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.

Considering I've seen Eraserhead more times than any other movie I can remember, it automatically goes to #1 on my 1977 list.
I don't much else from '77 that I'd be eager to see again, including Star Wars; I've probably sat through it in its entirety 3 or 4 times, and that's enough, although I sure loved it at the time. I could be talked into sitting through Close Encounters one more time, but it's not going to be my top choice if I have options for something interesting I haven't seen yet.

MDG gets my vote for featuring one of my favorite characters (Red Tornado) and showing the kind of hammer-blow slam I was thinking of with the topic. Fun covers all around, gang!

TARZAN #25, June 1979, Marvel Comics



“The Wages of Fear!” was written by Bill Mantlo and drawn by Sal Buscema and Bob Hall. The cover is by Rich Buckler and Bob McLeod.



This issue starts fresh, with Tarzan returning to the jungle after an arc in Pellucidar, the land at the Earth’s core which had run for the previous 11 issues. His monkey friend (“Manu” in Great Ape language!) is filling him in on what’s new in “Tarzan’s jungle”, and, as far as the monkey’s concerned, that’s not much.

As Tarzan approaches his homestead, a little worried about how Jane will react (Tarzan has no idea how long he’s been gone, because time runs differently at the Earth’s core), he sees his son, Jack “Korak the Killer” Clayton getting some bad news: his mom was investigating a huge jungle fire when she was charged by a rhino and plunged into a river gorge! They were unable to find a body, so Korak—and the newly arrived Tarzan—are off to search the gorge.



Tarzan takes to the trees, and Korak follows by car, worried that Tarzan took off before learning that the fire was deliberate. That fire was set by a trio of white poachers: Roger Tory, a pig of a man who isn’t worried about having killed Tarzan’s wife (although he’s going to blame the rhino), Ian Chalmers, who doesn’t want to kill a human, should Tarzan butt in, and Miss Lyle, apparently Roger’s girlfriend. The trio has capture Tarzan’s own Golden Lion, Jad-Bal-Ja (with his unique black mane!) to take back to “Roger Tory’s Bring ‘Em Back Alive” show. Off they motor to the base camp, before Tarzan can catch up. Next stop, New York!

Jane, to the readers’ relief, crawls up from the gorge, alive and angry. She eavesdrops as the villains pack their catches for the trip overseas. Jane has questions: Why did they set fire to the veldt, and how do they think they can smuggle this many animals out without Tarzan or the British Coastal Patrol catching them?

Just then the vengeful Tarzan arrives, freeing some of the captured animals and fighting furiously. The Golden Lion, through the bars of its cage, takes out one of Tory’s men with a paw-swipe to the back while Tarzan heads for the top dog, Roger Tory.

Jane, still lurking, discovers why they set the fire: to create a landing field for the cargo planes that will smuggle the animals out.

Tarzan is threatening to kill Tory, but Miss Lyle interferes with a cattle-prod; not even Tarzan can handle that kind of shock! Tarzan drops Roger, then quickly recovers and continues the fight, but now that Roger has the cattle-prod, he’s got an effective weapon to take Tarzan down. A few more jolts and Tarzan’s out, leaving Roger Tory with the brilliant idea to poach Tarzan himself for exhibit back in “civilization”!



Jane shows up to free her husband, but she gets captured and kidnapped, too, and Korak is left behind, vowing to follow them to New York.




Lackluster stuff here. Marvel obviously had high hopes for their TARZAN comic. Kicking it off with the team of Roy Thomas and John Buscema adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, it seems like they hoped to recreate the success of their CONAN comics. As a far more familiar property, they may have expected TARZAN to exceed Conan’s success. Sure, DC hadn’t made a strong seller of it, but they didn’t know how to do this kind of stuff like Marvel, Marvel was going to do it right. Rather than spread the ERB thin, Marvel would focus on the two biggest ERB properties, Tarzan and John Carter. No Korak series, or Carson of Venus, or Pellucidar. Put the guys who were currently making CONAN great on the job, going back to the source, spinning the Marvel Magic, and this was a sure-fire hit!

