Holy Lothar, @MWGallaher !

Next you’ll tell me that there was a comic called Jungle Girl that evolved into A Jungle....A Girl....Romance!

It's way down the list, but here's a preview:



As for B'Wana Beast, thanks for reminding me!

SHOWCASE #67, April 1967, DC Comics



Featuring B’Wana Beast in “Track of the Immortal One”
Written by Bob Haney, art by Mike Sekowsky and George Roussos

This was B’wana Beast’s second appearance, but an illustrated text page gives us a recap on the character’s origin:



Notice that the explanation of his powers is a bit vague: he “can control the animals”. They don’t just mean the usual “command the animals” we’ve seen every jungle hero since Tarzan doing, although Mike (B’wana Beast) Maxwell can indeed do that, thanks to his magic helmet. He’s pumped up enough to go blow-to-blow with a gorilla, as if he “had become part animal, with animal strength, cunning, and reflexes.” B’wana Beast’s main super power, granted by the “strange minerals and an ancient helmet” is quite a bit more unique: he can cause any two jungle animals to merge into a single hybrid creature under his command. I suspect the creative team was already feeling a little bit embarrassed about this bizarre capability, hence the soft-pedalling here.

The story picks up on a cliffhanger from the previous issue, with B’wana riding a green hybrid rhino/water buffalo beast of his own creation against a mechanical dinosaur under the control of He Who Never Dies, Hamid Ali, the Immortal One, whose skull-like visage can be seen on the cover.

Overhead, Mike’s friend Rupert Kenboya is in a chopper, stopping his fellow military man from grenading Mike and the Immortal One. Seems Rupert is assigned to bring in the presumed criminal B’wana Beast, who he knows to secretly be his good buddy, so he has to put up a good show of trying to apprehend B’wana without actually hurting him. Rupert’s grenadier speaks some embarrassingly primitive dialog, like referring to the helicopter as the “iron bird”.
As the battle continues, the scene cuts to the elephant Tembo, who, under B’wana’s command, is toting a truck-bed of copper ore through the jungle. He passes through a river filled with crocodiles, pressing on despite their bites! His master has ordered him to deliver the ore so that the Zambesi people can fulfill their contract:



With B’wana getting the upper hand, the Immortal One bails under a cloud of smoke emitted from his robotic monster. From the air, Rupert descends, ostensibly to capture B’wana, but actually intending to dispel the smokescreen, to allow B’wana to get away before he’s asphyxiated.

B’wana Beast commands a buzzard to track his enemies, and it leads him to a spot where the river vanishes into a cavern. Still riding his hybrid behemoth, B’wana enters the cave in pursuit, leading to another confrontation and a tumble over an underground waterfall!

Haney launches into his standard Part 2 on page 10, which sees B’wana use his powers to separate the rhino and buffalo so that all three of them have a better chance of surviving the falls. The animals skedaddle, but B’wana is stunned, an easy target for the Immortal One!

Not so fast, Hamid Ali! B’wana’s powers work even when he’s unconscious, and a swarm of vampire bats (in Africa?) comes to block the jungle hero from harm and bring him to shore.
As B’wana comes to, he realizes his powers are fading, so he sends a mental signal to the gorilla Djuba, who guards the magic potion up on Mount Kilimanjaro. Unbelievably quickly, Djuba makes his way to B’wana’s side, with a vial of potion tied around his neck:



The situation gets further complicated when Rupert’s father, the chief of the Zambesi tribe, sends his warriors after B’wana, thinking that he and the Immortal One are fighting over who will keep the tribe’s stolen copper. Rupert can’t convince the officials that B’wana is only trying to keep it from Hamid Ali, so he’s assigned, once again, to join in the hunt for his old buddy.

Next, Haney and Sekowsky bring in newspaperwoman Eve Carstairs, who wants to score the scoop on B’wana Beast’s true identity. And she has a pretty good lead on that scoop:



Heading into Part 3, B’wana’s next task is saving Tembo, the elephant, who has become caught in quicksand while he’s toting his load of copper. B’wana and Djuba mount up on some giraffes (!) to head to the rescue! As they approached the paralyzed pachyderm, they find Tembo under assault from their enemies, who see the precious copper as easy pickings:



All our featured characters converge now, with Rupert Kenboya falling from his chopper into the crocodile-infested waters around Tembo, Eve lurking with her camera in the trees nearby, the Zambesi warriors arriving in their canoes, and the Immortal One firing his big guns at everyone in sight!

As his iron crocodile-shaped ship is sunk, He Who Never Dies beats a retreat, and B’wana’s heroic intentions are demonstrated, leading to the tribe’s gratitude:



In a hasty wrap-up to set everything in place for an ongoing series, Eve confronts Mike about photographic evidence that proves he’s B’wana Beast, the evidence is destroyed by one of B’wana’s monkey friends, and Mike makes his moves to establish Eve as the obligatory love interest of the feature:



B’wana Beast, unlike most of the SHOWCASE tryout features, only got two issues, reportedly because Mike Sekowsky refused to do any more, but I suspect it was more of a team decision at DC that pulled the plug on this concept. After that, B’wana Beast was pretty much scrubbed from the DC Universe, not appearing again until the requisite cameos in CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. The character was later swapped out for a black African wearer of the helmet, going by the name of Freedom Beast, in ANIMAL MAN.

