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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 28, 2023 12:30:32 GMT -5
RIMA THE JUNGLE GIRL #6, Feb-Mar 1975, DC Comics  "Safari of Death" is credited to Bob Kanigher, writer, and Nestor Redondo, artist. Abel, a jungle guide operating in the Amazon and the primary supporting cast member of this comic, is being pestered by some unsavory clients who want to be led to the fabled white jaguar, as well as to the legendary Rima, beautiful jungle girl and friend to the beast. Abel lies, telling them that both are myths, promising only to lead them to Ytaioa Mountain, as contracted. Abel’s deception is exposed when Rima dashes past them with the white jaguar and his mate. The group opens fire, but Rima and the cats escape to a well-hidden cave, where she leaves the jaguars to rest “before your ordeal”. Rima returns to Abel, thinking he may be in danger.  He is indeed—his clients have not taken kindly to being misled about Rima and the jaguar, and Abel is beaten and bound until he is willing to spill the beans. Rima’s on her way, though, trotting fearlessly across a bridge of floating alligators!  She finds and releases Abel, not realizing she is in the crosshairs of the evil hunters who are lying in wait in the jungle. A rifle shot fells Rima, and the weakened Abel falls alongside her. Rima’s shoulder injury is nonlethal, but she’s at the group’s mercy, and they threaten to kill her and Abel unless she leads them to the white jaguar. She and Abel still resists, so the gang’s leader, Trask, threatens to burn the forest down. This is enough to convince Abel to give in, but not Rima, who trills a strange song which, unbeknownst to the hunters, is summoning jungle beasts to her aid. Just as Trask is about to resort to some more direct forms of physical coercion—“I’ll make her squeal, all right!”—the white jaguar arrives and attacks him. The men shoot the jaguar, but it lives long enough to kill them all.  Rima leads Abel back to the cave, where they learn that the jaguar’s mate has given birth to a new albino, ensuring that the legendary white jaguar will endure. The back-up feature is “Devil’s Doctor”, presented under the banner “Jungle Justice”. “Jungle Justice” was not an ongoing feature in RIMA, though. The first issues had featured a science fiction serial called Space Voyagers written by Kanigher, drawn by Alex Nino, and the final issue, #7, featured the debut of what is probably DC’s least known Bronze Age feature, a Western-influenced science fiction series called Space Marshal, featuring Linc Wade, whose origin story was the only appearance. That story concluded with the encouragement to “follow the startling adventures of Linc Wade, Space Marshal…”, but the cancellation of RIMA meant no such adventures would follow. I don't quite follow why an SF strip seemed like a good choice for backups in this series, but I know some fans have fond memories of Space Voyagers, a trippy little strip indeed. “Devil’s Doctor”, by Bob Kanigher and artist Ric Estrada, is quite likely something that was prepared for the inventory of WEIRD WAR TALES, with “Jungle Justice” plastered over the usual WWT introductory caption where the skull-faced soldier/host usually made initial comments on the story to come.  The story follows Dr. Adoph Kessel, a medical experimenter at a Nazi concentration camp during WWII, who picks child prisoners to take to the sinister Block 9. No one returns from Block 9, where Kessel experiments with shrinking humans.  Kessel’s a famed plastic surgeon as well as a mad scientist, and he’s flown to the African front to aid disfigured and disabled German soldiers. His plane is shot down, but he survives and is taken by Pygmies. He sees an opportunity to continue his experiments; after all, the Pygmies are already partway shrunk! Turns out the Pygmies have already perfected the art of shrinking humans themselves:  It doesn't exactly coalesce, but I find myself appreciating Ric Estrada's art a lot more now than I did as a teenager. There are some nicely moody panels in this one. RIMA is quite an odd little series, introduced under the editorship of Joe Kubert one year after DC took over publishing Tarzan. It seems to have filled in the gap left when KORAK, SON OF TARZAN went on hiatus. KORAK returned to the schedule in May/Jun 1975, the month after RIMA was cancelled as of her 7th issue. Like Tarzan, RIMA was a literary adaptation, based on William Henry Hudson’s novel Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (1904). That, however, was never explicitly acknowledged in the comic’s credits or letters pages. It’s unlikely that many comics readers of the time were aware of the novel, unless they had caught an airing of the 1959 film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn, or the CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED issue illustrated by Alex Blum.  The novel, which I’ve only experienced in abridged audio book, is not a typical pulpy jungle adventure, but a more literary and evocative tale, heavy on descriptions of nature and light on action—not the usual reading material of a typical 1970’s comics fan. While the story in this issue is rather slight, it’s not without its charms, owing not just to Nestor Redondo’s lush rendering and Rima’s undeniable sex appeal, at least to those readers who, like me, were very attracted to a conventionally ideal female form. Kanigher peppers his story with a bit of jungle action and seedy implications of impending sexual assault, but RIMA has an atmosphere unlike any of the other jungle comics I’ve read. Rima is hinted to be almost supernatural, and her kinship with the jungle wildlife is not exactly the typical master/servant relationship, where the jungle hero commands the beasts and communicates with them directly. It’s more like she is one of them, a natural denizen of the jungle ecosphere bridging the wildlife and intelligent humanity. Returning to Redondo, while he—with, possibly, his Filipino studio of assistants—delivered some gorgeous work, it looks to me like Joe Kubert was supplying detailed layouts from which they worked. The pages are filled with hallmarks of Kubert’s compositional style, such as inset panels, and camera angles and poses and expressions common in Kubert’s credited work. This isn’t the only comic in which I see strong evidence that Kubert’s vision was behind far more comics in the 70’s than those that bore his direct byline; RAGMAN and UNKNOWN SOLDIER are other examples. I’m only modestly talented with the pencil, but I think I could have delivered professional quality work if I had Joe Kubert’s layouts to work from, but Redondo’s finishes were unquestionably gorgeous throughout Rima’s brief run. So yes, RIMA THE JUNGLE GIRL is a definite Jungle Gem. Her series was gone too soon, and the character has been little seen since. She made a few appearances on television’s Super Friends cartoon, and was featured in DC’s pulp-inspired FIRST WAVE series of 2010, which featured the team of Doc Savage, Batman The Bat Man, and The Spirit meeting characters like Rima, the Avenger, and the Blackhawks. It even resurrected Rima’s 70’s vintage logo on one cover:  |
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Post by codystarbuck on Jan 30, 2023 22:30:12 GMT -5
Here's some Rima footage, from The All-New Super Friends Hour....
