While comic strips and cartoon characters filled newspapers, the first pulp characters emerged. Tarzan and John Carter of Mars are the first in 1912, followed by Zorro in 1919. These characters are some of the most influential characters for the future of comic book heroes. Let’s examine each more closely.
Tarzan
Edgar Rice Burroughs created an elegant version of the wild man figure largely unalloyed with character flaws or faults. Calling him Tarzan, the character first appeared in Tarzan of the Apes (magazine publication 1912, book publication 1914), and subsequently in 25 sequels, several authorized books by other authors, and innumerable works in other media, both authorized and unauthorized.Tarzan was described as being tall, athletic, handsome, and tanned, with grey eyes and long black hair. He wore almost no clothes, except for a loincloth. Emotionally, he was courageous, intelligent, loyal, and steadfast.
He was presented as behaving ethically in most situations, except when seeking vengeance under the motivation of grief, as when his ape mother Kala was killed in Tarzan of the Apes; or when he believed Jane had been murdered in Tarzan the Untamed. He was deeply in love with his wife and totally devoted to her; in numerous situations where other women express their attraction to him, Tarzan politely but firmly declined their attentions.
When presented with a situation where a weaker individual or party was being preyed upon by a stronger foe, Tarzan invariably took the side of the weaker party. In dealing with other men, Tarzan was firm and forceful. With male friends, he was reserved but deeply loyal and generous. As a host, he was, likewise, generous and gracious. As a leader, he commanded devoted loyalty.
In keeping with these noble characteristics, Tarzan’s philosophy embraced an extreme form of “return to nature.” Although he was able to pass within society as a civilized individual, he preferred to “strip off the thin veneer of civilization,” as Burroughs often put it. His preferred dress was a knife and a loincloth of animal hide; his preferred abode was any convenient tree branch when he desired to sleep; and his favored food was raw meat, killed by himself; even better if he was able to bury it a week so that putrefaction had a chance to tenderize it a bit.
Tarzan’s jungle upbringing gave him abilities far beyond those of ordinary humans. These included climbing, clinging, and leaping as well as any great ape. He used branches and swung from vines to travel at great speed, a skill acquired among the anthropoid apes.
Abilities
His strength, speed, stamina, agility, reflexes, and swimming skills were extraordinary in comparison to normal men. He had wrestled full-grown bull apes and gorillas, lions, rhinos, crocodiles, pythons, sharks, tigers, giant seahorses, and even dinosaurs (when he visited Pellucidar). Tarzan was a skilled tracker and used his exceptional hearing and keen sense of smell to follow prey or avoid predators.Tarzan/John Clayton was very articulate, reserved, and did not speak in broken English as the classic movies of the 1930s depict him. He could communicate with many species of jungle animals, and had been shown to be a skilled impressionist, able to mimic the sound of a gunshot perfectly. This was a limitation of the author: even the Frankenstein monster spoke well primarily because the author could write broken English or did not think to include it as part of the character.
Extremely intelligent, Tarzan was literate in English before he first encountered other English-speaking people. His literacy was self-taught after several years in his early teens by visiting the log cabin of his infancy and looking at children’s primer/ picture books. He eventually read every book in his father’s portable book collection and was fully aware of geography, basic world history, and his family tree. He was “found” by a traveling Frenchman who taught him the basics of human speech and returned him to England.
Tarzan could learn a new language in days, ultimately speaking many languages, including that of the great apes, French, Finnish, English, Dutch, German, Swahili, many Bantu dialects, Arabic, Ancient Greek, Ancient Latin, and Mayan, as well as the languages of the Ant Men and of Pellucidar.
Tarzan has been called one of the best-known literary characters in the world. In addition to more than two dozen books by Burroughs and a handful more by authors with the blessing of Burroughs’ estate, the character has appeared in films, radio, television, comic strips, and comic books. Numerous parodies and pirated works have also appeared.
