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Post by brutalis on Aug 1, 2016 8:25:34 GMT -5
With the release this week of the complete Joe Kubert Tarzan i thought it would be a grand opportunity to ask everyone about their adventures with ERB?
My first exposure was of course the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies on perpetual rerun during my childhood and the following Ron Ely television series. From there i looked up Burroughs at the local library and found a few of the Tarzan paperbacks and a 2 John Carter paperbacks. I read through those and so from there began my hunt through used bookstores as i fell on love the two of them. Of course it took many years traipsing through many stores and yard sales and flea markets but i eventually managed to get all of the John Carter series and even more slowly found the Tarzan novels. Collected the Pellucidar series and enjoyed the corny Doug McCLure movies.
i had a few of the DC Kubert Tarzan's but managed to get all of the Marvel John Carter and Tarzan series off the rack in the late 70's. i screamed hallelujah when it was announced there was going to finally be a John Carter movie and it really was a quite good movie that hasn't gotten much respect. Anytime a new Tarzan movie comes along i am there for the thrill of the jungle. Caspar Van Dien's Tarzan and the Lost City was grand fun (again it wasn't treated very well in) and then this summer's Legend of Tarzan which is superb.
Last month i bought e-book version's for my Kindle reader so i now have at my hand for travels the complete 18 Tarzan novels and 7 of the John Carter novels. So whenever i wish it my mind can travel into the deep and dark mystical jungles of adventure or my soul fly to ancient Mar's fighting alongside or against the Barsoomian's and four armed green men found there...
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Post by Deleted on Aug 1, 2016 9:28:53 GMT -5
My experience is similar. The Ron Ely TV show hooked me then I discovered his Tarzan & John Carter books at the library. Bought a ton of Tarzan comics. I liked the John Carter movie. Haven't seen the new Tarzan movie...
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Aug 1, 2016 9:38:48 GMT -5
I discovered Tarzan at the same time I discovered comics, I guess : my dad would read me the Russ Manning Tarzan Sunday strip in the newspaper. (I really can't say if the first comic I read was Tarzan or Tintin). I was enthralled by the character and his fantastic world. A few years later, the Tarzan comic strip got me to my very first novel : The son of Tarzan (with a Burne Hogarth cover).
The Ron Ely TV show came later, and I liked it fine even if there was a distinct lack of Jane and Korak.
Comics-wise, I read a few translated Tarzan comics while growing up (mostly taken from Dell comics and from the daily Manning strip). When I bought the first Kubert issues, it was honestly for the John Carter back-up! (I had become a big John Carter fan too).
In recent years, my most frequent purchases of reprinted material were Tarzan strips. The Manning stuff is all available, now, and I also got a Dark Horse reprint of the Manning comic-books. There are also three volumes reprinting the Hogarth Tarzan strips, and they are really neat.
I look forward to the Kubert book!
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Post by brutalis on Aug 1, 2016 10:43:30 GMT -5
Right there with you Roquefort in waiting with anticipation this week for the Kubert Tarzan to ship. I only have a few beaten and torn copies so this will be a whole new experience to enjoy reading through in complete this series. I have the TPB in Black and White of the complete John Carter, Warlord of Mars and what a treasure of art and story that one is. Now if someone collects the Marvel Tarzan run into a TPB color or black and white i would be a happy camper. I have the Hogarth reprints and need to get the Manning collections.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 1, 2016 12:54:41 GMT -5
I actually bought the DC and Marvel ERB books well after the fact when I became an ERB fan by reading his novels. I was a big science fiction fan in junior high and became friends with a couple of fellow SF fans who were both huge ERB fans. So I went from the books...primarily the Barsoom novels and a few stand-alones...to the comics.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 2, 2016 9:40:55 GMT -5
I came to Burroughs himself kinda late. I enjoyed the Weissmuller movies as a kid, and watched the Ely series (hated the kid sidekick, though). But I couldn't get into the books; they seemed long-winded and boring. I bought some Tarzan comics and liked them well enough (DC best, then Gold Key, over Marvel's super-hero flavored version), but I still felt I was missing something. The concept seemed better than the execution.
