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 | The Ghostbreakers Mythos: A Dream

By GW Thomas

Lovecraft's circle shared mention of their separate creations in the pages of Weird Tales, name-dropping here and there a friend's character or some other reference. This was the beginning of the Cthulhu Mythos. Not everyone at Weird Tales was included; just the closest correspondents of Lovecraft’s. Later, August Derleth would take what was largely a game for HPL and tie it into a commercial package that featured monsters, weird books, and a shared world of dreams and terror. I suspect Manly Wade Wellman tried a little of this magic too.

"The Half-Haunted" (writing as Gans T Field), a Judge Keith Hillary Pursuivant ghostbreaker tale, appeared in Weird Tales in September 1941. This tale was the last for the Judge for several decades because Wellman would create a new ghostbreaker of even greater popularity in John Thunstone. But in this tale, Wellman borrows a page from Lovecraft's literary game. He mentions another Weird Tales alumnist's creation, that of Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin, without doubt the most popular character in WT's original run. In effect, what Wellman was doing was saying that the Judge and de Grandin existed in the same WT universe:

"...New Year's Eve found him at Harrisonville where de Grandin and Towbridge [sic] wanted his word on translating certain old Dutch documents better left untranslated..."

1941 is an interesting date for this to happen. De Grandin had been around since October 1925 while the Judge had first appeared only three years previous in January 1938. Still, the readers of WT liked both and you can see Wellman trying in a small way to create a Weird Tales Mythos like Lovecraft's. Why hadn't he included some actual Mythos?

Wellman did write one Mythos tale, "The Terrible Parchment" (Weird Tales, August 1937), that appeared five months after HPL's death, written as a memorial to the great author. By 1945, the only Mythos works appearing were August Derleth's pastiches. Derleth had taken control of the Lovecraft material, writing to authors such as C Hall Thompson to cease-and-desist. A number of unauthorized pastiches had appeared in Weird Tales by Gardner F Fox and Thompson. Ironically, "The Half-Haunted" appeared in an issue that sported a cover based on one of Derleth's pastiches about Ithaqua: "Beyond the Threshold."

Wellman did it again in "John Thunstone's Inheritance (Weird Tales, July 1944):

She smiled, with a great deal of maddening mystery. "Why not ask your friend the Frenchman -- Jules de Grandin? You and he are very close. Are you surprised to learn that I keep some watch on your movements?"

He answered her questions in order. "I invited de Grandin, but he and Dr. Trowbridge have all they can do in that line just now..."

Seabury Quinn finally returned the favor to Wellman in Weird Tales September 1945 in a non-de Grandin story called "Take Back That Which Thou Gavest." Instead of including Judge Pursuivant or John Thunstone in a story, Quinn pulls the authors into the frame for one. The opener is Quinn and Gans Field walking the streets of New York, looking for somewhere to drink. Quinn mentions that Field has just finished "The Hairy Ones Shall Dance" and is now working on "The Black Drama." (These stories both appeared in Weird Tales in 1938, seven years earlier. Editor Dorothy McIlwraith must have liked this kind of self-referential promotion for she could have easily cut the entire frame as the story does not need it.) The gist of the frame is that Gans sees an odd old man and curses at him in French. Wellman is well-known for his jovial nature and Quinn comments on this. How could a man be so evil that even the pleasant Gans Field should curse him out?

It's possible that Wellman saw a chance to tie other Weird Tales characters outside of the Mythos (maybe giving Derleth a bit of a poke too?), especially if they were ghostbreakers. A Ghostbreaker Mythos. To make this a reality, more writers would have had to be connected. To my knowledge this never happened. Wellman did tie some of his own ghostbreakers together into this shared universe when he wrote the 1982 novel The Hanging Stones, featuring Silver John and Judge Keith Hillary Pursuivent. He did not have John Thunstone and Silver John meet, but the singer with the silver strings did cross paths with John Thunstone's greatest enemies, the Shonokins, in After Dark (1980). So in this way, all three of his famous ghostbreakers do exist in the same universe.

I wish that E Hoffman Price's Peter D'Artois had flourished in Weird Tales, then he could have been tied into the Ghostbreaker Mythos as well. Unfortunately it was the popularity of Jules de Grandin that forced Hoffman to give up the character, since readers kept accusing him of ripping off Seabury Quinn.

