Böcker av Edgar Rice Burroughs

Previously available only to subscribers of the Edgar Rice Burroughs website, Tarzan of the Apes is at last available in print.Presented in Sunday newspaper landscape format in a handsome hardcover edition, these adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic tales are scripted by comics legend Roy Thomas and illustrated by Pablo Marcos. Presenting the origin of the Jungle Lord and his earliest adventures, any Tarzan comics collection begins with Tarzan of the Apes.

As vacation time approached, Dick and Doc had become as hard as nails and as active as a couple of manus, which you will know, if your education has not been neglected, is the ape-word for monkeys. Then it was that the big surprise came in a letter that Dick received from his mother. Tarzan of the Apes had invited them all to visit him and spend two months on his great African estate! The boys were so excited that they talked until three o'clock the next morning and flunked in all their classes that day.

For the twenty-second time since the great wave had washed him from the steamer's deck and hurled him, choking and sputtering, upon this inhospitable shore, Waldo Emerson saw the sun sinking rapidly toward the western horizon. Suddenly Waldo became conscious from the corner of his eye that something was creeping upon him from behind out of the dark cave before which he had fought. Simultaneously with the realization of it he swung his cudgel in a wicked blow at this new enemy as he turned to meet it. The creature dodged back and the blow that would have crushed its skull grazed a hairbreadth from its face. Waldo struck no second blow and the cold sweat sprang to his forehead when he realized how nearly he had come to murdering a young girl. She crouched now in the mouth of the cave, eying him fearfully. Waldo removed his tattered cap, bowing low. "I crave your pardon," he said. "I had no idea that there was a lady here. I am very glad that I did not injure you." But now his attention was required by more pressing affairs -- the cave men were returning to the attack. They carried stones this time, and, while some of them threw the missiles at Waldo, the others attempted to rush his position. It was then that the girl hurried back into the cave, only to reappear a moment later carrying some stone utensils in her arms.

At the end of A PRINCESS OF MARS, the first volume in Burroughs's Mars series, John Carter managed to get the factory that produces oxygen for Barsoom working again -- and collapsed. When he came to, he found himself back on earth, and separated from his beloved Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Helium. It's a decade later when Carter returns to Barsoom, and he finds himself in that part of the planet that the natives consider to be "heaven" -- which is no heaven at all. Carter has to reunite with his friend the fierce green warrior Tars Tarkas, fight with plant men and the great white apes of Barsoom, violate some significant religious taboos, survive the affections of an evil goddess, foment a slave revolt, fight in an arena, and still save Dejah Thoris in the middle of a giant air battle between the red, green, black and white people of Barsoom. . . . High adventure, Martian style.

At the start of this volume, Tarzan knows his inheritance as an English lord, but is determined to hide that since he truly believes that his cousin, William Cecil Clayton, would make a better lord and husband for his beloved Jane. He gets involved with a married Russian countess (there's a plan! -- oh, sure) who has issues with her criminal brother (Nicholas Rokoff -- a real villain, naturally, who becomes a regular in the series) and her older husband. As a consequence of his interaction with brother, Tarzan is lured into a room where he is attacked by a dozen Paris muggers. The scene that details this mugging is one of the great chapters in the literature of muggings. Tarzan fondly recalls his childhood and his foster ape mother with a friend, D'Arnot: "To you my friend, she would have appeared a hideous and ugly creature, but to me she was beautiful -- so gloriously does love transfigure its object."

A ship's mutiny forces a young noble English couple out onto the African coast, and their child is born in the wild. When they die a short time later, the boy is adopted by an ape, and raised as her own. The boy, Tarzan, rises to dominance in the jungle . . . TARZAN OF THE APES is Edgar Rice Burroughs's exploration of mankind a it's seen from the perspective of a man reared outside civilization, and the insights he offers are often not flattering. Tarzan has all the features we look for in a hero -- he is handsome, brave, and stronger than any ordinary man. But he is an arrogant loner, prone to violence. TARZAN OF THE APES explores that which is within all of us, the primal drives and abilities that made for our survival -- Burroughs created a hero who, because of his immense potential and truly unique upbringing -- became a believable SUPERMAN. Burroughs told the tale in engaging prose which still sweeps us along.

