WEEK 3: The Comic Strip: Tarzan

This week I looked at many vintage comic strips. One that peaked my interest the most were the Tarzan comic strips by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The fictional character Tarzan first appeared in the 1912 novel Tarzan of the Apes. Due to its immense popularity, Tarzan of the Apes was adapted into a full page Sunday newspaper strip in 1931. I observed that the illustrator Rex Mazon maintains a consist style for several years. While I grew up knowing Disney's version of this jungle hero, the stories throughout the strip are ones I had never heard before.

I think the effective nature of comics such as this stem from the repetition of themes and sequences. Once you have read a few of the Tarzan comics, you begin to see that the stories have a pattern and there are an order of events that most often happen in each comic. The pattern usually starts out with Tarzan coming across a problem in the jungle, fighting off an enemy, being the object of a woman's affection, finally before victorious and then heading off on another adventure. I feel the reasoning behind this is to put the readers mind at ease by giving them a simple framework for the plot, all while making each story new and exciting. 
Another observation I made when I look at these comics is that I don't see them as just drawings but rather illustrations. You can clearly see an attention to detail of each character's anatomy. The way Tarzan is depicted shows his muscular body while at the same time moving freely in the jungle.

-Abigail