Tag Archives: Tarzan

The Saturday Comics: 5 Comic Covers Featuring Jimmy Olsen And A Gorilla.

27 Oct

October 27, 2012

Halloween this year, annoyingly, falls on a Wednesday. Do you trick or treat on a school night? Do it the Friday after? Or the Friday before? Or both? And even worse, this year my part of the USA is expecting Hurricane Sandy to hit right before Halloween, meaning that it just might get wiped out totally. So judging from the low traffic online, I’m guessing that tonight is party night. So in the spirit of Halloween, here is the ghost of a previous post.

December 22, 2010

We skewered Lois Lane yesterday, so let’s give Jimmy Olsen a shot.

This one is simple. Here are five classic covers featuring Jimmy Olsen and a gorilla, and sometimes as a gorilla.

I have to wonder why Superman would ever leave his own title, given all the strange stuff going on in Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen comics. Where is the dignity?

Did you see that last issue? FREE! ICE CREAM COUPON WORTH TEN CENTS! Not bad for a comic that only costs a dime.

I like gorillas as much as the next guy, as long as Jimmy Olsen isn’t the next guy, but I have to wonder what is going on here? On three of those covers he turns into a gorilla (or jungle man, twice), on one cover he is marrying a gorilla, and on the last he is filming a gorilla. Does he have some secret room where he keeps his gorilla stash? Does he sleep in a furry gorilla suit? Is he filming gorilla porn in that issue? I don’t want to know! And if I were Superman, I’d just leave him alone. If Jimmy wants to switch bodies with a gorilla so much that they’d reprint the same story almost 100 issues apart, I say let him. Superman, you only carry your “pal” so far.

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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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