Captain Billy's Whiz Bang gave a pastor's Egypt trip the pulp treatment in 1922
by Ellsworth Toohey · Boing BoingCaptain Billy's Whiz Bang was a humor magazine launched in 1919 by Wilford Hamilton "Captain Billy" Fawcett, a WWI veteran from Minnesota. Named for the artillery shells he'd heard in France, it ran until 1936 and was one of the most popular adult-humor publications of its era: suggestive cartoons, off-color jokes, and material that strained the limits of respectability. Its success bankrolled the Fawcett Publications empire that eventually produced Captain Marvel comics.
The January 1922 issue included "The Flesh Pots of Egypt," a travel dispatch by Rev. "Golightly" Morrill, pastor of People's Church in Minneapolis. The reverend toured Alexandria and Cairo and filed a piece that reads as if he came to condemn vice and found it extremely compelling. Alexandria's street life produces "Fleshy Fatimas, overpainted and underclothed [who] prowl about the street seeking whom they may devour." Cairo's female entertainers demonstrate "a laxity of muscles and morals, and dance in a way that makes it unnecessary to attend a gymnasium."
The Orientalist contempt runs on every page. Women in Cairo's entertainment district are described as "caged like wild beasts behind iron-barred gratings which are necessary to keep them from murderous assault on the morals, money and lives of the passersby." The Whirling Dervishes produce music that "outranks the obligato serenade of a love-sick tom-cat."
Morrill's farewell to the country is one long sneer: "Good-bye, Egypt! Land of faro-banks and Pharaoh mummies — of backsheesh, bad smells, sphinx and blase globe-trotters! Desert domain of donkeys, dirt and dervishes — of tombs, temples, turbaned thieves and veiled vampires!"
The magazine capped the piece with a non-sequitor kicker, after the closing asterisks: "Even cultivated girls sometimes grow wild."
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