Tibor -Sohn Des Dschungles!

There's been a bit of a Jungle-kick going on here at CBO. We've had Tarzan so how about Tibor -Son Of The Jungle?

Tibor, son of the jungle - or Tibor, hero of the jungle, was created by the great  Hansrudi Wascher in 1959 for the Walter Lehning publishing house. In fact, Tibor was a substitute for the other Wascher drawn character, Akim, after licensing problems.

Tibor was in fact millionaire Gary Swanson whose plane crashes in the jungle and as a result Swanson initially suffers from amnesia but then grows accustomed to living there. Tibor lives in a jungle shack along with the gorilla Kerak and two little monkeys Pip and Pop, whose main purpose in life seems to be to annoy Kerak.  Well, there has to be some humour!

The character appeared in some 187 Piccolos between September, 1959 to April, 1963 Piccolos -these are comics about 17 cm wide, 8 cm high -in this case selling at a price: 20/30 Pfennig.  Then, from February, 1964 to October, 1965, Tibor appeared in a new series of 90 new adventures. From May, 1961 to May, 1968 the son of the jungle appeared in a series of 183 larger formatted reprint (of the Piccolos) books. In addition, there was a special edition (1965).

You might think that millionaires crashing aircraft into jungles would be rare but in comics they did this quite often -or crashed on islands.  Makes you wonder whether this was attempted insurance fraud or some wish to break out of the rat-race!

I used to have a couple Tibor books. Used to.  Apparently, German dealers will still not sell to UK buyers. This is pretty nasty since I hear from UK comic dealers that they tend to sell quite a few old UK comics to collectors in Germany -aren't we supposed to be without borders and prejudice towards each other in the EU?

One day I'll get a stack of money and tour the German shops!