Steve Does Comics

Obviously, the genius of Ka-Zar as a concept is that he combines Edgar Rice Burroughs' two classic creations Tarzan and the Land That Time Forgot into one dino-packed package.

But issue #10 of Astonishing Tales takes that combination even further, as Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway and Barry Smith give us a tale of World War II shenanigans in the Hidden Jungle.

After having floated around on a lake for a while, Ka-Zar stumbles across the survivors of a World War II battle between a U-boat and a British destroyer. Despite it being the early 1970s, the crew and their children are still fighting.

And they're still fighting despite their two commanders knowing full well the war is over.

Needless to say, Ka-Zar isn't going to stand for this sort of behaviour in his jungle and sets about foiling the commanders' scheme and finally bringing World War II to a close.

Oddly, Barry Smith's artwork isn't as sophisticated and detailed as it was in previous issues of the strip. Either inker Sal Buscema wasn't in the mood to ink in all that detail, or this issue was drawn before the earlier ones. I'm not sure which.

Needless to say, the leader of the British talks like Crocodile Dundee and the leader of the Germans wears a monocle and slips well-known German words into his speech, despite speaking English most of the time.

This is, after all, a Marvel comic and, so, such cliches can't be abandoned.

It has to be said that the motives of the twin commanders are somewhat inconsistent.

It seems they elected to keep the war going for their men in order to motivate them to survive in such a dangerous land but that doesn't stop them from later plotting to destroy their own men once their deception is exposed, suggesting a desire for power is all they're really interested in.

Ultimately, none of that matters. What matters is it's a memorable tale, built upon a great idea and carrying a warning to us all about the futility of warfare and the need to question those in power, to think for ourselves and, when asked to do insane things, to listen instead to our own common sense.

As you no doubt know, this blog ploughs through millions of comics every day in order to bring you opinions so powerful they could rock the world. Why, grown men themselves have been known to hide in cupboards to avoid the power of my fulminations.

But the truth is that even I don't always have strong enough feelings about a comic to bother reviewing it in full. Therefore, this is a selection of what I've been looking at lately that I can't bring myself to give a full write-up to.


The Avengers have their second outing and find themselves up against the Space Phantom who, for years, I always got mixed up with the Space Parasite.

Needless to say, in this tale, everyone gets everyone mixed up with the Space Phantom and by the end of it all, the Hulk's quit and the newly formed group are already a man down.

Just to make things worse for our heroes, not only are they a man short but the very next issue, they have to fight both him and the Sub-Mariner.

Bah! Who needs that pesky Hulk anyway? Thanks to the maturity levels that only Namor can supply, the Avengers return to full strength with the return of Captain America.

Batman has  his greatest failure!

Or perhaps he doesn't, as he encounters murder on a film set.

This is actually one of my favourite Batman tales from the era but I don't have anything to say about it that I haven't said about other Batman tales in other posts, therefore I shall not review it but merely express my liking for it.

Captain Marvel goes all cosmic and has his head redrawn by John Romita.

To be honest I've never been totally sure what Cosmic Awareness is but it's all good mythic stuff as Jim Starlin's Cosmic Cube saga rumbles on and we get some back-story for the solar system.

Jim Starlin's long-gone but Mar-Vell's Cosmic Awareness comes in handy as he uses it to beat the Super-Adaptoid and bring Rick Jones permanently back to our world.

Tragically, this means we shall have to endure more of Rick's singing career which mostly seems to consist of him declaring himself not to be John Denver.

I can confirm that I too am not John Denver.

Ka-Zar finds himself in a Savage Land re-enactment of Moby Dick as he helps a vengeance-seeking wally try to kill a giant river monster.

The story's concept might be pretty clichéd but it's beautifully drawn by Alfredo Alcala.

It's the Mighty World of Marvel but it might as well be called Daredevil Annual 1979, as our red clad hero finds himself in two tales.

The first is a very long but uninvolving team-up with the Black Panther. The second is shorter and stronger as the man without fear finds himself on a train, up against the Beetle and the Gladiator.

Those of an observant nature will know that Christmas was an exciting time for me.

When I say, "Observant," I mean, "Fixated," and, "Prone to stalking," as only such people would know  I spent the Festive Season braving the wilds of Devon.

American visitors to this blog will of course not know the dread reputation Devon has amongst the God-fearing folk of England. What savage terrors I encountered there as I was forced to battle manfully with various wild animals for supremacy.

Needless to say, I was triumphant, managed to get the blanket off the cats on more than one occasion, avoided tripping over a dog and lived to tell the tale.

But who else could have managed such a feat?

Only one man could.

And that man is Ka-Zar: king of the Savage Land.

And so it was that, as I roamed, bare-chested, the fields of Devon, people would often say to me, "Steve, having someone of your fame in our little county's quite an honour but when did you first encounter the loin-clothed loiterer on whom you've clearly based your survival skills?"

And the truth is it was in Mighty World of Marvel #61.

This is a good thing. Mighty World of Marvel #61 holds a special place in my heart. Not only was it one of the earliest comics I collected but its reprint of Incredible Hulk #109 features one of my fave Hulk tales, as the green skinned stirrer lands in the Savage Land and proceeds to make a nuisance of himself before saving the world from a machine that can make it rain a lot.

