Turok, Son of Plants [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Looking at all the comic books that have used plant monsters, one title stands far above the others for monstrous plants. Now to be clear, I have dismissed series like Batman that feature villains like Poison Ivy on an irregular basis. What I am looking for is a comic series that featured different stories with different monsters, not recurring villains or heroes such as Swamp Thing or Man-Thing. The comic that used so many plant monsters was Western Publishing's Turok, Son of Stone. While anthologies like House of Mystery and Adventures into the Unknown had their share, it was Turok and his sidekick, Andar that met the most villainous plants.

And different plants too, not a recurring appearance of the same jungle vine or stalking tree. In the course of one hundred thirty-three issues, Turok saw five different plant encounters from issue #11 to 122. Over those twenty-one years, Turok and Andar encountered one plant fiend for every five years. That's pretty impressive when you consider how long most comics last.

The first green terror appeared in "The Valley of the Vines" (Turok, Son of Stones #11, March-May 1958). The duo are escaping a T-Rex and become trapped in a valley where the vines will allow you to come in but not go back out. The thorns are all on one side, keeping animals in, I presume as a food source.

Turok and Andar are enveloped by one of the pods of the plants after arriving in the valley. They are freed by cavemen who have been trapped in the valley for a long while. They befriend Ulf, but make a mortal enemy of his rival, Dal. The pods release their prey if struck at the base.

When the T-Rex that chased them into the valley becomes trapped as well, Turok sees his way out. Using fire arrows, Turok and Andar drive the gigantic dinosaur through the deadly thorns. The saurian dies at the end, making a bridge for Ulf and his tribesmen to climb out of the valley. They escape and Ulf's leadership is reaffirmed.

"The Deadly Jungle" (Turok, Son of Stone #26, December 1961-February 1962) has the two friends encounter predatory vines and pods they call "plant-traps". Turok claims, "I have never seen plants like these..." which of course we know is wrong. Only thirteen issues ago he had, but let's not quibble.

Turok learns there is a tribe of cavemen nearby who know of a seed that, when ground into a powder, will release the vines. They won't share the location of the seeds. Andar spies on them that night but is discovered. He ends up in the vine trap and Turok must go in search of the seeds. The cavemen know of two spots where the red flowers grow, but direct Turok to the more dangerous location. The flowers grow near a pterodactyl nest and Turok has to do some fancy shooting to escape. With the powder, he rescues Andar but also releases an allosaurus by accident. He tricks the dinosaur back into the vines.

"The Land of the Plant People: The Deadly Maze" (Turok, Son of Stone #45, May 1965) really pulled out all the stops, featuring a half dozen different plant monsters. Turok and Andar discover a living wall of thorns in a canyon. Beyond the wall is a race of men who call themselves the Plant People. This is a good name for they have plants for many uses besides the thorn wall, which can be activated to open and close. They also have plants that act as alarms, seed pods which capture people, others that contain sleeping gas, thorn spikes that thrust upward and kill dinosaurs for food.

The best thing the Plant People have is a gauntlet known as the Maze. Anyone who can make it through is declared innocent of a crime. Turok and Andar are accused of killing a man they found dying. In the Maze there are the usual strangling vines, as well as giant Venus flytraps, acid sprayers, cacti that shoot spines, "Moon Plants" that cast a radiance and make it easier for the sentries to see you. Turok saves them both by setting one type of plant against another. He uses fire to drive off certain plants. The duo make it out of the Maze, but the Plant People won't let them go. Turok uses his new knowledge to set the plants against his captors.

Turok took a decade long break before encountering another plant monster. After "The Deadly Maze" what was there left to do? Turok and Andar's return to the deadly jungle proves disappointing to say the least. "Where Honkers Fear to Go" (Turok, Son of Stone #98, August 1975) has Turok and Andar chased into a grove by a herd of stampeding triceratops. They encounter creeping vines, biting pods, even vines in the river, and spend the entire story fleeing from them. That's about it. No real plot, just plants and they get away. It's a greatest hits from "The Deadly Maze" without much plot. Not surprising, the second story in the issue got the cover.

The final plant tale is a sad good-bye. "The Vines of Death" (Turok, Son of Stone #122, July 1979) proves even less interesting. Aggressive cavemen stop following the duo, saying, "They'll die when the rains come." Killer vines shoot up after a rainstorm and try to grab the hunters. Turok uses fire to hold them off until the vines wither in the heat. (Turok learned this and many other tricks back in The Maze but seems to have forgotten after fourteen years.) Again nothing new, no real plot. Somebody phoned this one in, remembering the good old days of 1965.

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.

Plant Monsters: The Stories [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

The first stories of killer plants were written by two Americans. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote "Rappacini's Daughter" in 1844 and showed us that a father's wish to protect his daughter's virtue can become almost pathological. Rappacini infuses the girl with plant poison, making her the precursor of Batman's Poison Ivy. The second story was twenty-five years later and written by the mother of the American family story, Lousia May Alcott, who penned Little Women (1868). Her story has the Gothic title of "Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy's Curse" and is the first real killer flower story. Seeds from a mummy's treasure grow into a large blossomed plant. When worn, the flower sucks the vitality from the wearer.

