Tales From The Quarter Bin--Loincloth On Fire!!

The quest of a lifetime may have just been fulfilled.

I was wallowing in some quarter binnage, lookong for something fitting for this week's Friday Night Fights. And I come across this:

Looks like a win, right? Kubert-drawn Tarzan fighting a shark?!? This is material for the best Friday Night Fight ever, right?

Wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, gaze upon the Lyingest Cover In Comic Book History.

Tarzan never wears his loincloth in this story. He is fully clothed throughout, and he even spends most of the story in a suit and tie. Not to mention a leisure suit.

There is no damsel in distress in this issue, let alone one chained and dressed somewhat scantily.

Tarzan is never in the water in this story. He is on a boat journey at one point, but at no point does anyone at any point actually go in to the water.

And, perhaps most importantly, THERE IS NO SHARK. Not at all. No even a fin. Repeating: NO SHARK.

You know, I can overlook the occasional minor difference between the cover and the story. I have no problems with symbolic covers, representational covers, artistic covers, ironic covers, covers created by sociopathic editors to "inspire" stories for their writers and artists. Hell, under the right conditions, I'm even down with covers that, for purposes of maintaining story suspense, deliberately misleads the reader.

But there is one inviolable rule that has been violated here:

If you have a cover showing Tarzan fighting a shark, then you had DAMNED well better have Tarzan fighting a shark on the inside.

Tarzan #219 (1973), you are dead to me.

(OK, not really. It's still a Kubert/Kubert/Kubert production; it's a pretty faithful adaptation of an actual Burrough's novel, and is a good read; and in all fairness, it would have been tough to come up with a good cover for this part of the story. Still, that's no excuse for the shark bait and switch)