Don't let the facts get in the way.

I was browsing through my copy of Our Gods Wear Spandex this morning, and found the following passage as part of the section where author Christopher Knowles lays out the influencing factors in the development of the superhero comic book:

Tarzan, whose name means "Skin-Boy" becomes the surrogate son of a gorilla named Kala, whose own baby had died.

Frowning, I made my way to my bookcase and pulled out my copy of Tarzan of the Apes (I own the edition with the Neal Adams cover - which seems appropriate, given that Neal Adams was a comic book artist as well) and flipped through until I found what I was looking for:

And then Tublat went to Kerchak to urge him to use his authority with Kala, and force her to give up little Tarzan, which was the name they had given to the tiny Lord Greystoke, and which meant "White-Skin."

In the next section of his book, Knowles discussed pulp magazines, citing the fact that Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories offered the first appearance of Buck Rogers, "and later, the first stories by sci-fi pioneer E.E. "Doc" Smith."  Ha - about ten pages later would be my guess, if not ten pages before.  Edward Elmer Smith's The Skylark of Space began its serialization in the same August 1928 edition of Amazing Stories that contained Philip Nowlan's Buck Rogers story.

At that point, I thought it was time for a little break from Mr. Knowles.

Those were just the errors I noticed on a casual basis - lord knows what I'd find if I sat down and methodically worked my way through the content.  It's disheartening to discover that someone writing a book isn't necessarily subject to the same demands for accuracy and research that I would have been faced with when doing an essay in high school.

- Sid