Mermaids hate cephalopods

By Anna Verhoog. [Suggested by Shad Daly]

Who wants a free copy of Sailor Twain?

I ended up with two copies of Mark Siegel's excellent Sailor Twain graphic novel, so I'd like to give one away. It's not even available to buy until October 2, so getting one now is kind of a cool deal.

If you'd like it, reply below or send me a tweet telling me you're entering the giveaway. That's all you have to do. At the end of the day tomorrow, I'll pick a random name from all the entries up to that point.

If you want to know more about the book, you can read my review at Robot 6.

What's the deal with fish-women?

I've always liked mermaids. I guess since Disney's Peter Pan, though I could've learned about them before that. And not just mermaids, but merdudes too. An undersea civilization of fish-people is an awesome adventure fantasy. The idea that mermaids are also a sexual fantasy frankly never occurred to me until recently. I had to struggle to understand it.

I mean, I get that they're sexy from the waist up. Mermaids are invariably beautiful and if they're not half-naked then they're all naked. Of course they're sexy. From the waist up. But that applies to women with legs too. What is it about mermaids that makes them a fetish?

What got me thinking about this was Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, a movie I expected to like (William Powell and a mermaid? I'm in.), but really really didn't. Ann Blyth is heart-breakingly beautiful as the mermaid, but as I said in my Flick Attack review of the movie, "When (Powell) seduces her by teaching her to kiss, it’s more Humbert Humbert than Captain Kirk." Blythe's mute, child-like mermaid is so innocent that she doesn't even get a name. She's literally nothing but an object of William Powell's mid-life lust.

She reminds me of Nova in Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes. If you haven't read the novel, there's a bizarre, but fascinating love triangle between the Earth astronaut (named Ulysse in the book), Nova, and Zira. Boulle's commenting on sexual attraction and the old question of which is more important: external beauty or internal? Nova is physically perfect and primordially sexual, but Ulysse can't connect with her. Her behavior - and possibly her mental ability - is too animal-like. When he finally sleeps with her, he's ashamed and I was a little creeped out. It's like he was having sex with a pet. Zira, on the other hand, is physically repulsive, but also warm, intelligent, and funny. Guess whom Ulysse ultimately makes the deepest connection with?



I should mention that William Powell's character is also married and has a young daughter in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid. That ramps up the skeeviness level quite a bit for me, but I would have been able to dismiss the movie without thinking more about it if I hadn't followed it up with Miranda, an English film from the same year with a similar plot.

Glynis Johns' (Mary Poppins, While You Were Sleeping) title mermaid talks and is even the aggressor in this version, but there's still something wonky about the way Griffith Jones' character (a married doctor on a fishing holiday away from his wife) reacts to her. Mr. Peabody accidentally hooks his mermaid while fishing and kidnaps her, while Miranda grabs Dr. Martin's line and pulls him in to kidnap him, but the men's reactions to the mermaids is the same in both movies. Martin objects to being held captive at first, but when Miranda makes a deal with him to let him go if he'll take her to the surface world with him, he not only agrees, but whole-heartedly throws himself into buying clothing for her and arranging her cover story as a wheelchair-bound patient of his. He has many opportunities to escape her, starting with the scene after they make the deal, and makes no use of any of them.

I know I'm overthinking Miranda. It's supposed to be a light-hearted story about the cute adventures of a mermaid on land, but I was already bothered enough by Mr. Peabody that it got me wondering what power mermaids have that two, independent film studios from opposite sides of the Atlantic would make movies about them in which mermaids make men want to put their marriages at risk. Then I got to thinking about some of the hyper-sexual mermaid art I've seen and debates about whether mermaid nudity constitutes "real" nudity because mermaids aren't actually human (in other words, looking at mermaid breasts is like looking at monkey breasts). That puts me back to Nova again and I wonder if the mermaid fetish isn't about domination. Here's a creature that (at least part of her) looks like a woman, but really isn't. She has the power to temporarily dominate men (certainly in Miranda's case and with mythological sirens), but can be overcome and tamed like any other wild animal. Only with a sexual element to it.



Here's what I think. I don't think it's about sex at all. In its historical context, I think it's about the allure of the sea. It's about what Herman Melville described in the first chapter of Moby Dick. "With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me." He goes on to elaborate about these feelings at great length (as Melville will).

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.

Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—Water—there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?

Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

That's not nearly all he has to say about it, but it gets the point across: People love the water and the ocean in particular. I do too, but some people love it with a passion that they can't understand, much less describe to someone else. They love it so deeply that they leave their homes and families for it. It's as necessary and pleasurable to them as sex.

Mermaids capture that metaphor quite nicely and the domination angle also fits right in. Mermaids - like the sea - are dangerous and will crush you. The idea of gaining some control or power over them/it is intoxicating, but men will never be able to dominate them or it completely and - to a certain mindset that loves being frustrated by the never-ending hunt - that makes them and it even more attractive.

[Mr. Peabody lobby card from Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans]

Night Tide (1961)

Dennis Hopper was sort of the Crispin Glover of his generation, wasn't he? I never realized it because he was already a respected, tenured actor by the time I showed up. I just figured that he happened to get (or at worst, like) weird parts. I never figured it was actually him making them weird. But he was only 25 when Night Tide came out and his role is a nice, young sailor. A normal guy who unfortunately falls for the wrong girl. At least, he looks normal on paper.

Actually, there's a little creepiness in the script. Johnny Drake's on shore leave in a little town on the coast of California when he meets Mora (Linda Lawson) in a beatnik coffee house. By "meets" I mean he sees her across the room, sits down uninvited at her table, bothers her by talking over the band she's clearly trying to enjoy, then follows her out the door and won't go home until she tells him where she lives and agrees to see him again. About the only point to his credit is that she doesn't leave because of him. She's spooked by a woman who enters the bar, gives Mora a threatening look, and then takes off again. But still, Drake's game needs a lot of work.

Once Mora decides he's okay though, he becomes a pretty decent guy. And if Hopper had played it a bit differently, he wouldn't have come across as desperately lonely and intense as he does. That performance lasts the entire movie too, so that Drake always seems a bit unhinged. His decency comes from the script's not allowing him to kill anyone.

It's not so kind to other characters though because this is a horror movie. Mora works as a sideshow mermaid on the boardwalk, but there's some question about whether or not that's just an act. As some of the locals tell Drake, Mora's last two boyfriends ended up drowned under mysterious circumstances. Some think that Mora believes she really is a mermaid - the siren variety who lures men to their watery doom. And the woman from the coffee shop may just be another siren, here to bring Mora back home to the island from which she was rescued as a girl.

I've fallen in love with low-budget, black-and-white horror movies from the '60s. Though Night Tide was written and directed by Curtis Harrington (adapted from his own short story, "The Call of the Sea"), there's a Roger Corman quality about it. The horror is mostly psychological with few special effects. And what effects it has are charmingly cheesy. It's a weird, pleasantly unsettling film with an interesting mystery and a strange, but likable main character to unravel it.

Three out of five mermaids.

Art Show: Keep Your Eyes on the Hands

The Mysterious Island



By NC Wyeth. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Polly



By Ted Naifeh.

Atlantean Pirate



By Carla Wyzgala. [Girls Drawing Girls]

After the break: Conan fights a sea monster, a man feeds a mermaid, an Avenging Son avenges, and an opu sways.

Art Show: Let's Hunt Some Orc!

I've got enough backlog that I'm going to go to three Art Show posts a week for a while.

Treasure Ship



By J Allen St John. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Building the Nautilus



By Jeremy Vanhoozer.

The Mermaid and the Shark



By Jessica Hickman.

After the break: Aquaman 2099, The Six Million Dollar Man vs Bigfoot, She-Hulk, Mary Marvel, Sucker Punch, Hobbit hunters, and giant, apocalyptic cephalopods.

Elsewhere... Lucas vs. Asimov!

Here's what else I've been up to online lately:

What Are You Reading?



Short reviews of Rooster Jack vs. The Mermaids and The Children of the Phoenix.

Warlord of Io vs. Science Fiction



This week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs is all about what makes an awesome space story: Science or Imagination?

Art Show: A Gaul No More!

Asterix the Viking



By Mike Hawthorne. [ComicTwart]

Red-Headed Pirate of the Caribbean



By Marc Davis. [Shad from Swing with Shad let me know that this Pirates of the Caribbean art is the inspiration for that Little Mermaid Pirate picture I re-posted from his site last month.]

After the break: speaking of mermaids; also some dinosaurs, Black Canary, Green Goblin, the Creeper, Medusa, and Wonder Woman.

