Yeah, I get that, but...

...what's with that response? "(r)" sounds like "are", but why is that supposed to be funny? Is it just "Hey, kids, have you ever noticed that the names of certain letters are homonyms for common words?" Did the second otter think the first was saying "Sir, you are a are otter!" and got confused because he was attuned to hear "otter" instead of "rotter"? Was this just written by somebody who didn't quite get the hang of telling simple jokes?
It may have gelled a little better if the first otter said "Sir, you (r)otter!" and the second heard "Sir, you are otter!" but that would be pretty awkward. I think that's probably the gist of the "joke", but it's spoiled by the additional wordage to make the first otter's remark more comprehensible as an insult.

If this annoys me now, I'm sure it would have been frustrating to 9-year-old M.W.

WILD BOY OF THE CONGO #10 [1], Ziff-Davis, 1950



You can read along here.


Well, this looks promising! That’s confirmed as a Norm Saunders painting on the cover, with a weapon-wielding “gorilla-god” being restrained from whacking an enchained beauty, courtesy of the Wild Boy of the title. Let’s dig in and see if this really does deliver the promised “breathless jungle thrills”!

The inside front cover is devoted to a page of Jungle Oddities. It’s presented like many other pages of unusual facts readers often found, but these sound a little dubious to me. The rare Malagasy tree “captures and eats men”?! The Liana vine of South America will “twine itself around a man, lift him from the ground, and hang him”?!

Paul Hodge provides the art for our introduction to “Wild Boy, Prince of the Jungle.” This looks to be an origin story, opening with young blond David, wearing a red-striped shirt, in Africa with his uncle Clyde. The uncle is plotting with the sleazy “Mr. Wilson” to have the boy killed along the safari so that Clyde can collect the lad’s inheritance. They’ve recruited the native Wabotu to attack the safari, but only to kill the boy. David foils the plan by running off into the jungle alone before the spear hits him.



From hiding, David overhears his uncle’s intent and tries to escape, but he’s cornered and doomed…but then an earthquake brings down boulders around him and his assailants. David alone survives, but he is trapped in a secluded valley, in the ruins of an ancient city, under the watchful eyes of a giant stone idol.



Four years later, David has become a capable young man of the jungle, swinging from vines, talking to his monkey companion Kimba, and earning the friendship of a panther by saving him from the grips of a giant snake.

Venturing out days later with his new panther ally Daro, Wild Boy spots, from a great distance, a peaceful village on fire. The village has been raided by the savage Muttu tribe in order to gather slaves, but a young native boy, Keeto, escapes, reaching the golden temple in Wild Boy’s Lost City before Wild Boy who bids the lad gather the survivors to the great temple.

The carvings on the temple wall seem to represent Wild Boy, who is considered the fulfillment of a prophecy of a “mighty boy, half hunter, half spirit”, who “would return and protect us in our hour of need!”



The Muttu have followed the villagers to Wild Boy’s temple, and Wild Boy sends the villagers into hiding, while he sets a fire inside the idol, making it appear to breathe smoke.

Wild Boy reveals himself, then blows a ram’s horn to summon the mightiest beasts of the jungle to his aid. The evil Muttu are mostly slaughtered, and the peaceful villagers are able to return to their home, safe and grateful to Wild Boy. Wild Boy invites Keeto to drop by any time and hang out.



A good origin story, and one can’t help but notice that we have here a blond boy wearing a striped shirt menaced by a “Mr. Wilson”! There is some interesting imagery available thanks to establishing the Lost City as Wild Boy’s base of operations, we get a pair of intelligent and valuable animal companions, and a human supporting character for Wild Boy to interact with. The ability of jungle heroes to communicate with animals is typical, and this story doesn’t bother to explain how David is able to develop that skill, but readers of the time were probably expectant of that from their jungle heroes.

Next up is the cover story, “The Gorilla God!”, again illustrated by Paul Hodge.



Wild Boy heads off to investigate the newly active volcano, leaving his friend Keeto behind to cook breakfast. Keeto is unaware that a savage enemy tribe is watching him from the brush. The savages abduct Keeto for use as a sacrifice to the gorilla god, so the monkey Kimba rushes away to inform Wild Boy.

