HAL FOSTER'S TARZAN The Complete Sunday Comics 1931-1937 XXL

This stunning volume reprints every Sunday page in a colorful XXL format. Reproduced from original newspapers (preserving the color and texture of the Ben Day dot coloring process distinctive to vintage comics), Hal Foster’s Tarzan carries you back to Sunday morning, belly-down on the living room rug, “funnies” spread before you, lost in a world of exotic adventure while mom whips up your own bowl of oatmeal. In 1928 commercial artist Hal Foster took a job to turn Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan of the Apes into a 60-installment black-and-white newspaper comic. Initially, no American papers wanted it, so it premiered in England, to great acclaim. When U.S. papers picked it up and wanted more, Foster wasn’t interested. It was only in 1931, with the Great Depression threatening his family with starvation, that he consented to take it on as a full color, full page Sunday comic, still calling the low-paid job “a bit of pottage.” That bit of "pottage" fed him for the next seven years, as Tarzan became the first adventure comic, and one of the most beloved Sunday strips in America. Though newspapers complained about the violence (Burroughs countered that Tarzan’s success was the result of a “human weakness for gory and gruesome situations”) and the incessant nudity (the writer’s script notes asked for “a great deal of female nakedness”) readers found Tarzan’s adventures with ancient Egyptians, modern criminals, Vikings, dinosaurs, killer apes, and a slew of provocative queens and princesses mesmerizing, right up until Foster handed off the strip to Burne Hogarth in mid-1937. "Amongst knowledgeable collectors, Hal Foster's run on Tarzan, which preceded Prince Valiant (cir.1933-37), is the high point of all Tarzan Sunday pages, even more popular than the Hogarth pages that followed them. They have never been collected in a good version. NBM did the series (followed by the Hogarth run) in 18 volumes that were about the size of the present Prince Valiant collections. But the reproduction quality was not great, no color correction, off-register pages were not fixed… this was all decades ago with limited technology. From my perspective, the material was not given the proper care and presentation it so richly deserved." "In the case of Taschen's new collected edition, they are clearly treating the material with the respect it deserves: an oversized format, superior image quality, and their trademark design and binding. $200 isn’t cheap, but it's all of them in one volume. Like Taschen’s The Complete Little Nemo, this will be the best-ever and most inclusive ever collection of Foster's classic work." -Bud All copies of this book will include an 8x11 Bud's Art Books exclusive art print, featuring an original illustration by Hal Foster. This one-of-a-kind Tarzan watercolor from 1933 was made for Eric Bergman Jr., the son of Foster's best friend Eric Bergman Sr., and was provided to us by Norma Bergman, Karen Bergman Paul, and The Harold R. Foster Estate Archives. “Foster would be my main influence. His Tarzan strips were perfection.” ~Frank Frazetta Rush Service and International shipping could require an additional charge.