I think all the stories are fantasy. Nice work by Robert Kline and Mike Royer.

EXPLORER JOE #1, Ziff-Davis, Dec 1951

You can read this comic at :

comicbookplus.com/?dlid=4514

I underestimated the challenge I set myself with this project to sample one of every jungle comic I could get access to; every time I dig in to select the next candidate, it seems like I find more that I’d overlooked. EXPLORER JOE is a pretty obscure one: it ran for only two issues in 1951, from Ziff-Davis, a company and time period and genre that has not been deeply mined by comics historians, with a lead character who hasn’t had the benefit of revivals and reprints.

EXPLORER JOE has a cover and a concept that evokes the “men’s sweat” magazines which were dying out when I first began haunting the magazine stand, but which have always held a fascination for me. It’s a pulpy, manly comic featuring a glob-trotting adventurer exploring the dangerous, uncivilized corners of the globe. The first issue focuses mainly on jungle adventure, but Joe would explore the mountains of Greenland, the Himalayas, and Tibet in the next issue.

The much-loved Norm Saunders painted this pulse-pounding cover with Joe aiming his pistol aimed at knife-wielding savages as he’s clutched by a red-haired beauty.



There are three Explorer Joe stories in this issue, and that will be the focus, but the adventures were padded by an inside cover feature on “Famous Ships”, a text story called “The Smile of Jean Charcot”, a three-page story of Robert F. Scott called “The Gallant Failure”, and one-pagers “Arctic Conqueror” (about Admiral Peary), “Arctic Trail Blazer” (Admiral Byrd), and “Wild Animals of the Northwest”.

“The Mountains of the Moon” was drawn by Arthur Peddy. The splash sets the scene: Stanleyville, Africa. Explorer Joe Thomas and his sidekick, Gadabout Swanson, are seeking Joe’s father, who was lost in the Congo 20 years past, but there are rumors of a white man living in the jungle.

The guys get a lead from an old man who remembers a man with a golden beard, who should be sought on the road to the “Mountain Which is Not There!” Is it Joe’s father? No telling, but he’s not going to forego any lead!

White guide Hans Van Groot offers himself for hire to lead the expedition, promising he knows the country, but he raises Joe’s suspicions when he’s seen buying winter clothes…

The native bearers are trepidatious, but after a trek through flat lands, they reach a sole snowy mountain, visible only when the usual mists have been blown away. Gadabout has some friction with Van Groot, and Joe intervenes when Van Groot threatens a native shaman, Zuri, who demands an offering of meat and salt to allow passage.

The expedition finds evidence of someone living in the vicinity, and it can’t be one of the natives, who fear the mountain. The weather turns, and Zuri now calls for a human sacrifice. Van Groot is cool with that, but Joe and Gadabout have had about enough!

Just then a white man emerges from the jungle, but it’s not Joe’s dad, it’s Kloeppen, Van Groot’s former partner, a 10-year fugitive from a diamond mine theft. Kloeppen is terrified of Van Groot, and Joe plans to see to Kloeppen’s recovery, since he’s hallucinating and in bad shape. Kloeppen wants to return to civilization, but he’s afraid Van Groot is after the diamonds, which Kloeppen is still hoarding somewhere!

That night, Van Groot distracts Gadabout and murders his ex-partner.



Van Groot has got the diamonds, but his native assistant Numpubu insists on his cut, leading to a cliff-side battle which ends with Van Groot falling to his death. Numpubu hands over the diamonds, which now have “blood on them”, and Joe heads off to return the diamonds to their rightful owners, disappointed that he couldn’t find his father, but ready to continue the search.



“The Sea Pearl” has art from Nick Cardy. It finds us in New Guinea, which, if we can trust Lowell Thomas from last time’s High Adventure feature in FOUR COLOR, is a dangerous land of headhunters; Explorer Joe confirms!



Joe’s working for Mr. Richards, an Australian who had gathered a fortune in pearls when a storm overcame them, leading to the capture and presumed murder of his partner Jake Frisbee, by the savages of New Guinea. Sure, Jake was an escaped convict, but he didn’t deserve such a fate…

Richards’ lovely daughter Leona insists on tagging along as the crew takes a bout up-river to seek the lost loot. They find the partially sunken wreckage of Richards’ boat, the “Sea Pearl”. Joe dives to seek the treasure but finds the hold empty. They head out into the waters to be safe from attack from the shore.

