Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.
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Who's up for a trip to the cinema?
I'm sure plenty of people were, this month in 1972. And when they got there, they could enjoy such delights as Fritz the Cat, Five Fingers of Death and Vampire Circus.
Tragically, I must confess that Vampire Circus is the only one of those I've actually seen. I shall, therefore, declare it to be my favourite of the trio.
Over on the UK singles chart, that April kicked off with Nilsson's Without You at Number One. But there was an unstoppable and unsilenceable force about to arrive on the scene.
And that was bagpipes.
It's true. Harry was soon dislodged by the artists known as The Pipes and Drums and the Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard with their version of Amazing Grace. So powerful was that record that it kept even Back Off Boogaloo from the Number One spot, for week after week.
And then the most ridiculously long-winded album title of all time appeared, to bother chart compilers everywhere, as Prophets Seers and Sages the Angels of The Ages/ My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair But Now They're Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows by Tyrannosaurus Rex hit the top spot.
From what I can gather, it seems to be two 1968 albums bundled together, in order to cash-in on the band's current rise to prominence.
But just imagine going into a record shop and asking for that lot.
Who wants to look up a caveman's nostrils?
It's a mighty Marvel landmark, as Him is back!
Subby's lost his memory but he doesn't have to worry about that because he's got a friend close to hand.
In this thrilling adventure, Frank Drake - no relation to Donald Duck - inherits Castle Dracula.
King Kull dives into action when he must confront The Forbidden Swamp.
Just who forbade it, I've no idea but I do know Kull meets Thulsa Doom for the first time.
More tear-stained misery awaits us in the latest issue of Our Love Story.
We also get the feature known as Suzan Says which I'm assuming is an agony aunt page. The agony aunt in question being Suzan Lane Loeb, the woman who replaced Flo Steinberg at Marvel.
We all do!
And Gil Kane duly obliges with another of those flying-at-the-camera figures he's so keen on.
I don't know much about the contents of this one but I know it includes a retelling of Ka-Zar's origin.
But how interesting that, this month, DC gives us the origin of Tarzan, and Marvel gives us the origin of Ka-Zar. Such is the strange and mysterious power of coincidence.
But Him is quickly caught up in the vile machinations of the Man-Beast who's out to ruin the newly created Counter-Earth!
What can Him do about it?
Well, for a start, he can get on with changing his name to Adam Warlock, so people like me'll never have to type sentences like, "What can him do?" again.
That aside, this is easily my favourite comic of the ones on display in this post.
Dr Doom.
And it's not long before the pair of them are in a submarine and out to retrieve the Cosmic Cube from MODOK's abandoned base.
But little do they know that the big-headed booby's still alive and watching their every move!
Neal Adams may have drawn the cover but Gene Colan supplies the insides, while the words are those of Gerry Conway.
But the Count is about to be revived and start causing a whole heap more trouble for the world!
Just who forbade it, I've no idea but I do know Kull meets Thulsa Doom for the first time.
But what's this? The bounder pretends to be an ally of Kull and asks to return with him to the City of Wonders?
And there's more. We also get Where Walks the Ghost from the pencil of Sturdy Steve Ditko, and Mister Morgan's Monster from Lee and Kirby.
In the first of those tales, an escaped convict looks to buy a haunted house to keep people away from him but, when its estate agent turns out to be the resident ghost, the crook turns himself in to the police, for his own protection.
In the second tale, humanoid robots have been banned but their inventor still has one left which aliens try to turn against mankind. However, when it resists, they're forced to flee.
And there's more. We also get Where Walks the Ghost from the pencil of Sturdy Steve Ditko, and Mister Morgan's Monster from Lee and Kirby.
In the first of those tales, an escaped convict looks to buy a haunted house to keep people away from him but, when its estate agent turns out to be the resident ghost, the crook turns himself in to the police, for his own protection.
In the second tale, humanoid robots have been banned but their inventor still has one left which aliens try to turn against mankind. However, when it resists, they're forced to flee.
