Tarzan and the Lost Tribes is the fourth and penultimate installment in Titan Books series putting together the comic strips by Burne Hogarth starring Edgar Rice Burroughs mighty Ape Man. Hogarth had stepped away from the series for a few years but was hustled back onto the scene when Burroughs himself took an interest in the declining Tarzan comic strip and demanded some changes. Rex Maxon was hustled off the daily strip and replaced by Hogarth (sort of -- more on this next week) and Hogarth took over the Sunday page from Ruben Moriera with a new writer named Rob Thompson taking over for Don Garden who had helmed the series since its inception.
This is the work that Hogarth is best remembered for, this is the stuff that made his rep for all these decades and made him a sought-after instructor for many up-and-coming artists. It's from these pages that the images I've long associated with Hogarth are derived. The first of the three continuities in this volume is titled "Tarzan and N'ani". The N'ani in the title is a queen of yet another remote tribe who worship a pagan god that resembles a giant ape.
It's a rarity in the Hogarth Tarzan stories in that Jane makes an appearance is the center of the action, or at least the catalyst for the action as Tarzan fights to save her from the tribes that seek to sacrifice her. Needless to say that Tarzan does indeed save Jane (we knew it all the time) and poor N'ani meets a terrifying end.
"Tarzan on the Island of Mua-Ao" is a departure from the norm in that Tarzan leaves the African continent entirely when he is abducted and taken aboard a submarine which voyages to the region near Polynesia. On an island there he and his abductors (some scientists) are captured by the Lahtians, a race that inhabit an underground grotto kingdom. Turns out that in addition to a bounty of tigers on the island there are two other societies (Orang-Rimba and Thalia) and Tarzan along with his ally, the giant Soros seek them out and band them together to overthrow the Lahtians. I noticed that in this series Hogarth loved to draw large cats and has Tarzan fight all manner of lions and tigers and such.
Back in his home territories (more or less) in "Tarzan and the Ononoes" our jungle hero comes across perhaps the weirdest of the societies he's met yet in the comic strip when he enters the land of the bizarre Ononoes, a race of giant heads with arms who appear to achieve mobility by rolling around. I'm never quite able to picture that as the rolling always leaves them face up, but they are striking creatures. Tarzan is looking for a lost daughter of an explorer, and finds her and rescues her, albeit with the assistance of an ape-like tribe called the Wolos.
One thing that is notable is that the format of the Sunday page alters to a horizontal one for the last few installments of this story. This new format as well as some of the dailies produced under Hogarth's watch will be the focus of the next report.
But that report will be delayed for a month or so for reasons that will become clear. Next month in "The Sunday Funnies" something completely different.
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What stands out, and what caught the attention of European aficionados,is Hogarth's composition of the entire page as a unit, something that had been done before in humor strips, but not in the more illustrative features by Foster and Raymond, for instance.
ReplyDeleteI'd agree that's a feature of Hogarth but I see that also in the best of Foster too in Prince Valiant if not so much his Tarzan work. This is the period when Hogarth was writing the strip too at times, giving him complete control.
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