Art Show: Stay Alive on the Terror-Planet!

Sea Monsters Attack!


By Frank R Paul. [Illustrateurs]

Ariel



Artist Unknown [Cruel Fairytale...]

ERBdom



By Larry Ivie. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Jungle Girl



By Bruce Timm [Pink of the Ink]

Korg: 70,000 BC



By Pat Boyette. [Illustrateurs. Check out other, lower res Korg covers here.]

Black Canary, Black Widow, Hulk, Dune, a space girl, and Frankenstein meets Twilight after the break.

Elsewhere on the Internets: Lincoln's Assassin, Kids vs Nazis, and June's Adventure Comics

It's been a while since I've done one of these updates, so I'll split it into two sections. Today is just the Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs columns from the past month.

Along with Jane Yolen's Foiled, we talked about four First Second books in a row.

Booth



I thought Booth was an informative, but flawed - mostly in regards to its storytelling, but I also thought the art could've been more dynamic - look at Abraham Lincoln's assassin. CC Colbert is the pseudonym for historian Catherine Clinton and Booth is not only her first graphic novel, but her first fiction work as well. That shows, but it's still an interesting account that made me curious to learn more.

Comic Book Resources also interviewed Clinton about the book and her research on it.

Resistance, Book 1



I enjoyed the first volume of Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis' Resistance a lot more. It's the story of some kids who get caught up in the French Resistance and learn to work effectively against the Nazis. There are at least two ways you can tell this story. You can either make it a fun, adventure-filled romp or you can realistically highlight how scary it would be for real children to be put in that situation. Either of those choices could make for a great story, but I was surprised and pleased that Resistance chose the second of them. And even more pleased that it did it so well.

The other choice (and a whole bunch of other adventure comics) after the break.

Art Show: Crom!

The Little Mermaid



Artist Unknown [Never Sea Land]

First Wave



By Lee Bermejo. [DC Universe: The Source]

Conan



By Sam Hiti.

Johnny Recon Hates (Space) Cephalopods



By Andy Kuhn. [Comic Twart]

Art Show: Me Tarzan

This is How They Getcha



Artist Unknown [Admiral Calvin]

Treehouse



Artist Unknown [Animation Backgrounds has a ton of cool background art from Disney's Tarzan.]

Tarzan and Jane



[Golden Age Comic Book Stories ran a fantastic post full of classic Hollywood romance for Valentine's Day. There's some Captain Blood in there too.]

T-Rex Love



By Mathieu Reynès.

Doctor No



By Michael Gilette (beware of music in that link). I know I've shared his fantastic Bond covers before, but they're always worth revisiting.

Batgirl



By Ted Naifeh.

Batman



By Victor Santos.

Alpha Flight



By John Byrne. [Giant-Size Marvel]

The Headless Horseman



By Francesco Francavilla.

Native Drums



By Genevieve Tsai.

Art Show: Mermaid Party

I don't find a little tasteful nakedness offensive, so I don't usually warn about it, but there's more than usual in today's post. If that makes you uncomfortable, you might want to skip this one.

Deep Water Days



By Richard Rogers [Tons more like it at Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Mermaids



By Wil Cormier. [Never Sea Land]

Aquaman Hates Cephalopods



You might think that he doesn't, but this collection of covers at Dollar Bin Blues tells a different story. This one's by Butch Guice.

Ruins



By Travis Hanson.

GI Robot



By Chris Samnee. [Comic Twart]



By Francesco Francavilla. [Comic Twart]

Reed Gunther



Remember that bear-riding cowboy from earlier? Mike Maihack's also a fan.

Youth and Her Glory



By Danni Shinya Luo.

Zatanna Comes to Life



By Stephane Roux.

Forest



By Mathieu Reynès.

Art Show: The Siren's Call

Mermaids



By Frank Espinosa. Man, I miss Rocketo. [Swing with Shad has four other mermaid comics covers in addition to this one.]



By Dugald Stewart Walker [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]



By Kristin Palach.

Island Girl



Also by Kristin Palach.

Lara vs T-Rex



By Otis Frampton.

Rocketeer vs Ornithocheirus



By Tom Fowler.

Rocketeer vs WWI Flying Ace



By Francesco Francavilla.

Valkyrie



By Arthur Rackham. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Xena and Gabby



Also by Otis Frampton.

Alice in Wonderland



By Ted Naifeh.