SUPERMAN/TARZAN: SONS OF THE JUNGLE #1 (of 3)

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Wednesday, November 21, 2001

I used to love DC's "Imaginary Stories," in which all sorts of unbelievable things would happen: Clark Kent would marry Lois Lane...oh, wait, that happened, didn't it? Um...Superman would split into two beings, one red and one blue...oh. Anyway, they used to be imaginary. Post-CRISIS, however, such stories only exist in the ELSEWORLDS line. Sometimes they can be a treatat other times, a low-down dirty trick.

SUPERMAN/TARZAN, a DC/Dark Horse crossover, straddles the line between those two categories: the script falls into the former category, the artwork into the latter. As concepts go, it's a great one. Instead of crashing in Smallville in the late twentieth century, Kal-El's rocket crashes in darkest Africa in the early part of the century. And instead of his parents getting killed by pirates and being raised by apes, John Greystoke returns to England with his family and is raised to become the eventual Lord Greystoke. But something is wrong. The young ape-man Argo-Zan is eventually rejected by his tribe and finds the rocket that brought him to Earth, where he learns his true origins. Back in England, John Greystoke feels incompletehe yearns for some place he barely remembers from infancy. Three guesses where he's dreaming of?

I'm incredibly taken by this story, especially with Dixon's deft handling of the mythologies of both characters and the subtle ways he turns each on their respective ears. Kal-El's interaction with the apes is fascinating; and the little we see of Greystoke makes us wonder just how the scene on the cover, in which the two displaced men meet, will finally occur. It's a very well-written script.


The artwork, on the other hand, is horrendous. Carlos Meglia, rather than choosing a mode that compliments the era such as Eddie Campbell's in FROM HELL or Kevin O'Neill's in LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, goes with a look that's somewhere between Disney on acid and the worst work of Don Bluth. It's not the "storyboard" style used in comic book adaptations of cartoon serieseven that would be preferable to the overly stylized work we get here, in which characters and landscapes bend at weird angles, everyone's expressions are grotesque caricatures, and close-ups are achieved through an unusual "frame within a panel" process that doesn't quite work. The worst part about it all is that it takes several read-throughs to figure out exactly what's happening. The style is so frenzied and over the top that you'll almost wish the story were animated just so you could figure out what's going on. Dixon's script deserves better rendering than this.

If you do manage to get around the artwork, though, SUPERMAN/TARZAN may become one of your favorite imaginary stories. Even for non-Tarzan fans, this one has promise, and the next two issues will reveal whether or not it can deliver. If this first one is anything to go by, though, I'd say it will.

SUPERMAN/TARZAN: SONS OF THE JUNGLE

Grade: B-

Issue: No. 1 (of 3)

Author(s): Chuck Dixon, Carlos Meglia, Dave Stewart

Publisher: DC/Dark Horse Comics

Price: $2.99