Evidently, Wild Boy can very literally talk with the animals: “What’s wrong, Kimba? I understand…bad men have taken Keeto for the gorilla god! Lead on…I’ll follow!” The gorilla god is legendary around this area, and Kimba leads Wild Boy and Daro the panther to a land new to them, an area reputed to be the domain of the gorilla god. Unfortunately, Wild Boy drops into a pitfall trap, just as gunfire is heard, so he orders Kimba and Daro to flee to safety. The shooters are white hunters in search of the gorilla god, hoping to exhibit the giant in Europe to great profit, so they grab Wild Boy from the pit they’ve dug, hoping he can lead them to their prey:



Their scheme is foiled when they return to their tent, allowing Wild Boy the opportunity to summon Kimba and Daro to free him from his wooden cage. Our hero has no time to waste now that he has escaped his captors; saving Keeto is top priority, so they get back to tracking him!

Wild Boy finds Keeto trussed up as a sacrifice before the massive gorilla god, but the rescue proves very easy:



And of course, here’s where the wicked white men catch up. When they dare to assault Wild Boy, the gorilla god attacks, savagely attacking the Europeans who threaten his friend. The gorilla thrashes the men to death, but he also dies from bullet wounds.

This enrages the tribe who kidnapped Keeto, since their god has died before their very eyes. They pursue our heroes as they flee, leading their pursuers to the edge of the volcano. Wild Boy summons elephants, and his enemies suffer death from trampling as well as volcanic eruption:



I’m struck with how jam-packed this story is in its short 6 pages. A few years later, Atlas/Marvel would be publishing jungle comics with similarly short tales, but never with as much action as this. The storytelling is compressed, sure, but it doesn’t feel rushed, even with two sets of enemies, a gorilla god rampage, an elephant attack, an erupting volcano, a jungle sacrifice, abduction, trap…whew! It’s not without some minor letdowns, such as the simple resolution to Keeto’s sacrifice, and Wild Boy’s way-too-literal ability to communicate with animals, but the pieces come together so that the bad guys all get the comeuppance they could earn back in the days before the imposition of the Comics Code Authority.

The obligatory text feature is “Man-Eater”. A white man named Walters is investigating some deaths in an Indian village which the locals attribute to a different white man who can turn himself into a devil-tiger. That man proves to be Thorpe, a killer who has stolen big cats from a European circus and is using them to wreak havoc. Thorpe overestimates his ability to control Rajah, the Bengal tiger…

Irv Novick and Bernard Sachs handle the art for “Jungle Guns!”, starring Joe Barton, Jungle Adventurer.

The dashing, pipe-smoking Barton is assigned by the Belgium High Commissioner to the Congo to guide an authorized yet suspicious party into the interior. These suspicious travellers are Karl and Olga Heinlin, who claim to be zoologists trying to reach Tambu country before the rains come. (Also, a pick-pocket named “Limey Louie” is being sought for stealing, so I suspect we’ll see him before long.)

As Barton pilots the pair on a boat through the river, Karl objects when Barton insists on finishing the journey on shore, in order to avoid whirlpools and rapids. As the men trade fists, the boat crashes, deciding the matter. The sinking of the boat reveals that Limey Louie was a stowaway in the hold, which was filled with rifles!

It turns out the Heinlins are communist agents here to sow revolution in European colony countries. Olga convinces her husband to keep Barton alive, since he’s the only one who can lead them to the natives. Joe Barton, claiming to be motivated only by his paycheck, makes peace with the commies and they reach the Tambu people, who welcome Barton.

With Barton the only one capable of translating, Karl doesn’t realize that Joe is advising the chief not to accept the offer of guns or the encouragement to rebel, explaining that the communists will return to enslave them if they do.

The Tambu delay their decision until the next morning, but the greedy Karl has, overnight, swiped the precious jewels from the tribe’s idol’s eyes and planted them in Joe’s pocket. The furious chief decides to accept the guns, and sentences Joe Barton to face the deadly bushmaster, the deadliest snake in the jungle!

Joe is rescued by Limey Louie, who has a conscience after all. Louie and Joe take a short cut to the boat, hoping to get there first, but they find the gun-filled boat surrounded by curious elephants. Karl tries to spook them by shooting at them, forcing Joe to expose himself or risk Karl causing a deadly stampede.

Karl shoots and misses, the elephants react exactly as Joe expected, killing Karl beneath their immense feet and crushing the weapons as well. When the Commissioner arrives, Joe refuses to lay the blame on Karl alone, despite Olga’s pleas. Olga goes with the authorities, and Limey Louie gets a pardon for his part in the affair.



Hey, this backup feature isn’t too bad! The Novick/Sachs art doesn’t wow me like Hodge’s, but the story reads like the many pulp magazine short stories starring cool-headed adventurers-for-hire.

