Michael May's Blog, page 119

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.

Movies I Missed in 2015: Part 4

28. The Night Before



I allow myself one Seth Rogen movie a year and intended to make this the one for 2015. The trailer made me laugh and I love Gordon-Levitt and Mackie. Just couldn't make my schedule work.

29. The Good Dinosaur



Wasn't super excited about this even before the unenthusiastic reviews. It's been on Pixar's To Do list for so long that my interest in it peaked a long time ago. But I do hear great things about the background animation in particular, so I'll get around to it one of these days.

30. Victor Frankenstein



Not sure this is going to be my bag, mostly because the tone seems inconsistent even in the trailer. Is it a horror movie? Is it a humorous action romp? Who knows. But I like the Frankenstein story and I like both those actors, so I'll give it a shot.

31. Christmas Eve



Everyone bags on these holiday-titled movies with huge casts of interconnected characters, but I tend to like them. And this one's got Patrick Stewart, James Roday, and Cheryl Hines.

32. In the Heart of the Sea



Sea adventure starring one of my favorite actors right now. Don't know why I'm not more excited, but I feel nervous about this one.

33. The Big Short



Love this cast so much and I hear good things. Not too sure about my interest in the subject matter, but I said the same thing about Moneyball and liked it a lot.

34. The Revenant



Sounds like an amazing experience. Not sure I want to put myself through it. Probably will.

And that's it. Thanks for letting me break this out over a couple of weeks. It gave me the chance to move a couple of films off this list and onto the other one. Next week, I'll start counting down the films I saw - least favorite to most.

Movies I Missed in 2015: Part 3

21. Victoria



I don't know much about the story and even less about the creators, but the whole movie is shot in one, continuous take and I hear it's an amazing experience.

22. The Final Girls



Not to be confused with Final Girl, which also came out this year. Okay, to be totally confused with it, so here's the difference. That one has Abigail Breslin and is sort of Hanna meets The Most Dangerous Game. It looks like an awesome thriller more than a horror movie.

This one is a straight-up horror/comedy in the tradition of Scream and The Cabin in the Woods. Taissa Farmiga and her friends get pulled into a slasher flick and have to survive, using their knowledge of the film and the genre in general. Looks pretty funny and I still want to watch it as a double-feature with Breslin's movie.

23. Our Brand is Crisis



Totally love Sandra Bullock. Often love Billy Bob Thornton. Our Brand is Crisis was really poorly reviewed, but the trailer looked funny to me.

24. The Peanuts Movie



I've heard nothing but good things. I love the Peanuts when they're done right and by all accounts this is them done right.

25. Spotlight



I wasn't interested at first, because I thought that the focus was going to be on the scandal and I'm done processing that story. I didn't think there was a new angle that would make me think about it in a different way. My understanding now though is that Spotlight is about journalism in general and is the best movie in that genre since (and possibly including) All the President's Men. That plus the cast makes me very eager to see it.

26. Trumbo



Another great cast and what looks like a really fun performance by Bryan Cranston.

27. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2



I missed Mockingjay, Part 1 last year due to life and never found time to re-watch everything before this one came out. And... I enjoyed the first two movies, but neither of them grabbed hold of me in a powerful way. Probably because I read the books. This is why I usually wait to read the books until after I've seen the movie. I tend to enjoy both versions more when I do it that way.

Anyway, I do plan to finish the movies, but not until this last one hits home video.

The Werewolf of Walnut Grove: Far-Out Frights [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

I Was a Teenage WerewolfI'll admit I never watched Little House on the Prairie as a kid, but I do remember my two sisters did. Instead, I watched old SF clunkers like Space 1999, Logan's Run, and of course The Man From Atlantis. All of which I find teeth-grindingly dull or silly these days. But that was TV in the 1970s. You took what you could get. Before Star Wars, science fiction and horror TV executives were few and far between: Gerry Anderson, Gene Roddenberry, Irwin Allen, and Dan Curtis. We sought out these names knowing they at least "got it."

So it should be no surprise that I missed the few forays into the weird that Little House did, like "The Lake Kezia Monster" (Episode 110, February 12, 1979), which showed that even the Ingalls couldn't get away from the '70s fascination with the Loch Ness Monster. They never encountered a UFO, but one episode did get me to sit down and watch. It was Episode 129, "The Werewolf of Walnut Grove" (January 7, 1980), written by John T Dugan (who also wrote Episode 110) and directed by William F Claxton.

