Well, there's also the bizarre MICKEY MOUSE #107-109, in which cartoon Mickey became a serious secret agent in a Dan Spiegle world!

I can only find just the littlest bit of a team-up, in JLA #92:



Nothing like a proper, spotlighted team-up between the two characters. In addition to those on your list (although I can't recall a "bona fide" Superman or Wonder Woman team-up, actually), the Golden Age Atom teamed up with Ray Palmer in issues 29 and 36 of his 1960's series.

Great subject! I'm (obviously) all for exploring some of the under-evaluated genres that have had significant presence in this medium.
Don Winslow has long fascinated me, with his prominent comics run, his presence in newspaper strips, radio, and film making it seem like he must have been something of a household name at the time that's now largely forgotten. There were a lot of big characters from the 20th century who, even if not familiar to modern society, have retained some level of name recognition, such as Fu Manchu, Buster Brown, Flash Gordon, and I suspect the very ordinary name "Don Winslow" may have been a big factor, since it's evocative of nothing: it sounds like the name of someone in middle management to me. But I may very well be overestimating his prominence even during his prime.
The thing I most remember about Mike Grell's James Bond is Grell's anger at Eclipse inserting a comic book sound effect on one of his pages; until he raised a ruckus about it in the fan press, I hadn't even noticed his policy of eschewing them.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you cover in this genre!

RANGERS COMICS appears to have had less coherence than other Fiction House titles. JUMBO COMICS had a title vague enough to encompass virtually any type of story, but RANGERS featured things like Firehair (a western heroine), The Secret Files of Dr. Drew (Jerry Grandenetti’s doing a spot-on Eisner impersonation in horror-suspense storis), and “I Confess!” (a murder mystery hosted by a fictional radio star), superheroes, war stories, sea-faring stories, a weird little horror series called “The Werewolf Hunter”, and a few jungle series, ending up as an all-out war comic.

Rocky Hall, Jungle Stalker was there at the beginning, in what was then called RANGERS OF FREEDOM #1, October 1941. (The Rangers of Freedom, who headlined the comic at the time, were a trio of “the best specimens of American youth” recruited by the US government to wear costumes and do superhero stuff.) In that first issue, Rocky met his partner-to-be, Gay-Ree, an orphaned boy raised in the jungle like Tarzan, but my sample selection is from issue 2, December 1941, and you can read this episode at comicbookplus.com.

Rocky’s second installment, like all of them, is credited on the splash to “Buck Masters”, a manly pseudonym if I’ve ever heard one. We meet Rocky, “tracker extrarordinary” and his friend Gay-Ree (“bred in the jungle”) hunting together in Kenya. Both appear to be young white boys living on their own in Africa: Rocky a white blond in short shorts and packing a big rifle and lots of ammo, Gay-Ree a white jungle boy in leopard skin brief with a long knife hanging at his crotch.

Gay-Ree’s superior hearing leads the two friends to where a “white man leads black-skins” in an attack on a garrison. Inside the garrison walls, the British defenders—including a sharp-shooting lady in a red dress--are assisted by a murderous ape against a monocle-wearing German and his fez-wearing native army. Rocky and Gay-Ree help to turn away the invaders, but not before they’ve taken the pith hat-wearing Britisher they were after!

The young lady, Joan Cranston, explains that the abductee is her father, a British officer, whose men deserted him. She blames the Nazis. No explanation is provided for her “ape-de-camp”, who speaks a monosyllabic ape language that is helpfully translated for the reader (“Ta” = “Kill”, “Bab” = “They bad”).

Rocky leads them on the trail of the kidnappers, but when they make camp, they face an elephant stampede and receive a warning message on an arrow. They evade the pachyderms by climbing a tree, where Gay-Ree strikes a familiar pose:



Gay-Ree gets the low-down from a tribe of locals: the “ape-god” is to sacrifice a “white bwana” at the cliff of the “ape-men”.

The Nazi villain offers the officer his life if he will announce that the natives are ordered to become slaves to the Nazis, but he refuses. Lucky for the noble chap, Gay-Ree comes to the rescue, followed by Rocky Hall, who is learning his pal’s vine-swinging ways.

Rocky, Gay-Ree, and the officer escape the Nazi, natives, and brutish ape-men, but find that Joan has been taken, and her pet ape-man, “Dum-Dum”, has been wounded.



