RAR #96: BRIGHT FEATHER, GOLDEN ARROW AND MANY HEARTS

 This 1951 "real American" comic has a convoluted history.

First, there was a 1939 masked-cowboy comic strip, "Lightnin' and the Lone Rider," whose two years of strips were reprinted in FAMOUS FUNNIES #61-80.

Then, according to one online source, the comic book company Ajax-Farrell bought the rights of the character, but devised their own version of the masked hero, different in various details, such as an Indian boy-aide, "Bright Feather," introduced (in LONE RIDER #1, 1951) as if he'd always been there.

Then, before any readers could have responded to anything in issue #1, some writer decided to have an Indian elder relate to Bright Feather a story about "Comet's-Tail," a mature warrior of the tribe from some indeterminate period. During a terrible drought CT decides to share his food with an infirm old woman. The old woman turns out to be a comely female magic-maker, "Many Hearts." The story doesn't define her very well, probably because MH is functionally a goddess-figure-- and it would have been unlikely for an American company in the fifties to portray an Amerindian goddess as diegetically real.

             

 It takes CT a few days to figure out that the comely squaw actually is the old woman-- a motif possibly borrowed from the English "loathly lady" trope seen in some Arthurian tales--AND that she prompted CT into sharing his food in order to demonstrate his moral rigor.

Once CT has demonstrated his purity of heart, the magic maiden gives him a golden arrow, telling him to shoot it at the sky. The arrow ends the drought and saves CT's tribe, after which MH gives CT his new name, "Golden Arrow."

Then the third issue of RIDER starts out with a story in which Bright Feather is still the hero's partner, though now Golden Arrow has an inset picture on #3's cover, even as there was one on issue #2. That story is followed by a solo "Golden Arrow" tale, and the last story, once more focused on Lone Rider, gives him no sidekick.

    In issue #4, a solo Rider story is followed by one in which Golden Arrow is suddenly in the same tribe as Bright Feather, whereas the story in #2 implies that BF has never met GA, and that GA belongs to some past generation.   

Finally, the A-F editors get around to the "crossover" they've been building up to: issue #6 bringing Golden Arrow into contact with Lone Rider, which at first glance looks like the editors deciding that the Rider needed a "Tonto" type of partner rather than a "Little Beaver." In this story, the Rider witnesses a ritual in which Golden Arrow, currently the chief of his tribe, shows that only he can pull Excalibur from the stone-- er, I mean, "the enchanted arrow." The masked cowboy wants to believe GA's feat is a trick. However, as in GA's first appearance, there's a "foundation myth" in which a godlike figure bestows the arrow upon the tribe, precisely to reify GA's claim to chieftainship. So this is one of the few western comics, like the story in #2, that indicates that Amerindian magic is real. I'll leave things at this for now and see if later RIDER stories have similar qualities.            
  

ADDENDUM: In issue #7, Golden Arrow's name suddenly becomes, without rationale, Swift Arrow, but he keeps his same pattern: either rendering aid to the Lone Rider or telling stories about mystical Indian lore, like "Blood Fury" in LR #19, wherein SA tells LR about how he and his tribe were rescued from death by a goddess-like being: "The Snow Squaw." Contrary to my expectations, for the full 26 issue run-- some of whose stories are reprints-- Swift Arrow keeps his own feature and does not become the Rider's "Tonto," while Bright Feather remains the permanent sidekick to the top-billed hero.    

In issue #23 (1955), the company introduces another masked cowboy, and this hero, like the first one from Atlas in 1950, got his name from having been raised by Apaches. He just gets two adventures before the title ends. A humor strip, "The Old Hermit," frequently guest-stars the Rider, but the relationship of the two characters is more an inversion like Superman appearing in a Jimmy Olsen strip, than a series of crossovers like those of LR and SA. 

MONSTER MASHUPS #152

 Here's one of the most forgotten crossovers: GORGO #12, "Monsters' Rendezvous," in which Gorgo and his mom fight giant Venusian invaders. They get a little help from Reptisaurus, who came about after Charlton adapted the film REPTILICUS. Following the official adaptation, Charlton made up a new monster, "Reptisaurus," with his own title, so the company could do their own flying reptile-monster w/o paying the owners of the REPTILICUS franchise.

    

MINING POLITICAL MINEFIELDS

 Since OD is a "junk-drawer" blog for stuff that doesn't totally fit the more developed theorizing of ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, here's a "thought-in-development" post spawned by my current watching of the controversial interview between Tucker Carlson and Hitler-fan Nick Fuentes.

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I'm about halfway through the Carlson-Fuentes interview. I see an additional reason Shapiro didn't like Tucker putting Fuentes out there; according to Fuentes he had a history with Shapiro going back to when Fuentes was just an up and coming Trump conservative, still in college. Though it doesn't sound like Fuentes was ever employed by Daily Wire, he formed various acquaintances there. But Fuentes got cancelled for his antipathy toward Israel, possibly by Shapiro himself, and for a brief time lost a podcast show because of DW cancellation.

Now, Fuentes could be lying as to how "reasonable" he was in questioning the US alliance to Israel. His questions, as HE HIMSELF represents them, sound extremely naive. Of course the US gives Israel money, and for the same reason they give money to the Saudis: dollar diplomacy, as a way to hold influence over a fractious nation. I can only assume, given Fuentes' insistence that the US "gets nothing" out of the connection to Israel, that he'd be in favor of dropping all connection with Israel. To Shapiro this could only be heresy, and deserving of cancellation, ASSUMING that Fuentes said nothing more than he claimed to have said. It's worth noting that Carlson has also butted heads with Shapiro over the whole "Israel is the bulwark of democracy" theme, and that, far more than "normalizing" Fuentes' idiotic racism, may be the main reason Carlson gave Fuentes an interview, DESPITE Fuentes having also insulted Carlson previous to the interview.