Reception
While Tarzan of the Apes met with some critical success, subsequent books in the series received a cooler reception and have been criticized for being derivative and formulaic. The characters were often said to be two-dimensional, the dialogue wooden, and the storytelling devices (such as excessive reliance on coincidence) strain credulity. According to Rudyard Kipling (who himself wrote stories of a feral child, The Jungle Book’s Mowgli), Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes just so that he could “find out how bad a book he could write and get away with it.”While Burroughs was not a polished novelist, he was a vivid storyteller, and many of his novels are still in print. In 1963, author Gore Vidal wrote a piece on the Tarzan series that, while pointing out several of the deficiencies that the Tarzan books have as works of literature, praised Burroughs for creating a compelling “daydream figure.” Critical reception grew more positive with the 1981 study by Erling B. Holtsmark, Tarzan and Tradition: Classical Myth in Popular Literature. Holtsmark added a volume on Burroughs for Twayne’s United States Author Series in 1986. In 2010, Stan Galloway provided a sustained study of the adolescent period of the fictional Tarzan’s life in The Teenage Tarzan.
Despite critical panning, the Tarzan stories have remained popular. Burroughs’ melodramatic situations and the elaborate details he worked into his fictional world, such as his construction of a partial language for his great apes, appeal to a worldwide fan base.
In her Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman described how various people of the time either challenged or upheld the idea that “civilization” was predicated on white masculinity. She closed with a chapter on Tarzan of the Apes (1912) because the story’s protagonist was, according to her, the ultimate male by the standards of 1912 white America. Bederman did note that Tarzan, “an instinctively chivalrous Anglo-Saxon,” did not engage in sexual violence, renouncing his “masculine impulse to rape.” However, she also noted that not only did Tarzan kill black man Kulonga in revenge for killing his ape mother (a stand-in for his biological white mother) by hanging him, “lyncher Tarzan” actually enjoyed killing black people, for example the cannibalistic Mbongans.
Bederman, in fact, reminded readers that when Tarzan first introduced himself to Jane, he did so as “Tarzan, the killer of beasts and many black men.” The novel climaxed with Tarzan saving Jane (who in the original novel was not British, but a white woman from Baltimore, Maryland) from a black ape rapist. When he left the jungle and saw “civilized” Africans farming, his first instinct was to kill them just for being black. “Like the lynch victims reported in the Northern press, Tarzan’s victims—cowards, cannibals, and despoilers of white womanhood—lack all manhood. Tarzan’s lynchings thus prove him the superior man.”
According to Bederman, despite embodying all the tropes of white supremacy espoused or rejected by the people she had reviewed (Theodore Roosevelt, G. Stanley Hall, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ida B. Wells), Burroughs, in all probability, was not trying to make any kind of statement or echo any of them. “He probably never heard of any of them.” Instead, Bederman writes that Burroughs proved her point because, in telling racist and sexist stories whose protagonist boasted of killing blacks, he was not being unusual at all, but was instead just being a typical 1912 white American.
The Tarzan books employ extensive stereotyping to a degree common in the times in which they were written. This has led to criticism in later years, with changing social views and customs, including charges of racism since the early 1970s. The early books give a pervasively negative and stereotypical portrayal of native Africans, including Arabs. In The Return of Tarzan, Arabs are “surly looking” and call Christians “dogs”, while blacks are “lithe, ebon warriors, gesticulating and jabbering”. One could make an equal argument that when it came to blacks that Burroughs was simply depicting unwholesome characters as unwholesome and the good ones in a better light—as in Chapter 6 of Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar where Burroughs writes of Mugambi: “nor could a braver or more loyal guardian have been found in any clime or upon any soil.” Other groups were stereotyped as well. A Swede has “a long yellow moustache, an unwholesome complexion, and filthy nails”, and Russians cheat at cards. The aristocracy (except the House of Greystoke) and royalty were invariably effete. In later books, Africans were portrayed somewhat more realistically as people. For example, in Tarzan’s Quest, while the depiction of Africans remains relatively primitive, they were portrayed more individualistically, with a greater variety of character traits (positive and negative), while the main villains were white people, although Burroughs never lost his distaste for European royalty.
In regards to race, a superior–inferior relationship with valuation was implied, as it was unmistakable in virtually all interactions between whites and blacks in the Tarzan stories, and similar relationships and valuations could be seen in most other interactions between differing people, although one could argue that such interactions are the bedrock of the dramatic narrative and without such valuations there was no story. According to James Loewen’s Sundown Towns, this may be a vestige of Burroughs’ having been from Oak Park, Illinois, a former Sundown town (a town that forbids non-whites from living within it).
