How Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mad Magazine Got Me into Trouble
Last week, I reminisced about how some of my earliest scribbles were influenced by the interstellar dogfights I saw in Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. I was always doodling — a look at one of my notebooks from any year of my schooling would testify to how it sustained me through boring classes.
There in the margins bloomed flora and fauna from the Dr. Seuss School of Zoology, spaceships, barbarians, and things that must have crept from the deeper recesses of the subconscious.
Needless to say, some teachers did not appreciate what they saw. I distinctly recall two occasions when my drawings elicited a phone call to my parents, followed by a dreaded talking-to by my father.
A Barsoomian Gender Mishap
The first incident must’ve occurred in the third grade — that’s when I started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars series. I was immediately transfixed by Carter’s adventures on the red planet, and the creatures of Barsoom fueled much of my drawing at that time. In after-school daycare, I drew a Martian landscape rife with four-armed Tharks. I was emulating the Science Fiction Book Club illustrations (Richard Corben) as well as the Michael Whelan covers (those Ballantine paperbacks were the then-current editions that I checked out from my local library).
Problem was, I was no Corben or Whelan. In my attempt to portray the musculature of one thark’s buff pectoral muscles, I succeeded in drawing what one daycare worker interpreted to be bare BREASTS! (I understand comic-book illustrator Rob Liefeld would run into the same problem in the ‘90s with Captain America. Check out the image after the “Read More” jump to see one of the most anatomically challenged pieces ever rendered by a professional artist.)
The first stop I made on my shopping expedition last Boxing Day was at my local neighbourhood comics store, which happens to be conveniently located two and a half blocks from my house. There, I found a deal in the back-issue bins: issues 1 to 4 of Stalker, a DC fantasy comic from the 70s. I’d vaguely heard of the title, but knew nothing about it. I thought I remembered hearing that it had good art, which I imagined perhaps meant work by somebody like Nestor Redondo or Ernie Chan. I was way off. In fact, the art was by the remarkable team of Steve Ditko and Wally Wood. As a result, it’s wonderful. And more than that: it’s truly weird fantasy art in every sense.
It’s a time for looking back, as the old year ends. Now so it happens that on a Boxing Day sale I picked up a book I loved as a child; and therefore it seems fitting to write a little about it, now, glancing back down the vanished days of this and other years, and to try to again see the pleasure I once had. Will it come again, as I work through the text? If I work on the text, then no. Because this text, more than most, is not made for working. It is a thing to be played.
