| Harlan
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| LITTLE "DIRTY"
COMICS Editorial commentary by R.G. Holt Socio Library Books, San Diego 1971/$4.75/2!5pp/illustrated |
| Hot Damn! The Kind Men Like |
HARLAN ELLISON
Thirty,
forty years ago, pop culture pornography demeaned women no less, locked
men into their silly machismo bag no less, but there was somehow, inexplicably,
a less, unsavory ambiance to it than today While I don't think, I'd care
for a moment to return to the sexual standards of the Thirties or Forties,
there was undeniably a heartier -- let's say more grossly healthy -- tone
to the smut. Today, even with the horizon of erotica expanded to include
four-color lithographed centerfolds of labia only slightly smaller than
the Great Wall of China and, vaginal closeups that make even the most sensual
of women look about as appetizing as Ausable Chasm, there is a hYPo- critical
air that makes one openly uneasy about enjoying pornography.My
mind rushes to make comparison on this matter with the "legitimacy"
of jazz when it came up the river from New Orleans and achieved respectability
in Kansas City and Chicago. Got so respectable it legitimized itself into
boredom and blandness.In
the halcyon days of yore, pornography was clearly and legally illicit, was
in no way compelled to have some sort of "redeeming social value," and so
did not walk any ambivalent tightropes or straddle any expeditious fences.
It was there to take into the woodshed or the potty, to be used while entertaining
oneself with what the scenery artists of "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" refer to
as Mary Five-Fingers. It was frankly and openly sleazy, and for all its
crudeness and frequent loathsome tastelessness it was honest and straightforward.
One did not have to wade through cover lines like "Sexy Pussycats on the
Prod" or "The Horrors of Gonorrhea" with their sniggering double entendres
or aspirations of social conscience. They were down and dirty, and eliminated
all middle-men of Supreme Court decision or over-your-shoulder bluenoses.
If you managed to get your hands on some pornography, it had been smuggled
in through Customs in some friend's suitcase, or had been muzzily printed
on somebody's basement printing press. There was, simply, no fucking around.It got right down to it.
And
for that directness and straightforwardness of purpose it had a breezier,
more (peculiar word in this context) decent way With it.Pause now for nostalgic transition.
Eighth
grade at Champion Junior School in Painesville, Ohio, in 1948, was like
almost every other Mid- western eighth grade in America that year. Heavy
sex entailed not being caught not kissing when the beam turned on you in
a game of "flashlight." Bones creak when I think of the term, but it was
called "necking" in them days. Oh, there were two wild, carnal creatures
named Annette and Patsy whom every guy in the gym class SWORE were letting
the members of the football team feel them up(another of those phrases)
in the, lumber room behind the wood shop -- al- though on sober reflection
across twenty- some years I doubt the val- idity of that charge -- and we
be- lieved it because both Annette and Patsy wore their pink angora sweaters
VERY tight. What
I'm trying to say is that hardly ANYbody was getting it on to any torrid
degree, and to my knowledge NObody was getting any (DAMN those phrases!)
though Teddy Beckwith always walked around with a curiously pleased grin.
Thus
it was, on a summer day indelibly burned into my ,Memory, during the break
between fifth and sixth-periods,at Champion Junior High School in Painesville,
Ohio, in 1948, that I passed across the misty frontiers between adolescence
and manhood, through the use of a mystical grimoire known in that time,
in that place, as " one of those little eight-pagers." I
came into my history class and one of my classmates -- a lad whose face
and name have slipped from recollection but whose kind- ness will NEVER
be forgotten -- slipped me. first a "Pssst" and then slipped me a folded
folio of three stiff-paper sheets, 8-1/2" long x 3" high that made a booklet
of eight inner pages and an outer cover 4-1/2" long x 3" high. The drawing
on the cover was a fairly accurate rendering of two comic strip characters
I knew well, and the title was "Toots and Casper in Paris."Though
Toots and Casper, a hold- over newspaper comic strip of the early Thirties,
was by no means my favorite Sunday comics favorite (I was a devotee of Alex
Raymond's "Flash Gordon," Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy," Milton Caniff's
"Terry and the Pirates" and Harold Foster's "Prince Valiant"), it was a
divertissement and enabled me to ignore the chore of copying down endless
trivia about something called the Obiter Dictum scrawled on the blackboard
by our teacher.Opening
the little comic book, I was confronted by a scene already in progress:
Caspar, the milque- toastish hubby of the curvaceous Toots (one wonders
how she ever wound up with a wimp like that, and no one with a grain of
humility could cast the first stone at her for what she got into in Paris
... or rather to be more specific, what got into her) was being hustled
in by a Parisian femme de Joie. She was suggesting in rather broad terms
that he par- take of carnal pleasures with her. I remember shaking my head
just a bit in confusion. From which Sunday installment was THIS a reprint?