Thus, it brings us such matchless classics as The Boy Who Can't Be Mine!, As Good as Any Man!, Wings on My Heart, Queen of the Blues! and My Song...and My Sorrow! All reprinted from the early to mid-1970s.
We also get the feature known as Suzan Says which I'm assuming is an agony aunt page. The agony aunt in question being Suzan Lane Loeb, the woman who replaced Flo Steinberg at Marvel.
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20 comments:
It's just occurred to me that despite being a lifelong comics fan and a Marvel reader from 1986 for about 15 years continously then off and on ever since, I don't think I've ever read an issue of Ka-Zar.
Hmmm.
I’ve never seen FRITZ THE CAT, but I have seen the other two. I saw FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH at a drive-in, as the second half of a double bill with BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES. I was a big fan of the POTA movies at the time, so even though I realized BATTLE was kind of cheap-looking and Really Not All That Great, I still enjoyed it. I remember thinking 5 FINGERS was amazingly violent but also pretty boring. I haven’t seen it since, so I can’t say whether or not I’d have the same opinion today.
VAMPIRE CIRCUS is easily the best of the three, in fact it’s one of my all-time favorite Hammer Horror films. It may actually be my #1. When I was a kid, Hammer films had the reputation of being gory and sexy (at least among Old Fuddy Duddy Film Historians who preferred the Classic Universal Horror movies they grew up with) but the ones I saw on TV disappointed on that score. When I finally caught up with VAMPIRE CIRCUS on cable TV in the mid-80s, I thought, ‘Well now, THIS is what all those Old Dudes were clutching their pearls about!’ Besides the copious amounts of blood and bared bosoms, it’s actually a pretty fun movie.
I think every single one of today’s selection of funny books is an entertaining read. For sheer ‘class’ I think the Kull story in MONSTERS ON THE PROWL might take the prize.
b.t.
Dave, I've read a few Ka-Zars - starting with Jack Kirby and Barry Smith reprints in Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes weekly - and liked most of them well enough, but I lost interest a bit once I found out he was actually called Kevin.
No offence to anyone of that name who may be reading this, but Shanna calling him Kevin all the time in the early 80s series does take you out of the story a bit.
Of course I also first read Warlock in Planet of the Apes too, and that first story about the High Evolutionary, the Man Beast and the fall of Counter-Earth is particularly good (even if it is obvious bollocks).
A Gil/Roy classic. It was better than than their other reboot, Captain Mar-vell fusing with Rick Jones, thats for sure.
-sean
Steve, I thought it was fairly well known that 'My People Were Fair...' and 'Prophets, Seers and Sages...' were the first two albums by T Rex, back when they were an underground acoustic guitar and bongo duo called Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Not that keen on either record myself. After the pair split Bolan obviously did better going mainstream, but personally my taste in dawn of the 70s nonsense leans much more to the kind of thing the other one, Steve Took, got involved with.
Such as legendary (well, it used to be very hard to find before the era of reissue mania) far out lp 'Think Pink' by Twink.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=f477nAUVEvo
-sean
Charlie has often wondered why "40 year ago today" gets way more comic-specific commentary than "50 years ago today."
Charlie suspects that many of us were just too young to have read them contemporaneously and not had the time to go back and read them given all the new material always present.
Charlie was lucky to read them contemporaneously and also have the benefit of reprints like Marvel Tales, Marvels Greatest, Marvel Triple Action...
That said, Charlie highly recommends many of the mags from these past few years, notably the big guns like Spidey, FF, Cap, Subby, etc.
If you can grab something from your library (i prefer paper) or online Charlie recommends it.
The FF stand out right now: great stories, great art. Hard to believe Steranko will be doing FF art in about a year or less for "50 years ago."
Like Sean, I first discovered Ka-Zar when he was drawn by Barry Smith in the Planet Of The Apes weekly - in fact, Ka-Zar was the first Marvel character I ever encountered because POTA No.5 was my first Marvel comic and the other two strips in that particular comic were the apes and Gullivar Jones, neither of whom were created by Marvel.
So I have a soft spot for Ka-Zar but I do wonder how Marvel got away with such a shameless Tarzan rip-off - Ka-Zar even steals four of the letters in Tarzan's name!
