Titan Books: Tarzan - In The City of Gold

Tarzan - In The City of Gold (Vol. 1)
The Complete Burne Hogarth Sundays and Dailies Library

 Don Garden , Burne Hogarth 

Titan Books

Hardback

Dimensions:  324 x 246mm

 168 pages

 ISBN: 9781781163177

£29.99

Burne Hogarth is one of the most famous artists in the history of comic strips - at the peak with Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon) and Hal Foster (Prince Valiant). In 1936 he followed Foster on the massively popular Tarzan comic strip, and set a new standard for dynamics and excitement.

Restored and reproduced in an oversized format, these editions will finally do justice to one of the most lauded illustrators of all time, whose work has been out of print for more than a decade.

Full-color restorations of the newspaper strips, reproduced in the over-sized full-page format made popular by current collections of Prince Valiant and Popeye the Sailor.

Details of extras:
Historical articles from Scott Tracy Griffin, author of Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration

According to Titan Books (hey, I got a damaged back cover!)  "This is the first of four exclusive volumes that will collect all of Hogarth’s newspaper strips. Beginning with the adventures “Tarzan in the City of Gold” and continuing with “Tarzan and the Boers,” Hogarth and writer Don Garden hit the ground running, and produced some of the most acclaimed stories ever to appear in the pages of newspapers worldwide."

First bit of confusion for me was that the cover (above) is the one I got.  But, I note on the internet this cover is shown:

I think the cover I got has to be the actual one, though -you don't just print up a few of these for review! Anyway, some really old -REALLY old comickers out there might remember the Whitman Tarzan and the City of Gold from...1954(?).

Yes, I just posted that because I liked the cover! There was a post a while back where I wrote about my meagre Russian Tarzan mini comics http://hoopercomicart.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/or-tarzan-russian-comic-series.html

I am also a proud possessor of the 1972 Hamlyn book  where Hogarth relates the origin of the Ape Man. Now to mention a few issues from Top Sellers and Byblos.

 I am a huge fan of all the old Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films as well as the Ron Ely TV series. In fact,

I'm a bit of a fan of the Lord of the Jungle up to the recent films (1980s on). So when this book was offered to me for review I thought about it, took a bit longer to think about -but my hand had allready typed "yes"!

Damn.

Anyway, this is another top quality book from Titan and the reproduction is lovely -remember the print quality of the original strips would not have been half as good as they are in this book (modern technology, eh?).  There are no giant robots, alien predators or any of the other contemporary gimmicks that people seem to think you need.  This is a good adventure book.

I must admit that I never suspect to see a fleet of Renault FT-17 (with cannon) -or vehicles based on those- take part in an invasion of the African velt!  Well, better than an F. R. Simms motor war car (1902), or a Mark V ....you have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?  But we have the Boers and their epic battle with natives. The Adventure! The tragedy! The....love.  The battle between Jungle Lord and Great Ape. Jungle Lord and lion!  Have I mentioned the Amazons yet?

At times it's almost as though a child has been given a box full of mixed up toys and uses them all in one game!  The results, strip-wise, are wonderful.

If you are a comic book fan of Tarzan then this has to be for you.  Even if you are not a big comic fan (WHY are you here?) but interested in some twisted way in comics or pop culture then this has to be for you.

I could write "wonderful fun" a dozen times but I won't. I'll just write: "Wonderful fun a dozen times"!