Rima turns up in more active role in Kim Newman's Angels of Music (with her segmented first debuted in Tales of the Shadowmen Vol 4: Lords of Terror), as one of several "angels" teams, who work for an unseen boss. Newman took the concept of Charlie's Angels and turned them into literary characters. In the first story, the Angels are Christine Daae (of Phantom of the Opera), trilby O' Ferrall (of the novel Trilby, which introduced the character Svengali) and Irene Adler (of the Sherlock Holmes story, "A Scandal in Bohemia."), with Charlie being portrayed by Erik, the Phantom of the Opera (who speaks to them via voice tubes, inside the Paris Opera House, with the Persian acting as Bosley). The second group consisted of Eliza Doolittle, Gigi, and Rima, as they infiltrate a casino, created and owned by Charles Foster Kane, and seek to destroy it. The surveillance system in the casino was created by Dr Mabuse (of the German film series, begin by Fritz Lang) and Kane also owns a group of restaurants that serve beef patties, with a golden K symbol to identify them. The novel adds further agents and sets one adventure around the Grand Guignol theater, notorious for it's bloody and sensationalistic productions.
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Post by MWGallaher on Jan 31, 2023 8:29:14 GMT -5
That sounds pretty cool, codystarbuck ! I've never heard of Newman, but I usually get a kick out of stories that team up characters from popular literature like that, so Newman's going on my to-read list. Thanks! |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jan 31, 2023 9:52:22 GMT -5
That sounds pretty cool, codystarbuck ! I've never heard of Newman, but I usually get a kick out of stories that team up characters from popular literature like that, so Newman's going on my to-read list. Thanks! Interesting... is that related to the Anno Dracula series? Seems like it could be...but doesn't really say so. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Jan 31, 2023 12:39:30 GMT -5
That sounds pretty cool, codystarbuck ! I've never heard of Newman, but I usually get a kick out of stories that team up characters from popular literature like that, so Newman's going on my to-read list. Thanks! Interesting... is that related to the Anno Dracula series? Seems like it could be...but doesn't really say so. Not directly, but certainly stylistically. For those unfamiliar, Kim Newman is a British author and film critic, who writes shorts stories and novels, plus magazine pieces, generally about genre films, for British magazines, like Total Film. He is a close friend of Neil Gaiman and they kind of broke into professional writing together (though Newman made professional sales first). His Anno Dracula stories center around Dracula, with the conceit that he survived the end of Bram Stoker's novel and becomes Prince Consort to Queen Victoria. A vampire regime controls the government, led by Lord Ruthven, another vampire of Victorian literature. Jack the Ripper is killing vampire prostitutes in Whitechapel and the Diogenes Club, chaired by Mycroft Holmes, dispatches agent Charles Beauregard to investigate. he meets a vampire doctor, Genvieve Dieudonne, who gives him great insight and aid. The series then advances to World War I, for The Bloody red Baron, where Dracula is aiding the Kaiser and developing mutant vampires, who transform into giant bats and attack Allied aircraft. The third, Dracula Cha-Cha-Cha, is set in Italy, in the late 50s, as a pardoned Dracula is about to marry a Balkan princess, in the world of La Dolce Vita. The fourth, Johnny Alucard, is set in 1970s and 80s New York and Los Angeles, as a vampire becomes a major figure in the film & entertainment world, is a quest to revive Dracula. In all of these, Newman throws in other characters from literature, film and television, some as direct actors, some as easter eggs. For instance, in The Bloody Red Baron, the German ace is harassed, while out hunting, by a beagle, who keeps trying to attack him! In Dracula Cha-Cha-Cha, there is an American, named Clark Kent, who is starring in a series of Hercules films (Superman was played by George Reeves, in the 50s and Hercules by Steve Reeves) and a Scottish vampire secret agent, working for the British government, named Hamish Bond (Hamish is Scottish Gaelic for James). Newman also has his Diogenes Club stories, where the various agents investigate weird happenings, in different periods of the 20th Century. These were kind of a spin-off of Anno Dracula, but in a kind of parallel world. One of the main characters is a late 60s/1970s agent, Richard Jeperson, who is a mix of the Jon Pertwee-era Dr Who and Peter Wyngarde, as Jason King. He has an assistant, named Vanessa, who is an Emma Peel pastiche. There is also Edwin Wintrop and catriona Kay, in the post-WW1 environment, who are very Nick and Nora Charles. These stories mix influences like The Avengers (Brit tv version), Jason King, Adam Adamant, Doctor Who, etc, with weird communities, strange phenomena, monsters and such. The Angels of Music were created for Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier's Tales of the Shadowmen pulp anthology series, where writers create new stories, using characters from French pulp literature (and other sources). Newman expanded it into a novel, after writing two stories for Tales of the Shadowmen. He also created a character, known as Kentish Glory, for the Diogenes Club books, then wrote a backstory for her, in one of those volumes, set at a girls' school. He expanded that into the novel The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, where the school features a remarkable group of students, who will go on to have extraordinary lives, in various fields, including crime fighting and crime, itself. He also di a Holmes pastiche, using Dr Moriarty and Col Sebastian Moran as a sort of opposite to Holmes, as consulting criminals, in The Hound of the D'Urbevilles. Newman also writes horror works, including The Quorum, Jago, and An English Ghost Story; plus, an adult choose-your-own adventure, called Life's Lottery. Quite frankly, I think he is a better writer than Gaiman, though Gaiman is more stylistic in his use of language. Newman is better at plot and character and probably a bit more acessible, for the average reader, with genre interests. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Feb 3, 2023 17:04:52 GMT -5
