Pulp Magazine Authors and Literature Fans discussion

August is almost here, and the discussion of our August common read, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, has already commenced on another thread. So, since we're close enough to August :-), I invite you all to continue your discussion of it here. Fire away with comments, praise, criticisms, questions, and whatever else comes to mind!

I'm answering post # 33 in the "July or August?" common reads topic where, Adam wrote: "I don't think Tarzan is American. He's the son of Lord and Lady Greystoke, who were both British. Although, I suppose, he was raised by apes in Africa. But I got the feeling from the first couple o..."

Tarzan was British, the son of a Lord.

Maybe some day I'll learn to write clearly. I was talking about John Carter. John Carter was American. Actually a big deal was made out of him being a Virginian specifically - old frontier stock that had been cultured up. This made him perfect, according to ERB. Cultured enough, but not too far away from the wilderness.

Actually, in A Princess of Mars, Burroughs makes Carter a former Virginia resident and Confederate veteran, but his actual origin is deliberately depicted as unknown and mysterious. (I recall finding that murkiness irritating and unrealistic rather than intriguing. :-))

To answer a question that was raised on the other thread, yes --the young black chief's son whom Tarzan killed with his noose (actually, he immobilized him with the noose, then stabbed him in the heart) had previously slain Kala, Tarzan's beloved foster mother. But although Tarzan killed him, he felt psychologically restrained from eating his flesh (which, in the jungle environment where Tarzan was raised, would have been the normal disposition of a slain foe) --a visceral recognition on Tarzan's part of their common bond and mutual obligations as fellow humans.

Oh, that's right. John Carter's first memories are of fighting the Civil War & he had descendants in VA. Thanks for clearing that up, Werner.

Jim wrote: "John Carter was, like Tarzan, the epitome of civilization according to ERB. He was American, male, white & intelligent. I don't recall a hero of his that wasn't, off hand."

I think you can see why I thought you were saying Tarzan was an American. :-)

Anyway, while this has been an interesting discussion, I think I'll hold off on posting any more until the rest of the group has finished the book so everyone can participate in the discussion.

I havent started reading this book yet, i will in a day or two i have a CL Moore collection to finish first.

I will join you guys in a few days.

Speaking about Tarzan i wont have a problem with him,the book no matter the level of racism if he is as likeable,interesting as John Carter. I liked that guy alot in Princess of Mars.

Adam wrote: "I think you can see why I thought you were saying Tarzan was an American. :-)..."

You meant because Tarzan was the last name I used before the pronoun. Yeah. I HATE it when people write confusing sentences like that. I DETEST it when I do. Oh well.

There are racist aspects to Burroughs's Tarzan, and the writings of REH for that matter, which are uncomfortable, but the stories as a whole do not push racism as a movement that I know of, and can be enjoyed for other values such as heroism and their entertainment value as a whole.

Some of REH's work was more racist, IMO. His Black Canaan has some especially derogatory passages & stories. I'll agree, they didn't push it, though. They just showed what was there.

It's something we ought not forget. I see it the way people reacted to all Middle Easterners after 911. An especially poignant example came to my house a few months ago. She's a Russian from Uzbekistan. After the USSR pulled out, she was left a minority in the country & endured a civil war. Her matter of fact tales are quite chilling.

REH fantastic fiction is relative free of racism for its times. His contemporary stories which I have read have the word niggers but as used then, to me it seemed like it was realistic for the characters,people that was racist in the story.

To me I can overlook what was normal for people that wrote in US for example in 20s,30s. Its when its too much hate.

REH wouldnt not be my fav writer of them all if he was a hateful racist.

Interesting. I don't think it was always or even usually hate. 'Different' & often 'less than', but 'hate' is too strong an emotion for most to keep all the time. Some did & more let them, but I don't think most really felt hate. I spent some of my early years in a rural area things hadn't changed much from REH's time. Using 'nigger' or 'colored' often wasn't a term of derision or anything, it was just common usage.

One of my best friends when I was little, was a black kid named Jonathan. We were transplants from Long Island, NY & didn't share a lot of the local prejudices. At dinner one night (Having me to dinner freaked Jonathan's Mom out, btw.) she informed me that it was polite for me to refer to them as 'colored' not 'black'. I don't recall what I said to prompt it, but I always remembered that.

