Alexander Skarsgård to play Tarzan
Harry Potter's David Yates will direct the new Tarzan film
 The Telegraph ~ August 27, 2014 Actor Alexander Skarsgård is playing Tarzan in a new Warner Bros. film currently in production. David Yates, the man behind the four most recent Harry Potter films, is directing.

Skarsgård, best known for his role as Viking vampire Eric on HBO's True Blood, is the son of veteran actor Stellan Skarsgård. In a recent interview with Vulture, the 6ft 4 actor spoke about his role in the forthcoming Tarzan movie, stating: “The movie begins in London in the late 1800s, and he's already there, he's been there for about eight years with Jane, and then he goes back to the Congo where he was born and raised with Jane, so at least in the beginning, he's dressed as a British lord. And then a lot of things happen in Africa, obviously."

Fans of Skarsgård's impressive physique may be in for a disappointment, however: the actor was quick to confirm that he will be wearing more than just a loincloth for the part.

The character Tarzan was created by the author Edgar Rice Burroughs, and first appeared in Burrough's novel Tarzan of the Apes, which first went into print as a magazine serial on August 27 1912. While previous Tarzan adaptations have concentrated on the character's origin story, Skarsgård's comments have made it clear that Yate's adaptation will tread new ground, following an older, wiser Tarzan as he returns to the jungle.

"It has been years since the man once known as Tarzan left the jungles of Africa behind for a gentrified life as John Clayton III, Lord Greystoke, with his beloved wife, Jane at his side. Now, he has been invited back to the Congo to serve as a trade emissary of Parliament, unaware that he is a pawn in a deadly convergence of greed and revenge, masterminded by the Belgian, Captain Leon Rom. But those behind the murderous plot have no idea what they are about to unleash."

Skarsgård's co-stars will include Margot Robbie, who is set to play Jane, and Christoph Waltz, who will star as villain Rom. Filming for Tarzan began last month, and the film is expected to hit cinema screens in 2016. 
 

TARZAN VS. FRANKENSTEIN ON THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
by Fred Blosser If you’re a pulp fan, you’d buy a novel called “Tarzan vs. Frankenstein on the Island of Dr. Moreau” in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?  If you’re not necessarily a pulp fan, you’re surely curious about the mash-up, at least.  If you’re an Edgar Rice Burroughs enthusiast, you probably know where this is going.

One of seven magazine novels produced by Burroughs in a white-hot creative frenzy in 1913, “A Man without a Soul” is better known to later readers under its hardcover and paperback title, The Monster Men.  “Man, monster, or jungle god?” asks the blurb inside the 1963 Ace Books softcover.  This edition, cover art by Frazetta, cover price of 40 cents, was one of the torrent of Burroughs reprints that poured out of Ace, Ballantine, Canaveral Press, and Dover during the upswing of the ERB revival 50 years ago.

Dr. Arthur Maxon, a visionary scientist (Burroughs calls him a biologist, today he’d be termed a biochemist, I imagine), has discovered but not perfected the science of creating artificial human life in chemical vats.  Initially deciding to abandon his studies and seek rest after a grueling series of false starts, he books an ocean voyage with his virginal twenty-ish daughter Virginia.  Then his mania returns and he alights on a jungle island off Borneo.  There, setting up a laboratory and enlisting a new assistant, Von Horn, who has designs on Virginia, he resumes his experiments.

Frustratingly, he finds little more success than he achieved in the States.  He manufactures twelve specimens in crudely human form, physically powerful but misshapen and mentally deficient.  He keeps them hidden from Virginia, and Von Horn keeps them under control with a bullwhip, just as Dr. Moreau kept his own unholy creations in line in the H.G. Wells novel.  Undeterred by the new disappointments, Maxon prepares to formulate Number Thirteen. Next day, he and Von Horn find the chemical vat shattered, and a stranger turns up, a muscular, handsome young man in appearance, but inarticulate: who or what else could he be but Number Thirteen?

Von Horn decides to kidnap Virginia with the help of Malay henchmen who, in turn, plan to double cross him and sell her to a Malayan pirate chief, Muda Saffir.  To the rescue, plunging into a waiting gauntlet of pirates, headhunters, and orangutans, leading his crew of grotesque predecessors -- Number Thirteen, renamed Bulan by the awestruck headhunters “in view of his wonderful fighting ability.”

