Uncle Remus, Indians, Ducks et al

[RMorris306@aol.com]

    A few comics on recent digests:

    Al Coelho is quite right about Uncle Remus and Br'er Rabbit. Many of the 
tales have roots in Africa (where stories about trickster heroes like Anansi 
the spider and the hare whose names include Wakaima and Sungura are told), 
but were adapted to the slaves' new home and status. Joel Chandler Harris did 
the same thing for those stories that the Brothers Grimm did for the folk and 
fairy tales of Germany: he didn't write the stories, but he did preserve for 
posterity the tales from an oral tradition that was in danger of extinction 
in an era of increasing literacy. (In a truly hideous attempt to maintain 
control, some pre-Civil War Southern states actually made it a crime to teach 
slaves to read or write, thinking that a literate population would be harder 
to enslave.) Harris's dialect was a sincere attempt to capture the speech 
patterns of the slaves, which he thought added to the atmosphere. And it 
probably did. Many respected writers of the time, like Charles Dickens and 
Mark Twain, did the same with their characters...except that Dickens' dialect 
characters, being mostly lower-class white people (Cockneys and the like), 
weren't as likely to get the same sort of accusations of racism.

    There have actually been quite a few Indians in American comics. Many, 
like Disney's Hiawatha (and later Pocohontas, and even the Indians in PETER 
PAN) originated in other media. The Lone Ranger, for instance, originated on 
radio, but went on to appear in television, movies, and of course comics, and 
in all those media he was accompanied by his faithful Indian companion, 
Tonto. Indeed, Tonto not only appeared in the Lone Ranger's comic book from 
Dell/Western, but also had one of his own. (Then again, so did Silver...the 
Lone Ranger's horse.) And the comics also gave Tonto probably his most famous 
line, from a MAD magazine parody ("TV Scenes We'd Like to See") scripted by 
long-time DC Comics editor E. Nelson Bridwell:

    (The Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by hostile Indians.)
    LONE RANGER: Uh-oh! We're in for it now!
    TONTO: What do you mean "we," paleface?

    The line has been quoted and requoted (usually in recent years with 
"paleface" replaced by the more PC "white man") endlessly in similar 
real-life situations.

    There've been a lot more Indian heroes in comics. DC Comics alone has 
featured Pow-Wow Smith (a Sioux lawman who became sheriff of a Western town, 
and starred for well over a decade in DETECTIVE COMICS and ALL-STAR WESTERN), 
Strong Bow (a Native American archer), Super-Chief (a rather strange Gardner 
Fox/Carmine Infantino creation who wore a buffalo head mask), and Arak (a 
10th-century Indian brought to the Old World by Viking explorers, who starred 
in a memorably fantasy series by Roy Thomas). There were also Firehair and 
Scalphunter, both white men raised by Indians who dressed in Native American 
style. Several other characters, including DC's Tomahawk and Jonah Hex and 
Harvey Comics' Clay Duncan (the foreman of Simon & Kirby's BOYS' RANCH in the 
early '50's, and arguably the true hero of the series) were also white men 
raised and trained by Indians. Indeed, Tomahawk eventually married a Native 
American woman, and his son Hawk, who was therefore half-Indian, took over as 
the star of the series. Robert Kanigher's war titles featured a number of 
ethnic minorities, including an Indian World War II pilot named Johnny Cloud.

    The one DC super-hero I can think of who was a Native American was 
Dawnstar of the Legion of Super-Heroes, a series set in the 30th century. She 
was a bit of a stereotype (her power consisted of superhuman tracking skill), 
but she wasn't that badly handled as a general rule.

    Marvel Comics seemed to have fewer non-super feature characters (one 
exception being another Gardner Fox creation: a Western hero named Red Wolf), 
but it had a few more Indian super-heroes...Danielle Moonstar (Shaman) of the 
New Mutants has been mentioned, but there was also Thunderbird of the New 
X-Men. He was rather regrettably killed off early in the run, but his brother 
Warbird, who had the same mutant powers, later appeared.

    On another note, I see that Emil Eagle, once cited by Don Rosa as one of 
his least favorite villains (because of his species, not usually found in 
Disney funny-animal comics) is the villain of the current storyline in the 
MICKEY MOUSE newspaper strip. Which is interesting in the light of supposed 
Disney policy about not mixing-and-matching villains (wasn't it once said 
that they didn't want to use the Phantom Blot in a Duck story, or the Beagle 
Boys in a Mickey Mouse story?), but Emil, a Gyro Gearloose villain who's 
hitherto appeared exclusively in Gyro and Duck stories, would seem to be a 
definite change...so maybe Mickey COULD go up against the Beagle Boys or 
Magica deSpell one day? (Considering that Carl Barks himself did several Duck 
stories with Mickey's arch-foe Black Pete as the villain, it seems only fair.)

    Finally, Don Rosa himself occasionally seems to have veered from his 
stated policy of making all his characters ducks, dogs, or occasionally pigs. 
I was recently rereading his delightful story "Oolated Luck," and who do we 
see as supporting characters but the Phishkisser Brothers, who, as one might 
guess from the names, are literal fish-faces! Not that I'm complaining, mind 
you, but I've never minded the variety of the faces in the Disney comics, 
either. (And, Don, I have to know...is there really such a thing as oolated 
squiggs? I've never heard of them, and always assumed not...but it'd be just 
like you to toss in something real, especially if it had an outrageous name 
like that. Cf: Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky...)


Take care,


Rich Morrissey