Well, maybe not. Starting out with adaptations of “Jungle Tales of Tarzan” may have seemed like a good idea, with self-contained stories ensuring a satisfying completion for each issue, but a young Tarzan growing up in the jungle talking to animals wasn’t the Tarzan most readers expected, and the faithful adaptations were based on creaky, out-dated material. Marvel quickly moved on to flashier material to adapt, “Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar”, and finally started cranking out new stories, using Pellucidar to introduce the kinds of monsters and sci-fi elements more appealing to the typical Marvel fan of the time. But with Thomas and Buscema not making this book the hoped-for hit, their talents were redirected elsewhere, and the book turned over to greener writers…and Our Pal Sal. Sal was, of course, about as close to brother John as you could get, in superficial ways, and I’m in no way a Sal-basher—I adored his DEFENDERS—but putting Sal on the book was perceived by many as a sign that Marvel wasn’t going to put much effort into making this a centerpiece of their line. And Bill Mantlo? Heck, why not?

With this issue, Marvel went briefly back to the classic African jungle environment, but only to set up their own retread of one of the most beloved Tarzan films, with Tarzan and Jane going to New York City. I respect that Mantlo portrayed Jane as a highly capable woman, as well she should be after all the adventures and challenges of jungle life with Tarzan, and I always liked Korak, so it’s great to have him join in. But it’s a 40’s serial kind of cheat just to have Jane climb back up after showing a clearly deadly fall into a deep gorge, and the dialogue setting up the bad guys is disjointed and confusing, so, from a technical perspective, it’s not especially well done.

To little surprise, Marvel’s TARZAN didn’t continue much longer. TARZAN and JOHN CARTER WARLORD OF MARS would be cancelled as of October 1979. With DC and then Marvel unable to turn ERB’s most famous creation into a success, there were no American publishers to bite on the license, and the Lord of the Jungle would go into comic book limbo for a while now. Marvel would take another shot—a single shot—in 1984, with MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL #29, printing a story by Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle, and I suppose I’ll have to get to that later: even though it’s a bit past my intended time frame, it’s got two of my favorite creators.

Most of the jungle comics I’ve been reviewing here have had text stories, but this is 1979 at Marvel, so we’ve got a letters page. This one has some interesting content: Howard Kinyon earns a No-Prize for correcting a violation of Burroughs’ lore in the Pellucidar material. David Boyington objects to Tarzan using the term “Numa” for a saber-tooth tiger, when it means (male) lion. No No-Prize for David: since the Ape language doesn’t have a word for “tiger” (and logically, why would it?), Tarzan used the closest equivalent term. Makes sense to me!

There’s a big drawing of Tarzan on the page, the original of which is to be awarded to whoever wins the contest to rename the letter column from the boring “Tarzan’s Jungle Drums” to something snazzier. They’ve already received a few entries, and even though they didn’t make the grade, the lettercol is going to share them. For example, “Jungle Lore” is suggested by one Billy Myers. Hey, that reminds me, I went to school with a Billy Myers. We were in band together, him on clarinet, me on trombone. He was a couple of years behind me, so we weren’t good friends, but the band was always tight, it was quite a bond in high school, your bandmates were always your friends, no exceptions. I haven’t thought about that kid in years! I wonder whatever happened to him? He’s not one of the many Facebook friends from Frayser High.



Oh, sorry for the divergence, folks! Where were we?

OK, more suggestions from the next writers include “Cry of the Ape Fans!”, “Through the Jungle Vine”, “Mangani Mailbag”, …

Hold on a second!

Did I just see what I thought I did? The address I skimmed past?

Billy Myers, 1484 Haywood, Memphis, IN 38127!?

No, there’s no Memphis, Indiana--that’s a Tennessee zip code. In fact, it’s a Memphis, Tennessee zip code. In fact, it’s a Frayser zip code. In fact, it was my zip code. By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, that’s my Billy Myers! It’s 1979, Billy would have been a junior at Frayser High School, and yeah, I’m pretty sure he lived on Haywood, just a few blocks north of the school! I didn’t even know he was a fellow comic book fan! Lemme see if any of my Facebook friends have him on their friends list…yep, they sure do, and darned if he doesn’t have a Black Panther cover picture! Ain’t that a corker?

