Korak Son of Tarzan Vol. 1 & 2
Gaylord Dubois (scripts), Russ Manning (art)Dark Horse, 2013
The great biologist Ernst Haeckel's celebrated egghead quip, "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," might not cut any mustard in evolutionary circles anymore, but it's spot-on accurate for the 20th century pulp magazine world Haeckel didn't live long enough to see. The idea that new organisms during their development rapid-march through all the stages in their ancestral history proved a bit too facile to stand up to genetic scrutiny - living beings, it turns out, are often too complex to be a mere sum of their parts. But the pulps – and the comic books they spawned – were driven by Mammon, not God; they operated as much as possible on the principle of varying duplicates of what’s already worked in the past. Their ontogeny recapitulated their phylogeny all day long.From a commercial standpoint if not an evolutionary one, it only makes sense. When the pulp magazine market began to boom at the turn of the 20th century, a new, enlarged, and largely unpredictable readership suddenly had to be wooed, and the popularity of certain books or characters was no longer tied to the long cycle of book-and-review. Thanks to the pulps and other penny dreadfuls, characters that perhaps required little time or imagination to create could become cultural phenomena and make their parent publications (although not often their creators) very rich. Searching for such phenomena was as haphazard and mysterious as prospecting in a dark mine: you chipped away and chipped away, and neither you nor anybody else could predict when you’d strike a vein, and the smart thing to do once you did – the only thing to do, really, was just to keep digging right there and hope for more. If you were dealing in fictional characters and you happened to create a sensation, you (or your avid competitors) immediately set out recapitulating that sensation’s phylogeny, as it were, in the hopes of creating another sensation in short order.When it came to pulp sensations, few men in the early decades of the 20th century knew more about both the lonely prospecting and the lucky strike than Edgar Rice Burroughs. Under the pseudonym “Norman Bean,” he had captured the imagination with his tales of soaring high adventure on the parched planet Mars, and readers were clamoring for more. Moving the scene of his stories to Earth but keeping the same ebullient narrative style and the same genius sense of timing, Burroughs came up with a variation on the same basic premise of his “John Carter of Mars” stories; whereas in those earlier tales, Earthman John Carter, after being mysteriously transported to Mars, found himself the ultimate fish out of water, in this new story, the infant scion of a noble British house is marooned in Africa and grows to adulthood among a fierce tribe of ape-like beings Burroughs called the Mangani. This stranger in their midst is neither fully Mangani nor fully man – he is Tarzan of the Apes, of course, and his serialized adventures brought a fame and sensation to Burroughs that was ten times greater than anything he’d known before.That fame rested right from the beginning on artwork. The adventures of Tarzan – with their savage beasts, exotic jungle settings, and, not to be overlooked, the statuesque naked guy running and jumping and flexing throughout – leant themselves to illustration. The initial story’s first hardcover edition had an eye-catching wraparound cover by Fred Arting, and long before the renowned comic artist (and later impresario of Prince Valiant) Hal Foster began his celebrated newspaper comic strip of Tarzan in 1928, the character had accrued a vivid visual vocabulary of apes and lions and elephants and near-nudity.At the bittersweet and wonderfully-written conclusion to that first tale, Tarzan heroically renounces his claim to his family’s estates in a misguided attempt to insure the happiness of his great love, Jane Porter, by letting her marry another man. Fans went wild in exactly the way fans tend to, and in short order the first of many sequels appeared, eventually becoming the 1915 bestseller The Return of Tarzan (with a cover by N. C. Wyeth, no less). In the third novel, 1916’s The Beasts of Tarzan, a nefarious Russian named Nicholas Rokoff and his cringing lackey Paulvitch, kidnap Tarzan’s infant son Jack with the intention of selling him to cannibals in order to exact his revenge on Tarzan. The Ape Man foils the plan with the help of his loyal jungle creatures, but the real danger, as ERB saw clearly, was that Tarzan might go from triumphant to tiresome: he was a married man and a father, after all (not to mention a responsible aristocrat) – just how many harrowing adventures could he believably have in the