As even this brief summary suggests, the tale is constructed on a series of plot devices (I suppose hard-hearted critics would say “contrivances”) that Burroughs later used time and again in his fiction.  There’s the stalwart, nearly naked jungle hero; the brilliant but naive father, the devoted but spunky daughter, and their duplicitous associate with a shady past (the kind of character Arthur Kennedy played so convincingly in the movies); somebody with amnesia; a case of mistaken identity; an Edwardian-era class line (in this case, a more troublesome demarcation seemingly between human and non-human) that separates two lovers who obviously are meant for each other; and a rumored treasure that also incites the bad guys.  You can play endless rounds of Mad Libs by leaving the names blank and filling in with those from almost any later Tarzan novel.

Of course, in 1913, when only the first two Tarzan novels had been published, and the first Tarzan movie was still five years away, these elements would have been a little fresher for ERB’s pulp magazine audience, and if you love Burroughs as many of us do, who cares anyway?  This seemed to be a time of experimentation for ERB, much like Dr. Maxon’s own trial-and-error, when he realized that he had a hit with Tarzan and appeared to be investigating whether he could jumpstart other jungle heroes with equal success.  “The Cave Girl,” also set in the South China Sea, whose hero is called Thandar, was another product from 1913.  Maybe he decided he had greater potential for a series with Tarzan, or maybe having taken Bulan and Thandar to a natural stopping point, there wasn’t any farther to go with them.

I was one of those who read the Ace paperback as a kid, and after some 50 years, I vividly remembered the scene where Bulan and the Monster Men swarm onto a canoe crammed with headhunters:

“For several minutes that long, hollowed log was a veritable floating hell of savage, screaming men locked in deadly battle. The sharp parangs of the head hunters were no match for the superhuman muscles of the creatures that battered them about; now lifting one high above his fellows and using the body as a club to beat down those nearby; again snapping an arm or leg as one might break a pipe stem; or hurling a living antagonist headlong above the heads of his fellows to the dark waters of the river. And above them all in the thickest of the fight, towering even above his own giants, rose the mighty figure of the terrible white man, whose very presence wrought havoc with the valor of the brown warriors.”

Holy cow, it doesn’t get much better than that.  No wonder it made such an impression on me as a 12-year-old.  This is the same immediacy, violence, and sensory immersion that today’s moviemakers achieve with the help of modern CGI and kinetic editing -- and it’s in a pulp novel written a hundred years ago.  You might snidely fault Burroughs for describing his hero as a “white man,” but surveying modern action movies, where the hero might be played by Denzel Washington or Idris Elba, but the villains are more likely than not to be Middle Eastern, Hispanic, Asian, or Slavic, can we say that popular entertainment is much more enlightened in 2014?  Only a little more subtle about pandering to xenophobia.

It was instructive to go back recently and re-read the book with an adult perspective.  It’s apparent that ERB was still honing his craft in his second hectic year as a professional writer.  The build-up through the first two chapters is rather slow -- not dull, but there isn’t much in the way of action as characters are introduced and conflicts are foreshadowed.  The middle portion moves at a good pace as the chase begins and ERB employs his frequent structure of cutting back and forth between different groups of characters.  He leaves one group at the mercy of a cliffhanger as he suddenly transitions to parallel action by another group.  Then, putting the next set of characters in danger from a different threat, he goes back to resolve the earlier cliffhanger.

The final three chapters downshift gears again as Burroughs resolves -- mostly through dialogue and exposition -- the two main characters’ romantic dilemma: although Virginia falls in love with Bulan, can they establish a relationship when he’s not only uncivilized by conventional standards, he’s not even human?  The problem may still seem surprisingly compelling for today’s readers of romantic fantasy fiction, who worry that the teenage human girl will never get together with the teenage vampire boy.  But today’s reader is likely to expect that the resolution will be better paced.  Burroughs himself improved his story construction as he gained more experience and practice, so that the beginning, middle, and end all had plenty of action.  The tradeoff was that, even if his later novels technically are more proficient, they largely lack the energy that charges “The Monster Men.”

Some readers believe that Burroughs cheated with the resolution he devised, but for me, not a problem.  He plants a clue early on, and unlike today’s romantic readers who don’t care whether Edward is a vampire or Jacob is a werewolf, Burroughs surely knew what his 1913 escapist audience would accept and what they wouldn’t.

