Interview in Dark Worlds Quarterly

If you're like me, you enjoy the guest posts here where GW Thomas writes about pulp magazines and Golden Age comics. And you've probably also noticed at the bottom of those articles where his bio says that he's the editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Well, worlds have collided and GW was kind enough to invite me to participate in an interview for the latest issue, now online. It's a special kaiju and comics issue and I got to chat about Kill All Monsters, this blog, and just influences and stuff I love in general. The rest of the issue is cool, too, with articles about Reptilicus, Kamandi, and much much more. Please go check it out.

Guest Post | Marga the Panther Woman

By GW Thomas

Jungle lords were nothing new in 1940. Edgar Rice Burroughs created Tarzan in 1914. Johnny Weissmuller had been playing him in the movies since 1932. Tarzan knock-offs like Bomba, Og, Son of Fire, Jungle Girl, Jan of the Jungle, Kwa of the Jungle, Kaspa the Lion Man, Sorak, Hawk of the Wilderness, Bantan, and Jaragu of the Jungle filled magazines and books. So why was there a sudden spike in jungle comics in 1940?

The biggest reason for the increase in characters was the creation of a sister book for Fiction House's Jumbo Comics that featured Will Eisner's Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. The new comic was called Jungle Comics and it followed its name, featuring only jungle characters. It ran for 163 issues from January 1940 to Summer 1954. In the first year, Jungle Comics offered Kaanga, Wambi the Jungle Boy, White Panther, Tabu, Camilla, Captain Terry Thunder, Simba, King of the Beasts, Drums of the Leopard Men, White Hunters of the African Safari, Roy Lance, and Fantomah. Some of these characters were so popular they spawned comics of their own like Wambi Jungle Boy #1-18 (Spring 1942-Winter 1952) and Kaanga #1-20 (Spring 1949-Summer 1954).

All of Fiction House's competitors took notice and jungle lords and ladies began to show up shortly afterwards in many comics. Fox’s Science Comics #1 (February 1940) largely filled with costumed heroes, created their first jungle gal, Marga the Panther Woman. (This was seven or eight years before Rulah, Jo-Jo Jungle King, Zago, Tegra, and Fox's other jungle denizens.) Marga and also Hillman's awful Blanda the Jungle Queen were the first out of the gates in the race for the comic jungle. The comic's author and artist, James T Royal is not known, though it may have been Emil Gershwin using a pseudonym. Louis Cazeneuve is known to have inked other people's pencils on the strip.

Since Marga appeared in a comic dedicated to "Science" her origin had to be scientific. Marga possesses real panther abilities, such as speed and strength, along with wicked claws, because mad physio-biologist Von Dorf wanted to create a race of panther-people. Once Marga is transformed, she tries to kill the doctor so that no one else should be subjected to the treatment. She leaves, thinking him dead. Von Dorf revives, then proceeds to blow himself up out of some desire to keep his secret process from others. In the end, Marga alone will possess the panther-like abilities. As a Pre-Code comic, Marga's first adventures are violent and the tone is harsh and unfriendly.

Again, since Marga appeared in a science fiction comic, her next adventure is in a weird, futuristic city where brave flyers like Ted Grant face off against the evil Uchunko and his spaceship marauders. Marga takes a back seat as Tom rescues her from a pit filled with snakes. The story ends and the next time we see Marga, she is living in the jungle like any self-respecting jungle lady. No more sky pirates or spaceships. From now on, Marga will be a terrestrial (if highly unusual) earth dweller.

The next story was obviously inspired by the film The Wizard of Oz, because an evil scientist named Professor Meier is capturing animals and turning them into winged monkeys that he can control with his mind. The winged attackers capture Marga, and the Professor plans to make her into the general of the army of flying beasts. The serum he gives her does not turn her into a drone, but increases her already super powers. With the help of a rogue flying monkey that she calls Homer, she goes to the army of the nearby city and destroys Meier. An antidote is given to the animals and she returns them to their natural state. Homer turns out to be a police dog; now Marga's bosom companion (though we never see him again!)

After defeating the Professor, Marga gets a chance to join the circus. She becomes the star of the show with her tiger-wrestling and -throttling act. The evil Dr Borgia wants Marga, but she spurns his advances. When rival circus owner Randler wants to buy Marga out, he joins forces with Borgia to implant lion essence in the tiger, so that it will kill Marga. Marga defeats the savage beast only to become one herself, killing Borgia and Randler. She goes to trial for her crimes but the judge won't sentence her. She is free to return to the circus but chooses instead to return to the jungle. This installment is particularly noteworthy for its cartoony and inconsistent artwork.

The following story is better drawn in places (with small cribs from the Sunday funnies Tarzan) but almost lacks any real logic. The local Africans are trying to kill a rogue elephant, but Marga intervenes. With the elephant's help she rescues the village warriors. The person who was aggravating the pachyderm (not really sure who that is?) is killed, so all is well again.

The artwork up to this point has been inconsistent, with the style and conventions for speech bubbles and lettering changing each time. Now that the strip was being drawn by a single team, a standard opening was created for Marga: "Inoculated with the traits of a black panther, MARGA, an attractive white girl, joins aviator TED GRANT on an expedition into the jungle fastness." Ted Grant, now an African adventurer rather than a spaceship captain.

Shortly after this, Marga moved from Science Comics to Weird Comics where she did her thing side-by-side with The Sorceress of Zoom, Dr Mortal, and The Eagle, once again a jungle gal in a superhero magazine. But this time Marga settled into her groove with evil hunters, an occasional caveman or dinosaur, and plenty of obvious evil baddies. She rescues Ted, Ted rescues her, and nothing much changes in the jungle for a dozen more similar tales. Marga's blue-black dress is now red and her less vicious attributes (no longer a man-killer) and plots are as time-worn as bad Hollywood B-movies. And so Marga went out, not with a savage jungle yell, but with a wave and an unfulfilled promise for more adventures.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Guest Post | Clifford D Simak: The Beginnings of a Master

By GW Thomas

Clifford D Simak (1904-1988) had a writing career that ran for fifty-five years. He was one of the early SF writers who could adapt to changes brought about by John W Campbell at Astounding. The stories listed here are his early works before this transformation. Usually I lament the Campbell revolution (or at least oppose the snobbery that came of it), but in the case of Simak, I would agree that these early stories are not even close to what he would achieve later. These 1931-32 stories include four stories for Hugo Gernsback at Wonder and one for Harry Bates at the Clayton Astounding. After 1932, Cliff took a three year break, writing one tale for the short-lived semi-prozine Marvel Tales before taking another three year break. The new Simak emerges with this last tale that tackles religion head-on. When he returned in 1938, it was with "Rule 18" for John W Campbell. The old Simak was gone forever.

"The World of the Red Sun" (Wonder Stories, December 1931) was Simak's debut as one of Hugo Gernsback's growing stable of new writers. The story takes two time travelers, Harl Swanson and Bill Kressman, to Denver millions of years in the future. There they find the human race reduced to savages by a weird being calling himself Golan-Kirt. This entity from Out of the Cosmos can kill men with his mind. In an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style arena scene, the travelers take on Golan-Kirt armed only with their .45s and the knowledge that he kills with illusions. (The creature claims to be from space, but the travelers figure it is actually a mutated scientist from a scenario like that in Edmond Hamilton's "The Man Who Evolved" [Wonder Stories, April 1931]). The humans win the mental battle by ridiculing the monster; laughing at him (shades of Star Trek!). What might have been a happy Burroughsian ending turns sour though when the men try to return to their own time. Isaac Asimov noted the story in his anthology Before the Golden Age, because Simak wrote in a plain workman-like style, differing from many of the others in Gernsback's magazines, and because of the downer ending: one still mimicked in the final moments of films like The Planet of the Apes decades later.

"The Voice in the Void" (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Spring 1932) has Simak poking at religion for the first time, a theme he would tackle again and again in stories like "The Creator" (mentioned below) and in novels like Project Pope (1981). Two adventurers, Ashby and Smith, take on the Holy of Martian Holies when they steal the bones of Kell-Rabin. The Martians hunt the fugitives down and even place Smith's brain in a tube, a form of immortality. Ashby escapes with the tube as well as another - containing a Martian priest - and hides in the desert. There the three (one man and two tubes) discover an ancient pyramid from a religion that predated Kell-Rabin. Inside, Ashby finds an immense treasure and the means to exact his revenge: a vengeance that gives the story its title. Simak once again ends on a sour, ironic note, but does reveal the mystery that drives the entire story: What is in the coffin of Kell-Rabin?

