by Neil Vodavzny

I got to thinking the other day how come there are so many pulp-derived blogs? It’s not just that they’re there, it’s that they’re indispensible. You stumble across them,
and are instantly caught-up in the knowing references and astonishing design/artwork. What, in short, connects the pulp universes – from ERB and REH to Marvel and DC?

For a start, they lend themselves to narrative art – whether spot illustrations or comics. That trait you could say is common to all classics, whether heroes of the Bible or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, viewing the Bible through a sort of folkloric prism, natch. According to my idea of classical (Go East part 2), there is a playful element and a type of legendary energy – it can’t be completely po-faced.

The playfulness captures the heart and invites you into a world which is not too literal, very suggestive and even mask-like – as in the superheroes (Roy Thomas’s long-running fanzine is called Alter Ego). Within their universe, the energy is very real and can be fantastically classical, as in Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan newspaper strips

Now, the fabulousness of this art is derived from playful energy – a type of artifice. What is this playful energy? Very good question. My idea is it’s akin to the question at the heart of religions – a type of unknown or nonsense that is visualised through symbol (only).

Just then, I stumbled on Ernst Haecker’s magnum opus Art Forms In Nature. Mother Mary & Joseph – that really is gobsmacking! A fairly close reading of the accompanying text (by another German) followed, and this led me to the conclusion they are illustrations of tradition in nature.

What Haeckel essentially did was take his inspiration from Art Nouveau – and the arts & crafts movement of William Morris at the end of the PreRaphaelites – and apply it to natural forms. He took from nature its baroque flourishes, iconicised them, and produced a narrative in design of related types. The fact that he could produce this narrative is a type of full-proof evidence that the baroque and arabesque exists in nature. That is a type of knowledge you derive from the illustrations (which were in turn used in design studios).

Another way of putting it is that the style he adopts provides the content that is within nature; without the style you don’t get the content. Now, what a classical style has is a type of playful energy. Anything that accords with the PreRaphaelite ideal, say. Japanese prints, with their sinuous wayward energies, are another big influence on art-nouveau.

Haeckel’s images of bats are quite reminiscent of mask-like oriental drama, sinuous and surreal. Because he is able to interpret nature’s forms according to a cultural tradition (art nouveau), this gives us the knowledge that nature has its own, iconic tradition. Icons exist in nature, but what are icons?

Icons are playful representations of natural powers. They resemble masks because they are suggestive of force and dynamism. They are playful because that’s just the way things re. One cannot apprehend the unknown, so one weaves around it, like so.

Icons are omnipresent in pulps. One of Starlin’s favourite devices is to pit two powerful antagonists against each other in a dual identity of warring opposites.

The sense you may get from it is a type of mad nonsense? Yes, but it’s a nonsense derived from iconic reality. Barry Windsor-Smith, who’s style is the most easily identified with Pre-Raphaelite and art nouveau, plotted and drew the Doctor Strange story, in Marvel Premiere #3. His fabulous rendering and elaborate flourishes, in terms of mystical paraphernalia with period detail and arabesque, support a wafer-thin story.

It’s to do with the unknown threat, the reveal, then a further unknown. The point is, BWS’s style, imbued with all the Doctor Strange folklore, imbues the tale with significance. Details like the soul in the tree trunk open the mind to fairy tales and Narnia. The same goes for Conan tales; they conjure-up allusions through their imagery (see prev).

A classical painting, like Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, takes its origins from a legend which is part of European tradition. The story is somewhat superior to BWS’s Doctor Strange, but is embroidered to the sumptuous hilt by Titian. Iconic tales can be quite simple, their evocation is anything but.

This harks back to Clifton’s quote (prev ) that the aim of an artist is to produce the definitive Batman, Wolverine or whatever. The details impart this playful sense of dynamism. Conversely, by trying too hard, the energy dissipates in a too literal representation.

BWS’s Doctor Strange story is another type of nonsense, a forceful and dynamic one. The point of these stories is to have some moral basis and significance – anything else goes. Pulps convey a tradition of iconic force through their narrative style, which is analogous to the narrative style of nature.

Like classic pulps, the significance of Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite Holy Grail is in the way physical and moral force are delivered. The florid lines and naturalistic setting introduce valorous knights into a tableau of virtue and grace.

Owing to the naturalism of the art nouveau style, the forms of nature partake of the moral implicit in the shrine-like setting. Wings, petals, shield emblems imbuing a sense of harmony.

Because of this physical and moral vitality, I would say pulps are closer to the origins of Western Judeo-Christian culture than many suspect. I say Judeo-Christian because that is our artistic heritage. These pieces concern Western art, more or less related to iconic nature. The subject can only be treated from that perspective. Since icons are traditional in both culture and nature – as I see it – one cannot treat nature as something different from culture. In fact, that is the premise of Haeckel’s work.

The best and hence the most prevalent example is probably a fairy tale. Actually, I have a thing about people messing with tradition: Russell Brand and Neil Gaiman are two who have revisited fairy stories. The less said about “Bland’s” Pied Piper the better. Gaiman’s The Sleeper & The Spindle strikes me as a mix-up, a sexual crossover with Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, featuring the dwarves racing to the rescue of the night-borne one.