Rocky and Gay-Ree sneak up the back way, and even Dum-Dum recovers enough stamina to join in the action:



With the nameless Nazi dead, Gay-Ree convinces the natives that the ape-god (as portrayed by Dum-Dum) wants them to abandon this “silly war business”, and the natives comply, seeing that “white warrior friend of ape-god!”

Maybe I’m fatigued—or whatever the British colonizers might call it--from reading too many bad jungle comics, but I find this a Jungle Gem. Rocky and Gay-Ree would mature quickly into manhood by the time of their final appearance in RANGERS COMICS #13, with Gay-Ree opting for the simpler name of “Gary”:



The jungle setting dominated in an interesting feature that premiered ten issues later, in RANGER COMICS #23, June 1945 which you can read at comicbookplus.com.

Kazanda of the Lost Continent was created by artist Ted Brodie-Mack of New Zealand and writer Archie E. Martin (under the name of Peter Amos) of Australia, and first appeared in the Australian comic book publications Kazanda the Wild Girl and the Lost Continent (1942) and Kazanda Again (1944) from publisher N.S.W. Bookstall, which was reportedly the first Australian company publishing original comic books during WWII, when imports were restricted. Kazanda’s comic book adventures are evidently the first comics published originally in Oceania to be reprinted in the United States, thanks to RANGERS COMICS reprinting the first of the two comics in somewhat altered extracts over the course of several issues. Fiction House was proud enough of their acquisition to promote the debut on the cover, but not enough to commission new art, instead using some WWII racist caricature material:



Kazanda is a seemingly supernatural beauty guarding the lost continent from outsiders who try to approach by ship, who are reaching the shores of the evil Sylf, who permits no outsiders. Paul is the handsome blond man accompanying a professor and his daughter Aileen, who are seeking the mysterious landmass, and Aileen is somehow able to sense Kazanda’s warnings, which Kazanda projects into an “air picture”, via which Kazanda sees the explorers’ ship torpedoed by a submarine (which Kazanda calls “one of Sylf’s water monsters!”).

Aileen is missing, but Paul and the Prof take a lifeboat to the shores of Sylf, in hopes that the girl has made it there alive. Kazanda greets them, informing them that she is queen of the lost continent. She shows them hospitality, and demonstrates the ability to generate a fire with her mind:



She is even able to make the flames invisible, so as not to attract the “strange and terrible people” who live nearby—Sylf’s henchmen, a brutish bunch who have captured and imprisoned Aileen. I guess the “queen’s” rule isn’t exactly continental in scope…

Kazanda acquaints the visitors with their enemy, Sylf the Subtle, via her air pictures:



As Kazanda spies on Sylf, she sees he has an entire harem of captive women, who he keeps mounted on flaming pedestals to stand on display in the “grotto of eternal silence”:



Once placed on the flaming column, the base upon which she stands spins, transforming her into permanent stillness, to serve like a statue as one of “Sylf’s stone wives”.

The air picture fades, and Kazanda is joined by her “messenger”, the tiger, Fang, with whom she is able to speak, demonstrating yet another astonishing supernatural ability. Assuming that Aileen is to be Sylf’s next victim, the fearless Kazanda agrees to escort Paul and the professor to Sylf’s kingdom, to rescue the young woman…to be continued!

OK, no question that this is a Jungle Gem! The first Australian comic book exported to the American market is nothing ground-breaking, treading the familiar tropes of lost civilizations, jungle explorers, talking to animals, mystic abilities, with some tinges of Weird Tales pulp courtesy of Sylf’s somewhat kinky fetish for putting his captured brides on literal pedestals.

The original, including all of the Australian copyright records associated with “Kazanda, the Wild Girl and the Lost Continent”, can be seen by clicking the “View Digital Copy” link at:

recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/ItemDetail.aspx?Barcode=771775&isAv=N.

The flow of the story has suffered from Fiction House’s abridgment and revisions. The original is structured like a Sunday comic, with a title panel at the start of every page. Here’s a sample page:



In its original format, Kazanda is a much more richly developed feature than a typical comic of the era, taking its cues from the likes of Flash Gordon to populate its fantasy environment with strange life-forms and civilizations and conflicts. The artist does some nice work on the vegetation and wildlife, and does some good girl art (although relying on some obvious photo swipes for the most lushly rendered pages). An international Jungle Gem!

