I've occasionally commented that Eisner showed a penchant for spoofing ethnicities and nationalities, and one can see an example of this in his comic Arab villain Ahmed-the-Trader in the late-1947 story "Money, Money." However, about six months prior to that tale, Eisner produced a somewhat elegaic look at the Arab world, playing off the West's discovery of oil-- a.k.a. "black gold"-- in various North African countries following the end of WWII.
Eisner begins the story with an improvised, but none the less serious, elegy for the waning fortunes of an Arab landholder, Abu Ben Adim. (Presumably the author chose the surname to signify "son of Adam," for reasons that become clearer later.) Though in antique times Abu's tribe was rich, in 1947 his land has become unfruitful and Abu is almost the last of his line. Like the original Adam, Abu has two quarreling sons, Abu's being named Hanash and Ali. Both are, to borrow from a much later Christian text, "prodigal sons" insofar as they both deserted their father's orchards to seek success in the Western world. The only reason Hanash and Ali return to their father's house is because he's on his death-bed, and both "jackals," as Abu calls them, want nothing but their unearned inheritance. Further, both of them are thoroughly rotten. Hanash in particular brings a prisoner in tow: none other than the crime-fighting Spirit. As for Ali, he has a Western woman in his company, though her face is cloaked by a veil, and as soon as he receives his bequest, he heartlessly leaves the woman behind, presumably having enjoyed some romantic tryst with her previously.
As for the bequest, Abu leaves to Ali all of his land, which Abu considers barren, and bequeaths the "family sword" to Hanash, though in dying he curses both sons for their faithlessness. Hanash believes that he's been given the stick's short end, since both brothers know that the Ben Adim land is rich in oil, and that Western petroleum companies will pay top dollar for access. Hanash retaliates by making a particularly odd attempt on his brother's life: bludgeoning him with the covered-up body of the Spirit.
This doesn't serve to kill Ali, but while one of Hanash's henchmen takes the crimefighter away for an eventually fatal encounter, Hanash executes Ali, impaling Ali with the family sword, and in effect "exchanging" their bequests.. Ali's widow pretends to go along with Hanash, who then decides to kill off the Spirit by shooting the bound and covered figure. To no reader's surprise, it's soon revealed that the hero escaped and left the henchman bound and covered, so that the henchman dies and the Spirit can keep following Hanash. (Hanash seems a particularly dim villain, not to even check the face of the enemy he plans to execute.)
Within a few pages of this fast-paced tale, Hanash makes plans to sell off the deed he's stolen from his dead sibling, and the Spirit, trailing the villain, learns that the veiled woman is none other than his old sparring-partner P'Gell. This time the money-hungry adventuress is working hand-in-glove with the Western powers to make sure her employers get the deed, and the Spirit is fine with that, so long as he still gets to take Hanash into custody for his assorted crimes.
The story then rushes to the big twist ending: P'Gell's employers don't want just the land, they also want the family sword with which Hanash killed Ali, because there's a map on the sword that will guide the buyers to the only oil cache on the Ben Adim land. Crazed by this revelation, Hanash escapes and runs into the desert, intending to regain the sword from his murdered brother's body, but he simply perishes in the desert heat. Eisner then adds a double twist, revealing only to the reader that Ali survived his stabbing for a time. Ali crawled away from the scene of his murder, trying to slake his thirst with water, and all he found was-- oil.
In Kitchen Sink's 1986 reprint of "Black Gold," commentator Dave Schreiner elicited from Eisner the observation that "If I were doing the story today, I'd have done something about Israel becoming a state." Though this did not take place in real history until 1948, I would guess Eisner knew, even in 1947, that revolutionary Jews in Palestine were trying to oust British rule with the object of forming such a state, which become possible when the Brits left and the Israelis defeated the Arabs in the 1948 war. However, "Black Gold" is a much more mythic story by not referencing politics directly. Archaic Israel is mentioned only fleetingly, and the real bone of contention stems from the quasi-colonial efforts of the European powers to get access to the oil hidden with the earth controlled by the impoverished Arabian people. That said, Eisner certainly does not make the European powers any sort of villainous figures, and even P'Gell is relatively tame this time around. One may hazard that for Eisner the Europeans' interests would have been in line with those of America, while the interests of the Arabs would have been, to say the least, unfriendly to the interests of Jews everywhere. The idea of the cursed bequest brought to my mind the wrangling between two other Biblical siblings, Esau and Jacob, in that Jacob manages to steal Esau's birthright. In "Black Gold," though, both siblings attempt to supplant one another, and end up bringing about one another's deaths. Whether or not this is a comment on the dwindling fortunes of Arabs as Eisner saw them in 1947 is up to the individual reader.
No comments:
Post a Comment