Even if Wellman's mention of de Grandin was just a blip on the screen, a mere whim to please a fellow writer, the idea of a Ghostbreaker Mythos is very appealing to one such as I. Imagine Martin Hessellius, Abraham Von Helsing, Flaxman Low, John Silence, Carnacki, and all who followed belonging to a fraternity of ghost chasers! This idea was irresistible and I have used it in my own work. Thank you, Manly Wade Wellman! The Fraternity of Ghostbreakers goes on...

Using friends in stories was also part of the Cthulhu Mythos game. Clark Ashton Smith used Lovecraft as the model for Tomeron in "The Ephiphany of Death" (The Fantasy Fan, July 1934). Robert Bloch portrayed HPL in "The Shambler from the Stars" (Weird Tales, September 1935) and Lovecraft returned the favor in "The Haunter of the Dark" (Weird Tales, December 1936). Frank Belknap Long used a thinly disguised portrait of HPL in "The Space Eaters" (Weird Tales, July 1938). For Quinn to use the same idea in 1945 is not surprising. It's part of the Mythos game.

Perhaps the most interesting of these portrayals was done by August Derleth in 1966 in "The Dark Brotherhood". This posthumous collaboration with Lovecraft is about a man (who is very much like HPL: keeping strange hours, admiring architecture and graveyards) who finds multiple versions of Edgar Allan Poe popping up. In this way, HPL and Poe get to share a story together just as Derleth and HPL penned the story together.

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.

When Planets Clashed: War in Space [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Manly Wade Wellman continually surprises me. "When Planets Clashed," his writing debut back in Wonder Stories Quarterly Spring 1931 is no exception. I expected a juvenile effort, technically poor, but showing the spark that would flower in years to come, such as Robert E Howard's "Spear and Fang" in Weird Tales. Instead of some filler piece, "When Planets Clashed" is an interplanetary war tale with a difference. Yes, it has the elements Hugo Gernsback would expect in a story about Earth and Mars waging a war across space. But as Gernsback says in the story's intro:

Stories of Interplanetary warfare usually presuppose earthlings who are all heroes and enemies across space who are all villains. The supposition is also made that earth is fighting to defend its honor or its people from a predatory race from another world.

The idea of an interplanetary war certainly wasn't new in 1931. HG Wells started it off in 1898 with the War of the Worlds, in which the invaders were inhuman, squid-like beings. Future wars between humans go back even further to novellas like George Tomkyns Chesney's "The Battle of Dorking" (1871), where England is invaded by thinly disguised Germans, and even Hugo Gernsback's own classic publication of Philip Francis Nowlan's "Armageddon 2419" that featured the Asiatic Hans who conquer America. Gernsback's competitor, the Clayton Astounding, presented numerous examples of stories in this fashion, with brave Americans beating evil invaders. So Wellman is writing within an SF tradition, but it is what he does within that tradition that is surprising.

Despite Gernsback's applause that the story is different, much of it is not. He claims that the hero is not so heroic. This is untrue. Jack Stillwell, our earthling who loves Mars and in particular the Martian girl Yann, promises her he will fight for his side with honor. This involves him going single-handed to the moon to locate a secret base of Martian raiders. Once he finds it, he decides it is too big for a fleet of earth ships to destroy, so he sneaks inside as a saboteur. Fortunately, he runs into Yann's brother Nalo and the Martian naively allows him to have run of the ship. Betraying his friend, he blows up the super-ship, killing Nalo in the process. Torn with feelings of guilt, he still joins the Earth fleet that engages the superior Martian armada and wins. This part of the story is filled with radio-controlled bombs and destructor rays little different than Raymond Z Gallun's "The Crystal Ray" or even John W Campbell's "The Ultimate Weapon" five years later. The middle part of this tale is well-written, but nothing new.

It is the beginning and ending of the story that make it stand out. In the beginning we see Jack torn between his loyalty to Mars and Earth. He leaves Yann with the promise that he will return to her after the war is over. And he does, but carrying a terrible weight. He has caused the death of Yann's brother and indirectly her father as well, who died in the space fleet battle. Yann says, "How sad that the war was needed to assure one world of the humanity of the other..." No glory for Stillwell the war hero. His pain is so great that he says he can not bear Yann's touch and must go away and never see her again. She changes his mind by saying she has lost her brother and father; must she lose Jack too? He relents and says he will take her to Earth, which he describes as so beautiful. Yann accepts his invitation but you can sense she is also losing the planet Mars. The finale is so atypical of pulp science fiction that I am surprised the story lies largely forgotten; unanthologized. I can only surmise it was the occurrence of World War II that made this tale fade away. The philosophy behind it -  the acknowledgement of propaganda and its role in the war - would become unpopular after the Depression was over. From Gernsback's introduction again:

This psychology is not at all new. It is the favorite in our wars on earth, and the propaganda each nation pit out in 1914-18 in the form of books, lectures and motion pictures showed it as a just, peaceable nation defending only its right to existence.

