Tarzan the Untamed

Rating:
Summary: Another Great Adaptation from Russ Manning
Review: I always loved Russ Manning's artwork when I was a comic collector. It's a shame that he died so young and before he really received the credit for his great artwork that he so deserved. And the problem was, in the sixties and seventies it was often hard to find. "Magnus," his futuristic series was published quarterly and so I could only look forward it four times a year. His Tarzan work was more plentiful, but even so, Gold Key Comics apparently did not have the greatest distribution in the world so I often would miss an issue. Thankfully, Dark Horse is collecting some of Manning's work on Tarzan in this volume and others like it.

This volume collects Russ Manning's adaptations of "Tarzan the Untamed" and "Tarzan the Terrible." Both are notable for taking place during World War I and the fact that Tarzan battles Germans. "Tarzan the Terrible" would become one in a long line of a recurring theme for Burroughs-- Tarzan discovering a lost land. Hey, it worked over-and-over again throughout the run of Tarzan. As usual, the art is beautifully rendered.

Rating:
Summary: Russ Manning's stellar adaptation of two ERB Tarzan novels
Review: Russ Manning (1929-1981) is best remembered for being the artist for the syndicated daily and Sunday "Tarzan" comic strips in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as well as being the creator of " Magnus, Robot Fighter" for Gold Key comic in 1963. While his artwork on Tarzan was not as great as that of Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth, his storytelling skills were slightly stronger than those legendary artists. More importantly, when Manning was picked by ERB, Inc. to do the daily and Sunday "Tarzan" strips for the United Feature Syndicate, he brought the character back to the vision of the character Edgar Rice Burroughs had developed in his novels, especially the early ones.

"Tarzan the Untamed," which Manning wrote and illustrated, with the assistance of artist Bill Stout actually combines two of ERB's novels, "Tarzan the Untamed" and "Tarzan the Terrible." The stories take place during World War I, when German troops were invading English colonies in Africa in 1914. Burroughs had come to believe that La, the High Priestess of Opar, was a better mate for Tarzan than Jane Clayton, and so he had Tarzan return to his jungle estate in British East Africa to find the burnt corpse of his wife. The only way he can recognize her is by the ring on her finger. Cursing the Germans, Tarzan swears vengeance and leaves behind the trappings of civilization, heading off to kill Hauptmann Fritz Schneider and every German soldier he can find..

This is an unusual Tarzan story, because usually the plot of one of ERB's pulp-fiction yarns is that the hero is trying to rescue his beloved from a land of strange people and creatures. But "Tarzan the Untamed" is a revenge story as the King of the Jungle displays the same sort of animal cunning and creative cruelty that he displayed as a youth in "Tarzan of the Apes" (I especially like the scene in the trenches). It is not until the end of the first half of the story that Tarzan discovers Jane is alive and the prisoner of the Germans. At that point we get to Manning's adaptation of "Tarzan the Terrible," where rescuing his wife finally becomes more important than getting revenge. Of course, Tarzan manages to do both, as well as dealing with a lost civilization of lion men and another one of those hidden lands where dinosaurs still roam the earth. Manning does have to sanitize the original stories a bit, which contained some of the most graphic scenes in all of ERB's work, but we still get the sense that this is not the same Tarzan who played with Cheetah in all of those Johnny Weismueller movies. On balance, "Tarzan the Untamed" is an excellent adaptation of those two Burroughs novels, much better in that regard than anything we have seen in any Tarzan film.

"Tarzan the Untamed," which features cover art by Mark Schultz, is one of four volumes of reprints of Manning's great work on the Tarzan comic strip that Dark Horse has published as graphic stories, the others being "Tarzan of the Apes," "Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar," and the 1999 Eisner Award-winning "Tarzan in the Land That Time Forgot." Manning's artwork has been completely re-colored using the impressive digital techniques that we have seen in other Dark Horse reprints. Still to be reprinted in the United States are "Tarzan in Savage Pellucidar" and "Tarzan and the Beastmaster," but I have to think those will be forthcoming at some point in the relatively near future.