Tarzanesque

 ( Comics Terminology ) 

In the mid 60's, taking advantage of the success of the genre, other Brazilian publishers created their own tarzanesques. One of them was Targo (later renamed Taika) from Editora Outubro created by Heli Otávio de Moura Lacerda. Targo was an orphan who survived a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest (more precisely in the border of the state of Amazonas with Peru, although he also had stories set in the Brazilian Plateau) and was raised by indigenous peoples. The character had stories produced by artists such as Helena Fonseca, Jayme Cortez, Gedeone Malagola, Nico Rosso, Rodolfo Zalla, Moacir Rodrigues Soares, and like Tarzan and Thun'da, Targo also lived with Prehistory creatures considered extinct. The idea of an Amazon inhabited by prehistoric beings had already been portrayed in the book The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1912. Like Tarzan, Targo also had his own family, consisting of his wife Arimá, her brother Aurici, and a jaguar. Under Jayme Cortez's guidance, the character was a joint creation of editors and cartoonists from Editora Outubro, and it was up to Gedeone Malagola to name the hero. According to him, the name came from a policeman friend who had the surname "Targa" and he used to joke with the name of his friend comparing it to the Tarzan. Coincidentally, Targa was also the name used in a French tarzanesque published in the 1940s. Gedeone himself had also created another Tarzan-inspired character, "Tambu" and made Tor stories by Joe Kubert for Gráfica Novo Mundo. Another example was Tarun by Paulo Fukue, released in EDREL's Magia Verde comic book . Like Thun'da, Tarun was a man trying to return to civilization, not fitting in the wild child/good savage archetypes, and like Targo, Tarun lived adventures in a lost region of the Amazon, the "Fantastic Region". For the Mexican origin publisher Editormex,Gonçalo Junior (15/08/2008). Especial: Para Celebrar Eugênio Colonnese. HQManiacs. the comics artist Edmundo Rodrigues drew a story of Antar (an anagram of Tarzan), which was a magazine of photo comics of Tarzan movies, Jungle Jim, among others. In 1963, created by Marcel Navarro to compete with Akim, the French character Zembla appeared in the comic book Spécial Kiwi, which even had stories drawn by Akim's co-creator Augusto Pedraza. However, Zembla's stories were closer to parodies, since he was raised by lions and wore a leopard skin strip, and had as allies a lion, a wildcat, a kangaroo, a pygmy, and a magician (clearly inspired by Lee Falk's Mandrake). The character was published until 1994 in France, and both Akim and Zembla were published in digest size. Another French creation was Yataca, born in the Amazon Jungle, living his adventures in the Americas for twenty issues, and after that, inexplicably, his stories moved to Africa.

Between 1967 and 1968, DC Comics published Bomba, the Jungle Boy whose main character had appeared in a series of books beginning in 1926 and ending in 1938. Like Tarzan, Bomba was also adapted for the movies between 1949 and 1955, with his stories set in the jungles of South America. The character was played by Johnny Sheffield who had played Boy, Tarzan and Jane's adopted son in the 1939 film Tarzan Finds a Son!. In the series of Bomba films, Boy replaced Korak, Tarzan's legitimate son in the book series, and South America was swapped for Africa, with scenes reused from the 1930 documentary Africa Speaks! His stories would be republished by the publisher in the 1970s in comic book s starring Tarzan and produced by Joe Kubert. To avoid copyright infringement, Bomba was renamed Simba.