If you’d told me a couple years ago that I would be reading and enjoying a Tarzan comic from the 50s, I would have scoffed. But, this stuff is good. After reading a few convincing articles on Jesse Marsh and his Tarzan work (for instance, the long article in Comic Art #9 by Ron Goulart or Jesse Hamm’s posts), I found some online scans of stories and got hooked just in time for Dark Horse to start releasing these new reprint volumes. Each volume holds a year’s worth of issues. Some restoration has gone into the books, but I’m not sure how much. Some of the colors (particularly lighter ones) still retain a dot pattern, though others are solid. Some of the stories have poor line quality but most look pretty good for 50 year old comics.

I’m utterly drawn in by Marsh’s art, compositions, renderings, colors (okay, not sure he was responsible for those). He tells the story, and he does it with style. His character renderings have a bit of a drawn-from-life/staged-model quality to them. You might fault it for being stiff and posed, which it is, but I don’t think that is necessarily bad. Despite their stiffness, Marsh’s figures fly across the page. He often shows Tarzan leaping from one tree to another, suspended in mid-air, or wrestling with some animal or human, using the composition of the panel and sequence of panels to make the stiff figures dynamic and engaging.

Tarzan issue 13 page 28 panel 4

The figures add a geometric quality to the images, which contrasts nicely with the flowing jungle of the backgrounds (see above). The swaths of color and feathered strokes that make up Tarzan’s world are almost abstractly rendered, yet they retain their representational necessity. Whoever did the coloring was working with an extremely limited palette–primarily: two greens and two blues with a single yellow, orange, and purple–to pull Marsh’s marks into planes of fore/mid/background. The colors provide a consistency to the pages and in their simplicity help ease of flow of information. I even stole these compositions and colors for one of my abstract comics.)

Marsh’s art has a realism to it. His animals are carefully and realistically draw (and there are lots of animals in these stories) and the people are all realistically proportioned. Even Tarzan, the superhero of the story, is drawn so that he looks like a human (modelled on Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller I believe). As I understand it, Marsh researched African tribes to add realism to his portrayal of them, too. In this respect, these Tarzan stories seem different than other jungle comics I’ve seen (admittedly not many), in that the natives are not portrayed as a single uniform stereotype of the savage jungle dweller, rather Tarzan encounters all sorts of tribes and groups. The only group consistently portrayed in a poor light are Arabs, who are always the evil slave traders, given no chance to be shown in any positive light.

I haven’t seen much written about these new collections, which is a shame as the work here is well worth reading. At another time, I’ll have to spend a little more time looking at a single story. For the time being, couple small examples…

Tarzan issue 9 page 11 (click for larger)

I love this page of Tarzan trying to get a bunch of bears out of a cave. Marsh slathers on the black so that Tarzan is seemingly headed into an abyss. The yellow stones slip away until there is only impenetrable darkness.

Tarzan issue 14 page 17 panels 5-6

Tarzan issue 14 page 18 panels 1-2

This panel transition from the bottom of one page to the top of the next (in volume 3 of this series it also involves a page turn, though I don’t know if that is the case in the original) is an interesting use of a larger gap in time to accompany the larger gutter (so to speak). While we’re at it, note the harsh geometry of the backgrounds here (in contrast with the jungle in the image above) and the skillfull composition of the group of small figures and their dark shadows in the second to last panel. The second panel is of a type Marsh uses a lot, showing only the head and shoulders of a couple characters with a blank background. Somehow he always makes those panels so interesting. In this case he fits four heads in there with a clear sense of their spatial relation to each other. That last panel is a bit awkward with its centered figure and background statuary (which seems to come out of nowhere).

Tarzan 19 page 3 panel 3-4

These panels make great use of scale to show Tarzan’s smallness in relation to both the landscape, the skies, and the pterodactyl. And check out those awesome clouds in the second panel.

If you want to read some of these stories, you can find a bunch at this Edgar Rice Burroughs Webzine page. (The images above are from that site. Those in the book are much cleaner.)

[This is part 8 of a 30 part series where I am writing daily reviews for the month of December.]

III.

One of my very favorite books in my collection of “fine” art books is a collection of Erotic Watercolors by Rodin. The stunning images are mostly pencil drawings with watercolor washes. The rendering of the figures is minimal, a few curved pencil lines that look tossed off in a few moments, and maybe they are. Behind those lines, though, is a masterful sense of composition, line, and observation that looks easy but is nearly impossible to replicate–similar in that way to the deceptively simple lines of John Porcellino. Reading Santoro’s work often gives me a feeling similar to looking at that Rodin book (or Picasso’s etchings illustrating Ovid). What makes Santoro’s work even more interesting in the context of comics is the way he varies his style within the same work. A realistic landscape is juxtaposed with an almost completely abstract figure. An iconic, tightly drawn face is juxtaposed with a head that is no more than an oval outline.

