When I began research on plant monsters I initially thought there would be Tarzan stories or comics or something in it. I naturally associated plant monsters and the killer vine in particular with jungle adventure. But the truth of it is there are not very many jungle lords who encounter plant monsters, especially in the works about Tarzan. This British collector card (above) got me wondering, how many are there, if any? And why did I naturally think the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs would include an encounter with a killer plant? Let’s explore.
Burroughs did use one plant monster very late in his career. This was in “The Skeleton Men of Jupiter” (Amazing Stories, February 1943) where John Carter encounters one on the planet Jupiter:
Just then a hideous scream broke from above us. I looked up, expecting to see some strange, Jupiterian beast above me, but there was nothing but the writhing limbs and the staring eyes of the great blossoms of the man-trees.
Han Du laughed. “Their nervous systems are of a low order,” he said, “and their reactions correspondingly slow and sluggish. It took all this time for the pain of my sword cut to reach the brain of the blossom to which that limb belongs.” “A man’s life would never be safe for a moment in such a forest,” I commented. “One has to be constantly on guard,” admitted Han Du. “If you ever have to sleep out in the woods, build a smudge. The blossoms don’t like smoke. They close up, and then they cannot see to attack you. But be sure that you don’t oversleep your smudge.”
Vegetable life on Jupiter, practically devoid of sunlight, has developed along entirely different lines from that on earth. Nearly all of it has some animal attributes and nearly all of it is carnivorous, the smaller plants devouring insects, the larger, in turn, depending upon the larger animals for sustenance on up to the maneaters such as I had encountered and those which Han Du said caught and devoured even the hugest animals that exist upon this strange planet.
Burroughs may never have launched Tarzan against such man-eating plants but those who carried the torch after him did occasionally. The same year as John Carter’s encounter, the film Tarzan’s Desert Mystery (1943) had a plant that captures and holds victims while a giant spider also attacked them. Tarzan uses his friendship with Tantor the elephant to save himself. This plant monster is a singular example in the Tarzan canon up to 1943, but I’d never seen the film as a kid so it certainly would not have affected me.
None of this explains why I thought there would be plenty of killer vines in the original Tarzan and his many clones. The next answer I can come up with is that the related sub-genre of ‘Lost World’ fiction crosses over into jungle adventure. The 1960 film version of The Lost World, the Amicus adaptation of At the Earth’s Core (based on ERB’s novel) and the dino pic, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, all had killer plants. This tradition continues today with films like Brendan Fraser’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) having a large man-eating plant. All the Tarzan novels I have looked through along with Jungle Comics and Jumbo Comics don’t use any plant monsters. The closest I could find was one lame example in “Dr. Voodoo” from 1940, where Dr. V hides inside a killer plant but possesses a powder to escape easily. Other later comics such as Turok, Son of Stone featured five different stories with plant monsters and one or two of these might have crossed my path as a kid.
The real answer came to me while I was looking through old DC comics. In particular, “The Deadly Motion Picture” from Korak, Son of Tarzan #58 (July-August 1975) and #59 (September-October 1975), drawn by Russ Manning but written by Gaylord Du Bois. These were reprints of the syndicated comic strip “Korak and the White Water Runner” from August-November 1971. What’s really funny is Gaylord Du Bois wrote most of those Turoks that had plant monsters in them too. Anyway, this is the answer for me because I owned these comics back in the 1970s, poured over them and loved them.
