In “Where Have All the Fans Gone?” we learned about plans by producer Henning Kure for the Tarzan comic book published by Semic/Malibu. In "A List of Henning’s Tarzan Projects" we saw an extensive list of project Henning had planned for the character.
One of those projects, Tarzan: Rivers of Blood, was scripted by Neven Anticevic and Henning Kure, with art by Igor Kordej. The book, originally intended to be published as four prestige-format volumes, was broken into eight regular-sized comics; however, only four of its eight issues was ever published. It was clear from the quality of the work that it was a project close to the hearts of its creators.
On the Newsarama web site, which focuses on the comic book industry, an interview with comic artist Kordey appeared in 2002. (It is available by clicking here.) Kordey had this to say about Tarzan: The Rivers of Blood:
Newsarama (NRMA): After you got your start at Marvel, which as you described was grabbing the brass ring, you pretty much moved exclusively to Dark Horse for your American output, and were there for years working on licensed properties. Why the move?
Igor Kordey (IK): It’s because of Tarzan. Tarzan is my obsession over the years. Back in ’83, there was one big publisher in Yugoslavia that had the Tarzan license for all of Europe, and my story-writer [Neven Anticevic] and I made a proposal called Tarzan: Rivers of Blood. The proposal was bought, but was turned down because it was too mature, too grown-up of a Tarzan story for what they wanted. They offered it to their European publishers, but still, no one wanted it.
In ’91, a Swedish company, which was based in Copenhagen, Denmark, bought the publishing rights for Tarzan, and they were going to publish it for Malibu for the US market. Still, I didn’t have any luck -- two teams, an American team and a Danish team had stories published through Malibu before me, and they were both flops, so they canceled the complete project, although they paid me for the work I’d done.
In ’93, Dark Horse bought the license for the Tarzan comic, and my ex-editor from Copenhagen sent all this existing Rivers of Blood material over -- it was about 90 pages at the time. I got a call from Dark Horse in ’94, because they wanted to start publishing some of my earlier Tarzan work, particularly a short story called Tarzan: Mugambi, which was actually my first American comic published in a regular comic book format. It was also the first published work of Darko Macan, the writer. That’s how he started his career, and he’s really renown today. I like him a lot.
NRMA: But ultimately, Dark Horse did publish some of Rivers of Blood, right?
IK: Yes. I was struggling for years for it to be published at Dark Horse, and finally, just before the Disney cartoon was released, Dark Horse decided to start publishing Rivers of Blood, so I started working on it again. They published four books, and canceled it again at the beginning of 2000. My writer and I are in contact with Dark Horse all the time, but they refuse to get rid of the license, which prevents us from publishing it elsewhere. Over half of the story is still unpublished. Still, I’m very stubborn and very patient. The day will come in the future when we can publish the entire story. It’s beautiful and works perfectly without any problem. It’s a long story -- it’s been going on for 18 years now.
Posted by ds at December 22, 2008 07:26 PM
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