Now as all good fanboys know, Michael Landon, star and producer of Little House, before his stint on Bonanza starred in a B-movie called I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), directed by Gene Fowler Jr. It was the inspiration for the Teen Wolf movies and now the TV show. I suspected that this episode of Little House was a gentle poke at that film. Would Landon don his furry make-up again? I had to see.

"The Werewolf of Walnut Grove"The plot of the episode is far from great gothic material. A large student named Bart is bullying the teacher of the school, so Laura and Albert devise a plan to scare the bully straight. To do this, they create werewolf make-up and a papier-mâché rock. They lure Bart to the barn where Albert is wearing his Landonesque make-up, escapes his shackles, and picks up the rock to crush his victim. The plan fails when Carrie, Laura's little sister, blabs. Bart's behavior is amended when all the kids in the school thrash him. The result is laughs not chills.

On the plus side, the teacher Miss Wilder, mentions S Baring-Gould's non-fiction volume, The Book of Werewolves (1865). This unfortunately is the only werewolf information that works historically. Little House is set in the 1870s to 1880s. Being conservative, saying a sixth season episode is in the 1880s, all that follows is still inaccurate. First off, in a conversation as the young ones prepare their trap, Clarence mentions Transylvania. Such ideas came from Bram Stoker's Dracula, written in 1897, and even more so from the 1931 film made by Universal. (Bart should have said, "Where's Styria?") Any werewolf lore in the 1880s would have been grounded in Baring-Gould's book or older material. All the big werewolf novels had yet to be written, including Gerald Biss's The Door of the Unreal (1919), The Undying Monster by Jessie Douglass Kerruish (1922), and Guy Endore's The Werewolf of Paris (1933).

Man-Shaped MonsterStories like Capt Marryat's "The Werewolf" (1839) or Alexandre Dumas' The Wolf-Leader (1857), which would have been available to the Ingalls, feature men who turn into wolves. The werewolf is essentially 'wolf shaped.' This is another anachronism, the man-wolf, such as Landon played in 1957 and as Albert looks when wearing his make-up. This idea of a 'man-shaped' monster was first done by Robert E Howard in "Wolfshead" (Weird Tales, April 1926), but didn't really catch on until Endore's novel was filmed as The Werewolf of London with Henry Hull in 1935. We simply have to accept that this concept of the lycanthrope is a reference to Landon's film and not accurate historical information.

John T Dugan, who wrote both episodes, was aware of the current interest in cryptoids and monsters, and appealed to his 1970s audience's frame of reference rather than being strictly accurate and therefore too obscure. Dracula was at least ten years away from the Ingalls' time. The Surgeon's Photo of the Loch Ness Monster was five decades in the future, but they were known to mom and dad and the kids sitting there in front of the TV. Inaccurate as these 1970s icons are, they are fun and fascinating, whether it is Kolchak: The Nightstalker or Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of... Having lived though the decade of hippies to disco, these Little House episodes make me look back and laugh. Not until Chris Carter's The X-Files would TV take such an interest in the unexplained again. The truth is out there. And it is in Walnut Grove.

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.

Movies I Missed in 2015: Part 2

11. Lost River



Ryan Gosling's debut as a writer and director wasn't well-reviewed, but it has some things going for it that keep me interested: the spooky underwater town and a cast that includes Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan, and Matt Smith. Gonna be low on my To Watch List though.

12. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl



Critics were divided on Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, mostly around the tone. Some found it charming while others described it as snotty and in love with its own specialness. Only one way to find out where I fall.

13. Big Game



Always in the mood for a movie where Samuel L Jackson plays the President of the United States and has to fight off bad guys in the wilderness alongside a kid with a bow and arrow.

14. The End of the Tour



I like Jason Segel a lot and Jesse Eisenberg some, but I'm especially looking forward to the movie's exploration of the shifting definitions of success. It's tragically fascinating how people are rarely satisfied with whatever level of success they've achieved. We're always reaching for that next rung. Would love to hear what The End of the Tour has to say about that.

15. Cop Car



I'm ready to see Kevin Bacon play a good guy again, but until that day, I'll take him as a crooked sheriff chasing a couple of kids who've stolen his ride.

16. Final Girl



I quit watching Scream Queens about three minutes into the pilot, but the idea intrigues me. And since there was also a 2015 movie with the plural version of this exact title, I'm thinking a double-feature might be in order.

17. Z for Zachariah



I like all these people and the trailer intrigued me. Looks like a twist on the traditional romantic triangle with higher stakes due to the post-apocalyptic survival angle.

