ERB allowed Tarzan to marry and have children. Of course, ERB also had Tarzan as a British lord who did not have a 9-5 job. (Prior to the Green Hornet, fewer heroes had jobs to balance with their adventures-the Green Hornet worked as a newspaper publisher. Since 1936, more heroes seem to have 9-5 jobs instead of just independent wealth.)
http://lorendiac.livejournal.com/4207.html
(I mentioned in Part 1 that when Edgar Rice Burroughs wanted to give Tarzan a son almost 80 years ago, he introduced the existence of the “baby” at the start of one novel, and then simply jumped forward at least ten years before the start of the next novel, so that we quickly reached the point where “Jack,” now a young adolescent in superb physical condition, could get lost in the African jungle and prove he was a chip off the old block by living off the land and acquiring the catchy nickname of Korak the Killer. But ERB’s characters stayed “creator-owned” during his lifetime, and his family has maintained the final say on Tarzan-related matters ever since. As a general rule, writers of the Corporate-Owned big names in superhero continuity aren’t allowed to skip ahead so fast and furious between installments unless they want it labeled Elseworlds or something. After all, in John Byrne’s first Superman/Batman: Generations storyline, he was able to skip ahead a decade at a time for reasons similar to ERB’s . . . but just try and get away with that in “mainstream continuity” with characters who are supposed to be perpetually twentysomething or thirtysomething years old!)
http://www.toonzone.net/forums/showthread.php?123027-Superhero-Reproduction-Part-1-quot-We-can-t-follow-the-normal-timetable!-quot&highlight=Tarzan
“Continuity within a larger universe of superheroes” and the consistently slow passage of time are the main culprits here. Those are problems previous “action heroes” in other mediums didn’t have to cope with. As an example of how easily raising a child worked out for another Big Name in the action hero business, let us consider the example of one of the earliest and best of the classic “pulp heroes” of the early 20th Century – Tarzan of the Apes, created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. (ERB for short.)
The first four Tarzan novels are:
1. Tarzan of the Apes
2. The Return of Tarzan
3. The Beasts of Tarzan
4. The Son of Tarzan
In #1, Tarzan was born, grew up, met Jane and fell in love with her, and started to get more-or-less integrated into Western culture. (He learned to speak French and English, for starters.)
In #2, Tarzan married Jane at the very end of the book.
#3 started out about two years later, with Tarzan receiving word that their baby son Jack had just been kidnapped. This was mainly a plot device to give Tarzan and Jane ample excuse to run all over the place, seeking revenge on the master villain who had arranged the kidnapping. Eventually the kid turned up, safe and sound, of course, having basically spent the entire novel “offstage” where he wouldn’t slow down the action of the plot by needing his diapers changed or a fresh bottle of milk heated for him every few hours.
#4 started out by re-introducing a villain who had been the sidekick of the master villain in #’s 2 and 3, stating that the master villain had now been dead for “ten years” (ever since the final scenes of #3). Jack ended up being abducted and living in the jungle (following in his father’s footsteps, of course) for awhile as an incredibly strong and resourceful adolescent boy. After all, he was the title character this time!
See how neatly it worked? All that messy stuff about nine months of pregnancy, followed by the actual delivery, followed by at least the first few months of Jack’s life as an infant before his kidnapping, magically occurred when we weren’t looking, somewhere in between the final chapter of #2 and the opening chapter of #3. But ERB simply skipped right over those “two years” because there was nothing breathtakingly exciting about them from his point of view. And after the loving parents got the baby back, the next decade or so of his life was skipped between #3 and #4! No details about dirty diapers, teaching him to talk, teaching him to read and write, etc., were ever provided. ERB wasn’t interested in telling us all that “mundane” stuff that we could just as easily see and hear and smell at home taking care of our own children or younger siblings, so he skipped ahead to when the Son of Tarzan was old enough to conceivably take care of himself during adventures of his own! (Meanwhile, of course, there was absolutely no sign that the passage of time was reducing Tarzan’s own strength and stamina in any noticeable way that would prevent him from starring in other adventure stories later.)
ERB could do that simply by typing his manuscripts that way. Who was going to stop him? But as a general rule of thumb, the writers on the monthly titles about Superman and Batman and Spider-Man and the X-Men can’t. Why not? Because of this thing called Continuity, and the associated concept of Very Slow Aging in order to keep characters from getting “too old” too fast.
ERB didn’t mind a bit if Tarzan must logically have been aging from his late teens, to his twenties, to his thirties, to his forties, etc., as time went by. He could have Tarzan and his son both fight in World War I; he could have Tarzan (a grandfather by then) fighting again in World War II. ERB could get away with that because he created and owned his own characters, and nobody could second-guess him and “force” him to throw away a story idea because of “continuity problems” it would create regarding the passage of time “in continuity” for dozens of other writers working on a hundred other heroes who were supposedly all living in the “same universe” with Tarzan and all aging at the “same rate.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs (ERB) was one of the first writers of “action hero” material to feel the need to retcon something like this into his leading man’s life. Tarzan fought German soldiers in East Africa in World War I; and it was also established that his son Korak the Killer was old enough to wear a military uniform during that war (airman in the RAF, I believe). A few decades later, ERB had Tarzan wearing a colonel’s uniform in Southeast Asia during World War II. With various of his stories being closely tied to actual historical events, he should have been getting pretty long in the tooth by the 1940s, and even his son Korak should have been pushing fifty or more . . .
But Tarzan, as described in the novel, did not have gray hair and wrinkles, nor had he lost any of his incredible strength and stamina over the years. Toward the end of this novel — Tarzan and the Foreign Legion — Tarzan told some new friends a story about his saving the life of a witch doctor way back when, with the result that the witch doctor had gratefully dosed him with a secret potion that allegedly made the patient “immortal” — in the sense of “ageless — although not “unkillable.”
hope she'll like it!
t: If she's not interested, I can always give some of my comics to my nephew.
