Steveforthedeaf made an interesting point about my meandering reflections on Superman: wasn’t Tarzan a superhero, and wasn’t he running about in the loincloth before Superman? It might get tough trying to work out whether Tarzan 
counts as a superhero, but that is mainly because the definition itself is heavily weighted to a posh version of ‘looks like Superman in the 1940s’, but since he turns up in Chris Gavaler’s book on Superheroes (Bloomsbury), and had a comic strip in the funny papers from the 1920s, I am totally claiming him.
Gavaler talks about Tarzan in the context of the… well, rather unfortunate context of the early twentieth century. The Tarzan that springs to mind – the one off the film who did that big shout and was a noble savage – isn’t the one that started things off. Tarzan was a classic white saviour, aristocratic and a reaction to the effete standards of civilisation. He was a real man, okay, and if the MRAs had been about during the 1930s, they probably would have written letters to the editor about how the films were feminist propaganda because the literate, sensitive and articulate hero of the books had been reduced to a grunting savage. He was a Lord, you see, so he was well-bred and although he had been nurtured by magic apes, he had the graces of his genetics.
Or something: it is all a bit confused. The members of his family who lived in civilisation were all rather weak and spineless, so it doesn’t really work to say that the bloodline is what made Tarzan special. But Gavaler sees Tarzan as one of a number of aristocratic heroes who emerged from the popularity of eugenics. Superman is in that tradition – he takes his name (possibly) from Nietzsche’s ideal of the ubermensch, which George Bernard Shaw reckoned was to do with selective breeding. I don’t think Nietzsche did – he saw it as a spiritual thing, but eugenics was a whole thing in the early twentieth century until the Nazis took it to its logical extension. They took the whole ‘nature boy’ thing too far as well, and it is why the early comic book tended to get lumped in with totalitarian ideology, because they appear to share a notion about the perfect man that is… off.
Anyway, I amclaiming Tarzan as a comic book superhero because he was written through a dodgy belief in a superior type of human, had a distinctive costume (the loincloth) and did stuff that, I am sorry, but isn’t really that likely to happen in real life. Apart from swimming really fast, like in the films, or wrestling crocodiles or whatever, he learnt loads of languages at super-speed and had a similar power-level to someone like Captain America. Plus, he is a bit allegorical, works well as a foundation for sociological discussions about the values of his era… actually, I can’t tell the difference between him and Namor anymore.
thetempohouse 