Vampire Circus stars Lalla Ward who later played Romana in Doctor Who.
The best Ka-Zar tales (for me, anyway) were those in the early 80s series by Bruce Jones and Brent Anderson. As Sean noted, there was a lot of "Kevin" calling, and a lot of introspection for a book named "Ka-Zar the Savage". But then it is more engaging dialogue than "Ka-Zar fight dinosaur, save Zabu!". Perhaps he got dialogue coaching early on from the Hulk...
Steve, there are some fine covers today! That Kull cover rocks. I'd buy it just for the pretty picture...
As for those three films, I've seen none of them. However, I do remember seeing ads for "Fritz the Cat" as a callow youngster and being a bit confused- how could a cartoon have an R rating? What would auncle Walt say?
Color Me Clueless — despite the blindingly obvious steal, it didn’t really dawn on me right away that Ka-Zar was a direct rip-oHOMAGE (yeah that’s it, we’ll say HOMAGE) of Tarzan. In my defense, the first Ka-zar comic i ever owned was ASTONISHING 18, towards the end of his extended New York Adventure. He was wearing street clothes, hanging out with a mini-skirted SHIELD agent, fighting a couple of dudes in spandex and a big-ass teleporting bug-eyed Monster, and oh, he had a pet sabertooth tiger. None of which signified ‘Tarzan Clone’ to me at first glance. Ka-zar and Bobbi Morse kept up a GREEN ACRES-ish conversation about which was better, New York City or the Savage Land, so I was certainly aware he came from the jungle, but it didn’t quite register. The storyline felt like an interesting mix of Superheroics, Espionage, Urban Adventure and Sci-fi, not at all like any Tarzan movie I’d ever seen. Even when he returned home a few issues later, it still didn’t feel especially Tarzan-ish to me — again, the wizards and dinosaurs kinda threw me off the scent. I think I was in the middle of reading KA-ZAR 6, beautifully drawn by Buscema and Alcala, when the Tarzan parallels finally hit me.
As for Marvel ‘getting away with it’ — Tarzan knock-offs were a dime a dozen in comics, movies, TV shows, pulp magazines, children’s books, etc, for decades, long before the Silver Age Ka-Zar first swung from a vine. He was neither the first Tarzan Swipe, nor the worst. Some of the other knock-offs (like Ki-Gor in the JUNGLE TALES pulp) were SO close to the original, they practically WERE Tarzan in all but name.
b.t.
It’s funny…? We’ve had Tarzan for about 100 years. We’ve had Kazar for about 50 years. And, as Colin pointed out above, Kazar does sound familiar to Tarzan. And then about 30 years ago we were blessed with Turok The dinosaur hunter from valiant comics. It’s like someone decided let’s steal all the important consonants and then use the vowels that were not used in Tarzan or Kazar, lol
DAVE - I’m not sure how much you are missing in life from not having read a Kazar comic book. But for his two issue appearance in Spider-Man 103 and 104, I never found the character particularly interesting. Indeed, at a comic book show, I scored some 64 page, $.25 giant which featured him fighting daredevil if I recall correctly. It was cheap like only a dollar and in great condition and if I recall correctly Jack Kirby drew the cover (Barry Smith?) It was one of those $.25 reprint books from way back in the day. And man oh man was it a slog to read that story… I don’t think I ever finished it. It just seemed to ramble on and on and on…
SEAN - tour analysis of Hogarth- Foster - Eisner makes perfect sense!
Yet, is it perhaps ironic, that many of us still remember Joe Kubert’s work on Tarzan and yet so few of us have ever heard of burn Hogarth?
But Colin, your name takes half its letters from Charlie's - does that make you an imitation?
Seriously though, yes Ka-Zar is a bit of a knock off, not just of Tarzan but Burroughs generally (the Savage Land = the Land That Time Forgot). But I agree with b.t. about that kind of thing being something of a genre in itself by the 70s, and it depends how its done - Marvel's Ka-Zar was generally better than their Tarzan comics, at least the ones I've read.
