Hal Foster's
Tarzan in Color
To someone like me, who grew up in the late 1950s and early '60s, Tarzan in Color (the new series of reprints of the Tarzan Sunday comics drawn by Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth) is a revelation. Reprinted complete, in original color, and “at as large a size as your library can accommodate” (as NBM, the publisher, observes with amusing accuracy in its advertisement), these pages present a fascinatingly different version of ERB’s legendary hero and one noticeably truer to the character as envisioned by Edgar Rice Burroughs than any of the numerous Tarzan adaptions that peopled my childhood.
Growing up in that time period, it was natural for me to believe that the Tarzan most people knew was not the marvelous, complex, introspective character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but the anemic, superficial imitation given us by Hollywood--“Me Tarzan, you Jane,” Johnny Weissmuller and Johnny Sheffield. These volumes point out just how wrong my perception was. From 1931 to about 1950, newspaper readers around the world were treated to an incarnation of the ape-man which, if not the intellectual equal of Burroughs’ original, was certainly much closer to the “real” Tarzan than I had realized--a Tarzan who cavorted regularly with apes, danced the Dum-Dum, had an estate in England and a son named Korak, and deported himself with intelligence, dignity, and grace. It was Burroughs’ Tarzan, too, that listeners found on radio; so it is fair to say that until Burroughs’ death, it was only the movies that promoted the heretical vision of Tarzan as simple-minded jungle strongman.
One of the first things noticed on opening Volume 1 is the quaint depiction of Tarzan, who is drawn as a large, handsome man with long, pageboy haircut, wearing a leopard skin loincloth with shoulder strap. This “style” of portraying Tarzan seems to have been quite common in the late '20s and early '30s. It can be found on the covers of Blue Book during that period and on the dust jackets of Tarzan and the Lost Empire and Tarzan the Invincible, as well as in the Frank Merrill serials Tarzan the Tiger and Tarzan the Mighty. A little reflection and research indicate that this garb and sartorial fashion originated with Elmo Lincoln or Gene Polar and was carried on in the movies throughout the silent era. When Foster drew the first daily strip, which adapted Tarzan of the Apes, he portrayed Tarzan in the movie fashion, with shoulder-strapped loincloth and long hair, and Rex Maxon continued that convention in both the daily and Sunday versions. However much we may resent Hollywood’s simplistic “Me Tarzan, you Jane” representation of ERB’s hero, we have Weissmuller’s portrayal in Tarzan the Ape Man to thank for making passe that quaint and somewhat effeminate portrayal and returning us to St. John’s more virile image of Tarzan.
Although this series of albums as published and planned by NBM contains
a few minor disappointments--the omission of the less impressive work of
Maxon and Rubimore, for instance--there are still ample rewards for those
of us who until now were unable to experience the vigor, charm, imagination,
and breathless sweep of these classics of popular culture. More annoying,
though, was the poor proof reading that noticeably flawed Bill Blackbeard’s
otherwise fine introduction (Maxon’s name is misspelled no fewer than three
times); but the publisher seems to have recognized this error, and no similar
oversight was noticeable in the subsequent volumes (2 and 3). My greatest
quibble, actually, is over the publisher’s unfortunate decision to reproduce
Foster’s wonderful introductory page as a black and white frontispiece.
(This full page was designed to be published by newspapers picking up the
feature belatedly.)
While I wish NBM would have reprinted the entire, unbroken strip, including
all of the Maxon pages, I must admit that the sample color Maxon included
in Vol. 1 certainly is poor. I pulled out my House of Greystoke copies
of the Return and Beasts daily story-strips and found that
the criticism of Maxon is quite warranted, at least in those adaptions.
His work is very sketchy and unattractive. However, by the time he did
Tarzan
the Fearless, he had improved dramatically. I don’t have all of the
strips to refer to, but those I do have suggest that the loss of the Sunday
strip, the appearance of enormous talents such as Foster and Hogarth, and
quite possibly a “stern talking to” may have inspired him do the best work
of which he was capable. My impression is that his work in the later '30s
and the '40s is not only acceptable, but has a certain charm of its own.
I need not say very much about Foster’s drawings. From his very first panel,
the talent that earned him his reputation as one of the three greatest
artists ever to grace the Sunday comics page is evident. (The others are
Burne Hogarth and Alex Raymond.) Although his earliest pages are primitive
and underdeveloped in comparison to later efforts, even these display a
mastery of form that few artists can equal. Foster’s art continued to evolve
over the initial four years of his tenure, and one of the joys of this
series is to be able to watch him work out many of the techniques that
have since become standard in the graphic adventure narrative. Over a period
of a few months he moved from a static presentation that even occasionally
allowed action scenes to take place between panels (in narration) to a
breathtaking, frame-by-frame depiction that makes the action come alive
on the page. The sequence in which Tarzan must save the unconscious Korak
from being killed in a fall from a cliff (June 26-July 24, 1932) is an
excellent example of this technique. The happenings of perhaps five minutes
are spread across five weeks, to stunning effect.
Still, despite Foster’s fine talent, these pages are not without flaw.
Occasionally his sketchiness reappears, or he allows a less than convincing
picture to be published. (The lion in the sixth panel of the strip of May
1, 1932 is probably Foster at his worst.) He also is not consistent in
the way he draws Tarzan’s face. It’s frustrating to have the character
look markedly different from panel to panel. (The bottom, leftmost panel
of April 17, 1932 features a truly ugly rendition of Tarzan.) Foster also
has the annoying habit of having Tarzan smile inappropriately, making me
wonder how familiar he was with the literary ape-man.
The author of the story continuity in the first year of the Foster period
clearly had a fascination with mysterious women, giving us Fulvia the Beautiful
and the masked lion tamer Lenida. These subjects must have been particularly
suitable to Foster’s talent and temperament, for he rendered all these
exotic females strikingly. The writer also seems to have had some understanding
of Tarzan’s character. The sequence of six single-page stories that followed
the conclusion of the story Foster inherited from Maxon are particularly
noteworthy examples of the Burroughsesque feel that could be achieved at
times; they included such gems as “Tarzan’s First Christmas” and “Tarzan
and the Fox Hunt” and served to establish for a new audience the character
and history of the ape-man. Another such imaginative and striking sequence--possibly
the best in Vol. 1--occurs in a flashback, when we see a tuxedoed Tarzan
at a London circus, snarling as he rushes to save Lenida, the lady lion
tamer, from the beast that has attacked her. He battles the lion, kills
it, beats upon his chest, races out into the night, his formal attire in
tatters, and winds up squatting on the limb of a tree in the park. It’s
a marvelous bit of storytelling.
Finally, toward the end of Vol. 1, the influence of the talkies is felt
for the first time as Tarzan sets out to find Eric von Harben at the Elephant’s
Graveyard. Wounded, Tarzan uses the shoulder strap of his loincloth as
a sling for his wounded arm. So ends Vol. 1. When Vol. 2 opens, Tarzan’s
arm is healed and the shoulder strap abandoned forever, thanks (for once)
to Hollywood’s influence.
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