TARZAN, over the years, has been drawn by, more great illustrators than you can shake a No. 3 Winsor-Newton sable inking-brush at. Two of the greatest are here represented: CLINTON PETEE, who painted the cover of the first pulp serialization of the first novel, TARZAN OF THE APES, back in 1912.
This was pretty fierce action painting, back then. Petee was followed by others, most notably J. Allen St. John and Hal (PRINCE VALIANT) Foster.
BURNE HOGARTH, whose November 11, 1941 Sunday TARZAN strip is excerpted above, achieved the most recognition around the world, for his “old master” approach to action-adventure drawing; tense, dynamic, powerful. European art expert and comic art enthusiasts have had gallery exhibitions of Hogarth’s TARZAN strips. Now, in comic books, Joe Kubert takes a hand in drawing/writing/and adapting the TARZAN series, for DC. Joe Kubert is doing TARZAN as Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote him … as an English lord, who, finding himself in the jungle, naturally became “Lord of the Jungle.”
The return of the Native!
TARZAN’S WRITER/ARTIST JOE KUBERT TELLS ALL IN AN EXCLUSIVE MONSTER TIMES INTERVIEW
EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS, in his long lifetime, populated the imaginations of millions, with strange worlds at the center of the Earth’s core (PELLUCIDAR) exotic denizens of fabled Lost Cities of Gold (TARZAN, KORAK), strange alien monster races with four arms, others with dinosaur tails and multitudes of bulging bug eyes riding pterodactyl ptaxicabs (JOHN CARTER OF MARS, CARSON OF VENUS). The menagerie of strange beasts and creatures and monsters and mammoth, gigantic animals would sink an Ark.
Now the burgeoning Burroughs’ zoo comes marching into your merry little mind, out of the pages of the National Periodicals (DC) Comics group.
This month, and in the next couple of months, DC will be premiering a new line of ERB comix: TARZAN, KORAK, and TARZAN PRESENTS: EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS’ WEIRD WORLDS.of the various books the WEIRD WORLDS book is the third, incorporating features originally to be in the first two (and the arrangement is pretty complicated and so won’t be gone into here). We will be seeing therein all these various features:
TARZAN: written, edited & drawn by Joe Kubert.
JOHN CARTER OF MARS: Written by Marvin Wolfman, drawn by Murphy Anderson.
KORAK – SON OF TARZAN: Written by Len Wein, drawn by Frank Thorne.
PELLUCIDAR – Written by Len Wein, drawn by Allan Weiss.
CARSON OF VENUS: Written by Len Wein, drawn by Mike Kaluta.
Astute MT readers may note that Messrs. Kaluta, Wein and Wolfman, are also contributors to THE MONSTER TIMES. THE MONSTER TIMES alumnus makes its mark!
The new National Burroughs books are the news event of comix this year. DC has acquired permission to adapt anything ERB ever wrote. Gold Key Comics used to handle TARZAN and KORAK, but the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate took them away from Gold Key and handed the rights over to DC, solely, it is rumored, on the strength of the work of one DC artist, Joe Kubert. We managed to interview this man in comix news, this week, and his comments about the direction the amiable Apeman, as well as comments from DC freelance editor, Marvin Wolfman, should prove interesting to THE MONSTER TIMES’ readers.
Joe Kubert is a burly, bearded athletic middle-aged man, who looks more like he’d be participating in Burroughs’ high adventures than drawing them.
Introductions were exchanged, and then…
The Interview
MT: What is the basic direction you intend to keep with the TARZAN book? Will you go to the more fantastic realms of lost cities, or will you keep it more to Jungle adventure?
KUBERT: The life-blood of any cartoon character is change, fantastic change and pacing so that the reader doesn’t know what to expect next. When you ask me where he’s going to go, what he’s going to do; “I don’t know” other than that TARZAN will be as he himself was in TARZAN OF THE APES, Burroughs’ original conception. In fact, the first four issues will be pretty much taken verbatim from the original TARZAN OF THE APES, I’m just winding up that fourth book now, Where we’ll go next, I’m really not sure. It could be fantastic adventures, like TARZAN & THE LEOPARDMEN. Or perhaps a completely original story; I don’t know. We’ve a lot of material to choose from.
MT: To clarify for those who only know of TARZAN through the Weismuller & other movies, how do you see the original TARZAN?
KUBERT: Not as the grunting kind of a guy that Weissmuller portrayed him. Although, Weissmuller came closer to looking like TARZAN than any other actor. Physically. But mentally, The Ape Man, as far as Burroughs’ description is concerned, has learned to read English before he can speak it, he’s learned to speak French, then speak English. He’s a rather well-spoken, well-read kind of a character, not the grunty Weissmuller one of “Me TARZAN, you Jane! HimBoy!”
MT: There are other attributes to his character that were skimped upon in the movies. A “moral tone” beyond the simple filmed attitudes. How closely can you keep to this in the comix format?
KUBERT: Well, I’m trying to adhere to this as closely as possible, although I feel a lot of the things that Burroughs did, in 1912, are outdated, as our mores and morals and ideas have changed rather drastically since. For instance, natives. The black men. In the original book they are shown as being forced to go into the interior of Africa because of the suppression and cruelty of the white soldiers who just at that time (1912) were beginning to invade the dark continent. However, in other parts of book he described blacks as overly-subservient or overly-cruel themselves, or even bestial, which I feel are completely out of context with things as we know and feel them today. So the moral character of Tarzan will stay rather closely to the original character that Burroughs gave him, only I’m trying to make it as “contemporary” as possible. By that I don’t mean that he’s a “Now” character, or a hip kind of a guy, he’s still a rather naive kind of a guy who will kill if he’s put on the spot but doesn’t kill for the sake of killing. There is one episode in which he learns how unfair, how greedy and cruel the outside world is, and he returns to his own African home, commenting how the white men outside are no better, and in many ways much worse than the beasts of the jungle. That the people outside kill because of greed and cruelty, where animals will rarely kill for any other reason than to protect their own domain or for food. His few short forays into civilization only bring him back to the place where he was born. A sort of touchstone.