I turned the page, to find Toots lying on her Paris hotel bed in a state
of dishabille Puck (the mascot of the Comic Weekly) would have found most
distracting. As I recall, she had a highly improbable number of fingers
on her left hand up her pudenda, and she was contorted in a posture that
even my teen-aged eyes construed as writhing. She was bemoaning the fact
that she was sans (ladies and those of gentle sensibilities -- not necessarily
one and the same -- will excuse the direct quote to which I am impelled
by the rigors of honest reportage), "A big, hot cock to shove up my burning
quim."Well, sir.
As
I had no idea what a "quim" was, it took me a few perplexed moments to come
to a flushed realization of just precisely what the usually demure Toots
was lamenting the absence of. When I did, I must, Confess my-eyes bulged.
That is one of those literary clichés one encounters in Doe Savage
paper- backs and workshop manuscripts submitted by sixteen year olds, but
Mother of God they DID bulge, like a pair of overdone oysters.Hardly
had I grasped the moist, one might almost say BURNING significance of that
utterance, when my oysters were drawn to the left side of panel 2 wherein
Toots lay attempting to assuage her vaginal discomfort. A MAN was climbing
in through the window!Panel 3 showed him ravaging her womb, and commenting sagely on her "long legs and delicious cunny."
Modesty
and a certain discomfort in my groin at this very moment of the retelling,
forces me to end the panel-by-panel description of this tense little interpersonal
quadrangle. Suffice it to say, it was a real eye-opener to me. Whey-faced
youth that I was, the rest of that history period was lost on me. To this
day I have no bloody idea WHAT in the history of the Holly See the Obiter
Dictum portended. When class was ended my now-nameless connection retrieved
his precious magic tome, and I wasleft with only a burning bright experience
that surely colored all the activities into which I entered as a young man.
To
this day I conceive of all Paris hotel rooms as being pre-stocked with not
only a bidet, a bilingual editi of the Gideon Bible, and the scent of heliotrope,
but equally as well provisioned with a Toots, lying out in peignoir hiked
up around her waist, softly lamenting surcease from her diurnal deprivation.
If only I knew what a "Cunny" was! End of nostalgic transition.
The
above history is imparted not to convince the reader that this reviewer's
puberty was, in fact, achieved, nor even to establish the reviewer's credentials
for what follows here, but solely to set forth a happening that was so common-place
in those days as to be the rule rather than the exception.Though
it was a pivotal factor in my life, and a secret to be cherished till today,
it was equally so for the hundreds of thousands of tottering tots who obtained
their first peek into the annals of pornography IN JUST THAT WAY in the
Thirties and Forties.You see, we were a simpler people then.
We
bad no X-rated films, no beaver magazines, no live sex acts in cocktail
lounges, no topless pizza parlors, and in Painesville, Ohio, we didn't even
have hookers and lubricated condoms in the gas station toilets. All we had
were lies, dreams, and an occasional 8-pager.In
an "appreciation" functioning as foreword to a marvelous new book titled
LITTLE "DIRTY" COMICS, someone named Robert Reitman (and one wonders where
publishers come up with these non- entities to introduce books deserving
of introductions by more recognizable,prestigious names) points out: "
... what we in the Middle West in the late Thirties and Forties called 'eight-pagers'
(which in the East, I'm told were called, simply 'little dirty books, I
and in the West for obvious reasons, 'Tijuana Bibles')," and that is the
sermon for the day, gentle readers, a mastrabatory ramble down Memory Lane
for those old enough at the time of the battles of Bataan, Kiska and Attu,
Saipan, Tunis and Bizerte to know what their penile member could do.Collected between covers for the first time are twenty-eight complete Tijuana Bibles concerned in intimate detail with the herculean and improbable sexual acti- vities of such comic strip stalwarts as Andy Gump, Orphan Annie, Moon Mullins, Popeye, Dagwood, Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka, Supeman and Steve Canyon (to select at random) and such real-life notables as Mae West, "Baby Face" Nelson and the peripatetic Fuller Brush Man. To be absolutely historically accurate, this may be the SECOND time such a compendium has been assembled, but the FIRST to reach general distribution. However, there is even some reason to doubt the existence, of the "first" collection of 8- pagers: in April of 1965 the gloriously deranged mind of "The Realist's" editor, Paul Krassner, caused to be published a report that Grove Press had assembled a volume titled TILLIE AND MAC: THOSE LITTLE COMMIC BOOKS THAT MEN LIKE, publication of which had been impeded by the district Attorney of the city of New York.
