When the Savage Land is threatened, NO BAMBOO CAGE CAN HOLD KA-ZAR – Astonishing Tales #10

Ka-Zar. A big, dumb, primitive blond who talks about himself in the third person. Whose origin tale borrows liberally (or, more accurately, outright steals) from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. What else can you really say about the guy? Not that I don’t think that he has his charm, mind you. He’s noble. He has his own dinosaur-infested realm, the Savage Land. And, lest we forget, HE HAS A SABER-TOOTHED TIGER PAL/PARTNER. Zabu trumps your lapdog. Or anything that can fit in a purse.

I was never much of a fan of Ka-Zar when he’d be thrown into more modern settings (I reserve that enthusiasm for Conan when he’s vaulted into a megalopolis like 1970s NYC). But him defending his native domain against the never-ending phalanx of douches that sought to plunder/purloin/colonize it never gets all that old for me. I should get bored to death with this trope, but I don’t. (I think I know the reason for that. I’ll get to it towards the end of this.) And this comic has more of the same.

This issue (written by Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway, with art from Barry (Windsor-) Smith and Sal Buscema) presents a new twist on an old thoroughly mined historical oddity. Remember those Japanese soldiers on isolated Pacific islands that didn’t know that World War II had been over for years? The gaunt, die-hard true believers that crawled out of holes like Morlocks and squinted at the unfamiliar rising sun (OH THE IRONY) and found out that all that they had held out for was gone? This comic doubles down on that, presenting us with U-Boat and British crews that destroyed each other’s vessels, found themselves marooned in the Savage Land (which is in Antarctica, which means World War II truly deserved that moniker), interbred with the natives, and now carry the war on to the next generation.

But there’s a twist — yes, a twist on a twist. Before that, though…

OMG HERE’S KA-ZAR AND ZABU STABBING AND BITING A SEA-MONSTER:

The spent Ka-Zar and companions wash up amongst the German contingent. How can you tell they’re German? Well, they say so, but apart from the Meins and such, the head Hun wears a monocle. Monocles don’t necessarily equal “German,” but there’s a good chance that anyone wearing one has some lederhosen in a drawer somewhere:

Note: The word “Nazi” is never mentioned in this story. Nor is there ever a swastika on display. Just saying.

The twist in this whole thing is that the two sides aren’t necessarily the enemies that they make themselves out to be, as the older members of both sides have lost their marbles Bridge on the River Kwai-style and have perpetuated the war amongst their children to toughen them up (or something). And this twist is, to harken to another bridge movie, a bridge too far. It’s preposterous. It’s unacceptable to the reader — at least this one. But it does give us Ka-Zar (who stumbles onto these shenanigans and gets thrown into the bamboo hoosegow) straining against his bonds in a most muscular manner, as earlier seen on the Gil Kane/Joe Sinnott cover:

Okay, okay. We hear you.

The story ramps up to a doubly unlikely ending, with the Savage Land threatened with destruction and a confrontation on the edge of a volcano (Volcanoes are treacherous story elements. See: Joe Versus the Volcano.). Zabu is the one to save the day, but then almost falls into the fiery magma. This sends Ka-Zar into a ohmygodohmygod tizzy, and leads us into our tear-inducing rescue:

Gerhad is one of the German second generation. I worry about what meaning of love he learned from this, as love can be a pretty broad term. I have images of Canis: Cologne for Dogs dancing in my head.

If there’s one thing that you can learn from this comic, it’s that Zabu is the goddamn star of this show. The STAR. Animals are always the stars. People cry during Dances with Wolves when Two Socks gets killed by the loutish soldiers about a trillion times more than over any of the hellish suffering of the human characters. Put a tame, loyal animal in your plot, especially one that in a normal setting would be dangerous and terrifying, and you have some potential story arc dynamite in your hands. Star dynamite.  Like when Shatner was the purported star of the original Star Trek, but then got insanely jealous when he saw the bags and bags of fan mail that Nimoy was getting. (Not that Spock was a tiger or a wolf. Nor was Nimoy. I don’t think. Anyway, you get the picture.)

I like Zabu, and I wonder if Ka-Zar’s love would allow him to weather the legions of Zabu fans out there, or if he’d bite his fist as he choked on his envy. FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

On the artistic side, this story falls far short of what Roy Thomas can usually offer. Perhaps too many cooks in the kitchen. And there seems to be a lot more Sal Buscema in the art side than the stylings of Barry Windsor-Smith, back in the halcyon days before the latter added the regal middle moniker. If you look close you can see his stuff, though. Get out your magnifying glass.

So. There you go. A random Zabu comic book from the 1970s. With some Ka-Zar in it.