far reaches of Africa?More recapitulation was clearly needed, and the answer was near to hand: young Jack Clatyon could grow up into an adventurous teen, every bit as heroic and nudity-prone as his father, but less compromised, more unpredictable. Thus was the 1917 novel The Son of Tarzan born.The book draws much of its initial momentum from The Beasts of Tarzan. The stranded lackey Paulvitch travels to London with the Mangani Akut who helped Tarzan in the earlier book. Akut is clearly looking for his old master, but Paulvitch schemes to put the ape on exhibit and clean up on box office receipts. Word reaches happy-go-lucky young Jack Clayton that a marvelous performing ape is in town, but his mother Jane, fearful of losing her boy to the jungle world where she’d so often lost her husband, absolutely forbids him to go and see the creature (in one of the book’s many remarkable moments, when Jack frankly confesses to his father that he intends to steal away and see the ape, his father equally frankly tells him he’ll physically punish him if he does – there’s no tension or anger in the scene, just honest statements of intention on both sides). When Jack and Akut meet, yet more phylogeny is recapitulated: the boy’s jungle heritage begins to stir in his veins, and when the wretched Paulvitch ends up dead, boy and ape take the first steamer for Africa, convinced there can be no life for them in England anymore.Burroughs wrote The Son of Tarzan quickly and got a hefty sum for it, and in its pages you can practically feel him breathing a bit more freely at being away from his famous hero for long stretches of narrative. Akut proves a nagging but effective teacher ("Numa, and Sabor his mate, feast upon those who descend first and look afterward,” he gripes at one point, “while those who look first and descend afterward live to feast themselves"), and he’s forever trying to convince young Jack to find some nearby tribe of Mangani who will accept them. The jungle is evidently teeming with humans; not only are there various native tribes, but there’s the evil Swedish poacher Sven Malbihn and the even more evil Sheik Amor ben Khatour, who has abducted Meriem, the sweet-tempered little daughter of French Foreign Legion captain Armand Jacot and is keeping her in his compound as a slave when a typically Burroughsian tangle of complications allows Jack – by now a strapping teenager who calls himself Korak the Killer – to rescue her. Prior to finding her, Korak had defied Akut several times and tried to make friendly contact with the various humans they encountered in the jungle, and he’d grown bitter at his failures:
"The lesser beasts flee from me in terror," he murmured, half to himself, "the greater beasts are ready to tear me to pieces at sight. Black men would kill me with their spears or arrows. And now white men, men of my own kind, have fired upon me and driven me away. Are all the creatures of the world my enemies? Has the son of Tarzan no friend other than Akut?"
But when he sees Meriem, he feels for the first time the odd combination of anger and arousal that ERB depicts so well. The three of them – boy, girl, and ape – move off into the jungle and enter into a strangely peaceful existence of hunting and sleeping and avoiding ferocious predators. Meriem is initially terrified, and Burroughs lays it on with his inimitable effervescence:
For many months the strange life of the three went on unmarked by any unusual occurrences. At least without any occurrences that seemed unusual to the youth or the ape; but to the little girl it was a constant nightmare of horrors, for days and weeks, until she too became accustomed to gazing into the eyeless sockets of death and to the feel of the icy wind of his shroudlike mantle.
But in many surprising ways, Burroughs is the least sexist of writers (fans of his Mars books mostly already knew this); in patient and believable detail, he paints a picture of gamesome little Meriem quickly adapting to the jungle and learning its ways. She’s soon as lean and limber as Korak himself, easily capable of racing through the treetops and finding her own game – and fighting, when it comes to that:
The girl saw it [Korak’s discarded spear] and snatched it up. No faintness overcame her in the face of this battle primeval at her feet. For her there was no hysterical reaction from the nerve strain of her own personal encounter with the bull. She was excited; but cool and entirely unafraid. Her Korak was battling with another Mangani that would have stolen her; but she did not seek the safety of an overhanging bough there to watch the battle from afar, as would a she Mangani. Instead she placed the point of Korak's spear against the bull ape's side and plunged the sharp point deep into the savage heart.
