Some literary characters slip free from their creators and become part of our shared culture, becoming the closest thing we have to a modern mythology. You don't need to have read Arthur Conan Doyle, Carlo Collodi and Mary Shelley to understand Sherlock Holmes, Pinocchio and Frankenstein. It is certainly the case with the most famous creation of Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, who first appeared in print 100 years ago. Very few of the boys who beat their chest and warbled the distinctive animal-ish yodel ("the bull ape's savage roar of victory"... "What a frightful sound!... I shudder at the mere thought of it. Do not tell me that human throat voiced that hideous and fearsome shriek", as the novel has it) had read the novel. It could be said that not many of them even should.
Alan Grant, the Scottish comics writer who has worked on Judge Dredd and created Mr Zsasz and Jeremiah Arkham for Batman, has called Tarzan the original superhero (indeed, Grant's career began writing Tarzan comics). Tarzan was almost immediately a multimedia hero: on film by 1918, as a comic by 1929, on radio by 1932. The character also has the strange plasticity that allows him to be put into countless, even contradictory, kinds of story.
As a superhero avant la lettre Tarzan provides a missing link between Nietzsche's Ubermensch and Siegel and Shuster's Superman. He is an outsider to civilisation that incarnates its best aspirations. In the novel, Tarzan is aware that he is king of the apes but not an ape. He is also far more frightening: "he joyed in killing, and that he killed with a joyous laugh upon his handsome lips betokened no innate cruelty. He killed for food most often, but, being a man, he sometimes killed for pleasure". At the novel's ending, once Tarzan's identity as Lord Greystoke has been revealed, he abdicates it just as he abdicated tyranny over the apes after he killed the brutal Kerchak: "My mother was an ape," he says "I never knew who my father was."
The original book is not just casually racist, but deliberately ideologically and, to our modern eyes, offensively racist. The white, English Tarzan has "that confidence and resourcefulness which were the badges of his superior being". His first real fight, against Bolgani the Gorilla, pits "a little English boy, though enormously muscular for such" against the animal. "In his veins, though, flowed the blood of the best of a race of mighty fighters, and back of this was the training of his short lifetime among the fierce brutes of the jungle". The first humans he meets are black, and cannibals: however, when Tarzan kills Kulonga, a "hereditary instinct" prevents him from cannibalism (the "world wide law" against it apparently does not apply to native Africans). When he does meet other humans – Jane included – the chapter is headed "His Own Kind".
Like HP Lovecraft, we can recoil from the belief system. But like Lovecraft, Rice Burroughs is also a deeply weird writer. The scene where Tarzan teaches himself to read using a primer is supremely odd. Printed letters are "some strange kind of bug ... for many of them had legs though nowhere could he find one with eyes and a mouth". Tarzan can read, and write, but not speak: is there a Derridean in the house?
Tarzan of the Apes was an immediate success; and fans clamoured for a sequel. ("Dear Sir, I have read The All-Story magazine for the past year, and I think Tarzan of the Apes is a swell story, except the ending, which was rotten," wrote one correspondent). Burroughs obliged with 26 further Tarzan books. There was, if not realism, then at least verisimilitude in the first Tarzan story: the magazine publication featured tigers, which became panthers and lionesses in the book publication). Later books are far more fantastical: Tarzan is variously set against Germans, Ant-Men, Russians, dinosaurs, a lost city of Roman legionnaires, a lost city of medieval knights, a lost city of Atlanteans, a film crew and the inhabitants of Pellucidar, the world inside our hollow Earth (and the subject of another six Burroughs novels). In Tarzan and the Foreign Legion, he joins the RAF and is shot down over Sumatra, where his jungle education comes in handy in seeing off the invading Japanese.
On one hand, the Tarzan legacy ends up with such insipid fare as the Disney movie: on the other, he is still a touchstone for cult writers. Michael Moorcock's first job, at the age of 16, was editing Tarzan magazine, and it's not too far a leap to see in the polymorphous adventures of the King of the Jungle the first spark of the Eternal Champion in Moorcock. And Cheeta – who never appeared in the books – gave us one of the most entertaining and libellous celebrity biographies of recent years