Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years Volume 2

Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan: Comics #Marsh 2

by Gaylord DuBois, Jesse Marsh (Illustrator)

Rare book

Genres: Comics, Adventure

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 2009

About the author

Gaylord McIlvaine Du Bois (as it appears on his baptism certificate), or DuBois (He signed it both ways: as two words, both capitalized; and as one word with a capital "B") (August 24, 1899 Winthrop, Massachusetts – October 20, 1993 Orange City, Florida) In his lifetime he wrote well over 3000 comic book stories and comic strips as well as Big Little Books and juvenile adventure novels.

An avid outdoorsman, Du Bois had a real affinity for writing stories with natural settings. His forte was in Westerns, as well as jungle comics and animal reality comics. He created many original second features for Western Publishing (e.g., "Captain Venture: Beneath the Sea", "Leopard Girl", "Two Against the Jungle", etc.), but most of his work for the company was in writing stories with licensed characters. Perhaps most notably, Gaylord Du Bois wrote Tarzan for Dell Comics and Gold Key Comics from 1946 until 1971.

Reviews

[Jan Philipzig · Rating 4 out of 5]

While collections of Tarzan newspaper strips by acclaimed artists such as Hal Foster, Burne Hogarth and Russ Manning still enjoy a fair degree of popularity, the Tarzan comic books by Jesse Marsh are known almost exclusively to comic-book historians today, and that is a real shame. After moving from Disney to Dell Comics, Marsh introduced Tarzan to the comic-book medium in 1947, and he would continue to draw Dell's Tarzan series until health problems forced him to call it quits in 1965. This review is for all the Dark Horse volumes reprinting the early years of his run.

Marsh's understated, uncluttered, straightforward style may not be very flashy, but it is the perfect match for these pure adventure stories about honor, spirit, friendship, and family; stories that casually juxtapose the grim realities of slavery and poaching with fantastic appearances of dinosaurs, Roman soldiers, and medieval knights lost in time. The jungles look lush, the ruins ancient, the velds hot and dry. Most importantly, though, all stories are infused with a sense of vitality and sincerity that brilliantly captures the naïve, heartfelt, no-nonsense (and, of course, not always politically correct) heroic fantasies of pre-adolescent boys.

[Dominick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, this is entertaining enough, if unspectacular. The usual Tarzan silliness is here at times--every animal on Earth all in the same jungle, for instance, or the constantly-imperiled Jane--but DuBois does try to shake things up a bit with the stories. I think my favourite was about the scientist gorillas who have built a machine (I assume they built it; they have it, anyway) with which they transform men into midgets and enslave them. Tarzan's world is clearly a fantasy one, where Africa can host pretty much any sort of foe or interesting oddity, from dinosaurs to lost races--and multi-race ones, at that, including albino pygmies. The weirdest thing, perhaps, is that Tarzan is the smart, articulate figure he is in the books, rather than the movie-style grunter, but his son is still called "Boy." I'll quibble a bit about the paper, as well; the reproduction here is pretty good, but it would look better on a duller or matte-surface paper. too baad these Dark Horse editions don't provide more in the way of editorial material as well; some sort of essay on Marsh (beyond the brief introduction by Gilbert Hernandez) would add some value.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jesse Marsh is an under rated master of graphic art.