Comic strip Sunday with Russ Manning

As always we are a bit late for Russ Manning´s anniversary but going over the list of birthdays from the last days it was one of the few that was worthy of a new post and we already had a few dedicated to the late Don Heck. Since we already covered Russ Manning´s creation science fiction hero MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER extensively in last year´s homage post we journey back to the days when Afrika was still called the Dark Continent.

Now I am not saying that my reading taste is especially eclectic ( which anybody who follows this blog over a certain period of time can attest to because I am most often very fond of comics or runs most comicbook afficionados wouldn´t touch with a ten foot pole ) but as far as the comicbook adaptions of Tarzan are concerned I stray from the norm.

Apparently most people prefer either Burne Hogarth or Joe Kubert while I was always a Russ Manning fan. My movie Tarzan was Johnny Weissmüller and my comic Tarzan was drawn by Russ Manning. I guess I just have a thing for a clear style and his slick linework, strong composition and dynamic storytelling appealed to be before I even knew why I liked it.

When I started my comicbook reading career superhero comics hadn´t the stranglehold on the industry they have now so they were just a small part of the cake. Marvel Comics had just started a few years ago and here in Germany they only published a handful of series so everyone could afford to read the complete Williams Verlag line. Because of that comicbooks served all kind of genres from horror to fantasy, funny, science fiction, western, funny, pirates etc. Russ Manning worked in a few of these fields but he´s most famous for his association of Edgar Rice Burroughs´ Lord of the Jungle - he drew most of the TARZAN and KORAK pocketbooks I read as a kid - as well as his MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER for Gold Key Comics.

Now as usual I have tried to find the color pages that go with the original art and while some are not of good quality I did find most of them. The exception are the pages from Tarzan and the Beastmaster and Tarzan and the Savage Pelucidar which were produced for the european market.