KING KONG OF SKULL ISLAND BOOKS

KING KONG OF SKULL ISLAND contains the long awaited expansion of Joe DeVito’s original creation, Skull Island and is exclusively endorsed by the estate of the creator of King Kong, Merian C. Cooper. Originally only appearing only as a very Limited Edition, slip cased hardcover book, KING KONG OF SKULL ISLAND has now been reformatted into two spectacular, softcover volumes with expanded information and artwork:

KING KONG OF SKULL ISLAND Part 1: EXODUS and KING KONG OF SKULL ISLAND Part 2: THE WALL are now available to the mass market for the first time from Markosia!

Millennia before the Golden Ages of Egypt and Greece, a uniquely marvelous race of humans existed on the shores of what today is a portion of the northern rim of the Indian Ocean, on the northeast side of the Andaman Sea.

They called themselves the Tagatu. They could have-perhaps would have-ruled the world.

And then they vanished. Their former greatness and their relationship to the giant species of anthropoids known as the Kongs are only hinted at in a colossal Wall that still spans the peninsula of Skull Island. How did the Tagatu come to live on that prehistoric island, and how could they have built such a Wall in the midst of so many terrifyingly powerful dinosaurs?

KING KONG OF SKULL ISLAND Part One: EXODUS reveals the hidden history of the spectacular Tagatu civilization, the origins of the mighty Kongs and the strange, ancient interactions that enabled their survival in the midst of global catastrophe. Facing impossible obstacles, the remarkable exodus of an entire civilization unfolds against a cataclysmic backdrop, leading to an unlikely destination: Skull Island.

The survivors confront the indigenous, pseudo-sentient population of terrifying saurians called "Deathrunners." Led by their god-like carnosaur of titanic size, ferocity, and intelligence called "Gaw,” they threaten to wipe the Kongs and the Tagatu from the face of the earth...

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KING KONG OF SKULL ISLAND Part Two: THE WALL reveals the astonishing history of Skull Island after the arrival of the human civilization, the Tagatu, accompanied by the prehistoric Kongs. As they struggle to cope with the island’s bizarre fauna, flora and geological makeup, they encounter indigenous forward-evolved denizens called Deathrunners, who are led by their super-saurian queen, Gaw. The Tagatu’s only hope for survival is to attempt the impossible: the building a colossal Wall in the midst of an all-out war for species survival between the deathrunners, Gaw and the Kongs!

Please go here for more details.

King Kong of Skull Island contains the long awaited expansion of Joe DeVito’s original creation, Skull Island. Exclusively endorsed by the estate of the creator of King Kong, Merian C. Cooper, King Kong of Skull Island opens with The Denham Diaries, followed by a novel in two parts: Part 1: Exodus and Part 2: The Wall, all co-written by Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland. The book features lush, full color interior art and an extensive sketchbook section written and lavishly illustrated by DeVito.

"King Kong of Skull Island" is now available to everyone, everywhere as an ebook! This ebook is unabridged and contains every illustration in both color and B&W exactly as in the Kickstarter Limited Edition hardcover book.

It’s Fantastic!

KING KONG of SKULL ISLAND is a 9"x12", 268 pp illustrated novel, in slipcased hardcover. It’s a Limited Edition of only 500 books, and comes with a special, author-signed bookplate. 

This epic volume chronicles the origins of the Kongs, the island's ancient civilization called the Tagatu, and their fight to survive in the midst of Skull Island’s prehistoric denizens, culminating in the epic building of the Great Wall. Untold mysteries surrounding Skull Island’s enigmatic origins and its bizarre natural wonders are also revealed.

KING KONG of SKULL ISLAND is an important addition to the Kong canon, and is a must-have for the serious King Kong fan. It contains six major parts:

– The Skull Island Journals, The Writings of Vincent Denham, Ph.D., a retelling of DeVito’s original Skull Island story that reveals the fate of Carl Denham in the wake of King Kong’s death, recounts the epic adventure of how Kong became a King, and reveals the secrets of the Tagatu people, the ancient human civilization that worshipped Kong. Along the way many mysteries are uncovered while continuing to explore the saurian evolution and adaptation that took place there over the 65 million years following the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, effectively making Skull Island a character in its own right.

– An all-new Skull Island Novel in two parts:

Part 1: Exodus delves into the hidden history of the Tagatu civilization, the origins of the mighty Kongs and the strange, ancient interactions that enabled their survival in the midst of disastrous events. Facing impossible obstacles, the spectacular exodus of an entire civilization unfolds against a cataclysmic backdrop leading to an unlikely destination: Skull Island. Unless a solution can be found quickly, the unimaginable dangers encountered there threaten to wipe them from the face of the earth forever....

Part 2: The Wall tells the incredible story of what happened on Skull Island after the arrival of the first human civilization, their interaction with the prehistoric Kongs, and the war for species survival against the island’s strange saurian denizens. Life on Skull Island has not stood still, but continued to evolve for tens of millions of years, to a point where humans may no longer be dominant. The inevitable, penultimate war for survival between humans, Kongs and super-saurians takes place against the backdrop of the massive undertaking of the building of the iconic Wall: A barrier that will span the millennia and play a major role in the rise and fall of the mythic beast-god of Skull Island, King Kong!

