THE READING RHEUM: SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR (1942/1944)

I've still not read all of the ERB oeuvre, but SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR definitely comes at the top of any list of "the women-led books of Edgar Rice Burroughs." It might also be the only one on the list, But Still...                                                                                                                   

By saying this, I'm not by extension agreeing with the modern idea of "equity:" that there ought to be, in boys' entertainment, just as many female heroines as there are male heroes. Burroughs wrote rousing adventures for male readers, though unlike some similar writers, he did include a fair amount of romance that could in theory appeal to female readers. I'd argue, though, that often, once ERB finished hooking up his male heroes with their romantic interests within the bonds of marriage, he sometimes didn't know what to do with them, with the obvious exception of Tarzan. So often, as in many of the serials, he would "spin off" a new hero with nominal connections to the "parent hero," and said hero would then have his own romantic arc. In the Pellucidar series, this pattern applies to both the preceding novels to SAVAGE: TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR and BACK TO THE STONE AGE.                                                              

  Yet, although there is a new romantic arc in SAVAGE for young warrior Hodon (who serves in David Innes' army) and the feisty tribeswoman O-aa, technically this novel is still a David Innes novel, even though he doesn't have a major role until the latter half of the tale. Moreover, his mate Dian the Beautiful gets as much narrative emphasis as he does. Usually, even the more tempestuous ERB ladies tend to exist to test the hero's resolve. But in this novel, I would say that Innes, Dian, Hodon and O-aa share ensemble status in this novel alone.                                                                                         

Like all of the other Pellucidar novels, the story is comprised by an episodic series of "escapes from captivity" and "search and rescue missions." Thus there's no point in summarizing the incidents, though the best sequences are those in which both Dian and O-aa are forced to serve as "earthly goddesses" to superstitious city-dwellers. Unlike many ERB heroines, these Stone Age beauties are unflinchingly violent in defending themselves. When Hodon steals a kiss from O-aa mere hours after having first met her, she cuts a slit in his chest with her stone knife, and later she stabs one of her captives to death with a spear. Dian and a male warrior have a standout scene having a bloody battle against a plesiosaur, and both females prove clever in playing upon the foolish ways of civilized people. Not that Stone Age cavepeople haven't been as dotty in previous books in the series, but we just don't see many of them this time out.                                                                                                     

           
    SAVAGE also offers ERB's best comical villain. This is an old man from 1800s Connecticut, made functionally immortal by his time in Pellucidar, but because he can't remember his name after so many years, the Pellucidaran natives dub him "Ah-Gilak," meaning "old man." Sometimes ERB calls him "the old man whose name was not Dolly Dorcas," which I won't explain but which I found moderately funny. Even before landing in the Stone Age world, Ah-Gilak was forced to eat from human corpses to live, and he delivered a strong liking for the flesh of his own species. ERB gets a lot of mileage from this goofy old codger, who's only an ally out of convenience but always poses some degree of menace.                           

  Though ERB started this novel in 1942, following it in 1944 with LAND OF TERROR, the last in the series, for many years it was not fully extant. To explain, I'll content myself with linking to this excellent writeup of the novel's history and conclude by stating that SAVAGE stands as one of the best books in the series, eclipsed only by the TANAR novel. Oh, and though this is a David Innes novel, I deem it a minor crossover because it does include a brief scene with Stellara, the female mate of Tanar-- who exist in their own "sub-universe" rather than being part of Innes' regular cosmos.                                               

ADULTERATED COMICS

 I was about to write a comment to this post on Rip Jagger's Dojo but decided to make that comment into a whole post here. The respondent to Rip's post asked the question as to whether it might not have been counter-productive for the early adult collectors of Golden Age comics to focus so much upon the very elements that anti-comics pundit Frederic Wertham vilified: elements like "cross dressing" and "injuries to the eye."                                                                                                 

As far as Wertham was concerned, such things were adult material that did not belong in comic books aimed at children. One might say that the introduction of such elements "adulterated" the pure state of material aimed at innocents, going by the dictionary definition:                                                                                                                         ADULTERATE: "render (something) poorer in quality by adding another substance, typically an inferior one"                                                                                                                            Now, I've provided an ample number of posts here to demonstrate that the purity Wertham defined was "purely" in his own imagination, and, by extension, in the imaginations of the parents and teachers who either got on board with Wertham or, in some cases, anticipated his jeremiad. What interests me here is the question raised: did adult readers of comic books in any way "adulterate" their own reputations by making commodities of the very things that Wertham considered pernicious influences?                     

                                                                                                              The short answer to that question is "no, because the Overstreet Price Guide didn't begin until 1970, and by that time, 'normies' had already formed their generally negative opinions of comics-nerds by that time." Since I became a hardcore comics-fan in the mid-1960s, I kept a pretty good weather-eye on "normie culture's" attitude toward comic books, and I don't think that even in the 1970s non-fans were aware of collectors looking for Werthamite trigger-points. Remember that although sustained comics-fandom in the U.S. started in the very early 1960s with the activities of Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas, not until 1965 did John Q. Public even become aware of grown men (and a few women) collecting and reading old comic books. The first convention for comic book collectors appeared in New York in 1965, the same year that Jules Feiffer's THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES was published. At most there had been some earlier Sunday-supplement essays about the weird adult comics-readers, but for most of those writers, the Wertham Crusade was yesterday's news. Even after the surprise of the "Bat-fad" the next year-- which certainly did not validate comic books in the eyes of sixties adults, however much it influenced later generations-- normies just didn't know much about adult comics-readers.                                                                                                                                                                   In subsequent decades others attempted to revive anti-comics  crusades, but I don't remember anyone making an issue of perverted collectors obsessed by gouged eyes and spanking scenes. At most I recall that a few comics-fans didn't approve of listing such trigger-scenes. But as the subculture got further and further away from Wertham, I think such triggers lost a lot of their appeal.                                                                                                                                    And what was the appeal for those who did look for such pernicious influences, whether or not the comics-creators had intended the scenes to be transgressive? I don't rule out collectors with particular fetishes, of course. But I think that for most adult readers, they commodified the supposedly salacious scenes as a way of mocking Frederic Wertham's screed. The very things he inveighed against, as the practices of sinful adults taking advantage of innocent children, became selling-points for comics-dealers. "Step right up and see the naughty cross-dressing Wonder Woman villain!" In my view, it's on the same level as the sinful sights of your basic carnival, which are "innocent" on a level that Frederic Wertham would never have understood.