Post by rberman on Dec 27, 2019 14:34:30 GMT -5
Superhero origins tend to grow more complex over time as writers look for new character hooks. Take Storm of the X-Men. Under Len Wein's pen, she started off as a member of an African tribe, a mutant who thought her powers were divine until she learned about the outside world.
Simple! Chris Claremont made her backstory far more complicated in X-Men #102, giving her an American father, a "Kenyan princess" mother, a birth in Harlem, and a childhood tragedy linked to the 1956 war in which Israel (backed by the UK and France, against protests by the USA) seized the Suez Canal from Egypt. Ororo gained an Oliver Twist dimension to her backstory as a child prodigy thief on the streets of Cairo, and a weakness for enclosed spaces.
But let's go back to Wein's original story. Better yet, let's go back to the late 19th century, when Aloysius Horn was an ivory trader in central Africa. Here he is later, in 1929, at the age of 78.
Horn was the subject of a 1927 memoir 'Trader Horn; Being the Life and Works of Aloysius Horn, an "Old Visiter" ... the works written by himself at the age of seventy-three and the life, with such of his philosophy as is the gift of age and experience, taken down and here edited by Ethelreda Lewis."
The book was quickly adapted into a film, the first non-documentary film shot by Americans in Africa, nominated for an Academy Award for best picture in 1931, starring Harry Carey as Horn. In order to add sex appeal to this pre-Hayes Code film, a fictional sub-plot was introduced in which Horn finds a crop-wielding young white woman living as a goddess in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the video clip below, she enters the scene around the 67:30 minute mark. Actress Edwina Booth contracted a tropical disease during filming and was unable to work for years afterward.
Now, white "jungle queens" were not exactly rare in that era, whether in comic books, pulps, or cinema, as pretext for stories about uncovered female forms. But what caught my attention was this particular advertisement for the film, in which the "White Goddess" (as her character was called) looks more like a dark-skinned woman with white hair:
Dave Cockrum had already been designing a black superhero for The Outsiders before using his work for the new X-Men series, but she looked more like actress Pam Grier. The flowing white hair and blue eyes came later.
This made me wonder how much Wein's original Ororo idea was informed by jungle queen stories in general, and the film Trader Horn in particular, and perhaps even this very poster.
Simple! Chris Claremont made her backstory far more complicated in X-Men #102, giving her an American father, a "Kenyan princess" mother, a birth in Harlem, and a childhood tragedy linked to the 1956 war in which Israel (backed by the UK and France, against protests by the USA) seized the Suez Canal from Egypt. Ororo gained an Oliver Twist dimension to her backstory as a child prodigy thief on the streets of Cairo, and a weakness for enclosed spaces.
But let's go back to Wein's original story. Better yet, let's go back to the late 19th century, when Aloysius Horn was an ivory trader in central Africa. Here he is later, in 1929, at the age of 78.
Horn was the subject of a 1927 memoir 'Trader Horn; Being the Life and Works of Aloysius Horn, an "Old Visiter" ... the works written by himself at the age of seventy-three and the life, with such of his philosophy as is the gift of age and experience, taken down and here edited by Ethelreda Lewis."
The book was quickly adapted into a film, the first non-documentary film shot by Americans in Africa, nominated for an Academy Award for best picture in 1931, starring Harry Carey as Horn. In order to add sex appeal to this pre-Hayes Code film, a fictional sub-plot was introduced in which Horn finds a crop-wielding young white woman living as a goddess in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the video clip below, she enters the scene around the 67:30 minute mark. Actress Edwina Booth contracted a tropical disease during filming and was unable to work for years afterward.
Now, white "jungle queens" were not exactly rare in that era, whether in comic books, pulps, or cinema, as pretext for stories about uncovered female forms. But what caught my attention was this particular advertisement for the film, in which the "White Goddess" (as her character was called) looks more like a dark-skinned woman with white hair:
Dave Cockrum had already been designing a black superhero for The Outsiders before using his work for the new X-Men series, but she looked more like actress Pam Grier. The flowing white hair and blue eyes came later.
This made me wonder how much Wein's original Ororo idea was informed by jungle queen stories in general, and the film Trader Horn in particular, and perhaps even this very poster.