In the previous volume, the Lord of the Jungle discovered the burnt corpse of his wife, Jane, after a visit to his African home by German soldiers. (One suspects that Burroughs never did like Jane; this sort of thing happened to her a lot.) In this volume, Tarzan learns that Jane was not murdered by the Germans but kidnaped -- and sets off in pursuit. As the novel begins, Tarzan has spent two months tracking his mate to Pal-ul-don ("Land of Men"), a hidden valley in Zaire, where he finds a land dinosaurs and men even stranger -- humanoids with tails. Ta-den is a hairless, white-skinned, Ho-don warrior; O-mat is a hairy, black skinned, Waz-don, chief of the tribe of Kor-ul-ja. In this new world Tarzan becomes a captive -- but he impresses his captors so well that they name him Tarzan-Jad-Guru ("Tarzan the Terrible"). Meanwhile, a second visitor has come to Pal-ul-don -- wearing only a loin cloth and carrying an Enfield rifle along and a long knife. Pal-ul-don is where Jane is being held captive, of course. . . .

A unit of German soldiers stumble on the estate of John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, in British East Africa in the fall of 1914. Tarzan and his son, Korak, are away, and Jane -- Lady Jane -- does not know that war has broken out between German and the British Empire. She welcomes them to her home. Meanwhile, Tarzan learns of the war in Nairobi and hurries home only to find the smoking ruins of his estate. Wasimbu, the son of Muviro, has been nailed to the wall, and the rest of the natives are all dead. Tarzan also finds the charred body of his wife, recognizable only by the rings on her fingers. Cursing the Germans, Tarzan swears vengeance and head into the wild, seeking revenge. During a tremendous thunderstorm, Tarzan kills a leopard -- and the Lord of the Jungle has returned . . . This is not your typical Burroughs yarn, where the hero pursues his beloved across a dangerous environment -- not at all.

As THE BEASTS OF TARZAN begins, Tarzan -- as Lord Greystoke -- is settled in civilized London. But two of his enemies, Nikolas Rokoff and henchman Alexis Paulvitch, are on his trail. The pair abducts Jane -- and Tarzan's son, Jack. Tarzan himself is stranded on a desert island, but with the help of Sheeta the panther and Akut the great ape he makes it back to the mainland. There he meets Mugambi, the giant chief of the Wagambi tribe, who becomes Tarzan's lifelong friend and ally. The group heads into the deep jungle after the kidnappers -- and when Tarzan finds them he lets the beast inside him wreck his vengeance. There's a beautiful irony, here -- Tarzan has come from the jungle into civilization, and his son must go from civilization to the jungle.

When Abner Perry invents a vehicle that essentially drills through the earth, he takes it to his good friend (and independently wealthy man about town) David Ennis. And what else can they do? Drill down into the earth, of course. What they find there isn't what we'd expect: it's an inner world called Pellicidar, a place where the sun neither sets nor rises -- because what appears to be the sun is no sun at all, but the molten core of the earth. Pellucidar is a great fun fantasy world, full of dragons, apes, and reptiles and Weird Things. It's ruled by sorcerous royalty (the princess falls in love with Our Hero, of course) and of course our heros end up hip-deep in dragons. . . .

. . . . between Tarzan's avenging of his ape foster mother's death and his becoming leader of his ape tribe. In JUNGLE TALES OF TARZAN, Burroughs gives us an Ape-Man who might have fit in a television sitcom or a domestic drama. We see a Tarzan whose character is barely hinted at in the events of Tarzan on the Apes -- this is a collection of stories that take place in the same years as that first novel, but show us a very different aspect of Tarzan. We see "Tarzan's First Love," a tale of a teenage Tarzan with a distracting crush on a big-but-beautiful female gorilla called Teeka. The Ape-Man (well, boy, actually) declares his love for her and battles a childhood friend for her favor. But in the end he comes to understand that some things are Just Not Meant To Be, and forsakes his childhood heart-throb . . . In "The God of Tarzan," the Ape-Man asks himself the meaning of life -- and attempts to track down God in the same way that he would follow the spoor of a wounded deer. In "Tarzan Rescues the Moon," Tarzan sees a lunar eclipse and in his efforts to rescue the moon, shoots arrows into the moon until the moon re-emerges from the eclipse. In the end, it's Tarzan's struggle to find real meanings in the world around him that distinguish him from the apes who are his adoptive kin -- and make him as fascinating today as he was a hundred years ago.

Here Tarzan returns to Opar, the source of the gold for lost Atlantis. Ages ago Atlantis sunk beneath the waves -- but the denizens of Opar still mine the gold of this lost colony. Tarzan, following greedy pair -- one Belgian, one Arab -- into the jungle, where they stumble into the lost city. Bad enough -- and then Tarzan injures his head in a fight and loses his memory. That's great news for La, the high priestess for the Flaming God, who's had a serious crush on the apeman since their first encounter. But the priests who work for her have other ideas: they don't intend to allow Tarzan to escape their sacrificial knives a second time.