Tarzan: The Complete Russ Manning Newspaper Strips, Vol. 3: 1971-1974

RUSS MAN NING

$49.99

Photo: Jackie Estrada

(Different in Canada)

®

Russell George Manning (1929–1981) was one of the most admired and influential cartoonists on the West Coast in the 1960s and 1970s. The San Diego ComicCon’s Russ Manning Award is given yearly to the most promising newcomer in the field.

Manning first discovered the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the public library in his boyhood home of Los Altos, California. He studied art at Santa Monica Junior College and the Los Angeles County Art Institute; after serving with the U.S. Army in Japan in the early 1950s, he began drawing comics for Western Publishing, based in Los Angeles. Manning was renowned for his faithful adaptations of the original Tarzan novels and created Magnus, Robot Fighter 4,000 A.D., arguably the 1960s’ most original science fiction comic book series. In addition to Tarzan comic books and the newspaper strip, Manning initiated the Star Wars newspaper strip in 1979.

COMPLETE NEWSPAPER STRIPS

1971 — 1974

EISNER AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST ARCHIVAL COMIC STRIP BOOK “The Library of American Comics has once again given fans another magnificent volume in a reprint series that is becoming a national treasure…. [Russ Manning’s] Tarzan newspaper strip is as exciting an adventure strip as has ever existed…a rich feast for both old and new fans of Burroughs’s work. To read these strips today is to be reminded of the best that an action strip can be. This is comic art at its finest.” — Mark Squirek, The New York Journal of Books

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RUSS MANNING VOLUME THREE: 1971-1974

The New York Journal of Books called Russ Manning “a stunning artist.” This third volume of a four-book set collecting his entire run of the Tarzan newspaper strip is reproduced from the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate file copies—and presents the final two daily storylines, plus four extended Sunday adventures.

In the dailies from August 2, 1971 through July 29, 1972, Tarzan returns to the Earth’s core, while Korak plays guide on the dangerous white water river. In the Sundays from January 24, 1971 through March 17, 1974, Tarzan travels to Pal-ul-don and Korak enters the City of Xuja.

EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS™

TARZAN VOLUME THREE: 1971-1974

IDW PUBLISHING

San Diego

®

OTHER BOOKS IN THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS EDITED AND DESIGNED BY

Dean Mullaney • ASSOCIATE EDITOR Bruce Canwell

Lorraine Turner Henry G. Franke III • MARKETING DIRECTOR Beau Smith

ART DIRECTOR AND SUNDAY PAGE RESTORATION CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

IDW Publishing, a Division of Idea and Design Works, LLC 5080 Santa Fe Street, San Diego, CA 92109 • www.idwpublishing.com • LibraryofAmericanComics.com Ted Adams, Chief Executive Officer/Publisher • Greg Goldstein, Chief Operating Officer/President Robbie Robbins, EVP/Sr. Graphic Artist • Chris Ryall, Chief Creative Officer/Editor-in-Chief • Matthew Ruzicka, CPA, Chief Financial Officer Alan Payne, VP of Sales • Dirk Wood, VP of Marketing • Lorelei Bunjes, VP of Digital Services

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ISBN: 978-1-61377-982-8 • First Printing, June 2014 Special thanks to Thomas Yeates (of the Apes) for his encouragement, enthusiasm, and friendship; Jim Sullos and Cathy Wilbanks at ERB, Inc. for making this possible; Tyler Wilbanks at ERB, Inc. for his dedication in locating and scanning the best possible copies of the strips in the ERB archives; Bill Stout for his insights and use of the photo on page 11; Mike Royer for his insights and use of the photo on page 11; Jackie Estrada for providing the dustjacket photograph of Russ Manning from the 1976 San Diego Comic-Con; Jennifer Bawcum for the photo on page 11; Rick Norwood for his always expert advice; Ken Webber, Mike Conran, and Dennis Wilcutt for their research; and to Melissa Manning for supplying the photos on pages 6, 7, and 17.

Edgar Rice Burroughs ™ and Tarzan ® owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. and used by permission. © 2014 Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The Library of American Comics is a trademark of The Library of American Comics LLC. All rights reserved. Introduction © 2014 Henry G. Franke III. With the exception of artwork used for review purposes, none of the comic strips in this publication may be reprinted without the permission of ERB, Inc. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information and retrieval system, without permission in writing from ERB, Inc. Printed in Korea.

THE DAY THE TARZAN DAILIES ENDED

by HENRY G. FRANKE III In the 1968 annual poll of the Academy of Comic-Book Fans and Collectors, Tarzan came in second for best newspaper adventure strip, behind only Dick Tracy but ahead of The Phantom and Steve Canyon. It was a gratifying acknowledgment for both Russ Manning and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. that Manning had successfully resuscitated the series just a year earlier. The mainstream popularity of traditional newspaper adventure comic strips and comic books, however, was on the decline.

