Tarzan Just Wants to Play with the Baby

Well, that doesn't look much like an adventure magazine, does it? But Blue Book Magazine actually published a lot of cool stuff, including a number of Edgar Rice Burroughs' tales. This issue--cover-dated September 1916--was the first of those publishing the stories that were later collected into The Jungle Tales of Tarzan in 1919.

Jungle Tales is the 6th of the original Tarzan books and the only one to be an anthology of short stories rather than a novel. Over the course of the first five books, Tarzan had married Jane and now had an adult son. (Which, by the way, causes no end of confusion to putting together a timeline for Tarzan's life.) Burroughs, at the time, was thinking that it would be more convenient to get Tarzan involved in adventures if he were single. He would soon try to kill off Jane, but publishers would balk at this and Jane was allowed to live.

But before Burroughs' turned the cross-hairs on poor Jane, he jumped back to Tarzan's days living with the apes. The 12 stories that make up Jungle Tales all fit into Chapter 11 of the first novel, set between the death of Tarzan's ape-mother Kala and Tarzan becoming leader of the apes.

My favorite is the third story, "The Fight for the Balu," published in the November 1916 issue of Blue Book.  I think this is because it is such an effective example of straightforward storytelling.

The story is simple. A she-ape named Teeka has mated with a male named Taug. Both were childhood playmates of Tarzan, so when they have a baby (a balu in the ape language), Tarzan wants to see it and perhaps play with it.

But as a new mother, Teeka reacts to situations on pure instinct--all centered around protecting her baby. She bites Tarzan when he approaches the balu. This involves Taug in the conflict.












What none of the apes realize is that a panther is lurking nearby, waiting for a chance to pounce forward and snatch up the balu while the rest of the apes are distracted...












It's a simple, fun story with Burroughs' doing his usual excellent job of giving us several fun fight scenes. Jungle Tales is an entertaining sort-of "time out" from Tarzan's adult adventures.

You can read it online HERE.