Tarzan A to Z | Pellucidar

Tarzan 101 | Tarzan at the Earth's Core

Celebrating Tarzan's 101st anniversary by walking through Scott Tracy Griffin's Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration.

After Tarzan and John Carter, Edgar Rice Burroughs' most recognizable series has to be the Pellucidar saga. He started it in 1913 with At the Earth's Core, which he wrote for the pulp mags after the Tarzan and Carter sequels, The Return of Tarzan and The Gods of Mars. Griffin includes a relatively long chapter on Pellucidar in Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration, tracking the series as well as the whole Hollow Earth concept made popular by the guy who discovered Halley's Comet and of course Jules Verne.

In At the Earth's Core, wealthy mining industrialist David Innes funds a drilling machine invented by a crackpot named Abner Perry. On the machine's first run, the two men wind up stranded in the underground world of Pellucidar, a place populated by prehistoric-like people and creatures including cavefolk, lizard-men, and telepathic pterosaurs. Innes escapes at the end, but is forced to leave behind Perry as well as the beautiful princess Dian he met during his adventures. In the sequel, Pellucidar, Innes returns to the world to rescue his friends.

After Tarzan and the Lost Empire, Burroughs wanted to tie Tarzan into the world of Pellucidar, but before he wrote Tarzan at the Earth's Core, he wrote another Pellucidar novel, Tanar of Pellucidar to get the setting ready for the ape-man's arrival. In Tanar, an inventor named Jason Gridley discovers a new radio frequency that's hosting Abner Perry's distress calls from Pellucidar. Gridley doesn't make it to the Earth's core until he teams up with Tarzan, so the bulk of Tanar is about what Gridley learns from the broadcast: that through a series of adventures Innes and his caveman friend Tanar had been captured by pirates, but that Tanar escaped to let Perry know what was going on.

In Tarzan at the Earth's Core, Gridley recruits Tarzan to help him rescue Innes. Because Burroughs had been told by a bookstore employee that books with aircraft on the covers were popular sellers, the author had Gridley and Tarzan take a zeppelin to Pellucidar. Burroughs was mostly foiled in his plan though by cover artist J. Allen St. John, who rightly preferred a cover scene of Tarzan fighting some gorilla-men. But St. John did put a monoplane on the back cover (seen at the top of this post), so hopefully they got a few extra sales out of that.

Griffin covers the rest of the Pellucidar series, which includes seven Burroughs novels and one, authorized sequel from the '70s, Mahars of Pellucidar by John Eric Holmes. And because Tarzan takes a group of Waziri warriors with him on the rescue mission, Griffin also takes the opportunity to include a chapter on Tarzan's history with the fictional tribe and the use of natives in general in the Tarzan stories.

Elsewhere... the Kill Team introduced themselves

Kill All Monsters! | Meet the Kill Team



All this week at the Kill All Monsters! blog we ran character profiles for the three members of the Kill Team and the organization they work for. They've also been handily collected for your convenience at Review 2 A Kill.

And, of course, three more pages of the comic went up yesterday while two of the monsters went down.

Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs | FX2: The Lost Land



I reviewed a comic that gets closer to the title of my column than any comic I've ever covered there. No gorillas ride any dinosaurs in The Lost Land, but a cowboy does (or a prehistoric reptile anyway). It's a fun story with great art. Don't let its being a sequel keep you away from it. I haven't read the first FX and I never felt...um....lost.

Art Show: Would Someone Get This Big, Dapper Carpet Out of My Way?

A Journey to the Center of the Earth



Artist Unknown. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories, who's got a ton of other great Classics Illustrated covers in the same post. Seriously, if you only click through one link today, this should be the one.]

Hawaiian Dancer



By Katie Shanahan. I just fell in love with her stuff a few days ago, so this post is going to be a bit Shanahan-centric.

Best Friends



By Hannah Christenson. [Art Jumble]

After the break: Batman, a warrior woman, Thor and Co., the Hulk, Daisy Kutter, Steampunk Star Wars, and Fett... Boba Fett.

What Looks Good for Comics in March

This week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs looks at the awesome, new comics coming out in March.

See ... Tiny Gargoyles!
Fear ... Vicious Assassins!
Explore ... Hollow Worlds!
Thrill ... to Viking Warrior-Women!
Marvel ... at the Crack Team of Russian, Gas-Mask Wearing Supernatural Investigators!
Chuckle ... at the Comment: "What's wrong with the cover of Sif #1? You can't see her tits or ass!" (Thanks for that Kirok. Totally made my day.)

"Lord" of the Crystal Bow, My Butt

SSSHHUNK!



By H.W. McCauley.

At the Earth's Core




Both by Frazetta.

"The Man-Killer!"



Pappy's got the whole story.