The Sunday Funnies - Tarzan Of The Apes 1929!

It was 1929 and Tarzan of the Apes had become a significant feature in the popular culture of the time. Edgar Rice Burroughs had released fourteen novels featuring the character and around ten silent movies had been made starring the character. But since adventure comic strips were not so much a thing in 1929 Tarzan had yet to make a mark in the newspapers around the country. That is until ERB and some enterprising chaps decided to make it so and in doing that brought aboard a very talented advertising illustrator named Hal Foster. 

Several years ago IDW Publishing puit out the first year and more of the Tazarn of the Apes dailies as part of their The Library of American Comics Essential series. The tome gives the reader a nice historical essay for context by Henry G. Franke III and follows it up with the first four continuities of the strip. The four novels adapted for the comic strip were the first four written and published by ERB. The novels have been stripped down to around 15,000 words or about a tenth of their original lengths and the strip is arranged in a format of text and picture familiar to fans of the classic Big Little Books. 

A fellow named Joseph H. Neebe was the driving force behind the comic strips and arranged with ERB for the rights. It took a while for the format to be arrived at and for artists to be arranged. And still more time was required to sell the strip to the newspapers which had not had any experience with an adventure strip of this kind. Comic strips were mostly gags and light-hearted and the saga of Tarzan was hardly that. Neebe hired a writer named Ralph W. Palmer and a respected but unknown advertising artist named Hal R. Foster for the artwork. By do that Neebe transformed the comic strip as we understand it and laid the groundwork for much of what we think of as comic books themselves. 

The comic strip was eventually sold novel by novel with newspapers having the option to stop at the end of any yarn. Tarzan of the Apes debuted in America on January 7, 1929 but had already appeared in the British magazine Tit-Bits several months earlier making it the first adventure comic strip. Foster handled the art chores magnificently on the first sequence which adapted Tarzan of the Apes. But Foster then left for more lucrative work. Rex Maxon was tapped to take over and he began his long association with the Tarzan character despite complaints from ERB himself. Maxon's style is less ornate than Foster's but has just as much energy if not more. Maxon (with some anonymous help) went on to illustrated the next three Tarzan novels -- The Return of Tarzan, The Beasts of Tarzan, and The Son of Tarzan. The Foster adaptation of the first novel has been reprinted a few times but first as The Illustrated Tarzan Book No.1 seen at the top. 

The first two novels by ERB are among his finest work. They form one long story that establishes the character of Tarzan as we understand him and in this stripped-down illustrated format function quite well. Nicholas Rokoff is one of my absolute favorite fictional villains and he gets some good attention  in these wild yarns.  The Beasts of Tarzan and The Son of Tarzan are less effective narratives suffering from wacky plotting which in the case of the former undermines its climax, and in the former doesn't give the reader enough Tarzan, though Korak is a decent substitute. I hadn't read these last few novels in many years and it was nifty to get to revisit them in this fresh way. 

This tome is highly recommended and sets up the Hal Foster Sunday pages quite well. Those we will begin with next week. 

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