With the perspective of nearly fifteen years behind us, we are able to realize that seldom is any nation solely a villain and another solely a hero. Wars, we have learned, are the work of professional war makers, and are fought by men who kill those they might be friendly with, were they permitted to be. The present story is splendid for the picturization of an interplanetary war, that shows both sides of the picture.

Such a debut should have been noted by historians. (EF Bleiler, in SF: The Gernsback Years, found Nalo's behavior unconvincing, for he would have certainly had Jack arrested as a spy.) Wellman remains largely known for his last works about occult detectives in the fantasy genre and much of his SF work has not been appreciated fully. He would get to return to the interplanetary war theme toward the end of his career in Sherlock Holmes and the War of the Worlds (1975), which he wrote with his son Wade Wellman. And again in The Beyonders (1977) he would show how an alien invasion affects a small, rural town, an approach M. Night Shyamalan would use in Signs, twenty-five years later.

One of the reasons that Wellman could write such a story as “When Planets Clashed” was his unusual upbringing. He began life, not in America - world of hot dogs and baseball - but in Uganda, the child of missionary parents. Manly’s first companions were very unlike himself, allowing him to see the universality in different cultures rather than the differences. It is this perspective that does not allow him to paint the Martians as villains. Wellman would rely on this sensitivity again in his numerous historical works, especially those with Native American people such as The Last Mammoth (1953).

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.

Manly Wade Wellman's "Lee Granger, Jungle King" [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Manly Wade Wellman has many feathers in his cap: famous Weird Tales writer, a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, an Edgar Award for True Crime, a Pulitzer prize nomination for non-fiction, and the notoriety of appearing in court during the famous Fawcett vs. DC trial of 1948 (which Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood parodied in "Superduperman" in the fourth issue of Mad Magazine, April-May 1953.) Manly spoke from the stand of how his editors had encouraged him to steal freely from Superman for their comic, Captain Marvel Adventures. It was a strange place to end up. But where did it all begin?

Manly Wade Wellman decided to try writing comics after his friend and fellow Weird Tales author, Frank Belknap Long, had ventured into the world of "squinkies" as Manly called them. By March 1941, Manly would be writing the very first Captain Marvel tale "Captain Marvel vs. Z" in Captain Marvel Adventures #1. But before that he sharpened his pen on a few other comics including "Lee Granger, Jungle King" for Slam-Bang Comics (March-September 1940).

Slam-Bang was a Fawcett title that ran for only seven issues, but Manly and Granger appeared in them all. Beginning with issue #1, Lee Granger got the last nine to ten pages of each issue. The scientist-explorer sets out on a mission to fly over a part of unknown Africa. His plane is sabotaged by Arabs who are conducting illegal slaving in the unmapped territory. Granger saves himself when his plane explodes by using his loose clothing like a parachute. He is discovered by pygmies and accidentally wounds their chief with a poisoned spear. Granger saves the man's life and becomes friend to the entire tribe. As the pygmies' leading light, he teaches them science, helps them build a brick town, and even captures a lion and alters its brain. This is Eric, the talking lion, who is Granger's best sidekick.

In later episodes Granger defeats the invading Arabs, a race of flying demons called the Djinns, helps scientists who struggle to find the lost ruins of the Gelka (guarded by savages and gorillas), and fights the usual greedy white hunters bound to steal Eric away. He also encounters the queen of the giant ants, a woman raised by insects. The longer, ten-page format allowed Wellman to expand his story where many jungle characters had to make due with only five pages. The art was most likely drawn by Jack Binder in his usual serviceable but crude style.

Granger meets many beautiful woman, from rich debutantes to scientist's daughters, but they always leave, asking if they might meet again. The best of these was Kate Bond, who enters the hive of the ants, carrying a gun, which she is not reluctant to use on the queen herself. You have to remember these are pre-Code comics! Beautiful and deadly, she might have made a queen to Lee's king if the comic had continued.

