Harper College - Halcyon Yearbook (Palatine, IL)

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x x M . Q! I I Nz if C N l l..J S I .. t 4, A ss. -A+ K Z3 f' .... Then, to his after satisfaction, he realized that blood was cozing from a roand hole in Clarita 's forehead. Neither Vic nor The Shadow had fired that second shot. lts roar was covered by fhe en ho ol Vic's own gan. Soineone at the doorway behind them had leilled Clarits, by frying Io lcill the Shadow. The Shadow whirled. The intruder was revealed lilee a shape of ghastly horror in the living-room doorway. lt was Naniber One! His niainniy face aleanied yellow with hate above the starched ruff of his black satin Harlequin sail, The Shadow Fired!! The Shadow Magazine

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All parties suffer greatly from the rigid sex-role conditioning they received as chil- dren and adolescents. Perhaps this is most evident in the sphere of human sexuality. So many encounters seem devoid of kindness, respect and honest intimacy. Too many times intercourse becomes exploitative, men chalking up yet another conquest, women deriving a tenuous sense of worth from their desirability, their ability to use men to achieve emotional land sometimes economic satisfaction. Enter the human liberation movement, a rethinking process, a fresh set of alter- natives to the traps set by rigid and differentiated conditioning. No longer need men and women conform to an exploita- tive system. The components of mascu- linity and feminity are under-going an intense examination-resulting in new, operative frameworks of humanhood. The process of redefining one's self- image is arduous, but the eventual rewards seem well worth the time and effort. Stepping outside a confining mystique needn't emasculate the male nor dehumanize the female. Rather, a fresh insight into one's potential can be relized Men and women can share traits formerly designated to one or the other sex. Growth is defined by the individual self, over- steeping the boundaries imposed by dif- ferentiated orientation. All this should devastatingly affect men's and women's relationships to each other. Meeting on equal terms they can interact on a basis of co-operation, rather than on psychically croppling levels of dominance and submission. Economic achievement and status attainment are no longer only a male birthright, homemaking and child-rearing no longer the exlusive domanin of the women- people can choose from a previously cloistered set of roles. One's life-choices can result from asking what is best for me , not what is an 'ordained' male or female role. New questions concerning marriage are asked. No longer defined as a sufficient goal in itself, it may evolve into a dynamic vehicle for self and dual actualization. Also, the structure may grow to include new forms, homosexual alliances, group marriages, communalism, non-legal arrange- ments, and lVlargaret lVlead's two step mar- riage, one with, one without children. The single state also bears reexamination, it needn't necessarily denote loneliness and barrenness. Sexuality, stripped of tension and inane game playing, such, aided by a sense of honesty and respect, grow to be fully satisfying and meaningful. Liberation renders the male hustle and the female tease anachronistic and useless. One's bed needn't be an arena for confrontative carnal knowledgee rather a place for an honest and relaxed sexual experience. The aim is mutual reciprocity, sharing, in dating, in marriage, in child-rearing. Discarding crippling and dishonest mysti- ques e men and women face an exhaustive process of rethinking, reevaluation of old, durable institutions and practices. But, the eventual reward is a new sense of human worth, non-exploitative, non-demeaning, devoid of artificial standards of superiority and inferiority. F11 l'ul

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By: Steve Francos The way a culture acts on its members reachs varied levels of individual life. Re- cent surveys have shown 90W to 9901: of all American children read comics. Which is more than TV, Movies, or 'good' books. Some comic book titles have achieved cir- culation in excess of one million per month. ln fact a sales figure of less than six figures is grounds for discontinuing the title. Comics with this kind of readership and circulation figures strongly impart not only entertainment but state cultural ideals and myth heroes on a simply level. Simply in the sense of presentation not content. For here the child sees possibly his first example of socially stated right and wrong he enjoys while he is exposed to it. This is basically the position of Mike Uslan at Indiana University. Mike is a 20 year old junior who is teaching an experi- mental course in comic books. One aspect considered in the course which l'd like to go into some lenght here on my own is comic world history. Comics as we know them today just didn't pop up in the 1930's and evolve from there. The four color, 25 cent, 48 page comics we've become accustom to reading have ancestors, the old newspaper strips jfrom all the way back to the l890'sj and pulp magazines. While the newspaper strips had and still do effect comics most of the story lines and 'flavor' early comics recieved came from pulp magazines. lt was in 1937 with the advent of Detec- tive Comics fMar. l937j where we can begin to trace the influence of pulps. Comics had by this time jl937j a standardized size UM: x l0M1j but were without a unifying concept, a consistent theme. The March issue of Detective Comics changed all that by becoming a crime pulp with pictures: a comic concerned with the universal con- flict between law and order, between good and evil. From this point comics slowly started to gain the colorful appearance we're use too. Still even with a new perspective comics lacked something. The readership of the l930's wanted something more pulps filled this need. Pulps measured 9M x 7M and had ll4 to l62 pages between full enamel stock covers. Most had l28 pages which usually featured a lead novel of some 50,000 to 60,000 words and a half dozen short stories total- ing an additional 20,000 words. Some books featured more stories of shorter lenght, about 80,000. Pulps were untrimmed magazines named after the soft paper they were printed on. Publishers used pulp paper because there was nothing cheaper. Costs always figured into the publishers profit margin. This was because they had to work with the idea of quantity always in mind. The competition between companies for the available market was incredible. Some pulps were issued weekly, some monthly, bi-monthly, or quar- terly but the usual number of pulps appear- ing onthe stands at one time was 250. Every kind of story imaginable was told, nothing was too fantasic or absurd. A par- tial list will indicate just how well every kind of subject was covered. There was The Shadow, Flying Aces, Fire Fighters, Dargnet, Weird Tales, jungle Tales, Doc Savage, Prison Stories, Ghost Stories, Twice-a-Month Love Book, Quick-Trigger Western, Mobs, Front Page Stories, and Secret Agent X , the Man of a Thousand Faces. The pulps were cheaply printed, with flashy illustrations, sensationally written and they only cost a dime. They were aimed at the masses the vast lower and middle class buyers, who needed a cheap medium of entertainment. The stories found in the pulps were all plot. Characterizations was almost non- existant. lt would have slowed down the quick paced scripts. Chapters were swiftly paced paragraphs never more than a few sentences and sentences were ckipped and concise. Every single word had to keep the story moving. Pulp writers were paid according to the number of words in their stories. The pay scale ran from W cent low to a high of 3 cents. Some of the top name people in the field like Walter Gibson author of the 325 Shadow novel lwhich happens to be the all 45