It was very strange living in an area where sets of people were treated so differently. On Long Island, there were plenty of Italians, Pollacks, Germans, Irish & Swedes. (I'm a mix of most of those.) Lots of jokes about each other & some fighting, but no one I knew was treated that differently. Not like White/Black, but I don't recall knowing any blacks on Long Island, either.

I remember how freaked out Jonathan's parents were one day when we got into a fight & he gave me a bloody nose. He had one too (I think) & we were back to playing when his dad found out. They drove me home & it was a big deal. My mother didn't think so & shrugged it off, but Jonathan & I weren't really allowed to be friends after that. He wasn't allowed to come to my house by his parents orders. It was a shame & not just because there was only one other boy in range.

Jim wrote: "He wasn't allowed to come to my house by his parents orders. It was a shame & not just because there was only one other boy in range."

Yeah, that is too bad. You kids got over it but the parents kept it going.

Looking back on it, I recognize now that it was fear on their part. They were so indoctrinated to the feelings of the area that they couldn't see when those feelings were absent. Social inertia.

I heard & saw other, similar things in my own family. One uncle's parents were German, next door neighbors to my Mom's parents, & they had a rough time of it when that uncle was little, around WWII. Another uncle's parents on that side wouldn't stay in the same room as him. They were Italian & lived on the other side of the harbor. People are so weird.

In the first chapter, the tone is set by this short paragraph:
"Clayton was the type of Englishman that one likes best to associate with the noblest monuments of historic achievement upon a thousand victorious battlefields--a strong, virile man--mentally, morally, and physically."

I read this today and thought of you all:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/art...

It's an article about a Tarzan exhibition currently showing in Paris. There are a lot of great images if you click on the slide show.

Thanks, Adam! That's a fascinating article.

It's cool there's an exhibition, but they still don't capture the ferocity of Tarzan I envisioned while reading the books. Hollywood never came close. The Ballantine books were what I read, and their covers did capture it ....

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2076/2...

http://www.pagesandprint.com/Return%2...

and particularly ...

http://www.pagesandprint.com/Beats%20...

Thanks, Adam.

John, were the pictures you had links to done by Frazetta? I don't recall the last, but I think the other two were. Frazetta did a lot of art based on Burrough's books & really captured his heroes well. I think the website is down right now as his wife just passed away.

The cover of Tarzan the Terrible certainly looked like Frazetta to me.

His cover paintings for the Conan paperbacks were fantastic.

Frazetta ... the king! Sad that his wife passed away. If I recall, they were together a long time.

Not sure if he did the covers or not. Whoever did was masterful.

One cover I could not find was a good Ballantine image of Tarzan of the Apes ... also a kicker.

Ebay has this one on bid for 1 day
http://cgi.ebay.com/Edgar-Rice-Burrou...

Yeah, I just ordered one from ebay. Ah, the memories. I'll scan the cover when I get it.

I have several books of Frazetta's art. I should look through them to see if I can find the pics you posted, but I might not come back for far too long! Yeah, he was wonderful. His cover art for 'Conan the Warrior' & 'Conan the Usurper', the Lancer paperback editions, was one f the reasons I wanted to read when I was little. Pop left them out. I just HAD to know the story behind those pics!!!

Comic Images put out a set of Frazetta trading cards in the early 90's. I think I still have a lot of them someplace.

Absolutely. The cover did sell the Conan, Tarzan, and John Carter books for me.

Those would be cool to have, Dan. I can look through his books for hours. The details are fantastic, yet so raw. His pictures for the Kane books were just spooky.

Jim wrote: "Those would be cool to have, Dan. I can look through his books for hours. The details are fantastic, yet so raw. His pictures for the Kane books were just spooky. "

The Princess of Mars he did was my bookmark for ages.

After some googling, it looks like Comic Images put out three sets of Frazetta cards.

I just finished reading Tarzan of the Apes. I really enjoyed it, even though every character was a caricature - or perhaps because of that. I'm not real happy about him leaving us on a cliff hanger, so will start The Return of Tarzan today.

