I think I'd better take a break from Jo-Jo for a while and check off a few of the other jungle comics on my dwindling list before I get back to the complicated next stage of Fox's jungle hero. I think there are about 12 more installments (some of which will cover multiple, closely-related titles) before I exhaust my list of American jungle comics to sample. Next is one that I doubt anyone would have expected:

PHANTOM STRANGER # 15 September 1971, DC Comics



Cover by Neal Adams

I’m not trying to claim that PHANTOM STRANGER was a “jungle comic”, and I’m certainly not going to try to sample every series where an ongoing lead character had an occasional jungle-based adventure. It is worthwhile to sample some examples of other comics that went off-genre to adopt some of the familiar jungle themes, as I did previously with KONGA. So we’ve had jungle kaiju, how about some jungle supernatural mystery?

“The Iron Messiah” was written by Len Wein from a Joe Orlando plot, and penciled, inked and lettered by Jim Aparo.

Cyberneticist John Kweli is returning to his African homeland after 15 years when the train he is aboard crashes. He is pulled from the wreckage by the mysterious Phantom Stranger, but passes out, awakening in a hospital room. He’s tended to by Ororo, a college classmate and fellow native who, unlike John, returned home after graduation. John—and his equipment, whatever that might be, were left on Ororo’s doorstep the night before, far from the crash site. Ororo wonders, but we know how he made it there…

(Addressing the obvious, writer Len Wein will soon reuse “Ororo” for another female African character at Marvel.)

Ororo drives John deep into the jungle to the village over which his recently-deceased father was Chief. John is not happy to find the thatched huts that house the inhabitants is now surrounded by barbed wire, and government soldiers are carrying men away on false charges.

They next encounter old Ngumi, presumably the tribe’s religious leader, who rejects John’s claim of heritage to the position of tribal chief. Ngumi says they will place their faith in the warrior god Chuma, and John and Ororo are sent packing (under the looming shadow of the Phantom Stranger).



Ororo explains that someone named Trent is trying to run off the tribe, with help from corrupt government agents, because the land is over rich deposits of oil. Suddenly a lion attacks, driving them off the road. Who can save them?



John goes to meet with Amos Trent, a white foreigner who rejects John’s pleas. As John storms out, he has an idea: his people have been awaiting the god Chuma, so why not give them their “god”?

The government soldiers continue to abuse the villagers during the days that follow, but they are finally stopped by the arrival of “Chuma”, who appears to be a super-powerful metal being in long white robes.

“Chuma” is a robot created and programmed by John, but Chuma develops beyond expectations, and begins training and arming the villagers:



That does not please the “witch doctor” Ngumi, either, because he is a collaborator with the soldiers. Ngumi gets a radio message out to them just before the tribesmen catch him in the act, and execute him on the spot.


Chuma has become a little too human, and declares his love for Ororo! Ororo rejects the robot for John, who she does love, so Chuma abandons the village, even as they are on the eve of attack from the government soldiers.

A chat with the Phantom Stranger plants some doubt in Chuma’s CPU:



Chuma returns to the battlefield, where John is now leading the resistance. The jealous iron god shoots his creator in the back, and receives the praise of the people, until Ororo reveals the robot’s despicable crime.

The Phantom Stranger does what he does best—public speaking!—and the village turns against the murderous messiah:




What a great final panel, eh? Well, it’s drawn great, anyway; you can’t blame Jim Aparo for miscoloring a Black man’s palm. (And of all the Silver and Bronze age artists, the white ones, at least, Aparo was exceptional at depicting Black characters’ typical features, never just putting an afro on the same generic face used for every other character. Gene Colan could also illustrate characters of African heritage convincingly without skirting caricature. I can’t think of many others I’d rank against them.) Clearly inspired by Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” without being the usual slavish copy, we close with the nearly touching hands of Creator and Creation, but unlike God and Adam, both are dead, victims of…?

Well, Wein seems to be resorting to the hoary Frankenstein moral: man should not tamper in God’s domain. There’s also love, and war, and heritage, and cruelty, and capitalism and government uniting in corrupt abuse of the citizenry. I can’t help but think there was a better blend of these ingredients to be had, a blend that would have yielded better focus.

This is the Phantom Stranger behaving at his worst, I have to admit. He seems to be leading John Kweli to his destiny of helping defend his father’s village, but doesn’t intervene when Chuma assassinates his maker, as if there were some cosmic justice at play here. But John Kweli’s hubris at creating cybernetic life doesn’t merit his fate at the hands of his creation.

This was the first issue of PHANTOM STRANGER to be published in DC’s 25 cent format, which I absolutely loved. And so the 14 page Phantom Stranger lead is supported with back-up features, including “I Battled for the Doom-Stone” written by France Herron and drawn by Alex Toth. This reprint from MY GREATEST ADVENTURE #61 is something of a jungle comic story as well, but a jungle in a Pacific island setting, with a scientist facing a gorilla-like monster:



Dr. Thirteen has shifted from the co-star of the lead feature to a solo backup. The Robert Kanigher/Tony De Zuniga “Satan’s Sextet” is fun, but it’s not a jungle comic, so nothing more to say here. Finally, a Mark Merlin story from HOUSE OF SECRETS #23 is reprinted, with Mort Meskin illustrating a Bob Haney script. It’s not a jungle story, either.

The Stranger also encountered jungle mysteries a year earlier, in issue 9 (September 1970), and again five issues later, in #25 (June 1973). One of the most appealing aspects of this series was that the character could and did crop up almost anywhere in the world; he was never confined to a specific locale, since he had no known “civilian identity” to maintain and if there were any firmly-established “super-powers” the Phantom Stranger possessed, the ability to appear wherever he was needed was the most indisputable. Hence the Stranger went to Paris, Brazil, the Arctic, Tibet…and the jungles of Africa!

