Recommendations of the Editorial team
Any Sunday afternoon on television: First, Chewbacca swings through the jungle with the vine in the “Star Wars” adventure “Return of the Jedi,” and on another TV program, James Bond in “Octopussy,” and both let out the distinctive scream of the most famous jungle inhabitant of all time: Tarzan. The forest-and-meadow foundling is a pop icon. Although the live-action “Tarzan” films (see, for example, Christophe Lambert in “Greystoke”) have shown how difficult it is to portray the muscular loincloth wearer with dignity and not to portray him as an unintentionally amusing figure. Johnny Weissmüller, who played the original Tarzan in the 1930s (“Tarzan, the Ape Man”), at least received the respect that every actor who shows maximum physical effort between the bush and the tree deserves.
Between pulpy fantasy and images of his time
There’s no question that Tarzan is at his best in comics. With “Hal Foster’s Tarzan: The Complete Sunday Comics 1931-1937” all the colored Tarzan Sunday pages that Hal Foster created between 1931 and 1937 are now published. Even before his work on “Prince Valiant,” Foster combined anatomical precision and monumental landscapes to create sequences of images that went beyond the scope of newspaper comics at the time.
From today’s perspective, some representations may not be entirely unproblematic. “Tarzan” is based on colonial ideals, on exotic ideas about Africa and on the idea of a white superman who dominates nature, animals and “primitive” societies. In the 1930s, “Tarzan” worked as an adventure romance. However, this gives the volume a second level: it tells the cultural fantasies of the Western popular cult in the early 20th century.
Tarzan encounters dinosaurs, Vikings, criminals, mystical empires and grotesque creatures. Foster saw the Sunday comic as an event. Each page should appear larger and more exciting than the last. The fact that newspapers at the time complained about brutality and erotic depictions only underlines how offensive the series was for its time. Foster’s colleague Edgar Rice Burroughs defended the character’s success by pointing to the human preference for cruel and sensational material.
An opulent monument to the newspaper comic
The edition itself shows the original print aesthetics, including Ben-Day screening, which gives the pages their material origins from newspaper production. The accompanying texts come from Dian Hanson, who is also responsible for various erotic volumes at Taschen-Verlag. She has a lot to say about the sexualization of many characters.
- Hal Foster’s Tarzan. The Complete Sunday Comics 1931-1937
- Dian Hanson
- Hardcover, 34.4 x 44 cm, 4.39 kg, 392 pages
- bags.com
- EUR 200,-