Stories using amputated brains began as early as MH Hasta's "The Talking Brain" in Amazing Stories, August 1926, but really take off after Edmond Hamilton's "The Comet Doom" (Amazing Stories, January 1928), inspiring HP Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, August 1931), Hawk Carse's disembodied scientists in "The Affair of the Brains" (Astounding, March 1932) by Anthony Gilmore, Eando Binder's oft-reprinted "Enslaved Brains" (Wonder Stories, July-September 1934), and the classic novel Donovan's Brain (1942) by Curt Siodmak.

"Mutiny on Mercury" (Wonder Stories, March 1932) is the high-point of the early Simak. In this story, he describes a Martian rebellion from the point of view of an Earthman in a domed space station on Mercury. Besides writing a good action adventure, Simak describes the dangerous existence on the first planet along the strip between the hot and dark side: the only place living things can survive. When the Martians and their Moon Men stooges destroy the airlock on one of the domed stations, the author gets to tell what losing an atmosphere from a spaceport would be like. Simak does a great job of creating a Solar System of varied humanoids, like Leigh Brackett would do later in her Interplanetary mythos. Simak finishes the story with a space-flyer battle worthy of Edmond Hamilton. The only criticism I have of the story is its out-of-date (even for 1932) Imperialism. The Martians and other aliens are presented as inferior and conniving, but it is hard to identify with a race of men who would subjugate such people.

"Hellhounds of the Cosmos" (Astounding, June 1932) almost feels like a regression after "Mutiny on Mercury." Some of this may be the fact that Simak was writing for Harry Bates instead of Hugo Gernsback. The tale begins like so many others at the Clayton Astounding: a world under attack by alien invaders. Here Simak deviates from the usual story of a brave young scientist who saves the world (and a pretty girl) with an invention. His hero is a newspaperman, Henry Woods, who visits a scientist, Dr. Silas White, and discovers that the black terrors that have been attacking the world are creatures from the fourth dimension. Simak gives a rather convoluted explanation for how these creatures are actually less evolved than the beings in our three dimensional world. All goobley-gook aside, Dr White invents a machine that will translate humans into the fourth dimension to strike back at the invaders. Ninety-nine men go into the weird light, including our newspaper reporter, to find that in the other dimension they form a singular creature, named Mal Shaff. This weird brute has a knock-down fight with another monster named Ouglat, amidst a world of steel cliffs and red skies. Mal Shaff begins to lose because Ouglat is growing bigger. The invaders have been recalled from Earth and grow Ouglat to mammoth size. Dr. White saves Mal Shaff by sending in the Marines, allowing Mal Shaff to destroy his opponent. Once victorious, other fourth dimensional creatures invite Mal Shaff to stay and none of the men who went across ever come back. Simak, master of the downer ending, strikes again! How un-Astounding!

What I found most interesting about this story was comparing it to the horror fiction of Frank Belknap Long. His province of other-dimensional monsters can be seen in stories like "The Space Eaters" (Weird Tales, July 1928), "The Horror From the Hills" (Weird Tales, January-March1931), and especially "The Hounds of Tindalos" (Weird Tales, March 1929). Long's Cthulhu Mythos horror fiction centers on weird other-dimensions, attempting to create a Lovecraftian frisson of terror. Simak (who was probably familiar with Long's work) tries for something more SF and less horror, but it is certainly his closest to a horror tale in these early stories.

"Asteroid of Gold" (Wonder Stories, November 1932) has the Drake brothers mining a gold-rich asteroid when space pirates capture them. The leader of the pirates, the notorious Max Robinson, devises a cruel torture for the two. He places their ship on the twin of the asteroid, another rock revolving just out of reach, and leaves the two men only three air bottles. Max glories in the idea of the two close brothers fighting for that last canister of air. The Drakes settle down to die with dignity, but chance intervenes. A meteor hits the Twin, causing it to fly towards the asteroid. A desperate race begins, with the men leaping from rock to rock (seen in the illo) in an attempt to avoid being crushed. The plot almost feels like a Campbell puzzle story (like Asimov's "Marooned Off Vesta"), where the two men would have used the third tank to propel them through space to the Twin. This doesn't happen, but some Age of Wonder action and excitement does instead. If Simak had written this ten years later, it would have been a much different ending.

"The Creator" (Marvel Tales, March-April 1935) marks the final days of Simak's first apprenticeship. As F Lyall points out in The Creator and Other Stories (1993):

CDS was not always serene in his attitude to such questions [religious matters]. "The Creator" is very different. In its time it was notorious. CDS wrote it in 1933 or '34 after he had more or less decided that his dalliance with sf was over. The editor WL Crawford persuaded him to write one more... And, though it bears the stamp of its era, and though it is a product of a young writer, it stands as a stimulus to thought even today.

The plot of "The Creator" has two scientists, Scott Marston and Peter Sands, discover time- and space-travel through a combination of machinery, mediation, and dreams. One vision in particular is of a vast laboratory. When they finally transfer their physical bodies there, they meet the Creator, a being of glowing light. The Creator introduces them to three other time travelers from other worlds. He also shows them our universe, a mushy grey thing that the Creator made, then injected with life. When the men discover that the Creator is working on a method of destroying all matter and eradicate our universe completely, they join up with the other aliens and defy their master. Using a machine constructed by one of the other travelers (an alien that looks something like a stick bug), the time travelers flee with the universe in a bubble of purple force field. The Creator tries to destroy them, but is himself destroyed. The creatures from the universe have killed their god. When Marston and Sands return to Earth, something goes wrong and they end up lost in time.

Looking at the story, we can see that Simak has rewritten "The World of the Red Sun." He spends more time in explaining the time machine and its creation, but ultimately it is the same tale. Instead of Golan-Kirt, we have the Creator; instead of two men defeating him, we have five time travelers of different races. Again, there's the suggestion that the Creator is himself a lab experiment from some other, higher being, and finally, there's the unhappy ending with the humans lost in time. If Simak was leaving SF for good, perhaps he felt that repeating himself, enlarging on and improving his first effort, was not a bad way to finish off where he had begun.

The early parts of the story are quite Lovecraftian, similar in idea to HPL's "Beyond the Walls of Sleep," but like with "Hellhounds of the Cosmos," Simak doesn't use the device to produce creepy thrills. Instead, it's an SF means to tell his story. He would later in his career give a nod to Lovecraft in “The Call From Beyond” and in the episodic fantasy novel Where the Evil Dwells (1982), when the adventurers enter a temple inhabited by other dimensional monsters right out of Arkham. Perhaps in 1934, he had contemplated joining the Weirdies in Mythos-building and remembered that time fondly fifty years later.

All the stories mentioned above are worthy of reading, but when I look at them critically I see that most could be changed to ordinary adventure stories quite easily. "The Voice in the Void" could be a desert adventure with Arabs, "Mutiny on Mercury": an airplane adventure; "Asteroid of Gold": a pirate yarn. Despite these connections to other forms of pulp writing, Simak does play with some big SF ideas. His time travel story "The World of the Red Sun" throws off big ideas a little too quickly, never really developing some of them. Here was a young writer excited about all the possible stories to tell. But by 1935, Simak was dissatisfied with the field. As Lyall wrote, he "more or less decided that his dalliance with sf was over" and he was moving on. It took John W Campbell and Astounding Science Fiction to change Cliff's mind. With SF going in a new direction, Simak joined the ranks of Asimov, Heinlein, de Camp, and others in pushing SF forward. A necessary evolution, I suppose, but I have a fondness for these early stories. They spark with the possibilities of what is to come. Clifford D Simak was one of those early torchbearers and we can only thank him for all the great stories he wrote.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Guest Post | The Four Color Adventures of Frosty the Snowman

By GW Thomas

From just about the very beginning of comic books, publishers have realized that with the extra leisure and more generous spending habits of December, it’s a great time to sell more comics. Thus the Christmas Special. From Bugs Bunny to Superman, the Christmas comic became a seasonal surety on wire store racks.

1950 was the year Gene Autry tried for Christmas gold a second time. His first hit had been “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which had been Number 1 the year previous. His rendition of Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson’s song “Frosty the Snowman” proved almost as impressive (getting to Number 7), adding yet another entry to the pantheon of non-religious Christmas characters. The song would have to wait nineteen years to get a cartoon based on it, but in the meantime, the comic specials filled that void.