Closing out the book is a third Wild Boy story from the drawing table of Paul Hodge, called “The Invaders.” Wild Boy encounters wounded man, reporting that “two strange men of great evil…come to village…ask to be brought to Lost City…” The man dies of gunshot, and Wild Boy vows to avenge him.

Back in the native village, the evil men are beating people, trying to extract the secret location of the Lost City. With villagers facing down a rifle barrel, one villager relents, but warns that they will perish if they try to learn the City’s secret.

Once the safari reaches the Lost City, the villagers attempt to beg off, having wronged the “great jungle prince”, but the evil whites intend to loot the legendary ruins, and need the natives to carry their takings.

Before they can kill another villager, Wild Boy attacks from out of nowhere, but he succumbs to the club of a rifle butt to the back of his head, and is bound and taken prisoner.

The invaders find golden statues, which they begin destroying, caring only about the value of the raw materials. Wild Boy can only watch in distress, until his panther Daro frees him by gnawing at his bonds.

Wild Boy means business, and attacks one villain with his knife going for the throat, but the other man is taking aim with his rifle. Wild Boy turns so that his enemy takes the bullet, but that leaves him as an easy target for the second shot.



(This page is a good example of the jigsaw puzzle approach Hodge takes to his panel design throughout the issue.)

Once again, though, Daro comes to the rescue, knocking his master out of the bullet’s path. A third shot is never fired, because the remaining invader is taken down by “a bolt of lightning from the angry skies.” Wild Boy graciously accepts the villagers’ apology; the evil has been destroyed and Lost City is safe again.

That was a quick one, but a cracking good one. The implication is that Lost City is defended by supernatural forces, making the literal “bolt from the blue” a forgivable means of polishing off the menace. Never mess with the integrity of ancient idols, kids!

It’s pretty shocking to see the hero of the comic holding the end of a dagger to the bad guy’s throat. There’s no question that Wild Boy would have carried through, even if the writer spares him the burden of killing by the convenience of friendly fire.

As a special treat, the back cover features a full color pinup of Wild Boy and his panther Timba before a massive stone idle. The GCD doesn’t identify an artist for this, but I think it’s very nice work.



Well, how about that? Unexpectedly, I find this to be a definite Jungle Gem! Although it’s loaded with well-worn jungle tropes, cliches, and conventions, everything is executed well. The artwork is above average, the rendering is lush, the Lost City adds visual appeal, the stories make effective use of their page count without excessive padding or hasty shortcuts. I had never heard of the artist Paul Hodge, and I quite like his work. He staggers and angles his panels so that no page is just rectangular blocks, but does so in a way that doesn’t hinder the flow of reading.

Out of all the jungle comics I’ve sampled so far, this is the one I’m most tempted to read in full. WILD BOY ran for eight issues in 1950-1952, with its first three issues numbered 10-12. Ziff-Davis had only been publishing comics for a few months when WILD BOY debuted, so this was not a case of a new comic taking over the numbering of a cancelled comic, as was typical of the industry. Ziff-Davis actually debuted five new series in January 1951, all of which started at #10, so this appears to be a ploy to make these appear, to retailers, to be well-established properties. Ziff-Davis had actually only published 7 comics in total thus far: FAMOUS STARS #1-2, KID COWBOY #1-2, ROMANTIC MARRIAGE #1-2, and AMAZING ADVENTURES #1.

Ziff-Davis sold many of their properties to St. John Publishing when they abandoned the market in 1952, and St. John continued the series under the new title WILD BOY OF THE CONGO. Their first issue, #9, appears to have been prepared by Ziff-Davis but handed over to St. John, and was published a year after the last Ziff-Davis issue. After that single issue of new material, St. John reprinted earlier Ziff-Davis content, but published them under new covers by Matt Baker, such as this one:



I won’t be sampling the St. John issues separately, letting this one stand as my single review of WILD BOY.

I've been trying to figure out whose work that back cover reminded me of, and it finally hit me: Jack Katz. I'm not very familiar with his work, particularly in the 50's, but this gives me the same vibes as the First Kingdom covers I used to see (and always pass up) in the comics shop. The composition, the coloring, and the level of detail strike me as similar, but I don't know the identifying hallmarks of either Katz or Baker.

But yeah, Hodge does some pretty impressive work, and I've never in my life seen his name or comics career discussed. Going by the GCD, his identified credits indicate a short stay in the industry, with three issues of WILD BOY and less than 20 short stories for various Atlas horror, western, and war anthologies.

