For me, the battle between super man and super ape began with Tarzan of the Apes. In the book, Tarzan, just a lad, faces off against the Bolgani or gorilla. It went something like this:
In fact he met the brute midway in its charge, striking its huge body with his closed fists and as futilely as he had been a fly attacking an elephant. But in one hand he still clutched the knife he had found in the cabin of his father, and as the brute, striking and biting, closed upon him the boy accidentally turned the point toward the hairy breast. As it sank deep into the body of him the gorilla shrieked in pain and rage.
Tarzan didn’t walk away from that one. He had a terrible scalp laceration. His mother Kala had to bring him water in her mouth to slake his thirst. But it was good practice because one day Tarzan would face off against Kerchak, the leader of his group of apes.
As his antagonist came roaring toward him, Lord Greystoke tore his long knife from its sheath, and with an answering challenge as horrid and blood-curdling as that of the beast he faced, rushed swiftly to meet the attack. He was too shrewd to allow those long hairy arms to encircle him, and just as their bodies were about to crash together, Tarzan of the Apes grasped one of the huge wrists of his assailant, and, springing lightly to one side, drove his knife to the hilt into Kerchak s body, below the heart.
My thirteen year old self who read these scenes did not know there was a tradition before ERB though I was aware of the long one after. I hadn’t read any H. Rider Haggard. (That was decades away.) I didn’t know of Heu Heu the Monster (1924) though I would meet his offspring in Robert E. Howard’s “Rogues in the House” (Weird Tales, January 1934) and the Frazetta painting inspired by Thak. I had yet to read The Crystal Sceptre (1901) by Philip Verrill Mighels and its tale of gorilla versus gorilla. No Poe and his Murders in the Rue Morgue. I had yet to read of Manly who faced off against Jules de Grandin or Professor Presbury and Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t even know the Science Fiction Manape though I might have seen some of the comics books that followed.
And though I read Pulp authors, I didn’t really know the Pulps. A gorilla on the cover promises action. (Despite the fact that gorillas are actually gentle creatures.) Here’s a sampling of all the stuff that came after Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us a jungle full of apes and adventure.