Dell had the popular anthology comic, Four Color, which alternated between familiar newspaper comic characters, Disney and Warner Brothers, to movie and TV adaptations. The year after Autry’s hit, readers saw the first Frosty the Snowman comic with Four Color #359 (November 1951). Written and drawn by Jon Stanley and Dan Gormley, it set the pattern for the next ten years. Gormley would draw seven of the eleven issues, each showing up in November or December.

Many of the stories are suggested by the original song. “Before I melt away” inspires several stories where Frosty needs to keep himself from melting, such as “The Heat Wave” (December 1961). “There must have been some magic in that old silk hat they found” gives us several stories about the hat, whether stolen by evil snowmen or lost in a mix-up after being cleaned. Later, when the cartoons were done in the 1960s, they too latched onto these ideas.

The first full-length story, “The Evil Snowman,” features a villainous snowman with a black Russian beard. The story would get a second version (called “The Snowman Contest”) in the final issue where the evil snowman wears a checked vest instead. (After eleven years of stories, even Gormley had run dry.) This first issue also introduces some of Frosty’s sidekicks: a rabbit named Skeeter, Santa Claus (with his elves and reindeer), Jack Frost, the Straw Man, and a gang of kids who come to the rescue whenever Frosty needs them.

Most of the Frosty plots follow similar themes. There are a good number of stories in which Frosty loses his hat like, “Frosty the Snowman and the Old Top Hat” (November 1952) and “Magic Hat” (December 1958). He doesn’t turn into an immobile snowman, but he can’t walk around (or skip and dance, as he often points out) either, and it is up to kids or animals or mere chance to bring his hat back.

Other stories focus on Frosty as helper or hero, usually for a small child or animals, like the ducks and other forest creatures in “Saving Frozen Ducks” (November 1952), “Frosty the Snowman Makes the Forest Safe”(November 1953), and “Frosty the Snowman and Peter Polar Bear” (November 1954). In these tales, Frosty may go on a long journey, giving the story a grander scope than the neighborhood tales. Sometimes he is helping Santa Claus, like when the elves all come down with the flu or the toys are missing. Frosty encounters a number of witches in these stories, as they require a villain, like the one who has taken all the hobby horses in “Frosty the Snowman and the Crystal Castle” (November 1953). Wolves and foxes also show up as bad guys.

Frosty also acts as teacher sometimes to boys who have lost their way. “Bad Bobbie” (November 1953) has Bobbie tricking Frosty into shoveling the walk for him, but when Bobbie tries to get Frosty onto skis, the tables are turned. Frosty is an expert skier and causes a pile of snow to recover Bobby’s walkway. These bad boys usually see the error of their ways and become good with Frosty’s help.

And lastly, my favorite of the Frosty stories are mysteries, where Frosty acts as detective. The November 1954 issue had “Down on the Farm” where a “ghost” is playing practical jokes on the farm animals. Frosty, of course, uses his little white cells and figures out who is the culprit. “The Missing Page” (December 1960-February 1961) has Frosty help a girl find part of a missing book.

In 1964, Rankin-Bass' animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer would premiere. A perennial favorite, it featured a snowman named Sam, not Frosty (and modeled on the actor who played him, Burl Ives). In 1969, Rankin-Bass acquired the Frosty property and put out an animated cartoon of him that has also become a seasonal fixture, with Jackie Vernon as the loveable snowman. R-B did a crossover cartoon in 1979 called Rudolph the Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys. All of these animated shows remind me of material in the Dell comics, especially the idea of Frosty's becoming associated with Santa and the North Pole, though it is hard to say if they had any influence as many of the ideas can be found in the original song.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Guest Post | Groo vs Conan: A Hyborian Romp

By GW Thomas

December 1932: Conan the Cimmerian explodes onto the pages of Weird Tales in "The Phoenix on the Sword" by Robert E Howard. Not the first sword-and-sorcery tale (that was Howard's earlier Kull tale, "The Shadow Kingdom"), but "Phoenix" did begin a fantasy franchise that is still a hit today in novels, comics, and occasionally films and television.

Sergio Aragones was born just a little under five years later, in Spain. He rose to fame as a cartoonist in Mad Magazine, drawing all those little margin cartoons beginning in 1963. Mark Evanier (who will come in this story later) estimates that Sergio drew over 12,000 of them.

In May 1982, fifty years after Conan stepped onto the sword-and-sorcery stage, Groo the Wanderer appeared for the first time in the back pages of Destroyer Duck #1. This four-page battle scene between Groo and a four-armed dinosaur ninja goes badly for the princess whom Groo is attempting to save. The strip bears only Aragones name as he had yet to team up with writer Mark Evanier (see, told ya). This he would do for a back-up story in Starslayer #5 (November 1982). A five-pager this time, announcing the coming of Groo's own comic. And so it went. First Pacific Comics, then Marvel's Epic line, then Dark Horse. He is Groo "the Wanderer" after all.

In July 2014, we finally saw the stars align and the impossible happened. Conan, superstar of sword-and-sorcery, met Groo, super parody of same, in Groo vs. Conan, a four-part series. Begun in 2011, unavoidable delays due to back surgery kept the crossover from seeing print until 2014.

The plot is made up of three threads: first, that of the creators Sergio and Mark, who are trying to save a comic shop from being closed by a ruthless lawyer. Sergio ends up in the hospital and receives multiple medicinal shots, resulting in him running around the city in a hospital gown thinking he is Conan on a glorious adventure.

The second thread is Groo's, as he is hired to stop a protest around a bakery that is being closed by a ruthless vizier. When the townsfolk hear that Groo is coming, they cry that a terrible monster has come to kill them all.

The third thread is Conan's as he leaves his home to face the terrible monster Groo. The two meet and different versions of their meeting are told in taverns around the town. Meanwhile, back in Conan's village, his second in command Olaf takes over, having heard that Conan lost to Groo and is dead. All these threads rush together in what turns out to be a fairly predictable ending. Lawyer and vizier are defeated as Groo and Conan team up to fight a common enemy (what else would happen in a cross-over!). Poor Olaf when he finds out that Conan has not fallen in battle...

[NB: It turns out this wasn't the first time Sergio Aragones appeared as himself in a comic. In Jon Sable, Freelance #33 (Febuary 1986), Aragones is invited to draw the comic book version of BB Flemm's children's fantasy called "Cave of the Half-Pints," about leprechauns living in Central Park. Aragones appears alongside characters like Jon Sable and even ends up in a hot tub with his female agent.]

The final result of Groo versus Conan is a fun romp. The Aragones art is hilarious as always. To blend the more realistic Conan art of Tom Yeates must have been challenging, but the effect is good; something similar to Pete's Dragon animation from Disney back in the day. The jokes are fast and furious, with Evanier taking good-natured shots at hospitals, health care, the police, comic book fans, and best of all, at Sergio and Mark and their long working relationship. The sword-and-sorcery jokes were not as many as I would have liked, but after thirty-two years of Groo comics, what's left? Conan plays the straight man most often, with lines about how he must endure Groo's stupidity. Like so many actors faced with acting with a comedic maniac like Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, what do you do? Stand back and let them fly.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Guest Post | G Peyton Wertenbaker, Science Fiction Pioneer

By GW Thomas

Early science fiction writers had it tough. Little or no pay and even if you succeeded, everybody thought you were nuts for writing "that junk." It should not be surprising that many of them were young men trying out a new interest. One of these was Green Peyton Wertenbaker, a sixteen-year-old who submitted his first story to Hugo Gernsback's Science & Invention, a non-fiction magazine that occasionally published "Scientifiction" stories. Wertenbacker's first try was called "The Man From the Atom" and it appeared in April 1923. But Hugo had bigger plans for Scientifiction and G Peyton Wertenbaker.

April 1926 saw the reality of Gernsback's dream of a magazine filled only with science fiction. It was called Amazing Stories and it reprinted Wertenbaker's tale along with Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Allan England, Austin Hall, and Edgar Allan Poe. The entire first issue was made up of reprints. So was the second, with the exception of "The Man from the Atom (Sequel)." As suggested by its odd title, it was the second part of Wertenbaker's tale of the man who could control his size. It was also the first new science fiction story to appear in an all-science-fiction magazine. So why isn't G Peyton Wertenbaker a household name?