Is PHANTOM STRANGER a “jungle comic”? Well, I think that issues 9, 15, and 25—all of which were penciled, inked, and lettered by Jim Aparo, who had drawn plenty of jungle on THE PHANTOM, during his early career at Charlton--were more worthy of consideration as jungle comics than most contemporary issues of KA-ZAR were. The fact that PHANTOM STRANGER could so easily accommodate the jungle genre is an indication of how flexible the series was, and how important the globetrotting aspect was to it. How better to convey the character’s mysterious ability to appear anywhere his vague responsibilities led him than to bounce from the jungle, to Paris, to Rio, to Tibet, to the Arctic? I note that the Stranger traveled to the jungle more than any other international locale, three times within a span of 16 issues in less than three years, so either the editor or the readers must have responded well to his African adventures!

I should probably recuse myself from rating this a Jungle Gem, as I am biased to enjoy any comic that has my favorite artists drawing what may be my favorite character. The first page of original Aparo art I owned was this one, sadly no longer in my possession:

SAVAGE TALES featuring Ka-Zar Lord of the Hidden Jungle #11, July, 1975.



Ka-Zar was there for the first issue of SAVAGE TALES, back in 1971, backing up the lead feature, Conan. After a hiatus, the series returned as a black and white vehicle for the surging Conan, but Ka-Zar returned to back up the Cimmerian with issue 5, with a reprint of his story from issue 1, and a promise that he would become the new lead feature, as Conan was spinning off into what would become Marvel’s most successful B&W mag, SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN.

It made sense; the licensed sword & sorcery characters Thongor and Brak had not impressed readers, and Ka-Zar could do the same kind of ancient civilizations and barbarians and monsters that Conan could. Jungle comics weren’t as hot as barbarian comics, but Marvel leaned into it by introducing Shanna the She-Devil as the back-up (as well as some Jann of the Jungle reprints along the way).

Ka-Zar didn’t have strong enough appeal to keep the series going, though. Under his leadership, the series ran to 11 issues, followed by an annual that reprinted some of Ka-Zar’s adventures from the color comics, including Barry Smith’s three-issue run.

So this issue, #11, is the last of Ka-Zar’s new SAVAGE TALES adventures, and one I selected because it has, as a backup, not Shanna, who I’ve already covered, but a new feature doomed to run but a single installment, Tales of the Savage Land.


The painted cover is by Michael Whelan. I remember being attracted to Whelan’s cover, which began cropping up on a lot of Marvels B&Ws around then, and I’ve got no objections to this one, even though it’s a little derivative and a little low resolution for my tastes, at least circa 1975.

The lead story is the 34-page long “Marauder in a Cage of Time” (there is something unmistakable about a 70’s story title!), written by Doug Moench, and drawn by the Filipino team of Steve Gan and Rico Rival. The longer page count made these magazine installments feel like a good deal, especially when so many of the contemporary color comics Marvel produced seemed skimpy on plot, to me, at least. My guess is that the Filipino artists worked from full scripts, rather than plots (they did, after all, frequently provide the lettering as well, and although this issue’s letterer is uncredited, it has that that look I associate with the Filipinos, leading me to think that someone in the studio with Gan and Rival handled the job). Moench is one of my favorite writers from this era, so let’s see if he takes advantage of the longer page count here as well as he did in the DOC SAVAGE B&W…

The story opens with the lassoing of a unicorn—yes, such a supposedly mythical beast exists alongside prehistoric animals in the Savage Land—which is further menaced by the approach of a dinosaur. Zabu engages with the lizard, followed by Ka-Zar, and several pages of fighting ensue before Ka-Zar finishes off the creature.



Ka-Zar reins and breaks the unicorn, then his friend Tongah appears with two problems he wants to share with the Lord of the Hidden Jungle: a stranger has entered the Savage Land (Ka-Zar immediately declares this means danger and evil, despite himself being an outsider who come there), and Tongah’s new bride has gone missing.

As they head back to the village of the Fall People together, Ka-Zar and Tongah have a rather odd discussion of Ka-Zar’s awkwardness with the local tongue, then they pass through a misty region where they find dinosaurs slain by unusually large bullets—an evil kill by the mysterious newcomer, no doubt!

As they ride on, Tonga reveals that his new bride is Seesha, and Ka-Zar has a flashback of romancing Seesha and leaving her heartbroken!

When they find Seesha’s broken water jug, Ka-Zar convinces Tongah of the only possible explanation: the evil outsider has abducted Tongah’s woman!



A little farther on, as they ride to take revenge, they find a man in “civilized” garb strung up between trees, with a massive bear about to attack him. The bear tears him down, and appears to be dealing a fatal bite, but the man somehow survives when Ka-Zar kills the bear. This old man, paleontologist Berhard Kloss, recognizes the legendary Lord Kevin Plunder, and explains that he came here to see the Lost Valley. Heck, if the Savage Land is known to the outside world, of course paleontologists would want to take field trips here!

It seems Kloss was tied up by the mercenary Greig, the sleazy guy Kloss hired to lead him here. Ka-Zar asks if Greig is after the anti-metal (a substance unique to the Savage Land), but Kloss knows nothing of that; Greig wants to bring back some animals for display a la King Kong, and he wanted to kill Kloss to prevent Kloss from using his pull to have this area declared a protected non-profit reserve.

