Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan: Le Monstre

The collection was nominated in the Harvey Awards for Best Writer the year it was published. The artists Roucher and Manoukian went above and beyond the call on the pages they produced. Since the artists live in Paris, they walked the route from the Moulin Rouge to the Opera House and reproduced the actual street views in their art. The final backdrop in the Opera is a reproduction of an antique backdrop that is still in existence today. Even the magazines appearing in the newsstands are actual period publications. For each of the stories I researched a half dozen books on both the period and the people I feature in the stories. Many of the character anecdotes are true. A lot of care went into every detail of the production of this beautifully written, drawn and designed collection.

I just picked up a collection of collected Tarzan insertion stories. Set in some of the blank spaces of Tarzan's history, Tarzan runs into some very interesting characters.In the first story, Tarzan is taken to the Paris opera where he runs afoul of a character known as the Phantom of the Opera. With Tarzan's intervention this classic tale ends on a much more hopeful note.In the second adventure, Tarzan is joined by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Nikola Tessla and Thomas Edison. The characters are involved in an adventure involving a mad monk and an old book. The book is the diary of Baron Frankenstein and the monk is his creation. In the end Tarzan prevents any further dabbling in creating life and tells the creature of Pellucidar where he will be able to fit in.The final story in the collection has Tarzan and a zoo gorilla track down the fiend that calls itself Mr. Hyde. This is probably the best written of the three tales as it gives some very interesting insights into the characters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.