Mike Ashley in The History of the Science Fiction Magazines, Part 1 (1974) wrote of Wertenbaker: "He was born in Virginia in 1907, and deserted the science fiction field after but five stories, all competently written and deserving of further reprinting. (Although one must grant the licence of some rickety science)." Like so many writers after him, including RF Starzl, Edwin K Sloat, Charles W Differin, and many others, Wertenbaker would leave SF behind to pursue more lucrative fields. (He would become a professional technical writer, a writer of regional novels, London correspondent for Fortune magazine, serve in the Navy, then work at NASA. He would help Hubertus Strughold write The Green and Red Planet (1953), a scientific appraisal of the possibilities of life on Mars. What more could a SF writer want?

His "but five stories" include:

"The Man from the Atom" (Science & Invention, April 1923 and reprinted in Amazing Stories, April 1926). A young man named Kirby, eager for adventure, volunteers to try out a new device that Professor Martyn has created, one that can expand or shrink someone to infinite size. Kirby experiences growing larger than the planet, then the solar system, then the universe. But afterwards, he pines for Earth when he realizes that while he was expanding, time was moving faster back home than for him. Even returning to normal size, everyone on Earth has long since passed away. The tale ends with a cryptic mention of Kirby's going to live with a cruel, but advanced race that treats him like a primitive caveman. This story was significant, for it built on ideas Ray Cummings had used in "The Girl in the Golden Atom" (All-Story Weekly, March 15, 1919) and Henry Hasse would expand on in "He Who Shrank"(Amazing Stories, August 1936).

"The Man From the Atom (Sequel)" (Amazing Stories, May 1926) shows the race that Kirby ends up with. They are an advanced people, but the men are all emotionless scientists and the women, who are considered inferior, are more like our own Earthfolk. Kirby's education into this new civilization falls to a girl named Vinda. It is Vinda's uncle who finds a way for Kirby to get home to Earth -- sort of. He postulates that time is circular and that if Kirby expands to great size in a certain fashion he could return to a world that is the next incarnation of 20th Century Earth. The scientists calculate exactly how this can be done and Kirby is too busy with the expectation of returning home to notice that Vinda has fallen in love with him (even though she is programmed to marry Edvar in a stale, emotionless marriage). Kirby returns home only to realize he too is in love with Vinda and leaves again to find the next incarnation of her and her world. The final product of all this expanding (and time traveling) is pretty annoying since Kirby comes off as being a bit thick. The influence of HG Wells's The Time Machine is obvious, with the Time Traveler returning to Weena's time at the end.

"The Coming of the Ice" (Amazing Stories, June 1926) was written when Wertenbaker was nineteen and was the first new story not based on a reprint. This tale follows Dennell, a man who gains immortality by an operation. The doctor Sir John Granden and Dennell's fiancee Alice die in an auto accident, leaving the immortal to suffer the long years ahead in loneliness. We follow his years as an academic, taking multiple PHDs, but ultimately being left behind as the human race evolves beyond his capabilities. Dennell suffers as a primitive curiosity as the human race grows large brain and weak bodied. When the ice comes, this proves to his advantage, being physically superior to the future humans. It becomes bad, with only a remnant of mankind living at the Equator. The immortal is forced to feed on his fellow men until the last survivors commit suicide together. He is alone and writing a history of mankind that no one will ever read. The story showed a much finer touch to the clunkier "The Man From the Atom."

"The Chamber of Life" (Amazing Stories, October 1929) follows Barret, a filmmaker who wakes up in a lake. While returning home he recalls the night before when he had met a scientist named Melbourne. Piecing together what has happened, Barrett remembers that Melbourne showed him his "Chamber of Life," a virtual reality room that took Barrett to a perfect world where he met Selda and fell in love. The Chamber of Life acts directly on the brain so when Barrett left the chamber he experienced both worlds before ending up in the lake. The story ends with the man sadder, knowing he will never see Selda again, but unwilling to find Melbourne and return to her. Many SF critics credit Ray Bradbury's "The Veldt" as the inspiration for the Star Trek holodeck, but this story predates Bradbury by twenty-one years. It even has the germ of the famous Geordie LaForge/Leah Brahms love story arc. That Bradbury read this story in his youth is likely. Beside the holodeck inspiration, this story, with its fragmented structure, shows Wertenbaker taking a new, maturer command of his writing. It is in my opinion his best work.

"The Ship That Turned Aside" (Amazing Stories, March 1930) (as Green Peyton) is a variation from Wertenbaker's usual formula. In this tale, a ship passes into the fourth dimension and a scientist named Pretloe offers his ideas on what has happened. Captain Weeks discovers an island that the narrator, Pretloe, and Weeks explore. There they find a city that they approach, only to find themselves in Paris. Another doorway from the fourth dimension lies there. Wertenbaker anticipates much of the interest in the Bermuda Triangle with this tale. EF Bleilier thought this tale one of the best to appear in Amazing Stories.

"Elaine's Tomb" (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Winter 1931) tells of a college professor, Alan Frazer, who is madly in love with one of his students, Elaine. He goes to Egypt with a fellow teacher, Weber, who is trying to decode an ancient secret that predated the Egyptian civilization. While there, Frazer dies of a tropical fever, but before he dies he gives Weber permission to preserve his body as the ancients did. He wakes to find himself in the far future where the sun is old and red. He is revived by the future humans who turn out to be lazy, disinterested folk, who have all their needs met by robots. Frazer discovers there is a famous building in the north called "Elaine's Tomb" and he must go there. Ice has claimed the northern and southern points of the globe, but Frazer flies from Cairo in a flying machine. He stops at Mexico City and the Tower of Science. There, a scientist named Kivro, helps him to locate the tomb, which lies in what was once Chicago. North America is covered in glacial ice and inhabited by diminutive savages. Frazer finds the tomb resting in a village of these primitives. He uses a ray device to break into the tomb and revives Elaine. When they leave, the villagers appear and tell Frazer that Elaine is their queen. In the struggle to escape, the flying ship is damaged by the ray device and the couple are stranded in the cold. They decide to walk even though they know they will freeze to death. Exhausted, David covers Elaine before passing out. He wakes to find they have been rescued by Kivro. The tale ends with the couple contemplating their life in this strange world. This last romance shows that Wertenbaker had grown to be an SF writer of some ability.

Wertenbaker's favorite device is the younger man who tries out a scientific discovery made by an older man, always an avante garde scientist, working outside the accepted norms of science. Sometimes he is a kooky inventor like Professor Martyn; sometimes a respectable surgeon like Sir John Granden. The device is always the same though: the older man makes a discovery, but the younger man is game to try it out, usually with terrible consequences. If he had continued to write, it would have been interesting to see how he would leave this formula behind. How much of it was his own - and how much simply done to please Gernsback's requirement for scientist heroes and weird gadgets - we will never know. Wertenbaker's increasing ability to handle the human story within his narratives suggests better things to come.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Guest Post | The Jungle Cover Triangle

By GW Thomas

Looking at copies of Jumbo Tales I was first struck by how lush these covers were (and who could refuse buying them?), but secondly how each followed a formula of construction I like to call the Triangle. There is some variation, but the most popular examples feature three main focal points set in a triangle. These included the star hero or heroine, a threat (an animal or villain attacking), and a victim to be saved. The artist could vary which was largest in the picture but all three had to appear within that triangle. This got me looking back. When did this start? Did all jungle-themed comics have this cover formula?

I started with the oldest comics, the Tarzan newspaper strip that began in 1929 (the Ape Man actually came late to comic books in 1947). Typically, especially during the film cover era, these were not "triangular" but usually a double image, Tarzan striking a pose with a weapon or object in his hand. The publicity stills of Lex Barker or Gordon Scott were easily produced and promoted the film's main asset, the actor. The later covers were paintings and required more animals and fantastic villains to be featured in them.

But when Real Adventures Publishing entered the scene in 1938 with their general audience comic, Jumbo Comics, they didn't know that within their second year every cover would be a jungle cover, as their character Sheena, Queen of the Jungle rose to prominence in their stable of characters. By #18 (August 1940), the superhero covers were gone and the jungle would be featured on every issue until #159 in May 1952. That's 141 issues over 12 years! But that's just Jumbo Comics. Their sister magazine Jungle Comics, featuring Kaanga, would run 163 issues from January 1946 to Summer 1954. And then there was Kaanga, 20 issues on his own from Spring 1949-Summer 1954, with every cover a jungle triangle.

