JANN OF THE JUNGLE #17 is dated June, 1957. It sports a dramatic Bill Everett cover, colored by Stan Goldberg:
We’ve already sampled Jann before, when she appeared in Marvel’s JUNGLE TALES, their 1972 reprint series. Jann debuted in Atlas’s JUNGLE TALES, which ended with issue 7, dated September 1955. Two months later, Jann took over the cover billing with issue 8 of JANN OF THE JUNGLE. The comics roots are represented in the cover’s subtitle (“and Other Jungle Tales”), but the indicia indicates JANN OF THE JUNGLE was the official, registered title. The first JANN issue carried over the four features that ran in JUNGLE TALES, so my guess is that Atlas simply rebranded what had been intended for JUNGLE TALES #8, but dropped Waku, Prince of the Bantu after one issue, in favor of at least two Jann adventures per comic, as was convention for title characters in that era. Don’t worry, we’ll sample Waku when we circle back to JUNGLE TALES.
The issue opens up not with the story promoted on the cover blurb, but with “Voodoo Vengeance!”, written by Don Rico, pencilled by Al Williamson, and inked by Ralph Mayo, who produced all three Jann of the Jungle stories this issue. Jann earns the enmity of “Carson, jungle scavenger”, when she stops him from looting the elephants’ graveyard. He vows to stop the legendary jungle girl, even though Jann considers herself as having done him a favor, since he’d have been imprisoned had he tried to leave with illegal ivory.
Jann goes about her jungle business, restraining a lioness from attacking an antelope, while Carson is consulting the weak, aged Akra, native voodoo doctor. In return for “white man medicine” to ease Akra’s aching bones, Akra will exchange a hand-made voodoo doll. Akra warns that his dolls are
not to be used against the good, but only against the wicked. But Akra fulfills his end of the bargain, crafting a likeness of Jann, whom he does not know, thanks to his reclusive lifestyle. Carson proves unreliable, and departs with the doll but without sharing any medicine. Akra prevents his servant from seeking vengeance, confident that “his doom is already sealed by voodoo vengeance!”
The voodoo doll works, and Carson is able to freeze Jann in a helpless position when she is attacked by lions. She figures out exactly what happened: “I’ve been voodooed! That’s what’s been done to me!”
The voodoo spell dissipates in time for Jan to escape the claws of the big cats, and the voodoo magic leads her on a path through the jungle to the shack where Carson is hiding out—he is being strangled by the Jann doll!
Carson declares that this awful experience has cured him of his evil ways, and Jann allows him to leave without the ivory, wondering what
really happened. Akra has been miraculously healed now that the evil of Carson has left the jungle, and all ends well in Jann’s jungle.
Voodoo is one of the more sensationalistic topics a jungle comic can utilize, and of course, one can’t expect an authentic representation, just the voodoo doll trope. It’s notable that this “voodoo doctor” is
not the villain of the piece, since his dolls are only usable against the wicked, but they
do work as advertised. Also notable is the implied dismissiveness of the effectiveness of the practice on healing, where even the voodoo doctor knows he should rely on “white man’s medicine” instead. The magic works for the sinister task of controlling others’ bodies, but not for the respectable goal of healing them.
“Earning His Way is the 2-page text story, coming as the second feature, which strikes me as unusual for the era. Don Heck and Don Perlin provide a small illustration. It follows an engineer working construction in the Indian jungle, where he hires elephants from a local tribe to assist him.