The article went on at some length, dealing with alleged briefs by Grove's attorney before the appellate court, and bore the same stamp of verisimilitude Krassner used to imbue his bogus "sections left out of the Manchester book about the death of JFk." But, though reliable sources assure me the book did, in fact, exist, I am forced to believe it was another Krass- neroid hoax for surely, if Socio Library Books could publish with impunity the volume at hand, a firm as devoted to the making of the buck as Grove would have had THEIR offering already afloat on the sea of commericalism. In any event, whether the Grove Press tome of legend exists or is the product of febrile imagination, we DO have this $4.75 anthology of 8- pagers . . . and it's about time.
As an art-form, the 8-pager is long-overdue for critical attention. Stylized to almost the rigid form of a fugue, the 8-pager at its best dealt with utterly familiar dramatis per- sonae from the world of comix and mass entertainment and yellow headlines and get up in one or two panels the "situation" in which the protagonist -- Wimpy, Jungle jim, Snuffy Smith -- might find himself. It was without exception a circumstance surely only existent in the fever-dreams of schoolboys who accepted the Great Sex Myth Images of the Thirties and Forties: the rich nympho in the Rolls Royce, the farmer's daughter, the unsatisfied birde on her honeymoon night morning,,the girls, of easy virtue, and the housewives who lay panting in wait for traveling salesmen. That these archetypes existed in reality need not be disputed, but if one were to take as matter of fact the frequency with which horny heroes stumbled upon such ladies in these little pictorials, one would not for a moment question why it is that the world is overcrowded today.
By panel three or four, usually, the pig protagonist was already "ravaging the flue" of the ready- made rape victim. And by panels five or six the young lady was in advanced stages of coitus exsul- tatio. (It should be pointed Out that even the snerdiest of male attackers in these comix possessed penial organs of a size and potency fit only to satisfy a female lust on par with that of Catherine the Great of Russia, whose amatory desires tended toward heavyweight affairs equine paramours. I can easily understand how it is that so many men of my generation were hung up on the size of their organs; one glance at Popeye's spinach-fortified sidesplitter lurching toward even the capacious maw of Mae West, and one would be shamed into soldering one's zipper shut for life.)
And with what little justice there is in this harsh and unjust world, Women's Liberationists can ameliorate their loathing of such documents in which women are even LESS than sex objects -- are in fact, merely talking meat -- by the inevitable denouement, in which the guy ALWAYS gets one-upped, made to look like a boob or an asshole or both,or is singularly and royally fucked-over by the ravishee. While many there may be who conceive ,of these little sex-dramas as utter trash, it is beyond question that they, formed a hitherto-unexplored and possibly very important part of the pop culture thinking of three decades of American males, God help us.
For this reason, and for the purer motivation of sly pleasure at seeing Little Orphan Annie screwed by Sandy, the otherwise pristine Ella Cinders being thoroughly rumpled by a grossly anti-Semitic stereotype, or the high-and-mighty Superman failing to get it up, up and awaaay . . . this is a book deserving of preservation.
Four of the 8-pagers are In color, and the rest have been reproduced flawlessly, down to the last near-illegible obscenity scrawled on the walls. Obviously the book is a commercial venture, despite its festoonery of "redeem- ing social comment," but this is one of those instances where the huck- sters have- done us a good turn. Handed from paw to sweaty paw by schoolboys blighted by terminal acne, surely in a few more years all of these comix would have been lost to us. Preservation of the past is, in and of itself, a noble act. And while our current age of sexual permissiveness finds these epics dated and more than a trifle silly, still it WAS a time that existed, and these 8-pagers were a reflection of the morals and manners of the day.
Quite apart from their salacious value, which surely must be negligible in a day when one can lay out a couple of bucks and see, if not Deborah Kerr or Faye Dunaway or Glenda Jackson getting it on in the buff, at least DAISY LAY OF THE OZARKS, quite apart from that now-serendipitous value, the notes and introduction by R. G. Holt are cogent, barely pompous, and intelligently observant.
At $4 75 for a large paperback, one might conceive of this book as overpriced, but when one stops to consider that as schoolboys we paid from a buck to five bucks just to cop ONE of these little darlins, to five bucks for twenty- eight offeringsisahelluvabargain. Hell, in those days Id've paid five bucks just to find out what "cunny" meant.
copyright ©1971 Harlan Ellison
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Harlan
Ellison's Hot Damn! The Kind Men Like |
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