What strikes me most about this strip is first off that Lee Granger is not a Tarzan wannabe. Only once does he use vines to swing down on foes. Usually he uses his superior understanding of science, making him more of a jungle Doc Savage than a Lord Greystoke. Secondly, Wellman's scenarios are usually not too typical of jungle stories, having a more fantastic element to them. I especially liked Issue #3 that has the feel of Robert E Howard's "Almuric" to it, with winged foes and sword fights (both that story and issue #3 appeared in May 1939 so it might have been Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pirates of Venus (Argosy, October 2, 1931) or Howard's "Wings in the Night" (Weird Tales, July 1932) that inspired him just as easily.

The source for the giant ants could have come from any number of pulps (which Manly knew, for he was in them) such as "The Master Ants" by Francis Flagg (Amazing Stories, May 1928), "The World of the Giant Ants" (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1928) by A Hyatt Verrill, or "The War of the Great Ants" by Jim Vanny (Wonder Stories, July 1930). And of course, the jungle ant classic, "Leiningen Versus the Ants" by Carl Stephenson (Esquire, December 1938).

Wherever Manly got his ideas, they were better than most of the jungle crowd. Only once does he stoop to overt racism in the strip, when he claims he must save the scientists because they are white. Such narrow-mindedness seems odd from the man who flew in the face of convention with his debut "When Planets Clashed" and wrote of space war from both sides of the conflict. His work as a whole speaks of a love for all humankind. It was this deep compassion that made stories like "Song of the Slaves" (Weird Tales, March/April 1940) memorable, or his work on the Civil War worthy of Pulitzer consideration. And it was this sense of honor that directed Manly to tell the truth on the stand in 1948. Manly was always, first and foremost, a gentleman.

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.

Four-Color Sci-Fi: Science Fiction Writers Who Wrote Comics [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

When radio became big across America in the late 1920s, there were those who worried it would kill pulp magazines. The magazines quickly adapted though and the two mediums complemented each other. In one case, radio even created one of the biggest selling Pulps. The Shadow began as nothing more than a narrator's voice and an evil laugh by Orson Welles. The voice was fleshed out into a fantastic character and that hero became Street and Smith's top title, selling out every two weeks. Other radio shows such as Suspense and X-Minus 1 adapted stories from magazines.

No, it wasn't radio that killed the Pulps. It was three other media enemies that came about in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The first of these was the paperback. For the soldiers fighting in World War II and Korea, the smaller size made more sense than larger magazines, and after the war was over, well, people just kept reading them.

Television was another very powerful enemy. Unlike radio, the TV networks weren't interested in adapting Pulp fiction. They were producing their own style of stories, largely based on earlier radio titles, and besides, it was free. All you had to do was buy a TV.

The last and most insidious of the enemies of the Pulps was their own spawn, the comics. Many of the Pulp publishers created comic lines to match their Pulp titles. You had Planet Stories, so Planet Comics. These cheaper-to-produce, but comparably priced publications ate away at Pulp profits. By 1955 most of the Pulps had either died or mutated into fiction digests (like Astounding Science Fiction or Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.)

This change in market affected many writers. Some of Science Fiction's writers had no choice but to write both kinds of stories. But before we look at these writers, it is important to mention two SF alumni who had a profound effect on comics. These were Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger. The duo began as editors and SF fans. They were involved in creating the first SF literary agency, and for helping to launch the first World SF Convention in 1939. As rabid fans, they knew everybody, though they did not write stories or draw pictures.

In 1944, Schwartz started AA Comics, the company that one day would become DC, where he would work until 1986. Weisinger became the editor of the Superman line, a post he held until 1970. Schwartz headed the changes in 1956 that would see comics move away from the methods of the comic strip packagers of the 1930s toward more modern approaches to superhero story-telling. And to do this he needed good writers. One of these was Gardner Fox who would give us Hawkman, as well as Batman's utility belt. He eventually worked on every major DC title during the Golden Age. Fox is best known for comics, but he also wrote for a few Pulps like Weird Tales and Planet Stories. Another unlikely comic star was Harry Harrison who started as an artist for EC (pencilling for Wally Wood) and even wrote the Flash Gordon comic strip for a decade. Unlike today, being a comic book writer was not something to brag about (possibly even lower than being a Pulp writer) and so Harrison used many pseudonyms before breaking into SF publishing as the creator of The Stainless Steel Rat.

