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.

DEBUT OF FLASH GORDON IN TURKEY

While it has been reported that 'Bringing Up Father' was published in a Turkish magazine before the 1930s, it can safely be said that the potential of the comics medium was first realized by Mehmet Gürtunca in 1935. Two children's magazines published by Gürtunca, Çocuk Sesi and Afacan, were giving place to comics among its pages alonside stories, etc. Afacan's 1st series, which started in 1932, capitalized on Mickey Mouse strip continuities. Both Afacan and Çocuk Sesi, which had started in 1930, also published humorous juvenile comics continuities by Orhan Tolon, regarded as the first Turkish comics artist. Afacan's 2nd series, which started in 1934, began running 'Avcı Baytekin' (Jungle Jim) and Tarzan. Then, 'Baytekin' (Flash Gordon) began in color in the center pages of Çocuk Sesi with no. 281 (13.5.1935) and caused a big sensation.

Above: cover of Çocuk Sesi no. 381, announcing the start of the amazing adventures of Baytekin. Below: two further covers of Çocuk Sesi from 1935.

On July 6th, Gürtunca's Ülkü Yayınevi (Ülkü Publishing House) published an Avcı Baytekin album, which is apparently the first comics book ever published in Turkey. It was followed in August with six Secret Agent X-9 albums, confusingly titled Baytekin (it should be noted that the Turkish publishers presented all three characters by Alex Raymond as if they were the same character, venturing into the jungles, into the space and working as a secret police from time to time!). In September, seven Mickey Mouse albums and at least three more Baytekin (X-9) albums were published. It was claimed that some of these albums, for instance the Baytekin / X-9 ones, reached a circulation of 50,000.