One might ask why this feature made it to print in the first place. While jungle comics weren’t exactly undergoing a renaissance in 1967, old jungle adventure movies were still routinely broadcast on TV, so it may have seemed a genre with some sales potential that was being overlooked, although Gold Key was still pumping out TARZAN and KORAK, maintaining what probably appeared to be a permanent lock on that license. As we’ve already seen, BOMBA would take over the jungle comic slot on DC’s schedule soon after this second and final installment of B’wana Beast.

I’m sure B’wana Beast was little-missed, if at all. I do admit to liking the character’s helmet; it’s a unique design with a striking silhouette. What passes otherwise for a costume does a fair job of evoking “super-hero” at the same time as “jungle hero.” Superheroes were there right at the start of the jungle comics genre, with the White/Red Panther, who we met in the look at Fiction House’s JUNGLE COMICS #2, and his compatriot features Fantoma and Tabu. The explicit adoption of a superhero premise makes it easier to explain the jungle hero’s standard ability to communicate with animals, but that never seemed to be much of a concern to all the jungle features that employed the trope. I assume there was readership crossover in the 1940’s between superhero fans and jungle fans, but then again, maybe not: Fiction House was the leader of the tribe during that decade, and they phased out superheroes early on in their publishing history, so they may have been onto something. In the second big phase of jungle comics, the 1950’s, superheroes were out of fashion, so the jungle superhero never did manage to really catch on. B’wana Beast was certainly not the character that was going to change that.

I liked the Weird Tales vibe of Hamid Ali; I've always liked the idea of immortal villains, who have a much more convincing path to accumulating the kind of power and wealth and arcane wisdom than most. He wasn't what you could call a richly developed character, judging from this issue, but he had potential. As far as I can tell, no one has dug this guy up for any repeat appearances in the decades of DC comics published since. That's a shame...I could see him fraternizing with Vandal Savage and General Immortus on the periphery of a story somewhere.

Jungle Gem? Absolutely not. Jungle Junk? Arguably, but it’s at least up to the usual competency of Haney and Sekowsky, and has an undeniable charm for those who, like me, appreciate the oddball experiments, half-baked ideas, and goofy concepts that litter the 1960’s comics scene. And there was a lot packed into these 24 pages, perhaps too much! If B’wana’s tryout was initially anticipated to be the standard three issues of SHOWCASE, maybe Haney had to pack more than he’d planned into this one, resulting in a rather unsatisfying rushed sense of story-telling. It didn’t give B’wana Beast a fair chance, if you ask me!

Sekowsky’s art could make you think it was actually drawn by Alex Toth, as in that final panel.

TOM-TOM THE JUNGLE BOY #2, 1947, Magazine Enterprises



TOM-TOM is, as should be apparent from the cover, one of the rare breed of jungle humor comics, and its creators appear to remain unidentified by the GCD or any other sources I can locate. The illustration is journeyman level work; I’ve seen far worse cartooning hit the stand, but this is generic, dashed-out work that employs all of the conventional cartooning shortcuts it can, skimps on visual detail, and is inked with a tracer’s mentality.

Its inside front cover features a “Pic-Puzzle Page”, with a combination of puzzles and activities that are either two simple or too complicated—I know I would never bother with anything that asked me to cut something out and paste it on cardboard:



The first story begins with Tom-Tom and his monkey companion, Itchi, using a flexible tree trunk to assist in sawing logs. As an engineer, I’ve got to admit that’s a pretty clever idea, assuming you can whip up a double-handled saw and sawhorse somewhere in the jungle!



I refer to Itchi as Tom-Tom’s “companion”, not pet, because Itchi, like the rest of the jungle animals, is fully anthropomorphic. Tom-Tom does show a greater innate intelligence, and is unquestioned as the leader who directs Itchi and “Tree-Trunk” the elephant in assisting with his project. Tree-Trunk, to his own disappointment, doesn’t get to enjoy the fruits of his labor:



When Tom-Tom and Itchi are threatened by alligators, they turn to the pachyderm for aid, and reward him by building a new, larger raft off-panel, one that Tree-Trunk can not only ride along on but propel with the waving of his trunk!

And, uh, that’s the end. I haven’t read this kind of comic in a long while, so I was expecting the trio to go on downriver to have an adventure together, but it’s a four page trifle to set up a mild visual gag in the final panel.
Next up is a “fish story”, that has Tom-Tom’s catch of river fish pounced upon by “Slicky the Seal”, who shows them all up with his seal-style antics in an attempt to procure the jungle boy’s fish. With his superior human cunning, though, Tom-Tom is able to catch Slicky in a bag… but he’s not called “Slicky” for nothing:



With Tree-Trunk’s assistance (again!), Tom-Tom and Itchi create a cage with which they trap Slicky and send him downriver, with the relieving reassurance that the cages is secured by glue, which will melt, freeing the pest many miles downstream, giving them time to enjoy a fish dinner.

