Lord of the Jungle #6 // Review
Tarzan looks to right the wrongs of the past. It’s been a long and arduous journey into the jungle, but he’s ready for the final showdown in Lord of the Jungle #6. Writer Dan Jurgens closes out his series with artist Benito Gallego. Colorist Francesco Segala amplifies the drama as the story reaches its ending. The overall premise of an aging Tarzan entering the jungle is an interesting one that Jurgens and company manage some success with in the course of the series finale. The series doesn’t quite manage to live up to the potential of the premise, but it’s a competently told tale.
Tarzan finally returns the diamonds to their proper place on the throne. Those among them are too young to have known a time when they were there. They were only village legends until Tarzan returned with the massive gems. It’s not over, though. There is at least one more thing that Tarzan must do before things can be completely set right. It involves a tale that reaches far into the past to when Tarzan was a young man of the jungle and into the heart of who he is as a person.
Jurgens has constructed a solid ending to a very respectable series. Everything seems more or less resolved by the end of the issue, even those things that aren't necessarily finished. It's all more or less over. And it feels a little tired when it does. A bit like the aged Tarzan himself. There would be more satisfying ways of exploring this sort of personality. They would have to dive a little deeper into the main character. As it is, Jurgens’s script is a bit too lost in the intricacy of its own details to really focus in on the fascinating complexity of Tarzan’s psyche in advanced age.
Gallego’s art has a late Silver Age quality about it that feels like vintage Sal Buscema. Action slings across the page with suitably powerful intensity. There are moments of deep drama that resonate through the issue. It’s too bad Jurgens’s writing so totally over-renders the story on the surface of everything. The visual world that Gallego is bringing to the page feels like it wouldn’t have been entirely out of place in an old issue of Jungle Action. Jurgens’s script rests heavily on the page, obscuring a story that could have featured much more sweeping action and more thoughtfully dramatic visuals.
The idea of an aging Tarzan returning to the jungle to set some things straight is actually a really intriguing idea. It's just too bad that Jurgens’s plot structure is so weighted down in unnecessary details. Had Jurgens focused just a bit more on the psyche of the hero and not what was going on in the world around him, it might have been a more fascinating psychological journey with the character. As it is, there’s nothing specifically wrong with the story. It’s just not very interesting.