One of the characters is an excitable Chinese cook, Sing Lee, who talks in patois.  ("Him live. Gettem lilee flesh wounds. Las all.")  He turns out to be brave, resourceful, and shrewder than the white guys realize.  Even at face value, he isn’t much more outrageous a caricature than the comic relief characters written by Chinese scriptwriters and broadly played by Chinese actors in Jackie Chan’s and Stephen Chow’s Hong Kong action comedies today.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, Maxon’s creations pathetically realize that they are outcasts.  Instead of being enraged about their situation, like the creation in Mary Shelley’s allegorical novel, they are resigned to it: “it would be better were we to keep forever from the sight of men.”  Here ERB anticipates Boris Karloff’s and James Whale’s sympathetic treatment in “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), in which the creature moans, “We belong dead” after he is spurned by his intended mate.  In a weirdly kinky scene, the Monster Men decide they’re better off finding sexual partners among female orangutans (“I see a beautiful one yonder now.  I am going after her”),  provoking a bloody fight with the male apes.  Burroughs lifted ideas from other writers, but they were usually the greats (Twain, Swift, Verne, Anthony Hope), and he rarely did so without giving them his own thoughtful inflection.

Burroughs apparently liked the basic premise of artificial life and used it again 25 years later in the ninth book in the John Carter series, “Synthetic Men of Mars.”  That novel doesn’t get a lot of love from ERB fans like Richard Lupoff, but I think it’s one of Burroughs’ more inspired efforts.  Going “The Monster Men” one better, the dashing hero undergoes a brain transplant so that he can infiltrate an enemy city and save his sweetheart; he spends most of the novel in the body of a lumbering, Quasimodo-ugly synthetic man, and wonders whether he’ll ever get back into his own body.

There are reports of a new Tarzan movie in the works.  I wish they’d tackle “The Monster Men” instead.  I suppose the failure of “John Carter” makes it unlikely that Hollywood will ever try an untested Burroughs character again, but maybe they could call it “Tarzan  vs. Frankenstein on the Island of Dr. Moreau.”

SDCC: What's New with Tarzan, John Carter & Edgar Rice Burroughs?
CBR Comic Book Resources
ERB's creations live on in a variety of mediums

As pop culture pushes forward with an unprecedented amount of genre films, television and publishing endeavors on the way, it's important to remember the forerunners of today's popular characters. At Comic-Con International in San Diego, fans and professionals gathered to honor the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the prolific author that created such seminal characters and concepts such as "Carson of Venus," "John Carter of Mars," "The World of Pellucidar" and the granddaddy of them all, "Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle," all of which live on today in one form or another.

The panel of experts on all things Burroughs consisted of moderator Scott Tracy Griffin, author of "Tarzan, the Centennial Celebration," the artist of the "Cave Girl" comic strip Diana Leto, Dynamite Entertainment Senior editor Joe Rybandt and president of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., Jim Sullus (sic). Sullus called the company he oversees "a small, family run company ran by the Burroughs heirs, committed to not allow the properties to go stale." Rounding out the panel was writer of the online Burroughs comic strips "Korak the Killer" and "The Mucker," Ron Marz, and long time Burroughs World artist Thomas Yates.

The annual panel kicked off discussing the biggest current event of the Burroughs world, the 2016 Warner Brothers "Tarzan" film, which was greeted warmly by the Burroughs faithful in attendance. Sullus informed the audience that the film will feature "True Blood" star Alexander Skaarsgard as Tarzan, Margot Robbie ("Wolf of Wall Street"), Samuel L. Jackson as Tarzan's "sidekick," as Sullus called him, and Christoph Waltz as the film's antagonist. Sullus described the film's plot as, "Tarzan is the lord of the jungle but now he is also lord of Parliament. He is tapped by the Queen to go to Africa -- and Samuel L. Jackson is a U.S. Marshall -- together, these guys go to Africa and solve some problems."

Sullus then updated the audiences on the Constantine "Tarzan," Animated film which has been released in Europe and South Africa with sporadic showings in the U.S. Sullus proudly announced that the film "will soon be shown in China, in 5000 theaters, and will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray in the U.S. on August 5.

After mentioning some newer business ventures, like "Tarzan" slot machines and online games, Sullus moved to the publishing world. The first book up was the "Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs" an anthology by top genre authors like Peter David, F. Paul Wilson, Mercedes Lackey and Kevin J. Anderson. The book features many of Burroughs creations like Tarzan and the "World of Mars," "and there is a talk of doing a second one," according to Sullus.

Sullus then plugged the upcoming second volume of the "Russ Manning 'Tarzan'" by IDW Publishing, calling Manning "a master of 'Tarzan' art.