First of all, of course, he has to fight Ka-Zar.

Frankly, against such opposition, Ka-Zar's totally outclassed.

When I first read the tale, knowing nothing of the character, it didn't strike me just how outclassed he really is but he and Zabu are soon dispatched by the Hulk and left to the tender mercies of the Swamp Men who're in the mood to set light to them.

Frankly that's the least of their worries because it seems some naughty aliens have planted a doomsday machine in the Savage Land and it's in full swing.

What can even the Hulk do to stop such carnage?

It turns out he can't do anything but Bruce Banner can and Bruce battles to sort things out, as a giant robot stomps the land.

It's not hard to see just what the appeal of the tale is. The mixture of the Hulk, prehistoric creatures, jungles, aliens, Tarzan clones and giant robots is a heady and evocative mix. Not only did the tale introduce me to Ka-Zar and Zabu but it introduced me to the Savage Land itself - and Umbu the giant four-armed alien statue with a killer tuning fork.

Herb Trimpe had been drawing the strip for a few issues when this tale started but, for me, this was the tale where he really arrived, his partnership with John Severin hitting its stride to take the title to heights it had rarely even aspired to before but rarely fell from from that moment on.

Within mere weeks, the Hulk would be in outer space battling a giant mouth in space, Betty Ross would be made of glass, the Leader would be back and the strip would exert a grip on me that, even all this time later, those tales still hold. It's not often you can view an individual issue as pivotal in a strip's history but I reckon The Incredible Hulk #109 is more than worthy of that description.

Ka-Zar takes it out on the neighbours!

Ho, Zabu! What strange and new madness befalls the Savage Land?

This kind of madness - because the results are in from Steve Does Comics' poll to discover who's the best jungle lord; Tarzan of the apes or Ka-Zar, lord of the Hidden land!

It was an epic struggle, featuring two characters who think nothing of walking down the street in a loin cloth or of killing everything in sight to prove how great they are.

Still, eventually we got a winner.

And that winner is...

...Tarzan!

That's right, in a decision to send the most rational of jungle lords on an enraged quest to stab even more dinosaurs, you the reader have voted in favour of Tarzan, by a margin of eight votes to four.

Take this, Tibbles! Nothing can stop me now! Nothing!

Sadly, this means Lord Plunder must now settle for being evicted from his tree-house to make way for Lord Greystoke, leaving him to live in a caravan in Morecambe where there's barely a dinosaur in sight but they do have a lovely bird sanctuary for him to terrorise. Those ducks aren't going to know what's hit them.

But oh the bitter shame and disappointment.

The House of Lords. You might think it's full of senile old dodderers - sleeping their way through debates about dog mess - and people who simply bribed their way to a seat. In that case, you've never read  Ka-Zar, Lord of the Hidden Jungle in which you'll see at once the truth about British peers. They might struggle to stay awake through their own speeches but give them a monster to fight, and it's off with the shirt and out with the knife.

There are times when twenty pages seems long enough for a story, and times when it doesn't. This is one of the times when it doesn't. Warned by Reed Richards that seismic disturbances at the South Pole are going to set off a chain of volcanoes whose eruption will destroy the world, Benjamin J Grimm parachutes into the Savage Land and teams up with Ka-Zar, lord of the hidden jungle. They then find themselves up against a would-be super-villain called Volcanus who's going to tap into the power of the erupting volcanoes and turn himself into a being of living flame. Needless to say our heroes soon put a stop to that.

Trouble is they put a very quick stop to that. A stop so quick it makes you wonder if the story was even worth telling at all. In twenty pages there's simply not enough time to establish Volcanus as a major threat - not when the first half of the tale's taken up with the Thing getting to the Savage Land, fighting a pterodactyl, fighting an allosaurus and meeting and swapping notes with Ka-Zar. And so, just as Volcanus leaves no ripples on the lava he ultimately falls into, he leaves no ripples on comic book history. The, "Bad man with a big vehicle invades the Savage Land looking for power/wealth," concept is the standard Ka-Zar plot line and so, on its own, was never going to thrill. That meant it needed an imaginative handling and a memorable villain. It gets neither.

And a dinosaur -- of sorts.

It's a shame, as this is one of the most fondly remembered stories of my childhood and one of the comics I was keenest on getting when I started rebuilding my collection. I mean, on paper - and that's where comic book stories exist - what's not to love about it? It features my favourite pile of talking bricks. It features my favourite lord of the jungle. It features my favourite hidden land that contains dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, it doesn't feature a very interesting story.

To make matters worse, the Thing is completely annoying - spending the first half of the mag cracking an endless stream of unfunny jokes - and the set-piece scene featuring the Thing and Ka-Zar vs an allosaurus is seriously marred by the fact that Ron Wilson's pencils make the allosaurus look more deformed than threatening.

That's not to mention that, at the end of the fight, we get Ka-Zar celebrating, Tarzan-style, at having killed the beast. I don't know, somehow Ka-Zar celebrating killing things doesn't sit right. You sort of feel he should have more respect for dumb animals, even ones that go around trying to eat people.

It was either smoke and mirrors or it was page count and covers but was there anything more exciting in the 1970s than getting your hands on one of Marvel's magnificent monochrome mags?