SHANNA THE SHE-DEVIL #1 was cover-dated December, 1972. Marvel brought this to the stands as a part of a short-lived attempt to publish comics with more appeal to female readers. Here’s how it was explained in the Bullpen Bulletins:



In the Bullpen Bulletins the following month, it’s noted that “writer Carol (sic) Seuling and artist George Tuska were helped out at the last minute by a bit of additional dialogue from the nifty new ballpoint pen of Steve Gerber—a name we predict you’ll be seeing a lot more of, in the near future! Steve’s an old confidant and correspondent of Roy’s, whom he brought east to help himself and Steve Englehart with the editorial efforts on our ever-expanding comix line.”

SHANNA initially seems like an odd choice for a “girl’s line”, since jungle girl comics, I presume, had a track record of appealing more to boys. The Cat could have been intended as Marvel’s answer to Wonder Woman, and Linda Carter, the night nurse, had potential appeal in a market that sill supported nurse books, romance books, and gothic books on the paperback rack. SHANNA did have a 70’s “women’s lib” vibe and an ecological perspective that lent it a more contemporary feel than the classic jungle girl books, though.

The debut story, “Shanna the She-Devil”, is penciled by George Tuska and inked by Vince Colletta. It opens with Shanna, assisted by her leopards Biri (a black panther) and Ina (a spotted leopard) intervening before “Ivory Dan” Drake can slaughter an African elephant in an illegal poaching expedition on a protected game reserve.

Shanna orders Drake and his men off the grounds, but Ivory Dan intends to defy her commands by moving to a different hunting location. His hired native man, Kula, refuses to assist him: “I will not hunt with you! You are evil! And to evil men, Shanna brings death!”

Drake responds poorly, and beats Kula, who is left seeking revenge for the humiliation. Kula reports his former employer’s plan to Shanna, who heads off to stop the poachers, sending Kula to summon the game warden. Shanna tracks down the sexist pigs and begins upsetting their plans, “asserting her femininity until she gets a cowardly rifle butt to the skull:



The sight of the gun triggers a flashback in Shanna’s concussed noggin. We learn that she is Dr. Shanna O’Harra, a well-to-do Manhattanite veterinarian serving as environmental specialist for the Municipal Zoo. When the zoo’s big cats are slaughtered, Shanna rescues the sole survivor, a leopard named Julani, who Shanna had hand-raised. A panicked guard finishes the slaughter, thinking the leopard was a danger to Dr. O’Hara.

We get another sub-flashback to her childhood, when she tried to prevent her own father from shooting a leopard in Africa, then return to her origin. Not only have zoo animals been under attack across the country, and Americans have been increasingly cruel to animals.



Now another sub-flashback shows that the “leopard” Shanna’s dad was firing on was actually his wife, Shanna’s mom!



Shanna takes Julani’s cubs, who had been safe in the hospital at the time of the slaughter, and makes plans to leave the “civilized” world behind. Training montage time:



Shanna takes a new job opportunity to relocate the cubs (Ina and Biri, as I’m sure you’ve guessed) to the Dahomey Reserve in Africa. She dons Julani’s pelt in order to better bond with the growing cubs and becomes a jungle girl in the classic mold…

…At which point we catch back up with her as she recovers consciousness, bound and helpless before Drake and his men Vole and Zarg:



Zarg is a gargantuan brute, but Shanna’s training allows her to defeat the big galoot. She tries to stop Ivory Dan from shooting the elephants, but he fires before she can do so, starting an elephant stampede that leads to Dan’s demise:



In the closing panels, we get a quick introduction to the game preserve’s warden, Patrick, evidently an Irishman, and Gerber and Seuling establish that Patrick has been wooing our jungle queen with frequent but refused proposals.

SHANNA’s main flaws are its awkwardness, its overblown messaging, and its paucity of jungle atmosphere. The awkwardness shows in the pieced-out flashback to her childhood, which are nested at two different levels of the story (part in the “now” storyline, part within a different flashback. The training scene is necessary to set her up as being capable of jungle survival, but it comes unexpectedly, and is unconvincing. This awkwardness may be due to Carole Seuling’s rookie status as a comics writer, and may be why Gerber was recruited to assist. Seuling only has a few credits other than this one. Her husband was well-know retailer Phil Seuling, and that probably played some part in her getting this gig.