After reading closely & looking at Burroughs attitudes toward women & blacks, I don't think he was terribly prejudiced for his time. He makes the point that blacks & whites have similar fingerprints - unlike apes which would be simpler, of a lower order. That's an unusual admission for his day. He grants equality where many wouldn't.

His treatment of women isn't as kind, but we really only have two - besides the native women, some of whom are killed because they fight like their men. Jane & Esmeralda are both caricatures, as are Professor Porter & his side kick, so I don't think he's shown us his actual opinion yet.

The story hinges constantly on coincidence & stupid, heroic restraint, which didn't do the plot any favors. Still, it was fun.

Looking back, I'd forgotten how completely fantastical Burroughs's Africa is. Even his apes don't behave as any recorded ape species do. They're meat eaters who make music, etc. Also, the way Tarzan acquires language and learns to speak and read flies in the face of what we now know about semiotics and human development.

But it's fantasy. And Tarzan is such a great, enduring character.

In some ways, though, I prefer the way Jane and Tarzan are portrayed in the first two Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan. Purists object to Burroughs's cultured Tarzan, master of many languages, being played as a dumb brute who speaks broken English, but giving Jane the upper hand in terms of language and culture makes their relationship more interesting. And their sexual relationship is pretty racy. In the book Tarzan of the Apes Jane immediately swoons when the "forest god" kisses her, but in the movie, there's initial fear, which makes it much more believable and sexy when she finally gives in to his brute-force charm.

His pictures for the Kane books were just spooky." Karl didn’t care for Frazetta’s first efforts at Kane; too scrawny, especially on _Dark Crusade_. He grumbled he’d made Kane look like Susie Thompson, the slender roommate, at the time, of Barbara Mott, the future Mrs. Wagner. He’d been happier with _Bloodstone_. We speculated that Frazetta might have a special place in his heart for Conan, since that first cover was his big breatk-through into the big money, and was holding back on other warriors.

Of course, I am one who greatly resents Image Comics use of Frazetta’s Kane art, drawn, at this point, according to Karl’s description (unlike Frazetta’s first Kane cover) as the basis for a completely unrelated red-haired warrior. I haven’t read the stories, so I don’t know if there are similarities other than the depiction of the protagonist and the titles, but their use of the image long associated with Kane is reason enough to never buy another Image volume. I’m not holding this against Frazetta himself. Hard to say how much direct input he had into the arrangement.

John wrote: "Absolutely. The cover did sell the Conan, Tarzan, and John Carter books for me." A Frazetta cover, at one time, could make or break a new author. Karl was pleased, I’m sure, when Warner decided to give _Death Angel’s Shadow_ a Frazetta cover (though many prefer the previous, decorative one by Stan Zagorski since it was, at least, based on Kane). Frazetta was so much in demand he could do heroic paintings in his free time knowing some publisher would find a way to use them, as was the case here.

This book marked the only time I ever shared art credits with Frazetta. And, I confess, that only by a technicality. I suppose I should have been satisfied, but young artists are a prideful lot. And there really aren’t that many OLD artists; they mend their ways or starve.

Jim wrote: "Those would be cool to have, Dan. I can look through his books for hours. The details are fantastic, yet so raw. His pictures for the Kane books were just spooky. "

The aspect I used to marvel over in Frazetta’s paintings wasn’t the detail but the lack of it. He was very clever in adding just enough detail, in the areas of light, to give the illusion that the whole painting was intricately detailed, which it seldom was. Sort of like Will Eisner in that regard, though Eisner was more stylish.

I confess I studied his work at great length hoping to emulate his facility if not his style. I’m afraid I could have bought every coffee table book he ever released and still not have gotten it.

Jim wrote: "Interesting. I don't think it was always or even usually hate. 'Different' & often 'less than', but 'hate' is too strong an emotion for most to keep all the time. Some did & more let them, but I..."

I don’t remember race being a big deal in East Tennessee. We were segregated, with separate fountains and rest rooms and so on, but just because everybody else was (including in the North, like, say, in the Cotton Club). And I’m sure I accepted that black folks were not as smart as me, but that was not of much significance. I didn’t think most white people were, either.