Fate intervenes when Meriem is separated from Korak and Akut and finds herself under the care of an enormous and enigmatic stranger she dubs Bwana, who lives on a sprawling jungle estate with his loving wife and seems to be systematically searching the countryside for something. Readers know instantly that Bwana is Tarzan, come to Africa in a hopeless quest to find his missing son, but Burroughs never says so, keeping the parallel identities moving along with a true showman’s skill; as Meriem meets a wealthy English suitor at Bwana’s ranch, a young man Burroughs insists on calling “the Honorable Morison Baynes” as though to underscore the character’s initial less-than-honorable motives toward Meriem. Baynes is a good foil, a conventional Englishman who’s astonished and a little bit repulsed one night when he sees Meriem out on the lawn chattering with a troop of baboons:
"You were really talking with them, then?" cried the Hon. Morison. "You understood them and they understood you?""Certainly.""But they are hideous creatures – degraded beasts of a lower order. How could you speak the language of beasts?""They are not hideous, and they are not degraded," replied Meriem. "Friends are never that. I lived among them for years before Bwana found me and brought me here. I scarce knew any other tongue than that of the mangani. Should I refuse to know them now simply because I happen, for the present, to live among humans?"
Baynes reports having glimpsed Korak (he laconically remarks that the lad is “remarkably muscled, and exceedingly tanned”), but he initially falls under the evil sway of the Swede Malbihn, until – in a classic Burroughs internal conversion – he finds his inner hero and ends up in a desperate riverside shootout with the bad guy while Korak is occupied elsewhere.Korak is mainly occupied with being tied up. He’s been captured by the Sheik and lashed to a pole in the compound, and he cannot get free. During his years wandering in the jungle, he befriended an enormous bull elephant who now comes to his rescue, killing the Sheik and carrying Korak – pole and all – into the jungle (it’s this bizarrely passive image that comprises the first cover of the book). But although the elephant gently lays him down on the ground, he can’t untie the knots that hold Korak, and even Korak’s great strength can’t break them; he faces the prospect of starving to death in the midst of plenty, with his elephant friend vigorously guarding him the whole time.That’s where Meriem – until now lost in the confusion – finds him, but when she goes to him intent on cutting him loose, Korak’s elephant friend, thinking her a threat, charges at her while Korak screams for him to stop. The girl seems doomed, but at the last second a stranger leaps into the elephant’s path and halts him with one imperious command. It’s Bwana! But in that instant he also stands revealed as the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan (ERB is often rightly drubbed as a word-jobbing hack, but it takes undeniable skill to pull off this climax; readers are thrilled at the revelation of Bwana’s identity, even though they’ve known it all along). Having found his wayward son at last, Tarzan frees him, and Korak, smiling, utters the patently false reassurance that phylogeny always pays to ontogeny:
Korak laid his hand affectionately upon his father's shoulder."There is but one Tarzan," he said. "There can never be another."
His sentiments notwithstanding, Korak was invented for the express purpose of being another Tarzan (indeed, several times in The Son of Tarzan ERB slips and reflexively refers to the lad as “the ape man”), and like virtually everything else Burroughs created, he was a hit with readers. He appears in future Tarzan novels (duly married to Meriem, of course), but it was in the Tarzan comic strip that his popularity really flourished – and any mention of early Tarzan comic strips must be a mention of the revered artist Russ Manning.Manning teamed up with veteran comics writer Gaylord Dubois to create a small stable of jungle-themed content for the comics imprint Gold Key, and in issue #139 of that imprint’s Tarzan comic, Tarzan and Jane’s son “Boy” was re-christened “Korak” and launched in his own series in January, 1964, with scripts by Dubois, art by Manning, and arresting painted covers by Morris Gollub. Manning, whose clean, dynamic pencils were already making him a fan favorite, stayed in the collaboration for eleven issues, finally leaving the book to become the main artist for the more lucrative Gold Key Tarzan series in 1965 (Dubois stayed on, churning out readable adventure after readable adventure with lesser artists). The three years Manning spent drawing Tarzan cemented his status as one of the best comic book artists of all time – which alone would lend an immediate phylogenic interest to his stint on Korak even if the issues themselves weren’t so enjoyable in their own right.Those eleven issues have now been dusted off, lightly remastered, and given two very nice hardcover reprint volumes by comics publisher Dark Horse so that a new generation of fans can come to love Manning’s artwork and an old generation of fans can fondly recall their days eagerly awaiting some new issue of Tarzan or Korak on the comics spinner-rack at Trow’s Paper Goods in sleepy small-town Iowa. The two volumes look good on the shelf together, and Dark Horse has made the refreshing decision to use a pulpy kind of paper stock instead of the more plastic-feeling overly-reflective pages found in most hardcover comics reprints.They commissioned original Introductions too, with mixed results. Fantastic comics artist Steve Rude introduces the first volume by using his allotted space to hike up his pants and complain about the kids with their comics these days. According to him, readers here won’t find
that suffocating darkness so overwhelming that you’ll feel like taking a cold shower after reading it. You can read these stories without reacting to the author’s pointed politics or questioning your gender. There’s very little moral confusion and no need for adult warnings on the cover. Most importantly, you’ll actually have an opportunity to suspend your disbelief and use your imagination.You see, the stories in this book were produced in a time when you were actually meant to feel good after finishing reading a comic book.