The triangle had become the norm. Whether it was Rulah, Zoot Comics, Zegra, Jungle Lil, Jo-Jo, White Princess of the Jungle, or Yarmak in Australia, they all used the same formula. The one exception was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a solo comic that for 18 issues ran from Winter 1942 to Winter 1952-3. The Sheena covers sometimes returned to the Tarzan-style double image, with Sheena holding a weapon. Her star had risen high enough she could stand with the Ape Man.

One variation of the triangle is what I call the Square. This works the same as the Triangle, but the artist sneaks in a fourth figure, usually a second animal, such as two hyenas rather than one, or a mount upon which the hero/heroine rides, such as an elephant or zebra. The Square came along in later years as the cover artists must have been quite bored by the typical cover of Sheena throwing herself from a tree limb to intervene with an evil hunter or tribesman.

Where did the Jungle Triangle come from? Was Jumbo Comics #15 (the first full Sheena cover in May 1940) the first to use it? Not at all. I got to thinking about the very first Tarzan illustration of them all, Clinton Pettee's cover for Tarzan of the Apes (All-Story, October 1912). There was the triangle! Tarzan straddling a lion, about to plunge his knife into its side, while on the ground, John Clayton lies, the intended victim.

And of course, the jungle pulps later became jungle comics, as companies like Real Adventures phased out or doubled up their pulps - like Jungle Stories - with comics. These too had covers and what do you know... the Triangle! Clinton Pettee started it, the pulps and comics continued it, and even Frank Frazetta, the master painter, used it in 1952 for his Thun'da comics, which he abandoned when the strip dropped the caveman and dinosaurs angle. Frazetta returned to it in the 1960s when he came to paint his Tarzan covers like Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. The fierce lion attacking Jane is about to get a surprise as Tarzan comes to the rescue.

Later jungle comics such as Shanna the She-Devil and Ka-Zar did not use this formula as often (what would be so old-fashioned by the 1970s), but rather the typical Marvel-style cover. DC's Tarzan and Korak under Joe Kubert harkened back more to the old days, but Kubert adds a sizzle to the old formula that makes it his own. The most modern jungle girl covers by Dave Stevens or Frank Cho look more like publicity stills to a Sheena movie or pin-up art. The triangle lives on but only in subtle ways.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Guest Post | November Joe: Canada's Sherlock Holmes

By GW Thomas

Hesketh Prichard

The Northern was Canada’s one true contribution to genre literature. The majority of Northerns are tales of fur trappers or gold miners: strong men and women pitied against the rough conditions of life in the wilderness. One book amongst these tales of hunting, trapping, and the lives of the animals that dwell in quiet places belongs to another genre as well. The book is November Joe (1913) by Hesketh Prichard. Despite being a Northern of the highest order, it is also a detective novel, or rather, a collection of detective stories.

Prichard's detective possesses the Sherlockian ability to see what others do not: "...Where a town-bred man would see nothing but a series of blurred footsteps in the morning dew, an ordinary dweller in the woods could learn something from them, but November Joe can often reconstruct the man who made them, sometimes in a manner and with an exactitude that has struck me as little short of marvelous."

The character of November Joe is incredible, but no more incredible than the man who created him. Hesketh Prichard was the son of a British officer who died weeks before his son's birth. Raised in England by his mother, he trained for the Law but became a writer instead. Through his acquaintance with JM Barrie, Prichard and his mother went to work for Cyril Arthur Pearson, the owner of Pearson's Magazine in 1897. Under the pseudonym E and H Heron, the mother-son team wrote a dozen tales of ghostbreaker Flaxman Low. But Hesketh was not limited to horror stories. He wrote books about hunting, sports, and his travels. These caught the attention of President Teddy Roosevelt who called Prichard's Through Trackless Labrador (1911) the best book of the season.

With the coming of World War I, Prichard enlisted as an "eyewitness officer" in charge of war correspondents. His observations at the front led him to lower the number of British casualties from snipers. He developed several techniques to locate German snipers, including inventing the dummy head and improved trench design. He also spent his time and his own money improving British sniping rifles and techniques. For this he was given the Distinguished Service Order in 1917. To say the least, Hesketh Pricard knew guns, shooting, and the wilds of Canada; all part and parcel of the story of November Joe.

November Joe begins with our Watson, Mr. James Quaritch, leaving work for three months to go shoot moose. His friend, Sir Andrew McLerrick, recommends November Joe as his guide. Upon arriving in the woods of Quebec where Joe lives, Quaritch is asked to deliver a message to Joe. The Provincial Police offer him fifty dollars if he can find the killer of a dead trapper. The hunting trip off, Quaritch convinces Joe to let him tag along.

THE CASES OF NOVEMBER JOE

"The Crime at Big Tree Portage" gives Quaritch plenty of opportunities to see November Joe in action. The two men go to the lumber camp at Big Tree Portage where the dead man, Henry Lyon, lies. Joe quickly accesses the few clues, seeing that the killer pulled up in a canoe, called to the man, and then shot him, leaving virtually no evidence. But Joe isn't stymied. He backtracks Lyon to his camp before the murder. Here he finds two beds of spruce boughs and evidence of the identity of a second man. Going to the small town of Amiel, November Joe finds out the background of Lyon's life, the names of all the men away trapping, and quickly narrows his suspect list to one man. He and Quaritch visit the man and quickly get a confession. When they learn of his reasons for the killing, Joe helps him destroy evidence, making it impossible for the police to follow the trail. The fifty dollars is not as important to Joe as his sense of backwoods justice.

"The Seven Lumberjacks" has local tree-fallers being robbed by a gang of thieves. False evidence has them accusing their boss, Mr. Close, of the deed, but Joe's careful examination of the ground tells him that the gang is only one man, and one of the lumberjacks. He sets a trap too tempting for the thief to resist.

"The Black Fox Skin" has a widow, Sally Rone, seeking out Joe because someone is robbing her traps: a ploy to force her to marry or starve. One of the pelts that is taken is a black fox pelt worth eight hundred dollars. Suspicion falls on Val Black, one of Sally's suitors, when he is found with stolen furs and a condemning bullet is found in Sally's cabin. November Joe suspects a frame-up. He sets a trap for the culprit and Sally and Val are free to marry.

"The Murder at the Duck Club" is almost an English cosy with its select club members and enclosed space. Young Ted Galt is accused of murdering Judge Harrison while out shooting geese. The tracks do nothing to clear the fiance of Harrison's daughter, Eileen. Instead of tracks, Joe examines the guns that have been so damning for Galt, as only he uses size 6 shot in his shotgun. Joe gleans a different motive and quickly rounds up the killer, someone else with a grudge against the judge.

"The Case of Miss Virginia Plank" has November and Quaritch looking for a murdered girl. November's careful tracking proves the girl is not dead, but kidnapped. Later, after meeting the kidnappers (a big man who talked and a small one who didn't), November is onto the truth. The tracks of the small man reveal his moccasins are too large. November knows that Virginia Plank was the small man and the kidnapping is a set-up. With a knowledge of civilized girls and a little poking around, he identifies the girl's accomplice, Hank Harper, and finds her at his cabin. Virginia explains why she pulled the stunt, and like in "The Crime at Big Tree Portage," November's sense of justice outweighs his sense of law.

"The Hundred Thousand Dollar Robbery" has Joe following a missing banker named Atterson, who has absconded with $100,000 in securities. Joe finds the man, but realizes that he has been robbed in turn and in fact used by another to commit the crime. He deduces who would have been able to turn Atterson's head and tracks down the woman, getting the money back.

"The Looted Island" has a fox farmer named Stafford robbed of $15,000 in fur. His employee, Aleut Sam, is also missing. Joe agrees to track down the culprits for ten percent of the furs' value. The island is frozen and icy, so there aren't any tracks to follow. Instead, November examines the fox pens and the cabin where the robbers camped out for a few days. This produces some information, like the fact that all the carcasses are from red foxes, not black. Someone has taken the foxes and tried to make it look like they were killed. Before they can act, the three men notice smoke coming from the neighboring island. Here they find Sam who tells a story of being stranded for eleven days. November examines his campfire and knows he is lying. The ashes indicate only a two-day stay, as Sam has no axe with him. Stafford forces the truth out of Sam and the men are off to Jurgenson's fur farm. The Swede can’t deny the evidence November provides and agrees to return the black foxes and two extra for their trouble.

