Our Gods Wear Spandex (11 page)

One of the best-known Victorian-era occultists was the Irish-born novelist Bram Stoker (1847–1912). Stoker was raised in Dublin and later attended Trinity College. While working in London managing the Lyceum Theatre, Stoker was initiated into both the Golden Dawn and The Societas Rosicruciana. He may also have been a Mason, although this is undocumented.

Stoker is best known for his classic 1897 novel
Dracula
, which popularized the myth of the vampire. The novel has become a metaphor unto itself. Stoker portrayed his Count Dracula as a charming aristocrat with a powerful sexual allure, not as a slobbering ghoul. An entire subculture has sprung up around the vampire myth, fueled by American novelist Anne Rice's hijacking of the theme.

Several stage plays and film adaptations of the novel have been made, and there was also a popular Marvel Comics series in the 1970s called
The Tomb of Dracula
.

Although
Dracula
is Stoker's best-known occult novel, he also wrote two other highly influential works—T
he Jewel of Seven Stars
(1903) and
The Lair of the White Worm
(1911). The first concerned the possession of a young English girl by the evil spirit of an ancient Egyptian queen. Its theme of spiritual transmigration and Egyptian sorcery arose from Stoker's involvement with groups like the Golden Dawn. The novel became the basis for several film adaptations, the best of which is the 1971
Blood From the Mummy's Tomb
. The second was a novel of pagan revanchism that prefigured Lovecraft, with a cult that worships a giant subterranean worm led by aristocratic Lady March. The book was made into a sexually charged Ken Russell film in 1988.

The gothic atmospheres of Poe, the detective hero of Doyle, the fanciful technologies of Verne, the prescient science of Wells, and the forthright spiritualism of Stoker would all come together in the middle of the next century to provide a fictional backdrop for the superheroes of the “pulps.”

The “pulps,” so named for the cheap grade of paper on which they were printed, were the direct descendants of the penny dreadfuls and dime novels. In fact, the term “pulp fiction” has come to define low-quality genre fiction in general. Comics, B-movies, and genre-driven TV shows all have thematic roots in the pulp magazines.

Frank Munsey is generally credited with inventing the “pulp-wood magazine” at the end of the 19th century. Munsey came to New York from Maine to enter the rapidly expanding publishing market. His first offering was an adventure-story magazine called
The Golden Argosy
(later, simply
Argosy
) that first appeared in December 1882. Dime novels were still the preferred format for adventure stories, but pulps had the advantage of qualifying for less-costly second-class postage. The new format evolved quickly to a standard 128-page magazine, with a stapled or
glued binding and a coated-stock cover. The early pulps generally featured Western and detective stories, with a smattering of war or high-adventure offerings.

Several publishers entered the burgeoning market, among them Street and Smith, Popular Publications, Culture Publications, and the A. A. Wyn Group (later renamed Ace). Two early pulp firms later became important comic publishers—Dell, founded by George Delacorte, and Fawcett, run by Wilford and Roscoe Fawcett. The pulps laid the groundwork for the comic boom by spawning organized “fandom.” Fans formed clubs around favorite titles, genres, and heroes. The Letters pages in the pulps became the
de facto
clubhouses of these early fans. Later, fans of the sci-fi pulps formed influential groups like the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, which helped forge an alliance between pulp fiction and the occult.

Pulp publishers compensated for poor paper and printing quality by using colorful, eye-catching cover illustrations. Cover artists like Virgil Finlay, Margaret Brundage, Frank R. Paul, Frank Kelly Freas, and H. J. Ward became stars in their own right, able to sell a magazine solely on the basis of their illustrations. Editors often commissioned a painting first and hired a writer to dream up a story around it.

The pulps did not emerge in a vacuum. American popular culture had always been at odds with its Puritan heritage. In 1919, the 18
^th
Amendment prohibited the sale of alcohol in an attempt to clamp down on the rapid expansion of social and cultural liberalism that followed the First World War. The Volstead Act, as it came to be known, was answered by an explosive reaction that found expression in jazz, illicit booze, and sexually explicit fiction. By default, the pulps became a medium for all types of forbidden expression, including occult themes. Many pulp writers, like Talbot Mundy, were actively involved in the occult; many others were fascinated by it.
⁵³
Pulp heroes all tended to live on the edge of cultural correctness and seemed to delight in testing social norms.

