Thursday, April 20, 2023

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MONGROL MAN" (UNCLE SAM QUARTERLY #4, 1942)

 When I went myth-hunting in the pages of Quality's publication UNCLE SAM QUARTERLY-- a short-lived attempt to give the ultra-patriotic hero his own title, lasting just eight issues-- I thought it likely that any mythcomics there would be authored by Sam's creator Will Eisner. But though Eisner's contributions in this series are amusing, the most mythic story here is by an unknown writer and stalwart artist George Tuska. Neither collaborator attempts any of Eisner's well-known tics with respect to lettering or panel composition, but "The Mongrol Man" does evince the sort of bloody-mindedness I associate with Eisner's sometime collaborator Jack Cole. However, so many fans have sought out Cole's work that "Mongrol" probably would have been identified by now if it was one of his works.




The title is an anomaly in two respects. First, there isn't just one "Mongrol Man," there's three of them. Second, the name seems to be punning on the two words "Mongol" and "mongrel," but only the second word actually has any significance in the story. This is surprising because during WWII a favorite trope of American superhero comics was that of a "20th-century Mongol invasion." Strangely, although "Mongolian" was informally used to describe, not just inhabitants of Mongolia, but all Asians roughly east of India, none of the comics I've read actually conflates any of these various recrudescent Mongols with the Japanese. Perhaps even comics-writers, far from concerned with fine points of cultural history, couldn't associate the Japanese opponents, usually pictured as small-statured, with Mongols, who were portrayed as tall hulking brutes.





Nazi eugenicists concerned themselves primarily with creating racial purity by excluding all supposedly inferior races from interbreeding with the Aryan stock of Germany. This story's villain, biologist Jeremiah Korntooth, goes to the other extreme: creating a "perfect brute race" by somehow combining aspects of humans of different climes and possibly animals as well, meaning that he was taking leaves from the books of both Frankenstein and Moreau. Hence, the brutes he invents are actually "mongrels," which sounds like the opposite of the Nazi ideology.

The common ground, however, seems to be that Korntooth has some roughly parallel beliefs about the fetishization of raw power, since he describes the three leaders of the Axis powers as those who "share my ideals." He views the advance of Western technology as a weakening influence upon humankind, and he decides to create a new breed of superhumans to offset human dependence on technology. Having bred just three Mongrol Men, he bestows one apiece on each of the Axis leaders and then vanishes from the story.

Now, Quality's Uncle Sam was supposed to be a heavy-hitter like Superman, able to fling around tanks and proving invulnerable to bullets. Two issue previous, the top-hatted hero had engaged in a grueling battle with a similarly powered opponent, and the cover for USQ #2 described the story as a "14-page powerhouse battle." Actually, the story was 14 pages, and the battle only lasted six, but for a Golden Age story, that was still pretty long. All this to say that a reader in 1942 could have reasonably expected Uncle Sam to take on the exemplars of the "brute race" and beat them in hand-to-hand conflict.



However, the "Mongrol" writer isn't concerned with matching Korntooth's mongrels against the strength of American willpower. Instead, by the way Sam and his ordinary-joe servicemen aides dispose of the creatures, the moral seems to be: use anything you have, technology or trickery, to overcome threats to freedom. So in the encounter with the Mongrol Man serving the Italian army, the sailor "Tex" lassoes the monster from his plane (don't try this at home) and successfully dashes the "invulnerable" Mongrol against a cliff-side.




The second one is defeated more by tricky use of the surrounding environment. When Sam and friends arrive to take on the monster serving the Germans on the Russian front, the second of the two aides, "Bayou Bill," tries to drug the Mongrol by pouring vodka in his drinking water. It's not certain that the Mongrol is weakened by the alcohol, for he comes after the serviceman. Uncle Sam comes to Bill's rescue and after a short battle knocks the creature into a handy quicksand pond, where he asphixiates.





The last of Korntooth's creations joins a couple of Japanese fighter-planes in trying to destroy an Allied vessel. This time Uncle Sam forms no particular strategy; he just dives down into the sea to duke it out with the Mongrol. But the last of the brutes is defeated by another manifestation of the technology hated by Korntooth: when one of the Japanese fighters is downed by Allied fire, the plane crashes on top of the Mongrol, whose invulnerability is something less than Superman-esque. The Axis' use of pure strength is invalidated, though Sam's useless sidekick Buddy sounds a little like Korntooth, complainnng about "sissy stuff." 

On a side-note, I have no idea why the writer named his villain Korntooth. The expression "corntooth" is an old putdown accusing a person of bad dental hygiene, in that he's so neglected brushing that one of his front teeth has turned corn-yellow. It doesn't seem to have any actual relevance to the villain's depiction, so probably the writer just thought "corntooth" would be an amusing name for a pretentious evildoer.



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