OK, then, entirely unearned, I’m going to have to call this a Jungle Gem just for the Billy Myers factor. If you ever have the unexpected pleasure of finding a forgotten friend show up in a 45-year-old comic book, you’d probably call that a gem, too.

I'll go ahead and post before the formal announcement of results, since I've got a busy morning ahead of me...

This week, let's see covers with characters smashing--or at least slamming, not necessarily breaking--inanimate objects with a hammering drop of their closed fist!

The standard rules apply--

- Post one, and only one, classic cover that fits the theme of the contest.
- Cover must be from a published comic book or collected volume published before February 2013.
- It's helpful if you include the title and the issue number of the comic in bold, in case some posters cannot see your image.
- Covers must be posted before voting begins.
- Voting takes place on Tuesday, February 21, beginning at 12:01am PST and ending at 11:59pm PST.
- Vote by posting the name of the poster whose cover best fits the theme or that you simply like the most in bold.
- The winner of the contest is the entrant with the most votes after the voting period ends.
- The winner chooses the theme for the next week's contest.
- If you don't think the cover fits the theme, don't vote for it; please don't post disparaging remarks about it.
- If a cover is more recent than the classic time frame (currently February 2013), kindly point it out to the poster, who may then choose an alternate before voting begins.

Have fun!


Here's my example entry, KOBRA #6, 1977:


(Gotta love 70's cover dialog--how does it follow that destroying a bridge is the final step in conquering the world? 

Time to tell the tale of my late-in-life conversion to metal...

Now I've always been a hard rock fan, but the more extreme stuff never appealed to me. Even though my first real concert was Black Sabbath, heavy metal wasn't something I could take seriously.

But I have always liked exploring unusual genres of music, and it was, I think, in 2010 that I was reading an article on the web about micro-songs, extremely short pieces of music. Mentioned there was the record holder for Shortest Music Video:



Well, OK, that was worthless crap, but it led me to wikipedia, down a rabbit hole of different subgenres of metal, and I discovered an article on Funeral Doom. That page had as a sample a clip from a song called "The Country Doctor" by a group called Burning Witch. Frankly, that cracked me up: "The Country Doctor", to me, evoked the image of a kindly old fellow delivering babies in a Little House on the Prairie small town, but I played the clip and...

...well, that cracked me up, too. A completely ridiculous slow screamed phrase over a chord and beat so slow as to be almost beyond any sensation of rhythm. But I was intrigued, and I wanted to experience the whole song.

So I went to a music streaming service and played it.

Still ridiculous. Rock needs to be fast. Who wants super-slow stuff like this? Not me!

But another day came, and I couldn't resist playing it again to marvel at how anyone could listen to it. And I listened to the whole album. And I did it again. And it got under my skin, so I started investigating who these guys were, and what other Funeral Doom bands were out there. With an interest in Lovecraft, I found several bands taking influence from him: Coliseum, Evoken, Thergothon, and I was really getting into it. From there, I found myself marveling at Ahab's nautical-themed Funeral Doom. I wasn't a heavy metal fan, but I think I really did like this slow stuff!

So I explored more from the guys who kicked this off. Burning Witch only put out a couple of albums, but two of its main creative force formed Sunn O))), who did ambient metal, which was another weird new subgenre to explore. And among that group's offerings was something called "Cursed Realms (Of the Winterdemons)" supposedly a cover of a group called Immortal. But it sounded like a haze of heavy sound, and I wondered just how that could be a cover of a "real song", so I had to head over to the world of Black Metal to listen to the original.

Immortal's original bore no resemblance to Sunn O)))'s "cover", except sharing the same lyrics, which were almost indecipherable in either version. But now I was going through the same process as before: how could anyone enjoy this garbage like what Immortal was doing? So I had to listen to Immortal, and again, I was drawn to repeat the listening just to ponder why anyone would choose to listen to that...

...and wouldn't you guess, I got hooked on Immortal, graduating to their entire catalog and listening to it so frequently it became my main driving music for way too long.

I was sold, I was converted, I was a heavy metal fan, although I've kept a broad range of musical interests, even indulging at length in what may be heavy metal's polar opposite, the microgenre of mallsoft. But I'm never likely to outgrow Immortal, Ahab, Acid King, Evoken, Alestorm, Abbath, Burning Witch, and Thergothon.