Savage Tales #6 - Marvel

I'm still in a savage mood, so I thought we'd continue with Marvel's other savage magazine, Savage Tales! Garrrr!!

First off--beauty of a cover by Neal Adams(gee, how many times have I typed that?)--exciting, drawn within an inch of its life, and brilliantly composed. It took me, like, a full minute after looking at this to discover the wooly mammoth about to stomp on our buxom damsel in distress! (women's shirts on Marvel b/w covers never seem to have much structural integrity)

After an uncredited pin-up on the inside cover(on first blush, I'd say it looks like John Romita inked by Marie Severin; since they were both Marvel staffers I imagine they needed to throw a page together quickly, and who better than the legendart Romita and Severin to do it?), we open with the lead Ka-Zar story, "The Damnation Plague!" by Gerry Conway, John Buscema, and Tony DeZuniga.

The story involves a plague(duh) that infects Ka-Zar's Savage Land home, and he races to find the people infected and contain it. We also get a re-cap of Ka-Zar's origin, all wonderfully executed by Buscema and DeZuniga. The only problem is--the story stops mid-stream. Why? Well, according to an editorial at the bottom of the final page, a kidney infection sidelined DeZuniga, and he couldn't complete inking the rest of the story!

So Marvel was forced to slot a reprint in place of the second half of the Ka-Zar story, putting the lie to the "All-New Adventures" blurb on the cover, which Marvel cops to.

After this unusual sequence of events, we get an editorial about Ka-Zar courtesy Roy Thomas, a history of Marvel's newest feature, Brak the Barbarian, and then "Fangs of the Black Orchid!" by unknown, Al Wiliamson, and Ralph Mayo, reprinted from Jann of the Jungle #16(1957). While I would've preferred to see the second half of Ka-Zar, you do get some nice Williamson art and a guy almost eaten by a giant plant, so that should count for something.

Next is "Dragonseed" starring Marok the Merciless, by Len Wein and Steve Gan. Mark demands an old wizard use his powers to give him an army to plunder with, but he finds that you sometimes don't want what you think you do. It ends with a sort of EC-esque "gag" ending which I found fairly funny, since it has an ironic quality not seen in most of these "savage adventure" type stories.

Ka-Zar is back in the next story, "The Night of the Looter!" by Stan Lee and Buscema, reprinted from Savage Tales #1(boy, that "all-new adventures" is really taking a beating.) A man and a woman invade the Savage Land in a tank(!) looking for treasure, convincing a group of ape-like savage men that they are gods and they must do their bidding. When Ka-Zar attempts to stop them, the woman tries to seduce Ka-Zar(getting almost nude in the process, Buscema drawing one of his most sultry villainesses), but he doesn't fall for it, and rejects her.

They try again, but the treasure that is Vibranium melts their tank(!!) and the ape-men suddenly realize these two are not "gods", and drag the woman away. Now this is where things get grim, as the woman, Carla, is dragged away, the husband goes after her, realizing his folly.

When he and Ka-Zar find her, she is facing down in a pool of water, dead, and naked. Now, she wasn't naked when she was kidnapped, so....yeesh! Stan Lee wrote this? A solid adventure/morality tale, but also a fine example that Marvel was willing to push the envelope with the b/w magazines in a way they never could've gotten away with in the regular color line.