18. The Intern



I'll pretty much see anything with Anne Hathaway in it these days.

19. The Keeping Room



Likewise Hailee Steinfeld, but especially a Western with a bunch of tough women.

20. Pan



I know it's supposed to be the worst movie of the year, but I like Hugh Jackman and the Peter Pan story enough that I can't ignore it. Besides, it can't be worse than Hook.

Movies I Missed in 2015: Part 1

As usual, I'm gonna spend the month of January looking back at the movies of 2015. And as usual, before I rank the ones I saw, I'll spend some time listing the ones I wanted to see, but didn't.

The Missed List is usually smaller than the Watched List, but it gained ground in 2014 and actually caught up in 2015. As of right now, there are 36 movies on both lists. Lots of reasons for that, most of them boring. But because I hope to sneak a couple of movies off the Missed List and onto the Watched this month, I'm going to break the Missed List into a few sections, giving me time to watch a couple of them before I reach the end. Again as usual, I'm listing these more or less in the order they were released.

Feel free to let me know in the comments which I need to bump to the top of the To Watch List.

1. Paddington



Trailers for this made it seem like the last thing I'd want to watch - a slapsticky affair trying to draw humor from putting refined Hugh Bonneville in ridiculous situations. But by all accounts - and I do mean all - this is really good and touching and I need to give it a look.

2. Match



Love all of these actors, especially Patrick Stewart, and this looks like a great role for him. Lots of character stuff with a little mystery thrown in for fun. Should've seen this by now.

3. McFarland USA



I'm a sucker for underdog movies and I like the cast of unknowns. Except for Costner, of course, but lately he's been resurrecting the good will I felt for him early in his career.

4. Everly



Salma Hayek plays a woman under siege in her own apartment. Trailer makes it look less like The Panic Room and more like Machete though, so I'm very curious.

5. The Salvation



Seems like every year there's a Western that I totally missed hearing anything about. This time it's got Le Chiffre and Vesper Lynd and I'm all in.

6. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel



Loved the first one and I have every reason to believe I'll love the second one, but its mere existence feels unnecessary to me. I didn't really want more with these characters, but now that there is more, I'm compelled to revisit them.

7. Cinderella



Not my favorite fairy tale and I was super irritated that the trailer told the entire story. That's always a sure way to keep me out of the theater. I'm fond of Kenneth Branagh though and I've heard that he does put fingerprints on the story instead of just straightforwardly retelling it, so I'm curious.

8. It Follows



I'm picky about the horror movies I watch, so I rarely go when they first come out. Instead, I'll wait and listen for the buzz to figure out what the good ones are. This one has a swarm around it.

9. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter



I have no idea what to expect from this other than it looks gorgeous and the Coen Bros' Fargo is a driving force in the plot. Curiosity engaged.

10. Woman in Gold



I either love or am fond of so many people in this movie: Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Katie Holmes, Charles Dance, and Elizabeth McGovern. And I'm interested in the themes about art and ownership that The Monuments Men thought about, but didn't explore fully enough for my taste. Also: courtroom drama.

Lena Thorul, Jungle Princess [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

The 1960s get a lot of press for being a time of civil unrest, counter culture, and music. Another thing it was, was a time of experimentation with alternative ideas, such as yoga, meditation, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Beatles meeting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and adopting Asian beliefs (or in some cases, just the clothes). It was a time of astral projection and pyramid power. It was also the age of ESP.

Let's forget that science fiction had driven that bandwagon over a decade earlier. It took ten years for everyone else to catch up. And the comic books were no different. Jack Kirby at Marvel created Professor X for X-Men #1 (September 1963). Psychics came two years earlier to the Superman franchise, specifically Supergirl, with the telepathic character of Lena Thorul, who was secretly Lex Luthor's sister. Beginning February 1961 in "The Curse of Lena Thorul," she was brought to life by Superman's original creator, Jerry Siegel.

Lena helped Supergirl with her powers until the cat got out of the bag in Action Comics #313 (June 1964), written by Leo Dorfman and drawn by Jim Mooney. What could possibly happen to the lovely Lena if she found out? Amnesia, of course. Followed by life in the jungle and some zebra underwear. If it worked for Lois Lane in 1959, why not Lena Luthor five years later?