What you’ll find here, Rude says, is “simple, old-fashioned stuff.” Rude rose to fame as the co-creator of the popular comics character Nexus, who’s a costumed killer of mass murderers.The second volume’s Introduction is by artist Steve Bissette, who gives a lively and detailed account of the behind-the-scenes dealings at Gold Key that might be true or that might only be as true as, for instance, his summary of the plot of The Son of Tarzan:
Burroughs had a surviving foe of Tarzan kidnap Tarzan’s son Jack Clayton, spiriting him from London to Africa, where Jack escaped thanks to the arrival of the great ape Akut. There, Jack hunkered down with the same tribe of great apes that had raised his father, and became Korak the Killer. Korak rescued Meriem, the daughter of a French Foreign Legion captain, and took her as his mate.
Since only about ten percent of that is accurate, readers may want to suspend their disbelief a bit (perhaps until a definitive Manning biography gets written, or better yet, a definitive history of Gold Key).
The main attraction is the artwork in any case, and here we can watch all over again as Manning learns on the job, alternating his pages between simple, satisfying action moments (when handsome young Korak punches you, you’re well and truly punched) and much more elaborate set-pieces that clearly foreshadow the work he would do on his legendary
Tarzan run. His Korak starts off as a somewhat stiff miniaturized version of Tarzan, but as the issues progress, Manning works in a slimmer, more lissome grace to his half-naked jungle prince. Korak faces dinosaurs, mastodons, giant vultures, killer plants, and even, in one particularly memorable issue, aliens, and through it all he’s accompanied by a slightly altered version of Akut called Pahkut, who’s more oafish than his book-counterpart and mostly complains about how hungry he is.
The two go through the always-interesting adventures Dubois cooks up for them, and at least once in every issue, Manning uncorks some kind of low-key visual stunner of layout or composition, often throwing long shadows across his scenery, often muting the main action of a sequence (only Manning would put a rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex in the background of a panel) in order to heighten its drama. Despite Rude’s misty-eyed nostalgia, there’s quite a bit of violence in these pages, and Manning looks at it unblinkingly. It’s all easily nostalgic and instructive, a big, pretty look at how comic books used to be done on the non-superhero side of the ledger. Dark Horse has produced quite a few similarly attractive reprint volumes of old Dell/Gold Key properties like Turok, Son of Stone and Magnus, Robot Fighter, and they’re to be commended for all it.Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., whose management of ERB’s intellectual properties in the sixty years since his death has been disgracefully timid, scattershot, and acrimonious, currently has no line of Tarzan paperbacks in bookstores, although the steady encroachment of public domain will likely soon fix that problem. But in the case of a character as popular as the Son of Tarzan, it hardly matters: thousands of copies of old paperbacks, each with their signature cover, can be found all over the world, and now, thanks to Dark Horse, these wild comic book adventures are reproduced – recapitulated! – in the jungle sunlight one more time.____
Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for
The Washington Post,
The National,
The Wall Street Journal,
The Boston Globe,
Historical Novel Review Online, and
The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of
Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs,
Stevereads.
