Tarzan - The Black Edition

These are hands down my favorite versions of ERB's Tarzan of the Apes. Much of that is nostalgia. I literally gave up food money to land the first six volumes of this set. I completed it as the years rolled by and have even dropped dime on the Neal Adams art portfolios which feature this art and more. I have more to say at the end of what is a divine gallery. 

(Apparently, Neal Adams also produced a painting for Tarzan and the Ant Men. I must say his is superior in drama to Vallejo's below.)

When Ballantine contracted with Neal Adams to do a gallery of new Tarzan covers for their paperback reprints of ERB's classic hero, they apparently also contracted with Boris Vallejo to do the same thing. What happened is that we have two of the great artists of the time doing Tarzan covers at the same time. I'll be blunt and say that most of Vallejo's work leaves me a bit cold. He is often compared to Frank Frazetta, who clearly inspired him, but Vallejo is all about surfaces while Frazetta and to some extent Adams, are all about interiors. They capture a feeling, a mood, a notion while Boris Vallejo merely illustrates and paints brawny men and nubile women in motion. There's something missing. That said, these covers are still fairly early in his career, and he hadn't lost that certain something that first made him a so interesting. Later though that little bit of magic gets lost as an obsession with the human form overwhelms all else. 

This Post is a Revised Dojo Classic. 

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Beyond Thirty - The Lost Continent!

Beyond Thirty is one of ERB's earliest and least successful novels. It was published once in his lifetime in 1916. It's the story of a typical ERB hero who against the precepts of his society sojourns across the thirtieth parallel of longitude and lands on the European continent, a territory unseen by Western eyes for two hundred years. The outbreak of war caused the Pan American countries to restrict travel there and in the interim a great multi-continental nation was developed. This seems clearly to be written in response to the questions about whether the United States should enter the First World War. 

The story was combined with another Burroughs tale and released in a fannish small-market edition in 1957. It stands out to me because it sports a handsome Gil Kane cover. When the surge hit in the 60's release as much ERB material as possible, the story was edited and retitled The Lost Continent and unleashed again onto the market, this time with an outstanding Frank Frazetta cover. The Lost Continent is a more dramatic title, though no less informative than the weirdly obscure Beyond Thirty. 

The story has most all the elements ERB fans are looking for -- a rugged militaristic hero, a beautiful yet savage damsel, and a cadre of trustworthy and less than trustworthy side characters. Jefferson Turck is the hero and he finds and falls in love with Victory, the heir to the British throne no less. (Or what is left of it.) Wild beasts have taken over much of the British Isles (at least the part we visit) while the population has reverted to savagery. Modern sophisticated armies have developed in what was the Abyssinian Empire and later we discover in China. 

Richard Lupoff in an essay included in the Bison edition I read called the novel "malformed" in that Burroughs spends a lot of time setting up the characters and settings, and then suddenly we discover new empires in the latter pages, but there seems no time to explore them hardly at all. There are some interesting spins in that Jefferson is made a slave of a black general and he finds his slavery demoralizing and dehumanizing. If ERB was making a marginally progressive statement about race relations or not, it certainly reads that way. 

This is a quick sturdy little read. ERB fans will like it because all the elements seem to be there. For others the mileage might vary. 

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