Of course it's possible that Shapiro might be 99% correct in all of his defenses of Israel, contrary to both the "America First" Right and the "America Last" Left, but in my view he would still not be right to cancel Fuentes. Yes, don't give him a job if you don't like his politics, but if you try to make him lose a job, then you're as corrupt as the Mad Lib Progressives.

I'm now at the point where Carlson is working his way toward mitigating Fuentes' "White people first" views. More on that later.    

PART 2--

So my verdict is that yes, Carlson did play down his opposition to Fuentes because of their fundamental agreement on opposing "Christian Zionists" who supported Israel's right to exist. Fuentes and Carlson may have very different reasons for that conviction, but yes, Carlson's idea of pushback against Fuentes' real racism was just to make very general comments about the wrongness of imputing racial guilt to any people. Since Carlson didn't challenge any particular Fuentes statement, Fuentes just let Carlson ramble on until they got back to what Fuentes wanted to talk about. 

Nothing Carlson did, however, counts as "normalization." I don't know if Ben Shapiro started that whole thing but it sounds very much like a Mad Lib talking point: "we can't allow this speech because it's RACIST." Shapiro would have better off doing as Dave Rubin did, keeping the objections on a purely moral level and not indulging in "If This Is Allowed to Go On" nonsense, because such rhetoric empowers the Corrupt Lefties, giving them talking points about a fragmented Right. Rubin disassembled much better than Shapiro did, highlighting Carlson's statement that he "hated Christian Zionists" worse than anyone, which would include all sorts of Jihadists and Communists who have been making many more people in the world miserable. 

PART 3-- During a televised conversation between Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro this week (following a convo between Kelly and Tucker Carlson the previous day), Ben Shapiro made the claim that another Con broadcaster, Candace Owens, had claimed that Erika Kirk was somehow complicit in her husband's death. Kelly was aghast at the time, but the next day came back on her show and stated that Owens had said nothing of the kind. The New York Post agreed with Owens in calling Shapiro a liar, and the Post hypothesized that Shapiro had over-invested in a narrative about Owens from another broadcaster, Stephen Crowder. As of 11-13 Shapiro has not produced evidence of his claim. Of course Owens is no stranger to rash claims, either, having recently claimed, with no evidence, that the Federal government had faked the messages Tyler Robinson sent to his trans lover. 

Additionally, to the "Christian Zionist" thing, I still think Carlson has over-invested in this narrative, but Kelly spoke to him and he admitted that he did not really mean his hyperbolic hatred for the Zionists.     

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 In 1964 Disney launched a comic co-starring The Beagle Boys and "Mad Madam Mim" from THE SWORD AND THE STONE. This story, "By Hook or Crook"  from DONALD DUCK #96 tosses in a third crossover, that of PETER PAN's Captain Hook as well.

The Captain also plays a more standard villainous role in "Voyage to Azatlan" (DD #119, 1966), opposing Donald and the marine mallard Moby Duck.

 

CROSSOVER MADNESS

 In this post I talked somewhat about the crossovers in the ARCHIE universe of super-teens, including their encounter with the evil scientist Mad Doctor Doom, who originally appeared in a 1962 issue of ADVENTURES OF LITTLE ARCHIE.

But I didn't mention this villain-crossover in CAPTAIN HERO--

-- wherein new villain Witch Doctor seeks to impress three "elder states-menaces," in the form of Doctor Nose, The Consumer, and The Whistler-- though as I recall, technically, The Whistler wasn't IN the ARCHIE superhero stories, but in the contemporaneous ARCHIE spy-spoofs, entitled THE MAN FROM RIVERDALE. Not that even I, after all this time, care about the discrepancy. 

MONSTER MASHUPS #151

Here's a Satanic bacchanale attended by many monsters--"ghosts, zombies, vampires and werewolves." The plot of this 1951 story in ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN #25 was probably borrowed from the more famous 1950 EC story, "Horror Beneath the Streets." In the earlier story EC's three horror-hosts pass into the real world and harangue the EC editors into giving the hosts their own books. The writer of this story, probably editor Richard E Hughes (who had a rep for writing many ACG tales under diverse pen names), asserts that Satan resents ACG writer Alan Hartwood for having given mortals such good instructions on how to dispel supernatural evils. After conveniently overhearing that Satan has designs on Hartwood's life, the aggrieved writer spends most of the story fending off werewolves and vampires but then gets spirited away (sorry) to Hell by some ghosts. And yet there's a happy ending, because for some reason Satan then allows Hartwood to continue sending stories to ACG as their new "ghost writer." Wasn't the whole point of the persecution to KEEP Hartwood from writing new stories?

I used the word "Hell" generically, but the script only claims, on page 3, that Satan's minions are "denizens of the Unknown." This would have to be one of the first times that Hughes or one of his writers used that placename as a synonym for some domain that was two parts "afterlife" and one part "collective subconscious." Sixties comics-readers often saw "The Unknown" cited as the stomping ground of the ghostly hero Nemesis.          

 

MONSTER MASHUPS #150

 

It may not be profound but it's the most fun a JLA crossover has been in years. The four icons from the Monsterverse used here are Godzilla, Kong, Mechagodzilla and the Skull-Crawlers. Some new ones are invented as well, though not all of them are given names in the comic proper.