When we left the Lord of the Jungle last week, we were about half-way through a magnificent story arc from the Sunday comic strip. Written and drawn by Russ Manning, this arc ran from February 1971 through April 1972. Jane had escorted two women photographers to the outskirts of Pal-ul-don, the dinosaur-infested Lost World that exists somewhere in Africa. As is typical in any story set in Edgar Rice Burroughs' never-a-dull-moment universe, the women end up deep inside Pal-ul-don.
Tarzan and Joiper (a tiny visitor from the valley of the Ant Men) enter Pal-ul-don to find and rescue the ladies. After a series of fast-paced adventures, Tarzan has rescued the lady photographers (Samie and Carli) but hasn't yet found Jane. What he has found is one of the Waz-don who inhabit Pal-ul-don getting pushed into a pack of hyeanodons by some of his fellow tribesmen.
Tarzan rescues this guy, but he's forced to separate from the girls, who promptly get to themselves get kidnapped by the Waz-don. Trying to keep more than one of his friends un-kidnapped at any one time is sometimes a Sisyphean task for poor Lord Greystoke.
Anyway, the Waz-don he rescued is the high priest at the Waz-don cliff city. The priest had somehow ticked off the chief and been given a death sentence. Tarzan ends up in the city and it soon involved in political shenanigans, which in turn leads him to fight (and win, of course) a duel that makes him chief.
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Pretty much the moment Tarzan takes over, the Ho-don (the light-furred natives who are perpetually fighting the Waz-don) attack. So Tarzan is soon in the midst of a battle involving soldiers mounted atop several different species of prehistoric beasts.
Manning's art work has never been better--the above panels represent the sort of image I can stare at pretty much forever in rapturous awe--and his story has not just been exciting, but also quite sophisticated as we are quickly introduced to new characters and complicated political situations. The exposition never slows up the story and we never lose track of what is going on.
During the battle, Tarzan spots Jane apparently leading the Ho-don's in battle. But Jane does not acknowledge him when he calls out to her. She does, though, order the Ho-don forces to retreat.
At this point, the action moves away from the Ape Man to let us know what has been going on with Jane all these months. In fact, Manning is going to emulate one of the Burroughs' most common storytelling techniques. He breaks away from Tarzan at the cliffhanger moment. He'll catch us up on Jane's story, then break away from her at a cliffhanger moment. Then he'll flash back to Tarzan, showing us what he has been up to since we last so him. Then he'll intersect these two stories at a key moment.
Jane, by the way, is also up to her neck in complex political intrigue. I'm not going to try to summarize the details. The important point is that she's being blackmailed into pretending to be a sun goddess by an evil high priestess.
When she attempts to get the upper hand over the priestess, she ends up getting tossed into an arena to be eaten by saber-tooth tigers. She looks a tad worried in the above panel, doesn't she? But for Jane, a situation like this is usually called "Tuesday."
That's the point we break away from her story and return to Tarzan, recounted his adventure in sneaking into the Ho-don city and ending up in just the right place to launch a last minute rescue of his wife. For Tarzan, this sort of thing is also called "Tuesday."
I'm pretty sure that if you look up the word "awesome" in the dictionary, it shows you the above panel as the definition.
Jane, despite having a broken arm, gets her licks in on the priestess, then she and Tarzan escape from the city, finding a place to rest and heal from their respective wounds.
But what about the two girls? What about Joiper the Ant Man? (And if I was going to criticize this story arc at all, it's that Joiper didn't get much to do during this last half.)
Well, it turns out that Tarzan and Jane are destined for most adventures in Pal-ul-don before they get home. But Manning made his readers wait for that. The next five months of strips would focus on Tarzan's son Korak. The strip would return to Tarzan and Jane in September of 1972 and give us another full years' worth of adventure in Pal-ul-don. I won't promise when, but we'll take a look at those strips eventually.
Next week, though, we'll return to the Wild West for the second of the four adventures featuring the Yankee Lee Hunter and the ex-Confederate Reb Stuart.
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