The 1970s opened with major social and economic turmoil in the United States. The Vietnam War framed public unrest and cultural changes in the country. Adventure comics were steadily becoming a victim of changing tastes.

Television had also clearly eclipsed comics as the leading purveyor of serial fiction. Both Manning and ERB, Inc. were concerned that United Features Syndicate was not adequately promoting the Tarzan daily and Sunday strips, nor actively pursuing more U.S. newspapers to subscribe to it.

Manning had a good relationship with Robert M. (Bob) Hodes, ERB’s general manager and vice-president, who had made the decision in 1967 to hire Manning to replace artist John Celardo. Manning wrote Hodes in September 1971 about a family road trip to Corpus Christi, Texas, “stopping all along the way to get copies of local newspapers. Not once, on the entire trip, did we find a newspaper with Tarzan in it.” While on this vacation the

cartoonist even tried to approach the owner of the newspaper in San Angelo, Texas, with the idea of influencing several Texas papers under his management to pick up the strip. He had no luck reaching the owner/publisher, but ironically the paper asked Manning for an interview.

While the strip was not a major seller to newspapers in the U.S., it did very well outside the country. Manning’s Tarzan strips received high praise around the world. His style was popular in overseas markets, notably Europe and Latin America. ERB’s income from these overseas licenses more than offset the stagnant subscriber list at home.

sssss Of concern to Manning was that growing inflation during the Nixon Administration meant that the cost of living and the expense to create the strip could quickly outstrip his income. The cartoonist was an independent contractor hired by ERB, Inc. Through the years Manning would refer to a September 14, 1967 letter with ERB, Inc., laying out the conditions of his work, as his official contract. He maintained regular correspondence with ERB, Inc. and would visit their offices in Tarzana, seventy miles from his home and studio in Orange County.

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He made it clear that his was a battle of balancing creativity and quality of the strips against the cost to produce them, which meant that he had to decide how much time he could invest in the strips. As an independent contractor he also had no health insurance, workman’s compensation, or pension. The workload and constant deadlines led Manning to hire assistants, but this came out of his paycheck, not from ERB, Inc. or UFS, so he had to be judicious in bringing on help. In 1969 Mike Royer—after working with Manning for four years, including the first two years of the newspaper strips—left for better paying work. To keep things running smoothly ERB, Inc. gave Manning the raise he requested in late 1969 to hire another assistant.

In an early version of “product placement” the cartoonist figured out a way

he might benefit from his Tarzan work beyond the standard paycheck for the strips. Manning always loved the water, boating, and fishing, and in July 1971 phoned both Evinrude Motors and Zodiac of North America, following up with both through formal correspondence. He told them that he was beginning a new storyline in the daily strip starting on August 23rd of that year, to run for at least twelve weeks—Korak, the son of Tarzan, would accompany a film crew traveling on expedition upriver in Africa in inflatable boats powered by outboard motors.

“The boats and motors would be featured in nearly every scene,” he explained.

They would be “illustrated accurately and realistically, using actual models if supplied.” Trademarks and emblems would be shown, if possible. There would be no failures in boat or engine; all units would be portrayed as reliable and without fault. He reminded both companies that the strip was syndicated worldwide, with approximately thirty million readers.

He asked Evinrude for a 25-horsepower motor “to use as a model in the production of the strip, and for my personal use thereafter, in return for the display and promotion.” Late in July he told Zodiac, manufacturer of inflatable boats, that he would feature their Mark II and Mark V models in the strip. He asked that a Mark II be sent to him “for photographic purposes, and to be kept for his private use after its usefulness in the comics strip is complete.” He received the inflatable boat at his home on July 26th, assembled it, and had already begun taking photos of it that same day. His contact with Evinrude and Zodiac was no secret to ERB, Inc. He furnished copies of all of his correspondence to ERB, Inc., and even referred both companies to ERB, Inc. in case they wished to negotiate for the use of these particular strips in public relations or sales campaigns.

Manning’s success in acquiring the Zodiac boat is a favorite story of his daughter, Melissa, who fondly recalls her father taking photos of wife Dodie in the boat, up on blocks in their front yard, as she modeled for images to be included in the Korak storyline. Family vacations centered for many years on Punta Banda (on the coast of Baja California, Mexico), and the Zodiac boat and its outboard engine were mainstays all those years. The storyline “Korak and the

Left: Russ Manning receives the Inkpot Award at the 1974 San Diego Comic-Con. Opposite left: The cartoonist on vacation in Punta Banda with his new Zodiac boat and Evinrude motor, October 1971.

