Planet Stories #30: Battle in the Dawn: The Complete Hok the Mighty, by
Manly Wade Wellman (Paizo Publishing, March 2011). Cover by Kieran Yanner

Wellman created his character Hok the Mighty in 1939 and wrote several follow up stories with the character. In 2011, Planet Stories released a “complete” Hok the Mighty collection called Battle in the Dawn, with a cover by Kieran Yanner. The character as Yanner imagined it is shown here and makes me think of Brak the Barbarian.

Despite that image, the stories are not sword & sorcery but what I call “Caveman” fiction. Hok is a Cro-Magnon, an early Homo sapiens. He is wandering north in search of new hunting grounds and comes into contact with the Neanderthals (beast-men) living there. The result is a war between true humans and the sub humans, and Hok leads the way.

[Click the images for mighty versions.]

Although Wellman had clearly read some of the scientific thoughts of the time on the human entry into Europe, he gets almost all the science wrong as we know it today. Hok would not have had blond hair, white skin and blue eyes, for example. Those mutations arose later.

His descriptions of the Neanderthals are also pretty far off from what we think today. But, as long as you don’t care about the scientific actuality, the stories themselves are fun. They are highly pulpish with exciting action and brief but effective descriptions. Hok goes on to have adventures that have him essentially inventing the sword and the bow. He visits “Atlantis,” or what was supposedly the real root of the legend.

The Hok stories all appeared in pulp magazines in the 30s and 40s. Tales in the collection are:

“Battle in the Dawn” (Amazing Stories, January 1939)
“Hok Goes to Atlantis” (Amazing Stories, December 1939)
“Hok Draws the Bow” (Amazing Stories, May 1940)
“Hok and the Gift of Heaven” (Amazing Stories, March 1941)
“Hok Visits the Land of Legends” (Fantastic Adventures, April 1942), and
“The Love of Oloana” (An unpublished piece about Hok’s wife)

Fantastic Adventures April 1942, containing “Hok Visits the Land
of Legends,” and Thrilling Wonder Stories, January 1940, with
“The Day of the Conquerors.” Covers by Malcolm Smith and Howard V. Brown

There’s a final story called “The Day of the Conquerors,” (from Thrilling Wonder Stories, January 1940) which features a character much like Hok and introduces us to a Martian invasion that is defeated by the human savages. There’s also an untitled fragment featuring Hok, which originally appeared in the Karl Edward Wagner anthology Echoes of Valor II (1989).

Wellman espouses the fairly common idea that modern legends and myths have their roots in ancient realities. The concept allows for some fun stories.

These stories are actually the best thing I’ve read by Wellman. I’m not a huge fan of his work, mainly because his prose is very workman-like and doesn’t really have much poetry to it — unlike writers such as Robert E. Howard. However, the action here and the quickly sketched character interactions and relationships were satisfying.

Fletcher Vredenburgh contributed a long piece on Hok the Mighty here at Black Gate back in 2013.

The Solar Invasion, by Manly Wade Wellman (Popular Library, October 1968). Cover by Frank Frazetta

I still have another book to read by Wellman, and it has an amazing cover by Frank Frazetta. This is The Solar Invasion. My copy is 1968, from Popular Library. It’s a novel of “Captain Future,” a character created by two editors, Mort Weisinger and Leo Margulies. There was an entire pulp mag devoted to Captain Future and almost all the stories were written by Edmond Hamilton.

In fact, Hamilton’s name is almost synonymous with the creation of Captain Future. Wellman did manage to get in this one novel. Wellman wrote many other stories but most of that work is unfamiliar to me and not specifically SF/Fantasy related so this is likely to be my last post about him.

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Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was The Sword and Planet of Manly Wade Wellman.