The Devilman of the Deep - Dark Worlds Quarterly

“The Devilman of the Deep” was an eight-part serial in the British story paper, Scoops. Some historians consider Scoops to be the first all-Science Fiction magazine in the UK. Some refer to it as a Pulp but this is not really true. It is a story paper, no different from The Skipper, Triumph, The Thriller or Hotspur, except that it doesn’t feature other genres such as Westerns or detective stories. Scoops was for SF fans.

Art by Frank R. Paulconsider Scoops to be the first UK Science Fiction Pulp. This is true in terms of it being an all-SF magazine, but its structure and practices were similar to the other story papers like *The Wizard, The Thriller* or *Adventure*. Like most of these 1930s publications, credits were deemed unnecessary so we don’t know who wrote “The Devilman of the Deep”.

Their inspiration for “The Devilman of the Deep” is easier to glean from the very first illustration: H. G. Well’s and his story “In the Abyss” (Pearson’s, August 1896) or its reprint in the American magazine, Amazing Stories, September 1926). An oceanographer goes into the deepest part of the ocean in a diving bell. He discovers a race of fish men. The sea dwellers react to the bell as we would to angel falling from the sky. They try to capture the scientist but he escapes. Wells used this scenario to comment on a certain religious experience. The Scoops author took Wells’ story as the opening for their much longer tale.

But the influence of Wells is not all I noticed. The main cast of characters, a scientist named Mark Stanmore, his assistant, Bulwer Kells, and Abel Cornwall, their rough man of adventure and companion resembles the trio of Professor Arronax, Conseil and Ned Land from Jules Verne‘s aquatic masterpiece, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. (Wells has a solitary researcher in his diving bell.)

The story opens with our three heroes getting ready to dive into the deepest ocean in the Southern Atlantic. A mystery has presented itself, a ship that is locked in place by no visible means. (Again, a hint of Verne’s 20,000 Leagues.) To solve it, the three men will descend in their newly designer explorer. The bell drops five miles towards the six mile bottom before they detect anything unusual.

The Sea people attack the diving bell, pulling it into an underwater cavern. The men leave the bell and meet the leader of the aquatic people. He is an evil looking creature called Devilman. The humans learn that Devilman wants their weapons technology so he can attack another colony of fish-men. The men flee, shooting their way out. They only escape because another sea man, named Sea Flight, throws in with them. He is the head of the scientists of the deep. Sea Flight helps the men escape in huge bubbles that rise to the surface. They get pulled back down for more adventures.

Issues of Scoops can be found for free at Comic Book Plus.

Part One (April 7, 1934)

Part Two (April 14, 1934)

Part Three (April 21, 1934)

Part Four (April 28, 1934)

Part Five (May 5, 1934)

Part Six (May 12, 1934)

Part Seven (May 19, 1934)

Part Eight (May 26, 1934)

Conclusion

It is interesting to compare this story with Paul Ernst’s “Marooned Under the Sea” (Astounding Stories of Super-Science, September 1930). Written four years earlier, Ernst’s take on underwater fishmen feels like it was sprung from the same Wellsian font. “Davy Jones’s Ambassador” by Raymond Z. Gallun (Astounding Stories, December 1935) returns to this idea again, after the Scoops tale. The undersea adventure becomes an SF trope in this decade with similar stories in later years like “The Fish-Men of Venus” by David Wright O’Brien (Amazing Stories, April 1940) and “The Slaves of the Fish-Men” by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Fantastic Adventures, March 1941) for Ray A. Palmer.

A last observation, this anonymous writer has spun his tale very much in the fashion of the early Edmond Hamilton. Ed wrote a number of Wellsian invasion stories for Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Another Brit who wrote in this vein was John Russell Fearn, beginning in 1933. I have to wonder if this tale might be one of his? I can offer no real evidence of this though.