JUNGLE GIRL #1 (1942) and NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL # ?? (Fawcett) In 1941, Republic Pictures released the serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel, as well as Jungle Girl, nominally adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs short story “The Land of Hidden Men” into a serial featuring Nyoka Meredith, a newly created character not created by Burroughs. In 1942, Republic released a sort of sequel, The Perils of Nyoka, featuring a similar character in Nyoka Gordon, played by a different actress, with no attributions or credit to Burroughs. Fawcett abridged its 15 chapters into a one-shot called JUNGLE GIRL, taking the title of the first serial as the name of its adaptation of the second (although still prominently displaying the title of the then-current serial on the cover and as the subtitle of the interior story, connecting with comics browsers no matter which of the serial titles they may have recognized). You can watch the first chapter of the serial at:  You can read this comic at comicbookplus According to the GCD, the art on the cover and interior is attributed to Harry Anderson JUNGLE GIRL #1 has a table of contents pages featuring six chapter titles for its “main feature”, none of which correspond directly to the titles of any of the fifteen serial chapters. Like the serial, this issue tells of Nyoka’s fight against the strange desert queen Vultura, who is aided by her pet gorilla, Satan. Nyoka is the daughter of the late Professor Gordon, and as the only person capable of translating the newly-discovered Tablets of Hippocrates, she is the target of considerable attention and finds herself in many perilous situations. Interestingly, the comic invents many of its own cliffhangers to end the chapters, rather than sticking to those from the serial (although it does adopt a few of those within the chapters). Since serials weren’t released on the same schedule nationwide, this would have prevented too much spoilage for kids whose newsstand got the comic before their theater rolled the film.  Nyoka is a fairly capable character in both the comic and the serial, demonstrating intelligence and skill in battle, although it looks to me like she’s a little more reliant on her male friend Larry in this comic than in the portions of the serial that I sampled. And unlike the typical jungle girls, she’s well-rooted in the civilized world, not living a primitive life in leopard skins among the apes.  This, though, highlights a bit of a problem with this comic: while it’s called JUNGLE GIRL, the action takes place primarily in the African desert, not the jungle. It’s a lot of fun, and benefits from being based on one of the best of the Republic serials, but it’s not a jungle comic! (Aside from the inset photo of ‘Kay Aldridge as “Nyoka” in the Republic Serial’ on the cover of JUNGLE GIRL #1, there is no further acknowledgment of Republic in this or in the following issues, with Fawcett claiming the copyright in the indicia. I have no idea what the legal arrangements were, if Republic retained any interest in the property, or if they sold it outright to Fawcett, or if Fawcett just co-opted the property and got away with it because Republic either didn’t know or didn’t care, but several other jungle comics of the era also adapted properties from TV and film without the published legalese we’ve come to expect in more recent years.) Following that “main feature”, we get to the two “shorts” promised at the start. “The Three Legionnaires” is a two-page text story credited to Nathaniel Nitkin. The name may sound like a pseudonym, but I’ve found a lot of credits for Nitkin in various magazines and newspapers in the 40’s, and I’ve found the name in the Social Security Death Index for a man who would have been around 30 years old when this was published, so it’s likely Nitkin was the real name of a writer who was availing himself of many opportunities, including several of the obligatory short text stories in the comics of the time. The story, as one would likely guess, features members of the French Foreign Legion and concerns Legionnaires convincing a Tuareg queen in the Sahara to ally her people with the Axis against the Italians. It’s not a jungle story, so I’ll give it no more attention than that. Then comes “Willy Wynn”, a humor feature about a boy who invents a superglue and tries to sell it to the military. The demonstration is successful, but it’s easily removed by a lady’s nail polished. Not that it matters, because Willy has forgotten the formula anyway! In the final panel of the “main feature”, the reader was encouraged to write in if they “want to see more adventures of Nyoka, the jungle girl”. Evidently, few cards came in, because it would not be until 1945 that Fawcett returned to the character, picking up with issue 2 of the renamed NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL and running through to issue 77 in June 1953.  For contrast, I’m going to skip ahead to issue 75, January 1953 and see how the feature looked once it had a few years of development behind it.  