Swinging through the trees was all well and good, but Tarzan required a way to fly.
Of course, the civilized Lord Greystoke might have piloted a plane, but that wouldn’t have seemed very Tarzan-like in his comic book adventures.
The problem was solved in 1952’s Tarzan’s Jungle Annual 1, when the Ape Man used a scientist’s growth pills to create a giant eagle he named “Argus” after the 100-eyed sleepless giant of Greek myth.
“He and the Waziri call it the King of Birds,” wrote Tarzan researcher Bill Hillman, noting the Argus’ first mission was to fly Tarzan to the city of A-lur in the dinosaur-rich lost world of Pal-ul-don. Discovering that the half-human Torodons have conquered the city, Tarzan uses Argus to rally allies.
“Argus is a formidable force during the battle,” Hillman wrote. “Flying on Argus, Tarzan catches Jala, King Jadon’s sister, before she falls to her death.”
Thereafter, whenever the jungle king needed to travel swiftly by air, he called on Argus. Flight opened up several story possibilities for the lengthy Dell comic book series illustrated by Jesse Marsh.
Nicknaming the bird his “Sky Ranger,” Tarzan could wage effective war by firing arrows from Argus’ back. Tarzan used the bird to battle giant wasps, rampaging dinosaurs, the crocodile-masked Terribs and other menaces. He fed Argus fish.
Tarzan’s son Boy also rode the giant eagle, and once used it to rescue a woman threatened by a leopard. Argus simply picked up the big cat and dropped it off a cliff.
Argus was eventually given companion eagles, Aguila and Aiglon, so that several people could take to the skies.
The eagles weren’t Tarzan’s only means of avian transport. For swift earthbound journeys, he had the flightless dyals from Pellucidar, the primitive world at the Earth’s core chronicled in a separate Edgar Rice Burroughs series. The dyal is known to science as the Phorusrhacos, the extinct eight-foot-tall “terror bird” that inhabited Argentina during the Miocene era.
Tarzan’s giant eagles were among those evolving elements that were unique to the Dell series, which created its own internally consistent world. A fanciful offshoot of ERB’s concepts, Dell’s four-color world included more lost cities and monstrous beasts than you could shake a spear at.
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