In fact, my grandfather sold Raleigh products door to door, often taking me with him, and many of his customers were black, so I got a different perspective. We whites were the supplicants, the blacks the ones with the money and power.

During the sit-ins here in Knoxville our mayor at the time, John Duncan (later congressman), tried to speed up integration of department stores and downtown restaurants, even going with a delegation of black activists to New York to talk to the owners of some of the store chains with operations in Knoxville. It was the Yankee merchants who balked, for fear of alienating customers in other parts of the South, not the locals, who really didn’t care and would have, for the most part, welcomed more customers. So Duncan just saw to it the segregation laws weren’t enforced too vigorously. When integration finally happened the whole process took about two weeks.

At one point the guy who’d gotten the KKK going again, a guy named Kaspar, announced plans to demonstrate and organize in Knoxville. Duncan sent him word that he might come to Knoxville vertically but he’d leave horizontally. He never came, so that stereotypical Southern menace was put to a good purpose.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that it took a good bit of courage for Karl Wagner to openly befriend me as I was quite the pariah (though big enough to hold my own, by the time I’d graduated, with the other high school toughs). And our mutual friend Terry Reynolds was, as in your case, forbidden to visit me once his mother learned of my unsavory reputation (I supposedly slept in a coffin, among other disturbing idiosyncrasies). In our case it had nothing to do with race. As in your case, there was one other boy our age in our semi-rural neighborhood, but he had no appreciation whatsoever for horror and heroic fiction.

I'm reading The Return of Tarzan now, almost done, & I think everyone will find a completely different take on the black/white thing.

John, that's so cool working with Wagner. I the Frazetta did a good job with Kane. He's described as looking like a man with the muscles of 3 stretched across his frame. He does look a bit thin, but the spookiness is too cool.

As for Frazetta's detail, I see what you mean. I was referring to is some places where I've seen closeups of his brush strokes. An entire bulging muscle is defined by one, efficient stroke (heavy paint on one side, down to the canvas on the other) giving the impression of super detail. It makes his work raw & alive, unlike Vallejo's (sp?) work which is so smooth & exact.

Jim wrote: "Some of REH's work was more racist, IMO. His Black Canaan has some especially derogatory passages & stories. I'll agree, they didn't push it, though. They just showed what was ther..."

I recall that right after 9/11 one poor unfortunate was gunned down because he was wearing a turban. The morons can’t even get straight whom they’re prejudiced against. Murder by stupidity.

At some point - I think in the 60’s - certain Legions of Decency began demanding that Tarzan books be removed from library shelves since Tarzan and Jane were living in sin. Just goes to show groups don’t have to have any idea what they’re talking about to work themselves into a frenzy over something. As though we needed a reminder of that.

There is also at least one story in which Conan expresses admiration for the cunning and resourcefulness of a black king, and Tarzan, I recall, has a black sidekick in _The Beasts of Tarzan_ who is depicted as very noble. Of course they were racist by the standards of our day. But NOT by theirs; they were creatures of their time, and it’s pointless to judge them by the mores of our own. With the exception of a tiny number who were ahead of their time, EVERYONE was racist, and it was NOT a southern phenomenon. Look at the media of the day: books, magazines, movies. Few of those originated in the south. I might even venture to say that Amos and Andy, especially when it was a daily serial, was MORE respectful of blacks than most other shows and movies. In fact, that show might have blazed a lot of trails in getting the majority in the US to accept black people as just folks. It was the fact that there were no HEROIC depictions of blacks on the air, with the possible exception of Lothar, as counterpoint to Amos & Andy’s comedic ones.

Sorry to veer off topic. I will mention, though, just SLIGHTLY off topic, that a long-running feature in Tarzan comics was “Brothers of the Spear” wherein a black teenager and a white one were depicted as equals, a feature that was ahead of its time and, as far as I know, never provoked any protest.

Mohammed wrote: "His contemporary stories which I have read have the word niggers but as used then, to me it seemed like it was realistic..." Mark twain used that word, too, in _Huckleberry Finn_, and he was a pretty good writer.

Cormac McCarthy used it Blood Merdian i saw a few days ago when i sampled the book. No one calls him a racist. Just historically correct since its a western set in 1850s.