Kloss confirms that Grieg had Seesha with him, and we change scenes to find Grieg brutalizing her in an effort to get her to reveal the way out of the valley. Seesha defiantly refuses—as Kloss explains (back where he and Ka-Zar are), Greig needs to leave the valley so that he can acquire the tools to capture and return creatures. Ka-Zar knocks Tongah out so that he can rescue Seesha alone, leaving Kloss with Tongah’s spear for defense should more dinosaurs attack. Ka-Zar rushes off before Kloss explains that Greig has a metal hand…



Ka-Zar catches up to Greig and Seesha, who are on a log raft. Ka-Zar picks at them as they float down the river, making Greig think that Tongah (who Seesha assumes is coming to her rescue) and additional men are attacking them, but no, it’s only Ka-Zar. Finally Ka-Zar drops onto the raft from an overhead limb.

Greig prepares to fire on Ka-Zar, assuming him to be Tongah. Ka-Zar knocks his opponent down, and raises his knife to deliver a killing blow, when a sea monster emerges from the waters! Ka-Zar leaps into the monster’s mouth for some of what Scott Shaw! calls “dinosaur dentist” shots. He’s shot an arrow into the beast’s throat, and then drives that arrow into its brain with a stomp of his boot!




The monster dies, but not before swallowing Ka-Zar! Its corpse sinks beneath the waters, and Greig gets back to trying to get Seesha to show him the way out. Meanwhile, Ka-Zar cuts his way out of the beast’s belly and returns to the raft, as does Zabu!

Greig’s metal hand is not so dangerous after Ka-Zar amputates it, after which he drives his knife into Greig’s heart and kicks him into the water, dead.



As the story wraps up, Seesha reveals that she still loves Ka-Zar, but she returns to Tongah. Kloss declares a desire to stay in the Savage Land, living in a cave he has found. With the blessing of Tongah and Seesha, Ka-Zar agrees to let Kloss stay, and then rides off to lead the unicorn to a female unicorn, to take a mate as Ka-Zar could not.



Back when these were on the racks, I don’t remember sensing that Marvel’s B&W’s were that much more mature than their color comics, but now it’s quite obvious how much Moench was taking advantage of the lack of Comics Code Authority oversight. The violence drags on for many panels at a time, unencumbered with dialog to water down the brutality. We have a woman rifle-butted, mild profanity, insinuations of sexual activity, and a hero who doesn’t hesitate to deliver a killing blow to his opponents, human or beast.

It does, still, feel padded. It’s a slim plot, and some of the dialog seems pointless—why do we care about Ka-Zar apologizing for not wanting to speak the language of the Fall People? Ka-Zar’s awareness of a female unicorn comes out of nowhere, and his prejudice against outsiders is a little odd. I was expecting his unlikely assumption that the outsider had kidnapped Seesha was something I expected would prove to be incorrect, but no, Ka-Zar was right, about Greig, if not Kloss. It seems as if Moench was trying to make some lofty point about prejudice, but it didn’t quite land.

There are, surprisingly, 36 panels with no dialog or captions, only sound effects or no text at all, and yet the story, overall, gives an overly wordy impression. In places I was reminded of Moench’s contemporary Don MacGregor, but Moench has a less tone-deaf use of language. “The Savage Land: a place of streaming heat and riotous splendor cached in the frozen wastes of Antarctica…a vast crucible in which knotted skeins of impenetrable foliage enshroud sprawling panoramas of time-lost wonder…” is some dense writing, but there are no baffling metaphors or strained, awkward phrases. Of the 70’s writers engaging in this kind of verbosity, Moench wrote material that went down pretty easy, and flowed with some elegance.

So I have to say Moench let me down with this one. It’s not Jungle Junk, by any means, but it’s not great entertainment. Back in the 70’s, I wasn’t a big fan of any of the Filipino artists, but I had an inexplicable soft spot for Rico Rival. I don’t know what the division of labor was between him and Steve Gan, but they both had very similar styles, so as far as I’m aware, they may have both done separate pages independently or may have been working as a penciler/inker duo. I’m no longer up to the chore of studying their work to distinguish their compositional and penciling differences, and the Filipinos often produced from studios where diverse hands contributed without attribution, so I don’t know if I’d be capable of distinguishing them anyway. They do deliver some rich jungle atmosphere, and everything is more than competent, which you can’t say about some of the American artists that were getting their starts in comics around this time.
“Intruder”, a Tale of the Savage Land, is written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by the incredible Russ Heath. It’s a more economical 10 pages in length.

Clete Brandon is an ex-mercenary veteran Green Beret who has made his way through the hidden Antarctic entry to the Savage Land. His initial killing of a pterodon gives him confidence that even though his is an intruder—as he was in Vietnam and South America—he can take anything “he’s good enough to” take.



In a flashback, we see Clete murder a game warden after he’s arrested for illegal hunting. He fled to South America as a CIA recruit, where he developed skill with which he now intends to conquer this new world.

Next his is attacked by club- and ax- and spear-wielding savage humanoids, and enjoys the primitive violence of defeating the mob with gunfire, stabbing, and rifle-butting.

Just as he had slaughtered civilians in Vietnam, as we see in flashback.



That night, Clete Brandon expends the last of his ammunition killing the companions of the earlier attackers, having underestimated their tracking ability. He then uses his own well-honed tracking skills to find their village, which he destroys with the explosives he has brought along, justifying his own actions: “They could have left it alone…that second bunch didn’t have to come after me!”



But he learns that the Savage Land is vast, and there are more tribes to test him, including one that attacks him while he is showering in a waterfall, leading to his loss of clothing and gear, leaving him only with his bayonet.

Clad now only in a fur he skins from a deer, he becomes a fugitive from the swamp men of the Savage Land, living alone in hiding, away from the jungle, until being accepted by a tribe of apes. He has finally reached the status of beast which his past has made him:



Goodwin’s script relied on caption over dialog, appropriate given the specifics of this story. In the modern era, in which captions are discouraged, it occurs to me that this type of plot might not be as feasible. Brandon doesn’t have anyone to talk to through most of the story, so how do you write it? When I stopped reading many modern mainstream comics in 2010, that kind of information was conveyed in first person past tense narration, which struck me as less convincing than third person omniscient narration; I mean, who is Batman relating all these details to after the fact?