But Harrison was one of the last. Before him were the stars of the 1940s. Writers like Eando Binder, actually Otto Binder (who continued to write under this weird pseudonym after his brother Earl no longer wrote with him), that gave SF the robot hero, Adam Link in Amazing Stories from 1939 to 1942. While writing SF Pulp, he also wrote Captain Marvel for Fawcett. He would write for Captain Marvel Jr and co-create Mary Marvel with Marc Swayze. He worked for DC in the late '40s and '50s, creating the early stories of Bizarro for Superman and co-created another super chick, Supergirl. Otto left comics for magazine editing. He became an avid supporter of UFO lore along with his old editor at Amazing, Raymond A Palmer.

Manly Wade Wellman is best known today for his occult detectives, John Thunstone (Weird Tales) and Silver John (Fantasy & Science Fiction) but he wrote all kinds of SF pulp as well as receiving a Pulitzer nomination for his historical work on the Old South. He started in comics with Captain Marvel Adventures #1 in March 1941 and ten years later would find himself testifying against his employer in court when DC comics sued Fawcett for plagiarizing Superman. (Mad Magazine would parody this case in 1953 as "Superdooperman vs. Captain Marbles".) Wellman also wrote for Blackhawk and ghosted for Wil Eisner's The Spirit while Eisner did a tour in the army in 1941. Wellman also wrote for DC's Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space in the 1950s.

Frank Belknap Long was a close friend of HP Lovecraft and began his career writing horror stories for Weird Tales. He wrote Science Fiction in the years after Lovecraft's death, appearing in John W Campbell's prestigious Astounding Science Fiction. Between 1941 and 1948 he wrote for Captain Marvel, Superman, the "Congo Bill" stories in Action Comics, Green Lantern, Planet Comics and DC's horror comic Adventures into the Unknown. During his comic writing decade, Long lived in California.

Alfred Bester wrote a small number of Science Fiction novels but each is a classic of the genre. His The Demolished Man and The Stars, My Destination are frequently included in lists of must-read books. Before these novels of the 1950s he wrote comics from 1942 to 1946. Julius Schwartz recruited him to work on Superman and Green Lantern. Bester is credited with penning the Green Lantern oath that begins, "In brightest day, in darkest night..." He also subbed for Lee Falk on The Phantom and Mandrake while Falk was in the army. Bester left comics for radio work. His wife, Rolly Goulko, was a busy radio and TV actress.

Henry Kuttner was a prolific writer in many genres, producing horror and Sword & Sorcery for Weird Tales, Shudder Pulps, hard-boiled Mysteries, as well as Science Fiction. He would marry writer CL Moore in 1940 and the two would write under a number of pseudonyms including Lewis Pagdett and Lawrence O'Donnell as well as under their own names. Kuttner would try his hand at comics in Green Lantern between 1944-46 but would return to magazine writing.

Sam Merwin Jr, like Fredric Brown and Robert Bloch, wrote in both the SF and Mystery genres. He began as an influential editor at Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder and other Pulps. He gave up editing and became a freelance writer in 1951. One of his first jobs was writing for DC's Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space until 1953. He wrote a number of SF novels and stories before returning to editing and writing for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

Edmond Hamilton started writing comics in 1946 because the Pulp markets were so bad after the War. Before this he was a regular in Weird Tales, Wonder Stories, the Clayton Astounding, and Amazing Stories. He is often cited as the co-creator of the sub-genre of Space Opera. He wrote the Captain Future novels between 1940-46. In comics, he started on DC's Green Lantern but eventually worked on all the Superman titles, Batman, and was instrumental in designing the Legion of Superheroes. He is credited with helping to create the idea of the DC Universe. We wrote the "Chris KL99" strip for Strange Adventures. This comic was loosely based on Captain Future. He left comics twenty years later in 1966, because he and fellow SF writer and wife Leigh Brackett were traveling more often.

Only Gardner Fox hung on longer. He left comics in 1968 when DC refused to give him benefits or royalties on his long canon of work. He turned to writing Sword & Sorcery and adventure novels for Tower paperbacks. Of all these Science Fiction writers, Fox has most often been garnered with awards and accolades, such as the Bill Finger Award, the Eisner Hall of Fame, and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame, having worked in comics for thirty-one years.

What this infusion of SF talent did was add a dimension of imagination to comics that was lacking in the 1930s. The first comics featured a fantastic character, but once beyond the strange gimmick the story was pretty pedestrian, with the hero punching out a bunch of crooks. The Science Fiction writers expanded the possibilities of what comic stories could be until anything was possible. So while I'm watching Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern say those famous words, or Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers fight aliens from another dimension, or Batman use his weirdly dark gadgets, I think of my favorite Pulp writers and smile. Comics may have helped kill off the Pulps, but nowhere else does the flame of SF Pulps burn as brightly today.

