Occasionally, the Darwination Scans time machine sets down in location, well, very strange. When I discover a new magazine, I don't necessarily know what's going to be in it. This one, the title says it all, it's Battling Girls, so, no mystery, and, yet, still very strange.
After typing so late last night (a nice entry if I do say so) and finding the occasion tonight to work a cover repair, I've grabbed an old scan for a quick post in keeping with my post a day pace. I don't give nudity warnings here at Darwination Scans, do they at the museum? Nakedness is not is not the same as filth. And in the name of exploration, I've scanned some filth, too. Maybe I even enjoyed it :D
Battling Girls contains nudity (alongside the black censorship bars, it's kind of bizarre), but it's not really filthy. These ladies are "house wrestling," whatever that is. A strange subculture I doubt I want to google. And yet, it's still kind of fun. I'm reminded of a recent viewing (do excuse when I do this, but I like to talk cinema, too) of Killer Sally (2022), a recent netflix doc on bodybuilder Sally McNeil and the murder of her husband, Ray McNeil. It covers some wild territory in the world of semi-pro bodybuilding and mixes an expose of that era of bodybuilding (*roids*) with a number of very human stories of generational violence and trauma. More touching than you'd expect. Sally's side hustle is wrestling men for money. There's no sex involved just a kink for wrestling giant, muscled women. That may be weirder than this (and who I am I to judge another fellow), but Battling Girls is freaky deaky.
A quick eBay search turns up a similar title, Female Fighting, with what looks like a multi year run in the 90s into the 2000s, as well as the long running Amazons in Action which seems to feature some boxing as well. There are multiple watchers on many of these magazines, so it's a thing o.O
I did meet at least one scanner back when I scanned this who seemed to really like this material, a reserved and kindly gentleman, so I don't think the fans of these mags are radical pervs or anything.
Magazines are home to so many niche subcultures, and this is just one of them.
Keep you guard up, scan land, the Darwination Scans time machine continues to stick and move, bob and weave, and generally kick much ass in a continuing exploration of American magazine culture. Tonight, I offer an older scan. My scans, McCoy's edits. Fighting Stars, December 1975.
Enter Jim Kelly, rampaging through American cinema on the heels of his performance as ultra badass and ladies man Mr. Williams in Bruce Lee's classic Enter The Dragon (1973) and his leading role in Black Belt Jones (1974).
Added to the earlier post is a George Benson tune from the mentioned Muhammad Ali film, The Greatest. You've been warned.
The excellent trailer for Black Belt Jones which received mixed reviews and box office results but later gained a certain cult status for badassery.
Surprisingly, Kelly is only the second most badass character in the trailer. Sydney, played by Gloria Hendry takes no shit when Jones acts the heel and points, "Do those dishes or something" equivalent to the "make me a sandwich" used by moron bros everywhere. Careful bros, you might just get a foot in your ass.
Halfway expecting a slapdash exploitation of blaxploitation, I was instead amazed at the density of film history on display (the film covers the entire history of black cinema leading up to the 70s era and what was to follow. I thought of the film after ill-advisedly wading into a tired discussion on the current trend of "diversity" casting in modern film. I'd recommend the movie for some insight into just how it feels to never see yourself represented in film. There's a bit of that in the trailer.
You can almost see the emotion in Samuel Jackson's eyes as he looks away saying, "When I was a kid kid, we had Step n Fetchit, Willie Best, Buckwheat...But I still wanted to be them." Some of the most touching moments in the film are when black actors recount their experiences in the cinemas of New York City as kids trying to interpret their exclusion from the cinema.
The age of blaxploitation was short, but in many ways a golden age for black actors, directors, and stories about, you know, black people. Never since and likely never again will the mainstream so wholeheartedly embrace and empower black film (blaxploitation prospered because there was money to be made in that particular era make no bones about it)
Admittedly, a lot of the movies of the era are bad, but, as any lover of B cinema knows, even bad movies may have their redeeming qualities. Most notedly, the soundtracks are often AMAZING. The soundtracks would precede the film, ginning up interest - more famous examples include classic albums like Issac Hayes' Shaft or Curtis Mayfield's Superfly (a classic American album by any measure). But the quality of the soundtracks goes beyond the more famous examples. There's jazz legend Roy Ayers' Coffy or Willie Hutch's The Mack. James Brown's soundtrack for Slaughter's Big Rip-Off. Hell, let's play Slaughter's Theme right now, J.B. truly was the Godfather of Soul. The opening calls remind me so much of some Kendrick Lamar (one of my son's faves) I've been listening to.