You can read this one at comicbookplus, too! Nyoka ran photo covers for much of its run, and I don’t think that the cover model was Kay Aldridge, star of the second serial. The model portraying Nyoka is wearing a costume reminiscent of the one Aldridge wore on-screen, but with shorts that are quite a bit less baggy. I suppose in New York City it was easy enough to find models and photographers capable of staging jungle scenes, but I wonder if the majority were taken in one massive photo shoot or whether Fawcett went back periodically to get new ones. Issue 75 most likely wasn’t taken at the same time that most or all of the earlier ones were, because it debuts a new “costume” for the character, one with even skimpier shorts and showing more skin. And it looks to me to be a different model; here’s an earlier issue for comparison:  Did Fawcett commission a new photo cover to show off Nyoka’s new look, or did they run out of the original set and commission or purchase a new set, but no longer had access to the original costume, forcing a change that they then reflected inside? No man can say… The inside cover features a one page black and white humor strip featuring Egbert the Explorer. It’s a weird one with a final panel that intentionally undercuts the gag:  This issue has a 3-part story called “The Jungle Myth of Terror”, tentatively attributed (according to the GCD) to writer Rod Reed and artist Bert Whitman. It’s got the standard Fawcett look, with neat, clean panels and a light-hearted feel to the lettering:  In chapter 1, Nyoka’s accused of violating hunting restrictions, and she accuses rival hunt guide Mr. Degreey of setting her up with planted evidence of slaughter, in order to steal her business (yeah, I’d probably go for Nyoka, too, as my guide in Africa). Nyoka’s given 24 hours to prove her innocence. Her first clue comes with a visit from Pierre Pastel, an artist who’s hair has been shocked white when he saw and escaped from the mythical griffin, a giant beast with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Degreey finds out that Pierre and Nyoka are about to hunt a griffin, and plots to follow and kill them both. After an intervening non-jungle humor story about Ballyhoo Barney, chapter 2 continues with “The Monster’s Lair”. Degreey’s shot misses Nyoka, but scares away a threating tiger. Degreey sees an opportunity in his failure, planting his hot rifle in Pierre’s tent, putting suspicion on him:  Further events raise Nyoka’s suspicion even more, and Pierre offers to let Nyoka tie him up helpless while she investigates further. This seems like a bad idea, and of course, it is; the griffin appears and carries him off before Nyoka can return to save him:  By the end of the chapter, not only has the griffin gotten away with Pierre, a second griffin has picked up Nyoka’s station wagon, with her in it! Pause for a half-page humor strip, Trader Tom, and a fun quiz, then the text story, “Gate to Doom” by John Martin. An explorer escapes a long-dead Pharoah’s trap because over the centuries, the Nile’s rise had rusted the iron gates that were intended to capture intruders within the inescapable tomb. “The Valley of Death!” concludes the Nyoka adventure, as she rescues Pierre from the griffins’ lair, and then graciously saves the evil Degreey:   The issue closes with another humor feature, Colonel Corn and Korny Kobb in “The Job Seeker!” Maybe my standards have lowered after the dreck I’ve been exposed to in this project, but I’m declaring Nyoka a Jungle Gem. Fawcett’s appealing style and the element of the fantastic help this a lot, but I really liked the way the story continued the cliffhanger chapter endings. If this was a consistent element of the series, it would help the book to stand out over all. Time to skim a couple more issues… Yes, it looks like this was the standard approach, at least at this stage of the comic’s run: multi-chapter stories with cliffhanger endings leading into each new chapter, divided up with back-up material. That gives NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL a distinctive feel as a series, and I look forward to sampling a few more. But we’re not quite done with Nyoka, because Fawcett was about to go out of the comics business, and would sell the rights to Nyoka to Charlton Comics, who would carry on the series… |
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Post by codystarbuck on Feb 3, 2023 22:11:38 GMT -5
If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that Fawcett retained comic book rights to Nyoka, from their contract with Republic, just as Republic retained the rights for everything they created for Jungle Girl, including the Nyoka name, which Burroughs had never used. They may have been able to sell those rights to Charlton. Some of those licensing contracts, in those days, had weird components, compared to these days.
Point of trivia: In the serial, Larry Grayson is played by Clayton Moore, the Lone Ranger, himself. Jay Silverheels appeared in the earlier Jungle Girl serial. So, Nyoka has big Lone Ranger conenctions.
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Post by MWGallaher on Feb 4, 2023 0:18:02 GMT -5
Yeah, those licensing arrangements are a part of comics history that I don't think has been sufficiently documented, and at least for that era, probably never will be. I don't think the comics historians of today even know the details of fairly recent deals, like Marvel's arrangement with the Sax Rohmer estate, beyond what can be inferred from the evidence of publication, so we'll likely never know how Fox arranged for a Dorothy Lamour comic. And I assume some of those older contracts were tighter than others, so Fawcett may have had completely clear rights from the start to publish Nyoka comics as they saw fit. It had to have been pretty new legal territory with a lot of variability in different cases.