Redartz, from what I read of the early '80s Ka-Zar series it did seem pretty good. The real reason I didn't follow it regularly back then was that once it became one of Marvel's first direct market only titles I couldn't afford it regularly - it was that or Moon Knight, and Sienkiewicz won out.
Come to think of it, I seem to recall Bruce Jones also revealed Ka-Zar was from Kentish Town. So he's Kevin from norf London.
-sean
Steve, b.t. etc, I have seen Fritz the Cat, and take it from me - none of you have missed out on anything.
Like all of Ralph Bakshi's films, its a lot more interesting to read about than actually watch.
-sean
Charlie, you might be conflated several different Ka-Zar items.
MARVEL SUPER HEROES 19 (March 69) features Ka-Zar on the cover (Young Barry Smith doing his best Kirby impression) and an All-New new lead feature written by Arnold Drake and Young Steve Parkhouse and drawn by George Tuska and Sid Greene. I’ve tried reading it several times over the years but never quite made it all the way through. The art is extremely off-putting to me (and I usually kinda like Tuska just fine). Golden Age Namor and Torch reprints fill up the back pages. 25 cents, 68 pages.
About a year later, Marvel published a quarterly KA-ZAR comic for 3 issues, reprinting Ka-zar’s earlier encounters with Daredevil and Spider-Man. New stories featuring Hercules and The Angel in the back. 25 cents, 68 pages.
It’s always seemed a bit odd to me. Hard to imagine the character was enough of a fan-favorite that Marvel felt there was money to be made by publishing three big fat issues reprinting his earliest adventures. The first issue is dated August 1970, which is also the month Ka-Zar began appearing in new stories in the front half of ASTONISHING TALES, so I guess the King-Size reprint book was meant to be some kind of cross-promotional thing.
b.t.
B.T. - I think you are spot on regarding my conflation, lol! MSH 19 is the one I am thinking of. Like you, I have tried exactly twice (or thrice) to get through the Ka-Zar story and just... can't... do it... The story just seems to plod along without direction.
Also, who started this thing of "dressing up" the heroes: WONDER WOMAN, KAZAR, NAMOR... I assume these were attempts at boosting sales. Not a bad idea for Wonderous Woman and Namor since they were basically royalty that we think of as royalty.
Heck I think even Tarzan got dressed up when he was visiting London in some incarnation in the 90s? Not sure if ERB ever had him visiting London?
But Kazar - the dude was just a savage unless he attended the Tarzan school of teaching ones-self everything from English to Math whilst being raised by apes. (Not sure that makes sense to anyone who hasn't read Hogarth's masterpiece "graphic novel" from 1973?)
SEAN - Was Tarzan in the "LAND THAT TIME FORGOT" or was it an ERB thing for other stories? I recall Tarzan simply being a shipwrecked, orphaned white kid growing up in contemporary Africa.
Yes, they were two was a different things Charlie - that was the point, that Ka-Zar was a conflation rather than just Tarzan.
Although as it happens I did actually have a 'Tarzan in the Land that Time Forgot' comic as a kid, drawn by Russ Manning.
b.t., As I understand it, the general assumption in the American comic biz 50+ years ago was that it more or less ran on ten year cycles, and at the start of the 70s publishers were casting around for new directions to hold reader interest as obviously the superhero craze of the previous decade was finished.
So I assume Marvel gave Ka-Zar a push around the same time as launching Conan, and then trying Kull, Thongor et al as part of a go at finding out what was going to be the new thing.
Its like Tomb of Dracula #1 turning up here not long after the first Werewolf By Night, and shortly before Man-Thing arrives in colour comics... Pick a genre, put enough sh*t out and see what sticks.
-sean
*they were two different things
Apologies for the poor editing there. Duh.
-sean
Charlie- thanks for the KaZar info! I've read good things about the 80s series so may give it a try one of these days!
Moench & Sienkiewicz on MOON KNIGHT was just out of this world & I still cherish those issues (really blown away how much those values are going through the stratosphere) -- but those KaZar issues, back in the 80s, were great in their way & fun to read too!
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