Original Vintage Greek Comic, GAOUR TARZAN, To Fidi tou Magou, 1952, Nr. 18, RARE!

At the end of September 1951, Nikos Routsos, who was writing on behalf of “Ankyra” the reading “Tarzan-Gaur” (he had started it a year before under the title “Fairy Tales” first and then “Tarzan”), breaks with the publisher Apollo Papadimitriou and their collaboration is abruptly interrupted, leaving the series unfinished. The reason for the interruption was the increase requested by Routsos in his per-issue fee. It was true, that it had achieved an unusually higher circulation than other corresponding magazines. Thus, the upward adjustment of the fee of 500 drachmas for each issue is morally justified. It is not known today if the title of the magazine belonged exclusively to Routsos, as its intellectual creator. After all, copyright at that time in Greece was a rather disreputable and murky situation.
For Routsos, however, it was an opportunity to try his hand as a publisher. Guaranteed by the momentum of the successful title, which he slightly parallaxed probably for good and for bad, but also to put more emphasis on his “Greek” hero, he proposed Gaur as the title of the magazine and threw himself into the battle. He also gave his effort a name of publishing property without any corporate form, apparently for more prestige, a name that does not appear anywhere in the issues except on the covers of the volumes of bound issues: “ELEK – Hellenic Publications”. Even though the cover of the magazine was monochrome, not only was it not inferior in aesthetics to the four-color ones, but one could say that it stood out impressively among them. So are its interior pages with balanced, high-quality illustration. They were created by Byron – Byron Aptosoglou, in some of his best illustrations in popular children’s magazines.