So why then did this title only last two issues from Avon? I don’t know for sure, but the forces against comic books were gathering and there were some public burnings of comics. Maybe the publisher felt the heat from those fires. (Although a few years later in the early '50s Avon was right there with much maligned crime and horror comics, so at this late date who really knows.) I can picture a young guy looking at this comic in the drug store, thinking the title is provocative...she’s a beautiful, sexy girl...and she’s a slave girl so she has to do what her owner wants...oh hell yeah! “Hey, gimme a dime so I can buy a comic book!”
Malu lasted one more issue. Number 2 is re-titled Slave Girl Princess, with a less provocative cover. Maybe I’ll get around to showing that sometime.
Howard Larsen did the cover and first story of this issue, but the rest of the book looks like some other artists had their hands in.
There's a couple faces that look almost Wood-ian in this, and the plotting and pacing are all over the map. It's well done in the evil cult section, but just hard to read in the opening section.
ReplyDeletePappy, I think you're looking at this comic through your dirty old man eyes :) Sure, it's titillating, but most readers were probably pre-teen and a bit more interested in the two-fisted action. Even the author(s) knew this, Malu is basically a Maltese Falcon throughout the story, almost all the action is with our sword wielding hero.
And I have to ask, why the weird modern bookends? They don't really add to the story!
Brian, Brian, Brian...“most readers were probably pre-teen...” might be fair to say, but my “dirty old man” eyes were once dirty pre-teen eyes, and if I had set my glims on that pushed-up bosom my hands would have been shaking with desire to own this comic because it was sexy, not because of the sword-fighting. (I would have been embarrassed to take it to the clerk to buy, though, and would have regretfully left it behind.)
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that despite a preponderance of comic readers being pre-teen, comics like this were aimed at older boys, teenagers and young men, and really popular on military bases. With the average age of modern comic book readers probably being in their twenties it would be no big deal, but in 1949, plopped down amongst the other comics, which included a diverse range from Walt Disneys to Crime Does Not Pay I think it would have been a big titillation for the boyish imagination, no matter the age.
I commented before how belly buttons are absent from pre-1960 comic books, but this girl has one. I wonder if anyone in 1949 noticed, or cared.
ReplyDeleteKirk, maybe they noticed. I just looked at Slave Girl #2, and the belly button is gone.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to Brian's second question, the bookends tied into the "past life regression" craze that peaked with the Bridey Murphy story (1956). The fact that it was published 7 years earlier is interesting. I don't remember the craze amounting to much in the 40s?
ReplyDeleteThanks!
Jah, Papsy, zose belly buttons was schmut!I campaigned to get rid of zem all, but it seems zey haff made ze comeback! Tsk tsk...chust don't look...
ReplyDeleteZis comic made more than my hands shake back in der 50's! You are a bad influence on me...
Hey, Wertham, take a good stiff drink and calm those shakes. Works for me.
ReplyDeleteRemember, most comics showing bare-chested guys removed the nipples, which made even less sense than whiting out belly-buttons. There must've been a powerful anti-navel lobby at one time, because they were doing it in the '60s on TV.
To this day the sight of a female belly button brings on powerful feelings...that at that juncture I was once attached to my mother! Maybe that was the reason the bluenoses found them objectionable.
Darci, I think reincarnation has been a fairly popular subject for some time amongst mystics. It hit a high point of interest in the fifties with The Search for Bridey Murphy. I remember the frenzy surrounding the book and the topic of past life regression.
ReplyDeleteIt's been so long ago that it was news that maybe only those of us of an age to be knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door even remember it.