Posted: 08 April 2021 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | 5
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Rebecca Jansen wrote:
A follow-up question might be was DC predatory in getting ERB away from Dell/Western/Gold Key to start with? |
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Not really. Apparently ERB Inc. was not happy with Western at the time, because sales of their Tarzan and Korak titles were declining, and they weren't producing enough material to keep the foreign publishers happy (they were only producing eight issues per year of Tarzan). Also, ERB wanted comics that would promote some of their non-Tarzan characters, and Western wasn't interested in doing that. Robert Hodes considered self-publishing (a recurrent theme, apparently) but decided against it and approached Carmine Infantino. DC agreed to produce stories with some of the other Burroughs characters and publish a monthly Tarzan book (as well as a bi-monthly Korak). If you want more info about this and the history of Tarzan comics in general, add Alter Ego Magazine #129 to your shopping list.
It does seem strange that ERB was unhappy with Kubert's Tarzan work, since it is (in my opinion) really fantastic. But if you compare it to the stories Gaylord Dubois was doing and the Manning-house style art at Western, it's clear that it really was a dramatic change.
Probably another problem was that Kubert disliked Jane and preferred stories where Tarzan was a lone, savage adventurer, rather than the family man of the Gold Key series and the Manning comic strip. IIRC, the only times Jane appeared in Kubert's Tarzan were in the issues where he adapted the first two novels. And after that, he skipped over books featuring Jane and instead adapted stories in which she didn't appear, like The Lion Man and The City of Gold. And Jane never appeared in any original stories written by Kubert.
Edited by Jason Czeskleba on 09 April 2021 at 1:46am
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