The All-New Adventures of Tarzan are now available in hardback graphic novel format from (you guessed it) Dark Horse comics. Well, the first two of them are anyway.
The art for the first story is by Thomas Grindberg, and that for the second is by the Buscema-like Benito Gallego, both of them New Masters in the comic art field today.
The first story-arc has Jane and Paul D'Arnot plane crash into an unknown region, apparently not too distant from Opar. Tarzan, refusing to believe the death of his mate without proof, begins his quest, Nkima in tow. The two are briefly misled into thinking Jane is in Opar, where La once again demands Tarzan become her mate siking Ben-Id-Numa (great silver lion) upon him. Tarzan is forced to slay the beast, and several of La's beast-men minions, before continuing his quest.
Meanwhile Jane and Paul are captured by ancient Greek soldiers and taken to New Illium, where the twin colonies of ancient Sparta and Troy still war. Yes, it's the same grand old tradition Burroughs himself revisited time and again in his novels wherein twin lost cities tribes or races perpetually feuded.
But the authors insert a difference here to the formula; these are not the descendants of the ancient Trojans and Greeks, but the very same people, apparently knocked out and kept immortalized by a strange subterranean gas in the early days of the colony (a bit reminiscent of Bruce Jones' tale of the Martian Tara plant regenerating an entire lost civilization in his earlier Dark Horse series). Thus the young beauty who is a dead-ringer for Jane is the ACTUAL and legendary Helen of Troy! There ensues a great adventure in the Burroughsian tradition, that has Tarzan siding with the enemies of Jane's captors, Nkima kidnapped by Bolgoni-Mangani-Oparian hybrids, and Jane turning the tables on Helen of Troy, and assuming her role. All is eventually resolved the heroes depart the land of New Illium with a truce of sorts enacted between the cities.
Jane was supposed to be a beauty, but who new she was a vertible twin of the fabled Helen? No wonder all the villains of ERB seem to fall for her.
The next tale begins as a sort of sequel to Tarzan and the Leopard Men, with an apparent revival of the dreaded cult, and one of them seeking Tarzan's death in revenge. It turns out though, that the leopard cult is being used for something even more monstrous and bizarre, that has more connection with ERB's The Monster Men than the other Tarzan books. There is even a reference to The Island of Dr. Moreau, suggesting that perhaps the worlds of H. G. Wells and ERB co-exist.
The third story-arc takes place in Pal-ul-don, and is still going on in the online comic, but it appear it has nearly ended. Tarzan returns to the lost land with Nkima, where he first battles a jato, or saber-tooth lion-tiger over a kill, when both he and the strange feline become mired in quick sand. After helping each other escape, there is a truce between man and beast. While they don't become immediate friends, like in the old Kubert story of Go-Numa and the Black queen (why didn't this happen with Ben-Id-Numa?), and Tarzan and the jato go their separate ways, it is apparent that the two shall meet again, and the incident is not a one-off. Next Tarzan encounters a gryf, and having learned the trick of the Tor-o-don from his previous visited, Tarzan is soon riding on his back. A bit of sequence is also given to ja, the large spotted lions of the valley, as a pride of them drive some young jatos from their kill. The ja is one animal that is somehow rarely seen in Pal-ul-don comics.
Next they encounter a young girl-warrior of the Waz-ho-don tribe, pursued by a giant -sized Tor-o-don. The gryf slays the huge man-beast, and Tarzan learns that the girl is called In-A, and she is on the run from Ko-Bar, the Tor-o-don leader who has murdered her parents, outcasts of Pal-ul-don's two major races. and bent on conquering all Pal-ul-don, by first assaulting the captial. Just like in the novel Tarzan's Return to Pal-ul-don, the authors explore the Waz-ho-don race, composed of outcasts of Waz-don and Ho-don, that Burroughs never got around to utilizing as major players. Though Lt. Obergatz, a villain of Tarzan the Terrible, had spent some time among them. While the warrior in Return was white-skinned with black fur, In-a has skin of a purple or violet shade. Anyway, Ko-bar leads an attack on A-lur, City of Light, and Tarzan is captured, and later forced to fight a huge jato in the arena.
At this point, remembering an earlier scene, we can easily guess what happens here. And that In-a will finally get revenge.
It might be useful to point out at this point there are no other dinosaur species here other than the gryf. Somehow, it seemed obvious that this would be the case, almost from the start. They are assuming that this is Tarzan's first return to Pal-ul-don after Tarzan the Terrible, and all those Manning adventures never occurred, and likely won't occur. This is the Pal-ul-don Burroughs invented. Ko-Bar's Tor-o-don army is carried on gryfs, as they should be. There are no garths or hackers. The Ho-don have not managed to train the gryf. One other mammal native to Pal-ul-don gets shown, a species of "red hyena". A red coloration, known scientifically as erythristism, which has been recorded very rarely in leopards, to name one species.
Burroughs states early on TTT, that Pal-ul-don appears a land where "every known species of bird and beast appears to have taken refuge." The animals Tarzan encounters represent ancestral forms of modern African animals ("forms unaltered for countless millenia") or new strains that have developed when isolated within the small valley. The ja, though I've it assumed to be ancestral, could be either of these. The red hyena, seems a species or subspecies that is uniquely evolved in Pal-ul-don. The stranger beasts that Tarzan was NOT familiar with might be now-extinct creatures like calicotheres or extinct relatives of the giraffe like small sivatheres.
Gigantic mammals like indrictherium or deinotherium? Probably not. The gryf seems to be the only giant creature, retile or mammal extant on Pal-ul-don's mainland.
It's a zoologists paradise, but not one overrun by giant reptiles or mammals as it is in the Manning strips.
We're now onto another topic, and I think only a different post can do it justice.
And here is a pic from the Karl Shuker website of what a erthyistic or 'red' hyena might actually look like:
You can read the entire article here:
http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/search/label/erythrism
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