My son is 30 years old today. And while this is a wonderful thing and I’m thrilled to have the experience, it also demonstrates one of the great failures of my lifetime. He stopped reading comics before I did. When I was a kid, before the direct market, before cable television, before the discovery of fire, kids might read comics for a few years but usually stopped around the time they started high school. There were a lot of reasons for this (puberty, team sports, rock’n’roll) but I’ve always thought a big reason was the spotty distribution. It was more difficult to be a dedicated fan when you couldn’t be sure that the magazine racks would have the same titles every month. Still, I was an unusual child. I kept reading comics, despite the hardships, despite my gender. I’ve always enjoyed a quest – especially when said quest involves shopping. Of course, I wanted to pass on these values to my child. We spent many happy hours in his youth, walking to the comic book store on Comic Book Day, reading comics, discussing comics. He met Stan Lee before he started school. When I applied for a job at DC, I remember telling Paul Levitz that my five year old kid could explain Crisis on Infinite Earths and the multiverse, and Paul wanted to arrange for him to come in and explain it to the editorial staff. After I got the job, my kid could sit in the DC library and read the bound volumes of back issues because the librarian knew he would take care of the books. My son learned important lessons from his father, too. By the age of three, he could tell a Tex Avery cartoon from a Bob Clampett. Family values were important to us. And now, this. He’ll explain that it’s not his fault. The monthly comics that he read all of his life left him. The Flash that he knew (Wally West) is gone. So is the Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner). I could have said the same thing at his age, when The Powers That Be took away my Flash (Barry Allen) and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan). The difference is that TPTB made new characters who had new stories. I might like them or not, but they were new. My son’s heroes were replaced by the characters his parents liked. That’s a problem. The market for superhero comics (and I love superhero comics) isn’t adapting to a new audience. It’s adapting to the old one. My boy still enjoys a good graphic novel. He likes a lot of independent, creator owned series (which he buys as trade paperbacks). He can still speak with great wit and insight and humanity about the socio-economic and political implications of Superman and Batman. If we’re in the same city at the same time, I’m sure we’ll go see Guardians of the Galaxy together. He’s turned me on to some great books. I’m loving Saga based entirely on his recommendation. But I wait for the trades. Maybe I’m not as old as I look

As I engage with the machine before me, it is the evening of May 26th – yes, Memorial Day, wherein we commemorate the most noble and glorious of human activities. And what else? Well, as you may have heard, Batman celebrates his 75th this year. Yes, the caped crusader, the dark knight, Bruce Wayne’s elseperson made his debut in May of 1939. (Okay, you pickies might observe that, given publishing practices of the time, Batman may have actually appeared in late April. Go away, pickies.)

Now, given Batman’s birthday and Memorial Day being so close, is it not appropriate that we conflate those two. Honor Batman’s participation in the defining event of his early years, War the Deuce? Where did he serve? The European front? The Pacific?

Ooops! Nowhere is where he did his war duty.

Of course (again nodding to pickies, who have not gone away) that’s not necessarily true. Yes, yes, you could read every comic book in which he appears from, say, 1941 to 1945 and find nary a trace of him in foreign combat zones. But look at the contemporary movies and yup, there he is, in a 15-chapter serial that got into theaters in 1943. It is not terrible, measured against stuff like it, and it did contribute The Batcave to the Batman mythos, for which, I guess, we can be grateful. But it was what it was, a kiddie entertainment made cheaply at the height of a world war, and so flavored with chauvinism. Here’s a couple of the narrator’s lines: “This was part of a foreign land, transplanted bodily to America and known as little Tokyo. Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs. it has become virtually a ghost street.”

It was what it was.

And that was that when the subject was Batman and the war? Nope. I said that Batman engaged in no war activity in comics published while the war was actually being fought but fast forward to 1969 and we find Batman teaming up with Sgt. Rock and the combat-happy joes of Easy Company. It’s a flashback story, but what’s flashed back to is Batman fighting in Europe with Rock and the guys.

So…the comic book Batman did not participate in the war while it was happening, but he did participate in it after it was long ended. I’ll wait while you untwist your mind.

I don’t know why the comics folk kept Batman out of the conflict abroad – other comics characters participated in it – and this may be one of those facts that history has annihilated, lost to us forever. Most people thought, and think, that it was that rarity, a just war and nobody sitting at my computer is arguing, not about World War Two. About other wars? Let’s not get started.

But I wonder: if the comics guys had done a Batman war story during the war, what kind of story would it have been? Batman leaping from the trenches and leading his troops into the enemy’s withering machine gun fire? Or Batman slinking around a blacked-out city searching for spies? Or would they have opted for realism and given us a story full of mud and suffering and pain and fear and ignominious death?

Not likely. Not then.

Probably not now.

Wow, that sounds disgusting, doesn’t it? But as you might surmise from the accompanying artwork, those of us who are into newspaper comics strips are often called “strippers.” This is either self-deprecating or sophomoric. But there must be a lot of us, because there seems to be about a half-dozen high-quality reprint books being issued every month. Which means I am: a) happy, and b) broke.

In order to protect my ever-shrinking finances, I was going to pass over Titan Books’ Tarzan In The City of Gold, reprinting Burne Hogarth’s work from 1937 to 1940. This is because NBM reprinted all of Hogarth’s Sunday Tarzans (and the Hal Foster stuff that preceded it) back in 1994. I have those books, although I don’t fault Titan for putting the material back in print twenty years later. Besides, the NBM books were limited to 300 copies. But Titan fooled me and sent me a review copy, bless them. They truly understand the fanboy’s middle initials are “O.C.D.”

I’m glad they did. The book starts with Hogarth’s first effort, sort of mid-story although a thorough recap is provided. The reproduction is sharper, the volume is bigger, the cost is much lower, and the design is more attractive. The indicia says this is part of “The Complete Burne Hogarth Library,” which implies eventually they’ll be reprinting his short-lived, hard-to-find but even more amazing adventure series, Drago, as well as his even harder-to-find humor series Miracle Jones.

Tarzan has attracted the efforts of a great many of comics’ finest artists, including (in politically convenient alphabetical order) Neal Adams, John Buscema, Frank Frazetta, José Louis Garcia-Lopez, Mike Grell, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Joe Jusko, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert, Roy G. Krenkel, Russ Manning, Grey Morrow, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, and Tom Yeates. That is breathtaking. That is amazing. That is adjective-defying. And, in many circles, Hogarth’s work is regarded as the best of the lot. Personally, I couldn’t make a choice if my life depended upon it.

Hogarth is properly regarded as a true master of the medium, and even though it reprints his earlier work, Tarzan In The City of Gold shows us how he earned that reputation. He revisited the property in 1972 with an original hardcover graphic novel (thereby stirring up the “who did the first graphic novel” debate decades later) adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ seminal Tarzan of the Apes. Four years later, Hogarth did a sequel adapting four of Burroughs’ prequel short stories published as Jungle Tales of Tarzan. Perhaps these titles will be part of this series as well.

Be warned. I’d kill for Drago.

Tarzan In The City of Gold by Burne Hogarth with Don Garden, Titan Books, 208 pages, $39.95 hardcover.