Tag Archives: Classics Illustrated

It’s Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s — Curtiss!

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So, if you were going to turn some Steuben County resident into a comic book hero, my votes would go for Glenn Curtiss and Charles Williamson, mostly because both of them in a lot of ways were bigger than life, and splashy along with it.

“Charles the Magnificent” has yet to make it into the primary-colored world of comic books, but Glenn Curtiss has. I collect comics, and a year or so back, hoping to find Mr. Curtiss, I took a chance on “The Illustrated Story of Flight,” published by Classics Illustrated in 1959. I was right, too. Glenn had been gone for 29 years by then, and he was far from forgotten.

The hero of Hammondsport gets half of a two-page story entitled “Pioneer Pilots.” Rather delightfully, the artist introduces Curtiss slouched way down in his easy chair, reading the paper. Here he learns of a $10,000 prize for a flight from Albany to New York (actually, you could go in either direction). That slouch or lounge, with shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, wordlessly captures the down-home, off-the-cuff Curtiss.

Introduced as the man who built Charles Willard’s long-distance airplane, shown in three panels on the previous page (twelve miles! nineteen minutes!), Curtiss takes off from Albany on May 29, 1910, and soon runs into rough weather – depicted as a very impressive rain storm through which he forges ahead. Curtiss certainly had some trouble with turbulence, but not the storm shown here. In fact, he wouldn’t have dreamed of tackling it – he was a bear for safety.

The artist (possibly Ernie Hart) does a darned good, highly accurate job with Curtiss’s airplane. He obviously had some photo resources to work with. The panels describing Curtiss’s stop for service, and his successful landing, show Glenn in his “super hero” costume – suit, tie, high collar, and flat cap – a tiny circle even represents the cap badge that Curtiss always wore. In the final panel a smiling Curtiss sits in the pilot’s seat while the narration box enthuses, “Curtiss reached New York in only three hours!”, and a spectator shouts, “He did it!”

He did indeed. Glenn Curtiss was a huge hero in his day, the pre-World War I avatar of Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Yeager, Neal Armstrong, and Burt Rutan. His career might have been made for comic books, which didn’t exist yet, but he WAS a primary inspiration for the original Tom Swift books, largely written by a man from Binghamton.

So Curtiss gets a full page in “The Illustrated Story of Flight,” plus the not-quite half-page in which Willard flies a Curtiss airplane. The large final panel of Samuel P. Langley’s story notes that his aerodrome “was rebuilt and flown” many years later, with no mention of Curtiss, or the fact that that body of water in the picture is Keuka Lake. Two panels of “Between the Wars” show the NC-4 “first across” transatlantic flight in 1919, again without mentioning Glenn as the builder. All told, two pages of Curtiss stuff, out of 80. (The Wright brothers get eight, plus a few odd panels showing one of their airplanes.)

The Grand Comics Database (www.comics.org), which recently marked 222,222 issues documented from across the globe, lists Glenn Curtiss as a character in five fillers or text articles, all published (one of them in Sweden) between 1946 and 1969, plus this comic story, and a 1909 book of caricatures, both of which I documented myself for the database. So there’s plenty more room for a Glenn Curtiss comic – not to mention Charles Williamson. As Stan Lee would say, excelsior!

“Crossing the Rockies” to Oregon – AND to the Comic Books

I enjoy comic books, and I collect comic books. A few years ago I reported in this space about a Classics Illustrated Special Edition, To The Stars! This is because that issue has a major feature on the 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar, including creation of the glass disc in Corning in 1935.
There’s also an issue called Crossing the Rockies, which I’d never seen, but which I figured HAD to mention Marcus and Narcissa (Prentiss) Whitman. I finally took the plunge a few weeks ago and ordered a used copy available on Amazon.
And just about the whole first chapter, nineteen pages, is dedicated to the Whitmans.
So to tell the tale as the comic tells it… [with editorial comments from me in square brackets]…
The chapter’s entitled “The Oregon Trail,” and it opens with several Oregon Indians asking for missionaries. “The greatest of these missionaries was Doctor Marcus Whitman,” and he’s introduced in the third panel.
Whitman accompanies Reverend Samuel Parker to the far west, at first sneered at by mountain men when he falls sick. Before long, though, he’s nursing them through cholera and performing surgery on Jim Bridger, compelling the scoffers and scorners to change their tune.
Sent back east to recruit more settlers, he startles the folks in his home town of Rushville (who weren’t expecting him) by stalking into church in mountain-man mode, accompanied by two Indians. [This is the only area community actually named in the story. Rushville’s Marcus Whitman High School honors this native son.]
Whitman persuades four others to join him in Oregon, including Henry and Eliza Spalding and Narcissa Prentiss, whom he marries. [Marcus lived and doctored for a while in Wheeler, where a stone marker commemorates his stay. Narcissa and Bath-born Henry were from Prattsburgh, where they knew each other from town, church, and school. In fact, Narcissa had declined a marriage proposal from Henry – no clue how it affected the close-knit party knowing that Eliza was Henry’s second choice and Henry was Narcissa’s second choice. Franklin Academy has a monument to its famed alumni, and a plaque in Ithaca commemorates their commissioning service. The Narcissa Prentiss home is now a museum in Prattsburgh.]
Against all advice they take the women into the Great Prairie and up the Rocky Mountains; indeed, the women insist upon it, and carry on gamely with the men through snowstorms and raging rivers. After a 96-day trip they reach Walla Walla on September 1, 1836, hailed as the first white women to cross the continent. [Well, maybe. Seems to me it depends on how you slice it. Certainly Spanish-American and Mexican-American women had crossed in the Texas-New Mexico-Arizona-California region.]
Whitman returns to the east on business. When hard times combine with reports of a wonderful setting in Oregon, nearly a thousand emigrants itch to leave Missouri in 1843, and they hire the returning Marcus Whitman as their guide. No other wagon train has ever made the trip, but he wins them through, and within two years 4000 more have joined them.
This of course puts extreme pressure on the local Indians, who start to push back. Two panels straightforwardly tell how Cayuse Indians killed Marcus, Narcissa, and a dozen more on November 19, 1847. [All of which is factual. The story sticks to the facts, doesn’t make it too bloody, and does not portray the attacking Cayuse as savages.] Following this two Oregon men cross the continent to Washington and demand that the government provide for protection and organization in the territory, which soon comes to pass.
While the 1958 comic never questions the white “westward expansion,” it also does not demean the Indians. They all speak in full grammatical sentences, and they are not portrayed as bloodthirsty or unreasonable.
The Whitmans and the Spaldings were remarkable people – Marcus crossed the five times, under grave dangers and mostly on foot or horseback, in a day when most people never went twenty miles from their homes. He was a missionary, a doctor, a pioneer, and a developer… mixing up those roles may have contributed to his death. One thing he never dreamed of being was a comic book hero.