People overdo it and call REH,co a racist without reading their stories because they were from other times. I have read many Conan stories where REH wrote the blacks just as the white people. He wrote about a story set in Punt(modern Somalia).

No modern writers writes a fantasy story set in Somalia today. People are full of s****.

Has anyone else read both Tarzan & the Return of Tarzan yet?

I recently finished both & am now starting Lord Tyger, Philip José Farmer's take on & tribute to Burroughs & Tarzan.

Farmer wrote several take-offs on Tarzan. My favorite was an Ace Double novel, with a Tarzan tale on one side and a Doc Savage story on the other, both of them the same story from different points of view, with Tarzan pitted against Doc Savage. I was cheering for Tarzan. The titles were, as I recall, _The Mad Goblin_ and _Lord of the Trees_.

There was also a novel wherein both characters appeared; it was a porn novel, written in Farmer’s early days when he needed the money. I can’t recall the title of that one.

Hey, got my Ballantine edition in and scanned the covers. Uploaded the image

http://photo.goodreads.com/photos/125...

No doubt, the Tarzan on this cover matches the ferocity described by Burroughs between the covers.

Cover art is by Neal Adams, btw.

http://www.nealadams.com/Portfolio/na...

... but young artists are a prideful lot. And there really aren’t that many OLD artists; they mend their ways or starve. "

Tough to make a decent living in art or writing.

Adam wrote: "Looking back, I'd forgotten how completely fantastical Burroughs's Africa is. Even his apes don't behave as any recorded ape species do. They're meat eaters who make music, etc. Also, the way Tarza..."

Chimps will band together and hunt monkeys and eat them. It ain't pretty though.

On the other hand, gorillas don't touch meat, far as I know, and are friggin' massive, and likely much closer to the great apes Burroughs envisioned.

Chimps do hunt and kill monkeys, but only in certain tribes. Chimps are close enough to us in intelligence to override their instincts. One tribe that does hunt happens to be probably the most famous wild tribe in the world, that observed for many years by Jane Goodall.

Even in those tribes the hunt is not to fill nutritional needs. In most cases, monkeys are killed and presented to females in estrus as a sort of bouquet. The females then often play with the dead monkeys, rather like dolls, only eating them as an afterthought. Chimps – and most other primates – do not require meat in their diet. I wrote an informal paper that touched on that topic before I took up my healthcare studies. It’s at my http://www.vset.net site, linked from an article halfway down the main page titled “Are We Natural Born Killers?“ and thence to the paper “Of Men and Monkeys, Memes and Meat.”

John wrote: "There was also a novel wherein both characters appeared; it was a porn novel, written in Farmer’s early days when he needed the money. I can’t recall the title of that one."

It's called A Feast Unknown, and Lord of the Trees & The Mad Goblin is the (much less pornographic)sequel.

I don't think the genesis of the book had any more or less to do with Farmer needing money at the time than anything else he wrote. On the contrary, I think it's a book that's firmly within the areas of some of his most abiding interests.

It's pulpish adventure, specifically using his favorite characters Doc Savage and Tarzan who he enjoyed playing with so much the entire Wold Newton cycle came out of it, as well as the excellent Lord Tyger (which, honestly, I enjoyed a lot more than anything of Burroughs's I ever read, but that's me) and his officially sanctioned Doc Savage novel Escape from Loki (which I enjoyed a lot less than most of Lester Dent's stuff I've read).

Also, it's porn, and Farmer (along with Theodore Sturgeon) were instrumental figures in bringing graphic sex into mainstream genre fiction. Like his writing in general, it was something he wanted to do, not something he contracted to do, to put bread on the table.

Recently, Wolde Newton scholar Win Scott Eckert finished one of Farmer's unfinished manuscripts (with Framer's blessing and help) which continued this blending of pulp and sex, The Evil in Pemberley House. It involves Doc Savage's daughter inheriting the estate from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and unlike A Feast Unknown, The Mad Goblin/Lord of the Trees and Lord Tyger is official Wold Newton canon, even with its steamy sex scenes.

Best,

Tim Byrd
www.DocWilde.com
Home of the Frogs of Doom!

