Survival!

Book: Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle

Issue No.: 18

Published: August 29, 1978

Titles: “Survival!”

Cover Price: 35¢

Format: Original paper copy

When a bunch of Marvel’s superheroes teamed up on the big screen in the 2012 Avengers movie, it was a huge deal. Sure, we’d seen good comic book movies before. But superheroes getting together to fight a common foe (or maybe just fight amongst themselves) is a time-honored comic book tradition (going all the way back to 1940) that hadn’t made the transition to superhero movies till The Avengers.

Not that there weren’t movie character crossovers. Those go back to at least 1943, when Universal’s Frankenstein and Wolf Man appeared together in the aptly titled Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. And Batman’s sidekicks and super-villains appeared in multiple movies in the 20th century. But The Avengers was the first movie that featured multiple superheroes (Thor! Hulk! Captain America! Iron Man!) that had previously been the leads in their own movies.

In 1929, a decade before the original Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner teamed up in the pages of Marvel Mystery Comics, writer Edgar Rice Burroughs created a groundbreaking crossover of his own, sending his iconic jungle hero Tarzan to Pellucidar, the lost world setting of his 1914 novel At the Earth’s Core. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that book was titled Tarzan at the Earth’s Core.

Marvel was publishing two characters licensed from Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1978, Tarzan and human-on-Mars John Carter. Of the two, I’ve much preferred the Carter comic books. A lot of the Marvel Tarzan books I’ve read feature way too much casual racism and animals-in-peril for my taste. I was hopeful that moving Tarzan to the more fantastical lost world of Pellucidar would make for stories more to my liking. And so far that’s proving to be the case.

This installment finds Tarzan teaming up with some local sea pirates while hunting down some bad guys from the surface world. Also Tarzan has to fight a giant aquatic dinosaur at one point. Plus there’s a princess from the surface world having some adventures of her own in Pellucidar. I assume that she and Tarzan will eventually team up.

Adding to the fun, this issue looks good, with pencils by the great John Buscema, inks by the great Klaus Janson, and letters by the great John Costanza. Buscema was also doing a lot of Conan work for Marvel at this time. And, if I have a gripe with this storyline, it is that putting Tarzan in a fantastical setting like Pellucidar makes these stories more similar to Marvel’s Conan stories. But, again, given my distaste for the “real world” Marvel Tarzan books I’ve read, that is a minor gripe.

Next time — Hellcat, Nighthawk, and maybe a few more Defenders!