This type of stylistic variation is almost never seen in comics, and where it is, the styles are most often used to differentiate two different narrative levels. A story within a story is given a different veneer, such as R Sikyorak’s comics within the comic in James Sturm’s and Guy Davis’s Unstable Molecules or the connected narratives of Paul Hornschemeier’s Three Paradoxes. Santoro varies his style within the same work, not to differentiate narrative levels, but for expressive effect.

I have already discussed some of the stylistic variations in the landscapes of Storeyville, and the characters share a similar variation. They are drawn with a similar sense of specificity and abstraction, like the gestural drawings of a painting that capture the overall sense of posture and movement while neglecting details. Often existing only as loose black outlines with the most of minimal of facial features, they still exist in the panel with a life-like realism. This loose realism works in great contrast to the majority of comics. Santoro captures the essence of the figures in a way that is less about iconic simplicity and more about a minimally rendered life.

This loose minimalist drawing allows for subtle variations in style that are recognizable and expressive without being jarring and discordant. Often this shift in style is used to echo the narration or internal emotion of Will. In one page Will’s narration over his concern of “dwindling finances” and the sense of being lost is mirrored by the bare, geometrically abstract panels: backgrounds become minimal lines, often only a single horizon line; characters become even more loosely rendered, practically scribbled as Will walks this way and that across the page. [See above] The contrast between pencil and ink is well used, the pencils often serving to delineate objects at a distance, disappearing into the background, or even metaphorically at a distance (memory or thought).

In one of Chimera‘s last pages, as the couple walks together, two juxtaposed panels show a striking difference between the woman’s representaton. [See above] The first panel shows the man peering around a tree at the woman, half hiding. In the second panel he has came around the tree and they are face to face. In the first panel, the woman is drawn as an extremely abstracted black outlined yellow shape on a pink field, shorn of any details but still identifiable as the woman. The second panel shows her with facial features and hair rendered in black lines on a yellow field, a suddenly smiling face. The stylistic change echoes the hiding/discovery of the couple’s little game of peek-a-boo. Instead of hiding the woman behind the tree trunk and obscuring her completely, Santoro both shows and hides her simultaneously through the abstracted representation–a small but brilliant use of the combination of the panel sequence and drawing style for narrative effect.

These types of variations in drawing style for expressive effect are a sadly underused tool in the comic artist’s toolbox (though I should note the use in some manga of the “super-deformed” style that is interspersed for comic effect in otherwise more realist manga). Stylistic unity and consistency is a gold standard one dare not go against, yet it is one of the elements of Santoro’s work that makes it so effective and attractive. We see a similar sense of variation and beautiful inconsistency in Santoro’s most recent work, the as-yet unfinished Cold Heat.

The traditional way of making color comics involves a black line drawing that is filled in with colors. Over the decades this method has not changed greatly. The occasional comic is painted in an illustrative style, and many comics are drawn in black and use one color as a tonal variation. Computerized coloring has added to the “realism” of the colors, but most comics are still black outlines with filled in colors. Exceptions are not unknown: Austin English’s multi-colored crayons and Joann Sfar’s chaotic watercolors to pull two examples from my bookshelf.

Santoro gives Cold Heat a unique appearance by taking a more graphic printmaking-esque approach to line and color. He uses a palette of blue, purple, and pink along with textures, overlapping transparencies, and flat fields in a variety of ways.

Cold Heat uses dark purple as its primary line color, but unlike the black linework in most comics, the dark purple is not used to delineate all the characters, objects, and backgrounds. Other colors are used as lines or shapes, with brush strokes, pencil graininess, and what looks like transparent marker strokes. The sheer variety of color applications in the comic provides a powerful method for mood, emotional expression, location differentiation, and composition. I can do no better than to offer a number of sample panels or groups of panels to showcase these variations and stand as their own conclusion to this article but not the comics of Frank Santoro.

[Images from Storeyville, Chimera, and Cold Heat by Frank Santoro (Cold Heat created with Ben Jones). All available from Picturebox.]

Back in 1974, long after the disappearance of EC and shortly after the heyday of the underground comix, the direct comics market was just developing. Marvel and DC really were the only games in town, and into this arena the first issue of Jack Katz’s The First Kingdom was published by Bud Plant. At the time, Star*Reach, a science fiction and fantasy anthology, was the only other independent comic being published (the first issue having come out earlier that year), preceeding both Sim’s Cerebus and Pekar’s American Splendor by a few years. Katz envisioned the book as a single novel. He put out a new issue about every six months, ending the story with issue 24 in 1986.

