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 told in Heavy Metal Magazine, Elfquest, and the colorless Epic reprints of Conan and Red Sonja in Savage Sword. 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. Like most cartoonists, I have a head brimming with ideas. However, a problem I've always had to work my way through is that my natural process is a bit too stream-of-consciousness, and to really have a chance at creating and maintaining a long-lived project, I've found I need a narrative anchor that I can use 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. and so much material available in the public domain, left to languish, forgotten.
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 a lot of potential. Avon is a publisher that technically still exists, as a romance imprint of Harper-Collins. The comics they published in the 1940s and 1950s have been abandoned, and now exist in the public domain. Slave Girl Comics was a two-issue run in 1949 (with a further short story appearing in an issue of Strange Worlds.) There are eight stories about the titular slave girl, Malu, who looks suspiciously like Maureen O'Hara, and "her protector", Garth, who looks suspiciously like Tyrone Power, and their adventures across a wild land of constant peril, as Garth seeks to deliver Malu to city-kingdom of Ormuz, and her rightful place as a princess. These stories are an impeccable example of the sword-and-sandal adventure genre, moving into a form of proto- sword and sorcery.
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 solid, and deserve a revisit. That's the appeal of Malu and Garth. They're engaging characters, appearing in a series of exciting adventure stories, 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!