The next day, though, they’re all exploring on foot, where they come across the bizarre sight of an empty village with a man in a diving suit tied to a platform. Removing the man’s diving helmet, they find a native inside, and then find themselves surrounded by hostile villagers, who had been in hiding!



Joe and company are captured, but will be allowed to leave if they can retrieve the black-bearded white man who had killed the village chief—presumably Jake Frisbee, who had in fact survived. Black Beard had sailed to the Devil’s Island, a volcanic isle. Sailing to the isle Joe finds Jake setting dynamite traps. Joe captures Frisbee and plans to deliver him to the Cooktown police, but the native instead intends to execute Frisbee and Joe’s companions!

Joe uses some of Frisbee’s dynamite to disrupt the engagement, and escapes on a boat, recreating the cover scene, sort of. Jake is killed by the natives, and Joe takes his share of payment to finance another trip to Africa, to follow a new clue as to his father’s whereabouts.



“The Fire Opal of Madagascar” features another Arthur Peddy art job. Ben Oda lettered on this and the other Explorer Joe stories this issue. Joe and Gadabout are anticipating a peaceful time in Madagascar, but a murder is taking place wharf-side. The victim passes along a huge opal to Joe before he dies, warning that Missy Toussaint is in danger at the Toussaint plantation.

Joe and Gadabout reach the area, and eavesdrop to learn that Toussaint has been murdered by his own crew, while his daughter must put up with the murderous gang now occupying the plantation. Seems they’ve been selling rubber to enemy agents, and conflict is breaking out among the gang, some of whom object to the attention they’ll get when word gets out that Toussaint is dead.

The bad guys get into a gun fight over a card game, as Joe and Gadabout lurk and spy. Missy is under pressure to reveal the location of the hidden opal, but Joe comes to the rescue, directing the bad guy to the supposed location of the opal…but he’s actually sending him to a well-guarded temple, where the natives dispatch the villain!



There are more fights, and Joe and Gadabout finally resolve the situation, and head on to seek Dad, leaving Missy with the fire-opal to sell and become rich on. Maybe that’ll make her feel a little better about seeing her father murdered?


EXPLORER JOE’s not a bad comic. The book is on par with the newspaper adventure strips of the time, and it was good to see a motivating mission behind Joe’s quest, seeking his lost father. It’s refreshing to see less emphasis on the wildlife, and the variety in locale. The art’s up to snuff, but the final results lack the flair to elevate it much beyond a very conventional adventurer strip. There’s no attempt at personality: Joe is a generic he-man, Gadabout doesn’t even really fill the usual role of comic relief: he’s pretty much just an assistant to Joe. It’s very comparable to the lesser short stories in pulps of the era. Readable, but not a Jungle Gem, and certainly not Jungle Junk.

Joe wasn't entirely forgotten after this; reprints of his adventures from the second issue appeared in HIGH ADVENTURE #1, an oddity published by Decker Publications in 1957. 

The first story sounds like such a swipe of both H Rider haggard and Joseph Conrad that you wonder if the short lifespan of the comic wasn't due to legal threats (not that that ever stopped comics or Men's Adventure magazines).

The magazines would have had mor skin, though.

The question of what defines a “jungle comic” has been a struggle throughout this little project; it’s a genre that doesn’t have boundaries as clear as I thought at first. I’ve stayed alert to subgenres of the jungle comic: jungle war, jungle superheroes, jungle kaiju, jungle horror. And with this entry, we see another: the prehistoric jungle comic. These comics, which a reader would probably rush to label as “caveman comics”, or something similar, can justifiably be viewed as jungle comics. We see settings, tropes, and conflicts prominent in the most stereotypical of jungle comics: an environment of dense vegetation, caves, volcanos; primitive tribes with brutal traditions, superstitions, laws, witch doctors, and chieftains; battles with rival tribes, wild animals, and nature itself.