From RANGERS COMICS #50, December 1949, we’ll get our samples of two more Fiction House jungle-themed backups.


First up is King, of the Congo (note the comma!), credited to Nils Van Buren. King, a manly civilized American adventurer, is flying into Africa’s Kabloona Swamp to rescue Prof. Morrison and his daughter, Sandra, who are under threat from poisonous insects, crocodiles, fever, but most of all the dreaded Crocodile Men, a tribe of “swamp fiends”. Wabu, the priest of the tribe, who all wear crocodile heads as head-dress, has read the orders of their god, Zi, in the “magical vapors”—the intruders are to suffer the vengeance of a thousand thorns!

King has made a water landing in the swamp, and he and his matronly aide Bertha take off in the “skooter-bug”, a compact hydrofoil, leaving the young boy Jingo to watch the plane. King and Bertha are attacked by the crocodile men and taken captive, but Jingo’s pet bird, who also came along with them, attacks Wabu, then heads back to Jingo, using its skills of mimicry to “play back” Wabu’s words: “Silence, white cow! You and your companion are our prisoners!”

King and Bertha are taken to the wheel of a thousand thorns, some kind of oxen-driven mechanism that apparently rotates a wheel of blades across its victims:



Jingo arrives by plane, scaring off the tribe with gunfire. While King wallops the stragglers. They all escape, and the professor is delighted to find that Jingo’s bird is the Parateena Glorialus—a specimen of the very bird he had come to the swamp to find!

Nicely drawn, but definitely no Jungle Gem. This is King’s debut, and he’s almost completely ineffective.

Immediately following King is Jan of the Jungle, attributed to Coleman Hart. Jan had been around since issue 42. Jan is also, evidently, known as the “Wolf Boy”, but there are no wolves in this tale--I assume he’s some kind of clone of Kipling’s Mowgli. He’s a turban-wearing lad in an ambiguous geographical jungle setting, and he has the standard jungle hero ability to talk to the animals.

The story centers around a boat carrying a pair of young princes who appear to be of southeast Asian ethnicity, and who are undergoing the “tests of Ada” “to prove what manner of men ye be”. The first test involves kicking them overboard to fight with crocodiles—Khogar scores first by using one of the sticks they were given to prop open a croc’s jaws, and they’re both hauled in before any of the creatures can eat them.

Jan, meanwhile, is chasing Rona, the eagle for “breaking the law” by following its natural instincts to kill its prey (?!) Evidently, Jan’s law is that no animals are to hunt while human hunters are on the prowl, as has been reported on the jungle grapevine.

Down at the river, the young princes have been challenged to snare what prizes they can using only a rope. The wicked prince Amaru has smuggled a dagger, and has nefarious plans: he hurls the blade at his rival, who has used his rope to catch Rona, still injured from his encounter with Jan!



Jan saves prince Khogar and escorts him back to the river, where Amaru is basking in the glory of having brought down an eagle with only a rope. But before Amaru can be proclaimed chieftain in the absence of his missing rival, Jan and Khogar arrive riding an elephant. Amaru flees, realizing his treachery is about to be revealed. With Jan backing up Khogar’s version, Amaru is stripped of his title and Khogar is declared the new ruler.

Again, nicely drawn, but not a Jungle Gem. Browsing through earlier installments, this sometimes appears to be an African jungle, sometimes Asian. I don’t know if the creators really cared about the details. He lasted through issue 63, after which no more jungle characters would appear in the series.

Lastly, we turn to FIGHT COMICS, which featured an astonishing variety of content over its 86-issue run, including soldiers, superheroes, spies, sub-mariners, South Sea sailors, and lumberjacks, boxers, and, debuting in issue 32, June 1944, Tiger Girl.


The first Tiger Girl tale is attributed to “Allan O’Hara”, and the artist has been identified as Robert Webb, someone I’m unfamiliar with but who turns in a reasonably good piece of work here. Tiger Girl’s a jungle heroine in Africa who’s accompanied by a pair of Bengal tigers, but for once, she’s got a good explanation for her feline companions…

This first story starts in Ungandi lands, with white explorers Gordon and Lance on expedition. Lance admits he’s there not to hunt for lions like Gordon, but in search of the legendary Tiger Girl, whose tale he proceeds to relate:

He had bought a necklace belonging to the “lost race of Vishnu from India”, and the trader who sold it guided him to the lands where they mythical Tiger Girl was said to roam. When the safari is attacked by three lions, the Tiger Girl comes to their rescue.