The messaging is endemic of the times, and I admit I probably would have been receptive to it if I’d bought this off the stands. It does transform the tone to make this jungle queen an activist, feminist environmentalist, and it’s a nice touch to give her a Ph.D. and a notable career. The final-page insertion of a romantic interest blunts the effect, though.

I can’t pinpoint the reason for the lack of jungle atmosphere, though. George Tuska draws decent animals, he draws jungle environments, and Vince Colletta is at least compatible, as he usually was, with Tuska’s work, and I can’t blame things on any obvious shortcuts on Colletta’s part. It may just be the “Marvelizing” of the scripting that saps this book of the immersive feel of a good jungle comic.

For all its flaws, though, the book reads well enough, and if it doesn’t ascend to any heights, it’s not at the Jungle Junk level. At the least, the book seemed to have an intent behind it, rather than just being another adventure book to flood the stands with. I liked Marvel’s efforts at jumping on the “relevance” trend, and its experiments outside the conventional superhero stuff with these female characters, more minority leads, and expanding new material in the Western, horror, and war genres. But I admit to preferring THE CAT and, particularly, NIGHT NURSE to SHANNA.

That's a good way to express it, berkley . All your proposed artists could have brought the verve and authenticity and imagination these pages needed to elevate them, but SHANNA got Tuska and Andru, both good artists but neither of whom were well suited for this kind of material.

Good points, tarkintino . For a "relevant" comic, pro-environmentalism is playing it safe, since that was the one area of progressivism that the conservative establishment was willing to tolerate and even encourage in the youth of the 70's. (Today, even that has become a stark line dividing the culture, with some subsets in America not revelling in conspicuous, audacious acts of intentional pollution. Just last week, I witnessed for the first time some [expletives deleted] engaging in the repugnant act of "rolling coal".) In comparison, Shanna's feminist leanings were understated and rendered mostly irrelevant by her transplanting herself to the jungle.
But yeah, her origin is hard to swallow, and it's surprising that even then Marvel didn't realize the unseemliness of creating a new white jungle goddess type in the Sheena mold (right down to coming as close as possible to swiping the character name!) in 1972. Jumping from a training montage to being a jungle heroine revered by the natives? Talk about your "white privilege" in action!
I do want to acknowledge my appreciation for Seuling introducing Jakuna Singh, a Sikh agent of SHIELD, in issue 2. That was a fresh example of diversity, but Singh got killed off after just a few appearances.

VOODOO and VOODA and SEVEN SEAS COMICS

With its 19th issue in January 1955, Ajax-Farrell's VOODOO adopted a minor change to its cover dress. Instead of "Weird Fantastic Tales", which appeared above the title for the first 17 issues, or the somewhat milder "Astounding Fantasy!" that topped the logo on issue 18, this issue announced "Tales of Jungle Magic!"



You can read this comic at: VOODOO #19

While I wish I could say this was the beginning of a comic in the Jungle Horror subgenre, the tagline overpromised: there was only one tale of jungle magic leading off this comic, along with one jungle adventure in the South Seas islands subgenre, an Arctic adventure story and a routine horror story. A jungle horror format would have been entirely feasible: almost every horror anthology comic published in the 50's offered some jungle-based horror stories, with witch doctor curses, shrunken heads, gorilla brain transplants, etc. Star's TERRORS OF THE JUNGLE, despite its lurid name, featured mostly established jungle heroes like Jo-Jo and Rulah, rather than the implied horror content.

VOODOO, though, did come as close to a "Jungle Horror" comic as any I've seen. Although it was generally a pretty conventional horror comic for the era, it included a higher-than-usual percentage of jungle-themed stories--not in every issue, no, but sometimes more than one between its covers in a month. It seems, though, that Ajax-Farrell saw the writing on the wall, because they were about to get out of the horror comics business, as well as the superhero comics business, and devote themselves primarily to romance for a few years. Before they did, they tried to keep VOODOO going under less lurid, less conspicuous covers, spotlighting less alarming content while the public was being whipped up by Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent.

VOODOO #19's two jungle stories are "Destination Congo" and "The Thirsty Blade", both with Matt Baker art and both reprinted from SEVEN SEAS COMICS #5, from 1946. SEVEN SEAS COMICS was originally published by the Iger Studio, which issued a few comics--six issues of SEVEN SEAS COMICS and one each of BOBBY COMICS and STONY CRAIG--independently, but which mostly supplied content for other publishers. One reason VOODOO favored jungle stories is because Ajax-Farrell drew heavily from decade-old stories from that older series, reprinting them for a new audience. The "Pacific islands adventure" genre had never gained much traction in comics, but jungle comics had; I suppose the two are close enough that promoting these as jungle comics wasn't much of a stretch.