Tarzan was a white European male who grows up with apes. According to “Taking Tarzan Seriously” by Marianna Torgovnick, Tarzan was confused with the social hierarchy that he was a part of. Unlike everyone else in his society, Tarzan was the only one who was not clearly part of any social group. All the other members of his world were not able to climb or decline socially because they were already part of a social hierarchy which was stagnant. Turgovnick writes that since Tarzan was raised as an ape, he thinks and acts like an ape. However, instinctively he was human and he resorted to being human when he was pushed to. The reason of his confusion was that he did not understand what the typical white male was supposed to act like. His instincts eventually kick in when he was in the midst of this confusion, and he ended up dominating the jungle. In Tarzan, the jungle was a microcosm for the world in general in 1912 to the early 1930s. His climbing of the social hierarchy proved that the European white male was the most dominant of all races/sexes, no matter what the circumstance. Furthermore, Turgovnick writes that when Tarzan first met Jane, she was slightly repulsed but also fascinated by his animal-like actions. As the story progressed, Tarzan surrendered his knife to Jane in an oddly chivalrous gesture, which made Jane fall for Tarzan despite his odd circumstances. Turgovnick believes that this displayed an instinctual, civilized chivalry that Burroughs believed was common in white men.
Burroughs’ opinions, manifested through the narrative voice in the stories, reflect common attitudes in his time, which in a 21st-century context would be considered racist and sexist. However Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:
[Burroughs’] conception of the feminine that elevates the woman to the same level as the man and that—in such characters as Dian of the Pellucidar novels or Dejah Thoris of the Barsoom novels— figures forth a female type who corresponds neither to desperate housewife, full- lipped prom-date, middle-level careerist office- manager, nor frowning ideological feminist- professor, but who exceeds all these by bounds in her realized humanity and in so doing suggests their insipidity.
The author was not especially mean-spirited in his attitudes. His heroes do not engage in violence against women or in racially motivated violence. In Tarzan of the Apes, details of a background of suffering experienced at the hands of whites by Mbonga’s “once great” people were repeatedly told with evident sympathy, and in explanation or even justification of their current animosity toward whites. Although the character of Tarzan did not directly engage in violence against women, feminist scholars have critiqued the presence of other sympathetic male characters who do so with Tarzan’s approval. In Tarzan and the Ant Men, the men of a fictional tribe of creatures called the Alali gain social dominance of their society by beating Alali women into submission with weapons that Tarzan willingly provided them. Following the battle, Burroughs (p. 178) states:
To entertain Tarzan and to show him what great strides civilization had taken—the son of The First Woman seized a female by the hair and dragging her to him struck her heavily about the head and face with his clenched fist, and the woman fell upon her knees and fondled his legs, looking wistfully into his face, her own glowing with love and admiration.
While Burroughs depicted some female characters with humanistic equalizing elements, Torgovnick argues that violent scenes against women in the context of male political and social domination were condoned in his writing, reinforcing a notion of gendered hierarchy where patriarchy was portrayed as the natural pinnacle of society.
In Comics
Tarzan of the Apes was adapted into newspaper strip form, first published January 7, 1929, with illustrations by Hal Foster. A full page Sunday strip began on March 15, 1931, with artwork by Rex Maxon. United Feature Syndicate distributed the strip.Over the years, many artists have drawn the Tarzan comic strip, notably Rex Maxon (1929–1947), Burne Hogarth (1937– 1945, 1947–1950), Ruben Moreira (1945–1947), Dan Barry (1948), Paul Reinman (1949–1950), Bob Lubbers (1950–1954), John Celardo (1954–1967), Russ Manning (1967–1979), Gil Kane (1979–1981), Mike Grell (1981–1983), Gray Morrow (1983–2001) and Eric Battle (2001–2002).
The daily strip began to reprint old dailies after the last Russ Manning daily (#10,308, which ran on 29 July 1972). The Sunday strip also turned to reprints after May 19, 2002. Both strips continue as reprints today in a few newspapers and in Comics Revue magazine.
The comic strip has often borrowed plots and characters from the Burroughs Tarzan books. Writer Don Kraar, who wrote the strip from 1983 to 1995, included in his stories characters from other books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, including David Innes of Pellucidar and John Carter of Mars.
Shortly after the daily strip launched in 1929, the stories were given titles; this practice ran until 1939. The Sunday stories had titles from 1931 until 1950.
Tarzan has appeared in many comic books from numerous publishers over the years, notably Western Publishing, Charlton Comics, DC Comics, Marvel Comics and Dark Horse Comics. The character’s earliest comic book appearances were in comic strip reprints published in several titles, such as Sparkler, Tip Top Comics, and Single Series.
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