KING KONG of SKULL ISLAND also features:

– An extensive, illustrated Skull Island Details and Observations section that uncovers the details and mysteries of Skull Island as never before.

– A lavishly illustrated and hand-written Carl & Vincent Denham Sketchbook & Notes section that is hand-written, which expands on all things Skull Island further still. Printed in rich sepia tones on thick parchment.

– A lush, full–color Art Gallery of over a dozen set paintings beautifully reproduced on glossy, heavy paper stock

Introduction by Mark Cotta Vaz, Author of Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper

KING KONG of SKULL ISLAND is part of DeVito ArtWorks’ unfolding universe joining the Cooper Estate’s original storyline “Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong” with DeVito’s ground-breaking "Skull Island" origin story – the first and only creator-authorized expansion of the Skull Island mythos since Cooper created King Kong!

KONG: King of Skull Island Hardcover

THE HARDCOVER IS SOLD OUT!

Last of the first Edition "Kong: King of Skull Island" books, hand signed by Joe DeVito

$20 per book + $4 S&H.

Kong: King of Skull Island Softcover

“Have you ever heard of . . . Kong?” asked Carl Denham of Englehorn, captain of the ship taking the adventurer-moviemaker, and his cast and crew, nearer to Skull Island, in uncharted regions of the Indian Ocean. “Why, yes,” was Englehorn’s measured reply, as if rousing long-dormant memories of the native legends he had heard on his countless voyages in the area. Since the release of King Kong in March 1933, very few who have inhabited Planet Earth would need more than a second to respond in the affirmative. King Kong has become entrenched in movie lore and culture not only in America, but around the world as well.

The question that, in contrast, remains baffling to many people in the twenty-first century is: Have you ever heard of Merian C. Cooper? What may be surprising to a majority of those who are told about him is that Merian Coldwell Cooper, in addition to King Kong, is directly connected to the following: world exploration, many of the classic films directed by John Ford, Technicolor and the increased use of color in motion pictures, the birth of widescreen movies with Cinerama, the development of commercial aviation, and distinguished service in America’s air force in two world wars.

I vividly recall reading the newspaper obituaries, published side-by-side, of Merian Cooper and Robert Armstrong, the man Cooper had chosen, over forty years earlier, to play Carl Denham in King Kong. Cooper died on April 21, 1973, and Armstrong the day before. The death of one following so closely on the other reinforced even more to me the degree to which Cooper was the character of Denham. This mingling of Merian C. Cooper into his creations was a trademark of this passionate jack-of-all-trades. Readers of Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong will discover that Cooper and Denham, in so many respects, are one and the same.

A life that, by ordinary expectations of achievement, would logically be credited to five or six individuals, is, in the case of Cooper, confined to one human being whom famed journalist and broadcaster Lowell Thomas described as “not just a remarkable man, he was incredible.” With all of his accomplishments, there is little doubt that it is for the creation of King Kong that Merian C. Cooper will be most fondly remembered. King Kong was also an outgrowth of the motto that Cooper and filmmaking partner Ernest B. Schoedsack adopted as a litmus test for their future film projects. It was that locations and story elements must incorporate aspects of the distant, difficult, and dangerous.

Cooper was a man with seven-league boots, imbued with the romanticism of exploration, discovery, adventure, and danger more typical of a bygone era. Yet his love of twentieth-century aviation, technology, high finance, and the motion picture industry would, on the surface, seem irreconcilable to his passion for the primitive. Perhaps the most enduring creation resulting from this unique amalgamation of disparate worlds was King Kong.

Cooper himself indicated that the elements that became the motion picture King Kong began to come together in his mind in 1929, when he was thirty-six years old. The seed was most likely planted, however, at the tender age of six, when an uncle gave him a copy of Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa by Pierre Du Chaillu. That, according to Cooper, was when he decided to become a s his assistant. Two years later, Cooper became production head at RKO when Selznick left for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. During his tenure at RKO, Cooper paired up Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers, brought Katharine Hepburn to Hollywood, and began his long association with director John Ford, whom he brought to RKO to make The Lost Patrol and The Informer. Cooper’s stint at RKO also brought him in contact with technical wizard Willis O’Brien, then working on a secret, and ultimately unproduced, project called Creation, involving the stop-motion animation of models of prehistoric beasts. O’Brien would prove invaluable in bringing Kong to the screen.

The final link in what would become King Kong came out of discussions Cooper had with explorer W. Douglas Burden. Inspired by Chang, Burden led a filmmaking expedition to the island of Komodo and brought back two of its indigenous giant lizards for exhibition at the Bronx Zoo. That they eventually became ill and died was an element that found its way into Cooper’s beauty-and-the-beast story of a giant gorilla. The final story was classic Cooper, combining elements both primitive and contemporary, and whose premise involved difficulty, distance, and, most certainly, danger.