"The Mystery of Fletcher Buckman" is a traditional train murder mystery. Buckman is an oil expert traveling with his wife. He is to make a report that will either increase or decrease certain stocks. The man is found dead, hanging like a suicide. November quickly puts this idea to rest for he finds fingermarks on the man's throat where he was strangled. The report has also been stolen. A man who had been arguing with Buckman, a down-and-out oil worker named Knowles, looks like the killer, but November proves this untrue based on the clues in the murdered man's car. Taking all the evidence and geography in mind, November leads the provincial police to the post office where the killer is about to mail the stolen report. This story breaks one of the classic Ronald Knox's fair-play rules: "The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story...". The culprit is never even named, let alone known to November Joe. The story is more about proving Knowles innocent and tracking the killer.

The remaining chapters, "Linda Petersham," "Kalmacks," "The Men of the Mountains," "The Man in the Black Hat," "The Capture," and "The City or the Woods" tell the final tale of November Joe. (The previous chapters were obviously short stories sold to magazines, and now Prichard is attempting to give the book a final episode to fill it out.) Quaritch is approached by an old family friend, Linda Petersham. She's worried about her father, who has purchased a large hunting concession called the Kalmacks. In fairness, he paid out the local squatters, but someone has sent a death threat if Petersham doesn't pay another $5000. Quaritch brings in November Joe and all four are off to the wilds, surrounded by lurking danger.

Upon their arrival, Petersham is informed that one of his game wardens, Bill Worke, was shot through the knee while at Senlis Lake. November's tracking about the lake finds a 45.75 caliber cartridge. November has Petersham dump two loads of sand from the lake around the house to improve tracking. This keeps the blackmailers away for a while, but eventually they make their demands that the $5000 dollars be left at Butler's Cairn. The demand comes from a masked man who holds up the other game warden, Ben Puttick, at rifle point. Petersham doesn't want to pay and Joe agrees. He slips out the window and covers Butler's Cairn, but no one shows. This makes him suspicious so he sets up a plan for the following day.

November leaves for Senlis Lake, making sure everyone knows where he is going. Shots are heard and Quaritch runs to the lake to find Joe shot. Together they look at the body of the shooter, a man in a black hat with a beard. Joe has killed him with a shot to the throat. Quaritch carries Joe back to the cabin where he reveals that the mole in their group is Puttick. The dead shooter is identified as Dandy Tomlinson, who with his brother, Muppy (both names worthy of Jack London), devised the plan with Puttick.

Mystery solved, Petersham tries to show his gratitude to November by offering to set him up in business. Linda encourages November to take the offer so that she can marry him. In the end, November Joe refuses, returning to his woods. Prichard leaves just enough of an opening for a sequel if the book should sell well. (As no sequel ever happened, I guess it did not.)

What struck me as interesting about this ending is how, in essence, it is the same as the final pages of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs would write his most famous novel around the same time, so I'm not suggesting either author had any influence on the other. What I am suggesting is that the theme of both is that the Natural Man refuses to be corrupted or tamed by civilization. Tarzan returns to his jungle, more ape than man. The difference is that Tarzan of the Apes was a huge success followed by twenty-three sequels. The first of those was The Return of Tarzan, in which Tarzan and Jane are united at last. Jane and Tarzan build a ranch and remain in Africa. This is a choice that November Joe refuses to think of for Linda Petersham. He knows she is a creature of civilization and will never be happy living the mean existence of a trapper's wife.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Guest Post | Manly Wade Wellman's Hok the Mighty

By GW Thomas

Prehistoric fiction began almost as soon as Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. A lot of this early fiction seems silly in light of our current theories and archaeological discoveries, but some remains readable. HG Wells is one of these writers. He wasn't the first to pen a romance that included neanderthals, but he was certainly one of the most influential.

Wells' first try was called "A Story of the Stone Age" (1897). It doesn't feature any neanderthals, but is a tale of a rivalry between Uya and Ugh-lomi for the girl Eudena. This story was followed by the more important (if much shorter) "The Grisly Folk" (The Storyteller, April 1921). It is this one that I believe more likely inspired the pulp Stone Age tales such as Robert E Howard’s first sale, “Spear and Fang” and Manly Wade Wellman's Hok the Mighty series. Unlike "A Story of the Stone Age," "The Grisly Folk" is not expanded out in a full narrative, but reads more like an outline for a series of stories (an outline that Wellman gladly fills in). Wells postulates a small band of human hunters pressed north by competition and how they would survive against the grisly folk. He also tells how the neanderthals would become rarer and were the basis of the troll and ogre stories of childhood. Many of the elements in Wellman's first few Hok tales come right out of Wells's sketch. As with so much pulp SF, Wells is the wellspring.

Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty from Paizo Press collects all of the Hok saga nicely. I love Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John and Kardios stories, as well as the horror tales he did for Weird Tales. I am also a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, so this book seemed a natural. Wellman attempts something different than the fantastic Stone Age inspired by Burroughs, trying to remain scientifically plausible and avoiding dinosaurs (at first anyway). The Hok tales don't really remind me of Pellucidar so much as another book written many years later: Jim Kjelgaard's Fire Hunter (1951) with a realistic (for the time) portrayal of primitive man. The conflict is humans versus neanderthals, and considering recent genetic evidence, Wellman's tale of war could be fairly accurate. I suppose I should have become a Jean Auel fan, but Wellman's style of adventure appeals more to me. (That, and he didn't write 600-pagers.)

The first Hok story is "Battle in the Dawn" (Amazing Stories, January 1939). The plot is pretty simple. Hok and his band come to a land rich in game, but encounter the local neanderthals (known as Gnorrls). After stealing one of their winter homes, Hok swells their ranks by venturing south and finding a bride. He also saves her brother who has been captured by the Gnorrls so they can steal the human secret of making and using javelins. In the end, the small human band must face an army of a thousand neanderthals, which they defeat at great cost. The story is savage, unforgiving, and realistically brutal. Only the wooing of Oloana reminded me a little of ERB, and that in a very truncated form. The romance element also reminded me of Howard Browne's "Warrior of the Dawn" (Amazing Stories, December 1942). Did Wellman as well as Burroughs inspire Browne?

Wellman continued his series with "Hok Goes to Atlantis" (Amazing Stories, December 1939) where the caveman sees many wonders. He also runs afoul of Cos, the perverse king, and has the beautiful Maie fall in love with him. But Hok doesn't abandon Oloana for the queen. As with all love triangles, this is bad news for somebody: Maie. She dies in a bloody battle; a warrior's death for a warrior queen. Of course, it all ends with Tlantis sinking into the ocean and the legend starting. Wellman would use the other end of things with his Kardios series; he being the last survivor of the disaster (which through implication, he was also responsible for on some level). Also, I see how the Tlaneans may have inspired Howard Browne's civilized characters in Warrior of the Dawn, which appeared in Amazing three years later. Finished with the adventure, but richer in knowledge, Hok turns his back on such modern ideas as riding horses, using gunpowder, bronze weaponry, and feudal society. He prefers his simple caveman ways. He does keep a club with a gigantic diamond head, though.

What drew me to this story in particular was the suggestion that the Hok stories were sword-and-sorcery. This tale is probably the closest with a bronze-age society in it, but I would disagree with anyone who calls it sword-and-sorcery. First off, there is no real magic. The Tlanteans have gunpowder, which destroys them along with a volcano. The god they worship is Ghirann the Many-Legged, a giant octopus that Hok kills in a good fight scene. This kraken battle would be co-opted into other sword-and-sorcery tales such as John Jakes' Hell-Arms in the Brak series (and numerous Marvel Conan and Kull comics), though Hok's octopus is by no means the first in adventure/fantasy fiction.

The Hok series - and this particular story - is the outsider-comes-to-a-lost civilization story that started likely with HR Haggard (Allan Quatermain in particular) and then got recycled through Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan. Tarzan did go to Opar (at least three times) as well as a city of gold, a city of ant men, a city of Romans, and another of Aztecs. The Korak comics from DC were also of this ilk, with Korak visiting a different lost city each issue. One was even the underwater remains of Atlantis. The noble outsider almost always starts a rebellion that ends with his friends taking over. Hok was no different except that only he survived the whole mess.

