariat. Her very swear words are Hellenic, ‘Suffering Sappho!’, ‘Shades of Pluto!’ ‘Great Hera!’, and so forth. Reinvigorated by contact with the goddess, Wonder Woman returns with her lasso, to rope up aeroplanes, rip the conning tower off a submarine, and of course to tie men up in knot after knot. Indeed, if you think the Superman hero an active type, you should take a look at some of Wonder Woman’s sisters. This type of comic-book is said to be aimed at teen-age girls, and such would seem to be the audience, judging from the advertisements carried, which are for lonely hearts clubs (‘Don’t Deny Love!’), exotic nightdress (‘Real PEEK-A-BOO Frenchie’), bust creams, reducing devices, dancing lessons, and pills to provide against halitosis. However, the physical proportions and lack of warm clothing of the Wonder Woman heroine are obviously designed to catch the male eye and draw in the adult buyer. For all these girls, who are generally engaged in attacking Red Indians, African Negroes, gorillas, leopards, and the wicked queens of jungle tribes, are equipped with a Bikini uniform of some animal skin. In fact, in Jungle Thrills no 16 I actually came across a derisive reference to the new look made by one of the heroine’s henchwomen, herself got up (or down) in the briefest of shorts and bra. The most popular Wonder Woman heroine of all is apparently Sheena, a herculean blonde with hair to the waist, whose uniform is a leopard-skin swimsuit cut high on the thigh, and who wears large earrings, bangles on her wrists and ankles, and two gold bands about her biceps (jewellery is ‘in’ this year). Sheena regularly goes through all hell and back. In a typical story, in Jumbo Comics no 155, Sheena is clubbed by savages, forced to walk the plank, keel-hauled behind a ship (‘if the crocs do not get you, my dear–then my seven tests will’), thrown to lions, and left to a herd of rogue elephants, all in nine pages. In the booklet, entirely devoted to the activities of this heroine, SHEENA Queen of the Jungle, we may enjoy forty or so uninterrupted pages of this Aryan mistress–not only of the jungle but of the local natives, who bow in terror before her. As often as not these stories will show the rescue of some American girl in topee and tight-fitting jodphurs (but slightly more slender and girlish than Sheena), who is exploring the jungle. Sheena no 18 begins with a tale characteristic of this kind. Wicked natives capture and tie up the ‘civilised’ girl and prepare her for the guillotine. Sheena, however, performs a last-minute rescue, scattering the Africans with her thrashing limbs, and tossing men about like dice. In the second story Sheena spears a rogue elephant in the eye, knifes an alligator, and having quelled a Negro insurrection reports to the local commissioner (who is, of course, white), ‘You won’t have any more trouble with traders in that district, I promise you!’ In the last story, Bob, a white man and friend of Sheena is captured by a wicked Negro Queen, called Nairu. Sheena rescues him and goes for Nairu who (wise woman) runs for it–in vain, of course, ‘for the Jungle Queen’s bronzed arms locked around her...’ The last picture shows the ‘poor benighted’ ‘eathen’ bowing to the ground before the erect and rigid heroine, and submissively chorusing, ‘Sheena is the true Jungle Queen. Long Live Sheena!’ There are many other Sheena-personifications.

