Tarzan - Tarzan and the Adventurers (Vol. 5)

Excellent

always loved tarzan titles-these were new to me-well written, drawn,plausible story

Excellent

This was a good book, not as good as the other volumes, some of the other artist after Burne left were not quite as good, but overall a good book, great production

This is Titan Books fifth and final book reprinting the Tarzan comics of Burne Hogarth and guess what. Its dimensions are completely different from the first four books. The previous volumes were 10x13.1 and this one is 11.3x10.3. This was not an arbitrary change but was done because the dimensions of the strip changed in October 1949 basically cutting the size of the strip in half. The Sunday color strips only go up to page 56 and then switch to black and white dailies spanning Sep. 1947 to Sep. 1950.I have a bunch of issues with these strips that I have addressed in previous reviews but as the years go on they become more acute. These strips are from the late 40’s, early 50’s and yet they feel like they were produced in the 1930’s. All the stories are written in third person narrative with text boxes rather than word balloons. By this period most comic strips had become very polished yet Tarzan remains muddy and archaic looking. They couldn’t even bother to correctly surround the text in white space leaving much of it practically unreadable. Rob Thompson’s writing is extraordinarily one dimensional and repetitive. It just feels like he’s going through the motions and it was during this period that he got canned. Deservedly so.The main selling point of the series is Burne Hogarth and he definitely has his fans but I don’t count myself among them. Hogarth has all the villains with dark, evil, shifty eyes but Tarzan has that look too. Tarzan always looks old and weary. Hogarth draws Tarzan as if he has no idea how human muscularity works. Every muscle in Tarzan’s body is continually flexed even when he is standing in a relaxed position. I can’t figure out what Hogarth is doing with the Africans. The don’t look like blacks, they look like perhaps they are Indian or maybe Hogarth just doesn’t know how to draw a black. Whatever the ethnicity is of these people they are drawn with a sickly grey hue that no healthy human on Earth, that I know of, possesses. There is also inconstancies in the coloring. In one strip Tarzan pulls a drowned white man from a lake but when he emerges the man is grey.The black and white dailies occupy most of the book and I enjoyed them considerably more than the Sunday comics. Although Burne Hogarth’s name is attached to the stories in the dailies I don’t believe he did the art. It appears to have been done by a group of artists including Dan Barry, Nick Cardy and Bob Lubbers. I preferred each of these artists over Hogarth but ironically I believe it was Hogarth who did the writing for the final short Sunday story as well as much of the Dailies and I preferred Hogarth over Thompson. Thompson’s stories are all paint by numbers whereas Hogarth wrote fairly unique stories. The stories ‘Tarzan and Hard-Luck Harrigan’ and ‘Attack of the Apes’ were probably better than ANY of the Sunday comic storylines from any of the volumes.So why did I buy all five volumes for a comic strip I don’t particularly even like? First, I am a huge fan of the concept of Tarzan even if I often don’t like how he is used. I don’t even like most of the Tarzan books written by Burroughs. Second, once I’d started down the path of collecting this series I felt compelled to complete it. Third, I would love to have all the Tarzan comics even if their quality is somewhat lacking. This iteration of the series didn’t die because it was kicking ass. It died because the quality was severely lacking. Even the intro admits there were serious problems. The resizing of the book is disappointing since they won’t look correct sitting next to each other on the shelf but I understand why the decision was made. I’d actually be more interested in reading additional dailies because I felt they were much better.

Why make a format change and then not utilize the extra space gained?The IDW Manning Tarzan books are as wide as this Titan book but their halve page reproduction are larger by at least 3/4 inch all around, andwhere will i store this book now as it does not fit with the others?The pages reprinted in this book should have been included in volume 4 and printed sideways, we are only talking about fifty pages and any collector would have been happy to turn the book for reading and therefore preserving the uniformity of the collection.Again whatever restoration was done did not improved over the previous four books.In my opinion, with Titan publishing these books we most likely will never see a quality restored (english text) Hogarth Tarzan edition.It just does not make much sense not to put in the effort to make a quality product when it comes to showcasing something that is visual. What is the accomplishment of this whole project? I would not complain about the quality of the reproductions if the size was equal to the original printed newspaper size as in the Dark Horse Foster Tarzan books. With the reduced size you really miss everything that made Hogarth's art so special.There is a German series of restored Tarzan strips in books that are published by arrangement with Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

I really looked forward to possessing these final strips by Hogarth, since I know that he achieved a level of art in his later work that is almost unparalleled in the world of the comic strip. Unfortunately I am as disappointed by the quality of these reproductions, as I have been for the previous 4 volumes in the series. The publishers state that these prints were made by using the best quality sources available. I don't want to make spurious accusations, but from what I have seen on the web, significantly higher quality reproductions have previously been achieved (for example, the hard-to-find Flying Buttress editions).The unusual format for this final volume, compared to the previous books in the series, is explained as an attempt by Titan to reproduce the color strips in their original full layout versions as large as possible. This is a strange claim indeed, since the aspect ratio of this format does not actually suit the aspect ratio of these original layouts...! What has happened instead is that the color strips now appear small and cramped, with quite a lot of wasted whitespace at the bottom of each page.A MUCH better result would have been achieved by simply using the same size as the previous books, but in a landscape version instead. Even using portrait, but printing landscape-layout pages inside, would have served the strips much better, and resulted in dramatic increases in the size of each color strip, to a proper full page. This would also have improved the readability of the black and white strips in the second part of the book.All in all, it looks to me like this was another wasted opportunity, essentially just a better-than-nothing option. I am still holding out hope for somebody to achieve great quality, better-sized reproductions of the Hogarth strips.

Excellent reproduction of original comic strips.

I like the way Tarzan maintains the ecosystem

Poor reproduction & space management. Still most annoying is that Titan team dares to boast they have reproduced the strips with great care and love. Probably they don't know the meaning of the two.

leider weicht das Format des bandes von den bisher erschienenden Bänden ab. Diesmal im Querformat sind Tages und Sonntagsseiten gemischt.Die Sonntagsseiten sind nicht ganz seitendfüllend. Unten bleibt Platz für einen weiteren Streifen. Es wäre optisch besser gewesen, die Sonntagsseiten mittig zu drucken... naja kein Beinbruch.Die Mischung Sonntagsseiten/Tagesseiten ist jedoch genauso unglücklich wie bei dem Nachdruck der Manning-Seiten.Trotzdem für die hochwertige Qualität kein Punktabzug.

I thought i had a good deal buying this for SGD6.94 and was sorely disappointed because despite the very appealing cover design and size of the book, the contents were a big letdown simply because the panels art were quite small in size with so much wasted empty white space above and below them, the black and white dailies were not very sharply reproduced notwithstanding the small size of each and every panel. Titan did a fantastic job with their flash gordon books but not the hogarth tarzan books.