What Tarzan means: colonial ideology and constrained adaptation in American comics, 1947–1976

This article examines the relationship between commercial constraint and colonial ideology in American Tarzan comics through close analysis of three major artists spanning three decades of publication. Drawing on the concept of constrained adaptation, it argues that artists working on licenced properties with problematic legacies operate within severe limitations: they may make meaningful formal and tonal choices, but the ideological premises embedded in the franchise’s narrative structure remain largely beyond their reach. The article focuses on Jesse Marsh (Dell Comics, 1947–1965), Burne Hogarth (Watson-Guptill, 1972–1976), and Joe Kubert (DC Comics, 1972–1976), each of whom approached Tarzan within distinct publishing contexts and with different creative ambitions. Marsh worked within Dell’s factory model for children’s comics, which rigorously policed sex and violence while leaving Burroughs’ racial hierarchy entirely intact. Hogarth pursued aesthetic elevation, repositioning Tarzan as fine art in large-format hardcover editions – a strategy that reproduced the character’s colonial premise while rendering it invisible as ideology and visible only as artistic achievement. Kubert, working in the post-civil rights moment of DC’s socially relevant comics era, brought progressive intentions and genuine formal innovation to the character, but could not fundamentally revise a property whose commercial identity depended on Tarzan’s whiteness and mastery over the African wilderness. Together these case studies demonstrate that Tarzan’s colonial ideology is not a surface feature that skilled or well-intentioned artists can revise away. It is embedded in the character’s narrative structure, reinforced by commercial pressures that reward continuity, and sustained by readers’ emotional investments in a character whose long history is inseparable from its appeal. The article contributes to scholarship on franchise adaptation, comics history, and the reproduction of colonial ideology in popular culture, arguing that constrained adaptation produces ideological continuity even – and sometimes especially – when surface revision is most visible.