Appearance
A point about Stark's physical appearance which has been studiously ignored by every one of his illustrators until the James Ryman's covers from the Paizo Publishing Planet Stories line: like Brackett's other Mercurian characters (e.g. Jaffa Storm in The Nemesis from Terra), Stark has a very dark, almost black skin. His skin is "almost as dark as his black hair" and an antagonist refers to him scornfully as a "great black ape". The darkness of Stark's skin is reiterated in Enchantress of Venus.
Illustrators, on the other hand, have universally drawn Stark as white, even sometimes blond. Brackett's use of a strong, independent, and attractive black-skinned character as hero for several of her stories was very unusual for the 1940s and 50s. The artists' choice, however, to ignore her verbal description and substitute for it a generic white blond pulp hero even as late as 1982, reflects the much stronger and more common prejudice against such characters. The effect of these misleading illustrations has been such that Stark is never remembered or referred to by critics as a black-skinned character, though he is clearly described as such in the stories.
Read more about this topic: Eric John Stark
Famous quotes containing the word appearance:
“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”
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