Next we get Jann in “The Killer of the Swamps!” Here’s an instance of a story getting separated from the cover intended to illustrate it; the previous issue’s cover was quite obviously intended to accompany
this story. Covers of this era often make no pretense of depicting events on the interior; I like to think of such covers as an invitation for the reader to make up their own story, inspired by the scene depicted. In this case, readers got to see how the story they imagined compared to the one the professional writer dreamed up! Here’s the cover, a gorgeous piece by Bill Everett colored by Stan Goldberg, with Jann’s monochromatic, toned bottom section contrasting appealingly with the full color above-water image of her pursuers:
We begin with a quick setup of the cover situation: two white hunters are motorboating after Jann, intending to shoot her, while Jan eludes capture with the classic trick of breathing through a reed while underwater:
Once the boat has passed her by, Jann takes to the trees to spy on the men, who proceed to visit the Baluba tribe and trade trinkets for a mysterious box. As they boat away with the box, Jann is following, in the company of a trio of hippos. When the spooked traders fire on the hippos, the extremely dangerous behemoths capsize their boat, but the men’s biggest concern is that mysterious box, which ends up in Jann’s custody.
The men realize how foolhardy it would be to attempt to take the box from Jann, with those hippos protecting her, so they go ashore and give themselves up. They confess to trading the worthless trinkets for a box of diamonds, but when Jann opens the box, they all discover that those natives weren’t as naïve as they’d thought: the box doesn’t contain diamonds, it instead holds a deadly King Cobra!
The men attempt to flee while Jann struggles with the serpent, but they find themselves blocked off by gorillas.
Crocodiles and hippos help Jann to defeat the cobra; Jann’s main concern is the protection of the animals’ watering hole from the deadly “killer of the swamps”. As Jann leads the men away bound in vines, she bids farewell to her friends, and the men note the impossibility of their successfully challenging a woman who can talk to animals.
Being able to talk to jungle animals is a routine ability in jungle heroes and heroines, going back to Mowgli and Tarzan, so Jann’s not really so special among her peers, but scripter Rico does give a somewhat different vibe here, in that the animals are not called upon to assist her in removing a serious threat to the humans, but in removing threats to the animals. She’s bringing safety to the wildlife, not to the men and women living there.
Don Heck illustrates Cliff Mason, White Hunter, in “Trail of the Ten-Toed Thing!” Cliff is captured in the net trap of a bearded, white-haired old man who is seeking the “thing with ten toes” which has supposedly been after him. While Cliff watches helplessly from the net, the
actual ten-toed thing—some kind of huge orange, ape, apparently—attacks!
Cliff urges the man to grab the net, which is hanging from a tree branch, and the old man is able to climb it into the tree. When Cliff then asks to be cut loose, the old man does so, intending not to help Cliff into the tree but to drop him into the clutches of the deadly beast below!
Lucky for Cliff, the beast cuts the net and frees Cliff while itself becoming ensnared in the remains of the net, permitting Cliff to capture it alive. The old man becomes apologetic, claiming to have been scared, but when Cliff begins questioning why this ape is after the old man, he finds himself staring down the geezer’s gun barrel: this ape is an extremely rare and protected species, and the old man had kidnapped its young to sell for profit!
Ah, but Cliff knew the old man’s claims were shady from the start, and when the ten-toed thing attacks, the old man finds his bullets useless against it. In desperation, he tells Cliff where the ape’s young are, and Cliff pacifies the monster by bringing the young ones back to the beast’s protective arms.
Cliff has also recognized that this fellow moves pretty smoothly for an old man, and removes his fake beard: this is a young, healthy hunter in disguise, not the innocent victim of a pursuing beast, and he’ll now be heading before a judge, thanks to Cliff Mason!
That one was a little more complicated than it needed to be for a short four pages. The Ten-Toed Thing, which I’ve described for convenience as an “ape”, actually appears to be some imaginary species, known but rare in Cliff Mason’s world. Don Heck was a good artist, but threatening monsters were never quite his thing, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to have this revealed to be a man in a costume. Cliff is about as generic a leading man as you could get in what is a forgettable filler story.
“Marauder in the Lair!” has Syd Shores illustrating another Don Rico tale under The Unknown Jungle heading. The Unknown Jungle didn’t feature any continuing characters, but told tales of African wildlife. This one is four pages of lion action, with the male protecting his brood’s cave from an attacking python.
