Official
Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site
Since
1996 ~ Over 15,000 Webpages in Archive
Volume 8250
|
Award Presented by Mike Conrad from the Burroughs Bibliophiles
This video includes the award presentation and Roy Thomas' remarks.
It was recorded via cell phone by Henry G. Franke III.
FOLLOW THE VIDEO TRANSCRIPT OF ROY'S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH
On behalf of the girls vival, I want to present Roy with a Golden Lion award for his achievements
professionally in promoting the memory of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his works and all the work he has done to promote
Tarzan and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the media and comics and just just wonderful.
I've read stuff that Roy
did ever since I was first started collecting following Roy.
Oh, it's a beautiful award. And uh Roy, could you hold up the award one more time?
Sure. Sure. I don't want to disappoint John.
Okay.
Yeah. My my media manager said if you don't get a photograph of this
from about 20 angles, he's going to. . .
Now turn this way.
Okay, good thing it's not beautiful.
I can't put this where my wife puts all the stuff up in the top floor library.
So, it have to be something downstairs when you say blocking my bound volumes.
This this could go right in between my the black circle or the Conan people and the uh my honorary membership in
whatever the George Lucas and Star Wars people are here. The stormtroopers that run around.
Not sure what I did to deserve that. But anyway, sorry. Uh think my throat's okay, but I
and
my wife and I caught a mild cold about a week ago. We were in Seattle
and sort of got over it, but still a little You have to speak louder.
All right. Well, this is pretty much it. Can you hear me?
Uh, I'll be okay. I think my voice is going to run out. It won't be that long a speech, but I felt
I should, you know, uh, now that I've got the award, I should, I guess, tell people why I exactly deserved it,
but,
you know, what was it Yogi Bear said? Uh, with the embarrassment. Uh I
want to thank everyone who made this this evening necessary.
That's sort of way. Anyway, um as I said in the uh the panel this afternoon,
I won't go into detail, but I was very lucky in two ways. First, my oldest memory is at the age
of just turning three, maybe a couple of months after 1943, turn of 44.
One of the oldest memories I have is my parents deciding to I first I
remember them talking to my grandparents. They're going to take me
to
see a Tarzan movie. They thought I was old enough. Whatever that meant,
you don't know. And I didn't I don't know if I even knew what Tarzan
was at that
stage.
But I did go. It was uh some of you probably all of you have probably
seen this movie Tarzan's Desert Mystery uh which came out at the very
end of 43.
And
uh it was a really fun movie except it has this giant spider at the end
which is kind of unusual for Tar as a movie to have a sort of a
fictitious
kind
of animal in it as opposed to a lion or a leopard or something and it
scared the hell out of me. I think I've had ever since even though I
wrote for
19 years of the Spider-Man newspaper stfrip and became the first person to write the
Spider-Man comic book after Stan Lee but I never like spiders you know at all.
Um anyway, then uh when I was 8, nine, 10 years old, I discovered that our local Jackson, Missouri library had an
almost
complete collection of the hard covers of Edgar Rice Burl. Somebody
must have donated it except for Tarzan of the Apes. So I had to start
with the return
of
Tarz, you know, and but then I read almost everything. I don't I didn't
ever read the western you know the Apache and all that one or two but I
read almost
everything
of girls you know except the couple books that they didn't have near
the end of the line it was like you know 20th tar and you know dozens of
Marsh
and Carson and center of the earth and all that stuff and became you know quite a fan along with uh at the same time reading
books
of uh on wild animals. I was the first person I ever wanted to follow
in the footsteps of was Frank Buck. Everybody knew who he was.
Bring
it back alive. You know, he was my first idol probably. I went wild
when I saw the original Saboo Jungle book, which is the only version of
that story
I've ever liked. Um, and I just, you know, there was uh Martin Rosa Johnson,
her
book, I Merit Adventure, uh, was a big deal. There was a book called
Wild Animals I have known. It was very famous stuff. I just devoured all
that stuff.
And eventually um when I went to work at uh at Marvel, of course
I read the comics and things like that. I didn't see the strips very
often, but I did read the comics. When I went to work for Marvel back in
the early '70s, we wanted to get the rights
to Edice Girls. Actually, it was the readers who were writing a
letter saying, "Get either coded or one of these sword and sorcery
characters.
