Burne Hogarth is front and center in Tarzan Versus The Nazis, the third volume in Titan Books' series dedicated to the vintage comic strip series. Don Garden had been the writer of the series from the very beginning, working first with Hal Foster and then with Hogarth when he took over the artistic reins. Now he was called away to military service in 1943 and Hogarth became both the writer and the artist of the high-profile comic strip.
Hogarth's first storyline was "Tarzan Against Kandullah and the Nazis". It's a tale that calls upon Tarzan to help his old allies the Boers who are now facing a threat from Nazis who are stirring up the black natives yet again to take up arms against the white settlers. The next story is "Tarzan Against Don Macabre" and it brings in a villain who is at once suave and deadly, a sophisticated Spaniard who uses his charisma as well as violence to maintain his power. The centerpiece of this story is Tarzan's battle against a ferocious bull. Macabre also keeps a "Garden of Death" filled with deadly flesh-eating plants. Tarzan is able lead a small insurrection against Don Macabre before he heads off to battle with Nazis again in "Tarzan and the Nazis". This time he has as an ally a white ape named Bulak. It turns out the battle is against both the Nazis and the Japanese as both have representatives using locals to fight for them. When they prove unreliable modern troops are brought in but Tarzan is able to deploy a small army of wild animals to help quell the threat. He leads the forces into a trap where he destroys their munitions in a mighty panel.
"Tarzan Against The Gorm-Bongara Monster" has the Ape Man once again battling a deadly dinosaur, a variation of the T-Rex this time but drawn in Hogarth's distinctive style. Hogarth's animals often don't look exactly like you'd expect but they are brimming with power and speed. In "Tarzan and the Tartars" Tarzan once again is battling to return a rightful heir to the throne. He seems to do an awful lot of this in the series but then he does so in the novels as well. This time the saga takes on echoes of King Arthur with a magic sword and scepter being retrieved by our hero to prove the bonafides of the heir apparent. There's even a wizened old man guarding them in the manner of Merlin. The art begins to slide during this period and eventually Hogarth steps aside for the artist Ruben Moreira who signed his work here as "Rubimor". Rumbimor is decidedly less impressive than either Foster or Hogarth and the series takes a tumble in quality as the stories themselves seem perfunctory. But most of Rubimor's work is not collected here since the focus is on Hogarth.
The last story in this collection is "Tarzan on the Island of Ka-Gor" which begins with scripts by a returning Garden with art by Rubimor who was wrapping up his tenure on the strip. Then Garden continues in tandem with Hogarth until Hogarth takes over in the third and final part of this tale, which is neatly divided into three in the collection. Tarzan battles all sorts of critters in this tale which ends with a triple volcanic eruption. And for the first time in the Hogarth era, we meet Jane though she doesn't stay around long as a young woman wants Tarzan to find her diamond-hunting father. Tarzan recovers from an illness in the last part of this tale and is cared for by the animals of the jungle.
Don Garden it seems has wrapped up his tenure on the strip, but more on that next time, as well as sme of Hogarth's greatest work.
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The timing of Don Macabre is curious to me; I wonder if he was a lost character from the Drago series that Hogarth began in late 1945 (about a year later I think), whose villain, Baron Zodiac, was also a Nazi, but there were plenty of evil Latin scoundrels in the Pampas settings that Drago had to deal with as well.
ReplyDeleteI pondered that connection myself, but I only know the Drago series by its reputation and have never read any of them.
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