Review: Dark Horse Comics/DC Comics: Superman

This 400-page collection is the latest big, fat, book of crossovers between DC characters and those owned or licensed to Dark Horse Comics. I can't quite figure out how they are organized. For example, this collection includes two Superman/Aliens crossovers, which seem like they could have just as easily appeared in the previously published DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Aliens (which did include the Superman/Batman/Aliens/Predator crossover), and the upcoming DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Justice League will include two Superman stories. I imagine it has something to do with which publisher technically publishes which collection–note the way the order of which publisher is named varies from book to book–but regardless of the behind-the-scenes organizing principal, these books include a bunch of harder-to-find-then-I'd like crossovers of the past couple decades, many of them quite good comics.

This particular volume features comics from 1995-2002, three of which are in Superman continuity (or in continuity as it existed at the time), with the fourth and final one being an Elseworlds story. Let's take them one at a time, shall we...?

Superman/Aliens by Dan Jurgens, Kevin Nowlan, Gregory Wright and Android Images

This three-issue, 1995 miniseries is among the best of the DC/Dark Horse crossovers, and one of the better inter-publisher crossovers I've ever read. Much of that is due to the skill that went into crafting it, but more still is due to the amount of care that writer/artist Dan Jurgens put into the book.

The Aliens, like the Predators, have become such frequent participants in crossovers due to their extreme flexibility–they're basically just cool monsters to fight–that such comics can often read as extremely lazy. Jurgens, however, brings a real sense of occasion to this story.

He manages to make the story almost as much of an Aliens story as it is a Superman story, and while the superhero is the protagonist of the story, Jurgens carefully sets it up in such a way that the Aliens and their horrifying life-cycle aren't just backdrops to a Superman beat 'em up. Rather, he evokes the sort of lonely setting and the horror/suspense mood that are so prominent in the film franchise, and even uses the single, female protagonist that powered the earlier films...although here she is, of course, teamed-up with Superman.

More remarkably still, not only does Jurgens handicap Superman in such a way that the Aliens pose a real threat to him–most of the story is spent far from Earth, so his solar-based powers are waning like a dying battery throughout, and he must struggle with his refusal to take a life, even the lives of the Aliens–but he instills about as real a sense of danger that can exist in a Superman comic.

At no point did I think Superman was going to die in this comic, but when the near-powerless Superman has an Alien implanted in his no-longer invulnerable chest cavity, I did find myself wondering how exactly he was going to survive (My guess, that he would plunge himself into the sun, burning out the embryo while restoring his own powers, as soon as he returned to the solar system, turned out to be wrong; the reality was much grosser).

Oh, and Jurgens sets this story firmly within Superman's post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint continuity–inter-company crossover or no, this is canon guys–reflecting not only the status quo of the Super-books circa 1995, but also referencing a handful of previous stories from this continuity. Most of these aren't terribly important, although they are referred to in dialogue and asterisked editorial box, but one does play a big role: Superman's early career execution of the pocket universe Kryptonians, as that was when he swore never to kill again, an oath frequently tested by the Aliens (His first fight with a single Alien is actually kind of funny, as he keeps trying to communicate with it while it tries eating his face.)

Reporters Lois Lane and Clark Kent are covering LexCorp's space-division as they recover an alien probe and take it to their orbiting space-station. It's a distress pod of some kind, asking for help, and Superman recognizes the language it's using as Kryptonian. He insists that he and he alone find and help the people who sent it, with the help of LexCorp, who provides him with the space ship to do it in.

The destination? Argo City, a domed city in deep space (far from a yellow sun) and peopled with too-few Kryptonian-speaking humanoids. Superman loads some injured, unconscious residents into his ship and sends it back to the station, asking them to send it back for him (as otherwise he would be stranded here). Sure, his powers are slowly starting to wane, but how dangerous can the place be...?

Pretty dangerous, it turns out, as its swarming with Aliens, and, worse still, the unconscious people he sent back to the space station, where Lois is, are of course harboring gestating Aliens in their chests. At the end of the first issue, Jurgens provides a pretty big shock for his readers at the time: The blonde teenage girl who speaks Kryptonian and is fighting for her survival on Argo City tells Superman that her name is...wait for it...Kara.

That would have been a pretty big deal in 1995, as that would make her the only other survivor of Krypton in the post-Crisis continuity, it would also make her a new version of the original (read: real) Supergirl. The one in DC Comics at the time was the weird sentient protoplasm from a pocket universe one whose back-story just got more and more confusing until DC just let Jeph Loeb restart Supergirl's origin in Superman/Batman a decade or so after this saw publication).