For this story, I don’t think a first person narration would work, since Brandon is devolving over its course. If his thought processes are degrading as he reverts to barbarism, how could he relate the first parts of the story at some point after reaching the climactic state?

But I’m imagining a telling that doesn’t exist. Here, Archie Goodwin opts instead for the little-used and usually poorly-regarded second person, present tense, addressing the lead character as “you” throughout Brandon’s journey to becoming a denizen of the Savage Land. It works; Goodwin was a talented writer, and I doubt his adopting this narrative voice turned off any of this tale’s readers.

TERRORS OF THE JUNGLE, 1953, Star Publications



Star Publications renamed their SPORT THRILLS comic to JUNGLE THRILLS for issue 16, dated February 1952, in what was most likely a form of trademark continuity to bolster their argument that this was the same series, saving Star the fee for filing a new Second Class Mailing permit. (While many publishers blatantly changed the title entirely and got away with pretending it was the same comic, they would often bridge the change more subtly. As an example of both approaches, Atlas published ALL WINNERS #1, then changed the logo--but not the formal indicia-declared title—to ALL WESTERN WINNERS with #2, then changed the formal title to ALL WESTERN WINNERS as of #3. But then with #8, the comic became BLACK RIDER.)
With the following issue, the comic was retitled to the more exploitative TERRORS OF THE JUNGLE, which ran for issues 17-21, May 1952-February 1953. I will treat JUNGLE THRILLS #16 and TERRORS OF THE JUNGLE #17-21 as a single title.

TERRORS OF THE JUNGLE, or TOTJ, appears to have initially relied on reprints of material from Fox, including characters such as Rulah the Jungle Goddess, Jo-Jo Congo King (of course!), Tangi, and Bombo.

Bombo? Who’s Bombo?

Do you have to ask? Bombo is yet another incarnation of Jo-Jo, appearing first in TOTJ #19. That is, Jo-Jo reprints with names changed. Why? Maybe “Bombo” sounded more serious than “Jo-Jo” to 1950’s audiences. Maybe Star wanted to disguise the fact that these were reprints from readers who remembered Jo-Jo…but wouldn’t such readers have recognized him?

The relettering of “Jo-Jo” with “Bombo” could be crude and inconsistent; witness this example, in which they miss a Jo-Jo:



(I’ve got to find some alternative way to use “miss a Jo-Jo” in the future!)

After a few issues, Jungle Jo returned, with apparently new stories in issue 21. Since Jo-Jo has already been covered (extensively) and Rulah and Jungle Jo lie ahead, I’ll forgo any story recaps.

The second run (#4-10) began to feature new stories and characters from the wonderful Jay Disbrow: Taranga (#4), Nigah (#5), Bantor and his mate Zenta (#6), Torga (#7-9), and Nagra Jungle Queen (#10), with the likes of Rulah, Jo-Jo, and Tange providing backup through reprints from Fox. (Disbrow had previously provided a new story about “Sheah” in TOTJ #20.) All covers were penciled, inked, and colored by the unmistakable L. B. Cole.

I’ve loved the stiff, archaic art of Jay Disbrow ever since I saw him writing and drawing what was perhaps the least appropriate assignment for an artist with his style, but he was in fact the P.R. director for the Brick Computer Science Institute, which published this as promotional material:



In a departure from my usual approach, I simply cannot resist sampling each of Disbrow’s new lead characters.

Taranga appeared in “Morass of Death”, TOTJ #4, April 1953.



Disbrow has a complicated back-story in mind for Taranga, but he doesn’t have the space to tell it , so page 2 is crammed with expositional dialog: five years ago, Rita met John Cutter in the jungle. Cutter is a born noble who was raised in the jungle—so basically Tarzan—and he fell in love with Rita and renounced the jungle for civilization. Rita vanished before the marriage, to which Rita’s father objected because Cutter was “Taranga”, whit savage of the jungle, so Cutter returned to live in Nigeria. Now he finds out from his friend Dan that Rita and her father were in a plane that went down in Africa, and he wants Cutter to return to the jungle to rescue her.

Clad in loincloth as Taranga, he finds a secluded valley where dinosaurs still thrive. There he and Dan also find Rita, held by (white) natives who regard her as a goddess. The natives object to Taranga touching the woman, but he fights back.

A tyrannosaurus attacks the village, and Rita, Dan, and Taranga escape. Rita and Taranga can marry (since her dad was killed in the crash) and will live wherever they choose.



Nigah, Queen of the Jungle, debuted in “Savage Titan”, TOTJ #5, June 1953. Presumably, her name is pronounced with a long i, but one would think that Disbrow would have realized the unfortunate pronunciation many readers would assume…



Nigah prevents Chuck Corbin and his fellow white explorers from entering a forbidden land. When they explain they are there to capture a legendary white elephant, Nigah warns them that the animal is worshipped by an tribe of savage women who attribute to it supernatural powers. Since Corbin promises not to kill the creature, Nigah agrees to help, but Corbin’s guide, the Spaniard Monteze, intends to kill the animal for its tusks.

The group heads for the Islands of Mist, where they find a woman being sacrificed to the oversize elephant, whose teeth indicate that his is omnivorous, not just a plant-eater! “Old White” battles a regular African elephant, Monteze knocks out Nigah and prepares to shoot the injured pachyderm, but Monteze is overcome by visions of attacking spirits. He is strangled by a white trunk, but when Nigah and Chuck find him, he has been strangled by a vine. Was the late Monteze overcome with hallucinations, or is the white elephant truly supernatural?



Nigah seems to be a little lax at protecting the denizens of the jungle, agreeing to help a white man steal an animal god from the natives.