"Destination Congo" opens with a splash introducing the cast: Captain Ted, the native girl Misto, the native first mate Tanaka, the traitorous Bill, and Marty, "who paid a full price for worldly gain..." This introduction gives a B-movie feel, with suggestions of crime, treachery, and supernatural mystery.

And we start off with Misto performing "an ancient jungle rite" before "the fire of truth" in her New York apartment: Misto is casting a spell to bring her passage back to her island home. Bill and Marty, meanwhile, have found a "chump" to ship their cargo--guns--to the Diamond Isles, partway to some unspecified destination where, it is implied, they will be selling the weapons for nefarious purpose.

The "chump" is Captain Ted, who has managed to finish his purchase of The Dainty Jade, thanks to Bill's payment. Bill and Marty are claiming to be an oil prospector and engineer rather than gun smugglers, and these shady characters force Ted and Tanaka to set sail even as typhoons threaten.

Misto, who Bill and Marty saw in the city, arrives to book passage, and Ted allows her onboard over Bill's ojections. Misto, we learn, believes she has been brought here for some unknown purpose, and, intriguingly, thinks to herself: "I must be alert, even though I tire quickly these days..."

The typhoon strikes, Bill shows his true colors by wounding the captain with a shot from his pistol, and Misto assures Captain Ted that the villains will not live to carry out their plans.

Misto takes the wheel and steers the ship to the Diamond Isles, where she rejoins her people. Home at last, she begins to wither: she is actually an old woman, who is returning home to return to her true age and die in her homeland, lest her spirit be left in New York to wander as a ghost!

Bill and Marty are attacking the natives with their weapons, and Misto dives into the water to kill a shark, the carcass of which will play a part in her plan. That plan involves using the carcass to...um...I'm a little lost, but Ted and Tanaka toss some chum in the waves to attract the sharks, who'll devour the bad guys, and Misto ages and dies in the waters:



"The Legend" is the two-page text story. Said legend is that of R'wana and Ngobi, two hunters in love with the same girl, Blina. These Kenyans were the greatest hunters, and Blina the greatest beauty; R'wana was cruel and bloodthirsty, while Ngobi hunted only for the sake of feeding the people.

Fearing that Blina's father the chieftain of the village, would choose Ngobi for her mate, he proposes a challenge to determine which will become her husband: whoever can kill the black lion who has been worrying the village. Ngobi objects, arguing that the lion is no threat, but that attacking it and failing to kill it will turn it into a man-killer. The chief is confident that one of the men will succeed, and thus approves the challenge.

Ngobi is first to face the lion, and cannot bring himself to attempt the kill. R'wana has no such objections, and he takes his shot, wounding the beast. He thinks that since Ngobi didn't even try, he has won, but instead the villagers drive him to his hut in disgrace, realizing that Ngobi's concerns will now be proven.

R'wana sneaks through the night to assassinate his rival, but the lion attacks him! But Ngobi can now kill it without compunction, winning the hand of Blina, while R'wana dies, becoming a bitter, evil ghost.

Hey, that's actually one of the best old comics text stories I've ever read!

"The Thirsty Blade", the second jungle story in this issue, features the character Alani, the "South Sea Girl" who had an ongoing feature in SEVEN SEAS COMICS. It opens with the kind of scene the CCA would soon be forbidding, with a bound prisoner being mercilessly whipped while bound to a stake. But this prisoner bears the beating, reminding himself that he has an escape plan and a map the the Vanishing Isles...



The prisoner ("Bloody Roger") and his cutthroat companions revolt against the guards of the prison island, while Alani's blond boyfriend Ted dives for pearls in the seas around the peaceful Vanishing Isles. He's attacked by sharks, and Alani's spear misses the mark, so she dives in and slaughters the maneater with her knife! Alani is a formidable and capable woman in the classic jungle queen mode. She next proposes to show Ted to the "Mysto trees", as the escaped prisoners reach the island and begin to attack the villagers, who cry out for Alani.

The crew ambush and capture Alani and Ted, tying them to tree trunks so that they can observe the evening's scheduled "entertainment": the one by one execution of every villager!