As the series progresses, we learn whether or not this Kara is the Kara, but, more importantly from the stand-point of making a good Superman/Aliens crossover, Jurgens has effectively split the action into two settings, both evocative of the first two Aliens movies. On the space station, the hatched and escaped Aliens stalk Lois, LexCorp's Dr. Kimble and the rest of the much more expendable cast, while on Argo City, Superman gradually loses all of his powers and must face a series of blows to his confidence and optimism: That he can't just punch out the millions of Aliens, that he sent a ship-full of them towards a space station containing Lois and orbiting Earth, that no ship is coming to retrieve him and, ultimately, that he and Kara both have Aliens gestating in their chests.

As unlikely a pairing as the two multi-media franchises may be–seriously, pause and compare the films Superman and Superman II to Alien and Aliens in your mind for a moment–Jurgens makes them fit naturally, and manages to deliver a story that honors the attributes of Aliens while cutting to the core of what makes Superman such a great, aspirational, noble and heroic character.

You know what else is an unlikely pairing? Jurgens and Kevin Nowlan. Jurgens pencils the book, while Nolan inks it, but based on the results, it looks like Jurgens provided fairly full lay-outs and Nowlan finished them. It's a great collaboration, as it looks at once like the art of Jurgens and the art of Nowlan, two very distinctive, very prolific artists whose work is easily recognizable at a glance.

There are therefore a lot of the familiar lay-outs and heroic poses of Jurgens' Superman comics–having drawn Superman as long as he has, Jurgens' work often suggests the "real" Superman in the way that, say, long-time Batman artist the late Jim Aparo's Batman poses and expressions often seem genuine in a way that those of other artists don't–but here the art is all more detailed and smoother, with thicker, bolder black lines.

I enjoy the work of current Superman artists Doug Mahnke and Patrick Gleason, but honestly, I can't remember the last time I read a Superman comic where I enjoyed the artwork this much.

(I suppose it's also worth mentioning how odd it is to read this story after reading Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's first story arc of Justice League in 2011 and early 2012, the story in which Superman and his League allies so cavalierly kill Parademons without a second thought. This story is a good illustration of why that was so strange to see. Here Superman tries to communicate with an Alien before even striking it, and resolutely refuses to pick up a gun and destroy one even at his most hopeless, because a life is still a life. In Justice League, he was tearing apart Parademons that were, until recently, normal human beings, without even stopping to consider what they were.)

Superman/Aliens II: God War by Chuck Dixon, Jon Bogdanove, Kevin Nowlan and Dave Stewart

As is so often–too often–the case, the sequel is not nearly as good as the original. This 2002 miniseries, which retains only inker Kevin Nowlan from the first Superman/Aliens crossover, is as much a New Gods comic as it is a Superman or Aliens comic...in fact, Superman and the Aliens both seem like guest-stars in a New Gods comic.

Writer Chuck Dixon has Superman visiting New Genesis, just sort of hanging out with other humanoid super-aliens who can fly and are invulnerable and dress as colorfully as he does, when Darkseid launches a horrible attack. Having discovered the Aliens, Jack Kirby's god of evil impregnates a battalion of his warriors and sends them to attack New Genesis, essentially using them as trojan horses carrying the real weapon, the Aliens themselves.

During the course of the battle, which includes Lightray, Barda and Forager but no Mister Miracle, Orion gets an Alien implanted in his chest. Knowing his time is limited, he decided to go straight for Apokolips, with Superman tagging along. Meanwhile, Barda and her forces try to stave off the invasion of the Aliens that Darkseid rained down on them.

It is, in other words, everything the original Superman/Aliens was not. Here the Aliens are just cool-looking, dramatic monsters appearing in a Superman beat 'em up, but Superman is only one of several heroes doing the beating. If one wonders how Orion survived, I'll spoil it for you, although it should be noted that he should be invulnerable enough to survive in a manner more similar to that of Superman in the original. Basically, Darkseid shows mercy on his son, and uses the Omega beams to destroy the growing Alien. His long-term plan, he explains to lackeys like Desaad, is to instill a sense of indebtedness to his biological son, so that Orion may someday side with him over Highfather.

And, in the stinger ending, if not, well, Darkseid still has a hidden vault full of warriors with face-huggers on them, apparently in stasis to pull out when needed.

The only real pleasure I took in this particular story was the art. I like both Jon Bogdanove, a one-time constant presence on the Superman family of books, and Kevin Nowlan alot, although their styles seem even further apart from that of Jurgens and Nowlan.