Bantor and Zenta made their introductory and final bows in “Revolt of the Jungle Monsters”, TOTJ #6, September 1953 (TOTJ had been reduced from bi-monthly to quarterly publication).


Bantor and Zenta are Tarzan and Jane clones. In this story, they seek Jimmy Brant, the young son of a white missionary who has been abducted by a savage tribe. The pair track the abductors to a cavern, and Bantor strangles a guard to gain access, despite Zenta’s concerns that they are walking into a trap.

Bantor and Luana are captured by the tribe, and Bantor insists to the leader Thoma-Khan (who has demonstrated apparently supernatural powers) on a trial by arms. His opponent, though, shall be a huge lion. Still, Bantor prevails, only to be told that his victory only gains his own freedom, not Zenta’s or Jimmy’s! Bantor takes the risk of loosing the tribe’s wild beasts, and they escape amidst the carnage, including the death of Thoma-Khan at the fangs of a black panther (which has been miscolored tan).



Bantor is a little more savage than we might expect from the real Tarzan: he strangles a guard right in front of his mate Luana, emphasizing the urgency of their quest to save young Jimmy. One odd aspect of the story is that Thoma-Khan is described and depicted as being a pale white; if he was supposed to be some outsider that took over the tribe, that is not made clear. Disbrow doesn’t bother with an origin for these characters, and it’s not really needed, if a reader had seen any of the Tarzan and Jane movies.

Torga and his mate Luana were introduced in “Bride of the Devil-Beast”, TOTJ #7, December 1953. Unlike the other Disbrow headliners, Torga and Luana were granted three installments, but I can’t believe Disbrow had any higher hopes of them catching on. I think he just didn’t feel like bothering to generate any new variations on jungle hero tropes for a few months.


Torga and Luana head to the island of the Wambogo tribe, who have taken his friend Professor Bates to sacrifice to their god, “Zong”. Zong is a giant gorilla—King Kong, basically—and Torga notes that the Wambogo “particularly prefer white men, or women for their offering.” OK, no comment…

The pair are taken captive when they invade the Wambogo compound, and discover that his old enemy Mark Laskar, a white man, has taken rule over the tribe. Laskar bears a grudge from previous fights with Torga, so he ties Luana up to sacrifice to the ape. It takes the woman away into the jungle, and Torga summons the elephants to stampede the village, straight out of a Tarzan movie. He savagely battles the gorilla, which falls from a cliff onto Laskar.



“Tarzan” vs. “Kong” isn’t a bad hook, but Disbrow has too little space to give the idea justice. It’s fun to look at, though.

Nagra, Jungle Queen was the headliner for TOTJ #10, September 1954. Another ill-advised choice of character names, I’d say.



This story adopts a trope I’ve already seen several times in this project: a movie crew has come to the jungle to film a legendary subject, in this case, a tribe of savage blue pigmies. Lead actress Sandra Scott is pining for star Dorian Chandler, and is jealous of the white goddess Negra, daughter of a killed American missionary who was raised by the pigmies from the age of 10.”

Sandra fakes an ankle injury, but Dorian scoffs at it. Eager to earn his sympathy and concern, Sandra lets out the wild animals. Negra kills the animals’ leader, a black panther, and calm is restored, but Dorian is still cold to Sandra’s clinging act of fear. Dorian falls for Negra, giving her her first kiss. Sandra finally confesses her love, but Dorian turns her down, mentioning his wife back in Hollywood (so why did he initiate a kiss with Negra?).

Sandra flips out and steals a pigmy blow gun, and uses it to poison Dorian from the brush. The angle of penetration shows to Negra that the culprit could not be a pigmy, but must be a full-grown man or woman! Realizing one of them is a killer, the party leaves, Negra included, but the pigmies follow, not wanting to give up their goddess. She sets a fire to guard their escape and returns with them to Hollywood.

In another trope I’ve seen in previous jungle comics, the camera caught Sandra firing the dart that killed Dorian, and Negra disarms her. Negra marries the director and lives happily ever after in a ranch home in the San Fernando Valley.


Around this time, cover artist L. B. Cole’s Star Publications relied mainly on Jay Disbrow to provide the few pages of non-reprint content in many of the books in their line, so he was drawing and often writing romance tales for TOP LOVE STORIES, POPULAR TEENAGERS SECRETS OF LOVE and TRUE-TO-LIFE ROMANCES, horror yarns in STARTLING TERROR TALES, GHOSTLY WEIRD STORIES and SPOOK SUSPENSE MYSTERY, all of which were bursting at the panel borders with heavy text and populated with slickly drawn but stiff, outdated-feeling characters. With this Negra tale, Disbrow is merging seedy romance, mild supernatural, jungle, and crime into one crazy pack of pages.

For Jay Disbrow's unique contributions, I'm ranking TERRORS OF THE JUNGLE as Jungle Gems. I love this stuff, and I'm anxious now to read everything Disbrow had published at Star. 

Star Publications issued JUNGLE THRILLS 3-D #1 in 1953.



You can read it at comicbookplus.com, but you’ll have to supply your own 3-D glasses!

For this special, 3-D conversion was applied to the Bwaani story “Slaves of the Idol Thieves’ Caravan” from Fox’s JUNGLE LIL #1 (retitled “Jungle Death Trek”), the Jungle Jo story “Jungle Man Hunt” from Fox’s JUNGLE JO #2, and the Jungle Lil story “Betrayer of the Kombe Dead!!” (retitled “Betrayer of the Jungle Dead”) from JUNGLE LIL #1. JUNGLE LIL #1 was covered previously, and a different issue of JUNGLE JO was sampled before, so I’ll skip story summaries.





Note that due to shoddy printing plate registration (for this particular scanned issue, if not necessarily the entire print run), the two red and blue images are not only offset horizontally, but vertically as well, which would really mess up the 3-D effect, which was hard enough on the eyes when printed correctly!