Moving away from the world of "Tarzan" to Burroughs' other major property, "John Carter," Sullus showed those in attendance the upcoming new edition of "Princess of Mars" with 20 new paintings by Mike Kaluta. According to Sullus, "We had to get special permission from Disney Worldwide Publishing, because they have the publishing rights for us, but when they found out Mike Kaluta was going to be the artist, they were like, 'You bet.'" Sullus said. "They don't give that permission easily, but because of the artist, they felt it was a great idea to do it."

Dark Horse is publishing a "Jungle Tales of Tarzan" anthology in 2015 -- this is not the cover art for the project

Sullus then took the time to plug the Burroughs online program. "We currently have eleven strips up. The most recent ones are 'John Carter of Mars.'" At the mention of "John Carter," Sullus took the time to address last year's the Burroughs estate's litigation with Dynamite Entertainment. "We worked hard, both sides, to find some middle ground and we found it. So we made a joint press announcement about two months ago." Sullus was proud the two sides could reach an accord, allowing both Dynamite and the Burroughs Estate to publish "John Carter" stories.

The next strip that will be introduced to the online World of Burroughs will be "The Monster Men," which Sullus described as, "a professor and his beautiful daughter go to the island in the South Pacific to create human beings -- but create twelve miserable monsters who don't have any capacity other than brutal force -- and the thirteenth is a perfect individual." Looking to the future of the online Burroughs strips, Sullus said, "We're not done. We want to expand this program, we do need subscribers. It really is the bargain of the century, $1.99 a month or $21.99 a year -- we can have as many as thirty individual web comic programs from Edgar Rice Burroughs." They're considering launching strips based on Burroughs properties "The Lost Continent," "The Girl From Hollywood" and "Beyond the Farthest Star."

Moving on to Dynamite Publishing, Rybant said that his company is currently wrapping up "Dejah Thoris," but November will see the relaunch of "John Carter: Warlord of Mars" by Marz and Abhishek Malsuni. In regard to his take on "John Carter," Marz said, "This will not be a comic where superheroes stand around and talk for 22 pages -- This is literally the book I wanted to write since I was ten years old. I discovered Burroughs in general, and John Carter specifically, at that magic age of ten to twelve when the stuff you discover at that age is important to you for the rest of your life -- When Dynamite announced they were doing 'Warlord of Mars' and 'Lord of the Jungle,' I found [Dynamite publisher] Nick Barrucci and said, 'What the hell are you doing, not calling me?' Three years later, it was at this convention last year, Nick came to me and said, 'We are thinking of relaunching those and would you be interested in "John Carter?"' Which is like the dumbest question I ever heard." Marz called artist Malsuni the "perfect artist for Barsoom, and more importantly, Dejah Thoris." Marz said he is thrilled to play with the Burroughs' world on a monthly basis. The relaunch hits in November and Marz asked the Burroughs faithful to give the books a try. "'Avengers' and 'X-Men' will always be there -- if you want these kind of books on the shelf, tell your retailers to order plenty." Rybant added to Marz's enthusiasm and called the new book "an accessible, new #1 -- even if a fan had never read a novel, past comic or seen the film," and called Marz a "natural for the series."

Addressing the elephant in the room, Marz called Disney's critically and financially (at least in the U.S.) panned "John Carter" film "pretty damn great," to which the audience agreed with a nice round of applause.

In addition to his work for Dynamite, Marz is also doing "The Mucker: The Adventures of Billy Byrne" for EdgarRiceBurroughs.com. For those who never heard of this somewhat obscure Burroughs creation, Sullus explained that the original "was set in the Chicago slums, and Burroughs went in all sorts of directions with it. It's a lost world tale, and a jungle tale, and a contemporary adventure and it eventually turned into a Western." "Mucker" artist Lee Moder "just nails the period stuff" according to Marz, who also called "The Mucker," "Burroughs' first anti-hero," and described the new strip as, "The kind of Sunday comics you read as a kid."

ERB fans recognize that "John Carter" was unfairly buried

Marz informed the crowd that he is also doing the online strip for "Korak the Killer," the first strip featuring the solo adventure of Korak. According to Marz, "Inspiration from Korak came from reading the DC Comics strip as a kid... I specifically remember a Joe Kubert cover with Korak fighting an alligator, so when the opportunity to do 'Korak' came up, I jumped in with both feet."The artist on the strip is Rick Leonardi, the co-creator of "Spider-Man 2099" and a big Burroughs fan. Like his "John Carter" work for Dynamite, Marz's "Korak stories "are not adaptations, they are all new. If anyone read a book a few years ago, it was my Batman/Tarzan crossover -- there might be some settings and characters in this 'Korak' strip that are slightly familiar."

