Thomas Kent Miller
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Thomas Kent Miller

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The two right-hand photos are the flesh and blood me, taken about 40 years apart. They represent two distinctly different views of my personality. However, the black-and-white special profile image on the left is a detail from a larger drawing (seen to the right at the end of my blog with the elephant) by Hookway Cowles done for the 1958 impression of Macdonald & Co.’s The Ivory Child, an adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard first published in 1916. This image shows the head and face of Hans, Allan Quatermain’s aide de camp and companion in six of the 14 novels that form the Allan Quatermain saga. Haggard had introduced Hans in 1912 in the novel Marie. The reason I am sharing the picture is because Hans is my favorite character in the Quatermain novels. He is a vital character insofar as he is continually by Quatermain’s side through those six novels; he is clearly intelligent, wise, perceptive, devoted, brave, honorable, and is a font of understated humor. Throughout the books Quatermain and Hans take turns saving one another's lives. Quatermain refers to his aide’s ethnicity as being a Hottentot, a group known today as Khoi. In other words Hans was a short, wrinkled African native, and that is probably the reason that from 1912 to the present, illustrators have completely and utterly ignored Hans while some of Haggard’s other native characters were much discussed and well-represented when their respective books were in the spotlight. The only exception to this boycotting (perhaps consciously, perhaps not) of Hans was the Cowles drawing, which may well be the only published illustration of Hans in existence, despite his being featured in six novels over 14 years. Doubtlessly this was due to the racially-sensitive tenor of the times. Two matters now need broaching: (1) Some informed H. Rider Haggard enthusiasts say that they have seen other early drawings of Hans. Upon investigation I found drawings of ethnic individuals that the artists captioned as Hans; but these images are no more Hans (of the Haggard/Quatermain tales) than images of Santa Claus. (2) Thankfully, despite my categorical statement that Cowles' 1958 drawing of Hans is the only such image in existence, that was true until just five years ago, when in 2016 awesome illustrator and artist Clayton Hinkle illustrated my Airship 27 Productions Quatermain novella titled "The Rose of Fire" incorporating several wonderful images of Hans; his renderings of Hans in my subsequent 2019 novella titled "The Star of Wonder" are just as wonderful. In truth, seeing and experiencing Clayton"s lifelike images of Hans feels like watching Quatermain's lifelong companion return to life.

Because Hans only appeared the one time, which I find heartbreaking, until Clayton Hinkle's very recent delightful exceptional renderings, in Hans's honor, I’m making that one Cowles image of him be my avatar on Amazon and other Internet sites.
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