But the opening event is to be the execution, by improvised guillotine, of Alani's handsome companion. Alani, though, notices that the contraption has used the vine of the Mysto tree to hold the blade, and she knows of its "astounding properties": shortly after being detached, the vines melt!

Since the ignorant cutthroats bound Alani with Mysto vine, she escapes, but she must save Ted before the vines disintegrated and drop the chop on her chap! Through an unbelievable coincidence, Ted escapes decapitation:



In a grisly and abrupt finish, that blade-stopping knife comes loose just in time to land on Bloody Roger himself, as he was in the process of finishing off the South Sea Girl, and the final caption hastily summarizes the aftermath of the story:





With issue 20, dated April 1955, Ajax-Farrell modified the title to VOODA, with "Introducing Jungle Princess" over the new logo:






You can read this comic at: VOODA #20

Note also that VOODA bears the seal of the Comics Code Authority, and the name change is likely to have been motivated by the CCA's disapproval of the implications of the word "voodoo", even though the topic itself was not specifically forbidden by the code.

The creative team on the initial Vooda story, "Fools Against Fortune!", has not yet been identified at the GCD.

Vooda is set in the Congo, but Vooda herself is colored as a white woman. The opening caption makes a conspicuous reference to "voodoo", suggesting to me that the decision to rename the comic may have come after the production (or perhaps alteration) of this story:





The king of the tribe steals food from the cruel white aliens, and is shot down for his attempt. They then tie the slain leader's young son to a tree, to serve as tiger bait, proposing to then kill the tiger and use its meat to feed the tribe! Yes, in the real world, the boy would have nothing to fear from the mythical African tiger, but comic book jungles don't always respect authentic habitats...

Vooda hears the news, and arrives to save the day, killing the tiger and saving the boy. At her instruction, the villagers imitate the sounds of wildlife:



This fools the white hunters into assembling for a hunt, and while the men are out pursuing nonexistent prey, the villagers take back their stolen food and relocate it elsewhere in the jungle.

She next orders that the tiger's carcass be "placed at the bottom of the green spring when the water's temperature reaches freezing." (?!)

Three days later, Vooda spies the hunters starving in the jungle. While she is watching, she's attacked by a giant snake, and must battle with it. The hunters, meanwhile, find the tiger carcass left as bait, and argue over it, fearing more days of starving ahead of them. One kills the other, and the tiger's mate arrives to kill the survivor!



Hey, I thought the random snake fight was intended to delay Vooda and prevent her from intervening in the deadly end to the white hunters, but it was just there to add a little more stereotypical jungle action--Vooda watches coldly as the men get their just desserts, and is acknowledged as a wise ruler for how she handled this situation!

This is a pretty vicious little tale that has more than a few holes in it. These "hunters" can't find any prey to feed on in the Congo jungles? Just because the animals the villagers imitated weren't really there doesn't mean there weren't any actual meaty creatures still in their natural habitats! And I was puzzled over the bit about the frozen waters--you'd think the writer would have stopped as soon as he typed the word "freezing" and rethink his plot!--but I realize now that this was intended as a means to justify the tiger meat being preserved when the hunters returned after three days of starvation. But wouldn't the story have been even better if they were fighting over a rotting carcass as the only disgusting option left to them?

For a supposed introduction to the character, we get almost nothing about Vooda. We can infer that she's a typical Jungle Queen type: white woman from the "civilized" world establishing her own "kingdom" where she's loved and respected by the natives as their savior against menaces. I suppose readers were more than capable of filling in the blanks themselves.

"Danger Safari", also from unidentified creators, is a reprint of the Roy Lance story "Roy Lance in the Revolt of the Black Continent" from JUNGLE COMICS #2, which I covered in my first jungle comics sampling of this thread. The character's name has been altered to "Kit", presumably because Fiction House retained the trademark to "Roy Lance." This revision adds a lot of dialogue to the many silent panels in the original; norms had changed in the comic book business, and these changes reflect that the captioned illustrations common in the early days of the medium were no longer sufficient.

The new dialogue does add some substance and personality that was lacking. It also refines one story detail: in the original, all of the African tribes are united in uprising, but here, some tribes are opposing the villainous Dawambo.

Original:



Reprint:



"Kimbo, Boy of the Jungle" is next, with art attributed, according the the GCD, to the "Iger Shop", so, presumably, it was a group effort by several artists.



At least one prehistoric dinosaur has survived and been revived in Kimbo's jungle homeland. It's presence prevents the people from hunting food, so now Zodi must join the search for food, leaving his girlfriend Ranu behind to fend off the advances of the evil Mordu, who wants Ranu as his bride.

