Korak And The Quest For The Golden Key!

I've been trying to get hold of Russ Manning's Korak, Son of Tarzan comics for a little while and last week they arrived at long last. This series served in many ways as a warm up for Manning before he took over the reins of Gold Key's primary apeman, Tarzan himself. The Korak stories are generally lighter in tone and Manning's sleek style is ideal for the idealized handsome youth who is the "Son of Tarzan".

Volume one contains the first six issues of the run, all by Manning on the art with Gaylord Dubois supplying scripts. Morris Gollub was tapped for the covers and did all of the covers below.

The second and final volume of Dark Horse's archives of Korak is bit more of a mixed bag.

These issues, again all but one sporting lush Gollub covers offer up the last of the Dubois-Manning stories. Most of them were for Gold Key.

Manning left Korak with the eleventh issue to go to Tarzan. But he returned to Korak at Gold Key one more time.

The twenty-first issue under a George Wilson cover, features Manning artwork on a wild story in which Korak encounters outer space aliens. Wild.

The volume closes out with a real lost gem. Dubois and Manning put together a Korak strip for possible syndication. That strip was eventually run as a back up in some of the issues of Korak produced over at DC when they acquired the ERB licenses.

These are really slick handsome stories by solid pros. I'm eager to give them a read.

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Korak The Killer!

I have been awash in old silent Tarzan flicks this past weekend. After the debut of Tarzan on the silver screen in Elmo Lincoln's Tarzan of the Apes there came two more movies that continued the story sort of. These are lost films. But the next Tarzan movie adapts the novel Son of Tarzan and it's the most true ERB adaptation I've ever seen.

First there might well be changes, since it's been many years since I last read the novel, but overall the plot seemed to be there and largely intact. The key though was the format of a serial. Unlike the three previous silent Tarzans which were features, this movie is a weekly chapter play and its the perfect format for ERB's storytelling. The sprawling plots he concocted fit the form well, and the way characters roam around across a broad but peculiarly small landscape constantly crossing paths fits the chapter play very very well. The key to any ERB story is coincidence. That comes through as well as I've ever seen it.

The actors who portray Korak and Meriem as young adults are outstanding, two handsome young people who really gave me a sense of the wildness that comes through in the novels. Meriem is a great character here, complex but still at once both dangerous and sexy. Ironically the kid who plays the young Jack is the same kid who portrayed the young Tarzan in the original movie. Korak here is the very image of what I think Tarzan should look like. They cast a surfer and he does a number of interesting balance gags in the movie both in branches and on the back of elephants. The legend is that the actor was killed during the shooting of the climax when an elephant throws him down too hard. That doesn't seem to be the case, but this actor did die very young some few years later from cancer, so reinforcing the myth. The print is pretty primitive, so go into this with your eyes open (you'll need 'em).

The story though is pretty complete. The apes though are the most pathetic I've ever seen on screen, so thankfully there's very little of them to endure. The guy who plays Tarzan, Lord Greystone[sic] does so pretty well though in the beginning his wig is frightful. Later he comes across as a middle-aged Tarzan okay. Jane is lovely. The guy who plays the villain "Paulovich" is excellent and keeps the thing moving almost when nothing else is happening.

Great movie?

Possibly.

For its pure adaptation of the ERB canon I give this one high marks. This is a vivid presentation of the Tarzan mythology, one of the best I've ever seen. And this Korak is more ferocious than the comics version by far, though that's understandable.

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