The unbearable lightness of Eleanor

Eleanor Boardman, who spent most of her Hollywood career in the silents, is remembered chiefly for her role in King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), but I caught up with her in Vidor's Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), which Flicker Alley, bless 'em, feature in their upcoming (7/7/09) two-disc John Gilbert set. Bardelys is a swashbuckling costumer in which Gilbert romances Boardman, who, true to the genre, must resist at first, then succumb. In this film, the surrender takes place in a rowboat amongst some drooping willow branches that Vidor and his cinematographer make the most of. Gilbert, just back from his handsome lessons*, certainly makes the most of Boardman. This is probably acting, folks, but Eleanor's swoon of desire as Gilbert nuzzles her neck is disarmingly real.

*"handsome lessons" copped from Woody Allen (Bananas)

Was there chemistry here? After Bardelys was in the can, there was to be a double wedding: King Vidor and Eleanor Boardman and John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. But Garbo decamped, leaving just Vidor and his girlfriend to tie the knot. Maybe Gilbert had chased the wrong fox.

Eleanor's appeal--at least in this film--is difficult to define. She seems to come with no big star baggage and projects the quiet certitude of a real live girl. Even Olivia de Havilland, in her swashbuckle projects with Flynn, couldn't muster this. Yet, Eleanor is not the girl next door. Maybe she's more that college girl you wanted to date but who was a little too mature to fool around with the puerile likes of you.

Time out for Olive!

I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree.

Maxon's Young Earth

Having ferreted home the latest issue of Turok, I always treasured any appearance of Rex Maxon's irregular feature, Young Earth, if only because he kept his prehistory straight. He knew his Jurassic from his Cretaceous and what lived when. Such specificity was in high contrast to the depicted world of the feature stories, where dinos, mammals (including humans), reptiles, birds--even bunnies--all lived a freewheeling co-existence in the same lost valley. The writers for Turok can be forgiven for bad science; their Indians especially needed the cavemen because you can't base a line of adventure comics on poison arrows and killing saurians all day. The boys needed human conflict, not to mention a buddy here and there.

But in spite of drawing several feature stories (including the first), Maxon's role seems to have been one of educator, but as such, he was a poet, too. Visually, I mean. At the time--I was anywhere from 10 to 14 years old--I thought, in comparison with the other artists' more illustrational styles, that maybe Maxon couldn't draw as well as the others, but instinctively I liked his stuff better. Now I also know better. He was the superior draftsman.

For several hard-to-articulate reasons. First, better form. Maxon keeps it simple, implying mass more than rendering it. This leads to the second reason: because Maxon favors the open blocking of shapes (abstraction) instead of filled-in delineation (illustration), his work has a bolder graphic look, less penciled than painted. Bolder, yet, at the same time understated, gentle, as if by the hand of Raphael--even when the carnivore attacks.

Turok, Son of Stone, no.9, Sept.-Nov. 1957

One of Turok's finest covers, with my own copy of this issue lost forever. I haven't seen inside of it for well over thirty years. Sample panels below. An excellent Dimetrodon both on cover and in story. Dig the segmented body.

Like Athena from the brow of Zeus...

In 1954, the idea for Turok, Son of Stone sprang from the brain of this man, Gaylord Dubois (1899-1993). Dubois was an incredibly prolific writer for comics (one source gives the total number of scripts at over 3,000), many of these for Western Publishing, i.e. Dell and Gold Key comics.

The Turok concept seems to have blossomed out of Dubois' work on Dell's Lone Ranger comic, in which he'd recently inserted a new Indian character called Young Hawk. Young Hawk was to star in Dubois' new title about an Indian lost in a hidden valley filled with dinosaurs and cavemen, but before publication Young Hawk became Turok, and Turok gained a companion, the youthful Andar. The time period for their adventures was now "before the coming of the white man."

Dubois went on to write the next seven issues. As a small child, I only caught one of these, but now, with Dark Horse's archived Turok, I'm catching up, reading the first six issues in sequence as I would a book with chapters. Back in 1958, at 9 or 10, I was able to secure issues of Turok more or less regularly, but I was in it for the dinosaurs. Indians didn't grab me. I'd read a book about Squanto that I'd liked, and Lon Chaney, Jr. was okay as Chingachgook in an early TV show based on The Last of the Mohicans. Disliking Tonto was an untenable position. Yet Westerns bored me, and I'd never picked up an issue of Dubois' Lone Ranger comic. And cavemen? Even at 10 I knew cavemen with dinos constituted an anachronism, but, regardless of that issue, I had no use for them.

For this bristle-haired boy, the success of any issue of Turok rode on the frequency of dinosaur appearances and how well they were drawn. Large prehistoric mammals, saber-tooth tigers, mammoths, etc., didn't cut it. Just give me the thunder lizards, see?