Popular British novelist Edgar Wallace was brought into the project in December 1932, but died suddenly of pneumonia just over two months later, after turning out a draft script of Cooper’s story. The script was more fully developed, under Cooper’s supervision, into its final form by James Creelman and Ruth Rose. Cooper, nevertheless, kept Wallace’s name on the film and in publicity connected to King Kong, both because of his promise to Wallace and for its publicity value.

At nearly fifty, Cooper, with a wife and three children to care for, could easily have remained safely at home during World War II. However, his innate patriotism compelled him to sign up, as he had done nearly three decades earlier, to serve his country. In China, Cooper was chief of staff to General Claire Chennault of the Flying Tigers, and flew numerous bombing missions with his younger subordinates. Later, in the South Pacific, he was chief of staff to General Edward Kenney, masterminding air operations. At war’s end, he was among those on board the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay at the ceremony formalizing Japan’s surrender.

Following the war, Cooper and John Ford formed Argosy Pictures Corporation, and together were responsible for some of that era’s best films, including Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Quiet Man, as well as revisiting the giant gorilla theme with Mighty Joe Young. Ever on the cutting edge, Cooper was a major force in the development, along with Lowell Thomas, of Cinerama, the first commercially successful widescreen movie process, which revolutionized the motion picture industry.

I never met Merian C. Cooper. Photographs of him often show a broad smile of Cinerama proportions. Surviving audio recordings revealed his expansive Southern drawl, and a passion for what he was doing at the moment. My early interest in movies was bolstered by frequent viewings of King Kong on Los Angeles television during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Its effect was singularly impressive: the human qualities of Kong; Max Steiner’s powerful score, laced with themes for each character; and the derring-do, man-on-the-make Depression-era elan of Carl Denham. At the time, the only accessible publication on Cooper was an excellent article by movie historian Rudy Behlmer in the January 1966 issue of Films in Review.

It was in meeting members of his family that I discovered firsthand the Cooper quality of relentless decency and warmth. My association began in 1976, with Cooper’s widow, the gracious Dorothy Jordan, at her home on Coronado Island near San Diego, where the couple had retired. I was early in my career as a manuscript curator at the Special Collections department at Brigham Young University. In the ensuing decade, during which Cooper’s papers were donated to BYU in 1986, I also enjoyed getting to know their son, U.S. Air Force Colonel Richard M. Cooper. He patiently entertained the countless questions thrown at him as I wound my way through over fifty cartons of correspondence, passports, scrapbooks, photographs, and memorabilia accumulated by Richard’s father and seen by no one else.

I must admit to being more than guarded when I heard of a modern adaptation of the original King Kong story. My immediate reaction was to conjure up horrific images of the makeover of the Kong story by movie producer Dino De Laurentiis in the mid 1970s. Leave well enough alone was my unspoken plea. What made me even consider reading this new version was that the request came from Colonel Cooper himself. A subsequent weekend immersed in the typescript erased any concerns I had about heresy, blasphemy, or crassly commercial exploitation of Merian C. Cooper’s original story by Mr. DeVito and Mr. Strickland. After years of being immersed in Cooper’s own papers, I emerged from reading the manuscript feeling at home.

The authors’ single-minded determination to remain faithful to Cooper’s original story has resulted in what is, to me, a seamless tale that authentically derives from the spirit of Cooper’s fertile imagination. What they have done is to flesh out the story that Kong devotees so protectively revere, and yet allow the reader to create an authentic theater-of-the-mind experience, not unlike that of old time radio. DeVito and Strickland convincingly invoke the senses into the voyage of The Wanderer to Skull Island and back: the pelting rain, the pungent smell of the jungle, the strained muscles, sweat, and sinews of Carl Denham and Jack Driscoll on the chase for Ann Darrow in peril, the heat and dampness of the tropical isle, and even the acrid aroma of Kong crashing through groves of jungle flora. Of particular interest are their credible embellishments on Cooper’s original story, covering the time between the capture of Kong on Skull Island and his exhibition on Broadway, as well as what transpires from Kong’s escape and the havoc wreaked in midtown Manhattan until his ascent of the Empire State Building, Ann Darrow in hand.

Venerated stories that have become cultural legends are both formidable in their longevity and, at the same time, highly vulnerable and fragile. Their strength comes from endurance in the culture; their fragility becomes exposed by attempts to alter them. DeVito and Strickland have taken a story—for generations familiar and for decades beloved—and have given it a fresh retelling. They have done their job so convincingly that they reinforce King Kong as myth without disturbing its core time-honored elements. As with Cooper himself, the authors have deftly blended the old with the new in a story that is well within the confines of the term “Faithful.” “It’s alive!” cried Dr. Henry Frankenstein in the movie about his creation that has also become a cultural legend. In the case of Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong, Cooper’s creation is, indeed not only alive . . . but alive and well.

James V. D’Arc
Curator, Merian C. Cooper Papers
Brigham Young University