Lying injured, Lance witnessed Tiger Girl and her tiger defeat the lions, and was then taken, on a litter borne by Tiger Girl’s Indian aide Abdola, to a hidden Indian-style fortress deep in the jungle. There he would be nursed back to health by the compassionate Tiger Girl…

…but she was unaware that she was followed by the unscrupulous trader, who sought the fortunes he assumed were inside the moated palace. He made a deal with a native Chief to wage war against Tiger Girl:



The natives invade, but Tiger Girl, Abdola, and the twin tigers put up a strong defense, aided by the bullets of the briefly-recovered Lance:



Rather than killing Lance, Tiger Girls allows him to live once the attackers are killed, and sends him unconscious down the river in a dugout, along with the dead natives. He has forgotten the location of the hidden temple, but the story ends with Tiger Girl and her pets emerging into the light of the camp fire…

…and there the story comes to its close, with the promise of Tiger Girl’s origins to be revealed in the next issue. And here I fling away the rules—we need to know!

In issue 33, we see another quest for Tiger Girl, but this seeker is Abdola himself, in a flashback, seeking out the Princess Vishnu, having come from India. Tiger Girl’s father, Raja Vishnu, saddened by the death of his Irish wife, had come with the little princess—and his hunting tigers—to build a temple in Africa. There he was killed by a lion, leaving her orphaned in the jungle. The Sikh servant Abdola has come to return her home, where Rajah Viskita is staging a rebellion. Tiger Girl refuses, but gives Abdola an emerald to prove that he had indeed found the princess.

But Viskita has tracked them here, intending to eliminate the potential competition before the people know the heiress has survived. Once the rebels are eliminated, Abdola is sent back home to India with the jewel, while Tiger Girl remains behind.

But wait, that doesn’t jibe with the first installment? I guess we better read on into issue 34…


Nope, Abdola is still there, hanging out with Tiger Girl. Lance is nowhere to be found. If we were insistent on adhering to continuity, we’d have to assume that Lance was killed after all, since he had found his way back to the hidden temple. But it’s common for Fiction House features to take a while to settle into the official continuity, and evidently Tiger Girl stabilized to “jungle girl with two tigers assisted by a loyal Sikh servant in an Indian temple/palace in Africa.” Fair enough.

But just to be sure, let’s fast forward to FIGHT COMICS #60, February 1949, when Tiger Girl has taken over as the cover feature:



Still no Lance, and Tiger Girl and Abdola are still delivering jungle justice as always, with some nice art tentatively attributed to Jack Kamen, John Forte, and/or Jay Disbrow, according to the GCD:



I'd be very willing to read plenty more of these; there's a verve here that makes me consider Tiger Girl another Jungle Gem. 

Curiously enough, over in RANGERS COMICS, Fiction House had previously run a feature called Tiger Man. It was an unrelated, non-jungle series, relying on the curious convention of depicting the lead character overlaid with a phantasmal image of a tiger every time he sprang into action. 

My guesses:

The Vulture feels like a Ditko creation: the old man's face, the wings under the arm were echoed in Ditko's Dove.
Kirby did several other multi-armed characters over his career, so Dr. Octopus is a possible Kirby design.
When Kirby did Sandman in FANTASTIC FOUR, he redesigned the costume, so I'd assume the mundane original is Ditko.
Kirby did countless animal/human hybrids, so The Lizard might have been his.
Electro's design seems too gaudy and on-the-nose for Kirby.
Mysterio is 100% Ditko, to my eyes: the filigree, the elaborate bracers, the weird eyes on the chest.
Green Goblin seems like Ditko's creation. I can't see Kirby giving a major villain a rubber mask, but then again, if Kirby designed it, that may not have been his intent, but instead justifying a bit of fantasy in a character he saw as using a more practical costume.
Kraven is the only one of them I can recall Kirby using in a solo writing/drawing effort, so it may have been one of his own designs inspiring him to use the character in a Ka-Zar story.
The Scorpion strikes me as designed around Ditko-style poses, so I'd bet on this one being Ditko's.

If we take it that Kirby did indeed design more than one villain for AS-M, my money's on Kraven and the Lizard.

Still ahead lie samples of Fiction House’s three solo jungle stars, Sheena, Kaänga, and Wambi, but this time around, I want to begin sampling some of the other characters who appeared in the Fiction House anthology titles who wouldn’t otherwise get covered here.