Weirdly but understandably, Bogdanove seems to have attempted to town down the Bogdanovicity of his pencil work in an attempt to draw more Kirby-esque, and Nowlan followed his lead. The results are...weird. The New Gods characters all look extremely Kirby-esque, with some panels looking like Kirby himself drw them. Superman is a strange mixture of the thick-torsoed Silver Age Superman with flashes of a primal, angry Kirby face and Bogdanove's normal Man of Steel, and the Aliens look like, well, Aliens.

Dixon's Superman was so changed by his first meeting with these creatures, that he doesn't have any of the moral compunctions about seeing them exterminated that he originally had, and, even if he did, he spends much of the time fighting either alongside Barda or Orion, so it's not like it matters; he's not about to fight Orion to the death to stop the dying New God from turning massive Alien hives into pools of acidic blood.

Other than picking apart the various influences and letting one's eyes surf along the curious braiding of various art styles, there is still some pleasure to be had in the artwork. Dixon and company provide a few interesting images, particularly the scene that follows the mass-birthing of the Aliens from Darkseid's invasion troops, where we see a panel in which the just-born, snake-form of the baby Aliens cover the ground like a carpet.

It's a disappointing read, but then, it hardly matters in this particular collection, as it is but one of four stories, and it is sandwiched between two such great ones.

The Superman/Madman Hullabaloo by Mike Allred and Laura Allred

The second Aliens crossover is followed by Madman creator Mike Allred's three-issue, 1997 miniseries in which his signature creation meets the original and greatest superhero.

Allred was one of the greatest superhero comics artists of the time, and he remains as such–if anything, he's gotten better. His style is the sort that no longer seems as sought after by the Big Two as perhaps it should, but he he has a great line, and produces work that is clean, simple, just-flat-enough and classic-looking...more timeless than nostalgic. When I close my eyes and imagine "comic book art," its Allred's style that immediately springs to mind.

While the artist has long since done a great deal of work for both DC and Marvel, this was a rare and early example of Allred drawing non-Madman, non-Allred creations, and it is pretty glorious.

The plot finds Superman and Madman both aiding their respective bearded scientist friends in researching some weird energy at the same time, the result being a sort of cosmic collision in which they pass through one another and then materialize in one another's dimension.

Superman is in Madman's body, with an amalgamated costume (Allred is one of the great costume designers, and would have been up their with Alex Ross and Darwyn Cooke if I were Dan DiDio and I was trying to decide which artist to let redesign the whole DC Universe for The New 52; DiDio, obviously, went with Jim Lee instead), lands in Snap City. Madman, in Superman's considerably handsomer and more powerful body, lands in Metropolis, also with an amalgamated costume (here somewhat resembling a leather jacket-less '90s Superboy, but with more prominent yellow, and a strip of Madman-mask, so we'd recognize him).

While messing around on one another's Earth and meeting one another's supporting cast (Lois Lane and Professor Hamilton both get pretty big roles, while pretty much everyone from the Madman comics of the time show up), they figure out what's going on and how to fix it. Meanwhile, the collision dispersed bits of Superman's powers throughout both universes, so once restored the pair and their pals must track down individuals exhibiting super-strength and suck those powers out of them with a mad science device.

The root of all this madness? Mr. Mxyzptlk (Here pronounced "Mix-Yez-Pittle-Ick" rather than "Mix-Yez-Spit-Lick," as it was pronounced by Gilbert Gottfried on Superman: The Animated Series, which is how I've been pronouncing it since.)

While technically "in continuity," Allred's Superman and Lois are perfectly classic in their look and characterization, so that with only minor alterations to their clothing they could be Bronze Age, Silver Age or maybe even Golden Age Superman and Lois, or from various media. It's amazing what a good handle Allred had on the characters' essence, and the way he's able to boil them down so perfectly.

There's a neat scene where Madman asks Superman about God, and even a bit of a moral as Mxyzptlk challenges Madman to a magic-free challenge that can only be won physically. It's...well, it's pretty great.

The comic ends with a "The End?!" a gag referring to Dr. Flem's use of Madman as a sort of living crash-test dummy, but it's actually kind of disappointing that it did indeed turn out to be the end. At least we've since gotten to see Allred draw much of the DC Universe in his issue of Solo, and Metamorpho in the pages of Wednesday Comics and so many characters from the original Batman TV show on the covers of Batman '66 and...