Then 5 or 6 years ago, I tried again, with The Return of Tarzan, and something clicked. I loved it. Tried a few more, at random, and they were great fun. So back in 2011 I read the whole series straight through. Hell, I even enjoyed the later, repetitive ones. Loved the books, loved the character, loved Jane (who doesn't appear nearly enough). Hell, there were moments in the theater watching The Legend of Tarzan where I was tearing up, because I thought they'd gotten the character right. Like the stampede scene - Tarzan's allies are alongside the herd, urging them on, and we cut to see Tarzan running right in the middle of them, guiding them along. I loved that bit.
Anyway - I moved on to Burroughs' other stuff with the eagerness of any new fan. Read through all the Barsoom books the week before the John Carter movie came out. Loved them (except for the last part of the last book, bad fan-fic written IIRC by his son). The Barsoom books may be better, and are certainly more varied (only about half featuring John Carter, for example) than the Tarzans. (But definitely Tarzan over Carter.)
And, as a (mostly) reformed continuity nut, I loved how Burroughs tied his different series together. Tarzan goes to Pellucidar. Carson of Venus was trying to go to Barsoom. The Gridley Wave connects everybody.
tl:dr Late to the party, but a Burroughs fan.
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Post by Red Oak Kid on Aug 2, 2016 16:19:37 GMT -5
I first saw Tarzan in the Weissmuller movies on tv. I liked his version better than all the others. Perhaps it was just because of the MGM production values. In the 5th grade a friend was reading the John Carter books and so I started reading them. I liked them very much and then started buying the Tarzan books. This was exactly when the Ron Ely tv show started. I liked the Tarzan of the novels more than the tv show.
I remember buying a Gold Key Tarzan comic in the 60s. I liked the painted cover more than the Manning art. I always thought Manning's style was too slick for a jungle book. None of the local papers ever carried the newspaper version.
I bought the the DC Tarzan when it came out and really liked Kubert's version. I also liked the back up features of Carson of Venus and Pellucidar.
I never cared for the Marvel version of John Carter. Gil Kane's art had gotten too predictable by that time. Buscema on Tarzan was nice but it just covered the same ground that Kubert had already done. I thought Kubert's version was more dramatic. Buscema was more like Hal Foster.
I did not see the John Carter movie.
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Post by berkley on Aug 2, 2016 20:49:47 GMT -5
Tarzan and the City of Gold was one of the very first full-length novels I ever read and it left a big impression on me - I can still remember a lot of the scenes and set-pieces quite vividly even though I've never re-read it since. But I was so young - not sure exactly but less than ten - that it didn't make me aware of ERB as a writer or even of Tarzan as a series of books rather than just a fictional character that was part of the landscape, like Sherlock Holmes or Frankenstein or Dracula. This was the hardcover we had: It wasn't until a few years later, I think around the age of 12 or 13, that I read this hardcover edition of The Mastermind of Mars and A Fighting Man of Mars (the latter still probably my #1 ERB story) and became a devout ERB fan, seeking out everything I could find: Luckily, at this time there were a lot of paperback versions of pretty much every ERB book you can think of on the stands, though there are still a few series I haven't completed (e.g. Pellucidar).
