Number 1331: The Devil’s Ibistick

If you’re into demons and dieties, you’ve got a treat with the lead story from Fawcett’s Ibis the Invincible #5 (1946). You’ve got Azaroth and Beelzebub doing Lucifer’s business, and you’ve got a real off-the-mark version of ancient Egyptian god Thoth.

Thoth and Not-Thoth.

How hard could it have been for someone to crack a book on Egypt and see that Thoth had a bird’s head (an ibis), and what they are representing as Thoth looks more like the Hindu god, Shiva? It doesn’t seem that hard. But then, as I’ve mentioned before, any gods represented by cultures other than American were just sort of lumped into one big pile of “other” gods. If the artist or editor or writer or whomever thought a multi-armed god looked better than a bird-headed god, then they might have thought who was going to notice, eh? (They didn’t reckon on a cranky comic book blogger bringing up the subject 67 years in the future.)

Oh well, I like the cartoony demons. Art is credited to Charlie Tomsey with a question mark by Grand Comics Database, which means they aren’t sure. Script credit goes to Bill Woolfolk.

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The origin of Ibis. Click on the picture: