Ian’s Comments (group member since Apr 09, 2018)

Ian’s comments from the I Read Comic Books group.

Harry Harrison is best known as a science fiction writer, with a long string of novels, but he both illustrated and wrote comic strips and books early in his career. Unfortunately, I have never seen any of the latter that I recollect: but he made frequent use of pseudonyms, and some work wasn’t credited.

Lovecraft has always struck me as a little like radio drama: you have to draw on your own experience and imagination for the visuals. Which is not always a good thing, as his “indescribable” and the like tends to paralyze such effort.

“Yeah” is still considered informal, and Marian-Webster traces it only to 1863. Not quite a definite anachronism, but very questionable in its setting. Languages have time depth and social context to keep in mind.

“Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle” is the title of an existing book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, with a totally different plot. They may have avoided the full title to avoid complaints while still getting some name recognition. I am not sure if it was one of the Tarzan books on which copyright was allowed to lapse (a long story) but that might also be a problem.

I don’t recall the Australian situation, but wartime Britain banned the import of American pulp magazines to save valuable space in cargo ships — which had often shipped them as ballast before the war. Sympathetic Americans mailed copies of Astounding and its rivals to bereft fans.

Of course the science fiction magazines in particular were full of nonsense like jet planes and long-range rockets, Not to mention atomic bombs. Clearly of no possible value (There were experts who were sure the jet and rocket V weapons would never work, right up to when they were hitting London.)

In an unrelated incident George Orwell viewed with alarm all the violence in American pulps, based mainly on boxing stories in which people hit each other a lot, with details.

Ed wrote: "in the 1940s there were war-related restrictions (bans?) on how much paper publishers could use. Astounding magazine had to reduce the number of issues or number of pages (I've forgotten which)...."

If I recall correctly, Street and Smith dealt with paper rationing for Astounding, which sold relatively well, at least in part by killing its sister fantasy magazine Unknown/Unknown Worlds, and switching its paper allocation to Astounding.

But there may also have been a change in Astounding's format, I never got into the details of that story, just how it impacted the market for fantasy. And I never had the budget for vintage copies earlier than the post-war years.

One change in Astounding was the loss of serialized novels: too many complaints from readers in the military that they could never depend on getting the next issue, and wanted to know how the story came out. Not to mention that they might not be around for the next issue.

The story is very complicated, and I don't have a complete handle on it: part of the problem in later years was that DC had a grip on the relevant magazine distribution system, which itself discouraged even DC from maintaining a lot of titles, and used it to limit other publishers accordingly. Fewer copies available obviously meant lower sales totals.

Also, the contraction of the periodical publication industry hit other publishers hard. Fawcett, another magazine publisher, which eventually transitioned into paperback books, conceded a (probably successful) defense in the case brought by by DC that Captain Marvel was plagiarized from Superman, and dropped not only the legal case but their whole comics line. This appears to have been a financial decision. Even if Captain Marvel was still outselling Superman, especially in the juvenile market share, profits were diminishing, and they decided not to spend any more on the case.

An additional factor, according the the late science fiction writer and editor, and agent, Fred Pohl, was the break-down of the US-wide distribution system for magazines, which allowed regional distributors to pick and choose what they would deliver, instead of taking whatever the publisher provided, in competition with "American Independent," their national rival. This situation involved post-war profit-taking on warehouses bought up cheap during the Depression, and now more valuable to stockholders as real estate than as distribution centers.

An historical note:

Although the 'moral panic' over comic books had a significant impact in the industry in the early 1950s, it was not the sole reason for the disappearance of many publishers from the field, although it probably influenced the decision of those remaining to target a child audience only, instead of, like comic strips, including adult readers in their market.

Comic book publication had been fading since the late 1940s, along with sales of pulp fiction magazines: A major publisher, Street & Smith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_...) dropped almost all of their fiction line (except for "Astounding Science Fiction"), and, according to some sources, all their comic books, in 1949. (I'm not certain they had much of a presence in the latter field).

This was blamed in part on the advent of television as competition for a mass audience, and in part on the newly popular cheap paperbacks. Which became a new market for pulp writers when original novels joined the original cheap reprint editions.

The trend away from magazine fiction also may have been due in part to the WW II distribution of special paperback editions to US military personnel, which some believe changed the reading habits of a generation of American men (mostly) away from short stories and serials in disposable magazines.

Francis wrote: "And my first ever genuine imported from the U.S. comic was Detective Comics #671. The story was "The Golum of Gotham by Peter Milligan..."

Googling "The Golem of Gotham" turns up plenty of cover and interior images for that issue, and for the conclusion in Detective Comics #672.

(And, if you use "images" instead of the general search, you get lots and lots of other Batman material, golem material, and probably a lot else.)

For those interested in the actual beliefs and traditions surrounding the Golem, the main resource is Moshe Idel's "Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid" (1990), unfortunately out of print, and very expensive when available.

There is, however, a very good Wikipedia article, which does help in separating traditions from (some influential) modern fictions.

The title of "The Golem of Gotham" is an obvious riff on "The Golem of Prague," one of the modern works using the traditional theme.

Addendum: some of Idel's material on the origins of the Golem concept may be found in his short article, "Golems and God: Mimesis and Confrontation," available at

https://archive.org/stream/MosheIdel/...

His whole "Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions..." was at one time available on-line, but, after looking for it for a while, I concluded that has disappeared.

I'm obviously a dinosaur.

The first comic book I read through was probably from DC, was used, and belonged to my somewhat older cousins.

My memory is a little fuzzy on the sequence.

It was most likely a Superman story, and the oldest I distinctly remember was Action Comics #242 (July 1958), introducing Brainiac and his shrink-ray (well before he was revealed as a super-computer), with the bottle-city of Kandor. If that was the case, it was an auspicious start.

Even if it was another story, it was probably lot more interesting than the fairly routine crooks on the "Adventures of Superman" television show.

There is an outside chance that it was a nearly-new The Flash, #122 (August 1961), introducing the Top, with a cover depicting a giant hand grenade. But that may have been the first copy I actually owned.

(I seem to see a theme here -- remembering issues by interesting or eccentric villains. So the actual first may be lost to memory.)