MT: And so he prefers the jungle, where he is lord.
KUBERT: He is born into a nobility that is ingrained in him. Burroughs has set him up as the kind of a guy who would be a “lord” regardless of where he found himself. Simply because he was born of the royal lineage of English nobility. So to that extent he retains that kind of a character. He is “lord” of the jungle. He would be “lord” of the sewer, if he happened to find himself there. That’s what Burroughs built him up as, and that’s how I’m going to handle him.
MT: How is the relationship with Jane going to be handled? In the first book they weren’t married; living together in the jungle.
KUBERT: At this point, I’d rather have him a bachelor, his affair with Jane in the first book leads him to go to America to find her. They’d professed love to each other in the jungle before she’d left. The plot gets kind of convoluted. She leaves without him. He follows her. When they meet in America he learns she’s already been promised to somebody else, and he, being the noble savage that he is (jerk that he is), says that he realizes she’s already sworn to another, and for him to break this up would be a “most ignoble” thing to do. He then steps away from the relationship, rather than pulling her away from her betrothed, and just steps aside and goes back to his apes.
MT: That could be a pretty heartbreaking moment in comic books.
KUBERT: I cried for three days! (Laughter).
KUBERT: Seriously, I’m going to try to make it as dramatic as I possibly can. 1 think it works pretty good.
MT: One of the first things that strikes me about your art is that although mentally you have a strong conception of figures and settings you’re drawing, you keep it very, very loose and open.
KUBERT: I am very heavily influenced by the first TARZAN sequence, which was a combination of text and illustration by Hal Foster (who later created Prince Valiant), back in 1920, when the first TARZAN strip was sold. This was a basic, crude kind of an illustration that always lured me, enticed me into reading that strip. And I feel that it had the same effect on almost everybody. The crudity fit the character and setting so well – well, you call it looseness, I call it trying to get down to the very basic, simple illustrative qualities that will not slow down a story, so that someone who is not necessarily a comic book buff can enjoy the story, not obtruding, but enhancing.
MT: Still, there’s a powerful! draftsmanship involved, as say, the scenes of TARZAN wrestling a bull-ape, or staving off an attacking lion. Do you keep in mind the colorist as you do this?
KUBERT: Looking at these sketches in black & white is looking at only half the job. I definitely think of color. The colorist, Tatjana Wood, incidentally, has done a terrific job.
MT: From the way the ERB books seem to take well to comix, do you suppose Burroughs was a frustrated comic book writer?
KUBERT: Oh, no, I think that comic books were probably the furthest thing from his mind. I think that he was an adventure writer, and that basically comic books are that kind of a media. His pacing is a little slower in his books. You couldn’t get away with discussions, a series of balloons”talk-talk” in a comic book or strip.
MT: Yes, although his son, John Burroughs, did draw a comic strip version of JOHN CARTER OF MARS in the 1930’s. And there was a time in his college days that ERB drew editorial cartoons, and reputedly made sketches of all the monster characters which appeared in his books, perhaps to give a better idea of them to the illustrator of his novels, J. Allen St. John.
KUBERT: I didn’t know that.
WOLFMAN: The thing is though, that Burroughs didn’t mean this to be the greatest literature in the world. He was trying to do Pulp Writing. He was influenced by the pulps of the time. He had sold advertisements for some of the magazines, and then suddenly decided he could write better stories than were then in those magazines.
KUBERT: I think his greatest weight was the fact that he did a terrific action story with much imagination, which in turn, kind of “turned on” anybody who read it.. It kind of gives your imagination a shove into – oh about seven million different directions. His effectiveness is not so much what he has written, but what he has instilled in others to write beyond. And that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ worlds were a step-off point.
MT: For instance?
KUBERT: Ninety-nine and 9/10th’s percent of all science fiction writers are jumping off Burroughs’ wing. Pushed to delve into their own imaginations and machinations, impelled by Burroughs. Most science fiction writers will admit that they’re steeped in Burroughs’ writings.
WOLFMAN: Practically all the things that have been written lately he did in his early books. He had a race of women who were using artificial methods to create more children.
MT: Don’t mention that to Women’s Lib!
WOLFMAN: … That was in the PELLUCIDAR series. JOHN CARTER influenced those after him. Science fiction. Sword and Sorcery; Conan, in particular. Everything stemmed from that approach.
KUBERT: For instance, FLASH GORDON, which I think is one of the greatest comic strips of all time, must have been based on one of the half-dozen kinds of characters Burroughs created.
WOLFMAN: And the BUCK ROGERS strip, I think, is related very closely to BEYOND THE FURTHEST STAR … another ERB story which we may be soon adapting. He really set a pace for years to come.
MT: How would you sum up your efforts?
KUBERT: Just to wind this whole thing up; what Marvin and I are attempting to do, is to go back, get rid of all the extraneous crud that’s been done and that has kind of dissipated the main thrust of the character that I think that Edgar Rice Burroughs had in mind. We’ll go back to the original concept, and take The Ape Man in his raw vitality, and continue along the original thrust and line that Burroughs himself meant for the character. If we can do that, we’ll have accomplished what we set out to do.