How the complete “Tarzan: Rivers of Blood” finally got published

So, in a recent Greg Hatcher  Legacy File focusing on Tarzan, he briefly mentioned an abortive Tarzan mini-series called The Rivers of Blood. This post will be a sort of extended footnote for that column, because that series did eventually get published in complete form, albeit not in English (as I noted in my comment there) and I have the story about how that came about.

First a little background: Tarzan: The Rivers of Blood was first published by Dark Horse in 1999. The creative team behind it was a pair of Croats, artist Igor Kordej (or Kordey as he rendered his name for the English-speaking market) and writer Neven Antičević. The story takes Tarzan from his home in the jungles of Africa to Vienna and then to Zurich, first seeking aid from Sigmund Freud and then finally Carl Jung to help a mentally distressed Jane, who was put under a spell by a powerful magician. It was supposed to have a total of eight issues, but was cancelled after the fourth, apparently due to low sales.

Even so, Antičević had fully scripted the series, and Kordej had completed the art, i.e., both pencils and inks, for the fifth, sixth and first half of the seventh issues, and he had also done the roughs for the rest of the seventh and all of the eighth issue. And all that material sat around for a decade and a half, when a Belgrade-based publisher, System Comics, notified Kordej and Antičević that it had managed to get a license for a Serbian edition of Rivers of Blood, with the express intention of publishing the entire story and any extra materials. So in 2015 this lovely, oversized hardcover edition – or, as Kordej put it at the time, “one single, big, fat amazing book!” – was released:

I picked up my copy at Zagreb’s (and Croatia’s) main bookfair, Interliber, in late 2015, where Kordej and Antičević presented the book and did signings. (At the time I had a part-time gig for Croatian Radio’s English language service, so I interviewed them both and put together a piece on the whole situation.)

As per the publisher’s intention, this volume reprints the first four Dark Horse issues and the never-before-seen fifth through eighth issues. These latter four were printed “as-is”, meaning that they are all in black-and-white and the art in the last issue and a half consists of Kordej’s rough sketches with dialogue bubbles added.

Kordej had also painted the covers for those last four issues, so they’re also included:

If you want a quick page-through that will give you an idea of what the entire book looks like, here’s a video that was released as a sort of companion to that radio piece I mentioned above:

The only problem is that the entire story here has been translated into Serbian, so if you don’t understand that or one of the similar neighboring languages, you’re basically out of luck…