Superman/Tarzan: Sons of The Jungle by Chuck Dixon, Carlos Meglia and Dave Stewart

The 2001 three-part miniseries Superman/Tarzan: Sons of The Jungle adhered to the popular (to the point of default) formula for Superman Elseworlds stories of the time: What if the rocket that carried baby Superman from the exploding Krypton to the planet Earth landed in some other place or some other time? Here the rocket crashes not only in late 19th Century Africa, but into the pages of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan origin story.

So just as the mutineers were about to strand Lord Greystoke and his pregnant wife Alice on the coast, they see a fireball from the sky and take it as a sign not to do so, instead taking them to the next port. The fireball was, of course, Superman's baby rocket. And so it is Kal-El rather than Tarzan who is discovered, adopted and raised by the apes, while the-man-who-would-have-been-Tarzan is born in English society, although he becomes a mopey, Byronic figure, aware that something's wrong, that he's not where he's supposed to be, and so he travels the world in a funk, looking for his place.

The characters' stories are too powerful to be altered for long, however, and the original Superman and Tarzan narratives gradually but inexorably reassert themselves. When Greystoke joins a aerial zeppelin expedition of the ruins of a lost city in Africa, an expedition covered by Lois Lane of the Daily Planet and her assistant Jane Porter,
they are shot down by Princess La and her people.

Superman, decked out in a leopard-skin loincloth with a red "S" drawn on his bare chest, comes to the aid of the white-skinned people who fell from the sky. Along the way, Lois falls for this powerful man of action, while Lord Greystoke and Porter ultimately decide to stay behind in Africa, Greystoke finally having found what he was missing there.

So, at the end, Superman becomes Superman (albeit a bit earlier than usual, and thus the costue he wears for a single panel at the end in Metropolis looks much more Flash Gordon than superehro, and Tarzan becomes Tarzan.

Of particular interest is a prose piece entitled "Sons of the Jungle?" written by Robert R. Barrett, identified as "Edgar Rice Burroughs archivist." He recounts the relationships between the two heroes who would eventually both become stars of prose stories, comic strips, comic books, film and television animation, highlighting Superman co-creator and writer Jerry Siegel's overture to Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1934, which included a treatment for a John Carter of Mars adaptation in "cartoon-form," to run alongside the Tarzan Sunday strips. Burroughs, as per policy, never even read the letter. Barrett also address Burroughs' reaction about bringing Tarzan from his jungle setting to the modern, civilized , urban world, which would of course have made him into more of a Superman-like figure, to which Burroughs objected, saying that if Tarzan could not "out-superman Superman...he might suffer by comparison."

As interesting as all this is, I particularly like the paragraph devoted to this comic book series, in which he says that Dixon's "quite...entertaining" story is "interestingly illustrated by the team of Carlos Meglia and Dave Stewart."

"Interesting" is certainly one way to refer to Meglia's art, which is unlike any generally applied to either Superman or Tarzan. Highly cartoony and animated, to the point that the static characters sometimes appear to lurch or launch across the panels, Meglia's arwork is exaggerated as it can be while still being readable. I like it–although I'm not so sure about his obsession with drawing individual strands of hair on a man's arm or chin–but it's certainly not what I would have thought to apply to a crossover of these two characters. I can't help but imagine what a Superman/Tarzan comic drawn by the likes of Joe Kubert circa 2001 might have looked like, for example.

The 19th century theory of Directionalism, and how it applies to Joe Kubert

Last week I read Dave Standish's Hollow Earth, a 2006 book about the history of the concept of the hollow earth and what might be within it, beginning in the late 17th century when the idea was taken seriously by many scientists (most prominently Sir Edmond Halley) and then, by the time the 20th century rolled around, as an aspect of popular culture from utopian novels, works from H.G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe and science fiction writers (Warlord's Skartaris didn't rate a mention, perhaps because Standish rightly considered it derivative of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar; in fact, the only comic book mention is the cover and a page of a 1955 Classics Illustrated adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth).

In discussing how Verne's work reflected the science of the mid-19th century, Standish brought up the competing ideas of directionalism and progressivism. Here, I'll let him explain it:

Progressivsm meant what it suggests, that there is an observable progress in the geologic record, an upward march of creatures from lower to higher, culminating with man at the pinnacle. This was both in keeping with the spirit of the times—all sorts of progressive social measures were afoot—as well as being in harmony with religious ideas of a Divine Plan. Progressivism found metaphysical purpose in geologic events. Directionalism was a scientific expression of the biblical idea, going back to the work of [Thomas] Burnet and others, that the earth is in a state of decline from an earlier perfection...

This was my first exposure to either of those terms, but I suppose Progressivism is probably the more widely accepted of the two now, as it sounds more in keeping with evolution.

