60 african appropriations
ultimately dropped it. However, with the look-read boom of the 1960s,
Drum Publications introduced at least three new magazines built solely
around the photo-novel format.
In the beginning, Drum Publications experimented with a number of
characters more or less modeled after famous characters from Western
popular culture. There was the Son of Samson, an African superhero; Fear-
less Fang, a black Tarzan; The Stranger, a black Lone Ranger type of cow-
boy; and Lance Spearman, who turned out to be the most successful of the
Drum characters. A black Tarzan and the jungle scenery in which these
stories were set turned out to have been too close to the rural environment
left behind by the young urban migrant that was the publisher’s target au-
dience. Then again, a superhero like the Son of Samson and a cowboy like
The Stranger were just too far removed from everyday urban African life.
These characters were therefore dropped around 1969.^2 In the early 1970s,
Sadness and Joy was added, a magazine dedicated to photo novels with ro-
mantic content, which seems to have catered largely to a female audience.
In 1969, about twenty-five writers produced scripts for Drum Publica-
tions’ look-reads. Most of them were Africans, some of them students at
the University of Lesotho (Meisler 1969). They were paid the equivalent
of sixty-five U.S. dollars for each story. According to Stanley Meisler, the
scripts were edited in Johannesburg and then sent to Swaziland, where the
actual shooting took place, and the strips were ultimately rushed to Lon-
don for printing.^3 From there, the magazines were distributed throughout
the former Anglophone colonies of West Africa, East Africa, and South
Africa via the subsidiaries of Drum Publications. With a full-color cover,
usually featuring a dramatic scene of the story, and thirty-one pages of
black-and-white photographs, the technical quality of the look-reads was
comparable to that of contemporary A merican or British comic books—
their rivals on the African market. In East Africa and West Africa, they
sold for one shilling apiece. The inside front and back covers as well as the
backs of the magazines were used for advertisements (among other things,
Bic pens, Bennett Airmail College, and Johnson insecticide) and the
hawking of the company’s other publications (you must r ead drum /
people who think r ead drum).
To ensure the circulation of a South African product in independent
black African countries, most of which had begun to boycott the apartheid