In Kaanga no 10 Jungle Girl rescues a friend from a gorilla, stabs two men, and one tiger, in six pages, while Kaanga’s mate, a hefty brunette, is captured, twice tied up, and finally survives a ‘wheel of a thousand torments’. Firehair, a well-developed redhead, clubs four men in Rangers Comics no 63, and Tiger Girl, in Fight Comics no 78, is thrown to crocodiles (these ‘crocs’ again–this time they end by fighting each other for her!), and, when saved, metes out justice to mere males with a ferocious bull-whip–‘Then the fury-song of that singing whip ...’ (In Famous Funnies no 204 there is a quite detailed, near-pathological whipping of a coloured man by a brawny, bosomy girl Queen. In Jungle Comics no 143 Kaanga’s mate is back being tied up once more. She is abducted on a zebra by a hulking character in a T-shirt, resembling an ex-pug, and well and truly roped up. ‘I‘ll be killed,’ she says as she squirms seductively in her bonds, ‘ripped to pieces by apes!’ Actually, the reverse is what happens in this kind of comic. Animals are no match for these Wonder Women. In no. 145 of this series, the same girl is tied up three times in ten pages, while another called Camilla (no shades of Fanny Burney here) stabs two savages, one tiger, rides a rogue elephant, and wrestles successfully with a bearded male guard. In Jungle Thrills no 16, with a cover of a buxom blonde in the grip or the perennial gorilla (animal), Rulah concludes a wild career of killing by savagely twisting her coloured opponent’s leg until he screams for mercy–‘Let me go, Jungle Goddess, and I will be your slave for life.’ It is rather understandable that in the district of New York were I live, the children play games in which the coloured ones act out the role of ‘slaves’. This last book also features two more Wonder-Jungle heroines, Tanee and Phantom Lady, both of whom run around slapping other girls to make them talk. Tanee is actually the girl-friend of Jo-Jo, a muscular white man, and they appear in other booklets of the genre. So Terrifying Tales no 11 features this couple in a story wherein Jojo rescues a beautifully proportioned pygmy queen, called Mazda, who falls in love with him.Tanee, however, appears on the scene just in time and whisks away a puzzled Jo-Jo who reflects, ‘Truly the ways of women are strange! I wonder if there is any man so wise he can understand them?’ He goes on to save Tanee, in turn, from the now monotonous croc, kills a lion on the side, and assisted by his mates breaks up a cabal of revolutionary Negroes. This booklet shows a girl’s hand being amputated by an axe and a man eaten alive by an ape, both pictures liberally bedewed with drops of carefully drawn and coloured blood. One page, a filler, is devoted to, Jungle Curiosities, supposedly true stories about the jungle. The first, lavishly illustrated, shows that ‘African gorillas have been known to steal women for their brides’. Terrors of the JUNGLE no 21, cover showing a blonde menaced by two tigers and two Negroes, features Tangi and Kala, her mate, knocking and beating out natives. In her crimson Bikini Tangi is twice KO‘ed, but she survives to open up two panthers and knock out a Negro. ‘Thud! Greeted by the natives–Tangi has captured the brutal one! You are now our MASTER, Jungle Queen!’ The gender, incidentally, might be noted. Biceps and an aggressive personality, then, are the sine qua non of the Wonder Woman heroine, who gives our highschool girl a strenuous level to live up to. With the constant tying, whipping, slapping, branding, and general torturing that continue throughout these books, there might be some justification for thinking that Wonder Woman is condemned by psychiatrists. By precious few. Until recently Wonder Woman itself was written by a psychiatrist, ‘Charles Moulton’, pseudonym of the late Dr William Moulton Marston, AB, LLB, PhD (Harvard), still graces the covers. And Dr Lauretta Bender, who appears on the ‘Editorial Advisory Board of Superman National Comics (Action Comics, Superman, Superboy, Batman, Wonder Woman, Leave It to BINKY), calls the whole type ‘A strikingly advanced concept of femininity’. Strikingly would seem to be the operative word. For these Tarzana are usually equipped, if not with a lariat, at least with a knife or cutting whip. Strip and whip might well, in fact, be the motto of the writers of these stories; and amusingly enough, I found these twin elements in our folk culture ingeniously combined by David Kashner, who appeared in the film The Sundowners. For Mr Kashner actually strips a model with a whip! Frolic, for June 1952, a pin-up mag, shows him taking the clothes off his ‘whip-tease’ girl, June McCall, who is disrobed in this way down to a prettily striped bathing costume (matching Kashn’s whip, which is likewise striped) in a mere twenty-five seconds. ‘I searched for the lash marks,’ says Robert Preston with (of course unintentional) suggestivity, ‘and didn’t find one!’ I do not intend to inflict any more of these comic-books on the reader. It is relevant to note, however, before leaving them, that at the time the above booklets were selling like hot-cakes off the news-stands and in the drugstores of the USA, The Pocket Book of Old Masters was seized as obscene in Dubuque, Iowa.