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Post by MWGallaher on Feb 4, 2023 23:54:11 GMT -5
NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL #22, November 1957, Charlton Comics Seven months after Fawcett finished their run of NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL, with issue 77 in June 1953, Fawcett shut down their comics line. Somehow, Charlton ended up with the rights to publish the property. They didn’t pick it up immediately, though; Charlton waited until November 1955 to bring Nyoka back to the stands, and rather than continuing Fawcett’s numbering with issue 78, Charlton instead renamed ZOO FUNNIES, a funny animal comic, into NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL, continuing ZOO FUNNIES’ numbering with Nyoka’s debut in issue 14. Charlton would have less success with the character than Fawcett had, and Nyoka only had nine issues before giving up the numbering to SPACE ADVENTURES #23. That series would be the birthplace of one of Charlton’s best known superheroes, Captain Atom. But that’s outside of this threads purview! Let’s see what Charlton did with Nyoka… Charlton’s initial offering won’t be a good one to sample, since it reprinted the “Jungle Myth” story I just reviewed in Fawcett’s NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL #75 under this nice-looking cover:  You might ask, “How can Charlton label this ‘New Action Packed Adventures’?” Well, it was sort of new, because Charlton implemented several revisions in order to satisfy the Comics Code Authority, whose stamp of approval was now plastered on the cover. Nyoka would now be dressed more modestly, and anything too potentially scary would be censored. Here are some comparisons:  Issues 15 and 16 also reprinted Fawcett Nyoka stories, edited to appease the CCA, so I’ll skip ahead to Charlton’s final issue, #22, November 1957.  You can read this comic at comicbookplus.com/?dlid=26401(Although the cover implies the title is JUNGLE GIRL NYOKA, the indicia calls it NYOKA THE JUNGLE GIRL.) “Rogue Bull” is illustrated by Charles Nicholas and Sal Trapani, possibly written by Joe Gill.  A rogue bull elephant is threatening the local African villages. Nyoka investigates and finds a raging beast wreaking havoc. She is about to shoot it, when she notices a thorn in its…um…she notices it’s suffering from a thorn…  Realizing that the pachyderm is no rogue, just a suffering animal, Nyoka’s goal is to save the animal before less considerate hunters take him down. Two such inconsiderate hunters are Clive Dobbs and Ronnie King, who covet the elephant’s tusks. Clive and Ronnie join in under the pretense of helping Nyoka, but at the first opportunity, they take aim with their rifles. The elephant charges them, and they cry to Nyoka to shoot, but she refrains. The elephant is protected by law, and not a rogue. The beast calms down and leaves Nyoka and the guys safe. With the help of the natives, Nyoka traps the “rogue bull” and pulls a huge thorn from its trunk. Oh, ok, now I can see it there on the final panel of page two! Anyway, the bull is calm, and Nyoka reminds Clive that it’s illegal to shoot the elephant, who now reveals his peaceful nature. “The Amazon Jungle” is a one pager presented under the banner of “The Jungle People”, possibly drawn by cover artist Maurice Whitman. The Amazon jungle is a dangerous place, with jaguars and boa constrictors. Nyoka stars in “The Plunderer”, also illustrated by Nicholas and Trapani. Nyoka is talking to a native who is panning for gold, which is funding a hospital for the Mbaga tribe. Nyoka and the tribe think the gold is securely stored, but they are robbed. Nyoka tries to trail the thief, but he has escaped in an automobile, and “even Nyoka could not track an automobile…” The thief is presumed to be the shady planter Olnig, a bald white brute of a man. Nyoka pays him a visit under the pretense of needing directions. Olnig explains that he’s more of a “promoter” than a planter, and listens eagerly when Nyoka fibs that she’s on the way to see a display of precious jewels at a nearby village. Olnig has obviously taken the bait, and Nyoka plans to set a trap by allowing Olnig to see and steal a valuable ruby.  Olnig leads Nyoka to the cave where he stores his loot, but she’s able to escape by throwing a pistol at Olnig (?!) and the tribesmen show up to retrieve the stolen goods. The hospital is built using the funds from the sale of the recovered gold. “The Chacma Baboon” heads up another one page installment of “The Jungle People” feature, which also teaches the readers a bit about the flying fox and the chimpanzee. “Rivers of Rain” is a text story with no listed author. I’m not going to read it even though, if I did, I could very well be the only person alive who had actually read this story. “The Golden Snare” is another Nyoka story from Nicholas and Trapani. Bryan Drew tries to hire Nyoka to guide him to a native village that has an exquisite gold statue, and he wants to take it from the “stupid natives.” Nyoka’s having none of that, and rejects Drew’s proposal. Nyoka investigates the man, and learns that “Congo Charlie” has agreed to guide him, and that together they have already physically abused one of the natives. She confronts the men, warning them that the natives will come for them if they steal the statue, and that she’ll be next in line to deal with them if the natives fail. Nyoka fails to change their minds, and the bad guys force a native to lead them to the statue at gunpoint. In an awkward scene, the native balks partway to the destination, and only continues to cooperate when the men threaten to shoot Nyoka, who has caught up to them again. When they reach the shrine, Drew and Charlie find themselves behind bars when their attempt at theft triggers a trap. It is only Nyoka’s intervention that convinces the chief to free the would-be statue thieves from their predicament. As soon as the natives are gone, though, Drew and Charlie try again, now that they know how to avoid tripping the trap, but they find yet another trap: the statue itself clasps Charlie, and Nyoka holds Drew at gunpoint to await the police.  “The Big Cats” is, you guessed it, another installment of “The Jungle People”. Learn about lions, tigers and leopards, the jungles’ most ferocious felines. “The Sly One” is drawn by Bill Molno and Sal Trapani, at least according to Nick Caputo, who is a pretty sharp art-spotter. This is a short story set in the jungles of Brazil, not featuring any ongoing character. Phillipe Monte is committed to raising his son Ricardo to be a great hunter like Phillipe himself is, but Ricardo is a weak lad, much better at playing his guitar than hurling a spear. It’s not that Ricardo is uninterested in his father’s hunting stories; he’s especially fond of hearing the story of the Sly One, a leopard that has always managed to evade Phillipe’s traps, one of which he keeps baited at all times, but which the Sly One never falls for. When the Sly One kills a dozen steer from the village herd, Phillipe leads the villagers on a final hunt, to capture the Sly One once and for all. Ricardo the weakling is left at home with the women, where he berates himself for being unfit to participate, and wishes there were something he could contribute to the effort. If you guessed that Ricardo will use music to lure the Sly One into the trap, join me in the gang of poor guessers. Nope, Ricardo serves himself up as bait, thinking that it won’t matter if a loser like him dies. But once the trap is sprung and the Sly One and Ricardo are both inside it, Ricardo is able to slay the animal. Which would be somewhat interesting if the reader were allowed to see it, but Charlton was evidently afraid that the CCA would frown on anything exciting happening on-panel:  “Runners” uses up yet another page of “The Jungle People” to tell us that some African natives run 40 miles a day and work as mail carriers on foot. With the format of multiple very short stories, Charlton’s efforts here resemble Atlas/Marvel’s approach to jungle comics more than Fawcett’s, and they sacrifice Fawcett’s gimmick of imitating the serial format with cliffhanger chapter endings. In these short and simple stories, it’s impossible to get much of a handle on what Nyoka is. She comes across as just a white girl working as a tour guide, not an impressive jungle heroine. Charlton's Nyoka comic is, alas, Jungle Junk. The creators were trying so hard to be inoffensive and safe that they sacrificed a lot of clarity on stories that didn't have much substance in the first place. Comics readers of the time must surely have noticed the watered-down nature of what they were now finding on the stands. This is an unfitting end to what was an above-average character with a unique approach in the Fawcett days, a character with a Hollywood pedigree. It must have been a disappointment to the few suckers who gave up ten pennies for this dud; even censored Fawcett reprints would have been far better values than this stuff. |
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Post by MWGallaher on Feb 8, 2023 12:50:30 GMT -5
ASTONISHING TALES #12, June 1972, Marvel Comics  If the United States could be considered to include a jungle—by one definition, an area of dense forest and tangled vegetation, the Florida Everglades would surely be the most widely acknowledge. It has, of course, served as a convenient substitute for African jungles in many an American film and tv show, and it is to the Everglades we go for a sample of the adventures of Ka-Zar, “Lord of the Hidden Jungle”, for this tale from his sojourn in the States from the early 1970’s, one that incorporates a very special treat: the pages from the previously-unpublished second Man-Thing installment intended for Marvel’s black and white SAVAGE TALES #2, left homeless when that legendary publication was cancelled as of its first issue. (SAVAGE TALES would be revived the following year, but initially as an exclusive vehicle for Robert E. Howard properties, not Marvel creations like the Femizons, Man-Thing, Ka-Zar, and Black Brother, who had backed up Conan in the debut issue.) Roy Thomas wrote and John Buscema and Dan Adkins drew the new Ka-Zar pages for this issue, with Len Wein writing and Neal Adams drawing the Man-Thing sequence in ASTONISHING TALES #12. The amalgamated story is titled “Terror Stalks the Everglades!” It opens with Zabu, Ka-Zar’s sabretooth tiger companion, breaking out of a cage as he is being unloaded from the hold of an airplane landing in Miami. Ka-Zar, who was onboard with his human companions, prevents the airport police from shooting the beast, who is obedient to the Jungle Lord, but the cops still try to take them in, forcing Ka-Zar and his government-sponsored crew (including Barbara Morse, who will later become a costumed heroine known first as The Huntress, then as Mockingbird) to flee to the waiting helicopter, to head off to the top-secret mission for which Ka-Zar has been recruited. That mission is to track down the missing scientist Ted Sallis, who was working toward a “bio-chemical breakthrough” before disappearing in the Everglades, possibly because of a female companion, Ellen, who is thought to have been a spy for AIM. AIM is indeed active in the swampy rainforest, and they fire on the chopper, forcing it to land in the waters. Ka-Zar and Zabu get everyone out safely, but the two of them have to battle off a mob of hungry alligators, re-enacting a classic jungle hero trope.  