Thursday, October 7, 2010

TARZAN COMICS IN TURKEY IN THE PRE-WAR ERA - PART II: ILLUSTRATED STORY BOOKS BASED ON COMICS


While the US daily newspaper strip continuity 'Tarzan and Leopard Men' was being serialized in the Turkish weekly children's magazine Afacan in 1939 as 'Pars Adamlar', the same publisher, Ülkü, put out a series of illustrated story books featuring Tarzan in August of the same year. The first of these pocket-sized, 32-pages long Tarzan books was titled simply as Tarzan and came out on Aug. 2nd. It is actually no. 7 of Ülkü's Çocuk Romanları [Children's Novels] series, most of the earlier titles in the series being Turkish editions of Whitman's Snow White & Seven Dwarfs books.
Tarzan is an illustrated text story version of a Sunday newspaper comics continuity by Hal Foster which had started in late 1934 in the US where Tarzan faces Dester Molu, an evil and fake White God of the natives. The illustrations in the book are select panels from the comics. Three more Tarzan titles followed in quick succession: #8: Tarzan ile Uçakçı Kız [Tarzan and the Aviatrix Girl], #9: Tarzan Yine Galip [Tarzan Triumphs Again] and #10: Tarzan Yeni Maceralarda [Tarzan In New Adventures]. I don't have these three books , but the title of #8 suggests that it must have been indeed derived from the next Sunday continuity where Tarzan meets a female aviatrix prior to encountering a Viking colony after the Dester Molu episode. These form the bulk of the Sunday continuities which the editors of Afacan had skipped while running 'Tarzan' in that magazine in the earlier years.
#11 of Ülkü's 'Children's Novels' series was a Dopey (of The Seven Dwarfs) title and its back cover announced the next in the series to be yet another Tarzan book, but I couldn't find out what the precise title of that book turned out be.

No comments: