TARZAN LORD OF THE JUNGLE #1 by Arvid Nelson, Roberto Castro, & Alex Guimares

Dynamite Comics has launched a new Tarzan title for 2012, one hundred years after the initial novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs was published. When I first saw the Alex Ross cover, I was won over. Tarzan has always been one of those iconic heroes for me. I grew up on the Russ Manning Sunday Comics and absolutely loved Joe Kubert’s take on the strip for DC Comics.

However, Tarzan’s origin story has been told by everybody, so I feel like I’m going to have to slog through these first few issues to get to the real meat of further adventures, which I hope are coming soon.

Everybody knows how Tarzan’s folks ended up getting abandoned in the wilds of the African jungle and how Tarzan ended up getting raised by the great apes (which aren’t quite ape and aren’t quite human according to this current storyline). I can’t think of any hero whose origins have been told more often than the jungle lord’s. Maybe Superman? Batman? Captain America?

At any rate, this first issue goes through the all-too-familiar beats. As far as story went, I was almost listless working through the pages. I even got irritated at John Greystoke shouting at the men who had abandoned him that his wife was pregnant. That wasn’t a word that was bandied about back in those days. He would have told them that she was “with child.”

As I read through the story, I couldn’t help but compare the way everything was laid out and revealed to the many ways I’ve seen it done before. I did like the revelation that the apes are carnivorous, which I knew from the original novels but which was never given much attention in the comics, movies, and television show. That savagery was pretty cool.

Truly, the best thing about this issue (and probably several issues to come until we work through the origin) is Roberto Castro and Alex Guimares’ art. The pages, the jungle, the colors are all absolutely beautiful. The pair do an outstanding job on rendering the wilderness, and I loved the way the panels fit on the page. Very eye appealing. And the final panel where Kala is nursing Tarzan is moving.

I don’t know what the creative team has in store for the series after the initial origin sequence, but I’m hoping for some real down home jungle brawls and lost cities.

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