Tag Archives: New York

The Saturday Comics: Tarzan

7 May

April 7, 2011

One of the drawbacks to living in New York City, besides the high taxes, filthy subways, traffic, and an aristocratic and elitist Mayor, is the lack of classic comics in the newspapers.

Week after week of doing The Saturday Comics I am amazed to discover a comic strip that I thought had died an ignoble death decades ago still up and running. This week is no different. Doing some research on the ‘net I found that some cities still get to read the adventures of Tarzan.

Anyone who knows Tarzan only from the movies may be a little surprised by these strips. Unlike the semi-literate “Me Tarzan you Jane” that many of us grew up with, this Tarzan is faithful to the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. While raised as a youth in the jungle, he was later brought to England and educated as an aristocrat. Tarzan traveled in many worlds, from high society to the desert, but was most at home in the jungle.

If the title was taken off this strip you might not recognize it as a Tarzan strip at all. I read all of the original ERB Tarzan books and while I don’t recall him going to Japan and fighting samurai or the Yakuza, this is keeping in the spirit of Burroughs’ creation.

This is more like the Tarzan we all know, back in the jungle. I chose this strip because of Tarzan’s Duke’s of Hazzard-like arrow with a stick of dynamite attached.

Dinosaurs. Hard to do something based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs property without them. Tarzan should be no stranger to those monsters, having encountered dinosaurs in Tarzan at the Earth’s Core, the thirteenth Tarzan novel published in 1930, which was a crossover with ERB’s Pellucidar series.

New York is allegedly the greatest city in the world. You can’t tell that by the Sunday comics. I’ll take Tarzan over Marmaduke any day.

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Picture Postcard Thursday

10 Mar

March 10, 2011

Our last picture this week (unless I find a good picture) is once again from Forgotten NY. It isn’t a masterpiece of the photographic art by any stretch but it is interesting to me as I have driven right past it hundreds of times and wondered it if was the last of its kind. Turns out it is. Forgotten NY is a great site to poke around in if you like all things old and historically interesting with a New York Focus.

The Forgotten NY page about this lamp can be found here.

 

From the site:

I have just one photo today. It’s the last dodo, passenger pigeon, aepyornis, mammoth, tyrannosaur, brachiothere, trilobite, and someday, the last human. It’s the last of its type. Once, thousands of these wooden posts lined the parkways of New York and Long Island, built when they were literally parkways, running through wooded enclaves with tiny houses and green lawns. I call them the Woodies. They lit the great parkways constructed by Robert Moses beginning in the 1930s: the Belt (or Shore) Parkway; the Cross Island; the Laurelton; the Bronx River; and many others. Occasionally they found their way to regular city streets (I have seen pictures of them on 37th Street along GreenWood Cemetery and on Euclid Avenue in East New York) but mainly they were there to impart a rustic look.

Bucolicism left NYC in the 1950s and urbanism accelerated, and gradually, the Woodies disappeared. Their last bastion was the Belt and Shore Parkways in Brooklyn and Queens, where they hung on into the 1980s, though they were gradually supplanted by Deskeys. Finally the mixed bag of Woodies and Deskeys were sent packing and the Belt was lined with shiny, cylindrical poles (which you see in the background here).

The last Woody can be found on a service road connecting the Laurelton Parkway with the westbound Belt. Catch it while you can. While the odd decommissioned Woody can still be seen in the odd parking lot or pedestrian bridge, this is the last working example, and when it goes…they’re all gone.

Next week Picture Postcard will feature pictures taken by me, your obedient servant, primarily during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when I was but a mere slip of a lad.

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