I was thinking of the idea of Directionalism as I started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan: The Joe Kubert Years Vol. 1, and not because Burroughs created his own Hollow Earth setting and eventually sent Tarzan down there. Rather, I was thinking about the idea of a more perfect past getting lamer and lamer as time progressed as I read Kubert's prose introduction to the collection.

Kubert talked about how Hal Foster's newspaper strips based on Burroughs' Tarzan were what sparked his interest in comics as a child, and what an effect Foster's work on that strip had on his own development as an artist. Then, "jump ahead with me now some forty or fifty years later," and he talks about how Carmine Infantino asked him to become an editor at DC, which gave him "responsibilities including the war books, covers, and as many Sgt. Rock stories as I had time to do."

It was while he he was managing all those responsibilities that his friend Infantino, who knew of Kubert's love for the jungle lord, offered Kubert the Tarzan book that is collected in the volume the introduction appears in.

So Kubert wrote, drew, lettered and provided cover art for the monthly Tarzan while simultaneously working as an editor for DC.

That's a lot of work right there.

I'm having trouble thinking of a modern day equivalent to someone with that kind of workload. Perhaps Erik Larsen, who was writing, drawing and covering Savage Dragon while running Image for a while. Joe Quesada would attempt to write and draw or at least just draw Marvel stories here and there while serving as the company's EIC, but each would be thrown spectacularly off schedule (Although to be fair, Quesada's editorial duties were probably more equivalent to Infantino's at the time, rather than Kubert's).

Heck, forget editing though, how many people are even capable of writing and drawing 22 pages a month anymore? Or just drawing 22 pages a month? Not too terribly many. Certainly not many on DC's payroll (Jim Starlin might be the only writer/artist with long-form series even working for the company at the moment; Tony Daniel is writing and drawing a three-issue miniseries at the moment, though).

And then, how many of them can draw anywhere near as well as Kubert?

So looking around the comic shops today, at who's doing what and how well they do it, and then looking back at comics from Golden Age, Silver Age and even as recently as the mid-'70s when Kubert was producing this comic, it's not hard to imagine the artists of his generation as being the ideal comic book artists, working in a state of perfection, and the creators that followed devolving into further and further fallen states, along the lines of the fallen world theory of Directionalism as I understood Standish' brief explanation of it.

Kubert and his generation of artists may seem like the comic book artist equivalent of Bibilical heroes, people with super-human lifespans for whom great feats difficult for modern people to even comprehend were a daily occurrence but he and his peers were, I understand, actually regular human beings.

He felt the pressure of deadlines like all other artists (er, or at least like all other artists who used to work in comics back when there was still such a thing as a deadline), and he talked about that in his introduction to Tarzan: The Joe Kubert Years Vol. 2.

Here he talks about the positive side of deadlines:

Every artist asks himself the question: "How can I finish my drawing at a specific time, when I know I can improve it if I have more time?" Ironically, however, I have found that having a deadline can be helpful, not a deterrent...having deadlines engenders an ability to make drawing decisions more quickly and decisively. It also tends to build a stronger sense of self-confidence. Anyhow, I hope my theories are correct. I think they are.*

I found that interesting, and I wonder if some of the artists who take such a great deal of time to turn out 22 pages—artists like Brian Hitch, Frank Quitely, Joe Quesada, Carlos Pacheco, Dale Eaglesham, Ethan Van Sciver, Steve McNiven, Kubert's own sons, et cetera—might be better artists if they honored deadlines to the point where getting all of the art done in a particular time period dictated some of the choices they made (I should note I don't mean to call into question the abilities of the above artists. I really like a lot of those artists quite a bit, and some of them it's hard to imagine some of them actually drawing any better than they already do, but I admit to being curious about what a faster Hitch or Quitely might look like, you know? Some of them—like Van Sciver and McNiven, for example—I think might actually draw better if they spent less time over-drawing).

We've all heard Quesada, DiDio and other editors at the Big Two pose some form of the argument "Do you want it on time or do you want it good?" And Joe Kubert's work is one of the many (many, many) examples of why that line of reasoning is an artificial one.

Regarding Kubert's precise workload during the time he was drawing Tarzan, which he alluded to in the introduction to the first volume, he had this to say:

...I was also the editor of a number of other publications at the same time. So, in addition to drawing covers, editing, and sometimes illustrating other stories, I was also responsible for writing and drawing the Tarzan books. It was a lot of work, but it's the thing I love to do...At one point, I found myself leaning heavily (and dangerously close) to a deadline. No need for me to go into details, suffice it to say that at one point, 24 hours a day was simply not enough time for me to finish all I had to do and continue to eat, sleep, and breathe. So I called out for help.

