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Saturday, September 17, 2022

REGARDING EBON AMAZONIA AND ANCILLARY WHITE-A-TIZING

   

The latest addition to my "to read" stack.

About an hour ago I was talking with Michele about our "to read" stacks, and I forgot to mention to her that I finally got my hands on this pulp era classic from the woman who 26 years later wrote the screenplay for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and am currently reading it. I set about writing her a note explaining the why of my interest in it, and that note instead blossomed to what you are now reading, so I share it with you as well as Michele.

I used to collect coffee table books of vintage sci-fi pulp magazine artwork, volumes that sprung from the 1970's nostalgia boom, and I have been fascinated and enthralled by this cover illustration since I was around ten or eleven, when I first saw it in its original context as the cover for an issue of PLANET STORIES.

The March, 1951 issue of PLANET STORIES, its cover adding further fuel to my developing interests and imagination

At the time I was really into the style and aesthetic of vintage pulp illustration, its elements heavily influencing my sci-fi and fantasy doodles to this day, and this one struck me with the dynamism of its central figure. Who was that fierce warrior? What was her story? For forty-some-odd years I had no answers, but the other day I was looking at the cover on the internet and the thought occurred to me that a sci-fi/fantasy author of Leigh Brackett's pedigree probably had much of her catalog still in print or available somewhere, so I did a bit of sleuthing and found out that it could be had in a slim indie press volume that collected three of her unrelated novellas. It was under ten bucks, so I snagged it as this month's treat to myself.

Upon getting into reading it, I found it to be quite good and briskly paced, with Brackett's self-admitted love of the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard being unabashedly worn on her sleeve, as was evident from the style of storytelling and pacing, and the fact that the story's protagonist — who is not the titular Black Amazon — is an obvious gene splicing of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and Conan the Barbarian. That's a good thing, as the aforementioned authorial influences were two of the top tier writers of the pulp era, when they were writing while firing on all cylinders. 

I was surprised to discover that the novella is actually the fourth in a series about the sword-wielding guy in the lower corner of the cover illustration and that the Black Amazon is (thus far in my reading) somewhat disappointingly not the hero of the story, instead being a warlord and conquest-minded adversary for the actual protagonist. And while looking into whether or not I should read the rest of the series, I found it interesting that on every vintage pulp cover and in every magazine illustration or later reprint book that depicts the hero, John Eric Stark by name, well into the 1970's, he was never once illustrated as he was described. In the stories, due to his having grown up in the weird environmental conditions of a colonized Mercury, his skin is dark, described as almost ebony black, though ethnically he is of European Earth descent. Apparently, in those days it did not matter that he was not a negro, but he was close enough for rock and roll, and depicting a hero with black skin was just never gonna happen during the era between Pat Boone and the advent of Shaft. To the best of my knowledge, it was not until the '70's and '80's that sci-fi prose started featuring POC's as characters at all, let alone as heroes. 

Just one example of the illustrational white-a-tizing of the Stark character. (art by comics legend Jim Steranko) 

The more recent printings of Brackett's Stark stories, however, get his coloration right.

                                                         John Eric Stark, back and black.

Anyway, I was so enthralled by that old cover — an early example of media that fed directly into my adolescent fetish for strong, fierce females in armor —, I used to draw my own comics of what her adventures on Mars would be (comics that, if they still exist, are secreted away somewhere in my mother's files), and I may start sketching her again, though I will not adhere to the description in the novella. There she is described in more realistic and practical armor and a cloak, as she leads a nomadic tribe of brigands who survive in the snowy wastes in the upper northern regions of the planet, and it's clear that Brackett was pretty much dropping hostile Bedouins into the cold, so they had to wear gear that made sense for that environment. The version drew at age 11 looked a lot like the one in the vintage cover illustration, but drawing her today I would make the design of her armor a tad more modern/sleek and, since it's sci-fi/fantasy, I might add pauldrons to the shoulders which a modern illustrator of the bland, too-slick vintage-inspired cover did, to an effect that renders the figure stiff and un-dynamic, and maybe make her boots more like those of Wonder Woman in the movies, complete with greaves, but with visually obvious cushioned soles for the environment.

The modernized version of the classic illustration. Looking like something that would be found emblazoned on the side of a bitchin' van, this bears none of the dynamism and gestural character of its 1951 template.

That said, back to reading.

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