Or J.B.'s soundtrack for Black Caesar or Edwin Starr's Hell up in Harlem . J.J. Johnson, Lou Rawls, Herbie Hancock, Smokey Robinson, Ohio Players, Norman Whitfield and many other legends of American music helmed soundtracks of the era.
I'll spin one last soundtrack side for the hell of it, Memphis represent, a subtler entry perhaps and preceding the blaxploitation era, Booker T. and The MG's soundtrack for Jules Dassin's Uptight, I really like this.
A great flick! 9/10 stars without flinching. Of particular interest to pulp fiction fans might be blaxploitation adaptations of Chester Himes' Cotton Comes to Harlem and The Heat's On (Come Back, Charleston Blue), interesting takes on Himes' Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones. Himes may not quite be up there with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but, in my book, it's pretty close.
Anyways. Maybe there's some insight in the experiences of these black actors never recognizing themselves on the screen but then finally getting an opportunity that enlightens the debate on diversity casting. While I may not necessarily be rushing out to see Disney's live action adaptation of Peter Pan featuring lost girls among the lost boys, I think any issues with diversity casting is the least of Disney's problems right now. Maybe start with some good storytelling and avoid these live action remakes. How about another Dumbo or Snow White. I guess for now I'll have to be happy with the Pixar pictures which my kids loved (me too, UP? classic. Or Disney's releases of Miyazaki's Spirited Away or Ponyo, all credit to Miyazaki for those beauties though, his stuff is some of the best cinema there is).
How much difference does it really make if some comic hero is Asian instead of white? a detective gay instead of straight? or if they were to experiment with *gasp* a female bond? They're just characters. I get that historical and cultural markers can be important, but, let's be honest, much of the time it does not really matter and toying around with background just *could* help explore characterization. In any case, new generations of filmgoers might appreciate seeing people that look like themselves on screen, as evidenced by black science fiction fans appreciations on Nichelle Nichols passing (who played Star Trek's Lt. Uhura) in being able to see someone that looks like they do on the deck of the Enterprise. I'm not saying we need to upend our more historical strain of cinema (which is pretty tiny if you think about it, movies have rarely reflected reality) just that varying representation from the pretty much all white Hollywood representations of yesteryear is hardly an injustice to worry about.
Hopping off the soapbox now. Don't plan on getting back up there very often.
Back to Jim Kelly and Fighting Stars.
Contents
Before we get to Jim Kelly, let's go to the interesting article on Battling Siki (given name Louis Fall). Considering recent focus on Siki contemporary Jack Johnson, it's surprising there hasn't been any excavation of the story of Siki. Siki tells his own story in a piece of autobiography from the Bellingham American newspaper from 1922 they've posted at BoxRec (a nice fight resource) which you can read here. Most amazing to me in the wiki listing for Siki is the frequency at
which he would enter the ring. I counted sixteen bouts in 1920 alone.
Today, even lower tier MMA fighters will only fight 3 or 4 four times a
year. Champions and top fighters may only fight one or two times a
year. The toll on the bodies of the early fighters must have been
extreme indeed. And, like Johnson or Dempsey, Siki lived a fast life. An impressive string of wins that led up to the fight with Carpentier in 1922 we are about to read about would turn a win loss rate of about .500 in 1923 and early 1924 followed by a very bad record of losses until his last fight in November of 1925. There's no doubt the bottle got him. Or CTE, what the hell, all those fights so close, smh. In December of 1925, Siki would fight no more. As with many prizefighters, a change in fortune came quickly and
violently. A drunken Siki was shot twice in the back and died on a New York Street at the age of 28. No one was ever charged.
