JO-JO CONGO KING, Part I
Hey, don’t laugh. Well, okay, you can laugh at first, because JO-JO COMICS debuted from Fox Feature Syndicate as a humor book featuring a variety of funny animals and humorous humans, none of whom went by the less-than-imposing monicker of “Jo-Jo”. Why “JO-JO”? Maybe Fox thought it sounded funny—it does!—or perhaps the series began development as “HO-HO COMICS” and either another publisher had already trademarked the name. I can’t find evidence of a competing HO-HO COMICS being published, but “HO-HO” may have been considered potentially infringing on Four Star Publications’ HI-HO COMICS or ACG’s HA HA COMICS, both of which hit the stands earlier.
So for whatever reason, JO-JO COMICS it was, and it began with a Spring 1946-dated issue cover-featuring the “O’Brine Twins”, a cartoony pair of sailors whose stories had already been running as backups in other Fox anthologies. In July 1947, though, the initial premise was scrapped, and with its seventh issue, the cover read “Jo-Jo Congo King”. The formal title, according to the indicia, was still “Jo-Jo Comics”, occasionally simplified as “Jo-Jo”, sufficient to cover Fox’s claim that it was the same comic, to avoid paying a new fee to establish the desirable second class mailing privileges in the United States. (It appears that earlier in the history of comics, publishers were more concerned about plausibly claiming continuity between two obviously different comics being in some sense the same series, so name changes, when necessary, were more subtle, such as the classic example of EC’ MOON GIRL becoming A MOON…A GIRL…ROMANCE! As the years went on and the Post Office apparently demonstrating little concern, title changes were more abrupt, leading to instances such as Marvel/Atlas treating publishing BLAZE CARSON, REX HART, WHIP WILSON, and GUNHAWK as different issues of the same comic, at least for the purpose of postal registration.)
Jo-Jo Congo King took over with the 7th issue, but it appears to have been a hastily-arranged coup, with only two Jo-Jo stories—a total of 12 pages--backed with a couple of adventure features yanked from inventory: the last Bronze Man story, following the character’s previous appearances in BLUE BEETLE, and The Purple Tigress, a costumed heroine who had previously appeared in ALL TOP COMICS, and a non-jungle 2-page text story.
The first two Jo-Jo stories show him involved with two different women. The first, Gwenna, is queen of the Bonangi tribe. The synopsis on the GCD suggests that Gwenna is Jo-Jo’s “first mate”, but a careful reading of that story does not suggest that they are lovers, but friends. The second story, involving a mad scientist who makes plant life into dangerous monsters, clearly establishes another woman, Geesa, as Jo-Jo’s “betrothed”.
The next issue was mistakenly
also number 7, so these issues are listed as 7a and 7b at the GCD. 7b has 22 pages of Jo-Jo Congo King, a jungle-themed text story, and a humorous Western back up, Popgun Pete. As of the 8th issue, Jo-Jo seems to be romantically attached to Tanee—with Geesa long forgotten. Tanee will remain as Jo-Jo’s girl through the remainder of the feature’s run.
But before getting to the stories, I’ve got to address the elephant in the room—uhh—jungle…
Back in this post (
classiccomics.org/post/480474/ ) on DOROTHY LAMOUR, JUNGLE PRINCESS, also published by Fox, I speculated on what I assumed would have been a controversial aspect of the comic in 1950, perhaps even so controversial as to lead to Fox leaving the comics market. That aspect was what appeared to be interracial relationships between dark-skinned African men and light-skinned women with conventionally Caucasian features and hair.
