Zarnak: Forgotten Forerunner [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Comics have a great reputation nowadays. The top grossing films are all based on comics: X-Men, Avengers, Spider-Man, Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, and so on. If you want to sound a little more high fallutin', you can call them "graphic novels," I don't care. Big writers actually brag about writing comics or having a story adapted into comics. This was not always the case.

In fact, it was worse than that. Comics were an infection in science fiction; only slightly less worse than Venusian snot plague. Many SF writers wrote comics, but they didn't brag about it. Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman, Alfred Bester, Eando Binder, Edmond Hamilton, and Harry Harrison who started out as a comic artist and became a famous SF author. But of all the science fiction comics, there is one that is different. Perhaps especially hated or simply ignored, but unusual. I'm talking about "Zarnak."

"Zarnak?" you ask. Wasn't he a villain in Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane? Nope. Wasn't he a tentacular space monster in Planet Comics? Uh-uh. Wasn't he a Soviet spy who tried to blackmail J Jonah Jameson in Amazing Spider-Man? Never. Zarnak was the only comic character to appear in a science fiction pulp. Not to be inspired by a pulp or to get a comic from a pulp company, but to actually appear in one.

Wonder Stories has a long and complicated history. It began as Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, then became just Wonder Stories. All three were owned by Hugo Gernsback. But in 1936, Gernsback gave up the pulp game (at least for a while) and Wonder Stories got bought by the Standard Magazine chain, which changed the name to Thrilling Wonder Stories and placed twenty-one-year-old Mort Weisinger in charge.

Lester del Rey explains the change in his The Worlds of Science Fiction: The History of a Subculture (1977):

"The magazine was no longer the same. It was deliberately slanted to a lower age group, far more frankly designed to use action stories than Astounding had ever been, and it included a comic strip inside it. The comic insert was soon dropped, but it had already helped to give the magazine a bad reputation with the older readers."

First off, you can literally hear the contempt drip off Del Rey's tongue at the words "comic strip." Secondly, you notice that he quickly brushes the strip aside, unnamed, and moves on. Granted he was writing a history of science fiction but the abruptness is as typical as his comparison to the holy grail, John W Campbell's Astounding.

I plan to rectify Mr. Del Rey's omission. That "comic strip" was called "Zarnak" by Max Plaisted, a pseudonym of Jack Binder. (Both Binder and Weisinger have big things to do in comics, but more on that later.) Jack Binder was Earl and Otto's older brother (Jack 1902, Earl 1904, and baby Otto in 1911). Jack was the one who spearheaded the brothers' involvement with comics. Earl and Otto formed "Eando Binder" and went on to write such pulp classics as "I, Robot" before Otto eventually joined the Fawcett Comics team and wrote Captain Marvel and later moved to DC to help create Supergirl. Let's just say that Binders and comics went together.

But back in 1936, with a new juvenile pulp to launch, Mort Weisinger had Jack Binder produce "Zarnak," a cliff-hanger strip modeled on Buck Rogers (that had started in 1929) and Flash Gordon (1934).

Zarnak lives on the Earth of 2936, a planet regressed to medieval superstition after World War 5. Building a rocket plane, Zarnak leaves Earth in search of a spaceship that fled the planet and may have the last remaining scientifically civilized humans left. But Zarnak gets into trouble right away when a meteor plugs his rocket tubes. He is headed into the sun, but lands on the undiscovered first planet, Vulcan. There he finds slugs who eat metal and he uses them to unplug his ship and escape. He crash-lands on Mercury and meets the "crazy ones," beings with large, bulbous heads and are ruled by Thark. Zarnak is sacrificed to a giant bird that takes him to a city on the cold side. This city is inhabited by scientists who want to cut Zarnak up to discover the secret of longer life, because they live for only twenty-four years. Zarnak is saved by the beautiful Etarre, who takes him away in her plane, but they are shot down by Thark who puts them in his new machine that is supposed to separate their souls from their bodies. Zarnak fools Thark into thinking they have been freed, lures him to his ship, straps a jet pack on him, and is rid of the fool. The duo flies to the Hollow Mountain where Etarre betrays him to the Supreme One, giant-headed Vaeco, who wants to burn Zarnak alive. Vaeco relents and explains that he and Etarre are from Venus. Etarre was born looking like an Earthling, so Vaeco fled with her to Mercury, where he rules like a god. Zarnak becomes part of the team. He goes on a secret mission to find a rogue scientist living amongst the "crazy ones," finds their secret generator base, and is attacked from behind...

The strip was dropped and the next installment never appeared.

Let's look at the good and the bad now. On the negative side, the science was very poor. The meteor that plugs the rocket tube is hilarious. Zarnak contemplates jumping out of his ship into space, then quickly remembers this is entirely stupid. The characterization of Zarnak and his enemies is almost non-existent. We assume Zarnak is good because he is human and heroic. We assume the scientists and the crazy ones are bad because they are ugly and alien. Was this any dumber than other SF comics being produced? Not really, for the stories in Planet Comics and even the newspaper strips would make similar faux pas. On the plus side, Jack Binder kept the story moving with an Edgar Rice Burroughs-style pace (remember Thark?) He always managed to come up with a cliffhanger too, which is not as easy as you might think with only three pages an episode. The entire thing comes off as a paper version of a Flash Gordon serial. Not the high standard Lester Del Rey wanted and ultimately, neither did Mort Weisinger. Cancelled after only eight episodes, it is hard to imagine Zarnak had any real influence on science fiction. Unlike Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Zarnak was quickly forgotten.

Jack Binder must have shrugged off the cancellation. He was moving up in comics. By 1942 he had his own comic mill that employed such future stars as Gil Kane, Ken Bald, Kurt Schaffenburger, and Carmine Infantino. Binder himself penciled many of the Captain Marvel adventures written by his brother Otto. Jack closed the studio four years later, moving into semi-retirement, but continuing to pencil comics for a number of years.

Also to be noted: twenty-one-year-old editor Mort Weisinger would end up at DC in 1941. After a stint in the army, Mort became the man behind Superman and Batman, along with Julius Schwartz. It was Mort and Julius who would lure so many of those old SF writers into the DC fold, having first known them as fanboys publishing fanzines and semi-prozines and finally real pulp titles. Zarnak had come and gone, but the authors of Thrilling Wonder still had much to offer comics, bringing in the better science fictional content we take for granted as part of the DC universe.

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.