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It's a little hard to see, but this #10 cover has photos
of two identical covers, both bearing the image of a Funky Winkerbean Sunday
comic in which Crazy visits a comic shop and finds the one edition of "Tarzan
in Color" he needs to complete his collection. For the original cover,
Charlie Delgado clipped out the comic, glued part of it to an envelope,
and had it canceled with a special postmark that he himself designed for
the Black River Stamp Club show in Elyria, Ohio. The postmark celebrated
the comic strip, Funky Winkerbean, and Tom Batiuk, its creator, autographed
it for Charlie. The cover was postmarked twice, on two Edgar Rice Burroughs
stamps.
That comic strip is almost too tiny to read without a
magnifying glass so if you want to see it and some others in readable size,
along with book covers for "Tarzan in Color," go here:
https://www.erbzine.com/mag45/4564.html
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If they don't already have artistic skills when they're
sent to prison, many inmates literally have time on their hands to develop
them and, in my years of working for the U.S. Postal Service, I delivered
many an artistic envelope decorated by an inmate, usually to be appreciated
by a wife or girlfriend back home.
John Henkel was an inmate at Lima Correctional Institute
in Ohio and a fellow member of the Art Cover Exchange, a club where members
exchange art covers and letters with one another. I had mentioned in my
correspondence to John of my interest in Tarzan, and he sent me a cover,
dated June 18, 1999, with this Tarzan swinging across the envelope. John
wrote, "I like the old Tarzan movies. I'm staying busy with my artwork,
letters and still trying to go home! From behind the walls...." John eventually
did get out and I got one more cover from him afterward, but then our communication
stopped. I don't know what life was like for him after that, but I wish
him well.
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Johnny Weissmuller as "Tarzan" and other well-known movies
about Africa or Africans were celebrated on June 20, 1991, by the Kingdom
of Lesotho. Where's Lesotho, one might ask?
It's a landlocked country within the border of South
Africa. Along with the Vatican City and San Marino, it is one of only three
independent states completely surrounded by the territory of another country,
and the only one outside the Italian peninsula or that is not a microstate.
Lesotho is a little more than 11,583 square miles and has a population
of around two million.
Lesotho was previously the British Crown Colony of Basutoland,
but it declared independence from the United Kingdom on October 4, 1966.
Geographically, the entire country is more than 1,000
meters above sea level and is crisscrossed by a network of rivers and mountain
ranges including the 3,482 meter-high peak of Thabana Ntlenyana.
On the Thaba Bosiu plateau, near Lesotho's capital, Maseru,
are ruins dating from the 19th-century reign of King Moshoeshoe I. Thaba
Bosiu overlooks iconic Mount Qiloane, an enduring symbol of the nation’s
Basotho people. Sounds like a good place for Tarzan to roam.
Shown here is an individual first-day cover for the stamp
commemorating the movie, "Tarzan the Ape Man." The Tarzan stamp and seven
others are also grouped into two four-stamp sets on two other first-day
covers. A separate sheet with a stamp for the movie "Born Free" is also
shown on a cover.
These two cover designs are the only ones I've ever seen
for the Lesotho stamps.
The other movies represented are "King Solomon's Mines,"
"Mogambo," "Coming to America," "Gorillas in the Mist," "The African Queen,"
"Hatari" and "Out of Africa."