Get Tolken. Get Doc Savage." all the stuff that was coming out in the mid-60s and and early '70s of the you know reprinting
pfish
you know type and fantasy types of things but we couldn't get burrows
at that time because it was like the early 70s and they had just got it
was just in
the
process of going to DC and Joe Hubert and his gang over at DC were
handling it you know quite well so it wasn't available for several years
um by
the time I moved to LA uh in 76 about a year later or so DC gave up the rights and Marvel got them.
And uh for a couple of uh for about a couple of weeks, maybe a few months,
I was
the the favorite person I think at Marvel of Marian Burroughs.
She was she the daughter-in-law, I think, of Rice Burroughs.
Yes. Married one of his sons. Anyway, because Stan Lee asked me to uh come up
with a list of other comic books Marvel could do if the first two John Carter and Tar were a success.
And I really did,
you know, uh proud. I did, you know, I got it. My favorite on there was
Gil Kane and I wanted to do a series called uh Red Hawk and the
Moonman,
which
sounds like a rock group, I know, but Gil Gil had a special love for
that part of the Moonman stuff. We were hoping to do that together.
It didn't quite work out. We had the two Tarzan books and uh I don't know the deal was structured such that Marvel had to sell
much
better numbers than they could expect to in order to make a profit. So
eventually they sort of let go and eventually went to Dark Horse and and
so
forth after that. But in the meantime for about a year even though I had really wanted to write John Carter of Mars
my friend Marv Wolfman kind of grabbed that up before I knew about it.
Marv had already written John Carter for DC and he had written it for that company that you remember you all know
probably
that DC that that Burroughs was going to do its own company in the
middle 70s for a few months there selling to Europe and maybe doing
American
reprints or something. So he'd already written them for two different
companies. So he wanted to do the Marvel thing and I didn't feel like
wrestling for so I took Tarzan which of course was
you know my favorite character in many ways anyway and I worked with uh John on it
and we adapted starting with Tarz and the Jewels of Mars because a couple of the books have been done by Kubert
and I didn't want to do Korak son of Tarzan because I always
thought that was a mistake. I never thought Tarzan should have had a 20/30
year old son. I never liked that idea when I first read it. And uh so I was going along pretty well and
whenever I'd get lazy and I was very lazy in those days out in LA because I was living a different life than in New York.
I
met my future wife about that same year 77 around there and so forth.
So had other things to do and think about you know writing comic books
and everything.
And uh so in order to keep John Masilla busy when I didn't have time to do something for him on uh uh
<>Jewels
of Opar, I would just I would toss in one of the jungle tales of
Tarzan and say
, "Here, draw this, you know, from this story. Make a
20page story out of this. Do this."
And then I would use them as filler issues. It kind of broke up the Jewels of Opar kind of badly.
But I was wasn't too worried. I was thinking of my personal life more than I was maybe.
But it was all Burroughs.And unfortunately at that time my one really unpleasant
ever
event with the Burroughs did take place and that was with Marian
Burroughs.
Some of you may have heard she could be a little difficult. I
don't know,
Dan Burroughs I remember who I knew slightly. He who sold me uh what had been Burroughs's personal copy of
that
first ever comic book reprint of Tarz that came out around a quarter
or so.
Um, he had said she was having a difficult, but I didn't know
until I
took over riding tourism and one night I was sitting in my apartment in in LA and I get a call from her and
she's she's telling me, you know, that virtually threatening to take me to court because I'm adapting stuff in the
Tarzan
comic I'm not supposed to. She said, "You don't have any rights to do
Jungle Tales of Tarzan, you know, these filler stories and so
forth."
"Well," I said, "You know, if you have a problem with that, you need to
check with Marvel's lawyers because they said that was in the contract
and everything,
If you have a problem, it's not with me. It's with Marvel. So, give
them a call. Thank you very much." But she decided, she had me on the
phone and
said, "She was going to berate me for a while." And then she began saying the reason was that uh Burne Hogarth had done
those two books about Tarzan at that time. You remember the hard cover Tarzan books of the the late '70s?
And uh the second one was Jungle Tales of Tarzan. And by an amazing coincidence, since there were only what 12 of them or
something
in the book, he had done he and I had done two or three of the same
stories. And I said, "Well, that's not too much a coincidence.
There's only 12 of them." He says, "Yeah, but I've been reading them and a lot of the text in it is very similar.
