Wielding a huge mounted machine gun as if it were a tommy gun, a grimacing Tarzan blasts away while a lion at his side leaps in to finish off the survivors.
Wars bring out the bloodthirsty side of popular culture, and the handsome cover painting for Tarzan of the Apes 163 (Jan. 1967) illustrated the point.
The long-running Tarzan comic book feature — first published by Dell, later by Gold Key — sort of split the difference between Edgar Rice Burroughs’ educated and eloquent Lord Greystoke and the caveman Tarzan popularized by Johnny Weissmuller’s dozen Tarzan movies in the 1930s and 1940s.
Like ERB’s character, the comic book Tarzan drawn by Jesse Marsh was well-spoken. But like Weismuller’s Ape Man, he spent his time in jungles and loincloths.
Cartoonist Sergio Aragonés recalled, “The first Tarzan comic I saw was drawn by Jesse Marsh, and I fell in love with his interpretation of the character, but the Brothers of the Spear backups were drawn with such crisp, beautiful lines, such great composition and clarity.”
In 1965, Brothers of the Spear artist Russ Manning took over the Tarzan feature, and Gold Key immediately launched into remarkably faithful adaptations of Burroughs’ novels, from Tarzan of the Apes (1912) through Tarzan and the Lion Man (1934). Comic book readers were getting the “real” Tarzan at last — brooding and intelligent, infrahuman yet educated.
Two of those novels (which had originally been one story) covered Tarzan’s activities during World War I. The war’s outbreak prompts Lord Greystoke to race home from Nairobi in order to protect his wife Jane, but he finds his plantation burned.
Though received with hospitality, German troops had turned on their hostess and murdered everyone there — including, presumably, Jane.
“Tarzan tenderly buries the remains in Jane’s rose garden and, swearing vengeance, sets out to aid the British in East Africa against their foe,” noted Richard A, Lupoff in his excellent book Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. “He ravages behind the German lines, stealing silently past sentries, literally feeding Germans to the lions.”
Lupoff noted that 1920’s Tarzan the Untamed and its 1921 sequel Tarzan the Terrible “…attained heights of adventure, realism of motivation and atmosphere, and fantastic bounds of the creative imagination not seen in the earlier books of the series (nor, sad to say, in the later ones).”
At the end of Tarzan the Untamed, Lord Greystoke discovers that Jane is alive, having been kidnapped by German raiders. The burned corpse he’d found wearing her wedding ring was that of a servant, left there as a cruel joke by the Germans. In Tarzan the Terrible, the Ape Man traces the escaped Jane to the prehistoric land of Pal-ul-don.
The story was loosely adapted as the 1943 Tarzan film Tarzan Triumphs. When Nazi troops make the mistake of kidnapping Boy, the Ape Man abandons his isolationist principles and shouts, “Now Tarzan make war!” (prompting cheers from the audience, one imagines).
So more Germans got fed to more lions.
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