Where I have seen Siki's story before in popular culture, though (at least of his fight with Carpentier) is in vintage boxing magazines like The Ring (the most famous of all boxing titles) or Fiction House's Fight Stories, a pulp I've shared at least one issue of here at Darwin Scans. And here it is in Fighting Stars. Magazines are a great resource for discovering and researching fight lore. They refresh the cultural memory on the great fights and fighters of yesteryear. These are our legends, and us fight fans do like a good story.
You always wonder how some of these characters might fare against the modern fighter (poorly would be my guess, but they were indeed tough sons of bitches, I have no doubt of that).
But let's see how Siki fared against Carpentier.
Set up as a patsy for french filmmakers looking to capture the fight on film (films of fights were big money makers in the days before TV and PPV), Siki agreed to take a dive. But in the third round Carpentier hit him too hard. He hadn't agreed to this. When he got up, the dive was off. Time to bang, bro. Hemingway was at the fight. I'd like to see his account.
You can watch right here through the wonder of Youtube and decide what you think happened.
Carpentier had
it coming, and you have to love the quick reversal of judges' decision.
I'm not gonna call out any names, but the UFC has seen some horrible
judging in the last year. If you think the days of "the fix" are over,
you'd be wrong. It may not be so blatant or even clearly intentional,
but the fighter that might be in the promotion's best interest to win
often does so, even if Dana White declares the result an injustice
afterwards. Fighters be getting robbed, yo
More interesting to me in the article is not the Carpentier fight but the acknowledgement of the racial elements in boxing of the day and even Siki's own playing to stereotypes. Fighters still do it. Look at that whiskey shilling cartoon of an Irishman, Connor McGregor. Every time I see a Proper Twelve commercial during a UFC event, I'm ready to hurl. He's gonna get his, though. Oddsmakers have it as a pickem in the lead up to the Chandler fight, but, make no mistake, the fool's money is gonna be on the Irishman - just where Vegas wants it. Danger Will Robinson, Danger. I'm not a sports gambler, by the way, as I don't like gambling to interfere with my love of sport. I would be happy to sit down for a game of poker with you, though :D
The hour grows late and the lights begin to dim here in the Darwination time machine. Time to get up the Kelly article. Like McGregor, Kelly says he's not here to take part but to take over. Indeed the future looked bright for Kelly. Coming from Karate (and Tennis?!) competition, Kelly's appearance in Enter the Dragon mesmerized. By Black Samurai, perhaps, the act had grown stale. I'm going to have to go back an watch Three The Hard Way, sort of a blaxploitation All-Star, I don't think I've seen that one. Or Kelly's appearance in Highway to Heaven o.O
Lord help us.
Wow, I found an article on Michael Landon as tennis player in a sister pub in my file of old scans just now, Stars in Sports, August 1974. I wonder if that's how he ended up on Highway to Heaven, some tennis connection. That's a fun title, too, I'll post it sometime.
Here's the image I just fished out though - I'd forgotten about until the mention of tennis back there. Kelly from another magazine I posted long ago here at Darwin Scans (I'll fix that post, too. Goddamn, so much housekeeping to be done around the museum here - it's my own fault for letting it fall into disrepair these many years!)
Right On! v06n04 (1977-02.Laufer) Centerfold Jim Kelly. Priceless.
Black Samurai looks like he belongs at the country club. And that racket! It's about half the size of mine. I don't doubt Kelly would run my ass off the court, though. Dude's a specimen.
Crime, March 1953. Cover by Howell Dodd. A classic example of JD pulp art. What are these kids smoking, anyways?! You better believe Darwination knows. Get a better look on Flicker here.
I tracked down the original and was pleased to see it exists. We can only say that for a fraction of pulp art. Sold for just above five Grand at Heritage. I've seen paintings sell for millions that do far less for me. I daresay that collector should hold on to this one. I do not own a single piece of original pulp art, but maybe someday...
I daresay the the digital image of the magazine cover looks even better than the original.
A second one! Cover Only!
Enoch Bolles, Gay Parisienne, September 1937. See it more easily on Flickr here.