Opposite right: Russ and his mother, Opal, on the road with his truck, camper, and the always-inflated Zodiac boat. “He took that thing everywhere,” recalls daughter Melissa. (photos courtesy Melissa Manning) 6

White Water Runner” in this volume shows Manning was true to his word to Zodiac and Evinrude (see pages 28-29).

sssss Despite the travails of income and changing markets for the Tarzan strips in the U.S., the early 1970s were good years for Tarzan worldwide and Bob Hodes continued with his business strategy begun in the late 1960s. Part of that strategy concerned the Tarzan comic book. Graphic Story World, edited by Richard Kyle, reported in its July 1971 edition that Gold Key would publish its last issue of Tarzan of the Apes with the December 1971 issue. ERB, Inc. decided to change publishers because they had been dissatisfied with the series once Manning had left. ERB, Inc. was now aiming for “a more mature audience” and a publisher “faithfully portraying ERB’s characters and backgrounds.” (The license would eventually go to DC Comics.) To offer those mature audiences another graphical interpretation of the ape-man, Hodes had edited an illustrated adaptation of Burroughs’s original Tarzan of the Apes, blending the novel and ERB’s words with new art by Burne Hogarth, eventually published as a hardcover book by Watson-Guptill in 1972. Kyle also reported an upsurge in Manning’s

newspaper strip overseas, noting that a writer in Japan would novelize some of Manning’s storylines.

Sales on the newspaper strip, however, remained flat. In a letter to ERB, Inc. in May 1972, Manning wrote that “Tarzan is the most popular adventure strip in papers it runs in. I’ve been told repeatedly, and am convinced that the excitement, interest, and story-telling of my Tarzan strip is the equal of any in the newspapers…yet it is no crashing success. The best that can be hoped for is that hanging in there, trying every combination of story, art, and character, will suddenly be in sync with time and cycle.”

Manning explained to Hodes that he had again reached the point where he needed to hire competent help and that inflation had wiped out the benefit of the raise he had previously received in 1969. He also recognized that there might not be enough income from the strips to warrant the requested raise, but Manning reminded Hodes that he was the only person writing and drawing an adventure comic strip at the time without help. The president of UFS confirmed to the cartoonist that foreign sales sustained the strips, which prompted Manning, ever the professional, to ask Hodes if he should “emphasize tales that appeal most to those areas…and what does appeal there?”

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Above and opposite: Always on deadline, Manning at his drawing board. (photos by Clay Miller)

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The requested raise did not materialize, but Bob Hodes had a different proposition for the writer/artist. Hodes had toyed with the idea of ERB, Inc. publishing its own comic books in the U.S., but decided to license Tarzan to DC Comics. He had more ambitious plans for the illustrated Tarzan overseas. Reprints of the Tarzan and Korak comic books, in addition to original stories created by local writers and artists, sold well abroad and had been doing so for many years. Untapped, Hodes told Manning, was another comic-based medium—the longer-form dubbed the “graphic album.” The term applied to a variety of publication formats, but in general they were different from standard comic books in that they usually ran forty to sixty pages or more, often with a single extended storyline or linked set of shorter stories, printed slightly larger than regular comic-book dimensions on high-quality paper stock, often in hardcover. Belgian artist Hergé’s Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, published in 1930, is the most prominent early example of the graphic album. By the early 1970s Hugo Pratt’s epic Corto Maltese series set the standard in Europe for all adult adventure comics of the decade.

This format was virtually unknown in the U.S. at the time. ERB, Inc. envisioned higher incomes with a new outlet for Tarzan stories that would be co-produced through their regular licensees in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. Hodes was also instituting his plan to reduce ERB, Inc.’s reliance on middlemen. The company would directly take on production of these albums. Manning was a critical part of the plan, as he would create extended forty-six-page stories in their entirety—scripting, layout, penciling, inking, lettering, coloring, and post-production—by himself or with hired help. Eventually the understanding was that an album meant forty-six pages of story, a title page, and the covers, as well as endpapers.

This represented an exciting creative challenge for Manning. He originally signed up to create six albums, with the expectation of a quarterly or better production schedule. In a 1975 interview with Shel Dorf he remarked that one of the joys of the newspaper strip was “the chance to wing it as you go, increasing the possibility of unexpected tension and accidents. But the 46-page Tarzan albums are a whole ’nother bucket of worms. I’ve just finished number four, and I’ve had to do some pioneering in this format, since these Tarzan books are among the very first of a new breed. 46 pages is long…much too long to handle like a 15- to 20-page comic book story, and certainly not like a meandering comic strip.”

