Camera-ready comic art drawing for Tarzan

This pen-and-ink drawing prepared for the Tarzan comic strip shows Tarzan completing a mission and getting word of another call for help in the Akamba Village, where a fire has broken out and the tribe is battling against the addictive use of Zakara leaves—“the dream weed.”

John Celardo (1918-2012) started his career drawing for the Staten Island Zoo. After World War II he drew for comic books through various publishing houses. In the 1950s and 1960s Celardo drew the Tarzan comic strip, and in the late 1960s was given the Tales of the Green Beret. For two decades, starting in the 1970s, Celardo was the comic strip editor for King Features Syndicate. He also began drawing Buz Sawyer in the 1980s.

Tarzan (1929-1972) was a comic strip based on the popular title character, who first appeared in the 1912 novel Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Along with its film and comic book spin-offs, the story was also adapted as a comic strip, which premiered in 1929. The comic strip storyline closely followed that of the novel, showing British-born Tarzan surviving in the African jungle and being raised by apes. As in the novel, Tarzan grows up to meet and fall in love with a stranded American girl, Jane Porter.

Currently not on view