The panel then moved to Leto, who proudly announced the upcoming graphic novel "Jungle Tales of Tarzan," available June 2015, a year before the upcoming movie. The book will feature twelve Burroughs adaptations by twelve different artists, set in the days before Tarzan met Jane. Published by the Sequential Pulp imprint of Dark Horse Comics, the book will feature art by Leto, Daren Bader, Pablo Marcos, Lowell Isaacs, Steve Gordon, Jamie Chase, Mark Wheatley, Carlos Artiglio, Tom Yates, Terry Beatty, Steve Price and more. All the artists have a "different style and specific emotion for each story." Leto will be doing a story called "Tarzan's First Love," for which she used "mixed media combining nature photography and water colors to bring the lush world of Burroughs to life."

The panel had time for a few questions, the first of which was from a fan who requested more information about the 2016 film. Sullus said "The film is scheduled to be released July 1 -- filming has begun in an actual castle. There will be a bit of shooting of Africa, and much of the film will be set in Britain."

A fan asked if there is any truth to the rumors of a "John Carter" musical. No such luck, but the panel talked about a "Tarzan" musical that had been very successful in Europe. Moving back to the film, Sullus said Disney "has the sequel rights to 'John Carter of Mars,' -- if we were ever to get the rights back, we would explore every possibility trying to get the sequel made, and if we couldn't do it in the U.S., we would go off shore... We would love to have a sequel because, oddly enough, 'John Carter' has received such notoriety now, that everybody knows who John Carter is. So we think attendance figures would really skyrocket. It was really U.S. attendance that ruined the performance of that film; internationally, it was over $200,000,000 in sales. Just in the U.S., the sci-fi community kind of went negative on it early, and the blogs went negative thanks to the Super Bowl ad that wasn't well done, and changing the name from 'John Carter of Mars' to just 'John Carter,' losing the reference point. They really went negative, and you saw what happened at the box office. Next time around, it could be a blockbuster.

To wrap up, Sullus preached to the Burroughs converted. "To many of us, 'John Carter' was unjustly maligned. The best thing you can do to show your support for the franchise is buy 'John Carter' product. Talk about it online; there is a 'Take Me Back to Mars' Facebook group, there is an online petition. Our strength is in our numbers."
 
 

JT Edson 
(February 17, 1928 - July 17, 20140
JT Edson was a writer whose fight-packed, politically incorrect Westerns crafted in Melton Mowbray sold 27 million copies
The Telegraph ~ July 25, 2014

JT Edson, who has died aged 86, was a former British Army dog-handler 
who wrote more than 130 Western novels, accounting for some 27 million sales in paperback.

Edson's deft, if hardly elegant, works – produced on a word processor in an Edwardian semi at Melton Mowbray — contain clear, crisp action in the traditions of B-movies and Western television series. What they lack in psychological depth is made up for by at least 12 good fights per volume . Each portrays a vivid, idealised “West That Never Was”, fuelled by corny jokes at a pace that rarely slackens.

His authentic descriptions of 19th-century weapons, his interest in what causes a gun to jam and in the mechanics of cheating at cards enjoyed a strong following, especially among serving British soldiers

But his accounts of catfights involving women punching, scratching and biting as they tear the clothes off each other in the mud, did not appeal to the new breed of feminist publishing executives. Others pointed out that a young man sent to Broadmoor for killing a Sunday School teacher claimed to have modelled himself on Edson’s hero, the half-Comanche, half-Irish Ysabel Kid. There was also the novel The Hooded Riders (1968), which portrayed an organisation resembling the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic resistance group.

In 1984 the Labour Party protested about the characters in JT’s Ladies: they included a gunslinger called Roy Hattersley (then the party’s deputy leader) and his sidekick Len Murray and three desperadoes named Alex Kitson, Alan Fisher and David Basnett — all of them well-known trade union leaders.

At the same time, Edison delighted in pricking southern, middle-class, pretensions. The dedication to JT’s Ladies declared: “For all the idiots of the press who have written articles entitled things like 'The Fastest Pen in Melton Mowbray’ and have been filled with the most stupid, snob-oriented pseud-jargon never to appear on the pages of mine or any other author’s books. May the bluebird of happiness fly over them when it has dysentery, because that is catching.’’

John Thomas Edson was born at Worksop, Nottinghamshire, on February 17 1928, the son of a miner who was killed in an accident when John was nine. He left Shirebrook Selective Central School at 14 to work in a stone quarry and joined the Army four years later.

