Gardner F. Fox in the Fantastic Pulps

We live in a time when the creators of Science Fiction’s legacy go unacknowledged. For example, in the 2015 Ant-Man film Scott Lang goes “subatomic” and falls in “a quantum realm” but saves himself from being trapped there for all eternity. As I watched this I thought of Ray Cumming’s “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (All-Story Weekly, March 15, 1919). I thought of S. P. Meek’s “Submicroscopic” (Amazing Stories, August 1931) and “Awlo of Ulm” (Amazing Stories, September 1931). I especially thought of Henry Hasse’s classic “The Man Who Shrank” (Amazing Stories, August 1936) and wondered if Ant-Man would solve his problem in the same way. (He did not.)

Another writer who has left a huge legacy with little recognition is Gardner Francis Cooper Fox (1911-1986). Fox began his career writing for Batman as early as 1939. (It was Fox who gave Bruce Wayne his “utility belt”.) During his decades long career with DC, he would work on such characters as The Flash, Hawkman and The Justice Society of America. He was there when Julius Schwartz revamped DC comics to meet the new “Comics Code”. He was there when DC invented its Multiverse.  Outside of DC, he would pen the first Sword & Sorcery comic called “Crom the Barbarian”. He would return to S&S with pieces for James Warren’s black & white magazines. He left DC in 1969 in a disagreement over health benefits.

That title above is pretty specific because Fox wrote a lot. Both in Pulps and comics. We are only going to look at his Science Fiction, Science Fantasy and Horror. The Sports Pulps don’t interest me particularly, though he wrote plenty for them including hockey stories. (Sorry, being Canadian doesn’t immediately mean I want to read about hockey.) Westerns I like more but we won’t discuss them here.

All through the 1940s and 50s, while Garner F. Fox wrote about superheroes (giving Hawkman those Sword & Sorcery weapons for instance), he also had a side-line in writing pulp. He wrote for four magazines in particular, depending on his mood. These were Weird Tales (for horror stories), Amazing Stories and Marvel Science Stories (for Science Fiction) and most of all, Planet Stories, where he helped to define the sub-genre we now call “Sword & Planet”.

Fox’s fiction debut was impressive with “The Weirds of the Woodcarver” (Weird Tales, September 1944). This little noticed Cthulhu Mythos tale borrows from both Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. A newspaper reporter wants to score a story so he goes to do a write-up on the town’s oldest woodcarver. The little old man has thousands of figures in his store, all of inhabitants that cross his window. The detailed figures all bear a mark on their chest, either a cross or a weird eldritch symbol. Those with the cross have found good luck while those with the other symbol have all met ill luck.

The carver invites the reporter to see the figures deeper in the store. Each successive set goes further and further back into history. The reporter is stunned when he realizes the carver must be hundreds of years old. Eventually carvings of frontiersmen give way to older and older figures until the cavemen go by. The carver promises figures that even predate humankind in the basement. The mastodons and dinosaurs give out to weird squamous creatures.

The unbelievable nature of the creatures jerks the reporter out of his belief. He taunts the old woodcutter as a good liar. The old man insists the world was inhabited by the Primal Ones but all have fled except one. The old man proves his point by sending the man back in time to the primeval jungles where an ancient city houses people sacrificing a girl to a weird squamous and tentacular monster with burning black eyes. The reporter flees back to the main store to learn that the only Primal One left is the carver, who decides who lives and who is sacrificed to him. The reporter leaves, never sure which he will be.

The Lovecraftian elements of the story are pretty clear with the familiar Mythosian chant, mention of Mi-Go and Tcho-tcho people. The Robert E. Howard elements are in the rolling back of history, much as the Mirrors of Thune did for King Kull as he gazed into them. What I don’t know and wished I did was if Fox got permission to write the story from August Derleth. In 1946-47 Derleth would tell C. Hall Thompson to stop writing Mythos after his three Weird Tales appearances. Fox may be another who spurred Derleth to put his foot down as controller of the Lovecraft estate.

“The Last Monster” (Planet Stories, Summer 1945)

“MANnth” (Planet Stories, Winter 1945)

“Engines of the Gods” (Planet Stories, Spring 1946)

“Rain, Rain, Go Away” (Weird Tales, May 1946)

“Heart of Light” (Amazing Stories, July 1946)

“The Man the Sun Gods Made” (Planet Stories, Winter 1946)

“Sword of the Seven Suns” (Planet Stories, Spring 1947)

“Vassals of the Lode-Star” (Planet Stories, Summer 1947)

“Werewile of the Crystal Crypt” (Planet Stories, Summer 1948)

“When Kohannes Screamed” (Planet Stories, Fall 1948)

“The Rainbow Jade” (Weird Tales, September 1949)

“Temptress of the Time Flow” (Marvel Science Stories, November 1950)

“Tonight the Stars Revolt” (Planet Stories, March 1952)

“The Warlock of Sharrador” (Planet Stories, March 1953)

With the passing of the Pulps in the mid-1950s, Gardner F. Fox devoted himself largely to comics once again. He did return to Sword & Planet for two short novels in the 1960s when ACE published its popular dual-sided ACE Doubles. The Warrior of Llarn (1964) and The Hunter Out of Time (1965) continued threads Fox had pursued in the pages of Planet Stories.

   But Fox wasn’t quite done yet. In 1972, Fox would return to Sword & Sorcery, first with the story “The Holding of Kolymar” in Ted White’s Fantastic (October 1972). This was followed up by two novels series, Kothar the Barbarian and The Warlock Kylix. Fox wasn’t quite done with S&S just yet. In 1976 he penned ten stories about “Niall of the Long Journeys” for The Dragon Magazine. These later tales, along with Fox’s Sword &Sorcery comics, deserve an article all their own so I won’t go into them here.