[1] Tarkan was created by Sezgin Burak while he was resident in Milan, working for the Italian art agency Studio D'Ami.
The first adventure of Tarkan, Mars'ın Kılıcı (The Sword of Mars) was serialised in 1967 as a comic strip on the pages of daily Hürriyet.
As an infant, he is orphaned after an Alan raid and raised by wild grey wolves, a process that makes him overwhelmingly powerful and courageous.
Tarkan's sole companion is his grey wolf named simply Kurt (Turkish for wolf) and he is occasionally helped by Kulke, a cunning and skillful warrior of short stature, and Bige, a bold and chaste girl with romantic interest in him.
[6] Although the name of the character is claimed to be styled as a compound word referring to Tatar ethnic origin of the artist himself,[3] the word Tarkhan is actually a title for Turkic and Mongolian nobility and was used as a given name millennia before publication of the comic series.