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Post by thwhtguardian on Aug 2, 2016 20:58:26 GMT -5
I discovered Tarzan at the same time I discovered comics, I guess : my dad would read me the Russ Manning Tarzan Sunday strip in the newspaper. (I really can't say if the first comic I read was Tarzan or Tintin). I was enthralled by the character and his fantastic world. A few years later, the Tarzan comic strip got me to my very first novel : The son of Tarzan (with a Burne Hogarth cover). The Ron Ely TV show came later, and I liked it fine even if there was a distinct lack of Jane and Korak. Comics-wise, I read a few translated Tarzan comics while growing up (mostly taken from Dell comics and from the daily Manning strip). When I bought the first Kubert issues, it was honestly for the John Carter back-up! (I had become a big John Carter fan too). In recent years, my most frequent purchases of reprinted material were Tarzan strips. The Manning stuff is all available, now, and I also got a Dark Horse reprint of the Manning comic-books. There are also three volumes reprinting the Hogarth Tarzan strips, and they are really neat. I look forward to the Kubert book! Manning's work on Tarzan is one of my favorite strips of all time! It's a must read for any fan of Borroughs or just comics in general.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 2, 2016 21:10:15 GMT -5
It wasn't until a few years later, I think around the age of 12 or 13, that I read this hardcover edition of The Mastermind of Mars and A Fighting Man of Mars (the latter still probably my #1 ERB story) and became a devout ERB fan, seeking out everything I could find: Luckily, at this time there were a lot of paperback versions of pretty much every ERB book you can think of on the stands, though there are still a few series I haven't completed (e.g. Pellucidar). Mmmmm...I love me some Science Fiction Book Club Editions.
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Post by berkley on Aug 2, 2016 21:39:35 GMT -5
It wasn't until a few years later, I think around the age of 12 or 13, that I read this hardcover edition of The Mastermind of Mars and A Fighting Man of Mars (the latter still probably my #1 ERB story) and became a devout ERB fan, seeking out everything I could find: Luckily, at this time there were a lot of paperback versions of pretty much every ERB book you can think of on the stands, though there are still a few series I haven't completed (e.g. Pellucidar). Mmmmm...I love me some Science Fiction Book Club Editions. Yes, and I highly recommend the rest of the series, all with Frazetta covers and interior illustrations (except one book by Corben, and not his best work, unfortunately). We only had this one but I was able to find the others second hand at very reasonable prices a few years ago. This was from some kind of book club our parents signed up for. I think my older brother probably made all the SF selections.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Aug 2, 2016 21:54:25 GMT -5
Mmmmm...I love me some Science Fiction Book Club Editions. Yes, and I highly recommend the rest of the series, all with Frazetta covers and interior illustrations (except one book by Corben, and not his best work, unfortunately). We only had this one but I was able to find the others second hand at very reasonable prices a few years ago. This was from some kind of book club our parents signed up for. I think my older brother probably made all the SF selections. Doubleday operated The Book of the Month Club which was an umbrella under which there were a number of other "Book Clubs" including The Science Fiction Book Club. I was a member of the SFBC off and on from probably 1980 until sometime in the late 90s when e-commerce made it somewhat redundant. The amazing thing about the SFBC were the omnibus editions which collected a number of books into decent quality hardcovers. The perennials (at least during my time with the SFBC) were Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, Zelazny's Amber Novels (in two volumes) and ERB's Mars books.
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Post by the4thpip on Aug 3, 2016 9:55:20 GMT -5
I am gonna give the new "The Land That Time Forgot" comics by "American Mythology" publishing a try, considering I was responsible for the original German translation of the three Caprona novels back in 1999, which this year a new edition and went to E-Book for the first time.
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Post by thwhtguardian on Aug 3, 2016 11:01:05 GMT -5
I am gonna give the new "The Land That Time Forgot" comics by "American Mythology" publishing a try, considering I was responsible for the original German translation of the three Caprona novels back in 1999, which this year a new edition and went to E-Book for the first time. That's a pretty great cover illustration!
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Post by foxley on Aug 3, 2016 19:22:34 GMT -5
My first exposure to ERB must have been the Ron Ely Tarzan TV series. However, not long after that, I discovered the Tarzan novels in our local library and fell in love with the 'real' Tarzan.
And I have to second jodoc's recommendation of The Legend of Tarzan. This is finally Tarzan done right on the big screen (and I'll even forgive it the vine swinging nonsense that appears nowhere in Burroughs).
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