Saturday, June 11, 2022

RAR #59: MANDARRA

The last issue of ACQ's UNKNOWN WORLDS title appeared with this striking "rage against the machine" cover.


The lead story inside, probably scripted by editor Richard Hughes under a pseudonym, tells a fairly routine tale of an Old West Indian, Mandarra, who kills a medicine man while preparing to go on the warpath against white trespassers. The medicine man calls up a "Great Spirit" who condemns Mandarra to death.



A few generations later, some reservation Indians are being menaced by greedy white men, so Mandarra's spirit is released from inside a tree that's implicitly been standing for a hundred years without ending up in someone's fireplace. While there's no need for the black-outline Great Spirit to appear in the latter part of the story, for some reason either artist or writer decided to stick him in there, for whatever dopey reason.




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