They make their way to the government complex, where the crew are watching over an ailing Dr. Calvin, a nearly comatose old woman whose only words for the weeks she’s been under care have been “Ted Sallis” and “Man-Thing”. That very “Man-Thing” happens to be lurking outside the window, helpless to tell them the truth behind the local rumors of a horrible creature that burns faces and may have killed Ted Sallis…  And here comes the Man-Thing insert… Neal Adams’ pages were intended for black and white publication, and Marvel wisely limited the new coloring to yellow tints and blue caption boxes, distinguishing them as flashback scenes. (The first panel is fully colored; this depicts Man-Thing lurking outside a window, and the main story was constructed to mesh with that to allow this single panel to be “current time”.) The Man-Thing sequence quickly recaps the character’s origin: Ted Sallis injected himself with the Super-Soldier formula he was there to develop, causing his transformation into the mute Man-Thing when Ellen betrayed him, and Ellen paid for her treachery at Man-Thing’s burning touch, while Man-Thing was left to roam the swamps seeking revenge. A local yokel happens upon Man-Thing while hunting for a “witch-woman” reputed to be building “monstahs”. When he tries to shoot Man-Thing, the swamp monster’s grip burns his arm, causing him to drop his pistol and flee in pain. Man-Thing happens upon the “witch-woman” and follows her to the government facility where she is revealed to be Dr. Calvin, working in a high-tech facility. I suspect the dialog has been altered to make reference to AIM and Bobbi Morse, in order to more closely align with the main story, but anyway, a mob shows up at the place, holding Bobbi Morse hostage, reporting that Jasper Petrie (the previously-seen yokel) has just had his arm amputated thanks to the “research” that the mob presumes Dr. Calvin is responsible for.  (As an interesting aside, this page served as the inspiration for Man-Thing’s cover corner box image, after a single issue using a less moody head-on body shot on Man-Thing’s first color feature installment!)  Morse shouts that the ringleader is an AIM agent stirring things up, and she tries to escape, but the AIM guy grabs her and carries her away into the swamp. (Again, I wonder what the original dialog indicated here, because there is likely some cobbling going on here. The hostage girl now identified as Bobbi Morse looks more like one of the townspeople, but appears to be sympathetic to Dr. Calvin. Perhaps some pages were deleted?) Man-Thing suddenly appears, killing off and/or burning many of the mob members and saving the girls. The Man-Thing is able only to grunt unintelligibly, but Dr. Calvin recognizes some humanity, and runs fearlessly to the monster, suspecting some connection with the missing Ted Sallis.  Dr. Calvin, though, is shot from behind by the dying ringleader, and Man-Thing flees back to the swamp. Back to present time and Ka-Zar, who hears the creature lurking outside, and pursues Man-Thing into the swamp. The Man-Thing falls into a pit trap dug by AIM agents in their highly-recognizable bee-keeper gear, and when Ka-Zar reaches them, he knows somehow that he should be protecting Man-Thing against the AIM agents, and begins to fight.  One AIM agent falls in the pit, where he’s burned to death, but eventually Ka-Zar, himself, ends up tossed into the pit, and his face shows fear as he faces “the most startling swamp-creature of all” (as Marvel would tag his comic in later years). And as we know now (but didn’t know then), “whatever knows fear burn’s at the Man-Thing’s touch!” But that’s a matter for ASTONISHING TALES #13, because we end on this cliffhanger! While this is something of an aberrant installment of the Ka-Zar feature, I’ll get to his more typical environment, the Hidden Jungle of the “Savage Land”, when I sample the character’s solo series. This will also serve as my only consideration of Man-Thing; if the Everglades is indeed a jungle, that makes the Man-Thing feature a jungle comic itself, or at least a twist on the genre worth recognizing in this thread. My fondness for Man-Thing, and indeed, the entire microgenre of swamp monster comics, elevates this issue into a Jungle Gem for me, boosted even further since it is also an example of another thing I always get a kick out of, comics that mine leftovers from cancelled comics. But no, this isn’t a fair look at Ka-Zar, an out-of-place Jungle Lord in long trousers for this stretch of stories. It's not really a great comic, though, and not it’s an exemplar of the jungle comic, so my rating is admittedly subjective. The construction is one of insignificant events assembled to accommodate the Man-Thing pages. There’s no suspense to fighting off a few cops, alligators, and AIM agents, it’s all about arranging a face-off between Ka-Zar and Man-Thing for the next issue. The Man-Thing sequence is the real highlight, and it’s a fairly trivial and unsatisfying installment. I can’t honestly heap much praise on the John Buscema artwork for this issue. It meets his usual standard for competent comics, but his ubiquitous presence in Marvel’s 1970’s comics was fatiguing to me. I know many comics fans among us can never get enough of his work, and it’s an exaggeration to say he would eventually show up drawing an issue of everything (I can’t remember him drawing any issues of Iron Man or Spider-Man or X-Men, for instance), but seeing him on everything from bottom-rung features like The Golem to middle-of-the-pack comics like Nova to top-tier books like the Fantastic Four became tiresome to me, and his stock poses, composition, and expressions began to bore me. Adams’ work, though, is just the kind of thing I most enjoyed seeing from him, moreso than his overwrought superhero material. It’s moody, rich art, and Buscema and Adkins’ rendition of Man-Thing looks a bit laughable in comparison. At this point, Marvel hadn’t figured out how they were supposed to color Man-Thing, and what works in the (almost) black and white of Adams’ pages looks awkward in four colors, with Man-Thing looking like a hairy brown gorilla with orange warts and a small green face with short tentacles. They were on their way to refining it, though; the next issue of ASTONISHING TALES would promise the start of a new Man-Thing feature soon to begin in one of their “presently feature-less” monster mags, from Gerry Conway and Grey Morrow. That mag would turn out to be FEAR #10. |
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Post by codystarbuck on Feb 8, 2023 16:05:18 GMT -5
No Dennis Weaver in an airboat? Must have been chasing after that damn kid's bear.....
As an aside; there is an episode of that series, where Ron Howard gets to play an older kid who bullies Clint. Ron actually got paid to bully his little brother!