The third installment of Hok the Mighty may be my favorite: "Hok Draws The Bow" (Amazing Stories, May 1940). The plot involves the coming of Romm, an evil-doer in the tradition of Hoojah the Slay-One from Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar series. Like Hoojah, Romm can speak the language of Hok's enemies and sets himself up as a god of the Gnorrls. He has invented the spear-thrower and also understands military strategy. He takes on Hok in a spear-throwing contest and makes it obvious he wants Hok's wife, Oloana. The Gnorrls kill many of Hok's people and drive the survivors away. In desperation, Hok takes his bow and goes after Romm with only his wife beside him. The ending is exciting and pure pulp.

The invention of the bow is part of Jim Kjelgaard's Fire Hunter too. Both stories try to imagine how new weapons and tools are invented. The invention of the bow predates history, so anybody could be right. Arrowheads from 64,000 years ago have been discovered, so Wellman is certainly well within the right range. If neanderthals died out about 30,000 years ago, that would set these stories just before then, because I don't see the Gnorrls being around for much longer in the Hok sequels.

A little extra with this issue of Amazing was Manly Wade Wellman's bio. The Paizo book includes it as well. What makes this so special is that it appeared before the Silver John stories and is the Wellman who was largely known as an SF writer.

A shorter and less impressive tale, "Hok and the Gift of Heaven" (Amazing Stories, March 1941) is still a pretty good read. Hok and his tribesmen are in the middle of a battle with the fisher folk when a meteorite falls on the battlefield. Hok is knocked unconscious and wakes to discover molten metal from the space rock. He uses this to create the first sword, which he names Widow-Maker. After the battle, Djoma and his fisher folk take Oloana and Ptao, Hok's wife and son. Hok follows the band back to the ocean and their village, which is built on stilts out in the water. Hok must face sharks and fight a battle against great odds that ends with him and his loved ones about to be sacrificed. Only a sudden surprise for the sword-wielding Djoma saves them. In the end, Hok gives up his sword and goes back to stone-age weapons. Wellman does a nice job of pitting Hok's Shining One (the Sun) against Djoma's sea-god in their arguments, perhaps the first theological disagreement of prehistory?

The final entry in the Hok saga is the longest, "Hok Visits the Land of Legend." Unlike the earlier installments, this one appeared not in Amazing Stories, but in Fantastic Adventures, April 1942. In this last tale, Hok is bored with the challenges of a hunter and decides to go after a mammoth on his own. He builds a giant bow and shoots a giant arrow into Gragru's chest, but the mammoth does not die. Hok follows his prey to a secret valley where the mammoths go to die. Here he is attacked by pterodactyls (at last! dinosaurs!) and fights and kills one in a fight reminiscent of Tarzan's visit to Pellucidar in 1929.

Then he discovers what he calls an elephant-pig (Dinoceras ingens) or Rmanth. The beast is devouring his dead mammoth. Hok shoots two arrows into the beast, but must flee into the trees. There he is saved by a voice from inside the tree. He enters a hole to find the tree hollow and inhabited by a man-like creature of slender build with prehensile feet. His name is Soko. He takes Hok to the village in the trees. (Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs may have inspired this, but Wellman's own upbringing in Africa is more likely.) The village is ruled by a tyrant named Krol who keeps the people under sway by allowing the pterodactyls (or Stymphs) to rule the tops of the trees, and the Rmanth to hold the ground. Hok fights the beasts and defeats the tyrant, leading to the legends of Hercules.

What struck me most about this tale was, first off, how far Wellman wandered from Wells' original, inspiring "The Grisly Folk," and how he made the series his own. Also, the basic plot set-up of this story is a dry-run for his classic John the Balladeer tale "O, Ugly Bird!" (F&SF, December 1951) in which a sorcerer uses a flying familiar to terrorize a rural community. Wellman liked stories in which a wandering hero (be he John or Kardios or Hok) comes to a troubled place and prevails. It is also a dry-run for The Last Mammoth (1953), a juvenile adventure novel about a friend of Davy Crockett's who goes to a far Indian village to kill a mammoth that is terrorizing them.

Thus ends the Hok series, with Hok keeping the hidden valley a secret; returning to his people to live out his days in more fantastic adventures that would come down to us as the tales of heroes from Hercules to Beowulf.

There is one other story that lies close to the Hok series, "The Day of the Conquerers" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, January 1940), appearing after the first two Hok stories. In this science fiction tale, Martians armed with death rays and robots come to Earth to take over the planet. They are faced with an able opponent in Naku (or Lone Hunt), one of the Flint People. Since he is armed with a bow, the story must take place chronologically after Hok's life, for Hok invented the weapon and he makes no reference to alien invaders. So, Naku is one of Hok's descendants and a worthy warrior and cunning fighter.

The Paizo volume includes this story along with a one-page fragment of an unfinished Hok story and an unpublished tale called "The Love of Oloana." Most of this story was incorporated into "Battle in the Dawn." The introduction by David Drake adds a nice explanation of Wellman's youth in Africa. All-in-all, Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty is a Wellman or pulp fan's dream and a completist's treasure.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Guest Post | Chris KL99 - Space Adventurer

By GW Thomas

Edmond Hamilton has many claims to fame in a science fiction writing career that spanned fifty years. He began in the pages of Weird Tales, contributing the most SF of material in the largely horror magazine. He also explored his own brand of fantasy and even wrote a few legitimate horror tales. Hamilton's style of cosmic-sized adventure won him the nickname "World Wrecker" Hamilton, though he was also capable of writing deeply personal stories too, like "He That Hath Wings" (Weird Tales, July 1938). In 1940 he was chosen to write the Captain Future series created by Mort Weisinger. Hamilton's career peaked in 1949 when he wrote his most famous novel, The Star Kings.

In 1946, Ed made another choice that would affect his direction for the next twenty years. He began writing comics for DC's Superman and Legion of Super-Heroes. He would leave comics in 1966, returning to stories and novels full time. Before that day, Hamilton would write largely superhero fare, but occasionally he got to return to his SF roots in comics like Strange Adventures. In the inaugural issue he began his "Chris KL99" series, which would appear in seven issues. Loosely based on the Captain Future formula, Chris KL99 is a space explorer who flies around in his ship the Pioneer, with his three sidekicks: a Martian adventurer named Halk, the Venusian scientist Jero, and his chameolonic dog, Loopy. (Interestingly, Hamilton wrote six more Captain Future novellas for Startling Stories while penning this comic. There were enough space adventurers around in the comics to not make this a conflict of interest.) Chris got his name from Christopher Columbus, because he was the first baby born in space. The KL99 is his status from the Space Academy where he scored 99%. All seven adventures were drawn by Harold Sherman.

The first cover went to the adaptation of Destination Moon, but Chris KL99 opened the issue. His first adventure is "The Menace of the Green Nebula" (Strange Adventures #1, August-September 1950). Chris and his buddies are lured into the Green Nebula by a fake distress call. Unscrupulous types follow them to the planet of the nebula to steal its rich radium deposits. This turns out to be the food of the radioactive men who dwell there. It's up to Chris and his friends to make things right. Fortunately, Chris knows a little science about radium that saves the day.

"The Metal World" (Strange Adventures #3, December 1950) begins with mysterious raiders stealing metal treasures like the Eiffel Tower and Brooklyn Bridge. Chris KL99 and his team find the ion trail of the thieves and follow them to their planet-size spaceship. After being captured, Chris comes up with a scheme that will save earth's treasures and the inhabitants of the Metal World.

"The World Inside the Atom" (Strange Adventures #5, February 1951) has Chris answering a distress call from a miniature universe. Shrinking to microsize, he and his two comrades go to Ruun, a planet that is dying because its sun has gone out, allowing monsters to attack its citizens. The distress call came from Drimos, who turns out to be a tyrant, ruling the people with his artificial light. Chris discovers that Drimos is actually the king's twin, Karthis, and that the true king is imprisoned. He uses his size control to rescue Drimos, but Karthis vindictively destroys the light that holds back the monsters. Chris and his friends grow to immense size and restart the sun by throwing a dead planet into it. Obviously inspired by stories like Henry Hesse's "He Who Shrank" (Amazing Stories, August 1936), the atomic science of this story is quite dated even for 1951.

Up to this point, Chris KL99 had been the headliner of Strange Adventures. By #7 he started to appear later in the issue, and often last. This may indicate that other strips in the magazine were more popular, like the non-series stories by Gardner Fox or "Captain Comet" by Edgar Ray Merritt (John Broome). But more likely, Hamilton was busy with Superman and other, bigger titles.