Help came in the form of Frank Thorne, who pencilled and issue of Tarzan for Kubert. A fact at which I could only shake my head in disbelief. Even when Kubert couldn't meet his obligations, he still managed to write and ink the damn issue. My God.

I realize I'm kind of skipping around at this point, but there was one more passage of Kubert's introduction to this second volume I found impressive as all hell. In the first volume's intro he explained how, in preparation for the gig, he re-read all of Burroughs' Tarzan novels and re-read Hal Foster's strips, including many he hadn't read the first time around. Here he describes what else he did to perfect his craft on the book:

Drawing Tarzan enabled me to focus on the human figure more than any other comic strip work I'd done previously. I attended life-drawing classes. I garnered a huge amount of reference, such as photographs of animals (gorillas, chimpanzees, monekys, snakes, lions, elephants, and sundry other jungle denizens)**. It was a learning experience, especially rewarding when I felt that I'd succeeded in achieving some dramatic impact or physical action engendered by the original stories.

I was really impressed to read that. Here's an artist who essentially had it made. Not only was he working for one of the bigger comics companies, but he wasn't a boss there. He wasn't a freelancer who had to worry about being fired off all his books or anything, and yet he still took the time to attend life-drawing classes to get a better handle on anatomy, because...well, why exactly? Out of respect for the character, and the work of those who instilled in him his passion for that character, Burroughs and Foster? Out of respect for his audience? Out of respect for himself, wanting to be certain the work he was signing his name to and accepting pay checks for was as good as it could be while still honoring the time-constraints of a monthly schedule, even if it meant continually learning how to be a better artist?

Reading these—both the thirty-some year-old comics work and the few prose pages of introduction—made me glad that Joe Kubert has a school teaching future generations how to draw for comics, while more than a little bummed out about the caliber of comics work that Kubert's old company and their cross-town rivals (and, more importantly) comics fandom reward these days.

One piece of advice often given to aspiring comics artists is that they shouldn't teach themselves how to draw simply by looking at other comic books, and yet how many in the Big Two's stables are currently producing art that was so clearly learned from years of re-drawing Image Comics panels in the early '90s? How sad is it to think that thirty-years ago a DC editor took the time to take a life-drawing class in order to be sure he got Tarzan's musculature just right, while today we have artists who can't even draw the human foot, and would rather set every scene in a deep fog or shallow water than risk the attempt?



*I can't speak to comic book drawing, as what little drawing I do is just for fun, but that certainly sounds right when applied to writing. I know I became a much, much better writer over the course of the year I spent working at a daily paper, where each day between three and four p.m. I was expected to turn in one to three articles between 400 and 1,200 words each, depending on what the other two guys in my bureau had gotten out of their beats that morning. In the years since, as newspaper staff writer and freelancer I know I've often turned in work that wasn't my best and I could certainly have improved if it was the only story I was working on, or if I didn't have to go to sleep at some point, or go interview someone or see a movie or show up for my day job or whatever. But on the other hand, having a ton of time to labor over something just as often would lead to poorer results, as there's a great temptation to over-think things and end up editing something into incoherence. The professional writing I've done that I'm most proud of more often than not was done when I had a deadline defining the amount of time I had to fuss over it, a time that was never so great that I could spend hours and hours laboring over it, but no so short that I was aware of rushing.



**One thing I noticed almost immediately in reading these stories is that the species of "ape" that Tarzan is the king of is pretty vague. As I mentioned earlier in the week, I still haven't read the Burroughs books yet, so perhaps he assigns a definite species to the apes there, or notes that they are a sort of lost, fantasy species of ape. Of course, Burroughs was first writing at a time when virtually nothing was known about the great apes of Africa. His first Tarzan story appeared in 1912, while as late as the 1860s they were being described as bloodthirsty, man-fighting beasts, and the mountain gorilla wasn't even discovered until 1902. In the Johnny Weissmuller movies, they have men in gorilla suits playing the apes, and chimpanzees are supposed to be the baby and juvenile versions, which grow up into the gorilla suit-apes (I think by the third or fourth one they abandoned this idea completely, and the chimpanzee Cheetah is the only great ape around). In the Disney version, which deals with Tarzan's childhood, the apes are clearly gorillas, and their depiction reflected modern understanding of them). Anyway, the apes in Kubert's stories seem to be something between a chimpanzee and a gorilla. They look and behave more like chimps than gorillas—for which there's a special ape-language name, "Bolgani"—but they're huge, bigger than Tarzan, and their ears are usually smaller and their faces hairier than chimpanzees. I've read about giant chimpanzees in various cryptozoology books before, and I guess there has been a recent discovery of rare, large chimpanzees that look and behave a bit more like gorillas then their smaller cousins in the congo, as reported by National Geographic and The Guardian. They're usually called Bili apes, after where they live, although locals call them "tree-beaters" or "lion-killers." They would certainly seem to fit the bill of Tarzan's apes better than either chimpanzees or gorillas.