Well, judging from JO-JO CONGO KING, published several years earlier, I suppose that if there were any objections, they weren’t strong enough to drive Fox from the stands, because Jo-Jo lives in a version of the African jungle where
all the native women are colored and drawn to look like white women, while the native men are all brown-skinned, with hair and facial features more generically characteristic of Black men. It’s a very curious convention to adopt, and I can only guess that Fox wanted to take advantage of the prurient appeal of having lots of scantily-clad women, but thought that only light-skinned, Caucasian-looking women would appeal to the comics’ readers. As a commenter on comicbookplus.com put it, in reference to a similar comic, ZAGO JUNGLE PRINCE (which I’ll cover later):
Zago exists in a strange universe. He is claimed to be a "Jungle Prince", but unlike, say Dell's BROTHERS OF THE SPEAR, that title is never explained. Zago exists without benefit of origin or hint of a backstory of any kind. He lives in a native village where all the females are light-skinned like himself, but all the males besides himself are dark-skinned. There are several instances where we see a dark-skinned native refer to a light-skinned girl as his daughter, or his mate (or the light-skinned girl refer to a dark-skinned male as father or husband). In addition, all of the women are young and attractive; and children or elders are never seen -- either female or male. In the one story where a child seems to appear, he actually turns out to be a 20-year-old midget! That not only seems to present an extremely odd picture of Africa but seems especially puzzling when you remember these stories were published in 1948. Native women are, without exception, whether good or evil, portrayed as light-skinned. We never, ever see a dark-skinned woman, yet all the male natives are dark-skinned (as you would expect for Africa). At first when I noted this in a couple of stories, I simply wrote it off as a mistake of the colorist (they are notorious for not actually reading the scripts), but after a goodly number of stories, it became obvious that this policy was not only consistent, but quite deliberate, and somewhat baffling.This also raises the question of whether Jo-Jo’s girl-friend Tanee is supposed to be one of the native females or a white like Jo-Jo…assuming that Jo-Jo
is white! After all, in his first appearance, he addresses the bad guys as “white”, almost as if he doesn’t consider himself to be of the same race:
Or does any of that even matter in Jo-Jo’s fantasy jungle world? Are we to imagine Jo-Jo’s world is a utopia where skin color is irrelevant to society? If so, though, why the gender distinction between light and dark skins? Heck, this is one of the most difficult-to-write-about issues that’s arisen in these jungle comics, riding some line that feels racist to me, but I can’t clearly articulate why—it’s some kind of racist/sexist/exploitative/fantastic jumble of hard-to-process choices. Help?!
More Jo-Jo could be found in ALL GREAT JUNGLE ADVENTURES, which was (sort-of) a one-shot release, 132 pages for 25 cents, published by Fox in 1949. Fox published several of these extra-long giant comics by removing the covers from four unsold, leftover, regular-length comics and reassembling them under one new cover. I say “sort of” a one-shot because the contents to be found behind these covers might vary, even between copies with the same cover. Fox published several such collections of their romance comics and superhero comics, but this appears to be the only giant jungle comic Fox attempted to recycle.
The format might have seemed like quite a bargain, but as I mentioned in prior post, Fox had a policy of printing the first story page of its comics on the inside front cover, colored in tones of a single print color (cyan or magenta), plus black, of course. Consequently, four of the stories in each giant--stories which would have been the lead story in their respective original releases—would start on the second page, lacking splash or title page!
The copy that you can read at
comicbookplus.com/?dlid=16553 evidently collates interiors from ALL TOP COMICS #16 and JO-JO COMICS #18, but as I said above, collections of other Fox jungle comics were also issued between these same covers. From a stack of cover-stripped unsold jungle comics, they would grab four and rebind them under this cover, so there’s really no telling what combinations might have been released.
Since the component comics are considered elsewhere in this thread (or are not relevant to the topic of jungle comics), I’ll refrain from digging into the stories on this one. The inside front cover is a one-pager in black and magenta called “Man Eater”, about the Bengal tiger. The stories feature Rulah, Jo-Jo Congo King, Phantom Lady, “Tropical Topics”, and a “True Crime” story narrated by Phantom Lady.
That's a lot to say about Jo-Jo, so I'm splitting this into multiple parts. Coming up, a proper sampling of an issue of JO-JO CONGO KING...