As a sergeant in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, Edson served in Kenya during the Emergency, on one occasion killing five Mau Mau on patrol. He started writing in Hong Kong, and when he won a large cash prize in a tombola he invested in a typewriter.

On coming out of the Army after 12 years with a wife and children to support, Edson learned his craft while running a fish-and-chip shop and working on the production line at a local pet food factory. His efforts paid off when Trail Boss (1961) won second prize in a competition – a promise of publication and an outright payment of £50.

The publishers offered £25 more for each subsequent book, and — with the addition of earnings from serial-writing for the comic Victor — Edson was able to settle down to professional authorship. When the comic’s owners decided that nobody read cowboy stories any more, he was forced to get a job as a postman (the job had the by-product of enabling him to lose six stone in weight from his original 18).

Edson’s prospects improved when Corgi Books took over his publisher, encouraged him to produce seven books a year and promised him royalties for the first time. In 1974 he made his first visit to the United States, to which he was to return regularly in search of reference books. He declared that he had no desire to live in the Wild West, adding: “I’ve never even been on a horse. I’ve seen those things, and they look highly dangerous at both ends and bloody uncomfortable in the middle. My only contact was to shoot them for dog meat.”

Edson’s bachelor-tidy study, with a wall covered in replica firearms, was the setting for a daily routine broken by a lunchtime stroll to the local pub. A secretary in the room next door handled his fan mail, income tax demands and the sales in Danish, German and Serbo-Croat. Occasionally he would ask her to help him act out some particularly complicated Main Street gunplay and to help produce a JT Appreciation Society newsletter .

His heroes were often based on his favourite film stars, so that Dusty Fog resembled Audie Murphy, and the Ysabel Kid was an amalgam of Elvis Presley in Flaming Star and Jack Buetel in The Outlaw.

Before becoming a recluse in his last years, JT’s favourite boast was that Melton Mowbray was famous for three things: “The pie, Stilton cheese and myself – but not necessarily in that order’’.
Edson and his wife Dorothy were divorced. They had two sons and a daughter, and he also adopted her three sons by a previous marriage.

Indian woman, armed only with farm tool, fights off leopard
CNN ~ August 27, 2014 New Delhi (CNN) -- The fight is said to have lasted a half-hour and pitted a leopard against a woman armed only with a farm tool in an isolated field in India. Kalama Devi, at 54 years old, won.

Devi, a widow and mother of one, has been telling her story from a hospital bed in Srinagar, in Uttarakhand state, where she's being treated for fractures, swelling, scratches and cuts to her skull that have required 50 stitches. "I held the leopard with my hands, it then bit my hand and then left it. ... Both my hands are in immense pain and I am not able to lift them up," she said.

According to the doctor who's treating her, the leopard pounced about 10 a.m. Sunday as Devi, who had been cutting grass with a sickle, walked through a field in the village of Koti Badma, in the Rudraprayag district of Uttarakhand. It fractured her left hand first, so with her right hand clutching the sickle she repeatedly hit the animal -- for about 30 minutes.

She said she kept pounding the leopard until she ran out of energy, then, exhausted and bleeding, limped one kilometer to a nearby village to seek help, Dr. Abdul Rahul at the HNB Base Hospital in Srinagar told CNN. Villagers found the leopard dead when they went to the scene of the reported attack, the doctor said. It's not the first leopard attack in the area, Rahul said, though he added it was more common to see injuries as the result of attacks by bears. Another woman was recently killed by a young male cat, which was shot dead by hunters, according to Digvijay Khati, chief wildlife warden in Uttarakhand. "These are alarming incidents because usually leopards attack and kill dogs, goats or young children -- not adults," Khati told CNN. He said the big cats' natural habitat is shrinking, and their natural prey are becoming scarce. However, Khatis said, "We cannot say that the increase of human population in the areas is responsible, because attacks have even occurred where human population is less, and people are now moving out to the plains in search of work," he said. ~ VIDEO

Those Famous Monster magazines
Will give you nightmares, son.
And Sick and Mad and Frenzy?
Not 'til you're twenty-one!

The Savage Sword of Conan?
Oh, spare me from that gore!
And I don't want you reading 'bout
James Bond and Miss Galore.

Young man, I'm your mother!
Now you do what I say!
Some day you're going to thank me
That you didn't go astray.

I often think of mother,
How loving, and how kind
But how'd that blasted Wertham's soul
Find harbor in her mind?