There’s no hint to be seen as to where on earth this jungle setting is supposed to be, but in a children’s fantasy, one needn’t argue the unlikelihood of seals in the neighborhood.
The next story has an actual title, “King of the Jungle!” The title is awarded Tom-Tom by his animal friends, for his “loyalty and kindness to all the animals of the jungle”. The coronation party is disrupted by the howls of Goon-O the Gorilla, which send the celebrants fleeing for safety…but they lose Itchi somewhere in their flight!

Goon-O takes Tom-Tom’s crown and forces the jungle beasts to bow down to him, but the daring Tom-Tom swings from a vine and steals back the crown. The superior human manages to retrieve his crown and closes the story with a lame sight gag:



Well, this is proving to be a weak excuse for a humor comic. The details don’t really merit much of a critique, since it’s not supposed to deliver anything but throwaway chuckle fuel, but there does seem to be a bit of a theme with Tom-Tom demonstrating innate superiority, even while the animals appear to be as intelligent as he is.

In the next story, Tom-Tom is delivering mail atop his “friend” Tree-Trunk. They find a message in a bottle, for which Tom-Tom shifts to “Jungle Airmail”, riding on a flamingo, but the…umm…hyena?... tries to steal the mail. Tom-Tom foils him by baiting him with a mouse-trap in a satchel:



The only thing of interest to note is that the hyena, or whatever he is, is wearing clothes, unlike the other jungle animals. I don’t think they put much thought into this series.

Next is “Fixit the Fox”, where Tom-Tom and friends are pestered by a fox while they try to make clay models. The fox is eventually rolled up in clay and entombed in a cave, with the reassurance that there is another exit…somewhere…



It’s interesting that the creators are aware enough of the cruel fates they are depicting that they make a point of clarifying that these acts—sending a seal in a cage down the river, blockading a fox in a cave—are not really death traps. Even so, these finishes would have bothered me as a young reader; I was extremely disturbed by the closing credits of The Jetsons and The Flintstones, so this would have really bothered me!

Next up is a tale rendered in a narrated children’s book format rather than comics with word balloons. “How the Snail Got Its Pace”:




Next, Tom-Tom is running a jungle sight-seeing service, executed from Tree-Trunk’s back. The tourists run into our old pal Goon-O, who is evidently a killer:




When Goon-O robs Tom-Tom’s customers—who are all monkeys wearing clothes, probably because some of them are female, so clothing was necessary to establish gender differences—they insist that he recover the stolen goods within 24 hours. Tom-Tom tricks Goon-O by escorting a new batch of “tourists” that are actually dummies filled with bees and molasses:



There’s one more short Tom-Tom story to go, and it finds the jungle animals dealing with a dried-up water hole. They find a substitute, but it’s guarded by a jealous alligator:



The gator eventually gets his comeuppance in the form of a rain of crabs.

So, not great stuff here. The stories are trivial, the art pedestrian, the humor weak. Magazine Enterprises managed to get three issues of this tripe out, and a decade later, they tried again, reprinting two issues under the title TOM-TOM AND ITCHI THE MONK. Has anyone, anywhere, really referred to monkeys as “monks”? Alas, this is unquestionably Jungle Junk. A more talented creative team might have been able to craft a creditable jungle comic in the animated humor style, but this wasn't that creative team. Humor comics always look easier than they really are, but cartoony does not equal funny. Young readers may not be particularly critical, but I can't imagine anyone who bought this getting a genuine laugh out of it.

While I wish I had some promising jungle humor comics left to try, it doesn't look like there are any contenders out there. There's Disney's JUNGLE BOOK and some spin-offs, from Gold Key, but not much else. 

Melvin definitely deserves a nod, being MAD's first parody of a specific character from popular fiction, and one of only two three* from its original four-color run to earn a sequel! I think that's one of the few I-Five issues I don't remember reading, if I ever did.

I have dug up a pair of one-shots that are primarily in the jungle humor genre, which I'll be addressing in a single post (since they are related to each other) sometime soon.

* Melvin, the Lone Stranger, and Dragged Net

Yes. In the early 20th century it was common enough to be in the title of a couple of newspaper comic strips, both by Gus Mager - "Knocko the Monk", followed by the monkey detective "Sherlocko the Monk". All the monkey characters had names that ended with "o", and this was briefly a fad. Four brothers who performed in vaudeville got nicknames during the fad; one of them was named after a character in the Knocko comic strip - "Groucho".

Arthur Conan Doyle threatened to sue over the "Sherlocko the Monk" strip, so Mager humanized the characters and re-titled the strip "Hawkshaw the Detective". It ran off-and-on until 1952.