Prehistoric jungle comics have an advantage over those set contemporaneous with their publication dates, in that the primitive nature of the cultures depicted are more believable. There is no nonsense like the Africans of B’Wana Beast calling airplanes “iron birds”. Granted, part of the appeal of the jungle comic, as produced in the middle 20th century, was the notion that uncivilized savage societies still existed out there in the wild, where modern men and women could encounter them, or, cliched though it is, become worshipped as a god or goddess by the ignorant primitives.

There aren’t all that many prehistoric jungle comics of which I am aware. There are some prehistoric comics that are fair to exclude from the subgenre, since they take place in clearly non-jungle environments, such as the American Southwest, but in this installment, I’ll take a look at those comic book Neanderthals who spent much of their time in the overgrown jungles of a mythical land before history. I’ll forego detailed plot descriptions this time, let’s just see how jungle-overgrown these prehistoric comics can get!

First up is NAZA STONE AGE WARRIOR #1, from Dell, dated December 1963.

Read this issue at comicbookplus




NAZA is drawn by the ubiquitous Jack Sparling, a.k.a. “Dell’s Darling”, Dell’s go-to adventure artist following Western Publishing’s departure from producing Dell’s content in favor of their own Gold Key line.

NAZA is a pretty tedious product, but its primitive tribes, witch doctors, crude weapons, and heavy vegetation make it blend it well with jungle comics:



There is plenty of threatening jungle wildlife to contend with:



…including giant ants fighting off barely-drawn mastadons:



NAZA does make it easy on me, with the writer explicitly describing the setting as “the jungle”, thus supporting my contention that this is a valid subgenre of jungle comics:



…but I can’t count this as a Jungle Gem. I can’t bring myself to declare it Jungle Junk, either, though. It’s not offensively bad enough to rank that low, it’s merely unengaging. I hesitate to be too harsh on Jack Sparling, who did some stuff that I really liked, but I can’t help but picture Dell editors in the early 60’s being so out of touch with the state of the art that they figured Jack Sparling represented top notch adventure comics. And maybe Dell’s readers were undiscriminating enough to take Sparling’s work--which here is indisputably rushed, crude and often ugly—as plenty good enough.

ANTHRO #6, July-August 1969, was the last installment of Anthro’s Silver Age feature. Its one year, bi-monthly run followed a debut of the feature in SHOWCASE #74, May 1968. After its cancellation, Anthro would not appear again until the massive team-up in SHOWCASE #100, May 1978, the tenth anniversary of the character’s debut.



ANTHRO was the creation of writer/artist Howie Post, who produced all seven installments. In this final installment, he was joined by inker Wally Wood, whose unmistakable style brought quite a sheen to Post’s rough but appealing approach. I don’t know if Wood was brought on to save the comic under the hypothesis that Post’s own finishes were out of touch with what the modern comics reader expected or if there were other circumstances that dictated another hand contributing this time around, but I’m grateful that ANTHRO served to showcase both Post’s unadulterated vision and Wood’s lush rendition during its short life.

ANTHRO was a fun adventure series with a light-hearted, often humorous tone. As the story opens, Anthro is riding a horse into the Forest of Giants to find the missing Embra, the girl he loves. As the caption box informs us, “his bon voyage is an ominous warning!”—“Fool! You will die in the forest!”, shouts a white-haired caveman!

The Forbidden Forest of Giants looks plenty like a jungle to me:



The Forest is, to no surprise, a dangerous place, as we’d expect in any good jungle comic. The fight against a lion is a classic jungle adventure trope, and Anthro does it:



Anthro defeats the white lion with the aid of an Asiatic-looking stranger, one of the “Giants” of the forest. A comical exchange of friendly gestures—such as the generous tossing of a substantial slab of meat into Anthro’s chest—caps off an unexpectedly peaceful encounter. But it’s an adventure comic, so soon Anthro is facing other dangers familiar to jungle comics readers, such as a drop into a pit trap, where he is rescued by the very subject of his mission—Embra, and her wounded father. Anthro nurses the delirious dad, claiming that Pop gave his blessing for Anthro’s marriage while in his weakened state.