Zodi's band encounters the dinosaur, and only Zodi survives. Kimbo, a white (of course...) jungle boy arrives to aid Zodi and join him in hunting down the monster. But first he sends Zodi back to his village to recover.

Mordu convinces the village that Zodi has murdered his tribemen, and is exiled, leaving Mordu to claim the lovely Ranu.

In the wild, Zodi is helpless when attacked by a big cat, but Kimbo comes to the rescue. Together, they defeat the giant lizard and restore Zodi's good name, leading to Mordu's exile:



Kimbo is another out-of-nowhere white savior type, and again the reader is left to fill in any gaps as to why this kid is such a hero to the natives. The dinosaur adds a bit of spice to this tale, but it's pretty lame stuff, rendered in a rather pedestrian style.

"Bull Stampede" is the two page text story. It has safari members Rod Carson and Terry Drummond--both great examples of the kinds of names comics writers of the time seemed to dub their adventuring characters!--triggering an elephant stampede to chase off the threatening Swami tribe. This one is not one of the best text stories I've found in old comics, for sure.

Finally, writer Manning Lee Stokes and artist Matt Baker deliver "Echoes of an A-Bomb." This is a reprint of another South Sea Girl story from SEVEN SEAS COMICS #6, with the name of its lead character Alani relettered as "Vooda." Over the course of its three-issue run, several South Sea Girl stories would be revised to become "Vooda" stories. Some of the apparently new Vooda stories could be left-over, unpublished inventory from Iger, altered to feature this "new" character.

Like the Roy Lance story, Ajax-Farrell have added dialogue:

Vooda:



South Sea Girl:



Throughout the story, many word balloons have been expanded, slowing down the reading experience, but the effect is not as much an improvement as it was to the under-scripted Roy Lance tale. It doesn't appear to me that the additions to the scripts in either were intended to satisfy new CCA restrictions, but that they were intended to make the comics feel like a more substantial reading experience.

The villains here are members of "Death, Unlimited", here to test atomic bombs. Vooda has friends from Washington arriving to aid the island. She swims to the nearby American ship to get aid, and they reach the island just as the bad guys' dirigible heads off to a safe distance for detonating the explosion.

Vooda:



South Sea Girl:



Vooda grabs the tether, climbing to the cabin of the dirigible and grabs the bomb's radio controller, tossing it out into the ocean below. The men try to fight her, but one plunges to his demise, followed by Vooda, whose superior swimming skills allow her to survive.

Well, Ajax-Farrell didn't even try to reconcile the two stories: this certainly isn't the Congo setting of the first story. Fortunately, the Vanishing Isles of the South Sea Girl stories is home to a variety of fauna, including gorillas, so reprints in later issues could better pass themselves off as jungle stories.

I'll consider this look at VOODOO/VOODA to suffice as my sampling of SEVEN SEAS COMICS as well, since SEVEN SEAS COMICS' most prominent jungle material is reprinted here. I did skim a few issues, which included several other sea-going features that didn't go deeply into the jungle. The first issue provides an introduction to Alani, the South Sea Girl, establishing her as the "young beautiful ruler and protector" of the Vanishing Isles, "where the pounding surf sweeps adventure against lush shores."



To my great surprise, this first South Sea Girl story turns out to be the story reprinted as "Destination Congo" in VOODOO #19! Alani has been turned into "Misto", and, in order to satisfy the more horrific expectations of readers of VOODOO, assigned a fate to age into an old hag once she reached her shores:






As in previously cited examples, Ajax-Farrell padded the dialogue here, beyond rewriting the script to make it something more like a horror tale. They also performed some surgery on the art, joining panels from different pages:

Reprint/Remodel:



Original:



Instead of aging and dying with the sharks, Alani survives to wave farewell to Captain Ted, who departs while the mists guarding the Vanishing Isles are gone.

So Alani the South Sea Girl appeared in three different guises over the course of VOODOO/VOODA: as Misto, the doomed mystery woman from the Congo, as Alani the South Sea Girl, and as Vooda the Jungle Princess.

Of the three versions, I prefer the original South Sea Girl, but Vooda makes for slightly above average jungle fare, with stories that provide a bit more bite than then defanged 50's fare that would follow the adoption of the Comics Code. There's some nice Matt Baker art, providing plenty of atmosphere. Not a Jungle Gem, but well worth a 1955 dime to readers of the time.