I assumed that during its long run, JUNGLE COMICS would have introduced many new features along the way, besides those we sampled in #2. But the contents stabilized with Kaänga, Simba (King of Beasts), Captain Terry Thunder, Wambi Jungle Boy, Tabu, and Camilla. The only backup added to the contents was a feature—other than educational 1- to 2-pagers on “Jungle Facts” and “African Wildlife”--was called “Jungle Tales”.

Since late in the run, Tabu and Camilla had been significantly transformed from the versions presented early in the run, I’ll do a second look at those characters in this post. And although Fantomah disappeared from JUNGLE COMICS partway through its lengthy run, that feature underwent a radical alteration from Fletcher Hanks’ bizarre creation, so we’ll take a look at her later incarnation.

JUNGLE COMICS #51, March 1944, which you can read at comicbookplus.com/?dlid=36384, presented the final installment of Fantomah. Gone was the skull-faced supernatural avenger of the jungle that the remarkable Fletcher Hanks had created; two years earlier, the feature, which had long lost the services of its creator Hanks, had been overhauled, revealing that Fantomah was actually the “daughter of the Pharaohs”, queen of the lost city of Khefra. As a part of her restoration to her true heritage, the “ancient gods” bestowed “mystic hair” on her, transforming her look:




(from JUNGLE COMICS # 27, March 1942)

Attributed to “W. B. Hovious” (how obvious!), Fantomah, Daughter of the Pharaohs, bows out in an untitled story with art, according to the GCD, by George Appel. The tale opens with Queen Fantomah strolling “through the colorful Khefran bazaars where wares from all the world are sold”. Evidently, the lost jungle civilization has somewhere along the run become known to the rest of the world, and here we have a new merchant—a lemon-yellow Asian!—arrived declaring “at last I fulfill my vow to El Hamid the Wise your father. Peace be with him!”



Fantomah did not know her father, who died when she was a baby, so the foreign merchant fills her in. The visitor is Wang, a prince of the Eastern Mountains, who was once saved from drowning by the heir to Khefra. Friendship between Wang’s people and the Khefrans was frowned upon, so the two buddies wandered through Africa until El Hamid was called to his throne. They never met again, but now Wang has made the pilgrimage to deliver a clue to a great treasure, to be bestowed on his heir: a strange serpent bracelet with four heads, each eye missing.

El Hamid intended for his heir to go on a quest to seek the missing eyes, and Wang can only think to start at the dried-up river where he and El Hamid met. As Fantomah, Wang, and her men go deeper into the jungle, they are attacked, first by a revolutionary Khefran, then by cannibals protecting the dried riverbed.

Wang dies saving Fantomah from a cannibal’s spear, but then Fantomah is attacked by a giant cobra, the “Serpent of Kaaga River” that the cannibals were guarding. Fantomah kills the snake with her knife, and is then recognized by the cannibals as their queen.



In the serpent’s lair, Fantomah finds a chest of treasure: the serpent was put there to guard the jewels for her. Atop the pile of gems is a ruby eye, the first one gained on what is, according to the final panel, an ongoing quest. The wealth will benefit Khefra, the cave will be a tomb for Wang.

Obviously, the tale of the quest would never be completed, since the feature was discontinued.

Fiction House’s long-running features, like many Golden Age comics features, sometimes morphed into quite different things as they ran. Fantomah the supernatural Avenger learns her true identity as a transformed queen and now appears to have some memory of her late father! It appears that by the end here, Fantomah’s setting had changed from a lost kingdom in current-day Africa to a fantasy setting sometime in the distant past. It’s a strange jumble of civilizations on display here, with a caricatured Asian (at least depicted as a noble and brave ally), Egyptian pyramids, Romanesque armor, cannibals with spears, wooden shields, and bones through their noses, northern African bazaars, Greek-looking metal shields, phrases evocative of Islam. It’s a lively mélange, indeed, but based on my browsing, I prefer the more specifically Egyptian look of the installments immediately following the transition to the “Daughter of the Pharaohs” concept. But even in those earlier days, the white Khefrans were dealing with Black Africans depicted in stereotypical native attire.