The mass of love-comics follow the general outline of the adolescent love pattern which I have sketched in above. On the whole, they contain little violence and are only as reprehensible as you consider their ethics to be. The Westerns are of course a riot of gunfire from beginning to end, and largely dispense with women. But when Roy Rogers says in one of them, ‘Flirtin’ women spell trouble’, he is being literal enough, for the villain, as often in a Roy Rogers movie, is frequently of the fair sex, who prove they can tote a Colt with the best of us. The fantastic science books, with trips to Mars and back, are increasing, but there is little new in them, except to note that our relations with our neighbouring planets are those of continual aggression. We visit these astral bodies with only one apparent intention, to conquer, and ‘Taste an Earthman’s Fist!’ is our mode of address on arrival. Vile monsters abound in these unexplored places and a girl, an attractive girl of course, and with her skirt above her hips, is apt to find herself in the jaws of a sort of leprous looking winged crocodile, like the one in Planet Comics no 69. And the inter-planetary zones have their Superman heroes too, like the Red Comet, a muscular he-man who, in this Planet Comics book, is assisted by Dolores, who clubs a man unconscious then says proudly, ‘I’ve made this mug change his mind, Red!’ This book has everything, incidentally; it even has a Wonder Woman of outer space, called Gale Allen, who is shown in the opening picture slicing off the head of a swarthy-skinned opponent who is throttling one of her female assistants. Gale out-wrestles one man, cracks another on the nut with an oar (‘Maybe this’ll put sense into you!’), and takes a third for a ‘water-baby’ ride. She is herself once captured, in the hectic six pages of her story, and abducted by the ‘copper-skinned cohorts’ who constitute her foes. As she herself has on no more than red bra and panties, secured with a wide, studded belt, knee-length boots and bracelets, and since she is slung over the black man’s shoulder, there are some moments that might conceivably be considered rather more ‘obscene’, I should have thought, than those scenes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling which gave such offence in Dubuque.

The educational, or classic, comic has made a supposedly sincere attempt to improve children’s reading in this field. Unfortunately, their sales have not been encouraging, nor their pictorial content immaculate (look at the undress of the ladies in no 99 of this series, Hamlet). Mr Legman seems to think that they may be even more dangerous when they depict violence:

 

‘Alfred Nobel is made educational in eight pages of dynamite explosions, Florence Nightingale in eight pages of Crimean War horror...The education comic...gives murder prestige. It sells children on murder the way tooth-paste is sold. Movie stars do it, duchesses do it, men of distinction do it–why don’t you?

 

‘In Hamlet, for instance, I noticed that of the forty-four pages nine were of the ghost scene, while eight more were of direct physical combat (Hamlet himself goes about most of the time with a drawn sword). Six pictures show Ophelia slowly drowning. Hamlet, however did not seem to be, in text, quite so strictly corrected as Macbeth, the ‘classic’ (in all senses) comic of which Punch made so much. There was also a Catholic comic, directed against Communism in 1949, and carrying so much bloodshed and proving so vicious in outlook that most American cities banned it. I rather like the one, however, sponsored by US industry, called The Fight For Freedom, which ascribed the American Revolutionas due in large part to ‘government planners’ in London. I hope this will be preserved.

 

 

[SOTIcollector]

I've finally got my copy of the new Parade of Pleasure. What an outstanding work! Lots of great new illos!

 

Sorry I didn't see this post till after the book was published. I suppose anything I'd contribute at this point is too late for that edition. However, we're always collecting references from SOTI, POP, L&D, etc. at the Seduction of the Innocent website (SeductionOfTheInnocent.org), so check in any time to see what books have newly been identifed from those works.

 

Keep up the good work, Greg!

 

-Stephen O'Day