Tarzan: the Jesse Marsh Years volume 1


By Gaylord DuBois & Jesse Marsh (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-59582-238-3

I don’t know an awful lot about Jesse Marsh, other than that he was born on 27th July 1907 and died far too young – on April 28th 1966 – from diabetic complications at the height of a TV Tarzan revival he was in some part responsible for. What I do know, however, is that to my unformed, pre-fanboy, kid’s mentality, his drawings were somehow better than most of the other artists and that every other kid who read comics in my school disagreed with me.

There’s a phrase we used to use at 2000AD that summed it up: “Artist’s artist”, which usually meant someone whose fan-mail divided equally into fanatical raves and bile-filled hate-mail. It seems there are some makers of comic strips that some readers simply don’t get. It isn’t about the basic principles or artistic quality or even anything tangible – although you’ll hear some cracking justifications: “I don’t like his feet” (presumably the way he draws them) and “it just creeps me out” being my two favourites…

I got Jesse Marsh.

He was another Disney animator (from 1939) who became in 1945 a full-time comics illustrator of that company’s comicbook licensee Whitman Publishing. Their Dell and Gold Key imprints, based on the West Coast, rivalled DC and Marvel at the height of their powers, and famously never capitulated to the wave of anti-comics hysteria that resulted in the crippling self-censorship of the 1950s. Dell Comics never displayed a Comics Code Authority symbol on their covers – they never needed to.

Marsh jobbed around the movie properties, mostly on westerns like Gene Autry, until 1948 when Dell produced the first all-new Tarzan comic. A newspaper strip had run since 1929 and all previous books had featured expurgated reprints of those adventures until Dell Four Color Comic #134 (February 1947) which featured a lengthy, captivating tale of the Ape-Man scripted by Robert P Thompson, who wrote both the Tarzan radio show and the aforementioned syndicated strip.

‘Tarzan and the Devil Ogre’ is very much in the Burroughs tradition: the sometime Lord Greystoke and his friend D’Arnot aid a young woman in rescuing her lost father from a hidden tribe ruled over by a monster, an engrossing yarn made magical by the simple, underplayed magic of a heavy brush line and absolutely unmatched design sense.

Marsh was unique in the way he positioned characters in space, using primitivist forms and hidden shapes to augment his backgrounds, and as the man was a fanatical researcher, his trees, rocks, and constructions were 100% accurate. His animals and natives, especially the children and women, were all distinct and recognisable – not the blacked-up stock figures in grass skirts even the greatest artists too often resorted to. He also knew when to draw big and draw small: the internal dynamism of his work is spellbinding.

His Africa became mine, and of course the try-out tale was an instant hit. Marsh and Thompson’s Tarzan returned with two tales in Dell Four Color Comic #161, August 1947 – (a remarkable feat: Four Colour was a catch-all title that featured literally hundreds of different licensed properties, often as many as ten separate issues per month, thus so rapid a return meant pretty solid sales figures). In ‘The Fires of Tohr’ Tarzan and D’Arnot rescue a stranded professor and his niece as they search for a fabulous lost city, only to fall foul of a crazed queen of that ancient race, whilst in the second tale ‘Tarzan and the Black Panther’ the Lord of the Jungle crushes a modern slave trader who thinks himself beyond the reach of justice.

Within six months the bimonthly Tarzan #1 was released (January-February 1948), a swan-song for Thompson, but another unforgettable classic for Marsh – and the first of an unbroken run that would last until 1965: over 150 consecutive issues. In ‘Tarzan and the White Savages of Vari’ Greystoke rescued a lost prospector from a mountain kingdom of Neanderthals and the issue also featured the first of many pictorial glossaries, Tarzan’s Ape-English Dictionary, which gave generations of youngsters another language to keep secrets in…

‘Tarzan and the Captives of Thunder Valley’ introduced a few recurring characters such as Manu the monkey and the noble ape Gufta in the first of many a tale written by Editor and prolific scripter Gaylord DuBois wherein the Lord of the Jungle went to the aid of an English boy searching for his father, a scientist specialising in radioactive ores. The deadly plot uncovered threatened to destabilise the entire world and ended in a spectacular climax worthy of a Bond movie.

Issue #3 introduced Tarzan’s family. In ‘Tarzan and the Dwarfs of Didona’ Jane is left to mind the store when Boy (later called Korak) played with baboons and got lost on an island in the Great Lake. Threatened with blood sacrifice by aggressive white pygmies the dauntless lad could only wait for rescue – and a severe scolding…

This first magnificent hardback collection concludes with ‘Tarzan and the Lone Hunter’ (#4, July-August 1948), plunging the reader deeply into the fantastic worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs as old friend Om-At the cat man from the lost land of Pal-Ul-Don (introduced in the eighth novel Tarzan the Terrible) comes looking for his lost mate and embroils the ape-man and his brood in a deadly battle with a megalomaniacal witch-doctor…

Although these are tales from a far-off, simpler time they have lost none of their passion, inclusivity and charm whilst the artistic virtuosity of Jesse Marsh looks better than ever. Perhaps this time a few more people will “get” him…

© 1947, 1948, 2009 Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. Tarzan ® Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. All rights reserved.