Fantomah herself is portrayed inconsistently even in this short tale. She boldly announces her intention to kill an attacking cannibal, but then immediately cedes to him, declaring “Do your evil work—be quick! I am not afraid to die!” Not exactly the finest of jungle heroines on this page, but two pages later, she’s facing down and killing a giant cobra with a small knife. That killing feels a little off when it’s revealed that this beast was put in place to guard her own inheritance, but that doesn’t seem to matter to her, since she’s got her goods.

The Quest is a well-worn frame on which to hang an ongoing tale, but this one doesn’t make much sense when you think about it. Why would El Hamid leave such an elaborate challenge to a friend that he left behind? And if they were fellow travelers as young men, wouldn’t Wang have been there during all the preparation of this leg of the quest, and all others?

In JUNGLE COMICS #26, February 1942, Camilla welcomed Pygmy friends into the Lost Empire where she reigned as Queen. She had already been rehabilitated from the villain she had been portrayed as in the earliest installment, and was no longer operating as a sorceress, but the series had continued in its fantastic hidden civilization of white people. At the end of that installment, she had allied with the Pygmy tribe and imported elephants into the Lost Empire as beasts of burden and transport.

In the following issue’s installment, Camilla finds herself lost in the jungle, outside of her empire, where she slays a zebra and takes its hide for clothing. She rescues a downed white aviator, Ben Austin, and makes allies of the tribe that had been trying to kill her. At the end of that tale, a native declares that “truly the white one is queen of a jungle empire!” It was a new direction for Camilla, who became a clone of the more popular Sheena, also a “queen of the jungle”.

Our sample of this incarnation of Camilla comes from JUNGLE COMICS #132, December 1950.


Victor Ibsen takes the byline of the story, and he is credited as the writer according to the GCD, which identifies Ralph Mayo as the inker, with Bob Lubbers listed as the possible penciler.



The tantalizing splash shows Camilla fighting against a small flying dragon, and the story begins as the Africans of the Zanziba kraal worry about the people fleeing winged demons plaguing the tribe. Medicine man N’loka scoffs at chieftain Birano’s plan to wait on assistance from “jungle queen” Camilla, but we then see that N’loka is rabble-rousing in the employ of shady white men Bayne and Fanning.

N’loka’s ceremonies indicate the coming of “a barge of death”, but Camilla arrives to declare N’loka a fraud. He doesn’t look like much of a fraud when “a vision of horror roars from clouded skies”:



As Camilla and her big cat Fang deal with the escaped leopard, Bayne and his men arrive and subdue the dragon under a tarp. The zebra-riding (!) Fanning worries about being seen and trailed, but Ben Bayne has a cover story in mind.

Camilla kills the leopard, and chieftain Birano sets her after the “strange bwanas” who carted off the monster.

Next, we confusingly shift to more whites, “Miss Susan” and her men who seem to be tracking Bayne and company, who have stolen the only diamonds remaining from Susan’s mine. They’re running behind Camilla, who has caught up to the thieves and is forcing them to explain themselves.

Bayne claims to be a scientist who came to the jungle seeking out “this prehistoric dragon bird”. He claims to have fled the scene in fear that the tribe considered the dragon a sacred being.

And then Miss Susan and her men arrive to confront Bayne. When they draw their weapons, Camilla defends Bayne, thinking the new arrivals are here to steal the dragon, rather than to recover stolen treasure.

Camilla ends up pistol-butted and falling down into a pit of brush, and Bayne’s gang turns the tables, until they find out an accomplice has sung, the mine’s run dry, and they’re in the crosshairs of the commissioner. Even worse, Zanziba warriors are rallying against them. Sure, Camilla’s dead, or so they think, but they know it’s time to kill off Susan and her men and hit the trail!

Camilla’s alive, and when she sees that Bayne has fled without his dragon, she’s suspicious…

Meanwhile, Bayne and his hostages have reached the abandoned mine, confirming Susan’s story, so they recover the catapults “used to launch our little pets”. Their cruel plan is to use the catapults to launch Miss Susan to her death, followed by her men!

Yes, as Camilla is discovering at the same time, the “dragons” are fake, with “a white man’s machine inside to drive its wings”. She somehow rides the flying mechanical monster to the mine and drops down to take out the villains.



Well, that tale was an awkward mess, with an overly-complicated plot poorly conveyed. Camilla has devolved considerably from her mystical beginnings, and she now speaks like something of a primitive herself. I find it rather fascinating how Golden Age features could transform themselves into something completely unrecognizable from their initial premises, trusting that the readers wouldn’t notice. They must have had some idea that at least some of their buyers were habitual followers, but their primary goal was telling this month’s story; what came before mattered little if at all.