What chance did Lena have, being telepathic and having to interview Lex as part of her FBI application? The truth slips from Lex's mind and snap. Off Lena runs to anywhere - Africa - where she acquires a movie starlet's costume for a film that is being made. Without memory, she adopts the clothing and with her amazing abilities she tames the jungle animals around her. She becomes a legend of the jungle, the Jungle Princess! When a stray bullet creases Lena's head, giving her back her memory, she goes back to Metropolis to perform with her lions and elephants. There she also cuts into Supergirl's business, rescuing some people from a collapsing balcony with the help of her savage friends.

During Lena's premiere she is once again tortured by the idea of being ridiculed as Lex Luthor's sister. She can't perform, so Supergirl takes her place. Since she can't control the animals with her mind, it is Supergirl's strength that saves her from the lion's mouth and the elephant's foot. As Superman saved Lois Lane from harm in "Lois Lane, Jungle Princess," Supergirl does the same for her friend this time.

Meanwhile back in prison, Lex Luthor has become the "Plant of Metropolois Prison." With Supergirl's innocent help, he gets quantities of "Vitagron" and "Energite" (nothing suspicious there!) and grows a vine down the walls of the prison. He comes to the theater, expecting Lena, but is captured by Supergirl. The green flowers he has brought for his sibling are special, having the power to erase Lena's bad memories, which they do. (Lex wisely guards himself from the fumes with a handkerchief, pretending to have a cold.) Heading back to prison, Lex is happy he has been able to help his sister forget his terrible legacy.

This second trip to the jungle doesn't have as much "jungle-ness" to it, but it still gets in some minor Tarzania. Lena, when she speaks to her animal friends (more for effect than need, as she can control them silently) she speaks the "jungle language," which the animals can understand, including "Urtah! Itay! Kabray! Despite sounding like Pig Latin, it is descended from Tarzan's "Bundalo" and "Kreegah!" that is familiar to fans of both the comics and original stories. Typical to most jungle queen stories, Lena uses her amazing powers to stop poachers who are stealing from the Elephant's Graveyard. She also directs one of her apes to rescue a man from quicksand.

Once again DC Comics showed a lasting interest in the heritage of the jungle. Or were they simply catching the rising tide? Ballantine Books was selling millions of copies with their new Tarzan editions in 1963-64. This new wave of Tarzan fever would see Ron Ely play the ape man on TV in 1966. DC would have loved some of that jungle action, but Western Comics would keep the Burroughs' properties until the early 1970s. Still, a good, generic jungle princess now and then couldn't hurt.

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.

Michael and the Tower of the Elephant

Happy New Year, everybody!

Next week we'll get into 2015 movies that I watched (and didn't watch), but to close out this week and open up the year, here's a link to a short article I wrote for GW Thomas' Genre Writer blog.

You know GW from his awesome guest posts here, so it was fun to be able to write something for him when he put the call out for pieces on favorite science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. I had to think long and hard about it, but kept coming back to Robert E Howard's "Tower of the Elephant." Visit GW's blog to see why.

There has been a podcasting. Have you felt it?

I haven't talked about The Force Awakens here, but I won't shut up about it out in Podcast Land. You can hear my initial reactions to it on Starmageddon with pals Dan and Ron, then pal Carlin and I interviewed our kids about it on the latest Dragonfly Ripple.



I'm looking forward to getting super in depth about it with the Nerd Lunch crew and Kay on an upcoming episode of that show, but until then, Pax and Kay and I got together for a talk on the books and comics of the Star Wars EU. That was a great trip down Memory Lane and also filled up my reading pile with a lot of recommendations for the future.



Anyway, lots of great Star Wars conversations with more to come. I'm not planning to do a full post on it here, but I'd love to hear what you thought of Force Awakens in the comments below.

Sword and Sorcery Cliche No. 2: Barbarian Bikinis [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

I believe the movie was Spartacus (1960) with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. In an early scene, the trainer of the gladiators is showing the new recruits how to kill an opponent. Using a large paintbrush, he dabs on color in three spots, explaining these are the three most vulnerable places on the body. With a cruel switch he cuts at the throat, the belly, and the knees. Why do I mention this? Because if you look at Red Sonja's steel mail bikini you'll see it covers none of these.

Red Sonja was created in 1973, not as an adaptation of a Robert E Howard character, but as an amalgam of Howard's Sonya of Rogotino, CL Moore's Jirel of Joiry, and just plenty of sexy '70s goodness. And who am I to argue with the commercial results of selling sexy babes to fan boys everywhere?

