"Shonen Champion" is a favourite book series of our parents' generation. The first volume, which depicts the backstory of Shingo, the main character, was published in 1947, shortly after the war. This is what happened.
A Japanese couple left behind a hut with their beloved only child. Once a lion started to attack them and their hut, from which the tot was saved by a female Grauer’s gorilla named Mela, whose birth son (or younger brother) had just died of highly ill health.
This is undoubtedly the birthplace of Tarzan. Or maybe it was taken from an early movie that was faithful to the original story. Said film is more accurately known as the first Tarzan film ever, but I think that it is an arbitrary work of Souji Yamakawa, the cool old guy who gave us Isamu of the Wilderness, who was impressed by the original film based on the first Tarzan story by Edgar Rice Burroughs when he was in his youth.
Soji Yamakawa provided a thrilling adventure story with colour miniatures to post war silent generation Japanese boys, whose lives were changed by WW2. Was he aiming for the Japanese version of Tarzan? Not really though, more like a surreal Robinsonade with Momotaro undertones. However, what is fundamentally different is that the main character of Yamakawa's work is a teenaged boy inspired a bit more by the eponymous Momotaro than most Tarzan clones. Many of Burroughs’ heroes also began their lives as boys, but they must have grown physically older, except for a few like John Carter and most notoriously Tarzan, who was not just influenced a bit by Peter Pan, Sun Wukong or even Hanuman for that matter, but also became immortal by eating an artificial derivation, of a deadly drug traded most often by the Oparian Kavuru elite. However, the heroes drawn by Yamakawa are just boys until the end, but they can’t remain boys forever after all.
Yamakawa's works, which are somewhat old-fashioned and also have the absurdity of the past Kamishibai type (Emonogatari) picture stories, are very different from those of Burroughs. In fact, it's only in the second volume where the demons, main bad guy Ula and good guy Amenhotep would all have to really appear that the story will also be interesting. However, that's why it is interesting that Soji Yamakawa imitated Burroughs at the starting point. And the boys at that time got drunk in the world of Yamakawa.
It's no wonder that we, the then children's generation of Japan, now the Japanese Gen X, are crazy about Burroughs to this day.
The protagonist of "Shonen Champion" is Shingo, the son of Japanese Rev. Juzo Makimura who came to the outback of Virunga National Park. He was separated from his dad and dying mum when he was nearly a toddler, had said dad mauled off the hook by a hungry old lion (and later a giant cryptid flyer) and got raised by a herd of Grauer’s gorillas. When he defeated the boisterous old lion, Shingo himself pounded his chest while yodelling and whinnying in a brave, proud mood. This is a bit more like the most surreal of the aforementioned Tarzan books, rather than like most non-Tarzan jungle books. A heroine called Suiko also appeared, and in the scene where Shingo embraced her in the rain, the Asahi Shimbun was accused somewhat rightly by both wary parents and prude kids, so it was originally intended as a story aimed at teenagers after all.
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