So let’s see how Tabu fared in his final days. He departed JUNGLE COMICS as of issue 121, January 1950, and took his final bow in a back-up in KAANGA #9, October 1951, in a story drawn by Howard Larsen. Let’s see the end of the line for Tabu!

Tabu is gazing into his magic fire and sees the ghostly image of a woman declaring “Tabu! By horn, by fang, by claw must I strike! Strike until the flower of peace is once again in its final resting place. Farewell, I can say no more!”

Tabu then responds to cries from a pair of inexplicably white natives who are threatened by a rhinoceros. At Tabu’s command, the rhino transforms into the ghostly fire woman, who warns them that the fang and claw are yet to strike.

The pair are Ronda and Princess Dorena, guardian of the sacred temple, who have fled from her life of permanent temple service so that they can marry.

Next a giant serpent wraps itself around Ronda, but a stab from Tabu’s knife forces it to transform back to the ghost woman—the attack by fang has been foiled. Although it’s been simple to defend against these mysterious threats, so far as I can see, Tabu seems concerned, and quizzes Dorena, who admits she has taken from the temple a supposedly worthless trinket as a souvenir, a small jeweled flower.

The final attack comes, the attack by claw. That’s delivered at the hands of a gorilla. Not that a gorilla is particularly known for its claws, but the creators of this story know so little about gorillas that the artist avoids drawing it:



Well, I’ve got to give Fiction House some credit for keeping Tabu as a mystical wizard of the jungle through to the end, but it’s a far cry from Fletcher Hanks’ nigh-invincible supernatural avenger. One can’t expect much from a trivial 4-pager, but it’s a shame that the biggest join here comes from the artist’s shortcuts in drawing an ape!

Jungle Tales was a late addition to the roster of features in JUNGLE COMICS, debuting in issue 148 (April 1952) and continuing through issue 161 (Winter 1953). The feature seems to have always been limited to four pages, with a byline attributing it to “Trader Jim”. The GCD doesn’t have any credits for the feature in any of the issues I looked at. Jungle Tales is centered around a jungle trading post operated by the white “Trader Jim” Dawson, who narrates short tales about the African jungle.

This sample comes from JUNGLE COMICS #150, June 1952. It opens with a little (white) boy interrupting a white hunter from shooting a baboon that is trying to steal his ammo. Jim tells the angry hunter that they don’t shoot baboons around there, and that the boy’s interference saved the hunter’s neck.

Trader Jim proceeds to relate the story of Henry Braddock, who was scouting a location for a trading post with his wife. When baboons overtake his boat and begin destroying his property he fires on them, despite having been warned by the natives not to do so. One of those baboons watches after the gunfire with vengeance in his eyes!

Braddock is having natives bring in some hunting cheetahs, with the intent of chasing off the baboons. The cheetahs do a good job, and the baboons that survive are chased into a cave, which Braddock seals off with dynamite.

Weeks later, though, baboons are back at the stockade wall, ominously lurking and observing Mr. and Mrs. Braddock! A month later, the baboons attack. They destroy the trading post and pounce on Henry, whose scent they remembered and hated. Mrs. Braddock was rescued, but Henry was subject to what the natives call “baboon vengeance!”



The angry hunter thinks it’s bunk, that baboons are “dumb”, but then sees that his gunfire has drawn more baboons, and is left with the advice to “go on up into the interior…shoot your lions, elephants, and rhinos…but leave the dumb baboons alone!”

What an odd, vicious little jungle tale that was! It verges on jungle horror, and while the depiction and coloring of the baboons is dodgy, the scenes of their mayhem might be enough to give a sensitive kid the chills. I think the abbreviated format served this backup nicely; there’s not much to the story, but no time to get as bored with it as one does with many other jungle comics. I skimmed a few other installments, and they all appear to be little Jungle Gems, with a heavy reliance on savage wildlife attacking humans!

Since this post is already way longer than it should be, I'll cover the rest of Fiction House's jungle backup features in the next installment. That will focus on the jungle features from RANGERS COMICS, including: 

• Rocky Hall, Jungle Stalker!
  King, of the Congo!
  
• Jan of the Jungle
• and, at last, Tiger Girl!