Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan: Dark Horse Omnibus (2015)

 Recently, I borrowed Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan Omnibus from the library, hoping for some decent Lost World imagery. It's a collection of comic strips from the 90s.

This image of Tarzan taking down a dinosaur, byArthur Suydam, did set the scene nicely, I must say! There is certainly a bit of a Jurassic Park vibe off the dinosaurs here for sure (as with almost all mid-90s dinosaurs).

The first proper story in the collection, Tarzan's Jungle Fury, is absolutely bonkers, even for Burroughs. Tarzan discovers that his patch of African jungle is infested with mutated dinosaur-like creatures, all carrying some sort of infection which causes them to devolve into malformed, tentacle-laden monstrosities. It turns out that Tarzan himself has accidentally caused this infection by bringing an intelligent plant-like creature back from Mars (or Barsoom). Something odd about this story is that in the Burroughs-verse, Tarzan's Africa is already crawling with Lost Worlds, dinosaurs, and other fantastic critters. So it's a little unclear how unusual we're supposed to find all this (at least until the tentacles appear). I also don't know when he went to Mars - if its' from Burroughs directly, or an earlier comic.

The art, by Christopher Schenck, is only ok. I like his dinosaurs, but his people are oddly proportioned, and other animals such as six-legged lions and giant spiders are flat and uninteresting for the most part.

There are two lost cities at war with one another. Again, in Burroughs generally, lost cities are ten-a-penny so it's hard to have Tarzan elicit any surprise upon discovering more of them. These ones have a really crazy backstory, however: the Barsoom infection melded with the bones of the long-dead city dwellers, bringing them back to life and rebuilding these ruined settlements. Of course, they are now infected with the tentacle-disease, so there's plenty of body horror, not to mention one group of people who commit mass suicide rather than fight the endless war, so they melt themselves with a giant ray gun. I can't say that this story isn't chock full of bizarre, unexpected elements, even if they're applied somewhat sloppily.

The next story, Legion of Hate, features another lost city. This time round, it's a city of Amazon women who have been enslaved by a small group of Nazis. I enjoyed these pulpy Indiana Jones elements, as well as the WW2 setting. The Amazons have a strange tradition of enslaving and mating with only white outsiders, which is why they first think they can trust (or use) the Nazis. There are some interesting but undercooked ideas about race going on here, especially between Tarzan and his closest African friend. Tarzan begins to grapple with the fact that he is a white man literally lording it over an African domain at the same time as white Europeans are destroying the continent wholesale. That he genuinely loves Africa makes the significance of this fact even more difficult to grasp for the Lord of the Jungle.

The next two stories feature no lost world themes or imagery, but I did like some of the scene-setting art of early 20th century Paris and America by Stan Manoukian and Vince Roucher. In these stories, Tarzan seems to be doing a kind of Grand Tour in the guise of the urbane John Clayton, Earl of Greystoke. They are really a kind of League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen situation (though written a couple of years before Alan Moore's series), with Tarzan encountering famous fantastic characters from the fin-de-siecle world. In Le Monster, Tarzan gets mixed up in a fairly straight retelling of The Phantom Of The Opera.

The Modern Prometheus is far more free-wheeling and ridiculous. Walking the streets of New York in 1909, Tarzan bumps into a visiting Arthur Conan Doyle. The pair then join Nicola Tesla(!) in an adventure against the fiendish Thomas Edison (the reverse of the comic Barnum! where Tesla is the villain and Edison a hero) as well as a sort of Frankenstein's monster.

The final tale, Tarzan VS the Moon Men, is more like reading actual Burroughs. Tarzan travels into a future Africa where Selenite invaders have already conquered America, and are now making a start on the Dark Continent. I quite liked their 1950s-looking rockets.

All in all, these Tarzan comics are wild and wacky, though not quite in the way that Burroughs himself frequently is. There is a tiny bit of genre-savvy here and some attempts to address modern ideas about things. but for the most part, this is an example of creators playing in Burroughs' sandbox, enjoying themselves, and not attempting to be too meta (apart from one appearance from ERB himself!).