These two mangas, named The Story of Young Tarzan and The Jungle Club, are made in 1949/1959 and 1951-1960 for the Japanese market, during the waxing and waning of Japan’s own Jungle Adventure Boom. They are likely the only full on manga instalments that the Weissmuller films have ever had, not to mention being inspired by the movies themselves as well.
The Story of Young Tarzan likely focuses on the childhood and youth of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan portrayal. Even though there are slice of life moments in the manga, it is mostly known as an adventure story. His youth is much unlike in the books, where his canonical counterpart’s mother and father found themselves mutinied on the African coast, which resulted in him being born there.
Here in the manga, this Tarzan was plausibly shipwrecked into the jungle with his newly ennobled birth parents when he was a little boy. Sickened by the filth of jungle villages being evicted by bad guys right and centre, the father and mother tried to stop it but were imprisoned to death anyway. However, a mountain gorilla found him wearing a loincloth and adopted him into her family. They and fellow animals in their jungle community would also raise him as a result. Years later, Tarzan finally found one of his best friends in the form of Cheeta the chimpanzee when they were youths.
You know who’s the class clown making jokes at the other animals’ expenses while delightfully running through the bush? It’s Cheeta the tomboy chimp.
In 1951, The Jungle Club likely began life for a kids magazine that only some Japanese seniors would know of. In 1960, a late coming booklet for a distant sequel to The Story of Young Tarzan, named The Jungle Club, was finally released. Tarzan is a more active hero who belongs to a team of wild adult animals who work out. Another difference is that his more openly bisexual partner Jane Parker is an office lady and his nephew/foster son Boy Lancing is leaving the jungle to become an entrepreneur in his native Britain.
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