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If you're sick of hearing me going on and on about Joe Kubert's Tarzan, given that this is my fifth post or so on the subject within the last week, don't worry, this is the last one I have planned for now. Unless I find the third volume of Dark Horse's collection somewhere, anyway.

Jeff Smith on Joe Kubert's Tarzan

I was Google Image-ing to see if I could find any examples of Joe Kubert's ape drawings from his Tarzan run to use to illustrate today's post, and instead I found this: A 2006 blog post Jeff Smith wrote about Kubert's Tarzan, inspired by the Dark Horse's release of trades collecting it.

It's only a couple paragraphs long, but if you're interested in Kubert and/or his Tarzan, I'd definitely recommend giving Smith's post a read.

Smith is himself a great cartoonist, and picks up on unique elements of Kubert's work and communicates about it far, far more perceptively, efficiently and effectively than I could.

Reading it reminded me that Smith had cited Kubert and his Tarzan work as a big influence on his own comics, so I then pulled out my copy of Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond, the catalog of the 2008 Wexner Center for the Arts gallery show of the same name, to see if he also discussed Kubert within it. And he did!

It's a little less concise than his blog post, but definitely of interest. A portion of the catalog is dedicated to a transcription of an interview between Smith and the show's curators, Lucy Shelton Caswell and Dave Filipi. In this section, the latter prompts Smith, "Just from looking at Bone there are definitely Joe Kubert influences. Can you talk about him?"

And Smith does:

[H]e didn't obsess about details, and in fact he would often leave out information. He might not even draw somebody's feet, but you always knew where the feet were. I came to appreciate that his artwork was in some ways better than the people who were drawing really perfect anatomically correct people. He engaged your imagination. I definitely brought that into my Bone work. Nothing I draw looks like Joe Kubert, but I was very conscious of how much information you had to impart because Joe knew exactly how much he needed to sell the idea completely. And I actually think that's more powerful—when you, the reader, fill in the feet. YOu do more than fill in the feet when you're doing that. You're filling in everything around the feet and behind them, and you make the world all the more real. The storytelling was really powerful. He could make an adventure story move. One minute he could have Tarzan standing there talking to someone, and you got Tarzan standing with his weight on one leg, like a real human would, instead of standing there with his hands on his hips like a superhero, and the next minute he's in the trees carrying a human being chased by gorillas, and it all looked completely real. It looked like that's really happening—and trees that are a hundred stories tall. It's just how he can make something impossible feel so plausible that you almost could feel the sunlight splashing by him and feel tree limbs under your feet.

Man, now I really want to see what a Jeff Smith Tarzan comic might look like...

Even Tarzan's dreams are totally bad-ass

This is the cover of Tarzan #214, a 1972 DC comic written and illustrated by Joe Kubert, containing the story "The Nightmare!" It is, like the rest of Joe Kubert's Tarzan comics of the 1970s, what comics critics often refer to as "awesome." In fact, it's so awesome, that we should take a closer look at it together, in order to appreciate that awesomeness. If you can't find our own copy of the single issue, you can always try to hunt down a volume of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan: The Joe Kubert Years Vol. 1, which reprints it (If you live in the Columbus area, you can try the Grandview Heights Public Library, which is where I found this copy.)

Tarzan is skulking about the tree tops with his knife unsheathed, so hungry he could eat a horse, or its African equivalent (a zebra). Swinging from vines and putting various jungle beasts in submission holds burns a lot of calories, you see.

He spies "a young wappi" below him—wappi either being a rare type of jungle deer I've never heard of or simply the ape word for deer—and pounced at the little, gangly, helpless, big-eyed, big eyelash-ed source of calories, but Tarzan deems it too skinny and too young (And too cute, I bet, although he doesn't say so). After giving the poor beast a heart attack, he lets it go, bidding it to go back to it's "kalu," when he catches a whiff of cooking meat from the village of the Gomangani, a nearby tribe with a name that sounds like a genre of Japanese comics.

