Being Hogarth’s own creation he put his heart and effort to this strip. Several reasons to start it as well as concluding it so early have been presented. Whatever the reasons to depart with Tarzan and starting Drago or to return to Tarzan were, the results are memorable. In Fantagraphics’ Comics Journal Library 5: Classic Comics Illustrators (Fantagraphics Books 2005) also Hogarth’s own views are being presented as part of an interview. Some details can be read from CJL5 and are not in scope of this post.
In his Drago comic strip Hogarth gave us a full presentation of his talents. We see it all here; A Tarzan like main character and adventurer who goes into the greatest adventure ever, jungle as drawn by Hogarth and as we have been used to see it also in Tarzan, beautiful woman, masked hero, submarine, nazis and so on. All the characteristics of a great adventure comics. Sometimes it feels that Hogarth tried to include even too much into one adventure. The ingredients here would have been enough for a half dozen of great stories. If continued Drago would have had so much potential.
The first reprint I ever encountered was the Pasific Comics Club black and white edition of Drago (PCC 1985). While it had so much flaws (printing, quality, lacking of colors) it did provide a great comic strip adventure experience. And while being actually the first full reprint it also introduced people into Hogarth’s own creation and imagination.
There has also been black and white reprints available in Europe but unfortunately I do not have those as references here.
In Australia there was an abridged reprint already in the late 40’ies. This was published by Southdown Press as part of their Tip-Top-comics series. The comic book had a good looking cover picture by artist Ed Smith, who, as I have understood, was quite famous illustrator at that time. Unfortunately there has not been so much additional info of the artist. This is the only Drago image not drawn by Hogarth which I have seen. In thinking of this I have not seen any sketches nor Hogarth’s own illustrations of Drago outside of the actual strip.
Originally Drago was published in color. The original coloring was designed by Hogarth. The pages were published as full tabloid size pages in some newspapers but in most newspapers the strip was shown in full half size or third sized strips. It was mentioned that at the time of publication (when everywhere people were still seeing effects from the war) there might have been shortage of paper so newspapers were hesitant to spend so much space for a new comic strip.
The old strips are pretty hard to find if one is looking for them. At least some occasions there was Superman comic strip on the reverse side and people mostly collected them. One other reason for being rare is that most people just do not cut and save comic strips in general. So even if some strips are common it is in most cases very difficult to collect full set of any old newspaper comic strip. In my 2 decade lasting interest on Hogarth’s work I have seen full size newspaper pages, 4 of them, on sale only once. Unfortunately the US based seller was not willing to accept offers for them outside US. The full halfs and thirds can be found if keep looking. I managed to collect my own full collection over 8 years, mostly through ebay.
What comes to color reprintings, there are none. The only color
version I have encountered was done in Spain in 1973 by Noveno Arte
(Drago El Baron Zodiac). This edition was however recolored and the
colors were just adequate.
In recent years there has been some plans and effort to make a proper color reprint. Both restoration and recoloring possibilities has been studied. However so far no plans have come into reality. Now when Hogarth’s Tarzan reprintings are emerging again after a long hiatus the time could be very good also for Drago.
