Title: Tarzan Battles The Ape (Pencil Study)
Size: 3 1/2” x 5” inches - ACEO Double Sketch Card
Medium: Colored pencil on grey board
Year: 2011
Artist Personal Collection (For Sale)

This one is loosely inspired by one of my favorite characters in the old adventure fiction I read as a kid. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan!

My dad got me reading the books after seeing one of the black and white movies at a Saturday matinee, and after that I was hooked.

The comics where also a huge influence on me, one of my earliest memories of drawing anything, was copying a Joe Kubert cover on The Return of Tarzan comic. It was the big treasury edition, I’m pretty sure I’ve actually still got the thing.

I remember when I was still working in comics back in the nineties, I ran into Joe Kubert at a convention. I told him the story and what a hero he had been to me growing up as a kid wanting to be an artist. He was very gracious and I think it made him feel good to hear it.

I know I really felt like I had come full circle, from being the kid lying on my grandmothers floor drawing comics, to actually working in the same industry as the guy whose work I was copying, all those years ago.

It was defiantly a pretty cool moment