Century Comics Group (though this book was published under its former name Mecca) is now releasing The First Kingdom in four volumes, each containing six of the original issues. As of this writing, the second volume is forthcoming, with the third being solicited.

To try to briefly summarize the story of even this quarter of The First Kingdom is futile. Katz created one of the densest comics I’ve ever read both in content and visuals. The beginning introduces us to the idea of a man made cataclysm that altered the Earth and left behind a few survivors, robbed of all civilization. The protagonist for the early issues is Darkenmoor a hunter who loses his tribe and begins his path along a tragic fate, foretold early on by an old seer. His path is quickly crossed by a group of “gods,” who live in a civilization atop high mountains. Darkenmoor gathers other people, fights monsters, and founds a city-state. The jealousy of his brother-in-law and a fallen god work against him, while a goddess attempts to work in his favor. His son is born and must be hidden away on an island, while the brother-in-law takes control of the city-state. And that’s just the really broad elements (without giving away too much).

One would not go off course to think of Greek myth, epics, and tragedies. Katz’s story runs very clearly in the same vein as ancient Greek literary works. Like the epic of the Iliad, he tells his story with a large cast of characters and jumps about between characters, scenes, and times, focusing more on the bigger picture than any single character. Like an ancient tragedy, characters and gods interact and fight against their unbeatable fates which invariable bring death. Like the Greek myths, the gods display human emotions and pettiness. Like these works, Katz’s story has a didactic core (that is not yet clear in this quarter).

For these reasons, the comic is not a simple sword and sorcery tale, though at first it certainly seems like one. Katz’s story is an epic on many levels, spanning (even in this volume) centuries. As such it often forsakes smaller scenes in favor of large events, foregoes much characterization in favor of showing the larger place of characters in the story.

Narration is a large part of The First Kingdom. Nary a panel passes that is not narrated. In some cases it is a tired redundancy of telling us what the images are already showing, but in most cases it is necessary for the leaps of time involved in a great many of the panel transitions. Oddly, Katz uses typeset text exclusively in the comic. All narration and dialogue is set in a rather boring typewriter font on a white background with no borders. The dialogue is not put in any balloons, just set above the characters’ heads, usually at the top of the panel, which visually mixes it with the narration. That said, I never had trouble differentiating the two when reading. Only after reading the whole book did I realize that the narration is in all caps and the dialogue is not.

The sheer amount of text is not the only element that creates the visual density of Katz’s pages. His page layouts neglect the use of gutters. All the panels are divided from each other by a single shared border, as if he had no space to spare in cramming panels onto each page. Early on he puts a lot more panels onto a page, often causing confusing as to the sequence of reading, but by the end the panels are larger and clearly organized. There is no use of any recognizable grid, Katz seems to come to each panel deciding its size without regard to any preconceived layout.

A typical crowded panel (one-third of a page). Click for larger.

Within these crowded together panels, Katz’s art adds even more density to the page. He uses a great quantity of lines to fill the panels, crowding in characters, background, and all manner of creatures. One of his panels holds the amount of lines and visual information that most whole comics pages lack. The lack of color or even much use of spot blacks creates a visually uniformity across these crowded pages that requires attention. The attention is worthwhile, as Katz’s art is impressive if often grotesque.

Another crowded panel featuring some of Katz’s monstrous creations (one-third of a page). Click for larger.

The human figure is a particular focus of Katz. The comic is filled with figures, hardly a panel lacks one and often contains dozens. The denizens of this post-cataclysmic land do suffer a certain uniformity of stature: muscular yet bone thin. Clothing too seems to have been a victim of the changing Earth. Most of the characters go about naked or nearly so, though not in a sword and sorcery chainmail bikini way. Rather, the figures lack the blatant eroticism of most fantasy art, and are more often than not slightly grotesque in shape.

When I started reading the book I was quite put off by the story and art, but I stuck with it, plowing my way through the text and images, becoming more immersed in the story and its world. Katz weaves together a number of storylines, cutting back and forth between different characters with great frequency. At first, I was often hardpressed to differentiate the characters and keep track of the goings-on, but by the end I not only understood what was happening, I wanted to find out more.

I can’t imagine where Katz took his story (though some images I’ve seen indicate the book becomes more science fictiony), but I’m curious to find out. It’s clear that he had a seriousness of purpose and a plan. He wasn’t just making it up as he went along. Even as early as page six, Darkenmoor is granted a vision of his fate. The panel showing this vision has a number of scenes that we see come to pass over the course the following issues.

Century’s reprinting of the comic often suffers from a graying of the art. The blacks are not quite black enough and the whites are often a little grey. Hopefully this will be rectified in the next books, I didn’t find it too hard to fix when scanning the samples above.

I’m not aware of any comic like The First Kingdom. As it began so it remains, standing alone, with few peers.