"The Lost Earthmen" (Strange Adventures #7, April 1951) is Chris KL99's first origin story (this will be changed in future guises). In this episode, we learn why he jumps from planet to planet, exploring deeper and deeper into space. He is on the trail of the Starfarer, a ship his mother and father used to find a new Earth. When they did not return, Chris joined the Space Academy so he could go in search of them. He finds their ship on a remote planet where the survivors remain. His parents died as heroes, saving the doomed ship, hit by an ether-wave. But the survivors are once again in trouble. The ether-wave that made them crash will destroy the planet by drawing a storm of asteroids. Chris and his friends have to hurry, using parts from abandoned ships to repair the Starfarer. His quest now finished, Chris plans to quit space forever. He finds a recording from his father and mother that inspires him anew to carry on exploring the universe.

"The Exile of Space" (Strange Adventures #9, June 1951) is Halk's origin story. As chief scientist of Mars, he ruined the great crystal that pumps the planet's water. He has been searching space for a replacement. This he finds on a world that has sent a distress call. When the three arrive, after a couple of close calls with energy beings and an asteroid belt, they find the local tyrant has several power crystals and uses them to oppress the people. Chris and his friends, using gravity inhibitors (a la Buck Rogers), fly up to one of the crystals and take over. Using that crystal, they blow up the others. As a reward, the people ask Halk to take the last remaining crystal with them. Halk is able to make amends for his mistake, but doesn't give up his life in space.

"The Missing Moon" (Strange Adventures #11, August 1951) starts with a visit to a planet of astronomers who give Chris an interesting photograph of earth. In the picture, there are two moons. Chris begins a quest to find earth's missing moon. He follows a trail in space that leads him to the moon, where a civilization of technology haters arrest him and his friends for sacrilege. He learns that there was once a war between the two moons. Giant energy weapons destroyed the surface of our moon, while thrusting the second moon out of orbit and into the galaxy. Escaping the moon-men, a new problem threatens everyone. A dark star is drawing near and only the projection weapons can save them. Halk and Jero hold off the moon-men long enough for Chris to divert the moon away from the star. He even parks the moon around a warm sun, improving life for the moon people. Shades of Space: 1999!

"The Rival Columbus of Space" (Strange Adventures #15, December 1951) features Shan Kar, a fellow explorer from the planet Zor who is Chris KL99's only rival. Shan Kar decides he will enter a deadly, bell-shaped dark cloud because he thinks a planet lies inside. Chris warns Shan Kar off and everyone thinks he is jealous. Both explorers head out in their own ships. Monsters attack Shan Kar's ship, but Chris saves him, allowing them to arrive at the planet inside. Shan Kar lands, even though Chris warns him again. Shan Kar finds gigantic jewels, but the rays from these cause him to grow to a giant size and unable to return in his ship. Chris has been to the planet before and has devised a metal that can counter-act the rays. He joins Shan Kar on the planet and begins smelting ore to make a covering for the giant. Shan Kar is shrunk back to normal and they all go home. Once home, Shan Kar declares Chris the true "Columbus of Space."

The character of Chris KL99 would live on at DC after its original author was gone. In later comics, his origin was changed and he made several cameos in other titles. But the great days of Edmond Hamilton stand nicely separate from these later changes. Here is space adventure of the simplest, pulpy kind as only "World Wrecker" Hamilton could provide.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Guest Post | The Darker Drink: Pseudonymous Saint

By GW Thomas

The Saint series by Leslie Charteris is known for its highly adventurous flare. In fact, Charteris really created the James Bond film feel. If you read Ian Fleming, you find a Bond who is morose, cold, and rather unappealing. The flamboyant spy with the quips and one-liners is Simon Templar with the more realistic backdrop of Fleming to support it.

One can argue that neither the Saint nor 007 is particularly "realistic." Criminals do not defy the police as Templar does Inspector Veal. Spies do not stand out as playboys and rock stars. If there is anything George Smiley can tell us, it is that these characters are fiction's equivalent of comic book heroes. Which is alright. They serve a different purpose than John le Carre's cold, depressing truth. They make us laugh and dream of fast cars and faster women. They embody the fourteen-year-old's zest for life and all its possibilities.

It shouldn't be a big stretch for a superman of Simon Templar's stripe to have adventures that are just a little less believable. Even fantastic. Which he did do on a number of occasions. These stories were collected in The Fantastic Saint (1982), edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Charles G Waugh. The book includes "The Newdick Helicopter," "The Gold Standard," "The Man Who Loved Ants," "The Questing Tycoon," "The Darker Drink," and "The Convenient Monster." The book acknowledges that the second Saint novel, The Saint Closes the Case (1930), is similarly fantastic, but too long to include. Among the stories gathered were four tales that actually appeared in SF magazines; three reprinted in Fantasy & Science Fiction. This shouldn't be too surprising since F&SF was created by Francis J McComas and the mystery/SF guru Anthony Boucher. The more surprising one is "The Darker Drink" that was the Saint's only SF pulp appearance in October 1947's Thrilling Wonder Stories.

"The Darker Drink" begins with Simon Templar alone in a cabin, frying trout for his supper. Suddenly a stranger comes to his door - pursued by three men - and begs Simon to help him. To convince the Saint, the man shows him a crystal that contains the image of the most beautiful woman in existence, Dawn. The man, Big Bill Holbrook, claims he is really bank clerk Andrew Faulks, a man dreaming the entire thing from his sleep in Glendale, California.

The Saint thwarts the thugs, meets and kisses the girl, and makes Big Bill jealous, but nothing really makes any sense. The girl can't remember her past. Everybody keeps calling the Saint the same three nicknames, in exactly the same order, until finally the thugs' big boss, the very fat Selden Appopoulis, faces off with Templar. The shootout does not go the way it usually does with the Saint and the Happy Highwayman falls to the floor with a bullet hole in his chest. Except he wakes up and none of it seems to have happened. Simon still has the gem in his pocket, so he can't quite believe it was all a dream. When he gets to Glendale he finds out Andrew Faulks had slipped into a coma, but died at the exact time Templar was shot. Even the gem has disappeared from his pocket. In the end it all really had been a dream of a dying man.

This story offers little we haven't seen before in dream stories. The shock at the end isn't particularly good. What makes this story fun is two other things. One, Charteris keeps you guessing even though you know some explanation will be forthcoming. Secondly, and much more rewarding, is that the author has fun with himself and his formula. All the plot elements are familiar Saint material: the man in need of help, the beautiful girl, the vicious thugs; the shoot out. Without the fantastic element, it could easily pass for one of the duller radio episodes. The author pokes fun at himself when Simon Templar notes to himself that "this sounds like one of those stories that fellow Charteris might write." This will be doubly so when we consider the true authorship of the story. For Charteris didn't write it.

The actual authorship of these "fantastic" Saint stories has been the subject of some educated guessing. It is a well-known fact that Harry Harrison wrote Vendetta For a Saint (1964) and that all the novels after 1963 were not written by Charteris. Most were written by Lee Fleming and revised by Charteris. "The King of the Beggars" (1948) was written by Henry Kuttner from an old radio script. So who wrote "The Darker Drink?"

At first, some thought it was Harrison or Theodore Sturgeon, but this was not the case. The best guess these days is that is was Astounding Science Fiction alumnus Cleve Cartmill. Cartmill is best remembered as the author of "Deadline," a tale about nuclear weapons before the devices were common knowledge. The story drew a visit from the FBI that had Cartmill and editor John W Campbell in the hot seat until they could prove that they had been writing about nuclear technology in science fiction for years. And that if they suddenly stopped, the Nazis might get suspicious. Cartmill is also suspected as the author of the story in which the Saint meets the Loch Ness Monster: "The Convenient Monster."

"The Darker Drink" never received a television rendering, so we can't look at how Roger Moore might have played out this weird scenario. The closest we can get is "The Convenient Monster" (the only story from The Fantastic Saint to be televised) that appeared on November 4, 1966. In this color episode, the monster is never shown; only implied. If "The Darker Drink" had been produced, it would have been easy enough to recreate, since no monsters or special effects were needed. The confusing atmosphere might have been intriguing in a good director's hand, but I don't think the producers would have contemplated a scene in which Simon Templar is shot dead (even in a dream). The TV Saint always wins. This story was perhaps the closest he ever came to failing that motto.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.