A quick and easy restore unlike the rest of these cover only posts, I'm sure I could go further. With a mint copy, I can get a nice image with just a half hour or hour of work. I have a good number of fresh cover to cover girlie pulp scans in the pipeline (as you've no doubt noticed, it's a peculiar and particular interest of mine), but I also want to sort of fill out the record with some quick(er) restores of some much deserving pin-up cover art from overlooked and celebrated artists as well. Cover only.
Matt Baker, Teen-Age Romances March 1955. A masterpiece. Maybe my favorite Baker piece of all time. And that's saying something. The looks on their faces, the fall scene - this is a complex and simple piece of romantic poetry without a single word. Gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.
Flicker is mostly where I'll be sharing cover only work along with some of the key images from new and old scans (because, have I mentioned, Blogger images suck? At least click on them for a halfway decent look, the unclicked embedded images can be hard on the eyes).
If you look in the details of covers I share on Flickr, you can find a mediafire link to the full scan. When there's no link, you know, cover only :I
Cover only. The bane of the magazine scanner. The eBay search you've had for years finally hits paydirt. There's that little thumbnail image so full of promise. I bet there's a lot of pulp collectors out there as efficient as I am in combing through eBay search emails and in crafting ebay search strings. I can look through pages of thumbnails at mach speed and tell instantly the rare occasion I've actually hit a target. And - once in a while - you see that magazine you've been hunting for years, decades even. You click it, and there's those dreaded words, cover only. What moron cut the cover off this magazine #%@#*!!!
Well, somebody must not have felt the same way about it as I do. I'm looking to scan an issue front to back. The cover cutter may be more interested in framing a little bit of art or may be just a pin-up enthusiast, bless his heart :I
Usually magazine collectors don't go for just the cover, but in rare cases we do - when that piece of art is just so tempting that we don't even care about the rest.
I've tried to be pretty good about listening to the little scanning angel on my shoulder that tells me, "don't just scan the cover, you've got this mag out of the bag, and the cover is just your reward for the rest. Preservation first, man."
These past couple weeks, though, the little devil on my shoulder has been whispering other naughty, wonderful things in my ear, "just the cream, Darwin, ooh, and how about that one and that one and that one and that one..."
Going forward, I'm going to follow the muse a little better than I have in the past when it comes to working with cover images. If I have a cherry squarebound issue I don't want to subject to the glass, I'll restore the cover and some other scanner can scan their beater copy for the rest. It's OK I'm a cover hound. I'll just keep it in check.
The first image above isn't quite like that. Gentleman goldenage scanner Snard did a number of sweet Baker issues for the JVJ project at the Digital Comics Museum way back when and allowed me to grab a couple of raw .tif files from his DC++ share for my own purposes. Ten years later, I've finally gotten around to the restoration, and it is absolutely glorious.
I told a friend today my number one piece of advice in cover restoration is to start with a good copy. The textures are sharper, the colors more vibrant, etc. and the amount of time you save with a high grade copy is enormous. However, it's not like you get your choice of copies when it comes to valuable or scarce scan targets, and the copy JVJ graciously allowed us to scan was decidedly not mint. For a gem like this, I'm happy to to go the extra mile.
Another martini, bartender! Cover only. Henry Clive for The American Weekly, June 16 1940:
Henry Clive. Australian born, American master. Summer Honey. Luscious, indeed. Art director for Charlie Chaplin and star villain in City Lights. Glamor artist extraordinaire.
More on Clive in later posts, I promise.
Another new restoration. Clive's American Weekly covers are incredible if difficult scan targets. In this format, the scan requires an A3 scanner and likely dealing with at least one fold and joining multiple images (at 22 inches tall and 16 inches wide it won't even fit on an A3) but look at the payoff. As time went on, The American Weekly went to a smaller but still impressive size. I've got a handful of these by Clive (and others) and will do at least one representative issue but likely a number of cover only scans. The American Weekly is an incredible trove of American illustration, finding a flat copy with no folds is almost as rare as the dodo.