Tarzan hangs around in the treetops outside their village, as they celebrate the recent kill of a sick water buffalo with their poison arrows by eating and drinking themselves into a stupor.

Once they've all passed out, Tarzan creeps into their village and sticks his hand into their cooking pot:

Tarzan is at once repelled...and sickened by the taste! For the first time, the ape-man is eating cooked meat! It disgusts him...but--he is hungry! And...he eats!

Kubert's Tarzan is one of the many old comic books which is even better when it's read out loud.

Tarzan climbs to the very top of a tree with the meat, and struggles through some more before ultimately giving up on it:
Hmm, the meat smells bad and it feels as if it is trying to eat its way out of his stomach. You know, I think it might have spoiled. Tarzan is no sissy though, and decides to lay down and digest that meat with all his might.

He drifts off to sleep, only to awake to the sound of a roar. It's "Numa," ape-speak for lion, although this lion differs from others in that a) it is huge and b) it is made of stone.

Tarzan would be a bit worried about such a lion, were he not confident that lions can't climb trees. But no does he sooner think to himself that he's safe up in the tree than this happens:
It's like the old say, out of Numa's mouth, into the giant, blue vulture's talon.

The vulture squeezes Tarzan's belly to a pulp, flying higher and higher, as the Jungle King whips out his long tooth an starts a-stabbing. The monster bird drops him, but rather than being broken to pieces on the jungle floor, he finds himself back in the tree where he first laid down to sleep:

Again he closes his eyes, and when next he opens them, he sees an even freakier beast:


After that freak out, Tarzan heads to his father's cabin, and staggers around, putting everything together and realizing that the food that made a pain in his belly was also making him see things that weren't real.

Mystery solved, he lays on the jungle floor to sleep again, next time waking to see a huge, snow white gorilla standing on its hind legs, baring its fangs at him, and glowering at him with pink eyes.

Fool Tarzan three times, shame on you, but fool Tarzan a fourth time, and shame on him. He's not freaking out about this hallucination. "He...is...not real! Soon-- he will disappear... and... I will awaken in the tree... alone!"

Tarzan tries to ignore the monster ape, even after it whacks him across the jungle with a huge log. But once it wraps its arms around Tarzan and starts crushing him, the ape-man begins to realize that maybe this monster isn't a hallucination.

So over the course of two pages, Tarzan bites the ape's arm, he tries throttling it, he slips behind it and puts it in one of the chokeholds he uses on his animal foes, hanging on even as the gorilla starts smashing Tarzan between its own back and a nearby tree trunk. Eventually it sinks to the jungle floor dead, and Tarzan, show-off that he is, puts a foot on its chest, beats his own hairless chest and "gives vent to the kill-cry of the bull ape!"

This is the last story in this particular volume, and, throughout the collection I've seen Tarzan execute plenty of acts of amazing physical prowess, from wrestling a rhinoceros to punching out a giant gorilla which he was fighting on the roof of a speeding airplane, but I think this battle was his most impressive. I've been horribly nauseous before, I've had the flu, and I've had food poisonings of various types before, and, in such cases, walking to and from the bathroom seemed to great a task for me, and it took all my might simply to raise myself up from the bathroom floor where I slept fitfully to the rim of the toilet bowl to vomit.

But Tarzan, in that same state, managed to kill an over-sized gorilla with his bare hands.

When he realizes that the white ape isn't going to disappear, even after dying, he rubs his eyes and begins to question reality:

"Then...Perhaps everything else is not real! The trees...the sky...the clouds... all false!"

Heady stuff! This is the most existential jungle action story I've ever read!

Finally, Tarzan comes to grips with the difficulty of knowing reality given man's limited perceptions, and swears off Gomangani cooking in favor of vaguely drawn jungle fruits:

So what is the moral of the story? That sometimes things are not what they appear? That you shouldn't steal food, because it might end up being spoiled and making you freak the hell out? That if you're hungry and catch a fawn you should go ahead and kill and eat it, no matter how cute it is?

Personally, I found it to be an eloquent reminder that being vegetarian is good lifestyle choice. You never know when a piece of meat might make you imagine you're being attacked by stone lions, giant blue vultures and snake men.

The full nelsons of Tarzan

Tarzan is very forward.

And he's not afraid of commitment.



(That's a panel from 1972's Tarzan #209 by Joe Kubert, which is handily collected in Dark Horse's Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan: The Joe Kubert Years Vol. 1. I hope you all like Tarzan and Joe Kubert, because I just read the first two volumes of this series and I think I'm going to be posting from it all week because goddammit Joe Kubert is amazing)