Sunday, January 15, 2012

Tarzan Is Back As Lord Of The Jungle

This isn't a review. While looking for more information regarding the warrior that Jubell questioned in yesterdays post, I came across a lot of art for something called Lord Of The Jungle. The images had no dates on them and the amount of covers were plentiful. I wasn't sure what it was at first, a Tarzan rip off, or an official product. I did a little research and discovered only a few things. It is based on the original novels and will be uncensored. (Racism?) Then I found out that it just came out, like just last month in December.
Something really bothered me. That was simply the amount of covers and the talk I keep seeing of issues that haven't come out yet. Why does this bother me? Well I can't say I follow a lot of comics these days, but as a consumer the sheer amount of covers that already exist, confuses the fucking crap out of me. Comics are already hard enough to get into due to all the various titles, story lines and associated crap one character can be in. This is all without adding the clutter of 3, or 4 different covers done by different people for each issue of a brand new series. Now just think about how bad that is for a new consumer interested in your product, that they don't know is new, when you leak what seems like 16 covers out over the net. So many covers drawn by different artists for a book that only has one issue out at the moment can't be good can it?

Number one, as the consumer with no information, just seeing these, I already feel like I have missed out on several issues. Number two, that the project looks like it's be handed from artists to artist several times already. I start thinking about if the title needed to be retooled, or how hard it will be for me to catch up. I don't want to start buying a comic that has 20 issues I already have to catch up on. Now you can tell me that the information is easy to find online, but I didn't find that information right away. In fact the first place I found the images they were just plopped on some blog in Spanish with no explanation of what they were, or if they were related. They were mixed in with various Tarzan images as well. If I'm standing in some comic shop randomly browsing comics, I might mistake the various covers as ones I also need to grab, increasing the price in my head and lowering my chances to pick this thing up. I have seen this happen. But I digress.

The other big problem is that I can't find one freaking page of the comic to view online by doing a simple google, or image search. So I don't even know what Tarzan is gonna look like inside the books. And that is of utmost importance when sexual appeal is a huge seller. I know this ain't the 80s and 70s anymore and American ain't Japan. I have fallen all too often to the trick of purchasing due to alluring, sexy cover art, only to have the shock of finding something totally unappealing inside the book when I get home. Unlike say, oh I don't know, Class Comics, it would appear that Dynamite isn't making it's contents well known to masses via affiliates. That's not a good sign. I'm not a comic book consumer as such, but I would think you would have enough faith as a company to showcase your main artists work on the web and on the cover of your book. Or at least keep the image of Tarzan consistent, by using some sort of model they should all follow. At least at first anyway. Sometimes Tarzan is super buff, other times he's lanky, sometimes he has a triangle necklace, other times he doesn't. What the...what are they going for here, complete confusion?

The big deal behind this is, is that in this day and age I have to actually go to a book store, or comic book store and seek out comics. Back in the day I could grab stuff from the local variety store, or supermarket. Now I have to go out of my way to get comics. If I have to go out of my way, make it clear that what I am going after is worth my time, effort and GAS.
Anyway here are some of the covers. We get some nice eye candy. As you can see I found some with out the title of the comic and even the issue number on them. That helps!


This is the most baffling cover choice of all. It's so old school and out of place compared to the other styles. It looks like it's from another time period. As a consumer I wonder if this is an older version of the same title. It's also the one that makes me think this is what it's going to look like inside the most for some reason.

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