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.

When Elephants Rule the Earth... [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Manly Wade Wellman won himself a place in Fantasy history as the author of the Silver John stories that first appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1960s and later in novels. Before that he had a prolific career writing in the SF Pulps beginning in 1931 in the pages of Wonder Stories Quarterly. After that he appeared in practically every SF magazine until the 1950s including John W. Campbell's Astounding. As an SF writer he penned many tales under his own name (such as the Hok the Mighty series for Amazing Stories) as well as under pseudonyms like Gans T. Field (in Weird Tales) and Levi Crow (in Fantasy and SF), as well as under house names like Will Garth.

One of those times he used a nom de plume was when he wrote "Elephant Earth" as Gabriel Barclay for Astonishing Stories, February 1940. I am not sure why he chose to publish this story under a different name since he does not appear in the same issue under his own name, the usual reason for such changes. He did use the same pseudonym for "Hollow of the Moon" (Super Science Stories, May 1940) also edited by Fredrick Pohl, so he may have intended it as a name for Pohl publications alone.

No matter the by-line, "Elephant Earth" is an unusual and charming tale. It follows a man named Lillard who has been put into suspended animation, waking to find the human race destroyed by a mysterious plague, though a handful of humans may have escaped to Venus. The elephants, in Man's absence, have developed language and civilization. The elephants take Lillard to their leader so that he can decide what to do with him. Three factions vie for the last man on earth. The Medicals want to dissect him. The Mechanicals want to use him for delicate work that the elephants find impossible to do. And the last group, containing the Lillard's sole friend, Aarump, are space scientists who want to use him as a test pilot. While the chief of the elephants is deliberating on these choices, the scientists sneak him away and send him into space. Lillard lands on Venus, feeling even more lonely when he hears a female, human voice...

Wellman has great fun with this story, doing a good job of reversing the roles between man and animal. He allows us to see just how cruel humanity is in its attitudes towards beasts of burden. The majority of elephants have no concern for what Lillard wants any more than we would have for what a dog or a horse desires. Rod Serling captured this same disregard almost 30 years later in the film The Planet of the Apes (1968). Wellman has a few good chuckles like the Apes films, like when the elephants discover that the humans they admire most from ancient books, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and Robinson Crusoe, are all fictional characters.

And we could leave Wellman there easily enough, but circumstances would arise that Manly would get a second chance at his elephant story. In 1951, Wellman, along with other Pulpsters like Eando Binder (Earl and Otto Binder) had moved to writing comics as the Pulps began to fade. Wellman wrote for the DC comic Strange Adventures. In issue #11 (August 1951) Wellman produced "The Reign of the Elephants" (drawn by Jim Mooney and Frank Giacoia). This tale appeared alongside Pulp old-timer Edmond Hamilton's "Chris KL-99", loosely based on his Captain Future character, a character Wellman had written as well in the pages of Startling Stories. It must have felt like old times. But I digress.

This time around the elephant tale begins the same but very quickly changes. The elephants have no desire to dissect the man, now named Clay Parks. (He is given a thought translator to make conversation easier than in the Pulp story.) When invaders come from the stars, it is up to Parks to show the elephants the art of war. Clay meets one of the invaders and sees she is a beautiful woman, not a human fled from earth but a product of parallel evolution. The invaders try to sway the last man on earth to betray his planet but he uses the thought transmitter to set a trap. Once the invaders are in the elephants' control, it is easier to sue for peace. The story ends with Parks and Lylla, the beautiful space girl, in love, and men and elephants working together.

In the second version of the tale we get to see Wellman rework his original idea, going for more action. The thought translator could have been just a cheat but he is a pro and makes it the key to the story's resolution. The original story strikes me as a more powerful tale, while the comic elephants are more passive and less convincing. In "Elephant Earth," Wellman extrapolates things like elephant architecture and their mental outlook, which lacks the concept of luck. Ultimately this could be a matter of medium. A constraint of the comic book storytelling is that things must be shown while in a story the more esoteric stuff is limited only by the length of the tale. All that aside, it is intriguing to see how an author plays with the same idea in two different ways. And there are few authors more able and fascinating than Manly Wade Wellman.

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.