Tor 3
Everything I stated about "One Million Years Ago" applies to this book as well, except this issue's Apologetics introduction, or statement from the creators is oriented towards readers who are strict interpreters of The Bible who believe that The Earth is only 6,000 years old, while that in Issue #1 is aimed towards readers who believe in current (1953) mainstream scientific theory, that The Earth is much, much, much...... ad infinitum more likely to be many, many millions of years old, and thus for it to be almost less than infinitesimally likely that even primitive Hominids (let alone Modern Humans) lived alongside dinosaurs and primitive reptilian species.
Tor in The World of 1,000,000 Years Ago
Again, Kubert's artwork in this book is excellent, and a joy to behold. Right at the start is an ironic bit of dialogue, which has Tor speaking to his ancient mammal (perhaps attempt at ancient primate?) friend, who I think looks more like an ancient lemur than monkey. Tor speaks to him in an old-fashioned form of English speech, ('tis), the contraction of the words "it is" which is still used in Ireland, and several regional and local dialects in Britain, but not used at all in normal, mainstream speech in USA, except in period pieces in film, TV, radio, and printed entertainment and similar media's educational pieces. Of course, Tor and his family would be speaking a very primitive language much more dependent upon physical gesture sign language, calls, yells, grunts, and one-syllable words, which would bear little resemblance to a modern Human language.
And, I DO realise that the word balloons contain 1953 Standard TV, Radio and Print American English solely for the convenience of the reader. Yet, it seems rather silly to use a speech form which only dropped out of normal daily speech in British North America a few generations before, to represent the speech of ancient Humans a million years before, when how they communicated with each other is most likely to only loosely termed "a language", if at all.
This reminds me of the weird (and I think silly) German film and TV technique used in dubbing American stories soundtracks, with the speakers speaking their lines using Bavarian Dialect instead of standard Hochdeutsch, to represent the American English dialect in the US antebellum (Old) South. Of course, Bavaria, Schwabia, and Baden (Southern German states) are, especially the rural folk who form the main bulk of speakers of Bayrish Dialect, are negatively stereotyped as being simple, unsophisticated (hickey) and less educated than their sophisticated northern (urban) counterparts (unfairly, as there are plenty of rural northerners - but the creators of media are generally all well-educated).
And, of course, it is silly for Tor to be using "Old Fashioned" speech, with his pet, as our dogs (or other intelligent pets) would not likely understand words we haven't used with them, before. To me, these are humourous jokes, but they hurt the reader's enjoyment of reading the story MORE than the amusement of the joke adds to their pleasure, because it makes the reader stop and think, and out of the flow of the story.
Tor's encounter with the Plesiosaur and the giant squidlike animal are excellently drawn. And the colouring of those scenes is wonderful. His battle with the clean shaven (hairless) tribe on the forbidden Isle of Fire is really good action. That made me stop and wonder if their tribe had suffered from a severe fever that made them lose all their body hair, or they found some sharp flakes of obsidian which they used to scrape their hair off so cleanly on their skin's surface (and they must do it every day. Hard to believe a tribe would do that that long ago, when they had to keep moving to find new (unpicked) vegetable and fruit gathering areas, and in between running from and hiding from dangerous predators.
Tor finds other "Modern Humans" who are enslaved captives of "The Fire People". Tor brings new courage to the enslaved people. When they are captured and taken to the caldera of the volcano to be sacrificed, the most beautiful young woman throws herself in, rather than letting a Fire Man do it, and Tor climbs down and fights a serpentlike animal and rescues her, and leads her, and a few of The Human survivors of the continuing volcano explosion to his raft, and takes them back to the mainland and freedom.
A well-drawn and entertaining story.
Snow Trap - Text Story
This story involved a valley with a tribe of farmers who lived of of fruit and vegetable farming, rather than hunting and gathering. Current mainstream accepted scientific theory is that farming and domesticating animals, including the wolf (the first), occurred much, much,much closer to our own times than to one million years ago (domestication of the wolf- and change into dogs started roughly 40,000 years ago, and first domestication and farming of grains (rather than just harvesting wild forms) at about 12 to 13,000 years ago.
The theories in 1953 were not appreciably different from today's as they pertain to the relative time distance from today and 1 million years before. The predatory tribe, who captured slaves, used flint knives. Although that might have been possible, wrapping the oddly-shaped flecked stone to a wooden handle, I am sure that Kubert, in a drawn story, would have made it appear as a streamlined weapon, much too modern for that long ago. But being a text story, he gets a pass on this one. But, overall, I'm sure that he was writing and drawing to the taste of pre-teen American boys, just as most foreign cuisine restaurants in USA, Canada, and most other "Western Culture" nations, cater to local tastes in cuisine, and modify their traditional dishes into watered down or severely changed versions.
Tor Story 2 - (Valley of The Amazons)
A typical theme in Fantasy genre action series. Not unexpectedly, Tor defeats a sabertooth cat, bringing together the women's tribe with the other local tribe, and stopping Human sacrifice.
Pteranodon - Educational Page
The information includes the statement that this reptile lived from 155 to 120 million years ago. Yet a Pteranodon was shown together with Tor in a splash panel in Issue #1, where Kubert and Maurer stated that all these animals COULD have survived until the time of Humans. I think that strategy is detrimental to selling these books. IF they wanted to give the boys what they think they want, why not couch their strategy and plan in THIS way in their introduction to the series: "This series is based on considering what life would have been like if Humans and some Jurassic animals had lived during the Cretaceous Period (or flipping the position of the time period chosen).
Danny Dreams
Uncle Jim needs to learn more about Islanders and Native North Americans. He should have said that "they depend upon fish as their main source of protein and some vitamins." And as far as for Inuits, most of them depend a lot more on eating meat of seals than fish, (and everyone knows that seals are not fish.). And in older times, they also hunted caribou and musk oxen.
An inventive story. It's a good plot, having Danny save the old man, seeing that what he is weaving can be used as a fish net. I'm not thrilled with a marine reptile from The Mesozoic Age being used, when a shark from about 1 million years ago would have sufficed. But it was an interesting episode, that stands on its own and provides lots of suspense and a trigger to make the reader want to read the next issue of "Tor", which I will do. Again, they tell the reader that the animal actually is thought by most scientists to have died out 66 million years ago. But they claimed in their introduction, that it "COULD have" been alive 1 million years ago.
Dr. Wertham probably used such misinformation as ammunition to have this type of comic book removed from the shelves of newsstands and stores; whereas, if the creators' introduction just stated that: "This book was written to explore the possibilities of what life would have been like if Humans lived side by side with the animals of The Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Mesozoic Periods.", nobody would have a problem allowing a book to have a fantasy story, and no one could accuse the publishers of publishing information that could have them believing "false facts" and hurting their education.
All in all, this seems a bit better than Issue #1. I'd like to see the 3-D issue, #2 (which goes by a 3-D title rather than "Tor". But, I doubt that CB+ has it, or a footnote about it would have been included with the information on this series.
Author
Topic: Reading Group #301 Joe Kubert & Tor (Read 3287 times)
