C O M I C S G O N E The Missing Link To Primates In Comics by MICHAEL EURY The Avengers TM & © 2007 Marvel Characters, Inc. BARREL OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . 5 C H A P T E R 1 BORN TO BE WILD . 6 Girl-Grabbing Gorillas Cover Gallery . .15 Tarzan Through the Years Cover Gallery . 16 Q & Ape with Joe Kubert . 18 Q & Ape with Anne Timmons . 22 C H A P T E R 2 WALKING TALL . 24 Kong-a Line Cover Gallery . 36 Q & Ape with Arthur Adams . 38 Q & Ape with Frank Cho . 44 C H A P T E R 3 MONKEY BUSINESS . 48 Mo’ Monkeys Cover Gallery . 62 Q & Ape with Carmine Infantino . 64 Q & Ape with Tony Millionaire . 68 C H A P T E R 4 GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST . 72 Super-Heroes Battle Super-Gorillas Cover Gallery . 92 Q & Ape with Bob Oksner . 94 Q & Ape with Tim Eldred . 98 C H A P T E R 5 MAKE A MONKEY OUT OF ME . 102 Going Ape Cover Gallery . 118 Q & Ape with Nick Cardy . 120 Q & Ape with Jeff Parker . 124 C H A P T E R 6 WHERE MAN ONCE STOOD SUPREME . 126 Planet of the Apes Cover Gallery . 134 Q & Ape with Doug Moench . 136 Safari-goers and beastmasters never know when they’ll meet a monkey with a mad-on! Watch your step as you bungle into the jungle, where the apes are... BORN TO BE WILD! ave you ever seen a jungle movie that didn’t depict the snorted commands of their middle-aged editors hot to ape H gorilla as really, really angry? That’s fang-snarling, Hollywood’s lucrative jungle craze, tapped the gorilla on the chest-pounding angry. shoulder (from a safe distance, of No, Gorillas in the Mist doesn’t course) and knighted him the poster count. child for cantankerous critters. Sure, From the 1930s and through the you’d find the occasional savage-lord- early ’50s, movie houses played lots vs.-lion cover, and the suggestive of cheaply produced jungle serials jungle-queen-vs.-anaconda cover, but and pictures. You know the type: the ones that most grabbed readers’ They open with a bunch of snooty attentions featured grumpy gorillas Europeans in pith helmets on holiday (or other ornery apes). This wasn’t the in the jungle, or a gang of ne’er-do- exclusive terrain jungle or “adventure” wells out to purloin some weathered series—once in a while, some of artifact. These interlopers inevitably comics’ earliest caped crusaders found stumble across an enraged bull ape themselves mask-to-face with a that’s jackhammering his pecs and maddened monkey! frothing like a busted washing How can I put this delicately…? machine, grunting something that, in Oh, forget that, here it is, straight up: his language, can only mean “Git off Many of these artists could not draw my property!” Or “I’m taking the apes. Some of them drew the dumpy- blonde, sissy-britches, just you try guy-in-a-baggy-gorilla-suit gorilla. and stop me!” Hollywood knew that Some evoked racial or sexual stereo- a grumpy gorilla was always good types, many blatant. Some pulled off for a scare… or a laugh, if you passable swipes from nature photos. looked close enough to see the But in their defense, the entire comic- zipper in the gorilla suit. book art form was in its infancy then. Why the rage, Congo king? And as Arthur Adams says, “…in life, Look at it this way: How would you you’re not really required to know feel if a chattering tour group how to draw a gorilla.” tromped through your back yard? Not that it mattered to the Territorial squabbles have led count- A gorilla beat out neo-star Superman for the spotlight on average readers of the Great less countries to war, so really, these Leo O’Mealia’s cover to Action Comics #6 (Nov. 1938). Depression and World War II, the era apes are entitled to a little bluster. © 2007 DC Comics. we now call comics’ Golden Age. Many of the moviegoers They were unpretentious, usually poor watching those jungle serials and pictures were young men (and kids looking for a quick and affordable escape from their reality occasionally, women—you go, Tarpe Mills!) who made serialized of hardships. Few could discern between a hack and a master. pictures of their own in the flourishing field of comic books. And Toss a snarling beast on that funnybook cover, and Junior would those impressionable writers and artists, marching in step to the toss down his hard-earned dime—that’s the law of the jungle. Born To Be Wild! 7 TARZAN OF THE APES The first stop on our jungle-comics safari is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, which first appeared in prose in 1912 and in comics in 1929. In the first Tarzan story, confrontational king ape Kerchak slaughtered British castaway Lord Greystoke. Protective she- ape Kala, a mother that just lost her baby during a fit of Hal Foster’s Tarzan Sunday from April 2, 1933. © 2007 ERB. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions. Kerchak’s rage, claimed the orphaned human infant as her own. At this pivotal moment, Harold (Hal) Foster adapted Burroughs’ original tale into a daily Burroughs’ tribe of Great Apes became Tarzan’s Smallville—a (Monday through Saturday) newspaper strip. Distributed by the village raising a child with a great destiny. Metropolitan Newspaper Service, Tarzan of the Apes ran for ten Burroughs’ apes were as real as any of the story’s humans. weeks during the winter of 1929. Foster declined to resume the The author named his principals and assigned them identifiable strip upon its continuation and was followed by Rex Maxon and personalities, and provided them a language and communal later the celebrated Burne Hogarth, although Foster returned in rituals. Once Tarzan matured into the role of globetrotting September 1931 to illustrate the Tarzan Sunday strips for an adventurer, his ape family became the great walk-on supporting outstanding run of nearly six years. Foster and Hogarth, the most cast. On comic-book covers and in stories, Tarzan’s primate famous of all Tarzan artists, each had a unique way of drawing companions were frequently found by the Ape-Man’s side (or at apes: Foster’s were often squat and belligerent, where Hogarth, a his throat, if that’s what the editor needed). master of anatomy, rendered lissom, sinewy beasts. Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes was an immediate hit in The Ape-Man also made his comic-book premiere in 1929 1912, but the Jungle Lord’s first appearance in comics form did when Foster’s dailies were collected in The Illustrated Tarzan not occur until 17 years later, when classically trained artist Book. Throughout most of the Golden Age, Tarzan remained the 8 Comics Gone Ape! An undated pencil drawing by John Buscema, the first artist of Marvel’s 1977 Tarzan series. © 2007 ERB. Courtesy of Heritage Auctions. John Buscema’s pencil rough for the cover of Marvel’s Tarzan #14 (July 1978). © 2007 ERB. Courtesy of Tom Ziuko. DC had high hopes for its Kubert Tarzan. Carmine Infantino, then-publisher of DC (see the Infantino Q & Ape in Chapter 3), presumed Tarzan’s worldwide popularity would make the title a bestseller. When “Warner Bros. had that amusement park in New Jersey, one of the Six Flags, I think, we put two books in there,” Infantino recalls. “I thought Tarzan would be a natural… and Superman. Superman outsold Tarzan, can you believe it?!” After its exciting start, DC’s Tarzan eventually lost its energy once Kubert’s busy schedule divorced him from the art chores— first he did layouts over which Rudy Florese and Frank Reyes provided finishes, then he bowed out of the title and it briefly limped along, sometimes running Kubert reprints from earlier issues, until being canceled with #258 in 1977. “It didn’t do well,” Infantino laments. “We didn’t have luck with that character.” Marvel snatched up the property for a 29-issue run begin- ning with a first issue—not a renumbering of the old series— cover-dated June 1977. Writer/editor Roy Thomas adapted Burroughs stories with John Buscema as Tarzan’s penciler. Readers were treated to Buscema’s inks over his own pencils in the first two issues, with Tony DeZuniga (and later, other inkers) embellishing his work beginning with the third issue. Especially when inking himself, Buscema’s Tarzan was raw and vigorous, and his apes were frenetic and often frightening. Born To Be Wild! 13 SPOTTED AMONG THE APES IN: Tor, Tarzan, Sgt. Gorilla in Star Spangled War Stories, random DC Comics gorilla covers with JOE OTHER CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: Flash Comics, co-creator of 3-D comics (1953), Viking Prince, Silver Age Hawkman, Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace, Tales of the KUBERT Green Berets comic strip (1966–1968), The Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art, Fax from Sarajevo Conducted by telephone on September 13, 2006 I understand that your caveman, Tor, is returning. As a matter of fact, it’s going to be published by DC, and their procedure is to first run six issues of the comic book and then encapsulate or enclose those six issues as a graphic novel. Now, I’ve already written the story and am almost finished with the first issue, but it does deal with apes… or hairy people, anyhow. You might argue whether or not these would be apes at that stage of evolution.