By 1962, innumerable reflections of Tarzan and Superman had been cast in the funhouse mirror of popular culture. So why not just combine the two concepts?
That’s just what writer Dave Wood and artist Dick Dillin did in The Super Jungle Man, a nine-page cover story in Blackhawk 173 (June 1962).
Several iterations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape man preceded even the creation of comic books. Pulp magazine readers had their choice of Bomba, Bantan, Jan, Jongor, Tam, Tharn, Kaspa, Ki-Gor, Kioga and Ka-Zar (who’d be reinvented as Marvel’s in-house Tarzan).
And versions of Tarzan were always popping up in comic books, once Superman got the industry off the ground in 1938. Batman and Robin, for example, not only fought Tarzan knockoffs, they — along with such unlikely others as Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane — temporarily became ersatz Tarzans themselves.
“After Tarzan showed up and hit it big in books, comics and movies, there was a wave of Tarzan clones,” noted the ERBzine blog. “They were raised by wolves, by apes, by ape-men, strange beasts of varying sorts, crazy old jungle coots, lost tribes, you name it. Probably the most ridiculous serious one was the Black Condor, a 1940s comic superhero who was raised by, you guessed it, condors, and went on to fly and fight crime in one of the most homoerotic superhero costumes ever created.”
Blackhawk’s super-strong, super-fast Jungle Man — seen outracing a gazelle and beating out a fire with a tree trunk — is Kim Craig, the lost son of a big game hunter. A verbally limited defender of animals, he gained superhuman powers after finding “a great cave with a glowing rock.” When criminals use the same rock to empower themselves, the Blackhawk team overcomes them with subterfuge.
This fun, silly story wouldn’t mark the low point for Tarzan iterations in superhero comics. That would come five years later, in a Showcase feature called B’wana Beast.
But that, as they say, is another story.
Johnny Williams wrote: Covers like this hooked in so many children like myself. It's intriguing and you feel almost compelled to find out what it was about.
ReplyDeleteJohn Leslie Sinclair wrote: I have a vivid memory of seeing this issue in the rack on the food van that used to come around our estate back in the day...
ReplyDeleteGene Popa wrote: Also in the early 1960s, it was erroneously believed by many that the character of Tarzan had fallen into the public domain. Several smaller book publishers commissioned new Tarzan novels, and Charlton Comics actually launched their own Tarzan series in competition with the official series at Gold Key (and may fans then and now consider Charlton's comic to be better written and drawn, and more faithful to ERB's original stories, then Gold Key's). However, Tarzan was not in the PD, and the ERB estate's lawyers put an immediate halt to all of the unauthorized literary versions.
ReplyDeletePaul Zuckerman wrote: After the war ended, Quality had the Blackhawks fighting tyrants around the world- - while there were any number of former Nazis, a lot of them were stand-ins for the Communists. There were a heck of a lot of countries being overrun in those books, since almost every issue had three stories where the team was protecting democracy in different countries!
ReplyDeleteDC rapidly got rid of that aspect. Had the team fight ordinary criminals. But, like most other books at this time under Jack Schiff and his associate editors, there were monsters, aliens, weird SF stuff.
For a while, around 1964, the team got a new look under Murray Boltinoff. While I didn't care as much for the red and green uniforms, the old blue/black ones were retained for WW II stories that became a regular feature in the book for a while. I enjoyed the book then. For a while, Lady Blackhawk also became a villain working with Killer Shark. There was a lot of development at that time, but then they axed all the improvements with the super hero era.
I agree with James about those last two issues of the original run-Boyette's art was a bit sketchy but it somehow worked, and the team got back its original uniforms as well as origin--which had been altered in the 1964 reboot.
The Evanier/Spiegle run remains the high point for me. I didn't care for the 70s revival and hated, detested and abhorred the Chaykin reboot.
The one thing about the Quality version that remains disturbing is the treatment of Chop Chop. Even after the Comics Code came in and he was no longer drawn as a caricature, he still spoke embarrassingly, and not just the way the other foreign members of the team did. Only at DC did Chop Chop finally become a full fledged member of the team though it took a while to fully get there!
James Chatterton wrote: Very well written, Paul Zuckerman. I loved the 70s disco Blackhawk revival. I felt it captured the high adventure spirit of the Blackhawks from the 40s, and updated the series well. But I don't think I've ever found anyone who agreed with me on that. I've always been uneasy about the Chaykin run. It was visionary in some aspects, but it just deconstructed the myth behind the Blackhawks too much for me. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It's taken me a long time to warm up to Spiegle's art on Blackhawk, but that really is the best sustained Blackhawk series since Crandall's run in WWII.
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