July 2, 2025 and according to Amazon twelve years ago on this day in 2013, The Library of American Comics released “Tarzan The Complete Russ Manning Newspaper Strips Volume One. This is the date the book was made available on Amazon, I believe. Other sources show the release date as June 18, 2013. Beginning a new four-book series collecting the entire run of the Tarzan newspaper strip by Russ Manning. In 1967, Manning was selected by the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate to take over the strip and bring it back to the original Burroughs vision. With assists by Bill Stout, Mike Royer, and Dave Stevens, Manning created 26 original Sunday storylines and seven daily stories. The action took place from Pal-ul-don to Opar and Pellucidar and beyond. The first volume includes more than 650 daily and Sunday strips from December 1967 through October 1969, reproduced from the Edgar Rice Burroughs file copies.
There's a foreword by Russ Manning's assistant on the strip, William Stout. Henry G. Franke III, former editor of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Amateur Press Association and current editor of Bibliophiles’ BURROUGHS BULLETIN, contributed introductions for each book in the series.
The drabble, "Art for Art's Sake, for today is excerpted from a revies of the book and of Russ Manning’s Tarzan newspaper strips written by Chris Mautner and originally published in “The Comics Journal” on September 12, 2013.
There’s no denying Manning’s capability, not just as an artist but as a storyteller. His crisp, dynamic art excels in the best Alex Raymond/Burne Hogarth tradition. His panels are full of a lean, muscular Tarzan leaping and gallivanting through the jungle and toward the reader. He’s excellent at pacing the strip, especially given the minimal amount of space he was given (usually only three panels a day. Manning’s Tarzan is something of a middle finger to newspaper editors, a sign that not everything in the funnies needed to be drawn on the level of Miss Peach, dwindling space be damned.
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