The sitcom-style gag is that this all happens while the lioness is out capturing prey, and when she returns to find her mate still peacefully lounging on a rock, she continues to think her “husband” is a useless, lazy slacker of a male: “And such is the way of the female, even in the unknown jungle!”
This is not the most polished Syd Shores art I’ve seen, but he does fine with authentic-looking feline poses and features. The joke, while not that funny in modern times, is at least something to liven up a minor story. Back in the 50’s, animal adventure comics were not uncommon, so there may have been a decent audience for this kind of material. The fact that The Unknown Jungle appeared throughout this run implies that there must have been.
Finally, we get a third Jann of the Jungle story, “The Drum Beats at Midnight!” Jann and Pat, a blond man who I assume is a regular supporting character, are warned from entering “the country of the Golden God of the Midnight Drum”, and Pat goes after the spear-waving native holding his camera and tripod for use as an offensive weapon. Jan restrains Pat, realizing that the warrior who warned them is sick, and collapsing. She and Pat take the unconscious warrior to his village, where Jann finds that all the tribe are sick and dying from thirst. It seems B’wana Jennings, who had previously opened the reservoir for the village during dry spells, has been replaced by another, who refuses to provide water unless the villagers give him the holy treasure in their temple: the Golden God of the Midnight Drum.
Pat’s request for a photo of this god is denied: no one sees or hears the god until the people are in danger. Jann argues that the people
are in danger, and she vows to do what she can.
And what she can do is attack Yancey, the new holder of the reservoir, who plans to hold out on sharing until water until the tribe turns over that golden statue. She gives Yancey a good punch, but gets captured by Yancey’s aide, “Bull”. With Jann as a hostage, Yancey expects that her friends the people of the Golden God will give in to his demands. Jann’s warning is unheeded:
Yancey argues that the drum hasn’t beat so far, but Jann explains that it only sounds at midnight, then makes a hasty escape. The men try to follow, but are delayed when the fall into a pit trap intended for lions. By the time they climb out, Jann has taken to the trees, heading to the reservoir.
Yancey traps her dangling from a vine over a pond filled with crocodiles, but as he saws at the vie intending for Jann to fall in with the vicious amphibians, the Drums of the Golden God begin to beat! The two of them plunge into the croc-infested waters, and Jann rescues him as the water begins flooding down into the valley.
Back in the village, Pat’s finally getting some footage of the Golden God, and he reports that he
saw the God beat the drum, the God having declared that it had
become midnight then his people were in trouble.
Jann’s confrontation with Yancey and Bull highlights an awkward disparity that affected almost all jungle girl comics of the era: Jann is able to engage in direct physical combat with the men, but they can’t fight back hand-to-hand. They can bind, they can restrain, they can aim their guns at her, but they can’t violate the taboo against hitting a woman.
The conclusion is somewhat strange, insinuating the supernatural, but not showing it. I’ve noticed a lot of Atlas era stories conclude with text and dialogue imparting last minute explanations of things that weren’t made clear, or tacking on upbeat post-scripts or clarifying that justice would be done, etc. I don’t know if those were routine editorial touchups or just the standard approach to story wrap-ups, sparing the reader illustrations of what wouldn’t be visually interesting. I guess in this particular case, the readers might have felt cheated if they were given a single panel of the god coming to life and that was all they got, but the limited page count didn’t allow for even a taste of it.
Based on this, I’m calling JANN OF THE JUNGLE a
Jungle Gem. Maybe it’s the beauty of the All Williamson art and Bill Everett cover, but more than that, the Atlas format just provides such satisfying little nuggets of easily digested adventures that find it a pleasant experience. I found the same in Atlas’s Westerns of the era. Even when the stories or art didn’t bowl you over, they were always competent and focused, certainly worth a reader’s dime. I’m tempted to sample some of their war comics to see if I get the same level of satisfaction.