The idea of plant monsters really caught fire in the 1870s after botanical discoveries of large drosera and other flesh-eating plants were found and reported in the illustrated newspapers. These lead to fake reports which then lead to the storytellers of the day creating the first man-eating tree stories. These include A Conan Doyle, Julian Hawthorne, Phil Robinson, Grant Allen, and many lesser known writers. HG Wells reinvigorated the idea in 1894 with his blood-sucking orchid tale, "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid." I always used to think Wells invented the idea, but he comes to the part twenty years late. It was Frank Aubrey's The Devil-Tree of El Dorado (1896) that scores a hit in novel form. The Victorians would go on writing about killer plants all the way into the pulp era.

Weird Tales and the other pulps explored the idea with varying amounts of innovation. The Unique Magazine featured twenty-three killer plants (that I have discovered so far. I am sure there are others), beginning with "The Devil Plant" by Lyle Wilson Holden (May 1923) to Donald Wandrei's "Strange Harvest" (May 1953). May is significant, for I noticed, especially with the comics, that plant monsters tended to appear in that month as if the allergy season drove the concept of hostile plant life. Amongst the Weirdies to pen a plant story are Clark Ashton Smith (7), Edmond Hamilton (3), David H Keller (3), Howard Wandrei (2), Jack Snow, A Merritt, Seabury Quinn, Carl Jacobi, and Mary Elizabeth Counselman. The genres range from science fiction to horror. Clark Ashton Smith's "The Seed From the Sepulchre" and Jack Snow's "Seed" would be imitated (knowingly or unknowingly) in Scott Smith's bestseller The Ruins (2008). For this is another thing I have noticed, plant monster stories haven't really changed much, even after a hundred and forty years.

More modern times saw one story in particular pull the plant trope in a new direction. This was John Wyndham's blockbuster, The Day of the Triffids (1951). Unlike most plant monsters, Wyndham's triffids are not found in a jungle (or come from space as in the 1962 film), but are created specifically by men. Wyndham uses their nastiness (as well as the blinding of humanity) to comment on human ills (a la the Cold War). Other novels that explore plant monsters in a new way include Brian W Aldiss's fantasy Hothouse (1962), in which all the characters and setting are plants. Others like Susan Cooper's Mandrake (1962) and Frank Herbert's The Green Brain (1966) would predate James Lovelock's 1970s Gaia Theory, in which the entire Earth as a living organism fights back against humankind.

Fantasy has always featured supernatural trees in the form of dryads, sylphs, and mandrakes. L Frank Baum had fighting trees in The Wizard of Oz (1901), though they were reduced to talking trees in the film. JRR Tolkien would write about Old Man Willow and Treebeard the Ent in The Lord of the Rings (1954-56), while his friend, CS Lewis would use (to a much lesser degree) similar creations in his Narnia books (1950-55). Sword-and-sorcery of the 1970s would offer up new versions of the killer tree for the barbarians Conan and Brak to fight. And in most recent years, JK Rowling gave us the Whomping Willow of the Harry Potter series.

Modern horror hasn't lagged behind. While chasing Stephen King and Jaws-sized success, some less talented authors would write 1980s horror novels featuring killer vines, none worthy of particular mention. More interesting were the anthologies of older stories such as Vic Ghidalia's The Nightmare Garden (1976) and Carlos Cassaba's The Roots of Evil (1976). Many modern horror writers have created single, short exertions into plant monsterdom including Kit Reed, David Campton, Brian Lumely, and Jeff Strand. More often though, as from the very beginning, the majority of such tales were written by less well-known or even obscure writers who produced few or no other stories.

Scott Smith surprised the world of publishing with his novel The Ruins in 2006. While I gritted my teeth and held my tongue when mundanes thrilled to "the novelty," I can't say anything against Smith's book. He wrote it in a style that elevates it above mere pulp. While the flesh-eating vines are not new, his prose has a dreamy quality to it that lulls the reader into a sense of quiet before the monsters are unleashed. I heard the film version criticized as "just another 'let's watch a group of twenty-somethings get eaten' film" and I can understand this. The film lacks Smith's dreamy prose quality, though its CGI plants are quite frightening.

I haven't gone into a lot of TV or movies here, and no comics at all (for the comics always followed, never setting trends), because there simply isn't room. The only video productions that had anything really new to add were the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), especially the musical version in 1986. "Feed me, Seymour!" the bulbous Audrey II cries, and in that moment, as the large-toothed mouth hovers over the insignificant Seymour Krelboyne, the final version of the plant monster has arrived at last. For every twelve-year-old kid who bought a Venus Flytrap to feed flies to, for every hunter lost in the bush, feeling like the forest was his living antagonist, for every allergy sufferer (I feel your pain!), here is the image of plant as hostile. We forget that they too are living, moving, evolving, struggling organisms. And it takes the occasional plant monster to remind us every so often. Has the final plant monster story been written? I hardly think so. Like dandelions springing up on your lawn, the plant monster isn't going anywhere soon. Check out the database at gwthomas.org.

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.