Beyond Kids.

The 1930s ushered in a significant development in comic art: the rise of the adventure strip. From the family strips of the 1920s, which focused on kids and domestic experience, comic strips moved toward the lurid and the action-packed.

Tarzan.

"Me Tarzan, you Jane" may have been Tarzan's most lasting contribution to the American vernacular, but it was only one of many. The shaggy, inarticulate hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1914 adventure novel Tarzan of the Apes was an orphaned English lord who, following the death of his parents, was raised by the she-ape Kala in the jungles of Africa. Harold Foster's strip, launched as a daily in 1929, was instantly successful: its focus on danger within an exotic locale, its Darwinian leitmotivs, and its thematic preoccupation with eugenics so appealed to readers that by 1931 the strip began appearing in Sunday...