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JOURNAL OF MODERN MYTHOLOGY AND POP CULTURE INTRODUCTION PAGE 40
In a series of fantastic novels, the Ape-Man's adventures far surpass anything from the movies, comics, radio, or TV. This is no intellectually deficient, vine swinging (he brachiates), tree house dwelling savage, as portrayed in films by Johnny Weissmuller and later imitators. The 1966 film Tarzan and the Valley of Gold presents a business suited Ape-Man arriving in Mexico City to aid a friend. Criticism revolved around the early part of the movie where Tarzan foils the plans of villains, appearing like a "jungle James Bond." In the latter portion of the film, wearing the loincloth, he sometimes uses modern weapons (machine guns and grenades) in his fight against evil. This was actually nothing new to Burroughs's character. In the 1915 novel (pulp magazine appearance, 1913) The Return of Tarzan, the Ape-Man lives in Paris educating himself, visiting museums, and even smoking and drinking.
Left: Tarzan and his warrior friend Orando battle the dreaded Leopard Men; dust jacket art by J. Allen St. John; first book edition published 1935, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Right: Frank Frazetta illustration of the Ape-Man taking out the heavyweight-boxing champion of the world, with one swipe; Tarzan and the Champion. First published in Blue Book Magazine in April of 1940, it was included with two other stories in Tarzan and the Castaways, published by Canaveral press in 1965, with Frazetta's artwork.
Before returning to Africa, he becomes a secret agent for the French government, forty years prior to the creation of James Bond! Clayton, John Clayton, the eighth earl of Greystoke. The 1920 book Tarzan the Untamed shows him to be a crack shot with a rifle in his fight against a German invasion of Africa. He learns to fly airplanes in the 1924 book Tarzan and the Ant Men. During World War II, he is Colonel John Clayton of the Royal Air Force (RAF) in the 1947 novel Tarzan and the Foreign Legion. A superb linguist, Tarzan speaks fluent Mangani (the language of the human-like apes that raised him), English, French, German, Dutch, many sub-Saharan and North African dialects, and other languages picked up during his adventures in the "lost worlds" of Burroughs's imagination. Tarzan is also more feral, wild, with Super-Human strength, and more ferocious than the media reflects.
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