Tomorrow, keeping up my pace of a post a day which I intend to keep until I've gained some of my old readership back, two more cover only scans and maybe a second quick post of something from the archives. I have so many old scans that never made it out here on the open web, I could blog them for years. I'm all about the new projects, though, so I'll be mixing in some more expedient posts when it comes to some of my past scans as I try to get them up here and at the IA in an orderly fashion.
Cover by Pete Kuhlhoff for Short Stories, August 10th, 1946
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, as the carnival barker on the cover might implore, witness the incredible marvels of the scanning time machine, inside this tent, you will step nearly eighty years into the past and experience the wonders of yesteryear. Free ticket to the show here: Short Stories v196n05 (1946-08-10.Short Stories) (Darwin-DPP).cbr
Get the joined version with a scanner image signature in the .cbr, or you can easily view or download the unjoined scan in the format of your choice at the Internet Archive here.
Coming in at #5 on the list of longest running pulp magazines is Short Stories, a typically underappreciated pulp that featured an excellent variety of fiction from an excellent variety of authors. Running from 1890 to 1959 and even twice a month from 1921 to 1949. The old timers in the world of pulp collecting talk about these being available for a quarter in long boxes as a junk pulp, but a quick survey of authors in almost any issue almost reveals quite the opposite. In addition, the frequency and quality of illustration is higher than your average pulp as well.
Pete Kuhlhoff executes an interesting cover on tonight's issue. The carnival in chaos - the mob, eyes wide - some scatter, some can only stand aghast, jaws dropped in amazement. The Carnival Barker conducts. It stretched a long way from the past... SIDE-SHOW SHADOW.
I'm in, don't know about you. A good pulp cover might have you turning to that opening story without even glancing at the contents (usually the hurried first stop of the pulp reader as he walks away from the newsstand or ambles back to the porch from the mailbox).
"Lakeland. The place had a pretty name. But it was dump. I knew the smell the minute I stepped off the bus."
Prime pulp prose. And there you go, hooked already. H.L. Mencken said of the author, Theodore Roscoe, that, "Many of the so-called literati could learn a lot from Mr. Roscoe. He gets things down with amazing facility." Probably best known for his stories featuring Foreign Legionnaire Thibaut Corday, the prolific Roscoe wrote mostly adventure stories in a variety of pulp titles.
After you've finished the first story (often the best in a pulp but not always), NOW we can get back to those contents and see what other adventure or mysteries or western or crime or comedy stories await us. That's the joy of Short Stories, the variety.
A seasoned reader of the pulps might first recognize Seabury Quinn, a regular in Weird Tales, or perhaps Walt Coburn, a skilled and prolific writer of Westerns who at periods in his career averaged over 600,000 words a year in print. That's a lot. Fiction on the fly has its perils, but it has its joys too, a devil may care pace practiced by both author and reader. These days, I feel like the pulp reader of old - thumbing through the day's scans, looking for and reading good stories. We of later generations may have missed them the first time around, but it's a damned good time to be a lover of pulp.
Samples. The Singing Cowboy appeared often in the pulps. Johnny Guitar minus the gun?! DEATH MUSIC
His wiki doesn't even mention his career as an author (it's amazing how many of the pulp writer led dual lives or practiced dual occupations) and, instead, mentions only his famous career as an Olympian. But after his athletic career, Jackson V. Scholz flourished as a writer, most often writing in Sport Story Magazine from Street and Smith. You can find a long list of his works here. This is the first time I've noticed a western from Scholz, but I don't doubt he wrote others now and then.
Seabury Quinn, voyager into the mysterious, explores the dark continent and and a shapeshifting Leopardess.
I think the illustration in Short Stories is most excellent. I always like a good splash page. Shoe-String Stampede by Frank Richardson Pierce.
Or how about a little poetry. From Cowboy poet and Montanan, a regular in the Western pulps, Dan Cushman.
I leave with a few of the small and scattered illustrations. Sometimes these can be fantastic. I'll see you next time we touch down on the Darwin Scans time machine, who knows where, who knows when.
Syd Shores cover for the Avon line's Gangsters and Gun Molls, June 1952.