He enthusiastically continued, “A good album must be carefully crafted, with definite pacing of storyline, information, density, characterizations, and, where possible, even color. I’m still learning about this format, of course, but the way I’m handling them seems to have evolved into something closer to movie-making than to any of the usual methods of comic book/strip creation. I block out a rather complete plot and page breakdown, then begin writing and illustrating anywhere I feel like it

throughout the 46 pages. If, in writing and illustrating a certain sequence, I feel it needs emphasis, it gets more pages than shown on the storyboard…realizing, of course, that there must be a corresponding reduction elsewhere. Then, as completion nears, and even after completion, it becomes necessary to edit. And I must admit, there have been outtakes—on the studio floor—panels, pages, that didn’t fit or were too irrelevant. Wasteful, perhaps, but this method allows the maximum freedom to create. These albums are very exciting to do. They are a real challenge, trying to realize the potential inherent in this, the next logical step for first-class graphic stories.”

In early 1972, when Manning and Hodes negotiated the terms to create the Tarzan albums, a critical aspect of their agreement was for a payment in advance of the start of each album, followed by payments in installments, so that Manning could hire “competent assistance.” Manning could also use these assistants to help on the Sunday strips, as his studio would be the hub to produce both projects. He was allowed to keep the original artwork for the albums, which he couldn’t for the newspaper strips.

To maintain a quarterly production of the albums Manning planned to interweave work on these with the Sunday pages. He would concentrate on the Sundays for several weeks in order to get ahead of the UFS deadlines, then devote two months to an album.

sssss The victim in this scheme was the Tarzan daily. The continuous deadlines for the six-days-a-week daily could not be reasonably accommodated when he started creating the albums. In a 1972 issue of Graphic Story World, Manning commented: “It’s impossible for a single person to write and draw an adventure strip, daily and Sundays, over several years. The workload becomes too great.” His expected income for the albums would also exceed what he earned for the daily.

Manning had not planned for the daily to end forever in 1972. To fulfill newspaper subscriptions when Manning closed out his last daily strip, UFS had scheduled six months of reprints, beginning with the 1947 Burne Hogarth/Dan Barry daily strip adaptation of ERB’s original novel, Tarzan at the Earth’s Core.

On July 3, 1972 Manning reported to Hodes that he would deliver the last daily Tarzan strips to UFS the next week. By August 1st he planned to start work on the first Tarzan quarterly. He noted that advances and time payments would speed up production and allow him to “hire high-quality assistance that will be necessary” to stay on schedule.

In fact, Manning delivered the first three pages for the premiere album on July 21st. The project was on its way.

Meeting timelines quickly became a challenge. Confusion over production standards, increasing fees for production materials, and many revisions to the artwork led to significant delays and mounting costs. Originally the plan was to have six albums

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completed before the publication of the first one. The long-range vision of Bob Hodes was a series of albums published in hardcover that would have an enduring availability for purchase—“to be on sale forever.” Instead, it took Manning eight months to complete the first album, Tarzan in the Land That Time Forgot. Coloring was completed on March 31, 1973, with some postproduction work still necessary. The final version of the album was delivered to ERB, Inc. on April 11th. Manning’s original tale brought Tarzan into another one of ERB’s unique lost lands, the prehistoric island of Caspak.

The graphic albums required a higher standard of artwork and coloring because they were printed on quality paper instead of newsprint. Russ Manning was one of the first in the United States to adopt the Europeanstyle coloring method to ensure better color. Bill Stout, who was assisting Manning at the time on the daily and Sunday Tarzan strips, colored the first two graphic albums. In this method, each page of original black-and-white art was photographed to create a film negative. The image was then printed

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in black on a sheet of clear acetate, as well as in pale blue ink on white cardstock paper. This “blueline” was then colored by hand with markers and gouache. To check the results of coloring, the black-and-white acetate was taped over the painted blueline so that they would be in register with each other. The color separations would be shot from the blueline paintings.

The acetate provided the solid black separation, which made the black print crisp and clean.

Based on his research of European formats, Manning had assumed dimensions for the first album closer to regular European comic book production, but he miscalculated. Eventually the precious original artwork would have to be shipped overseas to the publishers to help them work out formats. In the beginning Manning also created artwork at a level commensurate with printing on lower quality paper. As the first album was close to completion, Bob Hodes confirmed with Manning that the aim was to produce quality albums, not comic books. Manning thus put even more

Below: Manning with his assistant Dave Stevens (center) and San Diego Comic-Con co-founder Shel Dorf (far right). (photo courtesy Jennifer Bawcum) Right top: Mike Royer working on two Tarzan Sunday pages—#2260 (June 30, 1974) on the drawing board, and #2259 (June 23, 1974) to his left, both from the storyline, “Return to Castra Sanguinarius.” (photo courtesy Mike Royer) Right bottom: Bill Stout and Royer outside Manning’s studio. (photo courtesy Bill Stout)

Opposite: For the European graphic albums, after a page of the original black-and-white art was photographed, the image was printed on a sheet of acetate (left) and colored on a blueline (center). The acetate and the colored blueline were then combined for the final printed art. (images courtesy Bill Stout) 11

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