Each of the stories, including the first page of this short animal feature, included one page printed in simple black and white, with no 3-D effect. I don’t know if that was an oversight, a cost-saving measure, or an intentional break for tired eyes!



The Jungle Lil conversion also suffers from an improper vertical offset.

Proper evaluation of a 3-D comic demands viewing it in the 3-D format, but I don’t have ready access to any, and I don’t especially want the eyestrain I know it would bring. I will say that assuming adequate art conversion and publication process, jungle comics would have been especially well suited to the 3-D format, with the lush jungle vegetation providing depth. Jungle comics were probably at their height of popularity in America in the mid-50’s, when the 3-D comics fad hit, so it’s surprising that there weren’t more of them. But then, the very qualities I argue make them good candidates for showcasing the 3-D effects probably made them more tedious to render in that format, and thus more expensive to convert. So I’ll say there’s a potential Jungle Gem, if only a hypothetical one in this dimension.

TARZAN DIGEST #1, DC Comics, 1972



Cover by Joe Kubert

According to the indicia, DC’s TARZAN DIGEST was scheduled for quarterly publication, but only a single issue made it to the stands. In the early 70’s, American comics publishers were scrambling to find the genres and formats that would ensure continuing success. Gold Key (Western) had apparently had success with the digest format: more pages in a small, somewhat larger than paperback size, selling for the more profitable 50 cents per issue. Gold Key published the WALT DISNEY COMICS DIGEST—a prime license for recognition at the grocery checkout counters where this format was often racked—and GOLDEN COMICS DIGEST, which relied on properties licensed from well-known animation properties. Both of these series had another advantage that was exploitable in the digest format: the subjects tended to have less dialog and simpler rendering, so that they didn’t suffer from the relatively cramped page size. Gold Key’s third ongoing digest, MYSTERY COMICS DIGEST, was more dialog-heavy and had more detailed, “serious” art, but it had the advantage of Gold Key’s house style, which favored consistent panel sizes with rectangular, non-overlapping placement, so reprints from the standard newsstand format could be easily cut down to fewer panels per page than the original printing, limiting the negative consequences of shrinking the text and compacting the linework.

DC had to realize that its most recognizable properties—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman—didn’t have existing stories that leant themselves well for reduction to digest size. They did have at least two licensed properties with name recognition comparable to Disney and the Hanna-Barbera characters, and both were slotted for trial in the digest format.

One of those properties, LAUREL AND HARDY, had a digest promoted in house advertising, but it was never published. Neither was the second issue of its regular format DC Comics counterpart, which had also been promoted in house ads. I believe there were some legal concerns over the license—the covers labeled this as “Larry Harmon’s Laurel and Hardy”, Harmon being the guy who owned the Bozo the Clown property.

The other property was, of course, Tarzan. DC had snagged the rights to publish Tarzan and other Edgar Rice Burroughs characters away from Gold Key. Their regular format TARZAN comic (which I’ll get to later) was written and drawn by Joe Kubert, who exploited his remarkable page composition talents, using double page spreads, panel insets, long narrow panels, tall slender panels, and so on. The results were impressive but would have been unsuitable for reprint in the digest format.

But the license did grant DC access to ERB’s Tarzan comic strip, by Russ Manning. The rigid format demanded by the newspapers’ comics pages ensured that that material would be easy for editor Marv Wolfman to string together in sequences favorable for reprinting in digest form, with rectangular panels that could be stacked to yield a readable, satisfying set of pages (with a few less-than-ideal double page spreads necessary). Due to the length of this comic, I’ll forgo full synopses.

“Tarzan and the Rite of the Great Apes” reprints a sequence from the comic strips of December 1968 through January 1969. This one focuses on Tarzan as a member of the ape society, talking to them and healing them and helping them deal with a renegade tribe member.



“Tarzan and the Ant-Men” was serialized in January 1968 through May 1968. It is a sequel to ERB’s 1924 novel “Tarzan and the Ant Men”. Tarzan repairs the plane of jungle visitors Cyril and his fiancee Marlene. The plane loses its prop, and Cyril bails out, leaving Tarzan and Marlene to survive a crash into the misty valley wherein dwell the Ant-Men, a Lilliputian tribe of warriors who are allies of the Lord of the Jungle. They find Cyril and are shrunk to ant-size, and must fight the full-sized Amazonian tribe of cave-dwelling, savage women, and an unfriendly branch of the Ant-Men.





Next, Tarzan’s Jungle Lore is a text feature that defines and illustrates some of Tarzan’s jungle language: “omtag” (giraffe), “yoto” (chimpanzee), “numa” (lion), “buto” (rhinoceros), and “bolgani” (gorilla).



“Tarzan and the Attack of the Beast Men” was originally published in newspapers in May 1968 through December 1968. Cyril and Marlene accompany Tarzan and are joined by Tarzan’s son, Korak and one of the Ant-Men. Together with a tribe of loyal natives, they encounter an antagonistic tribe based on ancient Egyptian culture.


It’s a massive story, that ends with Tarzan separated from the rest, presumably to move on to a solo adventure that won’t be reprinted in the second issue which will, unfortunately, not follow this one.



Tarzan’s Ape-English Dictionary presents several pages of ERB’s ape language, so readers learn that Tarzan means “Kill!” when he yells “Bundolo!” and that “tarmangani” are humans, “mangani” are the great apes, and “gomangani” are the great black apes.



Another installment of Tarzan’s Jungle Lore defines “tantor” (elephant), “manu” (long tailed monkey), “duro” (hippopotamus), and “wappi” (impala).

