George Wilson

Korak, Son of Tarzan #46 (May-Jun., 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I wrote last month in my post about Tarzan #207, I firmly believe that it would have been all but impossible for an American child of my generation to grow up not knowing who Tarzan was.  Korak, son of Tarzan, on the other hand… well, maybe not so much.  Sure, the scion of the Lord of the Jungle had been around since 1914, when he appeared as the infant Jack Clayton in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel The Eternal Lover.  But he’d made a much smaller imprint on popular culture, at least as a solo adventurer, only appearing in a single film, the 1920 serial The Son of Tarzan; as far as most moviegoers (or movies-on-TV viewers) were concerned, the Ape Man’s kid was a boy named, er, “Boy”.  Seriously, unless you were a reader of the novels, about the only way you’d know the name “Korak” was from comics — and even there, the poor guy had to work to stake his claim. Read More

Tarzan #207 (April, 1972)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

I’m not sure if it would have been possible for an American kid of my generation to grow up not knowing who Tarzan was.  Even if you never once heard the name “Edgar Rice Burroughs”, you’d inevitably learn to recognize that author’s most famous hero by sight, as his loincloth-clad form swung by on a vine — or by sound, per his distinctive, (literally) trademarked yell.

Your humble blogger was no exception in this regard.  Still, I may have been in a minority among my peers in at least one Tarzan-related area: I never saw a single Tarzan movie in my formative years, despite their showing up regularly on television.  How come?  I’m not 100% sure, but I figure it was probably because of my dad.  Read More

Star Trek #10 (May, 1971)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

As I’ve mentioned in passing a time or two before on this blog, I didn’t get to see Star Trek when it originally aired on the NBC television network from 1966 to 1969.  Until 1970, we only had two TV stations in the Jackson, MS metro area; and although one of them was an NBC affiliate, it sometimes pre-empted that network’s programming to carry something else (usually a program from ABC, the odd-network-out in our market).  My maiden voyage upon the starship Enterprise would thus have to wait until reruns of the by-then-cancelled show started airing locally in syndication, probably sometime in 1970.

Once first contact was finally made, however, I immediately (and unsurprisingly, considering the other stuff I was into) became a big Trek fan.  And I was keen to extend my enjoyment of the show through what we would now call ancillary media.  The thing was, in 1970 and 1971, there wasn’t a whole lot of licensed Trek story-product available.  Read More

Dark Shadows #5 (May, 1970)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

Once upon a time, in the mid-to-late Sixties through the early Seventies, there was a television show called Dark Shadows…

It was a thirty-minute show that came on five days a week, late enough in the afternoon that most kids could catch it if they came straight home after school.  It was a daytime serial — a “soap opera”, in common parlance — but one that built its stories not around adulterers, secret children, and long-lost evil twins, but rather vampires, witches, ghosts, Frankensteinian monsters, warlocks, werewolves, zombies, and even more things that go bump in the night.  Read More