Now, I’ve not read the story, but this quote struck me: “I was thinking, how close fairy tales could become. Could they be physically contiguous?” I have a problem with this. A fairy tale is a fable with a moral simplicity built in. The reviews I scanned insisted it wasn’t a lesbian story, but the image obviously is. Gaiman, being so fantastically ubiquitous and hip, has the tendency to liberalise and trivialise the primal and elemental.

His pal Harlan Ellison is old-school, and confronts violence squarely with no trace of sentiment (I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream). These yarns are fantasy, but dark fantasy, and speak to a warrior ethos Man must rekindle before the ember fades (like Philae’s signal). We have to be masters (and mistresses) of our own destinies, not enslaved to .. . well, here’s an example. Philae prompted a twitter-trend of “wecanlandonacometbutcan’t”, say, “convince a self-checkout machine there is no unexpected item”. Such trivia really do divert the mind from what is staring us in the face – some things are less trivial than others.

Ellison is so deeply immersed in ancient and romantic lore he’s somewhat immune to the modern techno-enslavement, a characteristic I find disarmingly naïve. His essay What Killed The Dinosaurs (not online apparently) says it all, the big switch-off from TV, the medium he wrote classic fantasies such as Demon With A Glass Hand (Outer Limits) in the 60s and 70s. We are nothing without imagination, the ability to discriminate for ourselves, and TV robs us of that facility slowly but surely.

Imagination being a figure of our connection to nature, liberals have the capacity to really mix-up and trivialise the vitality of the connection. You can play around with legends to your heart’s content, but leave the moral. A good example is Roy Thomas’s fascinating parody of Little Red Riding Hood, in She Devil With A Sword 

Thomas uses a device of a were-being, keeping all the elements such as the old woman being mimicked by the wolf, in a satisfyingly gruesome yarn. The point of a legend is it’s a type of truth revolving round human fallibility, gullibility, lust that never changes. You have the wilderness and the woods.

That is the story in all its elegant simplicity and naturalistic force. Moral force is something you mess with at your peril as it tends to be a liberalising trend of sexualisation. Women who are less sexualised (in fairy tales and pulps) are correspondingly romanticised; they are stronger, and the contrast of male/female is more interesting and dynamic. A good example is Clea, the on-off alien love-interest of Steven Strange, a fascinating and generally unobtainable femme.

Harlan Ellison is as well-trodden in comic book circles as pulp/sci-fi, and wrote (The Comics Journal #57, 1980):

They educate, they inculcate, they set the moral and ethical tone for youngsters on whom the Analects of Confucius or Aquinas’s Proofs are lost.

Exactly, and one of the easiest ways to mess with them is the liberalising sexualising trend, which eclipses the kinetic grace of combat, the romantic aura of physique and setting. All the old-school artists from Hal Foster (prince Valiant) through to Marvel’s 70s roster of Thorne, Chaykin etc have it to varying degrees.

Apologies for the après 70s diatribe, but comics are our modern folklore; up to the 70s (ie in America) they have the emblems, the grace, the naturalness and the romantic aura to deliver a moral contenta moral content.

The 70s also saw the revival of Robert E Howard’s Weird Tales heroes (from the 30s) – in fact, Thomas’s parody was loosely based on one fragment.  Once you lose that to liberalising sexualising hogwash, even if well-written, it’s well-written junk nonetheless. Only connect, as they say, and lore has to connect to nature in the round, not as some modernist spin on sexual politics.

Howard, as you can tell from the fragment, was good at weaving the narrative content of nature into his tales - Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers
(Cimmeria) – a dark poet. This is the content which is lost to a liberalising trend. Human culture is intertwined with nature and the physicality of the human figure is a token of romance, drama, motion, colour, sensuality.

All those things come out of nature because it is a tradition of iconic forms (Haeckel – prev.) That is what you get out of Renaissance art. Just to pick at random Rubens’s Pan and Syrinx, you get very similar images in Frank Thorne’s Red Sonja or Barry Smith’s Conan. Plus ca change.

Copyright 1977 Marvel Comics

Liberalising seeks to do without tradition, whether racial, sexual, sensual or otherwise (natural, basically) and therein lies its weakness. We who are borne of nature cannot do without the tradition of nature. That is culture without content, the nihilism of a liberal age. Add to this the new media, and it becomes a male-oriented techno-fetishism (of the female often enough), completely divorced from nature.

So, tradition that is connected to nature is part of our heritage, to be cast aside at our peril. Moving on to folklore, Judeo-Christianity has its fair share. To be honest, that’s the main thing I get from the Bible; a wealth of stories in and around Israelites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Philistines that add to Western lore. My view is that one has to use such resources as folklore that are implicitly connected to nature, then disentangling such elements as we may not care for. We are connected, via our Judeo-Christian heritage, to a view of nature. That view is classical and aesthetic.