I'm thinking that many of you readers have some misconceptions about the Amazons. I know I did, until I read the adventures of...
Flip Falcon In The Fourth Dimension!!
See, Flip is this doofus who invented a time/dimension/whatever machine, and went off to have psychedelic adventures every month. And thanks to Flip Falcon, I'd learned where I was so wrong about the Amazons.
First, I had always believed that the Amazons were from the Classical period, what with their interacting with Greek gods and heroes and such.
Wrong.
16th Century? Boy, was I wrong. Silly me.
Anyway, Flip finds an obscure passage in a book referring to these Amazons, and he decides to take a little time trip to take a look-see.
Which brings me to my second misconception. See, I had always thought the Amazons came from Paradise Island, a.k.a. Themiscyra, and that it was somewhere in the Mediterranean/Black Sea region, where the classical Greeks might come across it...or at least the Atlantic, right?
Wrong again.
D'oh!! The Amazons come from...the Amazon!! How obvious in hindsight!! I suppose now we know the true owners of Amazon.com...
My next misconception? I had thought Amazons to be a fierce warrior race. Nope...they need a WASP male from the future to save their bacon!
Hmm, I guess Flip isn't concerned with preserving the timeline here...Fortunately, these particular conquistadors neglected to bring their firearms, so Flip quite easily whoops them.
Fun Fact: there was an obvious coloring error in the story, because while the Spaniards clearly were fully clothed earlier, the last two pages of the story had them running around like this:
Uhhh....ewww.
Anyway, using his futuristic white male wisdom, Flip Falcon doles out important advice to the Amazons:
Ah, Flip...since you were in the area, couldn't you have warned any of the other nearby peoples? Or do you only rescue races of hot women??
Since men know best, these meek and mild Amazons run away from from potential conquerors...
And there they surely remain, huddled together in the deepest depths of the rain forest, awaiting the return of Flip Falcon to tell them that it's safe to come out. And waiting...and waiting...packing up low-cost books and DVD for shipments to consumers worldwide...
So thank you, Flip Falcon, for setting me right on so much about the Amazons!!
Flip Falcon educates us in Fantastic Comics #9 (1940). Interesting note--for his first few adventures, he was known as Flick Falcon...
Flip Falcon In The Fourth Dimension!!See, Flip is this doofus who invented a time/dimension/whatever machine, and went off to have psychedelic adventures every month. And thanks to Flip Falcon, I'd learned where I was so wrong about the Amazons.
First, I had always believed that the Amazons were from the Classical period, what with their interacting with Greek gods and heroes and such.
Wrong.
16th Century? Boy, was I wrong. Silly me.Anyway, Flip finds an obscure passage in a book referring to these Amazons, and he decides to take a little time trip to take a look-see.
Which brings me to my second misconception. See, I had always thought the Amazons came from Paradise Island, a.k.a. Themiscyra, and that it was somewhere in the Mediterranean/Black Sea region, where the classical Greeks might come across it...or at least the Atlantic, right?Wrong again.
D'oh!! The Amazons come from...the Amazon!! How obvious in hindsight!! I suppose now we know the true owners of Amazon.com...My next misconception? I had thought Amazons to be a fierce warrior race. Nope...they need a WASP male from the future to save their bacon!
Hmm, I guess Flip isn't concerned with preserving the timeline here...Fortunately, these particular conquistadors neglected to bring their firearms, so Flip quite easily whoops them.Fun Fact: there was an obvious coloring error in the story, because while the Spaniards clearly were fully clothed earlier, the last two pages of the story had them running around like this:
Uhhh....ewww.Anyway, using his futuristic white male wisdom, Flip Falcon doles out important advice to the Amazons:
Ah, Flip...since you were in the area, couldn't you have warned any of the other nearby peoples? Or do you only rescue races of hot women??Since men know best, these meek and mild Amazons run away from from potential conquerors...
And there they surely remain, huddled together in the deepest depths of the rain forest, awaiting the return of Flip Falcon to tell them that it's safe to come out. And waiting...and waiting...packing up low-cost books and DVD for shipments to consumers worldwide...So thank you, Flip Falcon, for setting me right on so much about the Amazons!!
Flip Falcon educates us in Fantastic Comics #9 (1940). Interesting note--for his first few adventures, he was known as Flick Falcon...
Actually you could argue that Flip Falcon was more factual than Wonder Woman with its bowdlerized re-writing of Greek myths (asexually reproducing women riding giant kangaroos). The popular etymology of the name Amazon river is that it was named after female warriors encountered by a group of Spanish conquistadors led by Francisco de Orellana in the mid-16th century (this version first written down ca. 60 years later, in 1609). IIRC they later couldn't localize these Amazons, so you could say they "disappeared".
ReplyDelete(Spanish colonialists also encountered "amazons" in Dahomey (now Benin) in Africa and searched for an island of "Amazons" in North America. And they named California after a fictional island of black-skinned Amazons ruled by a Queen Calafia from the romance Las Sergas del muy esforzado Caballero Esplendián.)
Amazons are from all kinds of periods, AFAIK the Greeks already had myths about them before the Classic period. It should also be noted that even for the Greeks "Amazons" was a name that applied to two distinct peoples, one being the more familiar Eastern one based in Asia Minor, southern Russia, the Ukraine etc., the other supposedly living in Libya near the mythical Lake Triton. These African Amazons were credited, among other things, with conquering Atlantis, which led the 18th century French scholar Claude Guyon (who wrote a big book on the history of the Amazons, whom he believed to be real) to speculate that they used Atlantis as a stepping-stone on their way to South America.
But there were also stories of Amazon societies from other cultures, for instance the Czechs tell stories of the "Maidens' War" that ended the rule of the Bohemian Amazons. In the middle ages they also believed in a "Maidens' Land" variously located North of central Asia or in Finland. Adam of Bremen (11th century) describes them it as an Amazon society on the Baltic Sea beyond Sweden and speculates that they procreated by having sex with male prisoners of war or "the monsters that not uncommonly live there", giving birth either to beautiful women or cynocephalic males (i.e. humans with dog's heads on their chests).
BTW, the real Themiscyra was located in Pontos (on the eastern half of the Southern shore of the Black Sea in what is now Turkey). But it was not the only place where Amazons are supposed to have lived - there were at least 14 towns in Asia Minor and Greece that claimed to have been founded by or named after Amazon queens, most famously Ephesus with its Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
They just kinda had a thing about clean-shaven male legs back in the Golden Age, didn't they?
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