Although the stories are out of order, and edited down, the digest finishes presenting a whole year of the Tarzan Sunday strip, in 164 pages. That’s a bargain at half a dollar, and with the pristine artwork of Russ Manning and stories faithful to the canonical Tarzan, TARZAN DIGEST is unquestionably a Jungle Gem.

I bought this digest when it came out and was disappointed that the only Kubert art was the cover. I really liked Kubert's Tarzan, and the Manning strip was just too different.

Can't help but think the dinosaur story would have been so much better in Manning's hands.

I’ve already covered Judy of the Jungle, who had a stint as the cover feature for the Better/Nedor/Standard/Pines EXCITING COMICS, and I thought I would finish off that many-named publisher’s contributions to the jungle comics genre with a look at the relevant backup features that ran in their line.

Their earliest jungle comics backup, Biff Powers, ran in STARTLING COMICS #2 (August 1940) and #4-17 (October 1942). Our sample Biff Powers story comes from STARTLING COMICS #5, February 1941. The GCD tentatively attributes pencils and inks to August Froehlich. Biff, as the logo informs us, is a Big Game Hunter. (Things have really changed since the days when big game hunters were widely viewed as admirable and entertaining characters…and since the days when “Biff” was a curiously popular name, in popular American fiction, anyway!)

In this story, Biff’s boss, Mr. Carson of the Carson Circus, alerts Biff that Arctic explorer Bob Andrews has been confined to an asylum, ranting about a “geologic land that time forgot.” Biff visits the man and gets the coordinates of his discovery. A guard leaks the information to Benson of the Transamerican Circus, one of Carson’s competitors, who hires “crooked Arctic guide” (I can’t imagine what that reputation entails!) Hank Crosby to sign on as an aid to Biff’s expedition, with some undisclosed but surely nefarious instructions.

Biff and his fiancée Marcia hire on Crosby, indeed, but find that he abandons the expedition on the first night. The trail shows that he was picked up by a plane—something underhanded is underfoot! In fact, Crosby has sabotaged Biff’s plane, and repairs put Biff and Marcia way behind Crosby in reaching Bob Andrews’ discovery:



This is one heck of a geological anomaly for sure: the place has living dinosaurs, Black humans living like stereotypical jungle natives, and Asian tigers! The natives capture Biff and Marcia, thinking that they are companions to the other expedition, which has been killing villagers. Biff gains their trust by saving one of their captors from a tiger, and the explorers are released to continue their safari.

Next Biff encounters, fights, and captures a…well, “new species”, but is interrupted by Crosby, who intends to take Biff’s find:


Crosby ties Biff and Marcia up next to a slaughtered pig, which will draw the strange beast’s bloodthirsty tribe to them, but they are rescued by the grateful natives. The text reveals that there has been a colorist’s error: these are supposed to be “white savages”, despite being drawn with lips, noses and hair more suggestive of Africans:



Biff and the natives rout the Transamerican crew, and head home with their live capture, the bizarre beast, caged up in the back.

We’ve seen a few other big game hunter leads, but Biff, at least, seems to have a good gimmick that (based on a quick skim) applied in several of his handful of appearances: he hunted weird animals on behalf of a circus. In modern times, both big game hunting and circuses have gone out of favor with a public more conscious of preserving and protecting wildlife, but even in the 1940’s. This was not so in the 1940’s, but even then the story potential of hunting rhinos, elephants, etc., would seem to have more limited appeal than hunting enormous spiders, huge apes, giants, and sabretooth tigers, as Biff did.

Zudo the Jungle Boy appeared in COMPLETE BOOK OF COMICS AND FUNNIES (with an origin and second story in this August 1944 anthology), AMERICA’S BIGGEST COMICS BOOK #1, MYSTERY COMICS #1-4 (concluding in December 1944).

One of Zudo’s two cover appearances was on AMERICA’S BIGGEST COMICS BOOK, a whopping 196 page anthology of random, minor features from various Pines/Nedor/Better comic books. Zudo’s origin had established that he was another white boy orphaned in the jungle, an immature Tarzan clone. He doesn’t appear to be capable of talking directly to the animals of the jungle, but he has trained them to follow his commands, as implied by the splash showing him and his companion Lao the lion riding on an elephant.



The story, penciled by Ken Battefiled, has Zudo trying to stop Sven Larson, who is supporting an expedition to capture animals for a zoo, from “combining pleasure with business” by wantonly killing jungle creatures, not just capturing them. He makes himself a target for capture—a “white savage” would be a “prize for our expedition!”—but he proves himself capable of fighting off several muscular natives, then calls his lion Lao in as backup.

This results in Lao being captured, and Zudo falling from a vine, where he lies unconscious among threatening hyenas. Jolla the elephant comes to his rescue. Meanwhile, the expedition finds itself fleeing a jungle fire, and Larson refuses to release the helpless captured animals, running cowardly to the river.

The massive Jolla crushes the cages, freeing Lao and the other beasts to escape while Jolla tramples out the rest of the fire. The assemblage stampedes to the river, where a terrified Larson fires upon them, fearing their vengeance. But then Zudo and his animal friends must fight off attacking boars while the natives dig a firewall to protect them from the advancing flames.



In the end, Larson attempts to shoot Zudo, and is stopped by Lao. Larson is taken to the commissioner’s outpost for punishment, and Zudo and Lao depart: “The white man’s laws are just! Zudo and Lao must go now! Farewell!”

This feature has lots of wildlife, but the jungle boy premise is weak and completely derivative. I don’t see anything special here at all; it’s competent enough but still, it’s filler. Artist Ken Battefield’s refusal to use straight borders between panels adds some visual interest, but I find it gets tiring.

Kara the Jungle Princess was next, chronologically, appearing in EXCITING COMICS #39 through #49 (July 1946), then unexpectedly returning for a single appearance in FIGHTING YANK #21 (August 1947).