From what I read in the reviews of "A Feast Unknown" here, it looks like it is the porno novel, but thanks for mentioning both. I put them on a swap list, but I don't know if I'm terribly interested in reading either.

Sturgeon was good friends with Heinlein, I've read. They belonged to the same nudist club or something. I've never forgotten Sturgeon's story, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let Your Sister Marry One?". It was a story about a planet founded on incest that was shunned by the rest of the civilized galaxy & made a strong argument for the taboo being ridiculous.

Heinlein's fascination for sex, incest & such is one of the reasons I disliked so many of his books published after 1970 or so.

Jim wrote: "From what I read in the reviews of "A Feast Unknown" here, it looks like it is the porno novel, but thanks for mentioning both. I put them on a swap list, but I don't know if I'm terribly interest..."

A Feast Unknown is a great read, if I remember correctly (it's been over twenty years since I read it). But it is very much over-the-top in both sex and violence, so if that's an issue, best stay away.

Jim wrote: "Heinlein's fascination for sex, incest & such is one of the reasons I disliked so many of his books published after 1970 or so."

Yeah, his work lost a lot during that time. So many of his books seem based on not only the desire to have sex with his mother, but to have sex with everyone, including himself.

Best,

Tim Byrd
www.DocWilde.com
Home of the Frogs of Doom!

Jim wrote: "From what I read in the reviews of "A Feast Unknown" here, it looks like it is the porno novel, but thanks for mentioning both. I put them on a swap list, but I don't know if I'm terribly interest..."

Ah, yes; A Feast Unknown. Thanks for reminding me of the title, and, Tim, for correcting my assumption that Farmer needed the money. Perhaps it was not so much needing money - he was gainfully employed at the time as a technical writer - as much as it was just wanting to get more of his work into print. Essex House specialized in erotic literature, and it was early in Farmer’s career as far as widespread public recognition went. At the same time erotica was gaining greater acceptance due to the efforts of publications such as Evergreen and others. And Terry Southern’s whimsical porn novel Candy had made quite a splash (published, if memory serves, by a number of houses, most of which never paid Southern a dime since he’d failed, for some reason, to copyright it. Or so I’ve heard). So A Feast Unknown was a logical undertaking in its time, whatever the motivation for writing it.

I guess I made that assumption because, as I recall (and it’s been MORE than 20 years; closer to 40, probably), the sexual aspects just seemed to be tacked on to an otherwise entertaining story. They were not erotic scenes; they were just porn scenes. One that sticks in my mind involved the Tarzan and Doc Savage inspired characters having a duel with their - I’ll say sexual members, since I don’t know what filters there are on this group. I’ve nothing against erotic literature, but I’ve never cared much for porn. Perhaps it’s that when I was young enough to have really fancied porn there wasn’t much available.

I have to say Lester Dent requires making a great deal of allowance, as well as keeping his works’ historical perspective firmly in mind. Wagner was a great fan, but he regarded it as high camp, unintentionally amusing, having the charm of a small child innocently making remarks comical to the adult mind. I’ve read maybe a dozen or so of the novels, largely thanks to Bama’s remarkable covers, and I, also, find them amusing, but my capacity for such fare is limited. Dent had one particular talent, which was to resolve a dozen plot threads on the very last page, part of the fun of reading him. Norvell Page, on the other hand, often just plain forgot two or three or subplots in his Spider novels. Of course, so did Tolstoy, some of whose characters, introduced at length, just sort of vanish.

In general I just never cared much for Farmer’s totally original work, though I never read a great deal of it so I’m not the best judge (of course, not caring for it, I wouldn’t have read much of it). I read Flesh back in high school, and wasn’t much impressed. Probably it was the sex scenes that got me through it, though, in those days, I tended to finish any book I started, a compulsion I’ve since overcome. I’m not sure I ever finished To Your Scattered Bodies Go, and I never bothered with any of the sequels. However, I did greatly enjoy the intertwined sequels to A Feast Unknown, Jim, and highly recommend them (bearing in mind, of course, that I was a callow youth when I read them).

I think Farmer may be the rare exception to the rule whose best work was his pastiches. That seems to have been his real passion and where he directed his most imaginative efforts. That inclination is probably not too hard for those of us in this group to understand.

