Shipwrecks and Rescues

Gaylord Du Bois wrote many Tarzan and Korak stories for Dell and Gold Key. He often lifted a plot element or character from ERB's original novels and re-used them in his own stories.

For instance, in the 1940 story "The Quest of Tarzan" (re-titled Tarzan and the Castaways when collected into a book in 1964), Tarzan is injured and temporarily loses the ability to speak. He's captured and caged aboard a ship by villains who intend to make money displaying him as a "wild man." The ship is eventually wrecked upon a reef during a storm, thrusting Tarzan and other survivors into another adventure.

So the "captured and unable to speak" bit was simply to get Tarzan into the larger story. In Korak Son of Tarzan #35 (May 1970), Du Bois and artist Dan Spiegle take this incident away from Tarzan and give it to Korak, once again using it to introduce the protagonist into a larger adventure.

When Korak finds his friend, the ape Akut, a prisoner, he attempts to free him. But he himself is shot by the captors. The bullet grazes his head and leaves him unable to use human speach, though he can still manage ape talk.

As it turns out, Korak's inability to speak is a legacy left over from the Tarzan story, but has no effect on the plot here. It only lasts a few pages until a storm drives the ship onto some rocks. A dunking in the ocean seems to have cured him.

Korak, Akut and a another captive of the slavers named Daniel Moray are the only survivors and manage to salvage a boat. Daniel, it turns out, had fallen into the hands of the slavers while trying to find his son Harry, who had been captured earlier by the same guys.

Well, nobody in the Greystoke family is going to turn down an opportunity to help with a quest like that. When they make it to the coast, they begin to follow a river that should lead them to the guy who bought Harry from the slavers. It's probably a bit of a coincidence that the slaver ship was wrecked near such a convenient spot, but such coincidences are as long a tradition in the Greystoke family as helping those in need.

After some minor adventures, they find the city in which Harry is imprisoned by the local sultan. That panel above, by the way, is a magnificent example of how much fun Spiegle's art could be.

This has been a solid story so far. If I wanted to nit-pick, I could complain that Du Bois waited a little too long before they found Harry. With the page count for the story nearly reached, his rescue from the city goes a little too quickly and smoothly to be as exciting as it could be. But it is still fun to read, with Akut knocking out a guard and Korak knocking out the sultan before they steal the sultan's private plane and make a getaway.

Despite the rushed ending, "The Slave of El-Ghazi" is a solid, straightforward adventure which borrows an element from Tarzan's adventures to use as a jumping-off point for a brand-new tale.

Next week, the Man of Steel teams up with the Boy Wonder.