Tuesday, January 18, 2011

If You Blinked You Missed: Young Tarzan in Pizzazz

Greetings, Groove-ophiles! Back during the Groovy Age, companies like Scholastic, Xerox, and Marvel produced magazines with names like Dynamite, Bananas, Smash, and Pizzazz. These periodicals were aimed at tweens and teens and covered pop culture, sports, and school. They usually had puzzles and games, as well as some sort of comics or comics-related material. Marvel's Pizzazz (fall 1977-winter 1978) was a late-comer into the tween/teen mag sweepstakes, but they certainly learned as many lessons from their competitors as possible, producing a slick and lively (and often funny) mag. Best of all, they knew how to use comics. Every issue included a three page Star Wars strip (which Ol' Groove'll share with ya if ya ask real nice) and a variety of humorous comics (ditto). The first eight issues also featured a strip starring Edgar Rice Burroughs Young Tarzan. The first strip was written by Roy Thomas, with David A. Kraft taking over for the remaining eight. Most of them were inked by Ernie Chan. Best of all, each and every one of 'em was penciled (and sometimes inked) by Big John Buscema. You might'a missed it then, baby, but here it is now!







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9 comments:

  1. Mike D.January 18, 2011 at 12:10 AM

    I only had the first one

    ReplyDelete
  2. John Matthew StaterJanuary 18, 2011 at 12:18 AM

    Joe Kubert used to give art lessons in one of those magazines - love it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Edo BosnarJanuary 18, 2011 at 5:21 AM

    These are lovely, thanks. No disrespect to Kubert, but I prefer Buscema's rendering of Tarzan - in fact, I still think Marvel's was the best comic book version of Tarzan.
    Groove: since I think I had only one issue of Pizzazz back in the day, and don't really remember any of it, I'm officially asking real nice - please share those Star Wars strips with us.

    ReplyDelete
  4. FaffJanuary 18, 2011 at 5:57 AM

    Pizzaz was one of those fabled treasures that never reached us here in the UK. All we ever saw was the ads that left us wanting more. These Tarzan strips are fabulous and always good to see Buscema's work he's inked himself.

    Star Wars would be great.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Mike D.January 18, 2011 at 9:07 AM

    @ Edo - in case you're interested. DARK HORSE did a very very Marvel run on TARZAN comics in the mid to late 90's..the artist was Michael Schenk and then I believe Ron Randall took a turn.
    Great stuff. It looked like a continuation from the Marvel stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousJanuary 18, 2011 at 12:15 PM

    Excellent! Thanks a lot. I look forward to seeing the humor and "Star Wars" strips that also ran in "Pizzazz."

    ReplyDelete
  7. BobJanuary 18, 2011 at 2:11 PM

    Thanks! I can't thank you enough -- I'm a huge Tarzan fan and remember those one-pages fondly.

    I've been going through your blog for a couple of weeks, now, and am delighted by seeing so much of my boyhood come alive again. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Mike D.January 19, 2011 at 3:13 PM

    Edo...pardon me. The Dark horse comics were by Christopher Shenk and Lee Weeks....Weeks who is a Kubert student got mixed up in my head with Randall who is also a Kubie....Schenk however...I got mixed up with Michael Schenker from the SCORPIONS...the rock band.
    Look them up you'll like them.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Rafiq RajaFebruary 25, 2012 at 4:03 AM

    Amazing Share. Thanks for feeding us with these Buschema epic, Groovy :)

    ReplyDelete

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Special thanks to Mike's Amazing World of Comics and Grand Comics Database for being such fantastic resources for covers, dates, creator info, etc. Thou art treasures true!


Note to "The Man": All images are presumed copyright by the respective copyright holders and are presented here as fair use under applicable laws, man! If you hold the copyright to a work I've posted and would like me to remove it, just drop me an e-mail and it's gone, baby, gone.


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