As a matter of fact, my first comic strip was in a local underground paper and was titled The Illustrated Adventures of the Cockroach and was political satire inspired by The Spider. I just felt that my fellow college students living in the rundown mansions converted to apartments around the University could better identify with a cockroach. I’ve another strip running now, both very minor efforts of local interest.

And I think it’s been mentioned here before that Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt seems an awful lot like Doc Savage. No doubt Cussler thought to create a more realistic version of the Man of Bronze, though I find his character only marginally so, if at all.

And again, of course, it must be mentioned that Superman would probably have been a much different character, if he had come into existence at all, had it not been for Doc Savage - who was very directly borrowed from - and, in my opinion, John Carter.

John wrote: "Even in those tribes the hunt is not to fill nutritional needs. In most cases, monkeys are killed and presented to females in estrus as a sort of bouquet. Chimps do hunt and kill monkeys, but only in certain tribes. Chimps are close enough to us in intelligence to override their instincts."

I haven't examined any statistics, but the documentary I saw on chimps hunting had them consuming meat on site, not presenting it as a gift to another.

Good thing our stone-aged ancestors chose not to override their instinct to consume meat, as it helped provide the necessary protein otherwise lacking in their grazing diet, and helped brain size evolve both through the fats consumed and the strategic thinking involved in carrying out a hunt of much larger and more powerful prey. Language as well, to communicate those thoughts.

Tarzan of the Apes was a mighty hunter, and loved his meat raw as cooking ruined the flavor. Course he also at the fruits hanging about and roots as well.

Man DID override his instincts, as man is, physiologically, an herbivore. There is ample protein in plants to build muscle, as Thoreau pointed out in his anecdote of the farmer observing that man could not live on plants as there is nothing in them from which to build bone, while his plant-fed ox yanks him and his plow along. I’ve seen the claim, notably in _Walking WIth Cavemen_, which was about as authoritative as Alley Oop, that meat enabled us to grow brains. There is absolutely no scientific basis for that claim. If there were, we might expect the hierarchy of intelligence to correspond to the amount of meat consumed, which is, plainly, not the case. In fact, of the six known self-aware animals, two are carnivores, and one of those is a bird. The elephant has a highly developed language, and its level of intelligence is quite striking.

As I’ve said elsewhere, the notion that man had to have meat to evolve the intelligence to create the weapons that enabled him to acquire the meat he needed to evolve the intelligence needed presents logical difficulties.

As the book _Man the Hunted_ clearly demonstrates, our ancestors’ place in the food chain was not as top predator but, humbling though it is, as prey. Evading death at the fangs and claws of more formidable creatures might also have been a good incentive to evolve a quick and clever mind. My own guess is that man began eating meat as a scavenger, probably inspired by observing carnivores and wanting to emulate their fierceness, and that meat-eating became necessary when some of us (presumably the weaker ones, forced out of our “garden of Eden”) moved into temperate areas where meat was the only way, as far as man was concerned, that nutrients were stored over the winter.

BTW, and to move a step or two back toward being on topic, many fundamentalist web sites list Cain as the first vegetarian and attribute his violence to irritability brought on by the lack of a good steak. Kane’s creator, Karl Wagner, probably would have been annoyed by that as he, too, liked his steaks rare, a preference I picked up after dining with Karl and his parents a few times, though I preferred mine medium rare, “the temperature of fresh kill” I used to say. Though my own family raised much of our own meat we didn’t have the land nor the money to invest in a calves to raise beef; we raised only chickens, rabbits and pigs, none of which are best served rare. When we had beef it was from the grocer or the butcher, most often chopped steak as it was cheap, and we ate it well done. As you might have guessed, I no longer eat meat at all.

John wrote: "Man DID override his instincts, as man is, physiologically, an herbivore. There is ample protein in plants to build muscle, as Thoreau pointed out in his anecdote of the farmer observing that man c..."

This is the first time I've ever heard man was physically an herbivore. Wrong teeth & such. We're omnivores. Vegetarians have to be very careful, even in these generous times to take proper supplements, especially for their kids or they can have all kinds of deficiencies.