From the JVJ project at the Digital Comics Museum. When I had it available to me, I always left JVJ's identification indexes at the end, almost as great a contribution as the comics themselves. Artist identification is so, so helpful when studying the golden ages of comics and illustration. I'm pretty good at it in certain areas (girlie pulps), but JVJ's eye for the golden age is something else. Artist identification is very much an important part of cultural preservation, and I always fear that when some of us old paper lovers go, they take a lot of their knowledge with them. If you see an unidentifed artist and have a solid ID on an image I post, chime in on comments, eh?
Twoby raws, DNation edits
Interior front cover by the great Everett Raymond Kinstler. I love the way the four different images preview the comic. Avon/Realistic is definitely a publishing house for comics lovers to explore.
Syd Shores splash for MARA HITE Bank-robbing Murderess.
You'll never be anything but a two bit punk! From now on I'm
running things. Often the power hierarchy in the gun moll to gangster
relationship, sort of like my marriage :D
Lastly, a Gerald McCann splash for Gerald McCann splash for ALICE CORT - Hollywood Hellcat.
Alice's gang moves in on a Chicago Loop restaurant, closing time, 1943. Do not get in Alice's way.
or you can view the scan and download in a variety of formats at the Internet Archive here.
I'll be damned if the time machine didn't land in an unexpected destination yet again. Sharing some music mags yesterday, I chanced across this gem which Doc Oldschool scanned for me to edit. I don't recall if he picked it up as a target or if he held on to it all the years, but I'm guessing the latter, jesus christ.
What a relic this mag is - I'm pretty sure I never picked up a copy myself, but it's a mainstream attempt to kind of fuse some metal and punk rock coverage together in a commercial but still slightly subversive package. Thumbing through it, there's all sorts of wild photos from a simpler age. 80s Ozzy was something else. The first I remember encountering the man close up so to speak is in the Decline of Western Civilizaton docs
Holy shit, man, get yourself together 😆 Enough to make a young punker straightedge.
I imagine another initial slant on Ozzy as a too-hip GenXer would be something like Beck's here
In the years since, and, especially recently, I've come to pretty much worship Black Sabbath as the pioneering doom metal gods they are, so Ozzy is the man, no matter what he got up to with reality TV and the like.
But back to the issue at hand. Scanners like to bag a v01n01 because, well, it's the first issue, eh? Magazine collectors like Doc Lomazow love the first ish of a mag and so do we. There's always so much enthusiasm, and you often get an optimistic mission statement like this:
Hairhead fashion? Check. I can safely say I never had a glam metal hair-do and still crack up at this shit. Of course, old men envy the young, or so they say
I'm very happy to have my son pick up the guitar which has brought me so much joy over the years. He's using the fender strat copy I bought at 17 and fixed the electricals on. Still a killer, easy to play make, but it might have just been ridden till the wheels fall off.
I love the Ibanez hollow body I play (not enough) now.
Fellow students in shop class always had the Metallica T's. I never did catch on.
This is more my speed. I can still bop out listening to The Ramones
But, for me, the kings of metal will always be Slayer. I tend to like slower and trudgier varieties of metal, but goddamn if they don't kick so much ass. I was gonna link the old Tom Arya Scream Button there but it's 404, what a pity. SLAYERRRRRRRRRR!
Fuckin' Ozzy, man, what a treasure.
Wild Style, so much hair product at work here o.O
See there's the glam stuff, but then we get a nice interview with Lemmy. This mag was playing to a wide audience:
Interview with Gregg Ginn, but here's the always shorthaired Henry Rollins as young man. I do admit I like the fact he followed a different muse and hung up the spurs so to speak. Rock tours until death seems like an odd way for your heroes to ride into the sunset. On the other hand, shredding to the grave shows spirit.
Coming out of the comics scanning scene, I'd be remiss not to include a strip by Big Daddy Ed Roth
or, The Scriptures book review. Dr. Proctor Roctor knows about the good stuff.
I'd almost forgotten about Ozzy and the bats. I wonder how much mileage he got out of that bit. Available on VHS and Beta Hi-Fi Videocassettes.
Rock on, scan lovers, and let 'er rip. Even when I say I know where the Darwination time machine is going to end up tomorrow, it seems I never do. \m/ \m/
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