One of the earliest pulp heroes was the aristocratic detective Nick Carter, who first appeared in
Nick Carter Weekly
in 1886. Carter became the top sleuth for Street
and Smith. His yarns usually involved rescuing some posh young deb from the depredations of mobsters, sickos, perverts, and cultists. Carter survived in one incarnation or another into the 1960s, when he became a James Bond-type spook. Street and Smith launched
Detective Story Magazine
in 1915, which was so popular it earned itself a weekly release schedule and spawned a host of clones.

In 1920,
Black Mask
, one of the most important detective pulps, debuted—created, strangely enough, by the legendary social critic H. L. Mencken.
Black Mask
heralded the arrival of the hard-boiled detective—bare-knuckled heroes like Carroll John Daly's Race Williams—and paved the way for the more aggressive superheroes of DC Comics. Dashiell Hammett's classic Sam Spade novella
The Maltese Falcon
and Raymond Chandler's early Philip Marlowe yarns both appeared in it.
⁵⁴

The first true superstar to emerge from the pulps, however, was Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan, who first appeared in the October 1912 issue of
All Story
. Tarzan was actually young Lord Greystoke, scion of an aristocratic family marooned in the jungle after a mutiny at sea. Tarzan, whose name means “Skin-Boy,” becomes the surrogate son of a gorilla named Kala, whose own baby had died. The
Tarzan
series was an enormous hit, spawning over eighty-eight film adaptations, starting with a series of silent films in 1918. The definitive Tarzan film series began in 1932 with
Tarzan the Ape-Man
, featuring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller in the title role.
⁵⁵

Tarzan has also been a major comic character since 1931. Both Marvel and DC have had a crack at him, among several others. Alan Moore has included him (under a different name) in his Victorian-era superhero series,
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
.

Burroughs reportedly based Tarzan on the myth of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. He presented Tarzan as an idealized man, a noble savage free of the corruption of civilization—almost, in fact, Christlike. Burroughs inserted religious and esoteric themes in many of his other characters as well, and occult themes are woven throughout the Tarzan stories. Artist Hal Foster explicitly introduced themes from the ancient mysteries into his
Tarzan
newspaper strip in the famed “Egyptian Saga” storyline, in which the hero encounters a “lost world” of ancient Egyptian descendants. An injured Tarzan is mystically restored by a priestess of Venus, who believes him to be an incarnation of Thoth, god of the apes. He undergoes an occult initiation in the temple of Isis, passes a series of tests to prove his kinship to the sacred beasts, and is finally greeted by the Egyptians as an avatar of the god.
⁵⁶
Foster's next strip,
Prince Valiant
, still runs to this day. A knight in the mythical court of King Arthur, Valiant's mentor is Merlin, history's most famous wizard. Of course, the Arthurian mythos was of particular interest to 19th-century occultists.

The Thirties were a miserable time for America. Urban violence, mass immigration, the Depression, and political radicalism at home and abroad kept Americans in a state of fear and anxiety. Prohibition empowered organized crime. Corruption and graft compromised local and state authorities. The tentacles of the syndicates reached deep into labor and municipal unions, social institutions, and even into the Catholic Church. As the worries of the American public grew, so did the need for comforting fantasies of powerful, decisive men who could set things right. Pulp heroes got more powerful and more outlandish as publishers competed for readers. As Les Daniels wrote, “the rise of superheroes like the Shadow, Doc Savage, Spider and the others coincided with the downfall of public figures in the Depression.”
⁵⁷

In a sense, the superhero became a historical necessity in America. As Les Daniels wrote: “The rise of crime in the US and the emergence of dictators in Europe
were also regarded by the pulp publishers and their writers as forces that could be combated only by men of supernormal powers.”
⁵⁸
The model for the pulp hero who could save this ailing world was supplied by sci-fi novelist/social critic Philip Wylie in his novels
The Gladiator
(1930) and
The Savage Gentleman
(1932).

The Gladiator
told the story of Hugo Danner, a professor's son subjected to his father's genetic experiments. Hugo develops superpowers—he can jump “higher'n a house” and run “faster'n a train,” (as opposed to being “able to leap tall buildings in a single bound” or “more powerful than a locomotive”)—but is unable to find a constructive outlet for them. Danner excels at football and on the battlefield during World War I, but is persecuted when he demonstrates his powers while rescuing a person trapped in a bank vault, and becomes discouraged while working in politics. His isolation leads him to join an archaeological expedition in South America, where he is struck by lightning and killed after cursing God.