The Sunday Funnies - Tarzan In The City Of Gold!

When the great Hal Foster left Tarzan to make more time for his masterpiece Prince Valiant it put the Ape Man in a hard place. Foster had become for many (including Burroughs himself) the definitive artist for the character and anyone who stepped in to fill his shoes was going to have a tough job. That person turned out to be Burne Hogarth who came to the strip in the middle of Don Garden's long saga "Tarzan int he City of Gold". Already the yarn had seen Tarzan wage a small-scale war alongside the citizens of the city against greedy invaders from the modern world. And for his efforts he'd been ordered into prison by the Queen who felt she had no choice when the miscreants seemed to hold all the cards.

But as the saga continues under Hogarth she suddenly relents and allows Tarzan to take command once again and to this end he attempts a different strategy and goes into the jungle to round up an army of wild beasts to counter the soldiers who want to ransack the city. He finds apes and lions and even elephants to help him after much effort and alongside the citizens they are able to eventually stave off the threats from the outside world. The city of the gold is safe and Tarzan makes a hasty exit to return to his old stomping grounds. 

After a revitalizing Dum-Dum or two get those old ape juices flowing Tarzan heads home to his ranch but is almost immediately called away to help a tribe with some invaders. These invaders called the Boers are actually settlers who have bought the territories they are heading to and the chief of the tribe just wants to renege and kill them off with Tarzan's help. But the Ape Man gets wise and what follows is more akin to a classic Western than a jungle epic. We have wagons arranged in a defensive posture and guns and arrows and even eventually a cavalry save. There's plenty of intrigue in this one as well. 

Then it's a displaced Asian culture which come into view in "Tarzan and the Chinese".  Actually, it seems that we get a tiny version of the invasions of Genghis Khan into China. Tarzan finds a immense wall and crosses over into a new territory where despite his help and nobility he is doomed to die. But eventually the invasion of barbaric natives creates a need for someone of Tarzan's talents and the highly civilized Chinese are then able to defend themselves somewhat more effectively. Eventually of course Tarzan wins the day and heads out for regions he's more at home in. 

That brings him in conflict with a strange race of "Half-Men" in "Tarzan and the Pygmies". A villain named Marsada is leading yet another safari to find treasure and it finds trouble instead. The daughter of the man paying for the quest is quickly the object of desire of the baddie and is saved by Tarzan and whisked away into the trees not unlike his original romance with Jane, though he has not such intentions with this young lady named Linda. 

They are only saved from the savage "Half-Men" when a powerful band of women appear to help in "Tarzan and the Amazons". Then Tarzan becomes the object of desire for the most powerful of these savage women Kuleeah and he has to do his best to let her down easily, though it proves mostly impossible. It's all he can do save Linda and get beyond the reach of these women. 

The final storyline in this volume has Tarzan once again meeting up with the Boer settlers and he must battle furiously to save them from a greedy villain named Klass Vanger who wants the diamonds he suspects is on the land owned by the Jan Van Boeren and his allies and works up the local natives with lies of the settlers breaking their promises to them. His daughter Matea falls under the spell of the villain despite the true love of a powerful man named Groot Carlis who fights alongside Tarzan to great effect. There is much back and forth intrigue in this storyline but as you'd expect by the end the lovers are united and the battle is won for the moment though danger sill lurks. 

We'll get a glimpse of that danger when we take on volume two of Burne Hogarth's Tarzan in Tarzan Versus The Barbarians next week. 

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