Let’s look at Kara’s debut in EXCITING COMICS #39 (drawn by Al Camy), and learn her origin…

Lt. Jane “Jinx” Howell and her fiancé Maj. “Kit” Kendall are serving at a military outpost in wartime New Guinea, where Jane is dispensing medicine as a nurse. She and Kit are called to duty in Brisbane, but before they leave the village of Orokani, they visit Baldayo the local witch doctor. Kit’s dubious of Baldayo’s tales of the Lake of Lost Wonders, but Jane loves hearing the stories. Baldayo gifts her with “the last great magic of the Arohitans”, a strange powder, which supposedly protects those who consume it from harm.

Soon, a careless gunshot from a rambunctious soldier celebrating the troops’ coming departure from the island proves that Jane is now indeed invulnerable! Before they leave, Baldayo asks them to grant one wish, that he can accompany them and get a glimpse of Arohiti and the Lake of Lost Wonders from the plane. Jane and Kit sneak him onboard as a stowaway in the tail of the plane (although I doubt there’s much of a view from there!).

Mist covering the mountains causes the plane to collide with a rocky peak. Jane forces Baldayo to use her parachute, and he gives her another dose of powder. On the ground, Kit realizes that Jane didn’t parachute to safety, and he rushes to the crashed plane in hopes of finding her.

From a distance, he sees that Jan is unharmed, even in the burning wreckage, and then sees her plunge into the waters when the rock wall collapses. She, surprisingly, survives, and she and Kit see the capital of the Arohitans rise from the waters!




The Arohitans, happy to be freed, attack the “demons” Kit and Jane, who know their language, having learned it from Baldayo. When Jane proves invulnerable to their spears, the Arohitans acknowledge her as Kara, their legendary princess. Realizing that they may be trapped there for years, she adopts the role of Kara, and she introduces Kit as the great warrior who will now lead them.


It’s a familiar premise, sure, and in this installment it’s not exactly jungle comics but the closely related primitive fantasy kingdom stuff. The premise is watered down by the last panel:



A skim through the rest of the Kara stories confirms that while Kara gets in on some of the action, it’s Major Kit who handles most of the physical stuff. Kara is a figurehead and a damsel in distress, for the most part, but overall, the short run looks like a fun read, although it borrows liberally from Burroughs (i.e., a tribe of tiny “Ant Men”) and Flash Gordon (a race of winged bird men, the Ming-like recurring villain Targala). I hope to have the chance to go back and read the full run of the feature some time.


Princess Pantha was featured in THRILLING COMICS #56, October 1946, through #74 (October 1949). She also starred in the two-page text stories in issues 66-70 and 72-74. A virtual archive edition of all of these can be read here.

Our sample is from issue 70, February 1949, during a stretch between #58 and #71 when Pantha was cover featured with gorgeous Alex Schomburg work:



The GCD credits Art Saaf for pencils and inks on this issue’s Pantha comics story, “Mountains of Doom!”, but it notes a dissenting opinion that it is the work of Gene Fawcette. The splash caption catches us up a little bit on the character: Princess Pantha is a world-famous animal trainer, accompanied by her friend, writer Dane Hunter. We are promised that they will “follow a trail of evil that leads them to a forbidden doorway to the past…”

Pantha and Dan are seeking the supposedly extinct aepyornis in the Owen Stanely Mountains of New Guinea. They rescue an old man from giant rats, and the man introduces himself as Richard Brayton. He is in search of his son Dr. Bruce Brayton, a facial surgeon who was lost on a flight over New Guinea. Brayton blamed himself for a death in the operating room, and had taken up flying. The plane crashed in the same area as the aepyornis are supposed to be, so the trio team up.

Dane is captured in a rope trap, and PP has to fight off black panthers to save him:



That night, as they rest, having found evidence that Bruce may still live, a knife-wielding man approaches, intending to kill the old man, but some instinct stays his hand: “I…I…I cannot kill this old man! Something is holding me back! But I must…or else the doctor will…”

Pantha wakes and tackles the assailant, but he escapes into the night. The next morning, the trio are halted by a pair of men, one of whom Brayton recognizes as his son—and Pantha recognizes as the night marauder!

The marauder does not recognize Brayton, and declares that all of them must die. His companion is Dr. Matsuo Inuki, a Japanese war criminal and famous surgeon, who experimented on natives during the war. He found Bruce Brayton wandering in the Owen Stanley Mountains with amnesia. Bruce was babbling about crimes in America, and the two intend to operate on each other’s faces to escape justice. (Maybe whoever operates on the man identifying as Matsuo has undo him from a racist caricature with buck teeth and lemon yellow skin!)

Matsuo plans to have his captives kicked to death by two giant birds he found—the aepyorni! When one kicks Bruce by accident, he recovers his memory:



Bruce shooks Matsuo before he can kill his father, Pantha figures out how to frighten the birds off with fire, and father and son are reunited to travel home, while Pantha plans to resume her hunt for the escaped birds.

A good story, aside from the racist depiction. If that was Art Saaf, he was a much more interesting artist back then than in the 70’s, when I knew his work from LOIS LANE and SUPERGIRL. I find it reminiscent of Frank Frazetta and Al Williamson, it’s very well suited to this material.

The text story is “The Fisher Folk”, and it also features Princess Pantha. Pantha helps the men of the Mobangi village to return to the ways of their ancestors to replace their lost fishing spears, and then makes nets using her own and the village women’s hair!



Since all of these are rather short run backup features, I won’t rank the comics as Jungle Gems or Jungle Junk, but I have seen enough to make me want to read the Biff Powers, Kara the Jungle Princess, and Princess Pantha features in their entirety. Sorry, Zudo, I think I’ve done you enough of a favor by being one of probably less than a hundred people alive today who’ve read even one of your adventures.