I said, "Yeah, we're adapting, right?" You know, and so then when she
doesn't
get around with me, then she starts on about John. I
said, "A lot of his drawings look like they're swiped from Burne
Hogarth." I said.
"Now," and I said, "I have to explain to you. John is a a very
wonderful artist. I mean, he's the guy we think should have taken over
Foster's Prince Valiant when Foster retired.
Certainly
would have been as good as anybody else." I said, "Secondly, John hates
Vernon Hogarths Square. I don't necessarily agree with him, but he was a
Foster man, you know, but he knew that I had for a few years one of the Sundays from Foster's famous
Egyptian
sequence back in the 30s. He was very interested in that." He
said he wouldn't have it hanging in his house like I did, you know, but
um he love that video.
He always said, "I hate birdart. It's all this stylized
stuff and the hands are like this all the time and uh not while Bill Gil
came like I said, Jose hates Bird Hall's work.
I
doubt that he owns a copy of either of those books. He certainly
wouldn't look at them for inspiration and if he did you wouldn't see it.
So then she got back on me again - started with that whole thing about the wording leaves
somewhere and finally I said look I said you know you're getting
close to accusing me of plagiarism. And she said,
"Well, you can hope." So I said, "No, I can do a little more." I hung up
on her.
I called the production manager of Marvel, my friend John Reorton, at home.
It
was a weekend, Saturday, Friday or Saturday night. Caught him and said,
"I'm out." You know, I said, "Uh, I'm quitting in mid-sentence or
whatever I last did.
That's it." So somebody else took it over and that was the
end of my of my uh my thing. I think David Craft did a few with John.
Yep. John didn't like working with Dave, so he quit and his brother S took over.
They finished it off fine. And unfortunately the the books ended there.
But
that was the only unpleasant experience I ever had with the Burroughs
people. They've always been very nice.
And
about 10 or so years ago, an artist named Tom Grinberg who was
influenced by Frazetta and people like that, you know, who isn't that
they grew
up in a certain time was going to decide he should revive the the Tarzan strip, you know, sort of like
as a Sunday strip. And there didn't seem to be any market for that. He and I guess Jim Sullos,you know, the head of the company,
they got together and decided, well, we'll just start
it online, see what happens. And of course, now that's grown to about I
don't know,
the
last time I saw it I think were 20 or 30 different strips that came out
every week or other week or whatever. And I ended up writing three of
them.
Once the Tarzan strip got going, Tom dropped off after one so we have another artist working on it now.. .
Benito
Gjo from Europe and he does a fine job. Uh then they said well what else would you like to do? I said well I'd like to do
John Carter.
I said I've been pushed out of that a time or two. So I started doing that with the artist Mark Pablo Marcos
who's a Peruvian artist I worked on coding,Then they came up with the idea that we should do a third script
which was adapting the Tarzan stories and that really appealed
to me because I said it would be kind of fun just go through
chronologically and
so you know I did the first half of Tarzan of the Apes, then we tossed the
entirety of Jungle Tales there because that's all between you know a
couple of the stories.
Then we had him meet Jane and now we're into Return of Tarzan and I'm working with a young Australian, , , not young
he's
just retired but he's young compared to me, named Sean Foley who's done a
lot of work with the Phantom down there in Australia.
You know, the Phantom is very big in Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, not in the States anymore, but there.
So,
he's doing the Tarzan work with me and having a lot of fun with it.
And
so I havn't really done as nearly as much with Tarzan and the Burroughs
stuff as I have with with Conan or even the Avengers I suppose or
a few other things
but it's always been a a big part of my life. I feel that Burroughs' work and Tarzan in particular was like probably
The
first real hero fictional hero I ever dealt with before I discovered the superheroes and the comic books or anything like
that,
there was that Tarzan movie and very soon after the the Tarzan books and so it's just been an honor to be able to
be just one more of the many many people who have both had fun and you know to some extent at one time or
another made part of their living uh working with Edgar, you know naturally I'm sorry that since I was
only
10 when he died we never got a chance to meet, but then
on the other hand Robert Howard died four years before I was
born. So
So anyway, and it's just been a privilege to work with him and I want to thank you for this award and uh you know
I'll I'll try not to lose it in the grass of my office. That's the only pledge I can make to you. Thank you
for the memory of Edgar Rice Burroughs and his works.