But of course, every primitive jungle tribe has its unusual laws and customs, and Embra’s tribe requires that her older sister be wed first, so Anthro brings dad and daughter home to his tribe, where a truce between tribes is secured, and where Anthro hopes to find a bride for older sister Ita. Ita proves not to be the lovely lass her sister is, but she still finds a mate, and Anthro’s finally on the verge of marrying, when his fellow member of the Bear Tribe, Nima, challenges the wedding. Thanks to the complex set of rules one expects from jungle tribes, the potential brides must battle it out:



When the fight ends in a draw, another tribal law comes into play: Anthro must marry them both!



And it is on this cultural cliffhanger that Anthro’s story came to an end! There was no Next Issue, thus no “The Stranger!”, and Anthro’s conjugal conundrum was never to be resolved. But folks, this is a definite Jungle Gem or, if you prefer, Troglodyte Treasure. ANTHRO has a well-deserved reputation among knowing comics fans, and Howie Post did some delightful work here. Few successes spun out of the late-era SHOWCASE comic, alas, depriving us of more of this, a worthier work than concepts like the Creeper and Hawk & Dove, who, although just as unsuccessful, had the benefit of superhero trappings that would allow them to return to the stands again and again, while Anthro remained in the mists of pre-history.

KONG THE UNTAMED #2 was published by DC Comics in September 1975, produced by writer Jack Oleck and artist Alfredo Alcala.



Berni Wrightson drew that gorgeous cover, but that super-cool logo looks to me to have been the work of Alfredo Alcala himself (letterer Todd Klein contends that Alcala only did the “Kong” part, so I’ll bow to his expertise, but I’m proud to remember having identified Alcala’s unique style of lettering back in 1975).

In this story, Kong fights off wolves and finds himself surrounded by hostile “Beast Men” as he sits at his campfire, deep inside the jungle:



Kong’s rival from issue 1 helps him to escape, as Kong’s boldness earned the respect of the brutish Gurat. We see another defense often seen in jungle comics: lighting a fire in the grasslands:



By the end of the issue, Kong and Gurat are blood brothers, and the young man has his first true friend (and supporting character).



In FINAL CRISIS, Grant Morrison depicted Anthro as “the first boy on Earth”, to contrast with Kamandi, but really, Kong would have been the more appropriate choice; Anthro was a young man, Kong was a boy. KONG THE UNTAMED, part of DC’s mid-70’s attempt at launching a Fantasy sub-line, lasted only five issues. Gerry Conway (sigh) took over as writer, but by the end Alcala was gone, replaced by newcomer David Wenzel (who would become a highly-regarded fantasy artist) and old pro Bill Draut, competent but unremarkable (and, evidently, unreliable). Still, though, I’ve got to rate KONG THE UNTAMED a Jungle Gem, a treasure for those of us who love the forgotten short-run features that popped up in the 70’s.

TOR was a Joe Kubert creation, initially published in 1953. DC featured a combination of new and reprinted material in a 6-issue run beginning in June 1975. Our sample is issue 3, from October 1975.



This issue reprints “Isle of Fire”, a story reminiscent of the South Sea Islands offshoot of jungle comics, with savage tribes and the ever-popular volcano:



“Danny Dreams” reprinted another Kubert feature of the past, one that focused on a modern day boy who dreamed himself into fantastic adventures, and in this issue, he dreams himself into an island jungle of prehistoric days, where he befriends a primitive pygmy-like tribe:



I didn’t really love TOR, but I’ll rank this as a Jungle Gem on the inarguable high quality of anything Joe Kubert ever produced.

On the Marvel Tarzan samples: I've seen very little of it apart from online glimpses like this, but I think Sal Buscema was overworked in the 1970s and his art became very cookie-cutter at times. When I got back into comics around the spring or early summer of 1975 his name in the credits was at first a plus for me, but gradually this positive feeling diminished. It never reached the point that I actively disliked his work, but I felt pretty ho-hum about it by the end of my marvel-reading days in the early 1980s.

When did Jane become a blonde? Was this only in Marvels Tarzan or was it standard in all Tarzan colour comics? It's been many years since I read the ERB books but I think she was a brunette originally, wasn't she?

I considered including TUROK and TRAGG in the prehistoric jungle comics, but all the issues I skimmed through were set in rocky environments, making it difficult to justify them as anything more than jungle-adjacent, if that. I've been really impressed with the TRAGG issues, and I look forward to reading that run from beginning to end soon. BROTHERS OF THE SPEAR is going to get a sampling here eventually.