But it raises the question: where did such ridiculous armor come from? Whether it is Sonja's steel attire drawn by Frank Thorne or the equally common fur version for less divine opponents painted by Frank Frazetta? The fur and steel bikini is our second sword-and-sorcery cliché and it has its own history, of course.

The 1960s was a time of expansion, even explosion, for fantasy, whether in print or on the silver screen. It was also a time of changing ideas about sexuality, freedom, and identity. So for every feminist staking out more territory for women there was a paperback with a sexy lady on the cover or a movie with a semi-clad starlet in it. In this way, Ray Harryhausen was one of the first filmmakers to have a beautiful young woman as the centerpiece to the film. Not that he had to animate them. Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC (1966) was quite capable of wearing her own fur bikini. This was not a sword-and-sorcery film, but when Harryhausen would produce later films like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) or Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), he was sure to include Caroline Monroe and Jane Seymour in revealing Arabic garb.

In the paperback world, an area of increasing expansion since World War II, artists like Gray Morrow produced numerous fantasy scenes for novels costing only ten cents to a quarter. His work was solid, but nothing compared to the furor that Frank Frazetta would create when he began painting covers for the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs for ACE and the story collections of Conan for Lancer. Here women wore as little as possible, regardless of whether they were on the sands of an alien planet or in the snows of Cimmeria. This sounds as if I am putting down Frazetta's work. Nothing could be further from the truth. To look at a Frazetta is to peer into a frozen moment of action and magic. His work sold as many books as the thundering great words of Howard or Burroughs.

Frank Frazetta (1928-2010) was a classically trained painter. Unlike the goofy-looking SF covers of a decade before, Frank's images were so believable, so real in the moment of time in which they happen. You didn't stop to say, hey, isn't that gal a little cold standing there in the snow as she's about to be eaten by wolves? That was the power of Frazetta's brush. A power so enchanting that Betty Ballentine published best-selling collections of his work. I can't imagine the '70s without those volumes containing his paintings and sketches.

Whether they captured your imagination or not, Frazetta did perpetuate the fur bikini-ism of Harryhausen, as lesser artists jumped on the Frazetta bandwagon. What Frank could pull off in a flurry of excitement, they could not. And so the cheesy sword-and-sorcery gal with the impossibly huge sword became a favorite of artists making their money at SF conventions (along with that other fave, the gal with the incredibly large bust and a smoking laser rifle).

The transition from fur to steel occurred quite by chance. Red Sonja appeared for the first time in Conan the Barbarian #23 (February 1973), drawn by Barry Smith with a full shirt of mail and sexy hot pants. But Smith left after Issue #24, and Roy redesigned the character's attire when simple dumb luck put an image in front of him. This was an unsolicited, single page, black-and-white illustration by Spanish artist Esteban Maroto. Unlike American (or British, if we included Barry Smith) comic artists, Maroto brought a Roccocco flourish to his art. The bikini Red was wearing looked more like something you'd hang on your porch to catch the wind than a suit of armor.

Roy Thomas saw the potential and so the first issue of Savage Sword of Conan (August 1974) bore a Boris Vallejo painting with steel bikinied Red Sonja and Conan fighting a crew of undead warriors. (These Boris Conan covers are oddly important to me for as a fourteen year old I had a T-shirt emblazoned with a Boris decal that declared to the world my status as a sword-and-sorcery nut. I never quite got around to having a Frazetta painted on my van though.) The look had arrived. Red Sonja, wearing steel coins where any reasonable person would want thick leather and metal armor, danced across Marvel publications, sword in hand. Artists like Frank Thorne would draw Sonja in regular sized comics, attend conventions with steel-bikinied fangirls (including Elfquest's Wendy Pini) and even do his own racier version of Red called Ghita of Alizarr in the '80s.

We are stuck with the fur and steel bikinis. They are part of sword-and-sorcery's history. (As is the terrible movie version of Red Sonja starring Brigitte Nielsen from 1985. Strangely, Brigitte never wore the ridiculous steel bikini but a Romanesque leather corset with fur trim. Not sure why this was so. Red's steel attire was part of her draw. Plenty of cosplay costumes proved it was possible to make such a garment. Perhaps Nielson refused to wear it?) I like to think that we can set this cliché aside now, laugh at our simplicity back in the day, and return to something closer to what Catherine Lucille Moore conceived with her Lady of Joiry back in 1933. But if Dynamite Comics, the latest copyright holder of the She Devil with a Sword, is any indication, I'd better not hold my breath.

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.