LOAC Essentials Volume 7: Tarzan of the Apes

LOAC Essentials #7

by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Writer), Hal Foster (Artist), Rex Maxon (Artist)

In January 1929, Hal Foster, creator of Prince Valiant , had his first published newspaper strip art with the debut of Tarzan , a comic that would produce more that ten thousand strips before switching to reprints in 1972. It was Foster who illustrated all 60 episodes of the strip's adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's seminal novel, Tarzan of the Apes . Now, LOAC Essentials brings you all of Foster's first comics work, reproduced from ERB's syndicate proofs. In addition, this book includes adaptations of The Return of Tarzan , Beasts of Tarzan , and Son of Tarzan , each drawn by Rex Maxon. Get ready for the first 300 daily Tarzan comics ever produced, all together in a single, affordable package!

LOAC Essentials  reprints the daily newspaper strips that are essential to comics history, in a format that preserves as closely as possible the original reader experience. By reproducing the strips one per page in an oblong format, it allows us to have the experience of reading the comics one day at a time. Each volume contains seminal strips that are unique creations in their right and also contributed to the advancement of the medium, along with panel-by-panel annotations.

Genres: Comic Strips

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 12, 2015

About the author

Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.

Reviews

[Dan]

I love the Hal Foster art in the first 80 pages but it got to be like climbing a mountain once Rex Maxon took over so I eventually said piss on it and didn't finish. It didn't help that each panel has a paragraph of text beneath it. It really slowed things down.

[Brent]

This is basically Edgar Rice Burroughs words put to drawings by Hal Foster and Rex Maxon. What could be wrong with that?

[Michael]

The art reproduction is erratic, likely more a fault of the available artwork than the publisher's quality efforts, and Maxon's artwork sometimes looks unfinished - not to mention his depiction of Africans owes more to minstrelsy than Nat Geo - but there's still some value in this book as a historical document showing us the evolution of the adventure comic strip serial. Also, Hal Foster's art is pretty good (I don't mean to disparage Maxon's, which has a clean line elegance in its best moments, but sometimes appears minimal-for-sake-for-a-deadline) and the stories, while repetitive and sometimes meandering in their middles, have a certain urgency as they race toward their conclusions. I also have to give a little credit to Burroughs (and the strip's scripters) for Jane and Meriem's resourcefulness. These aren't damsels waiting around for a rescue (although they are rescued a few times).

[Joe]

Rex Maxon ... hack! that's right, I said it