In lieu of a somewhat more substantive post that I’m still tinkering with, here’s a 1964 comic book story whose Cold War origins have always confused me. Not that it’s confusing that a science fiction story would be about the Cold War; what else was it going to be about? The question is, who’s who in this particular Cold War conflict.
(I decided to stop trying to YouTube stories; breaking this story up into its separate panels would ruin some of the effects — like the the “circle” bit at the top of page 9, the comics equivalent of the way a movie cuts from an exterior to an interior and back again.)
Now, okay, the Cold War markers are fairly clear, as you would expect in a science fiction story from the year that Mad Men will soon get to. You’ve got Planet Zentrox, the thriving tourist-friendly place, vs. Planet Glob, the ugly, drab conformist hellhole where everybody looks alike. The President of Zentrox even has a teenage daughter; she’s called Zeena instead of “Lynda Bird” or “Lucy Baines,” but we still get the point. Just in case we’re wondering what this is about, we get this rather late in the story:
But the weird thing about this Cold War story is that the bad guys are religious bad guys, who are defeated when our hero exploits their doctrine and makes them think that God is displeased with them. So in allegorical terms, the story seems to present the Globs as God-fearing Communists whose religious belief renders their military might useless.
The message of the story, apparently, is this: The side that believes in tourism, sports cars and construction work will win out over the side that’s held back by religion. Provided, of course, that Little Archie gets abducted by aliens and shows up to help, but he gets abducted by aliens all the time, and occasionally finds aliens in his refrigerator, so it was inevitable that he’d be involved in any interplanetary conflict.
Now, my guess would be that this plot might come from an earlier science fiction story or film, the way Bolling’s “Plesiosaur” is inspired by Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn.” If I knew what the inspiration was, the point of the Zentrox-vs.-Glob conflict might be a bit clearer. (One of the reasons I did this post was that I figured someone might know what this is based on.) But as it is, the way the story reads for me, it’s like the Godless capitalists beat the religious planet.
As to how Little Archie Andrews managed to get the entire planet made over in so short a time… he can do pretty much anything. Even at this age, he’s already begun to have an inexplicable magnetism for women:
Wait in line, Lynda Bird Zeena. Wait in line.
Finally, for a lighter side of Bolling and outer space, I wanted to throw in a (somewhat late) reciprocal link to Doug Gray and the classic 1959 story “The Shrimp From Outer Space.”
Gray’s blog, The Greatest Ape, collects stories by non-superhero comics masters like Barks, Bolling, Kelly, John Stanley (Little Lulu) and Al Wiseman (Dennis the Menace). You can spend a lot of time reading the great material there, but it’s time well spent.
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…there was a ‘Little Archie’?
…what’s the difference between that and regular Archie?
Maybe the Hob-Glob thing isn’t supposed to represent God in the conventional, western religion sense, but that whole Mao-Our-Glorious-Leader-cult-of-personality thing.
MGK,
You don’t argue against religious nuts that much so you may not understand how they perceive the “godless”. To the ones lacking the most introspection, any philosophy that is argued as fervently as their own religion can be compared to and later defined as a religion. This pseudo-revelation causes them to think that their own spiritual gibberish is validated by default.
This is basically all a G/god is: People taking an anthropomorphic metaphor manifested to relate to the unknown, then substituting the lack of theoretical knowledge of the unknown for the conjectural metaphor and then finally taking the metaphor too far by assigning it wants, needs and social abilities.
Of course, the wants, needs and desires of the G/god in question are entirely based on the individual that projects them upon the faceless metaphor.
Regardless, in the context of this story line, the stone-faced leader which the globs worship “like” a god is a clear reference to their stone-faced idol Stalin who never frowns upon the labor of the masses. The writer is unwittingly addressing a perceived lack of introspection on the part of the Communists who worship the society that Stalin has wrought without addressing their own lack of it, because THAT introspection would be heresy and downright UnAmerican.
Little Archie seems remarkably blase about the whole situation, really.
I love how Zeena starts referring to him immediately as “Little Archie”–without even being properly introduced, no less. It would be so awesome to have her come back in the “main” Archie timeline and start calling him “Normal-sized Archie”.
Also, I love how incredibly Golden Age her costume is, and really the art for the entire story, despite the fact that it was made in 1964.
I think that trying to paint this as a Cold War allegory may be a mistake, though. The Cold War had obviously seeped into the national consciousness and was influencing most SF stories–the drab, identical aliens, the fear of invasion, etc.–but I think that was sort of the “baseline” for SF, one that people might not even have thought much about. Within that context I don’t think most comic artists were trying to make everything fit into a strict Cold War allegory.
So young, so innocent. Gather ’round the historian while he tells you about the Kaiser stealing all our numerals, and, more importantly, a lost, golden age, when we didn’t need communists hiding under our beds.
For, you see, we had something even worse. We had …Catholics. Irish Catholics. French Catholics. Huron Catholics. But mainly Spanish Catholics, who would turn vast invasion fleets around on a dime at the least manifestation of some two-bit saint.
That was some nice art for such an odd story, anyway. It kind of looks like Ditko’s scifi stuff
That must be what it feels like to read an unrestrained and unedited train of thought. Wow that’s a strange story.
I don’t think it’s meant as a Cold War allegory either. It just has the one ‘better to worship Hob-Glob than be dead’ line, because that’s just part of the surrounding culture.
I wonder how many aliens visited Walvis Bay back then. Were they offended by the Apartheid regime?
I wonder how many aliens visited Walvis Bay back then. Were they offended by the Apartheid regime?
Walvis Bay seems to be one of those Bolling running gags that meant something to him, rather than us (along with the fact that every time someone picks up a newspaper he’s reading a headline about “Prune Fungus”). The name of the ship Mad Doctor Doom always escapes on is “The Pride of Walvis Bay.”
Is Little Betty Cooper just as insane as her current day counterpart?
Is Little Betty Cooper just as insane as her current day counterpart?
Well, she (in one of the best comic book stories ever created) took a lock of Little Archie’s hair for her collection.
That’s not necessarily disturbing in itself, but we know where that obsession leads.
I love the way she sighs while explaining that Hob-Glob is made of stone. She’s like Space Princess Richard Dawkins.
I’m not sure it’s a cold war allegory either, although it’s always possible that the story is based on a more directly allegorical story and some details were lost/changed in translation to lil’Archie.
Or you could go with Jon’s analysis, that the stone idol is the ‘face of the state’ Big Brother analogue. A mindless devotion to a stone idol is the same as a mindless devotion to a ideology.
Still, I think the simplest answer’s the best, so I’m going to go with ‘Tom Sawyer prank on a galactic scale.’
Is there a particular reason Hob-Glob looks exactly like Ego the Living Planet?
Is there a particular reason Hob-Glob looks exactly like Ego the Living Planet?
Other way around, sort of, since Ego the Living Planet debuted two years after this story.
As for why, it may just be one of those weird karmic Archie-Marvel parallels that caused them both to introduce a “Doctor Doom” character at the exact same time.