The Enchanted Dagger

Page 2 of Kalthar.  If you are as keen an observer of the cultural moment as I am, you probably noticed that there are some elements of Kalthar which could be considered “out of step” with our times, so it’s a good thing it wasn’t written in our times.  Savage Blacks!?!  Um….excuse me!?!   Whats all this?  A giant white man is the chief of an African tribe?  That’s racist! What kind of toxic white savior complex comic is this?

I think you make a lot of good points.

Maybe it’s a bad idea to refurbish Kalthar, yes?  To be honest, I haven’t read all of the Kalthar stories yet, so we’ll have to discover together whether or not he is a bad comic book character who does not deserve to be remembered by fans of comic books and neither should anyone who even thought for even a nano second that Kalthar Redux would be a good idea.  Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned!

Kalthar was obviously influenced by Tarzan the Ape Man, written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who himself harbored many of the “racialist” views of his day.  The term racism, so popular today, didn’t enter the lexicon until the 1930s, often referencing the hard line policies of Nazi Germany.  I think its safe to say that the Kalthar character owed more to Tarzan than Hitler.  It would be no surprise if the artists who worked on Kalthar had views that were influenced by the cultural norms of their times, just as the levelheaded among us today are trapped in a world of deranged anti-government Q-Anon fanatics and self appointed Neo-Marxist thought police, cancelling people in a pique Jacobin fervor.

The right wing is so delusional in all of it’s decroded values that they might just have to destroy everything before they develop a rational belief system that can keep pace with reality.   Meanwhile the far left’s invention of dubious new cultural norms, created and codified in our institutions of higher learning and then zealously defended by harping on tweets people wrote ten years ago when they were 17, will eventually be hoisted on their own petard…they’re leaving behind quite the paper trail of their social media reign of terror…watch your backs!!  I think most people frown on the ridiculous cancel culture, which reduces people to their most off color moments, often poor or nuanced attempts at humor, and then discards them with uncompromising ideological zeal, playing to an audience of twerps.  Remember the Jacobins, ye children of the revolution.

So we’ll have to wait and see….  Should Kalthar be remembered at the risk the negative associations we might see in him?  Or maybe he should be erased from history in the style of the Stalinists, cutting undesirable ideas from it’s telling of history?  Fortunately, I think it’s safe to say that even if there are some uncomfortable overtones in Kalthar (and Tarzan… and John Carter…and HP Lovecraft, etc etc) that it’s probably not the most racist thing ever written and it’s contribution to a growing global culture tolerant of the fallacies and foibles of the human being is little more than a raindrop on a vast lake.  So don’t worry about it.