January 1950: Tarzan of the Dells

Dell Comics specialized in heroes made famous in other media — characters like the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Lassie and Tarzan.

The “wholesome” factor was built in.

“Although Dell didn’t submit its comics to the Comics Code Authority, the company developed its own internal set of guidelines mildly known as Hints on Writing for Dell Comics,” noted comics historian Bill Schelly. 

“The document had a section on Taboos which began, ‘Avoid sophisticated and adult themes’ as well as ‘anything dealing with minority races, politics, religion, labor, suicides, death, afflictions (such as blindness), torture, kidnapping, blackmail, snakes, sex, love, female villains, crooked lawmen or heavies of any race other than the white race.’”

They must had have to make an exception for Tarzan, because minority races made up the bulk of the population even in his mythic African continent.

Tarzan first appeared in the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan of the Apes in 1912, when artist Jesse Marsh was 5, and so the ape man had already been swinging around for 35 years when Marsh began to draw him for Dell Comics in 1947.

“Writer Gaylord Dubois attempted to blend the Burroughs material with the currently popular motion picture version,” noted comics historian Jim Brancatelli in The World Encyclopedia of Comics. “What resulted was an unsatisfactory hybrid of Burroughs and movies: Tarzan’s son was erroneously called ‘Boy;’ Jane was a brunette, Tarzan lived in a treehouse, and covers sported photographs of Lex Barker or Gordon Scott as the movie Tarzan.”

Tarzan had been a multi-media star since his inception, with the first Tarzan film appearing in 1918. In fact, the date of his first newspaper strip — Jan. 7, 1929 — is considered the birthday of the adventure comic strip (because by coincidence, the Buck Rogers science fiction comic strip debuted the same day).

Superman, Zorro and Tarzan all counted as superheroes when I was a kid in the 1950s, and I still think of them that way.