Making Malu
A Brief (Personal) History of Malu the Slave Princess, and Her Protector, Garth.
Malu and Garth are not my invention.
A few years ago, I was struck with the creative urge to make a comic story just for me. Growing up, I fell in love with weird fantasy, post-apocalyptic fiction, and space opera (the more psychedelic, the better.) As a cartoonist, I've always been most attracted to the far-out, black and white indie and Euro fare that was published most heavily during the 1970s and 1980s. I was (and still am) enthralled by stories published by Heavy Metal, Warren, WaRP Graphics, Epic -- any "adult illustrated fantasy" I could get my hands on. There is nothing more beautiful to me than the masterful ink drawings of cartoonists like Wendy Pini, John Buscema, Frank Thorne, Barry Windsor-Smith, and of course, European masters like Moebius, Philippe Caza, Sergio Toppi, Fernando Fernandez, among so many others.
I want to make a comic like those by the cartoonists I've loved my whole life. Dark fantasy, sword and sorcery, distinctly adult, and saturated in weirdness. There's a certain feeling that I get from those sorts of comics, and I want to make a comic that evokes that same feeling. Like most cartoonists, I have a head brimming with ideas. However, having a bunch of ideas is the easy part. Putting all those ideas into an order that makes good work is the hard part. My strategy is to find an existing narrative I can use as an anchor to find purchase for all my ideas.
And that's where Malu and Garth come in.
For a long time, it's been on my mind that the Golden Age represents a largely untapped resource for creative folks to draw from and use for their own projects. It's a generation full of fun, pulpy stories that could (and should) be adapted to more modern formats. It's a time and creative space where quantity was the order of the day, and it was meant to be ephemeral, made quickly and on the cheap, and bought, read, and discarded to make room for the next issue. There is so much material made during the Golden Age of comics that's been left to languish, forgotten, but the great thing is that it's also material that's now in the public domain, and available for anyone to use however they will.
There are some wonderful communities that are dedicated to archiving old media, comics included. I was surfing around Comic Book Plus, my favorite of these communities, and came across a comic I think has so much potential. Avon is a publisher that technically still exists, as a romance imprint of Harper-Collins. During the 1940s and 1950s, Avon was in the business publishing short-lived adventure and crime series, featuring largely forgotten characters in stories that have been long abandoned. Slave Girl Comics had a two-issue run in 1949, along with one more short story appearing in 1951, in the pages of Avon's anthology, Strange Worlds.
In total, there are eight episodic stories about the titular slave girl, Malu, who looks suspiciously like Maureen O'Hara, and "her protector", Garth, who looks suspiciously like Tyrone Power. The stories recount their adventures across a wild land of constant peril, as Garth seeks to deliver Malu away from bondage, to the city-kingdom of Ormuz, and her rightful place as a princess. These stories are an impeccable example of the sword-and-sandal adventure genre, so popular at the time, shifting at times into a form of proto- sword and sorcery -- a genre which, while invented by Robert E. Howard in the 1930s, and seemingly tailor-made for comics, didn't really find its home in comics until after 1950. Thus, the adventures of Malu and Garth hold a special place in the history of fantasy comics.
It's unclear who wrote them, but they were given a dynamic visual treatment within the confines of the Golden Age style by Howard Larsen. Not only do the old pages seriously hold up well, the stories themselves are some solid action and intrigue, and deserve a revisit. That's the appeal of Malu and Garth. They're engaging characters, appearing in a series of exciting adventures, within an interesting setting, but their lifespan was short. That leaves so much room to build upon everything, from the characters, the setting and lore, and the narratives themselves. It's not a completely blank page, but it's enough of a rough draft to really add the flourishes I enjoy, and want celebrate.
Read the original adventures of Malu and Garth at Comic Book Plus!