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Post by MWGallaher on Feb 8, 2023 16:21:51 GMT -5
Fortunately for me, Ka-Zar was my only gateway into the Everglades' qualification for this thread, so I'm not going to feel obligated to include Dell's GENTLE BEN series here; the sample pages I've looked at online make it seem like it would be a chore to read:  |
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Post by MWGallaher on Feb 8, 2023 16:38:48 GMT -5
And while we've got Ivan Tors' GENTLE BEN on the page, I also (probably) won't be able to include a couple of other more genuinely jungle comics that were based on Tors' productions, COWBOY IN AFRICA from Gold Key and DAKTARI from Dell. I just don't have copies and can't find any available scans.   |
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Post by MWGallaher on Feb 11, 2023 8:04:01 GMT -5
FOUR-COLOR 949 Lowell Thomas High Adventure 1959, Dell Comics  You can read this comic at comicbookplus.com/?dlid=38285The issue was written by the prolific Gaylord Du Bois, with art by Bob Fujitani. While this will serve as my sample of Dell's FOUR COLOR, which included at least one other jungle feature--namely Tarzan--over its long run. FOUR COLOR can't really be called a jungle comics series, since it featured a random variety of features and genres, changing every issue. I wouldn't even really call it a "series" in the sense in which the term applies to almost every other comic book. It was more of a publication tracking mechanism of value only to Dell, not to the consumer. A reader couldn't use the numbering to tell how many other installments of a particular feature might have appeared, or what month it came out or release order (Dell might issue multiple FOUR COLOR issues in a given month or week). If they tried, they would be woefully misled, since the indicia for this particular issue declares that this is HIGH ADVENTURE No. 949! Imagine the poor collector assuming there were almost a thousand issues of this that he'd never noticed on the stands! But anyway, for the purposes of modern day collectors, FOUR COLOR is a "series", and it had some issues fully devoted to jungle stories, so I've got to do it... Lowell Thomas was an adventurous traveler, writer, and radio broadcaster, and he helped popularize the travelogue as narrator of 20th Century Fox's Movietone newsreels. This comic, which had at least one other installment in FOUR COLOR, is presented as a comic book travelogue, hosted and narrated by Lowell, focusing on the lifestyles of jungle peoples but framed within a narrative context that has Thomas participating in thrilling but presumably common jungle adventures, with characters introduced as if they were real-life subjects in a documentary--and who knows, perhaps they were! The photo cover promises New Guinea headhunters on a rampage, an impressive nose piercing, the lumpy-faced Thomas, and some elephant riders. We get more photos of the travels to be explored, in comics form, on the inside front cover, in black and white, of course.  First up, is New Guinea. According to this comic, the natives are cannibals who keep their victims' skulls as souvenirs. The white governor has provided native police to protect Thomasin his travels through the New Guinea jungle, and he's accompanied by a white crew, mostly Australian veterans. As the group travels four hundred miles of the Sepik River, they document the sights. In a friendly village, we see the native's skill at piloting shallow canoes, operated from a standing position. Thomas gleefully documents the sale of wives in a panel that demonstrates how Dell's non-participation in the Comics Code allowed them to depict female nudity, at least in the acceptable "National Geographic" manner:  After showing us the sculptor and the most important man in the village, the canoe-builder, Thomas hires 60-year-old Tom Davidson to guide them further up-river, where they barter with fish hooks, razor blades, and tobacco with another friendly tribe. This tribe demonstrates bare-handed crocodile-catching:  Next, we observe the governing council, the initiation of young men into manhood, and bull-roarers, tattooing, and drumming:  And finally, on to the main attraction, the cannibals! Here, we have a bit of narrative introduced, as Thomas and his crew meet up with Peter O'Sullivan, the white police officer in charge of the area. Peter explains that two local tribes are in conflict, after one tribe turned a peace feast into a skull-collecting party! Peter is cool as a cucumber, despite being under threat himself:  Thomas accompanies O'Sullivan on another issue, the return of a captured native girl to her tribe:  We watch as O'Sullivan boldly faces the savages unarmed, pleading for peace and declaring the kidnappers punished; he wins his suit for peace and the expedition comes to an uneasy but bloodless ending as Thomas heads back downriver, leaving "a man whose life is almost unbelievable adventure---a strong, friendly, yet lonely figure---Peter O'Sullivan!" Thomas's next High Adventure takes place in the Indian jungles, where we will witness "Tracking a Man-Eater"; apparently tigers were taking 5000 human lives per year!?  Thomas arrives at an elephant training camp to join a tiger-hunt aback specially trained elephants. We witness the capture of new elephants to be trained and see some of the training process before hitting the trail in pursuit of some man-eaters:  Along the way they astound the primitive locals with modern technology:  The villagers report the savage attacks they've been suffering, depicted with some restraint, but still a startling sight only found in non-CCA-approved comics of the time:   After many more pages of preparation, including a religious ceremony, and search, we finally see the crew capture and kill a tiger, whose beautiful head is held up as we gaze into its lifeless green eyes for the final panel of art before the concluding Dell Pledge:  The inside back cover provides some more photo documentation of the tools and weapons of New Guinea, proving that Thomas really had been to the area as reported in the pages of the comic, and the back cover has a color comic page cutting tigers some slack from the terrifying reputation that had been tagged with a few pages earlier:  OK, that was different. Exploitative, definitely, and exaggerated, most likely--it's my understanding that cannibalism is far less common in these "primitive" tribes than was reported to credulous, thrill-seeking audiences of the past. But there is clearly some educational content in documenting some interesting customs and ways of life, although it is framed, unsurprisingly, in an atmosphere of superiority of the "civilized" world. This would be a Jungle Gem to at least some readers looking for thrills and, err, titillation, and despite my hesitation, I found it to be an engaging and interesting comic, with at least a somewhat convincing air of authenticity. Not bad for an "educational" comic! |
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Post by codystarbuck on Feb 11, 2023 18:44:35 GMT -5
Shouldn't something called High Adventure be set in Colombia? Or Amsterdam?
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