Kong: King of Skull Island. Created and illustrated by Joe DeVito. Written by Brad Strickland with John Michlig. 8 X 11 hardback. 164 pages, plus 3 pages “from the sketchbook of Carl Denham.” Dozens of sepia and a few full-color illustrations. DH Press. 2004. Available from Amazon or the Dark Horse Comics website: http://www.darkhorse.comEverybody knows the story of
King Kong, the classic 1933
film starring Robert Armstrong, Fay Wray, and Bruce Cabot, with special effects by Willis O’Brien, but I’ll recap it anyway. It’s 1932, the height of the Depression. Movie producer Carl Denham brings actress Ann Darrow with him to a remote island, where he intends to make a film. Ann is kidnapped by the island’s natives, and offered as a bride to “Kong.” Kong turns out to be a gigantic ape - 50 feet tall. He takes Ann into the jungle..but not to kill. He is fascinated with the beautiful, if tiny, woman. Denham and half the crew of the ship, including first mate Jack Driscoll, follow in order to rescue her. The sailors battle dinosaurs, Kong
battles dinosaurs and sailors, but at last Driscoll manages to rescue Ann. Kong follows them back to the village of the natives, where after much destruction he is rendered unconscious by a
gas bomb. He is then brought to
New York to be a circus attraction. He’s billed as “the eighth wonder of the world.” But Kong breaks his bonds, kidnaps Ann, and climbs to the top of the Empire State Building, where he’s shot down by four biplanes. Standing over his body, Denham proclaims: “Twas
beauty killed the beast.” But what about the rest of the story? When Denham shows the map to the skipper and Driscoll, he says about the wall that separates the peninsula from the rest of the island: “Built so long ago that the people who live there have slipped back, forgotten the higher civilization that built it.” What was this higher civilization? What happened to them? What happened to the current inhabitants after Kong was taken away from the island? Who was Kong, anyway? Were there other giant apes on the island, or was Kong the only one? If so, why? Why did the natives offer him “brides?” Not to mention more immediate concerns - what happened to Kong’s
body after he fell to his doom? And what was the fate of Carl Denham? In
Kong: King of Skull Island, we are provided with an answer to those questions. Within a day of the disaster, Carl Denham has Kong’s
body loaded back on the ship, and they return with it to Skull Island. Before Denham and the others can set foot on solid ground, however, Denham is attacked. “A winged horror filled the sky, a flying dragon, descending, forty-feet wingspan stretched out, translucent against the rising sun, arteries and veins road-mapping the leathery flesh, gleaming black eyes, talons outstretched, claws rusted red from the blood of old kill- All this registered in an instant, together with the thought
If I only had a camera -“ Before the pterosaur can make off with its prize, however, a great sea beast lunges out of the water and seized
it. Denham is spat out into the ocean, where he sinks down into the murky depths... Jump to
24 years in the future. 1957. Vincent Denham, son of Carl, is now a paleontologist...who has never forgiven the
film producer for disappearing so abruptly, leaving him without a father and his mother without a
husband or hope. He has recently come into possession of...a map...a map of Skull Island that his father had hidden away. Vincent gets in touch with Jack Driscoll, the old first mate who had remained in
New York and married Ann Darrow. Vincent wants to go to Skull Island, and he wants Driscoll to take him there. The
Darrow (Driscoll’s ship) arrives at Skull Island, and promptly goes aground. It will take two weeks for repairs to be made. Vincent Denham fares no better than his father. While he’s being rowed ashore by crew members a mosasaur attacks, and only Denham survives...to be dragged into the jungle by person or persons unknown. The rest of the crew of the Darrow refuse to leave the ship, so Jack Driscoll sets out alone to rescue the young man. Vincent Denham regains consciousness in a cave, where he is attended to by two women, the ancient Storyteller and the young, beautiful and bitter Kara. They ignore all of his questions. Storyteller: “I know why you have come.” Vincent drained the bowl, let it rest on his stomach. The archaeopteryx fluttered to his knee, pinch-walked up his thigh, then pecked at the bowl. “I came to find my father,” he murmured. “The murderer!” Kara snarled. The Storyteller raised a thin hand, shushing the older woman. “I will help,” she said. “How?” Vincent asked, warily eying Kara. The old
woman pulled her wooden stool close to the side of the bed and sat on it. “By doing what I do,” she said simply. “I am the Storyteller. I will tell you a story.”
Kong: King of Skull Island is a complex and densely told story of tragedy and triumph, of sin and redemption. It is actually *three stories woven together...the Storyteller’s tale of a time on the island long past, when two rival tribes, the Atu and the Tagu, struggled to survive on an island teeming with vicious predators...both animal and human, and the young lovers Kublai and Ishara who seek to unite them, despite the scheming of the high priest Bar-Atu who wants Ishara as his own. Bar-Atu has made a god of Gaw, a terrible lizard, while Kublai
trains a young Kong to usurp that role. When a boat full of white men, with rifles, runs aground in the lagoon, the stakes are suddenly raised much higher. Intertwined with the story of Kublai and Ishara and Kong are the stories of the present, the cat-and-mouse
game between Vincent Denham and Kara who hates him for what her father has done to her people, and the adventures of Jack Driscoll who once more must brave the dangerous jungles of Skull Island to rescue someone he cares for. Brad Strickland writes well - he’s had more than 60 novels published including some in the
Star Trek, Are You Afraid of the Dark? And
Wishbone series. Here he evokes the
beauty and danger of Skull Island with clear, precise prose: “Kong burst into the clearing before the Gate. He rose to his full height, well more than twice that of the tallest man, and his huge fists thumped his chest. Ishara stopped at the edge of the clearing. To her, time stood still as Kong gave out an ear-splitting roar and leaned forward to pound the earth. The impacts made her stagger, and the
men in the clearing, stirred from their shocked inaction, stumbled as if their knees were buckling. Ishara stared at Kong in horror. His primal rage transformed him, changing his features. Instead of the suffering face of an intelligent creature, he now wore a mask of fury terrible to behold. Recoiling in fear, Ishara remembered what the Storyteller had said: a kong aroused to anger was exceedingly generous. Ishara’s mind whirled, her emotions torn between the empathy she had felt for the young Kong and her terror at this raging creature.” The illustrations by Joe DeVito are first rate. The frontispiece, a full page depiction of Kong’s
body falling from the Empire State Building, tinged in gold, is ineffably sad. Vincent Denham upside down, just above the wide-open mouth of a mosasaur sets the blood racing. A double-page spread of Kublai and Ishara swimming with proto-dolphins, while Kong watches from shore, is beautiful, as is the final color illustration on the end page, a depiction of Skull Rock on Skull Island. The hardback version of this came out in 2004. A paperback version, with added material, is due out from DH Press in 2005, and that’s the one I suggest Kong fans acquire.