The plots meant little to me, the writing nothing at all. But now that I'm paying attention, I must give Dubois his due, especially for his scripting of the first issue. It's not surprising to read that Dubois was an "avid outdoorsman." Turok is nothing if not a tale of survival in the great, prehistoric outdoors, with only simple tools, a bow and arrow, and your wits to keep you alive. Dubois fills his narrative with Indian ingenuity, most often in the form of Turok observing a dangerous or mysterious circumstance, pondering his options, and then acting decisively upon his best judgement.

In the first issue's fourth panel, Turok notices a column of what appears to be smoke rising from a distant hill. Andar thinks prairie fire, but Turok knows better. [above]

Throughout Turok's quarter century run, there was this constant: while Andar persistently leads with his youthful gut, Turok pauses, thinks, and troubleshoots. Dubois inserts Indian lore and Indian know-how whenever he can, and thereby, perhaps unintentionally, provides his stories with a subtext.

Whenever Turok and Andar meet up with primitive tribes in successive sunken valleys, the Indians are the ones with technology and advanced weaponry (poisoned-tipped arrows) and the cavemen are the savages, sometimes not knowing how to rub two sticks together, helpless in the face of nature and its attendant terrors like flesh-eating dinosaurs. Who's white man now?

One day, not unlike today, in the lost valley...

Who was Rex Maxon?

Here's a pleasing Plesiosaur from Rex Maxon, the artist responsible for the very first Turok, Son of Stone story. But other artists would take over the comic soon enough, with Maxon mostly relegated to doing 4 page mini-features, but, still, over the years, he was called to do a few more featured Turok stories. Maxon was much more a stylist than Giolitti, who drew most of the stories form '62 on and whose realism could often turn sketchy and banal. Maxon's tiny educational features, like "The Plight of the Plesiosaur," from issue number 9, September-November, 1957 enlivened many a dull issue. Maxon's dino's were less fierce than Giolitti's, but I admired the former's ability to simplify and create a more "equivalent" visual world than the literal, illustrational Giolitti. Buying an issue and finding the feature stories drawn by Maxon always gave me a flush of pleasure. I'd scrutinize them at length like I would, as an adult, pore over Delacroix's late career Moroccan paintings.

Maxon had roots in drawing strips for the newspapers back in the 20s, 30s and 40s, and his draftsmanship and sense of form have the feel of strips and comics from those decades. From 1929 to 1947, he drew the daily Tarzan strip; but the Sunday Tarzan strip was taken from him in 1931 and given to future Prince Valiant artist, Hal Foster. It's been pointed out elsewhere that, when Maxon took on the first Turok issue in 1954, he used several ideas from a Foster Tarzan strip that featured the characters wandering into a "lost land," including a few images, e.g. below (Foster, left; Maxon, right). When, nearly a year later, Dell published another Turok issue, another, less gifted but more illustrational, artist took over. Perhaps Dell saw Maxon's style as old-fashioned?

Turok Son of Stone

It's happened. Fifty-five years after issue number one, an enterprising publisher, Dark Horse, has begun The Turok: Son of Stone Archives, with the goal of reprinting, in book format, a good portion of the run of this Dell comic title, Turok, Son of Stone, which drove me insane as a little boy. I was around 5 or 6 when the first issue appeared, and I wasn't allowed to have it. The first volume, containing the first six issues, is available now, with volume two (six more issues), coming in July. Two more volumes, if Amazon's listings are correct, are slated to appear within 2009, bringing the number of issues reprinted up to 24. They could stop there; those 24 contain the cream of Turok.

I first spotted Turok in an ice cream parlor run by an impossibly old woman, who maintained a rack of comics to the side. It was 1954. I was very little, and these being the dwindling days of horror comics, I think my mother was being protective. I got the ice cream but no comic. My mother died years ago, but I'd like to say to her now, "That silly comic I wanted? It was about Indians and dinosaurs."

But two years later she bought me my first Turok. Once she realized the wholesomeness of Turok--Dell was a "safe" line of comics, pledged to non-violence and no sex please--she would relent, and when she felt like it, I'd have my Turok. As the years went by, and with an allowance, I could snag my own copies, but by the time I reached high school and had been reading books for a while, Turok had entered its decadent phase, and I stopped buying it. Strangely, after I started college in the mid-sixties, and Turok was still being issued, my mother would sometimes buy an issue for me, and I'd have to act pleased, but Turok was way past being interesting. He was, in fact, lame. I was going to Fellini movies by then. Turok, Son of Stone would continue its run, under various publishers, until 1980.

Judging by the screen captures above, Dark Horse's reproductions look very accurate, although much brighter than the color had been on the cheap pulpy paper used for comics. Now I can see every issue denied me. I'm in control. I can have what I want. I want Turok. Now.

My sentiments exactly

From the Cosmos Trilogy (2003) by Frederick Seidel

It is time to lose your life,
Even if it isn’t over.
It is time to say goodbye and try to die.
It is October.