Gardner Fox as a young man, ‘splashing the field’ as a pulpster and comics writer.

Doing my emergency make-up birthday post yesterday for Ken Kelly put me a day behind on honoring another legend: Gardner Francis Fox. This should get me caught up on significant anniversaries for awhile.

Gar Fox was born in 1911, almost exactly five years after Robert E. Howard. A native of Brooklyn, he grew up reading the pulps. When he was eleven, Fox was given two of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels. After that, he "read all of Burroughs, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy" that he could find. It should be noted that about the only way that Fox could've read Mundy and Lamb in the early 1920s would be by way of the mighty pulp, Adventure. A slightly older REH was doing the same thing in Texas. Young Gar 'always particularly liked" the great A. Merritt and Merritt's influence could be seen in much of Fox's later fiction. Fox was also a fan of mystery writer, John Dickson Carr.

Gardner Fox studied law in the '30s and was admitted to the New York bar in 1935, but the Great Depression made Gar--a man with a wife and a kid--look to other venues for cash. At that point, he began a working relationship with National Allied Publications/DC Comics which would last for three decades.

While Fox started writing for the comics, he soon branched out to the closely-related pulps, selling stories most notably to Weird Tales and Planet Stories during the Forties and Fifties. His work for Planet Stories, especially, still holds up, full of the Merrittesque flavor that one also finds from Leigh Brackett and Poul Anderson during the same period.

During the '50s, Gar also branched out into the flourishing historical adventure field, with The Borgia Blade (1953) being the first of many. As I've written elsewhere, The Borgia Blade is a classic novel, full of blood, sex and good historical detail. I'm always amazed by how accurate Fox was in his historicals, considering that he was cranking out about a million words of prose for comics/pulps/novels every year. As it turns out, Gar said in 1971 that:

"Knowledge is kind of a hobby with me". (...) I maintain two file cabinets chock full of stuff. And the attic is crammed with books and magazines....Everything about science, nature, or unusual facts, I can go to my files or the--at least--2,000 books that I have".

Gar Fox’s sole Frazetta cover, thanks to Don Wollheim.

That's my kinda writer.

Fox would keep on writing historicals, but he also maintained his relationship with DC Comics. In fact, he was the main architect of the 'Silver Age' of comics that began at DC, which then sparked a similar revolution over at Marvel Comics. Little did Gar know that these were his final years at DC. Not long before he left, he mentored a very young Roy Thomas, who had adapted Fox's Warrior of Llarn into comics format in a classic issue of the Alter Ego comics fanzine.

I plan to discuss Gar Fox with Roy Thomas when I see RT at Howard Days 2021 this year.

Gardner Fox would leave DC Comics in 1968, at which point he wrote novels full-time. Among those would be sword-and-sorcery tales featuring Kothar the Barbarian, Kyrik and Niall of the Far Travels. I personally don't think much of the Kyrik and Kothar stuff. Mid-grade S&S at best. However, I consider Fox's tales of Niall to be a notch above that, on par with the best Brak tales from Jakes.

The first Niall tale ever published, from the second issue of Dragon magazine. The cover is by a young Thomas Canty, who would go on to illustrate Elric. — The first Niall tale ever published, from the second issue of *Dragon* magazine. The cover is by a young Thomas Canty, who would go on to illustrate Elric.

My advice to Gar Fox newbies is to read just about any of his historical adventure novels first. The style is a fine blend of REH, Sabatini and Lamb. Their quality is uniformly high and just about all of 'em could be converted into S&S novels without much tweaking. From there, check out his Planet Stories work and the Niall tales.

Raise a glass to the shade of Gar Fox, sword-brothers. He was a true pulpster who could write a fine tale of swordplay and passion.

Nearly all of Fox's works can be found at the Gardner Francis Fox Library website.